Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: in which we confront even more right-wing and corporate stupidity.

The government of Texas --lately very busy passing bills injuring women, folks of color, and transgender folks -- hopes you've forgotten about their utter incompetence during the February winter storm and resulting power grid failure, so I'm just gonna leave this report alleging that the death toll during that crisis was even worse than Texas said it was right here. Long story short: less like 151 deaths and more like 700 deaths. Long story somewhat longer: right-wingers will claim the state count's accurate because "these people had so many other things wrong with them," to which I'll say the same thing I always say: if you have diabetes and someone shoots you in the head, nobody will say you died of diabetes.

Amazon rolls out a "wellness chamber" (pretentiously called an "AmaZen" booth) for stressed-out employees, a very small, windowless booth in which you can sit and watch mindfulness videos and the like. Corporations always want plaudits for putting band-aids on gaping wounds! Maybe the solution to your employees' stress is, you know, not to stress them out by working them like robots? And I just know people will get fired for not meeting their quotas because they're in the meditation booth. Yes, even after their bosses let them. Did I mention no windows? (And hate to pile on, but we long ago discussed how the whole "mindfulness" movement might well be a distraction to keep workers in jobs they hate, and hate for good reason.)

When I hear that nearly three out of four Republicans think liberals staged the whole January 6 coup just to make Trumpholes look bad, I wonder if I may have to revise my belief that 25% of the electorate is batshit insane. I bet perhaps a third of these Republicans know the truth and are just showing loyalty to their party, but it is insane, frankly, to let your loyalty actually revise the facts for you. And not just facts, but logic: nearly every Republican politician opposes an independent commission to look into January 6; if antifa and BLM really caused it, which is to laugh, you'd think they'd want to prove that.

The incomparable Rebecca Solnit reminds us that centrism itself is a bias, and one that favors "an insidious and unjust status quo." Go ahead and read the whole thing; the onslaught of examples will, I trust, impress you. You know, I tried being a centrist once, and I'm sure I said at the time that it was because I hated extremists on both sides, but I was only doing it because I didn't want to sort out the truth for myself. And then I became a man, and put away childish things. (I also realized, as Ms. Solnit says, that extremism comes exclusively from the right. What, you think Rachel Maddow is comparable to Tucker Carlson? As if.)

When I hear that the Orlando Sentinel has finally given up on Sen. Marco Rubio ever doing the right thing, I'm tempted to respond: they ever had hope? I mean, Marco Rubio is the man who gives empty suits a bad name, the man who, quite recently, supported Amazon workers' fight to unionize only because Amazon refused to sell a few of his favorite right-wing books. And of course he was going to outline what he wanted from an independent January 6 commission and then find a reason not to support whatever came before him. Some of the Sentinel's writing is quite inspired, though.

Finally, in a related note, Senate Republicans filibustered the January 6 commission bill which gave them everything they asked for in negotiations with Democrats. Again: Democrats need to shame and shun Republicans; it's what any civilized person would do to someone who injured their community, as Republicans do every day with every breath. I wouldn't mess with Gladys Sicknick if I were these Republicans, though -- she could be this decade's Cindy Sheehan. And if Democrats don't make "a slap in the faces of all the officers who did their jobs that day" into campaign ads, then they deserve to lose their majorities.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, our Post Office, nursing home neglect, paid family leave, oil drilling in the Everglades, and fairness for pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise corporate taxes to pay for the American Jobs Plan, tell our Post Office to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's plan to cut services and raise prices, tell President Biden to help hold nursing homes accountable for neglect, tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family and medical leave, tell our Interior Department to reject oil drilling in the Everglades, and tell your Senators to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness 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 find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting, and have a happy and safe Memorial Day weekend!

Another day, another Republican "counter-offer" on the American Jobs Plan that ain't as large as it looks, plus they want to fund it with unspent American Rescue Plan money! So the Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund the American Jobs Plan with corporate tax hikes, not stupid tricks. "User fees" count as a stupid trick; like sales taxes, these always hit lower-income working families the hardest, and we can't just blame Republicans for it, either -- some of our Democratic Senators (cough Mark Warner cough) favor "user fees," too. So we need to disabuse them of that thinking. If you can fund good works by raising taxes on the corporations that constantly use their power against us, you do it. This shouldn't be hard to understand.

Our Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, is as we speak finalizing his plan to gut Post Office services and charge you more for whatever he's generous enough to keep doing, so Progress America helps you leave a public comment smacking it down. If right-wingers get in your grills demanding that you come up with a better solution, well, you can always say "repeal the mandate that our Postal Service pre-fund employee benefits for an absurd length of time," since Congress designed that mandate specifically to cause our Postal Service problems later on (even Mr. DeJoy wants to end this mandate, because stopped clock rule, I guess), or "allow our Postal Service to offer basic banking services to folks in rural and urban areas banks won't touch," which our Postal Service could do until the late 1960s. Right-wingers won't be listening, but it won't matter, because our government has to listen to our public comments. Seriously, there could be legal ramifications if they don't.

Public Citizen helps you tell our President to reject the Trump Administration "advisory opinion" that nursing homes should be immune from COVID-related lawsuits alleging neglect. Let them fight it out in court, obviously! Too many corporations think they have a "right" not to have to go through the trouble of defending themselves, but if they've done good Americans wrong, then good Americans have an actual right to force them to make it right. Again, I shake my head at the fact that I still have to explain things like this. I know most people get it, but the people who don't -- or, more likely, pretend not to -- seem to have too much say about everything. That only means we need to be louder.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid family and medical leave. That supposedly will be the one of the main aims of the American Families Plan when President Biden puts it out later on this year, but best to tell your Congressfolk now that we want paid family and medical leave. Seriously, they need to know right now that this is a priority with us. We're basically the only wealthy nation on the planet that doesn't have it, and only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment says look how well we're doing without it! Because we'd do a whole lot better with it if we didn't have to worry about getting time off whenever the baby gets a 104-degree fever or grandmom falls in her bathtub.

Sum of Us helps you tell our Interior Department to reject Burnett Oil's application to drill in the Everglades. Not just because it'll pollute our air and water and disturb unique ecosystems -- and these are both good reasons not to drill there, and maybe do some solar and wind infrastructure elsewhere! -- but because Burnett already has two drilling sites in the Everglades and hasn't cleaned up their messes there, though they've committed to doing so. When someone doesn't do what they say they're going to do, they murder a part of the world. Oh, and the area they want to drill this time? Just so happens to be Seminole holy land, which suggests, again, that politicians only care about the religions of white people.

Finally, the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1065, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The bill would force corporations to make "reasonable accommodations" to pregnant workers, and would prevent corporations from refusing to hire someone just because they're pregnant. You'll notice that each of those phrases preemptively refutes right-wing whining -- no, pregnant workers wouldn't be able to force their bosses to set up workstations in the bathroom, and no, corporations wouldn't be forced to hire pregnant workers just because they're pregnant. Right-wingers are formulating these "objections" as we speak, not to spark debate but to destroy it. Let's not have any of that.

Around the table: how *not* to treat Republicans, part 438.

Big pharma corporations have started running ads blasting efforts to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, and boy oh boy are they stinking pieces of dung. Letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would "stifle innovation," "keep you from getting the COVID vaccine," "kill jobs," and "institute government price controls." The first three are just stupid, but the fourth is old stupid -- think anyone under 30 seriously gets wigged out by "price controls"? Actually, when people hear "government price controls" today, particularly in the context of absurdly expensive drugs, they're more likely to say at last!

From the "So Much for the Tolerant Left" file: the New York Times scolds gay pride activists for refusing to let police officers march with them this year, by and large ignoring the fact that police have a long history of beating up gay folks. They don't seem to understand that the abused have had enough of being told to reach out to their abusers. And gay folks aren't the only ones who feel that way these days. January 6 broke a lot of us.

Study finds strong correlation between stimulus payments over the last year and a sharp rise in business start-ups -- particularly in the Black community. And the fact is you could cover most business startup costs with any one of these three stimulus checks and still have a lot of cash left over. Enhanced unemployment benefits no doubt also played a role. But at least one economist cautions against thinking the sharp rise in Black start-ups is a good thing, finding that businesses started up out of necessity (i.e., strictly because of lost employment) rose sharply in the Black community in 2020.

This has been a slow-motion train wreck for a while now: Kansas state Rep. Mark Samsel got caught on video preaching to students about (among other topics) God, masturbation, and suicide while substitute teaching, on the same day police say he physically abused at least one student. We've all had bad days at work, I suppose, but maybe not so bad we shoved one kid against the wall and kicked another one in the crotch, all while threatening "the wrath of God." Your Republican party, ladies and gentlemen! The party of patience, prudence, civility, and order!

When I hear that Sens. Manchin (D?-WV) and Sinema (D?-AZ) actually "pleaded" with Republicans to drop their opposition to the January 6 commission bill in which they got almost every silly thing they asked for in negotiations with Democrats, I can't help but hope they've decided to do this so visibly in order to give them cover for getting rid of the filibuster later. See? We tried to work with these guys, but you just can't!. But then Mr. Manchin said later he wouldn't get rid of the filibuster over the January 6 commission, and anyway, "pleading" with the Party of Sedition is always a bad look.

Finally, speaking of January 6, Gladys Sicknick -- mother of Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, who died in the line of duty during the January 6 attempted coup -- wants to meet with all 50 Republican Senators to convince them to support the aforementioned commission bill, though so far only 14 have expressed interest in meeting with her (or have met with her). I doubt even she will convince them to do the right thing -- and I also think that in the coming months she will be the target of right-wing hatred she never dreamed of before -- but she might shame them in the eyes of even more Americans, and we should all be shaming Republicans as much as possible.

Action: concerning antibiotic abuse, recycling, labor, privacy, equality, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell our FDA to fight antibiotic abuse on factory farms, tell Pennsylvania legislators to stop defunding recycling programs, tell your U.S. Senators to pass the PRO Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, the Equality Act, and the Medicare for All Act. 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 legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our FDA to do a better job restricting antibiotic abuse on factory farms. You don't want to live in a world where the next cut could kill you -- I have three cuts on my fingers as we speak -- so you don't want seven of every 10 antibiotics go to, no, not sick people or animals, but nominally healthy animals, and antibiotics all stop working as a result. And our FDA needs to do more than they've thus far proposed -- we clearly can't rely on factory farm veterinarians to voluntarily stand up to their factory farm bosses, for example. Sometimes you have to make people do the right thing.

Penn Environment helps you tell Pennsylvania state legislators not to slash funding for the Commonwealth's Recycling Fund. Hard to believe we have to tell them that, isn't it? But we do -- after all, they've done it four times over the last 12 years, and now some recycling centers won't collect plastic, glass, or paper, even. As a citizen, you do the hard work of separating your refuse so we're not completely surrounded by trash, but PA state legislators can't be bothered to do their part. That's why we get in their grills so they have no choice but to do their part.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Your right-wing Congressfolk will no doubt respond that of course they believe in protecting workers' rights, but the PRO Act "goes too far." That's BS. How is preventing corporations from forcing workers to attend anti-union meetings "going too far"? How is preventing corporations from retaliating against organizers and whistleblowers "going too far"? How is giving workers (versus their employers) the choice of voting via card check or internet "going too far"? They're not, that's how. So don't believe the hype.

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. Because we shouldn't let third-party data harvesting corporations sell your private info to law enforcement! Law enforcement is supposed to get warrants to look at that, not just buy it from some corporation! And don't brook any silliness about how "there's no privacy on the internet," because that's loser talk -- we should be able to enjoy the internet and feel safe. That's what America's all about, isn't it?

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. When they say "this bill is an unprecedented assault on religious freedom," ask yourself how denying gays and transgender folks loans and jobs and apartments fulfills anyone's "religious freedom." Here I thought religious freedom was about worshiping (or not!) at the church of your choice, not about forcing your beliefs down other folks' throats. In my experience, religion is a lot more than who you hurt.

Finally, 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. And don't brook any silliness about how "it's too hard" and "it can't be done." You know what was too hard and couldn't be done once? Ending slavery, getting women the vote, raising taxes on the rich, and enacting a minimum wage, among many other things we've done as Americans. And I'm pretty sure that good Americans who get slammed with surprise medical bills don't want to hear about what's too hard and what can't be done. And anyway, the only things worth doing are tough.

Action: concerning drug prices, voting rights, public investment, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to let election officials count early-arriving votes before Election Day, and tell your Congressfolk to fund overdue public transportation repairs and pass the MEAL Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement 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 find your PA state legislators' and Congressfolk's phone numbers (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices. Which virtually everyone supports! Except big pharma CEOs, of course, and we shouldn't let them have all the say about everything. The news hook, here, of course, is Rep. Porter (D-CA) embarrassing yet another CEO who deserved it, in unleashing her whiteboard to show how AbbVie has jacked up the price of Humira (the world's best-selling drug presently, treating arthritis and psoriasis, among other illnesses) 144% over the last nine years. You'd think high demand would result in lower prices! But you'd be wrong; if you really, really need a medicine, you're less likely to haggle over the price. Which is why we should let Medicare use the power of a 60-million-plus pool to bring drug prices down for everyone.

Common Cause helps you tell Pennsylvania's state legislature to let vote-counters actually count the votes they receive early before Election Day, instead of forcing them to wait until Election Day proper. Why did they do that? So they could make it seem like Donald Trump won the morning after the election, of course, and thus plant the seed of all his WAAAAAAH THEYZ STOLEZ TEH ELEKSHUNZ!!!! lies thereafter! No, I'm pretty sure that's the reason. It's not like we're asking election officials to put themselves out; ensuring a correct vote count is their job, after all. And we make that job harder by creating the illusion that the votes cast on Election Day somehow count more than the votes cast beforehand. (No, I'll not brook any hard-guys-vote-in-person silliness. Aren't we all too old to be swinging our penises around?)

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund long-overdue repairs to public transit. How long overdue? The NCTJ estimates that dedicating $20 billion annually for the next 12 years would eliminate the backlog. And that's not something we need to do instead of the American Jobs Plan, either, $240 billion over a dozen years not being a very large slice of the federal spending pie. No, I think calling attention to the public trans repair backlog -- and to the many, many jobs attacking that backlog would create! -- only brings more positive attention to the American Jobs Plan. Maybe the backlog will get incorporated into it! And billionaires made over a trillion bucks since the pandemic's start, so it's not like we just can't find the money.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2387, the Making Essentials Affordable and Lawful (or MEAL) Act. The MEAL Act would end the nefarious practice of keeping felony drug convicts from getting food stamps and other federal assistance, a practice which, if you think about it, defies all logic and common sense. Do convicts not need food if they can't get a job (which, thanks to the notorious "box" on most job applications, they often can't)? And how does denying them the federal assistance they need help them reintegrate into society? Again, too many politicians (including, sadly, our current President!) have made too much of a name for themselves calling cruelty and stupidity "tough love." This country is still young, but it shouldn't be that immature.

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. Because it'll fight gerrymandering, absurdly expensive campaigns, and all kinds of (frequently racist) vote suppression, of course! Also, if you've got a few hours, Daily Kos and Common Cause have teamed up to help you call West Virginia residents and ask them to call their state's senior U.S. Senator, Joe Manchin, and tell him to change his mind about supporting the For the People Act. The For the People Act enjoys supermajority support in polls there, just like everywhere else, and we at least need to deny him the excuse that his own constituents didn't call him. (He'll likely ignore us if we call from out of state -- a truism I've long heard but admittedly found hard to accept.)

