Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning vaccines, drug prices, police brutality, chemical safety, and methane emissions.

Long story short: tell certain House Reps that vaccine access is more important than intellectual property rights, tell your Congressfolk to control drug prices, fight police brutality, and keep PFAS chemicals out of our products, and tell Pennsylvania state regulators to close a major loophole in its gas drilling emissions proposal. 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 find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the following paragraphs.

Word on the street is that Democratic Reps. Scott Peters (CA) and Ron Kind (WI) are trying to dissuade President Biden from supporting a waiver that would allow vaccine development all over the world -- meaning, I guess, that Messrs. Peters and Kind are objectively pro-COVID. Standing up for "intellectual property rights über alles" is a dubious enough proposition even outside of a pandemic, but, ah, fellas? Taxpayer money helped develop these vaccines, so they're not "someone else's property." And as long as COVID is alive somewhere on Earth, it can come back to bite us. So, you know what's coming: you can reach Rep. Peters at 202.225.0508 and Rep. Kind at 202.225.5506. Remind them not just of their moral duty here, but also that taking this stance after getting all that big pharma money, which both men have done, is a bad, bad look.

Here's the kind of action alert I normally avoid passing along: Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk that, hey, drug prices are too high and they should make sure drugs cost less. Yeah, that's usually too vague for my taste, but it's also exactly the kind of thing Congressfolk need to hear, and frankly there aren't too many ways they can come up with to pretend to lower drug prices. If you want to tell them to let Medicare negotiate drug prices and/or empower our government to manufacture generic drugs whenever prices go above a certain level and/or assert more control over drugs taxpayer money helps to fund in the first place, well, hey, there's a comments section on the petition.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2892, the Protect Our Protestors (or POP) Act, and H.R. 2893, the National Police Misuse of Force Investigation Board Act. The former bill would make police violence against protestors a federal crime, and the latter would create a federal agency tasked with investigating deaths in police custody. Don't let folks tell you that cops can't do their job if we pass these bills, and not just because literally everyone who's ever had a job has said that when their jobs' standards have changed. Police officers aren't supposed to mow down peaceful protestors with tear gas and rubber bullets, and they're also not supposed to kill people before even charging them with a crime. I mean, if you can't hold yourself to those standards, maybe you need to sell shoes.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, which would empower our EPA to regulate PFAS chemicals. You may know PFAS chemicals better as "forever chemicals" that don't break down, that scientists have linked to cancer and thyroid issues, and that you can find in damn near everything, from nonstick pans to food wrappers to firefighting foam. Congress might actually be eager to pass this bill -- just say the words "keep our firefighters healthy" to Republicans and they at least give the matter some thought -- but we ought to tell them what we want them to do anyway, because big corporations come along and make them an awfully forgetful lot.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to fix a loophole in its proposal to control methane emissions from gas drilling. The DEP's proposal exempts older facilities from its scrutiny, which would only make sense to you if you accept the conventional "wisdom" that we should cut older buildings a break because they're old, but that's rubbish, not just because a building is a thing and not a person, but because the older facilities cause more than half the pollution, which should make sense to you, regardless of the conventional "wisdom." Some wisdom doesn't need quotation marks, after all.

Action: concerning worker rights, voting rights, monopolies, and clean air and clean water.

Long story short: tell certain Democratic Senators to get behind the PRO Act already, tell Arizona legislators to reject vote-suppression legislation, tell federal regulators to break up big tech corporations, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat Act and the so-called "FRACK Pack" of pro-clean air and clean water bills. 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 find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Word on the street is that three Democratic Senators -- Sens. Sinema (D-AZ), Kelly (D-AZ), and Warner (D-VA) -- have thus far avoided co-sponsoring the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which our House passed and which even Sen. Manchin (D-WV) and Sen. King (I-ME) have recently co-sponsored. You know what that means, right? Phone numbers! You can contact Sen. Kelly at 202.224.2235, Sen. Warner at 202.224.2023 (or 1.877.676.2759 if you're a Virginia resident) and Sen. Sinema at 202.224.4521. The PRO Act would make it much easier for workers to organize to bargain as a unit for better pay and better working conditions, and who could be against that? Besides the executives who make a lot of money denying workers those things, I mean. But they don't get all the say around here.

Progress America helps you tell Arizona's state Senate to reject a state House-passed bill that would kick 200,000 voters off that state's Permanent Early Voting List. Because Republicans would rather you make a request for an early ballot every damn year, because that's harder than getting one mailed automatically! And for whom would that be most hard? Why, people who can't just go where they like when they like, like seniors, poor folks, rural folks, and folks of color! Naturally Republicans can't claim "fraud" as a reason, because they can't find any (no, the so-called Cyber Ninjas ain't gonna find any, either -- though they might create some!), but they do cite "problems," never mind what they are. The "problem" here, as elsewhere, is that Joe Biden won this state, so let's tell Republicans to stop being sore losers.

Demand Progress helps you tell our federal regulators to break up big tech corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. It's actually a bad thing that Google's become a verb, or that Facebook has driven social media sites like Tribe and Orkut out of existence, or that Amazon controls about half of all online commerce. And I probably didn't say this well enough at the time, but even though the would-be union organizers did a bad job getting Amazon workers together, Amazon still shouldn't be big enough that it can simply crush the best of those efforts. There's only some utility to saying "you should've worked with the landscape as it was" -- if the landscape is that harsh, we also need to change it.

WildEarth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. S. 915 would repeal that section of the 2015 defense appropriations bill that sold the Oak Flat area of Arizona's Tonto National Forest to Resolution Copper, a notorious mining corporation looking to "develop" that land. Resolution's owner, Rio Tinto, just so happened to once employ then-Sen. Jeff Flake, and also donated big bucks to then-Sen. John McCain. So they got their money's worth! Sadly, the San Carlos Apache, to whom the land is sacred, got bupkus. From the Save Oak Flat Act, they'd get a lot more -- and so would we, since the Save Oak Flat Act would also save our clean air and clean water from over a billion tons of toxic crap.

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the "FRACK Pack," a suite of bills that would protect our clean air and clean water from the nefarious practice of hydrofracturing, or "fracking." Think it's an accident "fracking" is a cuss word on the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica? I wouldn't dismiss the connection so easily! The bills would, among other good works, force oil and gas corporations to better dispose of hazardous materials, force disclosure of chemicals used in fracking, and authorize our EPA to regulate fracking wells. And I guess the bills' opponents would say it'll "kill jobs." It won't, but what kind of civilization would we be if we continued to insist that we can't have both jobs and clean air and water? No kind of civilization, that's what -- both in that we'd be uncivilized and we'd likely be nonexistent in a few generations. Let's try to avoid these things, shall we?

Around the table: the California recall effort comes alive, and other developments.

Wondering if California pro-recall forces might actually come up with, you know, some reason to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom from office? Well, now they don't have to! I suspect a not-insignificant number of Cali voters would really hate the notion of big corporations saturating the state with "charity donations" that may have resulted in some of those corporations getting special treatment in state matters. Granted, you shouldn't count on a Kevin Faulconer or a Caitlin Jenner fixing that system -- or, indeed, tramping down on corruption generally -- but this is exactly the kind of thing that makes people hate politics, and thus also the kind of thing that can energize infrequent voters in a recall election, which is always about the incumbent.

If I'd submitted a short story to my upper-level creative writing class about the President of the National Rifle Association being an absolutely lousy hunter who maybe shouldn't be trusted with any kind of firearm -- or, indeed, any kind of story about a guy pretending to be salt-of-the-earth who turned out to spend six figures on designer suits -- my professor would have rapped my knuckles. But such is the quality of irony in this sick, immoral, and decadent age; it doesn't even offer us pleasure. Some would say I don't look hard enough, but the most obvious hypocrisy sure does seem to saturate our media, and too many of its practitioners barely try to hide it anymore. And, not for nothing, but only assholes hunt elephants.

You may be tempted to cheer when you hear that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) thinks we should have a January 6 investigation that focuses solely on January 6 and not on "violent" anti-racism protestors, but again, she doesn't deserve a whole lot of credit for standing up for the obvious. Indeed, she may be doing it because she knows the party's about to boot her out of Republican House caucus leadership anyway! C'mon, she learned at the knee of her father, one of the worst human beings ever to be Vice President.

When I hear that Tucker Carlson now sounds so unhinged -- lately saying you should call the police and child protective services if you see kids outside playing with masks on -- that maybe he's "joking," I'm reminded that brats hide behind jokes and adults take accountability for what they say. I'm further reminded that our "liberal" media has spent literally decades covering ever-crazier right-wing punditoids as if they're just folks-with-ideas, and if you don't do your job protecting your civilization, post-modern speculation is all you've got left. Also, satire has to be funny. Tucker Carlson ain't funny.

When I hear that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says the story of Joe Biden's first 100 days is "it's Biden's way or the highway," we should remember that this this is how the privileged talk when they don't get their way on everything, plus they project all their faults on their opponents. I wouldn't characterize the last 12 years as anything but "it's Mitch McConnell's way or the highway." And I would venture to say that President Biden would be following the people's will on "working with Republicans" as long as he works around them, or through them, or over them, but not "with" them. If I never hear the word "bipartisanship" again, it'll be too soon.

Finally, maybe he's just figured out which way the wind is blowing, but longtime Democratic consultant James Carville gives some good advice in this interview with Vox. I don't know that "wokeness is a problem" so much as people too proud of their wokeness (or strutting around with fake "wokeness"), and he doesn't say how he's going to cut into rural voting spreads, and he shouldn't use the word "cancel" like it means what Republicans want it to mean, but "stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Yiddish" is good advice, "make the Republicans own that insurrection every day" better advice, and his take on Florida reminds me (because I need it some times, like everyone else!) that people are much better than their voting records might lead you to believe. Also, over a year after calling Bernie Sanders a "Communist," he seems to like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Action: concerning gun control, anti-transgender bills, campaign donations to seditionists, treating workers right, and flavored tobacco products

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass real gun control legislation; tell Florida and Kansas state legislators to oppose anti-transgender bills; tell big corporations to stop donating to insurrectionist Republican Congressfolk; tell a European hotel-owner to treat its housekeepers right; and tell our FDA to ban flavored tobacco products. The paragraphs below provide all the email/petition links you'll need.

With all the police shootings and mass shootings we've heard about the last few weeks (see, things are really going back to normal!), and with most politicians either shrugging and saying nothing can be done or trying to do things that won't solve the problem, I refer you, again, to Thom Hartmann's proposals for real gun control, which you can share with your Congressfolk. Mr. Hartmann would make it as hard to get semiautomatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons and would regulate guns the way we already regulate cars. I no longer oppose banning assault weapons, but I remain wary of the kind of broad background checks politicians like to propose, and in any case I don't think these policy prescriptions would do as much good as Mr. Hartmann's would. And I prefer solving the problem to worrying about whose feelings we'll hurt if we solve the problem.

The Florida House has passed HB 1475, a bill that would, get this, allow schools to examine the genitalia of young girls in an apparent effort to keep transgender children out of girls' sports, and Change.org helps you tell the Florida Senate to reject this bill. How many ways is HB 1475 an abomination? Let's start with nobody should be looking at children's genitals except a physician trying to diagnose an illness directly relating to those genitals. And then let's go on with how public schools already know which of their students are transgender! I know, I know, some folks think transgender children, or our "tolerance" thereof, are abominations. If that's you, kindly navigate away from this page -- you can learn nothing from me, and yes, that's your fault.

Change.org also helps you tell Kansas state legislators to reject HB 2210, which would make it a felony for doctors to perform gender reassignment surgery or hormone replacement therapy on children, which should make even the folks who think it should be the parents' decision wince. I'm not impressed that Section 1(c) exempts doctors from this crime if "if a child was born with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development" -- that raises the possibility that the bill only exists to create drama, and that's the kind of thing we should smack down whenever we see it. And frankly, I trust any kid who says they're in the wrong body -- how likely is it that they're "just acting out" when there are a) so, so many other ways for kids to "act out" and b) there are so, so many other ways for kids to "act out" that don't result in them getting the crap kicked out of them by their peers? So much right-wing rage doesn't stand up to the gentlest application of logic.

Color of Change helps you tell big corporations such as Toyota and JetBlue to stop giving campaign funds to the same insurrectionist members of Congress to whom they said they'd stop giving campaign funds! I won't say it's useless for big corporations to give lip service to the causes we care about, but what Toyota and JetBlue (among others!) are doing is less than useless -- they want the good PR for "doing the right thing" without the bad PR they deserve for going back on their word. But we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR, so we don't have to put up with any of that. Remember, these Congressfolk smiled upon the events of January 6, even if they didn't actually aid and abet them; depriving them of campaign contributions is more toward the "least we can do" end of the spectrum.

Sum of Us helps you tell Ibis hotel owner AccorInvest to stop paying its housekeepers in dung pellets and treat them like human beings, which includes not running them through "scientific" task-timing, as they're currently doing. They give their housekeepers 17 minutes to change over hotel rooms, and as someone who works for a living, this is personal to me: I'm sick and tired of bosses looking at a spreadsheet and thinking they can learn more from it than they can from, you know, doing the job. Any idiot knows that if you've really got lollygaggers working for you, you confront them head-on, and you don't hide behind stupid assumptions about "how long a task should take" when you won't actually dirty your hands by doing it. Maybe that sounds old-fashioned, but I'm an old-fashioned dude, and this kind of task-timing doesn't sound like "making workers work more efficiently," but delivering wealth upward to executives more efficiently.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell our FDA to ban the sale of flavored tobacco products. They might taste like bubble gum or cotton candy or "tropical twist," but they all contain nicotine, and we really don't need to be starting children on a lifelong addictive habit. Whomever came up with this probably thinks they're a super-genius -- get 'em started young, and we'll be able to keep selling to them until they're old and grey! High-five! -- but they're not; they're just evil. I mean, I insist cleverness should result in good works, not (once again) in redistributing working folks' income to the undeserving rich.

Around the table: insane Republicans vs. weak Democrats, part 383.

We learn from Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post that the Republican "counter-offer" to President Biden's infrastructure/jobs bill is even worse than we thought. Basically, two-thirds of their "offer" consists of spending to which our government can already reasonably be expected to commit, meaning their $568 billion "offer" is really a $189 billion "offer." Plus they'd extend Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich to "pay for it," though those tax cuts have of course dramatically reduced revenue. Welcome to episode 983 of my podcast, "You Can't Work With Republicans."

Alexis Goldstein at Markets Weekly says big corporations are "crying wolf" on President Biden's proposed corporate tax hikes, and not just because his proposed 28% rate would still be a lot lower than it's been for most of the last 70 years, and not just because almost none of the promised boons of the 2017 corporate tax cut have ever materialized. Basically, no one's leaving America because of higher tax rates -- they say they're gonna do it, and then they either don't do it (likely because they were lying in the first place!) or they do it and they regret it. The action ain't in Luxembourg, after all.

When I hear that Joe Biden, in his first 100 days, has tried to avoid many of the mistakes of Barack Obama's first 100 days, I can only say and Mr. Biden's got more lessons to learn. I am reminded, though, of how the Obama Administration designed the Making Work Pay tax cut not to be noticed, and though I understand the principle -- people will more readily spend the money they don't notice they've got in the first place -- I hope it hasn't been lost on Mr. Biden that you'd get to do more good works if you just cut taxes and then walk around wearing a baseball cap that says I CUT YOUR TAXES.

Uh oh, maybe U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson really did say he'd rather have "bodies pile high in their thousands" than order a third lockdown back before he ordered a third lockdown, and Brits ain't proud of their cynicism like so many Americans are, so now would be a good time to remind everyone not just that political fortunes can change in a New York minute, but that the main (only?) reason Conservatives triumphed in 2019 was that they took a position on Brexit and Labour didn't. Labour appears to have learned the wrong lesson from that -- i.e., that JEREMYZ CORBYNZ IZ TEH LIBRULZ!!!!! -- but what else is new?

Don't be tempted to be impressed with Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) just because he'll say flat-out that the 2020 election wasn't stolen, because he also insists that Republicans don't engage in vote-suppression either, and I sure hope there aren't that many voters left who are fooled by the mere presence of a symmetrical argument. Frankly, deregistering voters of color because they don't respond to a junk mail-looking postcard demanding they respond if they haven't moved is real -- and waaaaaaaaaah my candidate lost so it must be stolen isn't.

