Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning foreign policy, vote suppression, fuel efficiency, clean water, airline refunds, and pipeline pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to stop training Saudi killers, tell big corporations to stop funding ALEC and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, tell our EPA to strengthen fuel efficiency standards and get the lead out of our water pipes, tell the big airlines to refund all those tickets cancelled because of the pandemic, and tell President Biden to stop the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

In light of the news that an American military contractor trained several of journalist Jamal Khasoggi's killers, Win Without War helps you tell Secretary of State Antony Blinken to halt all American training of Saudi paramilitary operatives. I mean, when they turn that training into sawing up a journalist into little pieces, I wouldn't blame you for feeling a little responsible. Of course, you shouldn't feel as responsible as those handling the bone saws, but we shouldn't be enabling the murder of journalists, either. Certainly not because "the world is a dangerous place!" That's a quotation from former President Trump (yes, exclamation point in the original), and it doesn't justify just letting anything happen.

MoveOn helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC), while Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to cut ties with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Both ALEC and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have pushed reactionary right-wing policies at the state and federal levels for years, but now both organizations have pushed vote suppression in the name of fighting "voter fraud," which no reasonable observer has found in the 2020 election results. You would think big corporations wouldn't want to be associated with the Big Lie, but the truth is they want it both ways -- they want the good press of saying they're against voter fraud but they want to keep ties to organizations that promote it. We're here to tell them they can't have it both ways.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to roll back Donald Trump's roll back of Barack Obama's clean car standards, while the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to restore the waiver they used to grant to California to set stronger fuel efficiency standards than the rest of the nation. Which meant cars generally built their cars to California standards -- rather than have two sets of cars, one for California and one for the rest of the nation -- but so what? The end result is better cars that go farther on a gallon of gas and thus not only pollute our air and water less but also cost good Americans less money at the pump. It takes a special talent like Donald Trump to look at all that and say nah, Americans don't deserve that! But he's gone, for now, and restoring better gas mileage standards is one of the things we need to do to keep him gone.

Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to require that our government remove all lead pipes from our sewer system. Recall that no amount of lead is safe to drink, that any amount of lead can cause brain damage in children, and that more than half of all Americans still drink water from systems containing lead, and you'll see the urgency of this matter. And, not for nothing, but if you're poor or Black, you have a much higher chance of drinking from contaminated lead pipes. Turns out Donald Trump tried to weaken EPA rules governing lead pipes on his way out of office -- like a mustache-twirling villain who's tied you to the tracks! -- but the Biden Administration paused that effort. Now we need to tell them to do better.

Consumer Reports helps you tell big airline corporations to pay the refunds they owe good Americans for all those trips that the pandemic cancelled. That's some $10 billion, which ain't chump change, and they're doing pretty good at the moment, what with all the reopening and the $50 billion in bailouts they got via the CARES Act, so they don't really have an excuse not to reimburse good Americans for the travel they weren't able to do because of COVID. Hell, I'm old enough to remember when a big corporation would go out of its way to make refunds like this just to look better than anyone else. Corporations have so much power now they don't have to do things like that. But good Americans still deserve their refunds, and we ought to help them get them.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell President Biden to stop the construction of the notorious Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. You no doubt know the reasons: transporting tar sands oil is fundamentally dirty, pipelines tend to break and pollute everyone's drinking water, pipelines somehow seem to find their way through Native American holy lands. But here's another one: the Trump Administration approved this pipeline without doing a proper environmental review, too, just like he did with the Keystone XL pipeline, a project for which President Biden revoked the permit on the first day of his Presidency. Let's not let him think his work is done here, of course. The work of the righteous is never done.

Around the table: congratulations, you're a socialist! Part 383.

Sonali Kohatkar assures us that "Socialism Has a PR Problem, and It Can Be Solved." She doesn't really say how, though, except to remind Americans that right-wing authoritarian regimes are more prevalent in Latin America than socialist ones, and also to remind us (as India Walton does) that right-wingers are fine with "socialism for the rich." From my perspective, all Americans are socialists already -- unless, you know, they don't pay taxes and don't drive roads and don't call cops and I could go on -- and socialist policy prescriptions (hello, Medicare for All!) are actually quite popular. The PR, I guess, is you tell people that, and you don't back down -- in fact, the more fierce you are, the better. Definitely don't sound like an egghead.

Here's an interesting poll result in Arizona: not only do more Arizonans disapprove of the Cyber Ninjas' "fraudit" than approve, but the "strongly disapprove" numbers are rather higher than the "strongly approves," and independent voters disapprove by an 18-point margin. I used to say you can't win elections just by pointing out how big an ogre your opponent is, but maybe I was wrong -- maybe it just took time for most other liberals to get as angry about right-wing shenanigans as I've been for close to 20 years now. Or maybe it took the biggest ogre of them all.

In a related note, more partisan media outlets are seeing their online traffic numbers circle the toilet now that Donald Trump's out of office. "Left-leaning" outlets are actually suffering a bit less than "mainstream" outlets, and "right-leaning" and "far-right" outlets are tanking harder than "left-leaning" and "far-left" outlets. I'd quarrel with the placement of Fox News as "right-leaning" (they're "far-right," duh) just as I wouldn't call Mother Jones "far left" (have they never heard of Counterpunch or Jacobin?), but basically this is good news to everyone who hates our media's addiction to sensationalism and drama. Or it could be: right-wing podcasts are, unfortunately, picking up steam.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) eviscerates Sen. Sinema's case for keeping the filibuster, calling it "essentially an argument of saying, 'Well, why do anything at all, in case something in the future may change it?'" Specifically addressing Ms. Sinema's putative fear of "radical policy shifts" every time one party or the other retakes the majority, she adds, "(w)ouldn't it be better to get people health care and voting rights for three years instead of zero years?" As usual, she said it better than I did, which is, I imagine, why she's in Congress.

Justice Thomas criticizes federal marijuana policy, calling it a "piecemeal approach" and a "half-in, half-out regime that simultaneously tolerates and forbids local use of marijuana," and frankly he's got a point. Granted, I think I know which way he'd go -- two decades ago, he managed to mess up an opinion on behalf of a unanimous court in re federal marijuana law by opining that pot had no medicinal value, a statement irrelevant to the facts of the case (which hinged entirely a matter where federal law superseded local law) and one certainly unsupported by the research of the time, since that research would have been largely illegal.

Finally, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us not to underestimate Donald Trump, as coverage of his recent Ohio rally has tended to do. Key finding: "Trump is popular mainly because his followers believe that, due to his shamelessness and unending aggression, he's their best vehicle for establishing the authoritarian rule that is their only real hope of retaining control over a changing nation," and though "(m)ost of them may not show up at rallies to listen to Trump complain about nonsense for an hour and a half," "they definitely vote." I once said, about Jeb Bush, that you should "never count a bastard out"; maybe "never count an asshole out" should be Donald Trump's 2024 campaign slogan.

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare expansion, paid family leave, Medicaid expansion, and big telecom cruelty.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, expand Medicare, provide paid family/medical leave, pass a bill that would let individual counties and localities accept the Medicaid expansion where states won't, and pass the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act; and attend a rally in favor of the For the People 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.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Voting Rights Act used to have a list of states that needed to pre-clear their voting law changes with our Justice Department -- until our Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, ruled that discriminated against Southern states (which comprised most of that list!). The Voting Rights Advancement Act would amend the Voting Rights Act so that any state or locality with a record of suppressing the vote would have to pre-clear their voting law changes. Don't brook any silliness about how "the South has changed" from the likes of Mitch McConnell -- the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would fight vote suppression everywhere, not just the South. So let's get to it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve and expand Medicare, by lowering the eligibility age to 60 and adding hearing, vision, and dental coverage. As they say, seniors have ears, eyes, and teeth just like everyone else, so there's no reason Medicare shouldn't cover them! And though I'd rather lower the eligibility age to zero, lowering it to 60 would be a good first step. I can already hear right-wingers whine how are you going to pay for it? If we pass it as part of the next reconciliation bill, we'd get tax hikes on rich folks and corporations to help pay for it -- plus we could let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, which even the Mercatus Center has said would save Medicare about $84 billion annually. (Toward that end, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3, which would let Medicare negotiate prices for most of the drugs it buys.)

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk you want our government to provide paid family/medical leave to all our workers. That is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of the American Families Plan, so we might as well tell Congress we want it, lest they think the American people care more about whatever manufactured outrage right-wingers want to flood the zone with today. And though asking HOWZ WILLZ WE PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!! does get tiresome, just so happens Sen. Gillibrand's previous family/medical leave bills have already answered that: with a payroll tax that would cost workers making $50,000 annually less than $9/month. Nine dollars! And that's not even how I'd do it! See, this is why I get tired of people who whine about paying for things.

Both Daily Kos and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would let counties and cities sign on to the Medicaid expansion even if state governments won't do it. What would be the opposing point of view there? That "states' rights" are too important? Gosh, that would be a tired argument! States that have refused the Medicaid expansion didn't do so because of some serious policy disagreement, but merely out of cruelty. No, a desire to "stick it to Obama" counts as cruelty; I mean, the result is the same. And if Congress doesn't have a moral obligation to fight cruelty, then why do we have a democracy to begin with?

Both Color of Change and Free Press help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which would stop big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners when they talk to their families on the phone. Is it right that we would take advantage of prisoners and their families in this way? Is any cruelty OK if it makes you look "tough on crime"? And don't be the fool who says well, don't commit a crime, then, since we all know that contact with families helps folks in prison stay out once they get out. Also, too, there's a pandemic on, which means less face-to-face contact with families, which means more phone contact. Like I said, it's cruel, and that means we must change it.

Finally, Deadline for Democracy will be holding rallies all over America this week helping you tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act; here's where to find one. You just enter your zip code and find the event nearest you. Some two out of three Americans support the For the People Act, but Republicans Senators just keep on with their propaganda that an end to gerrymandering, campaign finance disclosure for big donors, 15 days of early voting nationwide, same-day and automatic voting registration, and an end to racist caging practices somehow all constitutes a "Democrat power grab." As usual, Republicans doth project too much -- they're the ones doing all the power-grabbing, and the For the People Act would make it harder for them to do it! So let's get out there, in force, and remind them who they're supposed to serve.

Around the table: Republicans can't quit the drama, part 648.

And now, from the "We Have All Been Here Before" file: Gillian Frank and Adam Laats at Slate tell us about the long, long history of right-wing freakouts over schools teaching our kids unpleasant things about race in America. From Harold Rugg's 1930s textbooks to the 1950s American Nationalist to violent right-wing protestors in 1970s West Virginia to contemporary clowns like the one Kyle Whitmire skewers so well here, a pattern emerges: right-wing critics haven't read any of the books or engaged with any of the theories! Republicans truly are the Party of Drama. I mean, seriously, how many stand up to the drama now?

Damn-near-successful 2020 U.S. House candidate may have used campaign funds to bankroll his trip to the January 6 attempted coup. Seems to me Derrick Van Orden couldn't have been campaigning on January 6, having already lost his election and having not declared for the next one. But this guy damn near beat Ron Kind (D-WI), who's no great shakes; if Mr. Van Orden makes the general election again -- which seems likely, since Trumpholes won't like any "reasonable" Republican candidate in the primary -- we'll know all we need to know about how sick, immoral, and decadent we've become as a society. One would hope Democrats would do something beneficial with their power in the meantime; late returns haven't boded well for that hope.

Fox News's Chris Wallace levels a devastating question at Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN): given his vote against the American Rescue Plan, which provided billions of dollars for local police departments, "(c)an't you make the argument that it's you and the Republicans who defunded the police?" Mr. Banks says no, of course not, because of things Ilhan Omar and Nancy Pelosi said, which, again, is very teenage drama of him. Democrats should have the guts to run ads against their Republican opponents saying that Republicans voted against funding the police, but no one ever went broke betting on Democrat weakness.

When I hear that Bill Barr, Donald Trump's former Attorney General, said that Mr. Trump's assertions that fraud cost him the 2020 election were "bullshit," I remember the time a liberal could say something like Trump's own Attorney General says the notion that Biden stole the election is bullshit, but Trumpholes feed off nothing other than their own self-pity these days. "Why does everyone keep betraying us?" they wonder, and none will answer by saying "well, maybe the problem is me," though you'd think it'd be conservative to pose the question.

Finally, Republicans may have hit upon a "blueprint" to take back Congress in 2022, and you won't be surprised by any of its elements: "Biden Democrats are soft on crime, soft and ineffective on illegal immigration, and reckless and wrong with government spending." The platform doesn't "move beyond Trump" very well, since the Trump platform, such as it is, maps so well onto the first two items at least, and the three items comprise, respectively, something that didn't work in 2020, something that didn't work in 2018, and something that did in 2010. More importantly, they're three saucepans they've been banging for decades now; how hard would it be to run ads talking about Republicans saying the same old thing because they have no idea how to govern? Nah, Democrats will say that's too "uncivil." And then the party that tried to overturn a national election will get back in power.

Action: concerning jobs, drug prices, endless war, broadband access, payday loans, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Biden/Republican infrastructure "deal," tell our President to put the brakes on a rule preventing our government from forcibly lowering drug prices, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, expand broadband, clamp down on payday lenders, and end the filibuster. 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; for the Biden-related alert, see the second paragraph below.

First things first: tell your Congressfolk to reject the "bipartisan" "infrastructure"/"jobs" "deal" negotiated between 20 Senators and President Biden last week -- either call them or let Food and Water Watch help you email them. No one in America should care if this is something our President wants, or moderates want, or Republicans want; all we should care about is if it's what we want, and I would assert that it's not. And that's not just because Republicans are pretending that the separate reconciliation bill even Joe Manchin wants to do is some kind of "betrayal." It's also because the "deal" would privatize public assets to build other public assets -- that's called "asset recycling," which is just a 10-dollar way of saying "privatization." And if Democrats agree not to do a separate reconciliation bill in order to "keep their word" or appease Republicans, then they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. Of course, we don't deserve the fascist storm that'll follow, so let's try to head all that off by communicating our will to our Congressfolk in an unmistakable manner.

President Biden plans to move forward with a rule that would prevent our government, for the first time in over 40 years, from seizing drug patents when big pharma corporations charge usurious prices. If you remember Mylan charging hundreds of dollars for EpiPens and numerous corporations charging so much for insulin that diabetics now risk death in rationing the drug, you will scratch your head at the idea that our government should not step in and stop that shit cold, but, sadly, when Joe Biden was a Senator, he worked very, very hard to keep our government from "interfering" in absurdly-high drug prices. Maybe he needs a phone call about this matter! 1.202.456.1111 is the number, and here's the White House contact page. (If I get a separate action alert about this matter -- which seems likely, now! -- I'll share it.)

Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 256, which would repeal the nefarious authorization to use military force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Our House passed this bill, and not only that, 49 Republicans voted in its favor! Maybe I shouldn't make too much of that -- a lot of our Best and Brightest didn't do the right thing in 2002 when it really, really mattered, and a lot of the folks who just voted yea on H.R. 256 (Boebert, Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar, Greene, Issa, Jordan, McClintock, Schweikert) are still clowns, but at least now people like Mob Boss Mitch will have much less room to say well, this isn't bipartisan enough for me to permit to get to a vote. Oh, and if you're upset because "they're doing this to a Democratic President," please step away from this blog, because it ain't for you. And your values ain't shit if they don't inconvenience you once in a while.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. And don't brook any nonsense from your Congressfolk about it, either! Broadband internet is an essential service, or does Congress forget how many votes it took or hearings it held over the internet this past year? Certainly you don't forget how much work you did, or how much school your kids did, over the internet this past year! Note well, also, that H.R. 1783/S. 745 would prevent states from pre-empting localities within states from offering their own public broadband! After all, preventing localities from such matters of self-determination has always seemed not particularly conservative to me.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called "Fake Lender" rule promulgated by the Trump Administration. The Senate has already passed a resolution repealing the rule; now the House must follow suit. So what does the "Fake Lender" rule do? It lets payday lenders avoid state caps on interest by letting them essentially launder their loans through out-of-state banks! Woe unto the young buck who came up with that idea! That dude will find himself (do I need to gender-equivocate here? I suspect not!) at the Pearly Gates describing how he helped payday lenders trap even more good Americans in 300% revolving debt, and I think St. Peter's going to give him quite the side-eye. You know what you can take to the Pearly Gates? That you told your Congressfolk to stamp out this idea like the cockroach it is!

