Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning free speech, voting rights, oil, corporate NDAs, and OAN.

Long story short: tell Russia to stop oppressing protestors, tell PA state legislators to stop wasting taxpayer money "investigating" the 2020 election, tell California to stop buying Amazon rainforest oil, tell state governments to stop allowing NDAs between legislators and corporations, and tell Verizon to drop OAN like a hot potato. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Russian government to stop oppressing anti-war protestors. Russia has arrested some 15,000 of them, and this is Vladimir Putin's Russia, not Anton Chekhov's Russia, so "arrest" might well equal "never see the outside world again." Russia has charged some of these protestors with "disseminating false information" and "discrediting" Russian soldiers, which are just the kinds of "charges" snowflake governments come up with when they can't win arguments on the merits. Do we expect Russia to wilt under our express will? No, we do not -- me, I expect them to laugh at us. But do we consider it our duty as human beings to express our will anyway? Yes, we do.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to stop wasting taxpayer money (i.e., your money) on their sham election "review." They've spent nearly half a mil on this, and guess what they've found? Nothing, of course, in over a year and a half, and they've just extended the "review" for another six months, because that'll make the difference. But no matter how much they look, they ain't gonna find what ain't there. Of course, they don't expect to -- they're merely creating drama. Think maybe good Pennsylvania taxpayers might be sick of their legislature using their money to create more drama? Reader, I think so.

Stand.Earth helps you tell the state of California to stop buying oil from the Amazon rainforest. For a whole lot of reasons! Oil drilling in the Amazon threatens the world's greatest climate change fighter -- they don't call the Amazon rainforest the "lungs of the Earth" for nothing! -- plus it also threatens the numerous Indigenous folks who live there and who spend far too much of their time fighting developers. Don't believe the hype that "gas costs too much in California so we need to get it anywhere we can." That's how evil gets you -- by exploiting you when you're not at your best. They'd do much better expanding public transportation -- yes, even in California! -- so they can be stronger the next time evil strikes.

More Perfect Union helps you tell state governments to stop allowing big corporations to force state legislators to sign non-disclosure agreements. I've been talking about this issue perhaps too abstractly, though I still find the theoretical problem -- of forcing state legislators not to talk about issue with their bosses, their constituents! -- to be rather comical. Fact is, Amazon (the big corporation, this time) has been forcing non-disclosure agreements on politicians in places they've tried to build warehouses. What could Amazon be trying to hide? Tax breaks they don't deserve, their awful record with COVID-19, their general hatred of unionized workers? Whatever it is, folks deserve to know.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell Verizon to stop carrying the notorious One America News Network. DirecTV dumped them this past April, now it's everyone else's turn! How do you know OAN deserves oblivion? Because they sued Rachel Maddow for defamation after she called them "literally paid Russian propaganda" -- and lost. Meanwhile they're the defendant in at least one other defamation suit concerning the lies they spread about the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost by seven million votes. No, it's no "victory" for "free speech" if they still get to spew filth; nothing in our Constitution guarantees a paid platform for your free speech, only protection from your government oppressing you for your speech.

Around the table: mostly about guns.

"To End Mass Shootings," Henry Giroux writes at TruthOut, "We Need to Change the Deeper Structure of Life in the U.S." The Buffalo and Uvalde shootings "represent the end points of a culture awash in guns and violence, a society that nourishes and rewards the gun industries, and values the accumulation of profits over human needs." Thus we must pursue solutions well beyond the number/kinds of guns we can get in America. And valuing "the accumulation of profits over human needs" is not "just human nature," or we wouldn't have lived in a considerably different America between roughly 1932 and 1980.

Folks are wondering why police didn't rush into the building during the Uvalde, TX school shooting, and what we find out in time might be worse than what we know right now. But here's what I know for sure: right-wingers have been selling "more cops" as the solution to virtually every law-and-order issue for decades, but "more cops" didn't save the lives of 19 kids in Uvalde, so we can surely understand the anger of parents whose children bled out before any police officers made a difference that day. How about we end the myth of the "good guy with a gun," then? And how about the next couple dozen cop-show producers give us some help with that?

Guess what? The right wing's notion of controlling school shootings by "arming teachers" is also a terrible idea! Among the problems: people shoot their guns accidentally all the time, students could get their hands on the guns, even the best shooters hit their targets less than once in five tries, police might mistake a teacher shooting at a school shooter for the school shooter, and anyway if police aren't going to lay their lives on the line why should we expect teachers to do it? Also too, we demand "more training" of folks (here teachers, elsewhere cops) in all kinds of things that aren't directly related to their field as if folks' minds are really all that flexible. It's getting to the point where I'm starting to think "more training" really means "I don't want to work to solve real problems."

Jonathan Chait at New York magazine describes "The Conservative Playbook for Deflecting Anger After Mass Shootings," and though I wouldn't call it a "conservative" playbook -- a right-wing playbook, a reactionary playbook, an asshole's playbook -- it is pretty much a masterclass in evil argument! Call your opponents "political" when your own worldview is political, say that because a policy doesn't do everything nobody should ever do anything, and then go find "causes" of mass shootings that your opponents won't fight, like "critical race theory" as Sen. Johnson did the other day. Of course, bad arguments keep winning because Democrats won't fight for good arguments.

And on cue: Sen. Bill Cassidy (E-LA) suggests we ought to keep AR-15s around because some people use them to kill feral pigs. Many questions would ensue, chief among them is an AR-15 really the only way to kill a feral pig? Even so, his objection would be moot under Thom Hartmann's proposal, the one I've supported for a couple of years now -- the AR-15 wouldn't be illegal under the Hartmann plan, but you'd have to jump through more administrative hoops to get one, which presumably someone who needed it to kill feral pigs could do. If they need it.

Finally, after a week of ballot-counting issues, Jamie McLeod-Skinner has bested Rep. Kurt Schrader in the Oregon 5th House district Democratic primary by a pretty damn decisive 13-point margin. Finally politicians are paying the price for defying the will of the people -- in Mr. Schrader's case, for opposing Medicare drug price negotiation. You know what would be even better? If Republicans started paying the price for opposing the will of the people! Of course, you need fewer Democrats like Kurt Schrader, and more Democrats like Jamie McLeod-Skinner, to be able to do that, and the party establishment tends to enable the former and destroy the latter.

Action: concerning murder, data privacy, renters' rights, corruption, and cash bail.

Long story short: tell Brazil to stop allowing the murder of Indigenous folks, tell Google not to build a data center in Saudi Arabia, tell corporate landlords to stop preying on renters, tell our Justice Department to investigate connections between Jared Kushner and Saudi Arabia, and tell governments to end cash bail. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell Brazil to stop allowing corporate developers to rape and murder the indigenous Yanomami people who live in the Amazon rain forest. Hard to believe I had to write that sentence, but I did. The alleged rape and murder of a 12 year-old Yanomami girl and the three-year-old who went missing after getting thrown into a river are probably the stories you've heard, but this all takes place against a backdrop of a Brazilian government who do not care who they hurt as long as they're able to extract as much "wealth" from the Amazon rainforest as possible. That's why we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR. And, good Brazilians, I wish you well in your efforts to remove this evil government from office later on this year.

Sum of Us helps you tell Google not to build a data center in Saudi Arabia. They must think they're such cosmopolitans! If you're tempted to think well, Google shouldn't have all that personal data anyway, so who cares where they put it, I wouldn't entirely blame you, but ask yourself: have you ever criticized Saudi Arabia's years-long refusal to let women drive? Or their habit of using bone saws to murder journalists? Hell, ever criticize Donald Trump, who once said he wasn't about to go up against a nation whose citizens gave him so much money? I trust you are beginning to see the problem. And again, talk to Republicans about why we don't have good internet privacy protections. (Spoiler alert: they destroyed them.)

Renters Rising helps you tell corporate landlords to stop preying on renters. Specifically, you'll ask for the following: just cause (versus at-will) eviction protections; a 3% cap on rent increases; meet health and safety standards for habitable properties; have a good grievance procedure in place for tenants; and recognize tenants' unions. That all sounds quite reasonable to me! What would the objections be? That landlords just can't make money anymore? Of course they can! They just won't be able to make money without doing their job, which, sadly, is a goal many weak people have these days. Maybe their bankster bosses taught them! Anyway, renters deserve justice too, and what a shame I have to say it.

