Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning law and order, climate change, clean water, national forests, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, tell federal agencies to take climate change into account when spending taxpayer money, tell our government to keep radioactive waste off the vaunted Three Rivers, tell our Forest Service to keep logging out of the Tongass National Forest, and tell AT&T to cut off life support for the notorious One America News Network. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

People for the American Way helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Not because it didn't go our way -- that's just right-wing whiners projecting their inadequacies on us! -- but because we all saw how suspicious it was. Imagine being on trial for murder and watching the judge refuse to let lawyers call victims "victims" but allow lawyers to call them "looters." That same judge allowed Mr. Rittenhouse himself to pick which jurors to send home after both sides rested their cases, and the verdict absurdly expanded "self-defense" to include brats bringing killing machines to protests "just in case." The George Zimmerman verdict sucked, but even that made more sense than this! If our Justice Department investigates this absurdity, we might get some justice down the line, and that's worth the effort.

Progress America helps you tell our government to take climate change into account in its procuring decisions. I mean, you'd want them to go the extra mile to keep our planet livable if it were your money, right? Oh, wait: it is your money. Just so happens President Biden has called for this very thing -- but of course they have to take public comments on that first, and the right-wing whine machine is out in force with their comment-bots and paid crisis actors, so we have to speak up, too. No, "paid crisis actors" is entirely an appropriate thing to call right-wing commenters who take money to leave absurd public comments on matters concerning our government. It's not an appropriate thing to call us, of course -- we do good works for free.

MoveOn helps you tell our government to keep fracking wastewater off the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers. Those would be the famous "Three Rivers" that lent their name to the Pittsburgh Pirates' home stadium back in the day. Why keep fracking wastewater off the Three Rivers? Because the good citizens of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia depend on these rivers for clean water, and if a fracking wastewater barge sinks or springs a leak, it'll pollute that clean water so good folks can't drink it or wash with it. Seems pretty simple to me! If your snotty libertarian nephew says where will you put the wastewater then ha ha ha snort, just tell him there are a lot of ways to meet our energy needs that don't require fracking. I mean, c'mon, this is America, the can-do country!

Penn Environment helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to restore protections to the Tongass National Forest so that loggers don't spoil it. The Trump Administration, as you recall, decided to exempt over nine million acres of the Tongass National Forest as it wound down its evil term in office last year, saying that the rule would not cause "major adverse impacts to the recreation, tourism, and fishing industries, while providing benefits to the timber and mining industries, increasing opportunities for community infrastructure, and eliminating unnecessary regulations." Not mentioned: that the thousand-year-old trees of the Tongass trap more carbon than any other area in America. But, hey, as long as timber and mining CEOs get to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, who cares?

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell AT&T to stop funding the notorious One America News Network. Right-wingers love to talk about "starving the beast," the "beast," in their view, being our government, even though it provides services we need and pay for. Fact is, right-wing media is the beast, and I mean "beast" in the Book of Revelations sense. OANN, like Newsmax, Fox News, and The First, traffics in by far the worst drug in America -- right-wing rage -- and so they're the beast we need to starve. And yeah, I just said right-wing rage is a worse drug than heroin or fentanyl. Heroin and fentanyl destroy lives and families, but right-wing rage destroys civilizations. Take its money away and it'll go down faster than a vampire in a Nevada noon.

Action: concerning, at least one more time, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Senators to get the lead out of our drinking water, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, invest in the care economy, enact paid family/medical leave, let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and expand Medicare. 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.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Senators to ensure that the Build Back Better Act protects our clean water by funding lead pipe removal. As you know, the infrastructure bill President Biden signed begins the work of getting the lead out of our water pipes, but will by no means finish that work, which is why the Build Back Better Act needs to finish that work. I'm reminded, in the wake of Donald Trump whining that Republicans shouldn't have passed that infrastructure bill, that Mr. Trump's own infrastructure plan was to use $150 billion in tax cuts to "attract" $1 trillion in investment -- in exactly the kinds of "infrastructure" that makes money for some boss-man but doesn't actually help anyone. Getting the lead out of our drinking water helps everyone, so let's finish the job on that.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. Here I'm reminded that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) made loud noises about the cost of the bill when she originally spoke about it, but drew all her red lines around the parts that would have paid for the bill, like raising tax rates on the wealthy and on corporations! Doing that kind of bait-and-switch does open you up to the charge of being a liar, and in a sane, moral, and decent society, she would be so ashamed of what she's done that she wouldn't run for re-election. Why do I get the sense she's even more immune to shame than many of her colleagues? Anyway, that's why we keep doing what we do.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to ensure that the Build Back Better Act funds the "care economy," i.e., things like child care and home care. Cutting child care costs in half would be, as a famous philosopher once said, a big fucking deal, and I guess it's gratifying that Senators Manchin and Sinema haven't spoken out about any desire they might have to kill it, but I sure hope I haven't summoned a demon by saying that. And again: child care subsidies aren't "communism." Ask anyone who says so what they would do about child care corporations jacking up the cost of child care simply because they can -- that is, because almost all two-parent families have two working parents. Just remember: if they respond by saying "that's a discussion we should have," they're signaling that it's a discussion they're never going to have.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Senators to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Sen. Manchin is the 50th Democratic Senator who opposes this one; he says he'd like to pass something more "bipartisan," and more specifically something that relies more on payroll taxes, but he doesn't really think Mitch McConnell will allow that to happen, does he? And frankly our House's four-week paid family/medical leave plan is better, since it doesn't rely on regressive payroll taxes for funding. (Not incidentally, it also doesn't violate President Biden's requirement that the bill raise zero taxes on folks making less than $400,000 annually.) Now, previous paid family/medical leave bills did rely on payroll taxes, and they weren't onerous, but why do the worse thing if you can do the better thing?

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, Penn PIRG, and More Perfect Union all help you demand that your Senators put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. This was the other pay-for Kyrsten Sinema drew a red line against: the notion that Medicare could actually save the taxpayer money by negotiating for lower drug prices for American seniors. Seems the only folks who favor higher drug prices for seniors are the big pharma execs and the politicians who take their money. And when big pharma CEOs say that Medicare drug price negotiation will "cripple innovation," just remember that innovation only comes from necessity, not from comfort. Also remember that folks who have all the money don't "innovate" anything except how to get more money.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Joe Manchin doesn't like this, either, and to justify his opposition he mouthed a bunch of word salad about making sure Medicare is solvent first. Maybe he was just trying to avoid saying that he's been collecting a lot of money lately from big Republican donors with whom he previously had no connection. I should say that he and Sen. Sinema have been doing that, of course, and folks who shrug and say money talks really need to ask themselves: should politicians only listen to big donors? Politicians have to listen to their real bosses, their constituents, and most good Americans would have their Senators vote differently on a lot of these matters.

Around the table: from prayer apps to justice served.

"Prayer apps are flooding the market," announces Dorian Llywelyn at The Conversation, "but how well do they work?" If you think of praying as something you do on your own anyway, with only you and God around, you might be tempted to answer "not too well," although admittedly that's not all of us and folks have been spending more time alone than they'd like these days. Fr. Llywelyn sees both utilities and limits to prayer apps, but comes down more on the "limits" side, and I agree, skeptical as I am of attempts to achieve community through social media that don't necessarily involve achieving community in real space-time, and I rather suspect that if you just need reminding to pray -- hey, life gets busy! -- you've already got an alarm app on your smartphone that can help you with that.

Catalina Jamarillo at FactCheck.org patiently negotiates how "Viral Posts Misuse VAERS Data to Make False Claims About COVID-19 Vaccines." VAERS stands for "Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System," where folks have reported side effects after receiving vaccines for 30 years, but here's the thing: some haters use raw, unverified data to claim that vaccines cause much more harm than they actually do, when literally anyone can submit a claim, and frankly, haters don't even read these claims very closely -- LOOKZ ATZ ALLZ TEH DEATHZ!!!! meaning even less when, for all we know, the one who "passed away in their sleep" after getting the vaccine was ancient. Whenever you hear some guy bellowing "do your own research!" you can be pretty sure he has no idea how to do actual research.

Melvin Goodman at Counterpunch tells us "Why There Are So Few Whistleblowers." Because you'll ruin your life would, I suspect, be your first answer, but it's good to stare at the wreckage a little longer, and list the reasons your life will be ruined: because our "liberal" media will attack you, because you can count on military and intelligence agencies to actively conspire against you, because the last two Presidents (not just Trump!) have waged war on the Inspectors General who would receive your whistleblower complaints, and because today's Senators care little about protecting whistleblowers from retaliation. And I'm beyond tired of media knuckleheads charge a whistleblower with "narcissism," while permitting all manner of actual narcissism to spew forth from the mouths of politicians.

When I read that some House Republicans think "(p)eople need to get a thicker skin" is a proper response to Rep. Gosar's censure over posting a "satirical" snuff faux-anime in which his avatar kills two other avatars belonging to President Biden and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, I can only respond "well, you're one to talk!" Republicans who want us to "move on" from January 6 and "learn to take a joke" when threatened with decapitation have spent the last year whining so much about having to wear a mask, having to get a vaccine, and not being allowed on the House floor packing heat that they need their own diaper-changing stations. Which they wouldn't complain about, I'm sure, until an actual mother with an actual toddler needed to use it to change an actual diaper, at which point it would become TEH NANNYZ STATEZ!!!!!

Finally, we achieved a measure of justice in the Ahmaud Arbery verdict, as a jury found all three of his killers guilty of multiple felony murder counts, and by now you've probably heard 50 times that this verdict would never have come about without that video getting shared, and while that's true, we should also contemplate how many Ahmaud Arberys died 50 years ago when citizens were not able to carry high-quality video cameras in their pockets; the era where "everyone's a filmmaker" isn't entirely a bad thing. Moreover, we need to stop qualifying victories by saying "but it never would have happened if not for the activism," because we should be activists all the time.

Action: concerning Medicare, methane emissions, pensions, "forever chemicals," Arctic drilling, and "sacrifice zones."

Long story short: tell our government to abandon a long-term plan to privatize Medicare, tell our EPA to cut methane emissions in the most vigorous way possible, tell our Department of Labor to help protect pension plans from climate change, tell REI to get PFAS chemicals out of their products, tell the Biden Administration to reject the proposed Willow drilling project in Alaska and stop a massive drilling lease in Alaska's Cook Inlet, and tell our EPA to stop corporations from using working-class neighborhoods as their dumping grounds. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to scuttle a Trump-era plan to privatize Medicare. This would be the "Direct Contracting" plan, which allows Medicare to assign seniors to private health care plans managed by private corporations and insurers, even if the senior signed up for traditional public Medicare. In other words, Donald Trump told seniors that what they want doesn't matter, which should ring a bell. The fact that the Biden Administration hasn't thrown this program in the trash where it belongs means either they haven't gotten around to cleaning up that particular corner of the Augean stables or they secretly hope nobody notices it. If it's the latter, well, too late! And if enough of us speak out, Medicare will have no choice but to scuttle the program.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue the strongest methane emissions-cutting rule possible. We have many good reasons to cut methane emissions -- methane emissions pack a much bigger climate change punch than coal emissions do, methane emissions also represent lost usable energy, and on public lands methane emissions also represent lost royalties for the taxpayer. Also, you know, air pollution; you're going to be breathing the air all your life, after all, and there'll be no gated community to run to if we can't breathe the air. You'll also ask our EPA to ensure that the rule includes older gas and oil drilling plants; too many of the biggest polluters get "grandfathered" out of anti-pollution regulations. Word on the street is the EPA's rule is pretty good, but we've still gotta fight.

The Environmental Defense Fund also helps you tell our Department of Labor to approve a proposed rule to allow retirement funds to take climate change into account when making their decisions. After all, if you don't have a planet to live on, all your 401(k) money won't mean a thing! And the Labor proposal also reflects a reality too often overlooked (or, perhaps more precisely, "overlooked") by our "liberal" media -- that solar and wind have achieved parity of cost with fossil fuels more and more over the years, and sane investors wouldn't want to be caught with all their money in dying industries. Usually that's the thing you don't see until it's too late -- especially when you're obsessed with investing in "stuff that has worked for a long time." And a lot of stuff that has worked for a long time still works! But you've also got to know when to jump ship, and now's the time.