Common Cause, People for the American Way, the Daily Kos Liberation League, and the League of Conservation Voters all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore that part of the Voting Rights Act that our Supreme Court killed in Shelby County v. Holder -- the part that allows our government to pre-approve voting rights changes in states and localities that have historically suppressed the vote. After this year, that's going to be a lot of states and localities! So we'd better get that done, and done quickly -- with or without the Republicans' blessing (though Lisa Murkowski has signaled her support for the bill; now we only need nine more to avoid a filibuster! Or, you know, fewer, if we just get rid of the filibuster).

Around the table: I'm not even sure I can call it *good* news, part 677.

Restaurant workers across America go on a wage strike and say they won't go back to work until they get paid a living wage, and I say good for them! Everyone in America wants to go back to eating in a restaurant again, so workers might as well use their leverage! Note well that if unemployment really pays better than restaurant work, maybe instead of demanding our government stop making unemployment benefits better or imagining workers are "lazy" for not wanting to work their asses off for dung pellets, we should demand that restaurant work pay more. It's what a free market would demand, is it not?

Just when I thought I'd permanently soured on social media, along comes Payal Dhar at Yes! magazine to remind us that "Social Media (Has) Become() a Lifeline During India’s COVID Crisis." In a sane, moral, and decent society, you shouldn't have to take to Twitter just to find an oxygen cylinder, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, well, at least you can actually do that and find someone who gives a crap. Hopefully these horror stories remind us that social media is actually pretty good at connecting people, although the corporations running them would prefer that we spend all our time distracting people.

Actual election observer informs us that some 75,000 Republican voters in Maricopa and Pima counties in Arizona did not vote for Donald Trump in 2020, even though they voted mostly Republican in other races. The big story, I guess, is that Joe Biden won Arizona largely because Donald Trump lost it -- recall that Mr. Biden's margin of victory there was around 10,000 votes -- but the data also suggests that a little over 6% of Republican voters wouldn't vote for Mr. Trump, meaning roughly 3% of the electorate in Arizona could have voted for some other Republican for President. Perhaps not coincidentally, anti-Trump Republican Michael Wood, despite his best efforts, got 3% of the vote in Texas's 6th House district. Now I wouldn't call my thesis scientific fact, but I'd say it's strong enough to advise Democrats, yet again, to stop fantasizing about getting large numbers of Republicans to vote for them, and instead inspire, with good works, liberals and independents who'd otherwise stay home.

When I hear that our "liberal" media is also bad at covering border issues, if not quite as bad as right-wing news organs hyping a "border crisis," I stand ready with a proposal: next time we hear of a "border crisis," or a "caravan," or whatever, we should ignore it, because it's utter bullshit. In America, we do actually have the armed forces to respond to an actual ground invasion, not to mention the intelligence personnel to discover it's coming before it gets here. But what's actually happening at the border ain't that, so let's refuse to feed the right-wing drama machine.

I did not know that former Trump spokeshack Jason Miller had been accused not merely of cheating on his wife, but of slipping an abortion pill to his mistress, which nearly caused her death. I guess he thinks, like his former boss, that "rules are for little people." And I bet no cable news "personality" will ask him about it, because then he'll throw a fit and never go on their show again, like losing "access" to that particular "source" of "news" would be such a bad thing. Oh, no, no more Jason Miller on the TVzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Finally, alleged "libertarian" Charles Koch has funded efforts to clamp down on protests -- not just the ones that'd criminalize protests around "critical infrastructure," which you'd figure he'd support, but also the bills that let you off scot-free if you run over a protestor. Thus does a decade of talk about the importance of criminal justice reform prove utterly meaningless. Remember: never listen to a guy who has always acted like "rules are for little people."

Action: concerning unemployment, taxes, police brutality, Arctic drilling, and the minimum wage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to save unemployment benefits, make the CTC expansion permanent, pass police reform legislation, end "qualified immunity" for police officers, ban Arctic drilling, and raise the minimum wage. 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 (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to save unemployment benefits from the 20-plus state Governors who are trying to end it. Because the "generous" benefits are "keeping people from looking for work"! They hope you don't think that if jobs aren't paying more than unemployment benefits -- on which no one lives like a corporate CEO! -- then maybe the jobs should just pay more. You know, like they would in a free market! The economy's not "roaring back," either -- perhaps, as Atrios suggested a few weeks ago, Our Glorious Elites thought the April job figures would be a lot better than they were and just plunged ahead with the story they wanted to tell anyway! But we're past the point where we have patience with stupidity, right?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the American Rescue Plan's Child Tax Credit expansion permanent. That may be a lot of capitalized words all at once, so I'll put it more plainly: the expansion means anyone with children under 6 gets a $300 check every month, and anyone with children between 6 and 17 gets $250. Monthly three-digit checks for folks with kids -- what an idea! And one that got by me in all the coverage of the American Rescue Plan, which suggests maybe Democrats should, you know, run on that in 2022. Though they barely mentioned it in 2021! It's like they're ashamed of their good works! But we're not -- and we're going to keep on them to do more good works.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1280, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Specifically, you'll demand that your Senators pass a bill that would cut off the flow of military weapons to police departments, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, raise use of force standards in police departments, and reform the "qualified immunity" doctrine (which see next paragraph). Maybe Republicans can attack "that Democrat special interest bill" that bears George Floyd's name, but see if they'll defend chokeholds, or tear gas for protestors, or no-knock warrants, or police getting off scot-free for killing people. I would imagine that these would be tougher to defend.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers. As I said last week, it should be hard to convict someone of a crime -- even someone who pisses you off! -- but the "qualified immunity" doctrine, in practice, is a "get out of jail free" card for police officers who commit evil deeds. Folks who tell me how can they do their jobs with all of this pressure? need to ask themselves one question: should a person who commits a crime like murder get off just because they're a police officer? It's not "all this pressure" to hold people accountable for their wrongdoing. And, sadly, police officers need to be perfect. It's one reason why I think they should have less to do.

Environmental Action helps you tell your Senators to permanently protect the ANWR (or Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) from fossil fuel drilling. The 2017 tax "reform" included a provision opening up ANWR for drilling (indeed, it may have been the only reason Lisa Murkowski voted for it), but the 2021 lease sale didn't produce very many bidders, which means that our decades-long agitation has made big corporations loathe to go into ANWR, but I'd much prefer that the force of law kept them out. Scientists have been saying for decades that we're just not going to get very much oil out of ANWR, which would make it unnecessary to list all the other reasons (stopping pollution, preserving Native American culture, protecting endangered species) we'd have to stop drilling in a freaking national wildlife refuge. I mean, what else do they need "refuge" from? Aliens?

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass a bill raising the federal minimum wage to $15/hour. You've no doubt heard some of our older morons in politics and media say things like I only made $2/hour; what's wrong with that? Generally they made $2/hour 50 years ago; $2 in 1971 dollars is $13.19 today, thanks to a little thing called inflation that apparently only exists when right-wingers want to fear-monger about federal spending. Raising the minimum wage won't cause runaway inflation, or else a Big Mac in Denmark, where McDonald's workers make more than $22/hour, wouldn't cost roughly the same as it does here. And you know what else? Big restaurant corporations have already told investors that a $15/hour minimum wage won't hurt their business -- and if they were simply lying to their investors, there'd be consequences.

Around the table: and now, more journeys into Crazytown.

When I hear that over a dozen very large and very famous corporations have avoided over $1 billion in taxes just by taking, ah, questionable tax breaks they figured our IRS wouldn't bother going after, all I can say is: nice work if you can get it! $1.3 billion ain't much in the context of $1 trillion our IRS says it can't collect every year because it doesn't have enough money, but $1.3 billion would still pay the 2019 average American salary around 25,000 times. Maybe that statement finally makes the more thick-headed among us see that letting corporations get away with tax avoidance costs jobs. I mean, give corporations a pile of money, and they'll hoard it, but tax it and they'll spend it paying people to make stuff.

And now for another reason Republicans might win back Congress in 2022 even though they're the Party of Sedition: Republican-held state legislatures are rushing to pass bills that would make "small, unintentional errors of process that could occur at the polls or in the distribution of ballots" into felonies. That's just one reason we're now experiencing a "brain drain" of experienced election officials (another reason, of course, is that Trumpholes spent election season threatening them). All that could result in Republicans winning races in 2022, this time with candidates who are actual rabid raccoons. We can still organize and outvote them, but in America, it seems that only takes you so far.

When I hear that the AP has fired a reporter after less than two weeks after right-wing trolls put up her social media posts, all I can say is lookee here: actual cancel culture! Of course the AP can fire her for violating her employment contract if she even did that, but my point is that the people who think Harvey Weinstein got a raw deal won't call this "cancel culture," just as the people who constantly whined about being told they weren't anti-racist enough never called Jesse Helms "politically correct," even though he was exactly the kind of person who'd tell everyone what they should say and think and was prepared to retaliate against anyone who deviated from his will. A man does get tired of history repeating itself -- and of folks who never learn from it.

You've heard of the "Trump defense" for January 6 seditionists? Now some of them are also trying out the "mob defense," as in "I didn't mean to riot, but I got swept up by the mob." Teenagers have more of a case to cite "peer pressure" as a reason they did something stupid, but that's only because they're not adults, and when even a criminal defense attorney calls the "mob defense" a "desperation move," well, hopefully that brings the point home. In the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, let's give a warm welcome to the party of personal responsibility!

When I hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) compared the prospect of House Reps having to wear masks on the House floor to Jews wearing a "gold star" under Hitler, my first impulse is to ask: hasn't she heard of Godwin's Law? And then I remembered that the sheer number of actual Nazi wannabes who have emerged from the muck in Donald Trump's wake -- too many of them enabled by our "liberal" media's attempts to "understand" them -- means there is no Godwin's Law anymore. Why, it's almost like that was the whole idea!

Finally, the prison guards on duty when notorious child molestor Jeffery Epstein killed himself (or, possibly, "killed himself") in his cell have admitted falsifying records of what they did that night. My first reaction to this news was "why, that is the MOST! SUPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD!" My second reaction was annoyance that these clowns, whose admission will help keep them out of jail, made Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) sound like an actual human being, to wit: "One hundred hours of community service is a joke -- this isn’t traffic court...The leader of an international child sex trafficking ring escaped justice, his co-conspirators had their secrets go to the grave with him, and these guards are going to be picking up trash on the side of the road."

Action: concerning taxes, vaccines, occupations, detentions, and our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pay for the American Jobs Plan with corporate tax hikes and not "user fees," tell your Congressfolk to beef up IRS enforcement so we can catch more tax cheats, and tell our President to fund world vaccine efforts, stop funding Israel's occupation of Palestine, close the Guantánamo Bay detention center, and replace one more member of our USPS Board of Governors. 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 (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pay for the American Jobs Plan by taxing corporations, not working people. Because that's what "user fees" are -- they're basically a damn sales tax, and we should outlaw all sales taxes anyway, because they always hit working people harder than wealthy people, and taxes should hit wealthy people harder, not so much because there's more money there as because wealthy people will take away all your rights if they become too powerful. You know, like they're doing now! And definitely don't tolerate any Republicans who say "only the people who use the roads should pay for the roads," as if corporations don't use roads.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk they need to fund our IRS properly so they can catch more wealthy tax cheats. This is basic law and order stuff here -- imagine your government saying we can't pay for cops, so we're just going to let the burglaries keep on happening. You wouldn't tolerate that, would you? Well, why would we tolerate the loss of $1 trillion annually simply because Congress has starved it of money the last decade? That's $1 trillion that rich folks and corporations have essentially burgled from us! We shouldn't have to! Congress should do their damn jobs! And now I'm over my exclamation point quota for this paragraph.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Biden Administration to invest $25 billion in vaccine development around the world. Because you can kill it here, but if you don't kill it there, too, it's gonna come back here and kill you, and very likely in mutated form. Hopefully we don't need the argument put any more pragmatically than that! And $25 billion out of over $4 trillion in annual federal spending not only isn't a lot, but would get you a lot more than you paid for it. Unlike, say, defense spending, where outspending the next eight highest-spending countries combined actually hasn't brought us any more security. Odd how little real security actually costs.

Speaking of which, MoveOn helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop funding Israel's continued oppression of Palestine. How often to I hear Israel is becoming that which it came into existence to fight these days? Quite often! And I'd probably think differently about Israel's actions in Palestine if I were convinced they really were alone against an entire world, but which of their Middle Eastern neighbors is standing with Palestine right now? Judging by the imbalance in the death tolls, I'd say none of them. And that means Israel has been captured by the folly that any fight is a good fight, and all fights must be fought to the death. It's always sad to see folks become what they most hate. And true friends don't enable it, as we have for decades.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to close the Guantánamo detention center already. Guantánamo remains a stain on our national soul, and if you're not getting the stains out of your soul, you're not living a moral life. And no, it's rubbish that Guantánamo's detainees will all "return to terrorism." Most of them never were terrorists to begin with! How do I know? Because if they were, our government would have convicted them of something over the last 20 years, that's why! "Too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release" was a particularly noxious Obama-era fecal blast. We would laugh at Vladimir Putin saying that -- but we tolerate it here, too. And we shouldn't.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to oust another USPS Board of Governors member, Ron Bloom, and replace him with someone qualified and more likely to fire Louis DeJoy. But I repeat myself! President Biden can replace Mr. Bloom because he's already served on the Board past his term, and Mr. Bloom has incomprehensibly endorsed Mr. DeJoy, when Mr. DeJoy deserves only shame and shunning for the "work" he's done. He tried to steal the election for Donald Trump! You don't just "get along" with people who do that! And now he's about to take a Post Office that was running pretty well and ensure that it runs badly, for "cost-cutting" reasons, of course. If that's what our "best and brightest" entrepreneurial minds do, well, then, they're not our "best," are they? They're more likely grifters, in fact. And we deserve better.

Around the table: featuring mostly dispiriting Democrat weakness.

Chris Walker at TruthOut suggests that if Democrats run away from the "defund the police" movement, it could actually hurt them at the polls in 2022. You remember how well Jon Ossoff did in the 2017 Georgia 6th special? He lost. And you remember what happened when a Black Lives Matter activist ran for the same seat in the 2018 general? She won. Voters like it when you stand for something! And if you stand for something and you're not an idiot, all the better! This is why Republicans keep winning when they don't deserve to win! Not to mention that when ask folks if they want to "defund the police," they say no, but when you ask them if they want to "reallocat(e) portions of police budgets to create a new agency of first-responders...to deal with issues related to addiction or mental illness," they say yes, even though it's the same damn thing. (And, hate to pile on, but Rep. Maloney needs to understand that Republicans call Democrats "socialists" whenever Democrats take a breath, so maybe predicating your strategy on "making sure they don't call us socialists" is weakness.)

When I hear that two corporations control most of the podcasts in America, I immediately think that sounds like a job for our antitrust laws! Even though we've had a few generations of right-wing judges who will interpret antitrust law, how shall we put it, rather loosely. I'll admit I never got too much into podcasts, so it's a shame the podcast landscape will be fully-corporatized (and therefore lame!) before I ever do. And yes, I, too, remember when YouTube was good (i.e., before Google got its grubby mitts on it). We need to retrain our minds away from Facebook and Google and YouTube and toward, you know, the vast social network the internet could be.

When Jon Schwarz says "The Idea That Deficit Spending Is a Burden on Our Children Is the Dumbest Propaganda," he specifically means that "(e)very time the federal government sells a bond, it creates a liability for the government. But it also creates an asset for those who bought the bond, in exactly the same amount." Bonds can, of course, be inherited by children, more directly than the public debt can. Trouble is, naturally, that rich folks own most government bonds -- and every time our government cuts taxes for the rich, it issues more bonds to make up for the lost revenue, which means (as Al Franken told us many years ago in Lies and Lying Liars Who Tell Them) rich folks benefit from tax cuts coming and going, as they get lower taxes and the opportunity to buy more bonds.

