Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, our Supreme Court, water, consumer credit, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact a minimum corporate tax, confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to our Supreme Court, pass the Future of Water Act and the Comprehensive CREDIT Act, enact a code of ethics for Supreme Court Justices, and electrify our Postal Service's mail truck fleet. 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.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a 15% minimum tax rate on all corporate profits, no matter where they're "earned." I put "earned" in quotation marks not for the usual reason (i.e., do they really earn their money?), but because corporations love pretending they've "earned" all their profits in some untaxed corner of the world rather than in the United States. Remember in 2014, when corporations reported earning more profits in five nations than the entire gross domestic product of those nations? And this year, Elon Musk is the world's richest man, while his corporation, Tesla, will report a loss in the U.S. this year while making big profits outside the U.S. I smell a rat, and Congress needs to root it out.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to confirm D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as our next Supreme Court Justice. All you need know is that her Republican critics in our Senate basically soiled themselves in public trying to attack her -- Sen. Cornyn wouldn't STFU about the "rights" of religious folks to run roughshod over other folks' actual rights, and Sen. Cruz's clumsy attempts to get Judge Jackson to opine on critical race theory were the most absurd grandstanding. The one charge against Judge Jackson that probably gives you the most cause? Under-sentencing in re child porn possession, though Judge Jackson generally followed probation officers' recommendations if not prosecutors'. And their obsession with her work for Guantánamo detainees was horseshit, because Guantánamo is horseshit. If their best can't stick, they should confirm her.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7182/S. 3886, the Future of Water Act, which would outlaw water futures trading by banksters. A "future," as you may know, is a contract that compels you to buy or sell a commodity at a predetermined future date and price; if that all sounds a little like a way of getting over on someone, I wouldn't blame you. And a future is speculation, figuratively and literally, and speculating on the sale of one of the two most essential elements on Earth strikes me as profoundly immoral. I wouldn't tolerate almost any futures contracts in my ideal economy, but at least most of them only speculate on one sector or other; we won't all eat pork or beef, but we will all need water, so let's keep that out of speculators' hands, shall we?

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4120, the Comprehensive CREDIT Act. If you've ever tried to fix inaccurate info on your credit report, a near-Sisyphean task according to those who've tried it, then the Comprehensive CREDIT Act would help you, by establishing an appeal process for disputes and allowing courts to give injunctive relief while you get it sorted. The bill would also limit the kinds of medical debt that could appear on your credit report and require credit reporting corporations to provide you with more of your credit information, for free, before you need it (to sign a loan, for example). If this all sounds like Big Gummint forcing corporations do common-sense things, ask yourself why corporations aren't doing the common-sense things already. Where they fail, our government must step in.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a code of ethics for our Supreme Court Justices. Our Supreme Court Justices are the only federal judges who don't have one, and in recent days we've seen why that might be a problem, as we have learned more and more about Virginia Thomas's involvement in the January 6 attempted coup. Mrs. Thomas's husband, of course, is Justice Clarence Thomas, the only Justice to dissent from our Court's ruling allowing our House January 6 Select Committee to get certain White House documents. Doesn't matter if his wife's name was nowhere in those documents, because our highest federal officials need to avoid even the appearance of evil. Making them adhere to a code of ethics will help them do that.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to require our Postal Service to make at least three-quarters of its trucks electric. The one vehicle you're likely to see every day in America is a mail truck, and they'll never be the most fuel-efficient vehicles you'll see, so we might as well make them pollute less. (Even in West Virginia, which produces nearly all of its electricity from coal, electric trucks won't pump out the tailpipe emissions gas trucks do.) And what's just as bad as Postmaster DeJoy's decision to contract with a Wisconsin corporation to make gas-powered trucks? That same corporation's decision to move truck production to South Carolina so it wouldn't have to use its own union workers in Oshkosh! So, yeah, let's kill this deal.

Around the table: from electric cars to nuclear fears.

Electric cars can't charge houses yet, but Seth Blumsack at The Conversation tells us it's just a matter of time. There are logistic obstacles -- car batteries have to be able to run electricity in both directions, and metering equipment would have to be able to shut off electricity from the grid when folks want to run the house on their cars (which they'd do in a blackout, of course, but also during more expensive peak hours) -- but they're not insurmountable. The bigger obstacle might be keeping the folks who don't have cars from paying more for electricity.

Hard to believe, Harry, but our IRS's privatized debt collection program isn't just bringing in only about half the revenue it expected, it's also underreporting its costs. But wait, there's more! About one in every five targets of this program lives below the poverty line; I don't know about you, but I'd go where the money actually is! This is the third go-round for privatized tax collection, and it didn't work the first two times, either; I'd understand if you said how many more times until they learn? Problem is they already know. P.J. O'Rourke, God rest him, used to say that Republicans aimed to prove government didn't work by running it into the ground.

Ralph Nader, writing at Counterpunch, points out that no Senators asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson any questions about corporate power. That includes very, very important questions a Justice will eventually have to rule upon, such as trade agreements' power to nullify American laws (via the notorious investor-state dispute settlement system). But while Republican Senators soiled themselves in public trying to "trap" Judge Jackson somehow, Democrats slip by without asking any really tough questions about the real threat to American freedom: untrammeled corporate power.

Former actual journalist Lara Logan has sunk to the point where she says, out loud, that Darwinism comes from the Jews. "I'm not saying none of it is true," she strains to point out as if we should be grateful for such generosity, "I'm just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory -- based on evidence, OK, fine." And by "someone" she means the Rothchilds, who also (according to Rep. Greene) facilitated the creation of a space laser to cause California wildfires. I'm not sure we should call this an anti-Semitic "dog whistle," since everyone can hear it!

Oh crap "St. Louis beer heiress" Trudy Busch Valentine is running for the Democratic nomination in the Missouri U.S. Senate race. They must be thrilled that they can make people think about beer whenever they think about Democrats, but they're still clueless about the fact that people don't want heirs running things! Lucas Kunce merits only one mention in this article, which is better than the other nine ("at least"!) Democrats running for the seat who go nameless, but let's be clear: Lucas Kunce is the Democrat the establishment fears most -- because he's got the best shot at doing good works if he wins.

Finally, how absurd have the pro-Putin arguments gotten? Tucker Carlson suggests we need Vlad the Bad to stand between his nation's Muslim extremists and the nuclear weapons they might steal and fire on America! After all, there'll be "no one running the country" if he's not there! After all, when has a Russian leader ever succeeded another? This is a real Rube Goldberg contraption of an argument, but worse than that, it's hostage-taking -- don't wish for dictators to be powerless, he's saying, or America could die! It's the same kind of reasoning that puts "strongmen" in power in the first place! But we're not hostages -- we're free people.

Action: concerning Medicare, forever chemicals, border walls, war-mongers, methane emissions, and Fox News.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to end a Trump-era Medicare privatization scheme, tell fast-food corporations to get "forever chemicals" out of food wrappers, tell our government to abandon the "digital border wall," tell the Washington Post to stop publishing op-eds by aging war-mongers, tell our EPA to crack down on methane emissions from factory farms, and tell big corporate advertisers to abandon Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Biden Administration to end the Trump-era program that allows private insurers to pay for some Medicare patient care. Without telling them, I might add! C'mon, you know Donald Trump: if it were such a great idea, he'd never STFU about it! He surely wouldn't have hidden it! Sadly, the Biden Administration seems to be doing just that, having (after a public comment period that I'm sure didn't go well for them) renamed the DCE program (for "direct contracting entities") as ACO REACH, and yes that is an acronym. ACO REACH won't be as odious a program as DCE was, but as one observer said, "you don't slap a band-aid on a tumor and call it cured," and whatever they call it, DCE will remain the tumor that threatens to spread the cancer of privatization to all of Medicare.

Consumer Reports helps you tell fast-food corporations Arby's and Nathan's to commit to getting the PFAS chemicals out of their food wrapping. Doesn't matter that you just throw it out when you're done with it, because they don't call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for nothing -- you find them in just about everything anymore, they don't break down into safer elements, and scientists have linked them to cancer. And not for nothing, but the longer you let your cheese fries just sit in that wrapper, the more PFAS you'll likely have in your food. Chick-fil-A and Burger King have lately committed to getting the PFAS out of their food wrappers, following McDonald's and Wendy's; now Arby's and Nathan's need to follow suit, lest we one day get to the point where we can't get PFAS chemicals out of our products and our bodies.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our government to abandon plans to form a "digital border wall." That's got to be better than Donald Trump's vanity border wall, right? Not so much -- the "digital" wall relies partly on facial recognition technology, and as we know, facial recognition technology has the hardest time recognizing the non-white faces that would comprise the bulk of would-be immigrants to the U.S. Also, the "digital" border wall uses drones, which I'm sure will never turn on us. If we must have fewer immigrants to the United States, then we must do three things: 1) make all jobs in America good-paying jobs, 2) stop interfering with other nations' efforts to do same, and 3) stop letting corporations make all the decisions in America. That'll make wisdom and compassion much easier.

Win Without War helps you tell the Washington Post to stop running op-eds from discredited war-mongers. The news hook here? On the eve of the possible resuscitation of the Iran nuclear deal, Post ran a John Bolton op-ed, as if Mr. Bolton hadn't orchestrated its destruction by President Trump. Mr. Trump, for his part, delivered perhaps the only guilt-free laugh line of his Presidency the day he said if he'd listened to John Bolton we'd be on World War V by now! He also pushed that war in Iraq, and if you're thinking maybe we should let bygones be bygones after almost 20 years (!), just remember that no one who pushed that disaster paid for their evil works, which included smearing half of America as "traitors." "Forgive and forget" works in our personal lives, but it just enables politicians.

Food and Water Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to start cracking down on the climate change emissions coming from factory farms. This was a big joke to right-wing hotheads a decade ago, but farms pump out more than a third of all methane emissions in America, and not through flatulence but through industrial production. Joke'll be on them when they realize that our EPA can-so regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, and can-so regulate it on factory farms. They won't do it, though, unless we tell them to do it, and given how much factory farms already get away with by threatening higher food prices, our EPA really won't want to do it, unless we get in their grills about it. And we may have to do it more than once, and we may have to do it in court.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. No, that's not "censorship"! Governments censor, but our First Amendment doesn't guarantee a "right" to be paid by advertisers, just as it doesn't confer protections against activism or criticism. Why, I'd call it "starving the beast," and if Fox News has to get by with MyPillow and Snuggy ads, that's just the churn of civilization. We don't have to tabulate every awful thing Fox News has ever done to deserve shame and shunning, I trust, though demonizing the half of Americans who opposed the Iraq war as "traitors" does stick in my mind. If you want to meet corporate executives halfway, though, I suppose you could tell them they should abandon Fox because Fox sucks up to Vlad the Bad, and that's a bad look these days.

Around the table: from gerrymandering to "cancel culture" to crypto.

Our Supreme Court tosses Wisconsin's state legislative district maps apparently because they believed that map applied the Voting Rights Act too stridently in delivering an additional Black-majority district. Possibly Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn, who wrote the opinion supporting the map, spoke too precisely in saying "(w)e cannot say for certain on this record that seven majority-Black assembly districts are required" by the Voting Rights Act; you know John Roberts is an incurable literalist, and I guess the other five right-wing Justices are more than happy to indulge that if it suits their purposes. But I thought they were against stepping in this close to Election Day! Also too, why should Wisconsin's new maps resemble the previous ones as much as possible, as the state Supreme Court mandated? Those maps are terrible!

One veteran organizer calls Starbucks's anti-union efforts "the most intense (anti-union) campaign in modern U.S. history, and there’s really nothing in second place." Aside from the usual -- firing organizers, hiring dozens of new employees at a pro-union store to dilute the vote, disciplining workers for things no one had ever disciplined them for before, flying in managers to spy on workers, and calling "listening sessions" they dominate with anti-union talking points -- Starbucks stalls votes with endless appeals for district-wide (versus store-wide) votes, appeals they know will lose. They're also losing most of the votes, over 100 so far. I'm not sure bringing in former CEO Howard Schultz will help much; last we heard from him, he said so much stupid crap he killed his own Presidential campaign.

When I hear that "'Parental Bills of Rights' Are a Right-Wing Siege on Public Education,", all I can say is that right-wingers better watch their asses, lest these "bills of rights" get turned on them. Do they think Black and Brown parents won't say right-wingers are abridging their rights by forcibly effacing their history? Do they think the parents of trans kids will tolerate right-wing efforts to abridge their actual rights? Or do they imagine that only "the right" parents have "rights"? Remember, they're not rights if only some people have them. Great metaphor from Martha Kempner: "Every time (right-wingers) start to lose, they shake the snow globe and look at ways to generate outrage among their base."

Ari Paul at FAIR reminds us that when our "liberal" media organs decry "cancel culture" and "wokeness," they're really upset that we now live in a world where readers have more power to respond to stories than they ever did before. Used to be you had "letters to the editor" that the editor himself curated; now anyone can just write a comment on a webpage, and no I never heard our "liberal" media wring their hands about shame and shunning in the old days. Shaming and shunning aren't "oppression" but merely the churn of civilization, and First Amendment protections don't run in only one direction at a time. (Hate to pile on, but I presume that Bari Weiss, who resigned saying Twitter had become the Times's "ultimate editor," had nothing to say about Matt Drudge being the Times's "ultimate editor" for about a decade.)

Marjorie Kohn at TruthOut says that Republican Senators acted the fool at the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings in order to "agitate their base" before the midterms, but I wonder how well that will work -- Republicans took a lot of anti-gay marriage and anti-flag burning votes in 2006, and you know how well that went for them in November. It'd be nice, though, if Democrats would, you know, offer something of value to voters before then, if for no other reason that the Republicans' hysterical arguments wouldn't be the only ones anyone made to the voters. Voters will choose "he said something" over "he said nothing" every time.

Finally, at least a dozen enterprising writers take a red pen to a New York Times article purporting to "explain" crypto, with hilarious results. Seriously, this article provides a good primer on the bad arguments propping up crypto, and note well, also, how often the Times writer resorts to the passive voice and the excessive prepositional phrase: "there are things of actual substance being built," he writes, never mind who's building them, and he could have said substantial things, too. And he might have said "crypto wealth and ideology is going to be a transformative force in our society in the coming years" better by saying crypto wealth and ideology will transform our society. By the time he begins a paragraph with "What I'm saying, I guess," he doesn't sound modest or colloquial; he sounds like a man worried that speaking plainly would expose him.

Action: concerning COVID, gas prices, scientific integrity, no-knock warrants, abortion, and pot.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to approve emergency COVID funding and pass the Stop Gas Price Gouging Tax and Rebate Act, the Scientific Integrity Act, the Amir Locke End Deadly No-Knock Warrants Act, the EACH 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to approve additional funding for fighting COVID. Another omicron variant is on its way, and our government has run out of money for testing and vaccines; Congress didn't include more COVID funding as part of its last appropriations bill, apparently because they feared Republicans would object to it and scuttle everything. To which I respond: make them! And though I know the Lancet predicted, a few months ago, that the pandemic would be over soon, that's still a prediction, not a certainty, even if pretty good science buttresses it, so one should be prudent and prepare for the possibility that things could go wrong. Apparently it takes a liberal to preach prudence these days.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7099, the Stop Gas Price Gouging Tax and Rebate Act. Similar to the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, the Stop Gas Price Gouging Tax and Rebate Act would impose a 50% excise tax on crude oil-producing corporations on profits that exceed 10% over their average profits from 2015-19. The bill would then deliver the proceeds back to working families as monthly rebates. House Democrats should pass this bill posthaste and then put Senate Republicans on the spot. Let them say they can big oil corporations may not be price-gouging; people will love that! And let them be the ones to snatch monthly checks out of good Americans' hands; people will love that, too!

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 849, the Scientific Integrity Act. You remember how the Trump Administration EPA stacked its scientific boards with pollution industry hacks? Well, the Scientific Integrity Act would fight that, by making all executive branch agencies develop and enforce a scientific integrity plan that keeps politics out of scientific decisions. In practice, that means polluting corporations won't be able to dominate decisions about stopping pollution, a sentence that probably seems self-evident to you, but a lot of politicians seem to have trouble understanding the whole concept! Plus the bill would keep political employees' grubby mitts off scientific findings and give whistleblowers more power to expose wrongdoing. These are good works, and we should make Congress do them.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6877, the Amir Locke End Deadly No-Knock Warrants Act, which would, as its title indicates, vastly reduce no-knock warrants (and therefore deadly ones). It wouldn't outlaw them -- the court issuing the warrant would have to establish "clear and convincing evidence, supported by particularized facts, that...notice prior to entry would substantially endanger the life or safety of the law enforcement officer or other persons," which is the exception for which any reasonable person would ask -- and which most right-wingers will pretend doesn't exist in the bill, though it's in Sec. 3(a)(2). The bill would also outlaw no-knock warrants for drug cases, which would curtail (though not end) unannounced entry.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2234/S. 1021, the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (or EACH) Act, which would make federal health care programs cover abortion services, and make federal health care facilities provide access to abortion. Because abortion is a legal medical procedure, that's why! And if we don't provide abortion, we will make women breeders, and we're not much of a civilization if we do that. Pro-lifers would say we're not much of a civilization if we tolerate abortion, but all civilizations have to choose between greater and lesser evils. When men can give birth, and science can progress beyond using abortions to save would-be mothers' lives, we can think about all of this again.

Finally, Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement (or MORE) Act. Yes, Democrats will bring it up for a vote, thanks to our pressure; now we have to convince our Reps to pass it. They'll quake in fear of Republicans saying they're "soft on crime," but consider that Republicans say we should have fewer laws preventing polluters from befouling our air and water; why don't we call that "soft on crime"? After all, dumping poison in a lake or river hurts far more people than a burglary does; it doesn't feel that way to the burglary victim, obviously, but pollution still hurts more people. We should think of punishing polluters (or banksters, or tax cheats, or Medicare fraudsters) as being "tough on crime." I'll keep saying it until we do.

Around the table: "cancel culture" is drama, part 775.

