Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning Social Security, billionaire taxes, labor, Title X, and Native communities.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, the Babies Over Billionaires Act, and the PRO Act, increase funding for Title X services, and pass the CDC Tribal Public Health Security and Preparedness 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 H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act, which would actually expand Social Security benefits and tax higher incomes into the system to help pay for those benefits. Social Security keeps a lot of folks out of poverty, but why shouldn't it keep us out of poverty at a higher level? After all, we worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and we deserve to enjoy it in our old age. And in a sick, immoral, and decadent society where Rick Scott feels secure enough in his evil that he can actually propose sunsetting Social Security within five years, and where Mitt Romney feels secure enough in his evil that he can actually propose fast-tracking Social Security benefits without debate or input from the American people, it's long past time for us to play offense.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7502, the Babies Over Billionaires Act, which would tax unrealized (i.e., unsold) gains of folks worth over $100 million at 30 percent and then use that money to establish a Family Investment Trust Fund, which would disburse that money to the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services "for programs relating to supporting family well-being and the development of children." Hence, Babies Over Billionaires. The bill leaves establishing such programs a bit up in the air for my taste, but we could hash that out in amendments; I certainly wouldn't pass up an opportunity to get at all that money rich folks will never spend, but will instead use as collateral for the low-interest loans that really subsidize their lifestyle.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. We watch corporations do a lot of shady stuff to evade our labor laws, like calling their employees "contractors," forcing them to sit in anti-union propaganda meetings, and intimidating and firing workers who try to organize. The PRO Act would put a stop to all of that! And then working folks' victories over employers like Starbucks, Verizon, and Amazon could multiply all across the land. We know Republicans will filibuster this bill in the Senate, but let's at least have a vote and force them to stand against the 60% of Americans who'd like to be in a union and the 12% of Americans who are already in one. Seriously, it's well past time for Democrats to stop playing not to lose and start playing to win. We do it, so why can't they?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase funding for Title X family planning services, not merely restore funding to pre-Trump levels. Title X helps working families afford things like birth control, cervical cancer screenings, breast cancer screenings, and HIV testing. Of course you know Donald Trump spent the last four years crippling Title X services, mainly by prohibiting Title X funds from going to clinics that shared information about getting abortion care; this wound up impacting about half the good Americans who used Title X services during the Trump years. Because what is government for, if not for punishing people randomly to make a point? That's what bad government is for, of course, but good Americans deserve much better than bad government.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7577/S. 3968, the CDC Tribal Public Health Security and Preparedness Act, which would allow CDC Public Health Emergency Preparedness funding to reach Native American communities. Native Americans suffered just as much or more from the COVID pandemic as anyone else, and they also suffer high rates of both chronic health care issues (such as heart disease and diabetes) and chronic infrastructure issues (like lack of electricity and running water). There's no moral reason to exclude Native Americans from this funding, but extending assistance to Native communities also means diseases like COVID won't keep rising back up and biting all of us in the ass.

Around the table: now with *even more* corruption and whining from the right!

No, it is not absurd to claim, as Sonali Kolhatkar does at Counterpunch, that "Policing Causes Violence, Not the Other Way Around." Not just because the science tells us it's true, and not just because you can easily recall recent incidents (like the recent New York subway shootings) that increased police presence did not prevent. I think we've all experienced the phenomenon where we make problems worse by paying much more intense attention to them! And I'm old enough to remember when conservatives said "you can't just throw more money at a problem and hope it'll go away." But even those conservatives told us out of the other side of their mouths that we should throw all the moneys at police because crime. Also too, if we stopped using them as the Swiss Army knives of the state, we'd have better police officers for less money.

Hard to believe, Harry, but big nursing home corporations have sued to stop a New York state law that would force them to spend more money on patient care. Because they'd lose money! What cojones! They think the very notion of losing money an apocalyptic drama, but the neglect they foist on their workers and their patients is the real apocalypse. See, this is why we don't "let business be business," or "let big business make the important decisions." Also too, the very existence of "profits" in such a business testifies to the amount of care patients don't get -- after all, patient care is an expense. Bring back the 55% corporate tax rate and I bet we see a change right quick.

McDonald's franchises used Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) money to pay rent to McDonald's. No, really! McDonald's, the parent corporation, owns the land upon which individual fast-food joints operate, and collects rent from them, so the franchises took money meant to keep good Americans working and used it to keep franchises more or less current on their rent. Nice work if you can get it! See? Government doesn't work! right-wingers exclaim, though it was their heroes who ran government so badly. Public Citizen's Lisa Gilbert must be being very polite to say that PPP had "noble intentions," because I never got that vibe, particularly after big corporations collected so much welfare. I mean, people don't think their local McDonald's is a "small business," do they?

In a related note, some policy bigwigs are now asking "whether the stimulus checks were a mistake" given all the inflation we're having now, and all I can say is: seriously? We're debating this? It's never a "mistake" to keep tens of millions of good Americans out of poverty they would have descended into through no fault of their own; I would have done it differently (less PPP, more CTC), but to say it's not worth it because corporations are now taking advantage of us and jacking up prices at will? And not for nothing, but those checks amounted to $3,200 total over 12 months, and I sincerely hope we all know by now how quickly we can go through $3,200.

Another day, another far right-wing whiner running for state Senate in Michigan who laments that he "(c)an't even watch a college basketball tournament without commercials telling me I have to feel guilty because I think a family should be a white mom, a white dad and white kids." Reminds me of all those years I couldn't even watch cable news programs without pundits telling me I was a traitor and a terrorist sympathizer! So yeah, Randy Bishop, fuck your feelings. I will say -- not at all in his defense! -- that while I approve of all the interracial couples I see in TV advertising, I fear that future historians will one day conclude that our society was a whole lot more accepting of interracial marriage than was actually true. But since (as Franz Boas used to say) racism disappears when interracial marriage becomes accepted, I hope that point will be moot in 20 years or so.

Finally, after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) calls herself a "victim" of the January 6 attack, a Capitol police officer displays graphic photos of the actual injuries he suffered that day. That's some expert counter-trolling on the part of Aquilino Gonell, though I'm sorry he had to go through it at all. But we're all victims of Ms. Greene's slow-motion train wreck of a Congressional career.

Action: concerning law and order, pollution, labor, corruption, and privatization.

Long story short: tell Texas Gov. Abbott to grant Melissa Lucio clemency, tell Citigroup to get out of the Amazon rainforest, tell Verizon to recognize retail worker unions, tell our EPA to cut pollution from trucks and buses, tell our government to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy, and tell BlueTriton to stop taking the public's water. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first: Ultra Violet helps you tell Texas Governor Greg Abbott to grant Melissa Lucio clemency. A jury convicted Ms. Lucio of murdering her two year-old daughter in 2007, but, well, let's just say it's a bad sign for a verdict when five of the original jurors want a do-over because of evidence they didn't get to hear, evidence that included how thoroughly investigators coerced her to confess in the first place. I'm sure some folks would rather just adhere to the original verdict, not out of laziness but out of a sense that we've got rules, but I think they're misguided: one of the ways we protect our civilization is we make damn sure someone's guilty before we do something like kill them, since you can't really take that back. Erring on the side of innocence is a feature of civilization; too many folks think it's a bug.

Stand.Earth helps you tell Citigroup executives to stop funding oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest. Yes, that still happens, and not just because Jair Bolsonaro runs things in Brazil! But Citigroup executives meet today for their Annual General Meeting, so now's as good a time as any to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. They've funded oil drilling in the Amazon -- the world's best weapon against climate change, I feel compelled to restate -- to the tune of $40 billion over the years, which doesn't just mean pollution, but also means running roughshod over the rights of indigenous folks who live there. And yeah, it also means collaborating with the aforementioned irredeemable asshole whom I hope Brazilian voters will be able to turn out of office this year. Yeah, I said collaborating. As Rush Limbaugh used to say, words mean things.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg to recognize the Verizon retail workers' union in Washington state. Stop me if you've heard this before, but Verizon made over $4 billion in profits while cutting retail worker pay, which I guess is how they answer the question how do you think I got so rich? Verizon workers also suffer from the chronic understaffing and absurd scheduling practices that plague so many retail workers in America; could that be the reason Starbucks and Amazon workers are trying to unionize? Don't believe the hype that retail jobs are just unstable and workers should know that when they sign up. As if they have much of a choice! And anyway, calling misery "natural" betrays a profound lack of imagination.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to cut pollution from buses and semi-trucks. Again, throwing up your hands and saying they're big vehicles and they're just going to pollute! shows a profound lack of imagination. Semis and buses pump out a quarter of all pollution from vehicals despite comprising only five percent of all vehicles, and if they only get, say six miles to the gallon, wouldn't they be twice as clean if they got 12? This is the kind of imagination that makes good policy! You can't just sit there and say we'll never get them to get 50 miles to the gallon, so let's give up, but right-wingers want you to make that mistake non-stop, because then their paymasters (like big corporations that don't want to buy all new trucks) get everything they want. And why should they?

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Justice and United States Postal Service Inspector General to investigate Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for possible lawbreaking -- specifically, by holding onto investments in the corporation that just so happened to produce all those free COVID tests we got in the mail. No, it's not a matter of using your connections in the business world! For one thing, our government should have made the damn tests themselves, and for another thing, you're not supposed to personally benefit from the decisions you make on behalf of the public. I'm old enough to remember when public servants avoided the appearance of corruption; now they wave it in your face. Waving it in our face should get them punished, but it won't, unless we act.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell BlueTriton CEO Dean Metropoulos to stop taking public water from the drought-addled communities, or, indeed, any communities. BlueTriton, as you likely know by now, used to be Nestlé’s North American water stealing ahem bottling operation last year, but it's time we reminded the world there ain't no putting lipstick on that pig. And why should there be? Why should corporations get to siphon public water and then charge hundreds of times the amount they paid for the water? They call it "preserving a resource," but governments can do that. The most important thing here is that water doesn't go the way of health insurance, higher education, child care, and, hell, rent -- as an essential item that working families can't afford anymore.

Around the table: water is a human right! And other truths.

When I read about indigenous water rights activists traveling all over Mexico to protest corporate "looting" of good Mexicans' water, I feel a little ashamed that I'd never considered that hydroelectric projects could steal water from farmers. I mean, gas fracking corporations stealing water I knew about, but hydro still retains a green sheen that deflects criticism. I'm also reminded that Mexico's constitution literally guarantees the right to water to its citizens, and that corporate use of public water (which all water should be!) violates that right. I wish the water protectors in Mexico luck, especially since Mexico is one of those places where they'll shoot you in front of everyone for defying the will of corporations.

USC report finds that "what the safety net promises" low-income working families "and what it delivers are vastly different." And gives reasons! Some programs simply don't offer help to all those who need it, while others are so riddled with bureaucracy and complicated rules that eligible families simply give up applying, and that's before we get to language barriers, the absence of "a single go-to source of information that clearly and easily communicates what programs a family is eligible for," and, of course, the stigma of being a "welfare queen," which, as we recall, only existed in the darkest imaginations of Ronald Reagan. The good news? Even the Biden Administration seems to get there's a problem, and has taken steps to fix it, though we'll need to take more steps.

When I heard that many good Americans who oppose abortion would still help a friend of family member get one, I wondered if that meant those folks aren't very anti-abortion at all, but just fronting about it. But I should have known better! Not just because anti-abortion folks do set boundaries (only a few would pay for it, but more would help pay for it, almost half would help plan it, and three-quarters would offer "emotional support"), but because we all know from the gay marriage debates that the most rabid anti-gay marriage votary can easily crumble once it's his or her son or daughter who's gay.

I find myself far less impressed than many observers that Joe Manchin's approval rating in West Virginia has shot up over the last year-plus, despite his nefarious trashing of a popular legislative agenda, because the spike in his approvals comes almost entirely from Republicans. And those who would say he's really "got his finger on the pulse of West Virginia" should consider a) whether very many Republicans who approve of him now will vote for him in 2024 if a real Trumphole runs against him or b) whether someone who actually led on Build Back Better, and explained to his right-wing constituents why it'd be good for them instead of constantly cutting it down, could have achieved the same results. Seriously, when they say Joe Manchin "really understands his people," they're kind of cutting down "his people."

When I hear that Elon Musk's proposed purchase of Twitter might well "forc(e) us off a platform that we otherwise find just too hard to quit," I say we can only hope! I used to love my Twitter feed back in the day -- the old 140-character limit sure helped me say more with less! -- but it's always been a damn swamp where you could only stand out by being a prick. And I fear the mass exodus from Twitter won't be big enough, since (as Ms. Marcotte says) too many people think they need it to stay "plugged in" to current events. On one hand, I get that; I get most of my news through email, but I sure haven't left Facebook. On the other hand, anything worth doing is hard, and when do we start punishing trolls with shame and shunning?

Finally, when I hear that Democrats have yet to commit to a unified strategy for the midterm elections, I find I'm more than happy to help! What has unified Democratic government gotten us? an ad could say. The end of the pandemic. Seven million more jobs. The deficit cut by $1 trillion. Wages going up faster than they have in decades. Not a single American soldier lost in Ukraine. And the monopolies that cause inflation getting challenged in court for the first time in decades. And what have Republicans been doing all that time? Burning books. Defending dictators. Making it harder for you to vote. Whining about masks and vaccines. Oh, and this: (cut to January 6 footage). Vote Democrat on November 8. You're welcome again, Democrats.

Action: concerning monopolies, drug prices, gas prices, campaign finance, forced arbitration, immigration, and internet policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets App, tax the windfall profits of big oil corporations, pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow campaign finance law again, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, reject any bill that would force President Biden to reinstate Title 42, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

With the news that both H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act, and H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee by large bipartisan margins, it's time to tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer (whose contact information you may find here) to put the bills on the floor, not wait for "commitments" from 60 Senators. Because that's a stalling tactic! Both of these bills would strike blows against big tech monopolists, so our Senate should pass them. While you've got him on the line, tell him to put H.R. 6833, the Affordable Insulin Now Act, up for a vote as well. The bill would cap insulin prices, and "waiting to see how the broader reconciliation bill goes" is another stalling tactic! We already know how it'll go: Joe Manchin will string us along for six months and then say he just can't get there. Enough already.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits. Right-wingers will say that's "taxing success," but it's actually taxing greed, or taxing price-gouging, either one will do. Every time they call something like that "taxing success," they murder a part of our world, because they help condition folks into thinking corruption equals success. We've got to get back to the society that equates corruption with evil. Anyway, just four big oil corporations made over $70 billion in profits last year, and brook no silliness about how that's only six cents per gallon or whatever, because hello! $70 billion! You can't just slice $70 billion into ladyfingers. Next up on the right-wing noise machine: CEOs are underpaid because they only make 12 cents for every breath they draw!

