Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: the real source of American rage, and other topics.

As Joe Manchin wields excuse after excuse for killing the Build Better Act, David Dayen reminds us that President Biden can write a lot of Executive Orders that would do a lot of good. (Indeed, The American Prospect has made a list!) I sure hope President Biden isn't afraid that right-wingers will call him a dictator, since a) our laws already give our President the authority to issue these orders, b) right-wingers will say anything, no matter how stupid, and c) uh, have they met their Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump?

When I read that rural America faces an eviction crisis because American Rescue Plan Act funding for folks facing eviction has, ah, had a hard time getting to the good Americans who need it, I remind myself that this is why rural Americans vote for Republicans so much -- because Democrats don't do anything good for them when they have the power. I'm sure the information gap between what rural folks think they can get and what they can get is real, but again, shouldn't our federal government make damn sure everyone knows what they need to know?

Ho hum, a Gizmodo/Markup investigation finds that "predictive policing algorithms" tend to ignore white neighborhoods while "predicting" more crime in Black/Brown neighborhoods, meaning that "residents in over-policed areas are confronted, detained, or rung up on bullshit charges with alarming frequency" and then "this data gets fed back into the software to generate more of the same abuse." If you're still thinking but that's where more crime is har har har, all you need ask is whether every conceivable criminal gets punished. Difficulty: if you've ever committed a crime, no matter how small, and not served time for it, then the answer is "no." You did your crime out of sight, you say? Why do you suppose law enforcement didn't see you?

Noami S. Baron at The Conversation comes up with an unexpected answer to the age-old question of " Why We Remember More by Reading -- Especially Print -- Than From Audio or Video" -- that people approach audio, video, and social media with more of "an entertainment mindset," and thus don't devote their full attention to it. That's illuminating -- and mind-boggling, to me at least, since I try to devote my full attention to a TV program or an album just as I do to a book, but again, that's probably just me. All the other reasons you do better reading in print than any other thing -- because you touch paper, you remember the "physical geography" of a page, you remember what you read based on how far into the book you were, because you're more likely "multitasking" when you're on social media -- still operate, of course. Plus, I'd argue, you can re-read something in print far more easily and effectively than you can "re-read" a song or video (which occur in time and usually without accompanying written text) or even read a news article online (which could change when you read it again).

When I hear that the January 6 attempted coup has made the House of Representatives "a deeply unpleasant place to work," I'm tempted to call that a no-shit-Sherlock moment. After all, some of them helped plan the January 6 attack, while roughly a third of them enabled it by voting against certifying the 2020 election that same day for no damn good reason. When folks give you the impression they want you to die, it's hard to break bread with them. Or even drink martinis with them at D.C. watering holes. (The Wall Street Journal article referenced at the link sits behind a paywall, so I don't know how much it bought into all that both-sides-are-to-blame rubbish. Then again, maybe I do.)

Finally, as the year draws to a close, Kevin Drum's analysis of "The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage" is worth revisiting. Spoiler alert: basically, the "real source" of "our national temper tantrum" is the rise and primacy of Fox News over the last two decades -- yeah, talk radio and social media have done some damage, but not the damage Fox News has done. I feel compelled to mention, again, that what it offers its viewers -- rage -- is a very potent drug; it gives its users the illusion of control over chaos. And it's a damn shame that these very same people would never regard immigration or critical race theory as "chaos" unless some slick snake-oil salesfolk told them so, over and over again.

Action: concerning abortion, corruption, clemency, and actual cancel culture.

Long story short: tell Arkansas state legislators to fund family planning programs if they're really that against abortion, tell our Treasury Department to stop states from misusing COVID funding, tell New York Gov. Hochul to extend clemency to Randolph Jamison and Robert Webster, and tell the Sullivan County (TN) School Board to reinstate teacher Matthew Hawn. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Care2 helps you tell Arkansas state legislators to fund family planning programs if they're so concerned about abortions. And that includes birth control! Pick your damn poison, right-wingers! Of course they scream about birth control as much as they scream about abortion, which might lead you to think they don't really care about abortion; rather, they care about stoking rage over abortion, which you can't do quite as well if you actually reduce abortion, right? Colorado made it easy to get IUDs in 2009, and guess what? Their teen birth rate fell over 50% and their teen abortion rate fell over 60% over the next eight years. As long as our media use sex to sell stuff, and we keep buying it, we're not going to reduce abortions by making women wear chastity belts. But this is America! We can still reduce abortions, if we use common sense.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell our Treasury Department to investigate state misuse of COVID relief funds. Like, for example, Alabama's plan to use it to build more prisons! That's what the world needs, more prisons -- certainly not more policies that help people stay the hell out of prison! And you know Alabama ain't gonna fill those prisons with corporate criminals, but with Black folks who were all "resisting arrest." Aside from all of that, how does prison construction constitute relief for good Americans struggling to pay their bills and stay out of the hospital? The American Rescue Plan aimed to help folks pay their bills, not help state governments build prisons so their corporate cronies could get richer. So yeah, our Treasury Department should definitely be stopping corruption from happening.

Change.org helps you tell New York Gov. Hochul to extend clemency to Randolph Jamison. If you're familiar with action alerts like these, you'll see a pattern: man serves absurd amount of time not at all befitting the crime he committed, and becomes a model prisoner -- plus he's already survived cancer and COVID one time each in prison and surviving them again if (when?) they comes back ain't a sure bet, and besides, did he really do the crime of which he's convicted? That would be "possession of narcotics," said narcotics being on the floor of a car with five other people in it. For that -- and also for being Black, I'll bet -- he's already served 32 years in prison. And the laws that mandated these absurd sentences are no more, so what's the hold up?

Change.org also helps you tell Gov. Hochul to extend some mercy to Robert Webster, convicted of arson at age 17 and sentenced to 50 years to life in prison, of which he's served 34, again, as a model prisoner who's become the first member of his family to get an Associate's Degree and works to keep at-risk youth in the New York City metropolitan area out of jail. Oh, and when I say "convicted of arson," I don't mean he actually did the deed! His court case excluded witnesses and evidence that could have exonerated him, and when a police officer guarding the arson victim's home got murdered, the folks convicted of that murder actually got less time than Mr. Webster did. So Gov. Hochul can deliver justice here, however delayed that justice may be.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell the Sullivan County (TN) School Board to reinstate teacher Matthew Hawn, fired for the unconscionable crime of teaching about racism in the classroom! Right-wingers whine about "censorship" and "cancel culture" when they are the chief practitioners of censorship and cancel culture! Right-wingers talk about how "weak" liberals are but can't stand any criticism, on any grounds, ever! Yeah, you know these things, just as you know pointing out hypocrisy is never enough -- right-wingers induce rage in other folks solely to give them the illusion of control over chaos, knowing that this illusion will keep them coming back again and again for more rage-inducing evil. So let's not have good teachers like Mr. Hawn be collateral damage in this stratagem.

Action: concerning supply chains, taxes, postal banking, voting rights, and corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, expand Postal banking pilot programs, and pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the Ban Conflicted Trading 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.

Our House passed H.R. 4996, the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, earlier this month, by an astounding (and actual bipartisan) margin of 360-64; Matt Stoller explains why the bill is a good one, and the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) help you call your Senators and tell them to pass it. The Ocean Shipping Reform Act essentially re-regulates the shipping industry, an industry in which the big corporate players have, as Mr. Stoller explains, too many financial incentives to gum up the works. Now that the works have been pretty gummed up for several months now -- and you see how gummed up they are in just about every American port! -- our House decided to do something about it. Now we must tell our Senate to follow suit, lest they think we'll forget.