Consumer Reports helps you tell outdoor gear corporation REI to get the PFAS chemicals -- that's right, the "forever chemicals" -- out of their products. My guess is that REI would find that challenging, what with all the PFAS in their jackets and boots and tents and such, but tough toodles, because Americans deserve corporations that can change with the times. America certainly deserves corporations that live up to their "we're so green" PR, and REI certainly pumps out plenty of that. And you can probably recite this from memory by now, but PFAS chemicals are everywhere, and they don't break down, and they easily find their way into our bodies and wreak all kinds of health care havoc there. Getting the PFAS out of even one corner of one industry would be, as a famous philosopher has said, a BFD. So let's help make that happen.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell the Biden Administration to keep ConocoPhillips's notorious Willow project from moving forward, while the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell the Biden Administration to scuttle plans to offer over a million acres from Cook's Inlet to gas and oil drilling corporations. The American people hardly ever make any money from those sales anyway, given how much say big corporations have in the royalty rates to begin with! And both of these projects will pollute the hell out of Alaska, a land about which we don't know nearly enough to go fiddling about with new drilling projects. Remember when George H.W. Bush said the caribou like the Alaska pipeline, because they brush up against it? Our civilization doesn't appear to have advanced very far from that analysis. Which is one reason we keep fighting Arctic drilling.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our EPA to fight big polluting corporations from creating ever more "sacrifice zones" where good Americans can't live anymore. It's been a matter of popular knowledge for more than two decades -- at least since the time I saw Mystery Science Theatre 3000 reference it in an episode! -- that big polluters love building near communities with lots of Black and Brown folks in them, figuring, I guess, that nobody will miss them and/or that the folks who live there won't organize to fight them. Of course those folks do organize to fight them, but what a big help it would be to have our government standing with them for the first time ever! But they'll only stand with those communities if we demand they stand with them.

UPDATE. I apologize for messing up the link in paragraph 3, and I've now corrected it.

Action: concerning Social Security, war on Yemen, privacy, workers' rights, women's health, and Presidential power.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, block our President's recent arms sale to Saudi Arabia, and pass the Protecting Data at the Border Act; tell your Senators to pass the PRO Act and the Women's Health Protection Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protect Our Democracy 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.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act. Our "liberal" media love squealing that TEH SOSHUL SECURITIEZ TRUSTZ FUNDZ WILLZ GOEZ TEH BROKEZ!!!!!!, but we've blown past every deadline for the trust fund to go broke, and good Americans are still getting the checks they worked for, paid into, fought for, and deserve to enjoy in their old age. And while our "liberal" media loves talking about the "necessity" to cut benefits, none of them will talk about increasing revenues. The Social Security 2100 Act would not only increase revenues (by taxing income over $400,000 into the system for the first time) but increase benefits (by measuring inflation as it relates to seniors' lives a lot better). As Ross Perot might say, problem solved! If we speak out, that is.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to block the proposed $650 million arms sale to Saudi Arabia, which comes on top of a $500 million arms deal last month, and which the Saudis will almost certainly use in their interminable war on Yemen. And as Rep. Omar (D-MN) reminds us, we're not just selling arms to a country that's forcing Yemen into famine and destitution simply because they don't like their government, but we're also selling arms to a country that "kill(s) and torture(s) dissidents" like the journalist Jamal Khassogi, whom the Saudis killed with -- among other implements, I presume -- a bone saw. No use retorting, as Mr. Trump once did, that "(t)he world is a dangerous place!" (exclamation point in the original). One of the main reasons it's a dangerous place? We give money and weapons to killers and torturers.

Restore the Fourth helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass H.R. 5524/S. 2957, the Protect Data at the Border Act. As you know, our Supreme Court ruled back in 2014 that law enforcement needed to get a warrant to search your cellphone, because cellphones, in Chief Justice Roberts's words, "hold for many Americans 'the privacies of life'." Yet Customs and Border Patrol agents routinely search your cellphone at the border -- as lower courts "struggle" with whether our Supreme Court's ruling applies there, I guess because they think folks at the border are non-citizens, although that's far from a given (and not just because borders include coastlines). What would a conservative do? Give people at the border the protections of the law until you determine for sure that they don't merit them, that's what. And the Protect Data at the Border Act would help with that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would, among other things, clamp down on retaliation by employers against employees who try to unionize and clamp down on employers pulling you away from your work so you can sit for hours and hear their high-priced lawyers propagandize against unions. But all right-wingers bellow about is that it would outlaw state-level right-to-work laws, though there's a reason we call "right-to-work" laws "right-to-work-for-less" laws. Even if you're skeptical of federal influence in "state matters," you can't be in favor of firing workers just for trying to unionize, or pulling them off the floor to make them sit in stupid meetings for hours at a time. Can you?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act, which would essentially legalize abortion everywhere in America, now that our Supreme Court seems anxious to kill Roe v. Wade once and for all. I do not criticize anyone's sadness or pain at the mere thought of an abortion occurring, nor do I assume that the goal of anyone on the pro-choice side is "more abortions." Further, I doubt legalizing abortion would lead to that -- there were plenty of illegal abortions every year before Roe v. Wade. But we can't go back to a world that makes women into little more than breeders, and that's where right-wingers want to take us with their anti-Roe v. Wade activism. And to stop them, we have to speak out.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. The Protecting Our Democracy Act would limit a President's ability to declare national emergencies so they subvert the popular will (i.e., by building vanity border walls the people's representatives in Congress have refused to fund), plus it would prevent Presidents from profiting from their office (as a certain recent occupant of the Oval Office was known to do), and would require Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates to release 10 years of tax returns (ditto). These Trump-era sins would make our Founders spin in their graves, and though they share some of the blame for these sins (having created the Electoral College!), their hatred of untrammeled executive power is one we should all share. And act upon!

Around the table: featuring astroturf moms and "enigmatic" Senators.

I should've known this already, but when you see "concerned moms" screaming about "critical race theory" in schools, chance are that an astroturf group, maybe even one attached to the Koch brothers, funds them. Folks scoff when they hear about groups like Parents Defending Education or Moms for Liberty, because gosh they look just like ordinary Americans! But of course right-wing astroturf groups would find and groom ordinary Americans to mouth their nonsense -- after all, as a famous philosopher once said, you can't be a successful crook with a dishonest face.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema speaks with the Washington Post, and while I won't tabulate all of my objections, since they number approximately one per point she makes, I will say that we haven't been calling her an "enigma," as she supposes -- we've said she's defying the will of her constituents, which she tries to obscure by framing everything in terms of herself. ANd the notion that she's been very "open" about what she's doing matters nothing when her positions on Medicare drug price negotiation and raising tax rates on the rich and on corporations (to name two) fly in the face of the expressed will of her real bosses, her constituents. So clearly she's not being very "open" to them, and they're the people who matter most! (Hate to pile on, but when she talks about the "regular, everyday people" of Arizona, she's not only suggesting they approve of what she's doing when they clearly don't, she's also saying the rest of us really aren't "regular, everyday people." Maybe she's not the messaging Svengali she thinks she is.)

Surely Eve Ottenberg isn't the first observer to ask what the hell all this anti-vaccine sentiment not the first to ask what exactly all these anti-vaccine crooks hope to achieve -- it is reasonable, after all, to suppose that the targets of anti-vaxxers, as she puts it, have "no doubt already or will soon be relieved of every last cent they possess by internet charlatans" -- but I would submit, as I often do, that stoking rage among the already rage-addled is the endgame, not just because rage can be refocused on new targets as the "need" arises, but because right-wing politicians can so easily bait-and-switch the rage-addled into voting for them and therefore supporting things they'd never support during those moments they can think clearly, like dirty water or corporate tax cuts.

What could I possibly have to say about Marjorie Taylor Greene saying the Build Back Better Act is "Communism"? Same thing I've said more than once over the last decade: that virtually no one who brandishes “Communist” as a scare word these days can conceive of one-party elections, the abolition of capital ownership, complete central planning of the economy, citizens living in one-bedroom apartments assigned by the state, or the fear of being literally followed around by police at any moment, and calling anything else "Communism" insults all the billions of good people who suffered and died under real Communist oppression. Hey, if they're not going to change, why should I?

In a peripherally-related note, more than a few Republican Senators have smeared a Biden nominee -- whose family literally ran for their lives from Josef Stalin -- as, guess what, a Communist. Sen. Rubio, in particular, should be ashamed not just of being ignorant of Saule Omarova's personal history but of lying about her positions. "(A)bolishing private bank accounts"? Gosh, dramatic much? We can hope, I suppose, that Val Demings does America a favor next year and shoves this shit down Marco Rubio's throat.

Finally, Trump-endorsed Pennsylvania Senate candidate Sean Parnell suspends his campaign after losing a custody battle. And yet I still think he's not done, for what energizes Trump votaries more than a sense of having something taken from you? Mr. Parnell can still sell all of this to the votaries as that whore took my kids away from me, and to rank-and-file Republicans he can claim the judge didn't really think he was a bad guy -- which isn't exactly true, but they'll ignore the details if victory depends on it. Consider, also, that our "liberal" media loves a good "comeback" story, and you'll see why the good citizens of Pennsylvania to remain on their guard. I just hope his kids overcome what's happened to them.

Action: concerning the Build Back Better Act as passed by our House and considered by our Senate.

Long story short: tell your Senators to get the lead out of our drinking water, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, invest in the care economy, enact paid family/medical leave, let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and expand Medicare. 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.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Senators to ensure that the Build Back Better Act protects our clean water by funding lead pipe removal. Without clean water, you don't have health care; it's that damn simple. And the other infrastructure bill President Biden signed begins to do the work of getting the lead out of our water, but it doesn't finish that work, and we need the Build Back Better Act to finish that work. Even if Joe Manchin worries about the supposed "deficit" in the CBO's analysis of the Build Back Better Act, a) that deficit could be entirely made up by the IRS enforcement plank the CBO didn't include in its analysis and b) that deficit makes up a smaller percentage of the BBBA than does the deficit the CBO found in his pet "bipartisan" infrastructure bill. They'll say anything, and that's why we stay on them.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. And tell them that if they're really serious about that, they'll not only tell Kyrsten Sinema to eat the damn higher tax rates on the rich and on corporations, but they'll also tell the Northeastern Democratic House Reps that repealing the cap on state and local taxes is too big a handout to the rich! And remember that when some rich right-wing jerk says "they'll tax me today, but they'll come for you tomorrow," just remind them that you're already paying your taxes, thank you very much. Everybody can't hire million-dollar lawyers to help them evade their responsibility to their civilization, after all.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to ensure that the Build Back Better Act funds the "care economy," i.e., things like child care and home care. Regardless of what you may have heard, providing subsidies to help working families cover child care is not communism! They sling that word around the way they'd sling their feces around if folks didn't already frown on that. Child care subsidies help families navigate two unfortunate realities: one, that families can't afford to have only one parent working as easily as they could 50 years ago, and two, child care-providing corporations charge an arm and a leg for the service simply because they know people need it (thanks to reality number one). And when the market fails us, as it clearly has in this instance, our government needs to step in and make it right on our behalf. This ain't that damn deep, except to folks who love stoking rage everywhere they go.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Senators to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. The House version, passed late last week, puts four weeks of paid family/medical leave back in the bill, and apparently Sen. Manchin has already wondered out loud why they did that. Possibly because we demanded it? They act like they have no idea how this is supposed to work! Of course, they know how it's supposed to work, but they want to make politics like a sporting event, and they want to make us into spectators. But although nobody died and made Joe Manchin the One True Great and Awesome Real American President, he'll win again, unless we keep speaking out in numbers our leaders can't deny. Don't ever worry about being a pest to your Congressfolk. They're supposed to listen.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, Penn PIRG, and More Perfect Union all help you demand that your Senators put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. Our House acceeded to the unfortunate "reality" that Kyrsten Sinema and Bob Menendez won't support real Medicare drug price negotiation, and allowed Medicare to cap insulin prices (beginning in 2023!) and negotiate a limited number of drugs in 2025 and a few more in 2028. That's not nothing, but it's not good politics, either -- when eight out of 10 Americans want Medicare to be able to negotiate drug prices, you don't "look good" by delivering half-measures. Hence we go to our Senators, to tell them to do the right thing, again and again and again if need be.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Again Sen. Manchin previously cited Medicare's "solvency" in opposing Medicare coverage of dental, hearing, and vision care for seniors -- this, even though you need more of this care when you're older, not less! Which is something you would think a fellow like the 74-year-old Mr. Manchin would know! Of course, there are thousands of ways to save money for Medicare -- like drug price negotiation, which Mr. Manchin supports, but you can't discount the possibility that he supports it only because he knows it won't pass, with the opposition of Sens. Sinema and Menendez. None of that matters. All that matters is our will -- but only if we express it.