Finally, NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby and boy how I have missed saying that! helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster into the trash heap of history already. Yes, I supported keeping the filibuster around and making Senators talk through it all the way to the beginning of this year, but I'm done -- our Senators will never do the necessary work of a civilized society until we make them. And they just filibustered the beginning of debate on the For the People Act last week! The beginning of debate! No, I don't want to hear about lessening procedural "choke points" as a "compromise," because the Senate will not do it. If I may borrow a metaphor from Better Call Saul: if a chimp has a machine gun, you don't just hope he'll learn how to use it -- you take it from him.

Around the table: our leaders are irredeemably evil, part 737.

Here's something else you may not have known about the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" President Biden reached with Republicans late last week: it could reduce unemployment benefits in the name of "fighting fraud." I mean, God forbid we pay for an infrastructure bill by taxing some of the unearned hundreds of billions the richest Americans have squeezed out of us during this pandemic. Frankly I don't know how a state can fine people who have merely been accused, not convicted of unemployment fraud, but the ramblings of Sen. Shaheen (D-NH) on the matter don't exactly inspire confidence.

Josmar Trujillo at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media love creating fear about crime by hyping individual horrible stories and arguing about shadows. Crime is down since the 1970s, bail hasn't been reformed very much, and police haven't been defunded, but our "liberal" media don't care about the facts -- what are facts, after all, in the face of fear? Just remember: if someone says anything like "crime wave" in a totally unironic way, they're full of soup. (As an aside, I wouldn't use a phrase like "the corrupt poisonous fruits of BLM’s work," as Laura Ingraham does; the plural of "fruit," in this context, is "fruit, but worse, "fruit" really only requires one modifier -- "poisonous" would be the better one, I guess, but using two modifiers there just makes you dramatic.)

ProPublica keeps bringing it with their recent report that billionaire Peter Thiel has somehow stashed some $5 billion in his Roth IRA. Though Roth IRAs have historically limited the income of their holders as well as the contributions they could make, at least a dozen gazillionaires hold at least $20 million each in their Roths, mainly by taking advantage of tricks working families have no access to, like buying startup stock for pennies on the dollar and watching the value of that stock shoot up inside the Roth. Nice work if you can get it! You'll be pleased to know that Bush the Lesser made all of this worse during his second term in office.

Big telecoms have two more days to implement phone number-verification technology that aims to vastly reduce the number of scam calls you get on your phone. But many big telecoms have already implemented the STIR/SHAKEN caller ID technology, so if you haven't seen relief already, you might not. Plus, our FCC gave smaller telecoms (those with under 100,000 subscribers) an additional two years to implement the STIR/SHAKEN technology, and even if our FCC moves that deadline to next year, guess where scammers will be concentrating more of their efforts. You know what might make all this meaningless eventually? All the folks of my generation and younger who now won't answer the phone every time it rings because we're tired of all the scam calls!

Ho hum, Tucker Carlson wants you to think the January 6 coup attempt was an FBI-led "false flag" operation, and he's not only confused federal agents with "unindicted co-conspirators" in right-wing reporting (if you're a federal agent running a sting, you're by definition not conspiring, obviously!) but also cited, as evidence, the FBI stings that entrapped plenty of Muslims during the "war on terror" era. We all worry about law enforcement "creating" terrorists, but I suspect Mr. Carlson's concern about that subject is a relatively recent phenomenon, and though I generally don't blame people for coming to the truth only when it affects them personally, I do blame them for coming to the truth merely to broadcast another self-serving untruth.

Finally, Florida Gov. DeSantis signs a bill that would actually require the state to survey college students and faculty on their political beliefs. I firmly expect this law will die a horrible, humiliating death in court one day, though we may see a lot of fine educational talent abandon the state of Florida over the next few years in the meantime. But I myself have considered possibly going back to college in Florida just so I can be documented saying that Ron DeSantis is an irredeemable asshole.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, paid leave, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep privatization out of the American Jobs Plan, pass a Wealth Tax, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, enact paid family/medical leave, and make Washington, D.C. our 51st state. 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.

On the occasion of David Dayen at The American Prospect informing us that a central feature of the "bipartisan" infrastructure bill is the selling off of public services to private corporations in order to build new public services, this would be a good time to call your Congressfolk and tell them no privatization in the American Jobs Plan. When you sell off public works, you get money one time; when you hold on to public works, you get money, in the form of taxes, for as long as you can shepherd them properly. And nobody's still clinging to the notion that the private sector can do public works better, right? I mean, the opposite happens, like, all the time (as Mr. Dayen documents in his article). And once something's private, the people don't own it anymore.

In a related note, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Wealth Tax. We all just witnessed the ProPublica report detailing how little the very richest Americans pay in taxes -- and the Republican response was to say whoever leaked that information to reporters ought to go to jail! That sure is burying the lede! Most of us work a job and get a paycheck, but the very richest individuals don't have to work very hard -- they just let the money they already have do the "work"! But if they have absurd amounts of money, they can buy laws and politicians at will -- and they have! This is why we need to enact a Wealth Tax, and the Wealth Taxes proposed so far raise a lot of money without destroying any estates. Hard to believe, Harry, that anyone would seriously propose selling off public assets to fund new public assets instead of taxing the rich.

In yet another related note, both Americans for Tax Fairness and the Coalition on Human Needs help you tell your Congressfolk to make that Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. Lots of good American working families will be getting the first of their monthly $250 or $300 checks on July 15, and they're going to like it, even if Republicans don't. Even if Congress (foolishly!) let those expanded checks be annual after that, as they're supposed to be in 2022, good Americans with children will continue to reap the benefits of having more breathing space -- when you can meet the bills, you can be better parents. And, you know, it's hard to believe, Harry, that anyone would seriously consider ending these expanded benefits instead of taxing the rich.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family/medical leave for all Americans. We're about the only civilized nation that doesn't have it as a matter of course, and a mere 21% of American workers get paid family/medical leave via their employers, so we've got to fix that. Just so happens that President Biden's American Families Plan would include paid/family medical leave, but we'd do well for ourselves to tell Congress we want paid family/medical leave in advance. You hear how many Republicans talk about how their constituents are talking to them about the 2020 election? Wouldn't it be nice if they'd talk about how their constituents are talking to them about paid family/medical leave? Yes, it would. And we should help them do that.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which would make Washington, D.C. our 51st state. Because they deserve it! They have more residents than either Vermont or Wyoming and almost as many residents as Alaska and North Dakota, but nobody claims that those four states shouldn't be states. But at present, D.C. has one non-voting member of the U.S. House, and must submit to rule by our federal government -- and can I say that didn't help them very much on January 6? If D.C. had their own National Guard, for example, they could have responded to that uprising a lot more quickly than Donald Trump did. I mean, we do still value self-reliance and self-determination, right? Or do we only do that with areas that aren't majority-Black? I mean, I'd rather think better of my opponents, but they make it so hard.

Around the table: fight the real enemy, part 984.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch tells us that "The Republican Party Has Turned Fascist and Is Now the Most Dangerous Threat in the World," and he's not real hopeful that America will reject them, now that too many state election officials have quit (that's what happens when Trumpholes threaten their lives!) and Republican legislators are giving themselves the power to overturn elections on pretexts even flimsier than Donald Trump's. He almost skips over its alliance with big corporate power in his description of how fascism achieves its ends, but then maybe he was depressed enough.

Harsha Panduranga at the Los Angeles Times explains "Why Biden’s strategy for preventing domestic terrorism could do more harm than good." Long story short: because it's largely a rehash of the Obama-era initiatives that didn't work. In any case, connecting would-be right-wing extremists with "mental health and social services" would do a good deal less about right-wing terrorism than, you know, ending the death grip of corporations on our economy. If we're all working, and working happily, and getting ahead, we're a lot less likely to fall for the Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys of the world. If we're all working for dung pellets and paying extra for privatized water and getting slammed with surprise medical bills, then we're more likely to become right-wing terrorists.

When I read that a single person in Georgia has personally challenged the right to vote of over 30,000 good folks in Georgia that she's never even met, I feel compelled to ask: how is this legal? How can someone like Pamela Reardon prove she has any standing to sue these folks in a court of law? If two liberals in Wisconsin couldn't prove to our Supreme Court they'd personally been harmed enough by state gerrymandering, how can folks like Ms. Reardon prove they've been harmed by nonexistent voter fraud? (And next time someone tells you that "it's regular folks" who have "serious questions" about the 2020 election, just show them a picture of Ms. Reardon, and remind them that of course right-wing organizations like True the Vote want front people who look like "regular folks.")

Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Carl Nassib comes out as gay, and what a shame right-wing talk radio OG Lester Kinsolving isn't with us anymore so he can put unneeded "comic" emphasis on the word "end," as he did when former Washington tight end Jerry Smith came out to discuss his AIDS diagnosis. Of course, Mr. Smith had been retired for many years at that point, and it's a big deal that Mr. Nassib has come out while he's still in his prime. I'm sure right-wingers on social media are saying he's just doing this so the Raiders won't cut him, though, frankly, that wasn't very likely beforehand, and cynicism isn't even charming in a precocious 13-year-old.

Our Supreme Court has issued more famous rulings lately, but they've also ruled that children working as slaves to make chocolate for American candy corporations can't sue those corporations in American court, because (as Justice Thomas suggests) Nestlé and Cargill outsourced all the torture and abuse to Ivory Coast corporations and then said they didn't know what they were doing. One could argue that a leader should know what those who work for him are doing, and one could also argue that outsourcing itself might be evidence that a corporation aims to avoid accountability for what's done in their supply chain. And yeah, I noticed the former Obama official defending Nestlé and Cargill; I wonder how he sleeps at night.

Finally, as New York's mayoral campaign heats up, Julie Hollar at FAIR reminds us that New York's tabloids would rather you be obsessing about crime than, you know, the prospect of being evicted by your landlord because the pandemic forced you out of work and you haven't been able to afford the exorbitant rent. By the time you run down the actual crime statistics in New York -- which are, guess what, generally lower than normal, and much lower than they were 30 years ago! -- you will be reminded that whenever a politician or a media hack talks about a "crime wave," they're gearing up to lie to you. (That's a reminder for President Biden, too, of course.)

Action: concerning surprise medical bills, pollution, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to fight surprise medical bills, tell our EPA to act more vigorously against chlorpyrifos, tell Boeing to stop donating to politicians who try to overturn elections, and tell our President to appoint a strong anti-pollution Commissioner to the FERC. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will. And good hunting!

Penn PIRG helps you tell President Biden to enact the strongest possible rules against surprise medical bills. The No Surprises Act, which passed last Congress, authorizes our Executive branch to write, enact, and enforce rules preventing big health insurance corporations from foisting surprise medical bills on good Americans, but you know those big health insurance corporations (and the hedge funds, don't forget them!) will be all up in our President's grill, saying if he really kept them from, say, billing people for surgeries in-network with anesthesiologists who just so happened to be out of network, it'd kill jobs, or be a "burden," or something. Never do they think about the actual burdens they foist on us. That's why we remind our President.

In a related alert, Change.org helps you tell our government to stop medical collections from getting reported to credit bureaus and stop corporations from garnishing wages to pay those bills. Because people already are afraid to go to the doctor! And they don't need more reasons to be afraid! I suppose someone will come along and say what's wrong with paying what you owe ha ha ha snort, but as usual they ask the wrong question: why should health insurance cost so damn much, and why should so many medical bills come as a complete surprise to you? You can't just bootstrap your way out of a hostage situation -- you also need the law to help you, as civilized people have a right to expect.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reconsider its failure to ban chlorpyrifos from use on crops. You haven't been able to use that chemical in household chores for decades now, so why are we still spraying it on food? When scientists have linked chlorpyrifos to brain damage in kids? Naturally our EPA didn't think this was a big deal under the Trump Administration, but a federal court (of course) told them to go back to the drawing board and either ban it or set safety levels for it. Seems like a lot of Donald Trump's bright ideas die in court, and that's to our advantage. So let's take it.

Public Citizen helps you tell Boeing to stop giving campaign contributions to the Republican Congressfolk who helped try to overturn the 2020 election. After January 6, corporate campaign contributions to these clowns became toxic, but you probably always knew that as soon as we stopped looking, they'd restart their sedition-funding ways. Hence, we're reminding them that we're still looking. Jesus Mary and Joseph Donald Trump lost the election by seven million votes, and people who can't accept that are big whiny babies. Do civilized people let big whiny babies make all the decisions all the time? No, we do not. And big corporations need to start realizing their first duty isn't to their shareholders or their executives but to our civilization.

Finally, Food and Water Action helps you tell our President to appoint a new commissioner to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (or FERC) who will fight for energy policy that reduces pollution and helps us avoid the worst effects of climate change. Because we deserve that! FERC regulates the sale and transportation of gas and electricity, plus it also reviews proposed gas pipelines; you can see a whole lot of trouble there, can't you? Trouble in the form of more hurricanes, more wildfires, more floods, more droughts? Generally FERC has tended to rubber-stamp the dirty energy projects that make all these things worse, but a Commission vacancy comes up on June 30 (why, that's next week!), and that means an opportunity to get someone on there who looks a little more skeptically at these projects. But not if we don't speak up.

Around the table: Republicans filibuster the For the People Act! And other total non-surprises.

Senate Republicans refuse to even begin debate on the For the People Act, as all 50 of them filibuster a procedural motion to do so. Let the record show, then, that Republicans refused to debate on ending gerrymandering, instituting early voting, automatic voter registration, and same-day voting registration nationwide, mandating disclosure for big campaign donors, and ending the use of racist caging practices by the states. We can go ahead and assume they refused to even begin debate on these matters because they can't win debate on these matters.

Felipe da la Hoz at The Intercept describes how our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) exacerbated the pandemic in detention centers. COVID cases went up sixfold in these camps from March to May of this year, and no it wasn't because Joe Biden "let too many refugees in," but because ICE insisted on transferring a boatload of refugees to the very Mississippi detention center where cases were exploding. You thought we'd just vaccinate them? We should, if only because they're just going to keep the pandemic going if we don't, but, yeah, ICE ain't feeling that. (To be fair, a lot of refugees aren't feeling it, either, but that's because they don't trust ICE. I wonder how that could have happened?)

Jesus Mary and Joseph another fool wants to do an "audit" of the 2020 election in a state that has already done two audits, and this time it'll be in Pennsylvania. Sen. David Argall (R-29), who chairs the State Governing Committee, now says he wants to do a fraudit because too many people have "concerns" about the election, though he doesn't know why. Here's why: their "concerns" are completely manufactured by Donald Trump and his enablers! Yikes, if I had no soul and a cadre of dunces willing to parrot my lies ad nauseam, I could cause a lot of trouble, too. Does Mr. Argall listen to those constituents of his who worry more about right-wingers killing them, I wonder? Or has gerrymandering insured he doesn't have any?

A Harvard study asks why folks are so much worse at guessing prices on The Price is Right than they were in the 1970s -- and concludes that a) inflation was much worse back then (both higher and less stable), so people paid more attention to prices, b) online commerce has desensitized us to price over the last few decades, and c) there are so, so many more products now and products can only compete so much on price. Weren't we just contemplating how Republican messaging about inflation could work? This study makes me wonder; we complain about prices going up like we've always done, but now that I think about it, we complain more when we hit unexpected expenses, which are always unwelcome, but not the slow, relentless torture of '70s inflation. I know inflation has gone up since 2011, by my sense of food prices really hasn't since then. About bedroom sets and ski trips and A NEW CAR!!!!! I have no idea.