Alex Pareene suspects that right-wingers "might start trying to do voter fraud on a mass scale." And if you're tempted to respond that they kind of already have -- the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database helped right-wing politicians de-register Black and Brown voters for years, after all -- we're talking actual voter fraud here, the kind of which former Republican House Rep./Trump Administration hack Mark Meadows now stands accused after all the accusations of "voter fraud" he's leveled. Add in all the stories of actual voter fraud you've heard, which all seem to come from the right (Mr. Pareene tabulates only a few of them!), and you can see where one might be concerned.

Carl Beijer at Jacobin reminds us that "Critical Race Theory Is the Right’s Latest Obsession" but "They’ll Have a New One Soon." Seriously, it's like right-wingers have this Lazy Susan of outrages and just as even other right-wingers tell them to STFU about it, they just give it a spin and see where it stops. But Mr. Beijer also reminds us that right-wingers love telling us about "a relatively obscure text or theory that, we are told, lays out the secret governing plans and doctrines of the anarchomarxistliberaldemocrat conspiracy." Eventually, you have to explain why you keep losing to the anarchomarxistliberaldemocrat conspiracy, so you have to keep "discovering" new "secret texts." How long before they get to these books?

The Biden Administration sacks the two members of our President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition -- Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz -- who are running for Senate. Mr. Oz wrote a bunch of stupid crap about it, neglecting to mention that the Hatch Act actually prevents government employees from using their position to campaign for public office. Maybe the aforementioned two individuals can prove in court that no one cares about the Council and therefore couldn't possibly have used it to promote their campaigns! And I'm sure they'll try, but in the meantime, they'll just whine about being "canceled."

Uh oh: Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) might have a primary challenger this year, and someone apparently using a computer in the Missouri capitol building has repeatedly scrubbed any mention of sexual assault allegations from this challenger's Wikipedia page. Mainstream media organs reported on both these accusations, in case you thought maybe some liberal rando added them to his page to begin with. Then the challenger's spokeshack called Wikipedia "an unregulated, unedited, largely unsourced mass of information that is often inaccurate because anyone can post almost anything," which smells of desperation, as any ad hominem attack does. Sadly, Ms. Bush has two other primary challengers, though perhaps they'll split the Anyone But Bush vote.

Paul Krugman says high inflation will come down, perhaps not for the "soft landing" our Federal Reserve envisions, but still a soft enough landing that won't result in near-11% unemployment. Why? Because the inflation that finally died in the early '80s was "self-perpetuating inflation" -- "(e)veryone was raising prices in anticipation of everyone else raising prices," and wages were going up a lot faster back then, too, for the same reason; today folks simply don't anticipate inflation will just go up and up and up, and they plan accordingly, and if enough powerful people plan accordingly, inflation will come down. Probably not in time for Democrats to brag about it in midterm ads, if they're even so inclined, but I'll take the word of the Nobel Prize-winning economist over any self-interested cable news pundit or social media "influencer" you can name.

Finally, Vlad the Bad has finally come out and said that everyone wants to "cancel" him, just like everyone wants to cancel Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling! (Ms. Rowling, for her part, distanced herself from Mr. Putin's remarks right quick.) The article reminds us that being worth over $1 billion, as Ms. Rowling is, isn't exactly like being "canceled," nor is being the dictator of one of the most powerful nations on the planet. Good Russian citizens might "cancel" Mr. Putin eventually, but in the meantime, remember what all this is: drama, which is what right-wingers do best.

UPDATE. A reader has convinced me that "hater of transgender folk" is a bridge too far when describing J.K. Rowling, and though I still suspect her, I've excised the phrase from the above paragraph.

Around the table: right-wingers love drama, part 866.

How should I feel to learn that Thurgood Marshall had to endure a lot of racist BS at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing 55 years ago, too -- heartened that a particular evil has visited us before and we've survived it, or disgusted that evil keeps persisting with no new tricks up its sleeve? It is good to be reminded that right-wingers wouldn't shut up about crime in 1967, either, but the Marsha Blackburns and John Cornyns and Tom Cottons of the world should really be ashamed of themselves, even if they're not as overt about their love of segregation as James Eastland was.

ProPublica uncovers audio of a Texas school board superintendent describing exactly which books he wants banned in his district's libraries -- "It's the transgender, LGBTQ and the sex — sexuality — in books." Which do I hate more? Folks who natter on about "tear(ing) down values and force theirs and then also force acceptance" as if they're not the ones who do all of that? Or folks who pretend their objections are about sex, and then prove the opposite when most of the books they remove are books that just so happen to be about gay/transgender characters? I guess I hate the former more, but only because, as Justice Gorsuch (of all people!) has reminded us, the word "sex" means a lot more than these benighted souls think it means.

Hard to believe, Harry, but when Texas's government says its Operation Lone Star is doing a bang-up job disrupting drug crime and undocumented immigration at the border over the last year, they're fibbing more than a little bit. When you hear that Texas counts in all kinds of crime completely unrelated to events or issues at the border -- indeed, some of Operation Lone Star's "successes" took place hundreds of miles away! -- you are reminded, I hope, that even if you think Texas should obsess this much on drugs and immigration at the border, that puffed-up data is puffed-up data, and it always covers up incompetence. People still want competence from their leaders, right? And there's an opening for Beto O'Rourke.

Matt Stoller was just talking about bad judges issuing bad rulings about antitrust law, and just like that, D.C. Superior Court Judge Hiram Puig-Lugo outright dismisses D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine's antitrust suit against Amazon Prime, supposing that maybe the price hikes Amazon demands from every third-party sellers were all simply TEH FREE MARKUTZ!!!!! at work, even though Amazon's contract literally forbids these sellers from selling their wares for lower prices at their own sites. "Frankly I’m not sure Puig-Lugo even read the complaints," Mr. Stoller says. Mr. Racine can now appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the second-highest court in the land.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis refuses to recognize Lia Thomas as the winner of a recent NCAA Division I swimming race, touting the second-place finisher instead, all because Ms. Thomas is transgender. You may be asking yourself, self, who asked Ron DeSantis his opinion about who won a particular college swimming race? Of course, nobody had to ask him; he would have opined on the matter anyway, just so he could create more drama, since drama is the only thing he's good at, just as it's the only thing most right-wingers are good at. In another few generations, we'll be rid of all the people who find transgender folks gross because they only look at other people in terms of whether they want to fuck them.

Finally, about 10 minutes after Mr. Trump finally withdrew his endorsement of Rep. Mo Brooks for the upcoming Alabama Senate race, Mr. Brooks charged that Mr. Trump directly asked him to overturn the Presidential election on January 6 and hold a new election. You may recall Mr. Brooks telling the assembled crowd of whiners, on that very same day, that "(t)oday is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass," but I guess his behavior all makes sense to him. Mr. Brooks sounds like a sore loser, which is a shame, since we can all imagine Mr. Trump demanding that Mr. Brooks do the impossible and feeling/acting betrayed afterward.

Action: concerning taxes, paid family leave, child care, forced arbitration, the right to repair, and electric mail trucks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restore the Child Tax Credit expansion, enact a windfall profits tax on oil and gas corporations, pass paid family leave and child care subsidy legislation, outlaw forced arbitration clauses in all contracts, pass more expansive right-to-repair legislation, and force our Postal Service to use more electric trucks. 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 restore the expired Child Tax Credit expansion, which resulted in monthly checks of $250 and $300 (per child!) going to working family bank accounts. In a nation where about 40% of Americans literally do not have $400 for an emergency, getting a check near that amount every month for six months was, as a famous philosopher might say, a BFD, and if you've ever had a family, you know making ends meet every month is tough. Strange, then, that Joe Manchin not only said that the CTC expansion (and not, you know, monopoly power or corporate greed) was the "main driver of inflation," but that CTC expansion recipients just spent their extra money on drugs! Let's make sure stupid ideas like that never win the day in America again.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. With gas prices going through the roof because of corporate greed, this bill would both enact a tax on profits we can tell come from price-gouging and then remit a payment of around $250 to American families making less than $75,000. You know, in case Joe Manchin whines about "means testing" and whatnot. $250 ain't a big check, I know, but it'll also buy around five tanks of gas in most cars, and again, with some 40% of Americans not able to cough up even $400 in an emergency, a $250 check ain't a bad thing to have. It also shouldn't provoke right-wingers into whining about Big Gummint Handouts. I kid, of course -- right-wingers are always whining about something.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact family-friendly policies, like paid family leave and child care subsidies, into their next spending bill. Yeah, Joe Manchin was against these policies, too, but I guess we can't expect folks who literally don't remember a time when they couldn't just take a day off literally any time they wanted to be too understanding of those of us who can't. Nor can we expect folks who have literally never had any trouble finding the money to raise their kids to be all that tuned into those of us who do have trouble covering child care. But that's why we're here -- to remind (or, if necessary, educate) our leaders about our troubles and how they might help fix them. I mean, your personal experience should be a guide to further exploration, not a walled city that keeps everyone else out.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Our House has already passed this bill! However, unlike with the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, which enjoyed actual bipartisan support, our House passed the more expansive Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act (which would apply to all contracts, be they employment contracts or consumer contracts) on a largely party-line vote, with a mere one Republican vote in support. You'll never guess who, either: Matt Gaetz of Florida! Yes, that Matt Gaetz! Never let it be said that I didn't show Matt Gaetz in his best light. Anyway, this means we'll need to work harder on our Senators to pass this bill, but we're up for that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4006/S. 3830, the Fair Repair Act. Yeah, I know, the Agricultural Right to Repair Act is still out there and probably has a better chance of passing -- after all, who wants to vote against a bill that lets farmers fix their tractors? -- but fact is we all deserve the right to repair, and manufacturing corporations that keep the information we need to repair something we own from all of us. Gosh, if you own it, shouldn't you be able to fix it? Do big corporations need to keep having power over you after you've bought their product? I'm old enough to remember being able to replace my processor and RAM chips in my laptop, but now they make them harder to fix, plus they herd you into their repair shops, rather than yours. And that just doesn't seem pro-freedom, you know?

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to require that our Postal Service uses at least 75% electric trucks. What's the vehicle you see the most in your neighborhood? A mail truck! So if we can get the most common vehicle we see to be electric, we'd be fighting climate change more than if we bought an electric car for ourselves. And if you're thinking electric trucks aren't "powerful" enough to last, remember that mail trucks don't do a whole lot of highway driving or a whole lot of speeding! Lastly, don't fall prey to the whole ALL TEH ELECTRICKZ COMEZ FROMZ TEH COALZ!!!!! rubbish. Most states produce at least some of their electricity from renewables now, plus electric vehicles don't pump out carbon emissions like gas-powered ones do.

Around the table: chronicling more right-wingers right-winging it up.

How might big corporations fight new SEC climate change disclosure rules, per Daniel E. Walters and William M. Manson at The Conversation?. They'll say it'll cost them more than our SEC says it will; they'll say our SEC can't regulate disclosure of "Scope 3 emissions" (which result mainly from the activities of suppliers and producers); they'll say our SEC can't regulate "major questions" like climate-related disclosures at all, though it seems to me that telling investors what they're in for in re a corporation's dedication to battling climate change fits our SEC's mission fairly snugly.

Sonali Kohatkar says our Postal Service can be a model for other government agencies. For all the hurt inflicted upon our Postal Service by the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act's benefits pre-payment mandate, our Postal Service still "delivers to more addresses with fewer...employees” than big private mail services like UPS or FedEx, both of which don't handle our Postal Service's volume, or deliver to areas where they don't think they can make money. To those who'd say "mail delivery is hardly comparable to such complex needs as health care or banking," Ms. Kolhatkar reminds us that the private corporations that dominate these fields hardly do very well at them -- mainly because they account to their owners and shareholders more than they do to their customers.

Dan Pfeiffer explains "Why the MAGA Movement Loves Putin," a.k.a. "Russia's Pinochet." He lists four reasons -- they're "addicted to strength," they have "an apocalyptic mentality," they love "white power," and they understand "the perverse incentives of the internet attention economy" -- all of which might well be boiled down to "they follow the biggest dick." Of course, right-wingers don't love real strength; they love acting out the drama of strength, a drama that usually involves a lot of yelling at liberals and fantasizing about doing violence to them (or, maybe, just doing violence to them). It's kinda like watching a car wreck, which I'm sure is the idea.

When I hear that a majority of Americans believe "public schools are on the wrong track," I remember that Americans have legitimate fears about what two years of mostly-remote learning has done to their kids, but I still feel like right-wing propaganda has caused this particular poll result. Right-wingers ginned up controversy over something that doesn't even get taught in schools and now we all feel some kind of way about "racism"? That's so beneath us as Americans. And how have we responded to this question (or similar ones) in previous polls? We should know that, so we know more about what these results mean, but sadly, the article doesn't tell us.

Branko Marcetic at Jacobin performs a public service by reminding us that "The Right is Still the Enemy of Freedom." Regardless of Republicans' newfound (and selective, and opportunistic!) opposition to big tech corporations, they're still the ones "criminalizing protest," "banning books, concepts, and even words from schools," and "using executive power in new, repressive ways." 23 states (all run entirely by Republicans) have criminalized protest, 11 laws have made it damn near impossible to talk about racism in many schools, and Republicans have spearheaded anti-BDS laws in 32 states, when you'd think refusing to give money to someone would be a value for which they'd fight to the death. And, of course, they love themselves some Putin and Orbán.

Finally, Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) says that just as our Supreme Court should have left abortion to the states, they should have left laws against interracial marriage to the states! He tried to walk it back, of course, saying he "misunderstood a line of questioning" and discrimination is always wrong yadda yadda yadda, but we need to take the time to explain exactly why he's wrong. If we believe, as a civilization, that you should get to marry whomever you want -- the only way to interpret our Supreme Court's ruling in Oberkfell v. Hodges -- then we cannot accept a state's "right" to keep you from doing that. Mr. Braun, like many right-wingers, loves "states' rights" more than he loves people. This remains a common malady among Congressfolk, but not a tolerable one.

Action: concerning immigration, junk fees, grizzly bears, antibiotic abuse, wage slavery, and the notorious OAN.

Long story short: tell President Biden to end the notorious Title 42 program, tell our CFPB to end bankster "junk fees," tell our Interior Department to protect grizzly bears, tell our FDA to root out antibiotic abuse from factory farms, tell Wendy's to do better by the farmworkers in its supply chain, and tell AT&T to sever all ties with the notorious OAN. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Moms Rising helps you tell President Biden to end the Title 42 program that Donald Trump put in place so he could turn more refugees away. I know they said their Title 42 program was a health care thing, designed to keep COVID out of the United States, but what a crock of shit that was! How much COVID came from Mexico, or Honduras, or anywhere else a "caravan" supposedly came from? Now how much COVID came from a quarter of Americans refusing to get vaccinated in an elephantine hissy fit over Their Guy losing the 2020 election? Yeah, sure was a good thing we kept Mexicans out for "health care" reasons. Title 42 only allows our government to send refugees back without even the hearings our laws guarantee them. As civilized people, we demand better from their leaders as well as ourselves. So let's get to the demanding.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to stop the "junk fees" bank love to impose on working families. You can name overdraft fees as a "junk fee" -- do you really put a bank out that much when you make a math error? -- but our CFPB also wants to hear from you about "fees for things people believed were covered by the baseline price of a product or service," "unexpected fees for a product or service," "fees that seemed too high for the purported service," and "fees where it was unclear why they were charged." Banksters do come up with creative ways to steal your money! And of course they do it the most to working families and seniors. Our CFPB will fight for us -- but only if we demand it.

Change.org helps you tell our Department of the Interior to reject any plans it might have to remove Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears. We've been working to help improve grizzly bear numbers for almost 50 years -- yes, good works do occasionally take a very long time. But grizzly bears still only number around 1,200 in the United States (a far cry from 200 years ago, when their numbers were more like 50,000, not that we'd be trying to get back there, necessarily), and when the Governors of Montana and Wyoming talk about revoking protections for grizzlies, they don't foreground "tyrannical federal mandates" or "protecting other animals" or "we got wells to dig!" -- they foreground trophy hunting. It's like they're trying to be soulless! And soulless people shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to eliminate antibiotic abuse on factory farms. We've been telling them for a long time, and it's not like they've done nothing, but the need remains. Two out of every three antibiotics in America go not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, partly to make them "meatier" and partly to help them better endure the squalid conditions at factory farms. And what does antibiotic overuse help create? Superbugs, which took over a million lives worldwide in 2019, which was less than 2% of the 58 million folks total who died that year, but we could see 10 million annually by 2050, per a U.K. government study from 2014. And if a superbug gets you, the number that'll really matter will be 100% of you.

Daily Kos helps you tell fast-food corporation Wendy's to join the Fair Food program, which roots out the wage slavery and unsafe work conditions on farms supplying food to fast-food corporations. Every other big fast-food corporation has joined the Fair Food program, so Wendy's needs to step up its game, lest farmworkers march on Wendy's board chair Nelson Peltz's huge Palm Beach, CA mansion in the next few weeks and brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR against him. Imagine him having a gathering there; and then imagine him and his fellow travelers all laughing at the "little people" who think they can make a difference against his awesome power. Then imagine us winning, because his power is less like a machine gun and more like an anvil around his ankle.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut off all ties with the notorious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN). DirecTV dropped OAN from its lineup staring next month, and AT&T owns most of DirecTV, but OAN wouldn't exist without AT&T money to begin with, so starving the OAN beast of a platform isn't quite enough if you're still feeding it. OAN has, of course, filed a hilarious lawsuit against AT&T just for doing what it did, even suggesting that if they don't get an audience fed hand-to-mouth they have no free speech, though dozens of 2000s bloggers got big audiences without big corporate sugar daddy money. To think OAN says that with a straight face and still calls itself "conservative." C'mon, OAN, bootstrap up! Prove you don't need the corporate welfare!

Around the table: Vlad the Bad as rational actor, and other horrible truths.