Finallyformer Republican Senator/Presidential candidate Rick Santorum makes the abjectly absurd claim that there was "nothing" in America before the Europeans arrived -- and then, in a weak effort to "prove" his claim, says Native Americans contributed nothing to American culture! M. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and Leslie Marmon Silko would disagree -- to the degree we're willing to argue with Rick Santorum on his terms, of course. Rick Santorum used to be the gold standard of extreme right-wingers in America, but now he has to disappear an entire genocide from history just to keep up with the whippersnappers. If I were more (or less) spiritually advanced, I guess I'd find that amusing.

Action: concerning jobs, privacy, health care, corporate welfare, encryption, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk what you want from the Biden infrastructure/jobs bill; tell your Congressfolk to support the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, the Medicare for All Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act; and tell your Congressfolk to support encryption and stop Arctic drilling. 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 contact your Senators -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

It's time to be a bit more explicit with what we want from the Biden infrastructure/jobs bill: first, we want real tax hikes on the rich -- the top income rate needs to be 91% and the top corporate rate needs to be 55%, we need to tax investment income equally, we need to cap the mortgage interest deduction so homeowners can still get it but corporations can't game it, and we need to say no to any new sales or use taxes. Second, we want our government to create public renewable energy utilities to compete with the private (and less renewable) utilities -- hey, the Tennessee Valley Authority is still working for its people, and the Republicans there won't touch it! -- and we want fossil fuel workers retrained to build out these new renewable utilities (which sure is better than teaching them to code!). These aren't "impossible" things just because Senate Democrats are wilting under the pressure to raise the corporate tax rate even a little bit! They clearly need some steel in their spine -- and we clearly need to give it to them.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would prevent our government from buying location data from your phone and computer apps from "data mining" corporations -- as our government is presently doing from phone apps that tell Muslims which direction Mecca is in. You see what's wrong with that, right? I mean besides the racism? That's right, our government didn't get warrants for that data! When your government wants to investigate you, it's supposed to get a warrant from a judge; buying up data (with your taxpayer money, I feel compelled to add) gets around that. And we shouldn't allow that.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Think of health care that covers everyone, with no "networks" for your doctors to slip in and out of, and thus no surprise bills -- that could be Medicare, if we pass H.R. 1976. And when they say how are you gonna pay for it, liberal?, you tell them "we're going to convert the money big corporations already pay private health insurance corporations into an employer-side payroll tax and no one will have to pay a penny more." And when they say "oh yes we will," either repeat the words "employer-side payroll tax" like they're stupid, or congratulate them on their hard-earned cynicism which prevents anything good from ever happening ever.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. The bill would do pretty much what its title says it would do: stop the flow of billions of dollars in taxpayer money into the pockets of big fossil fuel developers. Why do they need handouts, after all? They're well-established technologies which make big money for a handful of corporations. And certainly we should not be funneling taxpayer dollars toward technologies that might well make our planet unlivable within a few generations. We have alternatives like solar and wind that deserve taxpayer assistance more. And we'd only be assisting ourselves in funding them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to refuse to fund any government effort to undermine encryption. Former Secretary of State Pompeo loudly assumed that anyone who uses encryption in their personal communications must be a criminal, but as usual he's wrong -- journalists often use encryption to talk to sources who might die if someone discovers their identity, and activists often use encryption to avoid getting wrongfully arrested by the state, too. Yeah, I'm sure quite a few aspiring January 6-style terrorists will use encryption as well, but I'm not going to trade liberty for security just to get at them a little more easily.

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) from fossil fuel development. ANWR has been a political football for over 20 years, and given how little oil will ever come from it and how important the land is to the Native Americans who live there, you have to wonder why. For a long time I supposed that our leaders just thought oil corporation executive salaries were that important, but now I'm starting to wonder if the ANWR "controversy" is just another decades-long attempt by right-wingers to piss off liberals. We can end such a wholly-manufactured drama by permanently protecting ANWR from fossil fuel drilling, and then right-wingers will have to find stupider things to throw fits about.

Around the table: from a public investment fund to the unwelcome rehabilitation of George W. Bush.

Alexis Goldstein at TruthOut describes a "National Investment Authority" that would enable good Americans to invest in public projects directly. That could be a lot better than "get Wall Street to do it" or "create an infrastructure bank" or "hand out tax breaks to attract private investment," the last of which was Donald Trump's big infrastructure idea. Also, too, banksters like to charge a shit-ton of fees and tolls, and a National Investment Authority wouldn't have to do that -- you know, just like Medicare doesn't have all the administrative overhead that private health insurance corporations do. They'll call all that "socialism," but you might better call it cutting out the middle-man. (As an aside, we also learn from Ms. Goldstein that the Chicago parking meter privatization deal was even worse than we thought.)

Nicholas Powers at TruthOut reports that "The ZIP Codes of the Trump Loyalists Who Attacked the Capitol May Surprise You" -- i.e., that many "came from Democratic strongholds, where the number of white people had declined as diversity increased." Well, if you're surrounded by people who think like you, you're more likely to let off steam around them than in a Capitol coup. Mr. Powers's last five paragraphs, under the subheading "The Poverty of Hatred," are must-read.

Jonathan Tilove at Texas Monthly profiles Michael Wood, running in the Texas's 6th House district special election, who's explicitly running as an anti-Trump Republican. His half of an exchange with a right-wing radio blowhard, who says "It's your feeling that everybody that disagrees with you is just deluded," is worth quoting in full: "This is one of the worst parts of what Trump has done to the right, is he’s turned us into a bunch of whiny little lefties. It’s all about 'feelings.' It’s all about 'Well, you’ve got your truth; I’ve got my truth.'" I've said similar things about Trump votaries (though I'll say "their own stereotype of liberals" rather than "a bunch of whiny little lefties"), but I wish Mr. Wood more success in shaking them out of their masturbatory stupor.

Larry Kudlow goes on Fox News to say the Biden climate plan will result in "(n)o burger on July 4," "(n)o steaks on the barbecue," and "grill(ed) Brussels sprouts," among other absurdities. I guess they'll claim it's "tongue in cheek," but aren't you supposed to be funny when you're tongue-in-cheek? That's only funny if Mr. Kudlow is deliberately parodying all the people he's been hanging out with since attaching himself to Donald Trump, and that does seem beyond him, even in this supposedly post-modern age.

CBS/YouGov poll finds that nearly half of Republican voters think the jury got the Derek Chauvin verdict wrong. Let them explain how! was my first reaction, but note well that "nearly half of Republican voters" represents most of the 25% of all voters who disagree with the verdict, and what percentage of the electorate is batshit insane, according to me? 25%. So, no explanation needed, or wanted! (But I also notice on page one of the poll, we also learn that nearly four out of five Americans think their local police do a good job, and displacing evil outside of your backyard is a foible not contained to the Batshit Insane 25%.)

Finally, it only took a dozen years, but we are witnessing, per Renée Graham at the Boston Globe, "The Wholly Undeserved Rehabilitation of George W. Bush." I've found chronicles of his sins as President to be, if anything, rather incomplete -- before Trump, Mr. Bush set the standard for gaslighting and fear-mongering, and I still vividly remember the fear of neighbors tattling on me to Homeland Security and me winding up in a Guantánamo, Indiana concentration camp. Since January 6, I've come to accept that Mr. Trump was worse, but really, that's like discerning the difference between a mound of dung the flies have found and a mound of dung they haven't found yet.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, paycheck fairness, Muslim bans, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, the NO BAN Act, and the D.C. Admission Act. 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 contact your Senators -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. I've heard little from right-wingers about the For the People Act lately, but I doubt that's shame -- it's more likely the complacency of knowing Republicans will filibuster it and Joe Manchin won't let the Democrats overcome such a filibuster. So what would we be missing out on, so Joe Manchin can preserve the "sanctity" of Senate "process"? An end to partisan gerrymandering, 15 days of early voting in every state, automatic and same-day voter registration all over America, and an end to certain racist caging practices including the notorious Interstate Crosscheck. So that's what we'll lose by keeping the filibuster as a tool of wanton obstruction.

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As you know, our Justice Department can't stop Southern states from passing restricting voting laws, thanks to our Supreme Court's ruling in Shelby County v. Holder -- that would be biased against the South, they said, but they explicitly said that our Justice Department could have that power if it applied to all states and localities. Well, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would enact that very thing, and then we could stop any state or locality with a demonstrated pattern of vote suppression from passing more vote suppression laws. I'm looking at you, Ohio!

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. My state's junior Senator writes that H.R. 5 "would eviscerate religious liberty protections." Guess what? That's complete rubbish! In H.R. 5 amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that it includes gays and transgender folks in its protected classes, but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already gives fairly broad exemptions to religious organizations, and H.R. 5 doesn't change that! So, either they know they're lying, or they don't know when it's their damn job to know. I don't know which is worse; I'm not sure finding out matters.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Congress passed an Equal Pay Act in 1965, which nominally makes it illegal to pay women less than men for the same work, but the pay disparity still exists, because (for example) employers still get to threaten employees with termination if they discuss their pay with each other, even though that's often the only way workers figure out they're getting screwed over. The Paycheck Fairness Act would prevent employers from doing that, among other good works. Do not admit any objections with the words "trial laywers" in it. If employers didn't try to get away with so much shadiness, we wouldn't need so many trial lawyers.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1333, the NO BAN Act, which our House passed last week. The NO BAN Act would prevent future Presidents from passing Trumpian travel bans obviously aimed at Muslims, even if our Supreme Court ignored Mr. Trump's words to that effect (he wanted to enact "a Muslim ban, but legal," according to his wingman, Mr. Giuliani). The bill would not "open the floodgates to terrorists" or whatever right-wingers say it's about, since our President would still have the ability to keep folks from entering, but our President would have to restrict folks based more on facts and laws than on the need to keep rageheads raging. The less say rageheads have over American policy, the better, that's what I say.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act, and thus make Washington, D.C. a state. D.C.'s netherland status continues to hurt its citizens -- over 700,000 American citizens have no voting representation in Congress, while they pay more taxes than the citizens of at least a dozen American states while facing more direct Congressional meddling in their affairs. Plus, of course, we just had an attempted coup on January 6; think a Washington, D.C. National Guard unit might have helped deter that? I think so, and the good citizens of our nation's capitol deserve so. And to those who whine that Democrats will get two more Senators: try persuading people to vote for you!

Around the table: send the kids to jail for life! And other cruelties.

Our Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, OKs life without parole for children who commit certain crimes -- and Justice Kavanaugh, in his majority opinion, appears to eviscerate precedent even as he claims to uphold it! I do recall this being exactly the kind of thing we feared from a Justice Kavanaugh. And where's the sense, from some of our highest judges, that if a child fails to badly that we even contemplate shutting them away in prison forever, that we, as a civilization, have failed that child? You could count on that, at least, from Anthony Kennedy.

Uh oh: Congressional investigation finds at least one Capitol Police official ordering, on the morning of January 6, that police look only for "anti-Trump" protestors, not the pro-Trump ones who then tried to stage a coup. Characterizing that order as "be on the lookout for counter-protesters because that is often where we have clashes between both sides," as one official does, ain't exactly a denial, and in any case I certainly hope the subsequent events of that day disabused them of the notion that "anti-Trump protestors" is where you look for the violence.

You might be irritated to confront a headline like "State-Supported 'Clean Energy' Loans Are Putting Borrowers At Risk of Losing Their Homes," but the full story is even worse: one of the Obama Administration's brilliant ideas from 2009 was to help low-income homeowners pay for improvements to their homes by giving low-interest loans to municipalities, who would then loan the money to homeowners and have them repay it in their property taxes! Nobody could have predicted that this would be a way to repossess those homes! And I'm pretty sure you were nodding off as you were reading the first sentence of this paragraph, but people with bad, convoluted ideas count on that.

Upon hearing that Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) seeks to "establish her independent bona fides as she faces a tough re-election battle in New Hampshire next year," you have to wonder why she thinks voting against a $15/hour minimum wage and opposing an end to the 20-year war in Afghanistan are good ways to do that. Assert your independence from Joe Biden, sure, but we might more reasonably say that Maggie Hassan is "asserting her independence from the public will," and that never ends well for a Democrat.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) vetoes a bill that would have banned transgender girls from participating in girls' sports, and the state Senate fails to overcome his veto, meaning the bill is dead, for now. Ah, but don't give him too much credit: this may be how they all want the drama to shake out. After all, if you "solve" a "problem," it's much harder to stoke rage over it later. Isn't it?

Finally, the Tennessee state House passes a bill banning state and local governments from requiring COVID vaccines, and all I can say is waaaaaaaaaaah! That's some "conservatism" there, preventing municipalities from determining what's best for themselves! But today's "conservatives" care about nothing but stoking rage in people, and they dishonor their forebears in doing so. I guess they don't see the irony.

Action: concerning payday loans, police brutality, vaccinations, and bad media outlets.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep payday lenders from gouging us, tell President Biden to guide cities toward using alternatives to police wherever possible, stop the flow of military weapons to local police departments, and help remove barriers to poorer nations vaccinating their citizens, and tell your cable provider to "un-Fox" your cable package. The paragraphs below will tell you how to contact these various entities. Good hunting!

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to roll back Trump-era rules that let payday lenders gouge more good Americans. 18 states (plus the District of Columbia, which should be a state) have capped loan interest at 36% or lower -- but the Trump Administration let payday lenders loan via banks in other states that, naturally, didn't have the loan interest cap. I'm old enough to remember when conservatives would never have allowed such a thing to happen. In these times, you could be forgiven for thinking Trumpian "conservatives" just go out of their way to hurt people so other people can make more money. What, it looks like something else?

The ACLU helps you tell President Biden to use his various purse-string and guidance powers to encourage localities to use alternatives to policing. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we use police officers like the Swiss Army knives of our culture, and no one is so good at everything that we can use them that way, so we shouldn't suggest that "more training" is the answer, either. Police officers should serve warrants and make arrests, and that's it. Firefighters should fight fires, EMTs should respond to emergent medical situations, and social workers should respond to mental health calls and domestic violence calls. Don't be tempted to say "that'll never work," because some localities are trying it now, and it works.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell President Biden to end the notorious 1033 program, which allows our federal government to send surplus military weapons to local police departments. Who don't use them to make their communities safer -- they use them to hurt protestors who protest their brutality in the first place! President Biden reportedly had an Executive Order curtailing the 1033 program all ready to go early in his Administration, but may have gotten cold feet after the National Association of Police Organizations weighed in. Now he may be thinking his good words about the Chauvin verdict will be enough, and he can continue to ignore his commitment to actually stopping police violence. We need to come together to say, guess again, Mr. President.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to support the proposed WTO waiver that will allow poorer nations to make COVID vaccines and give them to their people. They always talk about the supposed primacy of "intellectual property" when they say we can't do things like this, but a) our hard-earned taxes developed these vaccines, so we do in fact get a say, and b) no post-apocalyptic survivor will sit around a campfire saying "yeah, that superbug killed most of the world's people, but at least big pharma corporations got to make some more money!" Not convinced? Then consider that the pandemic can start all over again as long as it's alive somewhere in the world. As someone smarter than me put it: no one is safe until everyone is safe.

Finally, Consumers United for Fairness helps you, as they put it, un-Fox your cable box, which is to say, get your cable carrier to stop carrying Fox News as part of a "basic" package. So why this time? Oh, we could probably flip on Fox at any moment and find a good reason, but let's settle for Tucker Carlson alleging that the Chauvin jury convicted Mr. Chauvin not because there's a nearly-10 minute video showing him killing George Floyd, but because they were afraid of rioting if they exonerated him. Right-wingers love law and order until it gives them results they don't want! Does Mr. Carlson have a right to say such crap without being jailed by our government? Of course he does! But he doesn't have a "right" to be a highly-paid TV pundit; hell, he doesn't have a "right" to be broadcast, or else anyone who wanted a nightly news show would have to get one. And he certainly doesn't have a "right" to have his salary paid in part by the hundreds of millions of Americans who would never watch his program.

Action: concerning campaign finance, drug policy, sacrifice zones, child marriage, and facial recognition.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Democracy for All Amendment and the MORE Act and pass legislation outlawing "sacrifice zones," tell the Michigan state legislature to end child marriage, and tell event promotion corporations to reject the use of facial recognition technology. 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 find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the paragraphs below.