I was impressed with Michael Gerson's piece, "I'm a Conservative Who Believes Systemic Racism is Real." "We live in an imperfect world we did not create and have duties that flow from our story" is both true and a reminder that he used to write speeches for George W. Bush, and though we don't learn much about how Mr. Gerson came to his epiphany, that's kinda the point: folks don't very often see the structures of privilege that lift them up and hold others down, and he surely went through a good chunk of his life not seeing it. I also appreciate the note that "shame culture" can be "cruel and misdirected," because I suspect too many of Mr. Gerson's ideological brethren would say shaming is always cruel, though "shame culture" is an important tool in the civilized person's toolkit. We use it so we don't use our fists or our guns.

Finally, give filibuster supporter Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) a small amount of credit for writing a fairly thorough op-ed echoing some arguments I made years ago, but she's still wrong. Are we that worried about "the minority" being heard in Congress? 50 Republican Senators currently represent less than 20% of Americans, so, frankly, "the minority" already have enough representation, and that's built into the Senate no matter which party holds the majority. And rather than tell campfire tales about Republicans simply nullifying Democrat bills whenever they get Congress back, Sen. Sinema should remember how hard it is to undo legislation once it's passed, otherwise George W. Bush could have claimed the head of Social Security in 2005 and the Trump Train would have rolled over the Affordable Care Act 12 years later. (Who stopped that from happening, by the way? Not the filibuster, but the people.) And I might more likely agree that bipartisanship is the best way to create "lasting" results, except that, ah, the other party tried to overturn the election, with violence, and it's been decades since they cared about policy anyway.

Action: concerning health care, food safety, birth control, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare and pass the Baby Food Safety Act, the Global HER Act, the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement 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.

Both Social Security Works and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to lower the Medicare age to 60 and expand it to cover vision, hearing, and dental care. Should you sign this if you support expanding Medicare to include everyone? Why, yes! It's a good idea, even if it isn't everything we want, and it could get us where we want a whole lot better than the Affordable Care Act did. And maybe your Congressfolk need to know that we support expanding Medicare before they'll ever have the guts to expand it to everyone. Also, too, as the petition says: "(s)eniors have eyes, ears, and teeth. It’s about time Medicare covered them."

The Environmental Working Group helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2229/S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act. You mean baby food's not safe? Well, Congress found dangerously high amounts of lead, mercury, and arsenic (among other toxic heavy metals!) in baby food, and the state of Alaska just found a high level of arsenic in Beech-Nut's rice cereal, which Beech-Nut has now recalled. So, yeah, we need to do better, but we don't even mandate that food manufacturing corporations test their products for heavy metals or warn good Americans if they find them in their food. This crap can damage children's brains, and we still believe children are our future, right? And if anyone pooh-poohs baby food safety by saying "hey, I endured worse as a kid," you need only respond "yes, I believe you did."

Daily Kos helps you tell Congress pass H.R. 556/S. 142, the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (or HER) Act. The Global HER Act would let foreign non-governmental organizations get American assistance even if they provide abortions (as long as they're legal in both America and the country in which they're operating); as it stands, our President gets to determine whether that happens, and, of course, when that President's a Democrat the "global gag rule" goes back into the closet, only to come out whenever a Republican gets elected. I, for one, don't particularly want to keep going back and forth about this. Our Founders didn't want the President to be that important, and any blow we can strike against a President's importance is a good blow to strike.

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. And Public Citizen helps you tell them to do both. Dig Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) trying to feed us fecal arguments about the For the People Act: "It does away with the states being able to redistrict when you have population shifts...you’d have some kind of commission redraw the new districts, and I don't like that. I want states where people are moving to have control over how to allocate new congressional seats." Actually, states would still be able to redraw districts: they'd just have to use commissions (not one "commission," Mr. Graham) to do it, which makes it less likely they'll redraw Rorschach-blot-shaped districts that only serve the interests of individual legislators. They know this bill's popular, and they know they can't win arguments against it, and that's why they lie. But we don't have to put up with that.

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. Was I just advising you to tell your Congressfolk to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60? Well, I was also saying you can tell them to lower it to zero, too; only a pedant would complain about getting both messages from their constituents, and although many Congressfolk are pedants (or, worse, pretending to be pedants), there's no reason we should tolerate such behavior. And given the kinds of "public options" passing at the state level, we might as well draw a clear line between what's "public" and what isn't. Having our government administer the health insurance is "public," anything else isn't. And if you worry about government doing it, ask yourself: are you happy with your private insurer doing it? Best to answer after you've actually tried to get health care!

Around the table: featuring the usual assortment of whiners and sore losers.

Richard Wolff at Counterpunch says "The Neoliberal Drive to Privatize Everything is Running Out of Gas," but what if Republicans are just waiting until they regain the keys to Congress, be that this election or next? Not that we should ever allow them behind the wheel again, but I always fear that Americans have short memories, even when one party tries to nullify the people's will in an election, and I hate to beat a dead horse, but if Democrats actually accomplish something worth accomplishing with the power they have, they can head off Republicans getting control again, at least in the short term. And yet, as Mr. Wolff says, Mr. Biden ain't taking advantage of this situation the way he could, even if he seems to be doing more with the opportunity than Mr. Obama did. There's a solution in there, somewhere.

Jesus Mary and Joseph another sore loser cries "fraud" after losing an election, this time in Peru. And where a coup attempt failed in this country because a) our institutions have somehow survived 40 years of right-wing assaults and b) the coup ringleaders were awful leaders, I don't see Peru doing as well, not just because it's a closer race than Biden-Trump was, but also because right-wing racism is even more out in the open than it is here. (By the way, the leftist candidate who won enjoys the support of the rural poor. See, Democrats? That could be you, too.)

Ada Rajkovic at FAIR notices something missing from TV coverage of border issues: the words and stories of actual refugees! You'd think their voices would count for something, after all! And even when they do talk to a refugee, it seems like it's only for a few seconds. Maybe they don't know any refugees! I mean, it is possible, since media personalities tend only to talk to powerful people and each other these days. (And remember: when they call it a "crisis," they lie. And when they call it an "invasion," they insult the memory of everyone who ever had to endure an actual invasion. Words do mean things, after all.)

Sen. Sanders (I-VT) makes a list of things he won't support in an infrastructure bill, like gas taxes and electric vehicle fees. I wouldn't support any of these things, either, but this will be an interesting test -- does the right think it can make the nation's most popular Senator into an "enemy of bipartisanship"? If they think that, they have their work cut out for them -- after all, Bernie Sanders is the fellow who got applause for supporting Medicare-for-All at a Fox News town hall. (Seriously, though, electric vehicle fees? It's like Republicans just hate any kind of progress.)

Finally, when I hear that anti-vaxxers kept out of a Foo Fighters concert say their plight is like "segregation,"all I can say is waaaaaaaah. What was segregation like again? Being forced to walk and talk and eat and drink and live and work and play and get jobs and health care separately from your fellow human beings because of something you couldn't control, i.e., the color of your skin; you have considerably more control over whether you get a COVID vaccine. Segregation also involved getting the crap kicked out of you by police on a fairly routine basis. I keep having to explain this to people, and I think they're not listening because they know I'm right but don't have the guts to admit it.

Action: concerning jobs, racism, debt, clean water, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk what you want from the infrastructure/jobs bill, and tell your Congressfolk to support Black history, get relief for folks from their utility bills, keep lead out of our drinking water, and end the filibuster. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Regarding that American Jobs Plan: the Environmental Defense Fund helps you demand that Congress pass a bill that addresses pollution and renewable energy, since Republicans don't think lead-free pipes and solar panels can be "infrastructure." Happy to let oil and gas corporations suck at the corporate welfare teat, they are, but not to do anything about it, even though God only gives you one life. Meanwhile, Progress America helps you tell Democrats, explicitly, "no climate, no deal" -- as in, if the American Jobs Plan doesn't address the issues I've already discussed in the first sentence of this paragraph (among other issues!), then it should die. Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that whatever they come up with had better not gut the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion. That's part of what "using unspent COVID money" means, since the monthly CTC expansion checks haven't started coming yet. The good news? Those first checks go out July 15, and good Americans with children will get used to them right quick, so if Republicans start talking about the "urgency" of "getting something done," know that they're sweating, and that we can wait them out. (If any of them say we're "weaponizing" the CTC checks, I will smack a pimp. Republicans weaponize everything, so they don't get to whine about "weaponizing" monthly checks they didn't vote for. You'd think they'd have some damn pride. I mean, some of them are going to meet their Maker sooner than I am.)

The Daily Kos Liberation League does some freaking alchemy with this action alert, which helps you tell your Congressfolk to, and I quote, "support Black history education in our K-12 schools and denounce the racist attacks by Republican leaders. That's what all the right-wing attacks on "critical race theory" are really about: preventing our children from learning any decent Black history in our schools. No, it's not about "banning white people" or "sending whites to reeducation camps" or "cancel culture" or whatever swill they're peddling; it's about trying to make sure you don't learn enough about Jim Crow that you can't tell that Jim Crow still operates in America -- more subtly, yes, but that's what evil does when you beat it the first time. And you have to beat it every day of your life.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1783, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act. As I'm sure you know, good Americans have been having trouble meeting their utility bills during this pandemic; S. 1783 would provide $30 billion to cancel water bill debt, electric bill debt, and broadband bill debt. All of these are essential services -- yes, broadband, too, or have we already forgotten how much work and school we had to do online this year? -- and you know what's far, far worse than the "moral hazard" of government forgiving people's bills? The actual moral hazard of cutting off their services so they can't stay healthy and contribute to society! Look, we can't all be hedge fund managers -- most of us have to do real jobs, and real jobs, as we have been reminded over and over again, don't always pay enough, particularly when we don't have them. The Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act can help more good Americans better endure these horrible truths, and thus better fight another day.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1376, the GET THE LEAD OUT Act, which, despite its name, has nothing to do with local Led Zeppelin-related radio programming. What "moral hazard" will Republicans identify in a bill aiming to (as the title says) get lead out of lead pipes all over America, since literally any amount of lead in your drinking water can cause brain damage? Will they decry all the Big Gummint spending, as if private corporations will ever solve lead-pipe issues on their own? Will they lament all the regulatory bureaucracy supposedly inherent in forcing more lead-pipe disclosure in housing contracts? Will they claim that the bill's funding mechanisms (subjecting more large estates to the Estate Tax and closing the "carried interest" loophole that lets hedge fund managers evade taxes) will "kill jobs"? Yes, that all sounds incredibly absurd, and even if they were valid arguments, they still couldn't hope to meet the real moral hazard of exposing our children to brain damage.

Finally, pursuant to most of our goals this year, Public Citizen still helps you tell your Democratic Senators to end the filibuster. Do we care that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema say they won't support an effort to end the filibuster? Of course we don't! All we care about is that we express our will, and if we tell our Senators enough times, they'll start to look bad for not doing it. And, you know, I spent over a decade defending the filibuster, and arguing that we ought to make Senators actually talk their way through the filibuster like they did in the old days. But, honestly, I've fucking had enough.

Around the table: featuring more Republican stratagems that *should* fail.

This Jesse Frederik article from August reminds us that blockchain technology is "The Amazing Solution for Almost Nothing." If you're able to see through the "promise" of automating every conceivable job, or AI doing the job of people, then you're able to see through blockchain, no matter how much its defenders try to spin your head about it. And though I guess it's tempting that bitcoin can move money "without banks," the problem I have with banks isn't that they exist, it's that they hurt us if we don't regulate them properly. Also, too, "(d)ata should reflect reality, but sometimes reality changes and the data stays the same. That’s why we have notaries, supervisors, lawyers -- actually, all those boring people that blockchain thinks it can do without."

When I hear that three American states -- Nevada, Colorado, and Washington -- now have public health insurance options, I hasted to interject that they're not really "public options" in the sense of a government-run health insurance plan -- they're "public-private partnerships," in which states contract to private insurers to provide the service, and I'm scratching my head trying to figure out how that's substantially different from Obamacare. So let's not call these plans "public options," particularly since opponents will use them to tar all publicly-administered health insurance when they don't deliver better care at lower prices.

Factcheck.org evaluates a "viral video" suggesting the nasal swabs they use to test for COVID could cause cancer and even "change the DNA in your cells." I bet the truth doesn't surprise you: while ethylene oxide (or EO, used to sterilize most disposable medical supplies in America) is carcinogenic and mutagenic, the EO sterilizer disperses almost all of the EO from the supplies during the cycle's aeration period (which can last several hours), and thus leaves almost no EO on your nasal swabs and wound dressings and such, so it can't hurt you. So when folks say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, believe them.

When I hear that Republicans plan to use inflation against Democrats in the 2022 midterms, I can think of three reasons that might work: a) prices always go up and that frustrates people, b) Democrats won't use their power to accomplish anything, and c) Democrats won't run ads tying their Republicans opponents to the January 6 attempted coup. I mean, on the merits, the Republicans' case should fail -- if prices are up 5% from this time last year, could that be because there've been a lot of shortages of vital goods? -- but no one has ever gone broke underestimating the Democrats.

Am I surprised to hear that Trump Administration Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told fellow Administration higher-ups that "nobody is going to care" about the George Floyd killing? I mean, a cellphone video captured the whole thing, and his boss was quite adept at social media. But then, rising to the top of the Trump Administration food chain isn't exactly a dead-on indicator of talent or competence -- why, Mr. Meadows couldn't even win that House seat until the North Carolina legislature redrew the district so it ejected most of Asheville, so I couldn't say he's some kind of seer.

Finally, Benjamin Wallace Wells at The New Yorker profiles right-wing activist Christopher Cufo, who almost single-handedly started the right-wing tantrum over "critical race theory." Admittedly he's right that "politically correct" and "cancel culture" pale, as tantrum-inciting phrases, before "critical race theory," but his approach is a tired one: play up a bunch of isolated incidents from around the country and convince everyone it's all part of a "war on whiteness" or whatever. How well did that "War on Christmas" do for Republicans in the 2006 midterms? I mean, Christmas is a lot more popular than whiteness.

Action: concerning Medicare drug negotiation, good and bad Presidential nominations, product safety, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to include the Lower Drug Costs Now Act in the American Jobs Plan, tell your Senators to confirm Rohit Chopra as CFPB Director, tell your Senators to reject Neil MacBride as Treasury Department General Counsel, tell your Congressfolk to pass the STURDY Act, and tell big corporations to abandon ALEC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to contact your Congressfolk where appropriate, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to include H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act, in the American Jobs Plan. They can do that, because H.R. 3 would give Medicare the power to negotiate the prices of many drugs, and that power would result in savings for whom? For the taxpayer, of course! You fund Medicare, after all! And then the American Jobs Plan could apply those savings to needed projects. You've been telling them to help fund the American Jobs Plan with corporate taxes, and so far they haven't listened. They may not listen when we tell them to help fund it with savings from Medicare drug negotiation. But let's put it more toward the front of the public mind that Medicare drug negotiation is fiscally responsible.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's nominee for Director of our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra. Mr. Chopra has been a warrior for consumer rights for decades, and would represent a huge improvement over Donald Trump's CFPB heads, Mick Mulvaney and Kathy Kraninger, who seemed to think their job was to help the banksters rather than the American people. Some of Joe Biden's Executive branch picks, like Lina Khan as SEC Chair, have been pretty inspired; maybe that's why our Senators haven't confirmed Mr. Chopra yet. Still, duty is duty -- and duty ain't just for us, obviously.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to reject President Biden's nominee to be Department of Treasury General Counsel, Neil MacBride. Did we just say some of President Biden's Executive branch picks have been pretty inspired? Mr. MacBride's nomination isn't one of them! Mr. MacBride has been a long-time corporate lawyer, and regardless of how one may feel about his corporate defendants, I would not say that experience is an asset when working for our government -- in fact, I'd say it's more an asset for him and his once and future employers. Seriously, they always try to say we need more people in government who understand the economy, but what they mean is "more people in government who'll compromise government in favor of corporate power." And if I may borrow a metaphor, you can be an expert on the swamp without being a swamp creature.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1314/S. 441, the STURDY Act. "STURDY" here stands for "Stop Tip-overs of Unstable, Risky Dressers on Youth," and William Carlos Williams it ain't, but the title does accurately describe what the bill would do, and that's a good thing for a bill to do. The bill would mandate that our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) issue vigorous safety standards for these dressers and test them for tip-overs. What would an opponent of this bill say? I find it hard to imagine, but I guess it'd be something like GUMMINT BAD REGULASHUNZ BAD. They're happy to repeat that mantra when one of these dressers fall over on one of their children or grandchildren.