University of New Haven scholar Matthew Schmidt discusses the Russian war on Ukraine, and he makes a lot of sense: the Russian military ain't so hot, the Ukrainian military is very, very good, Vlad the Bad tried to win the war in the first week and doesn't seem prepared for failing in that, and yes he might use nukes on the battlefield in order to break the stalemate. Even so, Mr. Schmidt tells us Vlad the Bad is a rational actor, "following his own system of logic" where Russia is "the center of this geographic and cultural and spiritual space known as Eurasia," and Ukraine becoming more "Western" threatens that space. Where does it end? Likely with "the destruction of the Putinist regime," perhaps years from now.

Former Missouri half-term Governor Eric Greitens, now running for Senate, doubles down against his ex-wife's allegations of physical abuse (against both her and their children) in their custody battle, saying "truth will always prevail." He can ask Sean Parnell about that! Of course, Mr. Parnell had basically lost his custody battle when he bowed out of the Pennsylvania Senate race; the Greitens' battle isn't nearly as far along. But I can't help but think that that Eric Schmitt's $1.6 million fund-raising haul at Mar-a-Lago is more on his mind as he calculates all his denials -- and he calculates them to reach Trump votaries, who respond viscerally (and supportively!) to men who deny serious wrongdoing.

ProPublica finds the famous St. Jude's Children’s Research Hospital actually trying to muscle donors' families for bequests -- occasionally trying to get of children and other relatives disinherited in court! -- and that's a far more scathing indictment of their corporate character, I think, than their irregular-but-not-nonexistent support for parents visiting their kids. Says one person who actually beat St. Jude's in court over his father's estate: "Think of all the fees for lawyers that didn’t go to St. Jude, not one child, not one cancer patient." Maybe St. Jude's will respond that it's worth it because they get around double the national average in donations from wills and they use that money to keep massive medical bills from destroying families, but using probate as a weapon toward that end is evil, and anyway it should be civilization's aim to keep massive medical bills from destroying families, not St. Jude's.

When I hear that politicians like Blake Masters (running for Senate in Arizona) and J.D. Vance (running for same in Ohio) get their talking points from Tucker Carlson rather than Donald Trump, I question whether Mr. Carlson will ever have the same power as Mr. Trump, since Mr. Carlson projects neither the self-made myth or the tough-guy myth as well. And when I hear that all three gentlemen "sympathiz(e) with Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical worldview," I'd say Democrats have an easy retort, if they have the guts to use it: I'll take American values over Putin's anytime. I don't even care that they pretend to be economic populists, because so did Mr. Trump, and that did very little for us. (Hate to pile on, but if Blake Masters really can't imagine a liberal driving a logging truck, that's a failure of his imagination.)

In the wake of record-high gas prices, a Hart Research Associates/League of Conservation Voters/Climate Power poll finds that 87% of Americans think Congress should do something about oil corporation profiteering, with 80% specifically endorsing a windfall profits tax. 80% of the people support it, you say? You know what that means: Kyrsten Sinema will soon come out against it, because "bipartisanship"! And Joe Manchin will come out against it, because I just can't get there. But you know, folks like the Joker and the Penguin are playing the game like it's 2011, when that "we can't raise taxes on the rich because it'll hurt small businesses" lie still had a bit of cred; they now operate in a world where virtually everyone thinks oil corporations raised gas prices just because they could.

Finally, voting rights groups have sued a group that's named themselves the U.S. Election Integrity Plan for sending armed members into Black and Brown neighborhoods in Colorado to "question" them about their voting habits. Occasionally, they wear badges, pretend to be from "the county," accuse folks of voting illegally, and take photos of their houses, but I question the Bannon/Lindell axis's wisdom in choosing Colorado for this little adventure -- they're a lot more likely to run into armed liberals there than, say, Connecticut. I'm also bummed this is a civil suit, because I'd rather these clowns go to jail for a long, long time. I mean, c'mon, law and order, folks!

Action: concerning monopolies, drug prices, student loans, internet service, Chaco Canyon, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate whether Amazon lied to Congress about how it uses its monopoly power, tell President Biden to lower drug prices and extend the student loan payment holiday, tell our FCC to require big internet service providing corporations to explain internet charges and speeds clearly to consumers, tell our Interior Department to stop fossil fuel drilling around Chaco Canyon, and tell AT&T to keep its promise to stop contributing to election objectors. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate Amazon for lying under oath to Congress about how it blocks competition. Our House Judiciary Committee has alleged, in a letter to Attorney General Garland, that Amazon obstructed its efforts to discover how it engaged in unlawful anti-competitive practices, which would be like you obstructing a police officer's efforts to learn how you broke into someone else's house and stole their flat-screen. Apparently Amazon's claim that it didn't use data it collected on third-party sellers against them has already succumbed to investigative reporting (which hardly happens anymore!), and our House Judiciary Committee made this letter public, so Mr. Garland can evade further embarrassment by complying with their will, and ours.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to use his lawfully-granted Executive power to lower the price of prescription drugs. What can President Biden do? He can use "march-in rights" granted by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980 -- which is to say, he can grant the patent license for a drug to another corporation, or even reserve that license for our government, if our government helped fund the patent in the first place, which is usually the case -- or he can declare "eminent domain for patents," and simply assign the patent to a generics manufacturer. The big pharma corporations would whine about either of these things happening, but they'd also fold, because there's nothing they can do. Except, I guess, tell everyone Joe Biden is a tyrant for, ah, lowering drug prices. Yeah, that'll go over well with the American people.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell President Biden to extend the student loan payment pause past May 1. We've said that simply cancelling student loan debt would be the best stimulus we could enact, given that Republicans will block any serious economic stimulus so they can feel important, but given that the average student loan payment (per the Federal Reserve Bank of New York) is $393/month, the payment holiday sure ain't nothing! It amounts to a monthly stimulus that rivals the (now-expired) Child Tax Credit expansion for families with one young child. And to those who say I had to pay my student loans off, so why should they get a holiday? Pick a response: college costs are absurdly high now, we're still getting out of a pandemic, you have a heart of stone.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to force big internet service-providing corporations to give consumers a sort of "nutrition label" which would contain clear information about upload/download speeds, data overage charges, and the fees they prefer to keep hidden. When some right-wing troll asks "why should Big Gummint get involved?" you need only reply have you seen an ad for Comcast etc.? They tell you they're the fastest and you can watch all these fancy TV shows and they never tell you what they're really offering you! Do you remember Xfinity download speeds, or do you remember the Slowskis? Granted, only trolls ask you about Big Gummint in this context anymore -- actual right-wingers hate their ISP as much as you do, and for reasons they can tell their FCC to fix!

Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of the Interior to protect the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico from drilling and mining corporations. Because it would pollute public lands, kill unique wildlife, and defile an area of religious significance to Native populations. And you've looked outside at the night sky lately, right? And it seems like you see fewer stars in the sky all the time? That's air pollution and light pollution at work, and these things are not at work at Chaco Canyon precisely because we don't drill in there -- drilling rigs would bring massive work lights, which would make the stars invisible to us like it has just about everywhere else. Some things are worth saving, and a night with stars in it is one of them. It shouldn't just be in Van Gogh paintings.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to stop delivering campaign contributions to the Republican Congressdolts who voted against election certification on January 6. I wouldn't say they incited the attempted coup on January 6, but I would say they were the "legitimate" arm of that utterly illegitimate movement based on lies and whining. Seriously, it is a whole lot better not to have a President who never, ever stops whining, and thus enables that behavior in his votaries. AT&T must think they've bought some goodwill with us now that they've let their contract with OAN lapse, but if you stop doing one evil so you can keep doing other evils -- and supporting these 147 Congressdolts is evil! -- then you're kinda doing the whole good/evil thing wrong.

Around the table: of refugees, bioweapons, and "terrorists."

Everyone wants to help out Ukrainian refugees, but Julie Hollar at FAIR reminds us that "civilians in other conflicts" are "much less newsworthy" -- "particularly when they’re victims of the US." Hence Ukrainian civilians get on TV a lot, but Iraqi civilians didn't get much screen time back in the mid-2000s, nor did Serbian civilians a mere half-decade earlier, nor do Syrian civilians today; you just have to wonder if there's a connection, despite TV journalists intoning that "the pain of war is borderless." And when you read about how our "liberal" media tripped all over themselves back in the day avoiding saying that American forces were attacking Iraq, you'll be reminded of how they trip all over themselves today avoiding saying that American police officers shoot people.

When I hear that Russian biologists have informed us that Russian/QAnon claims that America is sponsoring bioweapons labs in Ukraine are utter bunkum, I'm reminded of when former U.N. inspector Scott Ritter said Iraq had no WMD in 2002, when he had at least three very good reasons to say the opposite. These Russian biologists are all very likely to find themselves dead or in jail soon, so let's not squander their good works by forgetting them, or by, say, giving more oxygen to the amateur epidemiologists who told us COVID wasn't real or masks choked you or vaccines killed 50,000 people.

Michigan's biggest energy providing corporation makes big bucks while shutting off electricity to many, many more homes than any other similar corporation in the state -- and also charges the highest prices in Michigan, and though it wouldn't be fair to say the state of Michigan rubber-stamps their rate hikes (generally, DTE gets about half of what it asks for!), I sure do wonder how the state allowed any energy-providing corporation to get so big, let alone fail to take into account whether good Michiganders can even afford these rate hikes. I mean, capping bills as a percentage of income will help, but how about some good old-fashioned trust-busting?

Senate Republicans apparently plan to attack President Biden's Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, for her work defending "terrorists" at Guantánamo Bay. Perhaps conscious that most Americans now think Guantánamo Bay was a total fraud, they're working on shortening their argument to "she kept defending terrorists," which should be enough for folks who already fight anything touched by Biden-nature. But as you're mindful of how many innocent people got sent to Guantánamo over the years, and how often our government held them for decades without even charging them, then really, Guantánamo was horseshit is the only response you need deliver.

When I hear that One America News Network has sued AT&T for breach of contract after AT&T simply didn't renew their contract, I'm tempted to yell frivolous lawsuit! from the mountaintops. OAN's argument has (at least!) four prongs, which is already a bad sign. First, it alleges a conspiracy between AT&T's (Black, Democratic) Board Chair and plaintiff-against-OAN Dominion Voting Systems, and good luck finding the smoking gun emails for that one! Second, it suggests that AT&T should have continued their relationship past 2022 because OAN had had an "exclusive advertising agreement" with AT&T through 2024; you've heard of the Commutative Property of Contracts, of course? Why, no, you haven't. Third, it alleges that AT&T didn't enforce a non-disparagement clause by preventing some of its other properties' celebrities from criticizing OAN; calling that a "reach" would insult actual reaches. Fourth, it alleges that AT&T is "imped(ing) the right of American television viewers to watch the news media channels and programs of their choice," a charge that should make every early-2000s blogger laugh hysterically. Gosh, these big corporations will say just anything to avoid the obvious truth: that good Americans succeeded in agitating for AT&T to dump OAN. Why would they want to occlude that truth, I wonder?

Finally, Ohio Republican Senatorial aspirants Mike Gibbons and Josh Mandel got into it in a debate hosted by FreedomWorks last Friday night, after Mr. Mandel accused Mr. Gibbons of outsourcing Ohio jobs at roughly the same time Mr. Mandel was fighting in Iraq. The timeline Mr. Mandel presents is more than a little tenuous, but Mr. Gibbons really stepped in it with his response -- think "I personally didn't buy the stock" will resonate with anyone? Will "I wish I'd made millions off of Chinese Petra"? And that was before the big confrontation, when Mr. Gibbons told Mr. Mandel he had no experience in the private sector and Mr. Mandel responded "I've done two tours in Iraq! Don't tell me I haven't worked!" Bad behavior in public is never good, but I think all this will help Mr. Mandel on primary day -- he orchestrated it all pretty well, though not perfectly (Mr. Gibbons didn't actually say Mr. Mandel has "never worked," but, as they say, if you're explaining, you're losing), and getting in other people's faces isn't exactly something that repels Trump votaries, is it? I guess we now know why Donald Trump is hedging his bets in this race. Josh Mandel's no great prize, of course -- he's already lost a Senate race, to Sherrod Brown in 2012 -- so all Tim Ryan or Morgan Harper has to do is, like Mr. Brown, offer Ohio voters something of value.

Action: concerning monopolies, drug prices, the right to repair, renewable energy, facial recognition, and marijuana policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Prohibiting Anti-Competitive Mergers Act, lower insulin prices, pass the Agriculture Right to Repair Act, invest in renewable energy, pass the No Facial Recognition at the IRS Act, and schedule a vote on 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.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7101/S. 3847, the Prohibiting Anti-Competitive Mergers Act. We could wait for our Federal Trade Commission and/or our Department of Justice to deliver on their (admittedly heartening) antitrust promises -- or we could pass the Prohibiting Anti-Competitive Mergers Act and tell them what to do, like automatically block mergers worth over $5 billion and reverse mergers that result in more than 50% market share. Again, our FTC and DOJ have made the right noises in these areas -- I can't recall another FTC that's said it would reverse merges, as this one has done. Still, we're much better off ensuring results than counting on results -- not least because Congress will have a hard time reversing results.

MoveOn helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower the price of insulin. Given that aspiring galaxy brains like Kyrsten Sinema have too much say in matters like these, we need to be as clear as possible -- insulin is a life-saving drug, and making life-saving drugs so expensive that people can't get them, or die trying to ration them, is cruel and inhumane, and civilized people will not accept it, nor will we accept the excuses politicians recite when the popular will pins their backs to the wall. This Congress just passed a major postal service reform bill and a major arbitration fairness bill, so we know this Congress can do things. Personal to those who say if you're afraid you can't afford insulin, don't get diabetes: what about folks born with it? Also, we sane people outnumber you.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 3549, the Agriculture Right to Repair Act. When your tractor breaks, you want to fix it; you do not want to hear that you have to take your tractor to an "authorized repair service" two hours away, nor do you want to hear that that'll cost more money for no damn good reason, nor do you want to hear any BS about "trade secrets." The Agriculture Right to Repair Act will force agricultural equipment manufacturing corporations to make any tool or information available to a farmer who needs to fix their equipment, plus it'll force said corporations to let farmers disable "security functions" in order to fix their equipment, all under "fair and reasonable" terms. This ain't a whole lot to ask, but we've asked for it for a while; now Congress needs to deliver.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in renewable energy now. Gas prices have shot up in the wake of Russia's war on Ukraine -- though we don't rely on Russian oil that much, of course -- and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has lately reported that climate change is basically outrunning us, so we've got both short-term and long-term reasons to step up our renewable energy game. And what of Joe Manchin's complaint that we shouldn't do electric cars because we'd rely too much on China for batteries? Even if that's true, it's not that important when you consider that a) you could charge your electric car at your house and b) nothing matters if Earth's too hot to live on. Oh, and c) you can make car batteries in America if you don't insist on paying all your employees in dung pellets.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 3668, the No Facial Recognition at the IRS Act. You recall that our IRS was going to make us use facial recognition tech just to get to our tax data? And that people rose up and told our IRS no way? And our IRS then suspended its contract with its facial recognition vendor and said they wouldn't make you use it? What if they wait until no one's watching and then contract with another facial recognition corporation and start this crap all over again? S. 3668 would simply prevent our IRS from using any biometric data for administrative purposes, plus it would force them to delete all the biometric data they've already collected. We made enough of a stink about this that we might get this bill passed -- but only if we keep speaking out.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to bring H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement (or MORE) Act, up for a floor vote. The bill would essentially legalize pot by removing it from Schedule I, plus it would reinvest in communities ravaged by the "war on drugs" and expunge pot convictions. What's the hangup? Oh, House Democratic leadership's afraid Republicans will scorch them for being "soft on crime." Newsflash: Republicans always whine about crime, regardless of how things are actually going. If they whine about the MORE Act, you tell the voters they literally "defunded the police" by voting against the American Rescue Plan Act. Easy! And, apparently, too hard for galaxy brain Democrats.

Around the table: of despots, oligarchs, and unwanted comebacks.

Remember how we were saying Vlad the Bad's oligarchs don't mess with his political dealings because he leaves them alone in their financial dealings? Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, goes deeper into that story, revealing how the billionaires picked Mr. Putin in the first place back in the 1990s. Incredibly, the Russian oligarchs actually went looking for a "Russian Pinochet" (this, while the actual Pinochet faced murder charges related to his nefarious rule!) to replace Boris Yeltsin, not just with Mr. Yeltsin's acquiescence, but with the actual help of Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, last seen telling America to fight inflation not by fighting monopolies (as the Biden Administration would do) but by pressing down even harder on the throats of working families.

Homeless folks and their advocates have begun an Occupy-style protest in none other than Boise, ID. Since the Ninth Circuit rules that Boise couldn't just criminalize homelessness, particularly if they weren't going to give homeless folks a place to stay, Boise police appear to be shaking down the homeless, often under the guise of "welfare checks" (which don't require warrants), hence the occupation of the state Capitol Mall. I wish them luck in persuading a state (and a nation) that they do matter and that our treatment of them matters, if we want to call ourselves civilized. Hell, Utah's as right-wing as Idaho is, and they do much better by their homeless.

Richard C. Gross at Counterpunch summarizes the right-wing stratagem in America about as succinctly as I've seen it done: "suppressing voting rights, restricting abortions, curbing teaching about race and identity, banning books in schools and libraries and picking on one of the most vulnerable in society – LGBTQ youths." After all, as he suggests, right-wingers not only can't win elections with superior ideas, they can't win arguments on the merits. Democrats would do well to use a similar summary in political ads -- in conjunction with their own accomplishments, which I expect to be more apparent by mid-summer -- though I doubt they have the guts. The Jesse Jackson epigraph -- "In politics, an organized minority is a political majority" -- is as stark as it is instructive.

Ho hum, Wisconsin Elections Commission won't do anything to the 10 Republicans who tried to pass themselves off as Presidential electors in 2020. I shudder to think the real reason they laid off was that one of the 10 was also one of the Commissioners, but you know what would be worse? If they actually believed the 10 fake electors' claim that they were just "keeping their options open" in case Mr. Trump won any of the 60-odd frivolous lawsuits he lost. And the Commission says Wisconsin state law doesn't prevent "alternative" electors from "meeting"; does it prevent them from pretending they're the real electors in a race their man obviously lost? Law and order!