One more thing: don't let "liberal" media scaremongering about inflation deter you from your support for a vigorous Build Back Better Act. Getting the lead out of our water, fighting climate change, and enacting paid family/medical leave will all lower health care costs; helping working parents pay for child care will lower child care costs and fighting climate change will also lower disaster recovery costs. You can't just choose not to build back houses if a hurricane destroys them, after all! And if you're worried about "runaway government spending causing inflation," consider, again, that the Build Back Better Act will be paid for even if we don't get all the revenue-raisers we want, and consider, also that raising taxes on the rich and on corporations and letting Medicare negotiate drug prices all save the taxpayer money. And I dare say folks will care about all of that more than they'll ever care about a number. But we do actually have to do these things for folks to care about them.

Around the table: featuring, believe it or not, *mostly good news!*

Our House passes the Build Back Better Act, 220-213, with only one Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine, voting against it -- and not without making a good point, that the bill gives a massive handout to rich folks by raising the SALT cap. Maybe he'll win another term! The House-passed bill includes four weeks of paid family leave, and the more times we make Joe Manchin come out against it the worse for him, and the CBO estimate said it would add nearly $400 billion to our national debt over 10 years, though said estimate didn't include incoming revenue from better IRS enforcement (though it also estimated that would raise a little over $200 billion over 10 years, which could be a bit conservative). Needless to say, making that SALT cap repeal a lot smaller would narrow that gap. Anyway, Democrats have some more things to run on; now let's see if they'll run on them.

John Deere workers who had been on strike for five weeks ratify a new contract, which gives them a 10% raise and an $8,500 signing bonus right away, preserves premium-free health insurance benefits, and strengthens their pensions. The total wage increase of 20% over six years isn't quite as impressive as the immediate pay hike, and the immediate pay hike isn't as impressive when you remember that inflation is now up to 6%, but we should still celebrate their achievement, because the best way to get treated right is to make your bosses realize they can't function without you. (The second best way would be to make hedge funds illegal. Really, how do they differ from speculators? We used to clamp down on speculators.)

President Biden fires two members of our USPS Board of Governors, including Ron Bloom, who had been a big Louis DeJoy supporter and whose investment fund just so happens to have a nice chunk of DeJoy money in it. It'll take time to get the new nominees in, who would then have to vote to fire Mr. DeJoy, but just remember that "Americans paying more for slower mail" is actually a hard sell! Especially to the good Americans who get their insulin through the mail! Then, after getting rid of Mr. Get-Used-to-Me, if we can get the Postal Reform Act through Congress and restart postal banking, that'll be a good couple of years' work. (As an aside, boy do I not care that the insiders didn't see President Biden's moves coming! We've been on him for almost a year about it, but I guess the "insiders" don't talk to very many regular Americans.)

Apple decides to let people repair their own iPhone 12 and 13 devices beginning early next year. It's not a particularly broad response to all out "right to repair" activism, and you'll still have to get Apple replacement parts, but getting Apple to go even this far testifies to our good works. I mean, this is Apple, which hates giving any control over their products to anyone! As an aside, does anyone else find it odd that Apple has long extolled its customers as "the best people" yet has spent the last two decades not trusting "the best people" to repair their own computers? I love telling folks about those halcyon days when I could replace the processor and RAM in whatever Apple laptop I had, and maybe, with a lot more agitation, those days can come back.

Max B. Sawicky at In These Times delivers another necessary reminder that all the scaremongering over inflation is "one of dumbest turns in what passes for economic thinking since voodoo economics." Saying more government spending (paid-for government spending, no less!) is "inflationary" is, for Mr. Sawicky, "like criticizing a fire company for using water instead of gasoline." And the real costs of rent, college, and health care -- all of which inflation barely tracks, I wonder why! -- have been going up for a long time, and even the Build Back Better Act as "moderates" have whittled it down would help lower these costs. And Jesus Mary and Joseph I'm old enough to remember when inflation was twice what it is now, so no breathless "news" stories about one family of 11 in one state paying $36 a month more for milk should put the scare in anybody.

Finally, Harvard Law School professor Ronald Sullivan explains why the Kyle Rittenhouse not-guilty verdict "flies in the face of legal standards for self-defense." Mr. Sullivan explains why pretty well, but all I can add is that I really wish I could see the silver lining in this verdict, but I don't -- Kyle Rittenhouse has many more (and many more obnoxious) supporters than former Most Unpopular Man in America George Zimmerman ever did, and thus he'll be feeding at the right-wing welfare trough until he croaks. Judge Schroeder sure did destroy his reputation, though. The only thing he can do now is run for Congress.

Action: concerning racism, pollution, ethics, right-wing news, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our EPA to fight environmental racism, tell our government to keep fracking wastewater off the Three Rivers, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, tell AT&T to end its financial support for the notorious One America News Network, and tell President Biden to help us save our Postal Service. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to act against big polluting corporations that harm communities of color. Some folks will hear that our EPA actually plans to do something about this and say what more do those people want? But I hear it and say about damn time! And that's because big polluting corporations have been purposely situating their big polluting plants near the neighborhoods where "those people" live for decades. Anyway, the question isn't "when will this inconvenient anti-racism end?" but "does anyone deserve to live in an area that will give them cancer just because they live there?" And the people who would answer "yes" to that question don't get all the say about everything.

MoveOn helps you tell our government to keep fracking wastewater out of the "Three Rivers" (i.e., the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers). Because these rivers provide clean drinking water to the good citizens of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, and having fracking wastewater barges troll up and down these rivers is a recipe for disaster. Thanks to Tha Bush Mobb, big gas drilling corporations don't have to tell anyone what's in their fracking wastewater, but scientists have found all kinds of goodies in it, and by "goodies" I mean "things that destroy your health," like barium, arsenic, benzene, radium, and hydrogen sulfide. Yum! Remember: none of our descendants will sit around a campfire saying "we can't drink the water now, but at least gas was cheap for a while!"

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5720, the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act. The Wall Street Journal, in an article I'm sure they didn't put anywhere near page one, found that judges failed to recuse themselves from lawsuits against corporations in which they or their family had invested over 680 times from 2010 to 2018; I'm sure that's a fairly small percentage of all lawsuits, but 680 times is still 680 times too many, because we expect impartiality from our judges. The Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act would require federal judges to report their stock transactions as they happen -- the law currently requires almost every federal officer but a judge to do that -- and would also mandate that our government publish those disclosures online. That's an improvement, so we should demand it.

Free Press helps you tell AT&T to drop its financial support of the notorious right-wing "news" network One America. I'll let Free Press's latest e-mail missive tell it: "Let’s be clear: OANN would not exist without AT&T’s money and DIRECTV’s national platform." And that's something even OANN executives acknowledge, rather candidly, in fact -- one executive said OANN's value "would be zero" -- and you often get that kind of candidness from folks who are pretty sure their gravy train's never going to end. But OANN's mission -- basically, to be a "news" channel for people who think Fox News has sold out -- wouldn't succeed without a sugar daddy. Does AT&T really want to be known as OANN's sugar daddy? So let's bring out the Big Stick of Bad PR on AT&T. Surely they don't want to be pariahs.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom so the USPS Board of Governors can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Mr. Bloom seems to be all that's standing in the way of the Board of Governors sacking Mr. DeJoy, and his term actually expired in 2020 (he's been serving in a "hold-over year" since then), so what's the wait? He can't be waiting for the inevitable scandal that'll occur when some good American dies because they can't get their medicine through the mail fast enough because Mr. DeJoy slowed down the mail, because that would be cruel. OK, of course I see the flaw in the above argument, but we're not cruel, so we can always demand that our President act like us when we're at our best. We deserve that much.

Action: concerning pollution, farming, prisoners, food safety, and racism.

Long story short: tell your PA state Assemblyfolk to reject pro-pollution bills, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, the Baby Food Safety Act, and the GI Bill Restoration 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject a pair of objectively pro-pollution bills, HB 1947 and SB 275. They would, guess what, explicitly forbid Pennsylvania cities and towns from enacting laws that would help them get off our national addiction to fossil fuels. Very conservative of them! What ever happened to "the smallest body of people should make the most important decisions affecting that body of people"? Money, that's all -- if a municipality decides to buy only solar or wind power, then big gas and oil executives won't be able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Sad! And Pennsylvania's Supreme Court found similar legislation unconstitutional, so let's save our legislature from further embarrassment by communicating our will.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act. The Farm System Reform Act would place a moratorium on the building of new factory farms, restore country-of-origin labeling laws for meat, and help break meat packer monopolies by reinstituting "spot market" meat sales, so that meat packing corporations don't force farmers into sales agreements that ultimately crush them. Hopefully you don't look at phrases like "no more building of factory farms" and say "but won't that drive prices through the roof?" We're seeing, right now, how oversized ships are actually driving inflation upward, simply by making themselves the only conceivable option in shipping. We're not there yet with oversized farms, but if big corporations get their way, we will be. Thus we have to stop them before they do.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act. Some folks pay over a buck a minute to talk to their loved ones in prison, and folks can't afford that. And prisoners certainly can't afford that, since they don't even make anything close to minimum wage in prison. If you find yourself thinking then they shouldn't have done the crime then ha ha ha snort, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that folks who can stay in touch with loved ones without paying an arm and a leg have a much better chance of staying out of prison once they get out than folks who can't stay in touch with loved ones, and 3) consider that just because you're in prison doesn't mean big telecom corporations should take advantage of you. If you need to slap yourself again, go ahead. Wisdom ain't easy.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2229/S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act. If you've heard of toxic metals like cadmium, arsenic, lead, and mercury in baby food, then you see the need for such legislation. And this bill's pretty comprehensive -- it'd impose maximum levels of toxic metals in baby food, require our FDA to review and lower those levels if necessary, expand our FDA's recall authority over toxic baby food, and even commission research on agricultural methods that'd reduce toxic metals in baby food. Our government, commissioning research -- why, that sounds like our government doing their job! And if the thought of government research makes you guffaw, just remember: without it, you'd have no COVID vaccine. No, really. You didn't think private corporations did all that, did you?

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5905, the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, which would extend G.I. Bill benefits to survivors and descendants of Black soldiers who fought in World War II. Why? Because the G.I. Bill enabled a lot of good American WWII soldiers of Italian, Polish, and German descent to get into the middle class for the first time -- but denied that access to Black soldiers, using methods of discrimination you won't have to work too hard to imagine. We made them a promise, and we reneged on it; now, with the GI Bill Restoration Act, we can make it right. Naturally, right-wingers will call this "reparations," like that's a bad word. They'll try to make any word a bad word! But that shouldn't keep us from doing the right thing.

Around the table: featuring *entirely unexpected Republican hypocrisy*.

The Conversation talks to three scholars about "Three Ways Congress Could Hold Facebook Accountable for Its Actions." I think good old-fashioned trust-busting is the best way to hold them accountable, but at least two of the three suggestions -- giving users more control over how Facebook uses their data in algorithms, and mandating transparency about Facebook's problems -- are good ideas. Making Facebook pay up for the broadband funding gap as a sort of win-win proposition ain't my favorite, though. I approve of win-win negotiations among good-faith negotiators, but the rest need to be brought to heel by our laws.

Dean Baker also warns against blaming Trump/Biden spending policies for inflation. Why? Because countries that actually spent more (like France and Japan) aren't seeing the same inflation, because the pandemic and the resulting supply chain issues (again) are the major causes of inflation, because proposals like universal pre-K and subsidized child care will actually alleviate inflation in numerous ways, and because higher wages and the expanded Child Tax Credit are actually helping families deal with inflation much better. We'll know more in the spring, I suppose -- if the diaper-loaded brats refusing to get vaccinated would be gracious enough to help us get out of this pandemic, that is.

Speaking of supply chain issues, the heroic Matt Stoller dives into the problems we're having with shipping. Corporations built bigger and bigger ships -- in the name of efficiency, I suppose -- but bigger ships carrying more stuff and arriving less frequently snarl trucking and railroad traffic by making them wait around for-freaking-ever, and these "too big to sail" ships also kill the smaller ports that can't handle the amount of stuff they're bringing. And that's just the beginning. Naturally, Congress's decision to stop regulating ocean shipping as a public utility in 1998 figures heavily in this story. (As an aside, trucker Ryan Johnson is really astute about supply chain problems, but I fear he'll never get the traction he deserves, not just because he says quite rightly that truck drivers should make more money, but because he's obviously not an asshole.)