You'll also want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent. Who's the biggest opponent of this enormously popular initiative? Sigh, it's Joe Manchin, who has apparently told his fellow Senators that parents will just waste those $250 and $300 checks every month on drugs. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) reports somewhat differently: "The stories I hear the most, if you put it in categories, are child care, school supplies, college fund, phone bills." That sounds like a Senator who actually listens to his constituents -- versus Joe Manchin, who clearly listens only to made-up anecdotes from his corporate executive pals. And again, the people who invent such crappy stories, and spread them, should not get all the say about everything in America.

Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand postal banking pilot programs in the year-end appropriations bill. Since that's apparently the only thing we're going to pass this year! Seriously, our Post Offices offered basic banking services until half a century ago; now the big banksters won't go into poor rural or urban neighborhoods, leaving those good citizens at the mercy of pawn shops and payday lenders. Expanding postal banking would go a long way toward helping those good Americans make a better life for themselves and their children. (Fun fact: Louis DeJoy deserves no credit for supporting postal banking services, because the USPS labor contract actually mandates the pilot programs! So you can also tell that to your anti-union friends.)

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. It's a good bill, even though it's Joe Manchin's bill -- it doesn't have the ethics provisions of the For the People Act, but it does almost all of the other things the For the People Act does, plus it cracks down on states trying to subvert the voters' will, which has been a problem in a lot of states this year. Of course, you'll also ask your Senators to ditch the filibuster, at least as it relates to voting rights bills, in order to pass this bill this year. Kyrsten Sinema has already said, once again, that no she will not do that, presumably because we should only "get to yes" by capitulating to Republicans on every conceivable demand no matter how absurd. We should still get ourselves, and our Senators, on the record.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. The news hook, of course, is the Business Insider report alleging that almost one out of every 10 members of Congress have broken insider trading and conflicts of interest laws, while over 180 Congressional staffers have failed to meet disclosure rules required by law. It's no use saying if you had that insider info, you'd try to profit from it, too, because it's wrong, and trading in corporations you will oversee as part of your job in Congress is also wrong. Thus the Ban Conflicted Trading Act would mostly prohibit Congressfolk from trading in stocks at all. Hey, if you know you can't control yourself, then you need to submit to the control of our laws.

Around the table: concerning our Postal Service, "natural immunity," taxing the rich, *Law & Order*, COVID tests, and the victory for Buffalo Starbucks workers.

Wondering how our Postal Service is doing? Well, what do mail slowdowns and the biggest executive bonuses in a decade tell you? They tell you that putting a Trumphole boss in charge of our Postal Service was not only a big mistake, but a big middle finger to the American people. Louis DeJoy got almost twice the money in bonuses this year as a starting assistant mail carrier got in salary. I'd say that's not a sustainable business practice, but folks like Mr. DeJoy are all too adept at channeling the rage of the injured against the wrong people. Keep that in mind next time your mailman complains about Muslims and immigrants.

Joshua Cho at FAIR notices that some folks are playing up "natural immunity" of folks who've already gotten COVID as a way of slamming vaccine mandates, or vaccines generally. Naturally, we learn that the single study (not peer-reviewed, naturally!) "natural immunity" proponents constantly flog actually came up with completely different results than many, many, many other studies. Dr. Marty Makary, by the way, made his bones as a gastrointestinal surgeon; why would I trust him (or, since this is going to come up a lot over the next year, a cardiothoracic surgeon) over an epidemiologist? Just because "they're all doctors" or "they're all health care professionals" doesn't mean they're all experts in everything.

ProPublica, in describing "How Three Families Shielded Their Fortunes From Taxes for Generations," does a great public service in describing the history of taxing-the-rich in America over the last hundred years, a history that, sadly, includes the damage these families have done in cutting taxes for the rich over the last 40-plus years. Particularly the Mellons, whose name these days gets buried behind the Scaifes, the family Sarah Mellon married into in 1927, and whose most notorious member -- Sarah's son, Richard Mellon Scaife -- donated bigly to right-wing causes (and ran the right-wing rag/money-loser Pittsburgh Tribune-Review) until his death in 2014. And you no doubt noticed that even Thomas Mellon freaking married into money! So much for the rich gaining all their largesse on "merit."

Public defender Olayemi Olurin writes an article at Teen Vogue that has needed to be written for a long time, entitled "Law & Order Taught Americans to Root for the Police." Law & Order "show(s) all manner of police violence, coerced confessions, and blatant violations of the law and a suspect’s rights," which helps condition us to "root for the police and the prosecutor." That's all true, and we've all seen hundreds of cop shows and thus have all rooted for the cops more than we would in more tranquil moments, but I'd say the problem is even deeper than that: all cop shows are Dragnet -- that is, they're literally melodramas, where characters only speak dialogue to advance the plot, and thus bad art begets bad civics. And, seriously, do police officers get into 22 complex life-or-death situations a year? And would the state have left Olivia Benson at SVU for 23 years-and-counting?

The Biden Administration will mail as many as half a billion free, at-home COVID tests to any home that asks for one, which is better than making folks fill out forms so their health insurers will reimburse them for their COVID tests, but you still have to ask for one, and it's not clear yet how you'll do that. Still, you asked for better from your government, and you got it! Now cue the whining from right-wingers that they're mailing tracking devices to your home! (News flash: if you have a cellphone, you're already carrying around a tracking device.)

Finally, Sonali Kolhatkar at Counterpunch covers the successful unionization effort at a Buffalo Starbucks. You'll read about the usual union-busting tricks ahead of the election -- suddenly hiring new anti-union staff, suddenly deploying external managers to that one store, management shutting down cafés so they force workers to watch Howard Schultz tell them not to join a union -- and you'll appreciate this zinger, aimed at corporate spokeshacks who call unions "third parties": "our union is going to be made up of baristas and shift supervisors who make up Starbucks. That’s not a third party." (As an aside: why do they want you to think a "third party" is a bad thing? I just can't imagine!) You might even start to think that when Starbucks executives constantly yammer on about the health insurance and tuition assistance they deign to give to their employees, they're actually delivering veiled threats! Don't join a union, or your health insurance gets it! Alternately, join a union and you'll have the power to compel better health insurance, plus you'll work the schedule of a sane person, and for more money!

Light posting notice plus bonus Manchin slam.

Posting will be light around here through the holidays, though I should note the death of the Build Back Better Act at the hands of West Virginia "moderate" "Democratic" Senator Joe Manchin.

Sen. Manchin said yesterday that he's a "no" vote on the Build Back Better Act, which in a Senate with exactly 50 Democrats means it won't pass. Naturally he adds, as he often does, that "(i)f I can't go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can't vote for it." Good! Now he can explain to the good citizens of West Virginia that he is the reason they can't get paid family medical leave, a cap on insulin prices, a cap on child care costs, higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, or an extension of the Child Tax Credit expansion that just delivered the last of the $250 and $300 monthly checks into working families' bank accounts on December 15. Of course all he'll talk about is inflation and COVID and the national debt, though all of the things I just listed would actually help battle inflation and COVID, and the Build Back Better Act would add less money to the national debt than his pet "bipartisan" "infrastructure" bill from earlier this year.

