Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning voting rights, clean water, saving our Post Office, pollution, corruption, and bad nominations.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, remove all lead water pipes in America, pass the Postal Service Reform Act, bring back the "Polluter Pays" tax, pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, and reject Rahm Emanuel's nomination as Ambassador to Japan. 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.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Our House passed H.R. 4 last week; now our Senate needs to follow suit, so that the Voting Rights Act can have some teeth again, after our Supreme Court knocked them out in Shelby County v. Holder. Our Court ruled, in that case, that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states in its pre-clearance formula (solely because more Black folks vote now than they did before the law, a line of reasoning the late Justice Ginsberg likened to throwing out your umbrella merely because it's stopped raining). Our Court also ruled that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass their muster; hence H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of vote suppression to submit its voting law changes for Justice Department pre-clearance. Republicans will argue we don't need it, but the evidence of your own eyes will say otherwise.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to replace all lead water pipes in America. Just so happens the budget reconciliation blueprint passed by both House and Senate this month could do just that! And that's what we should demand from our Congressfolk -- the removal of all lead pipes. LCV estimates that $45 billion would get it done, and that's, frankly, not much higher than other bills (most famously the WATER Act) have aimed to allot. And when "moderate" Democrats come at you with "we're afraid to tax corporations more due to international competitiveness," you can come right back with so we should tolerate brain damage from lead pipes anywhere in America? Because that is what these irredeemable weaklings really stand for. And it's about time all Americans understood this dark calculus.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. The Postal Service Reform Act would address the real cause of our Postal Service's recent financial troubles -- namely, the mandate to pre-fund retirement benefits for the next 85 years, like literally no other entity, governmental or corporate, has to do. If you had to pre-fund 85 years of retirement funds, hopefully you wouldn't go around wondering why your pockets are empty all the time. Get rid of that absurd mandate, and most of our Postal Service's financial problems will fix themselves, and we won't have to cut services or hike prices (as Postmaster General DeJoy would do) or close Post Offices (as Congressfolk occasionally propose). Why should only stupid ideas get implemented in America?

US PIRG helps you tell your House Reps to reinstate the "polluter pays" tax, so that big polluting corporations have to pay to clean up their messes. You'll recognize the principle, no doubt, from childhood discussions/arguments with your parents: you make the mess, you clean it up. We all accept that as axiomatic these days, yet we don't make corporations pay to clean up their messes, even though their messes are bigger than any pile of dirty clothes you ever left sitting around. We don't make them clean up their messes, I guess, because of "international competitiveness," but seriously, we should tolerate pollution just so a corporation can "compete"? If that's the price of competition, give me cooperation. And maybe these corporations should talk to your mother about cleaning up their messes. If they're lucky, she won't be holding her wooden spoon.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. The Ban Conflicted Trading Act would prevent Congressfolk from trading in stocks and securities while they're in office. Because doing such a thing would be a conflict of interest the minute you did it, given that you'll likely be voting on issues that would affect your trading, whether you sat on a finance-related Congressional committee or not. Really, that is the standard to which we should hold ourselves -- even the stink of corruption should send us running in the other direction. Some people argue against passing such laws because they're "common sense." In doing so, they ignore the mountains of evidence that trading corrupts politicians, but they also miss the point -- laws like this wouldn't "insult common sense" so much as fight malice.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Rahm Emanuel to be Ambassador to Japan. What is this, a "lifetime achievement" award? If so, Mr. Emanuel's hardly earned it on the merits! He's been pushing corporatism on the Democratic Party for decades, and he marred his tenure as Mayor of Chicago with (among other things!) his aggression toward the city's education system, his cover-up of the Laquan McDonald shooting, and his privatization of city parking services. And after that record of "accomplishment," we'd put him in charge of relating to a nation with over 100 military bases and the third-biggest economy on Earth. Wasn't Michael Jordan available? He's more accomplished, after all.

Around the table: in which corporations come up with totally non-novel objections to whistleblower law reform.

When I read that some big banksters are simply "opting out" of a process to forgive Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) loans, leaving some of those borrowers with no recourse for relief, I asked myself who the hell greenlighted that? And I was not surprised to learn that, though the Trump Administration's PPP was a pile of dung that delivered half a trillion dollars of your money mostly to big corporations, the Biden Small Business Administration created a program for smaller borrowers to get relief directly from the agency -- but allowed the big banksters to opt in to participating in that program, which means if said bankster facilitated your loan, they can still block you from getting relief from our SBA! Still, let's remember that banksters are evil -- Chase's hack response to The Intercept made sure to mention that their loan-relief application process takes less than 10 minutes, which will mean nothing when they say no.

Ana Popovich at Whistleblower Network News details how actual false claims by big corporations derailed the inclusion of amendments to the False Claims Act in the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" earlier this month. Even though, as I mentioned yesterday, the amendments would actually have raised revenue, and the amendments have actual bipartisan support in the Senate! What were those false claims? Oh, you know -- targeting corruption would "raise health care costs," the kind of excuse they pull out whenever we contemplate doing the right thing, and that "the burden of proof would shift to the defendant," which I can assure you is nowhere in the False Claims Amendments Act, where those amendments now sit, awaiting Congressional action. Greed, like rage, is a hell of a drug.

I'm just not that impressed anymore when conservatives notice that banning mask mandates isn't a conservative thing to do. Even Charlie Sykes's most salient point -- that states aren't being "conservative" when they prevent smaller governmental bodies and private corporations from mandating mask-wearing -- is essentially the same argument I've made for damn near 20 years now. I guess it's possible I'm being too hard on him, though I would also ask Mr. Sykes how he squares his conservatism with his support for former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose own notorious addiction to corporate welfare is also quite anti-conservative.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is probably right to declare (before a meeting of evangelists, how dramatic) that his fate will be one of three things: "being arrested, killed or victory," although I'd caution against the notion that it only has to be one of the three -- he could get arrested and get back into politics a few years down the line, as Silvio Berlusconi could tell him, amirite? I'd be miserable with the third option, perfectly happy with the first, and though of course I endeavor never to wish death on another human being -- even a 66-year-old billionaire asshole can redeem himself through good works! -- folks like Mr. Bolsonaro sure do test my patience on this matter.

Speaking of redemption and the difficulty thereof, Proud Boys leader Henry "Enrique" Tarrio, who proudly burned a Black Lives Matter flag in late December and cheered on the January 6 attempted coup from afar, now says he's sorry he did the things for which he's going to jail for five months. But even if you're not cursed with a close attention to diction -- you can apologize "profusely," but you can't be "profusely" sorry! That's not how words work! -- you'll still wonder if Mr. Tarrio's "remorse" is more because he got caught and he knows now there'll be consequences. He shouldn't fret, though -- he'll meet a lot of like-minded people in jail, and not all of them will be prisoners.

Finally, as Republicans loudly shriek about the "border crisis," and happily hand you a pile of "facts" that really require context -- if you think 2021 is bad, check out almost every year between 1983 and 2001! -- we should really let this whole concept of a "border crisis" rest in a deep, deep grave. Any "gang" of immigrants take over Laredo, Sierra Blanca, Tombstone, or San Clemente? Have we had to dispatch soldiers to retake these or any other towns so we can reinstall duly-elected local governments? No? Then people need to STFU about a "border crisis," just as they need to remember that 9.11 didn't lead to the installation of President bin Laden and thus also didn't represent an "existential threat." Contrary to what you've heard, Americans generally aren't soft -- but the folks who whine about immigration sure are!

Action: concerning evictions, Democrats, Medicare, taxes, whistleblowers, and prisons.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction moratorium, tell "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to kill the reconciliation bill, tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass the False Claims Amendments Act, and end slavery in American prisons. 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.

Now that our Supreme Court (by the expected 6-3 margin) has ruled the most recent Biden eviction ban unconstitutional, the Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction ban at least through December. Right-wingers will continue to shriek about TEH LANDLORDZ!!!!!, but landlords can weather bad times better than renters, and anyway that's beside the point -- the point is that our government enacted renter relief in the American Rescue Plan Act that hasn't gotten to renters yet, so it would be evil of us to let people get thrown out in the streets before we've made sure they got all the help they could get. That won't convince right-wingers, but nothing does anymore, except DIDDLEZ MY RAGEZ GLANDZ!!!!!

Now that our House has passed the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint, the National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell the notorious "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to sabotage it. Remember: when they say "the price tag's too high," what they really mean is "we don't want rich people and corporations to pay more taxes," even though wanting rich people and corporations to pay more taxes is the majority position in poll after poll after poll and it ain't even close. We could have better Medicare, lower drug prices, paid family/medical leave, better jobs for care workers, and real tax relief for real American working families, except that for some Democrats, big donors are more important than anything. They need us to remind them whom they actually work for.

Speaking of lower drug prices, the aptly-named Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to give Medicare the power to negotiate its own drug prices. It isn't just a good idea, it's a funding mechanism! Seriously, even the right-wing Mercatus Institute told us a few years ago that letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would save the taxpayer over $80 billion annually; times that by ten and you've got $800 billion, which all by itself is more than one-fifth of the aforementioned reconciliation bill's $3.5 trillion price tag. Also, it is a really good idea, since Medicare is the biggest buyer of prescription drugs in America and can use its leverage to reduce drug prices for everyone. We deserve good things from our government, but we won't get them unless we speak out.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The American Rescue Plan Act helped deliver $250 or $300 monthly checks to mailboxes and bank accounts all over America, so of course some right-wing Democrats want to end it; I guess they're just more comfortable going hat-in-hand to some big donor who didn't earn his millions or billions than they are running on, you know, actual accomplishments. If they really want to choose the guy who gilds the plumbing in his 19th vacation home over the kid who got lifted out of poverty, they can go right ahead. But we have to speak out so that if they choose unwisely, they'll get hurt at the polls. And anyone who puts big donors over poor children deserves that hurt.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2428, the False Claims Amendments Act. The original False Claims Act helps our government go after federal contractors (among others) who defraud the taxpayer; and the qui tam provision (literally hundreds of years old, don't let anyone tell you any differently!) has helped numerous whistleblowers get a part of what our government is able to recover; S. 2428 would strengthen anti-retaliation provisions and prevent judges from setting an arbitrarily higher standard for proof in fraud cases. Despite this bill's bipartisan sponsor list, the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" didn't include it, even though it would raise revenue. But that suggests that we need to be more vocal about it.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end slavery in American prisons. Specifically, you'd ask Congress to amend the 13th Amendment -- which allows slavery "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" -- and then apply our minimum wage laws to prisoners. We'll see how lucrative private prisons are after that! If you're thinking if they didn't want to be slaves they shouldn't have committed crimes, you're making a number of errors in your thinking: one, that any slavery is tolerable, anywhere, at any time; two, that anyone who commits a crime thinks like that; and three (and perhaps most important), that we're only supposed to punish prisoners, not rehabilitate them. So let's not hold ourselves hostage to cruelty.

Around the table: in which the whole concept of negotiation seems to perplex some Democrats.