When I hear that the Alaska legislature is contemplating a bill that would outlaw state IDs that comply with the national REAL ID system, all I can say is at last, the vaunted Alaska libertarian streak returns! The bill, HB 389, would give good Alaskans the option of using a driver's license photo that can't be read by facial recognition software, plus it would force Alaskan state government (namely the DMV; we'll get to them) to destroy all of its current drivers' license photos and prohibit "bulk sharing" of any of said photos -- a big deal since the Alaska DMV decided all by itself and in defiance of state law to upload all of its REAL-ID-compatible photos to the national database in 2017. I don't know if I've said this here, but folks who obsess over other people's papers are pretty much telling the world they don't know how to do anything about anything important.

Finally, recently-disgraced Andrew Cuomo says he not only might run for a fourth term as Governor of New York, but might create his own political party to do so. To which I must ask: why does he think people love him so much that he could create his own party? That man has always needed Democrats more than they have ever needed him. And boy do I wish he'd STFU about "cancel culture" already. He didn't "say" stuff so much as he did stuff, the First Amendment doesn't protect you from your employer, and we've accepted sexual harassment in the workplace is wrong for over three decades now. Hate to pile on, but I'm tired of hearing that "we have to reduce the anger in politics" from the people who stoke the anger with their wrongdoing.

Around the table: exposing bad judges, bad Senators, bad science, and bad media analysis.

Matt Stoller's been telling us that judges don't get antitrust law right anymore, and he describes a perfect example, a Third Circuit panel's 2017 ruling in Valspar Corp. v. E.I. Du Pont De Nemours & Co. Confronted with a fairly obvious case of corporate collusion on price-fixing, the panel voted 2-1 to dismiss the case before it even went to a jury, all because economists created "models" showing that "in a concentrated industry," corporations can "raise prices in concert due to a conspiracy...or just because it was easy for them to tacitly collude by watching each other change pricing and announce things publicly." And the Ninth Circuit protected chip-makers (remember them?) from a similar lawsuit in a similar manner this week. The good news? Lax judging has prompted big corporate executives to be even more open about their price-fixing, and sooner or later one of them's going to run into a federal judge who's had enough of this shit.

When I hear that President Biden just doesn't "get" Kyrsten Sinema, my first impulse is to say maybe there's nothing there to get! The short answer to "why does she say/do the things she says/does?" is "power." The longer answer is "she's sabotaging everything she can now so Democrats lose Congress and cling to her more desperately when she's up again in 2024." I know this because I saw George W. Bush employ this stratagem for eight years, which fact, admittedly, doesn't explain why Joe Biden doesn't get it. In any case, Sen. Sinema has no galaxy brain scheme to somehow lower drug prices without letting Medicare negotiate for lower drug prices; she has a "plan" to make herself "indispensable," though her planning is actually still rooted in the late 2000s. Meanwhile, here in 2022, even our "liberal" media don't rub the belly of "bipartisanship" like they did back then.

Herschel Walker, currently the front-runner for the Georgia Senate nomination, questions the explanatory power of evolution: "At one time, science said man came from apes. Did it not?" THEN WHY DO I STILL SEEZ TEH APEZ HA HA HA! We can answer his question simply: no, science did not say that! It said chimpanzees and humans have a common ancestor. I watched Herschel Walker a lot toward the end of his playing career, and I never saw a football player work harder -- I still tell people the story of how he helped a Giants teammate return a kickoff for a TD in 1995 by throwing two crushing blocks 80 yards apart. Needless to say, he's pissing away all that good will now. (Oh, and by the way, after this ad from primary rival Gary Black, he may not be the front-runner anymore. If Mr. Black trims a minute and a half from that ad, he'll have weapons-grade PR.)

Again our "liberal" media think that Donald Trump is "staring at resounding rejection in GOP primaries" this spring! Or, since he's not stupid, he's fomenting this endorsement drama, because he knows that endorsement matters most after the primary anyway, just like it did in Virginia. Why, he's contemplating pulling his endorsement of Rep. Mo Brooks in the Alabama Senate race, not because Mr. Brooks has "changed," as he says, but because Mr. Brooks might not even make a runoff! Now, could it be that since Mr. Trump has already endorsed in five high-profile races in May and June, that he'll look bad if they all lose? Not to his votaries he won't! They'll just accept whatever swill he peddles next -- Pat McCrory and Nancy Mace may be his enemies today, but for Donald Trump, tomorrow is always another country.

Speaking of Republican primaries, current Ohio Senate front-runner (really?) Mike Gibbons has said a bunch of stupid racist crap about Asians, even going so far as to cite The Bell Curve, the Bible of late 20th century "scientific" racism! And yet I'm not sure this will be a problem for Mr. Gibbons, either in the primary or the general. I mean, I'd prefer that it was, and if it weren't, it would be quite the reversal from the 2016 Senate race, when Democratic Senate candidate Ted Strickland distributed fortune cookies saying something about Rob Portman being China's best Senator, and then Mr. Portman buried him by over 20 points. Something else happened that day, a thing that made obnoxious racism acceptable again; I wish I could remember what it was.

Finally, Sen. Joe "the Penguin" Manchin (D?-WV) says electric cars would be a bad idea, because, and I quote, "I’m old enough to remember standing in line in 1974 trying to buy gas...I don’t want to have to be standing in line waiting for a battery for my vehicle, because we’re now dependent on a foreign supply chain, mostly China." Those of us who do not routinely wait in line for a car battery may not be able to relate, and I almost skipped over the fact that he uses an anecdote about waiting in line to fill a car with fossil fuels as if that's a reason to favor filling a car with fossil fuels. And while I have long argued against "free" trade, I do get sick of hearing "China" brandished as a scare word. Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph forget it, it's Joe Manchin.

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, paid sick leave, child care, and Oak Flat.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on billionaires, millionaires, and corporations, enact a windfall tax on oil corporations, lower drug prices, pass paid sick leave and child care legislation, and pass the Save Oak Flat 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.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on billionaires, while Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a surtax on millionaires and raise corporate taxes. Billionaires made about $2 trillion during this pandemic while we struggled to make ends meet, and a wealth tax (of roughly 2% on wealth over $1 billion) would raise a lot of money. A millionaire surtax would essentially raise the top tax rates on millionaire income by five to eight percentage points, which wouldn't be the 91% rate I want to bring back, but which would do a lot of good. And, of course, we need to tell the 50 Republicans plus Kyrsten Sinema they're wrong about corporate taxes every chance we get. So let's get back to it.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. I didn't know the other day that the bill -- in addition to taxing big oil profits whenever they decide to use inflation or Ukraine (or whatever!) as a cover for hiking the price of gas -- would remit the money it collects from big oil corporations back to working families making less than $150,000 (or, if only one parent works, $112,500), which should help the folks hardest hit by price hikes endure them a little better. Now let's see how many Republicans decide to go on record as voting against taxing big oil corporations and rebating that money back to good Americans. West Virginians, please clog Joe Manchin's phone lines; I don't want him giving those Republicans any more cover.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to, well, lower drug prices for all Americans. The news hook this time? Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told Politico that "if we want to reduce drug prices, then we need to do it now," because of "the difficulty of passing something like this in a Republican Congress." In other words, if Republicans win back our House and Senate, they simply won't do it; that's a hell of an admission from the man who'd be Senate Pro Tempore again if Republicans take back the Senate, and it allows his 2022 opponents a campaign angle: if you want to reduce drug prices, replace Charles Grassley with me. Anyway, we already know that Congress won't do a damn thing unless we make it impossible for them not to do it, and that starts with communicating your will to your Reps and Senators until they get it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund paid family/sick leave. Yes, 50 Republicans and Joe Manchin don't want it, but they're wrong there, too -- why, even a lot of CEOs will tell them that paid sick leave at least gives them some certainty as they deal with employee absenteeism. And the United States is virtually alone in the world in not providing some sort of paid sick leave to working families. Sen. Gillibrand's bills all funded paid sick leave with a tiny payroll tax, amounting to about $8 every month for workers making $50,000 annually; I'd prefer to tax the rich for that as well -- I mean, really, when is Jeff Bezos going to spend $180 billion? You can only go to the edge of space so many times with so many Star Trek actors before it gets old! -- but that should demonstrate how easy it'd be to fund it.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass child care legislation much like Senator Murray proposed in recent legislation and President Biden included in the Build Back Better Act. Basically, it would subsidize child care so that working families pay no more than 7% of their income in child care, and that's become a big expense for folks anymore, and you know why? Same reason college and health care have become such a big expense for folks anymore: they can't do without it. This ain't a "free" market at work, this is a captive market at work, and our government has to step in anywhere a captive market develops. What can right-wingers say in response? Don't have kids? Be happy you have jobs? I kid, of course -- right-wingers can't say anything about that, which is why they yammer on so much about critical race theory.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1884/S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. You recall former Arizona Sens. Flake and McCain delivering the Oak Flat region of the Tonto National Forest to the big mining corporation for whom Sen. Flake used to work as a lobbyist? The Save Oak Flat Act would reverse that giveaway, and never lease that land to any mining or fossil fuel corporation again, thus protecting Oak Flat from both pollution and desecration, since Oak Flat is also sacred land to the Apache. Sadly, neither of the Democrats who have replaced Messrs. Flake and McCain (Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly) have joined as co-sponsors of the bill. Arizona residents might as well call them both, though I doubt Ms. Sinema will do anything but laugh at them.

Action: concerning monopolies, labor, Russia, bank fees, COVID vaccines, and Fox News.

Long story short: tell our government to pause bank mergers, tell local governments to stop cracking down on striking workers, tell the International Satellite Laser Ranging Service to stop helping Russia, tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop "junk fees," tell big pharma corporations to share their vaccines so fewer people die, and tell corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell federal regulators to stop allowing banks to merge until our government can institute merger guidelines that better protect good Americans. And if our government decides that mergers do, in fact, injure good Americans -- a conclusion they appear to have already made! -- well, big banksters who want to merge and become even bigger will just have to sacrifice for the common good. Everyone in America has made immense sacrifices during this pandemic, except for big corporate executives, who, oddly enough, have just gotten richer while the rest of us ran to stand still. Does that sound like America? No, it does not -- unless one has a very cynical view of America. Cynicism is easy; civilization takes work.

More Perfect Union helps you tell local governments to stop putting corporate interests ahead of everyone else's when dealing with striking workers. Police will squash strikes and escort scabs to jobs, while judges will set absurd limits on how many striking workers can picket and (even) where they can stand. Does that sound like free speech to you? Governments profess to be concerned with "inconveniencing" other people, but if striking workers risk alienating passers-by when they picket, why do we need to limit their picketing so severely? And those who would complain about them blocking workplace entries had better not be the same folks who cheered on the convoys in Canada, for they surely alienated plenty of passers-by, and were far noisier than any group of picketers.

Change.org helps you tell the International Satellite Laser Ranging Service to stop providing data to Russia, so that Russia won't be able to make its GPS service work. Then, if they want to figure out where they're going next in Ukraine, they'll have to read the street signs just like we did in the old days! And I've heard that good Ukrainians have already figured out what to do about that. Seriously, we are doing the right thing in shaming and shunning Russia -- though of course the many Russians who don't support the war, and risk life and livelihood protesting it, deserve our support -- but there's no reason to make it easier for Russia to invade Ukraine. Keeping the data that helps run Russian geo-location efforts away from them won't affect too many Russians too badly. Just, you know, the ones at war.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to go after bank "junk fees." A "junk fee" might be an overdraft fee or an insufficient funds fee, the kind of thing a bank hits you with not because you really cost them $15 or $20 with your mistake, but just because they can. After all, it's a pain to move your money to another bank (or credit union hint hint), and your new bank probably won't be much better about the junk fees. And junk fees tend to slam the poorest among us, who aren't "bad at managing money" but merely don't have enough money to manage it effectively! Our CFPB apparently feels like we do, but we still need communicate our will, so they can better fight the banksters' inevitable frivolous lawsuit.

Amnesty International helps you tell big pharma corporations to share their COVID vaccines with the billions of world citizens who can't get them now. I usually argue pragmatically about this matter -- the more citizens worldwide get vaccinated, the less these new COVID variants can fester and bite us in the ass. But it's also the compassionate thing to do. Big pharma CEOs don't agree, because they only see money, though of course they don't put it like that: they have a litany of excuses, involving "the shareholders" and "the future" and such. But these are the concerns of small minds! Having money, cultivating the appearance of having money, the next awful thing you have to do to secure both of these to avoid shame -- we've got to do better than all of that. Big pharma CEOs can do better by getting COVID vaccines to everyone on Earth.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News already. "That's where all the eyeballs are" is no excuse -- we have an obligation, as a civilization, to make sure eyeballs get somewhere useful, and Fox News isn't useful, unless you consider "trapping people in a death-spiral of masturbatory rage" useful. (Spoiler alert: it is not useful.) You can pick whichever recent asinine utterance by a Fox News "personality" you like, but it may be enough at this moment in our world's history that the Kremlin has told Russian media that they should share as much of Tucker Carlson's bloviation as possible, as if he speaks for anyone but the masturbatory-rage crowd. These may be the proverbial emptiest wagon of our discourse, but we outnumber them.

Around the table: featuring evil government officials and Russian heroes.

Ho hum, Donald Trump's Homeland Security agency expected violence on January 6, but didn't tell anyone who could do anything about it. Oh, they told each other to be careful, but otherwise lol-ed each other in texts. This unconscionable failure came not too many months after HHS's Intelligence and Analysis head, Brian Murphy, quit and filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that his superiors at DHS were pressuring him to downplay reports of right-wing terror and play up fantasies about left-wing terror. Now would be a good time to note that if Donald Trump becomes President again in 2024, he has said he will push to have absolute authority to fire people like Brian Murphy merely for blowing the whistle on wrongdoing.

Josh Boak at the Associated Press asks "Two years into COVID, was $800B payroll aid plan worth it?" And answers that "just 23% to 34% of PPP dollars went to workers who would have lost jobs, at a cost of as much as $258,000 per job retained," and that "most of the benefits accrued to the affluent," which I'm sure was a complete accident! Seriously, the AP report does its best to be even-handed, but as a famous philosopher used to say, there's just no there there -- reports that the Biden Administration made it a little nicer to Black and Brown folks shouldn't convince you otherwise. Having banksters run the program was a stupid idea; how many small businesses do banksters know anymore? The original legislation contended that Ruth's Chris Steak House was a "small business," after all!

You might hate Spotify for its absurdly low musician royalties and its enabling of Joe Rogan, but here's another reason to hate it: it invests in artificial intelligence tools on the battlefield, and regardless of how you feel about war, I hope you don't imagine that AI "saves lives," for Philip K. Dick exploded that supposition in "Second Variety" almost 70 years ago. Also, Spotify hosts plenty of podcasts that generally make war seem like a fun video game and specifically advance the cause of drones and robotics on the battlefield, which see previous sentence.

Hard to believe, Harry, but today's battles over book banning are a lot like the 1980s battles over book banning, and I guess when Jerry Falwell didn't actually spew racial epithets, he probably caught a lot of folks off-guard. Today's "critical race theory" may be yesterday's "secular humanism," which I guess suggests how far we've come if our enemies are more willing to spell out what they hate. It also suggests the utter emptiness of right-wing arguments, which I wish meant more; desperate people fight ugly, true, but they only beat civilized folks when civilized folks aren't sure of themselves, which illustrates, if it needed it, that post-modernism has its limits.

Cal Winslow at Counterpunch profiles Will Smith, a prodigious offensive line talent who played only two years of professional football in the early '60s because racism. Yeah, when the Raiders' legendary/notorious owner, Al Davis, won't pay you what he pays the other starting guard who happens to be white, you can say "because racism." Will Smith had a tough time even getting as far as he did, surviving Southern segregation and its only slightly-less oppressive Northern flavor -- his Michigan coaches benched him because he was serious with a white woman, whom he eventually married and started a family with, and crowds everywhere shouted racial epithets at him, until he silenced them with his play. No teams contacted him after the Raiders let him go; he made a pretty good career in education after that. Thus endeth a lesson you now cannot receive in many public schools across America because waaaaaaaaaah!

Finally, journalist Marina Ovsyannikova goes on Russian TV to protest the war against Ukraine, not long after releasing a video detailing her shame at having propagandized on Russia's behalf for so many years. "Only we have the power to stop all this madness," she said in that video. "Go to the protests. Don’t be afraid of anything. They can’t imprison us all." Indeed, they cannot! And even if they decide to shoot them all, it'll take more than 10 generations to wash out that stain. She's a hero, and so are all the Russians who have already taken to the streets to protest this war; we would welcome them into our hearts and communities even as we would ostracize Vlad the Bad forever.