Naturally Joe Manchin couldn't stop there: he also said that the Build Back Better Act represents an attempt to "dramatically reshape our society." To which I say: that is to laugh! The Build Back Better Act is already a compromise of a compromise of a compromise of a compromise of a compromise, and I'm sure I left a few compromises out. And the fact is that all the Big Gummint spending programs I mentioned in the previous paragraph, all part of this effort to "dramatically reshape" America, actually promote freedom. Are you more free or less free when you're figuring out which bills you can pay this month and which ones you can get away with "forgetting" to pay? Are you more free or less free when you're paying one working parent's entire year's salary just for child care? Are you more free or less free when you can't afford insulin because big corporations charge whatever for it? Are you more free or less free when you can't take a day off to care for a sick child or a sick parent without losing pay or losing your job? Are you more free or less free when more of your taxpayer money goes right into the pockets of big pharma CEOs? Are you more free or less free when absurdly wealthy billionaires can just buy Congressfolk to change laws so they can make even more money without doing any more work or contributing to civilization in any conceivable way? I trust you know the answer to all of these questions, even if Joe Manchin doesn't.

Or, more likely, pretends not to. He's not stupid, and nor are any of his comrades in Congress, so I must reluctantly conclude that I was right, earlier, when I supposed that the Democrats set up this whole process to fail. So Democrats absolutely deserve to lose both Houses of Congress -- except that we don't deserve what'll happen to us if Republicans take Congress again, and anyway, why let the Democrats off easy? So we should still clog up their phone lines, and then make them pay for their greed and their venality and their folly -- preferably by making them lose their next elections to real liberals, but short of that, by making their names mud for as long as they're in office, the way Joe McCarthy's name was mud during his last term as Senator after he'd doubled down one time too many. I want people like Joe Manchin to be afraid to show their faces in public, and then I want them to lose their primaries and slink away. Because he doesn't have the power. We do. And we need to wield it until they all understand that.

Action: concerning press freedom, voting rights, weapons sales, "Grinch bots," and pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so our Executive branch can't keep abusing it, tell your Senators to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act, the Stopping Grinch Bots Act, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act, so that our government can't use it to put journalists in jail. Yes, that's what Julian Assange is, regardless of whether or not you agree with him! And that's what releasing the Wikileaks papers was, too, and if we're going to put him in jail for that, then we should have put Daniel Ellsberg in jail for releasing the Pentagon Papers, and nobody's in favor of that, are they? I must say I find it disheartening to find President Biden continuing the unfortunate trend under President Obama of using the Espionage Act to punish truth-tellers, be they journalists or whistleblowers from within the Executive branch. American democracy demands more of President Biden, just as it demands more of us.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to vote on S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act, this month. Especially now that Democrats have actually snuffed out the shutdown and debt limit dramas! And easy as it is to make fun of Joe Manchin's objections to the For the People Act, his Freedom to Vote Act is about as good -- it gets rid of ethics provisions I wonder why! but it adds provisions that would keep states from hijacking the people's will during elections, as many states have moved to do this year. And early voting for 15 days in all states, same-day voter registration, making Election Day a national holiday, clamping down on partisan gerrymandering, restoring ex-felons' voting rights, and restricting dark money campaign contributions are all good works. So let's make our Senators do them.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4718, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act. In the wake of our government selling over $100 billion in weapons to nations we know abuse the rights of their citizens, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Philippines, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act would allow our President to impose sanctions against any nation that breaks international human rights law, and that sure seems prudent -- I mean, you wouldn't want to be an accessory to someone else's genocide, would you? The bill would also establish a Commission on Atrocity Accountability and Human Rights, which would be able to supply Presidents with the information they'd need to determine human rights violations and impose sanctions. How would this bill's opponents object? Probably by yammering on about "socialism."

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5263/S. 3276, the Stopping Grinch Bots Act. What are "Grinch bots"? They're pieces of software that roam the internet and buy up all the most popular items, so they can resell them at a high markup. Nice work if you can get it! Actually, since you're not a Grinch-bot -- and, very likely, you're not someone who writes Grinch-bots -- you can't get it, and more to the point, you can't get something nice for your nephew for Christmas this year because some bot has already bought it up and now wants twice as much as it paid for it. In a time of supply-chain bottlenecks caused by COVID, this ain't exactly what you need this holiday season. But Congress has done this kind of thing before, with 2016's Better Online Ticket Sales Act, so they can do it again.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. We've been trying to get this passed for years, since too many bosses fire pregnant workers, won't hire pregnant workers, or make their pregnant workers' lives miserable; the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would prevent bosses from doing any of these things, by forcing them to make, and I quote, "reasonable accommodations" to their pregnant workers. Note well the word "reasonable," for when some right-wing prick rants about Big Gummint letting workers spend their entire shift in the bathroom, which the bill does not allow, because it is not a "reasonable" accommodation. Our House passed this bill in May by a wide margin, but the bill still needs a vote before the whole Senate, so let's prompt them to do that.

Around the table: featuring more garden-variety Congressional corruption.

Surprise, surprise, Business Insider finds nearly 50 Congressfolk have violated the STOCK Act -- law and order, people! -- while almost 75 held stocks in the three big COVID vaccine-manufacturing corporations in 2020, over a dozen have invested in big defense contracting corporations, and another dozen or so Democrats who pride themselves on their greenness have invested in big fossil fuel corporations. In order to influence these corporations' decision-making toward the good? I kid, of course -- you and I might more credibly make that claim than the people we charge with policing these corporations. Searchable database coming Friday, apparently.

From Mike Ludwig at TruthOut we learn that the third-biggest source of methane emissions in America (after fossil fuel and agricultural operations) is the American landfill, and not even our EPA can tell us how much methane our landfills belch forth. Which is to say, their way of measuring landfill emissions is two decades old and doesn't actually measure emissions at the source. The good news? Our laws mandate that our EPA review its emissions-measuring model (and update it as need be) every three years, but guess which American President didn't bother complying with the law? That means a forthcoming lawsuit will likely force our EPA's hand here. Also too, the Biden Administration has committed to fighting environmental racism, and most landfills are guess where? Near Black and Brown neighborhoods, of course. You probably didn't really need to guess.

The New York Times finds that some of the worst of the internet lies can be found in politicians' fund-raising emails, but I have to say I was taken aback by the news that Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) sent out a fundraising email saying the Build Back Better Act has Medicare-for-All in it. Maybe right-wing media have trained some of his constituents well enough to have a stroke when they read the words "Medicare for All," but, ah, is he aware how broadly popular Medicare-for-All is with conservatives and liberals? All I'm saying it that particular untruth might have backfired on him, which, sadly, makes it the exception to the rule. (As an aside: if Republicans are going to fundraise off the lie that our Justice Department wants to "label parents terrorists," when are Democrats going to fundraise off the actual death threats spewed forth by some of these parents?)

Ho hum, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) approves of federal disaster aid for Kentucky after tornadoes devastated the state, after a decade of opposing federal disaster relief for other states. I was about to say "so he'll respond by saying he always opposed deficit disaster relief those other times and not the principle of federal disaster relief," but his spokeshack's statement to Newsweek didn't even try that, instead saying leave us alone, we're suffering and grieving today. And, you know, I'm willing to discuss taking the money from somewhere else! Somehow I think Mr. Paul would oppose taking it from corporate welfare tax breaks, though.

The headline reads "Trump Says Netanyahu 'Never Wanted Peace' With the Palestinians," but the article (based on an interview with Mr. Trump) actually goes rather deeper than that: Mr. Trump apparently liked both Mahmoud Abbas and Benny Gantz, and really, really didn't like Mr. Netanyahu's attempts to annex even more of Palestine in early 2020, though if you were tempted to call no-shit-Sherlock on his claim that Mr. Netanyahu was just "tap(ping) us along," I wouldn't blame you. And though my initial reaction to the headline was "I think he's right!", my next reaction was "then why did you enable him?" History may yet record that Mr. Trump was little-if-any worse than the last five or so U.S. Presidents on Israel/Palestine policy, though that's a hell of a thing to bring to the Pearly Gates.