People for the American Way helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.J.Res. 1, which would amend our Constitution so that our federal, state, and local governments could regulate campaign financing again. Not that our Supreme Court has tossed all limits on campaign financing, but they've sure made it difficult for regular folks like ourselves to be heard over the din of rich folks' drama. Of course, it goes beyond "having a right to be heard" -- we have an actual First Amendment right to redress grievances with our government, with which the constant flow of money from big corporate donors interferes. Folks with more money don't have more rights, after all -- if they did, they wouldn't be rights, but privileges, and we better not be getting to the point where we call free speech a privilege.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3884/S. 2227, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. The MORE Act would take pot off of Schedule I, essentially legalizing the drug across our land, and would invest in communities most harmed by the "war on drugs," which, in most cases, will be communities of color. Pot has never belonged on Schedule I with heroin (ask Zombie William S. Burroughs about heroin!), and it's likely less of a "gateway" drug than alcohol, which remains perfectly legal, though we did try amending the Constitution once to ban it and it didn't go well. Basing so much policing around pot isn't going well, either, and I bet a lot of police officers agree, and would look forward to doing more real work.

The Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the notorious practice of "sacrifice zones," wherein our government essentially looks the other way while big corporations put all their pollution in communities of color, hence the term "sacrifice zone." We discussed this a bit yesterday when talking about the Byhalia Connection Pipeline going through communities of color in Nashville. President Biden has lately ordered the creation of a council to study the problem of environmental racism, which may do some good if the people on it are willing to go above-and-beyond, but you have every right to expect that "creating a council" might also result in "doing nothing," as it often does. Putting the force of law behind another front in the fight against racism would do a lot more good.

Change.org helps you tell the Michigan state legislature to make child marriage illegal. You mean child marriage is actually legal somewhere in America? Actually, it's still legal in 46 states! The exceptions are Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, at least three of which, ironically enough, right-wingers routinely describe as "liberal" states where "anything goes." But if a child can't consent to have sex with an adult, how can a child marry an adult? And as for laws allowing parental permission for children to marry adults, well, you can see how a child can be exploited that way, I trust. Welcome to episode 87 of my podcast, This Really Ain't That Hard.

Finally, Fight for the Future helps you tell live event producing corporations not to use facial recognition software on concert-goers. "Because it sucks and it's invasive" would be the short answer why, but these corporations are ready with a retort to that: they want to do it to "protect the public from COVID." So, to sum: we can't use a good way of protecting the public from COVID (like having folks carry around those "vaccine passports" to which right-wingers have tried to give a bad name), but we can use a bad way of doing it, one that routinely can't tell folks of color apart any better than your Tea Party uncle and Hoovers up all your data. Is it so much to ask that things not be so stupid?

Around the table: corporate welfare suffers a decidedly partial defeat in Wisconsin, and other tales.

Don't celebrate too much that Wisconsin has renegotiated that almost-$5 billion corporate welfare scheme with Foxconn and thus saved that state from pissing away more than half that money, for as Greg LeRoy at Good Jobs First reminds us, the close-to-a-billion dollars that the Village of Mt. Pleasant and Racine County put up just to accommodate Foxconn's empty shell of a manufacturing complex ain't never coming back. And let's not praise Gov. Evers too much for mitigating that harm, either -- with approximately zero good Wisconsinites favoring corporate welfare über alles, I think he should have done better.

Another day, another "anti-riot" bill designed to stifle actual free speech becomes law. We shame them for their violence and then they say 25 of us in the street are a "riot"! Here's the thing: blocking a street with a protest isn't actually "violent," it's just inconvenient, and our Constitution doesn't actually guarantee convenience. If it did, I dare say we'd never grow as people.

The NYPD has apparently deployed a robot dog inside that city's public housing projects, a headless dog described as "creepy," "a fancy toy in search of an actual use case," and a "prop() from a bad Black Mirror episode," an entirely sympathetic sentiment even though there are actually no bad Black Mirror episodes. These robot dogs collect a boatload of private data, can tow an 18-wheeler, and costs $70,000, in a time when people go hungry and teachers have to buy school supplies. And of course they're nowhere near as charming as this futuristic dog.

Two men die test-driving the Autopilot feature in a Tesla Model S -- and these men are, as you know, not the first to die at the hands of a driverless car -- and I'm reminded that some folks love saying that people cause a lot more accidents than driverless cars do. The problem with that, of course, isn't just that you can make cars safer so people cause fewer accidents, but that you can bring a person to justice if you need to. Just try bringing a thing to justice for killing someone. Why, it's almost like that's the idea.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) argues that the supposed deadness of D.C. on Wednesday night (a deadness disputed by at least one commenter!) after the Derek Chauvin verdict means that "BLM is the strongest terrorist threat in our country." Yikes, you riot, they yell at you, you don't riot, they still yell at you. I'm beginning to think nothing will ever be good enough for people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Finally, I have a bit to say about the Chauvin verdict. I remember saying, a few years ago, that even though George Zimmerman got off for shooting Trayvon Martin, Mr. Zimmerman had become approximately the most hated man on Earth, and Black lives would be saved merely because more wannabe cops would think twice before becoming such a pariah. But if Derek Chauvin had gotten off, and become an accursed wanderer himself, I'd have accepted that far less -- not as much because it's cooler to be a racist asshole now as because Jesus Mary and Joseph we have to come farther than that in seven years. I guess I'm relieved that we did, in fact, come that far. But we still have far to go.

Action: concerning marketing to children, public lands, and law and order.

Long story short: tell Facebook not to launch an "Instagram for kids," tell our FDA to outlaw flavored tobacco products, tell our President to restore Bears Ears and stop the Byhalia Connection Pipeline, and tell our Justice Department to investigate the alleged crimes of ex-President Trump. The following paragraphs will provide email/petition tools for all of these actions. Good hunting!

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell Facebook to scrap plans to create an Instagram platform just for children. Because children don't need more attention-diverting, crazy-making internet crap, that's why! Adults can handle it a lot better. You may well be asking yourself, self, didn't they worry about my grandparents reading too many pulp Westerns when they were children? I'm sure they did, but I'm also sure that reading pulp novels is far, far safer than imbibing images far faster than any generation has done before. And giving kids one more way to plug in to the virtual world ain't gonna help them in the real world. So let's tell Facebook to do better by them, rather than prime them to be the good consumer drones of the future.

Progress America helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to ban the sale of flavored tobacco-based products, including e-cigs, menthol cigarettes, and flavored cigars. Again, making these products taste like gummy worm or cotton candy is a way of setting kids up for lung cancer when they're adults; after all, luring adults into smoking now that everyone knows it causes cancer will only go so far. Better to harvest the addicts young, I guess they think, if not say. (And behind closed doors, I'm sure they are saying it.) Seriously, should any product for children be literally addictive?

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to restore the famous Bears Ears National Monument to its original size. I guess the courts can one day decide whether the Antiquities Act really gives Presidents the ability to scale down national monuments (Mr. Trump did it, so I lean "no"), but scaling down Bears Ears in the first place was a profound insult to the Native Americans who both pushed for the Monument's creation and took care of it once it was created. Mr. Trump, of course, took about 85% of it away so oil and gas drilling corporations could enrich their executives and befoul the land. I would think anyone would find that offensive.

The Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell President Biden to revoke federal permits for the Byhalia Connection Pipeline. Why? Because it would run through the Memphis Sand Aquifer and thus pollute the drinking water used by good Americans in and around Memphis, TN -- I don't say "potentially pollute" because pipeline leaks are just about a near-certainty, particularly in an age where the corporations that run the pipelines do so with near-impunity. Just so happens the pipeline would run through mostly Black communities as well; you hear enough about that to think that might have been the idea, too. This ain't tough: do more solar and wind and you won't be polluting our air and water so much, particularly in neighborhoods that got it bad enough.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate the various allegations against Donald Trump. I say "allegations" even though we all heard him try to get the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" 11,000 more votes, and we all watched him do a lot of other crap one would think would get you put in jail. If your Trump-loving friend comes at you with "but this is unprecedented!", go back at him with "oh, you wanted a President who'd smash traditions and now you want tradition to protect him?" If you still have Trump-loving friends, of course.

Around the table: Republicans complain about markets working, and other completely expected developments.

Again, it happens: Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) calls Major League Baseball's moving of its All-Star game out of Atlanta "economic terrorism." And here I thought Republicans would call that the free market in action! I kid, of course, but just you try making a killing self-publishing and watch Amazon call you a "literary terrorist." Or try growing your own organic tomatoes and watch Big Ag call you an "agricultural terrorist." Or, hell, just oppose whatever war our government wants to fight, and they'll call you "terrorist" without any qualifiers.

In a related note, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, reacting to a boycott of Home Depot for its so-far refusal to oppose Georgia's recent vote suppression law, says "This insanity needs to stop." It's "insanity" to boycott Home Depot? Gosh, where else will good Georgians buy silicone caulk and paint stripper? Last I looked, the First Amendment did not command me to spend money at any particular place of business. But keep being hysterical, Mr. Kemp; it's a really, really good look to the 75% of the electorate that isn't actually insane.

Ho hum, Nike responds to reports of its success in avoiding federal income tax last year by whining we do so pay a lot of taxes, like state and local taxes and customs duties. Which no one asked! Nike's own tax disclosures reveal that they actually got a $100 million-plus rebate. If you ask someone did you steal my money? and they respond by listing all the gifts they've ever given to anyone ever, you'd have every reason to be suspicious.

Actual economist Dean Baker finds the "alarm" over recent increasing government debt "misplaced." Pundits wring their hands over inflation and it never seems to come! Even in 2020, when government debt was a bigger chunk of national GDP since WWII, inflation went down, which makes sense when you remember how little you got around in 2020 or how anxious you were about whatever pile of money you had getting smaller. Right-wingers love saying how much they "understand human character," but too many of them, it often seems, don't understand how people get through. Money shot: "If we paid off the national debt, but left an economy in ruins and a devastated environment, we will not have done our children any favors."

Yesterday we said big corporations aren't falling out of love with Republicans like they might want us to think, but the estimable Kevin Drum will, at least, entertain the possibility that they are, and not for silly reasons -- "big corporations have mostly adopted the vaguely liberal 'responsible citizen' attitude of the majority of Americans," he says, not because they're so, so liberal, but "because their market research says this is what most people want." Still, Mr. Drum says, "businesses do still care about unions and regulations," and their hatred of both may keep them aligned with Republicans, if Republicans would just stop "upsetting the apple cart over trivial crap like Dr. Seuss and trans bathrooms that no one would care about if they'd just shut up about it." So, reports of corporate America abandoning Republicans are premature -- but the fissures between them will give us openings to do good works.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Charles Pierce at Esquire reminds us that "(w)e need to reckon with January 6 whether or not Republicans are prepared to participate." If that means "Democratic congressional majorities have to go it alone, then they should," and "(i)f Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice needs to be the venue for that reckoning, then so be it" -- but let's not wait for Republicans to take part in a reckoning that will look bad for them. I would go further: this reckoning means we must shun those friends and family who have spent the last couple of decades helping to create the climate of insanity that led to January 6. Republican politicians might never come around, but our friends and families might, once they find their worlds much smaller than before.

Action: concerning jobs, health care, corporate welfare, D.C. statehood, our Supreme Court, and whistleblowers.

Long story short: tell our President and your Congressfolk to raise the corporate tax rate much higher than some Senators would like; tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare for All Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the D.C. Admission Act, and a bill that would add four Justices to our Supreme Court; also tell your Congressfolk to strengthen whistleblower protections for folks who expose money laundering. 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 find your Congressfolks' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below. Good hunting!

Word on the street is Democrats are about to settle for a 25% corporate tax rate, when 28% was already settling, and all I can say is: congratulations, Democrats! You are about to lose the 2022 midterms! Seriously, making corporations pay more is popular, you know, with people, even if it's not popular with big corporate donors. So go ahead and call your Senators and demand a 55% corporate tax rate, just like the one we had in the '50s when we had damn near full employment almost every year. (Daily Kos also helps you demand higher taxes on corporations and the rich.) If you've got an extra minute, call President Biden at 202.456.1111 (or contact him at this web address) and tell him to give up on "negotiating with Republicans." We've watched Republicans "negotiate" for 20 years -- they block everything, they call their opponents "traitors," and they try to overturn elections when the results don't go their way. The only people our President should negotiate with is us.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Hopefully, spending the most on health insurance and getting less for it than most other rich nations on Earth is not the kind of thing that makes you you want to yell WE'RE NUMBER ONE! Now's a good time for two reminders: 1) we can fund it by converting the money big corporations already spend on health insurance into an employer-side payroll tax and fund Medicare for All without raising taxes on workers even one penny, and 2) the Democrats who ran in Republican-leaning districts but supported Medicare for All tended to win, and the ones who didn't tended to lose. So brook no ten-dollar-word cowardice from your Congressfolk about this.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. As its name suggests, the End Polluter Welfare Act would repeal handouts to fossil fuel corporations to the tune of $15 billion annually. I suppose the same right-wingers who pretend to hate subsidies "except for these" will turn it around at some point and argue that fossil fuel corporations need subsidies precisely because renewables are catching up to them! Of course, renewables barely pollute, whereas oil and gas drilling befouls our air and water and threatens to make our planet unlivable, so right-wingers still lose. Unless we fail to speak out, that is.

Both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and the League of Conservation Voters help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act, and thus make Washington, D.C. a state. You'd think Republicans would leap at the chance to give D.C. some autonomy, but alas, no -- they'd prefer to dictate to D.C., and they don't want one more Democratic House Rep and two more Democratic Senators in Congress, though, you know, if you were worried about that, you'd figure out how to win there! Also, too, if D.C. were a state, they'd have been able to protect themselves better from the seditionists of January 6. It's all about giving good D.C. residents the same amount of self-determination all our states have; why is that so much to ask?

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support legislation that would add four Associate Justices to our Supreme Court. Meaning our Court would have 13 Justices, not nine, and just so happens America has 13 appellate courts, so now our current Justices won't have to double up. And Congress can-so do this! The number of Supreme Court Justices has fluctuated throughout American history; law sets the current number at nine, not our Constitution, not our Founders. Don't brook any silliness from Republicans about this matter -- they were perfectly happy to have only eight Justices while it suited them.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen whistleblower protections for folks who expose money laundering. It's only been a few months that we've had protections for those whistleblowers, but they're not as good as they need to be -- when such folks can face retaliation without recourse to legal avenues, and when our Treasury Department can award whistleblowers as little as one dollar without being challenged, these are not good things. Many whistleblowers will have been out of work for several years and destitute by the time they get that piddling award, so it's important we reward people properly when they put themselves on the line like that. They're helping us be a law-and-order nation, after all.

Around the table: who gets gun control right? Not us!

From Francis Wilkinson at Bloomberg we learn about "Canada’s Reasonable Vision of Gun Control." 15 hours of classes to get a mandatory gun license, a month-long approval process that requires references, gun instructors who wish there were fewer gun owners -- why, it's like an alternate universe where everything works! In the Universe of America, however, some people call everything that might interfere with their rage-gasms "tyranny," and, as evidenced by the fact that Louisiana had double the murders of Canada last year with one-eighth of the population, they still get too much say in what goes on in America.

Our Supreme Court supposedly disappoints the gun-rights-über-alles crowd in America by refusing to take up three appeals of our national ban on guns ownership by non-violent convicted criminals, but they disappoint me, as well: generally we should not use criminal convictions to deprive people of rights after they've served their time, and that's as true for gun rights as it is for voting rights. You may recall, of course, that the Trump Administration, supposedly the greatest boon to the 2nd Amendment this land has ever seen, did nothing to restore gun ownership rights to non-violent offenders.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) plans to file a bill calling for the expulsion of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) for what she calls her "continual incitement to violence." What if we never actually see such a bill? It will matter not to right-wing votaries, for whom the thrill of rage is all that matters. Anyway, tit for tat ain't the most mature way to go about legislation, but this ain't even tit for tat, as I think most people can tell the difference between Donald Trump telling January 6 seditionists to "take back your country!" and Maxine Waters telling anti-racism protestors that "we've got to get more confrontational."

Surprise, surprise! Two Democratic Senators who oppose the PRO Act, Sen. Kelly of Arizona and Sen. Warner of Virginia, received buku bucks from Amazon in their recent campaigns. However, Sen. Kelly tended to get his campaign contribution from Amazon workers, while Sen. Warner got most of his from Amazon executives, and Mr. Warner sounds like a typical anti-union knucklehead in his opposition, with all his talk about "process issues" like that doesn't make him sound like a smartypants or something. Will Democrats never understand how much Americans hate people who sound like smartypantses?