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 80, which would amend our Constitution to allow governments to regulate campaign finance like sane people again. Let me be clear: nobody but a troll gets up in the morning and says praise the Lord corporations can spend as much money as they want on stupid campaign ads that put us all in a crappy mood! We actually live in a world where two-thirds of Republican voters want the kind of campaign finance laws that our Supreme Court outlawed in their notorious Citizens United v. FEC ruling, so we should pass H.J.Res. 80. Brook no slippery-slope arguments from right-wingers! A Constitutional amendment will not open the floodgates for all kinds of free speech restrictions, not least because money is not speech.

Daily Kos, Public Justice, and Public Citizen all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Why do so many good government groups want us to pass this bill? Because forced arbitration is awful! It forces people to redress grievances with corporations through arbitration rather than court, and guess what? You're far more likely to lose in arbitration -- it doesn't matter that oh, but the average award is bigger in arbitration if you lose. And not for nothing, but forced arbitration is yet another one of those monopolistic practices by which corporations fix wages. And since wages are the price an employer pays for your labor, wage fixing is also price fixing, and price fixing, as we know, is illegal. Judges don't call it that enough, but we're working on that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would preserve the notorious Title 42 immigration policy. Title 42 supposedly aimed to keep immigrants from making the COVID pandemic worse, and guess what? It didn't work -- with their whining about masks and vaccines, right-wing Americans kept that pandemic going quite well by themselves, thank you very much. No, the Trump Administration came up with the Title 42 program just to give them another reason to keep immigrants out of America, and too many Democratic politicians are going all Henny Penny at the prospect of even more immigrants, and the Republican attacks that will come with them. But failing to do the right thing on immigration because Republicans will attack us for it is cowardice. Which, again, Democratic politicians are good at.

Finally, FAIR helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. All you need know about her nomination? That the Wall Street Journal doesn't want her on it, out of a "fear" that she'll "silence conservative voices." Oddly, both the One America News Network and Newsmax have supported her nomination! If the Wall Street Journal thinks net neutrality (which Ms. Sohn would help restore) amounts to "censorship" of "conservative voices," that's their problem, because net neutrality -- which would prevent internet service providing corporations from delivering some files faster than others -- is not censorship. Like "conservative" and "socialist," "censorship" has become a word its users torture until it tells them what they want to hear. But we don't do any kind of torture here.

Around the table: your smartphone spies on you! And other horrible truths.

Obscure phone-tracking corporation proved its mettle in the burgeoning field of surveillance by spying on NSA and CIA cellphones. When you read, hopefully not for the first time, that "(c)ountless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers, typically without your knowledge or informed consent," I hope you remember that our FCC enacted some pretty good privacy-protection rules in 2016, only to have 2017's Republican Congress repeal them through the notorious "Resolution of Disapproval" process. I hope you remember that when Republicans pretend to "fight big tech," too. (And buying data may be easier than getting a warrant, but they're using our money to do it, which means we ought to get more say over the whole process.)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: our government hardly knows where all that military aid to Ukraine is really going, raising the possibility that it could "wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the US did not intend to arm." If you're thinking this is exclusively a feature of a Biden Administration, I've got three words for you: Osama bin Laden. In Ukraine specifically, this could mean white supremacist jerks who fight alongside good Ukrainians against the Russians now but just wait until after this is all over. The specter of a far right-wing governing coalition across Europe ain't as far off as we'd like, and you can't count on the likes of Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron to stand against it.

When I hear that our Justice Department says conditions at the Parchman state prison in Mississippi violate our Constitution, I shudder to think what those conditions might be -- and what conditions our DOJ has said nothing about! "Mississippi violated the rights of persons incarcerated at Parchman by failing to keep them safe from physical violence and for failing to provide constitutionally adequate mental health care," our DOJ says, but I wish that sounded substantially different from other prisons! Even worse: Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves can do no better in response than to say they've reduced the population at Parchman and they're working toward getting more officers!

So Texas Gov. Greg Abbott spent $4.2 billion in taxpayer money for, ah, "enhanced" truck inspections earlier this month, and guess how many immigrants they caught or drug seizures they made? Zero and zero, respectively. That's per Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who was trying to put lipstick on this pig by saying Mr. Abbott "successfully persuaded Mexico states (sic) to enhance security on their side of the border." I'm sure that's not why he did it, though. He did it because it created drama. That's the only reason right-wing politicians do anything anymore.

In a related note, I hear that a Republican memo purports to be a "Road Map for Attacking Democrats on Immigration." They say Democrats shouldn't attack Republicans if they want to win the midterms, but why doesn't anyone issue similar warnings to Republicans? I've only been asking this question for at least a decade now. And I've got another question: why would voters who saw through the nakedly racist opportunism of the "caravans" in 2018 fail to see through Republican opportunism about the same thing in 2022? I sincerely hope that after the second week of November we can all say that was a rhetorical question.

Finally, I understand that Barack Obama told Stanford University that he didn't fully realize "how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories, despite having spent years being a target of disinformation myself." Alternate headline: "Obama Regrets Not Fighting Hard Enough for Civilization."

Action: concerning monopolies, transparency, drug prices, social media, data collection, and conservation.

Long story short: tell our FTC and DOJ to enact the most vigorous anti-monopoly policies possible, tell our SEC to force big investment corporations to be more transparent, tell President Biden to use all his legal power to lower prescription drug prices, tell big social media corporations to detoxify our news feeds, tell Zoom to stop trying to collect more data on users under the guise of "reading emotions," and tell our Interior Department to restore endangered species protections for gray wolves. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to enact the most vigorous anti-merger guidelines possible. It's pretty simple: mergers kill competition, kill jobs, and raise prices, as we're seeing with three shipping magnates controlling 80% of the market and dictating terms to the rest of us, as we see when big corporations all but announce they pass on higher costs to good Americans to keep the outrageous profits coming, as we see in a hundred relatively small sectors of the economy (semiconductors, lab supplies, local media) where monopolies become the lynchpins that undo much larger sectors, and as we see when investment funds all but say they're looking to invest in monopolists über alles. All that's evil, so we've gotta fight it, and we've gotta fight it to the death.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission to force big investment corporations to be more transparent about their fees and their performance. Folks liken such transparency to a good nutrition label that helps you avoid foods with too much salt or fat or added sugars, and it's a good analogy; that must be why the banksters hate it so much! Banksters would prefer you just trust them that they can make your investments grow faster than anyone else, when their track record (particularly vis a vis state pension funds!) suggests they not only don't do better than the others but they charge you more than the others. You like to make more money, right? Then you ought to support more transparency from banksters.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to use his already-existing lawful power to lower prescription drug prices for good Americans. When even the New England Journal of Medicine tells you to do it, maybe you ought to listen! You can likely enumerate the ways Mr. Biden could do it -- he could seize patents of taxpayer-funded drugs (i.e., most of them) and let more generic manufacturers make drugs, or he could start investigating price-gouging among drug manufacturing corporations -- but he could also simply immunize our government from patent infringement suits. Hey, drug prices are going up way, way faster than (even today's!) inflation, and people die as a result, so I say do it all, and do it now.

The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell big social media corporations to "fix the feed," which is to say get the hate and lies out of our social media newsfeeds. They can do this in a couple of ways: first, by fixing or getting rid of the algorithms that ensure that obnoxious, hateful crap gets prioritized in your newsfeed; second, by hiring more people in order to monitor obnoxious, hateful crap on social media; and third, by disclosing their efforts in these directions. They'll hate to do all of that, because it's more work for them and more money they'll have to pay other workers! But making a mania of squeezing more money out of less work is more surely the mark of decadence than any celebrity drama you see on TMZ. This mania hurts America, and all civilizations, in every conceivable way, which is why we consecrate our lives to stopping it.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Zoom to stop scrutinizing emotions on Zoom calls. Zoom is, guess what, trying to use AI to read our emotions so they can create yet another datastream they can sell to third-party data brokers, but guess what else? Like facial recognition technology, their emotion-reading technology sucks! I mean, why not use AI to read the bumps on our heads, or better yet, measure our craniums? Facial expressions don't all say one thing or another, as anyone who's ever heard of sarcasm knows, and if they think an algorithm can read us pretty well, I got some everyday jerks that algorithms have helped turn into frothing white supremacists to show them. And not for nothing, but Zoom ain't the only game in town for video conferencing. But we'll try the Big Stick of Bad PR before resorting to boycotts.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Interior Department to restore protections to gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act. The gray wolf may not be endangered per se, but our ESA has never been about waiting until things got dire for a species before stepping in, and with Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana embarking on state-sanctioned, testosterone-addled wolf hunts this year, things are getting pretty near dire, even if our ESA has helped the gray wolf come back from the brink over the last half-century. I mean, there's protecting your cattle, and then there's killing one-fifth of the wolves in your state in a mere two and a half days, as Wisconsin has lately "accomplished." I'm not particularly anti-hunting, but I am anti-stupid, and states are acting dan stupid about wolves.

Around the table: featuring some of the unexamined assumptions that make us miserable.

Matt Stoller finds the failure of three recent DOJ antitrust cases to be a good sign for our efforts to break free from monopolies, partly because, well, you don't make good law if you don't risk losing cases, but also because two of those cases will get new trials thanks to hung juries, and also because our DOJ demonstrated that wage-fixing violates antitrust law (even if they couldn't convict on particular price-fixing accusations). Mr. Stoller wonders if juries won't convict because "cheating has become normalized in American culture, so people have a tough time viewing stealing from your employees as crime." That could be, but it could also be that we've all conditioned ourselves to value winning above all else -- as Mr. Stoller suggests, folks don't want to lose, even if losing would prepare the ground for future victory -- and thus juries "pick winners" when they should be doing justice.

Ho hum, prime time TV news programming goes on and on about how rising wages, not corporate greed, causes inflation. Again, folks have just accepted profits-über-alles as a feature of the landscape -- as it most certainly was not when corporate taxes and taxes on executive salaries were much higher and stock buybacks were illegal -- and erasing corporate profits from the discussion pits worker against consumer, meaning it pits American against American, just like they want it. When we fight each other, of course, we don't fight the real enemy. And yet even as our "liberal" media would blame your year-old $1400 checks for inflation more than they'd blame corporate profiteering, not even three in 10 Americans think corporations have "no choice" but to raise prices in the absurd manner they've been doing.

Oh look, now Amtrak wants to use our TSA's notorious "no-fly" list to stop good Americans from using our national train system. As Paul Craig Roberts has said, if a "no-fly" list has a million people on it, why aren't we having terrorist attacks involving planes every day? I'd also point to the notorious "Interstate Crosscheck" database, which deregistered voters for the heinous crime of having the same name as a citizen of another state, thus depriving them of their right to vote before charging them with any kind of "voter fraud." Thus it's not a "risk" that "limited information provided by Amtrak will result in inaccurate watchlist match results," but a certainty. And then, I guess, our government will squeal NASHUNAL SECURITEEZ!!!! so that anyone wronged by the "no-fly" list can't redress their grievance in court. Funny how that works.

Here's some good news: an Atlanta, GA Apple Store becomes the first one to file for a union, with Apple employees in at least six others looking to do same. If you're thinking that maybe $20/hour is already good enough for "those workers," you might want to try making it in Atlanta on $20/hour! Apple has 272 stores in the United States, so Apple workers have a long way to go to reach the levels of Starbucks organization, even, but I wish them the best. And I suspect that Apple's anti-union arguments will be even stupider than Starbucks's have been -- and, speaking as a long time Mac user, I also suspect they'll be a lot more condescending.

And now for another exciting edition of "The Headline Says It All": "McConnell and McCarthy Talked a Big Game About Dumping Trump After January 6, Then Did Nothing Like the Cowards They Are." Mr. McConnell, in particular, might like to more closely study the example of fellow Kentucky Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper (served 1946-49, 1952-55, and 1956-73), who famously told Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, after Mr. Taft suggested he should vote the way the party wanted him to vote, that he represented the people of Kentucky, not the party. I kid, of course -- Mitch McConnell is as empty and soulless a human being as has ever lived, and would never do anything for any reason other than power. (Later, Mr. McCarthy denied ever having said he'd dump Mr. Trump, even after the world learned his comments existed on tape. What a great Speaker he'll be!)

Finally, I can't say I'm against the Florida law that dismantles the "special district" basically run by the Walt Disney Corporation, but I notice the law wouldn't dismantle the district until June of 2023, or nearly eight months after the election in which the bill's biggest booster, Gov. Ron DeSantis, is running! Since the district's disappearance means over $150 million in higher taxes annually for Orange and Osceola counties starting next year, I'd say that's not exactly a profile in political courage. Maybe a campaign ad from his eventual opponent can frame it as such! Or an ad could talk about forcing those two counties to raise taxes next year in the larger context of the drama Mr. DeSantis constantly foments. There's a winning argument here, if Democrats would but make it.

Around the table: full of helpful reminders and helpful warnings.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) says Democrats will lose midterm elections if they don't do "big big things" "that are both badly needed and very popular with all Americans." You know, like we've been saying for a while, but still, it's good to hear a Democratic Senator say it. It's also good to hear a Democratic Senator say "Democrats cannot bow to the wisdom of out-of-touch consultants who recommend we simply tout our accomplishments." This is the woman who won re-election in 2018 by 30 points without running a single campaign ad on TV! Which at least one out-of-touch consultant then said was a big mistake if she wanted to run for President. Sexism sucks.

Alex Pareene provides yet another helpful reminder that right-wingers fully understand how journalism works, but simply don't want anyone to actually do it. "This new right fundamentally doesn’t want 'newsgathering' to happen," he writes. "They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda." As late as 2006 you couldn't get away from right-wingers who insisted, in America, that a journalist's only job was to write down what the President said and report it. I didn't think it could get any worse than that; as usual, I was far too optimistic.

When you confront the headline "Southwest Missouri high school teacher accused of using critical race theory loses job," I wouldn't blame you for thinking you mean she wasn't even "convicted"? But then, using a worksheet called "How Racially Privileged Are You?" isn't a crime, even if it makes some parents sad, and boy does the school come off as a bunch of cowards! Ms. Morrison refuted all their arguments and still heard but I'm hearing you're teaching CRT. Too many people value what they're "hearing" over what is. And some parents need to grow up.