Sen. Sanders (I-VT), upon being told "moderate" Democrats might try to shrink the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, says "I already negotiated," adding that "(t)he truth is we need more" and "(t)his is, in my view, the minimum of what we should be spending." It's good to be reminded that when you ask for more than you want, you get more of what you want, even if Democrats like Sen. Kaine seem befuddled at how all of that is supposed to work. Now all we need to do is clog up our Reps' and Senators' phone lines so that the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis doesn't move the goalposts again.

Steven Rosenfeld, about as good a writer on voting rights issues as we have, notes that a lot of Republicans are starting to come out against the Arizona "fraudit" of Maricopa County votes. More important, though, is Mr. Rosenfeld's speculation that when the Cyber Ninjas finally release their report -- which they were supposed to do this week but couldn't, reportedly because three of the "fraudit" leaders got COVID -- the "fraudit" will not merely "revive debunked conspiracy theories" but "find small administrative problems 'that could be twisted into appearing to be evidence...of voter wrongdoing or voting irregularities,'" in the words of an American Oversight report. I sure am looking forward to another few months of people who never knew anything about how we count votes in 2019 breathlessly sharing every single report of a suitcase moving somewhere they didn't expect in 2020.

With our Supreme Court striking down President Biden's attempt to extend the eviction moratorium, we learn that state and local governments have distributed a mere 11% of the money the American Rescue Plan Act allotted for helping folks withstand getting evicted. State and local officials cite the possibility of fraud as a reason to go slowly, but that's a little like saying you didn't pull the baby out of the fire fast enough because you were afraid you'd break its arm. Anyway, I think state and local officials aren't going fast enough because Republicans run most states, and they want the eviction assistance program to fail, so that Joe Biden gets blamed for it right before the 2022 midterms. Hey, it's not like Republicans can run on their superior ideas!

Republicans are already trying to make the Afghanistan withdrawal and all its problems "Matter in the Midterms,", but what is the "biggest hurdle" in them accomplishing this aim? The calendar currently says 2021, that's what! Which leads one to suspect that Mr. Biden -- who thus far hasn't budged on his August 31 deadline for getting the hell out, and if a Republican was similarly unmoved by circumstances, you know they'd be calling you "traitor" for criticizing him! -- is the real political animal here. Or maybe we shouldn't give him too much credit, since he really only had a choice of two different calendar years to withdraw from Afghanistan in the first place.

Yes, that was Donald Trump's former spokeshack going on Fox News to say that "when President Trump was President, you didn't see crisis after crisis. You just didn't see it." She adds, "I shudder to think about what COVID would have been like under Joe Biden," though Joe Biden's worst day for COVID cases is still January 20, and that was still only two-thirds as bad as Donald Trump's worst day. Anyway, remember when Bush Mobbers went on TV in 2009 and said you never had a terrorist attack while George W. Bush was President, no, sir? Well, this is even worse gaslighting. But I don't think Americans have forgotten how awful the Trump Administration was, or how he did actually have "crisis after crisis," most of which he manufactured, whether through his incompetence or through his insatiable thirst for drama.

Finally, notorious former Blackwater/Xe CEO Erik Prince offers to evacuate folks out of Afghanistan -- for $6,500 a pop! You've heard by now that around half of all Americans can't scrounge together $400 in an emergency; now consider that the poverty line in Afghanistan is around $700 annually, and that a little less than half (in the Asian Development Bank's conservative estimate) of Afghans sit below that line, and you'll start to think that Mr. Prince is only trying to get two kinds of people out: 1) rich people and 2) people he can make into slave workers. No wonder people say he has no soul!

Around the table: the drama, it burns!

FDA formally approves the Pfizer COVID vaccine, which likely means more vaccine mandates from businesses and local governments. It might also mean that a few folks who've hit upon "it's not fully-approved" as a reason not to get the vaccine will get it now. But the right-wing punditoids who've been yelling about full FDA approval will just give the Lazy Susan of Bad Arguments a spin and start mouthing off about something else -- at which point it should be clear, if it's not already, that right-wingers are stirring things up (and enabling the death of tens of thousands) solely so they can get power back in 2022. What, they're going to win with their policy proposals? (In the unlikely event you're on the fence about FDA approval processes, Nicole Karlis at Salon should assuage your fears with her detailed description of how FDA approvals work. It's certainly better than watching Fox News pull its "some critics say" crap.)

Clinical psychologist Doreen Dodgen-Magee writes extensively about the problems we face fighting social media misinformation, including social media algorithms that reward drama over sobriety, the "commitment bias" that leads folks to believe noxious crap for years just because (as Bruce Bartlett might say) it's hard to turn around a cruise ship, and the illusion of "stardom" social media too often affords. I agree that "more private messages and fewer elevated comments in social media spaces, quieter conversations, and, possibly offers of voice-to-voice conversations" would work better for friends and neighbors than public shaming, but I still think we ought to shame professional jerks and their most devoted followers -- not so much for their benefit, but for the benefit of others who may not be thinking clearly enough.

Because sometimes you need to confront Teh Stupid head-on, Marissa Higgins at Daily Kos does us all a public service in discussing the Virginia elementary school teacher who quit, in a public meeting, over being told to refer to trans students by their correct pronouns. Naturally she cites her "Christian" "values," and not, say, whether kids can really know whether they're trans or not -- I don't think boys just up and say they're really girls (and vice versa) in a world where peer pressure is even worse than it used to be, but even if I'm wrong, what the fuck harm does it do to call people what they want to be called? Too often the adults create all the drama when they're supposed to be modeling a better way.

Ho hum, the Trump Administration suppressed an EPA report stating that formaldehyde causes leukemia. You'd think all the hospital environmental workers in America would want to know that! How big a deal is this? A 30-year-old EPA assessment blamed formaldehyde for more than half of all cancers caused by industrial pollutants; the suppressed 2018 report says formaldehyde is three times more carcinogenic than that. Nonetheless, the unpublished findings somehow made their way to big chemical corporate lobbies, and then got suppressed, ostensibly because it was in the "wrong format." But people hate politicians who use arcane reasons to do nothing almost as much as they hate the nakedly corrupt.

Lo and behold, the right-wing New York Post institutes a mask mandate for its employees, after spending months slamming mask mandates in general, and while you wish the Post's readers would have a V8 moment over this -- they've been telling me to do one thing, and now they're doing another! They must never have meant anything they told me! -- you know as well as I do that the Lazy Susan of Bad Arguments sure is hypnotic when it spins. Maybe a "caravan" is coming to the border! Maybe Afghan refugees are moving in next door! Maybe there are transgender folks in my bathroom! There's always something when rage is all you care about.

Finally, Democrats struck a deal on the reconciliation bill, passing the budget framework immediately while promising to schedule a vote on the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" by September 27. "Moderate" Democrats should know by now the value of promises, and I guess it's nice to see Nancy Pelosi school them in it, rather than Mitch McConnell. But they'll have to finish both bills up by September 30 thanks to budget reconciliation rules, and how hilarious it will be to see Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema or Josh Gottheimer or Henry Cuellar come up with stupid reasons to scuttle everything. At which point Democrats would doom themselves to the minority in Congress in 2022, which is dangerous, since they'd be losing the majority to avowed fascists.

Action: concerning privacy, monopolies, student loan debt, Arctic drilling, refugees, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Apple to withdraw its plan to scan every piece of data on folks' iPhones, and tell the Biden Administration to suspend big pharma monopolies, cancel student loan debt, scuttle the ConocoPhillips Willow project, reverse its Title 42 refugee ban, and fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both No Spy Phone and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you tell Apple to scuttle its plan to scan every piece of data on our phones. Which makes a mockery of their oft-stated commitment to user privacy! They say it's to protect kids from sex traffickers, but does scanning every piece of data on every iPhone really do that? Apple's plan would compare photos of children to a national database of "child abuse images," but this is a species of facial recognition software, which we already know isn't very good at its stated purpose. And Apple's plan would also use, you guessed it, an algorithm to inspect kids' phones for sexually explicit messages, but this'll more likely put more gay kids at the mercy of abusive parents, since algorithms tend to regard any gay content as "sexually explicit." So, in sum: you don't want to give up privacy for security, but you certainly don't want to give it up for bad security.

Rethink Trade helps you tell President Biden to suspend big pharma monopolies so that everyone across the planet can get the vaccines. So we can end the pandemic! It sickens me that our leaders place "corporate intellectual property" above ending the pandemic; as long as we try to "do both," COVID will keep getting more opportunities to mutate and kill people. President Biden did say he favored a temporary WTO waiver on intellectual property matters, but saying you support something and actually doing something are two entirely different things, and the 150,000-plus cases we're getting every day now tell us it's well past time to do something.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to cancel federally-held student loan debt. This should be a conservative initiative! Our government would get less revenue, and the money would go back to good Americans so they can decide what to do with it -- yikes, it sounds like a tax cut! Of course, today's "conservatives" don't traffic in ideas; they traffic in rage, hence all that whispering in your ear about how you didn't get to have your student loan debt cancelled, so why should they? As too often happens with "conservatives" today, that kind of argument is utterly childish -- not letting someone else get a benefit merely because you didn't get it? What are we, 12? We have a heritage and traditions to uphold, and that demands maturity.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell President Biden to "walk away" from the proposed ConocoPhillips Willow oil drilling project in Alaska's western Arctic area. Arctic drilling has numerous intractable problems -- chiefly, the near-impossibility of remediating oil spills and our lack of knowledge about the ecosystems we'd disrupt -- but last week an Alaska District Court judge revoked the permit ConocoPhillips got from the Trump Administration, on the grounds that the Trump Administration (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) didn't adhere to federal law in analyzing the environmental impact of the Willow project. Seems like a good opportunity for the Biden Administration to simply wash its hands of the whole thing! And you can help them reach that decision.

NETWORK helps you tell President Biden to reverse his decision extending the notorious Title 42 ban on refugees, a ban based on the tenuous proposition that refugees might make the COVID pandemic worse. Governors DeSantis, Abbott, and Noem are already doing a bang-up job of that, amirite? The Trump Administration's decision to impose a Title 42 ban came from none other than advisor/man with a face even a mother could punch Stephen Miller, and loathe as I am to use ad hominem arguments, that fact alone should indicate that this Title 42 ban ain't about health care but about racism -- and about using any conceivable tool in the toolbox to slow emigration to the United States. You know what would slow emigration to the United States? If we stopped using the world as our litter box, that's what! So let's demand that our leaders do the right thing, in the right way.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy already. Not just for trying to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump, not just for raising prices and cutting services which is such a bold way of fixing problems, but for our USPS giving contracts to his old employer and for him investing in a fund run by one of our USPS Governors, Ron Bloom -- who not long ago said he thought Mr. DeJoy was doing a great job! If I pulled all this crap at any of my jobs, I'd be out on my ass. But in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, having money means never having to say you're sorry, or being held accountable for your actions. Let's work to change that, shall we?

Action: concerning jobs, war, refugees, voting rights, police violence, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to pass the reconciliation budget blueprint, tell your Congressfolk to repeal the "war on terror"-era AUMFs, tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap on Afghan refugees, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, eliminate qualified immunity for police officers, and pass the Postal Service Reform 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.