Win Without War helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate $2 billion in Saudi investments in Jared Kushner's funds, which could be payback for services rendered -- or a pre-payment on services to come, if we're so brain-dead as to elect Mr. Trump President in 2024. Maybe a Trump fatigue operates here, one that might lead you to say what more do I have to do, but that's what people like Donald Trump count on; it's why they spend every day doing as much damage to our civilization as possible, so you get tired of fighting them. Luckily we have a Justice Department that's supposed to get justice on our behalf -- but they won't do it unless we demand it.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state, local, and federal governments to end cash bail. Mainly because it's an unconstitutional way of putting people in prison before they've had a fair trial, but also because cash bail doesn't work, or else reducing cash bail would result in higher crime rates everywhere it's tried, which, naturally, it hasn't. Don't let the hysterics at Fox News bamboozle you into thinking otherwise with the same footage of the same crimes repeated over and over again. And don't believe the folks who say how can cops do their job? Police officers had better be able to do their job without violating our Constitution.

Around the table: useful idiots, everywhere!

Lots of good ways to think about our current predicament in Ben Debney's article "Culture Wars Defend the Minority of the Opulent From the Majority." The other day I suggested cultural warriors were "useful idiots" for corporate power, but Mr. Debney reminds us that the culture war is also very much like a protection racket -- "at a price, they offered protection against evils that they themselves would otherwise inflict, or at least allow to be inflicted." We find this to be literally true in the latest child-molestation scandal involving Southern Baptists! And maybe I don't say this enough, but the cultural warriors are all whiny little diaper-loaded brats! Their real problem with America isn't that they have "no voice in the public square," but that theirs isn't the only voice in the public square.

It's a damn shame that there are enough mass school shootings that scholars can study them and detect patterns in them, but from James Densley and Jillian Peterson at The Conversation we can learn a few things about these shootings. Like, either boys or 18-year-old men carry them out, they generally don't intend to live past the shooting, they generally leave warnings about what they're about to do, and most of them have a connection to the school at which they kill people. Also, it's not so much about "fame and notoriety" as it is about anger. I found getting along with other kids pretty tough when I was that age, which certainly wasn't all their fault, and I imagine it's only gotten worse for the teenagers who've come after me.

Our Supreme Court essentially sentences two likely-innocent men to death in ruling that inmates convicted in state courts can't appeal to federal courts if they had bad counsel. Why should a state get to abridge a citizen's Constitutionally-granted (and therefore federal) rights? Beats me. Oh, wait, I know: so that the Court's far-right wing, now numbering six of nine, can claim a broad "state's right" to ignore our Constitution whenever convenient, at which point it'll be bye-bye to a lot of things we've fought and died for. And dig Justice Thomas's whining about having to deal with "serial relitigation of final convictions"! Or, as your right-wing uncle would say, how many trials do we have to give a guy? The civilized person's answer: as many as it takes until justice is done. That is what great nations do, isn't it?

Henry Kissinger says that defeating Russia would have "disastrous" consequences. Like? Oh, you know, "upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome," and remember that Russia's been around for hundreds of years! Citing these as reasons not to hand Russia a decisive defeat sure sounds like an argument against ever doing the right thing if it injures any nation that happens to have endured for centuries. If our country gets taken over by fascists and starts bombing the crap out of Central and South America, I guess he'll argue against our "humiliation" or "defeat" for the same reason. Personally, I think the civilized people should make these decisions.

Finally, Sen. Sinema (D?-AZ) says that "D.C. solutions" to our mass murder epidemic aren't "realistic" (while Arizona's other Senator, whose wife nearly got killed by a mass shooter, has a more humane response). First off, new rule: no one who works in government gets to suggest that government just doesn't work, as the phrase "D.C. solutions" surely does, not just because they might be the reason government doesn't work, but also because they're biting the hand that feeds them and we are that hand, since we're the taxpayers who pay her salary. Second, her vaunted "message discipline" is starting to sound merely like the absence of empathy, which might make her the Sam Alito of the Democratic caucus.

Action: concerning mass murders, reconciliation, "forever chemicals," law and order, and antibiotics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop mass murders, pass a Build Back Better-style reconciliation bill, and pass the PFAS Firefighter Protection Act, the EQUAL Act, and the PASTEUR 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.

On the occasion of yet another mass school shooting, I present Thom Hartmann's two-pronged solution to the mass shooting issue: make it as hard to get semi-automatics as it is to get automatics, and regulate guns the same way we regulate cars. You may want to call your Congressfolk with some version of this plan. Right-wingers will say they don't want to get their guns registered because TEH FREEDUMZ!!!!!, but ignore them. Liberals will say there wouldn't be enough background checks, but ignore them, too, because the registration process does that job. As for fewer semis meaning less "freedom," remember that mass murder isn't a "freedom."

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a reconciliation bill that attacks climate change, raises taxes on the rich and on corporations, and extends the Child Tax Credit expansion. Yeah, the Build Back Better Act failed last year, because Joe Manchin finally said "I just can't get there," but if we turn out in force to demand the things BBB would have done, we'll increase the possibility of him "getting there." And don't believe the Manchinean hype that the Child Tax Credit expansion drove inflation. First off, you'd think it would have come down by now, since the CTC expansion expired almost five months ago. Second, we all know there's a relationship between high prices and high corporate profits.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7597/S. 4076, the PFAS Firefighter Protection Act, which would keep PFAS chemicals out of firefighting foam. They don't call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for nothing -- they leach into our drinking water and then our bodies and they don't break down, and firefighting foam is one of the main sources of PFAS chemicals. And if we really care so much about our first responders, then why do we expose them to chemicals that could give them cancer, thyroid problems, or reproductive issues? Don't believe the hype that PFAS-laden firefighting foam is the only or best option; at this writing at least 100 PFAS-free foams exist, and it seems unlikely they all suck.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1693/S. 79, the EQUAL Act, which would equalize sentences for crack and powder cocaine and allow resentencing of past crack-related offenses. Over a decade ago, Congress reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, and I guess that was progress, but we should go all the way to 1 to 1. Now some Democrats are afraid of doing anything daring about crime before the midterms, a strategy that very recent experience has taught us completely assures defeat at the polls. A lot of times you have to wonder if that's the idea. If so, history will treat them badly -- if any historians remain!

Finally, speaking of apocalyptic settings, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act, which will fund research and development of new antibiotics. As you know, seven out of every 10 antibiotics don't go to sick people or animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, ostensibly so as to make them meatier. But thanks to antibiotic abuse, we face a future of superbugs that can't be killed by antibiotics; you don't want to live to see folks sit around the campfire and say sure, the next cut can kill you now, but at least we had cheap chicken for a while! One way to ensure we don't is to keep researching, and finding, new and better antibiotics. So maybe do that instead of more corporate tax cuts?

Action: concerning law and order, drug prices, windfall profits, big ag monopolies, and the Shenandoah.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the 4th Amendment is Not for Sale Act, lower drug prices, pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations, and pass the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act and the Shenandoah Mountain 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. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would prevent third-party data-gobblers from selling your personal data to law enforcement; our laws presently only prevent ISPs from selling that info, so we gotta close that loophole. The news hook right now is data-gobblers selling data on everyone who visited a Planned Parenthood for any reason -- and you can see why folks would be a little scared about that -- but fact is data brokers shouldn't be selling your personal data to law enforcement, and law enforcement shouldn't be able to get that data without a warrant. I know, warrants, how quaint.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk, for the umpteenth time, to lower prescription drug prices so good Americans don't go broke buying life-saving drugs. I don't know how many more times I have to talk about diabetics rationing their insulin before they get the picture, but duty is duty and they will get the picture. And how about that: lowering prices as an inflation-fighting tool, since that's literally what it is. Right-wingers call that "price controls" like that's a dirtier phrase than price-gouging. I suspect most Americans would say you want to control prices? What are you waiting for? My EpiPen shouldn't cost $600!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. Gas prices go through the roof, and big oil corporations make record profits -- c'mon, we're not schmucks. I'm old enough to remember when big corporations took the hit in profits rather than pass costs on to their customers, but we're a sick, immoral, and decadent society now, so corporations make us pay. And yeah, I've noticed the smaller gas stations have the lower prices! But let's not have small businesses carry an entire civilization on their backs, OK? Big oil corporations won't do the right thing until we make them.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7827/S. 4245, the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act, which would set some limits on mergers in the agricultural sector. I'm old enough to remember when "big corporate farms eating up small farms" seemed to be the plot of every Hollywood movie! And it's so, so much worse now! Small farmers confront large monopoly power at almost every turn, and again, we should not ask the small farmer to shoulder responsibility for an entire civilization. Curbing mergers in big ag right now will at least give the small farmer some breathing room. And that's all the small farmer ever asks for.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 3911, the Shenandoah Mountain Act, which would permanently protect some 90,000 acres of the renowned Shenandoah Mountain area. This, again, is simple: we can protect one of the last undeveloped areas of the southern Appalachians, so good Americans and their children and their children's children can enjoy it -- or we can churn it up for energy that will disappear almost as soon as it's unearthed and mines and pipelines that'll spill filth into our drinking water. And no, we shouldn't churn up the area just to "create jobs." Preserving areas also creates jobs, for those who work to preserve it and those who help others enjoy it.