Action: concerning taxes, gas prices, corruption, energy policy, public lands, and saving our Post Office some more.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, tax the windfall profits of oil and gas corporations, prohibit themselves from trading on the stock market, pass legislation promoting renewable energy, pass legislation protecting public lands and rivers, and confirm two USPS Board of Governors nominees so they can fire Postmaster General DeJoy. 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.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion that put extra $250 and $300 monthly checks into working families' bank accounts. "Don't Take Away Our Monthly Checks," the petition's title reads, and sadly Congress has already done that, because Joe "the Penguin" Manchin said folks spent those checks on drugs, and no, I will neither forget nor forgive that evil lie. And he wonders why no one wants to talk to him these days! In real life, the CTC expansion helped good Americans buy groceries, clothes, and school supplies for their kids, and with so many good Americans still unemployed this time last year, it gave more than a few families breathing room. And now with inflation at almost 8%, wiping out the otherwise impressive gains workers have made in wages over the last year, we should bring it back.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall tax on oil and gas corporations. Gasoline prices have shot up, and big corporations use the Ukraine war as an excuse to do what they were going to do anyway, just as other corporations have used inflation as an excuse to drive other prices up, so we've got to discourage them somehow. Don't listen to your right-wing friends and neighbors when they whine that a windfall tax would "tax success," because, frankly, that demonstrates a very warped view of success. Scientists who develop new vaccines and teachers who help a generation do better are successes, but people who game themselves into a position to price-gouge a nation aren't successes -- they're parasites, and we should deal with them as such.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to prohibit themselves from trading or owning individual stocks. And why should they do that ha ha ha snort say the cynical, but they should do it because it clouds their decision-making and interferes with their oversight duties. If you've got a million bucks invested in a corporation that makes facial recognition software, how likely are you, really, to regulate their lousy racist technology the way you need to? Not likely, one would think. They get so pissy when you don't trust them, but it's not our job, as Americans, to trust them -- it's our job to make them do our will, and hold them accountable when they don't. Making sure they get rich sure doesn't do anything for their bosses, the people.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that makes renewable energy, not fossil fuels, the future of energy in America. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently issued a rather dire assessment of what we're doing to our planet, but the Russian war on Ukraine has also, I would think, given a lot of good Americans pause about getting fossil fuels from other countries when we've got plenty of sun and wind here at home. Oh, some right-wingers do see this as an opportunity to make our government allow oil and gas drilling everywhere, but oil and gas ain't gonna be around forever, while the sun rises every morning and the wind always comes back. When they said always said oil and gas were more "dependable," they meant that oil and gas delivered executive pay dependably. We gotta do better.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a slew of bills that would help keep our public lands and rivers clean. It ain't just wildlife that depends on clean public lands and rivers, after all -- we depend on them, too, to provide clean water and to give us places to go and explore. And small businesses also depend on public lands and rivers, because folks who come to enjoy them need to buy stuff just like we all do. Do we think bait shops and canoeing services support any old pollution because "it's the price of a free market"? Hopefully we won't find too many big corporations convincing people that we've "gone too far" in protecting land and water from development, because once they pollute public lands and rivers, it's hard to bring them back to health. We should know by now that we're better off solving problems before they start.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Senators to confirm two more USPS Board of Governors appointees so they can fire our Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Getting the Postal Service Reform Act passed was important, but we've also got to get Mr. DeJoy out, not just for trying to hamper our Postal Service's ability to get votes where they needed to go, and not just for his allegedly corrupt dealings with former Board of Governors member Ron Bloom, whom President Biden sacked. Fact is, Mr. DeJoy has actually tried to convince everyone that slowing down the mail and charging more for worse service were good ideas, and not some sort of pretext to privatize our Post Office. They're bad ideas, in a can-do America that always finds a way. To deliver life-saving medications, I feel compelled to add.

Around the table: monopolies crush wages, and other horrible truths.

Matt Stoller reminds us that monopoly power means lower wages for workers, and by "monopoly power," he doesn't just mean corporations forbidding you to work for any of their competitors; he also means typical corporate practices, like forced arbitration, non-compete clauses, and outsourcing, which give them, essentially, price-fixing power over wages. Price-fixing, of course, is quite illegal. Thus our Treasury Department reports that monopolies cost workers 15 to 25 cents on the dollar, and other academic studies tell us that workers make 20% less in this market than they would in a fully-competitive market. I think, with enough repetition, that "monopolies take food out of your mouth" would supersede "if you don't like your paycheck, just get a better job!" as an argument. Particularly in fields where you can't "just get another job" (let alone a better one).

If you've heard that most Americans favor a no-fly zone over Ukraine, David Moore at FAIR tells us why you may not want to trust such polling. When pollsters ask what a no-fly zone would actually entail -- i.e., shooting down Russian plans in Ukraine -- then the numbers look quite different (46% say no, and that answer actually beat "yes" and "I don't know"). Thus you have about one in six respondents both approving of a no-fly zone and disapproving of shooting down Russian planes in Ukraine, with almost as many respondents saying no to a no-fly zone but yes to shooting down Russian planes. Also, never trust a poll that doesn't let you say "I don't know" or "not sure" or "give me another choice because both these choices suck." Hey, a lot of people would give you any of those answers, to many difficult questions.

If you were comforting yourself with the notion that the Florida "don't say gay" bill only applies to third graders and younger, Brandon Wolf of Equality Florida will set you straight, as it were. To start with, the bill's language is of course vague enough to intimidate pretty much any teacher into silence on the matter -- even if the class does a family tree assignment and someone has two mommies on it, basically they can't discuss it in class, for fear it'll run afoul of the law. Plus, just like the Texas law that our Supreme Court should have struck down already, parent lawsuits will enforce the law, and schools can't recoup costs even if they win. And yeah, the bill also "equat(e) the existence of LGBTQ people to conversations about what happens in someone's bedroom." You'd hate to be known only for what you do in the bedroom, right? Well, gay folks still face that all the time, and they shouldn't.

Why has Attorney General Garland not indicted former President Donald Trump, according to Mark Stern at the New York Daily News? Because 98 percent of all indictments lead to plea bargaining, but Mr. Trump will most certainly not go that route, but will instead throw a massive public fit and drag the whole process through the mud, at the end of which he'll get off, because you're not likely to find a 12-person jury that doesn't have at least one Trump votary on it. All of which is likely true! And all of which is damn frustrating for those of us who have an actual love of law and order, and not just a relationship of convenience with the concept.

Sharon Zhang at TruthOut reminds us that Sen. Rick Scott's Get Skinned by the Game plan would raise taxes for working families in the bottom 40 percent income-wise by over $1,000. If you are or ever have been in that group (ahem!), then you know a thousand dollars ain't just something you can poop out, like Rick Scott can. (Hey, if he poops out tax plans, why can't he poop out money?) And, again, Democrats can run a million attack ads showing Republicans snatching thousand-dollar checks out of your hand, checks you count on getting when you do your taxes. Will they, though? Or will they wring their hands, again, over what they haven't done? (And one more time: the people who "don't owe federal income tax" still pay state income taxes, sales taxes, payroll taxes, and Medicare taxes, and that's not an exhaustive list.)

Finally, this may have gotten by a lot of folks, but Donald Trump announced at a "Save America" rally in Florence, SC over the weekend that, if Republicans regain the White House in 2024, "(w)e will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States." Ha ha "reforms"! After all, it's not like our laws keep our President from firing people at will for good reasons. I mean, just suppose the President is a diaper-loaded brat who throws tantrums in public every single day in his life and cares only about himself and uses his office to make himself richer and hurts even his most fervent supporters. Executive branch Inspectors General, for example, could stop a lot of that, which is why he tried to fire all of them on his first or second day in office.

Action: concerning Ukraine, pollution, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell our government to reject the "no-fly zone" route in Ukraine, tell our EPA to reject the Pebble Mine project, regulate factory farm pollution, and regulate chemical safety and truck pollution more vigorously, and tell President Biden to forgive student loan debt. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Roots Action helps you tell our government not to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine. It won't do what a lot of good Americans hope it will do (i.e., slow, or even stop, the Russian invasion), because it will then make the Russia-Ukraine war about Russia and America, which is what Russia wants. And hopefully the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Syria, etc., haven't been lost on us -- great power is more often a curse than a boon, at least when you use it. And, seriously, if we're going to oppose war, as I think most Americans now do, we're going to have to accept the fact that our opposition won't always give us the results we want. Of course I'd love to see Ukraine prevail over Russia! But I'm not willing to blow up the world to do it, and no-fly zones will take us there pretty quickly.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to permanently reject the proposed Pebble Mine project in Alaska's Bristol Bay area. Our Army Corps of Engineers rejected permits for Pebble Mine (finding its mine waste discharge proposal specifically wanting) late in 2020, but that's not a death blow for those who'd build a damn copper mine in Alaska's Bristol Bay, and thus risk not just polluting all the water around it but destroying the fishing industry, a business at least three Native American nations help conduct. It's true this project has been on life support for a long time, but in America, zombies have a way of coming back to life -- unless they get the head shot from our EPA, one supported by our communicated will as citizens. And we gotta speak out for that to happen.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to regulate factory farm pollution. Not just report on it, which they've been loathe to do, so we might as well play hardball. Of course "playing hardball" here is also synonymous with "doing a very necessary good work," since it ain't just animal waste polluting our clean water because of factory farms, but chemicals and drug residues which we really ought to be keeping out of our water in the first place. Not to mention methane! And factory farms have now become the biggest polluters of our water table, so we should tolerate no amount of corporate hostage-taking over "lower prices for meat." If you can't drink the water, saving a few pennies on chicken tenders ain't that important. And if they force us to choose, I'll just have to become a vegetarian.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to evaluate chemical safety issues more vigorously than they've done or proposed so far. Again, the risk of good Americans getting routinely poisoned by chemicals and burdened with the resulting health care problems should outweigh "the damage we might do to chemical corporations." Why would a civilized person say differently? All of us, not just conservatives, accept that solutions shouldn't be worse than problems, and that change can go too quickly and hurt too many people. These aren't controversial ideas, until they become manias -- until, for example, Republican politicians oppose all environmental regulations because of the "harm" they do to corporations. Hey, corporations are pretty rich! Then can stand to give up a little of their ill-earned largesse so we can all be a lot healthier!

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our EPA to enact more vigorous truck pollution rules than they have proposed. Admittedly, their proposal isn't bad; it would make new trucks cut carbon emissions and nitrous oxide emissions by 90% over the next decade. Trouble is, corporations won't all be buying new trucks right away! They'll do what anyone would do, which is try to make the ones they've got work as long as they can -- in fact, it'll make some corporations stick with them a lot longer than they should, a habit you certainly don't want to encourage if you're an Executive branch agency. "Punishing thrift," in this case, isn't as bad an evil as "letting pollution kill or hurt people." And again, corporations are rich, and can bear to make their trucks pollute less more easily than any of us can bear cancer.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to release the memo concerning his power to cancel student debt, and then cancel student debt. If the memo said he could do nothing with his existing powers under the law, he'd have already released it, and ended this conversation! So we must assume the memo told him, ah, something different, and he doesn't want to release it because he doesn't want to do it. He campaigned on forgiving $10,000 in student debt per borrower, which won't be much in the context of the six-figure debts students take on now just to get the B.A. everyone says they need to compete in the world, until they want to sell a lot of M.A.s. So, yeah, our President needs to do more, and delaying the restart of federal student loan payments won't be enough.

Around the table: dark money stokes school "debates," and other sad truths.

We've been hearing that dark money from the Koch brothers and other right-wing groups influenced the school safety debate these past few years, but now CMD tells us how. First the Koch brothers promoted virtual charter schools as the ticket to surviving COVID, and then when the economy tanked, they promoted "getting kids back to school right now" so they could get their parents back to work, a strategy that has informed just about every subsequent CDC guidance change that's gone in the wrong direction. Then, when schools began to reopen, you saw all those idiots complaining about kids wearing "diapers" on their faces, but they were getting their info from organizations like the Independent Women's Forum, which alleged that masks promote such disparate maladies as anxiety and tooth decay. Some of those folks, you remember, got violent. The sheer number of bad actors described by the article should impress you, if not also depress you.

Better sit down for the story of how Mesa, AZ Starbucks workers organized, since it involves (among other horrors!) a store manager with leukemia getting forced to work while sick (after blowing the whistle on Starbucks's anti-union practices) and then fired, and a district manager telling that same store manager she should try to "understand" where the person who painted a swastika on her house was "coming from." Starbucks also tried to add two dozen employees to the Mesa store (to counter the pro-union workers, naturally!) and argued before our National Labor Relations Board that workers should organize by the district, not the store, like that argument would convince anyone (seriously, when you buy coffee, do you shop at a store, or do you shop at a district?).

When I hear that our IRS audits households with incomes under $25,000 five times as much as everyone else, my first thought is thanks, Republicans, for defunding the IRS police so they don't go after the big tax evaders and go after low-hanging fruit! My second thought is that the poorest among us are the worst at getting away with not paying taxes, because everyone should know that the more economic power you have, the easier you'll get away with stuff. But turns out the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) is the main magnet that pulls an IRS investigation; we could assume, cynically, that giving out such tax credits makes people corrupt, or we could assume, far more constructively, that we should help people understand the EITC better. And still go after people who abuse it! But we need to go after the big thieves, too.

Let's see if I can explain this clearly: our government is hiding how much taxpayer money they're blowing on the notorious F-35 plane. OK, that wasn't as hard as I thought! The way they're hiding it is a bit confusing -- our Defense Department's Director of Operational Test & Evaluation (or DOT&E) has, in an apparently unprecedented maneuver, released two reports, labeling one of them "controlled classified," hoping you'll think it's an actual classified report. But it's not! Here's another headline you could write about the F-35: "almost $63 billion wasted on this boondoggle over the last two decades." The Biden Administration seems to have actually tried harder to get the F-35 to work, but you can't turn chicken shit into chicken salad.

Larry Nocella at Medium reminds us that the big energy corporations raise gas prices every spring! This year they must be thankful that Russia invaded Ukraine, because more Americans are wise to the "because inflation" excuse. It's stunning to go back over media reports from previous years to find that, yes, big energy corporations hike gas prices about this time every year (except 2020, when that pandemic kept everyone home), and they even write about "why" it happens. Not for nothing, but we should (as Mr. Nocella suggests) teach all teach people to use active verbs, not least because we'll better learn not to confuse human-made phenomena with laws of physics. If doing so collapses economics as a "science," well, we all have to make sacrifices for the greater good.

Finally, in case you were wondering how the QAnon folks were "adapting" to the new political reality after Russia's invasion of Ukraine: they're saying Vlad the Bad is actually bombing American biolabs so he can stop Dr. Fauci from creating the next pandemic! That's some pretty special reasoning, there, the more they try to prove their conspiracy theory, the more difficulties they trip over. Even Donald Trump is desperately trying to convince everyone that he hasn't been Mr. Putin's lapdog all this time, so QAnon will surely see some of their most devoted adherents flee -- though probably not many, since, ah, doctrinal flexibility remains their calling card.

Around the table: fake news purveyors produce "fact-checks," and other absurdities.

Good news, everyone (no, really!): our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) has restored the state of California's ability to set auto emissions standards that are stronger than our federal standards. That means, of course, that the auto industry will very likely just meet California's standards, since California is one of America's largest states; many auto industry insiders didn't think the Trump Administration's revocation of the waiver would have survived federal court challenges anyway, and given the Trump Administration's record in the federal courts, that sure was a winning bet. Sad to see Republicans calling the decades-old waiver "radical," as if that's the only word left in their vocabulary. And when they use that word, of course, they're projecting.

ProPublica reports on "fake fact-checks" spreading on social media and on Russian state TV, which purport to refute faked Ukrainian videos, but which seem to manufacture those videos just to "debunk" them! One analyst calls it a "disinformation false-flag operation" that's "like Russians actually pretending to be Ukrainians spreading disinformation." How do we know? Because the metadata of the uploaded "fact check" videos reveals both the "debunked" video and the "debunking" video have the exact same file name. It's rather like spreading a playground rumor about yourself and just to "refute" it and get unearned sympathy for yourself. In other words, it's drama -- and, sadly, it's drama that makes good folks think there's no such thing as truth anymore. Truth does exist, of course, and we have to fight for it every day.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) notes that big real estate corporations, often backed by bankster money, are buying up houses all over America -- mainly in low-income areas -- and thus are making America's housing shortage even more acute. Before you call that "the churn of civilization," note well that real estate corporations often flip the properties for inflated prices or charge exorbitant rent. Rent control would help the second part of that formulation, and restricting house sales to local buyers would, at least, force bankster-backed real estate corporations to launder their money through those local buyers, and the more complicated a scheme gets, the more likely it'll fail. In the meantime, bigness continues to ruin everything in America.

Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) says he did not reveal Ukrainian President Zelenskyy's whereabouts by twittering about the Zoom call they were both on, and that anyone who says he did is just "a partisan seeking clicks." Well, not exactly -- as the post instructs us, even if Mr. Zelenskyy was using a VPN, one could figure out where he was by following the trail left by the sudden surge in uploaded traffic, and I doubt Mr. Rubio, the Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, doesn't know that. You can boil Mr. Rubio's mistake down into just a few words -- "when he's not putting the Ukrainian President at risk with stupid tweets," one Val Demings ad could begin. I'd like to think she's the sort of person who thought of that before I did. Getting the same robotic response from Mr. Rubio about it during a debate sure ain't gonna help him, either.

Speaking of Republicans Senators up for re-election shooting themselves in the foot, Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) says Republicans should repeal the Affordable Care Act if they regain power, then walks it back rather unconvincingly. He does remember that Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act pretty much cost them the House in 2018, doesn't he? Yeah, I'm running this attack ad all day if I'm Tom Nelson or Mandela Barnes. Even though Ron Johnson's won two Senate elections already despite being a useful idiot for American corporatists, I question his tactics here -- like the trucker caravan that couldn't compete with Beltway traffic earlier this week, he may be trying to rally his votaries to a war they've already lost. A better tactician would fight, or create, the next war.

Finally, our Senate has passed H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act, by a substantial, bipartisan margin (79-19), which will end the onerous pre-payment mandate and thus give our Postal Service some breathing room. This is a major legislative achievement, so kudos to you if you called or wrote your Senators and told them to make it happen -- kudos to you, also, if you helped prevent the Toomey amendment (which would have banned postal banking forever) from making it into the final bill, for the bill passed our Senate without amendment. Dig Sen. Rick Scott's sore-loser whining near the end, and recall that his original objection was that it would harm Medicare though four out of five Postal Service retirees already enroll in Medicare.

Action: concerning pollution, worker safety, clean water, and dumping Fox News.

Long story short: tell Brazil to reverse an Amazon-killing rail project, tell our Postal Service to use electric trucks, tell the Biden Administration to protect Chaco Canyon, tell UPS to treat its injured workers better, tell our EPA to get all the lead pipes out of our water, and tell big telecom corporations to stop carrying Fox News in their cable packages. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell the government of Brazil to reverse course on building the Ferrogrão railway project, which would cut through indigenous lands and destroy nearly a thousand kilometers of Amazon rain forest. Naturally Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro -- who, with Donald Trump out of power, may rank as the world's worst political leader -- doesn't care about indigenous peoples, or about the ancient that do more to fight climate change than perhaps any other spot on Earth, but we care, and frankly we matter more than he does. And, frankly, so do the indigenous people who have heroically fought the Bolsonaro government. At least, in a sane, decent, and moral society, that would be true. But we must work to create and preserve that society every day of our lives. Hence we do it here, regardless of what he or his corporate cronies want.