Common Cause helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which has gone back into the vote suppression racket after famously bowing out of it after their work on Voter ID laws became well-known. I guess they didn't learn much from that, did they? Spreading Donald Trump's lies and funding "fraudits" of election results sure ain't the actions of someone who's learned their lesson -- unless they thought the "lesson" was "stay out of sight until the time is right." Big corporations need to learn a lesson, too -- that it doesn't matter how many nice things they say about helping Black folks vote if they're going to fund ALEC's vote suppression efforts. And the Big Stick of Bad PR still seems like the ideal weapon to teach this lesson.

Around the table: welcome to part 877 of "insane Republicans, weak Democrats."

File under "Well, This Sure Didn't Go Well!": when pressed by columnist Kyle Whitmire, Alabama state lawmaker can't describe exactly what it is that bothers him about critical race theory. Oh, they teach white CEOs something about themselves that isn't good, and there are "training sessions" and "reeducation camps" in some indeterminate part of the country, plus he wanted to "start a conversation" (though not participate in one, apparently!) and "(t)his is still the greatest country that's ever, ever been in the history of the world" and also he lost the link he was trying to retrieve that would have explained everything he was thinking and feeling like he's some damn teenage boy or something. Seriously, though, Mr. Whitmire's Columbo act is awe-inspiring; more journalists should imitate him.

In a bit of an anticlimax, our Supreme Court rules (by a 7-2 margin) that plaintiffs in an anti-Obamacare lawsuit don't have standing to bring the suit, since they can't prove injury. This suit aimed to topple the Affordable Care Act by saying that since Congress repealed the penalty for violating the insurance mandate, the whole thing had to go, but the majority ruling didn't get that far. Sadly, Justice Alito's dissent (joined by Justice Gorsuch) suggests that reducing the mandate penalty to $0 apparently wishes it into non-existence and thus should topple the whole law, even though the mandate is still on the books and Congress can, at least in theory, increase the penalty for defying it at any moment.

When I hear that just enough Republican Senators now approve of the "bipartisan" infrastructure plan that does about a tenth of President Biden's original proposal, I'm tempted to say sure-they-do -- once they pressure Messrs. Sanders, Markey, and Merkley to get aboard with it, suddenly one of the 10 Republican "supporters" will have a "problem" with it, and once he's appeased, another Senator will pop up with a "problem," ad nauseam. But it could be even worse than that! If this "bipartisan" bill somehow passes, whittled down to an even smaller nub than it is now, what's to prevent Joe Manchin from suddenly demanding the American Families Plan also be passed with "bipartisan" support? After all, it worked so well the first time! It'd be one thing if Democrats had asked for the sun and the moon and the stars to begin with, but of course they didn't. They deserve to lose their majorities in 2022 -- though we certainly don't deserve all the trouble that'll cause.

Now Sen. Manchin has found a bunch of voting rights initiatives he can support -- like 15 days of early voting nationwide, making Election Day a federal holiday, and automatic voter registration. Hmm, can you think of a bill the House passed that already has all of that? Why, yes, you can -- it's the For the People Act, the very same bill he said he couldn't support because it was too "partisan," and I guess that's why he didn't try to prove his point by describing which parts of the bill he found particularly "partisan"! Passing off a big chunk of the For the People Act as "ideas I could support" is pretty damn dishonest, but it looks like it'll amount to nothing now that Mob Boss Mitch has said he won't support that, either. It's what Joe Manchin deserves, even though we certainly deserve better.

Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS) apparently spent campaign funds to defend himself from charges of misusing campaign funds, so I guess he must be feeling confident about beating that rap! Turns out using campaign funds for your legal bills is not in and of itself against the law, but it also looks like the kind of thing that's so dirty it can topple an incumbent. In some district, anyway -- though a Democrat represented this district as recently as 2010, Republican voters now have a 21-point advantage in Mississippi's 4th, and that district doesn't even look that gerrymandered.

Finally, a bill making Juneteenth a national holiday has passed Congress almost unanimously, but that didn't prevent a dozen or so Republicans from acting like assholes about it. Rep. Massie (R-KY) suggested that good Americans might not be able to tell the difference between "Juneteenth National Independence Day," and "Independence Day," which sure isn't very libertarian of him -- libertarians think people are smart enough to run their own lives, but Mr. Massie thinks they're not smart enough to know the difference between July 4th and the holiday everyone calls "Juneteenth." Of course, he's a piker compared to Sen. Ron Johnson, who said it seemed "strange that having taxpayers provide federal employees paid time off is now required to celebrate the end of slavery." Try replacing "the end of slavery" with "Columbus Day" in that sentence and you might think what really gets Ron Johnson's goat is he won't have very many people to boss around today.

Action: concerning jobs, postal banking, facial recognition, corporate welfare, corporate spying, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep defense spending out of the American Jobs Plan, expand postal banking, and pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium 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 the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to contact your Congressfolk, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk not to include any defense spending in the American Jobs Plan. Because our defense department has enough money! And Democrats won't attract any Republican votes by hiding defense spending in the jobs bill! If they got behind a bill written by Mitch McConnell himself they couldn't get enough Republican votes, so they certainly shouldn't try any tricks that will not only backfire on them, but deprive worthy efforts -- like clean water, road and bridge repair, and renewable energy -- of vital funding. Hate to beat a dead horse, but we already spend more on our military than the next 12 nations on the list combined, so we shouldn't enable that state of affairs with an infrastructure bill.

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to expand postal banking. We've talked at length about the benefits of postal banking -- mainly that it would enable more folks in underbanked rural and urban areas to be able to save money, pay bills, and write checks and money orders. We may not have emphasized quite enough that these are places banksters won't go, because they don't think they can make absurd amounts of money there. So ensure your right-wing friends sheath their let-the-free-market-do-it arguments, because clearly the "free" market ain't doing its job here, and when the "free" market won't do its job, somebody has to. And why not the organization that belongs to us in the first place and offered basic banking services until the late 1960s?

Ban Facial Recognition helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3907/S. 2052, the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, which would prevent both our federal government and local police from using facial recognition technology. I've said enough times that it's lousy technology that can't tell Black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can, but perhaps I haven't said enough that the consequences of using this lousy technology are quite dire for the wrongly accused -- police can arrest you and detain you until the cows come home, because they either don't know or don't care how bad the technology is. And then you've got an arrest on your record, which makes it all the more likely police will target you again. So let's prevent that sort of thing.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. Every dollar spent on entrenched fossil fuel technologies that don't need the money but will surely take it and then act like they can't live without it is a dollar that doesn't fund something more useful -- like building out renewable utilities a la the Tennessee Valley Authority. Yes, it still exists, and even though right-wingers have run Tennessee for many years now, they won't touch it, because it works. And does Tennessee have all the problems Texas has in ensuring everyone has enough heat and electricity? No, they do not. There's a solution in there, somewhere. And only the cynical and the self-interested can't see it.

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. Your internet service providing corporation can't sell your private data to law enforcement, but it can sell it to a third party, which can then sell it to law enforcement. The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would close that loophole, and who wants it to stay open? People who haven't earned their money in some time, that's who. And they'll act like you will be raped and murdered if you tell your Congressfolk to pass this bill. But don't listen to bad people.

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. I'm reminded, again, how many good Americans went out and got COVID vaccines without having to worry about whether wherever they were going to get the shot was "in-network" or, indeed, how they were going to pay for the shot; wouldn't it be nice if all health care could be like that? Yes, it would, and expanding Medicare to include all of us would get us into that world -- and out of the world where diabetics ration their insulin, where folks with allergies go without their EpiPens, where folks who get treatment get slammed with surprise medical bills because their surgeon was in-network but their anesthesiologist somehow wasn't. That's a damn nutty world I've just described, and we Americans deserve better.

Action: concerning credit errors, internet privacy, methane emissions, social media, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell big credit corporations to fix errors in our credit reports, tell TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, tell our EPA to enact vigorous methane regulations, tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep drillers away from Dinosaur National Park, tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump permanently, and tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 of student loan debt per person. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will. And good hunting!

Consumer Reports helps you tell the big credit reporting corporations to fix errors on their reports and make their reports more transparent and accessible to their customers. Which could be any of us! More than one in three Americans told Consumer Reports that they've found errors in their credit reports, and an error could cost you a job, a house, or a loan, so this ain't nitpicking here. You'll also ask Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion to freeze your credit by default (rather than make you jump through hoops to freeze it, you know what I mean) and making credit reports and credit scores free to access forever. I eagerly await Republicans complaints that this would all be some kind of "job-killing" plan.

Fight for the Future helps you tell big social media corporation TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, like voice and face prints, from its customers. All these newfangled social media contraptions seem to come up with all these newfangled ways to intrude upon your privacy! And it's no use saying this is the future, there's no such thing as privacy, because that's a defeatism a civilized person can't abide. Losing $92 million in a biometric-related lawsuit earlier this year and $5 million to an FTC fine (for collecting children's data, no less!) have apparently taught them the wrong lesson. Perhaps the Big Stick of Bad PR can teach them the right one.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to fashion stronger methane regulations than the ones we've got. For all the good reasons: because methane-mitigation technology has gotten a lot better over the years, because methane packs a climate change punch even worse than coal, because leaking methane into our air is not only pollution but also a waste of energy, and because leaking methane into our air is not only pollution and a waste of energy but also steals taxpayer royalties, since any usable energy found on drilling operations on public lands belongs to us. Congress famously failed to roll back Obama-era methane rules in 2017, but the Trump EPA rolled them back late in 2020; now it's time to roll back the roll-back, and keep pollution and climate change from killing us.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep oil and gas drilling away from the Dinosaur National Monument. They call it that at least in part because you can find actual dinosaur fossils in the cliff faces! The century-old monument straddling the border between Colorado and Utah isn't just the home of historical wonders, but of two rivers that feed the Colorado River, so if some big corporation goes blasting a mere mile from the edge of the monument, it'll pollute the drinking water used by over 40 million people. It's not worth polluting that much water just so some executive can gild the plumbing on his 19th vacation home. Executives ought to learn to make money off renewable energy. Hell, some already have.

Progress America helps you tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump permanently. Some liberals have publicly worried about the free speech "risk" of doing such a thing, too, but remember that hardly anyone was using Facebook 13 years ago, so we don't actually have to treat it like it's the all-media or something. And Facebook's a private corporation, so it doesn't have to publish everything someone wants, any more than Random House does. We should hold Facebook liable for the slander and terrorist threats it publishes, but that's a different discussion. And besides, who stopped Donald Trump from putting his rantings on a weblog like we did in the old days? Oh, right: he did, because he apparently has no patience. So let's stop coddling him.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 of student loan debt per borrower. He's showing an awful lot of reluctance, and I remember when Barack Obama showed this kind of reluctance, it meant he wasn't going to do anything. But don't let that stop you! We need to keep on him, because we're right -- forgiving that much student loan debt would stimulate the hell out of this economy, plus it would show we're actually willing to correct the wrongs we commit as a civilization. What "wrong" was that, you ask? The wrong where we told everyone they should go into massive debt on a college degree so they can get good jobs -- and then took away all the good jobs! Worse than Lucy with a football, we were. So let's do better.

Action: concerning endless warmaking, drug prices, Israel and Palestine, immigration, discrimination, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Iraq AUMF, and pass the Lower Drug Prices Now Act, the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, the American Dream and Promise Act, the Equality 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 Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 256, which would repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) Congress passed to permit George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq in 2003. Finally! 2003 was 18 years ago, which means the Iraq War AUMF is now old enough to vote and to believe at least one doomed relationship from high school was gonna last forever, and like that doomed relationship, the 2003 AUMF ain't doing anyone any good now. Of course, Presidents still use it to launch unilateral wars in defiance of our Constitution and the popular will, so it not only doesn't do anyone any good, it does only evil. So we should wipe it out of our legal code.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Prices Now Act. If you thought letting Medicare negotiate more of its drug prices was a good idea before -- and chances are you did, since you're a person with a brain who doesn't let their ego completely dominate them -- you'll think it's an even better idea now that our FDA has approved Biogen's Alzheimer's drug that'll cost $56,000 a year. Some analysts say it'll double Medicare drug spending, and though I doubt it's that dire, Biogen's drug is basically the big thing in Alzheimer's treatment right now, so there'll be a lot of it out there, and that will drive up Medicare's drug prices. So let's give Medicare the power to lower drug prices, which means Medicare will spend less of our taxpayer money.

The Daily Kos Liberation League 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. OK, it's a long title and doesn't make a cute acronym (cue Benny Hill trying to pronounce "DHRPCFLUIMO"), but it would prevent Israel from using our taxpayer dollars to oppress the Palestinians. And "oppress" is the right word! Never mind who did what first: Israel clearly has superior power to Palestine, and Palestine's alleged allies aren't exactly stepping up to help them. And at the risk of saying something radical, everyone in this region is a human being, and deserves basic human rights.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act. Remember when President Obama essentially created the DACA program, to protect some immigrants who came here with their parents (and thus had no choice in their emigration) from deportation to a nation they wouldn't recognize and likely couldn't even speak the language of? Remember how Republicans all said this is Congress's job? Now guess how many of the bill's 175 co-sponsors in the House are Republicans. That's right, none. And this bill shouldn't offend them: it doesn't offer blanket "amnesty" to all immigrants who came here as children, and sets standards for whom our government can help. And here you thought these Republicans were all about boundaries! But no, civilized people are all about boundaries, and there ain't no intersection with "Republican politicians" on that Venn diagram.

The Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Because it's not even close to what right-wingers say it is! It won't "assault your religious liberties" unless you think "religious liberty" is all about discriminating against gay and transgender folk, which isn't how I've experienced religion at all. And it won't let boys dominate girls in basketball or softball or field hockey, either, nor will it allow boys to gang up on girls in girls' locker rooms. Seriously, right-wingers fixate on the most absurd end results of a bill these days, and why? Because they can't argue with the things the Equality Act would actually do, like prevent landlords from discriminating against gays. The only way they win is if they make you think their "reality" is actually reality. And it's not.

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. And Public Citizen helps you tell them to do both. We have been reminded, over the past few weeks, that actual bipartisan majorities of Americans support these bills, be they conservative, moderate, or liberal, so don't brook any silliness about these bills not being "bipartisan" enough. You know what the politicians mean by "bipartisanship"? Democrats and Republicans coming together to do whatever Republicans want. And we deserve better than such rubbish.

Around the table: Trumpholes run for office, and other sad tales.

David L. Wilson at TruthOut reminds us (and Vice President Harris!) that one can, actually, stem immigration to America: we can end the "war on drugs," stop letting arms flow to bad actors, and cut back on climate change-causing pollution, because all of these things also make lives miserable in Central America. Fun fact: the Obama Administration fiddled as a coup toppled Honduran President Zelaya in 2009, as right-wingers said they were concerned he was trying to make himself a Forever President -- and now Honduras has an actual Forever President who does nothing but oppress his own people. Heckuva job, America! One day we'll be talking about that in the same breath as the CIA-backed 1954 coup in Guatemala and the Nixon-backed 1973 coup in Argentina.

Jef Rouner at the Houston Press lists "5 Signs You're a Soft White Supremacist," but I bet you don't have to worry about whether you're exhibiting these signs. Do you limit your definition of white supremacy to only the most obvious suspects? Do you reflexively look for "middle grounds" because you're afraid of the truth? Do you habitually use isolated incidents to make broad conclusions? Do you think "diversity" has "gone too far" because it makes some folks ashamed boo-hoo? Do you habitually apologize for your Trumphole uncle more often than you fight his stupidity? No, I didn't think that was you, either. So let someone else sweat it, OK?