Around the table: in which we confront horrible truths about security, renewables, and campaigns.

Salon asks Brennan Center scholar Elizabeth Goitein "(w)hat would have been the worst-case outcome on Jan. 6." The answer? A military coup. And yet many Presidential emergency powers, granted through law by Congress, could also have wreaked havoc -- the Insurrection Act of course, but also the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which lets Presidents freeze bank accounts of Americans suspected of collaborating with a foreign power, and the Communications Act, which may allow our President to flip a kill-switch on our internet. And that's before we get to the emergency powers Presidents claim to have in the rarely-seen-I-wonder-why Presidential Emergency Action Documents.

In a related note, Branko Marketic at Jacobin tells us why we should be wary a domestic anti-terrorism bill like the one our House passed last week. Long story short: the bill isn't as repugnant as something Republicans would push and have pushed, but that's not a high bar to clear, and one could easily imagine its mechanisms being turned against liberals, as, indeed, all the other mechanisms of "national security" already have been. The Biden Administration still harasses anti-racism activists far too much, and a future Trump Administration (until the man dies, no sense imagining it'll be some other Republican) will do considerably worse.

When one hears that "Supply Chain Failures Prove Growing Need for Localized Economies," particularly with regard to food, one is right to ask: how do we help recreate local economies? The article suggests more than a few ways to do that -- from supporting mutual aid groups and farmers' markets all the way up to fighting "free" trade deals and supporting seed banks. We should also note that our FTC's proposed merger guidelines (which could also undo mergers) could be a good ally in this fight -- if we can keep corporations from getting absurdly huge, we can also keep them from throwing our lives into chaos at will.

This Harper's-style list about corporate involvement in spreading the "Great Replacement" theory should disabuse any notions we might have that corporations are somehow too "woke." Many corporations find racists to be useful idiots, since they distract folks from what the corporations are doing. It's like they're saying yeah, you did catch me polluting your water table, but before you shoot me, have you ever considered how Black and Brown folks get all the goodies and you can't get anything? And the reason you "can't get anything" is corporate power! And too many folks remember the good times, without remembering that reining in corporate power and taxing the rich were how we got the good times.

Arguing against renewable energy because of the extractive/exploitative effects of lithium mining sure is better than merely saying ha ha you're using coal to power your electric car! or passing around pictures of supposed "electric car graveyards" on Facebook, but it's no reason to throw up our hands and say we're just going to have to use oil and gas and coal forever, either. And it's also no reason to say every advance in technology exploits someone, as if the Indigenous folks who live near the salt lakes that provide around seven-eighths of all extracted lithium simply don't matter, or don't know better. The can-do thinker, of course, would be thinking past lithium in the first place.

Finally, Democrats are starting to see some of their early redistricting victories/non-losses get reversed in court. "(C)ollapsing across the map" is overly dramatic, but that's not the real issue: the real issue is that no Democrat should lose to any of these insane Republicans, and like the baseball manager who's already complaining about injuries three weeks into the season, Democratic politicians seem to be psyching themselves into doing just that. I sure hope I don't find out that it's always been about locking in the big campaign donations! After all, if you win, you have to do things, but if you lose, you can keep fundraising off the knuckle-dragger you just enabled to victory.

Action: concerning pollution, law and order, corporate taxes, non-disclosure agreements, and Fox News.

Long story short: tell our EPA to strengthen cross-state pollution rules, tell the city of San Francisco to investigate Jaxon Sales's death, tell Amazon shareholders to prod their corporation to pay more taxes, tell state legislatures to ban non-disclosure agreements between legislators and corporations, and tell your cable corporations to de-platform Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our EPA to update our cross-state pollution rule. As you might suspect, big power plants' pollution doesn't obey state lines, but frequently travels to other, downwind states; our EPA could protect those downwind states better than they do, but first they need to hear from us that they need to do it. And not for nothing, but "downwind" often means, in practice, "toward Black and Brown neighborhoods." Cue right-wingers yelling now pollution is racist? Pollution doesn't have a will of its own, of course, but polluters do. Like how right-wingers disappear polluters from the conversation? Why, it's like that's the whole idea!

Change.org helps you tell the city of San Francisco investigate the mysterious death of Jaxon Sales in 2020. Mr. Sales apparently went on a blind date only to die in another man's bed with the notorious date-rape drug GHB in his system, yet city officials told his family they wouldn't investigate because gays use GHB. You know who else uses GHB? Rapists! Seems to me an investigation isn't too much to ask! And when you confront the city's other odd decisions, you might think they're protecting the man in whose bed Mr. Sales died. An investigation might help us not to think that.

Both Public Citizen and Americans for Tax Fairness help you tell Amazon shareholders to support a resolution calling for Amazon to pay its fair share of taxes. After all, if Amazon doesn't pay for police, firefighters, and libraries, then the rest of us have to pay more! And remember: shareholder resolutions don't have to win; they only have to demonstrate that a not-insignificant number of shareholders disagree with something the corporation is doing and that if the corporation doesn't change, they might take their money elsewhere. Certainly a shareholder resolution is a more peaceful way of resolving our differences than whatever the "Dark MAGA" crowd might employ.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state legislatures to ban non-disclosure agreements (or NDAs) between legislators and corporations. To whom are state legislators supposed to account for their works? To their constituents! And non-disclosure agreements prevent that! They say they need non-disclosure agreements to ensure that people can speak candidly, but people speak candidly all the time! Anyone in politics who says they "feel" otherwise is full of shit! Corporations just don't want their unpopular (or unlawful!) "advice" to become public knowledge! And ask folks who signed NDAs with Donald Trump or Elon Musk how they feel about that decision now.

Finally, Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to dump Fox News from their platforms. The Buffalo shooter's manifesto had a certain from-Fox's-lips-to-the-shooter's-ears quality to it, and though I wouldn't put Tucker Carlson in jail for those murders, I don't think corporations should compel us all to pay to keep Fox News on our cable platforms. Without Fox, folks would have to work harder for their masturbatory rage. Like it should be! (And remember: no one has a First Amendment "right" to a cable platform; one only has a First Amendment right not to get thrown in jail for their speech.)

Around the table: featuring people who fought for things!

Thomas Alter II at In These Times writes about "The Radical Immigrant Farmers Who Helped Defeat the Robber Barons." And by the end you might be saying oh, so that's why so many right-wingers seem to be so anti-immigrant these days! You might also be reminded that a lot of what we take for granted these days -- or, at least, what we took for granted half a century ago -- came about only because folks smeared as "radical" and "socialist" held their ground and fought for a better life. These farmers fought slavery in Texas, too; I don't know how many of my contemporary Americans would have fought slavery if they'd lived in Texas in 1848. But I do know how many of them are doing nothing about fascism in America today.

Speaking of which, Russian anti-war activists, facing jail time for the nefarious offense of opposing Mr. Putin's little adventure in Ukraine, have had to get a little more creative in spreading the word. We're not as close to an era where a One True Great and Awesome American President can just put people in jail for opposing his wars, but we are much closer to an era where a One True Great and Awesome American President can incite his votaries to smash heads of anti-war protestors. So if you see a lot of Paladin memes on Facebook during that time, that might be a good way for American anti-war protestors to find each other. Facebook's algorithms sure won't do it, because that only works for racists.