When I hear that "The GOP's Fallout With Big Business Is Already Mending," I'm tempted to reply: that implies the fallout was ever real! But I'm pained to admit that I thought, for a minute and a half, that maybe the CEOs of today are younger than they used to be and maybe a bit more tolerant, etc. One day I'll learn not to be such an optimist. (As an aside, why do any sane people listen to what the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce says? It's like they're setting an example of what not to do.)

Finally, when I hear about Ivanka Trump getting an earful from right-wing loudmouths after she gets her COVID vaccine, I struggle to remember any of them being all that anti about the Big Man Himself getting his shot when they heard about it. Perhaps this is a good sign: that the "devotion" Donald Trump "inspires" can't be so easily transferred to others, not even his namesake. On the other hand, if Jared got his shot, maybe the faithful would be less angry, and then we'd suspect their real problem is Ivanka not having a penis.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, paycheck fairness, saving our Post Office, and war in Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act, and also to confirm President Biden's USPS Board of Governors nominees; and tell our President to stop arming the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers, or use the links in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. You've heard a lot about Republican vote suppression shenanigans lately, but you may not have heard that "blue" states have fairly restrictive voting laws as well! We notice it less, because crazy Republicans tend to lose elections there, but Rhode Island (for example) has a strict Voter ID law, Connecticut doesn't offer any early voting, and New York makes you jump through flaming hoops to change your party registration in advance of a primary. These states have poor folks and folks of color, too; why should we leave them behind?

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. What I was just talking about in re restrictive voting laws in "blue" states? The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act could fix that, as well. The Voting Rights Act singled out Southern states for federal approval of voting rights law changes, but the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would amend the Voting Rights Act so that any state or locality with a record of vote suppression would have to submit their voting law changes for federal pre-clearance. Your Republican Senators may be interested to hear that. I mean, of course they've figured that out (even Tommy Tuberville!), but they'll still be interested to know that their constituents have figured it out.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Right-wingers have been bleating about TEH MENZ INZ TEH WIMMINZ SPORTZ!!!!, and I feel like I've explained pretty well why that's utter bunkum, but Chris Walker at TruthOut tells us even more: not just that most Americans oppose the anti-transgender laws states have been rushing to pass lately, but that scientists find that trans athletes actually don't get much of an advantage by transitioning. If you thought about it for a minute -- that transitioning to another gender involves a lot of hormonal and musculoskeletal changes -- you'd agree. Of course, Republican politicians are trying to create an electorate that doesn't think about anything even for a minute. But we outnumber them, so we don't have to put up with that.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Our House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act last week, with exactly one Republican voting in favor of it, and I bet you already know that was Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania's 1st. (Nope, not even former Democrat and avowed disciple of "bipartisanship" Jefferson Van Drew of New Jersey's 2nd.) The Paycheck Fairness Act would (among other good works) prevent bosses from firing workers for talking about their pay with their co-workers, which is usually how women find out they're not getting paid as much as men. I guess Republicans will retort that the Paycheck Fairness Act restricts corporations' rights to restrict your speech! Everyone knows our First Amendment protects you from your government, not your boss, but that doesn't mean your boss's right to restrict your speech must be absolute -- particularly when that tramples over your rights as secured by the law. So don't brook that silliness, either.

Common Cause still helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors nominees -- not just because they're good nominees, but because they'll likely fire notorious Postmaster General/aspiring election thief/bad boss Louis DeJoy -- but maybe you should also call Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY), at 202.224.6542 and demand that he actually schedule this vote. President Biden nominated the three individuals well over a month and a half ago, so what's the holdup? You'd hate to think it's because Democrats want to privatize the Post Office, too, but simply want Republicans to get the blame for it. You'd hate to think that, but you also have to consider that. We should let Mr. Schumer know we're thinking that, too.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to stop arming the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. The news hook, of course, is that, contra his promises, our President still plans to approve the sale of "matériel that can be construed to have a defensive purpose," per the New York Times, and though that means fewer guns and bombs, it also means offensive weapons that, well, "can be construed to have a defensive purpose." Yemen is now the second-hungriest nation on the planet per the Global Hunger Index, all to deter Iranian influence there, supposedly, but the Houthi rebels the Saudi/UAE coalition targets are some of the best fighters of al-Qaeda on Earth, and with all the destruction the coalition has unleashed on Yemen, what are the chances good Yemenis actually find Iranian help less attractive now? It's like these wars are supposed to make everything worse. But we don't have to let that happen.

Around the table: Republicans spread rubbish about the infrastructure bill, and other total non-surprises.

FactCheck reminds us that Republicans are fairly consistently "underestimating" how much of President Biden's American Jobs Plan actually consists of what we'd reasonably call infrastructure spending. Long story short: it's not "6 percent" like they're all repeating like a bunch of robots, but by Sen. Thune's own limited standards it's more like 17%. And everything FactCheck names sounds like infrastructure to me, so really it's more like 65%. I include the $400 billion for long-term care for the aging, for example, since investing in facilities that take care of us when we're older does sound rather like building things our civilization can use.

When I hear that our "liberal" media still calls a thing "divisive" if people like it but Our Glorious Elites don't, I'm reminded that our "liberal" media called "opposing the Iraq war" an "extreme" position even after polls informed us that 60% of Americans held that position, and that the sainted President Obama called those who criticized his 2010 capitulation to Republicans on tax-cuts-for-the-rich "sanctimonious" and "purist," even though well over half of Americans, even then, wanted the rich to pay more in taxes. So this is an old trick, but one that's working less and less, I think. And let's say this one more time: "Every single Democratic incumbent in a swing district who endorsed Medicare for All won reelection in 2020. The same cannot be said for those that did not endorse it."

We mentioned last week that colleges have used the pandemic as (another) excuse to cut their departments, but I'm pleased to note that unions at CUNY and Rutgers have been pushing back, albeit when those universities actually tried to violate contractually-promised pay increases. But that's why we have unions, and it's why we should have more of them. It's also why right-wingers constantly go on about "union dues," when you'll generally make a lot more money in salary at a union shop than you'll pay in dues. I mean, what else they got? "Unions hold back progress" sure ain't working for them, being, as it is, demonstrably wrong.

After a lot of pushback from liberals, President Biden decided to lift the Trump Administration's draconian cap on refugee admissions after all. I guess our "liberal" media will talk about how he "caved" to the left, as if doing the people's will is itself "capitulation" (no, I don't think "the people's will" was ever "try to keep out all refugees"). But perhaps Mr. Biden realized -- unlike President Obama, notoriously known as the "Deporter-in-Chief" during his tenure -- that acting like a right-winger on immigration matters will garner you the appreciation of exactly zero right-wingers.

In a related note, certain right-wing Republicans planned to start an "America First Caucus," devoted, apparently to maintaining "a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions" oh the hell with it waaaaaaaaah. You can always tell when someone's blind to their own privilege: they think the fact that they don't get all the say about everything means they get no say about anything. Naturally one of the ringleaders now denies the whole thing, and just as naturally blames the media for reporting on the matter accurately.

Finally, the interwebs are agog with a clip in which Pat Robertson opposes police shooting Black folks to death without even charging them with a crime. He says a lot of the right things, but he keeps cutting himself off, too; possibly he's trying to avoid saying something he thinks will alienate his audience, and possibly he's angry police shooters put him in this uncomfortable position where he has to say he's "pro-police" while also saying you'd better be able to tell the difference between a gun and a taser. I do feel like I have been describing how to split that knot -- it starts with "stop making our police the Swiss Army knives of our civilization."

Action: concerning the Uyghurs, private prisons, the PRO Act, vaccine investment, and police brutality.

Long story short: tell big clothing corporations to stop enabling China in its exploitation of Uyghur Muslims, tell President Biden to cancel private prison contracts, tell your Senators to pass the PRO Act, and tell your Congressfolk to spend new nuke money on vaccine development and pass bills that would curtail police brutality. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Sum of Us helps you tell big clothing corporation Zara to stop using Uyghur forced labor in China to manufacture their products. Nobody should profit from slave labor, and nobody should profit from the Chinese herding hundreds of thousands of Muslims into concentration camps where they get tortured and brainwashed, either. Some folks, most likely trolls, will tell you that opposing Zara's efforts to profit off the Uyghurs actually hurts the Uyghurs, because then the Chinese will take it out on them more, or something. Eject such people from your acquaintance! Wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR against corporations profiting from oppression always pressures the oppressors, and any evil they do because they feel pressure is on them, not you.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Biden Administration to cancel all prison and detention center contracts with private corporations. Regardless of how you feel about punishment, etc., getting private corporations out of the imprisoning business will save the taxpayer money and make our government more accountable. Private prisons don't "do the job better for less," they do it worse at more expense, and generally they "solve" their accountability problems with large campaign donations. When we inject the profit motive into a public good, the profit motive overwhelms the public good eventually. And this is all a bad way to rehabilitate prisoners or address immigration issues. We still are serious about these things, aren't we?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would repeal state-level "right to work" laws (i.e., "right to work for less" laws!), stop employers from requiring workers to attend anti-union meetings or sign forced arbitration agreements, would stop employers from retaliating against employees (including managers) who blow the whistle on labor law violations, and would let employees determine how to conduct a union election. And how does the other side respond? By saying people shouldn't have to join a union if they don't want to. Most people want to, most of the others will be fine with it once they see the benefits, and we can accommodate the political beliefs of the rest (by keeping dues and political contributions separate, for example).

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2227/S. 982, the Investing Cures Before Missiles (or ICBM) Act. The bill would redirect funding away from new intercontinental ballistic missiles (which is what "ICBM" more traditionally stands for, see what they did there!) and toward an even better COVID vaccine. We spend too much money on missiles; we get too little for what we spend on drugs, of course, but you can make your tax dollar go a lot further on a vaccine than you can on yet another weapon. We already spend more on defense than the next eight nations on that list combined, and yet we still worry we're not safe! It's almost like the two facts are related. You know what makes people safer in this day and age, though? Knowing they're much less likely to die from a virus that doesn't have to kill them.

Finally, if you've missed previous action alerts about police brutality, Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end militarization of local police. The Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act and the Demilitarizing Law Enforcement Act both await House consideration, after all, and don't worry about making your Congressfolk sick of hearing about this from you! They're supposed to get sick of hearing about it, and then they're supposed to do something about it! This note, I realize, is of a piece with the previous one -- just as we're wrong that more missiles will keep us safer as a nation, we're also wrong to think more weapons will keep police safer on our streets. You know what keeps police safer? Knowing their communities better, and positively interacting with their communities more. Tough to quantify in a spreadsheet, I know, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Around the table: vaccines are still good, and other reminders.

When I learn that our CDC has found that some 5,000 folks -- out of 66 million fully vaccinated Americans -- have contracted COVID anyway, I fear that a few more fools will throw up their hands and say I TOLDZ YOUZ TEH SOZ!!!!, when, actually, we all knew, or should have known, that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines didn't have a 100% success rate (though they appear to have a considerably higher success rate than we thought!), and we also know, I would hope, that the number of people who would have gotten COVID out of that 66 million would have been much higher without the vaccines.

The New York Times has apparently killed a story about a bill that would restore the state's financial transaction tax, since the bill "had no chance to pass," a situation the Times could have helped by, you know, covering it! The state currently rebates financial transaction taxes back to investors; Rep. Phil Steck wanted to end those rebates, which makes sense -- I mean, you can't collect revenues if you're just giving them back! But when New York state can't fund police, firefighters, and libraries because they're not collecting enough in taxes, I bet the Times covers that -- and I bet they also say it "proves" that "government doesn't work."

To those who despair that our policing problems can ever be solved, note well that Fayetteville, NC has, for years, only pulled folks over for actual moving violations, rather than "busted tail-lights" and expired tags, and they're doing much better. And still some police officers would bristle under that regimen: how can I do my job? they'll say. You mean "how can you do your job when you have less actual work to do, and the work you do helps the community more"?

Another day, another reminder that there are no "moderates" in the Republican caucus. Read over the 10 names and you won't be inspired to think of John Sherman Cooper or Margaret Chase Smith, but worse than that, "moderate" Jerry Moran co-founded the Tea Party caucus in the Senate, "moderate" Thom Tillis shepherded the most reactionary legislative agenda in North Carolina history as speaker of that state's House from 2012-2014, "moderate" Mitt Romney is always there for you when it doesn't make a difference, and even Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have pretty much one achievement as "moderates," that being their refusal to go along with Obamacare repeal in 2017. Hell, Lindsey Graham was a hero once, too, but that doesn't mean we regard him as anything but a reactionary now.

In a peripherally-related note, "moderate" Sen. Shelly Moore Capito whines about how Joe Biden doesn't really negotiate with Republicans. She must have been asleep during that 12-year stretch where Mitch McConnell "negotiated" by simply saying no and blocking everything in sight. Later she admitted that her "sweet spot" figure of "$600-$800 million" for an infrastructure/jobs bill was pretty much made up on the spot. Could it be that Joe Biden won't negotiate with Republicans because he knows they're not serious? I would hope eight years of being Barack Obama's VP would have taught him that much.

Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price -- who famously instituted a $70,000 minimum wage at his collections corporation and cut his own salary to same, and then watched his revenues triple, his customer base double, and his employees almost double -- responds to Fox News morons who call him a "socialist." Spoiler alert: he's right, they're wrong. And we are reminded, once again, that they just call people "socialist" because they can't win arguments on the merits. Right-wingers really have so little to offer the world.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Costco drops My Pillow from its stores, so says My Pillow CEO/seditionist Mike Lindell. You likely helped bring this about, so treat yourself to a Boylan's Creamy Red Birch Beer, or whatever it is you like. And no, neither you nor Costco has violated his free speech rights -- no one has a First Amendment right to sell a pillow, after all. As a votary of the "free" market, Mr. Lindell should already be figuring out what to do next! Sadly, I suspect "what to do next" will be "make people feel sorry for me," which, also sadly, will likely make him more money than he deserves in this sick, immoral, and decadent society.

Action: concerning justice, the Estate Tax, the Dakota Access pipeline, antibiotic abuse, big tech monopolies, and debt collector harassment.

Long story short: demand justice for Daunte Wright and his loved ones, tell President Biden to include a stronger Estate Tax in his infrastructure/jobs plan and shut down the Dakota Access pipeline, tell our FDA to stop antibiotic abuse on factory farms, tell our government to break up monopolies like Google and Amazon, and tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop abusive debt collection calls. The following paragraphs will provide email/petition links for all of these action alerts. Good hunting!

First things first. Change.org helps you demand justice in the Daunte Wright shooting. The wheels of justice have moved relatively quickly, I suppose -- both the officer who shot Mr. Wright and her Police Chief have resigned their positions, and authorities have lately arrested the officer on a second-degree manslaughter charge. But, frankly, said authorities could have justified a murder charge, merely because the 26-year officer couldn't possibly have mistaken her relatively heavy handgun for her relatively light taser. Manslaughter may be where it ends up -- murder is a hard charge to prove, after all -- but the state may also be reducing expectations so it can let her off. So, clearly, we still need to make our will known.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell President Biden to include an Estate Tax hike in his infrastructure/jobs plan. Too many Democrats still live in the year 1999 and think the Estate Tax is a relic of the past, but they're as wrong about that as they are about everything else -- there's nothing "evil" about taxing large estates, and no you won't destroy any family farms if you do. Even the people who pretend to worry about that can't find any evidence of it! And if we raised the Estate Tax just to where it was at the beginning of the Obama Administration, we'll raise upwards of $230 billion over 10 years, or around one-tenth of the plan's total cost. Of course we should raise it even higher, like the For the 99.5 Percent Act would do. And feel free to tell President Biden that.