Finally, a right-wing pollster puts out a poll finding that two-thirds of West Virginians oppose the Build Back Better act, but I doubt Joe Manchin has been "listening" to that finding so much as rejoicing that all his hard work linking the Build Back Better Act to inflation has finally paid off! Just a few months ago 70% of West Virginians approved of the Build Back Better Act; I'd still trust that finding more than this one, since that one wasn't created by two months of media hysteria over inflation (and flew in the face of general negative or non-coverage from our "liberal" media). Also, too, most West Virginians like paid family medical leave; I wonder how they feel about the fact that their senior Senator killed it.

Action: concerning our "liberal" media, forced arbitration, women's health, protecting our democracy, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell CNN to ask tougher questions of U.S. Senators, tell your Congressfolk to pass the FAIR Act, and tell your Senators to pass the Women's Health Protection Act and the Protecting Our Democracy Act and to confirm Gigi Sohn as an FCC Commissioner. 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.

FAIR helps you tell CNN to ask tougher questions of U.S. Senators during live interviews. The occasion for this action alert is a softball interview CNN did with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ), in which CNN threw a bunch of granny balls at her, and didn't ask her about how her campaign donations might influence her actions or how she could possibly say she's serving Arizona when the good citizens of Arizona seem to disagree with everything she's doing. Big media poobahs like saying you can't ask tough questions of powerful people because then they won't come on your show anymore. I can think of a few words for that, like coddling and enabling. The powerful get too much of that in America. We have to remind our "liberal" media outlets that all that coddling and enabling is what makes good Americans hate them.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (or FAIR) Act, which would, as its title suggests, prohibit corporations from forcing you to resolve "employment, consumer, antitrust, or civil rights disputes" via an arbitration process that generally favors them, not you, and certainly not justice. (Forced arbitration clauses also generally prevent class-action suits; the bill prohibits them from doing that, too.) Do you like getting a Christmas gift that doesn't work right, only to find the corporation that made it or sold it to you won't let you go to court to redress this incident, as is your right? Then you will want your Congressfolk to make this bill into law. (Don't buy reports of four-digit "average arbitration awards," for when you lose, your "average" will be zero!)

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755, the Women's Health Protection Act. Our Supreme Court has allowed clinics to sue over Texas's notorious SB 8, but has inexplicably left the law in place while those suits work their way through the courts; only the Women's Health Protection Act will protect a woman's right to control her own damn body, and it would do a good job protecting it, both from state-level bans and from state-level obstacles (like forced ultrasound laws, laws allowing anti-abortion clinics to give false advice, and laws requiring more from abortion clinics than they require from any other health care facility). Don't believe the hype that Susan Collins wants to help codify Roe v. Wade into law, because she's already said this bill goes too far; the best way to change her mind is to flood her phonelines.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. This bill would stop future Presidents from profiting from their office, abusing their pardon power, declaring "national emergencies" whenever their ego gets bruised, and fire Inspectors General whenever they feel like, to name just four injuries Donald Trump did to this country while President. And don't brook any nonsense about how you're "rehashing the past" if you support this bill, because under that "logic," one could reject pretty much any attempt to make anything better in America! Indeed, it's almost like that's the idea! Besides which, he's running in 2024 -- he hasn't made it official, but c'mon -- which means his evil deeds are not the exclusive property of "the past."

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to be our fifth FCC Commissioner. Our Senate confirmed Jessica Rosenworcel as FCC Chair earlier this month; now they just need to confirm Ms. Sohn, and we can finally realize our dream of getting net neutrality back. That is, of course, exactly why Senators Tillis (R-NC) and Sullivan (R-AK) put a hold on her nomination earlier this month! But literally the only people who don't support net neutrality in America are a) corporate lobbyists and b) the politicians who enable them -- everyone else, conservative to liberal, supports an internet where big corporations don't get to dictate to you where you can go. It ain't just net neutrality at stake, either -- it's also all that infrastructure bill broadband investment our FCC has to manage. So let's get to it.

Action: concerning Build Back Better, worker rights, drilling near neighborhoods, probation "reform," and prosecuting Bolsonaro.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a vigorous Build Back Better Act, tell Kellogg's and Starbucks to give their workers fair contracts, tell California to prohibit oil and gas drilling in neighborhoods, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a probation-related bill, and tell the International Criminal Court to prosecute Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First up: let's call our Senators and tell them to pass the Build Back Better Act more or less as the House passed it -- plus let's make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, roll back the Trump tax cuts on corporations and on the top tax bracket, limit SALT repeal to workers making less than $400,000, and let Medicare negotiate drug prices on all its drugs. And enough of inflation as a fear stick! "Government spending more" does not mean "more inflation," no matter how much right-wingers want you to think so! You know what's driving inflation? Corporations charging you more! And brook no BS about "how much the bill will really cost" or whatever rubbish report Sen. Graham cajoled our CBO into creating. Joe Manchin is not stupid enough to "fall for this" -- more likely, they're all acting out the drama that'll enable him to vote against the bill. West Virginia residents can counter this by calling Sen. Manchin and communicating their will. Telling him they're on to the drama wouldn't hurt.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Kellogg's to give their striking workers a fair contract or else you'll continue to boycott their products. They're hiring permanent replacement workers as we speak, but that doesn't mean we should concede defeat, and anyway those replacement workers sure are in for a shock! Kellogg's actual workers are striking right now partly because of the notorious two-tiered salary system one could say is designed to pit worker against worker, but also because of 16-hour work days and forced overtime. Kellogg's last contract offer (which workers overwhelmingly rejected) purported to address the two-tier system, but would only allow 3% of workers at each plant to ascend to the top pay tier annually, meaning workers would have to wait nine years to get the pay they deserve! Keep that in mind when Kellogg's rolls out its propaganda about all the pay increases they offered.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell Starbucks to negotiate fair contracts with its workers in Buffalo who have voted to join a union. Nobody's worried that Starbucks coffees will be too expensive if Starbucks treats its workers fairly, are they? Because that is to laugh! Admittedly today's CEOs are so clueless they might well put that line out, but I've been at so many Starbucks branches that don't hire enough workers to handle the volume, plus Starbucks messes with its workers' schedules just as much as any other non-union corporation. It's well past time we recognized that work is work, that no worker is "worthless" merely because they work a service job. Unions should have led us in this direction a long time ago, frankly! But the time to do the right thing is always now.

Vision CA helps you tell the government of California to stop oil and gas corporations from drilling where good folks live. Gov. Newsom has proposed a 3,200 foot setback for drilling -- meaning corporations couldn't drill within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, and hospitals -- but only to new drilling wells; you would want existing wells to obey the 3,200 foot rule, too, right? After all, they pollute just as much, if not more, than new wells. This is an instance where "grandfathering" bad wells in will hurt people. Also, you'll urge California to ban new permits within setbacks until the rule takes effect, which will have the effect of getting drilling corporations used to the ban, since we care so much about their feelings these days. More important, of course, are the good citizens of California who deserve clean air and clean water.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state Senators to reject SB 913, a probation "reform" bill that will, in the ACLU's words, "trade one bad system for another." SB 913 would, on balance, make it easier for folks on probation to get sent to jail, when the whole reason behind probation is to offer an alternative to putting everyone in jail, plus it would make it easier for poor people to be sent to jail, by keeping people on probation indefinitely if they haven't paid restitution. If the words can't do the time, don't do the crimehave formed on your lips, I would hope you'd say that to corporate criminals if you say it to the imaginary Black folks in your head, and besides, keeping people on probation forever until they've paid a fine is a very good way of tripping people up so they go back to jail again, which would be a private prison corporation's wet dream. And they already have too many of their dreams realized at our expense.