Uh oh: an Iowa state audit finds that Gov. Kim Reynolds appears to have misused nearly half a million dollars in COVID relief funds to pay the salaries of office workers for three months in 2020. Hey, you know what's even more interesting? Apparently those salaries weren't in the budget Gov. Reynolds submitted before the pandemic, and the Governor's office has now said they'll provide documentation to our federal government after previously saying no such documentation existed. It ain't the barrel Kristi Noem will be turning in next fall, but what fun it would be to see a Democrat topple Ms. Reynolds in 2022, not two years after Iowa Democrats were given up for dead.

When you hear that "neoliberal Democrats are struggling to connect with working-class voters whose communities have lost manufacturing jobs," you might be tempted to say well of course they are! They're the same people who reject every actual attempt at helping to fix working class voters' problems! And then these voters turn to Republicans, who are worse but at least are willing to ape their anger, and then stoke it further. Author Joel Bleifuss says the Democrats' actual liberal wing, not its "moderate" corporatist wing, needs to stage an "intervention." Ever feel like that's what you've been doing your whole life?

Finally, Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL) touts the funding the infrastructure bill will deliver to his district -- without mentioning that he voted against that bill. Not only did he vote against the bill, he called it "a Green New Deal wish list" (if only!) that will "expand government control of our lives." As with the American Rescue Plan Act, where numerous Republicans tried to take credit for things they liked about the law without mentioning that they voted against it, this is a golden opportunity for Democrats to run campaign ads excoriating Republican hypocrisy. Sadly, Gary Palmer's district (Alabama's 6th) is one of the most Republican in the nation; a Democrat has crested 30% there once in the last quarter-century. I'd call that an opportunity myself, but Democrats ain't known for their bravery.

Action: concerning pollution, campaign finance, patents, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to review Steven Donziger's case, tell big corporations to stop donating to anti-voting rights politicians, tell big insurance corporations not to insure the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline, tell our government to ensure that our NIH gets listed on the Moderna vaccine patent, tell our EPA to to ban PFAS chemicals in food storage products, and tell our government to break up Amazon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice to review the Steven Donziger case and get justice for him. Steven Donziger is the lawyer who helped the Cofan indigenous people of Ecuador the biggest pollution judgment in history -- $9.5 billion -- from Chevron, after the big oil corporation illegally dumped billions of gallons of oil waste on Cofan land. That was a decade ago; after all that time, Chevron hasn't paid, but that doesn't mean they haven't been busy, trumping up a racketeering charge against Mr. Donziger in Ecuador and a contempt charge in the United States; soon he'll be reporting for a six-month prison sentence here, and if you're thinking he's really paying for daring to hold Chevron accountable, well, I couldn't blame you. Luckily, we have some say about whether justice happens in America, too.

People for the American Way helps you tell big corporations to stop donating to anti-voting rights politicians. And if that means "stop donating to all Republicans except for Lisa Murkowski," hey, that ain't my fault, just as it ain't my fault Republicans' response to any setback is to run even farther to the right. That's their fault, and it is also weak Democratic politicians' fault. And it is also the fault of big corporations that talk a good game about voting rights but still send campaign donations to politicians who suppress the vote. Corporate PR hacks no doubt stand ready to tell you their donations aren't about voting rights but about economics, or something. Trouble is sending a politician money enables them to do everything they do, and withholding campaign donations will help discourage bad behavior.

Public Citizen helps you tell big insurance corporations to steer clear of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. You know how usually we fight pipelines that run through big aquifers which provide drinking water to millions of people? Not imagine a pipeline that not only runs right through Africa's largest lake, Lake Victoria, and also runs right beside the second-largest freshwater lake on Earth -- no, really, that's in Africa! It's Lake Tanganyika, which sits on the border shared by Tanzania, Burundi, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo border -- but which also runs through one of Africa's few earthquake zones, virtually guaranteeing a pipeline burst even more than bad pipeline safety already does. A lot of sun falls on Africa; they should concentrate their efforts there, maybe? First, let's kill this project.

Public Citizen also helps you tell our government to ensure that our National Institutes of Health (or NIH) gets listed as a co-inventor of the Moderna vaccine patent. Sounds like not such a big deal, but it is: the corporations get all the credit for the vaccines, when actually our government does a lot of the research that makes them possible. Not to mention a lot of the funding, or in the case of the Moderna vaccine, almost all of the funding. Seriously, instead of Republicans picking stupid fights over Dr. Seuss and Big Bird, let's make them fight over our government getting the credit it deserves for making the vaccines that have saved so many good American lives. They'll lose that fight every time. Which is one big reason they pick the other fights.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to keep PFAS chemicals out of plastic food containers. They call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals," because they're just about impossible to break down and because they get into your body and cause all sorts of health care problems -- and one of the main places you'll find them is in your plastic food containers, many of which probably advertise themselves as "microwave-safe" but, ah, no. I'm old enough to remember when "shatterproof" plastic was The Future, but now I'd take the relative fragility of glass over all the pollution and ill health plastic has caused. And I'm pretty sure we didn't really understand how bad it would get! But once you do know, you have a duty to your civilization to help fix it.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our government to break up Amazon. Not just because its former CEO, the ubiquitous Jeff Bezos, is the richest man on Earth, and not just because it handles about half of all online sales, and not just because it killed all the smaller bookstore chains like B. Dalton and Encore and Waldenbooks, but because it collects so much data on its users that it can offer the same products small businesses offer at a lower price and thus crush small businesses. I used the Italics Hammer there so folks who yammer on about small businesses would see it. And no, breaking up Amazon won't mean you'll wait forever to get stuff! And even if it did, gosh, do you remember 1993? Do you remember special-ordering books you didn't see on the shelf? Gosh, do people even understand hardship anymore?

Action: concerning government spying, war on Yemen, voting rights, whistleblowers, Social Security, and our FCC.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act, end our military support for the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Whistleblower Program Improvement Act, and the Social Security 2100 Act, and tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's two FCC nominees. 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act. 20 damn years old, the PATRIOT Act is, and what has it done? Nothing, except make us less free. How do I know? Because we already had tools to prevent 9.11; Tha Bush Mobb just failed to do it, and when someone fails to use the tools they've got, you don't just give them more tools. Particularly tools that let our government spy on us without a warrant and without probable cause, in defiance of our Constitution! And those who say the PATRIOT Act has stopped terrorist attacks won't name them, because of "national security." You can say you did anything but can't prove it because of "national security"! It's stupid, and we need to stop it.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to end our military involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. President Biden's taken a few steps in this direction, but not enough, and previous bills didn't get a vote, hence we resort to the "attach amendment to defense authorization bill" method, since Congress has to pass a defense authorization bill. And this bill relates to defense, so brook no IRRELEVANTZ AMENDMENTZ!!!! arguments from haters. That amendment Rep. Russell (E-OK) tried to attach to the 2016 defense bill, which would have established a "religious" "conscience" exception so any employer can discriminate against anyone who might give them gay cooties? That's an irrelevant amendment, right there. Make sure you spell out the difference. Haters don't care, but other, more reasonable folks will.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Also, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster in order to get them passed, since a Republican filibuster is literally all that stands between these bills and their passage. I'm old enough to remember when Voting Rights Act reauthorization sailed through Congress with almost no opposition -- actually, so are you, since it was 2006! Now, no Republicans will support the fight against gerrymandering, dark money, and other forms of vote suppression, while only one (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) will support the fight to put some teeth back into the Voting Rights Act. Luckily, America has us to fight these battles, so let's fight them.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4107/S. 2055, the IRS Whistleblower Program Improvement Act. Currently the dysfunction of the whole IRS whistleblower process is so bad that it takes our IRS a decade to process individual cases, and on quite a few occasions whistleblowers have died before that could happen. The IRS Whistleblower Program Improvement Act would give whistleblowers more protections under the law and make sure they get paid more quickly -- there's nothing wrong with getting paid for the corruption you dime out, particularly since you stand a good chance of being unemployable after you blow the whistle. And you want the IRS Whistleblower program to work, because you want to bring tax cheats to justice. Tax cheats hurt everyone, after all.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act. The Social Security 2100 Act would increase benefits for seniors and better fund Social Security's trust fund. It would increase benefits by, well, paying out more, but also by calculating inflation in a way that reflects seniors' real lives (i.e., by conceding that seniors face enough fixed costs that they can't just switch to a cheaper option whenever they feel like it). And it would better fund the trust fund by imposing the payroll tax to income over $400,000. Don't brook all the hand-wringing of "moderates" who want a "grand bargain" that increases revenue but cuts benefits. We deserve better than that, and the Social Security 2100 Act would do better.

Finally, Battle for the Net helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's two FCC nominees. It's about time he nominated them, because our FCC has a lot of important work to do, especially since the internet has been more essential to our civilization during this pandemic than ever before (and more than we'd like, I would think). I hate to have to say it, but we're actually lucky that Democrats hold the Senate, because a McConnell Senate wouldn't even hold hearings on these nominees right now. That leads me to my next worry: that a Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema would try to burnish their "independent" credentials by stymying a critical Biden nominee! Paranoid? Perhaps. But that's why we communicate our will, though -- to forestall at least some of the ridiculous dramas that hurt good Americans and injure our civilization.

Action: concerning, at least once more, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get the lead out of our drinking water, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, invest in the care economy, enact paid family/medical leave, let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and expand Medicare. 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.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the Build Back Better Act protects our clean water by funding lead pipe removal. The bill our President signs today provides some funding for that purpose, but not enough, and it's not "cheating" to make this bill provide the rest, it's doing the right thing, a thing we ought to encourage our Congressfolk to do more. Their excuse for cutting lead pipe removal funding, of course, would be "the BIF already does it, so why do we need to do it again?" I just explained why; now we all need to explain why to our Congressfolk. Opposing clean water is politically difficult, but Kyrsten Sinema, for one, thinks she's the greatest political operator ever, so I wouldn't put it past her to do it. That makes what we're doing a, er, pre-emptive strike.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. The American people approve of raising these taxes on the rich and on corporations at a near-supermajority level, so the 51 Senators who oppose it aren't "being bipartisan" or "just trying to get things done," they're actively trying to subvert the people's will, which is the precise opposite of their job. It's that damn simple, and all the damn drama ruins everything. I speak, of course, of the drama where politicians try to prove they're "essential" by throwing a wrench in everything that isn't "bipartisan" enough, by which I actually mean "doesn't capitulate to Republicans enough." They should think about capitulating to the people. Because that's their job.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the Build Back Better Act funds the "care economy," i.e., things like child care and home care. The fact that this plank of the Build Back Better Act has made it this far tells me this was a big priority for Joe Biden, but now that Joe Manchin is playing Henny Penny about the inflation rate, it's in as much danger of being cut (or cut out) as anything else. But we have to start investing in Americans again. Folks who think infrastructure is only about roads or bridges are shallow; they don't understand how we actually build civilizations. Of course roads and bridges are infrastructure, but without people, people who will fight for and maintain the values we pass on to our children, a civilization can't exist. Some people would like that! But they don't deserve veto power.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Again, part of building a civilization is treating its people right, and being literally the only highly-developed country that doesn't guarantee paid family/medical leave to all its citizens is pretty much the opposite of treating people right. Joe Manchin's fretting about "the cost" is especially offensive here -- previously, Kirsten Gillibrand's bills funded it with a tiny payroll tax, one that would have cost the worker making $50,000 annually a mere $8/month. $8! And don't let anyone tell you that because people abuse the Family Medical Leave Act (which provides unpaid leave), we shouldn't pass this. Better to simply fight fraud, than to give up on civilization because fighting fraud is hard.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, Penn PIRG, and More Perfect Union all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. More Perfect Union also helps you tell your Congressfolk to make sure a $35/monthly cap on insulin prices stays in the Build Back Better Act; that's a big deal, since Americans pay way, way, way too much for insulin, which is a life-saving medicine, after all. Our House is apparently reinserting Medicare drug price negotiation into their version of the Build Back Better Act -- and since this would save the taxpayer money, it'd make the impending CBO score look much better -- so let's make sure everyone knows the American people's will is more important than Kyrsten Sinema's will, or Bob Menendez's will.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Democrats have gone with a different approach than I would have done, by improving health care services here and there, rather than, say, passing Medicare-for-All health insurance (and hate to beat a dead horse, but I've offered more than one viable funding mechanism in this space). Anyway, that doesn't mean the improvements they'd make aren't worth making -- but nor does it mean we shouldn't ask for more, like dental and vision care for seniors and reducing the eligibility age from 65 to 60. When we ask for more, people like Joe Manchin have to give you more. Hell, asking for anything has brought him further left than he'd like to go. So we ought to keep doing that.