If you needed more evidence of how cool Prince was, now you can watch the Purple One defend striking public school teachers as an 11-year-old boy in 1970. The Minneapolis public school system had a world-famous music program, which not only produced Prince and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and (of course) Morris Day but also Hüsker Dü and Alexander O'Neal who could sing a phone book. (Seriously! First time I heard "Saturday Love" I said is that Howard Hewitt?)

When I hear that "anti-woke" "warrior" David McCormick not only condemned "structural bigotry" right after the George Floyd shooting but went out of his way to make transgender folk more welcome at his hedge fund than anywhere else, all I can say is, well, buh-bye, David McCormick. Such are the wages of trying to con knuckle-draggers into voting for you. Now Pennsylvania Republicans can either have the Trump-certified candidate (Mehmet Oz) or one of the candidates Mr. Trump will happily certify if they win the primary (Jeff Bartos or Kathy Barnette).

Finally, I know Ted Cruz thinks he's funny when he says that Disney's (recent) opposition to Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law will lead one day to "Mickey and Pluto going at it," but he's not funny just like he wasn't funny when he was bashing Lisa Simpson, and Jesus Mary and Joseph one does get tired of slippery slope arguments. It's bad enough that folks still think homosexuality somehow leads to bestiality somehow, like a dog could conceivably consent to have sex with a human, but to assert that a rare corporate stand against bigotry will lead to the depiction of animal sex in a cartoon is ludicrous. I'd call it surreal, but surrealism has more rules than this.

Action: concerning drug prices, billionaire taxes, labor, forced arbitration, free tax filing, and pollution in public lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices, pass a Billionaire's Income Tax, allow Congressional staffers to organize, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, let working families file with the IRS for free, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks 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.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices using the reconciliation process. Since Republicans aren't going to help! Republicans think they're a lock for getting our House and Senate back, so they're just going to prevent anything good from happening, like that doesn't hurt people! You know who else needs to hear this message, though? Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Bob Menendez of New Jersey, that's who! They're not going to listen to anyone but their own constituents -- or, if they can get away with it, just their big donors! -- but if enough of their colleagues hear it, that might help light a fire under their asses. People like that don't do the right thing until they have to.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire's Income Tax and start taxing wealth the way we tax regular income. Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) will leap forward to tell you that we've never taxed that way, but of course there is a little thing called the Estate Tax, and anyway we need to start taxing these people that way, because they run roughshod over the rest of us. And these billionaires don't ever have to sell the property that makes them wealthy because banks will give them cheap loans to live on! Nice work if you can get it! Now, don't brook any nonsense from House Reps that "it's not worth doing because it won't pass the Senate." Even if it doesn't, it's still worth it to put our Senators on the spot.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation allowing Congressional staffers to organize for better pay and working conditions, specifically by repealing Congress's exemption from our labor laws. Congressional staffers get paid $30,000 to $40,000 annually in one of America's most expensive cities to work 60 to 80-hour weeks -- plus many of them have second jobs! -- and this means that most of the folks who work as staffers are folks who come from wealthy families, and don't we have enough wealth being slung around in Congress? If Congressional staffers can organize for higher pay and shorter work weeks, then more folks from all walks of life will be able to work there, and that would do us a lot better than having Congressional staffers who don't really understand how hard most Americans have it.

Public Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Public Justice's email missive puts the whole case pretty succinctly: "(f)orced arbitration is rigged...it basically allows big companies to avoid accountability when they do something wrong. And you have no say! If you make a claim, you can’t go to court. You can’t get a fair hearing. And 9 times out of 10, you will lose. And there is nothing you can do about it." Unless you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, that is! Don't believe the hype that "the average arbitration award is x thousand dollars," because if you lose (and you very likely will), your "average award" will be zero dollars. Plus the corporation can sue you back and win! And that's no way to get justice in America.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make tax preparation easy and free for all Americans with relatively simple tax needs. If you work for a living, our government should send you a pre-filled tax form (since they know, from employer-provided W-2 and 1099 forms, how much you make), and indeed our government has the legal authority to do that! So why don't they? Bet you can't guess -- because big tax-filing corporations don't want them to! And as you know from the news, the "deal" they made with our government "mandates" that these corporations provide free tax filing to low-income earners, but good luck finding it, not least because these corporations do their damnedest to steer you away from it! If you don't have investments so complex they look like corruption, you should be able to file your taxes for free.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5533/S. 2960, the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act. Keeping single-use plastics out of our national parks? You mean, we don't do that already? Indeed, we do not. And thus our National Park Service must deal with some 70 million pounds of trash every year, and you can bet that plastic bags and plastic wrap and plastic water bottles make up a sizable chunk of that; a review of Yellowstone National Park nearly a decade ago found that plastic bottles comprised half that park's waste stream. And we didn't know this when we embraced the shatterproof bottle, but plastics have become so ubiquitous that we now ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic some way or other every single week. Talk about unintended consequences!

Around the table: they're banning *math textbooks*! And other absurdities.

When I heard that the Florida Department of Education had rejected 41 math textbooks for various reasons, including "references to critical race theory," I found the tale was so absurd I wondered if media outlets were overplaying it. Apparently they are not! Even though Florida also said they'd rejected the math books for "inclusions of Common Core" and "the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics," I noticed they put their objections to critical race theory first, so I guess this really must be mostly about math books containing word problems about Tony and Aisha taking a train together. Banning math books is weapons-grade PR, of course -- for the Democrat who actually uses it! Don't worry about being civil, gang, because Republicans never do.

You won't be surprised to hear that child care and elder care programs can reduce inflation, even though it's the opposite of the Gospel According to Republicans and Joe Manchin. They're still complaining that those $1,400 checks you got a year ago have caused all this inflation, and not the greed of corporations making record profits. Anyway, child care and elder care both cost an arm and a leg -- because what are you gonna do, not get it? -- and thus subsidizing these things can help working families fight the effects of inflation. No, that won't cause more inflation! Remember: corporate greed causes inflation, and we've got tools against that, like good tax policy and strong antitrust enforcement.

When I hear that "Liberal Cities Are Not Immune to Mounting Attacks on Abortion Rights," I remember that cities are actually pretty diverse, and that while a lot of folks in them vote Democrat mainly because the alternative is untenable, not everyone who does that is pro-choice, and the anti-abortion movement can peel some of those folks off, and in the long run maybe even convert them to Free Marketeers. And sadly, though my world is big enough for a liberal anti-abortion group, the "Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising" hangs out with too many right-wing nutjobs to be that group.

Here's something we should be saying a lot more: "Ron DeSantis loves using very young kids as political props." The phrase "using children" should be weapons-grade PR enough, frankly, particularly when you're surrounding yourself with children as you sign anti-abortion legislation and anti-education legislation. It works the other way for him, too, when you recall that he bullied a group of college students into taking their masks off because wearing them, he said, was "COVID theater." That man sure does know all about theater, that's for sure. But not a whole lot about leadership.

At last someone else sees why Ron Johnson keeps winning Senate elections in Wisconsin -- not just because Democrats prepare for victory so badly, but because Mr. Johnson himself sounds like a jerk on right-wing radio but then seems so nice on his TV ads. Something for everyone! Democrats hammering him on how he personally benefited from the 2017 tax "reform" might work, but Democrats showing off his two-faced nature to everyone might also work. Some folks will secretly root for a guy who "sticks it to the man" by getting himself a tax cut -- this, even though the taxpayer is "the man" here -- but folks like liars a lot less.

Finally, I guess I'm not surprised that President Biden has reopened fossil fuel drilling leases on public lands -- legalese aside, the guy can do very little about the corporate greed that's actually driving inflation, but he has to at least look like he's doing something, though giving out a lease doesn't produce more gas tomorrow. But I am a little surprised (and pleased!) that his Administration raised the royalty rate for drilling on public lands by 50%; oil and gas drilling corporations will whine about having to pay the taxpayer more for the privilege of drilling on public lands (i.e., our lands), and sadly that could well mean that President Biden changes his mind! I sure hope not, though. If we're going to have drilling on public lands, let's at least make some bank. And if the "high price of drilling" scares oil and gas drilling corporations away, well, I'll just have to deal with it.

Action: concerning online privacy, child marriage, law and order, education, public water, and plastic pollution.

Long story short: tell the California legislature to pass a bill protecting children online, tell your Congressfolk to pass a child marriage ban, tell our FBI to investigate Jelani Day's death, tell state governments to teach the history of all Americans and not just white ones, tell BlueTriton's Chair to abandon his public water-stealing ways, and tell our government to stop buying single-use plastics. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will, and 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 Senators' phone numbers, where appropriate.

First things first: Sum of Us helps you tell California legislators to pass AB 2273, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which would help keep kids safer online. Specifically, the bill (per its abstract) would set standards for corporations "that creates goods, services, or product features likely to be accessed by children"; these standards would include "considering the best interests of children" at all stages of production and providing clear community and privacy standards, plus the bill would prohibit them from collecting and using kids' personal data. Big tech corporations want to kill the bill, but let's not allow them to have all the say about everything; kids deserve an internet that speaks to their needs, not one that contorts them into "adults" before they're ready, and certainly not one that bombards them with targeted ads before they can handle it.

Change.org helps you tell our Congressfolk to pass a national child marriage ban. Only six out of 50 states have a minimum marriage age of 18, and it doesn't matter that some religions approve of child marriage, because our civilization as a whole does not, because kids can't make adult decisions about consent to sex or marriage, and in any case religious "freedom" doesn't give anyone the "right" to abridge anyone else's rights, which child marriage most certainly does. Also, kids forced into marriage are too young to file for divorce or get into a domestic violence shelter, leaving them no options except abuse and molestation. If we want to earn the mantle of "civilized people," we need to outlaw child marriage; 300,000 children getting married in America between 2000 and 2018 testifies that we need to do better.

Daily Kos helps you tell our FBI to investigate the suspicious death of Jelani Day, a Black graduate student and aspiring doctor who disappeared last August and whose body was found face-down in the Illinois River 60 miles away from his school a week and a half later. That's suspicious enough, but local police declared his death a drowning three weeks after finding him, and claimed to find no evidence of foul play or intoxication, though they found some of his personal items in more than one location a mile away from his car, which had no keys or license plates. Local police have seemed strangely incurious about all of these suspicious events; perhaps our FBI will demonstrate that curiosity this tragedy, and justice, demands. But only if we demand it of them.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell state governments that our schools "must teach American history, not just straight white history." Right-wingers all over America have demanded that schools excise any teaching of American racism that might offend their frail sensibilities; right-wingers have a word for this kind of person (that would be a "snowflake"), but then they rarely demonstrate very much self-awareness. I quarrel, a little, with the petition's metaphor likening these right-wingers to a "squeaky wheel get(ting) the grease." I mean, it is apt, of course, but a better one would be the emptiest wagon makes the loudest noise. Over the decades, right-wingers have embodied this metaphor over and over again with their drama and hysteria. One does tire of it.

Sum of Us helps you tell BlueTriton Chair Dean Metropoulos to stop siphoning off public water everywhere he goes. BlueTriton bought Nestlé's water bottling operation in North America last year and renamed it, but you can't just put lipstick on any old pig, particularly when BlueTriton has kept up the old Nestlé habit of buying up all the public water it can on the cheap so it can put it in bottles and sell it as "spring water" or whatever. Why do we bother petitioning Mr. Metropoulos? I wouldn't blame you for thinking that's a little like petitioning the Riddler or Mr. Freeze, but we petition him to put him on notice that his name may, one day, be mud to future generations. If there are any! I mean, if folks like Mr. Metropoulos get their way, future generations may not have any water to drink unless they're very, very rich!

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our federal government to stop buying single-use plastics. More specifically, you'll ask the General Services Administration, which controls procurement, to prohibit federal agencies from buying these plastic products. Since they pollute the world and cause health problems for so many people and animals! Our federal government is the world's biggest consumer, and if they will stop buying single-use plastic products, then there'll be a lot less demand for them, and then there'll be a lot less of them clogging up landfills and getting into our air and water and bodies. I can already see the headlines on Fox News: Big Government Won't Let Defense Department Buy Bottled Water! But gosh, how did we ever hydrate before bottled water? They hope you don't ask.

Around the table: featuring stories about the power of organizing.

When I hear that far-right Christians aim to redeploy the "Astroturf" stratagem that worked so well for them in Virginia in 2021, I feel compelled to remind everyone that once we reveal such a stratagem (and I'll continue to reveal it as often as I can!) it becomes less effective, and also that as even E.J. Jackson knows, running against Terry McAuliffe isn't the hardest thing a candidate can do. Their stratagem might succeed, though, if Democrats don't point out all the Astroturfing going on in these races. People are too quick to accept that someone they know personally couldn't possibly be part of an Astroturf group! But too many of them are, and borrowing a hedge-trimmer from one of them doesn't make them more "real."

Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone not only digs up evidence that our FBI did, in fact, know a lot about the January 6 attempted coup before it happened, but also reminds us that our FBI professes that it simply doesn't have the legal tools to detect right-wing agitation before it happens but can detect and disrupt more peaceful liberal agitation with laughable ease. Which further reminds us that law enforcement agencies always use events like the January 6 attempted coup to justify even more surveillance power over the American people, when they hardly need it! They just don't focus very much on right-wing protestors, for some reason. Also, they don't seem to need to get warrants very often; there's a reason we get warrants.

On March 29, wind power produced more electricity than either coal or nuclear power for the first time; though not as much as natural gas. I can already hear the right-wingers squeal that TEH BIG GUMMINTZ GIVEZ TEH WELFAREZ TO TEH WINDZ POWERZ!!!!!, as if either coal or nuclear power would be able to provide any power at all without massive federal taxpayer support. Think how much power wind could supply if big corporations had done the smart thing and embraced it long ago! Versus the dumb thing of clinging like grim death to fossil fuel technology that's going to make our planet unlivable. (No, they're not "smart" merely because they've made a lot of money. Try taking money with you to the Pearly Gates.)

Luis Feliz Leon at New York Focus reminds us that the Amazon Labor Union organizing effort in the Staten Island warehouse "broke many of the traditional rules of labor organizing, while making history." The ALU had virtually no funding, no prior experience organizing, and no support from other unions; they also made "amateur missteps" like filing for an NLRB election before having majority card-signing support and refraining from home visits and door-knocking. So how did they win? They organized by talking to workers in break areas and in the cafeteria rather than at home -- since, as one organizer suggests, most folks look at their home as a safe space from work -- and used social media apps to specifically to reach workers whose command of the English language wasn't that great face-to-face. Besides, they're not the first independent union to win! In the '30s, those unions won all the time -- and after ALU won, more established unions supported them.