Penn PIRG helps you tell the Board of Governors of our U.S. Postal Service to change direction on their new fleet of mail trucks and make them all electric instead of gas-guzzling. That'll have a big effect on climate change, since these trucks go all over the country every day. Now some right-wingers will do a victory lap after saying all mail trucks use electricity from coal ha ha ha snort. But even the electric mail trucks that would run in West Virginia (the only state that gets nearly all its energy from coal) won't be pumping tailpipe carbon emissions into our air, and in states that use more renewables, of course, running those trucks will cause even fewer climate emissions. This is progress! Right-wingers want you to let the perfect to murder the good, so that you never do good. We've gotta fight that.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our Department of the Interior to keep mining and drilling out of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and its surroundings. By now you may be able to recite the reasons why we'd do that -- mining and drilling pollutes the water, pollution kills wildlife, Chaco has religious significance to nearby Native nations. The Biden Administration has proposed a 20-year ban on new gas and oil leases within a 10-mile radius of Chaco, but we'd like that to extend rather past that, ideally to "forever." I've said it before and I'll say it again: when you blow up land that folks lived on for thousands of years, that land is gone, forever -- and the fuel you'll make from it will be gone almost as quickly, as will the money you make from it. As far as renewable energy, the sun may set and the wind may die, but they always come back.

More Perfect Union helps you tell UPS to stop retaliating against injured workers and start doing right by them. UPS runs a lot of warehouses, as you know, and its workers handle a lot more heavy packages than you or I do, so they get hurt a lot -- and UPS tries to keep them on the job, or catch them in "lies" so they can fire them (if you get asked 50 times exactly what time you got hurt, you think you'll give exactly the same answer 50 times?), or send them to Concentra, a corporate clinic chain that apparently specializes in pushing workers back to work without giving them basic health care like X-rays or MRIs. Not for nothing, but Concentra has close to three dozen complaints on the Better Business Bureau website, where they're ranked one star out of five. UPS needs to do better.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get all the lead pipes out of our water systems. There's money to do that now, thanks to the infrastructure bill Congress passed last year, but our EPA still has to mandate that the lead pipes be gone, or else we risk losing some of that money. There's literally no benefit to having lead pipes in our waterways -- lead leaches out of those pipes and into our water eventually, and there's no safe amount of lead one can imbibe, because any amount of lead can cause brain damage, which then leads to other intractable health problems. You know how you get preventive health care for no additional cost now? Well, we should also get clean water from our government at no additional cost.

Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to take the Fox News Channel off the air. It's not censorship! Censorship is when our government takes something off the air; good Americans joining together to pressure private corporations to take something off the air is just the churn of civilization. And no, Fox doesn't have a First Amendment right to get carried by other big corporations! If folks really want to diddle their rage glands all day, they can go find Fox News on the internet, where big telecoms should deliver all files at the same speed (per net neutrality principles); needless to say, we'd fight algorithms that shove Fox News down your throat. We've got to win civilization every day.

Around the table: from a small victory on Title 42 deportations to a larger victory on plastic recycling.

And now for another exciting chapter of "Partly Good News": the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that President Biden can't deport undocumented families "to places where they will be persecuted or tortured," though our President can still use Title 42 to deport single adults and families that don't face such horrors in their birthplace. The ruling also questions whether Title 42 -- which allows our President to deport folks during a public health emergency -- should be discarded, saying it "looks in certain respects like a relic from an era with no vaccines, scarce testing, few therapeutics and little certainty." Right-wingers will interpret this ruling as a mandate to "let everyone in," but that's lazy. Or do I mean because that's lazy?

I'm linking to this one because of the headline: "Florida Just Passed The ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill, Another Prong In Agenda-less Republicans’ Faux Outrage Machine." Folks need to remember that all the Republicans' posturing about flag-burning and gay marriage in 2006 didn't help them keep their House and Senate majorities; I don't know that it hurt them that year, since Democrats by and large didn't mention it in their attack ads, but if Democrats run ads about it this year -- in the context of "Democrats ended the pandemic and kick-started the economy while Republicans went after gay kids" -- I believe it will hurt Republicans. We had better not be so sick, immoral, and decadent a society that bad people can continue to be bad without facing any consequences.

Ho hum, idiot Republican says gas prices were lower under Donald Trump in 2020, smart Democrat slams her for saying so. Doing a victory lap over low gas prices in the middle of a pandemic when no one wanted to spend any more money than they absolutely had to would be a little like if Democrats had done victory laps over low gas prices during Barack Obama's first year in office -- they didn't, because those low gas prices were entirely due to the bankster Armageddon of 2008, when, again, nobody wanted to buy anything. Naturally Republicans slammed Mr. Obama when gas prices went back up, citing the entirely useless gas prices of 2009! (The article also reminds us that building Keystone XL would not, in fact, help keep gas prices down, since it wouldn't even be done by now. We know what's causing high gas prices: big oil corporations price-gouging us.)

Also ho hum, Olivia Riggio at FAIR informs us that "Murdoch-Owned Outlets Ignore Their Own Role in Hate Crime Surge." More specifically, Fox News/the New York Post/the Wall Street Journal et al "often spread anti-Asian and antisemitic tropes, while taking no responsibility for the xenophobia that fuels these hate crimes in the first place." Like when Jesse Watters, whose apparent goal in life is to be as big an asshole as his mentor, asked "funny questions" to Chinatown residents or demanded an apology from China over COVID. Or when Dennis Prager, founder of a "university," tells us liberal anti-Zionists, and not white supremacists, cause anti-semitism against Israel. Or when Tucker Carlson drew breath.

PA House Rep./Senate candidate Conor Lamb used to be BFFs with Joe Manchin, but now he's "distancing himself" from the Penguin, saying in fundraising emails that he supports Build Back Better and the Women's Health Protection Act and would end the filibuster if elected to our Senate. They say a public servant ought to keep his finger to the wind, I suppose, but he's also hung onto his big donors, and supporting Build Back Better is very far from the most liberal thing a legislator could do. Has he changed his mind about Medicare-for-All, which also enjoys near-supermajority support in America? Of course not. Sadly, Mr. Lamb might get the nomination, given that John Fetterman and Malcolm Kenyatta are basically vying for the same voters, almost like that's the whole idea.

Finally, this might actually be unqualified good news: scientists may have developed a way to recycle plastic, at room temperature, in a mere 20 minutes. Currently, recycling outfits melt plastic, which has a sort of Xerox effect on the resulting quality, but University of Bath scientists used a zinc/methanol mix to break down commercial BPA beads, and moreover, were able to isolate the notorious bisphenol-A chemical you don't want in your clean water. The mix also broke down several other kinds of industrial plastic. The Bath scientists have only worked on a small amount of plastic, so we don't yet know if state, local, and federal governments or private recycling corporations (which would have a lot more plastic to break down) can use it yet. Still, we a little more hope today than yesterday.

Action: concerning Iran, drug prices, climate change, taxing the rich, our Supreme Court, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to allow us to restart the Iran nuclear deal, cap insulin costs at $35/month, pass more and better climate change legislation, tax the rich and corporations more, expand our Supreme Court, and pass the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk not to obstruct our President's efforts to restart the Iran nuclear deal, a major achievement of the Obama Administration. You'll recall how right-wing Senators actively obstructed the deal in 2015 by telling the Iranian government a future Republican Administration would probably scuttle it. Which Mr. Trump did, and for no good reason! The deal was keeping Iran from developing nukes, and its absence has permitted them to develop nuclear weapons technology much further than they had before. Don't brook any stupidity about how you can't "trust" Iran, because the deal required verification of Iran's compliance, not trust. Jesus, right-wingers can be so stupid. Anyway, we can restart the deal -- if we get in our Congressfolks' grills about it.

Both More Perfect Union and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin costs at $35/month, for which President Biden asked in his recent State of the Union address Daily Kos wants us to tell them to do it via budget reconciliation, but I'd honestly prefer they force Republicans to filibuster the insulin cap. Not because that legislation might not make it through reconciliation (the Senate parliamentarian killed the $15/hour minimum wage hike, you recall). It's more that I want to get Republicans on record as being objectively pro-death for diabetic children. People all over America are risking death by rationing their insulin because they can't afford it, so I expect they'll be even less receptive to Republican yammering about price controls than I am.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to step up their climate change game, given the possibility that our super right-wing Supreme Court may soon hamstring our EPA's ability to even regulate climate change. If that happens -- and it'd be a hell of a reversal of precedent, since our Court ruled as recently as 2014 that our EPA could regulate carbon emissions under existing law -- Congress will have to write more specific laws, which they're loathe to do, but which they'll have to do if we want a planet to live on in 30 years. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently found that climate change is outrunning us, so we'd better pick up the pace -- without right-wing rubbish about how "this isn't the government's job."

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a 15% minimum tax on corporate profits, both domestic and offshore, while Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on billionaires. Neither of these actions does everything I want them to do, but they'll make our tax code a good deal better -- a 15% minimum corporate tax will, with one swoop, end a lot of corporate welfare in America, and the wealth tax will begin to address the problem of runaway billionaires in America. If the nation's billionaires can add trillions of dollars to their net worth while the rest of us are struggling under the yoke of a pandemic, something's very wrong. And we, as Americans, have a duty to make it right. Corporations and rich folks need to pay more taxes, end of story.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand our Supreme Court. Yes, we should do it because six of the nine Justices are far right-wingers, and we should do it because a President rejected by 54% of the electorate in 2016 appointed the last three of those. But there's another good reason: we have 13 federal Appeals Courts in America, so having one Supreme Court Justice to manage each District Court will make all those courts work better. These reasons are all better reasons than ones Congress used the last seven times they changed the number of Supreme Court Justices. And if Republicans think it's unfair to expand our Supreme Court under a Democratic President, well, they should have won the 2020 election. I won't lie: I say that at least partly because I know it'll piss 'em off.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. Ignore fake "concerns" about Medicare from certain right-wing Senators (which even Sen. Portman of Ohio have said are bunkum). The bill would allow our Postal Service to offer services like fishing licenses which will increase revenue -- a consistent issue with our Postal Service, since taxpayers haven't funded it for decades -- and would, more importantly, shed our Postal Service of the mandate to prepay retiree benefits decades in advance, a mandate required of no other public or private entity and a mandate that, frankly, feels like a Bush Mobb effort to destroy our Postal Service. With the Postal Service Reform Act, our Postal Service would get much-needed breathing room.

Around the table: the stench of price-gouging is everywhere! And other sad truths.

Somewhat good news, everyone! Our Supreme Court has rejected pleas from Republicans to overturn state Supreme Court-ordered districting maps in both Pennsylvania and North Carolina. While consistent with Justice Alito's refusal to reconsider Pennsylvania state Supreme Court-drawn Congressional map in 2018, it's not good news that four of the nine Justices (including Mr. Alito, of course!) wanted to take the suits, and may want to limit state courts' jurisdiction over legislative redistricting. Even in states which give the courts a role in redistricting by law? I wouldn't put it past them.

Ho hum, gas prices are going up all over America, ostensibly because of Russia, but turns out we only buy 3% of our oil from Russia to begin with! So why are gas prices so high? The economist interviewed in the article makes fairly unconvincing arguments -- if Russia's imports to the Northeast were already down, why are New Jersey gas stations selling gas a few cents above the national average? We learned in 2005 that a state with major oil refineries (in Paulsboro and Elizabeth) shouldn't have that problem. I smell price-gouging here, just as a lot of us do almost everywhere else.

Read Stanislav Markus's explanation of why Russia's oligarchs -- targeted by Western sanctions over Russia's invasion of the Ukraine -- are "a Group of Men Who Won't Be Toppling Putin Anytime Soon" and you'll likely be quite depressed at all the post-Soviet corruption it describes, a matter about which right-wingers have never seemed terribly concerned. The 1990s and 2000s waves of privatization (first of parts of the Soviet state, then of public services) were so irredeemably corrupt it's heartbreaking; this is the same civilization that produced Tolstoy and Chekhov. Anyway, the oligarchs have a lot of money now but no power, by Mr. Putin's design, and the oligarchs who do speak out (Mr. Markus says there'll be more of them) don't play well together.

Idaho state Senate passes an anti-abortion bill modeled on Texas's notorious S.B. 8, though Idaho's bill narrows who can sue -- it specifically allows women who get abortions, the men who impregnated them, and their immediate family members to sue. That difference clearly represents an attempt to circumvent the obvious issue with the Texas law, which is the standing issue, and while I still don't see how a family can have standing to sue over another family member getting an abortion (particularly if they're not parents of a minor!), I can all too easily see the right-wing supermajority on our Supreme Court deciding this (and not the Mississippi or Texas laws) is the back-door abortion ban they've been looking for all their lives.

As I contemplate the way in which the Manhattan District Attorney's investigation into Donald Trump has, in the New York Times's words, "unraveled," I am reminded that rich folks just don't go to prison very often. I've argued with co-workers many times about this -- they see Donald Trump as someone who's so obviously bad at crime that surely anyone with eyes to see can see it. And they're right! He is pretty brazen and awful! But almost anything that happens during the course of an investigation creates an opportunity, and folks with money can exploit those opportunities better than the rest of us can imagine. Cyrus Vance's departure as Manhattan D.A., and his replacement by Alvin Bragg, created just such an opening. We may not learn what happened here until the historians take up the matter.

Finally, ITEP evaluates how much Rick Scott's Get Skinned by the Game plan will cost poorer working families across America. These folks already have "skin in the game" because they pay payroll taxes and Medicare taxes (not to mention state income taxes, property taxes, city wage taxes, and sales taxes), but ITEP's analysis provides even more fodder for Democrat attack ads, if they have the guts to run them. If Democrats were to air ITEP's finding that Mississippi residents could face 50 percent tax hikes under the Scott plan, they might even win a couple of races there. (Hate to pile on, but people's lives are not a "game." Only an irredeemable asshole like Rick Scott would call it a game.)

Action: concerning accountability, Russia, climate change, campaign finance, hunting trophies, and law and order

Long story short: tell our DOJ to investigate and possibly prosecute Donald Trump, tell fossil fuel corporations to abandon their Russian investments, tell our Transportation Department to release a promised climate-change reporting rule, tell state legislators to get private corporation campaign donations out of sheriffs' elections, tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to ban importation of hunting trophies, and tell President Biden to pardon non-violent marijuana offenders. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Common Cause helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the will of the American people after winning the 2020 election. Late last week House January 6 panel lawyers alleged in a California federal court filing that Donald Trump and several of his allies committed crimes as part of their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and if the January 6 panel has enough evidence to say that, then our Department of Justice has enough reason to hold Mr. Trump accountable. We witnessed a lot of these alleged crimes happening in real time, not just on January 6, of course, but also on January 2, during that alternately begging/threatening phone call to Georgia's Secretary of State. But a lot else happened in the dark, too, which is why we need to shine a light on it.

Sum of Us helps you tell French fossil fuel corporation TotalEnergies to quit investing in Russia, and also to quit fossil fuels. Yeah, it may not do the latter just because we say so, but it's more vulnerable to pressure on the former -- though it stands virtually alone among Western fossil fuel corporations in keeping its investments in Russia, saying that no sanctions have compelled them to divest thus far, and also suggesting that gas drilling is a more "realistic" option for getting off climate change. Set aside the fact that wherever gas drilling wells leak methane, they pack a bigger climate-change punch than coal. Switching to gas is the "reasonable" option only because that's their will to begin with! If they put their capital behind renewables, we'd see a lot more renewable energy right now.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to release the Biden Administration rule mandating measurement of climate change emissions from our national highway system. "Measurement," too, not mitigation! We've tried to get mitigation passed during the 2021 battles over the Biden agenda, with limited success. But the Trump Administration overturned this rule while in office because of course they did, while the Biden Administration has announced they'll reinstate it. Thing is, they haven't actually done that, hence our efforts to get more out of them than they've delivered thus far. They really ought to, since it could very well wind up in court one day, which never went well for Mr. Trump.

Color of Change helps you tell your state legislators to get private corporation campaign donations out of county sheriffs' elections. You know how politicians always tell you that campaign donations aren't bribes because they're not quid pro quo transactions and anyway of course you can rely on them to separate what's good for them from what's good for the public? They lie about all of that, of course, but county sheriffs have a much harder time lying all of that when some private prison corporation, or some real estate magnate, or some big telecom corporation, fills their campaign coffers. Gosh, what could these actors possibly want? Like, you know, land for a private prison, more arrests to fill those beds, usurious phone rates for prisoners? Win here, and we can one day win everywhere else.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ban importing elephant trophies under the authority of the Endangered Species Act. Savanna elephants are endangered in Africa, which is, of course, where hunters go get their trophies, and maybe once upon a time we could argue that we must deploy trophy hunting as a necessary evil in regions where elephant populations have overrun human populations, but that time sure in hell ain't now, not when elephants all over Africa are in danger of disappearing in our lifetimes. And not for nothing, but if you've ever seen an elephant mourn its dead, you sure as hell wouldn't parade around your neighborhood with a bloody tusk shouting look what I did! The more we learn of our world, the more responsible we must be, but hey, civilization ain't easy.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell President Biden to pardon non-violent marijuana offenders. He campaigned on doing that, so he ought to start keeping that promise. There will be right-wingers who will say "you're not supposed to pardon people to further political ends." Go ahead and ask them how they felt about George H.W. Bush pardoning a slew of Iran-Contra participants or Bill Clinton pardoning big campaign donors or Donald Trump pardoning Steve Bannon, because those are all examples of "pardoning people to further political ends." Pardoning folks we shouldn't have jailed to begin with? That's just righting wrongs, which is something civilized people always do. And if folks want to call "righting wrongs" "political," then let them get caught with their cynicism hanging out.

Around the table: from a welcome development to an unwelcome comeback.