It's not a big surprise that pro-choicers overstate the case somewhat that abortions since Roe v. Wade are safer -- one would imagine technology has improved over the last 50 years! -- but right-wingers no doubt cite this very fact (though not likely from Snopes!) as if winning a point in an argument is exactly the same as winning the entire argument. It's a form of personal attack -- ha ha, you're incorrect on a technical point, therefore I win the whole game just for pointing it out! Let's see any of those clowns inflict their morality on their daughters when they get pregnant. They'll all be saying "it's her choice" at that very moment. And I'm not inclined to see that as a strength, but as a weakness -- I mean, if your values don't challenge you, they're not very good values.

Can we really know if "your practice of Buddhism through listening to podcasts or use of meditation apps is 'authentic'"? Not to put too fine a point on it, but yes, if you don't sit in awe of podcasts and apps as this completely unprecedented technology, or as a direct conduit to magic learning. Anyway, long story short: "If digital Buddhist practice approaches the good life as eudaimonic -- as leading to human flourishing based on the pursuit of a deeper meaning -- it can be judged to be authentic. An inauthentic practice is one that just furthers hedonism by merely peddling bliss and relaxation."

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (E-NC) lost the Republican primary for his own House seat last week -- after a series of scandalous behaviors came to light somehow, and please understand that by "somehow" I mean "by the will of other state Republicans" -- and, well, he's not taking it too well: "I am on a mission now to expose those who say and promise one thing yet legislate and work towards another, self-profiteering, globalist goal...It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command." What does "dark MAGA" mean? Does it mean MAGA but actually shooting people? Seriously, the right needs to reinvent itself as a "new" right every few years because it has nothing nourishing to offer Americans; how many more of these must we sit through?

Finally, a Utah hunting guide faces jail time for baiting a bear out for Donald Trump, Jr. to shoot -- and he baited him out with "a pile of grain, oil and pastries"! I sure do hope "pastries" is what everyone remembers about this incident. Here's what else I hope folks remember: pretend-hunting -- hunting that isn't for subsistence, or even for training for the possibility of having to hunt for subsistence -- is uncivilized enough. But cheating at it is even worse! How lousy a shot is Trump the Younger?

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare-for-All, corruption, Social Security, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to secure voting rights, enact a Medicare-for-All health insurance system, ban Congressional stock ownership, reject Andrew Biggs's nomination to our Social Security Advisory Board, 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to protect our right to vote in America. Yeah, they've already refused to pass voting rights reform legislation several times -- or, more precisely, refused to get rid of the filibuster so they can pass it without Republican votes -- but that only means we keep telling them and telling them and telling them until they have no choice but to do our will. Best also to let them know that their love of the filibuster is horseshit. How do we know? Because they had a chance to enact a compromise -- force Senators to actually talk through their filibuster like in the old days -- and they wouldn't do that, either.

National Nurses United helps you tell your Senators to enact a Medicare-for-All health insurance system. Last week I described how Medicare for All would save good Americans money, but I should also describe how the privatized health insurance system costs us money: by putting up bureaucratic roadblocks to care that end up being rationalizations to deny care -- you think anyone in a single-payer country knows what a referral is? -- and also, of course, by jacking up the cost of medicine like (most famously) EpiPen and insulin. These are life-saving drugs, so big corporations can charge whatever they want, and you just have to pay it! Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to do that?

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6678/S. 3631, the Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, which would prevent members of Congress from owning stocks. Back in February, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA), who has on occasion tried to cast herself as someone who's against all these stupid wars we fight, bought somewhere up to $15,000 of Lockheed Martin stock a mere two days before Russia invaded Ukraine, and I would think folks naive if they thought she did that blindly. And she's far from the worst offender in Congress! Now, this bill has actual bipartisan support, but isn't moving very quickly; couldn't be that they're hoping we don't know anything about it, could it? Too late!

Civic Shout helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of one Andrew Biggs to our Social Security Advisory Board. Why? Easy: no one who wants to privatize Social Security should serve on the board of Social Security. Why, putting him on the Social Security Advisory Board would be like putting insurrectionists on the January 6 Committee! You know, for "balance." Just as there is no possible "balance" between freedom and fascism, there is no possible "balance" between Social Security and those who'd privatize it. Every time the stock market dips from now on, just ask a Republican: aren't you glad we didn't privatize Social Security like you wanted to do?

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner already. How do we know she'd do a good job? You know, besides the fact that she worked on our FCC's net neutrality order from 2016? Because the Fraternal Order of Police (who asked them? Big money did!) has campaigned against Ms. Sohn for her support of end-to-end encryption; they're afraid end-to-end encryption will keep them from doing their jobs. Jesus Mary and Joseph all they need to do is get warrants! Encryption won't save criminals from warrants; it could save us from government spying, though. Seems to me we'd want more anti-spying people in our government.

Around the table: in which someone actually proposes saddling all elections with an Electoral College.

This FactCheck article does a pretty good job summarizing our recent baby formula issues. I'm reminded that when you hear "should immigrant babies get formula before American babies?" that a better question would be: so babies don't deserve formula merely because they're immigrants? And if the answer is "well, not before our babies do," then ask why the Greatest Nation on Earth should have to choose. Marcus Aurelius would shake his head at all of that.

Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate wants to bring the Electoral College to Colorado statewide elections! Why a man would think "doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials" is a winning message is a bit of a mystery. If he were to somehow succeed in this nefarious plan, I can't say for sure our Supreme Court would strike it down, even though precedent commands it. Perhaps Sam Alito would say one-person-one-vote isn't a deeply-rooted enough right.

An anti-price-gouging bill aimed at oil corporations -- not the Windfall Profits Tax Act, but not a bad bill -- barely passed the House, with four House Democrats joining all Republicans in voting against it. Naturally Democrat anti-bill arguments were all hostage-taking: if we fight price-gouging, what will we do when we need more oil later? Why, you could argue against almost anything that way! If we put this CEO in jail for butchering his secretary and drinking her blood and eating the flesh from her bones, what'll we do when we need his leadership later? Of course, a truly great nation wouldn't need to answer that, because a truly great nation would train its people up into greatness. Clearly we've failed there with folks like Rep. Kathleen Rice, last heard helping to scuttle efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times tells us that the Amazon Labor Union victory in Staten Island, NY, requires organizers to recognize that "all of the time unions spend arguing with one another over who has the right to organize which workers, in which industry, at which company is one gargantuan waste of time." You'd think unions would already have thought of that, being on the ropes for the last 40-odd years as the share of union workers in the economy has dwindles from around 33% to around 10%, but then being on the ropes against an economy that seems to grow more diabolical by the day may make you inclined to cling to what you've been doing and tell yourself you just need to do it harder. Still, as Mr. Nolan says, "(b)uilding multi-union coalitions requires unions to recognize the futility of arguing over jurisdiction, and instead do the opposite: combine forces and organize without freaking out over who gets to put their label on the end product."

When I read David Brooks telling us that liberals need to stop looking down on right-wingers and pretending that only they have a monopoly on understanding right and wrong, I am tempted to replace the word "liberal" with the word "right-winger" everywhere in that op-ed and guess what? It works about as well that way; liberals certainly have no monopoly on believing their way is the only way. David Brooks apparently didn't hear any right-wingers calling Iraq war opponents traitors 20 years ago, let alone right-wingers constantly calling liberals weak since time immemorial, and that's the kind of blind spot that'll never help you ingratiate yourself with your new Democrat friends. (And those of us who do not imagine a wall between what Mr. Brooks calls the "moral freedom" ethos and the "you are not your own" ethos won't be persuaded, or even enriched, by the last 36 paragraphs. We certainly won't be convinced that the conservative worldview's "existential()...crisis" is a recent phenomenon. That carcass has been stinking up the joint for years.)

Finally, a right-winger actually tells Congress, under oath, that "places like Washington, D.C." use fetuses to power street lamps. As with right-wing efforts to call everyone who doesn't beat up a gay person a "groomer," I think legal remedies already exist to redress such absurdities. Never mind that she actually said that under oath; anyone can pretend they thought what they said was true as far as they "knew." No, someone with standing to sue needs to sue her -- someone with decision-making power in the D.C. utility grid, perhaps? And no, her saying "places like Washington, D.C." won't give her wiggle room; everyone knows what she meant. Playing whack-a-mole with these lies won't save us, but getting the liars to pay in a court of law might.