Mark and Paul Engler at Waging Nonviolence interview Rebecca Tarlau about "What U.S. Organizers Can Learn From Brazil's Landless Workers Movement." "(W)e need to contest power in all spaces of social life" (i.e., not just in the political sphere), "whether that’s in the media or the schools or with the land," and Brazil's Landless Workers Movement has been doing that for decades, whether through gaining permanent settlements or through establishing and maintaining health care clinics, educational curricula, and food processing plants. So they've essentially seized power without very much compromise by providing for their own needs as much as possible and through that service "prefiguring an alternative way of being" -- though when the Black Panthers (among others!) tried something similar in the United States in the '70s, our governments demonized them and our law enforcement took them down.

Finally, Indonesia's Parliament passes a bill criminalizing many forms of sexual violence, the first of its kind in that nation. Many observers think it doesn't go far enough -- it tackles domestic abuse, child marriage, forced marriage, and sexual exploitation but not rape -- while the religious right there complains that it doesn't include proscriptions against extramarital sex (like those guys really want that!) and "deviant" sexual orientations. My father would say if all the extremists are upset, it must be a good bill; I won't go that far, but I will call it progress, even if, as I suspect, getting it passed was (in Ronald Reagan's famous phrase) like crapping out a pineapple.

Action: concerning taxes, law and order, energy security, protecting our democracy, immigration, and copyrights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, oversee FBI investigations more closely, pass the Energy Security and Independence Act and the Protecting Our Democracy Act, support ending Title 42, and reject the SMART Copyright Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to revive the Child Tax Credit expansion that put $250 and $300 checks in the bank accounts of working families. Because that will help people struggling with inflation! Don't believe the Manchinean hype that "expanding the Child Tax Credit caused the inflation in the first place." For one thing, if that were true, inflation would have gone down by now, since the CTC expansion expired almost four months ago. For another, corporate greed causes most of the inflation we're experiencing! Corporate pre-tax profits went up 25% in 2021; recall that inflation was about 7% for the entire year. It's cruel to "get tough" on folks who need help making ends meet, and not to get tough on the powerful people who cause all the problems.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to conduct more stringent oversight of FBI "sensitive investigative matters" -- i.e., investigations of political organizations, religious organizations, public officials, or the media. We learned last month that our FBI allowed more than two errors per investigation on average in 2019, errors that contravened our FBI's own rules about these investigations and included such basic failures as failing to get proper authorization to even start an investigation. Law enforcement officers must answer to the law, and if not to the law, then certainly to internal procedures; we can't let them cut corners, because good Americans get hurt when they do. Sure, it's a "political organization" today, but tomorrow it could be you or I.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7439/S. 4013, the Energy Security and Independence Act, which would amend the Defense Production Act of 1950 so that it would cover energy production in America. Donald Trump will tell you that'd be "black helicopter territory" if our government stepped in and made big corporations produce renewable energy so we wouldn't have to rely on foreign countries so much, but no, it's not "black helicopter territory" for our government to actually insure that we rely on ourselves for our energy needs. And if big corporate CEOs think losing a few million dollars off their annual salaries constitutes "government oppression," I'd like to introduce them to some Russian anti-war protestors who could explain to them what oppression is really like.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which our House passed late last year. That also means contacting Senate Majority Leader Schumer (here's his contact info) and telling him to schedule that vote in the first place! No excuses about this one or that one maybe not voting for it! Hold their feet to the fire! The Protecting Our Democracy Act would prevent Presidential abuses of power like those perpetrated by Mr. Trump during his four notorious years in office, specifically targeting a President's ability to profit from his office and abuse his pardoning power, both of which Mr. Trump surely did. I guess this bill's opponents will yammer on about all that being in the past, ignoring the fact that the past teaches a great deal about what to avoid in the future. Hmm, that sounds almost conservative.

NETWORK, the National Catholic Social Justice Lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to support ending the Title 42 "health care-related" immigrant expulsion policy. President Biden (finally!) announced that he's ending this cruel policy, one former President Trump supposedly enacted to keep COVID out even though Mr. Trump's most devoted supporters then proved they can keep a pandemic going all by their damn selves. But quite a few Democrats have spoken out against this announcement in recent days -- they smell blood, might it be their own? -- but don't believe the hype that Joe Biden's not giving us tools to deal with the influx of immigrants. Those tools are laws and courts; they take a long time to work their will because they serve justice, not the need for second-rate politicians to "look tough."

Finally, No Censorship Filter helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3880, the so-called SMART Copyright Act. The SMART Copyright Act would basically force every internet entity that handles content to install automated filters aiming to catch copyright infringement, but if there's something worse than an overzealous human censor, it's an algorithmic censor that can't be reasoned with, let alone tell the difference between actual infringement and fair use! Seriously, too many politicians think machines can just do anything, when the tech bros feeding them that nonsense just don't want to hire people and pay them and give them health insurance and vacation time and paid family/sick leave and the like. And these tech bros laugh at the politicians they con! We won't be laughing if this bill passes, though.

Around the table: fighting the good fight, part 865.

You may want to see what some of your fellow Americans are telling our FTC and DOJ about how they want stronger antitrust enforcement. First off: in 2010, our FTC received 32 comments about antitrust enforcement rules; so far they've received over 100 times that amount! Second, a lot of these folks really know their stuff, and a lot of them have suffered serious abuse from their monopolist employers; after reading them, you will not be able to tolerate some corporate lobbyist telling you that most public comments come from people who don't know what they're talking about and only corporations really know what's going on.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: a whistleblower informs us that privatized Medicare plans are stealing millions of dollars from Medicare (and therefore the taxpayer, i.e., you and I). You may not read anything that surprises you -- OK, the woman who got diagnosed with prostate cancer might surprise you -- but the "aggressive medical record coding" will likely strike you as a euphemism for "inventing diseases so one can overbill for treatment." Remember that if Republicans take control of Congress, they'll refuse to fund going after Medicare fraudsters because "we can't afford it," just like they did last time. Law and order!

Should I have anticipated that a propagandist would one day slap the word FAKE over real video footage of dead war victims, as Russia has done in its war on Ukraine? Maybe, but if I'd put a detail like that in a short story back in the day, my creative writing professor would have rapped my knuckles. If I'd put in details about TV talking heads describing the dead bodies as "actors" or people Ukrainians supposedly killed after the Russians left to make the Russians look bad -- or about the whole "fact-checking" organ that just regurgitates state propaganda -- he'd still have rapped my knuckles, though he might have at least applauded all the effort I put in. The way things are now, I wouldn't even write satire about any of that.

David W. Moore at FAIR advises us not to trust polls on Florida's notorious "Don't Say Gay" law, mainly because pollsters tend to give folks incomplete information about the law when they ask them about it, rather than simply asking them about it. They give really incomplete information about the law, too -- how many Americans would support it if they knew it actually restricted instruction about sex through 12th grade and forced school counselors to rat on kids who tell them they're gay to their parents? I suspect folks don't actually approve of those things regardless of how they feel about gay and trans students.

Ho hum, TV ad claims that illegal ballot harvesting delivered both of Georgia's U.S. Senate seats to Democrats in 2020 -- as a way of attacking incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp, whom they see as inadequate to the task of fighting "voter fraud." Even the notorious True the Vote, which lodged the ballot harvesting complaint to which the ad refers, would not say the ballots harvested were themselves fraudulent, but of course that's only because saying so absent evidence would invite a lawsuit they'd almost certainly lose. Still, that doesn't prevent the masturbatory rage machine from churning onward, which I think is the whole point anyway.

Finally, people will give you a lot of reasons Donald Trump endorsed J.D. Vance for the Republican nomination in the Ohio Senate race, but let me be the one to say: don't believe any of it! Donald Trump latched on to J.D. Vance because Mr. Vance was starting to gain ground on Josh Mandel in polls, and with the primary less than three weeks away, Mr. Trump didn't want to get left behind, or be seen endorsing a "loser." I especially don't believe that Mr. Trump was "soured" by the Josh Mandel/Mike Gibbons chest-to-chest moment; the only thing that would have "soured" him about it, I would think, would be that it didn't come to actual blows.

Around the table: from Manchinean betrayal to right-wing feelings.

Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone reports on "How Joe Manchin Knifed the Democrats -- and Bailed on Saving Democracy," and even though I'm tempted to say we did kinda see all this happening in real time, it's still good to have the whole story of how Joe Manchin prevented Democrats from passing voting rights reforms in one place. Long story short: Democrats gave him everything he wanted, had every reason to believe they had a deal with him -- and he still betrayed them and, more pertinently, us. I've said this before and I'll say it again: whereas the story of 2009-10 had the entire party as the villain, the story of 2021-22 has Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema as the villains, and that fact will help Democrats at the polls this November.

OSHA data tells us that Amazon warehouses employed 33 percent of all warehouse workers in 2021, but was responsible for nearly half of all warehouse injuries. Also, warehouse injuries jumped 20% at Amazon from 2020 (when they were trying to appear to be on their best behavior, for obvious reasons) to 2021. Also, their serious injury rate is about double that of other warehouses, all because they all think they're engineers and their underlings are mere tools. No wonder they're starting to have some success in unionizing! Regardless of what right-wingers try to tell you, this is the kind of shit people are really tired of. Also too, do we really need that Doctor Who DVD the day after we order it?

Big clothing corporations garner a sizable part of their revenue from credit cards, and "revenue" too often means "usurious late fees and interest rates. Aside from the experience most folks have -- that credit cards are, in the end, usually a burden rather than a boon -- retail workers in this field hate being forced to push credit cards upon customers, sometimes at the rate of one every four customers (at American Eagle). The "rewards" for getting more credit card applications than your co-workers range from a gift card to a stick of gum -- not, you know, health care benefits or comp time or higher pay! All this so that big corporate executives can continue to make a crap-ton of money for doing as little work as possible.

I think too many of us are misconstruing Sen. Charles Grassley's remarks at a Waukon, IA town hall earlier this week -- he didn't actually say he'd vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act; he's probably just saying Republicans won't have a two-thirds majority in House and Senate in 2023, which is the only way Republicans could get a repeal done (since President Biden would veto a repeal effort). Sen. Grassley may well regret actually meeting voters if he's going to get questions like that, though. I mean, "voted to repeal Obamacare 16 times" sure sounds like an attack ad. That's a suggestion, Admiral Franken.

Amanda Carpenter at The Bulwark laments that Pennsylvania Republicans will nominate an election conspiracist for Governor in 2022. And that is profoundly disappointing; I'd hoped Dan Laughlin would at least make me feel bad for voting against him. Instead, we have the guy who bussed people to the January 6 attempted coup, the former U.S. Attorney who's tried to have the stolen election myth both ways, the hanger-on who became an "alternate elector" and demanded a "full forensic audit," and the state Senator who has let the Trumpholes completely cow him. Oh, and Dave White, he of the ad that compares Democrats who criticize his election conspiracy-mongering to crying babies. Of course people like Dave White are the real crybabies, but any of them could win if Josh Shapiro gets complacent the way Democrats do.

Finally, when I hear that "conservatives feel blamed, shamed and ostracized by the media," I'm tempted to say good! It's finally working! Of course, I don't think any of the folks quoted in the article are "conservatives"; I think they're reactionary rageheads. But after 20 years of you hate America and you're a traitor and you're with the terrorists and you're a socialist and you're a Communist and you're the real racist and you're a groomer, they should get down on their knees and thank the Lord that "I’m just done with dealing with people like you" is the worst they get from their friends and co-workers. And their attitude toward our media is worse! Our "liberal" media patronized these fools for decades until Donald Trump finally made doing that toxic, and right-wingers complained about media "bias" "against" them the whole time! And seriously, if right-wingers think they have it bad in America because they can't "be themselves" in the break room, they should try being an anti-war protestor in Russia.

Action: concerning monopolies, health care, pollution, and "liberal" media folly.

Long story short: tell our FTC and DOJ to crack down on mergers, tell your Senators to confirm Alvaro Bedoya to our FTC, tell HHS Secretary Becerra to reduce Medicare premiums, tell Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection to better protect good Pennsylvanians from PFAS chemicals, tell CBS to stop hiring Trump Administration trolls as "news analysts," and tell the Washington Post to stop giving all its oxygen in the education debate to right-wing trolls. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will, and 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 Senators' phone numbers, where appropriate.

The American Economic Liberties Project helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission and our Department of Justice to draw up merger guidelines that will actually encourage competition in America again. With Lina Khan as FTC Chair and Jonathan Kanter overseeing antitrust law at DOJ, our government has actually shown a fervor for doing exactly that, and though our FTC doesn't have a fifth Commissioner installed yet (which see next paragraph), the Administrative Procedure Act doesn't permit our government to simply ignore the popular will when it asks for it on matters like this, or else it'll have to answer in federal court, which, as you probably recall, was how most of Donald Trump's regulatory changes died. And if we make it harder for corporations to merge their way into monopolies, we'll bring inflation down. That's worth doing, right? (Matt Stoller, as usual, provides essential background.)

In a related note! You'll want to call your Senators and tell them to confirm Alvaro Bedoya as the FTC's fifth Commissioner; you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senator's contact info, and you can find Senate Majority Leader Schumer's contact info here, so that you can remind him to schedule a vote on Mr. Bedoya, whose expertise in privacy and technology certainly would help our FTC, since expertise in these issues is, well, lacking in our government generally. Don't believe the hype that Mr. Bedoya has "divisive views," because his views (on protecting kids' online privacy, for example) only divide Our Glorious Elites -- who sincerely believe that no concern of any good American should keep them from making as much money for doing as little work as possible -- from the rest of us.

Both Social Security Works and Drug Prices Are Too High help you tell HHS Secretary Becerra to lower Medicare premiums. Why? Well, specifically because our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) raised Medicare Part B premiums last year, in anticipation of having to cover the exorbitantly expensive and notoriously unproven Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm, which would have cost $56,000 per patient per year. Now, thanks largely to your activism, our CMS has decided it'll only cover Aduhelm for Medicare recipients in clinical trials, but since it's not going to be paying out all that money, it ought to bring premium prices back down. It's only fair! And it was never fair to make everyone pay for a drug our CMS committed to without making sure it even works.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell our state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to enact more vigorous rules protecting the public from PFAS exposure. PFAS chemicals, as you probably recall, are those "forever chemicals" found in all kinds of products which hardly break down once and now pollute our drinking water. You'll find the gnarled hand of PFAS in a lot of cancers, hormone disruption, immune suppression, and kidney disease; our DEP is doing something, at least, but has excluded a few PFAS chemicals from their rule, meaning it doesn't do enough to keep good Pennsylvanians healthy. That's why we're here, though, and remember: if they just flat-out ignore us and only do what big chemical corporations want them to do, we can go after them in court.