Ho hum, three Republican House Reps introduce a resolution to censure Reps. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Tlaib (D-MI), and Omar (D-NY) for "defending terrorist organizations and inciting anti-Semitic attacks across the United States." The first charge is gob-smackingly stupid and the second charge is a bit rich, considering how many anti-Semitic attacks followed in the wake of Donald Trump's 2016 election and how few Republicans are willing to say Donald Trump incited a riot on January 6, though the case for his conviction is considerably stronger. (Also, Rep. Omar didn't say anything wrong, and she shouldn't have walked it back even to the degree she did. And I bet sexism operates here even more than racism does -- if a man had said what she said, he could've doubled down and shouted louder and folks would have said he "shoots from the hip," but too many Americans brandish the b-word when a woman does something even remotely similar.)

Uh oh: at least two dozen corporations waving the Pride flag this month have, guess what, donated to virulently anti-gay politicians in just the last two years. You know, in case you thought corporate hypocrisy had boundaries. Even more telling in the linked article above are all the sentences reading "(such-and-such corporation) did not respond to a request for comment," which means they all know they can't point to a pile of dung and tell everyone it's really meatloaf. I imagine I'll get action alerts about this shortly. And when I get them, you'll get them.

When I hear that Republican candidates are falling all over themselves pretending (and, in some cases, outright lying) that they've received Donald Trump's endorsement, I'm tempted to hope that this really does all play out like a Kids in the Hall skit. "I've got a picture with the big man!" "Oh yeah? Well I've got an endorsement on completely authentic letterhead!" And there's also the ratfucking, as apparently happened to Hirsh Singh in New Jersey. Trouble is, none of this will be funny on Election Day, when Trump votaries all vote in jackboot lockstep for whomever has an "R" after their name. Hate to beat a dead horse, but Democrats could make all this drama beside the point if they would just do something with the power they have over the next two years. That would include not giving up those monthly CTC checks in some "bipartisan" infrastructure bill, an "option" I'm sure they've discussed.

Finally, a New Hampshire man facing criminal charges for his role in the January 6 attempted coup wants to run for Congress, and thinks his role in that shameful act can help him win, because "if you’re running for office, any attention is good attention." Granted, he's threatened to run for office before only to utterly fail to do the work that would take, and he only chose to run for Congress after he realized the woman he wanted to run against is a Congressperson and not a state legislator, but Jesus Mary and Joseph I want this dude to lose in the most humiliating fashion possible, because I don't want to live in an America where "any attention is good attention" -- I want to live in an America where we shame and shun people for seeking bad attention. It's not so damn much to ask, really.

Action: concerning the American Jobs Plan and how to pay for it.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk, once again, to listen to us as they consider jobs legislation, and fund it with higher taxes on the wealthy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

You've heard that a group of 10 Senators (only five of whom are Republicans, when you'd need 10 to overcome a filibuster) have come to an "agreement" about a $1.2 trillion (really only $569 billion in new spending) infrastructure bill? One that doesn't raise taxes on corporations or the wealthy, doesn't promise to fund renewable energy infrastructure, and doesn't fund the care economy we're all going to be a part of as we get older? Well, we've got action alerts for you today, then! Daily Kos still helps you demand a "big, bold, and green" jobs plan. Hey, why should we care what 10 Senators agreed to? None of them seem to think it's all that important to agree with us. Which is why we keep telling them, as often as we need to.

Both the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Moms Rising help you demand that your Congressfolk help build a care economy infrastructure. Think about it: child care costs an arm and a leg, elder care costs an arm and a leg, and workers in these fields get paid in dung pellets; keep leaving it up to the "free" market and we'll have a nation of debt slaves with a few CEOs at the top who gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Spend our taxpayer money insuring that care workers get good pay for good work and we'll start to build something we can be proud of. And it'd be nice if Republicans would stop pretending that it's not "infrastructure" if you can't drive on it. A civilization needs an infrastructure of hard-working, dedicated citizens more than it needs roads.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3805/S. 2028 and thus enact a "millionaire's surtax." I think millionaire income should be taxed at 91% just like the good old days and the bill's "millionaire's surtax" would raise the 37% rate on millionaire income only to 47%, but I try not to let the perfect murder the good, and we should take every opportunity we can to send our Congressfolk the message that the rich don't pay enough in taxes, a matter about which we got a painful reminder this week from ProPublica. Afraid it's not "biparatisan" enough? Over half of Republicans support it, per a Hart Research poll, so enough of that.

Inequality.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1979/S. 794, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act. This bill would actually raise corporate taxes if a corporation's highest-paid employee makes more than 50 times as much as its median-salaried employee; that tax rate would go up a half-percentage point in that case, and the rate would scale upward, such that a corporation with a 500-to-1 pay ratio would wind up paying five percentage points more. Again, I'd raise it all the way up to 55% for corporate profits over $1 million (and I would expect to lower the ratio that way, too), but let's communicate to our Congressfolk the fact that we think some people make too much money while the rest of us are scraping along, and that they should do something about it.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1459/S. 510, the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. This bill would enact a "wealth tax" that would finally start to get at the trillions of dollars the ultra-rich sit on -- you know, that money right-wingers always say will "trickle down" to the rest of us? Well, it doesn't, but the wealth tax would impose an annual tax of 2% of assets between $50 million and $1 billion and 3% on assets above $1 billion. It'd raise a lot of money, and the super-rich would still be super-rich -- sure sounds pretty harmless, doesn't it? Then all the whining right-wingers will do about might leave you scratching your head.

Around the table: of "labor shortages" and "trust issues."

Biden Administration withdraws Trumphole "public charge" proposal that could have prevented three million good Americans from getting food stamps. Not a big lift, admittedly, since a federal judge first blocked the rule and then tossed it completely, but perhaps the Biden Administration thought it might be a good time to remind everyone that the American Rescue Plan (for which exactly zero Republicans voted) expanded food stamps for families of four by $100 a month. That's the kind of thing people remember come election time -- versus, you know, the 2009 Making Work Pay tax cut that was literally designed not to be noticed.

The Economic Policy Institute's Heidi Shierholz urges Republicans not to "Ignore the Evidence on 'Labor Shortages,'" and while such urging might seem like a waste of time, the rest of us, at least, can parse the evidence she offers and be reminded that a) if unemployment insurance were really "killing jobs," you wouldn't see faster job growth in low-wage professions than you do in higher-wage professions, b) wage increases in the leisure/hospitality sector come in a sector that's still so poorly-paid you couldn't reasonably expect it to drive wages sky-high anywhere else, and c) they told a similar story in the Obama era, that workers just didn't have the skills employers were looking for, but the unemployment rate ultimately went down to 3.5% before the pandemic without a national job-training program, so we know that's bunkum. Also d) why do we listen to Republicans about anything, ever?

Republicans have used the ProPublica report on wealthy folks' tax evasion -- a report buttressed by personal info apparently leaked by someone within our IRS -- to claim, just like they did in 2013, that the American people should have "trust issues" with our IRS. I guess that's one way of trying to make chicken shit into chicken salad, but even in a nation of "temporarily-embarrassed millionaires," as Will Rogers put it, most Americans have been not-rich for far too long to think our IRS is really going to leak their personal info. Republicans are either being absurdly optimistic or are gaslighting everyone -- oh, why am I bothering, of course they're gaslighting, because when you're wrong all the time and you won't fix your wrongness with better policy proposals, what else can you do?

Upon hearing, in considerably more detail than before, that "Trump-Inspired Death Threats Are Terrorizing Election Workers," all I can say is we should throw all these people making these threats in jail! No matter what their "feelings" are about the 2020 election! Wouldn't that be law and order of us? After all, it's a lot less than what they'd want to do to us, merely for speaking our minds. And I'm sick of folks in their "Fuck Your Feelings" T-shirts suddenly demanding that we attend their "feelings." The chickens really are coming home to roost in America. (Go ahead and read the whole thing, if you're in the mood to be profoundly disgusted with right-wing weaklings.)

The Kaiser Family Foundation gives us some of the reasons folks are still "vaccine-hesitant," and though some of them don't seem hard to overcome (maybe we could do something about vaccines being unavailable where some folks get their health care?), some of them also seem rather piddling (if airlines require it, you'll get it? Well, your hesitancy is clearly based on deep consideration of the issues, then!). And surprise, surprise! The "definitely not" groups consists mostly of white Republicans, though most of them are between 30 and 49, which doesn't bode well for our future.

Finally, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich declares his candidacy for 2022 U.S. Senate race for the seat currently held by Democrat Mark Kelly. As recently as late December, this would have been a major get for Republicans -- he's already won statewide twice, he toes the party line on immigration, and he's enthusiastically joined in all those useless fights over the Affordable Care Act and "religious" "freedom." But now, having been judged by Donald Trump to be not enthusiastic enough about the Arizona "fraudit," I doubt he makes it to the general election. In fact, it's entirely possible Arizona Republicans will nominate a rabid raccoon to face Sen. Kelly.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, health care, discrimination, corporate spying, and antibiotic abuse.

Long story short: tell your state legislators to draw fair, ungerrymandered districts; tell our FDA to revoke its approval of a dangerous drug, tell Michigan state legislators to reject yet another anti-trans bill, tell Amazon to stop spying on good Americans, and tell our FDA to restrict antibiotic abuse on factory farms. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting, and have a happy and safe weekend!

Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators draw fair and transparent legislative districts. Which is to say, not the kind of Rorschach-blot legislative districts, the kind that exclude sides of streets and even individual houses, that tend to keep individual legislators in power when they haven't earned it either through good works or superior persuasion. This is one of the things that sucks about the future: given the choice between doing the hard work of earning power or using the computer software that can gerrymander a tailor-made district that'll return you to power without very much effort, legislators typically choose the latter. And we all hate that. But we have to tell them that, and we have to tell them that often.

Public Citizen helps you tell our FDA to revoke its approval of aducanumab, a drug that ostensibly treats Alzheimer's disease. Too many good Americans would quickly respond how dare we hurt the effort to stop Alzheimer's, but we have to consider whether approving a drug that caused brain bleeding and swelling in 40% of clinical trial participants, a drug our FDA's own independent advisory committee told them not to approve, a drug that will cost patients over $50,000 a year to take, might actually hurt the effort to defeat Alzheimer's Disease. Before you do the right thing, you have to get the right thing right.

Change.org helps you tell the Michigan state legislature to reject yet another bill that would mandate that transgender students only play sports in their birth gender. Why do boys become girls again? It sure ain't so they can dominate girls' sports and then hang out with their crew and talk about girls, but that's what right-wingers apparently want you to believe. When transgender folks come out, they risk getting harassed, getting the crap kicked out of them, even getting killed; maybe our politicians should focus a little more on that, and not so much on absurd fantasies about competitiveness in sports.

Media Justice helps you tell Amazon to permanently stop using its power to spy on people. Yeah, Amazon has responded to the Big Stick of Bad PR, but only conditionally: it has renewed a ban on selling facial recognition technology, the kind that can't tell black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can, to law enforcement, but that ban ain't permanent, and even as they announced that ban, it rolled out Sidewalk, a network that would run all manner of data from your Amazon devices into one big spying network. So, clearly, we need to keep at them. Jeff Bezos may be so rich he can blast off into space, but the Big Stick of Bad PR can still bring him back to Earth.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our FDA to set more stringent standards for antibiotic use on factory farms. Specifically, you'd ask our FDA to limit all medically-important antibiotic use on factory farms to 21 days; currently our FDA allows factory farms to use about a third of these antibiotics indefinitely, so Penn PIRG's proposal represents an improvement. Some three million Americans get sick from an antibiotic-resistant superbug every year, and that represents a little less than one in every hundred Americans, and I know you know at least a hundred people, right? So hopefully that drives the point home -- you know, in addition to the prospect that one day the next cut could kill us and all we'll have to show for it is richer corporate executives.

Around the table: having letters after your name doesn't make you smart! And other reminders.

Good news, everyone: TC Energy has scuttled the Keystone XL pipeline. So the next time someone says speaking out doesn't work, and organizing doesn't work, and activism doesn't work, you tell them that the Keystone XL pipeline died not because the politicians killed it, but because the people killed it. And note well that TC Energy used to call itself TransCanada, which means that the Keystone XL pipeline also sullied their name so badly they had to change it -- which, again, is our work.

Steve Wamhoff, writing in Fortune, reminds us that President Biden's proposal to tax "unrealized capital" would go a long way toward ensuring that the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk actually pay some damn taxes. And note well that when Republicans say they don't support tax hikes, what they really say is they want billionaires to go on paying no taxes while you try to decide which bill you can get away with not paying this month because you don't make enough money.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) points to "dark money" influencing Sen. Manchin of West Virginia, and notes that the For the People Act, which he famously opposes, would curtail the power of dark money. Good for her for pouncing on this, and let me say for the record that folks who find her "shrill" are either just repeating what they've heard or pretending to be "independent" thinkers. Independence isn't about deploying tired arguments in unexpected places, after all, but about transcending those arguments.

A cavalcade of charlatans testify to all sorts of nonexistent side effects to vaccines at an Ohio House committee meeting, and tempting as it is to joke about all the quarters and hammers and airplanes that have slammed into my shoulder since I got vaccinated, I feel compelled to point out that some of the folks who spewed at the hearing have advanced degrees, which should remind us, if anything does, to attend what folks say and do more than the letters after their names. This is a world, after all, where Newt Gingrich has a Ph.D.

When I read that "The Future of Elder Care is Here – and It’s Artificial Intelligence," I hasten to say AI is a tool, and nothing more, and don't imagine it won't occasionally give you useless info. But you know our stupid elites will use AI to replace actual people so they don't have to pay their salaries and benefits, at which point nursing homes all over the world will be little more than death camps. Wanna stop that from happening? Fight for good folks to make a decent wage to do good jobs. You know, like President Biden's original American Jobs Plan might have done.

Finally, Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, now running for state Attorney General, defends his support for our recently-defeated ex-President, going so far as to say "Trump is the center of the Republican Party." You mean the American people aren't the center of the Republican Party? I'm old enough to remember when a politician would say that even (especially!) if he didn't mean it! I guess winning office in a Republican-dominated state sure makes some people soft after a while. And so does blind devotion to an irredeemable asshole. But sooner or later, Trump votaries will know when they're being pandered to. Won't they?