First things first: call your House Reps and tell them to vote in favor of the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint the Senate passed a few weeks ago, the budget blueprint that will enable all sorts of good things to happen in America -- higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, a stronger care-based economy, and paid family/medical leave for all workers, just to name a few. A few "moderate" Democrats are trying to take the bill hostage, but theirs is the calculus of cowardice -- the result of their actions, which may also be the aim of their actions, will be to scuttle both the reconciliation bill and the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" at whose altar they kneel. If they do that, they will lose not only their own seats, but the House and Senate -- and this time, they'll lose them to Republicans who openly identify as fascists. So brook no silliness from your House Reps about "the difficulty of raising taxes in an election." You know what's harder than raising taxes in an election? Winning elections in a fascist state when you're not a fascist.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs) that started the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and thus end our "forever war." Some people, and by some people I mainly mean people on the right side of the political spectrum, just aren't happy unless we're at war. Put six beers in them and they'll say war is the way to remake the world! Helluva job they did in Afghanistan, if so. War isn't the way to "remake the world," it's the way to redistribute income from taxpayers into defense contracting CEOs' pockets. You may note that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) has sponsored these AUMF repeals, as she has done in the past, and you may remember that Rep. Lee was literally the only "nay" vote against the Afghanistan AUMF. If I were her, I'd wear an "I WAS RIGHT" baseball cap from now until the day they put me in the ground. But first, let's have her being right about that count for something.

In a related note, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap for Afghans fleeing from the Taliban, so that more of the 300,000-plus Afghans who helped our military during the war effort can get out. You've already heard famous right-wing blowhards warn us about the coming "invasion" of Afghans, but this should be pretty simple to figure out from a moral perspective -- we did this to them, by invading their country, toppling their government, and promising them we would make their lives better. Now the government we toppled is back in power like the last 20 years didn't happen, and right-wingers expect we'll put racism above letting the Taliban murder the folks who helped us? So much for being the "guardians of morality." Let's not let them make all the damn decisions around here.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Remember when our Supreme Court knocked the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder? H.R. 4 would put those teeth back. In the aforementioned Shelby County v. Holder, our Court held that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states by forcing them to pre-clear their voting law changes with our Justice Department -- but our Court also held that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass Constitutional muster. God only knows if that's true anymore, what with Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the Court now, but H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of voting rights violations to Justice Department pre-clearance. And with so many states trying to suppress the vote as we speak, we need H.R. 4. So brook no silliness about "how the South has changed," because this is about America.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk and the Biden Administration to prioritize ending "qualified immunity" for police officers when they execute Black folks without even charging them with a crime. I put that last phrase in there because it gives some people pause -- folks will "support the police" without thinking very hard about what it means, but they generally will not support "killing people without charge." A few will, believe it or not, but then every generation has had to deal with crazy people. Without getting too inside-baseball (I've done that in other posts about this matter!), "qualified immunity" restricts your ability to sue a police officer for a wrongful death, and restricts that ability way, way beyond the bounds of common sense -- to the point where parents of teenage kids shot by police can't get the justice they deserve. So let's get our government to do the right thing here.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Postmaster General DeJoy's response to USPS funding shortfalls? Raise prices and lower services. The Postal Service Reform Act's response? Stop forcing our USPS to pre-fund retiree benefits for employees who ain't even born, get postal retirees into Medicare, and allow our USPS to offer additional services like postal banking -- though the bill doesn't specify postal banking, so you may want to say that you want that in the bill when you talk to (or write) your Congressperson. Virtually all of our USPS's problems can be traced to the pre-funding of retiree benefits, and in my experience, our Post Office continues to deliver exemplary service even with all the crap they have to put up with, and services that work you want to keep working. So let's keep our Postal Service, and let's help it thrive.

Around the table: concerning tax cuts for the rich, asset forfeiture, stupid COVID ideas, and Afghanistan.

ProPublica finds yet another reason to hate the Trump tax "reform": it widened a loophole allowing CEOs who also own their own businesses essentially reclassify salaries as profits so they can pay less in taxes. Thus an effective top tax rate falls from 40.8% to 29.6%, which adds up at a CEO's income level. CEOs would have to justify the decrease in their salaries to our IRS -- if our IRS audits them, which hardly happens to rich folks anymore thanks to over a decade of our Congress defunding our IRS. WeatherTech CEO David MacNeil will probably regret taking ProPublica on a tour of his floor-mat empire, since he comes off like a self-centered jerk, to put it mildly.

ProPublica also tackles assert forfeiture laws in Massachusetts -- specifically, how hard it is to get your property back there even several years after the state decided not to charge you with whatever suspicion prompted them to confiscate your property in the first place. Seriously, the lengths the state goes to just to avoid giving you your property back (waiting years, putting your name in fine print along with a hundred others, demanding that you respond in court when you did nothing wrong) would be comic, if it weren't unconstitutional. If you still think drug charges are a serious enough reason to violate our Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful searches and seizures, note that Massachusetts will seize your property without a drug charge. Also, how well has that strategy worked in reducing drug addiction? By the evidence, not well at all.

Ho hum, Gov. Ron DeSantis (E-FL) pushes Regeneron treatments ahead of vaccinations as a hedge fund CEO invests millions in Regeneron and millions more in Mr. DeSantis's campaign. And when one of the few remaining Democratic state legislators points out that Mr. DeSantis is "not a full-blown anti-vaxxer" but also someone who "doesn't want to upset those who support the vaccine," you start to think he might actually be a pretty good politician. You will not, however, think he's a very good Governor, or a very good leader. The only reason Florida's seven-day moving average of new cases is under 20,000 is that Florida doesn't report every day, which would lead you to think Mr. DeSantis has something to hide.

Heard that the horse-dewormer drug ivermectin might be a "miracule cure" for COVID? Nicole Karlis at Salon explains why you should be, ah, skeptical. And when your Trumphole aunt says "but I read about it in the Wall Street Journal," you can reply that the Journal op-ed piece they read (or, more likely, heard about) was co-written by a drug industry "consultant" who worked for the corporation that created ivermectin. Also, the studies that "prove" ivermectin's effectiveness were almost absurdly small, or took place in test tubes which aren't human bodies, or retracted due to data manipulation. And I'd just leave it at that -- even Trumpholes who used to carry The Pill Book around at their jobs will go la-la-la-la when you tell them about side effects and drugs you should never mix ivermectin with.

Why oh why are we allowing the folks who started the Afghanistan War offer their opinions on its ending? There are plenty of astute observers our "liberal" media could use instead -- why, there are even folks who don't say one thing in public and another thing in private, as Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Lute have done. There is, of course, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), the only House Rep to vote against the Afghanistan War to begin with! Think she might have something interesting to say about all of that? To most of our "liberal" media's preferred voices on Afghanistan I would simply say: thank you for your input, but I think you've done enough.

Finally, Jon Schwarz at The Intercept reminds us who really "won" the Afghanistan War: big American defense contracting corporations. The biggest five defense contracting corporations in America have seen their stock returns go up almost 900 percent since 2001, while stocks generally have gone up by a bit over 500 percent, meaning the big five defense stocks did about 58% better than the stock market as a whole. All that, to put the same right-wing extremist government back in power that we were supposedly trying to dislodge when we went in almost two decades ago. Nice work if you can get it!

Action: concerning voting rights, taxes, working families, the right to repair, and worker rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, raise taxes on the rich, expand the Child Tax Credit permanently, and pass the Fair Repair Act and the PRO 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.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As Senate Democrats whittle down the For the People Act into uselessness -- apparently because Joe Manchin doesn't have anyone on his staff who actually reads bills -- the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act becomes the gold standard of voting rights legislation, as it would put the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act after our Supreme Court knocked them out in Shelby County v. Holder. This would be a big deal, as so many American state legislators, still wondering how a nice guy like Donald Trump could lose, are trying to restrict voting rights so that next time he (or some similarly nice person!) doesn't lose. So let's get this done.

Both Americans for Tax Fairness and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich already. Sometimes we need to send the message simply and plainly, and this is one of those times, as our House comes back early next week to vote on the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint the Senate passed earlier this month, and as several "moderate" Democrats have threatened to vote against that blueprint if they don't get to vote on the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" first, which, like, waaaaaaaaaaah. Could they be trying to scuttle both? They sure could! Should it matter? No, it should not! The popular will should matter, and polling has told us for years that large majorities of Americans want to tax the rich harder.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The second monthly $250 or $300 check has just arrived in the mailboxes or bank accounts of millions of good American families, and there'll be at least four more of those, reminding everyone that maybe your government can actually do some good on your behalf! But why shouldn't there be approximately infinity more of those monthly checks? Because TEH FISKULZ RESPONSIBILITIEZ!!!!!? Rubbish -- no deficit peacock ever cared about blowing over $2 trillion in Afghanistan just to return extremists to power after 20 years. So, yeah, how about we spend money helping kids stay out of poverty?

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4006, the Fair Repair Act. You remember watching your dad or granddad fix his car in the driveway? That's largely a thing of the past now, thanks to a society that believes we should never corporations what to do. So now corporations throw up endless roadblocks in front of the good Americans who want to fix their phones and computers, or hire someone who can. The Fair Repair Act would help change that, by forcing corporations to provide manuals, parts, and tools to anyone who wants to fix their products, and not just yowl TEH TRADEZ SECRETZ!!!!! anymore. Don't we value our independence as Americans? Then we ought to pass the Fair Repair Act.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The bill would override state-level "right to work" (for less!) laws, and would also prevent big corporations from forcing their employees to sit through anti-union propaganda while they're on the clock; the bill would even allow workers to use card-check to organize rather than a secret ballot election (which employers tend to manipulate, right, Amazon?). I'm old enough to remember when Senate Democrats took turns joining a Republican filibuster against the Employee Free Choice Act, but now we've got it embedded in a larger bill. And if we get in our Senators' grills, we can make it law.

Action: concerning worker safety, health care, corporate spying, facial recognition, postal banking, and clean water.

Long story short: tell OSHA to issue emergency extreme heat standards to protect workers, tell the Biden Administration to enact strong regulations fighting surprise medical bills, tell Apple to scrap its plan to put a "backdoor" into its next iPhone operating system, tell big corporations to ban facial recognition in their stores, tell our USPS Board of Governors to reintroduce postal banking at our Post Offices, and tell our EPA to protect Bristol Bay, Alaska, from the notorious Pebble Mine project. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Occupational Health and Safety Administration (or OSHA) to institute emergency standards to protect workers from extreme heat. There's been a lot of it this summer, as you know, and there'll be a lot more of it in future summers, and don't let your Republican uncle convince you that this is BIG GUMMINT RUN AMOKZ!!!, because the Occupational Safety and Health Act has authorized such emergency standards since its passage in 1970. OSHA has lately issued an emergency COVID-19 standard for health care workers, so issuing one for farmworkers and construction workers and landscapers ain't exactly a stretch.