One more thing: ignore all the pablum about how inflation should give us pause about passing this bill. The causes of inflation right now are a) COVID and b) supply chain monopolies, and neither of these have anything to do with paid family/medical leave, Medicare drug price negotiation, or any of the other things we've described above; these items certainly haven't become "irresponsible" just because inflation's above six percent now. (I'm old enough to remember when inflation was double that, but I digress.) Yes, Joe Manchin probably will use it as an excuse to kill the bill outright now that he's cut it by more than two-thirds, but we're not supposed to game out "what Joe Manchin will do"; we're supposed to express our will until our representatives in House and Senate do our will. We're right, and they're wrong. That ain't changed. Republicans, and people like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, will always find some excuse to do the wrong thing sooner or later; the only antidote to their excuses, and their inaction, and their cowardice, and their malice, is our will, expressed in numbers they can't deny. So let's keep doing that.

Around the table: monopolies ruin everything, part 834.

In case you were wondering, no, "economic overheating" (read: Big Gummint spending too much) isn't causing higher-than-normal inflation rates, according to Economic Policy Institute director of research Josh Bivens, who points to folks spending less on services you buy "face-to-face" and more on stuff, and spending that much more on stuff makes supply-chain bottlenecks worse. Craig Austin at The Conversation concurs about the role of supply chains, but also announces "Inflation is Here to Stay,". And yet I suspect that a) conquering the pandemic and b) breaking supply chain monopolies will do a great deal to break this inflation spike. The former might not happen very soon, given the immaturity of the still-unvaccinated, and the latter might also take some time, even if Mr. Biden has put the right folks in at the SEC and FTC.

Caleb Nichols at TruthOut explains how "Public-Private Partnerships are Quietly Hollowing Out Our Public Libraries." Are private, for-profit corporations like Library Systems and Services really "improving" library services when they buy them up? Of course not -- they're firing higher-paid union workers, replacing them with badly-trained technicians, and homogenizing a library's holdings, serving localities be damned. Seriously, when you hear the words "public-private partnership," run. Big corporations don't want you as a partner; they want you as a vassal. Or perhaps "vessel" is better -- to them, you're just a delivery device for money.

In this story about how Edward Durr upset long-time New Jersey state Senator/Norcross machinist Stephen Sweeney after exactly zero media coverage of Mr. Durr's many bigoted comments on social media, I was surprised and pleased to see writer Paul Farhi discuss "the state of local news reporting" as the main reason for that lack of coverage. "Years of cutbacks and consolidation" have "left behind 'ghost' newspapers" or "news deserts," particularly in Gloucester and Cumberland counties, which each used to have their own paper but now share a single one (with Salem County, no less). This maps onto what we were just saying about local public libraries; why, it's like consolidation and monopolies ruin every damn thing. (As an aside, I don't accept Mr. Durr's explanation that he said all those things because "I'm a passionate guy." I've been told I'm a passionate guy, too, but I've never called Mohammed or Bob Menendez a "pedophile.")

I have had it up to here with Kyle Rittenhouse crying at his murder trial. I'd put it to him in language he can understand: be a man! Nut up! As more attentive folks than I have pointed out, he's crying only for himself, not for any of the folks he killed -- or even the small businesses he was supposedly there to "help"! -- but right-wingers will lap those tears up, apparently tolerating tears only from those who deserve the trouble they're in. And when a Black woman cries over being turned away at the polls for no good reason of watching her boyfriend get shot by cops for no good reason, watch these folks who lap up Kyle Rittenhouse's tears flex their rage like the drunk, abusive dads too many of them are.

Speaking of whiny-ass babies who cry all the time because the world won't submit to their drama, a right-winger with a bit of an anger management problem has somehow secured a temporary restraining order against an antifascist for the heinous crime of exposing the fact on Twitter that said right-winger was at the January 6 attempted coup. Ironically, California may be the only state that makes it relatively easy for domestic abuse victims to get some breathing space from temporary restraining orders, and that's what Adam Kiefer used against Chad Loder. Meanwhile, law enforcement seems to be ignoring actual harassment by right-wingers against Chad Loder. As I often say, assholes ruin everything.

Finally, when I hear that a PRRI survey found that only 29% of Republicans believe America has changed for the better since the 1950s, I feel compelled to note that the top tax rate during the '50s was 91%, and the corporate tax rate was 55%, and corporations and the rich had many, many fewer loopholes to avoid these tax rates than they do now. But given that many more Republicans thought America had changed for the better during those years Donald Trump was President, one has every right to suspect these Republicans are nostalgic for that time "Black folks knew their place," though back then Congressional Republicans also favored civil rights legislation a lot more than they do now, and more than many of their contemporaries in the Democratic party, as well. Living in a fantasy world must be very hard.

Action: concerning sedition, pollution, antibiotics, and student loans.

Long story short: tell Congress to investigate House Reps for helping to plan the January 6 attempted coup, tell President Biden to use federal policy to fight pollution and stop a liquefied natural gas train from being built, tell McDonald's to put its money where its mouth is in re antibiotic abuse, tell President Biden to cancel student loan debt, and tell big corporations to stop funding the campaigns of the folks who helped try to overthrow our government. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Win Without War helps you tell your House Reps to investigate (and, if need be, expel) the seven members who allegedly helped plan the January 6 attempted coup. Am I really writing that sentence? Yes, I am really writing that sentence. As you know, a Rolling Stone report from late last month that some of the coup's planners meeting with these seven House Reps "dozens" of times; if that's true, then these seven individuals need to go. One of them, perhaps not coincidentally, is Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, who's gotten himself in some, ah, other trouble this past week. You can't get away with threatening your co-workers at your job, but apparently folks like him think they can get away with anything, and not just because they sit in absurdly-gerrymandered seats. But is that how civilized people act?

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell President Biden to undo the damage Donald Trump did to the National Environmental Policy Act (or NEPA). Specifically, you'd ask President Biden to 1) strengthen environmental reviews of potentially polluting projects, 2) allow our government to take climate change into account during such reviews, 3) keep polluting corporations from having too much a say in such reviews, and 4) give the public more time to comment on regulations aiming to protect us from pollution. Yeah, Donald Trump did the opposite of all that, and not for "jobs," either -- he did it because the only other person whose opinion he respects is a boss, and bosses hate being told to stop polluting when their money's at stake. But that's what civilized people do, and we need to do more of it, like we did just a few short years ago.

Penn Environment helps you tell the Biden Administration to cancel all permits for New Fortress Energy's proposed liquefied natural gas (or LNG) pipeline. New Fortress would run a hundred LNG rail cars across Pennsylvania every day, when less than a quarter of that carries the energy equivalent of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and once LNG gets into our air, as I expect it one day will because a train car will inevitably derail, it will expand to 600 times its volume and blow up the second someone accidentally lights a match. LNG rail was banned in America until 2019, and I bet you can't guess whose grubby pawprints are on that one. We banned it for a reason -- the money it'll make some CEO isn't worth the damage a major accident could do. Thus we, as civilized people, must step in again.

Consumer Reports helps you tell fast food corporation McDonald's to start acting on its 2018 promise to get antibiotics out of its beef supply. I bet McDonald's executives sure enjoyed all the positive attention for making that promise, but that was three years ago -- and what an innocent time it was! -- and in a world where over two-thirds of all antibiotics go to healthy feed animals, rather than sick people and sick animals, and this predicament threatens to bring back a world where the next cut could kill you, so McDonald's needs to get off the pot and start doing the right thing. A lot of people eat a lot of beef at McDonald's, to the tune of over two billion burgers every year -- they can't even put it on the sign anymore! -- so McDonald's could lead here, and I mean really lead, not pretend to lead like they've been doing.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell President Biden to cancel student loan debt. Which is in his power to do, since our government backs virtually all student loans, and canceling student loan debt would stimulate the hell out of our economy. Why, some of these folks might even buy homes one day! I'll brook no oldhead talk like I paid all my debts, why can't they? First of all, oldheads have no clue what today's student loan debt is like, because unless they're helping put their children through school they have no idea what the cost of college is today. Second, we promised students they'd get good jobs and good lives if they just went to college, and what did they get? Debt so crippling they're trapped in bad jobs and can't make good lives for themselves. It's time we made up for our mistakes. It's what adults do, after all.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the campaigns of Republicans who gave aid and comfort to the January 6 attempted coup by voting against certifying the 2020 election. Again, they said they'd do it, but they keep funding these clowns, so one must conclude that they simply lied to get the good PR. Thus it's time, once again, for the Big Stick of Bad PR. This sure does seem like an intractable problem, but the more we call attention to it, the more it'll embarrass them, and the more corporations will adhere to our will. Hey, it worked when we got over 100 corporations to leave the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC), and when you see it work, you want to see it work all the time. And as Americans -- hell, as civilized people -- we deserve that much.

Around the table: in which we confront yet more right-wing whining.

"Are people lying more since the rise of social media and smartphones?" asks David Markowitz at The Conversation. You're tempted to say F YEAH aren't you? You know, because of all the stupid crap you read on Facebook and Twitter? But this article deals with more mundane lies -- the ones you tell your boss to get out of work, the ones you tell your friends when you just don't feel like going out to dinner -- and references a 2004 study that found that, actually, folks will more readily lie with any technology deployed over the phone, and not so much over email (at least partly, I suspect, because it feels more like "putting something in writing"). Fast-forward 17 years and a much larger study finds more or less the same, and Mr. Markowitz also found a relatively low rate of lying, generally, except from people who lie a lot. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

When I hear that right-wingers had a whinefest about the "government propaganda" of Big Bird telling kids he got the vaccine and it's OK, I am compelled to say that it sure would help if our "liberal" media would treat dramas like these as "really, you're whining about that now?" You know, instead of they must speak for a large number of people, so let's endlessly pander to their dumb opinions and enable their weakness. (Not to pile on, but Sesame Street isn't really a "big government TV show" anymore, since HBO provides most of its funding now.)

In a peripherally-related note, Sen. Josh Hawley (E-MO) doubles down on his "masculinity" pablum because of course he does. I've already patiently negotiated his nonsense, so I think the best thing to do at this point would be to create a cartoon or comic book -- the bolder and sillier the art, the better -- showing him marching around without a shirt off (and occasionally raising his fist like he did at the January 6 rioters) yelling at people who he thinks are "injuring" masculinity. When they act like fools, we should make sure everyone sees them as fools.

I thought Elon Musk wasn't going to get the answer he wanted when he asked Twitter if he should pay more in taxes, but I was taken aback, for a moment, that the score was only 58-42 in favor of him paying more in taxes, since usually the tax-the-rich-more answer in polls clears two-thirds. But two caveats: 1) we should suspect polls that people voluntarily join more than we suspect those that pollsters have designed to actually reflect the population, and 2) I would not be surprised to learn that Twitter users have a higher proportion of get-rich-quick-wannabes who don't want to part with any of their "hard-earned money" than the general population.

Linda So and Jason Szep at Reuters write an admirable report exposing nine individuals who have threatened election officials within the last year -- and also exposing how little law enforcement has done about any of them. We learn that there are at least two schools of thought over whether "We're going to fucking kill you all" or "“You are all going to fucking hang. I’m going to make sure of it" enjoy our First Amendment protections, but that's not the most appalling thing about all of this. The most appalling thing about all of this is that law enforcement either doesn't care about bringing these irredeemable assholes to justice or secretly cheers them on -- I'm not sure how else to read a sentence like "(r)eporters connected with him in September on the phone number police called untraceable.")

Finally, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) gives a wholly predictable assessment of Republican successes in the 2021 elections, pointing to "bickering among (Democrats)" as the cause, and further opining that Americans "just want you to work together and get stuff done." That's a big gamble, right there, that folks haven't seen her as the one who didn't want to "work together and get stuff done," since she scuttled Medicare drug price negotiation by herself and she scuttled raising corporate tax rates and tax rates on the rich by herself. I would be quite offended if she got away with taking a big dump on the popular will in front of everybody and then claiming that the problem is all these politicians taking a big dump on the popular will.