Social Security Works helps you tell CBS not to give cush "analyst" jobs to right-wingers who deserve shame and shunning from the rest of America. Still angry that Tha Bush Mobbers got any work after the humiliations they inflicted on America between 2000 and 2008, but still want to see actual conservatives on TV? Well, former Trump Chief of Staff/man who wears glasses so people punch him in the face Mick Mulvaney ain't it. I would never call that man a conservative; I'd call him a reactionary, or a corporatist, or, I'll admit, a few worse things. And note well that CBS didn't even mention which Administration he'd served under the first time they put him on the air! That means they know they're doing wrong. Which makes our duty to fight their wrongdoing even more urgent.

Finally, FAIR helps you tell the Washington Post to stop letting right-wing bigots have all the say about everything in their articles about education. The title of their April 5 article didn't promise a whole lot to begin with -- "Teachers Who Mention Sexuality Are 'Grooming' Kids, Conservatives Say," and I still think anyone accused of "grooming" who isn't actually grooming should sue. Then, 13 paragraphs later, you finally hear an opposing point of view. I guess the Post will respond "well, we were reporting on what conservatives said," which a) they're not conservatives, they're reactionaries! and b) why not focus on what regular folks say -- including gay and trans kids! -- rather than right-wing trolls who pollute every pond they wade in?

Around the table: featuring rich folks' tax avoidance and Democrat weakness.

And now ProPublica lists America's 400 highest earners from 2013-18 and the tax rates they paid. How do they get away with paying so little? Well, thanks to Tha Bush Mobb's 2003 tax "reform," we tax investment income at much lower rate than the rest of income, even though it's all, you know, income. And a lot of rich folks donate stocks, which means they get to deduct the stocks' value from their taxes without even selling it and paying taxes on it. Nice work if you can get it! The 400 highest earners pay an average of 22%, which rate is higher than most other folks -- but most other folks pay more in payroll taxes, and 22% of a small pile ain't the same as 22% of a hundred-times-higher pile, particularly when having 100 times more than the next guy doesn't mean you need 100 times the food and shelter. I'll keep explaining that until all the haters shut up like they should.

Per Politico, Democratic politicians are adopting "firmer postures on law and order." Does this mean Democrats are, at long last, demanding that polluters and banksters get their just desserts when they inflict massive injury on our civilization? I kid, of course -- for too many Democratic politicians, as for too many "liberal" media hacks, "law and order" only ever means "putting more Black folks in jail and then doing the helicopter dance about it." (Also, could it be that we're seeing an "uptick" in crime in 2021 over 2020 because we were in lockdown in 2020? Again, I kid: of course that's the reason. Can't do too much burgling when you're sheltering in place because you're afraid you'll die if you don't.)

Gallup puts six separate climate change solutions to Americans, and found that they approve of all of them by large margins!. More than 70% of Americans approve of tax credits for home installation of clean energy systems, tax breaks for businesses that do same, and higher fuel efficiency standards for autos; as Newt Gingrich would say, if 70% of the people want something, they should get it. Of course, as we know, none of this matters nothing to the crowd that intones about lasting change and the importance of bipartisanship. But that just means we have to get in their grills more. (Even strict methane limits gets 62% approval; remind folks that methane leakage deprives good Americans of both energy and royalties -- when corporations drill for gas on public lands, that is -- and I suspect that number goes way up.)

I wouldn't get too down about polling in Nevada showing Democratic incumbents (including Sen. Cortez-Masto, whom I've always liked) running behind their Republican challengers, not just because it's only April and not just because they still might get actually unelectable challengers, but also because what one observer identifies as a handicap to those incumbents -- that "it is very difficult to convince undecideds to vote for you when they remain undecided despite telling us that they are very interested in voting in this election" -- is, frankly, just as much a handicap to the challengers. The undecideds who are "very interested in voting in this election" have also thus far looked at Adam Laxalt and remained undecided.

Our Justice Department puts a former Republican staffer in jail for 12 years for running a child porn ring; I have a tough stomach for evil, but I found some of the details here nauseating. So why don't we ever hear about liberals getting jail time for child porn? I won't indulge in any further sarcasm about this, lest some stray ragehead pretend such sarcasm confirms his rage.

Finally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) lashes out at a reporter asking her about the January 6 attempted coup by saying it only happened "one time"! In other news, we only dropped one H-bomb on Hiroshima. Later she lashed out at coverage of her initial lashing out, accusing our media of fomenting "drama" like she's not a wholesale dealer in drama herself! Between this and her police report on Jimmy Kimmel, I'm sure she thinks she's had a good week. But if her eventual Democratic opponent (who will likely be absurdly well-funded) gets even 35% in her heavily-gerrymandered district in 2022, I'd start putting that district on my watch list.

Action: concerning insulin, monopolies, privacy, banksters, and media.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act; tell your Congressfolk to pass the Open App Markets Act and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, reject the Kids Online Safety Act and the SMART Copyright Act, and pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act; and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: our House passed H.R. 6833, the Affordable Insulin Now Act, earlier this month, so now's the time to tell your Senators to pass this bill as well; you can find their phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page. Also, you can find contact information for Senate Majority Leader Schumer here, and tell him to schedule a vote on the bill post-haste. Brook no excuses! Nobody cares if it "has the votes"! Democrats act like it's a mortal sin to lose votes, but sometimes the best way to win a vote in the long term is to lose it in the short term! Won't Ron Johnson's opponent, or Rand Paul's, want to run ads about their refusal to stop price-gouging of diabetics? And won't Mark Kelly and Raphael Warnock (who's sponsored the Senate version) want something to run on? This is Politics 101.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act, and H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Both these bills would stop big tech corporations from herding you toward their chosen products, versus letting you get the products you'd like, and note well that the big tech corporations are getting all Henny Penny about these bills. As the article points out, when big corporations tell you a bill would result in apocalypse, you can be pretty sure they're more scared than you should be. Getting to use the app store of your choice to get apps? Preventing big corporations from favoring their products in your searches? That hardly sounds like the end of the world -- unless, I guess, you're used to making money without earning it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3663, the so-called Kids Online Safety Act, because (and stop me if you've heard this before!) it wouldn't keep kids safe from online predators so much as it would expand internet surveillance upon them (and, of course, on us as well). The bill would also let state Attorneys General censor websites they deem unsafe for children, which, given so many state-level politicians have done recently, will let them call gay and trans websites "predators." This is exactly the kind of bill that lets politicians look like they're doing something, but actual child molestors and sex traffickers will still circumvent these "protections." Put it like that, and you may move the needle for some of your Senators.

Fight for the Future helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3880, the so-called SMART Copyright Act, which would force every website to put content filters on it. To what end? To "protect copyright," supposedly, but "content filters" are algorithms, and algorithms won't err on the side of fair use, but will censor like mad, which will cripple free speech on the internet, almost like that's the whole idea. How do we protect copyright, then? We do it with the laws we have; the internet is not so unique a thing that existing laws won't protect copyright anymore. And we also do it by forcing corporations to hire people, not machines, to monitor for copyright violations! Corporations wouldn't hire anyone to do anything if they could get away with it, but people are so much more subtle and effective than machines.

Stop Wall Street Looting helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. This bill would stop banksters from buying up corporations and draining the wealth out of them by doing at least four things: 1) making banksters legally liable for the wreckage they leave; 2) closing tax loopholes that make predatory behavior so lucrative; 3) protecting workers first when big corporations go bankrupt; and 4) forcing banksters to reveal costs and returns to investors. A bankster who decides to go all In the Company of Men on some big chain restaurant will think twice about bleeding it dry and leaving working families out on the street if he might go to jail for all of that! And even country club jail time would be more law-and-order than corporations paying a fine and then deducting that fine from their taxes.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. How do you know that Ms. Sohn would do a good job at our FCC? Because Comcast went very far out of its way to lobby against her nomination -- and then got caught trying to hide that fact in its lobbying disclosure forms! Our FCC has been deadlocked 2-2 for over a year, meaning (among other things) no net neutrality restoration like virtually everyone in America wants and no work ensuring that infrastructure money helps build out broadband in rural and urban areas where it's needed. I don't care that Republican Senators will oppose the nomination; I don't care that Kyrsten Sinema might oppose it (since she opposes net neutrality, what a maverick!). I only care about doing the right thing, and making our elected leaders do the right thing, and this right thing is long overdue.

Around the table: why we need Utopian thinking, and other truths.

Paul Rosenberg interviews historian Victoria Walcott about why we need Utopian visions to create social change. Ms. Walcott's new book (Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement) not only reminds us that the rapid-fire successes of the Civil Rights movement only came about through decades of education and agitation, but that young Coretta Scott gave Martin Luther King, Jr., Edward Bellamy's famous Utopian novel Looking Backward while they were still courting, and the book informed much of Dr. King's thinking during the '60s. She also reminds us that the notion that "working-class people had a right to leisure, had a right to intellectual life, had a right to artistic endeavors" was once a Utopian vision. Her book comes out later on this month. (And not for nothing, but far too many of us embraced dystopian thinking during the '80s and '90s, not just because of the right-wing ascendancy in America, but because of our own immaturity.)

Robert McChesney and John Nichols, writing at the Columbia Journalism Review, propose a "Local Journalism Initiative" to revive local news organs. The internet (and monopoly news corporations, don't forget) have basically killed the advertiser-funded model of journalism, so Messrs. McChesney and Nichols would turn to taxpayer funding to restart the web of local news organs that kept us all connected until recently. The Initiative would send a lump sum of money to every county and then that county's eligible voters would vote on which three news organs to spend it upon (though, depending on the vote, more news organs than that could receive the money); the only news organs that could receive that money would be non-profit, county-based, functioning for six months, completely independent of any larger entities, and publish original content at least five days weekly. All that's for folks who read "taxpayer funding" and saw only the spectre of totalitarianism -- and for folks who think the BBC's failures mean NO GUBMINT INVOLVEMENTZ EVAHZ!!!!!!

From the "He's Not Wrong!" file: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wants a "strategic pause" on negotiations over the COMPETES Act, saying that Jeff Bezos shouldn't get a "$10 billion bailout to fuel his space hobby." And they say there are no populists on the left! Of course there are; our "liberal" media just ignores them. But the way he puts it is the way we should all put it, not just because nobody actually likes "bailouts," but because once right-wingers weaponize a word or a phrase, it's only right that we should take the words from them and point them back at them. (His repurposing of Sen. Manchin's "strategic pause" phrase is just icing on the cake here.)

Iowa judge rules that former one-term Rep. Abby Finkenauer can't appear on the Iowa Democratic Senate ballot in early June, because a few of the signatures she gathered for the campaign have no dates on them. Losing this case by literally three signatures sounds petty, but if you're that close to the line (Iowa requires a certain number of signatures, but also requires that at least 100 of them come from at least 19 different counties), you didn't do your job. Overall, I'd say this is no great loss. And it's also a boon for Admiral Mike Franken, who's been all over my Facebook feed saying how bad Fox News is for his soldiers, which sure doesn't make me hate him.

I'll admit I was surprised that Donald Trump endorsed Mehmet "Dr." Oz for Pennsylvania's Senate seat this year -- I'd figured he'd just prefer to wait to see who won and then pretend that was his choice the whole time. David McCormick's road to the nomination just got a lot harder -- and, ah, nobody really thinks Rick Santorum's quickly-issued endorsement will save him, right? Rick Santorum lost his last statewide election by 18 points 15 years ago and he was the incumbent! -- but I can't say Jeff Bartos's road to the nomination got that much harder; one could see benefits and drawbacks to having only one opponent he can call a carpet-bagger. If Mr. Oz is the nominee, then Republicans may not have as easy a time saddling John Fetterman with the story of the Black man he chased down with a gun, since their guy basically said on TV that we'll have to sacrifice more children to the economy. (Also, don't believe that the Trump brain-trust is having a "meltdown" over this endorsement. It's always drama when right-wingers fight in public, and of course it's bad drama.)

Finally, this just may be my favorite headline so far this year: "U.S. Didn’t Expect Major Explosions When an ISIS Bomb Factory Was Bombed." The article describes "a flawed 'collateral damage estimate' before an airstrike that killed scores of Iraqis in 2015," but (and I know this will come as a shock to you!) I don't think stupidity explains this mistake; I think malice does. Not in the I WANTZ TO KILLZ TEH NONWHITEZ PEEPULZ!!!! sense, but in the sense that you find it harder to prove to everyone you're "tough on terror" if you pass up targets "merely" because they might literally blow up and kill innocent people. I'm not sure I can say that's better, though. (And brace yourself for yet another iteration of nobody could have predicted in one of the post-strike assessments.)

Action: concerning anti-war protestors, law and order, pipeline safety, climate change, mercury emissions, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell the Russian government to stop hurting antiwar protestors, tell the Biden Administration to actually lead on trying Mr. Putin before the ICC, tell the Biden Administration to give up its fascination with "carbon capture" technology already, tell our EPA to bring back strong mercury emissions rules, and tell Travelers Insurance to stay away from Arctic drilling projects. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Roots Action helps you tell the Russian government to stop hurting Russian antiwar protestors. The news is full these days of stories of Russian citizens spouting pro-war propaganda, but there's a reason for that: the Russian government arrested all of its anti-war protestors and detained them! In America, our government just laughs at you when you protest them, but in Russia as in many other nations, you could lose your freedom, your livelihood, or your life. They probably count themselves as "civilized" because they don't just shoot them dead in the street! But it takes more than that to be civilized. And not for nothing, but if you've ever been called "traitor" for opposing the Iraq war, then Russian anti-war protestors are your brothers and sisters, and they need your help now more than ever.

Win Without War helps you tell the Biden Administration to lead the effort to put Vlad the Bad on trial at the International Criminal Court for war crimes against Ukraine. I don't need to recount the various war crimes Mr. Putin has committed against Ukraine; you can see them on the TV and on the internet. But despite what Mr. Biden has said, apparently off the cuff, our government generally doesn't have any appetite for prosecuting war crimes at the ICC, lest someone one day prosecute our leaders for war crimes! That's why we've got to speak out, and make no mistake, we're not just fighting Mr. Putin here; we're also fighting a future Donald Trump Administration (or a worse one!) when it enables our troops to commit rape and torture and mass murder in some foreign land to distract from some other evil they're committing against the American people.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell the Biden Administration that "carbon capture" technology is not a climate change "solution." What's wrong with "carbon capture," which aims to trap carbon emissions and store them? It never captures the amount of carbon they say it will, and big corporations use it as an "energy source" only to get more oil out of the ground. Carbon capture proponents will say it should be part of an "all of the above" energy strategy, but stupid ideas should never be a part of any strategy, ever. And if enough of us tell our government to scuttle its carbon capture dreams, our government will eventually have to explain to a federal court why they ignored us. Our recent experience in this area has suggested that wouldn't go well.