US PIRG helps you tell the Biden Administration to restrict surprise medical bills in the most vigorous manner possible. The No Surprises Act made it into the massive stimulus bill Congress passed at the end of 2020, and it authorizes our Departments of Labor and Treasury to issue regulations implementing it; big health insurance corporations, as you might expect, would like a lot of loopholes in said regulations, so they can continue to slam you with unforeseen "out-of-network" charges (your doctor was in-network, but his assistant wasn't! Or the anesthesiologist wasn't!). Damn exploitative, that is, and they'll have quite the conversation about their nefarious works at the Pearly Gates. In the meantime, let's prevent them from robbing us blind.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Apple to scuttle plans to build a spyware backdoor into its iPhone operating system. Apple's iOS 15 update will be able to scan messages and photos from any phone; they say they're doing it to stop child sex trafficking, but that's like firing a nuclear missile at a deadly pathogen or using a sledgehammer to destroy a wasps' nest, and I wouldn't blame you if you thought they always take your rights away by saying it's for the kids. I imagine Apple knows this is a dumb idea -- it's a way for evil people to get even more info from your phone than they already do -- but wants the good PR from "helping kids." They're going to get even more bad PR from "turning your cellphone into a spying device." Let's help them avoid that if we can.

Fight for the Future also helps you tell big retail corporations not to use facial recognition software in their stores. Because facial recognition software often "catches" the wrong person, more often if they're Black -- and because anytime you collect a boatload of data the way facial recognition software does, you're all but telling hackers to come and get it. When you speak out about this, you stand a very good chance of getting big corporations to listen and comply with your will -- a lot of very large corporations, like WalMart, Home Depot, Target, and Starbucks, have already committed not to use this software. But others, like Apple Stores (!) and Albertson's, are using it, so we beat them back with the Big Stick of Bad PR.

The ACLU helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to reinstitute postal banking program at our Post Offices. Post Offices often go where the big banks won't (Post Offices kinda have to!), so they're ideal for those rural and urban areas where your banking choices are this check-cashing joint or that pawn shop or that payday lender. And it's not like it's some nutty, out of the blue idea, because our Post Office offered basic banking services until 1967. And, not for nothing, but the banks you do find in underbanked areas love charging you fees out the wazoo; we can make our Post Office not do that, because our Post Office belongs to us. Or, at least, it should, if we but claim it.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to reject the proposed Pebble Mine project using its authority under the Clean Water Act. Even former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who never saw a grift he didn't like, wouldn't touch this project with a ten-foot pole -- knowing, perhaps, that the bad PR from permanently polluting the famous and bounteous Bristol Bay salmon fisheries would follow him to the grave -- but his successor showed a disquieting willingness to entertain the project; the Army Corps of Engineers rejected Pebble Mine's permit application, but what do we know about modern life in America? Bad ideas just keep getting back up like zombies, until we deliver the head shot of the popular will.

Around the table: more thoughts on the end of empire.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch -- possibly the world's best reporter on the Middle East -- says "It is Government Weakness, Not Taliban Strength, That Condemns Afghanistan" -- as in the Afghan government's "weakness and unpopularity," which his Afghani contacts describe as "no better than a gang of racketeers gorging themselves on US aid money or on juicy supply and construction contracts." Also, despite the $2 trillion-plus outlay, "Afghan soldiers were often short of food, ammunition, fuel and could not even get defective weapons replaced," in large part because "the American aid money never made it past the sticky fingers of US consultants and security companies." The story won't end here, though, because Afghans don't like the Taliban any better than they like the Americans.

Philippa Rizopoulos at TruthOut reminds us that privatization of Medicaid and Medicare also stands in the way of getting to Medicare-for-All. Medicare Advantage, an "innovation" of George W. Bush, now has over 40 percent of American seniors in its grip, and worse, nearly 70 percent of Medicaid recipients get their care, such as it is, from Medicaid Managed Care Organizations (or MCOs), and these developments don't lead to better care, or even cheaper care. They do lead to shifting networks, reduced benefits, and rejected claims, and they also lead to public programs bearing the burden of private corporations, just like with charter schools. Best to expand Medicare to include everyone, and all care, not least because we'd save money.

Does the fall of Afghanistan into Taliban hands again make you wish we'd "done more"? Here's a reminder from Alice Speri at The Intercept that "(t)he biggest al-Qaeda plot the FBI claimed to have foiled in the years following the 9/11 attacks involved no weapons, no plot, and no al-Qaeda." You say that's not precisely relevant? Perhaps not, but consider that we "did more" for 20 years in Afghanistan, throwing away over $2 trillion to get no further than the status quo, and consider, also, that "doing more" in Iraq helped al-Qaeda establish a presence there they didn't have before, and then helped birth ISIS. Maybe "doing more" shouldn't be our first impulse, particularly at those times we're trying to prove we're "right" about terrorist threats.

Uh oh: Minnesota GOP Chair Jennifer Carnahan faces calls to resign after one of the state party's big donors (and a close friend and fellow podcaster of hers!) gets indicted for sex trafficking. And just as the folks who squeal about "voter fraud" ignore all the Republicans who get caught committing it, the QAnon crowd will promptly ignore this scandal precisely because it implicates Republicans. In each case, you'd think right-wingers would take an opportunity to appear "independent," but they don't -- blunt force is their only strategy, in both argument and action. (And just like the rest of them, Ms. Carnahan issues a statement that's 60% about how badly she thinks she's been treated. That's how you know she's a Trumphole -- everything's a drama, and they're always the star.

In case you were wondering how Fox News's biggest stars were spinning our defeat in Afghanistan, both Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham focus on Afghan refugees, with Mr. Carlson calling them "invaders" coming to "your neighborhood." "Fuck you" was my immediate reaction to this news, but after I'd given the matter more thought, I found myself saying is this the best they can do? America may have stopped being a great power today, and all these clowns can think to do is bash immigrants who ain't even here yet? That'll be a hell of a footnote to the history of this war, if anyone's around to write it.

Finally, I read President Biden's Monday remarks about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, and I note that while his repeated insistence that "one more year, five more years or 20 more years" wouldn't make a difference is absolutely correct, it's also absolutely calculated to impress independent voters (as is his relentless blaming of the Afghan government and military), which might just make up for "the buck stops with me" most emphatically not impressing them. I don't want to bash the guy who actually got us out of a war, but I do also wonder how he didn't get heard about this matter during those eight years he was Vice President.

Action: concerning social media, Social Security, human rights, corruption, immigration, and spying on children.

Long story short: tell Facebook to stop trying to obstruct research on the ill effects of social media, tell your Congressfolk to fund Social Security more fairly and pass the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act and the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, tell President Biden to end notorious Title 42 expulsions, and tell schools to ban biometric surveillance of our children. 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.

Free Press helps you tell Facebook to reinstate accounts relating to NYU Ad Observer research. You may remember this story from last week: NYU researchers were looking into how ads on social media spreads bad information, but suddenly found their accounts locked out, with Facebook telling them that an FTC rule protecting consumer privacy compelled them to act. Of course, an FTC official quickly said that was bunkum -- NYU researchers weren't prying into normal Facebook user accounts, but were looking at advertising accounts, which suggests Facebook was actually just trying to scuttle their research, because it might tell us things Facebook didn't want us to hear. That's a look Facebook would want to avoid, I would think. They can't avoid it now, but they can at least rectify their error; some good could come of it, after all.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security by making millionaires and billionaires pay more into the system. Specifically, you'd ask your Congressfolk to start applying the 12.4% payroll tax to income over $400,000, so if that's not you (and I'd bet it's not, since that income level describes a mere four-tenths of one percent of all Americans), then you won't pay any more into the system -- but folks with money might, and thus enable the rest of us to live more comfortably on Social Security into old age. Reports of Social Security's "insolvency" are of course hysterical -- I'm old enough to remember when it was supposed to run out of money in 2016! -- but if we can make it run better and do more for good Americans, why wouldn't we do it? After all, you worked for it, you paid into it, you fought for it, and when you retire, you deserve to enjoy it.

World Beyond War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4718, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act. H.R. 4718 would empower our President to impose sanctions on nations that commit genocide, crimes against humanity (the bill enumerates 11 of these), or war crimes (36 of these), and would also prevent our government from selling weapons to a nation that commits any of the aforementioned crimes. The bill would even prevent such things as intelligence sharing and security training, except in the context of maintaining embassies and evacuating American citizens. The bill would also create a Commission on Atrocity Accountability and Human Rights who would recommend policies that would help us fulfill our duties under the bill. So this bill isn't just a moral bill, it's a smart bill. And we need more of those!

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, which would simply ban Congressfolk from investing in stocks, except for T-bonds and for certain "widely-held investment funds"; a Congressperson wouldn't have to divest of their holdings before taking office for the first time, but wouldn't be able to make new investments. We just learned that Sen. Rand Paul bought Gilead stock right before the pandemic, after receiving a briefing about the pandemic, and since Gilead makes a famous COVID treatment drug, we must ask, once again, why Congressfolk should ever get to "play the stock market" when they're inevitably going to vote on legislation concerning investments? Money prejudices everything, after all.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to end Title 42 restrictions on immigrants and asylum-seekers. Title 42 allows our government to deport folks when "there is serious danger of the introduction of [a communicable] disease into the United States," but why do that and then utterly fail to restrict international travel? Because racism, that's why. Because chest-puffing over immigration, that's why. The Biden Administration has lately announced it would continue the policy, which made all the right-wingers yelling and screaming about immigrants bringing COVID with them cluck-cluck in approval, right? No? They just kept yelling and screaming about immigrants bringing COVID with them? What a surprise! Seems to me we're keeping the COVID pandemic going well enough without imaginary help from border-crossers.

Finally, End Child Surveillance helps you, guess what, tell schools to stop spying on their kids using facial recognition technology. Which sucks! Which tends to racially profile people! Which is supposedly a "bonus feature" of temperature scanners designed to identify students who might have a fever! Which also sucks! I mean, you've had your temperature taken by a remote infrared thermometer, right? Then you know it sucks! This sure all sounds like a scam designed to herd kids around, and I wouldn't put it past the corporations that manufacture them to also have their hands in the school-to-prison pipeline! Hey, if I thought of it, they thought of it. And prison is big business now. So let's not let money or convenience rule all of our decisions. And certainly let's not let our schools do that.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, drug prices, government spying, gerrymandering, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell "moderate" Democrats to abandon their plan to scuttle the reconciliation bill, tell your House Reps to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations in said bill, let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, and pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, tell state mapmakers not to gerrymander legislative districts, and tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy already. 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.

First things first. Nine "moderate" House Democrats have threatened to vote down the reconciliation budget bill if our House doesn't pass the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" first. Know why? Their letter contains the five emptiest paragraphs you will ever read, and if they really believe the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" is a "once-in-a-century" thing, that is to laugh. And doing it their way, of course, puts the much better reconciliation budget bill at risk, almost like that's the whole idea. If any of these nine House Reps "represent" you, you can call them and tell them this ain't the hill they want to die on. And no, we shouldn't be "cautious" because we'll need most of those nine Reps to pass the reconciliation bill, or for Democrats to keep the majority in 2022. Democrats don't lose elections in spite of such "caution"; they lose elections because of it.