Finally, Avaaz helps you tell the International Criminal Court to open a prosecution against Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, not necessarily for all of the awful stuff he's done (a Brazilian Senate committee recommended he be indicted over his mishandling of the COVID pandemic), but particularly for his actions against the Amazon and against the indigenous folks who defend it. The Amazon has lost the equivalent of 3,000 football fields per day during his nefarious rule, and he has encouraged a lot of illegal logging and mining in the Amazon, plus violence against the good folks who live there, all of which may well meet the ICC's "crimes against humanity" standard, particularly when you consider that the Amazon rain forest would be the world's best defense against climate change if we'd just leave it the hell alone. Treating the world like your personal piggy bank should have consequences, but it won't if we don't demand it.

Around the table: featuring a lot of right-wing whining and stupid plans.

Yes, Virginia, the Trump brain trust, such as it is, really did put their plans to overthrow our government into a PowerPoint presentation. Which begs the question: if Mark Meadows turned this document over to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attempted coup before he decided to stop cooperating, what far worse crap could he now be hiding? It's a question worth answering!

Right-wingers are wringing their hands over the fact that "young Democrats" don't want to date them or be their friends anymore, but what the fuck do they expect after the way they've acted for the last two decades? How many times should they be entitled to call people "traitor" and "weakling" without any consequences? I, for one, am glad that the youths have figured out that shame and shunning are real things civilized people do. And, last I looked, our First Amendment guaranteed freedom of association, which I guess right-wingers think is only for corporations.

Alex Pareene suggests that Elon Musk might be playing a long game by making his self-driving cars work so badly -- chiefly so that governments may further restrict the movements of folks who walk, "for their own safety," of course. Instead of actually punishing Tesla for developing bad technology, which would be a better way of insuring citizens' safety than walling off their sidewalks! Those of us who are trying to make our lives more walkable might take such things a bit personally. And folks who find themselves impressed at such "galaxy-brain thinking" should ask what good any plan does if its goal is "make one person richer." It's not a thing to take to the Pearly Gates, after all.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph now Fox News prettyheads want to call the burning of their Christmas tree outside a hate crime against Fox News! Which sure would take corporate "personhood" to a whole new level! Apparently that's about the only way to hold the accused arsonist on bail in New York City now; of course they blame TEH LIBRULZ!!!! for reforming bail laws, and whine about TEH CRIMEZ SURGEZ!!!! though not using actual facts, but seriously, it's not at all absurd to regard a guy who burns down a big Christmas tree as not much of a flight risk or a danger to others. Why, Fox News is whining so much I'm starting to suspect the whole thing was an inside job!

Uh oh: a publicist for Kanye West apparently threatened a Georgia poll-worker with jail if she didn't "come forward" with non-existent election fraud. Of course he didn't directly threaten Ms. Freeman; he just said "I cannot say what specifically will take place. I just know that it will disrupt your freedom and the freedom of one or more of your family members. You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up." And he imagines a court of law won't find that a threat? Would now be a good time to remind everyone that Kanye West's best riff comes from Phil Manzanera?

Finally, the president of California's medical board alleges that a group of anti-vaxxers, possibly associated with the notorious astroturf group America's Frontline Doctors, have stalked her, spied on her (by flying a drone over her house), and confronted her in a dark parking lot. If these allegations are true -- and local police seem to think they are -- I hope these individuals get jail time. After all, if we want to be a law-and-order country, we should go after the real enemies of law and order.

Around the table: featuring an actual outrage in Myanmar and a clueless seditionist soon to be in prison.

As Myanmar's military sentences former/actual Prime Minister Aung San Suu Kyi to four years in prison on bogus charges, we are reminded, I would hope, that this all started because Suu Kyi's party won parliamentary elections rather decisively in 2020, but the military didn't like it, so they cried fraud and overthrew the government, murdering peaceful protestors numerous times since then. Bunch of diaper-loaded brats with guns, these people! And, sadly, this is where we're heading, America -- maybe not in 2024, as Republicans hope to retake the Presidency through merely corrupt means, but eventually, if we fail to do our job.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media pretend that the two remaining candidates in Chile's Presidential elections -- a far-right pro-Pinochet asshole and a not-as-far-left protest leader -- are somehow "equally bad." This is similar to "liberal" media arguments that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were equally bad, a conclusion not justified by any evidence, but I also suspect that a lot of our media thought Mr. Pinochet was good for business! Another question raised by the article: if "moderates" are so great, why did the majority of Chilean voters reject them? (And we now learn that the far-right candidate's father was an actual Nazi, contrary to said candidate's statements; how will our "liberal" media deal with this one? One candidate's father was a Nazi, but the other wants to destabilize Chile by paying workers in more than dung pellets. Both sides!)

Today, in "Who's Not Paying Taxes?": real estate and oil tycoons, according to ProPublica's trove of leaked IRS tax returns. Doesn't matter that magically converting profits into losses is legal; after all, a lot of immoral things are also legal merely because rich folks buy more favorable laws from their Congressfolk, and everyone who actually pays taxes shouldn't aspire to be more like Stephen Ross, but should be furious with folks like Stephen Ross every time they bottom out over a pothole. And nobody should be fooled by the concept of depreciation wiping out a building's worth for tax purposes over a decade, as if buildings typically crumble to the ground that fast.

One of the January 6 seditionists, facing a mere 60 days in prison for her role in attempting to keep Donald Trump in office despite his being rejected by 81 million voters, says on TikTok that she's hoping "to be able to work out a lot and do a lot of yoga and detox" while in prison, and also hopes there'll be "some protein shakes and some protein bars." All I can say is that if she'd spent a lifetime being harassed by police because of her skin color, she wouldn't now be hoping she can "use" her prison term to shed a few pounds.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) won't commit to supporting the Build Back Better Act, because word salad. Between this and not wanting to hold big corporations accountable with vaccine mandates even though he says it's their "responsibility," his tough-guy image sure is suffering. Also, if the "unknown" he fears is actually inflation -- and not just "the unknown," because refusing to raise taxes on the rich and lower them on working families and give workers four weeks of paid family medical leave and cut the cost of child care in half all because of "the unknown" is just abject cowardice -- then I'm old enough to remember when inflation was twice what it is now. We are truly led by the worst people.

Finally, David Brooks laments that "(w)hat passes for 'conservatism' now" "is nearly the opposite of the Burkean conservatism I encountered" as a young man, and though I've long been no great fan of Mr. Brooks, describing modern-day "conservatism" quite specifically as "a sort of mental brutalism" may be the best way anyone's described right-wingers screaming at the top of their lungs on TV -- make no mistake, they are absolutely trying to brutalize you. I also hadn't thought to locate the "brutish anti-intellectualism" of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers in the "epistemological modest(y)" of conservatism, and I think he's pretty courageous to say that. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Mr. Brooks has historically had too little to say about "big corporations suck(ing) the vitality out of local economies," but his entire argument is nonetheless very much worth your time. Personally I think liberals defend and maintain civilization at least as much as conservatives do, I conceive of the New Deal as a liberating force more than a planning project, and I put more faith in reason simply because I have so often witnessed it make sense of a complex world, but what a boon it would be to have these conversations again, rather than have to explain why you can't equate cancer and COVID to someone who's only trying to create drama in the first place.