Action: concerning climate change, corruption, pollution, mine reclamation, and peaceful protests.

Long story short: tell Home Depot to stop using the Canadian boreal forest for its products, tell our government to investigate FDA corruption in re our baby formula shortage, tell our Army Corps of Engineers to examine pollution from pipelines more vigorously, tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, and tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the removal of peaceful protestors outside Supreme Court Justices' houses. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Environmental Action helps you tell Home Depot to stop sourcing its wood products from the Canadian boreal forest. Our reasoning is the same for our world's largest intact forest as it would be with the Amazon rainforest or the Tongass National Forest: old trees are our best weapon against climate change; they don't call them "the lungs of the planet" for nothing. Thus turning them into cabinets or toilet paper is, in this context, rather short-sighted. And if we can prompt the world's largest hardware store into abandoning logging in the forest, we'll likely get others to follow. If not, the Big Stick of Bad PR is always ready for deployment.

Progress America helps you tell our government to investigate our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) for its role in our current baby formula shortage. And I don't care what corruption at our FDA this uncovers! If you don't want to get shamed and shunned by your civilization, then don't hurt people. Chances are that investigators will find that the revolving door between industry and our FDA doesn't help us deal with food safety crises, and they might also find that our FDA has given established baby formula-manufacturing corporations too much of a free pass on safety inspections. That'd be a shame to learn that, but knowledge is power.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to close the loopholes that big oil and gas drilling corporations use to evade scrutiny about the pollution their proposed pipelines cause. Specifically, we'll call for less "fast-tracking" of pipelines. We should be "fast-tracking" solar and wind projects, if we must "fast-track" anything at all! Yet big oil and gas drilling corporations constantly assert that their pipelines are "too urgent" to ensure they don't spew filth into our water tables. But no one will be sitting around a campfire in a hundred years saying we can't drink the water now, but at least CEOs made good money for a while!

The Sierra Club helps you tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. We should blame our Senate for dragging their feet on confirming Mr. Biden's nominees, but this one's on our President, because he hasn't even put a name forward. The long name gives you the idea that this is some bureaucratic rando, but with all the coal mines closing up around America, reclaiming and repurposing that land becomes a lot more important, and someone's got to run things at the department that would do that work. And, ah, this is the kind of thing that actually helps potential Trump voters in Appalachia. So how about we do it?

Finally, FAIR helps you tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the repression of peaceful protesting outside of Supreme Court Justice's homes. They actually suggested these protestors were totalitarians! By suggesting that they were "(e)rasing any distinction between the public square and private life"! Key word there, of course, is any -- protesting outside of the private homes of public figures who have, very publicly, made known their opposition to the popular will does not erase literally "any" distinctions between public and private spheres. And, ah, who exactly "harassed" or "intimidated" these Justices? If anything, protestors have been too polite.

Around the table: in which we describe yet more foolish behavior.

Malia Jones at The Conversation advises that we stop obsessing about "risk assessment" in re COVID and return to risk reduction: "wearing masks, getting vaccinated and boosted, avoiding indoor crowds and improving ventilation." The last item often requires legislation (for public buildings) and/or shaming and shunning (for private buildings), but you have a lot more control over the first three items. Remember: you're better off trusting an actual epidemiologist on these matters than a social media "influencer."

Study reverses memory loss in aging mice by "washing" their brains in cerebrospinal fluid. The fluid apparently washes out waste products, bathes brain tissue in proteins, and boosts growth of myelin, the sheathing material that protects neurons. Needless to say no one's done this in humans yet, but if it works anywhere near as well as it did in mice, it could be a game-changer in treating dementia and similar conditions. I wish the researchers (from at least four nations!) the best in continuing their work. If only spinal fluid could wash out the memory of watching all those pricks on Fox News!

Find yourself cringing a bit that Spain has outlawed harassment of women who try to get abortions at clinics? The key word in that formulation is harassment -- you don't need to be that creative, of course, to exercise your right to free speech without actually harassing an individual. But I would have struck the words "annoying" or "offensive" from the list of proscribed behaviors -- let shame, not the law, handle that stuff; outlawing "intimidating or coercive acts" is justice enough. It'll all be moot in the United States, of course, once our Supreme Court rules there's no right to an abortion anymore.

When I hear that Elon Musk says he'll be voting entirely for Republicans this year because Democrats are "too much captured by the unions" which is to laugh, I can't help but think I might be using that information as a reason not to vote for Republicans! But in truth, we've got enough evil to which we can tie Republicans (book banning, immaturity about masks and vaccines, fear about confronting their own racism, and of course, January 6), and also Elon Musk just isn't as unpopular as other titans of industry such as Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. At least, not yet.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (E-FL) has signed a bill that actually makes protesting in front of a private home illegal. How typical -- if someone, somewhere, is being an asshole, Ron DeSantis gets insanely jealous and tries to be an even bigger one. And where sane people see peaceful protestors, Mr. DeSantis sees only "angry mobs," which sure is rich coming from a man who obviously aspires to be a one-man angry mob. I'd say our Supreme Court would smack this down with a quickness, citing the precedent about protesting at abortion workers' homes, of course, though given how many good Americans have protested their houses lately, I'd just as soon expect the opposite -- which sure would be ironic, coming from a gang of jurists who've spent their lives devaluing other folks' lived experiences.

Finally, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he opposes NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, and though I prefer not to resort to ad hominem arguments, if Mr. Erdogan's against it, that's a pretty good reason to be for it. And dig his reasoning! Finland and Sweden haven't "taken a clear stance against terror organizations"? I think everyone's taken a "clear stance" against "terror organizations," though we may disagree that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party actually is a "terror organization." Anyway, yammering on about "terror organizations" is what dictators do. We know Mr. Erdogan's a dictator not just by what he does, and not just by how easily he wins re-election these days, but by the fact that our former President has such a hard-on for him.

Action: concerning Iran, gas prices, drug addiction, our Supreme Court, and our past mistreatment of Native Americans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to support the Iran nuclear deal, lower gas prices, and pass the MAT Act, the Judiciary Act, and the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies 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.

Peace Action helps you tell your House Reps to support re-entry into the Iran nuclear deal. Congressfolk on both sides have shown a disquieting unwillingness to re-enter that deal, and for what? To appease Trumpholes? To "put distance" between them and President Biden? To gain imaginary and irrelevant leverage over Iran's Republican Guard? Gosh, how about doing the right thing for the right reason for once? The Iran nuclear deal was keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but because Donald Trump decided to shit all over anything Barack Obama did that actually helped Americans, he took it away from us. And now Congress wants to make it harder to get it back? Tell them no.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to "protect Americans and keep gas prices low," because sometimes you gotta be simple and direct. And also sometimes because your Congressfolk are thick-headed because they only talk to each other and Beltway consultants! Recall Katie Porter telling us that her Democratic colleagues didn't talk about inflation because they didn't see anything about it in polling? The stupid is strong with some of our Reps and Senators! Anyway, if you want to deliver a more specific message -- like "pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, which would tax excessive oil corporation profits at 95%," you can add that to your signature.

People's Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 445, the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (or MAT) Act. All this locking people up for using and abusing drugs, tell me: has that worked? No, it has not, by the evidence that far too many Americans are still addicted to drugs. The MAT Act would remove certain bureaucratic obstacles to prescribing certain narcotic drugs that treat addiction. "Removing certain bureaucratic obstacles" may be the argument that seems to have attracted a stunning 46 House Republican co-sponsors! But only three in the Senate, meaning the Mitch McConnell Obstruction Machine may yet roll over it. Unless we speak out in numbers they can't deny, of course.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2584, the Judiciary Act, which would increase the number of Supreme Court Justices from 9 to 13. I've been saying we need four more Justices to keep up with 13 federal Appeals Courts, but recent events have made the necessity of getting better Justices up there more urgent to me. And I'm sure it's even more urgent for the women and gays and transgender folks who would be directly affected by Sam Alito's made-up "deeply-rooted" doctrine. I'm able to imagine such a thing because I possess the quality of empathy, a quality today's Supreme Court Justices seem to suppress. Surely Joe Biden can find four more Justices who get what it's like to be human.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5444/S. 2908, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Federal boarding schools aimed to "civilize" the Native American, but they separated families and abused students, which ain't exactly civilized behavior. Some folks will refer to this bill as an "apology tour" or "cancel culture" or whatnot, but admitting you've done wrong, and then righting that wrong, is about as American as America can be. Note well that the Quakers put out this action alert and the Quakers admit their own past wrongdoing in running more than two dozen boarding schools! That's how you do it.