Environment America helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous mercury pollution rules possible. Environment America's email missive puts it most succinctly: "When power plants burn coal, mercury is released up the smokestack. That toxic mercury then rains down into our soil and waterways, poisoning fish and threatening our health. Mercury pollution is linked to increased risk of neurological illnesses and nerve damage. Kids are especially vulnerable to the impacts of mercury and can suffer severe developmental issues." Our EPA had a pretty good mercury rule once, and it cut mercury emissions by 85% between 2012 and 2016; I bet you just can't guess what happened next. Well, he's gone now, so now it's time to undo all his evil works.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell Travelers Insurance to refuse to insure oil and gas drilling projects in the Arctic. Because drilling in the Arctic is not only fraught with danger -- the inevitable oil spills are harder to clean up in that frigid region -- but because drilling in the Arctic will threaten actual, thriving industries, like Alaska's famous salmon industry. And oil drilling ain't just about digging a hole and shoving a well into it; it also involves clearing trees, paving roads, and running pipelines, all of which disturb and destroy ecosystems. And not for nothing, but given that Alaska already pumps out a ton of oil and more Arctic drilling doesn't promise that much more, think maybe big corporations just want to ruin protected areas? And should we encourage that kind of immaturity?

Around the table: featuring yet another parade of pretenders!

As Hungarian Prime Minister/irredeemable asshole Viktor Orban proves even harder to dislodge than Bibi Netanyahu, the American right-wing press heralds his most recent re-election "as a victory against secularism and wokeness" and "an example for the Western world." I've always said we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society, but Mr. Orban is the very emblem of that decadence, not a warrior against it. And all the folks who think the absurdly high costs of rent, college, child care, and health care aren't the "real" problem with our society, but some kid who prefers "they" as a pronoun is? They're nothing more than Useful Idiots for decadence.

Cory Doctorow asserts that "gig companies" are either "violating employment law, or they’re violating antitrust." "(A) neglected -- and powerful -- aspect of antitrust is its prohibition on 'vertical restraint': when a company seeks to control the business of its suppliers," he writes, and when corporations like Uber and Doordash prevent their "contractors" (who are their suppliers, essentially) from working for other corporations or setting prices they can charge customers, that's "control(ling) the business of its suppliers." So: big gig corporations violate minimum wage and health care laws if they call their employees "employees," and violate antitrust law if they call them "contractors." They obviously counted on never seeing another President who'd go after monopolies. Ha ha!

For those of you keeping score at home, Starbucks workers at 200 stores have now filed for union elections, with at least 13 of them successfully forming one. Starbucks has nearly 9,000 stores in the United States (with close to 6,500 more that it licenses to operate within other stores), but note well that workers hit the 100-store milestone in close to six months and then hit the second 100 in a hair under seven weeks. Starbucks is still pretty powerful, and surely can peel off inattentive workers with even the stupid arguments they've made so far, so I wish these folks the best in their efforts to organize one of the largest chain-store corporations in America.

This article describing Congressional candidate Daniel Lee's work on the Culver City Council successfully enacting rent control, tenant protection, and single-family home zoning ordinances during the last few years may be even more valuable revealing the workings of one of Mr. Lee's main opponents, the notorious "assassin journalist" Ron Bassilian. (So does he shoot journalists, or is he a journalist who shoots other people? The world may never know.) Mr. Bassilian founded Protect Culver City -- which sure sounds innocuous enough, until you ask from whom -- and describes himself as a "moderate," but not only did he write an early "alt-right" tract and spew racist filth on Twitter, he just so happens to be most energized by things that also offend Our Glorious Elites, who don't want any of the little people to tell them they can't charge whatever they want for rent! In short, he's another Useful Idiot for corporate power pretending to be jes' folks.

When you read about Great Plains farmers fighting the prospect of a network of CO2 pipelines crossing their land, with the aim of pushing carbon emissions deep into the ground like that's going to undo climate change, you may be compelled to wonder what all the "salt of the earth" types who preen in Congress think about that. Don't they love the small farmer above all else? Don't they have a unique connection to those people, and to the land? More likely these peacocks will dismiss the grievances of actual small farmers as "special interest agitation" or conflate them with the Lakota "terrorists" who have fought alongside small farmers against previous pipelines. (And not for nothing, but most corporations won't even sequester the "recovered" emissions in the ground, but use them in future fossil-fuel projects.)

Finally, Stanford University engineers develop solar panels that can work at night. Solar cells actually have a lower temperature than the air around them at night, so by attaching a thermoelectric generator to a solar cell, you can produce a small amount of electricity. While some observers say you can't produce very much electricity this way, the Stanford engineers say they see "no intrinsic difficulties" in scaling up their product so that it can produce a lot of power; I suspect the truth is in the middle, which would still represent progress. Now watch the Fox News crowd guffaw over the prospect of "solar panels at night," like they think their own ignorance is a power source.

Action: concerning clean water, forced arbitration, scientific integrity, corruption, and plastic pollution.

Long story short: tell your Philadelphia City Council to replace lead-contaminated drinking fountains, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act and the Scientific Integrity Act, ban members of Congress from trading in defense stocks, investigate corruption allegations against Postmaster General DeJoy, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks 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.

Philadelphia residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your City Councilmember to pass Bill # 220221, which would force the city school district to replace all drinking fountains in schools with lead-filtering ones by 2025. That's because a recent study found 98% of Philly school drinking fountains had lead in them, and recall that no amount of lead in drinking water is safe, and that any amount of lead a child ingests can cause brain damage. So doing something about this shouldn't be this difficult, particularly since the American Rescue Plan Act delivered an extra $1.1 billion to Philly public schools and the district would only have to spend (per Penn Environment) around $6 million of that to fix the problem. But politicians won't do the right thing unless we demand it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. I don't want to downplay the importance of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act; it is a major piece of legislation, and I don't think I ever described the Affordable Care Act with that phrase. But why not press your advantage? Forced arbitration is unjust in every contract, for every reason -- and if arbitration is so great, why do corporations force you to use it? If you want to band together in a class action suit with other similarly-wronged folks, why should corporations get to stop you? Because they "deserve" more say than you? They don't -- but they'll get it, if we don't speak out.

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 849, the Scientific Integrity Act. The Scientific Integrity Act would force Executive3 branch agencies to create (and enforce!) a scientific integrity plan that keeps politics out of scientific decisions. After all, we just had President Troll pack EPA scientific boards with corporate polluter hacks, and that's not the kind of thing that free people should have to put up with. The bill would also keep political employees from muddying up scientific data and give whistleblowers more power to expose wrongdoing. Oh, and it ain't just about the EPA: our Food and Drug Administration sure hasn't earned a reputation for sobriety as of late, what with their greasing the skids for the Alzheimer's drug that may not even work. So, yeah, let's put a stop to that kind of thing.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban members of Congress from trading in defense stocks. Why can't we cut the defense budget, even though we spend more money than the next 8 nations combined and still never feel secure? It couldn't be because nearly 50 members of Congress have almost $7 million in investments in defense contracting corporations, could it? I'm still appalled how cheaply people can be bought -- yes, $7 million is a lot of money even when divided among 50 individuals, but you know that's a drop in the budget next to our annual defense budget, meaning that defense contracting corporations can purchase a lot of legislative power for their buck. We need to make a world where our leaders avoid even the appearance of evil.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy for yet another potential conflict-of-interest, this one concerning the free COVID tests our Postal Service delivered to our houses. Turns out Mr. DeJoy owned stock in one of the corporations that supplied COVID testing kits to the public, and didn't divest himself of said stock; some folks no doubt think this is no big deal, but owning stock in a corporation that might get work from our Postal Service while you're running said Postal Service is an invitation to corruption, the kind of thing our laws proscribe precisely because we don't want such corruption to happen. America may be the get-ahead country, but we don't want it to be the get-over country, and that's why we fight corruption.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5533/S. 2960, the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act, which would ban single-use plastics in our national parks. Not just because you don't want to see that while you're hiking or climbing, but because our national parks protect a lot of our clean air and clean water, not to mention ecosystems you don't see anywhere else. And seriously, how many cheap plastic bags do you need at the Sequoia National Park? There are plenty of alternatives to plastic bottles, coffee cups with plastic lids, and take-out containers, and the internet is anxious to tell you all about them. I suppose some folks must oppose a bill like this, but I suspect they're the same folks who think freedom is mainly all about being as obnoxious as possible and preventing others from shunning you for it.

Around the table: featuring a lot of evil right-wing rich folks and their evil enablers.

Studies say book banning at schools is worse than ever; the American Library Association study finds more attempts to ban books in 2021 than in any of the past 20 years. Naturally, most of these books feature Black, Brown, gay, or trans folks, and the PEN America report found that in literally 98 percent of book bans, school administrators didn't follow established procedures for challenging books -- yes, there are procedures for that! -- which means they're either unusually cowardly or unusually unscrupulous, neither of which is a good look in a civilized society. In a sick, immoral, and decadent society, I guess, it's totally acceptable. Dear Democrats: run against book banning in the midterms.

I can't imagine that "paid relational organizing," which pays folks to talk politics with their friends and neighbors, is a "novel" strategy in electoral politics; I can't tell you how many times I've suspected that the right-wing friends on my Facebook feed are all paid trolls for the Republican Party. The strategy's creators may be right that folks talking to each other means more than the phone calls most of us don't even answer anymore or (even) traditional door-knocking, but they might also be letting their love of technology override their judgment. Boy, it's a good thing that's never bitten Democrats in the ass before! I kid, of course. Even more important than "relational organizing": establishing a record and then running on it. Democrats have established a record, and if it ain't even the record they tried to establish, they can still run on it.

Jesus Mary and Joseph I'm so tired of right-wingers using stupid math not just to assert that TEH RICHEZ PAYZ MOSTZ OFZ TEH TAXEZ!!!!!, but that "the middle class is not really paying any kind of a fair share" of taxes. Setting aside that Ohio Republican Senatorial candidate Mike Gibbons, last seen losing an argument with Josh Mandel, thinks "the top 20%" are all in the same club; setting aside, also, that folks who "pay no taxes" on April 15 still pay plenty of sales taxes, payroll taxes, and state income taxes; setting aside, even, how rich folks shield most of their wealth from taxation by simply never selling stocks and properties and the like: rich folks are supposed to pay most of the taxes; it's how we keep them from taking everything away from us! Saying "the middle class is not really paying any kind of a fair share" of taxes is uniquely stupid, though, and if Democrats have any guts -- again, I kid.

When you hear that Peter Thiel has called Warren Buffet a "sociopathic grandpa" for failing to worship at the altar of crypto, you may be compelled to wonder: why "sociopathic"? Sociopaths have trouble telling the truth, respecting other people's feelings, and telling the difference between right and wrong, plus they also display a tendency toward impulsiveness and risk-taking; how does Mr. Buffet's stated opposition to crypto display any of those things? We never learn, but hey, they're just words, it's not like they mean things. Or is Mr. Thiel merely unable to avoid projecting his faults onto others?

I would not have wished for Will Smith to come along and slap Marjorie Taylor Greene, as Jimmy Kimmel did on his live show the other night, but Ms. Greene should know better than to file a police report about the matter, since a wish for violence isn't the same as a threat of violence -- which she should especially know since she herself has wished, out loud, for "a bullet" to magically make its way "to the head" of Nancy Pelosi. Now at least four individuals need to file libel charges against Ms. Greene for calling them "pro-pedophile," and then we can restore a semblance of law and order to this great land

Finally, when you hear Kyrsten Sinema tell a gaggle of Koch-affiliated "business" interests that "extreme rhetoric" interferes with her efforts to create "lasting results" for Americans, remember what she has really opposed: she has opposed raising taxes on the rich and on corporations back to where they were a mere six years ago, and she has opposed letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, and polls typically tell us that more than 60% of Americans want higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, and that 80% of Americans want Medicare drug price negotiation. Remember, also, that when she says Build Back Better "did not have the support to move forward," remember that the bill didn't move forward because she withheld her support on the above-named matters, matters that did, as I've said, have the support of the American people. So her battle, then, ain't between Kyrsten Sinema and "extremists," but between Kyrsten Sinema and America. (Also too, all her unctuous intonations about "small businesses" are right out of Paul Ryan's playbook from 10 years ago. That's how forward-thinking she is.)

Around the table: tabulating even more right-wing projection.

Uh oh: Tennessee Republicans propose a common law marriage bill between "one man" and "one woman," but forget to include age requirements, such that evil adults could force children into marriages when they're just 13. We know from the whole Roy Moore imbroglio from 2017 that this is a thing with the far right in America! Which reminds me that the QAnon conspiracy theory might also be projection. Let's not lose sight of the fact that this "common law marriage" excludes gays, and our Supreme Court might have something (more!) to say about that. (Hate to pile on, but the phrase "a conscientious objection to the current pathway to marriage in our law" holds no meaning whatsoever, since no one forces you to gay-marry as part of the "current pathway.")

From Sarah Lazare at In These Times we learn "How Workers Used Amazon's Captive Audience Meetings Against the Company." Long story short: be ready to answer their anti-union propaganda! Long story somewhat longer: "Be() just as antagonistic to them as they're being to us" at captive anti-union meetings, then being super-polite (but no less fierce, there's a difference!) at future meetings, plus also plenty of "(w)e are not a 'third party,' we work here" and using the mere fact of captive meetings to organize. A moment perhaps too understated: "People would appreciate being able to sit down and not have to work, but at the same time they thought the meetings were bullshit." I'm sure after being worked like machines, many Amazon workers saw captive meetings more positively merely because their bosses weren't grinding them into dirt for a short time.

When you hear that Republicans are converting Democratic voters at four times the rate Democrats are converting Republican ones in Pennsylvania, you have to remember that this statement would be true if Republicans literally converted four voters and Democrats converted one. The article tells a bunch of stories about hard hats pissed off about inflation and crime, but doesn't present that factoid in any sort of useful context until paragraph nine, when we learn that registered Democrats still outnumber registered Republicans, 4 million to 3.4 million, though we still don't learn how many voters chose no party affiliation, or third-party affiliation). And not until paragraph 14 do we get any hard numbers -- 1,315 Democrats have crossed over in Philadelphia. Out of how many total registered voters in Philadelphia? Over 1.1 million. Verdict: bad argument.