Action: mostly concerning pollution.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to make rapid COVID-19 tests free, designate the Delaware Water Gap a National Park, restore protections for migratory birds, ban mining within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, charge more money in public royalties for coal mining on public lands, and enact the most vigorous methane emissions regulations possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to make rapid COVID-19 tests free for all Americans. Last week he proposed requiring health insurance corporations to reimburse folks for the cost of these tests, but that's not really the same thing as "just make the tests free," and not just to folks who have no health insurance. If you're buying groceries and paying the bills, you might not also have $20 to plunk down for a COVID-19 test -- which would just be for you, of course; if you have children, you'd want to test them, too, so figure another $20 per child. Now it's adding up, and that's before we get to submitting forms to health insurance corporations! Many times I've had to call my insurer to get them to pay up after they wrongly rejected my claims, so we need to make this easy.

Penn Environment helps you tell the Biden Administration to designate the Delaware Water Gap as a National Park. The Delaware Water Gap is one of America's national treasures, a tribute to the success of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (now permanently authorized and funded thanks to 2020's Great Outdoors Act), and over 4.5 million folks visit the Gap every year. Incredibly, though, we have no national parks in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, or New York -- no, the right word is "incredibly," if you've seen the vast unspoiled lands each of these states have -- so I'd say it's overdue. And becoming a National Park (versus a National Recreation Area, as it is now) means tens of millions of dollars more in federal funding, which means we'll have something even better to leave to future generations.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to protect migratory birds from corporate harm. Specifically, you'd ask the Service to roll back the notorious Trump Administration rule "freeing" corporations from facing any accountability for their bird-killing pollution. For such a "law and order" "conservative," Donald Trump sure was all about helping big corporations escape responsibility for their wrongdoing. And the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (which the rule enforces) is over a century old; apparently the Trumpian interpretation of conservatism has nothing to do with "treasuring things that have endured," either. I kid, of course -- the Trumpian interpretation of anything is "whatever induces the most rage in the most people." But that's no way to run a civilization.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to ban mining within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness watershed for the next two decades. Because it would pollute the water, and for what? Not for jobs, that's for sure -- too many right-wingers justify any and every polluting project by saying it'll employ people, as if non-polluting projects don't employ people. This was, indeed, former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett's excuse for handing out billions of taxpayer money to an ethane cracker plant! But I digress. Our Forest Service concluded, in a 2016 study, that sulfide-ore copper mining would cause irreparable damage to the Boundary Waters; I bet you just can't guess what happened next: the "law and order" "conservative" President said to hell with it, we're leasing anyway. And so we reassert our will.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to stop subsidizing coal mining. How does our Interior Department subsidize coal mining? By actually lowering the royalties corporations have to pay for drilling on public lands! You would think our Interior Department would raise those royalties, if for no other reason than to make the taxpayer more money, since royalties do belong to the taxpayer. But our government still doesn't understand the leverage we as taxpayers have. And coal corporations still account for some three-fifths of all carbon emissions, despite providing less than one-quarter of our energy; if they're that bad for America, giving them corporate welfare is even more foolish. If we really want to fight climate change, we need to stop giving out these handouts.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the strongest methane emissions standards possible. Just so happens that cutting methane emissions (which accompany every oil and gas drilling operation in America) would deal perhaps the most efficient blow to climate change, since methane packs an even bigger climate change punch than coal does. And since the methane mitigation industry has been around for at least a decade, brook no HOWZ WILLZ WEZ DOZ TEH THINGZ!!!!! malarkey from big fossil fuel corporations! They're awfully ready with excuses, aren't they? And right-wingers love pretending your actual obstacles are excuses and the excuses of corporations are obstacles. Well, good luck to all of them at the Pearly Gates!

Action: concerning our Postal Service, net neutrality, fair regulation, protecting our democracy, and marijuana legalization.

Long story short: tell your Senators to confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees who will save our Postal Service from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and confirm President Biden's FCC Commissioner nominees, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Corporate Capture Act, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, and the MORE 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.

Progress America helps you tell your Senators to confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees who will protect our Post Office from its Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Who tried to sabotage the 2020 election, as you recall, and who has lately increased prices while cutting service as his "bold" plan to "save" our Post Office, and that sure ain't helping out anyone who gets their life-saving medications through the mail. President Biden hasn't nominated new USPS Governors, but we may as well put our Senators on notice that they work for us -- a fact we need to remind them of fairly frequently! -- and they're supposed to do our will. They're not supposed to put our Postal Service on a path to privatization, because only a few crony corporations want that, and they're not supposed to get all the say about everything in America.

Battle for the Net helps you tell your Senators to confirm both of President Biden's FCC Commissioner nominees. Our Senate Commerce Committee has moved Jessica Rosenworcel's nomination out of committee, but stalled on Gigi Sohn, as at least two Republican Senators, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, have put holds on her nomination because she's "too pro-net neutrality." If Messrs. Tillis and Sullivan actually listened to their constituents, they would confirm Ms. Sohn precisely because she's pro-net neutrality, net neutrality being one of the few issues that actually unites conservatives and liberals. As long as they're only going to listen to big corporations -- literally the only possible "constituents" they might have that oppose net neutrality -- then we're just going to have to be louder.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6107, the Stop Corporate Capture Act. What would the Stop Corporate Capture Act do? It would streamline our regulatory processes by a) keeping out corporate-financed "scientific" studies that aim to undermine clean air, clean water, and product safety regulations, and b) require our government to consider societal benefits a bit more broadly when crafting regulations. Too often Congress gives corporations too much of a say over regulations that are supposed to benefit all of us, not just them, hence the madness over "cost-benefit analyses" that tabulate how much money a regulation will cost a corporation, rather than how much a regulation will help all of us. The Stop Corporate Capture Act will strike a blow against all that, so we should demand it.

Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. You remember Donald Trump, right? Pretty much a walking advertisement for How to Abuse Presidential Power, amirite? Well, the Protecting Our Democracy Act would right a lot of his wrongs by strengthening Congressional subpoena power, giving whistleblowers more protection against retaliation, and restraining Presidents from abusing their pardon power. The bill would also restrict Presidential emergency declaration power, require Presidential candidates to release a decade's worth of tax returns, and prevent Presidents from profiting from being in office. Certainly the Protecting Our Democracy Act represents an effort to learn from our recent mistakes, and we should encourage that.

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. The bill would not only remove marijuana from our federal Schedule I, which would essentially make pot legal across the land, and it would expunge previous pot convictions and reinvest in communities harmed by the notorious "war on drugs," which has largely become a war on Black and Brown folks. Hey, the Man's gotta keep them down somehow -- the Man can't always stop them from voting no matter how hard he tries! Pot legalization is yet another issue that, these days, actually unites conservatives and liberals -- the only folks who really want to keep pot illegal are the folks who are already in a state of rage about everything, and they already get too much say in how we run America.

Around the table: featuring yet more life lessons from Joe Manchin.

Jack Shafter at Politico says it's well past time to "pull the plug" on cable "news", certainly as far as acting like it's so damn important. The big three traditionally over-the-air networks pull in five times the viewers for their nightly news broadcasts than all the big three prime-time cable news programs put together, and it doesn't get any better when you compare them to other audiences (Netflix streamers outnumber prime-time cable "news" watchers by about 17 to 1). Problem is these channels make so much money from advertisers and cable corporations, all about as equally-deluded as to cable "news"'s importance. And that's why we'll keep telling big cable corporations to drop cable "news" channels.