Around the table: in which we identify the *real* extremists.

Surprise, surprise, an Anti-Defamation League study of 450 murders committed by domestic extremists in America (like the Buffalo murders earlier this week) concludes that right-wingers commit about 75% of them. (By their tabulation, Muslim extremists commit 20% and left-wing extremists commit a mere 4%.) "(T)he American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left," the article says, but that only means right-wingers will simply redefine "murder" until it includes things like not inviting right-wingers to your barbecues or shaming your right-wing father-in-law for watching Tucker Carlson. I've even heard right-wingers call such things "a kind of death"! You know what's "a kind of death"? Death.

Researchers at Brown University and Microsoft AI Health inform us that if every American adult had gotten vaccinated, we could have saved well over 300,000 lives. Against over 1 million dead, that's a sizable amount. An earlier Kaiser study put that number at 234,000 -- by not counting folks who'd died while vaccinated-but-not-boosted -- and I put more persuasive power in that figure, since not getting boosted was more likely not a matter of ideology. Still, that's more than one out of every five deaths. And the other side's argument is all waaaaaaah personal choice you can't tell me what to do stop the steal!

When I hear that "Online data could be used against people seeking abortions if Roe v. Wade falls" -- a perfectly explicable outcome, since most folks turn to the internet for information about reproductive health care! -- I am reminded that the FCC passed pretty good data privacy rules in 2016, but Congressional Republicans nullified them in 2017 with a quickness, because if it's an instance of government helping you, then Republicans must shit on it. Also too, law enforcement can search your cellphones without even getting a warrant because legislators either don't understand technology or go out of their way not to understand it because big campaign donors don't want them to.

Ho hum, Mississippi, the state that aims to end Roe v. Wade via its 15-week anti-abortion law, also just so happens to be the worst state in the Deep South for providing health insurance coverage to low-income women. Medicaid recipients get only 60 days' worth of post-partum care in Mississippi (though the Affordable Care Act allows expansion of that care to one year), though at least one study found that over 80% of post-partum health care costs come after 60 dats. Why, it's like that was the whole idea! I'd look for big corporations to pressure to pull out of Mississippi, but there ain't hardly any there to begin with; Republicans really are going to run that state into the ground, which will hurt all the good folks who live there.

Buried deep in this excellent Steven Rosenfeld piece about Pennsylvania's Republican nominee for Governor, Doug Mastriano is a description of the first Josh Shapiro attack ad against him, and it's like the ad's makers rolled up as much Democrat weakness as humanly possible into one ad, which you don't even know is an anti-Mastriano ad until the end! Look, here's how to attack Doug Mastriano: call him weak for refusing to accept the 2020 election results and doing his damnedest to overturn them. Republicans love wearing Democrat epithets, from "deplorable" all the way to "ultra-MAGA," as badges of honor; let's see Mr. Mastriano work that alchemy with the word "weak." I'd say I hope it makes him melt down in public, except that public melt-downs aren't the career-enders they used to be. Just ask our former screamer-in-chief, Donald Trump.

Finally, maybe the Buffalo shooter could evade any plagiarism charges Tucker Carlson might level against him, but the part of their collaborative work I can't stand is this anti-diversity argument from Mr. Carlson: "Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?" Ahem: civilization is not a marriage or a military unit; these two institutions are parts of civilization, and insisting that the whole of civilization be exactly like any of its parts is small-minded. Even 15 years ago I thought Tucker Carlson was doing the best he could as a conservative; now I think he was just fronting, and his current fascist-worship was the endgame all along.

Action: concerning law and order, food safety, abortion rights, cluster bombs, and social media.

Long story short: tell governments to end cash bail, tell our FDA to limit lead in fruit juice, tell your state legislators not to restrict abortion rights, tell President Biden to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and tell your pension fund to support shareholder resolutions that would rein in Facebook's bad behavior. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our state, local, and federal governments to end cash bail. Don't listen to the loud voices saying how can cops do their job without cash bail? If you can't do your job without holding people indefinitely without trial, then you need to find a new job. Our Constitution guarantees your right to a "speedy trial," not a "trial whenever we get around to it so we can reassure the weak we're doing something about crime." Certainly you have a right to a speedy trial even if you don't have a crapload of money! And if a poll tax is unconstitutional, why isn't cash bail?

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to put a stricter limit on lead in fruit juice. Our FDA has proposed lowering the current limit on lead in fruit juice from 50 parts per billion to 10 ppb for apple juice and 20 for other juices, but manufacturers are perfectly capable of meeting a more stringent 1 ppb limit -- even if they say it'll "cost them money"! -- and that lower limit sure would be a whole lot better for folks who drink it. Especially kids! They'd have a lot less brain damage, cancer, and diabetes, that's for sure, and thus a longer life, with more potential for doing big things. That is what America's about, after all.

With the impending reversal of Roe v. Wade, Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators not to restrict the right to abortion. I've been loathe to criticize pro-lifers in the past -- though not pro-life politicians, particularly the ones who make their mistresses get abortions! -- but I suspect a lot of pro-lifers simply don't understand that (for example) a woman who tries to carry her fetus to term, but has to abort it because it'll kill her if she doesn't, isn't a "murderer." When it happens to them, perhaps they'll get it, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and if I can get it -- having absolutely no chance at ever getting pregnant myself -- then why can't they?

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to join the world cluster bomb ban, particularly now that Russia and Ukraine are using cluster bombs on each other. Over 100 nations have banned cluster bombs by signing onto the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but of course we're not one of them. Seems to me that if you're a law-and-order adherent, you'd oppose cluster bombs. Why? Because they kill people long after the war is over, which is neither lawful nor orderly. Let's not become so decadent a civilization that we beat our chests about how lawful we are but then let unexploded bombs kill people 50 years after we've all forgotten we were ever enemies.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to vote in favor of shareholder resolutions that would curb Facebook's ability to injure our civilization, i.e., with their algorithms that help white supremacists find each other easily. Now, because Mark Zuckerberg gives him and his cronies 10 votes for every vote everyone else casts, the resolutions won't win. But they rarely do! Even a resolution that gets 25% demonstrates that shareholders might be willing to take their money elsewhere, and executives tend to poop their pants at that thought. Maybe I should put the image of Mark Zuckerberg pooping his pants in folks' heads more often.

Around the table: tabulating even more right-wing drama!

House January 6 panel subpoenas five Republican House Reps, including wannabe-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. At the risk of going out on a limb, I expect he'll defy the subpoena, because that's what hard guys do! Laws aren't for him; laws are for Those People! All that will endear him with Trump votaries, who hold these two beliefs as irrefutable truth. (As an aside, if justice seems to be moving a little slowly, recall that Joe Lieberman had subpoena power during the Enron hearings but didn't use it.)

Guess what else is causing our current baby formula shortage? Big corporations dissuading our FDA from conducting more regular/more stringent inspections, that's what! Because waaaaaaaah it'll cost us money, though Abbott Nutrition (the corporation with all the contaminated baby food!) spent $5 billion last year just on stock buybacks. Remember: when you give corporations more money, they don't do the right thing. When do they do the right thing? When we make them do the right thing, through vigorous safety inspection and regulation.

Is it nice to know that Tucker Carlson's recent drama about a purported "masculinity crisis" is older than dirt? I'm not sure anymore. Anyway, long before the bow-tied Hungry Man heir, Bernarr Macfadden trained Italian fasicsts and told us they were more vigorous than Americans, which sure turned out to be a laugh once World War II started and Germany had to bail them out, and even President Eisenhower's Council on Youth Fitness came about because we were afraid the Communists were more manly, though today's "Communists" are somehow 97-pound weaklings and unstoppable killers all at once. And if you're tempted to think the guy who went on an all-milk diet seems harmless by comparison, recall that we have just had a two-year education in how health fads can be most emphatically not-harmless.