When I hear that the nefarious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) is behind a lot of state-level bills aiming to "empower" poll watchers to keep folks of color from voting, I'm reminded that ALEC pushed Voter ID bills in the early 2010s, and then, when activists prodded corporations to end their membership in ALEC, ALEC said they wouldn't do stuff like that anymore and would just concentrate on economic issues. So, they lied about that, too. Not that I'm terribly surprised, but someone's gotta note it. (Also, let us remember that a lot of the same corporations that have spoken in favor of voting rights generally still bankroll the same right-wing politicians trying to suppress the vote.)

Robert Reich explains "Why Strongmen Are Losing the Fight Against Covid." Long story short: they all suck at governing, which you'd expect, since they're all good at whining. They're also good at drama and doing Jeff George victory laps, too. Note well that at least 40 percent of Republican voters still won't get the vaccine because their Personal Lord and Savior and his media minions can't do their job right. The good news? "40 percent of Republicans" maps out pretty well on my "25% of the electorate is batshit insane" notion, and we should be used to them by now. The bad news? These fools will keep COVID going long after we should have stamped it out, which I'm sure Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are counting on to bring them back to power.

Finally, I must admit that I found Friday's news dump was especially dispiriting, as President Biden dropped over half a trillion dollars from his American Jobs Plan proposal just to appease Republicans (who were, predictably, not appeased), while his Administration has also apparently abandoned plans to increase access to health care via a public health care option and/or letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, both of which are popular and seem ideal for the American Families Plan. I swear, Democrats are like a football team that goes into prevent defense at the end of the first quarter. If they lose the House and Senate next year, mark Friday, May 21, 2021 as the reason why.

Action: concerning January 6, the Estate Tax, unemployment, pollution, and vote suppression.

Long story short: tell Democrats to hold January 6 hearings without Republican help or support, tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the 99.5% Act, tell states to stop using facial recognition software in unemployment applications, tell our EPA to roll back the Trump-era rule forbidding states from setting stricter car emissions standards, and tell Pepsi to stop funneling money to vote suppressors. 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 (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting, and have a happy weekend!

Consumers United for Fairness helps you tell Democrats to go ahead and hold hearings on the January 6 attempted coup without Republicans. 35 Republican House Reps actually voted for the independent commission legislation, but if we don't get 10 Republican votes in the Senate for it (hey, go ahead and call them, what could it hurt?), then Democrats should just move ahead. Are they afraid of being called "partisan" for it? Then they should all lose their next elections! Because they don't have the courage to do the job! Do the right thing, then worry about Republican hurt fee-fees. Bunch of damn brats, Republicans are. And it's about time Democrats stopped acting afraid of them. (I'm aware that the word "acting" implies this might all be one big drama. The only way to counter that is to be real with your Reps and Senators.)

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2576/S. 994, the For the 99.5 Percent Act. What would the For the 99.5% Act do? It would institute five Estate Tax brackets, ranging from 39% at the low end ($750,000 to $3.5 million) to 65% at the high end (over $1 billion). We all just witnessed billionaire wealth increase over $1 trillion during this pandemic, so it ain't like they ain't got the money. And one more time: this bill will kill exactly zero family farms! Too many good liberals still let this zombie lie live in their head, but even the organizations plugging this lie can't find a single example of a family farm lost to the Estate Tax! Next time you're in a room with 200 people, please understand that the For the 99.5% Act would only ever tax approximately one of them.

Fight for the Future helps you tell states to stop using facial recognition software on good Americans trying to file for unemployment. Because facial recognition sucks! It can't tell Black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can! And just as higher walls tend to be confounded by taller ladders, some scam artists have, no joke, resorted to 3D-printed face masks in order to confound the software, meaning the supposed fraud prevention measure has actually become a fraud creation measure. And, you know, submitting to software that makes everything worse also makes your wait for unemployment benefits longer! Just at the moment you really can't have any of that! So go ahead and deploy the winning argument against the officials trying to hurt you.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reverse the Trump Administration's rule preventing states from setting stricter auto emissions standards than our federal government does. If you're the kind of person who says f'ing California and their f'ing emissions standards making me work harder, then you're not the kind of person who says f'ing car manufacturers and their f'ing inefficient cars making me pay more for f'ing gas, and not just because the latter describes a real problem real Americans face. Seriously, we have to stop putting corporate executive whining on the same level as actual problems. No one says they don't have a right to complain, but they also don't have a "right" to get their way whenever they complain. No amount of money can buy you a right.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell PepsiCo to stop donating to organizations and candidates who help suppress votes. Corporations can talk all they want about how "the right to vote is a cornerstone of American democracy," as a Pepsi spokeshack has said, but actually putting your money where your mouth is? That's another thing entirely. Pepsi gave half a mil to the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2020, and said Chamber is leading the charge against H.R. 1, the For the People Act, a bill some two-thirds of Americans actually support in numerous polls. Their spokeshacks will say they only give to the Chamber for economic reasons, which is to laugh -- not just because it's actually kind of insulting to think we'll like the reactionary Chamber's economic agenda, but because the Chamber can spend its donations how it likes, and Pepsi knows that. So enough stupid crap from corporations.

Around the table: Republicans gonna Republican, part 845.

From ProPublica we learn that some $7 million in Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) loans went, via online lending corporation Kabbage, to obviously absurdly-named fake farms like the one in Minnesota that supposedly grew oranges or the cattle ranch put in the name of the Mayor of Long Beach Township, NJ. Clearly there was a lot of identity theft here, and just as clearly there was not a whole lot of oversight, either from Kabbage or from our government. If you're tempted to say $7 million out of some $350 billion ain't a big deal, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider how much good $7 million in loans might do for people who need it, and 3) remind yourself that corruption anywhere hurts our civilization everywhere. Also, consider all the steps Kabbage clearly took (like partnering with that bank in Utah to avoid interest rate caps!) to avoid scrutiny in the most general sense. Then, maybe, slap yourself again.

Sonali Kohatkar describes "Why Big Pharma's Arguments Against Patent Waivers," like the one we're trying to get so that poorer nations can have COVID vaccines too, "Don't Add Up." "It'll stifle innovation" you probably already saw through, since they trot that out when they oppose every good thing our government tries to do, but you might not have remembered that world taxpayers funded the COVID vaccines to the tune of billions of dollars, and big pharma corporations prefer to spend their largesse on marketing and overpaying their executives. But you may not have understood that calling generic vaccines from another country "fake" is sort of like saying we're the only civilized nation on the planet, which sure isn't the case -- every nation has a process for approving drugs. Some countries even have a better one!

Ho hum, we learn, once again, that there's no "exodus" from blue states to red states over TEH TAXEZ!!!!!, because too many people wind up paying higher taxes where they wind up -- like, say, in Texas, where taxes are actually a tick higher than they are in California. You'll remember studies demonstrating that high marginal tax rates in New Jersey explained very little about why people (ahem!) moved to other states. Which means I think the article does give too much credence to taxes as a reason rich folks move -- when your choice in life is either to be rich or to be rich, I don't think numbers that seem big to middle-class folks make a whole lot of difference.

Jessica Corbett at Common Dreams reminds us that although Amazon has extended its moratorium on law enforcement's use of its facial recognition technology, really, the credit belongs to activists (including you!) for wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. We are also reminded that Amazon still hasn't ended its Ring-police partnerships, that our government still hasn't acted to ban facial recognition technology, and that "Rekognition" is a hopelessly pretentious name for a piece of software.

Jesus Mary and Joseph where does one begin with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) blaming House Speaker Pelosi for causing the failure of the January 6 commission by "not consult(ing) in advance" with House Minority Leader McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader McConnell? With her almost mansplaining-level condescension, which we might almost call woman-on-woman crime? With the absurdity of demanding she "consult" with the party that egged on January 6 and is now gaslighting about January 6 about an investigation into January 6? With the sneaking suspicion that, just like with all Republicans, "consultation" really means capitulation? I know where we end: with the hope that that investigation into Sen. Collins's campaign finances has legs.

Finally, Alex Samuels at FiveThirtyEight describes "How The Republican Party Could Splinter (Or Stay The Same) After Liz Cheney’s Ousting." My money's on "stay the same." The Texas 6th House special showed us the ceiling of "Republican voters who absolutely won't vote for Trump or one of his Trumpholes," and that number is about 3 percent of the electorate. The remaining Republicans are a) Trumpholes, b) people who've been Republican all their lives and can't imagine being anything else, or c) people who will talk themselves back into the fold with fever dreams of SOSHULIZM!!!!! or -- far worse -- with "disgust" over "the people who hate Donald Trump" "going too far." That last item, seriously, is the soul of desperation.

Action: concerning the Child Tax Credit, paid family and medical leave, internet freedom, public transportation, and corporate welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass paid family and medical leave, and pass the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, the Freedom to Move Act, and the End Polluter Welfare 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 find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools on the bottom of this page.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent. This summer, that expansion will deliver an extra $300 monthly to folks with children under 6, and an extra $250 to folks with children between 6 and 17. I've given this matter a lot of thought lately, and it sure seems to me that an extra $250 or so monthly will give parents a lot of breathing room, which will help them be the best parents they can be. Already our everything-for-the-rich-and-screw-everyone-else economy makes it hard for them to be their best; the CTC expansion is a rare government policy that actually does that. So we really ought to keep it around.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family and medical leave plan. Paid family and medical leave will be a focus of President Biden's American Families Plan, but it might be better in the short run to tell them we support paid family and medical leave in the abstract, and then hold them accountable for the details later; at that point, they won't be able to say their constituents didn't talk about paid family and medical leave. We're the only big nation on Earth that doesn't have it, and no it wouldn't be particularly onerous to fund. You've heard that America's billionaires have made over $1 trillion more since the pandemic's beginning, right? Well, that'd be a good place to start.

Both Consumer Reports and the ACLU help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. Again, though President Biden's American Jobs Plan would nominally include more broadband, our Congressfolk still need to hear from us about it, not least because too many of them (cough Republicans cough) have been banging their saucepans telling everyone that broadband isn't "really infrastructure." All you need to do to prove them wrong is go through a pandemic! Now kids go to school over the internet, adults go to work over the internet, folks see a doctor and buy groceries over the internet -- yeah, it's obviously infrastructure. Why do we listen to Republicans again?

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2287/S. 1172, the Freedom to Move Act. Since at least the beginning of the Reagan years, we've been caught up in the idea that we should each have our own cars and rely less on trains and buses to get us around. But I think we're seeing the folly of that idea -- not just that it's selfish, but that it'll also help destroy our planet a lot faster. And you know, not everyone can have a car -- some people just don't make enough money, and they need public transportation as a result. Hence the Freedom to Move Act would issue grants to help make fare-free public trans a reality; after all, why shouldn't we spend our money on things we might all use? (And, not for nothing, but yeah, this bill or something like it could also get folded into the American Jobs Plan, so best to let our Congressfolk know we want better public transportation.)

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would end some $15 billion of corporate welfare for big fossil fuel drillers. I have to say I find far too many fiscal hawks will go after social spending with almost absurd ease, but will never say anything about corporate welfare -- which is far larger, and which represents a far greater immorality -- unless you provoke them, and why should I have to provoke people to do the right thing? Can't people do the right thing on their own? Can't they follow their own philosophy consistently and fight all big government handouts? If they can't, you have to wonder who might be lining their pocketbooks.

Around the table: in which, again, we grapple with various law-and-order matters.

When I hear that our Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that police need a warrant to enter someone's home, I first imagine that unanimous must mean narrow, and that turns out to be the case, as our Court actually ruled that the "community care-taker" exception carved out in Cady v. Dombroski doesn't apply to searches police conduct within a home -- Cady concerned a car search, after all. It's still a good ruling, not least because I'd prefer that police didn't have as broad a "community caretaker" role as they currently have.

C. Michael White at The Conversation wonders "Why Is the FDA Funded in Part by the Companies It Regulates?" It is an excellent question! And I'm not satisfied with the given answer (that the AIDS epidemic prompted the passage of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, ostensibly so that AIDS patients could get medication faster). I mean, was the time it took to get a drug right really the problem there? And if so, how did "funding with user fees" solve it? Are we sure small-government ideologues didn't have more to do with it? I guess it's good that this topic can bring up more excellent questions.

This Tucson Weekly article asks, "Police Keep Tabs on Social Media, But Who Keeps Tabs on Cops?" That is another excellent question! Sadly, the answer is "politicians who don't know how to do it, don't want to do it, or are afraid to do it." Also sadly, the right-wing activist from AZ Patriots says she knows police monitor her, too -- but this knowledge clearly hasn't helped her grow as a person, since she says "sometimes, you know, we feel like we’re being targets ourselves," as if it's OK to target other people, or as if it's utterly incomprehensible police would target her.

Steven Rosenfeld runs down the nuts-and-bolts problems with the Arizona "audit" of Maricopa County votes. That the "auditors" are Trumpholes you already knew, and you probably also knew about the blue pens and the UV lights -- but you may not have known that they're not following basic auditing procedures, like reviewing poll tape voting totals or setting aside problematic ballots after you've figured out the voter's intent. Thus they're virtually assured of coming up with vote totals "in conflict" with the final tally. Why, it's almost like that's the whole idea!

When I hear that Sen. Graham (E-SC) has said that he "accept(s) the results" of the 2020 election, all I can say is wow, only four months after January 6 and six months after the election, Sen. Graham acts like admitting water is wet is some great gift to the American people. Remember when they wanted us all to "accept the results" the day after Election Day 2016? Why is anyone a Republican again? After all, I would think, if you're conservative, you would not want to be associated with sore losers and reality-deniers.

Finally, let's again dismiss the idea that a "Trump defense" should get January 6 defendants off the hook for what they did that day. Mr. Trump can face charges of incitement to riot, but it takes two to tango here. And I really wish they wouldn't bring up a defendant's "Asperger's Syndrome" -- I put it in quotation marks because those are the lawyers' words, where everyone else's word would be "autism." As folks who watched last week's SNL have likely already said, just because you're autistic, it doesn't mean you're not also an asshole.

Action: concerning big pharma, transgender kids, the "citizen's arrest," social media, birth control, and Rahmbo.

Long story short: demand more affordable EpiPens, protect transgender kids in North Carolina, help end the concept of the "citizen's arrest," tell Facebook to keep Donald Trump off its platform, tell President Biden to roll back the Title X "gag rule," and tell your Senators to reject Rahm Emanuel as the next Ambassador to Japan. You'll find email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Change.org helps you tell Viatris to make EpiPen more affordable. Sound familiar? A few years ago, when Mylan owned EpiPen (Mylan merged with Upjohn in 2020 to create Viatris), it got in hot water for pricing it at $700 for two doses; the drug being delivered costs about a buck, and in 2009, two EpiPen doses cost "only" $100. But $700 for a life-saving drug that monopolizes the market? That's uncivilized, particularly coming from the richest civilization on the planet. In Europe they pay a whole lot less, despite the spectre of socialized medicine. Or do I mean because? In fairness, EpiPen also has competition over there, which our notorious "free" market somehow hasn't delivered. That means we're left with embarrassing EpiPen's owner into submission.

Change.org also helps you beat back yet another anti-transgender bill, this time SB 514 in North Carolina, which would (stop me if you've heard this one before) ban transgender surgeries and treatments in the Tar Heel state. The bill's authors appear to think trans kids are faking it, but if so, they don't understand children, like, at all -- the most important thing to a kid is approval, and coming out as trans risks that approval, whether from family or peers; who does that just for attention? When the "attention" you get is getting kicked out of your house or beaten up in science hall, the answer is "nobody." And it's not like there aren't ten thousand other ways to get attention that don't involve announcing you're really a different sex than you look like you are. Hell, for me it was aggressive sarcasm. You may be surprised to learn that people still remember me for it.