Ho hum, a former White House adviser now running for a U.S. House seat in New Hampshire voted in Presidential primaries in two separate states in 2016, which almost certainly violates federal law. "But I lived here in January and voted, so why can't I vote again when I moved here in June now that my candidate is out of the race?" should invite only one answer: one person, one vote. Republicans whine about "voter fraud" whenever they don't annihilate their opponents in elections anymore, and yet they're the only ones we ever seem to catch doing it. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

When I confront the question of how we should read great Russian writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the context of Russia's war on Ukraine, I must confess it had never once occurred to me that we shouldn't read them -- their work, like that of Anton Chekhov, predates the soul-destroying reign of Josef Stalin, and no one should presume they're "uncivilized" merely because Vlad the Bad is profoundly uncivilized. Indeed, I would argue that the only folks who think so either have never read these authors (Anna Karenina, for the record, is every bit as great as its devotees say it is) or feel so helpless in the face of horror that they would think almost anything to regain the mere illusion of control. Also, Messrs. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky know more about war than Vlad the Bad will ever know about anything.

Finally, despite Republicans' best efforts, our Senate confirms D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to our Supreme Court, by a disturbingly narrow vote of 53-47. Anyone else see a problem with the following paragraph? "Multiple Republicans, including Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Josh Hawley of Missouri, accused the judge of being lenient toward child sexual abusers. Fact-checkers say that the claims are misleading and that Jackson's sentencing decisions were in line with her peers on the federal bench." Give yourself a gold star if you think we should demand that journalists check the facts, instead of having "fact-checkers" do it.

Action: concerning anti-trans bills, Wall Street looting, campaign finance, conflicts of interest, big tech monopolies, and crack/powder sentencing.

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to reject anti-trans legislation, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, amend our Constitution to allow reasonable campaign finance regulation again, investigate Justice Thomas's possible conflicts of interest, pass antitrust legislation aimed at big tech corporations, and pass the EQUAL Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: H.B. 972 is yet another state-level transgender athletic ban, and the ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to oppose it. Look, this thing they pretend to fear, where boys become girls so they can dominate girls' athletics and bump girls out of scholarships to college? This does not happen, not just because federal regulations already require parental approval for trans kids to play sports. The people who pretend they think this happens display no evidence of ever having been a hormone-addled teenager, nor do they understand basic human greed -- people don't change sexes to dominate a sport only to be paid less than male athletes for the rest of their lives! Right-wingers love lecturing us on "human nature," but those of us who actually get it need to speak out.

Stop Wall Street Looting helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. You've heard enough over the years about banksters buying up corporations and draining the wealth out of them like vampires until all the workers are out in the street. The Stop Wall Street Looting Act would respond to that reality by taxing "carried interest" as regular income rather than investment income, forcing bankruptcy proceedings to take care of workers first, and stiffening penalties when banksters break the law. Note well the word "looting" here, as it reminds us (intentional or not, I couldn't say) that Ayn Rand, the right-wing thinker so many banksters worship, wouldn't call them "makers" but "looters." Hell, I'd call them takers! What a shame that today's elites would disappoint even the worst of our long-dead elites.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 80, which would amend our Constitution to overturn our Supreme Court's notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision and allow our government to restrain campaign finance again. Here's the amendment: "Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to forbid Congress or the States from imposing reasonable viewpoint-neutral limitations on private campaign contributions or independent election expenditures, or from enacting systems of public campaign financing, including those designed to restrict the influence of private wealth by offsetting campaign spending or independent expenditures with increased public funding." Virtually everyone in America supports this! So we should get it done.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Justice Clarence Thomas's behavior, particularly in re the January 6 attempted coup. The news hook there, of course, is his wife's incessant texting with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about the need to overturn the will of 81 million voters in 2020, but Justice Thomas also failed to recuse himself in 2000, even though his wife worked with the Bush transition team, or 2012, when his wife lobbied against the Affordable Care Act, or 2017, when his wife made money from one of the organizations working to uphold the Trump Muslim Ban. He'll insist that he's done everything above-board, but hey, if it looks bad, we should at least see if it is bad.

Both Public Citizen and Antitrust Day both help you tell your Congressfolk to pass antitrust reforms in re big tech corporations. Specifically, both tools help you ask your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act; the former bill would stop big tech corporations from favoring their products in your search results, while the latter bill would stop those corporations from forcing their users to use only their app store. That latter item might be a bit mind-blowing -- you're likely used to getting all your apps from one store, and you may imagine that there's just no other way to do it! But this is America, the can-do country, and too often we see that the world is a whole lot bigger than big corporations would like it to be. That's why we keep pushing them.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1693, the EQUAL Act, which would at long last equalize crack and powder cocaine sentencing in America, without amendment. Our House already passed the EQUAL Act by a huge, actually bipartisan margin; look over the list of Republicans who voted for it and you're bound to find at least a dozen names of people you really don't like. (Yes, Matt Gaetz was one of them.) It's almost like they've finally figured out that there's no reason to make sentences bigger for crack than powder, except racism. The main danger, I fear, is that some Senator or other will attach some poison pill amendment that would never survive the light of day on its own; feel free to communicate your will about this particular matter more forcefully in your email.

Around the table: and now for another exciting edition of "what are right-wingers afraid of?"

Here's something I missed from two months ago: asked about mail truck production moving from (a union shop in) Wisconsin to (a non-union shop in) South Carolina, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson said, and I quote: "It’s not like we don’t have enough jobs here in Wisconsin." After all, it's not like anyone with a job has ever left for a better job! That's weapons-grade PR for his eventual opponent, who could (and should!) run ads saying Ron Johnson won't fight for Wisconsin jobs, and then let him explain what he "really meant," since rule one is "when you're explaining, you're losing," and rule two is "especially if you're Ron Johnson."

Ho hum, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis loves going on about imaginary liberals "grooming" kids, yet won't allow the release of public records relating to an actual sex trafficking investigation! You'll read that this is that Matt Gaetz-related investigation and say well, no wonder, but that still doesn't give Mr. DeSantis the "right" to review records "for accuracy." Why, I wouldn't blame you if you read "review for accuracy" and thought bury records that would reflect badly on Republicans. He's become such a horrible person -- and he works so hard at it! -- that an attack ad might be better off portraying him as Godzilla, rampaging against the Sunshine State.

A Morning Consult/Politico survey finds Republicans actually have a slim lead over Democrats among folks who received the expanded Child Tax Credit -- which sure as hell wasn't the case before that expansion expired. This is yet another occasion to say thanks, Joe Manchin! He sure does seem out to destroy Democrats' midterm prospects so he can hear how "right" he was about everything afterwards, and this poll result suggests that effort is going quite swimmingly. He'll still have to answer for his works at the Pearly Gates, of course, but that'll be little comfort to us if he enables fascism because bipartisanship.

In other Senate Trolls news, Kyrsten Sinema has supposedly "told donors a path to revival" for the parts of the Build Back Better agenda Mr. Manchin will tolerate "is unlikely," and putting it like that sure does obscure the fact that she went to great lengths to kill that agenda, single-handedly killing higher tax rates on the rich and corporations as well as Medicare drug price negotiation. This is also a good opportunity to remember that to "get to yes" with Republicans on the infrastructure bill she gave in to everything of importance they wanted, but with her own caucus, she lays down the red lines. She, too, will have to answer for her works, whether she believes so or not.

Finally, when I hear that the Conservative Political Action Conference will take place in Hungary next year and Hungary's right-wing prime minister Viktor Orban will be the keynote speaker, I feel compelled to ask: don't they feel safe here? And if they don't, you have to wonder why. In any case, it's not a good look for people who thump their chests about how patriotic they are and how tough they are to run to a right-wing dictator for succor. (Don't care they did a similar conference in Brazil so they could bask in the warmth of Jair Bolsonaro; cowardice doesn't become courage when you do it twice.)

Action: concerning taxes, defense spending, forced arbitration, the Grand Canyon, gray wolves, and marijuana policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a budget more like the Biden budget but with less defense spending, tell your Senators to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Grand Canyon Protection Act and reject the Managing Predators Act, and tell your Senators to pass 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.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to use the Biden budget as "a roadmap to lower costs, invest in our future and unrig our tax system." You'll find things to like in the Biden budget plan -- the return of the expanded Child Tax Credit, paid family/medical leave, and higher taxes on the rich and on corporations -- but you could also tell your Congressfolk you'd take the Biden budget plan over Rick Scott's "Rescue America" plan, which would raise taxes on lower-income Americans and sunset Medicare and Social Security after five years. People care about making ends meet; the Biden budget addresses that, and Rick Scott's masturbatory rage-addled screed about "wokeness," the only Republican proposal on record, doesn't.

However, Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk you think $813 billion on defense in the Biden budget is way too much. Hey, might as well meet it head-on! Saying you want a budget that taxes the rich harder and helps working families more doesn't require that you accept that we spend even more money on weapons. They're selling it as "keeping pace with China," but China's military budget doesn't comprise even 31% of Mr. Biden's proposal, and what has Mr. Putin's little adventure in Ukraine reminded us? That massive military power not only doesn't guarantee victory (though, of course, our adventure in Iraq should have reminded us of that!), but it's an anchor around a civilization. Bigger guns and higher walls testify to a civilization's insecurity. So let's be more secure.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Congress has, commendably, ended forced arbitration in re sexual harassment complaints, but should end it for all contracts; the FAIR Act would do that, though the bill would still give consumers and workers the choice to use arbitration to settle a dispute if they'd like; I mention that because this bill's opponents will almost certainly lie about that. I expect folks would rather take offenders to court than to arbitration, once they learn you almost never win in arbitration -- and that corporations can then turn and sue you in arbitration and win! Again, how much of that "average $5,000 arbitration award" do you collect if you lose?

Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1052/S. 387, the Grand Canyon Protection Act, which would remove a million acres of Grand Canyon-area land from ever being considered for any sort of drilling or mining project ever again. Keeping drilling and mining projects away from the Grand Canyon -- which you really do have to see to believe no matter how many photos of it you've seen already -- should be a no-brainer, but though our House passed similar legislation last term, the McConnell Administration wouldn't even bring it up for a vote. We've got another chance to do it again, and this time, the notorious Kyrsten Sinema is the bill's main Senate sponsor! Let's see if she can work that bipartisan getting-to-yes magic for which she's so famous!

Environmental Action also helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 286, the Managing Predators Act, since it would remove gray wolves from the endangered species list in certain states. Thanks to our Endangered Species Act, gray wolves have come back from near-extinction, but they've only recovered about 15% of the range they used to have, and now they face death wherever they are. So naturally this bill would let four states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wyoming) treat gray wolves as if they have no Endangered Species Act protections, and would let all the other states set wolf population goals, as if none of them would ever set an absurdly-low population goal just so it can kill more wolves! Seriously, when they say Congressfolk don't know how to make laws, this is what they mean.

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Senators to pass the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. And Matt Gaetz voted for that bill, too! We live in an age of wonder! Sadly, Democratic Senators have made cowardly noises about the bill -- it's not exactly what they want, you see, though you would think that's why Senatorial debate even exists. We know their real problem, though: Republicans will say they're soft on crime. Like Republicans ever say anything else! Here's what they should do: pass the MORE Act, which most people want done anyway, then remind everyone that Republicans all rejected the American Rescue Plan Act which included more funding for cops and hate the Biden budget that would include more funding for cops. You're welcome, Democrats.

Around the table: from student loan holidays to the next Manchin drama.

President Biden extends the student loan payment holiday through the end of August. Presumably he could order another one in late August as a midterm-booster -- recall that time Republicans called a vote on war with Iraq before a midterm! -- or he could decide to forgive a mere $10,000 in student loans per person and count the money unpaid during the payment holiday toward that amount. That would seem awfully anticlimactic, but it would have served as a pretty good 30-month stimulus. Personal to those who find this debt holiday "inflationary": you still think corporations aren't inflating prices on purpose?

Eric Blanc at Jacobin talks to Amazon Labor Union organizer/night shift worker Angelika Maldonado about "How We Beat Amazon." I'll admit I was a little stunned to see how many Amazon workers told organizers you don't even work here (although they did!) just because Amazon bosses told them that! I guess you don't know everyone in a large warehouse -- recall that almost 5,000 workers voted in the union election. The winning formulae, apparently, include a) talking to everyone you can on their breaks and b) coming in on your off-time and talking to everyone you can on their breaks (which our laws allow, as long as you're not actually on the clock).

Hard to believe, Harry, but Republican-run states and cities generally have higher murder rates than those run by Democrats, and if you're suspicious that the Third Way study tabulates murder from 2020, which was not exactly a typical year, note well that similar studies have found the same results in Southern (and thus almost exclusively Republican-run) states for at least a decade. I think "crime waves" are largely a right-wing invention, but I'd rather have data in hand about other crimes before declaring victory over Republican crime hysteria. I'd also, you know, like to see things like pollution and bankster predation routinely included in crime data.

I don't like to merely tabulate Republican hypocrisy, but even I was astounded at the level of chutzpah Donald Trump's sons evince by complaining that Hunter Biden is "mak(ing) millions off (his) father's presidency." The Trump family took, on average, five trips requiring Secret Service protection per day, and mostly to "promote Trump Organization businesses," per Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. At the risk of violating Godwin's Law, the Trump kids accusing Hunter Biden of profiting off his father's presidency is like Adolf Hitler complaining about other people's anti-Semitism.

When I hear that accusations of pedophilia and "grooming" are "the new Red Scare," I think that's about right -- nothing puts the chill in someone like the thought that their child could be sexually molested. But will right-wingers be smart enough this time to avoid libel or slander charges? Because that would chill this particular stratagem right quick. I'm not sure Rep. Greene could escape those charges in calling Sens. Romney, Murkowski, and Collins "pro-pedophile," and I sure as hell would like to see Mitt Romney, for example, get all Jack Palance on her and say prove it.

Finally, Democrats now say they'll meet Joe Manchin wherever he is on a massive reconciliation bill, and they'll do it by Memorial Day. At last they're calling his bluff! Are they finally learning? Or will they be caught flat-footed, again, when he says but I want this to go through committees? My money is on Joe Manchin dragging this out precisely so that it'll fail and doom Democrats' hopes of surviving the midterms, all so his absurd notion of "bipartisanship" will survive. One thing's for sure, though: one way or another, his tenure as One True Great and Real American President will be over the day after Election Day.

Action: concerning law and order, banksters, insulin prices, student loan debt, climate change, and transparency.