Peripherally-related to the above goal, you can call your own House Reps and tell them to jack up taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the budget reconciliation bill. Such taxes could include: a 55% corporate tax rate on profits over $1 million just like we had in the 1950s, a 91% tax bracket on income over $1 million just like we also had in the 1950s, treating capital gains and dividends as regular income like we did until George W. Bush, a financial transaction tax of 1% like we had until the late 1960s -- beginning to see a pattern? These taxes didn't "cripple economies," but helped build the greatest middle class in world history, so they're not "impossible" so much as they're proven. Too many of these "moderate" Democrats claim tax hikes like these are too "radical" -- how something we used to do all the time could be "radical" is anyone's guess -- and they won't abandon their cowardice until enough of their constituents (i.e., us) get in their grills.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices by letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices. Medicare is the biggest buyer of drugs in America by far, after all, so if we let Medicare negotiate drug prices, we'll all have better drug prices. And even the right-wing Mercatus Center instructs us that Medicare drug price negotiation can save the taxpayer over $80 billion annually, which makes that a pay-for. We really can make this world a place where we don't reflexively cast morality and pragmatism as enemies! And no, Medicare drug price negotiation isn't BIG GUMMINT CONTROLZ TEH DRUGZ YOUZ GETZ!!!!!! Big pharma corporations control what drugs you can get by charging $900 a month for insulin, or $350 for a single dose of EpiPen. Fight the real enemy!

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3907/S. 2052, the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act. As its name suggest, the bill would prevent our federal and state governments from using facial recognition technology on their citizens, unless future Congressional legislation specifically authorizes it; facial recognition technology sucks, as any number of Black folks wrongly accused of crimes could tell you, so governments certainly shouldn't be using it. If the bill becomes law, then anyone wronged by a government entity breaking the law could sue that government entity; accountability is important, after all. The bill doesn't prevent local governments from using the technology, but would prevent them from getting government grants unless and until they do so. You don't want to be put in jail because you barely look like someone else, right? Then you want to get this bill passed.

Common Cause helps you tell state mapmakers not to gerrymander districts for the benefit of incumbents and/or political parties. As you know, the census data mapmakers will use to redraw districts came out last week, so that process will begin soon, and historically that process has benefited politicians, not regular Americans. Take Wisconsin, where Republican state legislative candidates typically get fewer votes than their Democratic counterparts, but somehow win almost two-thirds of the state's lower house! How does that happen? It happens when mapmakers draw Rorschach-blot-shaped districts that exclude sides of streets and even individual houses. It's the biggest reason our representatives give us nothing but the back of their hand, and we have to stop it. We begin to stop it by putting them on notice, and by making gerrymandering toxic to them, for once.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. It ain't just his naked attempt to deliver the 2020 election to his Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump, nor is it his determination to make our Postal Service run badly -- it's also the corruption! A week and a half ago we learned that our USPS awarded a $120 million contract to the corporation he used to run, XPO Logistics, which still pays the DeJoy family over $2 million annually by renting office space. But wait, there's more! Last week we learned that Mr. DeJoy spent a few hundred Gs on bonds from Brookfield Asset Management, and guess who's a managing partner at Brookfield? Why, USPS Governor Ron Bloom, of course! I'm old enough to remember when even the appearance of evil could cause people to resign; how about we bring those days back?

Around the table: from PR hackery to dumb wars.

PR hacks look for "normal, everyday" Arizona residents to write letters-to-the-editor supporting binding arbitration -- and when they can't find any, even in Arizona, they offer $2,000 a pop! Nice work if you have no soul! It's like even Arizona right-wingers know that binding arbitration is the way corporations keep customers and workers out of our courts, and ensure that customers and workers lose more of the cases against them than they would in our courts. Next time you hear about "crisis actors" and "paid protestors" on the left, remember that PR hacks paying people to write pro-corporate screeds is the evil that actually happens. I'm not sure why they're targeting Arizona, though -- maybe Mark Kelly's not the easiest get, but they'd probably have Kyrsten Sinema at hello.

When I read that Donald Trump has "politicized the most basic of pandemic safety measures," and that it's "as if he named Band-Aids un-American, and demanded that we bleed to show our heedless fealty," I'm tempted to respond let's not give the man any more ideas! I can all too easily imagine him saying why do we drink water anyway? Only losers drink water! Own the libs by refusing to drink any more water! And then his votaries would not only stop drinking water but demand that we gut the clean water standards that are the main reason we have any decent health care in America at all. I wish this were harder to imagine.

Ari Paul reminds us that "Right-Wing Cop-Bashing Didn't Start With Trump." You'll be reminded of the white supremacist stand-off at Ruby Ridge and the FBI raid on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco -- both of which prompted right-wingers to yell about federal cops -- and G. Gordon Liddy's repeated admonitions to his listeners to shoot federal agents in the head. All that's just from the '90s. But, yeah, everyone who proudly brandishes their I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! sign has a line that can't be crossed, one that will turn them into the kind of folks who try to impale Capitol police with flagpoles. And they'll yell at you when you point out their hypocrisy, which is a hell of a thing to take to the Pearly Gates.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who has spouted more unscientific nonsense about COVID than most Republicans and that's saying something, didn't bother reporting his wife's investment in a corporation producing a drug to fight COVID until 16 months after our laws required. Right at the beginning of the pandemic, too, which sure makes one suspect he had, you know, insider information. I wouldn't want to go into a re-election fight with this baggage; indeed, Richard Burr decided it wasn't worth it, and Kelly Loeffler lost in 2020. Then again, if the Democratic establishment forces another Amy McGrath-type candidate on the good citizens of Kentucky, then Rand Paul will get away with it.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (S-GA) responds to news that hospitals are filling up with COVID patients by saying "(e)veryone needs to get back down to common sense and needs to remember, we're human, we can't live forever." I'm old enough to remember when politicians ended careers by saying such things, but we live a sick, immoral, and decadent era in which a quarter of our electorate can only feel one emotion: rage. Also, her district is so gerrymandered she probably couldn't even lose to Jesus H. Christ himself. If only our House had passed a bill that could address this intractable problem! Oh, right, it did, and Joe Manchin won't let it come to a vote because bipartisanship with people like Marjorie Taylor Greene is somehow far more important.

Finally, as we confront the humiliating end to our 20-year presence in Afghanistan, I guess it's good to hear at least one "liberal" media outlet suggest that our whole adventure there was a stupid idea to begin with. $88 billion we threw away on training Afghan soldiers to fight the Taliban, and now we learn about "years of overly optimistic assessments from U.S. officials that obscured -- and in some cases, purposely hid -- evidence of deep-rooted corruption, low morale, and even 'ghost soldiers and police' who existed merely on the payrolls of the Afghan Defense and Interior Ministries." Sadly, none of this is particularly surprising, and if you thought maybe the whole point of the Afghanistan war was to bleed the taxpayers, I wouldn't blame you. And that sure wouldn't bode well for sticking around another two or 20 years to "fix things."

Around the table: concerning big pharma, tax cuts for the rich, sexual harassment, and other evils.

Facebook disables a couple of researchers' accounts (including their data), suggesting their research had violated the privacy of Facebook users -- except that the researchers were studying Facebook advertisers. And when Facebook said a Federal Trade Commission rule about customer privacy necessitated the shutdown, our FTC's acting director called that insinuation "inaccurate," leading us to wonder, again, whether corporate executives really are our "best and brightest," or just have the dumb luck of operating in an economy that rewards failure and stupidity with billions of dollars. The punchline? The researchers were studying how misinformation spreads on Facebook. In that context, one might call their ban suspicious.

President Biden tells Congress to lower drug prices, and specifies letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices as one way to do that. Now that's using the bully pulpit! If only President Obama had done this in 2009 when everyone else wanted to do it, President Biden wouldn't need to do it now. And remember: the right-wing "answer" to Medicare negotiating its own drug prices is Democrats want to control what medicines you get, an argument Democrats should be able to defeat easily if they're willing to get fierce. Of course, if they're not willing to get fierce, then they all deserve to lose all the elections.

ProPublica gives us more from their "Secret IRS Files": "How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Tax Cut.'" A mere 82 households reaped $1 billion from the 2017 tax "reform" just in the first year, and Ron Johnson's infamous "pass-through" tax cut, though supposedly for small businesses, yielded 60% of its windfalls to the top 1%, which means wealthy folks and big corporations have gotten subtler about using small businesses as a human shield. By the time you get to the notorious corporate welfare-gobbler the Bechtel Corporation and the big real estate interests who got tens of millions in windfalls, you'll be properly incensed.

Soon-to-be-former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo actually blames "cultural behavioral differences" for his misfortune, and his fellow Italian-Americans give him what-for. As one restaurant owner puts it, "We’re very affectionate people. When we do kiss, we kiss family, we kiss good friends. The only difference is I don’t stick my hand up anybody’s blouse." As an Italian-American, I can also assure you that my elders never taught me that groping was just "affection," either. And while many Americans may find "I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn" sympathetic, they'll probably have a lot of trouble seeing grabbing a woman's breasts in that softer light.

Dominion Voting Systems files $1.6 billion defamation lawsuits against right-wing news networks Newsmax and One America News (or OAN) and former Overstock CEO/Trump flunky Patrick Byrne, alleging that the news networks "manufactured, endorsed, repeated, and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies about Dominion" and that public figures like Mr. Byrne (who seems like he's trying to out-Mike Lindell Mike Lindell, what makes people want to do that?) aided and abetted this effort. If successful, these lawsuits might actually break Newsmax and OAN, which boo-freaking-hoo. Free markets, pimps! Consequences for evil actions! Conservatives used to be about all that, right?

Finally, although potential 2022 Republican Senate candidate/Trump flunky Herschel Walker has made grim noises about "voter fraud," his own wife appears to have broken the law by voting in Georgia in 2020 despite living in Texas. The couple get a homestead tax exemption on their Texas home but not her Georgia home, and her absentee ballot arrived with a Texas postmark; none of this is a good look. I find her attempt to explain herself quite irritating, but in saner times, I might be inclined to call all of this an honest mistake on her part! People have a lot to manage in their lives, after all! Yes, even rich people! But these are not saner times -- after January 6, they have all forfeited the right to benefit of the doubt.

Around the table: featuring vote "fraudits," corrupt bullies, and deficit peacocks.

David Gilbert at Vice profiles one of the ringleaders of the January 6 attempted coup, Amy Kremer, who now wants to conduct an Arizona-style "fraudit" of the Georgia vote. She does get around, I'll give her that -- she does a lot of pro-Trump rallies and events relying on financing of, shall we say, indeterminate source. And she's somehow just "a regular mom who loves (her) country" and a founder of the Tea Party, meaning she's been deeply involved in far-right causes for the last dozen years, including, you guessed it, birtherism. I wonder how her kids are doing.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) announces his intention to resign after a damning sexual harassment investigation and at least one criminal complaint, and Tim Murphy at Mother Jones reminds us that he was "a petty, corrupt bully." He only gives a few examples, but I'm sure the historians will have a much longer story to tell of the man who governed badly and covered it up with bluster and threats, though that's an ever-more familiar story, amirite, Trumpholes? My guess is we'll remember him as a meaner, grabbier Evan Bayh.