Action: concerning securities fraud, worker rights, social media, data privacy, Presidential appointees, and corporate news.

Long story short: tell our SEC to investigate Donald Trump's latest media organization, tell Starbucks to stop interfering with its workers' unionization efforts, tell our government to investigate Facebook for law-breaking, tell our FTC to protect Americans' data privacy, tell our Senators to confirm two Biden nominees to our FCC, and tell AT&T to stop funding the One America News (sic) Network. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to investigate the creation of the "Trump Media and Technology Group." Not because of "politics" or "irrational hatred," but because, frankly, the whole exercise looks like a scam designed to defraud investors. And it's no use shrugging and saying ho ho ho these people deserve to lose their money, because the law should protect all of us, otherwise it's not much of a law, is it? This "Trump Media and Technology Group" merged with a shell corporation, claimed it'd make a gazillion dollars, and then told Trump votaries to invest their life savings -- and voila! The stock price went through the roof, and now they don't have to do any work. Kinda like all his other doings, now that I think about it. So it at least merits an investigation.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Starbucks to stop trying to stamp out its workers' efforts to organize for better pay and working conditions. Buffalo Starbucks workers are trying to unionize as we speak, and Starbucks has responded in exactly the manner you thought they would -- with intimidation, mandatory propaganda meetings, and store closings. I've been in plenty of Starbucks with not enough workers to handle the volume, sp why shouldn't they unionize for better pay and working conditions? Do they not deserve our respect? It wasn't that long ago that Americans looked down on factory workers and their "unearned" prosperity (which was mainly their children's prosperity); now that they're almost all gone we idealize them. Let's not one day tell that sad story about today's workers!

MoveOn and the American Economic Liberties Project help you tell our government to investigate Facebook executives for their potential law-breaking. Which might not be confined to inflating advertising stats and then lying about them to investors, but may also include private discussions to deceive investors, clients, and regulators, as two investor lawsuits allege and which Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's documents also support. I guess Mr. Zuckerman, who's not even 40 yet, will one day say that he didn't know he was breaking the law because this was the first time he was a billionaire. The Buddhists may smile upon that explanation, but I won't, and our laws shouldn't, either. I mean, fraud is fraud, and if you commit fraud, you should pay the price.

Access Now helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact privacy rules that would protect Americans from the greed and venality of social media corporations (among others). You'll recall that our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) enacted pretty good data privacy rules in 2016 -- and that the Republican Congress, apparently unable to tolerate any attempt to tell a corporation not to hurt people, repealed those rules in a "resolution of disapproval," which also forbade our FCC from ever revisiting the issue. But that resolution doesn't apply to our FTC -- different letters! And even the Trump FTC fined Facebook $5 billion for privacy violations, so it has not merely a role in justice but some practice in extracting it. And President Biden's FTC is a vast improvement on Mr. Trump's.

Both Free Press and Fight for the Future help you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's two new FCC nominees. Now our FCC can do its work; previously it had only four Commissioners, guaranteeing 2-2 deadlocks on every conceivable issue; President Biden has essentially appointed Jessica Rosenworcel (whose term would otherwise expire in January) to a full term as FCC Commissioner -- a position she has filled on an acting basis this year -- and former Media Access Project executive director Gigi Sohn to the position left vacant by former FCC Chair Ajit Pai's resignation this past January 20. Without five Commissioners, our FCC can't do very much business, and much business awaits it, chiefly the possibility of net neutrality's reinstatement and the resulting increased ability to stop big telecom corporations from harming consumers. So let's get that done.

Finally, both the Juggernaut Project and Common Cause help you tell AT&T to stop its financial enabling of the right-wing "news" network OAN. As you no doubt know, AT&T actually wanted a new right-wing news network that could compete with Fox News; why on Earth anyone would actually want such a thing is a mystery that will forever befuddle me, but that's why we have the "news" network that constantly yammers on about how Democrats "stole" the 2020 election from Donald Trump by getting seven million more votes. They're no better on any other issue facing Americans today, and even their founder and CEO will tell you, if you put enough liquor in him, that OAN wouldn't survive without AT&T funding. Seems to me there's a starve-the-best mandate waiting to be enacted here. But only if we get in their grills about it.

Action: concerning government spying, voting rights, Social Security, Presidential power, and data privacy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act; pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and get rid of the filibuster do accomplish these things; and to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, the Protecting Our Democracy 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 and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Daily Kos and Win Without War help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act already. The nefarious Section 215 -- which authorized our National Security Agency (or NSA) to collect metadata on good Americans without a warrant -- may be no more, but our work ain't done, because the entire USA PATRIOT Act is a mistake. And it's a mistake built to repel good-faith attempts to prove it's a mistake -- it allows our government to claim "national security" in court challenges and in response to calls to prove it's worked -- which is the worst kind of mistake. And I won't lie to you: I hated what the "war on terror" did to America and so I want the head of the PATRIOT Act on my mantle. Or is that not bleeding-heart enough of me?

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Also, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster in order to get them passed, since a Republican filibuster is literally all that stands between these bills and their passage. And we deserve to have them passed -- they'd take campaign financing, gerrymandering, and state efforts to rig their elections all to the mat, and it might not kill them, but it'll leave them bloodied enough for more good Americans to express their will, which is what elections are all about. Elections ain't where the work ends, but it's where the work begins. And all Americans deserve to at least begin that work.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act. Anyone who bleats about TEH SOSHUL SECURITIEZ RUNNINGZ OUTZ OFZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!! should attend that the Social Security 2100 Act would increase both benefits and revenues -- the former by increasing the size of checks and by calculating inflation in a way that reflects seniors' real costs, the latter by taxing income over $400,000 into the system for the first time. Why the bill puts a "donut hole" between the current cap ($142,800 in annual income) and $400,000 I couldn't say, but this bill will put Social Security on a stronger footing. Not that it's on a bad footing now! That's just something right-wingers say. But all victories need to be maintained, and Social Security is no exception.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5314/S. 2921, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. Perhaps not surprisingly, this bill aims to prevent someone like Donald Trump from putting our democracy through the woodchipper again, as it would explicitly prohibit self-pardons, limit the President's power to declare emergencies like Mr. Trump's sham "national emergency" he used to fund his vanity border wall, and protect our Justice Department from a President's political interference. People still think if the President appoints an Attorney General then that Attorney General should just do his bidding! But people who believe that are cynical, and the cynical shouldn't get very much say about anything in America.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Internet service-providing corporations can't just hand over your private data to law enforcement without a warrant secured from a judge who believes the information secured by the warrant has a better than 50-50 chance of securing a conviction -- but third-party data brokers can hand over your private data to law enforcement, and they do, for, like, money. Which, since it's law enforcement paying the money, is actually your money, since your taxpayer money funds law enforcement! So when your friends and neighbors shrug and say if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear, just remind them that law enforcement misuses their money. Unlawfully and unconstitutionally, I might add.

Action: still in the shadow of the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get the lead out of our drinking water, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, stop obsessing about SALT caps, enact paid family/medical leave, let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and expand Medicare. 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.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the Build Back Better Act protects our clean water by funding lead pipe removal. Yeah, the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" the House just passed does do some of that, and that's not nothing, but we need to do more of it. And remember: if you don't have clean water, you don't have health care, period. And no clean water isn't something we "took care of" a long time ago and don't need regulations to take care of now -- we always have to take care of clean water, just as we always have to take care of the things we win. The fight for justice never ends; only right-wingers want you to believe that, and only about the things they hate. You see they're always fighting! And they'll come for your clean water if you let them.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. The Build Back Better Act as currently constructed doesn't whiff on these matters -- an effective 42% bracket on income over $10 million and a 45% bracket on income over $25 million, plus a 15% minimum corporate tax and a 1% stock buyback tax -- but my goals are always 91% on millionaire income and 55% on corporate profits over $1 million, and just because certain people don't want those rates to go up at all doesn't mean we should stop fighting for them. Don't worry about getting blamed for the bill's failure, because America already blames liberals for everything. Freeing, isn't it?

You may want to get on the phone with your Congressfolk and tell them not to make or break the Build Back Better Act over SALT caps (or caps on deducting state and local taxes). Tom Suozzi's red line (NO DEALZ WITHOUTZ TEH SALT CAPZ GONEZ!!!!!) ain't any less stupid than all of Kyrsten Sinema's red lines, and restoring state-and-local-taxes deductions to their pre-2017 levels will mainly benefit the very wealthy. Sen. Sanders (I-VT) has proposed eliminating the SALT cap only for Americans making less than $400,000 annually, and I think that's a good compromise, because most folks just don't care about rich folks in blue states getting their state and local tax deductions back, because gosh, they're just trying to eat. And Democrats want to be about that, right? It's hard to tell.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Our House Democrats are dutifully putting it back in the bill as we speak, and Joe Manchin must be laughing. "Didn't they hear me the first time I said no?" The more pertinent point is that Joe Manchin doesn't hear all the good Americans who say yes. And that's no less true in West Virginia (where the whole BBB agenda is very popular) than anywhere else! And if he wants to be an asshole, that doesn't mean you walk on eggshells around him -- it means you keep doing the right thing, and see if that keeps prompting him to be an asshole. We have to teach people not to enable assholes, after all.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. You'll be happy to hear that Democrats have heard you about that -- putting a very, very small version of Medicare drug price negotiation back in the Build Back Better Act, one that would let Medicare negotiate drug prices for 10 drugs in 2025 and 10 more three years later, which is exactly the kind of reform that sounds like very weak tea now, but which folks will fight for when Republicans take control of either Congress or the Presidency again. There is absolutely no harm, however, in expressing your will for more comprehensive Medicare drug price negotiation. "Making bad Democrats lose elections" does not count as harm.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. This is the thing we've made the least progress upon, largely due (and stop me if you've heard this one before) to the bloviation of Joe Manchin, who wouldn't dare expand Medicare services until "we put Medicare on a more solid footing." Medicare, the program that's been around longer than I've been alive, longer, even, than Star Trek has been alive? What is it that keeps Medicare going? Oh, right -- the will of the American people, who have worked for it, paid into it, fought for it, and deserve to have it when they need it. These are all principles that seem to elude Joe Manchin, since he doesn't seem at all conversant in them.

One more thing: just because the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" is now law -- and yes, though it's a flawed bill, it's not a bad bill, and Democrats will no doubt spend the next ten months forgetting to take the credit they deserve to take for it! -- doesn't mean we still shouldn't act on the Build Back Better Act. Withholding a vote on the infrastructure bill was the Democrat liberal wing's best chance at getting "moderate" Democrats to acquiesce on the larger Build Back Better package, and now that that's gone, what can still hold "moderates" to doing the right thing? Oh, right, us -- the only thing that has ever made politicians do the right thing. So let's hold their feet to the fire, folks.

Around the table: with more "liberal" media hackery and more sound advice from actual liberals on winning culture wars.

A couple of biologists explain how COVID-19 could become endemic, meaning it won't go extinct like the much less-transmissible 2003 coronavirus did, and we'll have to keep dealing with it, much as we still have to deal with the flu and the common cold. Scientists tell us that wearing masks and keeping your distance works against the spread of COVID-19, and that vaccines will render COVID endemic more easily than anything else, but I guess right-wingers would prefer to listen to some eye doctor at America's Frontline Doctors, since that eye doctor will tell them they don't have to be responsible for their actions.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media read the Tuesday election results in apparently the only way they can: by demanding that Democrats move to the right. Democrats spend 40 years moving to the right and it's never enough! The poster child for right-wing Democrats runs for Governor in Virginia and it's never enough! And it should be fairly obvious to anyone who's watching that it's the most right-wing Democrats helping Republicans kill the Biden agenda, even though that agenda is actually fairly popular across the political spectrum, and that the progressive wing (which wanted a $6 trillion agenda, you may recall) has done by far the most compromising, but why bother paying attention when you can just dust off the same tired shit and your boss will print it?

You may celebrate when you hear that the Arizona state Supreme Court has unanimously stayed the state's ban on mask mandates in public schools because it's unconstitutional, until you realize that their beef is procedural -- the state constitution forbids anything but budgeting from appearing in state budgeting legislation, which is exactly where the legislature put their mask mandate ban. It'll save lives, but the legislature might just get more creative. Dig the Governor's spokeshack saying "(w)e respect the role of the judiciary, but the court should give the same respect to the separate authority of the Legislature." Again, "not letting us do whatever we want" equals "disrespect"? Waaaaaah! This is why we hate right-wingers.