Food and Water Action helps you tell President Biden to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline. He's already shut down construction on Keystone XL, and Dakota Access is already leaking and thus already polluting, so if anything, that's more urgent. And don't brook any silliness about how shutting it down would "kill jobs"! Building pipelines and causing pollution is not the only way to create jobs! Hell, building solar and wind farms would be a good way to create jobs. And good luck getting most folks who complain about "job-killing" to notice when corporations actually kill jobs. They'd do better to notice when they can't drink the water because some pipeline has befouled it.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our FDA to strengthen its proposal for antibiotic use on factory farms. 7 out of 10 antibiotics in America go, no, not to sick people or animals, but nominally healthy feed animals, so factory farms can get more meat out of them and also so animals can better endure the squalid conditions of factory farms, and that's a system that will one day take us back to a world where the next cut could kill you because none of our antibiotics work anymore. Just about everyone in America but factory farms oppose antibiotic abuse, yet the factory farms still get their way. So we keep telling our FDA, and telling them, and telling them, because very often you have to tell people more than once.

Demand Progress helps you tell your government to break up big tech monopolies like Google and Amazon. The immediate news hook, of course, is Amazon's (so far!) successful push back against unionization efforts at its Bessemer, Alabama plant; we could of course tabulate organizers' critical mistakes in that effort, but we can do little about that, other than to publicize those mistakes; we can do more about getting out government to do the job it's supposed to do, which is keep big corporations from running roughshod over the rest of us.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to roll back rules allowing debt collecting corporations to harass you online about debts you might not even owe. The Trump CFPB sympathized mainly with poor, beleaguered corporations and felt they should be allowed to interrupt your entire life with demands for money you can't just poop out. And the Trump CFPB also seemed to feel that making corporations verify that you even owe them any money was too much a "burden" for them. For the Biden CFPB, that could change -- the Senate hasn't confirmed the estimable Rohit Chopra as CFPB Director yet, but the CFPB's acting Director is the also-estimable Dave Uejio -- but only if we speak out.

Around the table: in which we confront *completely unsurprising* reports about our Capitol police, tax evasion, and Republican "rebranding," among other matters.

Ruh roh: Capitol Police Inspector General report details all manner of ball-dropping at the January 6 attempted coup, including the former Chief's apparent ignorance of reports spelling out what would likely happen, and the Capitol Police's orders not to use their "most serious crowd-control weapons" as the attempted coup took place. Of course, if the seditionists really were Black Lives Matter or antifa, instead of right-wingers easily identifiable from social media, the Police would have used all the weapons.

IRS Commissioner tells Senate panel that tax cheats actually cost America as much as $1 trillion annually, which not only calls for yet another reminder that our IRS could catch more tax cheats if we would but fund it properly, but also a reminder that $1 trillion would have wiped out the deficit each year from 2013 to 2019 (when the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich blew up the deficit), as well as every year before 2009 (right after the bankster financial Armageddon). Of course, a great nation doesn't refuse to invest in our future simply to balance a budget, either.

Ludicrous as it sounds to people who have a working brain, the Republican push to rebrand itself as "the party of the working class" could actually work! Democrats have branded themselves the party of the smartypantses, after all. But if Democrats actually use their power for good, rather than let their so-smart-they're-dumb moderates scuttle all their initiatives, all the Republican rebranding in the world might not matter. (Also, it'd help if NPR moved that fifth-from-the-bottom paragraph a lot closer to the lede, or could see through Marco Rubio's "support" for unions as a mere attack on Amazon for not carrying a few right-wing books.)

Ho hum, Fox News -- with the conspicuous exception of Geraldo Rivera, has he finally remembered where he came from? -- ran the gamut of stupidity in "covering" the Daunte Wright shooting, saying we should keep the officer who shot him in our thoughts and pointing out Mr. Wright's previous arrests as if they were convictions. This is why people hate Fox News: it seems like they never, ever fucking learn. Although the truth is far worse: of course they're not stupid, and they know better, and they refuse to do better. As you may recall from yesterday, this is one way to starve the beast. Cutting the cord is another.

When I hear that former Gov. Terry McAuliffe leads the Democratic primary for Virginia Governor by a huge margin, I wonder what Virginia Democratic voters are thinking. Mr. McAuliffe is the kind of classic Clinton-era moderate who should never win an election again, and he barely beat Ken Cuccinelli in 2013 (he won by 2.5 points in 2013, in a race where the Libertarian candidate got 6.5%), and though we think Mr. McAuliffe will face someone worse in 2021, ah, we thought it couldn't get any worse than Mr. Cuccinelli in 2013. Folks should maybe pick someone who'll energize voters rather than someone who "can win." I can't believe, after what happened in 2016, that I should have to keep saying that. (And no, the 2020 election doesn't prove me wrong -- yes, Mr. Biden won, but Democrats barely kept the House and barely won the Senate.)

Finally, put me down as someone who agrees that the FDA and CDC should tell states to pause giving out the J&J vaccine, as Joan Walsh argues at The Nation. As Ms. Walsh says, telling the truth about what happened is better than pretending everything's all right, not just as a moral matter but a practical one. Folks who disagree say it delivers a critical PR hit to vaccine at a time vaccines need all the good PR they can get, but I would agree more with that if the J&J vaccine were the only vaccine on the market (it's not even one of the preferred vaccines on the market!). And personal to Nate Silver: "understand(ing) cost-benefit analysis" doesn't help you if you've died of a blood clot.

Action: concerning jobs, media, police brutality, facial recognition, airline refunds, and campaign donations.

Long story short: tell President Biden to show less "flexibility" with Republicans on his infrastructure package, tell your cable provider to stop carrying the Fox News (sic) Channel, tell big corporations to stop funding police foundations, tell Disney to stop using facial recognition software, tell big airline corporations to refund folks who didn't use their tickets in a pandemic, and tell the American Dental Association to stop donating to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). I've provided President Biden's phone number below for the first alert, and email/petition links for the others. Good hunting!

Yesterday we learned that President Biden seemed amenable to passing infrastructure/jobs legislation more like Republicans would like. Was he waffling? Was he doing pro forma meetings with Republicans? Was he playing them in yet another game of 19-dimensional chess? The answer doesn't matter. Here's what matters: we call President Biden, at 202.456.1111, and tell him do not pander to Republicans on his signature infrastructure/jobs legislation. This way, we change the story from "what's President Biden going to do?" to what we're going to do. And if enough of us communicate our will to our President, he'll hear it, if for no other reason that some staffer in the White House is going to be sick of all these phone calls. (And if you tell him you want the corporate tax rate to go higher -- say, to 55%, where it was in the '50s -- well, what's the harm in that?)

Consumers United for Fairness helps you tell your cable corporation to stop carrying Fox News. I've said it many times: even if you're not watching Fox News, you're still paying for it, and even if you make the cable company come out and block Fox News, you're still paying for it, and they'll never change their ways until we take away their money, particularly that pile of passive money they get from every cable TV subscriber in America. Seriously, $2 a month per account adds up -- and starving the beast of that $2 a month per account will also add up. Yeah, we finally cut the cord last year, but not everyone will do that, particularly if they like their HGTV and their ESPN and their Comedy Central. We've got the power, so let's use it. (And if anyone bellows TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!! at you over this, kindly direct them to the "$2 a month per account" phrase above.)

Sum of Us helps you tell big corporations like Starbucks, Target, and Coca-Cola to stop funding police foundations. Why? Isn't that, like, civic duty or something? Except that police foundations usually get the military weapons and surveillance tech for police departments, which they use to attack protestors and single out folks of color. So it's the opposite of civic duty, actually. And these corporations are trying to appear "woke"! Why, it's enough to make you suspicious of corporate PR! But we've got the Big Stick of Bad PR ourselves, plus the power to stop patronizing these establishments, which even in our monopolistic era ain't as hard as they'd like you to think. So let's do that.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Disney to stop using facial recognition software at their theme parks. Yeah, they say they've started "testing" that software at their Magic Kingdoms, but how much more testing do we need to do? We already know that facial recognition software not only intrudes on our privacy but can't tell Black folks apart any better than your Tea Party uncle can, plus it creates another pile of data most corporations have already proven they can't (or won't!) secure, so hackers can steal it. So it's evil and it's useless -- and useless in a way that makes it more evil. Surely Disney World has more to offer the world than that! And the Big Stick of Bad PR may help them remember that, so let's wield it.

Penn PIRG helps you tell big airline corporations to refund good Americans for all those plane tickets they cancelled in 2020. Too many Americans got vouchers, not refunds, and those vouchers have expiration dates, but the pandemic's still going on, so why should they be punished for continuing to make the right choice? Too often, in this sick, immoral, and decadent civilization, we punish people for doing the right thing and reward them for doing the wrong thing; how about we stop doing that in this instance? If it seems like it might not make that much of a difference to our posterity, rest assured that every time we reward the righteous and punish evil, we make a difference to our posterity. I've seen it happen enough times to know it's worth doing, but every day we must make an example of our good works -- and our good hearts! -- to others. It sure is better than cynicism, I tell you what.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell the American Dental Association to stop donating to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). They donate to him, I presume, because he's a dentist! Not just any dentist, either, but a member of the Arizona Dental Association's Hall of Fame! No, really, I'm not kidding. Sadly, Rep. Gosar has made a name for himself for other reasons -- for being one of the ringleaders of the Congressional effort to overturn the 2020 Presidential election (including the attempted coup of January 6!), and for making nice with white supremacists at the America First PAC meeting the next month. Dentistry Hall of Fame or no, this is one character you don't want soiling your good name -- a fact six of his nine siblings have taken to heart by endorsing his opponent in his 2018 and 2020 House races! If they can do it, surely the ADA can, too.

UPDATE. I am sorry to say the White House phone number is not working today; try the White House's contact link instead.

ANOTHER UPDATE. I wish I'd remembered that Fox News actually charges around $2/month in carrier fees to the big cable corporations, not 75¢/month, as it was many years ago; I've corrected the error above.

Around the table: ho hum, Republican politicians are full of rage and cowardice and whining and ignorance.

President Biden announces the U.S. will withdraw from Afghanistan by 9.11.21 -- really? After only 20 years? -- and naturally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) thinks such a withdrawal would be "dumber than dirt and devilishly dangerous," proving, once again, that a little alliteration is a dangerous thing. Of course Sen. Graham wants us all to be cowards, clinging to military aggression in order to "keep safe" from the Middle East terrorism that said military aggression has made much, much worse. Why, it's almost like that's the whole idea! Besides, you know what keeps people safe? Stopping the rich from running roughshod over them, a principle folks like Lindsey Graham pretend not to understand.

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut suggests there may be, ah, something else behind Sen. Manchin's repeated calls for "bipartisanship" -- namely, campaign contributions from the banksters who benefited most from the corporate tax cut of 2017 and don't want to see it go back up. To these banksters, the obvious response would be maybe there are other people in America besides you. They should count themselves lucky they're dealing with Joe Biden, who has only proposed raising the rate to 28%, and not those of us who would raise it to 55%, which is where it was in the '50s, the last decade we stopped the rich from running roughshod over us. You know, maybe we should make it so they have to deal with us.

In a related note, big corporations have started to run ads telling us we better not raise corporate taxes during an economic downturn! These clowns tell us we can't raise taxes because times are bad and then we can't raise taxes because times are good, but I think most Americans can now tell the difference between the taxes they pay and the taxes rich folks and corporations pay. And dig the Mike Pence crony who actually has the nerve to call his tax-fighting lobby the Coalition to Protect American Workers! Instead of spending $12.5 million to run ads opposing corporate tax hikes, maybe you could spend that money, oh, I don't know, safety in the workplace? You know, something that actually deals with "protection"?

In the wake of yet another Breathing-While-Black shooting by police, we are reminded that police can, in fact, pull you over in many states for hanging something from your rear-view mirror, ostensibly the "probable cause" police used to pull over Daunte Wright before shooting him dead. But I've had something hanging from my rearview for over a dozen years, and the next time I get pulled over for it will be the first. I'm pretty sure that's because I'm not Black! Naturally police say they need to be able to pull you over for hanging an air freshener from your rearview so they can investigate all the other sordid things you might be doing, which doesn't sound at all fascistic. But gosh, fellows, ever walk a beat? You know, find out what's going on in a community by talking to the people in that community? Some things we did do better in the old days. Even if you can't always quantify it on a spreadsheet.

When you hear that Republicans want to forge a "truce" between former President Trump and Senate Minority Leader McConnell, please remember that this is all drama. No Republican operatives actually care if Messrs. Trump and McConnell "get along" or whatever -- in fact, they have more of an interest, I would think, in keeping the discord going, not just because it distracts people from more nefarious doings (i.e., the wave of anti-voting bills and anti-transgender bills Republicans are forcing down good Americans' throats at the state level), but because it misleads people into thinking Republican politicians really are a very diverse group with very diverse ideas, when, fact is, they're all whining, bigoted seditionists.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, David Frum at The Atlantic argues that Republicans might actually be screwing themselves with their vote suppression legislation. To which I would respond: we can only hope! Seriously, he does make a lot of cogent arguments, among them that suppressing mail-in voting actually hurts rural voters who trend Republican at least as much as the urban voters who trend Democratic, though I would like to see a bit more evidence (i.e., turnout rates from more than two counties in Kentucky). But Mr. Frum is absolutely right that "winning votes is better than suppressing them," which leads me to assert, again, that Democrats could make all this speculation worthless by using their power to do good things this year and next, instead of letting Joe Manchin scuttle everything by demanding that we work with Republicans who want to burn everything down.

Action: concerning campaign finance, health care, law and order, drug policy, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to support a Constitutional amendment that would get big money out of political campaigns, and then tell your House Reps to pass the Medicare for All Act, the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act, the MORE Act, and the D.C. Admission Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your House Reps' phone numbers -- or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

People for the American Way helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.J.Res. 1, which would amend our Constitution so that our federal, state, and local governments could restrict campaign financing again. Go ahead and read the bill at Congress.gov; it's pretty short, and it would also allow governments to distinguish between "natural" persons (i.e., you and I) and "corporations or other artificial entities," which opens the door to banning corporate campaign contributions. Like many bills that don't pass, this is a very popular bill, and right-wingers will come at you with all kinds of hysterical stories about "what could happen" if governments were to regulate campaign finance again. Spoiler alert: they're all rubbish -- and you'll know they're rubbish because none of them ever happened between McCain/Feingold and Citizens United.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, and Black Lives Matter all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. You've seen those memes on Facebook about how you go get your COVID vaccine and no one asks you if you've got health insurance or cash on hand, and wouldn't it be wonderful if you got all your health care that way? Expanding Medicare to include all Americans would get us there, and no, you wouldn't be paying an arm and a leg more for it in taxes -- we could convert the money corporations are already paying for private insurance into an employer-side payroll tax, which wouldn't take one penny more out of your paycheck (since it's employer-side; the payroll tax splits Social Security taxes between employer and employee). Feel free to tell your Congressfolk just that. They'll either be impressed or scared; either reaction is fine.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Reps to pass the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act, which would repeal the notorious 1033 program which funnels surplus military weapons to local police -- who then use it on protestors against police brutality! I'd call that irony, but aren't we supposed to get pleasure from irony? And don't worry that you've also called supporting the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and/or the Stop Militarizing the Police Act, even if these bills have a lot of overlap -- if you voice your support for all of them, then you'll have told your Congressfolk "stop giving the police military weapons" several times, and that's what they most need to know.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Reps to pass the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, which would undo a lot of damage caused by the "war on drugs." No, really -- all the "war on drugs" did was put a lot of people in jail; and in the case of pot, it put people in jail because they used a drug that wasn't particularly dangerous, like cocaine or heroin. The MORE Act would make marijuana legal, invest in the communities most harmed by the "war on drugs," and expunge pot convictions from a lot of folks' criminal records. 16 states have legalized pot now; maybe it's time for our federal government to get the message.

Finally, both People for the American Way and the Progressive Reform Network help you tell your Reps to pass H.R. 51, the D.C. Admission Act. Why? Because it would admit Washington, D.C., as a state, that's why. It would be America's smallest state by a sizable margin (is that a sigh of relief I'm hearing from Rhode Island?), but it would not be America's least populous state (it's ahead of Vermont and Wyoming, and nipping at the heels of Alaska and North Dakota), plus it would be able to run itself the way other states do, instead of relying on our federal government to run it. (Sounds almost conservative, doesn't it?) Our government certainly left Washington, D.C. in the lurch on January 6, didn't it? If D.C. were a state, it'd have its own National Guard, and a lot of weekend fascists would think twice about trying that again.

Around the table: the dirty secret about the Republican agenda! OK, it's not much of a secret.