Long story short: tell our Attorney General to prosecute Donald Trump to the fullest extent of the law, tell our SEC to make banksters more transparent about their investment products, tell President Biden to use his existing, lawful authority to lower insulin prices and to cancel $50,000 of student loan debt, tell our SEC to enact vigorous climate change disclosure rules, and tell our FCC to make big internet service-providing corporations more transparent about their services and fees. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell Attorney General Merrick Garland to prosecute Donald Trump to the fullest extent of the law for his role in the January 6 attempted coup. You've heard that Donald Trump will fight to the death rather than accept a plea bargain, and it'll only take one Trump votary on the jury to get him off. But duty is duty, and I have to say Donald Trump does make duty easier, so brazen is he in his criminal acts. A federal judge has lately said, out loud, that "more likely than not" Mr. Trump broke the law, and Mr. Trump's White House reported exactly zero phone calls between 11.17 am and 6.54 pm on January 6. Now how suspicious is that? And what would it say if our President used burner phones during that time? It would say "prosecute to the fullest extent of the law."

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to force banksters to put a kind of "nutrition label" on their products. Food labels tell you how much Vitamin C, calcium, sugar, and fat are in your food, but the big private equity corporations have never had to tell anyone how much they collect in fees or how well their managed funds do -- until now, with our SEC's proposal. They'll be getting in our SEC's grills telling them how most investors already have all that information -- but then how do they bamboozle so many state pension funds into managing them, charging higher fees for worse performance? By enacting the most vigorous rules possible, our SEC can help change that sad state, which would help us all.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to use his existing, lawful authority to lower insulin prices. Folks are risking death by rationing their insulin because it costs so damn much, and if government can't keep people from dying due to corporate greed, what good is it? And just so happens Mr. Biden won't have to run to the Penguin and the Joker to get permission to lower drug prices -- he can seize insulin patents and let generic manufacturers make it, subject to "reasonable compensation" for the patent holder, or he can use "march-in rights" to get more generic manufacturers (or our government itself!) to make insulin, or he can start investigating illegal price-gouging among insulin makers. In any case, millions of diabetics can't wait.

Moms Rising helps you tell President Biden to cancel $50,000 of student loan debt already, as he promised during his campaign. We've gone through the reasons he ought to do that: because student loan debt is many degrees more onerous than it was 50 (or 20!) years ago, and because we, as a civilization, promised folks they could do a lot better with degrees than without them and we failed them in that promise. Some folks will tell you that wealthier people have all the student loan debt, but that's not true, or else the quarter of all student loan debtors who go to grad school would hold more than half of all student loan debt. You can discard arguments like I paid my way, so they can, too, not just because "paying your way" is so much harder now, but because you can generally discard arguments that go "I suffered, so they can suffer, too."

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our SEC to enact the most vigorous climate disclosure rule possible, which would make publicly-traded big corporations tell their shareholders how much climate change has impacted their business operations -- by reporting such things as the heat-trapping emissions they produce or how they plan to meet stated emissions reduction targets. These corporations don't want to do any of that, of course, because they're afraid their shareholders will abandon them, but no corporation has a "right" to have shareholders, while shareholders do have a right to know what they're getting into when they invest. A lot of shareholders don't care only about money; they also care about having a planet to live on 10 or 20 or 30 years from now! So let's help them be the best they can be.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to force big internet service-providing corporations to reveal what customers would be getting before they pay for a service. As with the SEC's pension rule above, this would amount to a "nutrition label" spelling out things like download speeds and fees. Your cable corporation loves assessing the fee they didn't advertise and you didn't anticipate! So our FCC would put a stop to that, by making them tell you what they're getting. It's a shame we have to compel big corporations to do that, but that's what we get when we don't force them to do the obvious good for decades on end, to the point where right-wingers call attempts at transparency "socialism." But most Americans, liberal or conservative, want their cable corporation to stop lying to them.

Around the table: containing rather less good news than yesterday (though not none).

Whizy Kim at Vox reminds us that although Google oligarch Eric Schmidt's funding of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy raises ethical concerns, we should also ask why we're not funding that Office with taxpayer money in the first place. I mean, if it works, we should fund it, and be invested not just financially but emotionally in the results. And certainly we should not run to a tech billionaire for money to fund an office that might help make policy affecting him; that isn't just corrupt, it's stupid. Personal to those who say WHEREZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!!: it'd come from cracking down on Medicare fraud and rich tax evaders, letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, and raising taxes on millionaire income, just off the top of my head.

I suspect you won't be surprised to hear that the largest-ever ivermectin study found that ivermectin didn't reduce hospitalization or help folks heal any faster from COVID. And thus we are again reminded that the unique American hatred of bullshit also makes Americans more vulnerable to bullshit than we would be if we didn't simply declare anything we didn't like hearing to be bullshit. You know what else would help? If we didn't aspire to be rich above all other things! Because the effort you put into being rich means you put that much less effort into being wise. And wisdom will nourish you through hard times better than riches will.

Brakeyshia Samms at ITEP informs us that racial discrimination in home appraisals is finally getting attention from both the Biden Administration and Congress. You've heard stories, perhaps, of folks who suddenly get better appraisals once they've taken down their Frederick Douglass portraits? The problem is much, much worse than that -- homes in Black or Brown neighborhoods get under-appraised when it's time to sell and over-appraised when it's time to pay taxes, meaning Black and Brown families get slammed coming and going. Remember this when they tell you racism is dead because Thomas Sowell graduated magna cum laude from Harvard all those years ago.

Li Zhou expresses some skepticism that Biden executive actions can rescue Democrats during the midterms, and while I'm similarly skeptical about "energizing the base," I also think Biden executive actions could help if they were about things everyone supports action on, not just the base, and if you look through the CPC's list of (many more than!) 55 actions Mr. Biden could take, you'll see quite a few in there -- particularly those pertaining to reining in insulin prices! I don't think independent voters will spend a lot of time fussing about, say, whether government should have stepped in to make cheaper insulin or force corporations to do same; they'll say Biden did something, and they'll look less unkindly on other Democrats as a result.

And the hits just keep on coming for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, as he appears to still own at least $100,000 of stock in the corporation that made all those COVID tests our Postal Service sent out. I know some folks will say c'mon, they got the tests out, didn't they? And they probably needed his connections! But America doesn't exactly have a shortage of "people with connections," and we have laws against conflicts of interest for good reason. And why isn't our government manufacturing COVID tests to begin with? I mean, right-wingers would throw tantrums about it, but we sure would have spent less money, and avoided the kinds of conflicts-of-interest that plague public-private "partnerships."

Finally, another day, another reminder that as inflation grips a nation, corporate profits reached yet another all-time high last year. They say the "free" market guarantees that if (hypothetically now!) supply chain issues happen, businesses will simply refuse to raise prices so they can keep their customers, but when you confront the fact that pre-tax corporate profits went up 25% while inflation went up 8%, you can clearly see that the "free" market ain't working. (If all corporations paid the full 21% tax rate, which, like, sure, that 25% number would only go down to 19.75%, which is still a lot higher than 8%.) Also, if you're ever at a street corner with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the "free" market, and the corporate-controlled market, you know which one to ask for directions, because the other three are figments of your imagination.

Action: concerning Ukraine, housing, government spying, monopolies, domestic workers, and the war on Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, pass the Homes for All Act, outlaw geo-fence warrants, pass the Open App Markets Act and the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act, and end our involvement in the war on Yemen. 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.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk not to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Nobody wants to see good Ukrainians suffer at the hands of Vlad the Bad, but nobody wants the U.S. embroiled in a war with Russia, either, since basically everyone will lose that one. Folks don't always understand what a "no-fly zone" really is, either: it's not some magic invisible dome that covers Ukraine, but U.S. planes flying over Ukraine and shooting down Russian planes, which, again, leads to war with Russia, and, again, very likely to Earth's destruction. And polls find majority American support for no-fly zones -- until pollsters explain exactly what that means, and then polls don't find majority support anymore. Yes, it's frustrating when bad people get their way. But a no-fly zone won't constrain Vlad the Bad.

Renters Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7191, the Homes for All Act. This bill would help build new public and private affordable housing, and it would help combat gentrification and promote alternative home ownership models, i.e., to "landlord owns and charges you through the nose." Prices for so many essentials -- health care of course, student loans because they tell you you're worthless if you don't go to college, child care and rent because what else are you gonna do? -- have been going up for much longer than our recent battle with inflation would indicate. And they do it because they can! People don't just up and move whenever they like, certainly not if no apartments will do any better by them. If the "free" market doesn't provide, our government has to step in. That's not "socialism," it's common sense.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing geo-fence warrants. A geo-fence warrant lets law enforcement ask big tech corporations what devices were in a specific area at a specific time, which may sound like a smart way to catch bad guys, but which actually violates our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as a U.S. District Court Judge has lately ruled. Law enforcement would comply with our Constitution if they got a warrant to find out whether a particular individual's devices were in a specific area at a specific time, but why do all that work when you can go on fishing expeditions? If it's wrong, and if law enforcement won't stop doing it, Congress has to step in and stop them, on our behalf. That's not "big government," it's common sense.

Free the iPhone helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act. You're thinking that if app makers want to sell their wares on an app store owned by Apple/Android/Google/Microsoft, they have to do whatever the app store owner wants? That's only true as far as making their apps compatible with particular operating systems (if they app maker fails to do that, it'll become apparent to the user right away!). But app stores typically do a lot worse. The Open App Markets Act would prevent corporations like Apple, Microsoft, and Android from forcing app makers to use proprietary in-app payment systems, forcing them to charge the same price in every app store, or punishing app makers who do either of the above. If corporations want "free" markets -- which they all say they do -- then they have to stop choking off competition.

The National Domestic Workers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4826/S. 2569, the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act. Our laws extend many protections to working folks, but for some reason our laws often exclude domestic workers from these protections (and by "for some reason" I mean "because they're poor and/or foreign"). The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights would not only extend minimum wage and maximum hour requirements for domestic live-in workers, it would ensure that those workers get certain other protections (for privacy, paid leave, sane work scheduling, and against discrimination) that, really, all workers should have, but which live-in workers feel particularly acutely. If you live where you work, your boss can abuse you plenty and easily, and nobody should have to put up with that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers resolution ending our involvement in the Saudi/UAE-led war on Yemen. Because starving two million children to death is wrong, because fighting undeclared and therefore unconstitutional wars is wrong, and because helping the coalition kill some of the world's best fighters against al-Qaeda is wrong, and ain't it funny how often that last item happens? Ask the Kurds how well we stood by them after they proved their mettle against al-Qaeda! President Biden did promise he'd get us out of this mess, but most of his moves over the last year haven't gotten us out, but more like further in. That means Congress needs to step in -- which, per our Constitution, they should have done in the first place!

Around the table: today with mostly good news!

Good news, everyone! Staten Island, NY Amazon workers vote to form a labor union and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, and worker safety from their employer. It ain't over, of course -- Amazon is a big corporation, able to spend millions on lawsuits alleging union election improprieties -- but this vote represents a major victory for workers everywhere. Folks who still look down on warehouse workers (and baristas!) should remember that, many years ago, folks looked down on unionized manufacturing workers -- and now that they're all gone, we lionize them. Why, it's almost like we saw manufacturing workers as "unskilled" because they were unionized! And we learned to see warehouse workers and baristas that way, too, as a sort of preemptive strike against their eventual unionization.

More good news, everyone! A U.S. District Court Judge has blocked large parts of Florida's recent anti-voting law, SB 90, and moreover has required judicial preclearance for all Florida voting rights changes over the next decade, which requirement he may impose under the Voting Rights Act. Choice slab of understatement: "At some point, when the Florida Legislature passes law after law disproportionately burdening Black voters, this court can no longer accept that the effect is incidental." Plenty of folks think either the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals or our Supreme Court will overturn this decision, but I still applaud Judge Walker's courage. It's a shame that applying the law is an act of courage these days.

Our House passes a bill capping the price of insulin -- with only 12 Republicans voting in favor! I, too, thought Republicans wouldn't dare oppose something popular even with Republican voters, but again I find my optimism thwarted, not that I'll abandon it. Alleged moderate Republican Cathy McMorris-Rodgers of Washington state actually said, out loud, "today, it's the government fixing the price of insulin. What's next? Gas? Food?" Hey, while we're at it, how about cable? Seriously, that's what you're left arguing once you've decided to become the objectively pro-killing diabetics party. And you know how the likes of Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert occasionally vote for the right things when you least expect it? Ah, not this time -- all 12 Republicans who voted for it are the kind who'd pass for "moderate" today. Nobody's asked me, but I'd run ads about this bill against every last Republican who voted against it.

Senators refuse to even begin debate on the House-passed Women's Health Protection Act, and the 48 Senators who wouldn't even begin debate include, of course, the Penguin of West Virginia and reputed "moderates" Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both "pro-choice" but, well, not that pro-choice, actually. And just as Republicans don't actually win a whole lot of elections by "energizing the base" with doomed votes, I don't think Democrats will energize the base nearly enough like this, either. Now, that insulin vote, which I presume won't get enough Republican support in the Senate? That's something that'll energize people (not just "the base"!) to vote against Republicans. Too many analysts say "the Democrats need to move to the center to win" instead of Democrats need to support the things everyone supports to win. A lot of them have done that, on insulin and elsewhere; now they just need to promote that.

Rep. Conor Lamb (D-PA), running for Pennsylvania's open Senate seat in 2022, accuses Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (who's seeking the same seat) of avoiding a Democratic candidate debate because he doesn't want to answer questions about the time he pulled a gun on a Black jogger in 2013. Mr. Lamb is right that Republicans will make an issue of that incident, but you may also notice that he launched this attack with a full month and a half to go before the primary, which makes me think he's actually doing the party a favor. And if he were doing it just to bolster his campaign, he'd have waited until the last two weeks (or at least the late April debates) before bringing it up.

Finally, ain't no good news Joe "the Penguin" Manchin can't shit on, and so it goes with his hysterical pronouncement that President Biden's decision to rescind Donald Trump's anti-immigration Title 42 "health order" is a "frightening decision." "Frightening"? Really? I thought this was a salt of the Earth guy who didn't frighten easily! Mexicans ain't bringing COVID with them to America, as we would know merely by remembering how high immigration was late last spring and how low COVID numbers were. And Americans have done well enough keeping the COVID pandemic going on our own, thank you very much, largely by throwing tantrums about masks and vaccines; how does Joe Manchin not know this? Oh, I forgot: despite all his strutting around about how Only He Understands the Common Man, he doesn't talk to voters, only to oligarchs.