Two Georgia election workers sue right-wing website Gateway Pundit for defamation. Their suit alleges that Gateway Pundit "repeatedly published demonstrably false claims that portrayed the women as 'traitors' who conspired to 'steal the presidential election in Georgia'," which apparently "incited months of death threats and harassment against them." I wouldn't put it past Gateway Pundit to assert an absence of malice because they would have attacked any election workers, not just the plaintiffs! In any case, I wish the plaintiffs the best in their efforts to get justice for what's been done to them.

Ben Horton at TruthOut reminds us that "Corporate Political Spending is Bad for Democracy", and I bring it partly because Mr. Horton actually provides some solutions in a post-Citizens United world, including limiting SuperPAC contributions and banning contributions from corporations with "substantial" foreign ownership. I also bring it up because it turns out former Supreme Court Justice Byron White, in a 1978 dissent, put the problem as succinctly as I've seen it put: our First Amendment doesn't "the public to allow 'its own creation to consume it.'" We would have to be nihilists to demand that our First Amendment provide the means for its own destruction, after all.

Margaret Hartmann at New York magazine reminds us that Dr. Mehmet Oz's Senate run in Pennsylvania forces us to "to reckon with Oprah Winfrey’s penchant for promoting pseudoscience that harms society." She brought Dr. Oz to the masses, after all, just as she brought Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccine malarkey from the middle of the 2000s to the masses. She also brought Dr. Phil to the masses; the only advice most of Dr. Phil's couples deserved was "I want you two to go back in time and prevent yourselves from ever meeting," and now Dr. Phil ain't a good place to go for COVID advice, either. Ms. Hartmann's article is very well-sourced, by the way; acquaint yourself with Dr. Oz's fall from early grace now and maybe we can prevent him from winning later. (As an aside, of course all the Trumpian Islamophobes will rally to Dr. Oz's side. He tells them what they want to hear, after all, and how else to convince yourself you're not prejudiced by carefully tabulating all your non-WASP friends?)

When I hear that Joe Manchin will join all 50 Senate Republicans in passing one of those notorious "resolutions of disapproval" aiming to take down President Biden's vaccine mandate, I note that he says we should "we should incentivize, not penalize, private employers whose responsibility it is to protect their employees from COVID-19," and I wonder why do we even have Republicans? They no doubt appreciate him making their arguments for them, but I must also ask: if it's employers' "responsibility" "to protect their employees from COVID-19," why wouldn't we punish them for evading that responsibility? I'd ask if he "incentivized" his kids doing their homework by giving them cookies before they did it, but given how his daughter turned out, I think I already know the answer.

Finally, I know the almost-shutdown is so last week's news already, but dig how House speaker Nancy Pelosi attacks the Republicans who would have shut it down in order to defund vaccine mandates: "How do they explain to the public that they're shutting down government because they don't want people to get vaccinated?" They say "Democrats can't message," but I think that's brilliant messaging, and I have to wonder why our "liberal" media doesn't recognize it as such. I can't decide if it's more because she's not a Republican or because she's not a man.

Action: Monday, Build Back Better, etc.

Long story short: tell your Senators to fight climate change, 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to ensure the Build Back Better Act makes historic investments in fighting climate change. It's simple: if we don't fight climate change, we won't have a planet to live on. Why, even those who live in gated communities won't have a planet to live on! And certainly don't believe Republican hype that President Biden's climate change agenda is driving up gas prices. Gas ain't the only energy in the world, after all, and big corporations are driving up gas prices because they can. And the Build Back Better Act ain't even passed yet! Yikes, they think we're all so stupid. And "I pretended everyone was stupid so I could gaslight people into doing things they didn't want to do" is a hell of a thing to take to the Pearly Gates.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. As I said last week, Sen. Sinema complained about the price tag of the Build Back Better Act, but then crippled the bill's ability to pay for itself! And she could still stamp her feet at the 15% corporate minimum tax and the 5% and 8% surtaxes on income over $10 million and $25 million respectively; tall we can do is keep communicating our will to our Senators until they do it. It has an effect -- Sen. Sinema's office, I've heard, ain't anyone's favorite place to work partly because of all the good Arizonans giving her what-for about what she's doing. If we keep that up, we'll have more of an effect.

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. Too many Democrats act like doing something for their bosses, the American people, will result in massive losses in the midterms, but does that make sense to you? Sure seems like doing something for the people makes them want to keep you in office! And just as expanding the Child Tax Credit seems like an easy thing to run on -- and not just because of all those $250 and $300 checks arriving in working families' bank accounts! -- cutting child care costs in half, as the Build Back Better Act would do, should also be an easy thing to run on! If Democrats are going to pretend doing this stuff is hard, then of course they deserve to lose. But let's make it hard for them to pretend.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Senators to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Paid family/medical leave is yet another popular initiative that has thus far fallen victim to One Holdout Democrat, this time Joe Manchin, who apparently prefers working with Republicans and paying for it with payroll tax hikes. That won't pass President Biden's no-tax-hikes-on-folks-making-less-than-$400,000 demand, and it also won't pass a Senate with more than 39 Republicans in it, like this one. Because they block everything! But how did we even get paid/family medical leave in the bill to begin with? Through our activism. And how did we get our House to put it back in the bill after Sen. Manchin wanted it out? Through our activism. It's the only thing that works, so we have to keep doing it.

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. And who demanded the exclusion of Medicare drug price negotiation from the Build Back Better Act? Kyrsten Sinema, of course, who now says she thinks the bill won't get done until after Christmas! As if she isn't one of the two main reasons this bill isn't done now! Yikes, she's worse than a cartoon supervillain. And they usually don't do their evil in plain sight. Hell, even Joe Manchin will tell you he'd prefer to finish it up next year; he doesn't act like it's some law of physics preventing it from getting done. But folks like Kyrsten Sinema are the reason we have to keep doing what we do.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Joe Manchin has expressed his "reservations" about this as well, due to Medicare "insolvency" or something, and that's why Democrats have been either the minority party or a timid majority party for the last 40-plus years -- like a football team going into the Prevent defense with two minutes left and a five-point lead, Democrats don't play to win, they play not to lose. Instead of worrying about TOO MUCHZ OFZ TEH SPENDINGZ!!!!, they ought to focus on doing the most good for the most Americans. If they did that, good Americans would actually be excited about voting for them! And getting dental/vision/hearing care for seniors sure would be "doing the most good."

Action: concerning Social Security, abortion, data privacy, law and order, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, the People's Response Act, and the Break Free From Plastic Pollution 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. The Social Security 2100 Act would increase both benefits and revenues, the latter by, as they say, scrapping the cap on the income that can be taxed into Social Security, at least for income over $400,000. Why there should be a donut hole on income between $142,800 (the current cap) and $400,000 annually I couldn't tell you, but taxing income over $400,000 represents progress, and we shouldn't let the perfect murder the good. Let's not let Democratic cowardice ("there's an election coming up -- scary, kids!") murder the good, either, but improving Social Security would be both good and popular, and really, everyone should get behind it. Even Republicans!