Sonali Kohatkar tells us "Why Republicans Are Betting the Farm on Attacking Transgender People." Long story short: they're trying to stoke rage in voters, and besides, what else they got? And note well that anti-transgender bills are "not being requested by constituents," in one observer's words, but you hear people talk about how much they don't like transgender people solely because it's "in the news" -- and it's only in the news because Republicans push these bills! Gosh, how do such things happen?

Republicans are circulating a memo on Capitol Hill calling the Biden infrastructure plan a "slush fund," but that's easy to counter: is my job a "slush fund"? Is my house a "slush fund"? Is clean water a "slush fund"? Is my kid's school a "slush fund"? Is high-speed internet for everyone a "slush fund"? Is the bridge I take to work a "slush fund"? Is retraining my coal worker uncle a "slush fund"? One could go on.

In a related note, Lindsay Koshgarian at TruthOut reminds us that the Biden infrastructure plan could very easily be funded given the amount of money our government pisses away on wars and tax cuts for the rich. Why, after you confront $6.4 trillion we've spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that have made everything in the Middle East even worse, plus the $2.3 trillion budget gap the Trump tax cuts will cost through 2027, you may come away from this article wishing the Biden plan was bigger! Might as well spend trillions of dollars on stuff we use, after all.

Ho hum, law enforcement officers allege that an antifa activist shot at them first -- thus presumably justifying their shooting him to death -- but their investigation may have left a few things out, such as the fact that the activist in question had a gun with a full clip on him at time of death, or the witness testimony that contradicted the witness testimony cited in their investigation, or the utter dearth of body camera or dashboard camera footage. Indeed, police may even have led an eight-year-old witness upon whose testimony the investigation relied heavily. Still, BUT ANTIFA! is likely to become the BUT HER EMAILS! of the new decade. Seriously, just try talking to a right-winger about January 6.

Finally, Sen. Cornyn (R-TX), noting that President Biden doesn't go on cable news programs, wonders if he's "really in charge." Jesus Mary and Joseph what if he's not going on cable news programs because cable news sucks? I mean, I wouldn't want to go on TV with a bunch of shouty know-nothing assholes either, and everyone's been pretending cable news is far more important than it really is for decades now; if our President wants to shame them by refusing to grace them with his presence, I'm all for it. Besides, Joe Biden ain't supposed to be "in charge" -- we are.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Equality Act, and confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees; also, tell big corporations to stop donating to politicians who restrict voting rights. 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 find your Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below. Good hunting!

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Most folks aren't falling for the ZOMG TEH CHILD MOLESTURZ WILLZ THE VOTEZ!!!!! stupidity, as evidenced by polling finding that two-thirds of Americans support H.R. 1. Newt Gingrich used to say that if 70% of the people want something, they ought to get it, so only a little more education about what's really in the bill -- an end to legislative gerrymandering, automatic and same-day voter registration, 15 days of early voting everywhere, disclosure of campaign donations over $10,000, an end to particularly nefarious forms of racist vote suppression -- should get us over the hump. Even Joe Manchin might hear it then.

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would, as you likely know, plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act by creating a new standard with which our Justice Department could stop vote suppression efforts at the state level (specifically, it would subject any state or locality, not just ones in the South, with a record of vote suppression for extra scrutiny). Why haven't Democrats formally introduced this bill yet, or folded it into the For the People Act? I don't know, but does it matter? What matters is what we want, and what we tell our Congressfolk.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R> 5, the Equality Act. As we speak, states are mulling or passing bills outlawing transgender students from competing in the sports that match their gender. Of course they know no boys will become girls just to dominate girls' sports and sentence themselves not only to a lifetime of making less money playing sports but ostracization from their buddies, but as David Frum instructs us, it's not about winning, or even fighting, it's about looking like you're fighting. Let's remind them there are more important things in life -- you know, like fighting real discrimination that gay and transgender folks face all the time, like getting shut out by banks and landlords and employers strictly on the basis of sex.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's three USPS Board of Governors nominees, not least so they can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy before he runs our Post Office even further into the ground. His big, bold proposal for getting our Postal Service back on its feet: higher prices and worse service. When I say CEOs are overrated, this is kinda what I mean. Don't let folks say he's just doing what has to be done, because this is America! We don't have to have a Post Office that runs badly! Especially when they're only losing money because Congress mandates that they pre-pay 75 years' worth of benefits! It's a manufactured hostage crisis, again! OK, I've run over my exclamation point quota. Anyway, while you've got your Senators on the phone, you can tell them to pass H.R. 695/S. 145, the USPS Fairness Act, which would repeal that Congressional mandate.

Finally, since we spent a lot of time on voting rights today, Public Citizen helps you tell big corporations to stop donating to politicians who suppress votes. Much more useful, I would say, than merely criticizing them in public, though I don't say that's worthless, precisely. But as many smart people have said, these big corporations gave a lot of money to the politicians who passed laws suppressing the vote. And they've done this dance with us before: they used to say they supported the nefarious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) for "economic" reasons, not for Voter ID or Stand Your Ground reasons. It's a load of rubbish. Let's let them know that we know that -- and give them an opening to do better, for once.

Around the table: the *real* reason the Amazon union drive failed, and other hard truths.

As you likely know, the union push at the Bessemer, AL Amazon plant failed, and Jane McAlevey at The Nation offers a fairly thorough post-mortem. Yes, corporations shouldn't get so big that they can push their workers around like Amazon does, but the Bessemer organizers didn't pre-empt obvious lines of attack about union dues, didn't meet workers at their homes rather than their workplaces, and didn't reach out to local community leaders until very late. Hell, they didn't even know how many workers the Bessemer plant had! As Phil Jackson used to say, when the refs are against you, you play above them. What's that? Easy to say when you've got Shaq and Kobe? We workers need to think of ourselves as Shaq and Kobe, because where would America be without us?

Wisconsin Supreme Court rules that state election officials don't have to remove voters off the rolls immediately when they suspect they've moved, although the actual decision is a lot more inside baseball than that -- two conservatives joined three liberals in a 5-2 ruling essentially saying that state law says local, not state, officials must clear voting rolls. Still, it gives us some breathing room, though I'd love to see the lawsuit that mentions that Wisconsin seems to wrongly tag voters of color as having moved more than anyone else.

It is to laugh that Mob Boss Mitch has called the creation of a commission to study the question of whether to add Supreme Court Justices "a direct assault on our nation’s independent judiciary." Surely Mob Boss Mitch, having been around the block a bit, knows that "creating a commission to study a question" is a sure way of ensuring nobody actually does anything about that question! I can only conclude that he's absorbed the lessons of Donald Trump well, i.e., always create drama and let others clean it up.

Congressional investigators unearth emails from Trump Administration HHS appointees in which they do victory laps about how they bullied our government into playing down the COVID pandemic. Note well that their bullying has helped cause over 575,000 deaths to date. Imagine being an asshole, and then imagine being proud of being an asshole, and you've got a lot of the people Donald Trump brought into our government. Is it too much to ask that, without the big man, they have at least as hard a time finding work as the security guard who caught the Watergate burglars did?

Finally, anyone else tired of John Boehner's new tell-all yet? He cusses out Ted Cruz, he complains about Tea Partiers making him look bad, but BFD: John Boehner is just another far right-winger who's spent the last decade-plus letting more obnoxious people make him look more palatable, and that stratagem is as old as the hills. His little Damascus moment when he becomes a Republican is also terribly shallow: "Because I was making a lot more money, the government was taking a bigger chunk of it." Even John Kasich would tell him money's not that damn important.

Around the table: the usual -- insane Republicans, weak Democrats.

Surprise, surprise, right-wingers are cherrypicking to argue that Georgia's new voting law is no more restrictive than Colorado's, leaving out little details like that Colorado votes almost entirely by mail and thus doesn't necessarily need more days of early voting, plus you have to ask for a mail ballot in Georgia, whereas in Colorado you just get one. You know what else right-wingers leave out? That Georgia's new law empowers its legislature to interfere far more in the vote counting than they did before -- and, as you may know, Republicans dominate the Georgia legislature. Gosh, I wonder what they'll do if we see an even bigger Democratic wave in Georgia in 2022?

Ho hum, fossil fuel corporations soaked up over $8 billion in corporate welfare from last year's CARES Act, but cut almost 60,000 jobs. Stick a pin in that for the next time someone squeals that we tax corporations so much that they can't create jobs. The reason they don't create jobs is that we don't tax them enough -- faced with the threat of real taxation, they'll spend their money on paying workers and building stuff, and faced with real regulation, they'll stop gobbling up existing properties just to deduct the mortgage interest. Not to pile on, but big fossil fuel corporations already get over $4 billion in corporate welfare annually.

Reactionary Missouri state legislature tries to thwart a Medicaid expansion, despite the fact that the state's voters amended their constitution in order to expand it. I doubt the state legislature will succeed in their efforts once the courts step in, but then that's not the point, is it? As David Frum instructed us recently, the point is to look like you're fighting, not win, or fight well, or even actually fight. And the rageheads will keep eating it up. And there are a lot of rageheads in Missouri. (Though, as an aside, maybe Lucas Kunce can neutralize them in the 2022 U.S. Senate race.)

New Mexico becomes America's second state (after Colorado) to ban qualified immunity for police officers, meaning folks wronged by police brutality (and other misconduct) can now sue and earn restitution. Folks who respond but how can cops do their jobs now should at least ask themselves why police officers need to be protected from accountability in order to "do their job." And if they find our justice system "skewed" in favor of the accused, they should remember that this is the way our Founders wanted it, and if they ever face a state trying to railroad them, they'll appreciate that a bit more.

"Some" Democrats worry that any tax-hike-on-the-rich in an infrastructure bill will "backfire" on them with the suburban voters who used to vote Republican. My advice to them is this: don't be weak and stupid! The tax "cuts" of 2017 didn't drive them into Republican arms in 2018, after all, and (as the article helpfully points out, I was beginning to think I was the only one who remembered) Barack Obama explicitly said, numerous times, that he wanted to raise taxes on the rich in 2012, and still won re-election. I often think Democratic politicos don't really understand voters, and this "worrying" sure doesn't convince me otherwise.

Finally, Kevin Williamson at the National Review -- another right-winger who thinks we should have fewer and allegedly "better" voters -- compares passing laws that help more people vote to loosening standards so we can have more doctors, but Jesus Mary and Joseph you have a right to vote, but you don't have a "right" to be a doctor. And if you're that worried about stupid people voting, you might as well just wear a sign saying "I can't persuade people to do the right thing." And maybe you ought to wonder why that is. Personally, I've found most people to be fairly intelligent and persuadable. Maybe that's because I expect more from them.

Action: concerning "bipartisanship," the filibuster, whistleblowing, public broadband, methane emissions, and corporate spying.

Long story short: tell Joe Manchin to stop Joe Manchining; write a letter-to-the-editor favoring filibuster abolition; tell your Congressfolk to pass the Peace Corps Reauthorization Act, the Broadband Justice Act, and a resolution of disapproval overturning weak Trump-era methane emissions rules; and tell Spotify to give up its creepy surveillance scheme. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Congressfolks' phone numbers -- or use the email/petition/letter-to-the-editor tools in the links below. And good hunting.

Well, Joe Manchin's really done it this time, not only announcing he'll support no effort to "eliminate or weaken" the filibuster, but that "the time has come" "to usher a new era of bipartisanship." "Bipartisanship" with the party that opposes any and all good proposals and tries to overthrow governments and rewrite voting rules when election results don't go their way? How about "no"? Future historians will point to this moment as the moment Republicans captured the House and Senate in 2022 -- unless we act! Mr. Manchin's phone number, as you likely know by now, is 202.224.3954. Now that he's provoked two action alerts in one week, I'm starting to think he wants to be Donald Trump. No one on Earth should want to be Donald Trump. Even Donald Trump should look in the mirror and say, "wow, I don't want to be that guy."

In a related development, Common Cause helps you write a letter-to-the-editor about the need to get rid of the Senate filibuster. You enter your zip code and see a list of local newspapers to which you might write, and then Common Cause provides a set of talking points you might use to write your letter. Don't fret that Republicans will one day get to impose their will on Americans, because guess what? They do that now, precisely because they exploit the filibuster. Next they'll put holds on bills and demand a physical quorum to turn the lights on and off, but they'll look like little whiny-ass babies when they do that. It would help if Democrats would point to them and say see, they don't want to pass automatic voter registration, that's why they're acting like little babies. But we'll continue to do that if they don't.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Peace Corps Reauthorization Act, not merely because the Peace Corps is generally a good thing, but because the bill would create protections against discrimination and retaliation for whistleblowers. That would have helped Sara Thompson in 2010 after the Peace Corps gave her the anti-malaria drug mefloquine, which our own military won't use because it's too dangerous; Ms. Thompson had no recourse, because our Peace Corps would have simply fired her, and now she suffers from mefloquine toxicity. And remember: whistleblowers ain't out for an easy buck, because after they've suffered through years of harassment and unemployment after they blow the whistle on wrongdoing, ain't no easy bucks ever coming again.

BroadbandJusticeAct.com helps you, as you might guess, tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1904, the Broadband Justice Act. The bill would essentially subsidize broadband as a public utility in public housing -- a thing poorer working families might well need, given that so many folks work and go to school over the internet during a pandemic -- and it might be a good first step toward a national broadband service. If you're worried that Big Gummint would oppress you with a broadband service, just remember that plenty of big private corporations already do that (and for an example of that, see the last paragraph below). And if you're worried that your taxes would subsidize someone else's broadband, don't worry, because our tax money subsidizes plenty of things you use, too.

Here, at last, a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act that would roll back a Trump-era regulation! EDF Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to roll back the Trump EPA's methane regulation, which actually increased the amount of red tape our government would have to hurtle to regulate methane. They said Donald Trump wasn't a conservative -- and they were right! I mean, don't conservatives think more bureaucracy is a bad thing? In any case, methane pollutes our air and packs a bigger climate-change punch than coal -- and not for nothing, but the methane emissions that big drilling corporations vent into the atmosphere represent energy we can't use and (on public lands) royalties our government can't collect. So, what's good about more methane leakage? No, CEOs getting lazier and fatter isn't a "good."

Finally, Stop Spotify Surveillance helps you tell Spotify to abandon its plan to spy on your conservations in order to "better" target music and ads. And here you thought the future would be full of solar panels and cures for intractable diseases and peoples of the world getting along! No, it's full of big corporations trying to get you to buy more stuff, and with Spotify's filing for a patent using voice recognition software, it's also about spying on you to do it. All that fear of government spying we had in the '60s seems so quaint now! It isn't, of course, and we must still fight government spying wherever we see it, but we must also fight corporate spying, too, particularly if our government isn't going to control corporate power on our behalf.

Action: concerning pollution, the right to repair, abortion, marketing to children, Social Security, and banning Donald Trump from Facebook forever.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to curb pollution and pass "right to repair" legislation, tell Texas state legislators to reject an anti-abortion bill, tell big tobacco corporations to stop aiming their products at children, tell President Biden to fire two notorious Social Security Administrators, and tell Facebook to keep Donald Trump off their platform permanently. The paragraphs below offer email and contact tools for each of these alerts.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to protect our clean water from longwall coal mining. What's longwall mining? That's when you dig into the ground to remove a long wall of coal (hence the name); this "wall" can be 1500 feet wide and two miles long, and, as you can guess, it can cause an awful lot of pollution and property damage. As it happens, coal corporations don't fill in the "wall" they've removed, so if your house sits above it, you're in big trouble. And of course state officials have found longwall mining responsible for nearly all the mining-related damage our streams have suffered in southwestern PA. Best to switch to solar and wind, which don't churn the earth anywhere near as much as coal corporations do.

Staying in PA for our next alert: Penn PIRG helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass "right to repair" legislation. We heard a lot about this when we were short on ventilators for COVID patients, and ventilator manufacturers didn't make it easy for third party repair techs at hospitals (who have been, in my own personal experience, excellent) to fix them. It's no better for farmers, who can't fix their own tractors (despite being, in my own personal experience, quite handy) because big corporations like John Deere don't make their manuals very accessible. They'd rather you go to them, or to one of their hand-picked "authorized dealers"! But trying to make good Americans so dependent on corporations is not very bootstrappy, you know.

Care2 helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject HB 3326, which would ban all abortions without exception and would charge anyone involved with an abortion with homicide -- which could result in someone getting the death penalty for abortion, since Texas still punishes some murders with the death penalty. The bill cites a dissenting opinion in a recent Supreme Court case concerning Louisiana's anti-abortion law, but seriously, facing the death penalty for seeking a medical procedure literally protected by our federal Constitution, as per the actual majority decision in Roe v. Wade? Some people can't help but do the helicopter dance in front of us. But they aren't "tougher" than the rest of us, they're weaker; otherwise, why would they strut?