Matt Stoller notes a new (and welcome) development in the antitrust war: our Justice Department's declared intention to pursue criminal charges in antitrust cases. Our DOJ hasn't done this for more than 40 years, and when you find out that Robert Bork is largely to blame for that, you won't be very surprised. You may be surprised to learn that the late Judge Bork considered "unionized labor" itself to be a form of price-fixing! That he was against taking action against price-fixing is no comfort there. (I probably should have hesitated to use the word "war" in the first paragraph -- but then, our reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce called it a "war" first. And given how much absurdly-high corporate profits have to do with inflation, that's a "war" they're waging against all Americans.)

So what's the big secret to how big pharma continually squashes drug pricing reform even though literally almost everyone in America wants it? You know, besides all the money they spend on ads and on buying politicians' votes? "No victory is ever secure, no policy seedling too small not to be treated as a full-blown existential threat," writes Alexander Zaitchick at New York magazine; thus we hear that even a mild reform like the original H.R. 3 from the last Congress "would plunge medical science into a 'nuclear winter.'" Perhaps you read that as a description of the landscape rather than a threat, but it's a threat, and if we (for example) let the pandemic induce us to yield to that threat, that'd be damn un-American. I mean, if we're going to be the can-do country, we should be able to create new treatments and not price-gouge. (Read the whole thing, though, so you can see how truly abominable big pharma's games are.)

I have to admit that I was more than a little surprised that after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called for someone in Russia to be a "Brutus" or "a more successful Col. Stauffenberg" to maybe assassinate Vladimir Putin, no less a personage than Ted Cruz took to Twitter right away to say what a bad idea that was! Until I saw that Laura Ingraham agreed that Sen. Graham's call was "dangerous and stupid," and I remembered that right-wingers all loved themselves some Putin until very, very recently. By and large, though, this is drama: right-wingers pretending to "disagree" always is.

Here's some good news: workers at a SoHo, Manhattan REI store voted to form a union last week, despite yet another anti-union propaganda campaign waged by their employer. That's some 100 stores behind Starbucks, and that's one REI store out of 165 (as of late 2020); REI also has a big mail-order and internet footprint as well, and believe it or not it still takes people to run those things, people who also deserve better from their employer. But I wish the SoHo workers the best of luck in their quest to get better pay and better working conditions, and I hope they'll tell their stories to the REI employees who want to organize their locations, too.

When I hear that 10 far-right Republican Senators want to hold up appropriations bills unless they get a vote on an amendment to defund President Biden's remaining vaccine mandates, all I can say is sure, you guys want to keep whining about vaccine mandates, go right ahead. The minority you represent may be louder than everyone else, but you are still in the minority, and many, many more Americans are sick of you than used to be the case. Of course Rick "Soak the Poor" Scott is one of them. Doesn't Rick Scott know by now how many people hate his guts? When you've won three elections but you got over 49% in only one of them, you should have a little more humility. (Hate to pile on, but in that one race, his 2018 Senate race, he got 50.1%; how does a man ride "presiding over hurricane relief as a Governor" to barely half-plus-one?)

Finally, former two-term Maine Governor Paul LePage says he's running for a third term because, dig this, "I am absolutely convinced that if we continue to hate each other, if we don't find a path to at least like each other and respect each other, our country is in for doom. Our constitution will not survive. We need to find a path to have civil discourse so we can talk both sides of the argument." Kudos to NBC News Center Maine for asking him a direct and blunt question about his past behavior, and for asking a decent follow-up question which tells us everything we need to know about Paul LePage's "new leaf": invited to say Democratic Gov. Janet Mills has done something right in office, he starts yammering on about socialism! Remember: the only reason people like Paul LePage start singing kumbaya is because they know they're wrong, and they know everyone else knows they're wrong, and if you find yourself in that predicament, don't you have to ask what you could have done differently?

Action: concerning "don't say gay," energy policy, anti-trans policies, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell Florida state legislators to reject the "Don't Say Gay" bill, tell President Biden to sanction Russian oil and gas corporations and invoke the Defense Production Act to build renewable energy infrastructure, tell big corporations to pressure Texas's Governor into rescinding his anti-trans policies, tell our Department of HHS to ensure a key pro-higher drug prices NIH official has as little say as possible about march-in rights for Xtandi, and tell big corporations to stop insuring dirty fossil fuel projects. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. MoveOn helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject the notorious "Don't Say Gay" bill. The bill no longer requires school officials to tell parents of gay or trans kids that they're gay or trans -- that's a conversation those kids would want to have on their terms, you know, in a free country! -- but the only reason that part of the bill's gone is because good Americans spoke out against it. Shine some light on the rest of the bill, which would criminalize even talking about queer issues in a school setting -- regardless of how relevant it might be to, say, a history or social studies class -- and we might be able to kill it like the vampire upon our culture that it is. (No use telling me that restriction only applies to third-graders and younger, not when Florida educators are going after much older kids as we speak!)

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to sanction the Russian oil and gas industries, and I quote, "no matter the impact it would have on the price of fossil fuels" here in America. America has suffered from worsening inflation ever since the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce declared "war" on American antitrust enforcers, and you won't have to drive around much to see that gas prices are already going up, again, though, again, to some degree they're hiking prices because they can. Still, I'd prefer higher energy prices to coddling Mr. Putin's favorite fossil fuel corporations. Besides, we can fill the gap in other ways -- like ending stupid sanctions against Venezuela, for example. Or using renewables!

Speaking of which, Stand.Earth helps you tell President Biden to ban fossil fuels from Russia and invoke the Defense Production Act to help manufacture more renewable energy infrastructure. It is a matter of defense, after all -- we would build more renewable energy infrastructure in order to, literally, defend ourselves from Russia using its fossil fuel leverage to browbeat us into submitting to their outrageous invasion of Ukraine, and (as Stand.Earth's email missive points out) will not require Mr. Biden to get permission from One Great And True Real American President Joe Manchin. He'll piss and moan about it, as drama kings tend to do, but ain't everyone sick of that already? I bet most folks are quite sick of it, and need only to be reminded of it. We're not all conscious of all of our feelings at once, after all.

In light of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's latest attempt to pander to the most rage-addled among good Texans -- classifying commonly-accepted health treatments for transgender kids as "child abuse" -- Public Citizen helps you tell Texas's five biggest corporations to lean on Gov. Abbott and tell him to rescind his bass-ackward trans policies. Big corporations need all the good PR they can get, after all! And if right-wingers attack corporate power because it's too "woke," well, we can work with that, too. Greg Abbott enacted his notorious anti-trans policies before his primary; perhaps now that he's won, he can pretend he didn't do it. Let's at least make him earn that, by wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR against the corporations that could actually make him do better.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell HHS Secretary Becerra to make sure National Institutes of Health (or NIH) official Dr. Mark Rorhbaugh recuses himself from any march-in proceedings the Biden Administration initiates over the prostate drug Xtandi. Dr. Rorhbaugh apparently has worked with big pharma lobbyists to sabotage march-in proceedings from within, which isn't his job at our NIH, because in government, you're supposed to serve the people, not the big corporations! This matters because our NIH handles march-in rights proceedings -- that is, those proceedings in which our government mandates a generic version of a drug that its creator charges too much for. And maybe the guy who's actively working against cheaper life-saving drugs shouldn't get to make all the decisions about making cheaper life-saving drugs! Seems reasonable to me.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell several big insurance corporations to stop funding polluting projects that help exacerbate climate change. Lately the American International Group, better known as AIG, has declared it will stop insuring new tar sands, Arctic drilling, and coal projects, and that's good news, not least because you almost certainly helped that process along if you were part of the public pressure that changed minds at AIG, but other famous big insurance corporations, like Chubb and Liberty Mutual, have not declared any such intention. Well, like I said, big corporations need all the good PR they can get, and they need to avoid the Big Stick of Bad PR as much as they can, so perhaps with a little more public pressure, we can get Chubb and Liberty Mutual to do the right thing.

Around the table: concerning forced arbitration, Russian nukes, and other burning issues.

Let's lead with good news: late last week President Biden signed H.R. 4445, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, a bill for which you and I agitated and a bill representing a major accomplishment of the 117th Congress. Less than half the Republican House caucus voted against the law, and the bill sailed through the Senate on a voice vote, so one might even call it a bipartisan accomplishment, though it's only a bipartisan accomplishment because an actual bipartisan coalition of Americans wanted it. This isn't just a major step forward for sexual harassment victims; it's a major step forward for those of us who want to end forced arbitration entirely. I long to live in an America where we can all get the day in court we deserve when we're wronged, and not some artificial "day in court" where the corporation usually wins.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch tells us that "(t)he decision by President Vladimir Putin to put Russia’s strategic nuclear forces on high alert is even more dangerous than it looks because it is an act of desperation." True, but we're doing the right thing by not raising our own nuclear warning, because why let assholes hold the world hostage? If we do that, we're pretty much declaring that we will not defend civilization, and we'll make such a declaration over my dead body. Yes, I'm aware it may come to that if Mr. Putin winds up using his nukes. (It may not come to that at all, of course, if we're doing what I hope we're doing in Venezuela.)

In a related but important matter, our sanctions against Russia seem to be missing a lot of very rich Russians who have invested a lot of their money in Western nations. You might be tempted to nod at this information if you were an adherent of realpolitik, but note well that many of the actual targets of sanctions have hidden their money with their wealthy pals, who've invested it westward. Some folks have irresponsibly talked of giving Mr. Putin an "off-ramp"; maybe this is one plank of that ramp. But we shouldn't give assholes off-ramps. We shouldn't be adherents of realpolitik, either; it's a game for the cynical, and the cynical can only play games.

Half of Americans prefer the Biden tax plan (which really isn't that much of an improvement over what we've got) to two recently-touted Republican tax plans (which are both abominations unto the Lord). 50% doesn't sound like much, but somewhat less than 32% would get rid of the income tax (Madison Cawthorn's plan) or make poorer working families pay more taxes (Rick Scott's plan); that number doesn't map too well onto my old saw that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane, but I've heard plenty of non-insane people embrace insane tax plans. They're easier to convince than the nutjobs, obviously, and together we still outnumber the nutjobs, which means we should lose zero elections to nutjobs.

I fear that when our establishment media notes that Donald Trump endorsements don't necessarily win Republican primaries, they're not quite getting how a Trump endorsement is really supposed to work. I don't really blame them, I suppose. But the day a Trump endorsement matters most is the day after the primary! Look at how it helped Glenn Youngkin in Virginia -- he was able to get a Trump endorsement and then could pretend convincingly to keep him at arms' length! The ideal plan for both Republicans and Mr. Trump would be a) for someone "electable" to win the primary and b) for Mr. Trump to then endorse that candidate; at this point the Trumpholes will "know" they can "trust" these candidates no matter what they subsequently say to "appeal to the center." I'd call it a clever stratagem, except that only evil will result from it.

Finally, why is Tucker Carlson's sudden demand for Judge Jackson's LSAT scores racist, as opposed to merely partisan hackery? Look past his utter disinterest in the LSAT scores of Messrs. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett (or, for that matter, Elena Kagan); look past, even, his own inability to get through college without being soused much of the time. He says Ketanji Brown Jackson's name is "a name that even Joe Biden has trouble pronouncing," and I would hope we would all recognize by now that making fun of a non-white person's name is a pretty standard racist attack. Even if you "don't mean anything by it."

Around the table: no more placating Joe Manchin, please!

Here's an interesting wrinkle on the subject of tax-preparing corporations that offer "free" filing but make you jump through flaming hoops to get it: TurboTax manufacturer Intuit gets class-action lawsuit over its free-filing feature dismissed, forcing plaintiffs into arbitration -- but a Chicago law firm is paying for thousands of arbitration claims against Intuit, which will cost Intuit millions in legal fees and might force a settlement! I have to admit, that's some good aikido, there. The writer compares this tactic to "guerrilla warfare," which, after all, is how underdogs win. Didn't we learn that in Iraq? Isn't Mr. Putin about to learn that in Ukraine? By the way, Intuit also faces challenges from state prosecutors and federal regulators over allegedly forcing folks to pay for tax-filing when they could have had it for free.

After a CBS reporter foolishly laments what's happening to Ukraine because it's "relatively civilized," Zeb Larson at Teen Vogue argues that we too easily declare some nations "civilized" and others not, and thus we effectively erase whole suffering populations. I remember folks who opposed the Iraq war in the mid-2000s still describing the area as "full of savages" who had "never had peace" -- mainly out of intellectual frustration, I'd bet -- but every nation has doctors, lawyers, engineers, poets, and peacemakers, and while folks like the Taliban make it hard to see that, all you need do is talk to a handful of individuals from so-called "backward" nations and you'll never think of them as "uncivilized" again. I shudder to think that so many Americans don't even have my meager experience in this area.

When you read about Hershey's efforts to thwart an organizing drive at its Stuarts Draft, VA factory, you'll notice a lot of familiar tales -- the corporation making record profits and touting its "efficiency," its insinuation that it could be a better friend to the workers than some union ever could, its jacking up prices and blaming it on "inflation," worker complaints about a two-tiered pay system and being forced to work 72 days in a row and never seeing their family. And, of course, there's also the corporation's sudden zeal about resolving certain long-standing complaints lodged by their workers, which only proves that the threat of unionization works. I wish the Stuarts Draft workers luck in their attempt to bargain for a better work life.

Twitter bans Missouri Republican Rep./2022 Senate candidate Vicki Hartzler from its service for an anti-trans tweet, and that's bound to kick-start her campaign! Now she can tout herself as someone victimized by cancel culture, and you know how Trumpholes love their self-pity, even if it's more like Twitter was her publisher and didn't want to publish her venom anymore because it gave Twitter a bad name. If she gets the nomination -- and all the other candidates really have so many problems! -- she can keep this seat for Republicans, as long as establishment Democrats do what they do best and snuff out Lucas Kunce's campaign. Heaven forfend they nominate a candidate who can win -- and whose stance against monopoly power, particularly as it relates to defense spending, now seems awfully in tune with the zeitgeist in America.

Jesus Mary and Joseph Joe Manchin has presented a framework for a major bill "he can support," though he knows full well that other Democratic Senators oppose prescription drug pricing reform and tax hikes on the rich! Why, it's almost like he's designed this effort to fail! You know, just like the last one, which infamously ended with him declaring he couldn't even vote for his own counterproposal, this after Democrats gave him everything he wanted! I presume he wants to stretch this out to October before he finally declares he just can't support what he originally proposed, which will demoralize the Democratic base and let the fascist party formally take control of Congress. Y'all've noticed I've stopped beating the drum for Build Back Better, right? That's because we can't give this drama king any more attention.

Finally, the Arizona state Senate censures one of their number, Sen. Wendy Rogers, after she fantasized about hanging her enemies at a racist conference and called the Ukrainian President a "globalist puppet" of George Soros, "globalist" and "George Soros" being code words now for "hating Jews." Ms. Rogers, of course, remains defiant, and says the censure violates her "free speech rights," though she has no comment on whether the censure might represent her colleagues' free speech rights. Could we finally be seeing a sea change in American politics, where folks start shaming those who habitually transgress our norms and mores? I'm not hopeful. But I'll happily accept proof that I'm wrong.

Action: concerning surprise bills, maternity coverage, drug policy, factory farm waste, the right to repair, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop interfering with enforcement of the No Surprises Act, make a full year of postpartum Medicaid coverage permanent, pass the MORE Act, force reporting of factory farm waste, and pass the Agriculture Right to Repair Act and the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to abstain from any interference (including lawsuits) their brethren might be contemplating against the enforcement of the No Surprises Act. The No Surprises Act essentially empowers the Executive branch of our government to stop "surprise" billing by medical providers -- you know, the kind where your doctor and your surgeon are in-network, but somehow your anesthesiologist isn't and now you owe $10,000? The Biden Administration announced fairly vigorous rules earlier this year, but naturally some of our Congressfolk, from both parties, are trying to scuttle them, all saying things like "the rules go too far" and "we need a light touch here." What's more unpopular than a surprise medical bill? The bankster who benefits from it! Isn't that enough of a reason for these Congressfolk to STFU on this matter?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to make permanent the 12 months of post-partum Medicaid coverage. Before the American Rescue Plan Act, Medicaid post-partum coverage ended after 60 days, but though the physical aftermath of a birth might be dealt with by then, the mental side might not be -- post-partum depression is a thing, after all, no matter what right-wing male punditoids say. (I don't need to gender-equivocate here, because the opposition to Medicaid post-partum care has not developed enough that our opponents rush out women who say toughen up, girls!) And, actually, it's not all about mental health -- it's also about poorer Americans who can't just take a day off to go to the doctor, and who thus need more time to get the care they need. Now I'm just waiting for Joe Manchin to say families just spend their extra Medicaid coverage on drugs.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell House Speaker Pelosi and House Majority Leader Hoyer to schedule a vote on H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. The MORE Act would essentially legalize pot (by removing it from Schedule I, where it's never belonged anyway) and would also expunge marijuana convictions, which would help a lot of folks injured by our "war on drugs." And no I don't care that Democratic leadership might be afraid Republicans will attack them for being "soft on crime" if they pass the MORE Act! Nobody says Republicans are "soft on crime" when they pass bills allowing banksters to steal more of your money and allowing polluters to befoul your air and water! Let's ensure that's the conversation we have every time someone tries to complain about crime.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that our EPA can enforce reporting of factory farm waste. You may well be asking yourself: self, why can't our EPA enforce factory farm waste reporting already, using its authority under the Clean Air Act? And that's a reasonable question to ask! The reason they can't, as it happens, is because unscrupulous Congressfolk, doing the bidding of big ag donors, constantly slip riders into other bills defunding any EPA effort to enforce rules on factory farm waste! So our EPA makes lawful regulations and then Congressfolk starve them of the money they need to enforce them? Why, you might well call that defunding the police! Hey, enforcing lawfully-made regulations ain't no different from enforcing the law.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 3549, the Agriculture Right to Repair Act. S. 3549 will do as its title suggests: make it easier for farmers to repair their equipment when it breaks down, when a broken tractor, for example, could mean thousands of dollars in lost income if it doesn't get repaired right away. And with big corporations abusing intellectual property rights to keep tools, software, and manuals away from farmers, farmers can only go to a narrow, corporate-approved number of repair techs, so they can't get what they need fixed right away. Our FTC has made helpful noises about the right to repair lately, but some corporations won't do the right thing until we make them. So let's make them. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and power is evil when wielded to do wrong.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) blocked consideration of the Postal Service Reform Act last month, even though our House passed the bill by an actually bipartisan 342-92 vote, and the Senate version of the bill has 14 Republican sponsors. But now that Mr. Scott got caught advocating tax hikes for folks just trying to make ends meet, how does his obstruction look? This bill would remove the crushing mandate (for prepayment of retiree benefits decades in advance) placed upon our Postal Service by Congress in 2006; it wouldn't get us, say, postal banking, which was a feature of post offices until the late 1960s, but getting rid of the mandate would represent significant progress.