Republican Governors Youngkin of Virginia and Hogan of Maryland tell our Justice Department to crack down on protests at Supreme Court Justices' houses, but I bet you just can't guess why they can't do that: because our Supreme Court long ago decided that going to the homes of Planned Parenthood workers was also First Amendment-protected free speech! Of course Messrs. Youngkin and Hogan know that; they're just stirring up drama, like all right-wingers do. "(P)reserve the integrity of our American judicial system" my ass -- Sam Alito just made up a rule aiming to scuttle 70 years of American jurisprudence.

Ho hum, Michael Grabell at ProPublica describes "The Plot to Keep Meatpacking Plants Open During COVID-19." Long story short: "the callousness of meatpacking executives and the level of industry influence over the Trump administration were far greater than previously known." Emblematic of that callousness, Tyson implemented mask-wearing and social-distancing on the chicken lines very quickly -- in China, not in the United States! Result: by July of 2020 you could tie over 6% of all COVID-19 cases to meatpacking plants, and then a few months later these meatpacking corporations were all desperate for schools to reopen, and you know why. I hope their 300% profit hikes get them into heaven, because I'm not sure anything else will.

Finally, Arizona Attorney General/Senate candidate Mark Brnovich's 2020 election lies are so brazen anymore that even Arizona Republicans have slammed him for it. I won't call this drama per se, since everyone can see the extensive documentary evidence of Mr. Brnovich's two-facedness on this issue, but I don't want to give Arizona Republicans too much credit, either, for without that evidence they might have more easily brushed off his evil works. See, thanks to January 6, I can hardly give Republicans the benefit of the doubt anymore. And I don't think that's my failing! Sooner or later, America has to get back to blaming the real villains.

Action: concerning baby formula, Medicare for All, paid leave, drug prices, and price-gouging.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fix the baby formula crisis, expand Medicare to include all Americans, pass paid family/sick leave, lower drug prices and expand home health care, and pass a windfall profits tax on oil and gas corporations. 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. You've heard of the national baby formula shortage, which is a matter of life and death for a lot of babies? Matt Stoller explains why it's happening -- short answer: monopolies -- and prescribes solutions, which you may call your Congressfolk about. These solutions include: temporarily allowing baby formula imports, particularly from nations with good (or better) food safety regulations; restructuring food stamp markets so they don't create baby formula monopolies; and breaking up our FDA so that one agency doesn't regulate both food and drugs. We may not get the change we need right away, but if we keep at it, it will. And if we do nothing, we'll get nothing.

National Nurses United helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare to include all Americans. Medicare for All will cover more folks for less money, end of story. Don't believe me? Believe the right-wing Mercatus Center, which tabulated the cost of Medicare for All at $32 trillion over 10 years -- or some $17 trillion less than the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid's forecast of all health care spending over the next decade. How do you pay for it, then? Simple: assess an employer-side payroll tax (meaning workers don't pay it!) amounting to what big corporations already pay for the private health insurance that rejects your claims for no good reason and doesn't cover everyone.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family and sick leave for all Americans. Since right-wingers constantly squeal WHEREZ WILLZ YOUZ FINDZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!!, I'll note that Sen. Gillibrand's original bill would have funded it with a 0.4% payroll tax (half paid by the employer, half by the worker), which, for someone making $50,000 annually, would amount to a little over $8 a month. $8! So everyone can take time off to take care of their kids, or their parents, or their grandparents, or themselves when they need to. And I'd fund it by bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and the 55% tax on corporate profits, which wouldn't be "socialism" so much as "what we did in the 1950s."

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices and expand at-home health care services. Most people want these things, so why can't Congress do it? Because Republicans won't do it! And also because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema won't do it, because they think they're so much smarter than everyone else! In 2 1/2 years if not sooner, these fools will be shown the error of their ways; wouldn't it be nice if a massive popular outcry helped them see the error of their ways sooner? That goes for your Republican Reps and Senators, too. If enough of us speak out, then doing nothing will actually get them fired for once.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. Because sky-high prices shouldn't lead to sky-high profits! I'm old enough to remember when corporations didn't raise prices solely because of increased costs. Why? Partly because shame still meant something back then, and also partly because we had fewer monopolies then, so we had a higher chance of finding a corporation that wouldn't rob you merely because it had the opportunity. Now they just gouge us because they can. If we pass a windfall profits tax on them, then they can't.

Around the table: special "Pennsylvania primary drama" edition!

So Donald Trump endorsed state Sen./January 6 attendee Doug Mastriano for Pennsylvania's Republican nomination for Governor mere days before the Tuesday primary, and one feels compelled to ask: what took him so long? Mr. Trump sure does like to get behind a winner, and Mr. Mastriano has had a pretty hefty lead in most polls for a few weeks now; that probably explains it. State Republicans say he can't win, but surely they understand things better than that! Republican wave or no, Mr. Mastriano has a decent shot against state Attorney General/presumptive Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro, particularly if Mr. Shapiro does the Democrat thing and act like he's got it in the bag.

Meanwhile, does the Trump camp seriously expect us to believe, in re Kathy Barnette's late surge in the PA Republican Senate nomination race, that "no one saw this coming"? I saw this coming, and I get paid by the hour! Of course, I mistakenly thought Jeff Bartos would benefit from "not being one of the two rich out-of-state guys in the race," but apparently his role in this drama has only been to take front-runners out, first Sean Parnell (he leaked the news of Mr. Parnell's divorce proceedings, you may recall), and then Messrs. Oz and McCormick (if I saw the ad he ran on that topic once I saw it a hundred times). Still, anyone could have seen this coming, particularly students of Deb Fischer's 2012 Senate campaign in Nebraska.

Much has been said about Ms. Barnette's loose tongue on Twitter since she's become a thing, but I take particular exception to her claim that "homosexuals LEAD with their sexual preference" (shouty caps in original). No, Ms. Barnette, you "lead with their sexual preference" by only talking about gays in terms of sex, which is but one aspect of anyone's life. I don't know how many more ways I can put this. Fun fact: Ms. Barnette lost in Pennsylvania's 4th House district in 2020 by 19 points -- and not only wouldn't concede defeat, but launched at least one frivolous lawsuit to stop it from happening!

And yet Republican efforts to stop Ms. Barnette's candidacy reek of desperation, as would any last-minute effort to stop a candidate whose surge you didn't see until it was far too late. I can't get away from that "Crazy Kathy Barnette" ad on TV (and if she were a man, think they'd call her "crazy"?). The ad not only takes alleged "praise" for Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter way, way out of context, but repeats phrases like "white racism" and "structural racism" with a sneer, as if that alone makes them "crazy" things to say! I could never vote for Ms. Barnette in the general election, but I hope she beats her opponents' asses beet-red in the primary, because the "Crazy" ad is exactly the kind of thing that should bring shame and shunning upon anyone who creates it.

Finally, the New York Times wonders why Rep. Conor Lamb, despite "Ha(ving) All the Makings of a Front-Runner," is not actually the front-runner in the race for the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nomination. I wouldn't blame you if you shot out because liberals are sick of this shit, that's why, but at least the Times did cite that (not in those precise words) as one of the two reasons, the other being the Lamb campaign's own "missteps." What were these "missteps"? Taking front-running status for granted, trying to appear "above the fray," calling yourself the "most electable" candidate -- in short, all of the things Democratic consultants always tell their candidates to do! If folks like John Fetterman and Lucas Kunce and Gary Chambers and Charles Booker can win their Senate elections this year, maybe folks will stop listening to the defeatist pablum of Democratic consultants. Why, folks might even realize that they're the reason Democrats went from (in Paul Begala's words) "the party of the factory floor to the party of the faculty lounge."