Progress America helps you tell New York state to outlaw "citizen's arrest" laws. Maybe you think of the "citizen's arrest" as something you saw on The Andy Griffith Show, though the "citizen's arrest" is as old as the hills -- or, at least, medieval England. But encouraging citizens to arrest other citizens doesn't befit a civilization that has police officers, and encourages far too many folks to do things they shouldn't do. Case in point: George Zimmerman, who was not a police officer but who took it upon himself to apprehend Trayvon Martin because he looked "out of place" or whatever. And you can all too easily imagine Trump-soaked citizens taking it upon themselves to "right" "wrongs" with powers they haven't earned and don't deserve.

Speaking of which, Free Press helps you tell Facebook to permanently ban Donald Trump from its platform. Because Donald Trump does not have a First Amendment right to a Facebook platform, that's why! He only has a First Amendment right not to be put in jail for his speech -- unless, of course, he makes terroristic threats, commits libel or slander, or (pretends to rack brain) incites folks to riot. Facebook is a private corporation, and though it too often acts like it just can't do anything about user content, we would best regard Facebook, both conceptually and legally, as a publishing house. And we don't demand that publishing houses accept every single manuscript, do we?

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to repeal the Trump Administration's Title X "gag rule," which keeps health providers from discussing abortion with their patients while receiving Title X grants. You've heard me say take government money, play by government rules enough times to think I might support the Trump-era "gag rule," but I've always said that when discussing employers taking our taxpayer money and then discriminating against employees. That's just wrong. Preventing health providers from discussing legal options for women's health care as a condition for getting federal grants? That's also wrong -- abortion is a legal procedure and a legal right.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to reject Rahm Emanuel's nomination as Ambassador to Japan. Because he's got a long rap sheet: as Barack Obama's first Chief of Staff, he was also the chief architect of capitulation in 2009 and 2010 -- calling liberals "retards" at one point for the heinous crime of wanting more out of a Democratic President than warmed-over Clintonism -- and from there he went on to serve two terms as Mayor of Chicago, overseeing systemic police brutality and privatizing as much of the city's public services as he could get his mitts on. And no, he gets no credit for Democrats retaking the House in 2006; if any one person gets credit for that, it's Howard Dean. We can't let the worst Democrats continue to fail upward.

Action: concerning jobs, law and order, pregnant workers, privacy, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk about your "red line" for the American Jobs Plan, tell your Congressfolk to oppose military weapons and "qualified immunity" for police officers, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. You can 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 links in the following paragraphs.

Tired of hearing how "bleak" the prospects are for a "bipartisan" American Jobs Plan? It's bleak enough that we're even negotiating with the supporters of the January 6 insurrection! The Republicans' "red line" is, of course, NO NEW TAXUZ!!!! -- although "use fees" somehow don't count as taxes to them, at least at this moment -- and President Biden's "red line," unfortunately, does not appear to include "the bill must raise taxes on corporations." Want a better red line? The American Jobs Plan must include a 55% tax rate for corporate profits over $1 million, must invest substantially in clean water, renewable energy, and the care economy, and must not include "use fees," which always hit working people harder than they hit rich people. Our red line matter more than their red lines -- if we speak out. (Daily Kos helps you communicate your will in re corporate taxes and renewable energy and the care economy.)

Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3227, the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act, which would end the notorious 1033 program which funnels surplus military weapons to local police departments. Seriously, if you heard "police get military weapons" in nations like Iran or Russia, you'd find that alarming, wouldn't you? Don't let "but police have it hard" get in the way of you finding that alarming here in America, too, because these weapons don't help police deal with criminals -- they help police put down peaceful protests against their brutality! And don't put the phrase "defund the police" in your counterarguments, either. This is literally not "defunding the police," and attaching any concept that makes you mad to any other concept that makes you mad is not argument worthy of civilized people.

Further along these lines, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers in America. "Qualified immunity" is the legal doctrine, promulgated by our Supreme Court in Pierson v. Ray, that protects government officials (including police officers) from civil suits over their discretionary actions (i.e., actions not mandated by law), unless the plaintiff can prove those actions violated "clearly-established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." But in practice, folks trying to get relief from police brutality have to prove something almost exactly the same happened to someone else, and that they got relief, in order to get relief themselves. And judges have used the narrowest excuses to throw cases out -- "your example was about police siccing a dog on a suspect lying down with their hands to the side, but you were sitting down with your hands up, so it's not the same! Too bad!" No, I didn't make that up. We should make it hard to convict people of crimes in America, but we shouldn't make it damn near impossible. "Qualified immunity" does that, and Congress should end it.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Too many women in America have to choose between having a baby and having a job, and why should it be like that? If men could get pregnant, you'd best believe bosses would make every conceivable accommodation at the workplace, like assignments with less lifting and more tolerance of bathroom breaks. But too often we assume women have "ulterior motives" for getting pregnant, when, hey, who would get pregnant just to get light duty? Don't believe the hype that the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would "make it impossible for bosses to do their jobs." The bill pointedly does not force bosses to make unreasonable accommodations. When you read bills, you learn things.

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. Our laws already prevent most corporations (including the big telecoms and social media corporations) from selling your information to law enforcement -- but our laws don't prevent the third-party data collecting corporations that buy that data from selling it to law enforcement! Which they do, so if you're a Muslim looking up which direction Mecca's in on your phone, now our government can find out about it, and harass you if they want. There's a reason we demand that law enforcement get warrants to investigate you -- it's for your protection! And we deserve that protection even when big corporations figure out how to work around it. And that's why we have lawmakers.

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. The Medicare for All Act would ensure that all Americans have health insurance, including the 30 million or so who can't get health insurance now, and we could deliver better care more cheaply. How? Well, for one thing, Medicare-for-All won't have a slew of million-dollar executives who need to be paid first. Also, Medicare-for-All will bargain with doctors and hospitals and big pharma corporations with the strength of a 330-million-person-plus pool, and in insurance bargaining, there's always strength in numbers. Don't worry that doctors won't be able to "make money"; doctors still make plenty of money everywhere that governments guarantee that everyone gets health care. So, really, there are no counter-arguments. (Cost isn't one, either; I've shot that zombie in the head many times, most recently last week.)

Around the table: why is anyone a Republican? And other mysteries.

Big corporations think they can pressure "moderate" Democrats into voting against any corporate tax hikes in the American Jobs Plan, a reasonable play on their part, but they also think Democratic Congressfolk will campaign on higher corporate taxes, which is quite an interesting take -- it wasn't that long ago folks said Barack Obama was dumb to declare he would raise taxes on the rich while running for re-election. Of course we're much better off not counting on Democrats running on corporate tax hikes, not just because, hey, these are Democrats we're talking about, but also because these corporations could be floating that whole idea just to induce liberals to accept a worse bill and count on the "fight another day" that never, ever comes with Democrats. Anyway, it doesn't matter what they want: it matters what we want. Be sure to note the first paragraph of our action alert today.

Remember that Republican House Rep who said the January 6 attempted coup wasn't an attempted coup so much as a "normal tourist visit"? Turns out the guy who said it, Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia's 9th, helped barricade the House chamber doors from the seditionists on that very day, and there's a photo. In case you were wondering, Republicans have a 31 point registration advantage in Georgia's 9th district, and Mr. Clyde won in 2020 with 78 percent of the vote, so though hope springs eternal and one should really compete in every district no matter how dire the circumstances, I wouldn't count on him going down due to his abject stupidity, as would happen in a sane, decent, and moral society.

Ari Paul at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media might have a better handle on the most recent unexpectedly-low jobs report if they'd actually talked to more than a handful of workers. They might have found out many workers aren't rushing to go back to work not just because employers still want to pay them in dung pellets, but because, well, a lot of jobs ain't worth risking your life (or the life of someone you love, who might be elderly or infirm). But then journalism textbooks have told you, straight out, for at least the last 30 years, that you can crib a lot of your work from corporate PR releases, and today's "liberal" media journalists sure seem to have taken that lesson to heart.

North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee (R) says he'll run for Governor of Nevada in 2022, and here's the rub: he switched parties, from Democratic to Republican, just this past April. Question: how can you make this switch after January 6? I mean, sure, he has answered that question by whining about TEH SOSHULIZM!!!!!, as if he's never driven a road or gone to the library, but frankly nobody should be a Republican, anywhere, after what happened on January 6.

Elie Mystal at The Nation reminds us that "There's Only 1 Reason" "Marjorie Taylor Greene is Gunning for AOC" -- and spoiler alert! It's racism. But I regret to inform my readers that I find too many intelligent folks, probably aiming to prove they're "not that liberal," equating the two, which is to laugh! I mean, one is intelligent, has good policy ideas, and doesn't raise her voice anywhere near the level our "liberal" media would like you to think she does -- and the other is Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Personal to the "why won't she debate us?" crowd: because nobody owes you a debate. Why, that would be like saying women owe you sex!)

Finally, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) went on Hannity the other night and of course he used the word "energy" to describe something President Biden supposedly doesn't have enough of and former President Trump supposedly has a lot of. We could chide him for being a naked propagandist for the former President, but let's instead be reminded that most Americans are sick and tired of Donald Trump's "energy," which we would better describe as "drama." And again, how does this Trumpian "energy" embody conservative values, such as prudence, or thrift, or a love of order and tradition?

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, voting rights, the filibuster, public lands, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell our government to do the right thing about the Israel/Palestine conflict, tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, write a letter to the editor advocating that we end the Senate filibuster, and tell President Biden to reverse Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments and forgive student loan debt. You can 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 and/or use the links in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

First things first. MoveOn helps you tell President Biden to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict and an end to Israeli evictions of Palestinians, while Demand Progress helps you tell our government to stop funding Israeli occupation of Palestine and Avaaz helps you tell world governments to sanction Israel for its actions. You don't need to know "who started it" to support these petitions; you only need to know how it is -- one nation is way more powerful than another, and brutalizes the other. And of course you should also be suspicious when you notice that the violence has buoyed the electoral fortunes of the Israeli Prime Minister who can't win an election outright but somehow stays in power.

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. Meanwhile, 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. You've no doubt heard that New Great and Bounteous One True American President Joe Manchin likes the latter bill but not the former, but who cares? We want both! We want both the bill that would help us end partisan gerrymandering and force big campaign donors out into the light and the bill that would restore the Voting Rights Act! Why should we have to settle just because Joe Manchin's the 50th vote?

Speaking of all of that, Common Cause helps you write a letter to the editor of your local paper advocating that we end the Senate filibuster. I used to advocate for fixing the filibuster, so that the Senators who would use it would actually have to work for it by explaining, at considerable length, why they oppose campaign finance disclosure or ending tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs overseas (to name just two popular initiatives they've filibustered over the years), but fuck that: Senators have abused this power, so they get nothing from now on, and Mitch McConnell's threats to slow down Senate business to a crawl if they get rid of the filibuster are irrelevant. Remember when Sen. Bunning (R-KY) singlehandedly stopped any further unemployment insurance considerations in 2010? Yeah, he wasn't running for re-election. Anyone who stops a popular bill because he wants a proper quorum to turn on the lights in the Senate building won't get re-elected, either. If we have anything to say about it, that is.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to roll back Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. When Trump votaries contemplated the phrase "drain the swamp," do you think the phrase "by chipping away at national monuments so that gas and oil drillers could pollute it" followed naturally in their minds? I would say not! Folks love their national monuments a lot more than Our Glorious Elites would like you to think, and they're actually not all that emotionally invested in big corporate CEOs making even more money from gas and oil drilling. Tell them "it's for the jobs" and you may get most of them to pause -- but tell them "that's what they want you to think," and then explaining exactly why that's what they want you to think that (i.e., as in the previous sentence above), will win most of them right back. Too bad our "liberal" media never thinks to do that. Hey, we can't do everything. That's why we live in a civilization.

Finally, both the ACLU and Daily Kos help you tell President Biden to cancel at least $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower. You've heard folks say they can't retire because they still have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt? Well, it's not actually the kind of thing that deserves the response well you should have thought of that before taking on all that debt ha ha ha snort, because our society has been telling everyone for years they have to get a college degree if they want to survive, and when you go telling people that, you either have to deliver on that or make it right if you don't. And forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt will make that right for a lot of people. Personal to those who'd be jealous: go gripe with God about when you were born, and God will you the same thing I will, that every damn thing in the world ain't about you.

Around the table: attempted coup as "normal tourist visit."

Food tech corporation develops method to store perishable food for up to 90 days without refrigeration -- essentially, they pasteurize the food with carbon dioxide rather than heat or steam, as it's typically done. Farther Farms, of Rochester, NY, might well revolutionize the processed food industry, which relies heavily on refrigerated transportation for a lot of perishable goods, and might well help save a lot of food that gets thrown out. But I am a little perturbed that they're focusing mainly on preserving processed foods, rather than just-picked fruits and vegetables.

Ho hum, Congressional Republicans are claiming that the January 6 insurrection was like a "normal tourist visit" and/or that it was really the fault of antifa and/or Black Lives Matter. They don't give out awards for gaslighting, fellas. Do they not remember that we saw everything?

Michelle Nickerson at the Washington Post says the rise of the alleged moderate Rep. Stefanik to GOP House leadership "manages to mark the decline of conservatism’s ideological grip on the GOP, while simultaneously marking the growing visibility of old-fashioned American racism and voter suppression." If you're seeing an opportunity for Democrats to take advantage by a) doing good works and b) repeating that vote suppressors are sore losers, well, all this apparently contradictory messaging might keep "untraditional partisans" (i.e., those who don't much care about traditional "pro-family" issues but don't like immigrants, for example) in the fold. Also, these are Democrats we're talking about. Read the whole article, as it reminds us that anti-feminism has been a core Republican principle for a long time, and will remain one even as they put more women like Ms. Stefanik out front.

Again I read that a slew of former Republican elected officials want to start a third party of "rational" conservatives, and again I wonder how many right-wing parties America needs. And again I note that being a never-Trumper sure as hell doesn't make you a "conservative." Did Tha Bush Mobb value tradition, prudence, order? I do not think you could reasonably conclude that they did -- unless you confuse conservatism with reactionary stupidity.

The Vatican warns U.S. bishops against denying folks communion if they happen to support abortion rights or euthanasia, and I have to say that sure seems like a good policy, perhaps even a Christian policy, if you understand the Parable of the Prodigal Son to mean the world is full of people who might one day come home. The Vatican even reminds us that abortion and euthanasia aren't the only issues in the world, a reminder that apparently bears repeating, since our politicians never seem to hear it.

Finally, our "liberal" media needs to stop doing Jeff George victory laps about the "low engagement numbers" at Donald Trump's new blog, and not just because most people would hear you say "low engagement numbers" and think you were trying to hoodwink them. I don't think he's dumb to write a blog at all, and I don't say that because I'd love to have these allegedly lackluster numbers myself; I say it because sometimes going backward is the best way to go forward. I mean, if you don't have big social media in your corner anymore, you have to use "old" social media. Certainly media criticisms will continue to fall flat as long as they cling to "the numbers."

Action: concerning jobs, war, debt, pollution, and law and order.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk that you want a jobs bill that invests in the care economy and invests in renewable energy, tell President Biden to end all arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, tell our CFPB to protect us from debt collector harassment, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject yet another pro-pollution bill, and tell Louisiana state legislators to ban the "panic defense." 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 phone numbers for your various state and federal legislators, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in the care economy as part of the American Jobs Plan and invest in renewable energy as part of the American Jobs Plan. We're all going to need more care someday, and our seniors need more care now, so investing in the "care economy," as they call it, is as much an investment in our future as investing in roads and bridges. And n.b. "investing in our future" when considering whether we should build out more solar and wind in an infrastructure bill. Investing merely in more gas drilling and more oil drilling is going to give us an uninhabitable planet one day; investing in renewable energy will give us, as Millie Jackson would say, a fighting chance. Politicians need to start putting our needs above their rich cronies' "needs."