Action: concerning gerrymandering, whistleblowing, drug costs, abortion, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to pass anti-gerrymandering legislation, and tell your Congressfolk to add strong whistleblower protections to the Climate Risk Disclosure Act, and pass the For the People Act, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, and the Equality 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 and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA helps you tell your state legislators to pass SB 222, which would establish a redistricting commission with some teeth in Pennsylvania so that legislators can't gerrymander themselves into unearned power. Two-thirds of good Pennsylvanians support a redistricting commission taking the power to gerrymander away from state legislators, and their number also includes a majority of Republican voters, so I say the voters have spoken here and the legislators should do our will, period, end of. And, while I'm thinking about 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 -- which would force every state to use a redistricting commission to redraw districts, rather than let legislators carve out their own personal fiefdoms with Rorschach-shaped districts that exclude single houses from districts. Might as well fight on every front, that's what I say.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to add strong whistleblower protections to H.R. 2570/S. 1217, the Climate Risk Disclosure Act. Big corporations love bragging about how green they are, but the Climate Risk Disclosure Act would actually force those corporations to disclose their investments in fossil fuels to their shareholders -- but without whistleblower protections, corporations will more easily hide such investments, because those who would expose them could be intimidated, fired, or otherwise abused. Whistleblowing is not for the faint of heart; folks who do it resign themselves to years of being unemployed and unemployable until they finally win their case and get some reward for their good works. So we ought to protect them wherever we can.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act. Republicans will whine that it's not "bipartisan," nor does it represent an effort to "compromise," but, as usual with Democratic bills, it is a compromise -- the bill would phase in Medicare drug price negotiation, as a sop to big pharma corporations, I'm sure, and would only require negotiation on 50 such drugs by 2024, and the "negotiated maximum price" might not be that much lower than it is now, at least in the short term. So, if you want H.R. 3 to be better, there's space in the comment block of the petition tool for that. But certainly don't let your loved ones think this is some radical, unrealistic bill. It's certainly much kinder to big pharma than I would be.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755, the Women's Health Protection Act. Republicans legislators all over America are passing anti-abortion laws as quickly as they can -- because dealing with the real problems facing their constituents isn't as easy as strutting before the cameras! -- but the WHPA would stop states from outlawing abortion or enacting restrictions on abortion that wind up making abortions nearly impossible to get. Why? Because allowing the continued assaults on abortion rights in America will force women back into being valued as breeders, and nothing else. Anyway, don't want an abortion? Then don't get one. Strange that I have to explain that.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. One more time: the Equality Act would prevent landlords, banks, and employers from discriminating against gay and transgender folk merely on the basis of being gay or transgender. It would do so by adding gay and transgender folks to the protected classes in the Civil Rights Act, and the Civil Rights Act already has a broad exemption for religious freedom, so don't believe right-wingers when they tell you it's an "unprecedented assault on religious freedom," because it's not. Don't believe right-wingers when they say "well, we should do something about discrimination against gay and transgender folks," either, because they never tell you what that is, and because what we should do about discrimination is already in the Equality Act. If I sound like I have no patience with stupidity, that's because I have no patience with stupidity. So I won't get started about fever dreams of boys becoming girls just so they can dominate in field hockey.

Around the table: featuring the usual gang of tax avoiders, bad leaders, and empty suits.

I don't have much to say about the ProPublica report revealing tax evasion by famous high-income folk. We learn that Jeff Bezos paid zero dollars in income tax in 2007 and 2011, and that Warren Buffett, despite talking a good game about taxing the rich harder, hardly pays any income tax generally. Right-wingers will no doubt have a circle jerk over George Soros's tax-avoiding ways, though right-wingers talk about George Soros much, much more than we liberals ever do. And to those who'd say well, they pay themselves in property that doesn't get taxed until they sell it, what did you expect, we can only say that doesn't make it right. And, you know, imagining a better world is a worthwhile endeavor, even if it's hard.

We learn from Sharon Zhang at TruthOut that the nefarious Koch network and the nefarious Heritage Foundation have been influencing putative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, mainly by organizing his more right-wing constituents. We all breathed a sigh of relief when Republicans seemed unable to articulate a reason to oppose the American Rescue Plan, but that's apparently because they were organizing around influencing Mr. Manchin better than we were. Some liberals are starting to organize around influencing Mr. Manchin, as in yesterday's rally in D.C. supporting the For the People Act and the Common Cause effort to rally his constituents around same, and that's a good thing, because in America, having the better argument only takes you so far.

Republicans filibuster the Paycheck Fairness Act, and, as usual, their counterarguments are weak. I've given "frivolous lawsuits" so many headshots already I'm annoyed it's still coming, and you could also have predicted "a boon to trial lawyers," though it's telling that Mob Boss Mitch had to utter it, rather than farm it out to some eager young'un in his caucus. And "we've got three laws on the books, why do we need four?" is profoundly illogical; the number of laws doesn't matter so much as their quality, or, more specifically, how well they anticipate the ways corporations will try to work around them. Why don't they just admit that they'd rather have bosses fire workers for talking about their pay with their co-workers?

Siyanda Mohutsiwa at FAIR writes about the New York Times's reflexively grim coverage of COVID in Africa even though infection rates are actually fairly low there. We Westerners have, for decades, reflexively thought of African nations as "corrupt" and "miserable," perhaps even "ungovernable," and even when we assume 150 years of Western interference has made it so, we still fail to imagine Africans as the protagonists of their own nations -- in this case, we fail to imagine them as "epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists," "academics," or "journalists" -- and that failure is also pretty racist. Read the entire article, though, because I can't list all the persuasive (and damning!) arguments in one paragraph, and also because it'll lead you to Binyavanga Wainaina's "How to Write About Africa," one of the most devastating satires ever written.

Georgia's state Board of Education not only approves a measure aiming to restrict teaching of American racism in public schools, but shuts off comments on the live YouTube feed of the meeting in which they did that nefarious deed, and that sure ain't a good look. Right-wingers have been strutting about their "toughness" for decades, but can't even hear an opposing argument? Why can't such basic failures of leadership be a Democrat attack point? I mean, we just got a four-year seminar in Why Republicans Can't Lead, not too long after George W. Bush's double seminar in that same subject. Maybe Democratic politicians don't do that because they're evil. "Gosh, win an argument, instead of stand around while Republicans lose them? Then we'll have to do things with our power!"

Finally, as Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) declares her candidacy to oppose Sen. Marco Rubio in 2022, Mr. Rubio himself opines that "(n)one of them (i.e., Democratic politicians) will admit to being a socialist. She probably won’t. But she certainly has voted for socialist things." So, Sen. Rubio, ever driven a car on a road? Ever taken out a book from the public library? Ever called a cop? If your answer to any of these questions is "yes," then congratulations, Sen. Rubio! You're a socialist, too.

Action: concerning Social Security, social media, saving our Post Office, fuel efficiency standards, and pollution.

Long story short: tell President Biden to fire two Social Security Administrators, tell Facebook to permanently ban Donald Trump, tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy, tell our EPA to enact more vigorous fuel efficiency standards, and tell President Biden to block the proposed Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. You can call President Biden at 202.456.1111 or use the White House contact form, or use the email/petition/comment tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fire two Social Security Administrators Andrew Saul and David Black, and fix the Supplemental Security Income (or SSI) program. Messrs. Saul and Black have done their damnedest to set fire to as much of our Social Security programs as they can, making it unnecessarily harder to apply for SSI benefits and "forgetting" to send info to our IRS so seniors could get their stimulus checks. You'd also ask our President to increase benefits so they at least meet the federal poverty level -- contrary to what Rand Paul might thnk, $794 a month ain't inducing anyone to fake back pain -- and raise asset limits, which are stuck at 1989 levels. Among other things! Making programs work better and firing bad workers ain't "socialism." Actually, it's what we expect and deserve from our government.

Left Action helps you tell Facebook to make its ban of Donald Trump permanent. Yeah, Facebook extended his suspension for two years, but if you lose an election and then whine about it being "stolen" without any damn evidence and then incite an attempted coup at our Capitol, then Facebook can err on the side of caution and just wash its hands of Donald Trump. Folks who still think this is about "free speech" -- as if anyone's put him in jail for spewing his filth! -- need to remember that this is 2021, where virtually anyone can publish their rants, however good or bad, on the internet. Why, Donald Trump just started writing a blog not even a month ago! And then, not even a week ago, he stopped. So he certainly has little standing to complain about "free speech."

People for the American Way helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who tried to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump by gumming up the works at our Postal Service and is trying to raise prices and cut services as we speak. Of course, the news that our FBI is investigating him for illegal campaign finance is just icing on the cake -- and could this be the thing that finally spurs our USPS Board of Governors to move? I kid, of course -- the only thing that should spur them to move is our will, communicated vigorously. And we'll keep communicating it until we get the Post Office we deserve, again.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to overturn the notorious "clean car" "standards" issued by the Trump EPA, and then set more vigorous ones. Because saving money on gas and polluting less are actually very popular with the American people! You can only get them to go along with less fuel-efficient cars by lying to them ("it'll reduce car prices," as if you won't lose that sticker price discount over the years you're paying more for gas) or demoralizing them ("accept the results," "then win more elections," etc.). Neither of those is a lasting strategy for governing, or, indeed, for preserving and perfecting a civilization. So, yeah, let's fight that.

Finally, Presente helps you tell President Biden to halt construction on Enbridge's notorious Line 3 pipeline. As we speak, over a thousand activists have blocked further construction of Line 3, and they're calling attention not merely to Line 3's path through Ojibwe holy lands but to Enbridge's, ah, not-so-steller pipe safety record. Remember when an Enbridge line ruptured and created the biggest inland oil spill in American history? It was only a decade ago, and you can bet the good folks of Kalamazoo, MI remember, since that spill dumped oil into 40 square miles of the watershed there. President Biden can stop this pipeline, ignore the right-wing wailing about TEH JOBZ!!!! -- and then stop negotiating with Republicans so he can actually help create jobs. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Action: concerning endless war, public trans, government spying, corruption, voting rights, and polluter welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Iraq war AUMF, create zero-emission public trans, release COINTELPRO files to the public, and pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act, the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement 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 and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that "authorized" war with Iraq and which all subsequent Presidents have used to fight unconstitutional wars all over the world. I put "authorized" in quotation marks because only Congress can authorize war, and they have to go through the trouble to declare war, not "give the President power to fight wherever he pleases." This is one of the reasons we broke off from England, folks! And Presidents have been abusing the AUMF for over 18 years now. Which means this mistake's old enough to vote, and it's damn near old enough to drink! So let's kill it already.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you demand that Congress pass legislation creating a zero-emission public transportation system. Yeah, we keep telling our Congressfolk what we want from this jobs bill, but they keep ignoring us -- so perhaps we should change tactics and demonstrate that the people want public transportation that doesn't choke the world with pollution. It's not so much to ask, right? Right-wingers act like people who like electric buses are weak. Of course, they then go around whining endlessly about how everyone thinks they're racist, but that's beside the point. The point is, having a livable planet in 30 years isn't "weak." Even if a few oil and gas executives don't get to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Which is what right-wingers really favor, whether they'll admit it or not.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2998, which would release all of our FBI's COINTELPRO files to the general public. I guess this bill's opponents will argue "bygones!" and "look forward" and "saying any part of our past wasn't absolutely perfect is treason!" But COINTELPRO went after protestors and activists ranging from anti-war and civil rights organizers to the Ku Klux Klan. Hey, maybe that's how you get right-wingers to support H.R. 2998! I kid, of course -- today's racists know well enough to disavow any love for the Klan. And yet our most recent departed President's campaign slogan was a Klan slogan from the '70s! So, again, learn about the past, and we can make a more perfect union in the future.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2662, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. "IG" stands for "Inspector General," and you may recall, particularly during 2020, how much maneuvering that irredeemably corrupt President did just to avoid the scrutiny of Inspectors General, who spend all their time investigating waste and fraud and abuse of power. You may even remember that Mr. Trump had to be talked out of firing all of them at the beginning of his term! Well, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act would place more limits on a President's ability to fire IGs and allow IGs to subpoena folks who've left our government if they can shed light on wrongdoing. It's bad if all that stands between us and oblivion is an Inspector General. But, ah, it's a lot worse if they're not there, or if they're a Presidential lackey.

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. And Public Citizen helps you tell them to do both. I know, I know, One True Real and Great American President Joe Manchin has expressed a preference, but he ain't the boss of us. And, toward that end, Daily Kos helps you sign up and call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator to vote for the For the People Act. 79% of them support the For the People Act, after all! And if he's going to write 299 stupid paragraphs about why he won't, at least we can get his constituents to embarrass him.

Finally, both the Sierra Club and Food and Water Action help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. Our government shovels $15 billion annually toward oil and gas drilling corporations that don't need it; how would you feel about that if it were your money? Oh, right: it is your money. The bill would also prohibit federal funding (which is, again, your money) toward fossil fuel R&D and/or international fossil fuel projects. Solar and wind power aren't pie-in-the-sky technologies anymore -- walk around your neighborhood and count the roofs with solar panels if you're unconvinced. Also attend the ridiculous stories you hear about wind turbines; if wind really didn't work, wouldn't they just tell you that?

Around the table: machinations of evil, part 293.

I won't go into every disagreement I have with Sen. Manchin's explanation of why he'll vote against the For the People Act when it comes up, since my disagreements number approximately one per point made, but let's just focus on his statement that the For the People Act is a "partisan" bill. How do we know it's a "partisan" bill? Not from him describing any parts of it, that's for sure, because he doesn't! No, we "know" it's "partisan" because no Republicans support it, and for no other reason. Hasn't he figured out after 11 years that Republicans don't support anything that might actually help people? Here's the punchline, though: an actual bipartisan majority of voters support the For the People Act in poll after poll! (Also, the bill earns 79% support in Mr. Manchin's state, West Virginia. You'd think that'd matter to him.) Yes, it turns out that ending gerrymandering and disclosing big campaign contributors and prohibiting racist de-registrations (to name three more things in the For the People Act than Mr. Manchin did!) are all actual bipartisan concerns!. Lesson: the actual bipartisanship of the American people should matter more than the drama-infused "bipartisanship" of politicians.

Janine Jackson at FAIR notices the Washington Post putting up a "native" ad (i.e., an ad that sure looks like news!) about Amazon's support for a higher minimum wage, though Jeff Bezos owns both Amazon and the Post. This was just a few short hours after the Washington, D.C. Attorney General announced an antitrust suit against Amazon. Anyway, Jeff Bezos's support for the federal minimum wage doesn't emanate from the goodness of his heart -- it emanates from the activism of good folks wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR, and their number may have included you. There's another name for ads that look like news, as Ms. Jackson suggests: fake news. I know, a certain former President has abused that term, but it does refer to actual phenomena.

Ho hum, the Proud Boys are trying to take over the Multnomah (OR) Republican Party, and they sure do some dick-swinging in their emails. I remember my heart being this full of hate once, but you know what happened? Several decades passed, and I became a man and put away childish things. Then again, what grown man calls himself a "boy," let alone a "proud" one? (Also, how amazing is it that the Oregon Republican Party of Mark Hatfield, Tom McCall, and Vic Atiyeh has come to this?)

I should have realized that Arizona state Senate President Karen Fann, one of the biggest supporters of that ridiculous "audit" of Maricopa County votes, belongs to the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC), notorious pusher of right-wing legislative initiatives for over three decades -- but I didn't know she was actually their second highest-ranking board member! This is another good time to remind everyone that ALEC said it was getting out of the vote-suppression game after taking all that flack for all those Voter ID laws -- but clearly they didn't mean that.

Finally, Donald Trump has apparently warmed to the idea of running for a U.S. House seat in the hopes that Republicans will take back the House and he can then be Speaker, and thus third-in-line for the Presidency, but I find it extremely unlikely that he's only now thought of this -- I thought of it months ago, and I'm not a thug like he is. The district in which Mr. Trump currently lives is quite Democratic -- Rep. Frankel won by 18 points in 2020 -- but maybe Florida Republicans, who control all the branches of government, can "fix" that via redistricting. I kid, of course -- I'd be shocked if they didn't.

Action: concerning jobs, voting rights, net neutrality, the filibuster, arms sales to Israel, and vaccine waivers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Biden/Manchin capitulation on the American Jobs Plan, tell PA state legislators to reject another absurd election "audit," tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules, tell President Biden to support ending the Senate filibuster, tell our government to stop funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and tell President Biden to support COVID vaccine waivers at the WTO. 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 and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

In light of the Senate parliamentarian's ruling that Democrats can use reconciliation once more this year, not twice, and Joe Biden's utter capitulation to Republicans on corporate taxes, and Joe Manchin's announcement that he won't support a jobs bill done through reconciliation, and general Democratic "anxiety" about raising taxes, it's time, once again, to call your Congressfolk and make demands for a real jobs plan. These demands would include: a 55% corporate tax bracket on profits over $1 million, the creation of a public broadband network, the creation of public electricity utilities that run entirely on renewable energy, and every last lead pipe and tottering bridge and broken road in America fixed. Seriously, we must not be held hostage to "the best they could do." Democrats deserve to lose their majorities after this debacle, but I suppose there's time to change their minds, if we do it loudly enough. But we'd better step up, because we're not going to have a country anymore if we don't.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to reject any effort at a 2020 election "audit," particularly one spurred by Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-33). It's not enough to say "you want another stupid "audit" by people who can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground?" It's not even enough to say "You lost! Get over it! Accept the results!" It's not even enough to point out that Sen. Mastriano was there on January 6. No, these "audits" are part of an attempted coup by Donald Trump, who swears he'll be "reinstated" as President in or around August. So you can go ahead and tell your PA legislators they will be accessories to this attempted coup if they allow this "audit" to happen. Only weak people think Donald Trump won that election. And weak people shouldn't get all the damn say about every damn thing.