Suddenly faced with a mayoral candidate not of their choosing, the Buffalo Democratic party is seriously mulling getting rid of the Mayor's office just so actual liberal India Walton doesn't win. All together now: waaaaaaaaaah! Doesn't anyone have any damn shame anymore? And sadly, their machinations could defeat Ms. Walton -- as those familiar with Upton Sinclair's 1934 run for Governor of California, or Matt Gonzalez's run for Mayor of San Francisco in 2003, or Nina Turner's recent run in the Ohio 11th Democratic House primary, already know. Read the whole thing for some of the truly non-explosive charges against Ms. Walton.

In the wake of Senate passage of a $3.5 trillion budget resolution, Republicans ready their big spender charges against Democrats. The ad is total horseshit, as you would expect -- "record inflation" is to laugh if you're over 40, and without an ounce of shame they call letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices "control(ling) what medicines you can get"! But ooh, ooh! I know what to say in response: my Republican opponent would overthrow the government just because his guy lost and he's a big crybaby; do y'all want to be represented by a big crybaby? You're welcome, Democrats.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) voicing "serious reservations" about the budget resolution he'd just voted for is just another dull moment in American politics. Look at his stilted, repetitive diction and you'll see nothing "serious" about his argument, just as you saw nothing serious about his argument against the For the People Act which named exactly zero things he didn't like about the For the People Act. Recall that he also took the American Rescue Plan hostage for 10 hours at the beginning of this year so he could posture about "irresponsible" spending. Maybe Kyrsten Sinema is right, and Joe really does love the attention.

Finally, folks are telling a lot of stupid stories about the "Biden economy" -- folks who complain about gas prices have no memory of gas prices more than doubling under George W. Bush, apparently -- but it does some good to confront Teh Stupid. Case in point: the North Carolina restaurant owner who claims he spends $200 more every week just for mayonnaise, which some Twitter users happily calculated means this clown goes through at least 250 gallons of mayonnaise every week, which sure seems like a lot of chicken salad and Caesar salad dressing. Which reminds us, once again, that the only way to beat scare numbers is to do the math.

Around the table: tabulating yet more right-wing drama.

Jonathan Cohn at the HuffPost describes, in some detail, why vaccine requirements are, in fact, perfectly legal -- and highlights some of the libertarians who agree. I have so little patience for right-wingers these days that I was all ready to nitpick the libertarians' arguments, but that's my failing, because Jessica Flanigan, Jason Brennan, and Ilya Somin all argue their case much better than Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, and Elise Stefanik argue theirs. This would make a good Goofus and Gallant strip -- "Goofus runs around shouting about freedom all the time, while Gallant makes sure he doesn't infringe on others' freedoms."

D.C. District Court judge wonders why our Justice Department is letting some January 6 insurrectionists plead down to a misdemeanor. I didn't like the answer, either -- that the intent of a particular defendant can't always be nailed down so neatly, like any of them were there for any other reason than overturning the election. I'll admit I'd have snapped out on the defendant who said he was trying to overturn the election only to have his lawyer say that of course he wasn't there for that. That may be one reason I'm not a judge.

Some "moderate" Democrats are hot to get rid of the Sales and Local Taxes (or SALT) cap, which prevents folks from deducting more than $10,000 in SALT from what they owe on their federal taxes, and I gotta say I find both their priorities and their vehemence quite irritating -- and look how our "liberal" media won't call Reps. Gottheimer and Suozzi "extremists," though they have literally pledged to stop the reconciliation bill dead if they can't get rid of or raise the SALT cap. What a thing to take to the Pearly Gates! They claim rich folks who can't deduct large amounts of SALT taxes take their money to Florida and Texas, but I don't buy that any more than I did when Republicans argued for cutting rich folks' taxes -- it's the same old hostage crisis no matter who's taking the hostages.

Charlie Sykes reminds us that "(e)ven as many Republicans rail against mask mandates and spread skepticism about vaccines, GOP leaders have settled on one place where they take the spread of COVID very seriously -- the border." But of course -- for Republicans, everything is just a tool to be discarded as soon as it's fulfilled its purpose. And again: when liberals get "tough" on immigration; they get exactly zero support from the right -- not least because right-wingers can only get support by doing things like insisting the border is on fire.

When you hear that a "MAGA civil war" may be brewing between Trump's inner circle and Fox News, after Fox edited out yet more "stolen election" claims before uploading an interview with Mr. Trump to YouTube, just remember that it's all drama! It's all distraction! Right-wingers love looking like they're at odds, not just as a big possum game but as a way of deflecting criticism over marching in jackboot lockstep about everything. (You probably also noticed that the Fox host who conducted the interview, Dan Bongino, essentially conceded the point to the MAGA crowd, which tells you who's still the boss.)

Finally, former President Donald Trump opines thusly about the recent COVID spike: "Could you imagine if I were president right now and we had this massive attack from the coronavirus? If that were me, they would say, 'What a horrible thing, what a horrible job.' And I don’t ever hear that." Regardless of what Mr. Trump "hears," President Biden's approvals have fallen since COVID cases spiked, but we don't even need to speculate on what would have happened "if" this had happened while he was President, because every single day between November 10 and the end of Mr. Trump's Presidency saw more COVID cases than the 132,000-plus we saw on Friday, and Mr. Trump spent that whole time filing frivolous lawsuits against the election he lost by seven million votes and inciting an attempted coup. In a sane, moral, and decent society, we'd all be serving Mr. Trump a big glass of STFU; in this insane, immoral, and decadent society, our media will broadcast his less-than-worthless utterances again and again.

Action: concerning the filibuster, service shutoffs, banksters, and law-and-order policy.

Long story short: tell President Biden to actively oppose the Senate filibuster, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, end hedge fund predatory behavior, and pass the Break the Cycle of Violence Act and the MEAL 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 Public Citizen and The Juggernaut Project help you tell President Biden to lead on filibuster reform. He's used his bully pulpit to argue for the For the People Act -- said he'd "fight like heck" to get it done, in fact -- but if he's not willing to endorse getting rid of the filibuster, it'll all be for nothing. Republicans use the filibuster to stop everything, which not only means no gerrymandering reform, no campaign finance reform, and no end to racist vote suppression practices, it also means Democrats look like they do nothing all day, which guarantees they'll be in the minority in Congress again. People like it when you do stuff, and they hate it when you don't. It's pretty simple, much simpler than the 13-dimensional chess Democrats seem to play most of the time.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4979/S. 1783, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, which would prevent utility corporations from shutting off your electricity and water and the like. I can already hear the right-wingers yell WHEN DOEZ IT ENDZ!!!!! Maybe it ends when they get the boards out of their asses and get vaccinated so we can end this pandemic! After all, a person without essential services is a person rather more at risk of getting COVID, and therefore at risk of keeping the pandemic going. There are times -- many times, in fact -- when the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do. This is one of those times. And remember how the Joe Louis Arena didn't get its water shut off in 2014 even after falling over $82,000 behind on its water bill. And I think people are actually more important than sports arenas.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would rein in hedge funds' predatory behavior. Hedge funds love to swoop in, buy corporations, and then suck the wealth out of them like the vampires they are, and as a result, good Americans lose their jobs. How do we put a stop to that? We tell Congress to make hedge funds (and their executives) legally liable for the evil they do, ban the practices that allow banksters to loot other corporations, protect the workers who'd otherwise lose their jobs and pensions (that last part's important!), and close the corporate tax loopholes that make hedge funds absurdly overpaid. No, they don't "rein in bad actors" in our economy. We've got laws and regulations for that, and if we don't, we make the laws and regulations better. Big corporations make very bad cops.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4118/S. 2275, the Break the Cycle of Violence Act. Which would do what? Fund community-based violence prevention programs, that's what. Which would be a whole lot better than calling the police every time folks can't solve problems with their family, friends, and neighbors. If you're tempted to call this "defunding the police," consider that a police officer should not be the solution to every conceivable problem -- not just for our sake, but for theirs. And if you're temped to call it a "slush fund" for Black folks, remember that no one will get rich of these government grants. Really, if it were all about grift, they'd be banksters. In fact, you really ought to look to the financial sector first if you're looking for grift.

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2837, the Making Essentials Affordable and Lawful (or MEAL) Act. The MEAL Act would repeal the law that bans Americans with drug convictions from ever getting food stamps or other forms of public assistance -- which sure sounds like the kind of thing politicians do to look tough, and thus should be opposed on that basis alone. But, seriously, if we actually do believe in rehabilitation, then lifetime bans for drug convictions is the precise opposite of logic as well as the precise opposite of mercy. And as for the folks who don't believe in rehabilitation, well, maybe there's a police state that'll take them in. I hear things are a lot simpler in police states.

Action: concerning taxes, Medicare, familiy care, and climate change.

Long story short: tell our Senate to raise taxes on rich folks, expand Medicare, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, enact the centerpieces of the American Families Plan, and ensure climate change action makes it into the upcoming reconciliation bill. 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.

You can let Sign for Good help you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the super-rich already -- they need to hear the general message just as much as they need to hear the specific ones! -- or you can make a phone call to your Congressfolk and tell them to raise corporate taxes, tax capital gains and dividend income at regular income rates, tax financial transactions, pass a Wealth Tax, and bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income (or pass a Millionaire's Surtax, which would only bring it up to 47%, but that'd be the highest it's been in, like, 36 years). Or you can do both! All of these actions would do this nation a great deal of good -- we'd not only have money to build an America that gives its people the services we deserve, but we'd restrain the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us, as they've been doing since approximately 1980. It's not often you can do unqualified good in this world, so seize the opportunity.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices already, and Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare. Our Senators are mulling both expanding Medicare (both eligibility and services) and letting it negotiate its own drug prices in the upcoming reconciliation bill -- no, not the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" they're still working on now, but the next bill, the one that might actually do some good and which they probably don't really want to pass anyway. You just know some idiot in the Democratic caucus will object to the "cost" of letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices when doing so would actually save the taxpayer some $80 billion annually! But we have a lot to say about whether they pass that bill or not. If we say it, that is.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. Hey, there's another thing that could fit into that reconciliation bill -- along with all those tax-hikes-on-the-rich we discussed in the first paragraph. The Child Tax Credit expansion, which delivers $250 or $300 checks into people's bank accounts every month, is such great policy and great politics I can't quite believe Democrats did it, but they did, in the American Rescue Plan Act, the first reconciliation bill of 2021. They're about to blow it with all their talk about "bipartisanship" and "how do we pay for stuff," of course, but, again, we have a lot to say about all of that -- if we say it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the reconciliation bill includes funding for home- and community-based care and paid family/medical leave. These items were the nominal centerpieces of the American Families Plan; now all we have to do is remind how-do-we-pay-for-it Democrats that a) they know damn well how to pay for it and they just have to have the guts to do it and b) if they fail at this, they're all toast in the 2022 midterms anyway. Seriously, you have Congressional Democrats who are all I can't raise taxes before an election. Because cutting taxes sure worked for the Democrats in the 2010 midterms and the Republicans in the 2018 midterms! No use saying we'd be better off without that kind of Democrat in Congress -- I mean of course we would, but we're stuck with them now, so better to communicate our will in numbers they can't ignore or deny.