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to end all arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition currently raining death and misery upon Yemen. He has ended "logistical and military support" for the coalition, and has frozen arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and these ain't nothing, but people are still dying in Yemen -- the U.N. estimates that 400,000 kids under 5 could die this year from hunger -- and we're still following through with all of Donald Trump's midnight arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition, so we need to communicate our will again. Remember that the big arms manufacturing corporations don't really want this war to end, because that'll be less money for them. You'd think some of our big "free" marketeers would just respond that those corporations ought to be able to adjust if they want to survive, but as usual, you can't count on them. But we can count on us.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to roll back its proposed rule that would allow debt collectors to deluge you with unlimited emails, text messages, and direct messages on social media platforms. Plus the rule would let them call you every day if they want, and the rule would let them harass you without even determining if you owe them any money! Which latter item you could very well construe as an attempt to defraud you! This rule was, of course, a Trump-era CFPB rule, since Donald Trump only lived to serve other bosses; the Biden-era CFPB may yet approach the level of the Obama CFPB, which was one of that Administration's best Executive branch agencies -- but only if we make our voices heard.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to reject yet another pro-pollution bill, SB 275. SB 275 would prevent any PA municipality from "(a)dopt(ing) a policy that restricts or prohibits, or has the effect of restricting or prohibiting, the connection or reconnection of a utility service based upon the type of source of energy to be delivered to an individual consumer within the municipality." Sounds wordy and harmless, right? Wordy is never harmless! The bill wants to prevent municipalities from making their utilities more renewable; the only "restricting or prohibiting" the bill cares about is ""restricting or prohibiting" oil and gas. It's corporate welfare, in other words. And how conservative, to want to prevent smaller governments from having more say in the decisions that affect them! Let's deliver this bill to the oblivion it most richly deserves.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell Louisiana state legislators to outlaw the "panic defense" tactic in murders of LGBTQ+ folks. Yes, Louisiana is one of 38 states that doesn't explicitly prevent lawyers from deploying the "panic defense," but from whence does this "panic" supposedly issue? Oh, from the "panic" a defendant feels when propositioned by someone gay or transgender or otherwise not prototypically "straight." I'm going to go out on a limb and say that almost every man in America has gotten hit on by a dude without murdering him. Murder equals unlawful death plus malicious premeditation, without the absurd excuse that he just couldn't cope with the guy who hit on him! So I would say folks who deploy the "panic defense" are anti-law and order.

Action: concerning taxes, voting rights, food safety, polluter welfare, law and order, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to be cowardly about raising taxes on the rich, tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Baby Food Safety Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All 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 find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links (where applicable) in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Dan Pfeiffer, clearly one of the better political thinkers to emerge from the Obama Administration, argues that Democrats ought to "lean into" tax hikes on corporations, because, and I quote, "(t)he idea that Biden’s proposals to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy are a political liability flies in the face of all of the polling as well as basic common sense." Hear, hear! Voters reward courage; they don't reward "this is the best we could do" or "Republicans wouldn't let us do more," and they sure as hell don't reward "I couldn't do the right thing because I'm in a swing district." You know what "swing" voters crave most from their reps? That they do the right thing! And they'll settle for the "courageous" thing, so you want to do an actual courageous thing before Republicans do the fake courageous thing. So go ahead and call your (Democratic) Reps and Senators and tell them they'll only get to keep their majorities if they do the right thing and raise corporate taxes. You can also tell them, if you're feeling ornery, that you wouldn't want to suspect that they're pretending not to understand this very basic calculus so that they don't offend their big donors. Votes win elections, not cash.

While you've got your Senators on the phone, tell them to pass H.R. 1/S. 1, the For the People Act. The Senate Rules Committee deadlocked on the bill on Tuesday, but Sen. Schumer used his power as Senate Majority Leader to advance the bill to the full Senate anyway, so now's the time to put the pressure on your Senators. They're no doubt hearing from the other side, though I'm not sure what arguments the other side could reasonably advance -- how can they say it's "a solution in search of a problem" when numerous state legislatures have repeatedly demonstrated the problem? How can they argue "record turnout in 2020" when states scurry to pass laws to ensure that turnout doesn't happen again? How can they say "bills like this should be passed in a bipartisan manner" when Republicans have acted in an entirely partisan manner for over a dozen years? Seriously, their arguments are dung. They need to hear that killing gerrymandering dead, disclosing big campaign donors, and ensuring same-day and automatic voter registration are actually pretty popular.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act. Because baby food sure as hell shouldn't have high levels of lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury in it! And the Baby Food Safety Act would actually set maximum levels for these toxins' presence in baby food, and establish mechanisms for lowering those levels as advancing scientific research would require. Why would we give babies food that might expose them to cancer and brain damage? The more pertinent question might be "why did big food manufacturing corporations do nothing about these things even when they knew about them?" Because a President Trump would let them get away with it no matter what we said, that's why. We have a better chance of influencing a President Biden in our direction, and that's why we need to tell our Congressfolk to pass this bill.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. The bill would, as its title suggests, cut some $15 billion annually in subsidies to big polluting corporations (like oil and gas drilling corporations) who hardly need the taxpayer help. And yet they'll fight to the death to keep them! Even as they admit to each other that tax breaks hardly matter in the decisions they make! (Hey, don't take my word for that -- take former Bush Mobb Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's word for it!) And, ah, why are we giving these handouts to polluters when we could be giving more of a hand up to solar and wind and geothermal? These things don't pollute anywhere near as much as fossil fuels do, and it ain't like the sun and the wind and the ground are going anywhere. Unless we destroy them all! How about we do the hard work of not doing that?

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. Big telecom corporations can't sell your personal data to law enforcement -- but they can sell them to private data broker corporations, which can sell your data to law enforcement! The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would close that loophole right quick, which would not only protect your right to privacy on the internet (I never agreed with folks who throw up their hands and say you just don't have any privacy on the internet; it's a species of cynicism), but would also save the taxpayer money! Yes, it would, since it's easier to just buy up a bunch of data ("WE NEEDZ IT TEH NOWZ, SO PAYZ UPZ!!!!!!") than it is to get warrants. Which is why we make law enforcement get warrants.

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. Which would expand Medicare to everyone and (by almost everyone's estimation, though they often don't put it quite like this!) cost less than funneling trillions of dollars into our current health insurance system, the system that slams you with surprise thousand-dollar medical bills all the time and moves doctors in and out of networks all the time. With Medicare for All, we'd have one network, and we'd have the bargaining power with private hospitals and doctors that a 330-million-strong pool would have! Plus we could fund it merely by capturing the money big corporations already pay private health insurers in an employer-side payroll tax (and please note that "employer-side" means "employees don't pay one penny more"). Sounds like a win for the American people all the way around.

Around the table: in which Mob Boss Mitch reminds us why he didn't speak up very often until recently.

Delivery drivers at Imperfect Foods successfully unionize, despite suffering weeks of anti-union intimidation by their employer. And Imperfect Foods is one of them-there "good" corporations, seeking, as it does, to use the approximately one in six pieces of food that simply gets thrown out because it doesn't "look" good enough. But that only tells you that we have to fight all the bosses, all the time, even the ones supposedly or actually trying to make the world a better place, because most of them still see workers as an impediment to their vision, rather than a part of it.

I said yesterday that Mitt Romney was wrong to suggest that Liz Cheney's ouster from GOP House leadership would cost Republicans votes in 2022, but an Axios-led focus group of swing voters suggests I'm wrong, as nine of 14 respondents said they could vote Republican in 2022, but eight of these said they wouldn't vote for an election-denier, and almost all of them said removing Ms. Cheney was a mistake. It's a small sample, of course, and the Axios group didn't appear to ask if Ms. Cheney's removal would itself affect their decisions. Also, too, how many of these swing voters will "get used" to an election-denier? I mean, I know what they're saying now, but let's see how the passage of time operates here.

When I hear that Republicans have apparently learned so little about "controlling" extremist movements from their inability to "control" the Tea Party that they have no chance at "controlling" the Trumpist movement, I feel compelled to respond: they have no damn choice! Either they can pander to the Trumpholes or they can persuade large numbers of people that they have real policies and a real vision, an undertaking they haven't attempted since the reign of George W. Bush. But let's not call either the Tea Party or the Trumpholes a "grass-roots movement" -- they're both big money-driven movements.

Ho hum, ex-FCC Chair Ajit Pai promised that deregulation would mean lower internet prices, but internet prices rose considerably faster over the last four years than inflation. He also promised that getting rid of net neutrality would spur internet infrastructure investment, and oh I don't even need to finish that story. Mr. Pai's response? Well, if you just count it differently you'll see prices actually went down, which should impress no one who pays an actual cable bill. Why do they charge whatever they want? Because everyone needs it, that's why! Seems to me our FCC dealt with the "everyone needs it" part covered when they classified broadband as a utility in their net neutrality order from 2015; then, of course, Mr. Pai's FCC repealed it. Let me know if I'm belaboring the point here.

Glenn Youngkin wins Republican nomination for Virginia Governor. The biggest Trumphole in the race finished third, but of course Mr. Youngkin isn't some "moderate," and he's certainly no "outsider," not if he worked for the Carlyle Group. And Mr. Trump has endorsed him, probably enjoying his refusal to even say "Joe Biden won the election" out loud. Can he win in a state getting bluer as we speak? Of course he can! His likely opponent will be former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a man almost tailor-made to depress turnout in these times, and remember that he barely beat Ken Cuccinelli in 2013, at a time when it seemed there couldn't be a more obnoxious right-winger than Ken Cuccinelli.

Finally, you may have missed this dung nugget from Sen. Mitch McConnell (E-KY), regarding his opposition to the For the People Act: "(t)hat is precisely what this is about: quiet the voices of citizens, particularly who gather together in 501(c)4s in order to express their views." Gosh, does he know how that sounds? I guarantee you that every swing voter who heard the phrase "501(c)4s" either promptly fell asleep or decided Mr. McConnell was a pretentious elitist. They might even have decided that he -- and not the ones relating tales of folks of color still having their vote suppressed -- was being the "hysterical" one!

Action: concerning law and order, immigration, antibiotic abuse, food safety, marketing to children, and dog-fighting.

Long story short: tell California judges to stop setting absurdly-high bail that no one can afford to pay, tell President Biden to reunite the rest of the families torn apart by President Trump's family separation policy, tell McDonald's to stop enabling antibiotic abuse on factory farm, tell Pepsi to get glyphosate out of its food products, tell YouTube to stop using autoplay and recommendation features on its Kids channel, and tell Russia to ban dog-fighting. You can find email/petition links for each of these action alerts in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Color of Change helps you tell the California Judicial Council to stop setting bail higher than defendants can reasonably pay. Some folks will react HOWZ CANZ TEH COPZ DOZ THEIRZ JOBZ!!!!!, but note well the words "defendant" and "reasonably pay" in the previous sentence -- if we're putting people in jail indefinitely before convicting them of a crime, we're not being a law-and-order nation; we're being a dick-swinging nation, and we should stop doing that. Furthermore, the California Supreme Court has lately ruled, in In re Humphrey, that "conditioning freedom solely on whether an arrestee can afford bail is unconstitutional," so the Judicial Council would be following the law in issuing a new guidance that conforms with the law. We want judges to follow the law, don't we?

The ACLU helps you tell the Biden Administration to keep reuniting families separated by the Trump Administration's evil border policy. Yeah, they've begun that process, but they've got at least a thousand families to go. And you'll specifically ask them to reunify families, bring them to America, protect them from deportation, provide support for them, and stop separating them to begin with. Some folks will bristle at the prospect that having your family carved up would gain you immediate, if not permanent, entry into the United States. But, really, it's the least we could do for them after putting them through everything we've put them through. And the likelihood they'll turn out to be (fill in name of whomever Republicans are drumming up hate against this week) is really very small. Most immigrants are running from far more serious trouble than what we imagine they'll create here!

Avaaz helps you tell big fast food chain corporation McDonald's to stop sourcing its meat from farms that abuse antibiotics. If we must have big corporations, we might as well leverage them toward our ends -- a big customer like McDonald's can change farming practices all over if we can use the Big Stick of Bad PR to make them stop getting their beef and chicken from farms that pump their animals full of antibiotics. This will be a life-and-death matter at some point in the future, because using seven out of every 10 antibiotics on nominally healthy feed animals sure is a great way of creating superbugs that can't be put down with antibiotics. It could take us back to the 18th century, a time when your next cut could kill you. Must that be the price we pay so we can have absurdly rich big ag executives?

In a similar vein, the Environmental Working Group helps you tell Pepsi to get glyphosate out of its food products. I don't just mean the infamous soda pop, I mean Quaker Oats, Lays, Tostitos, Doritos, Rold Gold, Life, and Rice-a-Roni, among others, and Pepsi owns all of these! Scientists have linked glyphosate to cancer for many years now, and Pepsi has done considerably less about glyphosate in their food than other big food manufacturing corporations, to the point where some Pepsi foods have nearly five times as much glyphosate in them as scientists consider safe. Again, Pepsi owns a lot of foods, and they don't like the Big Stick of Bad PR any more than anyone else, so if they do the right thing here, they can effect a lot of positive change in America. Just as their executives imagined they'd do, I'm sure, the day they set out to be rich!

Fight for the Future helps you tell YouTube to stop offering autoplay and recommendations features on its YouTube Kids channel. Because then the kids just watch videos all damn day! And they watch videos that are bad for them all damn day! You don't trust YouTube to give you good suggestions about anything but music videos, do you? I have friends who watch a lot of YouTube videos -- good YouTube videos about politics and science, they do exist! -- and then get recommendations to watch Jordan Peterson videos. Their algorithms don't serve your interests, after all, they serve YouTube's interests, and YouTube's interest is in keeping you watching videos, and shoving rage-inducing videos in your face is the easiest way to keep you watching. Why would we imagine they'd run a kids' channel any better than that?

Finally, Care2 helps you tell the Russian government to ban dog-fighting. You'd prefer the Russian government ban Vladimir Putin, perhaps, but just consider how awful dog-fighting is from the dog's point of view. Would you enjoy the humans you trust forcing you to fight another dog for several hours until one of you dies? Would you enjoy being the "bait dog" who has all his teeth removed and his mouth sealed shut so other dogs can practice their killing skills? How would you bright-side your way out of these scenarios? Yeah, dog-fighting is as old as the hills in Russia, but just because it's "history" doesn't mean we need to keep doing it, or tolerating it. See "statues, Confederate" for more information on that topic.

Around the table: in which several "establishment" Republicans misread the pulse of the party.

As Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) could be expelled from GOP House leadership today, Mitt Romney argues that such an expulsion will cost Republicans votes in 2022, but I doubt he's right about that. I'm sure he wishes that were the case, but Republican voters don't listen to Mitt Romney or his kind anymore -- half of them only listen to their Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump now, and the other half go along with them, whether out of misguided loyalty or a sincere desire to hurt Democrats. What's good or right sure as hell won't enter into this nefarious calculus.

ProPublica describes what happened after an out-of-work event planner bought emergency health insurance in 2019, after substantial changes to health insurance regulation, and then got slammed with over $33,000 in surprise bills! You can read the article and say well, he should have read the fine print, but only if you read all the fine print you come across, which you don't, and anyway why would a $2,500 limit on surgical costs be in the fine print? Because anyone who's ever had surgery knows that every surgery costs a lot more than that, that's why? Folks, this is Trumpcare.