Around the table: why Russia will lose the war, and other truths.

Ho hum, states are rushing to cut taxes, using money from the American Rescue Plan Act as an excuse, though that money was a one-time expenditure. They'll use any excuse to cut taxes! And remember: when they cut taxes, usually they cut taxes a lot for their cronies and only a little, if any, for regular folks. At least the Nebraska Senate is currently filibustering one of the more nakedly pro-wealthy tax cuts out there. Some of these states have proposed cutting sales taxes, and I approve of that in a general sense, but most of them have not addressed how they're going to raise the resulting shortfall, and every state but Vermont, you may recall, has passed balanced-budget amendments to their constitutions.

Kamil Galeev argues, convincingly I think, that Vladimir Putin will lose his war with Ukraine. Long story short: Russia's more concerned with strutting its stuff than doing the hard work victory would require. Long story somewhat longer: Mr. Putin wanted to basically blitzkrieg the hell out of Ukraine without planning very much for what would happen if that didn't work -- and his blitzkrieg wasn't going to work, since he didn't even plan that well. There's even more to the story -- Russia made its military more efficient until the mid-2010s, when it turned to making its military look more impressive, and Ukraine basically went in the opposite direction. And hate to sound like a broken record, but a lot of this will sound familiar to those who followed our adventure in Iraq closely.

Samuel L. Boyd at The Conversation discusses "Why Translating 'God's Law' to Government Law Isn't Easy." The answer has nothing to do with woke mobs or deep states, of course, and more to do with the fog of passed time: what we, in retrospect, conceive of as "laws," like the Code of Hammurabi and a lot of laws described in the Torah, weren't actually laws -- Hammurabi issued plenty of decrees at odds with his Code, and how many folks during the time of Deuteronomy stoned their kid to death for drinking and rabble-rousing? Not when there was choring to be done on the farm, I bet! In addition, folks may have come up with the concept of a code of law that comes from God, as in Exodus, in order to fight the Kings who oppressed them with their laws. Folks who insist on punishing transgender folks as often as they draw breath won't be swayed by any of these notions, but the folks who would see Leviticus more as a book about universal precautions will. Note well that the latter crowd is considerably larger than the former crowd.

When I read that "Activists push Biden to Expand Renewables for Energy Independence From Russia" -- and entirely reasonable plan we would already have implemented if not for the intransigence of Joe Manchin -- I'd still be happier to read "Americans push Biden to expand renewables," not just because that's generally true of how Americans feel, but also because I'd like us all to think of ourselves as activists, since that's what defending democracy and defending civilization requires. I'd like us all to think of ourselves as activists even though some Americans only discovered their love of activism because they didn't want to wear masks at Costco. I'd also prefer to read that "big energy corporations push Biden to expand renewables," since they're the biggest obstacle to a more renewable energy grid. The article's still very good, though, namely for its lengthy refutation of the notion that fracked natural gas will solve our energy problems. I mean, gosh, you've got sun and wind everywhere.

Our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) finds, after analyzing over 70,000 blood samples, that over 140 million Americans, including a majority of our nation's children, have had COVID through late January. That's way more than official reports give -- Worldometers.info counts a little over 80 million infections total in the United States, which doesn't even mean 80 million people infected -- and it also maps on to The Lancet's finding from January that official sources have way, way underreported COVID infections.

Finally, President Biden delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday night -- it was a good speech, a little heavy on solutions, if anything -- but Republicans didn't waste any time acting like idiots about it. Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) boycotted it because he'd have to take a COVID test beforehand, and because "I only take a test if I'm sick." Why, it's like he hasn't learned after two years that some 40 percent of all COVID infections come without symptoms! I spy something that's going to wind up in Val Demings's campaign ads; she might even call it "Where's Marco?" Meanwhile, Reps. Boebert (Q-CO) and Greene (Q-GA) heckled Mr. Biden while he was talking with a "build the wall" chant; if Democrats have any brains/guts at all, they'll run at least the photo accompanying the story in campaign ads. Ain't nothing an independent voter likes less than a person shouting on TV.

Action: concerning vaccines, clean water, Arctic drilling, and conservation.

Long story short: tell President Biden to pressure Moderna to share its vaccine technology with the rest of the world, tell our EPA to replace all lead-lined water pipes, tell our FDA to vigorously regulate agricultural wastewater, and tell our government to flatline an Arctic drilling project and protect old-growth trees everywhere in America. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to pressure Moderna to share its COVID-19 vaccine technology with the rest of the world. And by "pressure," I would mean "remind them that you can, by law, simply take charge of the patent and force them to share their tech with the rest of the world." You've heard that South African scientists had to reverse-engineer the patent from scratch? Great job, and I'm sure their travails will make a great HBO miniseries one day, but why should it have even been necessary? Someone already figured it out and decided to make the most amount of money possible from it, so millions of folks all over the world have to die? I swear the worship of mammon will kill us all one day, if it hasn't doomed us already. But in the meantime, duty is duty.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to replace all lead-lined water lines in America within a decade. The infrastructure bill passed last year will spend more money on lead-pipe removal than we've ever spent at any time in our history, and that's good, but our EPA still should establish the legal goal of getting rid of all the lead pipes in America, because that'll make it less likely that some of that money gets diverted to, ah, purposes not exactly related to lead-pipe removal. And any amount of lead in your drinking water causes brain damage, and we could have as many as 24 million children drinking water with toxic levels of lead in it, so the need is dire, and our EPA needs to recognize that, and our EPA also needs to require that we remedy it.

Staying with clean water for the moment, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to enact the most vigorous agricultural water requirements possible. Meaning what? Meaning big ag corporations have to work harder to keep the animal feces out of the water they use on their crops, and therefore our water, since it all winds up at the same place. It took our CDC nearly eight years to link two 2014 listeria outbreaks -- which hospitalized 22 good Americans and killed three -- to agricultural wastewater. Our CDC further estimates that close to 50 million Americans will get food poisoning this year, and 3,000 will die from it. And nobody laid up in a hospital with a disease they didn't need to get wants to hear that the way we do things now keeps your food cheap!

Both the Wilderness Society and the Center for Biological Diversity help you tell the Biden Administration to scuttle any plans they might have to restart the notorious Willow Project in the Western Arctic Ocean. The Trump Administration green-lit the program in 2020, and like a lot of Trump Administration projects, a judge stopped it because (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) the Administration didn't do the environmental reviews required by law before giving the project the green light. But this is yet another oil-drilling project in an area of the world we don't know enough about to drill in safely. You know the drill: frigid waters, fragile ecosystems, other sectors of the economy (hello, salmon fishing!) that could get injured or wiped out. But you still gotta say things to your government a couple of times (or a couple hundred times!) before they get it.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell the Biden Administration to protect old growth trees from logging wherever they may be in America. I've trumpeted the thousand year-old trees in the Tongass many times in this space, but they're not the only old-growth trees we've got -- we have many pines, junipers, oaks, and sequoias that old (and older) in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, and our oldest trees are some of our best climate-change fighters, given that they've been absorbing carbon dioxide far longer than you or I have been alive. And most of these trees only die when they get batted around by severe weather or someone injures them. And I keep saying this, but when they're gone, they're gone, and the money we get from cutting them down will never last as long, or do as much good.

Around the table: featuring yet another injurious monopoly and a sputtering caravan of whiners.

Matt Stoller relates the evil logic of monopolies to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Long story short: Russia controls so much of the fossil fuel market (gas, oil, even coal) that they can raise prices whenever they want, such that their invasion actually funds itself! Clever, unless you insist, as I do, that cleverness also be useful, and not just to some dictator or other. Do you suppose Facebook will let me say that Russia causes inflation by hiking fuel prices at will? Or is that an even more loaded question than I thought?

The second item in Bess Levin's February 28 news rundown -- to which you should all subscribe if you don't already -- describes Donald Trump taking credit for the fact that Putin's little Ukraine adventure isn't going as well as he'd hoped, because he "insisted" that NATO nations "pay() their dues," although, as Ms. Levin notes, Donald Trump not only didn't do anything worth taking credit for (because he invented the whole dues-paying story to begin with), but did an awful lot of harm to Ukraine, not least in trying to extort its President. You remember, the first thing for which our House impeached him?

Australian scientists, thinking they've developed tracking devices for magpies that are relatively unobtrusive, are surprised to discover the magpies helping each other get the tracking devices off. Thus the magpies not only demonstrate intelligence and problem-solving skills, but altruism, which they previously hadn't demonstrated to researchers, at least not in a way they'd noticed; one wonders what it was about the tracking device that provoked that response. I guess you never do know what'll bring folks together. Right, Vladimir Putin?

U. Aberdeen/U. Cal. Berkeley scientists theorize that our brains smooth out all of the visual noise our eyes receive by, essentially, "perceiv(ing) in a given moment an average of what we saw in the past 15 seconds" as the "illusion" of a "single visual snapshot." Thus whatever we're seeing at a given moment could be up to 15 seconds old. These researchers looked to understand "serial dependence," which describes a phenomenon in which you would "see" an object or person more or less as you've been seeing it for some time, so you don't have to process new information. In any case, I wonder if that's why I occasionally "sense" that a kicker's about to miss a field goal.

If Mitch McConnell is really worried that Rick Scott's "Rescue America" plan "could expose the party to unnecessary attacks this fall," well, I'd have to say that horse has left the barn. And Sen. Scott's walkback is weak: he can't be so cut off from ordinary Americans that he really thinks any of us care about the fine line between Senator-just-saying and Senator-running-party's-campaign-arm, can he? Then again, this is Rick Scott, America's CEO, we're talking about -- last time he talked to regular folk he was probably chewing them out for something that wasn't their fault. Anyway, he's beyond "when you're explaining, you're losing" and well into "when you're in a hole, stop digging." (Of course, Democrats still have to run campaign ads using the information Mr. Scott has so helpfully provided, but that would be like winning, which Democrats generally only do passively. I'd be happy to be wrong!)

Finally, when I hear that the far-right trucking caravan that started in California won't make it to D.C. because it's just not big enough anymore, I must say I'm disappointed. Come on, fellows! Let your freak flag fly! Come and get your humiliation; you've earned it! This couldn't possibly be because our Supreme Court struck down President Biden's vaccine mandate and because our CDC recently recommended that folks in low- or medium-risk areas can go maskless indoors, could it? (Remember: I've said I didn't disagree with the tactics, only with the message, the entirety of which, as far as I can tell, is waaaaaaaaaah.)

Action: concerning Medicare, drug prices, trade waivers, pot sentences, and facial recognition.

Long story short: tell President Biden to end Medicare privatization, lower prescription drug prices, negotiate a more comprehensive TRIPS waiver at the WTO, pardon marijuana-related sentences, and get rid of the notorious ID.me facial recognition technology all across our federal government. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to end the Trump Administration's Medicare privatization scheme. Which was? Medicare paying Direct Contracting Entities (or DCEs) money to cover part of seniors' health care needs, instead of directly reimbursing providers as is the traditional method, and often not telling seniors they were getting care from a DCE instead of Medicare! But President Biden has apparently decided to rename the program instead of end it, even though we all know that no matter how much you promise "transparency" and "accountability," privatization programs always result in taxpayers paying more money for less service. So it's time to tell President Biden you don't approve of him going in the wrong direction on this matter.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to use Executive Actions to lower prescription drug prices for Americans. We asked Congress to lower drug prices yesterday, and today we're asking President Biden to do the same, and frankly asking one person to exercise their legal authority to lower drug prices does seem easier than asking 538 to pass decent legislation. And if right-wingers want to whine about "untrammeled executive power" in regards to drug prices everyone in America agrees are too high, then let them whine. The Biden Administration has many tools left at its disposal, from the frequently cited "march-in rights" afforded by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980 to the "eminent domain for patents" successfully deployed by Tha Bush Mobb, of all Administrations, right after 9.11. So, no excuses.

Wondering how that whole TRIPS waiver thing at the WTO was going? Well, according to Sarah Lazare at In These Times, not as well as it could be -- the Biden Administration has apparently begun negotiating such a waiver by including only COVID-19 vaccines, and excluding tests and treatments. Actually getting the waiver done for COVID-19 vaccines would enable corporations all over the planet to manufacture generic versions of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and that's no small thing, but people are still going to get COVID, and thus the waiver should also cover antiviral treatments and rapid tests. Today you can call President Biden at 1.202.456.1111, but only between 11 am and 3 pm; you can also write him at the White House contact page here, and tell him to broaden the scope of a TRIPS waiver. He negotiates on our behalf, after all.

Progress America helps you tell President Biden to pardon and expunge non-violent marijuana convictions. Hey, he promised! I was a bit surprised to learn that, too, considering how anti-pot he's been his whole life, but hey, if you promise something, you ought to deliver it, even if (especially if!) right-wingers will demonize you for being "soft on crime." These right-wingers don't even care about crime! At all! How do I know? Because they have no righteous anger against banksters and polluters; when they think of criminals, they only see Black people. And having these convictions on your record keeps you from getting jobs, which makes it more likely you'll land up in jail again. So President Biden should get his pardon on regarding by far the least dangerous drug on Schedule I.

Finally, Dump ID.me helps you tell all branches of our federal government to dump the notorious ID.me facial recognition system. We successfully got our IRS to drop plans to use it this tax season, which yay us, but that leaves, basically, the rest of our government to work on, including our Veterans Administration, which uses ID.me and apparently works so poorly that our veterans and their families can't get emergency assistance or disability payments. That's not the good work you'd want to bring to the Pearly Gates! I mean, I could go on about all the wrongful arrests and wrongful denial of unemployment benefits that Black, brown and trans folks have to endure because of facial recognition technology, but maybe facial recognition technology costing you the money you've earned and need to make ends meet resonates a little more broadly.

Around the table: more thoughts about Ukraine, oil, dark money, and stupid right-wingers.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch reminds us that Vladimir Putin "Has Gambled Everything on His Snap Invasion of Ukraine" but "Now His Political Survival is in Doubt." "So why did Putin do it? Explanations that he has gone mad or plans to rebuild the Soviet Union are propagandistic. More convincing as a reason for him taking this present extraordinary risk is hubris, which is an occupational disease among those who have been too long in power -- 22 years in Putin’s case." I actually thought Russia would roll over Ukraine fairly quickly and then get worn down by years of guerrilla war, but now I'm not even sure Russia will do that well. Even George W. Bush could claim MISHUNZ ACCOMPLISHEDZ!!!!! for a few minutes.

In case you've been caught short by Mr. Putin's claim that his real aim is to fight "neo-Nazis" in Ukraine who practice "genocide," Jeffrey Veidlinger at The Conversation will set you straight. Long story short: Russians have more free speech rights in Ukraine than they do in Russia, and the neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine today have virtually no electoral power. I guess Mr. Putin is hoping you'll remember there were pogroms in Ukraine in the 19th century and that many Ukrainians collaborated with the actual Nazis, but these facts don't exactly make Ukraine unique (and the Ukranian pogrom occurred while it was part of the Russian empire, maybe that's a cautionary tale!). Besides, if Mr. Putin really wants to punish the sin of Nazi collaboration, why isn't he invading Norway or France?

If you've been thinking how refreshing it is that our "liberal" media has learned to hate imperialist wars, Jeff Cohen at Common Dreams will bring you back to Earth with the reminder that our "liberal" media never refer to American imperialism, except in quotation marks meant to be ironic. I'm still a bit puzzled that folks aren't thinking of the Iraq war when they think of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia has deployed 190,000 soldiers to take over a nation of 44 million people living on a little over 600,000 square miles; America deployed 150,000 soldiers to take over a nation of a little over 25.5 million folks living on a bit less than 440,000 square miles. The numbers ain't that different; I guess some Americans just want to forget it all, particularly that part where they called folks like me who opposed the war traitor.

When I heard that nationalizing the fossil fuel industry might be a good way of controlling inflation, I thought, well, with all the corporate welfare they already get, this isn't such a bad idea. We would (per Robert Pollin, who makes a lot of good suggestions in the article) spend about $350 billion buying a controlling interest in the three biggest oil corporations, but that's a one-time cost, of course, and it'll save the taxpayer a lot years down the line! I also remembered that the Trump Administration imposed (and the Biden Administration has, sadly, continued) imposed economy-crippling sanctions on Venezuela essentially because they had the same idea. Does that mean that if we nationalized the oil industry in America, our government would impose sanctions on itself?

You won't be surprised to learn that dark money is funding women's groups opposed to the nomination of Judge Jackson to our Supreme Court. I hope, after all these years of pretending the exception to the rule destroys all rules, we've learned not to devour every perceived irony as if it were manna from heaven. Women against women? Big whoop! The world's a big place, with lots of places for Teh Stupid to hide! I'm about as tired of hearing that right-wing judges always respect "the rule of law" while liberal judges are all "activists." Have they read some of these decisions coming from Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh? If it's not "activist" to ignore precedent, or to go on a fishing expedition for a precedent that fits your conclusion, I don't know what is.

Finally, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) spewed this forth on Twitter this past Sunday: "You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets." The rest of the Twittersphere roasted him, but I would like to point out that incoherence is a step up for this guy -- just five years ago, he was a first-term House Rep yelling that we "kill" "all" "radicalized Muslim suspects." To think this dude was a police captain and he still said, out loud, that we should kill suspects! And now he's a Congressdolt. I hope no one uses him as an example of "how people rise on merit in the Republican Party."