Progress America helps you tell big tobacco corporations to stop offering flavored tobacco products to children. You know how Jeff Sessions says pot is a gateway drug to much worse stuff? That's rubbish, but flavored tobacco products actually are a gateway for kids to pick up a cigarette habit as adults, as some four out of five kids who smoke started out with a tobacco product that tasted like chocolate or apple or bubble gum or any number of things. And giving kids a damn nicotine habit? Gosh, I guess big corporations just want a nation full of harried, overworked people, and they want them to start early! I hate to say "children are our future," but they fucking are, and we need to treat them like they are.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to fire the two Social Security Administrators who are trying to bollocks up Social Security, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. How have Andrew Saul and David Black tried to bollocks up Social Security? Roll call! They delayed seniors' stimulus checks! They added extra disability benefit reviews just-because! They pressured SSA judges to deny people disability benefits! You worked for Social Security, you fought for it, you paid into it, and you've earned it -- and you sure as hell deserve better than to have assholes steal it from you.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump from its platform permanently. Hasn't America been a much nicer place since he hasn't been able to bombard us with his obnoxious spew? Yes, it has. Facebook has no moral or legal obligation to keep enabling Mr. Trump's horridness -- especially now that Mr. Trump has announced he's going to start his own social network! This is something people with too much money can do! They're not being "oppressed" by existing social media keeping them off their platforms! They're not being "canceled"! Rage-filled people do nothing but whine, and they still get too much say in our civilization. But we can contain them. We do outnumber them, after all.

Action: concerning health care, immigration, fossil fuel funding, D.C. statehood, paycheck fairness, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare for All Act, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, the D.C. Admission Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act -- and tell them to reject the so-called Fair Access to Banking Act and revoke permits for the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. As Paul Craig Roberts, the father of Reaganomics, said many years ago, when the private sector screws up this badly (high prices, bad service, surprise bills, etc.) then our government has to step in. And Medicare works pretty damn well for our elderly, despite the fact that it's basically a high-risk pool which should constantly fail. Think how much better Medicare would work with all these healthy people in it! (How to pay for it? Easy: assess an employer-side payroll tax at about the amount they're already paying for private health insurance. They act like it just can't be done because they don't have the will to do it. Luckily, we do.)

Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2222, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act. What makes a great nation? Treating all people with the dignity and respect they deserve, and much as right-wingers want you to believe that everyone who wants to come here is a murdering raping drug-dealer, most of the folks who want to come here are a) good people and b) running from actual murdering raping drug-dealers. So H.R. 2222 would repeal mandatory detention for immigrants, prohibit solitary confinement, end our government's use of private prisons they refuse to hold to account, and ensuring all detainees get a hearing before an immigration judge. It really is well past time our government acted as civilized as we do.

Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 563, the so-called Fair Access to Banking Act. The bill would compel big banking corporations to fund the fossil fuel corporations they've avoided funding for the last couple of years, under popular pressure, of course. Ain't it just like a Republican to loudly insist that the "free" market is always right until it hits big fossil fuel donors? And then they make the "free" market do what they want! How conservative of them! And they've got some nerve talking about banks "discriminating" against fossil fuel corporations. Major anti-discrimination legislation (the Equality Act) stands before them and all they do is tell hysterical lies about it.

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act. You know the arguments against D.C. statehood suck when Mob Boss Mitch calls statehood for D.C. "pure socialism." What does that even mean? (And how does it differ from "impure socialism"?) Statehood would actually increase Washington, D.C.'s independence -- it could get vaccine supplies a lot more easily, which is a big deal these days, and it could create its own National Guard, which it sure could have used on January 6! Don't brook any silliness about how "the Founders didn't want D.C. to be a state," lest we use that argument against Idaho, which achieved statehood in 1890, long after all the Founders were dead.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Because women deserve to make as much as men for the same work, dammit! Why do people resist this idea? (OK, I know why, but all the reasons are stupid.) Despite the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women still don't make a dollar for every dollar a man makes for doing the same work, but the Paycheck Fairness Act would make it easier for women to find out their bosses are paying them too little and then do something about it. And when Republicans tell you this bill will "just help out the trial lawyers," tell them we'd need fewer trial lawyers if bosses didn't try to get away with wage theft.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to introduce and pass legislation that would revoke all permits for Enbridge's notorious Line 3 pipeline. Line 3 would carry almost a million barrels of tar sands oil daily from southwestern Canada under the Mississippi River to northern Wisconsin. Does running an oil pipeline under the Mississippi sound like a good idea to you? Particularly when you recall that an Endbridge pipeline rupture in 2010 polluted some 40 square miles of the Kalamazoo watershed? Fuel burns once, but clean water is forever -- if we work to keep it.

Around the table: starring our favorite slice of the electorate, the Batshit Insane 25%!

At least Biden Administration Press Secretary Jen Psaki doesn't suffer fools like Newsmax's John Gizzi gladly. Mr. Gizzi says a "private memo" found $1 trillion more spending in the Biden infrastructure plan than the Biden Administration reported, but one request for clarification from Ms. Psaki apparently provoked this slab of word salad: "there’s things there that somebody went through it or is claiming to have gone through it and added it up and came up with $1 trillion more than the president listed." If reporters can barely speak, how can they speak truth to power?

Reuters/Ipsos poll finds more than half of Republicans believe all that rubbish about the 2020 election being "stolen" or the January 6 rioters being liberal protestors "trying to make Trump look bad" instead of the right-wingers you could have found on social media. A little over half of Republicans is pretty close to a quarter of the electorate, which (like many other polling factoids about people believing absurd crap) maps pretty well onto my belief that a quarter of the electorate is batshit insane. I first started to think that after seeing George W. Bush's approvals bottom out at 25%. How innocent those times were.

Big restaurant corporations, including Denny's and McDonald's, publicly oppose a $15/hour minimum wage, but privately tell their investors it won't be "bad for business" at all. McDonald's, at least, has backed off supporting big corporate lobbies' attempts to kill the $15/hour minimum wage proposal, but still, your friends and neighbors might not have heard, so stick a pin in this information next time someone tells you the $15/hour minimum wage is "bad for business." Not everyone you meet is a troll, after all -- you might actually win some converts.

As we contemplate the possibility that your "smart" house might be sharing all kinds of data about your movements and habits with law enforcement, we should note, again, that our FCC passed pretty solid data privacy rules in 2016 -- but the Republican Congress under Donald Trump couldn't nullify them fast enough. We should also note that instead of putting your thermostat on your wi-fi so you can more easily read the outside temperature, maybe you can buy a thermometer and put it outside. You'll have to go outside to read it, but the exercise will do you good.

Apparently a Trump campaign contribution website made it so folks didn't realize they were making weekly donations to Mr. Trump instead of the one-time donations they clearly intended to make. But you'll be pleased to know that too many of his bilked supporters are already making excuses for the Big Man. They say that wasn't Trump, that was WinRed; how does the Smartest Man on Earth fall in with so many swindlers? It makes you think he's not really a great man or something. But for the Batshit Insane 25%, no excuse is too absurd, as long as it keeps the rage gland pumping.

Finally, of course I don't feel sorry for all those Trump Administration workers who can't get work because the job market is, ah, challenging for those folks who worked for the guy who tried to overturn the election -- I mean, if you do evil, you should expect to be ostracized by civilized people! I'll admit, however, that I do feel worse for the lower-profile folks (even former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who might want to go get another degree) than I do for all the far more famous Trumpholes who will make millions in unearned money spewing filth on Fox and Newsmax and OANN over the next few years. See? I do so have a heart.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, voting rights, discrimination, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Sen. Manchin you want a much bigger corporate tax hike than he does; tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Equality Act; and tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's three appointments to the USPS Board of Governors. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Jesus Mary and Joseph we have to call Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) again, after he said he wouldn't support hiking the corporate tax rate to 28% in the coming infrastructure bill. He said he also spoke for "six or seven other Democrats" (though not "Senators"), but I'd lay money that when I advocate for a 55% corporate tax rate, I speak for a lot more than six or seven other Americans. And does he even watch TV? Even Meet the Press wouldn't shut up about the 55-plus American corporations paying zero dollars in taxes in 2019. So, again, we have to help him put his finger up to the wind, by calling 202.224.3954 and giving him yet another piece of our minds. I hope he's enjoying himself.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. You may have seen ads attacking the For the People Act; though they make less absurd claims than "child molestors voting" and "workers handing out cocaine to voters waiting in line," the difference between them is nothing more than the difference between a mound of dung the flies have found and a mound of dung they haven't found yet. The things the bill would actually do -- automatic and same-day voter registration, campaign finance disclosure, and end to various vote suppression schemes that just-to-happen to target folks of color -- are all quite popular, and Republicans know that, so they're left with telling hysterical lies and hoping Democrats don't change the filibuster.

People for the American Way, Common Cause, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Senators to support the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. You know all these vote suppression bills state legislatures are mulling or passing in over 40 states? The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would stop most of them dead, by requiring pre-clearance of voting law changes for any state or locality that's demonstrated a habit of suppressing votes -- not just certain Southern states, as the Voting Rights Act originally stated. As I've said, voting rights are actually quite popular in America, except with whom, class? Except with sore losers who think they have a "right" to keep winning elections when they show their constituents nothing but the backs of their hands. So let's put a stop to that.

Both the Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. When a Trump-supporting co-worker tried to tell me that the Equality Act would let boys become girls so they can dominate girls' sports -- a story that falls apart under the most cursory scrutiny -- I told him the Equality Act was really about things like preventing landlords and banks from discriminating against customers just because they're gay, and guess what? He agreed that discriminating against gays like that was a bad thing. You have to tell Trump votaries more than once what the Equality Act's really about, but you have the upper hand in every argument you have about the Equality Act because you have the facts. And I insist that counts for something.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to confirm three USPS Board of Governors appointees, not just because they're good nominees, but so they can then fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. I gotta say that trying to sabotage our Post Office's efforts to deliver mail-in ballots should get you fired. You know what else should get you fired? Responding to delivery and service problems you created by threatening higher prices and worse service. That's not the kind of bold, entrepreneurial thinking that we celebrate in America, right? Or do we only celebrate thieves anymore? At the risk of being obvious, I can think of one fairly famous historical figure who did not put up with thieves in his house.

Around the table: in which we are reminded, once again, that long-term thinking is better than short-term thinking.

Simon Davis-Cohen at In These Times details the battle good rural Wisconsinites fight against big ag industrial farming operations trying to muscle onto their land. But they're not just battling the big hog processing corporations that pollute their water and sicken their animals and distort their economy -- they're also battling state legislators who preempt local ordinances and generally do big ag's bidding. Hey, that reactionary legislature has passed preemptions against localities who want to offer municipal broadband and rent control, so extending their gnarled hand to the throat of localities trying to protect themselves from factory farms is a no-brainer for them.

Now it can be told: "A Green New Deal Is Actually More Affordable in the Long Term Than Fossil Fuels," per C.J. Polychroniou at TruthOut. Not just because the likely alternative -- runaway climate change on a hopelessly-polluted planet -- is actually far more expensive, but because green infrastructure spending will not only reduce pollution but create jobs doing so, and those folks with jobs will all pay taxes, too. Also, renewable energy will be cheaper than fossil fuel energy in the long run, since you don't have to repeatedly churn the Earth in order to get renewable energy. That reminds me to create that Let's kick climate change's ass! bumper sticker.

This likely won't surprise you, but lower-income folks tend to overpay property taxes while wealthy folks tend to underpay them, and "the inequities in tax assessments are both very large and very common." You know what else won't surprise you? Some counties (shout out to Maricopa County, Arizona!) actually do a pretty good job of making sure property taxes don't fall mostly on the folks who can afford it least. Sounds like our politicians just need the will to do the job, as usual -- which will require action from us, as usual.

The more I read about how easily QAnon votaries dismiss the actual sex-trafficking accusations against an actual sitting Congressman, the more I think he talked so loosely on Tucker Carlson's show -- normally a bad idea when you're under investigation or about to get indicted! -- just to give these folks more to talk about. A theory so hungry for information to distort does need that information, after all. And thus we are reminded, yet again, that there is no debate possible about whether folks are "stupid of evil," not just because stupid is evil, but because looking stupid is too often the cover for evil.

Finally, dig Sen. McConnell (E-KY) actually saying the corporate criticism of Georgia's anti-voting law is "a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people." And thus Mob Boss Mitch pretends to care about the non-wealthy, pretends the "Outrage-Industrial Complex" doesn't operate almost entirely on his side of the political spectrum, and, worst of all, pretends backlashes occur "outside the constitutional order," as if we don't have a right to say anything unless we say it directly to a legislator, and as if criticism anti-voting laws is "unconstitutional." Of course Mr. McConnell is this big a hypocrite so you'll be stunned into silence.

Action: concerning corruption, sore losers, price gouging, antibiotic abuse, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight defense contracting corruption, tell Texas Gov. Abbott to reject the state legislature's sore loser anti-voting bill, tell our government we need to fight big pharma price-gouging on drugs developed with taxpayer money, tell our EPA to reverse its recent decision allowing big ag to spray antibiotics on orange trees, and tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers for the first action alert, and then for the others, use either the phone numbers (where applicable) or the email/petition/public comment links provided below.

The Project on Government Oversight reports that our Naval Department plans to cut its internal auditing personnel by 70% -- which means Naval auditors will be much less able to root out contracting corruption. Indeed, you have to wonder if that's the whole idea. Their excuse is that they'll be able to spend more money building ships, because staying within a budget is so hard when you already spend more on defense than the next eight countries on Earth combined! No use saying we might as well gut the auditors because the Navy consistently brings in projects late and overbudget anyway; actually, that's an argument for more auditors. Call your House Reps and Senators about this today and they'll never see it coming.

Public Citizen helps you tell Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to reject the vote suppression bill recently passed by the state legislature. Gov. Abbott's phone number, of course, is 512.463.2000, or 512.463.1782 if you're either from Austin or out-of state (odd tandem, there); let's see if we can jam up at least one of these lines today. You can already tell what the bill would do -- reduce voting hours, get rid of drive-through voting, and keep densely-populated areas from having more voting machines. Plus it would let poll-watchers actually film you voting; I didn't see that one coming, not being evil. Sore losers constantly try to keep people from voting, instead of, oh, gosh, I don't know, being someone worth your vote.

Sorry for the late notice on this, but the Coalition on Human Needs helps you leave a public comment about a federal proposal to keep our government from fighting back against big pharma price-gouging on drugs developed with taxpayer assistance -- but comments are due at midnight tonight, so let's get to stepping. Gosh, if you helped fund a drug with your money, you should get some say over what happens afterward, right? Like, you should especially be able to say don't charge so damn much for this drug that good Americans can't afford it? Maybe we should just have our government develop drugs without resorting to private corporations -- but in the meantime, we need to protect ourselves from getting screwed over by the system we've got.

One of the last things the Trump Administration did before (finally!) leaving office was green-light the use of the antibiotic streptomycin on big ag citrus trees. Because Florida, that's why! But the more antibiotics we spray on crops, the less effective they'll be on human beings and animals when they get sick, and the stronger the superbugs antibiotics can't kill will become. No, we will not, one day, be sitting around a campfire saying "well, the next cut you get can kill you now, but at least we allowed a Republican President to enact a policy designed entirely to help capture the Electoral votes of one state!" Would it be piling on to say that spraying antibiotics on crops is not a long-term solution? No, it would not. Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to reverse this corrupt and short-sighted decision.

Finally, both the ACLU and Daily Kos help you tell President Biden to forgive up to $50,000 in student loan debt per debtor. Why? Because colleges overcharge in the first place, because it'll stimulate the economy, because more folks will be able to start businesses and buy homes if they don't have big student loan debts hanging over them, and because our civilization did kinda promise people that going to college would get you a lucrative career and that's kinda been a lie for many years. Don't be the fool who would oppose debt forgiveness because you paid off all your debts! That would be an occasion for me to deploy the phrase it's not all about you, and with Donald Trump gone, I was really hoping to deploy that phrase a lot less.

Around the table: in which we confront, once again, certain unpleasant truths about our political class.