Matt Stoller takes us "Inside the Pharmacist Rebellion at CVS and Walgreens." Just 40 years ago (it's like that's a theme or something!), most pharmacies were either stand-alone or small chains, as they still are in North Dakota by law, but now CVS ain't just bought out at least 10 smaller drug store chains but an entire health insurance corporation (in Aetna), and the evils of monopolies now result in pharmacists -- who we've long thought of as pretty well off -- making complaints about the workplace that resemble the complaints of Amazon warehouse workers. Overworked and understaffed pharmacies mean more medical errors and ultimately fewer pharmacists (who lose their license if they make mistakes), but understaffing means the workers who stick around have more leverage. Now if only the politicians would notice!

Speaking of which, ProPublica describes how rich politicians from both parties slashed their tax bills "using strategies unavailable to most of their constituents." I do so love understatement! "(S)trategies unavailable" includes deducting funds your charitable foundation uses to promote you (as Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has done), putting your assets in a trust for your heirs (as Republican Sen. Rick Scott and Betsy DeVos have done), and taking advantage of big corporate depletion deductions (as Republican-then Democratic-then Republican West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia has done). Oh, and Darrell Issa voted against the Trump tax "reform" in 2017 because it capped SALT deductions, of which he made extensive use (and which some House Democrats have made their red line in Build Back Better negotiations!) Dig, also, some of the hostile spokeshackery offered by Republicans to ProPublica, though the gentler Democratic spokeshack prevarication is hardly better.

Finally, Amanda Marcotte at Salon tells us that "(t)rying to tiptoe around the culture war dragon is never going to work" and Democratic politicians should just stop worrying about "offending" Republicans and take the culture war fight to them. But by "culture war," Ms. Marcotte isn't talking so much about abortion or gay marriage, but Mr. Biden's failure to put vaccine mandates out in the spring, when they would have done more good; right-wingers have made the pandemic a culture war issue, after all. Just like they do with everything! Which is why you don't walk on eggshells around them.

Action: concerning communication, occupation, saving our Post Office, robotexts, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's FCC nominations, tell Amazon and Google to stop fueling the Israeli occupation of Palestine, tell President Biden to fire Louis DeJoy already, tell our government to stop robotexts as well as robocalls, and tell our EPA to regulate "chemical recycling" as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's two FCC Commissioner nominees. They're both good -- like a surprising number of Mr. Biden's first-term nominees! -- and at the FCC they'll have their work cut out for them. Without five Commissioners, we won't be able to reinstate net neutrality, and thus our FCC won't be able to force internet service providing corporations to, well, provide service during times of trouble. Like, you know, a pandemic, when literally everyone needs internet service! Or a wildfire -- you recall how Verizon throttled California firefighters' attempts to communicate with each other in 2018? We have no reason to put up with big telecom corporations' attempts to abuse us, but we're on our own fighting it if our government doesn't punish them when they do wrong.

No Tech for Apartheid helps you tell Amazon and Google to stop helping Israel occupy Palestine. They're both invested in Project Nimbus, as it happens, which provides cloud computing services to the Israeli military -- which makes them much, much better at occupying Palestine and oppressing Palestinians. But over a thousand Google and Amazon workers have demanded that their bosses back out of this project, which makes them courageous -- I mean, folks get fired for less in this "free" market system! But though this kind of technology is spreading, we can still win this battle. We got Microsoft to stop funding facial recognition technology in Israel last year, and this year we got Amazon to stop selling facial recognition technology (at least for now). So it's time to bust out The Big Stick of Bad PR. They're afraid of it because it works.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire Postmaster General DeJoy -- or, more precisely, fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom so he can get another USPS Board of Governors member in there who will fire Mr. DeJoy. Mr. DeJoy, you recall, tried to deliver the 2020 election to Donald Trump by slowing down services knowing full well our Postal Service would be doing more ballot-delivering than ever before; he also raised prices and cut services, and I'm old enough to remember when that kind of thing would get you fired in the private sector. Also, reports of his corruption have multiplied in recent months. Remember when he told Congress "get used to me"? That sassiness works a lot better from folks who don't try to shit all over everything. Dude's got to go.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our government to fight robotexts. Our Supreme Court, in an otherwise little-noticed decision earlier this year, dramatically narrowed the reach of the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act, saying that law only prevents a certain kind of robo-dialing that few robodialers actually use anymore, blasting open a loophole that now allows robodialers to spam you with texts, and guess what didn't exist in 1991? Our Supreme Court apparently loves to prove that a literal mind can be quite a curse, and often to the rest of us. You know what's on our side, though? People absolutely hate unwanted phone calls, so why would folks like unwanted texts more? Of course, first we have to make an absolute stink about it; otherwise our government will just figure everything's alright. Silence is assent, as Sir Thomas More would say.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to regulate "chemical recycling" in the most vigorous manner possible. And if that means "by outlawing it," who am I to complain? Proponents say "chemical recycling" (or melting down plastic into fuel) will help us avoid the worst effects of climate change, but they say the same thing about nuclear power, too, and it's about as cogent an argument. They want to melt down plastic, which already pollutes, and then use it as fuel which will also pollute? This isn't a solution to the pollution problem; it's a solution to the "some CEO doesn't have enough money to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home" problem. Which isn't a real problem! The real problem is the climate change "solution" that actually causes more climate change, and that's what "chemical recycling" is. So let's fight that.

Action: concerning voting rights, social media, prison phone rates, plastic pollution, and worker safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, and the Protecting America's Workers Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. By now you may know that the Freedom to Vote Act would authorize early voting for 15 days in all states, enact same-day voter registration, make Election Day a national holiday, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering, restore ex-felons' voting rights, and restrict dark money campaign contributions; you may not know that it would prevent states from interfering in elections so that a particularly party can "win" elections when their candidates get fewer votes. So ignore the right-wing rubbish about how "states should be allowed to run their own elections." If they're going to run them badly, then our federal government needs to step in.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. I know, Republicans blocked the bill yesterday, but that's one reason we pressure them -- so they know there will be consequences to their actions. Unless they think "voting against me" is a "terrorist act" or something. I wish I were kidding about that! I think we will be there soon! Anyway, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore our Justice Department's ability to stop states and localities with an established record of vote suppression from suppressing the right to vote any further. That's any state and locality with such a record -- you know, for when right-wingers try to tell you "the South has changed." When no one's brought up the South!

Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Normally I blanche when I see bills with the words "innovation" and "choice" in their title, but this one's pretty good -- it would prevent big online platform corporations from preferencing their own products, or discriminating against others' products, if the result "would materially harm competition on the covered platform." All monopolistic practices, you may notice! I believe Amazon is in court for this stuff as we speak, but I can think of other big tech corporations that should be shaking in their boots, like Facebook and Google. Or how about Apple? You can only use the "uniqueness" of your operating system as an excuse for so long! At least, that's how it should be. So let's make it be.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act. S. 1541 would make our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) cap what big telecom corporations can charge prisoners and/or their families for staying in touch over the phone. So that prisoners and their families can afford them! Currently these big telecoms can charge an arm and a leg for these calls, which is not only cruel, but also reduces the possibility that prisoners will stay out of jail once they get out of jail, and I believe every civilized person works toward prisoner rehabilitation. The only ones who don't, I presume, are the private prison corporation lackeys who love "repeat customers." But they're not civilized. But they don't get all the say around here.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2238/S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. It's not just about us breaking free from plastic pollution, it's also about the world's marine wildlife, who cannot afford well-heeled lobbyists arguing for their protection. The plastic corporations have big lobbies, but the hermit crab has us, and that's going to have to be enough. Besides which, a lot of animals harmed by plastic pollution can find their way to your dinner plate sooner or later, and if you didn't feel the harm before, you will then. And anyway, you probably did feel it before then -- a World Wildlife Fund/University of Australia-Newcastle study famously told us we ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic weekly -- but you just may not have known it. Now you know, and you can act.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2876, the Protecting America’s Workers Act. The bill would strengthen reporting requirements for workplace injuries and stiffen penalties for workplace safety violations, but it would also expand whistleblower protections, particularly for workers who won't undertake obviously dangerous tasks and those who help inspectors find workplace violations. Maybe this bill doesn't excite people, and big corporations will call it a "job-killer," but this is exactly the kind of bill that could help you out a lot if you get hurt at your workplace because of some boss's negligence. And if this bill passes, employers also won't be able to get away with hurting you just because you're a "consultant" or a "contractor" or a "temp," either. So let's get this done.

Around the table: containing last words on the Tuesday elections.

Natasha Lennard at The Intercept describes how America really has separate justice systems for fascists and anti-fascists -- but points to how that could change. The Wisconsin judge who won't let Kyle Rittenhouse's victims be called "victims" but will happily let them be called "looters" isn't even the worst of it, when BLM protestors almost invariably go before right-wing federal judges instead of local judges like Mr. Rittenhouse managed to get. But antifascists can do (and have done) better in civil cases against fascists, which have a lower burden of proof than criminal cases and which often leave fascist organizations bankrupt. Lesson: when things look dark, keep looking for light, and have faith you'll find it.

Faiza Patel and Mary Pat Dwyer at Just Security describe some of the, ah, inconsistencies Facebook deploys in deciding what to remove from its platform. Long story short: Facebook says it follows government designations (i.e., as a "terrorist organization") in making those decisions, but bans more groups than that, and anyway our government doesn't even compel Facebook to ban them. When we stop treating Facebook like This Completely New and Unprecedented Thing and more like a publishing house, "what to do about Facebook" will become clearer -- namely, that we compel Facebook to moderate public posts with considerably more scrutiny than they've been willing to employ thus far (though not private posts).

Sen. Josh Hawley (E-MO) writes a speech defending "traditional" "manly" virtues. You know, like "courage, and independence, and assertiveness," which I bet you thought were human virtues! Later on he says so, of course, though anyone with any intellectual honesty wouldn't have led you the other way in the first place, but even suggesting that folks who want men to stop raping women are against courage is gaslighting. Also, too, this "war" on "traditional masculinity" has not caused men to watch more porn; I'm pretty sure other factors have much, much more to do with it than that -- like nearly 60 years of Playboy magazine, if you want to take the long view, and the proliferation of porn on the internet since about 1996 if you don't. Used to be difficult to get porn, but not now.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) rightly slams Joe Manchin for his deficit hysteria over the Build Back Better Act, noting that the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" he helped "negotiate" actually adds to our national deficit. And that's what you get when you cave to Republicans on every funding demand! President Biden wanted corporate taxes and tax hikes on the rich to fund their "deal," and Republicans said no, and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, ace negotiators that they are, said OK.

When I hear that 31% of Americans think the 2020 election was stolen, I think it's officially time to revise my rule of thumb: it's not 25% of the electorate that's batshit insane, it's 30%. I hasten to point out that if we still lived in the New Deal era, that number would be a lot, lot lower. We'd still have insane people voting; we always have. But we wouldn't have to worry about them throwing bricks through our windows if we have a "love wins" sign on our front lawn, and we wouldn't have to worry about them one day deciding just to shoot up their neighbors' houses if they didn't vote Republican.

Finally, I hate to sound like a broken record, but yes, Democrats lost a lot of races on Tuesday mainly because they don't do enough with the power they have -- and when they don't do enough, then Republicans rush in with their BS about mask mandates and "critical race theory" and win. Appalling as it is that Republicans can win exclusively on such rage-stoking absurdities, we have to remember that this stratagem doesn't work when our government actually works for us. Others have said the pandemic and the economy are foremost in people's minds, and I think they're right; most folks glaze over when they confront all the inside baseball over the Build Back Better Act, but as the pandemic and the economy continue to upset voters' lives, voters will look side-eyed at the party in control, and that's the Democrats. Of course right-wingers will continue to throw sand in the gears of our recovery, but Democrats can confound them simply by doing the job we gave them to do -- end COVID, and rebuild our economy so everyone can get ahead. (And if you are looking for a silver lining from Tuesday: we'll never have to endure a Terry McAuliffe campaign again.)

Action: concerning Afghanistan, Facebook, Steve Bannon, nuclear weapons, fossil fuels, and forever chemicals.