You won't be surprised to learn that the Trump Administration spied on three journalists who reported on Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, but you may be surprised to learn that the Biden Administration defended that spying in court. Oh but we were investigating leaks, not reporters sounds like BS to most of America by now, hopefully, though I can see why this Justice Department only just notified the relevant news organizations of something that happened three years ago -- I mean, you didn't think the last Justice Department cared about following the law, did you? Still, remember that Joe Biden was Barack Obama's Vice President, and that Barack Obama was no friend to journalists, either.

As a federal panel stands ready to rename a bunch of racist place names in Texas, let's see how many rageheads defend them as a "vital" part of "history." But where were they when Candlestick Park became 3Com Park? Doesn't matter that 3Com bought it and thus "earned" the "right" to rename it -- Candlestick Park is a part of history! That's the argument! Seriously, if you had nothing to say about the renaming of Candlestick Park, you have no standing to oppose the re-naming of Negrohead Lake, let alone the long-overdue dismantling of Confederate hero statues.

When you read that "Election Researchers Reveal That Flexible Voting Options Boosted 2020 Turnout," you are reminded, I would hope, that even 2020 Presidential loser Donald Trump got 74 million votes, nearly five million more than the previous all-time Presidential vote getter (Barack Obama in 2008). I shouldn't have to remind you that Joe Biden got 81 million votes, of course, and I would advise that you ostracize anyone who gets triggered by these numbers.

Noted right-wing consultant Frank Luntz thinks Donald Trump's constantly whining about how he "won" the 2020 election will actually depress right-wing turnout in 2022. He's right that Donald Trump absolutely will be the nominee in 2024 if he wants to be, but he's wrong about his main point. Trumpholes won't read TEH 2020 ELECSHUNZ WAZ TEH STOLENZ!!!! as "it's no use voting" but as "let's all vote so they can't steal it this time." Why doesn't he see that? Maybe he does, and he's just trying to lull people into a false sense of security! Hey, I wouldn't put it past him. And he can always prove me wrong.

Action: concerning taxes, health care, chemical safety, public transportation, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the American Rescue Plan's Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, fight big pharma price gouging, pass the PFAS Action Act and the Freedom to Move Act, and keep bigger, heavier trucks off our roads. 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion from the American Rescue Plan permanent. The CTC expansion provides an extra $300/month to parents of children under 6 and $250/month to parents of children between 6 and 17, and I can tell you from experience that an extra $250 a month goes a long way. I guess all the Republicans who voted against it but will still try to take credit for it will argue that it was only supposed to last a year anyway, but, ah, are children going to stop having needs after this pandemic is over? The CTC expansion is good policy that'll cut child poverty in half in America, and would cost a mere $109 billion (out of some $4 trillion-plus in federal expenditures) in 2021, and when was the last time our government spent $109 billion to do people some good, instead of just throwing it away on corporate welfare? That would be a habit we would want to help them cultivate.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big pharma corporation price gouging. Surely our Congressfolk know we all hate big pharma price gouging -- diabetics who spend more on insulin than they do on their rent or mortgage certainly know it more acutely! -- but we still have to tell them we expect them to do something about it, and even though the Social Security Works petition doesn't get into many specifics, there's still space in the comments for you to get into specifics. Like, say, allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, which even the right-wing Mercatus Center says would save over $80 billion annually. And $80 billion in lower costs for the taxpayer could help pay for a lot of better things -- like expanding Medicare.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PFAS Action Act. The House passed the PFAS Action Act last term, and even though that bill attracted two dozen Republican votes in the House, Mob Boss Mitch wanted no part of it in the Senate, which meant two more years of "forever chemicals" that never break down and which scientists have linked to cancer and reproductive issues in our water. The PFAS Action Act would require PFAS manufacturers to clean up their own messes -- which seems as unprecedented in our politics as it doesn't in our parenting! -- and would require our EPA to limit the amount of PFAS chemicals that can appear in our water. That would cause a lot of non-stick pan makers and firefighting foam makers to make their products differently, but c'mon! This is a can-do nation!

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Move Act. What would the Freedom to Move Act do? It would offer grants to states and localities so they can offer fare-free public transportation -- it is public transportation, after all! -- and also so they can build out more public transportation to underserved urban and rural areas. The bill would authorize $5 billion in grants annually, which one could fund almost entirely by repealing oil and gas drilling subsidies! Those are big, big private industries that don't need taxpayer help, after all, but public transportation by definition belongs to us, and everyone who wants to use public trans should be able to. I am irritated to find any of these are controversial matters.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep bigger, heavier trucks off our highways. But bigger, heavier trucks can haul more, says the tiny little Satan sitting on my right shoulder, and thus save money! Yeah, Satan always loses me at "save money." Bigger, heavier trucks can haul more, that's true, but bigger, heavier trucks can also overturn more easily and they can also use more gas and pollute more easily and they also damage our roads and bridges more easily, so there has to be a point where having the biggest, heaviest truck actually costs us all more money, even if it allows some trucking executive to gild the plumbing in his 14th vacation home. And no one's advocating hauling goods in Geo Smart cars. Satan was just about to tell me they were. But I'm so on to Satan.

Around the table: in which we find politicians cynical and weak *but I repeat myself*.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy evaluates the tax hikes in President Biden's American Families Plan, and finds that they only affect the very richest taxpayers. When you hear that dividends and capital gains taxes would go up, and the hedge fund manager loophole would be closed, you would kind of suspect that. But why do we never dream of bringing the top income tax rate above where we put it in 1993? I've said it should be in the 90s for at least 15 years, and gosh, even Steve Bannon dreamed of a top tax bracket in the 40s, and he's a total asshole.

Surprise, surprise, big telecom corporations spent over $4 million generating fake anti-net neutrality comments during our FCC's 2017 effort to repeal the 2015 Open Internet order enshrining net neutrality principles in law. Our FCC did repeal that order, as we knew it would whether or not it could claim a massive grassroots upswell of anti-net neutrality sentiment that had never before reared its head. Maybe now our FCC can get it right again? Once we get a fifth FCC Commissioner in there, I mean.

As our Justice Department starts scrutinizing the Cyber Ninja's "audit" of votes in Maricopa County, AZ, we are reminded that Arizona has already conducted two statewide audits and that Cyber Ninjas aren't exactly very concerned with chain-of-custody issues. That's in addition to Cyber Ninjas's obvious pro-Trump bias, of course. The Daily Show, by the way, has probably produced the best summary of the Arizona "audit" (start about 2:54 into the clip).

In a related note, Arizona Republican Governor Doug Ducey starts providing state Department of Public Safety protection for Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs after she receives death threats from folks ginned up by the "audit" of Maricopa County votes. Newt Gingrich might call that an "unintended consequence," except he only says that about liberal stuff, and anyway it's probably not unintended, strictly speaking. Anyway, what says "I know I'm right and I'm deeply secure about it" more than threatening a political opponent's life?

If you're as tired of hearing How Great Liz Cheney Is as I am, you'll enjoy John Nichols's lengthy examination of Ms. Cheney's House career at The Nation, in which she stands on just about the wrong side of every issue and is a prick about it, and Adam Serwer's piece at The Atlantic, which concentrates mostly on Ms. Cheney's devotion to authoritarianism. Gosh, at least John McCain took an unorthodox position on campaign finance and for a time stood to his party's left on taxes, but Liz Cheney, like Adam Kitzinger, gives us nothing similar for us to hang on to.

Finally, Mob Boss Mitch wants to call a Waaaambulance over teaching of actual racism in public schools, but 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones has the right response: "He's saying that the truth is too difficult for apparently our nation to bear and that we're far too fragile to be able to withstand the scrutiny of the truth." Yes, it is always important to remember that the American people are tough even when our leaders are weaklings. And I do get tired of hearing all this whining about "divisiveness" from folks who are themselves the great practitioners of the unholy art of division.

Action: concerning abortion, voting rights, discrimination, and "bipartisanship."

Long story short: tell the Texas state legislature to reject an anti-abortion, anti-law and order bill; tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act; and tell your Congressfolk that you want results, not "bipartisanship." 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 legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

First things first. The Texas state legislature, not satisfied with suppressing voting rights and injuring trans children, continues its reign of terror with HB 1515, the so-called Texas Heartbeat Act, which is not only one of those bills that would make abortions illegal after a fetal heartbeat can be detected -- i.e., before most women even know they're pregnant! -- but would also allow anyone in Texas to sue any abortion provider for violating any of HB 1515's provisions. The bill's authors sell that as a way of keeping state law enforcement out of, well, enforcing this particular law like that's some kind of "compromise" or something, but we have a thing called "standing" in lawsuits for a reason -- to prevent precisely this kind of chaos where anyone who "feels" aggrieved by anything, ever, can sue anyone they like over anything they feel aggrieves them. Standing typically requires a) evidence of direct injury and b) some degree of certainty that a court can actually redress it. But once again, the party that constantly whines about "frivolous lawsuits" seems determined to create more of them with this anti-law and order bill. Progress American helps you oppose it.

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. Mob Boss Mitch McConnell (E-KY) says "100% of my focus is on stopping this new administration" -- again, apparently zero percent of his focus is on serving the good people of Kentucky! -- so let's contemplate what that "100% focus" would mean with regard to his plans to stonewall the For the People Act: it would mean state legislatures could keep drawing Rorschach-looking legislative districts that exclude individual houses on individual streets just so undeserving incumbents can be easily re-elected; it would mean states could continue to use bogus "databases" to pretend that citizens with common first and last names are voting in several states at once; it would mean state legislatures could continue to restrict early voting, mail-in voting, and automatic and same-day voting registration at their own whim; and it would mean no campaign finance disclosure of big donors even though virtually everyone in America wants that and such disclosure doesn't actually violate big donors' rights. So let's end the Age of McConnell by telling our Senators what they should really do.

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 would the continuing Age of McConnell mean for this bill? It would mean our Justice Department could do next-to-nothing about states that continue to suppress votes. It's no accident that, after our Supreme Court's Shelby County v. Holder decision -- which eviscerated this power granted to our Justice Department by the Voting Rights Act -- that those very same Southern states our Court felt the Voting Rights Act now "unfairly" targeted made a slew of changes to their voting rights laws! These changes just so happened to cement Republicans' unearned advantage in those states. So if Mitch McConnell gets his way here, Republicans will eventually make it so that no non-white person anywhere can vote, not that they'd ever put it like that, of course.

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. What will Mob Boss Mitch's "100% focus" on stopping this new Administration" mean here? It will mean that landlords can continue to refuse to rent to gay and transgender folks merely because they're gay or transgender, that banks can continue to refuse to serve gay and transgender folks merely because they're gay or transgender, and that states and localities can continue to keep transgender folks out of public restrooms merely because they find them icky. That may not mean much to you if you're not gay or transgender, but it would mean a lot to those who are, because they would continue to get pushed around by the law instead of be protected by it, as we all deserve. Ignore all that crap about boys playing girls' sports. I've gone into why it's crap a bunch of times already, and I won't go into it anymore. At some point, bad ideas have to die if they've lost the argument. And the folks who keep repeating them should be treated as whiners.

Finally, because they need to be told at least a million times before they get it, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that you do not want bipartisanship if it means good legislation can't pass or only bad legislation can pass. Seems commonsensical, until you listen to Joe Manchin say the same stupid crap over and over again like he has no idea which political party just tried to overturn the election on January 6. Was he even in the building? Anyway, when did we hear about "the importance of bipartisanship" in 2017, when Republicans controlled every branch of government? Approximately never. We only hear about it when Democrats control every branch of government! Because Democrats might actually do something good for people! I'm sick and tired of living in the Age of McConnell, where "bipartisanship" means "Democrats and Republicans coming together to do whatever Republicans want." The American people matter, too. And we need to step up and remind them of that, every damn day for the rest of our lives if necessary.

Around the table: cryptocurrency and other mysteries explained!

Robert Verbruggen at the National Review compares the trend of Republican-run states refusing enhanced unemployment benefits to those years Republican-run states refused the Medicaid expansion. In that they're both unpopular? Why, no! He thinks refusing enhanced unemployment benefits is an "opportunity" for Republicans! That's cynical horserace-speak, of course, but it also ignores the plain reality that folks notice when they're making less money. He can't even bring himself to evaluate the possibility that employers can't find workers because they won't pay more, and says on two occasions that he wished the research was better, which does beg the question then why even write the article? Almost refreshing, it is, to find so-smart-they're-dumb types somewhere other than the Democratic Party.

Ho hum, Republican Congressdolts are still promoting the Big Gummint relief they all voted against. This ain't a matter of simply informing your constituents what help our government offers, as one spokeshack hilariously tries to spin it, but a matter of bragging about it like you didn't do your damnedest to kill it, as Rep. Malliotakis (R-NY) does in calling one slice of that bill an "achievement()" of hers even though she, like every other Republican in Congress, voted "nay." Just wait until they run re-election ads talking about the things the American Rescue Plan did (and, if we're lucky, the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan) like they voted for any of them! I hope Democrats have the minimal courage to point that out; otherwise, they may find a Republican House that refuses to certify a 2024 Biden landslide.

President Biden announces he'll support waiving COVID-19 vaccine patents so more people can get vaccinated, and the big pharma corporations respond with their usual assholery, with one CEO saying the move will "disadvantage patients by undermining existing incentives to develop vaccines and therapeutics for future pandemics," by which I guess she means she's smarter than you because she knows more big words than you and can string together endless prepositional phrases. I kid, of course -- the waiver really won't "undermine existing incentives," not just because it'd be an emergency waiver that would end when the pandemic ends, but also because the primary "existing incentive" -- dead people don't spend money on health care -- ain't going away.

Julie Hollar at FAIR instructs us that "In Media Framing, Trans Kids Are Problems to Be Solved -- Not People With Rights." Which means a) not letting very many trans people speak, even in stories that purport to be about them, and b) swamping trans people beneath a "debate" that's all about the drama. When I read that our "liberal" media finds trans issues "vexing," I'm reminded how often they used to present AIDS as an issue that mainly affected heteros struggling with how to feel about it, rather than the folks suffering and dying from it.

Bank of England Governor says that cryptocurrency has "no intrinsic value" and that folks who invest it in should be "prepared to lose all (their) money." Don't understand cryptocurrency? That's because they don't want you to understand it! In a world where we can use an ATM almost anywhere on Earth and can pay bills without writing and mailing checks, it's hard to see why a thing like cryptocurrency needs to exist. Except, of course, so some people can con other people out of their real money.

Finally, the lawyer for one of the January 6 seditionists has advanced the argument that his role in the attempted coup was really kinda Fox News's fault, because his client did almost nothing but watch Fox News for the previous six months. I actually don't think "watching Fox News non-stop" is an addiction, certainly not the way, say, alcoholism is, so my response to all that would be ah, no, asshole, you're on your own. I mean, we can't just stop blaming people who do evil merely because Satan whispered repeatedly in their ear.

Action: concerning jobs, pollution, Guantánamo, our Post Office, and un-Foxing your cable box.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk that yes home and community care service spending absolutely belongs in the American Jobs Plan and to pass the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act; tell President Biden to close Guantánamo Bay already; tell your Senators to confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees so they can fire Postmaster General DeJoy; and tell your local cable provider to "un-Fox your cable box." 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 get your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below. And good hunting! It's almost the weekend!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that we should absolutely invest in home care and community care services. The Republicans are all up on the TV telling us that anything other than roads and bridges isn't "real infrastructure" (which they're won't vote to fund either, by the way), but actually, home and community care are real infrastructure -- if you think, you know, that civilization consists of people, rather than things. And if you've ever done home and community care (ahem!), then you know it's absolutely essential work that, frankly, we're going to need more of as the years go by. So don't let Republicans tell you your work isn't essential, or "real." And, ah, why do we let seditionists tell us what's essential or real again?