Finally, both the League of Conservation Voters and the Union of Concerned Scientists help you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the reconciliation bill includes climate change action. I know, climate change, paid family leave, home care, the Child Tax Credit, taxing the rich -- it's all so much! And we've dispensed with it all in five paragraphs, and you can dispense with it all in three phone calls and/or a few minutes with the above links. We're not in maintenance mode with America; we're in pull-the-baby-out-the-damn-fire-now mode, particularly as concerns pollution. All the Millionaire's Surtaxes in the world won't amount to much if we don't have a planet to live on, and we're not getting out of climate change hell without investing in renewable energy technologies, so let's remind our Congressfolks of that, as many times as we need to.

Around the table: fight the real enemy, part 985.

Ho hum, three big banks that "partner" with WalMart made literally all of their 2019 and 2020 profits from overdraft fees extracted from working families. Nice work if you can get it! Seriously, that's not work, and every time a right-winger defends the "free" market, that's what they defend. As an aside, while I don't expect the acting Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to tip his hand in an investigation, his vow to use "the full range" of "our supervisory toolkit" doesn't exactly inspire confidence, either.

When I hear that "the biggest labor rally in Alabama history" last week was also the most racially diverse, I'm reminded that racial diversity hasn't always been a given in the labor movement -- all too often, labor has sided against non-white folks, particularly immigrants. The rally was also politically diverse, with "Trump guy(s)" peacefully coexisting with BLM supporters, reminding us of what we can accomplish together -- as long as the other side doesn't stage coups, try to overturn elections, or keep the pandemic going with their refusal to vaccinate.

The Senate's "debate" on the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" grinds on, briefly interrupted by a desperate right-wing attempt to root out "politically correct virtue-signaling" in the bill, in the words of Sen. Toomey (E-PA). Sen. Toomey's lame joke about "racist escalators" reminds us that he's no "moderate" merely because he doesn't scream at everyone like Donald Trump does. Right-wingers should also know that we hardly use the term "woke" anymore -- basically, we only use it to describe people who make a show of being "woke" without actually doing anything useful about racism, sexism, and fascism.

Did Nancy Pelosi's yammering about how nobody can just cancel student loan debt seem to come out of the blue to you? Well, Ken Klippenstein and Ryan Grim at The Intercept suggest it may have had something to do with a couple of billionaire constituents bending her ear. Just because people think the Bay Area is full of rich tech bros doesn't mean middle-class working people don't live there, and a lot of those folks have massive student loan debt, but their will means little or nothing to Ms. Pelosi, apparently. And thus we are reminded, yet again, that House Democratic leadership really needs to get out of the young bucks' way.

They're calling the results in the Ohio 11th House district Democratic primary a lesson in how Democrat voters want "stability," but Natalie Shure at In These Times sees other lessons to learn. One of them you already know from the last paragraph -- the Democratic House leadership might hate Republicans, but they definitely hate fierce liberals who might actually do some good with the power they have. Another lesson you already know is the power of dark money. But a third lesson? AOC and Cori Bush won by emphasizing the need to make Democrats "live up to their full potential." People would rather be inspired than angered, after all.

Finally, color me unimpressed that Dick Cheney has apparently professed to be "deeply troubled" about the state of the Republican Party, because he played a big role in bringing all of this about! Stupid wars, lawless government spying, collapsed economies, attacking the patriotism of folks who disagree with you, not to mention the accelerated decimation of our manufacturing base -- what part of this does he not recognize? What part of this has he not enabled? And if Bernie Sanders had won the 2020 election, would he have leaped to defend the "peaceful transition of power"?

Around the table: more notes on pollution, racism, and health care.

Sharon Lerner at The Intercept explains how big corporations and weak regulators get dangerous chemicals approved by our government. If a corporation demands that our EPA declare their chemical is safe right-fucking-now, aren't they telling us that it's really not safe? And when more and more chemical approval cases suddenly become high-priority "hair on fire" cases, doesn't that make the word "priority" pretty close to meaningless? If your workplace worked like that, you'd call bullshit. (As an aside, some corporate hacks even threaten EPA workers with lawsuits. Do I dare I call them frivolous lawsuits? Yes, I do dare!)

Surprise, surprise, states that ended enhanced unemployment benefits didn't prompt very many people to get jobs. And you don't live like a king on unemployment benefits, enhanced or not, so gosh, maybe folks really just don't want to go back to bad jobs so they can be paid in dung pellets and suffer endless abuse from bosses and customers. Sure, fear of COVID and caring for relatives with COVID might be factors, but I doubt they're deal-breakers. Wouldn't a free marketeer look at this data and suggest that employers make their jobs more attractive if they want to fill more positions? I kid, of course -- no "free" marketeer ever blames a corporation for not doing enough.

When I read that African asylum seekers have an even tougher time at American concentration camps than other folks do -- and Frances Madeson's report is truly horrifying -- I am reminded that we have a long history of truly awful immigration policy. Remember when we used to give gasoline baths to poor (not well-off) Mexican immigrants at the border? The Nazis picked up on that! I guess right-wingers will call me a purveyor of critical race theory for even noting any of this. And I'll call them a bunch of whiny diaper-loaded brats who are too weak to handle the hard work of maintaining a civilization, so I guess that's at least a draw.

Hey, speaking of critical race theory, Olivia Riggio at FAIR notes that right-wingers have "manufactured" all kinds of meanings of the term. I guess they're not quite as embarrassing as that Alabama lawmaker, but why do we bother telling the difference between the mound of dung the flies have found and the mound of dung they haven't found yet? Even the right-wingers who try harder still basically insist that one counter-example destroys all trends, which is still pretty damn stupid. No, one college professor fantasizing about shooting white people doesn't obliterate the fact of police exterminating Black folks for centuries. No, one Black man getting two doctorates doesn't obliterate the racism that means other Black folks get none. And no, you're certainly not "the real racist" for pointing out the real racism. Gosh, no matter how many head shots you give these zombies, they keep getting back up. It's almost like Our Glorious Elites benefit from that or something.

Did Florida Governor Ron DeSantis really say that his state's "hospitals are open for business"? Yes, he really did say that. Politicians constantly use the phrase "open for business" as if it's an amulet that'll keep them out of trouble; is it too much to ask that Mr. DeSantis has finally put a stake through that phrase's heart? As we speak, Florida routinely leads the nation in daily new cases, and Charlie Crist just led Ron DeSantis in a poll. If Mr. Crist deploys the phrase "our hospitals are open for business" in his ads, he might just win. I hope Mr. Crist isn't too "nice" for that. Perhaps he should ask John Bel Edwards how well being nasty to people who deserve it can work for you.

Finally, New York Attorney General Letitia James issues report finding that Gov. Andrew Cuomo has sexually harassed "multiple" women. Please, please, don't take Andrew Cuomo away from us! said no liberal ever.

Action: concerning evictions, chemical safety, corporate welfare, worker rights, discrimination, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell our government to extend the eviction moratorium, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the PFAS Action Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the PRO 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell our Congressfolk to extend the eviction moratorium. Thanks largely to pressure from House liberals such as Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), the Biden Administration did issue an order extending the eviction moratorium for 60 days in high-COVID areas, and even though real estate groups might get our Supreme Court to overturn it rather quickly, that order isn't useless -- if nothing else, it buys a little time for somehow-undistributed COVID relief money to get to the renters who need it. Still, Congress needs to hear from us that they should do something about this -- Republicans would just love to see hundreds of tent cities spring up all over America. And I'm not worried about landlords' well-being. You don't get to be a landlord if you're not well-off. Besides, hardship builds character; isn't that what we always tell renters?

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, and -- this is critical! -- not weaken it to please their corporate paymasters. H.R. 2467 would, among other things, mandate that our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) set standards for how much PFAS chemicals we can tolerate in our drinking water; the ideal number would be "zero," given how hard it is to break PFAS chemicals down (they don't call them "forever chemicals" for nothing!) and how scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer and birth defects, but given their ubiquity in our products, we are already compromising by setting any non-zero limits at all. And our Senators know this bill should pass, so they'll try to weaken it and then take credit for it. That's a wicked game, and we shouldn't let them play it.

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. This bill would end some $15 billion annually in corporate welfare subsidies to corporations that, frankly, don't need the money, like oil and gas drillers. Literally the only people in America who want to keep that welfare coming are the oil and gas drilling corporations who get it, and, sadly, they contribute big bucks to the politicians who'll vote on this bill. And these corporations don't spend nearly as much in campaign contributions as they collect in corporate welfare! So we the people need to stop that. After all, we're the majority.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The big story this past week, as you may know, is a National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) hearing officer determining that Amazon did, in fact, break laws during the April unionization vote at its Bessemer, AL warehouse, and our NLRB may order another election in the coming weeks, but wouldn't it be nice if it didn't even come to that? The PRO Act would stop a lot of big corporate abuse and intimidation -- including the forced anti-union propaganda meetings and the retaliation against pro-union workers -- before it happens. Again, big corporations won't like it, and they will spend to stop it. But I would ask this of our Senators: do you really want to take "I was easily bribed repeatedly by big corporations" to the Pearly Gates?

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. Have I mentioned how disgusting I find the arguments against the Equality Act? Why, yes, I believe I have, in some detail. And what's most disgusting about them? None of them are true! Why, those arguments would need to take two buses and a train even to get in the same neighborhood as the truth! The Equality Act prevents bosses, landlords, and banks from discriminating against gay and transgender folks just because they're gay and transgender, end of story. If that offends folks' "religious beliefs," then maybe -- just an idea -- they shouldn't base their religion around who they hate.

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. And 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. Again: the arguments against these bills all suck. The bills would curtail gerrymandering, enact same-day and automatic voting registration, give all voters 15 days of early voting, force big campaign donors to disclose their donations, give power to stop vote suppression at the state level back to our Justice Department, and end certain racist de-registration practices, so if folks call all that "a Democrat power grab," they may want to consider whether it only looks that way because of actual Republican power-grabs -- like Voter ID, or creating Rorschach-blot legislative districts, or closing polling booths in Black neighborhoods, or using the Interstate Crosscheck database to de-register Black voters without telling them, or any of the several dozen other right-wing tricks you can name.

Around the table: what to do about dystopia, part 869.

Edward Snowden proposes a two-step response to begin dealing with the dystopia promised by the Pegasus Project: "ban the commercial trade in intrusion software," and hold corporations liable for investing or producing it. If you make it illegal, after all, you can hold people liable for making it. If we do these things, we won't eradicate spyware like Pegasus -- which, as you may recall, can turn on your iPhone's microphones remotely and listen in on what you say -- but we will make it a lot harder for spyware to do damage. As Mr. Snowden suggests, this is the same logic that operates behind vaccination.

In a peripherally-related note, Sara Morrison at Vox explains "how police can get your data -- even if you aren't suspected of a crime." Long story short: they can get it from a third-party data broker (the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would fix that), or they can use "reverse search warrants," which should be illegal. Should we be "happy" that our police don't have access to Pegasus yet? This sorry state of affairs is yet another reason we don't leave important questions to corporations. Trouble is, our legislators think only corporations know anything about anything!

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: ISIS supporters have glommed on to the Trump-friendly social network GETTR, posting videos of beheadings and the like. Well, they always said ISIS understood the social media landscape better than anyone! And they'll find plenty of sympathetic souls among the whiners who've left Facebook and Twitter because their friends shame them for saying obnoxious crap. GETTR's guru shrugs off the ISIS influence, but "free speech" still doesn't cover terroristic threats, nor does a private media corporation have any obligation to publish literally anything.