Sharon Zhang at TruthOut reminds us that Coca-Cola and Delta only slammed Georgia's recent vote suppression bill after it passed, which brings to mind Harry Reid's comment about Arlen Specter back when Mr. Specter was a Republican: "he's always there for us, except when we need him." And just as we might also say that Coca-Cola and Delta maybe shouldn't have given so much money to the politicians who wrote the vote suppression laws in the first place, we might also say that the Texas corporations now opposing vote suppression bills making their way to Greg Abbott's desk are just responding to the public backlash, too. Of course corporations should respond to the backlash -- but they should also do the right thing in the first place.

To the surprise of approximately zero attentive observers, at least 55 big corporations paid zero dollars in federal taxes on their 2020 profits, and in fact collectively "earned" about $3.5 billion in tax breaks, meaning we-the-taxpayers paid them $3.5 billion of our hard-earned money to do what? Unemployment rate is still almost double what it was before the pandemic. Stick a pin in this for when Republicans whine about the corporate tax hikes in upcoming jobs/infrastructure legislation. Also note well that well over half of Americans actually like President Biden's proposals better when they learn corporations will pay more taxes. It's like corporations are unpopular in America for some reason.

Speaking of infrastructure, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) says President Biden could have an "easy win" if he's just pare down his aims to something everyone would pass. To that particular line of rubbish, I offer this response.

Jesus Mary and Joseph will Democrats ever stop underrating Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson? They say he's leaving a trail of slime now with his words, but he's been leaving a trail of slime about everything he's ever talked about for over a decade. And yet he actually ran ahead of Donald Trump in 2016 after the national party left him for dead and Russ Feingold spent a year doing victory laps. So what keeps putting him over the top? Great political ads, that's what! No, not those overrated whiteboard ads -- watch his 2010 family intro ad and his 2016 diaper-changing ad. They're genius. I'd say "Democrats could learn a few lessons," except, ah, how did Russ Feingold win in the first place? With terrific ads!

Amazon spokeshack apologizes to Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) for suggesting he's stupid for believing the entirely true story that Amazon delivery drivers use pee bottles -- and Rep. Pocan responds by saying, in part, "This is not about me, this is about your workers -- who you don’t treat with enough respect or dignity." Remember: when your enemies are down, always keep hitting them. Maybe Rep. Pocan has what it takes to beat Ron Johnson in 2022. I eagerly await the first moron to respond by saying WISCONSINZ WILLZ NEVERZ ELECTZ TEH GAYZ!!!!!, as if Tammy Baldwin hasn't won two Senate elections. No, I'd lay money that it'd happen.

Finally, of course Donald Trump called for a boycott of major league baseball after they decided to move the All-Star Game out of Georgia in response to that state's new anti-voting legislation. I guess Trump votaries will say it's not "cancel culture" because the MLB "canceled" first, though that sure isn't the most mature look. But if Congress manages to get rid of baseball's antitrust exemption in a fit of pique, I can't say I'll be upset.

Action: concerning tyranny, double-dealing, diplomacy, Social Security, pollution, and corruption.

Long story short: tell big corporations to divest from Myanmar's military, tell France to reject an Arctic drilling scheme, tell President Biden to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, fire two notorious Social Security Administrators, regulate "forever chemicals" in our drinking water, and support international sanctions against Erik Prince for plotting to overthrow the government of Libya. Lots to digest, I know, but you can accomplish all of these aims easily by using the email and petition links in the following paragraphs.

Are there bigger armed whiners than Myanmar's military? They didn't like the election results, so they overthrew the government -- no, they really overthrew the government, plus if you protest this coup, they murder you. They want us to see them as big and strong and tough but I will always see them bawling, in diapers, stomping their feet. Sadly, they don't act in a vacuum, because big fossil fuel corporations like Chevron and Total support the government of Myanmar to the tune of over $1 billion annually, which motherlode now goes to the military, since it now controls the government. Gosh, what ever should these corporations do? I kid, of course -- they should stop sending money to the illegitimate bunch of crybabies now calling themselves the government of Myanmar. Sum of Us provides the petition.

Hey, speaking of Total: they want to drill for gas in the Arctic ocean, and what's more, France's President, Emmanuel Macron, has been criticizing the project in public while green-lighting it in private! Yikes, I hope he doesn't wonder why he loses his next election in about a year! You know what people hate even more than being told they have to stay indoors? When politicians say one thing and do another! Even in these post-modern times, the eternal verities still hold! Naturally, this Arctic drilling project will both unleash yet more pollution and threaten the lives of indigenous folks, but if we all bring the Big Stick of Bad PR, we can strangle this thing in its crib. Sum of Us provides this petition, also.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to get back into the Iran nuclear deal the Obama Administration negotiated in 2015 (uh, during which he was Vice President), then both Win Without War and Daily Kos still help you do that. Why? Because it was working before Donald Trump trashed it, and it can work again. Does it seem like Iran's asking for more this time? Doesn't mean they should get it, and doesn't mean they're going to get it! It's like the world doesn't understand what "negotiation" is. Granted, that could be at least partly because Tha Bush Mobb demanded that Iran accept all their demands "before negotiations can begin." But surely we don't need to behold ourselves to any Republican orthodoxy. (President Biden's phone number, as you may recall, is 202.456.1111; you can call him about Iran and the next three items, if you like.)

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fire Andrew Saul and David Black from our Social Security Administration. Why? Because they're trying to destroy Social Security from within, that's why! Because Donald Trump put them there to do just that! Always they deliberately sabotage our government and then say see? Government doesn't work! Like we're all not watching or something. Messrs. Saul and Black did eventually release that data our IRS needed to get stimulus checks out to seniors, but they only did that because we wielded the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. Maybe we should get some people in our government who don't need to be browbeaten into doing the right thing. We deserve it, after all.

Consumer Reports helps you tell President Biden to regulate the notorious plastic chemical PFAS, a chemical found in far too many things that doesn't break down very easily in our bodies or in our air and water (hence the moniker "forever chemicals"). Why not tell our Congressfolk to pass a law getting rid of PFAS, an act even these notorious Congressfolk have warmed toward in the past? Because our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) already has the authority, under the Clean Water Act, to regulate PFAS chemicals, and the EPA works for us. We don't even need to get all George Carlin ("you're a public servant -- go get me a glass of water!") on them. They can just make sure the glasses of water we get ourselves don't have so many toxins in them.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to support international sanctions against former Blackwater/Xe CEO Erik Prince. Not for bilking our government out of all that money being private contractors in Iraq, or for overseeing the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007, or for being Betsy DeVos's brother -- just for offering to give weapons and mercenaries to a would-be dictator seeking to overthrow the government of Libya, in violation of international law (which does-so matter, despite right-wingers' notions that it shouldn't). America's gotten in enough trouble for doing that, but having private citizens do it would be so, so much worse. We can make our government account to us, but we'll have a harder time making Erik Prince account to us -- unless we enlist our government to help us in that aim.

Around the table: how to sustain a civilization, part 255.

Our EPA dismisses dozens of "scientific advisors" Donald Trump put in to give big polluting corporations too much say over what our EPA considers "science." Should we call it a "purge"? Certainly not without mentioning that the Trump EPA purged those EPA advisory boards to get those corporatists on in the first place! But getting rid of "scientific advisors" who were trying to skew the science in the direction of corporate polluters is a "purge" in the sense that throwing up rancid milk is a purge.

Researchers find that rural Americans don't get equal access to justice via legal aid programs -- largely because these programs have a built-in urban bias. Mainly they assume everyone has access to broadband (which doesn't make them unique, sadly!), but they also assume everyone has access to lawyers, which, in the most impoverished rural areas, they don't. The first part does sound like a job for community broadband, particularly if the big broadband corporations either won't serve rural areas or price rural areas out.

Some folks find a way to get vaccine appointments -- by going to counties that went heavily for Donald Trump, whose residents often don't seem in a hurry to get vaccinated. And for a moment I said why don't we bus in folks from urban and rural areas who can't otherwise get here? And then I realized that all these MAGAts who aren't getting vaccines would, with no irony, suddenly complain about all these "tourists" taking "their" vaccines away from them! One day they'll realize how small their worlds have become, and how few of their friends and neighbors will talk to them.

Upon hearing that Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro has been "cornered" by the out-of-control COVID pandemic, which claims more lives daily in Brazil than it does even in America, my first reaction was: "couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!" My second, more edifying reaction: why are we talking about how things affect him, rather than how they affect good Brazilians? The reason: we're reading Bloomberg, which (at least here) seems unnaturally preoccupied with how perceptions of Mr. Bolsonaro affect markets, even by the standards of a nominally business-oriented news organ. Want some real market analysis? Ain't gonna be nobody left in Brazilian markets, the way things are going.

Ho hum, Trump advisor Peter Navarro handed out a crap-ton of taxpayer money for pandemic-related contracts to Administration cronies. No use surmising that "at least Peter Navarro saw what was going on and did something about it," since, well, it didn't result in a decent pandemic response, or even a not-entirely-awful one! No, this is more like notorious Tammany Hall machine manipulator/New York state Senator George Washington Plunkitt saying, as he reviewed his career of "honest graft," that "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em." And again, House Democrats investigating matters reported on by ProPublica reminds us that good journalism helps sustain a civilization.

Finally, David Frum looks at the right-wing outrage over "vaccine passports" and finds it particularly anti-conservative. "A sizable minority of Americans want to use airplanes belonging to others, theme parks belonging to others, sports stadiums belonging to others -- without concession to the health of others or the property rights of owners," he finds, but he also reminds us that "the point," for right-wing drama hounds, "is not to win the fight, or even really to fight the fight. The point is to announce the fight, and to keep raging about it, even if you do not in fact fight it very hard." I don't know if Mr. Frum has reckoned with his role in all of this -- even if that role was long ago, as a Bush Mobb speechwriter -- but we would be fools to dismiss this analysis now.

Action: concerning health care, the Estate Tax, D.C. statehood, unemployment insurance, and antibiotic abuse.

Long story short: Tell your House Reps to pass the Medicare for All Act, the For the 99.8 Percent Act, and the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, and also tell your House Reps to make unemployment insurance better and stop antibiotic abuse on factory farms. 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 find your House Reps' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links provided in each paragraph below.

H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act, would expand Medicare to include every American citizen, so that good Americans will never be at the mercy of lousy care and shifting networks and surprise medical bills ever again. Polls have told us that more than half of Americans want Medicare to cover everyone -- and since big media outlets and/or big corporations conduct these polls, you'd kind of expect them to say the opposite of what they say! -- and lately support numbers have been more like 60%. You may also have heard that "most people like their private health insurance," but I propose one of two possible reasons for that phenomenon: 1) people occasionally get tired of thinking about things that corporations deliberately make more obtuse, and 2) most people aren't using their health insurance at any given moment! Medicare4AllNow and Black Lives Matter provide petitions.

The For the 99.8 Percent Act (no bill number at this writing) would expand the Estate Tax, which has taken a lot of undeserved hits over the last 20 years. I'm old enough to remember when the debate over the Estate Tax (remember the "Death Tax"? Like most of us will ever pay it when we die!) was the stupidest debate in politics; needless to say, other debates have surpassed it. The For the 99.8 Percent Act would hike taxes on billionaire estates to 77% (of that part of the estate over $1 billion, that is), and if you're planning to leave an estate smaller than $3 million, you won't be paying any more money than before. But all those folks who've been profiting off this pandemic? Yeah, they'll be contributing more to water mains and rebuilt bridges than they thought. Roots Action provides an email tool.

H.R. 51/S. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, would admit Washington, D.C., as our 51st state. Republican arguments against it boil down to one thing: ZOMG TWO MORE DEMOCRATZ SENATORZ!!!!! Remember in the 1930s, when Republicans opposed Hawaii statehood because the people seemed too foreign and they'd just keep sending Democrats to Congress? No, you don't, because Democrats actually opposed the admission of Hawaii because the people seemed too foreign, and Republicans dominated the state back then! Better to focus, then, on how how 85% of its residents want statehood, or how D.C. could have defended itself from the January 6 attempted coup if it had its own National Guard like all states do. Both People for the American Way and the Progressive Reform Network provide petitions.

The Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform our unemployment insurance system. I'll admit I haven't given this matter a lot of thought, and not just because Republicans are constantly out to destroy what we've got -- why should unemployment be limited only to those who get fired, versus, say, those who quit their jobs because they're getting used like wet dishrags (and can prove it)? And if you remember how Rick Scott screwed up Florida's unemployment application system so badly that even Ron DeSantis kvetched about it, you might be more inclined to have one national system, too. And why shouldn't lower-wage workers get a higher percentage of their missing income? There's a lot to think about here.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to limit antibiotic abuse on factory farms. Seems we've been telling them to do this forever, and I'll admit it's a little depressing that just about everyone except factory farms wants them to stop doing this, and yet very little ever changes. Not nothing, mind you, but if we keep giving more than two-thirds of our antibiotics to nominally healthy feed animals, then diseases will adapt and we'll wind up in a world where the next cut could kill us. And when we do, we won't be saying well, at least we moved slowly and deliberately to protect the profits of our factory farms! Some people love talking about how we liberals "coddle" everyone, but nobody in America gets coddled like big corporations do. And we've got to stop.

Around the table: in which we confront completely-unsurprising findings about wages and taxes.

Uh oh: researchers allege that Florida has been undercounting its COVID deaths. Florida has officially lost 30,000 good Americans to COVID, but researchers say it should be more like 35,000, as Florida has undercounted deaths of folks with co-morbidities, although if you shoot a diabetic in the head, no one says they died of diabetes. Anyway, maybe this is why Florida law enforcement raided Rebekah Jones's house a few months ago, although it still seems to me that governing well is far easier than figuring out how to get re-elected doing as little as possible.

Fearing a "tsunami" of evictions at the end of this pandemic, Boston renters are forming tenants' unions to bargain with their landlords. And why not? Why wouldn't any good conservative prefer a tenants' union to the heavy hand of Big Gummint regulation and Big Gummint law-making and Big Gummint handouts? Oh, wait -- because, in these times, "conservatism" is only about manufacturing rage and protecting absurdly high wealth über alles. I must've forgotten which decade we're in.

Per Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut, "Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities." Of course they go after the humanities because they don't "make money," and of course you can see the gnarled hand of ALEC behind some of these efforts. But a civilization that only cares about mammon won't be a civilization for long, and as my 18th Century English Poetry professor used to say, you're going to spend your whole life inside your head, and you want that to be a well-furnished place.

New York state Comptroller data informs us that if our minimum wage went up as fast as Wall Street bankster bonuses, it'd be $44/hour. Should we tell Kyrsten Sinema? Perhaps we should, but she's been a tool of Wall Street since the 2008 meltdown, odd as that will sound to future historians. In a completely unrelated development, a Grinnell College study finds that out of every dollar in big corporate tax cuts, somewhere between 15 and 19 cents winds up in a CEO's pocket. This is, of course, despite politicians telling us that corporate tax cuts lead to more jobs, never mind that we had both a 55% corporate tax rate and full employment in the '50s.

A Good Jobs First study finds that corporate tax breaks at the state level cost public schools at least $2.37 billion in 2019. I'm glad they note, at the beginning of the report's summary, that this figure represents a 13 percent increase over the previous year and thus "came during the pre-pandemic period of economic prosperity." Stick a pin in that for next time the politicians say "the economy's bad, so we should cut corporate taxes" -- or, for that matter, "the economy's good, so we should cut corporate taxes." For the politicians, it's never a bad time to shift more of our tax burden from corporations to individuals and small businesses.

I was about to say I felt sorry for the couple who had Donald Trump crash their wedding at Mar-a-Lago and do his WAAAAAAAAH ME ME ME ME ME act, but then I realized that you take that risk when you decide to get married at Mar-a-Lago. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the happy couple expected him to show up, or even hoped he would. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn they paid extra for the experience! After all, if you're getting married at Mar-a-Lago, you're not working within a budget like the rest of us are.

Finally, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), facing sex trafficking charges, goes on the Tucker Carlson show (nice to be able to get that venue last minute!) and actually makes things significantly worse for himself, trying to debunk accusations that haven't yet been made and trying to draw Mr. Carlson himself into his story. When I first heard about this, I supposed the QAnon crowd would say Mr. Gaetz schlepped that 17-year-old girl around the country because he was fighting the deep-state child-sex ring undercover -- and, sadly, I was right.