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. S. 984 would make plastics corporations responsible for single-use plastic waste, by forcing them to contribute financially to the collection and processing of all that waste; that would be quite the welcome change from having everyone else clean up all of their mess. And then we'd see all that trash disappear right quick! Because they'd then make recyclable and reusable plastics, of course. Corporations don't like losing money, as you know. Don't worry that this change will be "too much" for them or that it'll "kill jobs." Corporations always complain about change -- but they can adjust more easily than us, because they have more money.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden to close the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention center. Guantánamo has been a stain on our nation for almost 20 years now, a place supposedly for detaining "the worst of the worst" terrorists, but when they hold you there for five or 10 or 14 years (like Mansoor Adayfi, whose book Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo comes out soon), they're all but announcing you're not a terrorist. Remember the Obama-era formulation "too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release"? No one is "too dangerous" to charge, convict, and sentence. If you think so, go live in a dictatorship already, because you're not tough enough for civilization.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's three USPS Board of Governors nominees -- so they can then fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, whose service-cutting and price-hiking ways make a mockery not just of our Post Office but of America. Where's the can-do spirit, Mr. DeJoy? Saying "we've got to raise prices and cut services" when our Post Office was running a crap-ton better before he got there sure ain't the can-do spirit I grew up with. You've heard that the reconstituted USPS Board of Governors might not fire Mr. DeJoy after all? We'll address that with the Board of Governors shortly. But your Senators should still know that you want him fired.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to "un-Fox your cable box" -- that is, get your cable corporation to dump Fox News -- here's the link. Now, perhaps you're saying to yourself, self, what about all the other far right news channels like OAN and Newsmax? Are we going to boot them off our cable box too? And the answer would be: sure, if we've got to! But this is mainly about Starving the Beast that is Fox News of all the user fees they collect from big cable corporations, which stick those fees in their prices for your basic cable package. OAN and Newsmax will surely become Beasts in due time, but in the meantime, let's teach our cable providers that there'll be a price for carrying noxious news channels full of drama and junk news.

Around the table: drama and not even *good* drama, part 876.

When I hear that the state of Montana will no longer offer the enhanced unemployment benefits after June 27 because "(n)early every sector in our economy faces a labor shortage," per Gov. Gianforte, I feel compelled to ask: is no one considering the possibility that folks won't get jobs because the jobs don't pay enough? You don't live like a king on unemployment benefits, but trying to pay people in dung pellets ain't gonna move a lot of behinds. And gosh, can our "liberal" media maybe consider this in their reporting? It wasn't that long ago that "offer workers more money" was a strategy corporations would moot out loud.

Right-wing organization continues its "audit" of Maricopa County (AZ) 2020 election votes, applying some very strange practices that could well be part of an effort to lie that the Democrats somehow stole the election. Earlier an Arizona Republic reporter caught them with blue pens (which can change ballots) in the auditorium where they're conducting the "audit," and the UV rays they're casting on ballots could erase marks as well; in any case, maybe we should look for fraud on the other side, since the worst President in American history somehow finished within half a percentage point of Mr. Biden in Arizona. (We have since learned that they're using UV rays to find bamboo in mail-in ballots. Get it, bamboo? Because China? People who would yell at you for calling them "racist" are yukking it up at that one.)

From Judd Legum at Popular Information we learn that even without Donald Trump, right-wing news sites (or perhaps "news" sites!) are absolutely crushing on Facebook. By my count, a mere six of the top 15 news sites getting the most Facebook "engagements" (clicks, likes, shares, etc.) are either center or center-left; the rest are hard right, and if you've never heard of The Daily Wire or Western Journal or Rumble, I wouldn't blame you. I provide this public service announcement in case anyone you know still thinks Facebook is actually censoring right-wingers.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch says "Britain Risks Cementing in Power a Corrupt and Incompetent Government (i.e., Boris Johnson's) in Undeserved Gratitude for the Vaccine." And if you're thinking "no one's thanking Donald Trump for the vaccine in America," remember also that he's out of office; Mr. Johnson's term doesn't end until 2024, which, sadly, leaves plenty of time for good Britons to get used to him, particularly since Labour has replaced Mr. Corbyn with yet another moderate. (If Scotland gains independence before then -- not probable, admittedly -- Labour will be even deeper in the muck.)

Finally, in yet another reminder that if you've come to today's conservative movement for calm, sober, adult thought, you've come to the wrong place, Tucker Carlson slammed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for failing to disclose a living arrangement with noted right-wing consultant Frank Luntz -- without mentioning that Mr. Luntz once employed Mr. Carlson's brother Buckley, and their working relationship apparently did not end well. So, he sucks up to Donald Trump by slamming Kevin McCarthy and settles a personal score with Frank Luntz? Sounds like a win-win! For Tucker Carlson, of course; not for anyone else. No truth to the rumor, by the way, that he has four other brothers named Chumley, Badges, Charles Maurras, and Taz.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, broadband, the Middle East, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk that "going big" on the infrastructure/jobs bill is more important than "going bipartisan"; tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax, make broadband internet more accessible to all, and stop Israel from oppressing Palestinian children; and tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a slew of pro-pollution bills. Use the tools in the upper-right corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's (and PA state legislators') phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the American Jobs Plan "big, bold, and green" -- and reject weakening it just to get Republicans on board. Not just because Republicans tried to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, either. Fact is, we've got a lot of problems in America that we can address by a) raising corporate taxes and then b) spending that money on projects -- like rebuilding sewer lines and building out renewable energy -- that'll make this nation greater. When everyone has clean water, we'll be greater. When everyone uses energy that doesn't kill the planet, we'll be greater. And when everyone has a job helping accomplish these things, well, you get the idea. Even if Republicans don't.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax. It's a piddling little tax, frankly -- two percent on assets over $50 million, and then three percent on assets over $1 billion -- but it'd raise a lot of money (upwards of $250 billion annually), and frankly these billionaires made out like bandits during this pandemic. Naturally, with all their money, they can buy more time with folks like Joe Manchin and tell tall tales about how "dangerous" it would be to raise taxes on the rich right now. But according to them, there'll never be a good time to do that. Can't raise taxes on the rich because the economy's bad! Can't raise taxes on the rich because the economy's good! All we have is our voices, so we'd better use them.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All (or AAIA) Act. We've all seen, I would hope, how integral broadband has become over the last year, thanks to the pandemic, but if you live in a rural or urban area or a reservation, you don't have the access the rest of us have, thanks to big telecom corporations refusing to build out into areas where they can't make money hand over fist! The AAIA would, among other good works, better-fund the FCC's Emergency Broadband Benefit program and pre-empt state laws that forbid municipalities from offering their own broadband services. Which are excellent wherever they're tried; just ask the good residents of Chattanooga, TN.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2590, the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act. The bill would keep our government from spending taxpayer money on Israeli oppression of Palestinians, including putting kids in military detention, demolishing homes, and grabbing more Palestinian territory. We're already violating international law by doing all of that! And most Americans would prefer we didn't enable their behavior. And no, you're not an "anti-Semite" for not wanting your taxpayer money to hurt other people. Even American Jews have been hearing that for years! Best to define "anti-Semitism" as, you know, things that hurt Jews, not things that merely interfere with Israel's political aims.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to reject five objectively pro-pollution bills. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but these bills (HB 72, 139, 288, 939, and 950) would hamstring our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) from issuing clean air and clean water regulations, mainly by granting the legislature additional powers to stonewall those regulations. All for the greater glory of gas and oil drilling corporations! The law already grants our DEP the power to issue regulations; if you don't like the regulations they issue, you leave public comments, which our DEP has to take into account in making a final decision. You don't demand tenth, eleventh, and twelfth innings in a game you lost in the standard nine.

UPDATE. The Sierra Club link in the final paragraph above no longer directs you to the five-bill action alert, possibly because the state House has now passed all those bills; calling your state Senators about the five bills would be the only option left, and the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page would help with that.

Around the table: in which we find the American people courageous, and the politicians cowardly and the media personalities decadent, as usual.

Surprise, surprise: a Politico/Morning Consult poll finds support for the American Jobs Plan actually ticks up when you mention the price tag. So if Americans aren't scared of spending a lot of money to make America greater, why are the politicians? Because the big corporations get in their ear all the time and drown us out, that's why. We just have to be louder. We'll do that shortly.

Facebook keeps Donald Trump banned from its platform -- but says the ban should never have been permanent and will revisit the matter in six months. Naturally right-wingers who don't read are whining about it, and if Facebook were a public utility, they might have a point. Of course I said might, and of course they'd never support actually making Facebook a public utility, and in any case Facebook is really a publishing house, even if loopholes in the law permit them to evade the responsibility publishing houses have. And publishing houses don't have to publish you! Otherwise they could never reject a manuscript, no matter how awful! Anyway, Donald Trump just started a blog, so nobody's trampling his rights.

President Biden rescinds Trump-era rule that would have allowed big corporations to classify more of their gig workers as "independent contractors." We should treat gig workers as employees, so they can earn a decent wage and enjoy overtime and worker safety protections; no 11th Commandment mandates otherwise. And if the stocks of pseudo-corporations like Uber and Lyft take a bit of a tumble, who cares? No one puts a gun to your head and forces you to be a shareholder. And no one has a "right" to get rich quick in the stock market. Gosh, I'm old enough to remember when "get rich quick" was something nasty you'd say.

A Public Integrity/AP/Univision report reveals that employers who steal your wages rarely get punished. And repeat offenders don't get punished that often, either, though, you know, you'd think they would. No, a prosecutor shouldn't use past offenses to mislead juries into convicting people of current crimes, but Jesus Mary and Joseph if you've been told not to steal your employee's wages, then you should be punished harder for doing it again and again. Biggest total non-surprise: if you're Black or Brown, you're more likely to get shafted.

When I read that "The Real History of Anglo-Saxons Undermines Racists’ Theories," I say well, of course history undermines racist theory, not just because the Anglo-Saxons were actually quite diverse, but because history always undermines ideology, and "racist theory" isn't theory per se, but merely the articulation of rage. I also say, gosh, what an understated headline, and not in a good way -- strikes me as a way of being "fair" to racist rageheads, not a way of saying you won't let them get under your skin. If you got all the facts, go ahead and flaunt them, that's what I say.

Finally, Tucker Carlson says that if colleges require their students to get the COVID vaccine, that means (due to some not-fully-articulated slippery-slope reasoning, I have to assume) that "(t)hey will have total power over your body and your mind forever." "(T)otal power," "forever," achieved through a single vaccine? Gosh, dramatic much? Right-wingers really have completely morphed into their worst stereotypes of liberals.

Action: concerning anti-transgender bills, racist media coverage, big tech monopolies, law and order in Oregon, and "forever chemicals."

Long story short: tell Texas state legislators to reject a slate of anti-transgender bills, tell our "liberal" media to stop exhibiting bias against folks of color, tell our federal government to break up big tech corporations, tell the state of Oregon to stop using non-unanimous juries, and tell our EPA to keep PFAS chemicals out of our clean air and clean water. You will find email/petition tools for each of these actions in the paragraphs below. Good hunting!

Change.org helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject no less than 10 anti-transgender bills they're currently mulling. And one of them is an objectively pro-child molestation genital-inspection bill, just like the one in Florida (while I'm thinking about it, here's that petition), plus a trio of bills that would call transgender operations and hormone treatments "child abuse." In other words, these bills want to force schools to actually commit child abuse, while calling things that aren't child abuse "child abuse"! And this is exactly the kind of absurdity to which you must resort when all you can do is diddle other people's rage glands. (I noticed, incidentally, that one of the candidates who made the Texas 6th runoff, state Rep. Jake Ellzey, co-sponsored HB 68. Did no one think to put that in a campaign ad? Or were they all too scared of who they'd offend?)

Free Press helps you tell our "liberal" media outlets to dismantle any anti-Black racism still in their newsrooms. Folks who think racism died in 1965 won't understand, but every time you hear that a Black man shot by cops for brandishing a cellphone was "no angel," every time you hear a Black shooting victim was "arrested 67 times," and every time you read a newspaper report parroting police reports as irrefutable truth, you are still witnessing racism in action in America today. Of course, once these newsrooms make the pledge, we'll hold them to it. In the meantime, there is some benefit to exerting popular pressure, and then measuring how much of that pressure will make media outlets respond. Another way of putting it would be "the Big Stick of Bad PR works."

Demand Progress helps you tell your President and Congressfolk to break up big tech corporations like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. There are all kinds of reasons to break up monopoly corporations in any field, but here's one relating to big tech corporations: surveillance. All these corporations Hoover up all kinds of data on you, and they also manufacture surveillance technology (like Amazon's Ring and Alexa) that your government can use against you when you haven't done a damn thing wrong. When big corporations decide you're a "terrorist" for patronizing one of their competitors, or leaving a bad review of their products, or for not buying any products at all, you'll see exactly what I mean.

Color of Change helps you tell Oregon's Attorney General to stop jailing people when they're convicted by non-unanimous juries, and to release and retry all those who went to prison without a jury unanimously convicting them. Finding the whole concept of a unanimous jury makes justice just too hard in America? It's supposed to be hard! Go live in an actual police state if you want it to be easy! And the states that used non-unanimous juries to convict criminals, guess what, used it disproportionately against non-whites. Most states stopped doing that a long time ago; now only Oregon remains, which would be a surprise to people who've only gone through Portland, but not to folks who know that Oregon put a whites-only clause in its original state constitution. So lets encourage them to start making up for all that now.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to limit PFAS dumping in our waterways. They call PFAS a "forever chemical" because even our formidable immune systems can't break it down, and scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, thyroid disease, and liver damage, among other ill effects. And you can find PFAS in just about everything -- firefighting foam, non-stick pans, stain-resistant fabrics, foam food packaging -- and now we learn that you can find it not only in your shampoo and your seafood but at the top of Mount Everest. How did that happen? Hey, it's everywhere and it hardly ever breaks down, so you don't need to be a quantum physicist to predict it'll turn up at the world's roof. So what we do now matters.

Around the table: another "job creator," exposed.

Dean Baker looks at first-quarter 2021 economic data, and finds our economy in strikingly good health. The 6% GDP growth for the first quarter has been the headline, but other factors also testify to this economy's strength -- the spike in home construction hasn't been nearly as large as during the housing bubble of the 2000s, and of course not nearly as driven by speculation. The GDP data alone doesn't tell us if productivity is outstripping wages as usual, but the spike in productivity does seem to be keeping inflation down, as does getting a lot of cheap crap from overseas, as we still do, and did more during 2021Q1 than 2020Q4. As civilized people we should address that latter item, but if we don't, and if its persistence makes more Henny Pennys look like fools for saying we can never ever do anything good for anyone ever because inflation, I guess I'll deal.

Uh oh: New York Democratic Mayoral candidate Andrew Yang promised that his Venture for America project would create 100,000 jobs in urban areas, but it's created more like 150 jobs over the last decade. See? It isn't only Republicans who give us things like the Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin! Seriously, I don't even believe the story that the self-proclaimed "numbers guy" turned out to be just not very detail-oriented, and if you're looking for more evidence that today's corporate executives are just a bunch of clowns who would make P.T. Barnum himself blush, well, look no further than this guy, who hasn't actually had a lot of real world business success (remind you of anybody?) but who nonetheless has a very good chance of becoming the next Mayor of America's most famous city.

Dominion executive Eric Coomer settles defamation lawsuit with right-wing news channel Newsmax (though not the suit's other numerous defendants) over its 2020 election coverage, including its "reporting" that Mr. Coomer had taken part in an "antifa conference call" designed to make Donald Trump lose the 2020 election. But I sure hope he made a mint off that settlement, because he's letting Newsmax off easy by allowing them to put their apology/retraction on their website, where folks ain't gonna read it. Newsmax should be leading off every single program for the next two weeks with that retraction; that's what I would have settled for.