In the wake of the news that nearly four out of every five comments filed on our FCC's net neutrality repeal in 2017 were faked by big telecom corporations, Daily Kos helps you tell our FCC to reverse said repeal and reinstate the 2016 Open Internet Order that made net neutrality the law of the land. Net neutrality, as you know, forces internet service providing corporations to serve up all files with the same urgency, which means you, not some corporation, get to determine what your internet experience is like. We don't have a fifth FCC Commissioner yet, and that doesn't help us get net neutrality back, but if we establish our will now, our FCC will have a harder time defying it later.

Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to support ending the filibuster. Earlier he said he'd support making Senators work a lot harder for it, and that's far from worthless, but our Senators pooh-poohed that, since it involved doing actual work for your obstruction, so it's time for President Biden to put the squeeze on them. Maybe he thinks calling out Sens. Manchin and Sinema while commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre was squeeze enough -- and, again, that was no small thing -- but they didn't seem to get the message. And if they won't listen to him, we should make them pay the price of not listening to us.

Both Freedom Forward and Daily Kos help you tell your government to stop funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can get bogged down in all the who-started-it if you like, but you cannot deny these two things: 1) Israel has way, way, way more firepower than Palestine and with great firepower comes great responsibility, and 2) all those nations that supposedly want Israel "wiped off the map" or whatever ain't exactly rushing to Palestine's aid. We don't need to give Israel any more weapons; they seem to have plenty of ability to defend themselves - and do indefensible things to others. It's not for nothing that I hear, unprompted, from co-workers, that Israel is becoming what they most hate.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to follow through on his support for a World Trade Organization (or WTO)-sanctioned COVID-19 vaccine waiver, which (contrary to the absurd proclamations of big pharma corporations) would help more folks all over the world get the vaccines they need. Don't get complacent about the dropping infection and death numbers in the United States (which are still only a little lower than they were this time last year!), because the rest of the world needs help, too, and every day we prioritize intellectual property rights over human life, not only do people die, but the COVID virus gets a little more time to mutate into something that'll bite us in the ass again. Once again, the compassionate is also the pragmatic.

Around the table: the harder they come.

Good news, everyone! our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) has enacted a rule outlawing the inclined baby sleepers that have killed at least 50 babies. That we know of, that is! These sleepers defy American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations for baby sleepers (i.e., that babies should sleep on a firm, flat, stable surface without restraints or soft bedding), though I suppose if Donald Trump had gotten wind of it, and saw an advantage, he'd be doing to the AAP what he's trying to do to Dr. Fauci. Anyway, if you agitated against the proliferation of inclined sleepers, you deserve a big fat Buffalo chicken cheese steak, or whatever it is you give yourself after a job well done.

What's "The Secret Behind Amazon's Domination in Cloud Computing" per Politico? Amazon hires former government officials to show them the ropes, that's how, which (as we remember from healthcare.gov's bumpy rollout) has more to do with how you fill out forms than how good your product is. So, for one thing, that's not very bootstrappy of Amazon, is it? And, for another, maybe we could imagine a much better world of cloud computing except that monopolists like Amazon game the system and impose their will on the rest of us. Anyway, add this to the reasons we try to stop the revolving door between government and industry.

Ho hum, NYC police seemed far more eager to crack down on protestors than to crack down on looters, and if you stand ready to say well, that makes sense, looters are dangerous, try and remember that being a police officer is supposed to be dangerous -- if you're working for the police and expect every day to be donuts and coffee, you're more than a bit deluded -- and think a bit more carefully about the politics of letting looters run relatively rampant. I mean, if they put down looting, where would Fox News get all its footage? Certainly you'll want to fully confront the notion that protestors are actually more dangerous -- to powerful people -- than actual criminals.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name, says he's still undecided on whether he'll run for a third term in 2022 -- but also says he's "more panicked today" about the state of the nation than he was when he first ran in 2010. Uh, that means he's running, folks. He has until June 1 to file -- and what a shame we couldn't get that info from the Journal Sentinel! It does seem newsworthy! Instead, we got another list of things Ron Johnson is wrong about; I guess I shouldn't be too mad about that, since it's a pretty long list, and thus a decent reference.

Our FBI is investigating Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for campaign finance associations. If Donald Trump were still blogging, I guess he'd squeal TEH WITCH HUNTZ!!!!!, but setting the aside the profound insult to those who died at Salem, one must ask oneself whether maybe our government is investigating Mr. DeJoy because his actions merit it. In other words, maybe our government's working for us, for once! And if this is the thing that finally gets that one fellow on our USPS Board of Governors to cut bait on Mr. DeJoy, well, who am I to complain?

Upon hearing that Israeli finally-soon-to-be-ex-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fears that his "overthrow()" "will cause a collapse of the global right-wing," all I can say is we can only hope! But, in my experience, right-wingers always find someone worse -- plenty of sympathetic folks think that, in soon-to-be-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, they already have. And really, right-wingers will be strong everywhere for as long as we liberals let them walk all over us. I think there's a solution in there, somewhere.

Action: concerning abortion, protecting wildlife, the Estate Tax, polluter welfare, government spying, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to reject anti-abortion bills, and tell your Congressfolk to pass wildlife corridor legislation, the For the 99.5% 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 (or state legislators') phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state legislators to reject the noxious anti-abortion bills HB 904, HB 1500, and HB 118. HB 904 is one of them-there "fetal heartbeat" bills which are essentially backdoor abortion bans, HB 1500 bans abortion after a Downs Syndrome diagnosis which will only prevent the diagnosis from being made in the first place, and HB 118 would require women who have miscarriages to fill out death certificates and pay to cremate their remains, which is straight-up cruel to grieving women who most certainly didn't "fake" a miscarriage just to have an abortion. Seriously, that last item goes into the pile with "border crisis" and "crime wave" as things that are just bullshit. Anyway, abortion is a right, and one that most Pennsylvanians support, so maybe preening before the extreme right isn't what we pay legislators to do.

Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to introduce and pass legislation creating more wildlife corridors, or overpasses above highways that prevent senseless wildlife deaths. I guess right-wingers will try to make "wildlife corridor" a cuss phrase, like they did with "secular humanism" back in the day and "chain migration" a couple of years ago, but there's no good reason for that. And wildlife corridors don't just save animal lives, they also save human lives, because we have fewer car collisions when animals get their own lane reconnecting their habitats. How about that: what benefits them also benefits us, plus it creates jobs for the folks who build the corridors. Makes you wonder about big-development-über-alles, doesn't it?

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2576/S. 994, the For the 99.5 Percent Act. The For the 99.5% Act would hike Estate Taxes on the wealthy when they die, and when I say "the wealthy" I mean "maybe two out of every thousand Americans," i.e., almost certainly not you or I or almost anyone you know. Do you have less than $3.5 million to your name? Then you will not get hit with the Estate Tax. And don't believe the tall tales about how the Estate Tax ruins family farms, either! Not even when they come from the Governor of South Dakota.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. Because big oil and gas drilling operations don't need the money, that's why! Gas is the last cheap fossil fuel, and will probably persist as an industry for at least another generation despite its polluting effects, and oil corporations have made $2 trillion in profits over the last 30 years, so they don't need the money, certainly not more so than the more nascent renewable energy technologies. Certainly don't believe the hype that "oil corporations only make 12 cents a gallon" or whatever -- it's like saying CEOs are underpaid because they only make $3 every time they draw breath. Which is stupid.

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. What if we polled good Americans on the question "do you want law enforcement to get your private data when you haven't committed a crime?" I bet most Americans say hell no! to that! Well, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would prevent private data-collection corporations from selling your data to law enforcement willy-nilly; law enforcement should have to get a warrant if they suspect you of a crime. And yes, our Fourth Amendment is supposed to guarantee that they have to do that, but our "law and order" politicians have been chipping away at that right for years. So let's make them stop.

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. I was just talking about polling, wasn't I? Well, actual polls have found, for three decades, that most Americans want Medicare to cover everyone in America! And these polls come from big corporations that you would think would have a vested interest in extracting exactly the opposite result! So I think we can trust their reading of the popular will in this instance. It's true that support falls when you start asking about how we'll pay for it. But ask folks if they support Medicare-for-All if we pay for it by capturing the money corporations already pay private insurers and converting that money into an employer-side payroll tax, and I bet support stays the same.

Around the table: the politicians deserve defeat! And other truisms.

Lake Highlands High School (TX) valedictorian replaces her school-approved graduation speech with one slamming Texas's new anti-abortion law. And Paxton Smith thus reminds us that the only alternative to legal abortion is the state turning women into breeders. Her immediate future, unfortunately, consists of death threats from cowards who can't do anything about the problems in their own lives, brainless mockery from right-wing punditoids, and a conspicuous silence from people who should know better. If she asked me for advice, I'd say she should just remember that her opponents are wrong, and that they will prove their wrong with their words and deeds. It's not always easy to remember, but it can be quite sustaining in times of doubt.

Alice Speri at The Intercept describes how Charlotte, NC police trapped peaceful protestors and then tear-gassed them during the George Floyd protests a year ago. Oh, and if you tried to break through the trap, you got the pepper bullet treatment, and if you stayed put, you also got the pepper bullet treatment. Apparently they call this "kettling," "corralling," or "bottlenecking," and my guess is nobody saw reports about this on Fox News -- not when they Fox can just show the same footage of the same violence over and over again without any context and without even having anything to do with whatever perceived outrage the Fox News prettyheads are screaming about that day.

Gov. Steve Sisolak (D-NV) says he'll sign a "public option" health care bill, but the bill in question, SB 420, doesn't really offer good Nevadans a "public" health care option so much as it offers yet another layer of privatized health care that'll supposedly offer comparable plans for a little less money, and that sure as hell ain't getting us any closer to Medicare for All. My 30-years-younger self might have said that at least the politicians know what people really want and are at least selling their swill accordingly, but really, there's more to the world than just words.

When I hear that folks watching the "audit" of Maricopa County (AZ) ballots find that the folks doing the audit are doing a lot of things wrong, all I can say is of course they are, because the whole point of this clown car "audit" is to come up with a different result than the state did -- a result the state came up with three times, I feel compelled to add -- so that Republicans can say AHA!, and the easiest way to come up with a different result is to screw up. And since most folks won't easily parse all the inside-baseball about blue pens and ballot security, they could get away with it, just as they've been getting away with deliberately crashing-and-burning our government so they can then say see? Government doesn't work!

Ho hum, now Rep. John Katko (R-NY) wants $50 billion more in assistance for restaurants after voting against the restaurant assistance offered by the American Rescue Plan. My guess is he'll find a reason not to vote for that, too. Those nasty Democrats wouldn't talk to us, he'll say again, in a world where no one should be talking to Republicans. Actually, his list of excuses for not voting for the American Rescue Plan (I count five in this article) is pretty wide-ranging, making it more likely he's just full of soup. I don't care if he's supposedly one of the "good ones" -- for his hypocrisy, he deserves defeat.

Finally, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) says she still doesn't support filibuster reform or repeal, opining thusly: "The reality is that when you have a system that is not working effectively — and I would think that most would agree that the Senate is not a particularly well-oiled machine, right? The way to fix that is to fix your behavior, not to eliminate the rules or change the rules, but to change the behavior." Actually, that's utter horsedoodle. When you have a "system" that doesn't work, you change the system -- you certainly don't keep haranguing the workers who have to work within the system about their "behavior." Only bad bosses do that, which makes me wonder how her staff feels about working for her. Besides which, all the "behavior" that actually does need changing comes from Republicans, and you just know she didn't mean they had to change their behavior.

Action: concerning privacy, transparency, and pollution.

Long story short: keep Amazon from connecting your smart devices to a larger network, tell our SEC to mandate more transparency for shareholders, tell New York state legislators to ban facial recognition technology, tell our EPA to enact vigorous clean car standards, tell insurance corporations to cut ties with coal, and tell federal regulators to keep corporations from siphoning public water. The following paragraphs contain email/petition tools for each of these alerts. Good hunting!

First things first: The Guardian reports that Amazon customers have less than a week now to opt out of its plan to turn all the "smart" devices in your house into a giant "mesh network" called Amazon Sidewalk, which, as you might imagine, would raise significant privacy and spying concerns. Maybe you don't want your Alexa to be on the same network as your neighbor's Ring, amirite? Per the article, if you have an Alexa or Ring app, you need to disable Sidewalk in that app's settings, but you only have until June 8 (that's this coming Tuesday) to do so, so you might as well get to it.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to tell corporations to be honest with their shareholders, especially in re its actions (or lack thereof) on climate change and workers' rights. Shareholders care about that stuff, after all, and how do I know? Because if you have a pension plan through your employer, you may well be a shareholder! And you have opinions on how you want your money invested. I mean, not everyone's all "just make me the most money"; even those of us who fear poverty in our old age still don't want to destroy the planet or hurt people just to avoid it. And our SEC does work for shareholders, who are also taxpayers, so let's tell them to do the right thing.

Sum of Us helps you tell New York state legislators to ban facial recognition technology there. Because it's bad at its job and can't tell Black people apart any more than your Trumphole uncle can -- and also the state of New York has nearly 20 million residents, making it the third most-populous state after California and Texas, so if New York bans it, facial recognition corporations will have a tougher time working around it, and thus you'll see less of it elsewhere as well. Which is a good thing! The last thing you want in your life is to be hauled away to jail because some POS software thinks you committed a crime. Just ask Nijeer Parks.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous clean car standards possible. The Obama EPA enacted fairly strong standards that helped good Americans spend less on gas and pollute less, but the Trump EPA couldn't wait to undo them, because Obama. Now the Biden EPA gets its chance to undo the Trump EPA's actions, but they'll still need to hear from us, in numbers that can't be denied. I mean that: government agencies can't simply ignore public comments, and where they defy the public, they have to come up with good reasons, lest they get smacked down in court. Hey, it happened routinely to the Trump Administration.

Public Citizen helps you tell big insurance corporations like Lloyds of London, AIG, and Tokio Marine to stop insuring and investing in coal plants. Two dozen other big insurance corporations have washed their hands of coal recently, and for good reason: why insure an industry that's dying, that is actually more expensive, over the life of their plants, than solar and wind are now? I guess Lloyds et al think energy's more reliable if you can churn the ground to get it -- like they've never heard of, you know, battery storage! That means we got to bring out the Big Stick of Bad PR, which makes all corporations run in fear. (Of course, we have to keep wielding it, or they'll come out of hiding and do the wrong thing again.)

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to stop BlueTriton from siphoning water out of the San Bernardino National Forest in California. Since California is in a drought, as it often is in summertime, and drought doesn't just mean thirst and agricultural hell, but also wildfires all over the state -- so letting private corporations take water that belongs to the people isn't the smartest idea, is it? Just so happens BlueTriton -- apparently aspiring to be the "new Nestlé," in Sum of Us's words -- has already ignored water regulators' efforts to stop them. It's like they don't understand that those regulators work for us. Thus it's time to flex our power.

Around the table: concerning right-wingers and how to convert them.

Since our "liberal" media organs don't seem to know what to do when right-wingers practice cancel culture on folks like AP reporter-for-12-minutes Emily Wilder, Dan Froomkin at Salon provides a helpful form letter these news organs can use when confronted by such campaigns. Money paragraph: "When (reporters) join our organization, we make it very clear that they need to adhere to the highest professional standards in journalism. That doesn't mean renouncing their opinions, or never having had any. It means not allowing their opinions to get in the way of fairly gathering, assessing and presenting facts." That doesn't seem hard to understand, but then right-wingers have, for decades, squealed TEH BIASEZ!!!!! whenever a media report disagrees with their strongly-held opinions. Time we stop giving such opinions legitimacy, maybe?