ICU doctor confesses that what her unvaccinated COVID patients tell her leaves her "surprised, disheartened, but most of all, angry," and who can blame her? You risk death taking care of COVID patients, you endure all the loneliness and all the supply chain shortages, you update your own living will, and now some YouTube University graduate lectures you about how intubation is the real killer? I'd slap a pimp if they did that -- which is yet another reason why I'm not a doctor. My patience with the unvaccinated is short, and I don't even encounter very many of them in my travels.

In a related note, Dartmouth University sociology professor Brooke Harrington writes about the "anti-vaccine con job" and reminds us that folks who've been so thoroughly conned can't just switch on a dime. And I would say the con is significantly longer than "anti-vaccine con job" suggests -- almost 20 years ago, for example, the same damn people all fell for the Iraq War Con Job. Apparently only other right-wingers can reach them, which I guess is good in the short run if it helps us get the upper hand on COVID again, but can they even reach them? Or have decades of right-wing yelling and screaming created a group of Americans who won't listen to anything that doesn't diddle their rage gland?/p>

Finally, California restauranteur Tony Roman hangs sign outside restaurant demanding that potential customers show "proof of being unvaccinated." In that spirit, I'd like some proof that Tony Roman hasn't fucked a goat. I mean, I don't want to associate with goat-fuckers, so I'm entitled to demand official documentation about that fact from other people. See how easy this game is? In the meantime, I urge folks to avoid dining at Basilico's Pasta e Vino in Huntington Beach, not least because for all you know you might run into a goat-fucker.

Action: concerning war, privacy, women's health, whistleblowers, and corporate spying.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the National Security Powers Act, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, the Whistleblower Protection Improvements Act, and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale 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.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act. S. 2391 would repeal all the authorizations to use military force (or AUMFs) relating to war in the Middle East, give Congress more authority over arms sales to other countries, and reform the National Emergencies Act, presumably so the next dunderhead who wants to build a border wall can't abuse it like the last one did. And if anyone tells you this would hamstring the President's ability to act, tell them that's a feature, not a bug. The President is only supposed to lead armies into battle after Congress declares war, not whenever the President feels like it.

Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1628, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act. S. 1628 would ban targeted advertising to children, require that internet corporations get consent before collecting data from children, allow parents and children to more easily delete personal data from private data brokers, and mandate a whole lot more transparency about this issue than we have now. We have the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, but that became law over 20 years ago, and a lot's happened since then -- it's a lot easier to get targeted ads now, for example. S. 1628 would help update COPPA for modern times. Our kids deserve that, after all.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. The bill would essentially legalize abortion all across the land, in anticipation of our Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which action would allow the states to regulate abortion again, and would make it illegal for states to restrict access to abortion in the ways they've done it over the last decade. The most recent egregious example? The Texas law that lets literally anyone sue an abortion provider for performing an abortion! Never mind proving standing to sue, or even that harm was done to you! A court will strike that part of the Texas law down for those reasons fairly soon, but why make good Americans wait?

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require bosses to make reasonable accommodations for workers who get pregnant -- that means more sit-down assignments wherever possible, more bathroom breaks, no firing of workers just for getting pregnant or refusing to hire workers who are just because they're pregnant. I shudder to think of the "objections" Republicans will throw up against this bill. I suspect they'll mostly be TEH TRIAL LAWYERZ!!!!! and TEH BOSSEZ CAN'TZ DOEZ TEH BOSSINGZ ANYMOREZ!!!!!, both of which will be revealed to be utter horsedoodle to anyone who reads the bill, or to anyone who's ever been fired because their boss wouldn't get them a chair.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2988, the Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act. Folks who blow the whistle on our government's corruption deserve our admiration, because they risk their careers and their personal lives when they do so; people who think they just live off the fat of a huge reward have obviously never blown the whistle on a damn thing in their lives. H.R. 2988 would better protect whistleblowers from retaliation at their jobs -- even if their boss is our President! -- and would give them more access to jury trials and speed up the process of rewarding them (if their whistleblowing merits it), so they can get on with their lives with minimal placing of sharp objects to their wrists after three years of being completely unable to work, just as a for-example. We need their good works, so we need to protect them.

Finally, 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. H.R. 2378/S. 1265 would prevent third-party data broker corporations from selling your personal information to law enforcement personnel, because selling that personal data willy-nilly like that may be lucrative for people who really should go get a real job, but it contravenes our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. If law enforcement wants to get you, they should get a warrant first, but buying up big chunks of data from brokers lets police work around that. And they shouldn't get to work around it! If you're tempted to get all thin-blue-line about this, just imagine police harassing you because some web search you did in 2009 raised their antennae.

Action: concerning vaccines, jobs legislation, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell employers to give their workers time off so they can get vaccinated, tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich to pay for the reconciliation bill, ensure that climate change, care economy funding, and paid family/medical leave all get attention in said reconciliation bill, expand Medicare, and get rid of the Senate filibuster already. 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.

First things first. Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell employers to give paid time off to their workers so they can get vaccinated. Some folks won't get the vaccine because they think it Owns the Libs, but others won't get it because they can't get time off from work, so telling employers to give paid time off to workers to get the vaccine should help with that. And if a boss says I can't afford it, ask him if he can afford to train a new worker when the old one dies of COVID because he wouldn't let him go get a damn vaccine. And ask him if he'd like to have a mini-epidemic at the workplace and lose a ton of money because of that. There's a reason we all hate bosses -- they never think of anything but the short term anymore. But they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

As Congress prepares for its wholly unearned vacation this month, you'll want to give them a call and list all the tax hikes on the rich that'd pay for reconciliation bill -- a corporate tax hike, raising the capital gains tax, treating dividends as income, a financial transaction tax, the Millionaire's Surtax, the wealth tax, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, did I miss any? Feel free to add to your list! After all, Joe Manchin is already making his "how are we going to pay for this?" noises. Good folks of West Virginia, tell him this is how we pay for it! He can only pretend he doesn't hear, and that act will get old fast, if it isn't old already. I think it's old.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to center climate change in the reconciliation bill. You can bet the big polluters will be yelling in your Congressfolk's ears about how stupid solar and wind power are and how we shouldn't be touching big oil's corporate welfare, so we've got to be louder. This has always seemed like a no-brainer to me -- spurring renewable energy production not only creates jobs (and jobs with similar skill sets to those that displaced coal and oil workers would have!), but reduces pollution and slows the ill effects of climate change. The problem, of course, is that our Congressfolk too easily act like they have no brains. Well, you know how it is with people who act stupid -- you just have to tell them again and again and again.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the reconciliation bill includes funding for home- and community-based care and paid family/medical leave. These were, after all, stated priorities of Joe Biden's, and we always knew a reconciliation bill would follow the infrastructure bill that Joe Manchin insisted had to be "bipartisan," and we always knew that reconciliation bill would have more so-called Democratic priorities in it. And I say "so-called" because these things are actually popular with the American people broadly, so we should communicate our will to our Congressfolk about them. After all, do we really suppose that the good citizens of Wyoming reflexively oppose paid family/medical leave just because their "representatives" in Congress do? I sure hope not.

The Hero Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare, by lowering the eligibility age, giving Medicare the ability to negotiate its own drug prices (which will save the taxpayer money!), and offer hearing, dental, and vision care. You'll hear from right-wingers that "Medicare Advantage already offers hearing, dental, and vision! Ha ha ha another libtard owned!" But Medicare Advantage is a private health insurance plan funded with taxpayer money, and why should hearing, dental, and vision be an "advantage"? It should be a standard. And again, do the citizens of Idaho reflexively oppose letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices just because their "representatives" in Congress will move mountains to prevent it from happening? I sure hope not.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster that Republicans have used to block every good thing Democrats have tried to do over the last dozen years. The "success" of the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" doesn't "prove" that we should hold on to the filibuster. Republicans got just about everything they wanted out of that "deal"; its existence only proves that "bipartisanship" means "Democrats and Republicans coming together to do whatever Republicans want." Politicians should do what the people want, and the people want their politicians to do the right thing and stop making excuses about why they can't. And "because the filibuster" sounds exactly like an excuse.

Around the table: once more into the breach.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times proposes a national strike fund, like the various GoFundMes that pop up for groups of striking workers. As Gomez Addams would say, capital idea! That fund would have a big target on its back from Day One -- from state and corporate hackers and from frivolous lawsuits -- but anything worth doing is hard. And, as Mr. Nolan says, "If the Frito-Lay workers in Kansas had had a little more money to carry them through, perhaps they could have won something better than, basically, the working conditions of a factory worker a century ago."

Amanda Marcotte says the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" "is likely the last nail in the coffin of any hope that Manchin or Sinema would seriously consider filibuster reform," which would prevent Congress from passing the For the People Act and thus likely doom America to rule by Republicans for the foreseeable future. But I don't imagine Sens. Manchin and Sinema are really "thinking" about whether or not to reform the filibuster; I think they've made up their minds, and the only thing that'll change their minds is relentless public pressure, since even a U.S. Senator will go to great lengths to avoid becoming the most unpopular person in America.

Establishment Democrats start using the Republicans' vote against the American Rescue Plan -- which increased funding to local police departments -- against them in midterms, essentially saying Republicans are the party that actually "defunded the police." Good to see Democrats have some smarts after all! And good, also, to see them tying Republicans to the January 6 attempted coup in this manner! I guess I'd still prefer they use that vote against the American Rescue Plan to run Republicans want to take your Child Tax Credit checks away ads, but hey, if Democrats actually look fierce about something for once, I'll take it.

In case you were actually wondering, Republicans who blame Nancy Pelosi for January 6 are legitimately full of crap. Basically, Republicans have alleged that Ms. Pelosi, as House Speaker, has all kinds of powers she doesn't actually have, or did things they have no evidence she actually did. Even the one person Ms. Pelosi did appoint to his job, the House Sergeant at Arms, was first appointed by John Boehner, then by Paul Ryan. Also, too, you first blame the people who attacked the Capitol for attacking the Capitol! This whole accountability thing seems to trip up nominal conservatives an awful lot.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) praises Medicare and Medicaid on Medicare's birthday, then promptly calls for Americans to "reject Socialist health care schemes." Elise Stefanik would kill Medicaid and Medicare with her bare hands if she could, but in the meantime wants you to think that programs everyone pays into so that seniors and poor folks can go to the doctor are not at all socialist. ("But I said Socialist, not socialist! See? Big difference! Another libtard owned!") But remember, if you drive roads, call police, visit the local library, or draw a Social Security check, congratulations! You are a socialist.

Finally, Donald Trump has reportedly called the police officers who testified before Congress "pussies" in numerous private conversations over the last few months. Thus continues his upside-down world, not just one in which actual courage is "weakness" and snake oil salesmen are "the best people," but one in which folks who have actually been through hell are "weak" just for admitting it. He must be chomping at the bit to slam Simone Biles -- or complain about how it's not "politically correct" anymore to do so. May a million people poop in his funeral casket.