When I read that state lawsuits attempting to force our government to let them cut their taxes using American Rescue Plan stimulus money face an "uphill battle" in our courts, my response is pretty much well, duh. Not just because the whole point of a stimulus is to add money to the pot, not make it easier for states to provide the same amount of money in that pot, but because states don't have a "right" to use federal funding to cut the taxes they charge. And of course when they say they should have let us use the stimulus to cut your taxes, you say you were going to cut your rich cronies' taxes; you don't care about mine.

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic talks to more than a few individuals who've thus far refused to get the COVID vaccine, and though I'm glad to hear that responding "think about transmitting COVID to your grandma would be like" gives such folks pause, I almost wish the article had ended before the last paragraph, because saying "liberals don’t take much time to calmly hear out the logic of those refusing the shots" is a pretty lame attempt at both-sidesism. The people who have the most trouble "imagining the lives of other people," in my long experience, are right-wingers.

Finally, the Democratic Party did so badly in a winnable Texas 6th House district special election, as two Republicans advanced to the runoff that we can reasonably ask if they threw the race. I wouldn't advise throwing any race, but when you note 16% turnout in a district that saw 68% turnout in 2020 and which Donald Trump only won by three points, and you realize that the party hitched its wagon to yet another can-win candidate who couldn't-win in Texas during the 2018 Democratic wave, you do have to wonder. Then again, these are Democrats we're talking about; one shouldn't assume strategy explains their failure when cowardice will explain it just as well. (In case you were wondering, anti-Trumper/otherwise far-right Republican Michael Wood got a hair over 3% of the vote; thus I would say 3% establishes the ceiling of the anti-Trump vote among Republicans. In other words, it's not a high ceiling, certainly not high enough considering that our "liberal" media won't shut up about them.)

Action: concerning taxes, education, birth control, reforestation, privacy, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fund our IRS properly so it can catch more tax cheats; tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act, the EACH Woman Act, the REPLANT Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All 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 find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to better fund our Internal Revenue Service so it can catch rich tax cheats. Our IRS estimates that tax evaders cheat us out of $1 trillion every year, and that represents about a quarter of our entire federal budgets most years, so the law and order thing to do, the pro-law enforcement thing to do, would be to give our IRS the funding it needs to make tax cheaters pay up, so we can then properly fund roads, bridges, schools, firefighters, police, et al. And now you know why Republicans stamped their feet so much in the early 2010s about "political bias" at our IRS -- so they could curtail collections, starve our government of money, and make it run so badly that even fascist assholes routinely get elected to federal office now. And if Congress doesn't fund our IRS, just look out for the QAnon/Trumpholes that'll take over Congress in 2022.

Speaking of things better tax collection could pay for, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2730/S. 1288, the College for All Act, which (among numerous other reforms) would pay for tuition and fees for all students who come from families that make less than $125,000 annually. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the bill's main sponsor, says the money would come from the Tax on Wall Street Speculation Act, which would tax stock trades at half of one percent, bonds at one-tenth of one percent, and derivatives at one-two hundredth of one percent; this bill would raise around $240 billion annually, which, in the context of the $1.2 trillion in wealth billionaires have accumulated during this pandemic, sure ain't too damn much to ask.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2234/S. 1021, the EACH Woman Act. The EACH Woman Act would repeal the notorious Hyde Amendment that prevents federal funds from covering abortions, but abortion is a legal medical procedure, and thus federal funds should cover it. The Hyde Amendment has essentially kept the world the way it was before Roe v. Wade, when rich folks could get abortions and poor folks can't. Right-wingers are always complaining about "how many babies Those People are always having," but then cling to the Hyde Amendment like grim death. It really is like they'd just prefer a world where nobody ever solves any problems and rageheads get to pop off all the time. But we're Americans, and we deserve better than that. And if you're against abortion, don't get one.

And now for the rare Arbor Day-related action alert: Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the REPLANT Act. The REPLANT Act would help reverse deforestation in America by mandating the planting of over a billion trees over the next decade, and if you're thinking of indulging in some hippie-punching over this, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that trees help purify our air and thus help us stay healthier, 3) consider that trees also trap a lot of carbon dioxide and thus help mitigate the effects of climate change, and 4) a lot of animals use trees to find food and shelter their children. How much of any of that does your average office complex or gas drilling well do? Yeah, that's what I thought.

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. The bill would close the legal loophole that allows big data mining corporations to sell your personal data to law enforcement, a sale which completely circumvents our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Big telecom corporations can't sell your personal data to law enforcement, because it's against the law; big data brokers should face the same prohibitions. And if that puts them out of business, well, why do we tolerate a business model that's essentially "make money violating other people's rights"? A sane, moral, and decent society asks these questions; this sick, immoral, and decadent society doesn't ask them anywhere near enough.

Finally, 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. Expand Medicare to include everyone, pay for it by converting the money big corporations already pay for private insurance into an employer-side payroll tax, and voila! We've solved all health insurance problems without any workers -- or corporations! -- spending a penny more on health insurance, plus we stop leaving 30 million Americans out in the cold. Plus no more surprise bills, no more four-digit deductibles, and no more networks with shifting boundaries. People who want to keep their private insurance? Too bad! You'll just have to settle for much better insurance.

Around the table: yes, Virginia, there are world leaders even worse than Donald Trump was.

Supreme Court rules -- by a 6-3 margin whose six votes evenly split between nominally liberal and nominally conservative Justices -- that our government must inform immigrants of all details of a deportation process in one document, a purely technical ruling that may result in thousands of long-term immigrants avoiding deportation. It's a fascinating ruling -- Justice Gorsuch actually seems to have interpreted the law here, as has Justice Barrett, who came off in her hearings like she would never ever interpret a law ever, which made me say more than once then what are judges for? Naturally Justice Kavanaugh, the most evil Justice, and Chief Justice Roberts, the most literal Justice, joined the dissent, which says, rather inaccurately, that the Gorsuch ruling defies common sense. (As an aside, when we hear that someone, particularly someone of color, got pulled over for a "busted tail-light," we'd do well to assume the police busted the tail light themselves.)

Idaho passes law banning any sort of "critical race theory" in public schools, even though such theory helps us understand how pervasive racism is. I'm pleased to see a crap-ton of Idaho students protesting the legislation at the state Capitol, but I'm displeased, of course, to watch the Idaho legislature completely ignore them. Right-wingers piss and moan about "cancel culture" and then they actually cancel critical race theory? Gosh, they should just try to prove it wrong, and if they can't, well, they should just be grown-ups and concede the point. I know you don't see people on cable news shows do that, but it is what civilized people do. And I don't want whiners who can't accept that America's ever done any wrong ever in my damn foxhole. They're the kind of people who'd hear a squirrel skittering and leave my ass to die.

Some folks are asking "where's Joe Biden's Tea Party," especially given that Barack Obama already had Tea Party rallies to put up with by mid-April, but I'd say the movement's already here -- a mix of Trumphole and QAnon, and their persistence suggests that the next big right-wing "movement," a term I use with some trepidation, won't have to seem "new" and "fresh" like the Tea Party surely did to the vast number of inattentive Americans, and that the absence of such "newness" and "freshness" serves a larger Republican strategy to stay under the radar until 2022. Of course, Americans ain't as inattentive as they used to be, either. (Also, not to pick on the article, but the ACA wasn't "big" or "bold" legislation; if the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan pass, they'll both more easily qualify.)

Alexis Grennell at The Nation argues that "Just Because Cuomo Deserves Due Process Doesn’t Mean He Shouldn’t Resign." Yes, finding people guilty of crimes should be hard -- though it shouldn't be as absurdly difficult to find someone guilty of sexual harassment or rape as it is -- but while you have an inalienable right to defend yourself from accusations, that fact doesn't confer upon you an additional "right" to keep your Governorship while you defend yourself from those accusations. It sure doesn't help that Gov. Cuomo held former Attorney General Schneiderman (he had be investigated and resign!) to a tougher standard than the one to which he now holds himself (oh, a resignation would just hinder an investigation, never mind exactly how).

Chris Christie goes on Fox News to say Donald Trump deserves an A for his Presidency, but also says, and I quote, "(t)here were some things that happened specifically at the end of the presidency that I think had some things that clouded his accomplishments." That's some real straight talk, right there! And "an A, except for trying to overturn an election and then inciting an insurrection" is rather like giving Herbert Hoover "an A, except for the Depression" and George W. Bush "an A, except for 9.11, the Iraq War, the FISA Amendments Act, and the Great Recession."

Finally, when I hear that Brazil is having a lot more trouble getting aid from the rest of the world over its COVID troubles than India is, I'd be tempted to say waaaaaaaah!, because Brazillian President Jair Bolsonaro is now the biggest asshole among world leaders, so much so that even other assholes (cough Boris Johnson cough) can't stand him. But I can't be so evil about that, because good Brazilians are dying thanks to Mr. Bolsonaro's failure to lead, or be human. Every awful thing Donald Trump did to kill 400,000 good Americans, Jair Bolsonaro has done bigger and worse, and now Brazil may ultimately lose more of its citizens to COVID than we will -- and Mr. Bolsonaro will be able to cheat his way to re-election more easily than Mr. Trump could.

Action: concerning "bipartisanship," voting rights, discrimination, paycheck fairness, and Muslim bans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to injure infrastructure/jobs legislation just to attract a few Republican votes and look more "bipartisan," and tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and the NO BAN Act. 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 Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

The Washington Post reports that both President Biden and Congressional Democrats might make significant concessions on the coming infrastructure/jobs bill to attract a few Republican votes and look more "bipartisan," so it's time to get on the phone with your Reps and Senators and tell them, again, that you don't care about "bipartisanship"; you only care about good legislation. And the Biden jobs plan is already a compromise! Most folks would want higher corporate taxes and more public investment! And, again, why on Earth are we valuing "bipartisanship" with the party that tried to overturn the election? You should never "work with" people who tell we-the-people to go fuck ourselves like they did on January 6. So get on the horn with your Reps and Senators and tell them to wake up already.

Bold Progressives helps you tell your Senators to pass both the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act -- even if it means ending the filibuster to do it. The former bill would end partisan gerrymandering, guarantee 15 days of early voting in every state, automatic registration, and same-day voter registration all across America, end racist vote suppression practices including the notorious Interstate Crosscheck, and mandate disclosure of anyone who donates more than $10,000 to campaigns. The latter bill would restore the Voting Rights Act's legal protections against states continuing to suppress the vote. And don't listen to Joe Manchin's foolish ramblings about how even forcing Senators to earn their filibuster by talking through it would "weaken" the filibuster. Right now weak people use the filibuster stop any kind of progress from happening anywhere in America. And I call that un-American.

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. Don't be dissuaded by right-wingers' hysterical fantasies of boys playing girls' sports, or ridiculous claims of the bill being an "assault" on religious freedom. Instead ask yourself: why does a bill that would prevent bosses, banks, and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folk constitute an assault on religious freedom? And ask yourself what teenage boy would undergo a sex change just to dominate girls' sports! Not just because professional women athletes make a pittance compared to men, but also because you don't just become a girl and then try to hang out with your buddies and talk about girls! Yikes, it's like they don't understand people.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act would make penalties for gender-related pay gaps more costly, expand the Fair Labor Standards Act's sex discrimination proscriptions to include pregnancy and gay and transgender statuses, and prevent employers from instituting rules preventing workers from talking about their pay with their co-workers, since that, sadly, is how most women find out they're getting discriminated against. The bill would also narrow, but not eliminate, the employer's ability to claim that any pay differences are due to bona fide factors such as experience and qualifications, as H.R. 7 says: "Such defense shall not apply where the employee demonstrates that an alternative employment practice exists that would serve the same business purpose without producing such differential and that the employer has refused to adopt such alternative practice." This all sounds like common sense to me.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1333, the NO BAN Act. The NO BAN Act would prevent future Presidents from issuing anything like Donald Trump's infamous Muslim ban, partly by explicitly preventing religious discrimination in such travel bans, and partly by making the Executive branch report to the Legislative branch within 48 hours after imposing any travel bans. The NO BAN Act passed the House with exactly one Republican vote in favor -- of course it was Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania's 1st; think the state legislature will try to gerrymander him out? -- but that does not prove that "the bill isn't good enough" because it "isn't bipartisan," but rather proves that trying to attract Republican votes, in this day and age, is a fool's errand. I mean, at the risk of beating a dead horse, this is the party that tried to overthrow the government because it didn't like the 2020 election results; why wouldn't you feel tainted if any of them voted for your bill?

Around the table: from Joe Biden's recent success to Ted Cruz's fake populism.

Here's another deleterious side effect of moving quickly during a pandemic: new brands of hand sanitizers with high levels of carcinogens. The online pharmacy Valisure filed a petition with our FDA last week finding that at least 15 brands of hand sanitizer contained the carcinogen benzene at levels above 2 ppm -- a level our FDA set a year ago, probably to encourage production. Benzene is one of the worst carcinogens, per our Department of Health and Human Services and the World Health Organization. The link above provides a list of the brands Valisure identified; I haven't heard of any of them, suggesting that brand name recognition has some utility.

You've heard of Joe Biden's American Families Plan? Well, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy finds that the plan's tax hikes would fall almost entirely on the top 1 percent of taxpayers. Specifically, it'd bring back the 39.6% tax bracket on income over $400,000 (but why not go higher?), while also subjecting capital gains and dividend income over $1 million to the same tax rate (it's currently 20%). It'd do other things, too, like finally end the "carried interest" loophole that lets hedge fund managers pay less on their unearned millions than you do on your hard-earned thousands.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon writes that President Biden has "turned the tables" on Republicans, partly by speaking plainly (which I wasn't sure would be a strength with him!), partly by embracing actually-popular ideas (though not enough of them, not yet!), and partly because Republicans don't even talk policy anymore, but just talk about whatever diddles the Batshit Insane 25%'s rage glands. I just hope her assessment isn't premature, even though he's done a good bit better than I thought he would. And I'm ashamed to say I didn't realize that the Republicans' Kamala's-in-charge trope is all about stoking racist and sexist rage. I mean, I can't explain it any other way!

In a peripherally-related note, Chris Walker at TruthOut reminds us that Republicans demand "unity" but that most voters like President Biden's policy prescriptions thus far. Far from being "catnip for their liberal base," as Mob Boss Mitch put it, the American Rescue Plan enjoyed 63% support in polling, while the For the People Act, putatively a "Democrat power grab," also in Mob Boss Mitch's words, garners 68%, which is actually a bit lower than the 70% of Americans who think Republicans should find common ground with President Biden, a cunning reversal of the usual "liberal" media formulation. Thus we are reminded that, just as "healing" meant "forget the hurt we caused you," "unity" means "submit to our will."

Sen. Scott's Republican response to the Biden address got all the ink, but Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) also delivered a response to the Biden address -- for the Working Families Party, and from the left. The WFP has been a fixture of New York state politics for over 20 years, though it has run or endorsed candidates in other states. I sure hope nobody from the right whines about "the liberals" getting two responses to the Biden address, lest I remind them that it wasn't that long ago that both the Republican party and the Tea Party -- the latter of which existed more in fever dreams and fundraising drives than in reality -- gave responses to numerous Obama State of the Union addresses.

Finally, Sen. Ted Cruz (E-TX) declares he won't be taking any more corporate PAC money. Not because corporations redistribute worker income upward to executives or pollute the planet or make unsafe products, but because they "run away" when the "left's digital pitchforks come out." In other words, Ted Cruz is as much a friend to the American worker as Marco Rubio, who infamously supported the Amazon union drive only because Amazon no longer sells some of his favorite right-wing screeds. Well, Ted Cruz is nothing if not cunning, so he might get a few new votes by pretending to hate corporate power without actually hating corporate power. And rageheads won't notice the difference.