Rebecca Watson at Skepchick tells us about a(nother) study finding it's actually not terribly helpful to directly debunk the obvious rubbish you see on Twitter -- and, in fact, folks who've passed on such rubbish tended to double down on it in the 24 hours immediately thereafter. But Ms. Watson reminds us that "this is only an immediate reaction to correction" that "doesn’t account for the possibility that (the debunking) planted a seed in those subjects’ minds." Toward that end, I'm reminded of this account from an ex-right-winger about how she changed her mind, an article that suggested (among other things) that we tend to change our worldview out of everyone's sight, that conversations we overhear will more likely change us than the pitched battles we're in, and that we more likely change after conversations we have with people who are more or less like us, which in turn suggests that former right-wingers are the best candidates to reach current ones.

The Project on Government Oversight presents "The F-35 in Two Minutes." OK, with intro and outro it's actually two minutes, 37 seconds, but it's still a terrific summary of a "the most expensive weapons program in history," one that's hemorrhaged taxpayer money (which is to say your money) for two decades. Long story short: the F-35 is a fighter jet that can't fight and can't fly, which means, at the very least, that we could have spent that money on something that actually can fight and can fly. How do the fiscal hawks in Congress allow this to continue? I kid, of course -- the "fiscal hawks" only care about the "expense" of programs that actually help good Americans, and then they make up hysterical arguments about "national security" if we don't keep throwing money away on things like the F-35.

In a related note, William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut reminds us, in re yet debt limit threat, that Republicans only care about the debt limit, and debt generally, when a Democrat's President. If you're thinking "this can't work again" -- a reasonable thought, if the debt limit battles of 2011 and 2013 are as fresh in your mind as they are in mine -- consider that every time Republicans foment drama and chaos and Democrats try to reason with them, Republicans win, as in they win the House (in 2010), the Senate (in 2014) and the Presidency (in 2016). I hope President Biden has figured out the same thing, especially considering he had a front-row seat to all of it. If not, we'll just have to remind him.

Look out, midterm wave-riders: Democrat Melanie Stansbury buries her Republican opponent in New Mexico's 1st House district special by over 24 points, larger than now-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland's margins in both 2018 and 2020, and the second-largest margin of victory since Democrats started routinely winning this seat in 2008. (Before that, Republicans had won this seat for 40 years. Things sure have changed.) Note well that Ms. Stansbury supports Medicare-for-All health insurance and the $15/hour minimum wage, when there's not exactly a shortage of Democratic consultants who would have told her to take the opposite position on both those issues so she could "better protect herself against right-wing attacks," attacks that would always come even if Jesus H. Christ himself were the nominee.

Finally, Donald Trump appears to have ended his experiment with blogging, which sure seems premature to me -- I thought his natterings were starting to get him back into the news, where he obviously hungers to be, and I thought reports of his "low" metrics (I should have such "low" metrics!) were largely meaningless. I guess he didn't think those reports were that meaningless, though, or he'd still be spewing his spew.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, defense spending, gouging of prisoners, drug policy, discrimination, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your state legislatures and redistricting commissions to cut out all the partisan gerrymandering, and tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending and to pass the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, the MORE Act, the Equality 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 Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Common Cause and Demand Progress help you tell your state officials to reject any and all partisan gerrymandering this term. Are state legislators and redistricting commissioners used to this sort of attention? No, they are not! Many of them will no doubt profess to a complete and utter surprise that so many of their constituents care about this! At which point they'll think they've put us off our guard and then go back to doing whatever nefarious works they planned to do anyway. Which is why we'll stay on them. Gerrymandering is the last refuge of politicians who can't win arguments on the merits, and why should they continue to win when they haven't earned it?

Both Daily Kos and Win Without War tell our Congressfolk to cut defense spending already. Because we are number one in military spending on Earth, and we spend more than numbers two through twelve combined. And has that made us more secure? Apparently not, since we still go bananas about nonexistent "border crises" and "crime waves." Yet President Biden, apparently having forgotten that right-wing media gave Barack Obama precisely zero plaudits for increasing defense spending, has just asked for $13 billion more than even Donald Trump got last year. I mean, you want to do better than Trump, but not in that way, certainly not when we have so, so many other needs as a nation.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which would prevent big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners and their families when they try to make phone calls. See, this is simple: there's rehabilitating prisoners, there's punishing prisoners, and then there's gouging prisoners, and why should a civilized nation tolerate the last item? Particularly since making it prohibitively difficult to pay for contact with loved ones makes rehabilitation a lot harder? Prisoners need to talk to their loved ones while they're paying for their crimes, and it's not "coddling" to, you know, not gouge them. Some kid at some big telecom corporation came up with the idea of overcharging prisoners and their families, and probably even called it a "captive market," ha ha ha snort. I wonder how he'll do at the Pearly Gates.

Both the Drug Policy Alliance and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, which would take pot off Schedule I (where it's never belonged), invest in communities most harmed by the "war on drugs" (which was always putting down protestors and Black folks), and expunge pot convictions from a lot of folks' criminal records (pot convictions help prevent them from getting jobs, and therefore puts them back on track to commit crimes to make ends meet). Why did we fall for things like Reefer Madness again? Because the cotton industry didn't want hemp as a competitor, basically. Think of all the pain we've caused because one group wanted to keep their advantages unfairly; it doesn't reflect well on us. Ending that pain does reflect well on us, though, so let's do that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The Equality Act, contrary to what you've heard from right-wingers, would add gay and transgender folk to the protected classes in the Civil Rights Act. Also contrary to what you've heard from right-wingers, the Civil Rights Act already has a fairly broad exemption for religious organizations, so there is literally no truth to all the right-wing whining about how the Equality Act is TEH BIGGESTZEZ INJURIEZ TO TEH RELIGUZ FREEDUMZ EVAHZ!!!!! No, the bill is mainly about preventing banks, doctors, and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folks. Most people are actually against that sort of discrimination now. (And if you're about to whine about transgender boys playing girls' sports, read almost any of my other paragraphs about this topic. I don't reinvent the wheel for anyone's amusement.)

Finally, 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. Hey, weren't we just talking about gerrymandering? The For the People Act would fix that (among other things) by making states use redistricting commissions, rather than self-interested legislators. And the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew out of the Voting Rights Act with Shelby County v. Holder -- and make it better! Republicans in the Senate won't vote for any of that, etc., but it's still our duty to communicate our will -- and to communicate that our will hasn't changed.

Around the table: why Republicans suck and why Democrats lose, part 328.

When I hear that a not-insignificant number of Americans aren't getting a COVID vaccine because they're afraid they'll get a surprise bill for it -- even though Congress has actually passed legislation making the vaccines free and few folks have reported getting such bills -- my first thought is why haven't Republicans exploited this fear? I mean, it's one of the more reasonable fears one encounters when trying to get wary folks vaccinated. But the question may answer itself: Republican politicians are a lot more comfortable exploiting completely absurd fears.

Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) mulls enacting a rule (authorized by the Dodd-Frank Act, so why has it taken so long?) that would give banking customers more access to their own financial data -- which could help those customers migrate to smaller, more local banks. Where they still exist, that is, though you've probably got some credit unions near you and their membership requirements probably aren't as onerous as you've heard. Naturally a poll finds that 75% of Americans would support a rule that'd make "switch(ing) between banks and other financial institutions" easier, which of course they do if you put it that way. So why don't Democratic politicians generally put it that way? We know it's not because they're stupid.

When I hear that rural Californians still await access to clean water after almost a decade of promises from the state, all I can say is that this is the reason Republicans continue to win in rural areas. They won't build out clean water infrastructure up better than Democrats do, obviously -- in fact, I'd say it's not at all going out on a limb to say they'll do it much worse -- but at least Republicans offer rage and fear, which always gives them the advantage whenever Democrats offer nothing, which is, sadly, all too often.

Former National Security Advisor/admitted felon Michael Flynn says America should have a coup just like Myanmar did. And you can see why: Myanmar's military is a bunch of diaper-loaded brats with guns, and they deposed the just-democratically-elected government there after claiming "election fraud" with no evidence whatsoever; why, I bet Mr. Flynn's Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump watched that unfold with considerable jealousy. Anyway, Mr. Flynn tried to walk it back in truly comic fashion -- well, it would be comic if I found irredeemable assholes funny.

Speaking of which, a Nashville hat shop has been offering a Star-of-David patch that says "not vaccinated" on it, and all I can say is waaaaaaaaaah. Being persuaded to get a vaccine, or being shamed into getting a vaccine, is nothing like having your home and business burned down, being banned from entire towns, being herded into concentration camps, being executed via gas chamber, or being turned into soap. How disgusting, that I still have to explain that to anyone.

Finally, when I hear that almost two out of every three Americans don't want Donald Trump to run for President in 2024, I feel the need to caution everyone that this means more than one out of every three Americans does, even after all the drama and incompetence he put on display for four years, and that it's far too easy to imagine at least one in eight Americans "holding their nose" and voting for him again, even though they're all perfectly capable of sending a message to their party to fucking do better. So let's file that under "Don't Get Complacent."

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, unemployment, our Post Office, immigration, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to divert the Child Tax Credit expansion to fund the American Jobs Plan and to prevent state Governors from prematurely ending extended unemployment benefits, tell our Post Office to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's plan to cut services and raise prices, tell President Biden to end yet another racist Trump-era immigration practice, and tell Senate Democrats, again, to end the filibuster. 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!

You know the latest Republican "counter-proposal" on the American Jobs Plan aims to repurpose unspent American Rescue Plan money -- but what you may not have realized is that "including unspent funds from the American Rescue Plan in the American Jobs Plan would repeal the Child Tax Credit Expansion that delivers $250 or $300 checks to working families every month for the next year. The fact they even proposed that shows how tone-deaf they are -- and how much confidence they have that it'll ultimately mean nothing in 2022. They might be right about 2022; these are Democrats we're talking about, after all, the same ones who are strangely not bringing up Republican involvement in January 6 every single day. So, yeah, repealing the CTC expansion should be an easy campaign ad for Democrats -- just show one hand passing a $250 check to another hand twelve times, and then show a Republican politician intercepting them all -- but, again, these are Democrats we're talking about. Which is why we need to get on the phone with our Reps and Senators and tell them no to repealing the CTC expansion. If Democrats allow that to happen, they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. And the American democratic experiment will likely be dead at that point.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop Governors in nearly half of American states from ending expanded unemployment benefits prematurely. Those expanded benefits expire at the end of September anyway; what's the hurry? Especially considering we still have over 6% official unemployment (the more telling U6 figure, which counts folks who've given up looking for work and folks who want to work more hours, stands at 9.9%)? The "hurry" is that Republican politicians want to look like they're "doing something," and as we should know from decades of watching this happen, politicians who look like they're "doing something," even something abominable, always have the political advantage. This is why we constantly tell Democrats to actually do something. Will they listen? If enough of us speak out, they'll have to.

Progress America helps you tell our Postal Regulatory Commission to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's proposal to raise prices and cut services. I keep putting it like that because it should be obvious what a bad idea that is. Do you remember being dissatisfied with our Post Office's performance before the pandemic? I don't, and I used it all the time! They did extremely well considering all the pressure our government puts on them -- taxes haven't funded our Post Office since the early '80s, and our laws mandate that our Post Office prefund its employee benefit plans over 80 years in advance, which no other entity has to do. But, sure, let's believe the Trumphole who came in and said he had to "get tough." "We have to raise prices and cut services"? How un-American is that?

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to end the Trump-era policy that used COVID as a pretext to expel asylum seekers without due process. "Always the wrong solution for the wrong reason" should have been Donald Trump's campaign slogan. Why is it wrong to kick asylum seekers out because they might have COVID? Because you can treat COVID, that's why! At least, you can if you have the slightest amount of competence; of course, when Mike "Let's Start an HIV Mini-epidemic in Rural Indiana Counties" Pence as your COVID policy leader, you don't have competence. It's also wrong because if someone really has COVID, you're sending them back to a country that probably can't treat COVID as well as we can, where they'll infect a lot more of their fellow citizens -- which also makes it more likely COVID will survive and mutate into versions that'll infect us again. Of course, for Stephen Miller, all that was probably a feature, not a bug. But if racism and bad leadership makes all your policy for you, then you're doing policy wrong.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Democratic Senators, once again, to end the Senate filibuster. Because they say it actually impedes bipartisanship, and they're right! Back when the Senate filibuster wasn't so easily invoked -- Senators used to have to talk for 48 or 72 hours to stop a bill, but now Senators just say they're not going to end debate, and then they go off to dinner or the theater or wherever, which actually ends debate! -- Senators would more likely support bills, knowing that'd give them a chance to shape it more like they wanted it. Now Senators filibuster bills that require campaign finance disclosure and prevent big corporations from taking tax breaks after they outsource jobs. You'd think, given how popular both those things are, Senators would risk losing elections doing that. But they don't, because the filibuster is too painless and too easy to use, so much so that Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) won't consider ending it even though his friends on the other side of the aisle just humiliated him by filibustering the January 6 commission bill. But that's why we remind them of our will.

Around the table: private corporations hunting citizens, and other horrors.

Tens of thousands of good Brazilians take to the streets to protest President Bolsonaro's continuing inability/unwillingness to handle the COVID pandemic and to demand his removal from office. I sure wish we'd done that in America -- and given that protesting in America can get you ridiculed but protesting in Brazil can get you shot, I applaud the courage of good Brazilians, and wish them the best in getting that irredeemable asshole out of office. (People say I'm not kind to call him that. Believe me, I am kind to call him that.)

From the "Dystopia Is Here" file: Joseph Cox and Jason Roebler at Vice describe how the creator of an app called Citizen -- which purports to alert its users to crimes in progress, thus "enabling" them to stop them -- stalked an innocent man all night, purportedly for arson, even putting a five-digit bounty on him. Citizen sounds like Nextdoor on meth -- one former employee calls it an "anxiety sweatshop" -- and hopefully you can see how Citizen employees working undercover in major cities can turn into a corporation's private dictatorship. Which, I maintain, would be even worse than a government dictatorship, particularly since it would have the volunteer "assistance" of large numbers of folks who think every suspect is a perp and every perp must be Black.

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo tells the story of a man detained at a private prison, in solitary confinement, for almost a year, without having his day in court, until the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals finally set him free. He must have been some kind of super-villain, right? You already know the answer to that, I trust: police originally arrested him on "marijuana-related charges." And we all know that in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, the real super-villains always get off scot-free. Sometimes they even get elected President.

Not too many years ago, my great-uncle asked why colleges charged so much; I responded, "because they can." But Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns, and Money gives us a much more exhaustive explanation. Preceded, of course, with a refutation of all the wrong reasons: that public investment in colleges has gone down (it hasn't), that faculty salaries have gone up dramatically (that is to laugh), that the monetary "value" of a college degree has gone up dramatically (that is also to laugh). Which mainly leaves, you guessed it, administrative expenses, which not only include more (and more highly-paid) administrators, but an administrator "class" that moves around from college to college and mainly concerns itself with, you guessed it, making more money. I'm old enough to remember when an education had intrinsic value.

Right-wing garbage merchants claim that Moderna's COVID vaccine has a "secret ingredient," and then try to "prove" their assertion with a safety data sheet that describes the ill effects of chloroform, not the "secret ingredient" in question. It's a little like trying to prove eating beef is dangerous by describing all the ill effects of eating cow dung. And if you decided that this wasn't a mistake but malicious evil -- that there is no way someone promotes this garbage by accident -- well, how could I blame you?

Tierney Sneed at Talking Points Memo catalogues, at great expense to her well-being I would think, the right-wing's mania for election "audits" they all think will return Donald Trump to office. What part of "accept the results" and "get over it" did they not hear? And note well that when even the most sympathetic auditors don't deliver the results right-wingers want, right-wingers just turn on them. Remember when Rush Limbaugh used to say liberalism was easy? He was wrong about that, too: being a right-winger is easy, because you never need to accept something you don't want to.