Long story short: tell our government to help suffering Afghans, investigate Facebook, charge Steve Bannon for defying a Congressional subpoena, and curtail development of nuclear weapons; tell big banks to stop funding big fossil fuel projects, and tell our EPA to regulate "forever chemicals" as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Win Without War helps you tell the Biden Administration to release and monitor Afghan assets. Key phrase in that formulation is "and monitor" -- nobody wants to release good Afghans' assets and just see the Taliban seize them. The former government of Afghanistan kept their citizens' money in international accounts, which is why this is even an issue in the first place, and now those citizens are at risk of starving to death and running out of medicine -- never mind that they can't even buy supplies or run businesses! -- and civilized people don't wish that fate on anyone. And it is their money, after all. Don't calculate that starving a few Afghans is the price we pay for isolating the Taliban. Again, civilized people don't do that, and besides, the Taliban live in a world where even ISIS hates them.

The American Economic Liberties Project helps you tell various Executive branch agencies (including our Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Federal Trade Commission) to investigate Facebook for possible crimes. Such crimes, per the incomparable Matt Stoller, may include: wire fraud (in inflating both video numbers and advertising "reach" numbers), securities fraud (in its failure to disclose such inflation to investors), violating the False Claims Act (an inflated number is a false claim), insider trading (Mr. Zuckerberg sold a lot of stock after learning of the Cambridge Analytica imbroglio), and price-fixing (Facebook allegedly got preferential treatment from Google in exchange for not competing with them). That's all illegal for good reason, and criminal charges may be the only thing that'll bring Facebook to heel. So let's demand that.

Left Action helps you tell our Justice Department to charge Steve Bannon for defying a Congressional subpoena. Our House subpoenaed Mr. Bannon in the course of its investigation of the January 6 attempted coup, but Mr. Bannon has claimed he could not testify until various executive privilege claims make their way through the courts. Presumably he has noticed that Donald Trump isn't President any longer, despite the fever dreams of right-wingers (including himself). Our House has since voted to hold Mr. Bannon in contempt; now the ball's in our Justice Department's court to decide whether to enforce that holding. If they care about law and order, they'll enforce it; you shouldn't be able to defy a Congressional subpoena during an investigation into an attempt to overthrow our government without consequences.

Peace Action helps you tell the Biden Administration how you want their Nuclear Posture Review to proceed. Chiefly, you'd argue for fewer nuclear weapons (and no new nuclear weapons) and you'd argue to take nuclear weapons off of "hair-trigger" alert, since we already have enough nukes to destroy the world hundreds of times over and they've never been particularly precise weapons. And how good a response is a nuclear strike to most of what happens in the world today? Should we have used nukes on Osama bin Laden after 9.11? Of course not, and too much of what harms our soldiers in the field are improvised explosives, suggesting that the future of warfare might be more about guerilla warfare. All new nukes do is make defense contractors rich, which ain't a good enough reason to do anything.

Daily Kos helps you tell the big banks to stop funding big fossil fuel projects. A lot of big banks express concern over the effects of climate change -- so why do they continue to fund big oil, gas, and coal projects? Possibly because they're not really telling the truth about their commitment to fighting climate change? It's a question worth asking! It's not just about pollution, either -- it's also about running roughshod over the rights of indigenous folks who live on the lands that big corporations would like to dig up. It sure seems like they'd do less harm to the indigenous if they concentrated more on solar and wind investment. They'd enable a lot less pollution, too. We deserve more of these win-win situations in our lives, but we won't get them unless we speak out.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to regulate "forever chemicals" as vigorously as possible. They call PFAS "forever chemicals" because they don't break down and once they get in your body, they stay there -- and then they wreak havoc, causing cancer, thyroid disease, reproductive issues, and liver damage, among other things you don't want to happen to you or anyone else. Unfortunately, you can find PFAS chemicals in damn near everything, from non-stick pans to fast-food wrappers to stain-resistant carpets to water-repellant jackets to firefighting foam. Maybe that all seems to big to fight. Who could blame you for thinking so? But back in the day, slavery was too big to fight, too, but we fought it and won. And we can win here, too -- but not if we stay silent.

Action: Election Day.

Today is Election Day; many of you may have voted already, but after today, this is it. So if you have any problems voting today -- including (but not limited to) finding your polling place, voter intimidation, accessibility issues, voting machine problems, and provisional ballot issues -- call 1.866.687.8683, a.k.a. 1.866.OUR.VOTE. (In Spanish, that phone number is 1.888.839.8682, or 1.888.VE-Y-VOTA. See other phone numbers at the 866.OUR.VOTE website.) You may also call the U.S. Department of Justice's Voting Rights Hotline at 1.800.253.3931; my guess is that the folks there this year will take you a bit more seriously than the folks there last year might have done. I still worry about pickup trucks with Confederate flags rolling through neighborhoods on Election Day; now I also worry about anti-mask and anti-vax folks yelling at you as you try to vote. And right-wingers will try, once again, to obstruct the vote-counting wherever it happens, so you may want to go to your state's Secretary of State website, find out where they're counting the votes in your area, and call 1.866.OUR.VOTE if you observe anything untoward -- you know, like masses of obnoxious jerks hurling abuse at election workers in an obvious effort to prevent them from doing their damn jobs.

Voting, as I've often said, is a citizen's minimum duty in America -- this is our government, no matter how little it resembles a good government, and we citizens must make it a good government, first on Election Day and then on every day thereafter. Our politicians would prefer that you vote for them on Election Day and then just shut your yap, but they don't get all the say around here, and anyway there's more to vote for on Election Day than one flawed candidate or another. The city of St. Paul, Minnesota, for example, puts a rent control initiative before its voters today -- and, naturally, the city's banksters, real estate moguls, and landlords have spent buku bucks trying to scare voters into rejecting it, even though about half of St. Paul's residents can't afford their rent anymore. Tucson, Arizona puts a minimum wage initiative before its voters today; if they approve it, Tucson would escalate minimum wage hikes faster than the rest of the state, reaching $15/hour in 2025 and indexing the wage to inflation thereafter. New York puts no less than five propositions before the voters that would strengthen the state's redistricting process and make it easier to vote, while Boston voters will try to make their city Board of Education members into elected officials again. It's not all good, though: Colorado places a plethora of questionable-and-worse ballot initiatives before its voters today -- two would slash property taxes and give state lawmakers almost-veto power over federal assistance, while a third would institute a sales tax on marijuana sales; taken together these would (sigh) raise taxes on lower-income working people so wealthy people can have tax cuts. How these play out could have more of an effect on people's lives than the venal human beings who have spent the last year or two hustling for our vote.

So let's get out there and vote today -- and then tomorrow, let's get back to giving our elected leaders, whomever they may be, the what-for they most definitely deserve.

Action: in the shadow of the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enact paid family/medical leave, let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and expand Medicare. 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.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. Kyrsten Sinema said no to this in the Build Back Better Act -- for what reason, we'll never know, since she values negotiating with Republicans more than her real job, which is negotiating with her constituents -- but President Biden's revised Build Back Better framework includes a 5% surtax on income over $10 million, a surtax that goes up to 8% on income over $25 million. (This would essentially create two new 42% and 45% tax brackets.) The framework also includes a 1% tax on stock buybacks and a 15% minimum corporate tax. Maybe Ms. Sinema says no to all of that, too, because chaos. But not before we've had our say, which is, after all, the most important say.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Joe Manchin said no to this in the Build Back Better Act, because, and I quote, "to expand social programs, when you have trust funds that aren’t solvent — they’re going insolvent — I can’t explain that...It doesn’t make sense to me...I just can’t do it." In other words, because Social Security's trust fund is "going insolvent" (which it's not, and you didn't know any of this was about Social Security, did you?), nobody gets paid family/medical leave, even though that would have been paid for by the bill's revenue hikes, most of which Kyrsten Sinema nixed. Got it? Me, I don't think this needs to be that damn deep -- the American people want it, and it ain't that hard to pay for, so we should have it.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. Kyrsten Sinema nixed this, too, even though H.R. 3, which would have let Medicare negotiate the price of some-but-not-all drugs, would have saved (per our Congressional Budget Office) over $450 billion over the next decade; if we let Medicare negotiate the price of all drugs, that would have saved $840 billion, per the right-wing Mercatus Center, of all entities. As I said, the American people want it, and it would actually save us money, so we should have it. Even if the big pharma corporations have a tantrum about it. Like they'd make it without taxpayer handouts anyway!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Again, Joe Manchin complains about Medicare's "stability" as his excuse to deny expanding coverage for health care seniors need, like the expansion wasn't going to be paid for or something! His "government should be a partner, not a provider" shtick is bunk -- we-the-people pay our taxes, so we provide for each other, not "the" government. The Biden framework includes Medicare coverage of hearing care, but not dental or vision care; while that's an improvement, seniors are still going to have dental and vision problems in the meantime. And our job right now is same as it ever was: communicate our will, as many times as we need to, until we get the results we deserve.

Around the table: containing hopefully our last-ever words about the "governing philosophy" of Kyrsten Sinema.

Want some good news in advance of Election Day? Steven Rosenfeld writes that "In Virginia, Organizers Are Turning Out Overlooked Voters of Color," namely, "in cities and rural areas where voters whom political insiders do not expect to turn out reside." How? By addressing a community's "pain points" (i.e., those issues where folks are really hurting, like hunger and homelessness), by doing a lot more listening than proselytizing, and by concentrating on issues relating to those pain points instead of candidates. Result: early voting among folks of color is presently much, much higher in rural areas than in urban or suburban ones. Of course, if Mr. McAuliffe wins this race, right-wingers will attack this very phenomenon when they claim the race was "stolen." But this is how we should win elections.

Sarah Mimms at BuzzFeed finds at least a dozen January 6 "protestors" are on the ballot tomorrow. If there are any non-partisan voters left, they should all reject these candidates' assertions that they were just at the Capitol but not part of the breach, or just at the rally but not at the Capitol, as if they just had no idea what was about to happen -- or what right-wing social media "influencers" wanted to happen. Certainly statements like "I don't know what constitutes the Capitol grounds" should set off their BS detectors.

When I hear that Amazon has told independent sellers who use the Amazon marketplace (and comprise most of its revenue!) that impending legislation could "force" Amazon to shut it all down, I ask myself how do our bold entrepreneurs ever do anything? Oh, right -- by necessity. If Amazon shuts down its marketplace, there'll still be an internet, and people will still find a way (or ten) to sell their stuff. I'm also reminded, of course, that big corporations always whine and take hostages at the prospect of government telling them to stop hurting people.

Uh oh: Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) called his brother-in-law the very same day he dumped $1.6 million in stock mere days before the COVID-related stock market crash of 2020 -- and his brother-in-law dumped between $97,000 and $280,000 worth of his own shares not even one minute after the call concluded. Mr. Burr also had, per our Securities and Exchange Commission, "material nonpublic information regarding the incoming economic impact of coronavirus," and how did he use this information? By reassuring the public at large, while warning social club attendees that the pandemic would actually be quite dire. Mr. Burr will not seek re-election in 2022, suggesting he might actually be capable of shame.

In case you were wondering, folks are going on strike a lot lately because of bad pay and working conditions, not because of vaccine mandates. That couldn't be because our "liberal" media (not just Fox News!) constantly yammers on about workers wanting to quit or saying they'll quit over vaccine mandates that hadn't even gone into force, could it? Why, yes, it could. It could also be because unions have been trying to negotiate issues caused by mandates, such as sick leave issues; our "liberal" media ain't exactly doing a bang-up job covering those, either. All that does is help Republicans win offices they don't deserve to win.

Finally, Kyrsten Sinema still has a few defenders, including the ones who tell us she's really committed to "bipartisanship" as the best way to ensure "sturdier, long-term legislative solutions for everyday people as opposed to short-term partisan victories that have a tendency to be wiped out in a new majority just a couple of years down the road," in her spokeshack's words. Three objections: one, how does that apply to working on a bill exclusively with your own party? Two, if you dedicate yourself to "bipartisanship," the other side can just say no to everything all the time, and pull you in their direction -- as they just did with the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" she supposedly "negotiated," where Republicans said no to every proposed corporate tax hike and tax hike on the rich. And three, making "negotiating with the other side" the center of your philosophy is offensive when the only folks you're supposed to "negotiate" with, as a Senator, are your constituents. We have power, after all, and disappearing us from the conversation disrespects us. After all, who saved the Affordable Care Act from being "wiped out"? We did -- not the politicians addicted to "bipartisanship."