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act, which would essentially codify the protections of Roe v. Wade into federal law. And with our Supreme Court apparently willing to bless Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, putting Roe v. Wade into law would be a good and necessary thing! One thing I rarely hear about this topic is that outlawing abortion wouldn't be like outlawing burglary -- anyone can commit a burglary, while only a woman can have an abortion, and ain't no right-wing legislators willing to penalize men for the ill-considered sex that prompted the abortion. I suspect they would enshrine ill-considered sex a Constitutional right, at least for men. But they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Big data mining corporations are harvesting your internet surfing habits as we speak! And worse than that, those same big data mining corporations will eagerly sell your internet surfing habits to law enforcement! And law enforcement should only be able to get that information with a warrant, which means they think they have a better than 50-50 chance of convicting you of something. The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would prevent big data corporations from selling your personal info willy-nilly to law enforcement. Your internet service-providing corporations can't do it under the law, and neither should these data harvesters. Also, they should get a real job doing real work.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act. I could be wrong about this, but I've long thought "defund the police" a bad slogan describing good ideas -- that we shouldn't turn to our police to solve every conceivable problem, nor should we blithely assume we can simply retrain police to be every other kind of worker we need (the way some folks blithely assume that "just learn to code" is a solution to every economic problem). The People's Response Act would fund better solutions to community problems at the state and local level, so that we don't send in a guy with a gun whenever someone has a problem, because sooner or later, as we have long known, that's going to get someone killed. And whatever else you want from your government, it shouldn't kill you.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2238/S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which would, among other things, make big corporations more responsible for their plastic waste, start a national refund program for beverage containers, and set minimum recycled-content standards for products. When all the haters respond by saying but we need plastic for things you stupid liberal ha ha ha snort high five!, you can take comfort in knowing that "breaking free from plastic pollution" is not actually the same thing as "never make anything with plastic again." You might even point it out to them! It won't change their minds, because they're haters, but it might change the minds of other folks who might be listening.

Around the table: from government spies ruining lives to a possible wrinkle in the CRT drama.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept tells the story of Aswad Khan, whose life the FBI appears to have ruined after he refused to inform for them. It started, apparently, with "repeated" detainment of his known friends and associates, and since our government made it known to all of them that Mr. Khan was the reason for their detainment, they started distancing themselves from him, with some coming to believe that he had done something wrong. And now he's likely on a terror "watchlist," which (as Paul Craig Roberts has reminded us) now has so many people on it that we should be having a 9.11 every day. Needless to say, folks upset at the "nanny state" would better train their ire here than on, say, Social Security or clean water regulations.

Penn State epidemiolgist Suresh V. Kuchipudi discusses the issues surrounding the new Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus, and in doing so raises the possibility, near the end, "that the unusually high number of mutations could be detrimental to the virus and make it unstable." Anyone who's ever torn down a load-bearing wall in their house could likely relate. (Full disclosure: I have never done that.) Personally I was holding out for "the virus chose the wrong 50 mutations because why should only humans be stupid," but I'd take "the virus mutated so much it couldn't infect very many people," too.

Ho hum, David L. Wilson at FAIR finds that "Media Don't Fact-Check Right-Wing Migration Myths." Lately our "liberal" media has presumed that six-figure settlements over the Trump Administration's family-separation policy -- a policy no longer in effect, remember that detail -- might induce more folks to migrate to the United States, though you can't demonstrate harm by a policy that no longer exists in a court of law. Of course plenty of actual science exists to demonstrate that folks come to America for work, not "frivolous lawsuits," and that science also maps cleanly onto common sense -- folks will work for $10/hour in America when the best job they can get in their home country pays less than that in a day. Also, too, NAFTA killed the Mexican economy, but our "liberal" media hardly remembers.

I should have realized this was going on, but Chris Walker at TruthOut tells us that big corporations have used inflation as an excuse to jack up prices. I mean, if non-financial sector corporate profits go up 37 percent and inflation goes up six percent, you would have every right to wonder whether maybe corporations could simply forego some of their largesse and help keep inflation down. They won't, of course, until we make them, but just remember that inflation (and economics, for that matter) isn't physics -- corporations will eventually use any old excuse to raise prices. Bernie Sanders gets the last word: "(t)he problem is not the worker who got a small raise and a $1,400 check 7 months ago. The problem is corporations making record-breaking profits while 700 billionaires became $2 trillion richer during the pandemic."

Finally, Jonathan Feingold at The Conversation says something fairly provocative: that the anti-critical race theory laws sweeping America actually enable more critical race theory teaching in public schools. I'll happily concede that laws prohibiting teaching that "[o]ne race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex" give enterprising teachers an opening, but I doubt the school administrators who'll enforce the law will think as subtly as this, and I wonder how many teachers will exploit that opening, knowing that they might eventually win in a court of law, but suffer greatly in the meantime. One hopes it only takes one.

Around the table: from farmers triumphing in India to right-wingers embarrassing themselves in Florida.

P. Sainath at Counterpunch describes the massive victory India's long-beleaguered farmers have recently won -- and how Indian media barely covered it. If this happened in the U.S., you'd just assume our media simply weren't interested in non-white, non-right wing protestors, but in India, you'd have to chalk it up to a general avoidance of discussing anything that would upset the rich and powerful. Indian farmers managed to get their Prime Minister to agree to repeal three onerous agricultural laws, this after surviving first-we-ignore-you-then-we-ridicule-you-then-we-bust-out-the-water-cannons, and they deserve our admiration and our support.

James Somers at The New Yorker describes scientific advances in mind-reading. Right now they're not "reading thoughts" so much as inferring them from brain patterns, and color me skeptical that it'll ever be particularly good, because the the brain is a far more magnificent thing than even neurologists know, not to mention that people will plug mind-reading tech with their own prejudices just like they did with facial recognition technology. But if the technology does get good, I'm sure Congress will be there with laws that protect good Americans from having their privacy invaded! I kid, of course; we'll have to prod them to do that, and the big data lobby could be even bigger by then.

I'm always pleased to see someone make the pragmatic case against our use of drones in foreign lands -- the moral arguments don't persuade certain people, for whatever reason, and the pragmatic case gives us an additional weapon to shame them (and prompt more moral behavior from the undecided). I'm even more pleased that former Navy officer James Durso takes the case farther than I thought to do -- by taking us past the errant drone strike (and the subsequent lack of punishment for anyone) as ISIS recruiting tool, which is where we are now, to the day when the other side have their own drones, and start taking out American embassies and other "soft" targets. Lesson: accountability is always the best policy, no matter how painful it might be.

When I hear that "QNuts" are "Falling Out of Love With Kyle Rittenhouse" -- over an apparently legit beef Mr. Rittenhouse has with former lawyer/QAnon darling Lin Wood -- I am reminded that this is how rage addicts try to convince us (and themselves) that they're not really rage addicts. Although when I hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), herself a Q adherent, is siding with Mr. Rittenhouse against Mr. Wood, I don't just wonder if this is just more right-wing drama to distract the folks -- I also wonder if folks like Rep. Greene abandon folks like Mr. Wood because, well, they think of Lin Wood as a loser, and you know how their real Personal Lord and Savior, Donald Trump, feels about losers.

When I hear that Donald Trump actually said that the House January 6 panel trying to get his records "will result in permanent damage to the institution of the presidency," my first impulse is to say he's got some cojones saying that, after taking a massive dump all over the office for four years. But let's grapple with the point about "preserving the confidentiality of Presidential communications," shall we? The American people deserve to know exactly what their President did and said in the time leading up to the attempted coup he instigated. There! Done grappling.

Finally, Jim Swift at The Bulwark takes us through the "anatomy of a viral lie," in this case the utter absurdity that Nancy Pelosi was about to buy a $25 million mansion in Florida, which would, somehow, justify everything Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have done. Read the whole thing, and then keep in mind that when journalists started reporting on rumors and justifying it by telling themselves they weren't doing "serious" work, they opened up a box that'd make Pandora blush. As a famous philosopher once said, when a man lies, he murders some part of the world.