Action: concerning inflation, pollution, corruption, law and order, and immigration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending Corporate Greed Act, the Green New Deal for Public Schools Act, the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, and the People's Response Act, and tell your Congressfolk to end the Title 42 program. 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. 7443/S. 3933, the Ending Corporate Greed Act, which would tax excess corporate profits at 95%. Want to do something about inflation, Democrats? This is it! Let Republicans explain how no corporate profit can really be "excess"! Let Republicans pretend record-high corporate profits have nothing to do with high prices! Most Americans are smarter than that -- yeah, supply chain issues have also contributed to inflation, but mainly it's corporate greed. Of course, this'll only work if Democrats bang that saucepan. And they'll only bang that saucepan if we bang that saucepan first, as loud as we can.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4442, the Green New Deal for Public Schools Act. The original Green New Deal was always a simple "sense of Congress" resolution, but this bill would actually remake our public schools into energy-saving, climate-helping, job-creating buildings, and it would, according to scientists, accomplish the equivalent of taking 17 million jobs off the road. Republicans will whine about the price tag -- $140 billion annually for the next decade. Can you think of anything Republicans have done lately that cost that much or more and did no good? Oh, right, the 2017 tax "reform." So drink a big glass of STFU, Republicans.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6678/S. 3631, the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, which would pretty much do what it says it'll do -- prevent members of Congress and their spouses from owning any stocks, bonds, derivatives, and the like. Because owning them clouds your judgment when you have to make decisions about them! Which is obvious to anyone who thinks about it! The list of exceptions in Sec. 2(c) -- T-bills, public pension funds, other investments that don't present a conflict of interest -- could be pared down a bit; a lot of public pension funds are in the death-grip of hedge funds these days. But this still represents progress.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act, which would fund alternative public safety responses -- alternative to policing, that is. Some folks would call that "defunding the police," but I suspect they're the same people who call everything "socialism" and "Communism"; this bill wouldn't "defund the police," but would fund approaches like mental health workers and youth programs that would work better than throwing everyone in jail all the time. It'd take a lot of pressure off our police, too; I say that if you want to "support the police," you stop asking them to do every conceivable thing like our brains are that flexible.

Finally, the Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the xenophobic Title 42 program. A lot of Congressfolk -- including, even, some Democrats I actually like! -- are acting like the end of Title 42 would be the end of the world, but that's rubbish. Title 42 expels would-be immigrants without their lawfully-mandated legal hearings for "health reasons," but has it kept COVID numbers down in the U.S.? Obviously not! Right-wingers who refused to mask and refused to get vaccines powered the COVID pandemic quite well enough on their own, thank you very much! So this is no time for any politician to strut like a peacock about being "tough" on immigration.

Around the table: in which Democrats maybe get a clue, or maybe they don't.

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), who deserves re-election as much as or more than any other Congressperson, tells us Democrats are having trouble realizing just how bad inflation affects working families. One of her colleagues told her "we're not seeing it in the polls," apparently completely unaware of how that would sound to anyone who doesn't breathe Beltway air. You don't find out what you need to know through polls! You find out through talking to your constituents. Who are also your bosses. (And Ms. Porter aims her anger at CEOs, which more Democrats should try. Bosses aren't that popular, as you know -- except with other bosses and the politicians who eat out of their hands.)

That being said, the latest inflation figures actually comprise better news, perhaps better than our "liberal" media would like. CNBC's headline talks of "inflation barrel(ling) ahead," but the year-to-year rate actually dropped from 8.6% to 8.3%, while the month-to-month rate dropped rather more sharply, from 1.2% in March to 0.3% in April; if inflation grew at the April rate for a year, the yearly rate would be 3.6%, while at the March rate, it'd be 14.4%. That's a big deal, and only Beltway insiders care that it "fell short of forecasts." Regular Americans don't buy bacon with forecasts.

How do "liberal" media outlets "manufacture opinion" on the Title 42 immigration issue, according to David W. Moore at FAIR? By inducing as many folks as possible to actually answer the question -- despite the fact that very few Americans pay very close attention to it -- first by omitting a "don't know" or "unsure" or "no opinion" option, and then by giving respondents rather incomplete information about the issue. Fox News's poll, for example, suggested to respondents that Title 42 was entirely a health care issue; did they note that would-be immigrants actually have a right to a hearing before being deported, which Title 42 denies? Of course not -- just as they didn't note that right-wingers kept this pandemic going quite well on their own, without help from "caravans" and the like.

Alex Pareene talks with Tom Scocca about automobile dependence, apparently an acute problem in New York City, where I have never considered driving anywhere to be a good idea. Our governments' devotion to public transit has been wanting for, oh, just spit-balling here, for a little over 40 years, which maps easily onto Mr. Pareene's discussion about "how quickly and easily you become a sociopath, even a borderline eugenicist, behind the wheel." It's a great discussion, one that almost offhandedly births a great idea: stop calling them "accidents" and start calling them "automobile violence."

I actually had to remind myself that Steve Bannon's threat against Mark Esper for the horrible crime of telling everyone how terrible Donald Trump's last year in office truly was is drama, just like it is whenever right-wingers attack each other. I guess we'll know it's drama when Mr. Esper utterly fails to sue Mr. Bannon, since terroristic threats -- even deliberately vague ones -- do not enjoy First Amendment protection. (No, it really is a threat! The only way "(w)hen we come to power...You are going to be held accountable for this, bro" is not a threat is if Mr. Bannon had said, right beforehand, "ignore everything I'm about to say.")

Finally, the Democrats' new line of attack against Republicans -- calling them "ultra-MAGA" -- shouldn't give us much hope that they, or we, will survive the midterms. Instead of letting Republicans "lean into" their own branding, how about you call them weak? I mean, whining about masks and refusing to get vaccinated is weak. Having big book-burning rallies is weak. And trying to overthrow the government when your candidate loses by seven million votes is weak. I want Democrats to call Republicans weaklings, and then I want to see Republicans try to "lean into" that.

Around the table: in which we contemplate various legal matters.

Elon Musk says he'd reverse the Twitter ban on Donald Trump, calling the ban "a morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme," and if I can think of an even clumsier way of putting that I'll let you know. His point is that the ban didn't silence Mr. Trump, though, actually, it kinda did -- not totally, but we don't let the perfect murder the good, do we? And none of Mr. Musk's nattering on about "free speech" changes the fact that Twitter is a publishing house -- whether he likes it or not, whether our laws recognize it as such or not -- and no belief in "free speech" requires that Twitter publish Donald Trump's ramblings any more than it requires that Random House publish mine.

Normally we turn to Patrick Cockburn for incisive analysis of foreign policy, but here he writes about "Mistakes I Made in Response to My Son's Mental Illness." Mr. Cockburn quit his job in order to "devote all efforts to helping Henry recover," not realizing that "I could not do much more than I was already doing and being jobless simply added to the strains on the family." He also didn't realize his son wasn't taking his meds for several years, which matters because "few therapies help until a person is stable on medication." The good news: coming together as a family or community helps "frequently a lot more than (people) think." And Henry has "done far better than most" in his predicament.

Folks are whining way too much about protestors holding vigils outside Brett Kavanaugh's house and the like; while I object to directly petitioning courts to rule the way I want them to; I certainly don't object to good folks taking to the street. Not too many months ago right-wingers waxed rhapsodic about a bunch of obnoxious truckers honking their horns all day and night because they didn't want to wear masks or get vaccines. (Naturally Susan Collins called the cops after someone wrote a chalk message outside of her house. Those poor, oppressed politicians! Sure, it's brightly-colored sidewalk chalk today, but what about tomorrow?)

Mob Boss Mitch suggests that Republicans will pursue a federal abortion ban if our Supreme Court overturns Roe as expected, and we say "suggests," of course, because he's trying to say it without actually saying it. And for good reason -- polling has lately told us that Democrats are doing better on the generic Congressional ballot, and do even better than that once voters figure out whicn one's the pro-choice candidate. In the meantime, Mitch ain't fooling anyone -- there's a reason he is literally the most unpopular Senator in America. Sadly, there is also a reason Democrats haven't given him the humiliating retirement he deserves. More than one reason, actually.

So why does Tucker Carlson say Disney's "behavior" "sounds like the behavior of a sex offender"? Easy -- because he knows actually coming out and calling them a sex offender might erase his family fortune in a lawsuit. The guy with the ZZ Top beard who calls you a "groomer" may not be so careful. Seriously, "grooming" is actually a thing, and if someone accuses you of "grooming" because you're not a complete asshole to gay and trans kids, get their name and sue them for slander. Right-wingers would call that a "frivolous lawsuit," even after you win it, so ain't nothing you can do about that. (What behavior was Mr. Carlson talking about, anyway? Your guess is as good as mine!)

Finally, speaking of the relationship between truth and lawsuits, One America News airs a 30-second statement stating, in part, that "Georgia officials have concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020" -- including, of course, the two workers who filed defamation lawsuits against the network. A settlement between the two parties forced that statement, and though the plaintiffs had the right idea there, I would have demanded a stronger statement -- "Georgia officials have concluded" gives OAN too much wiggle room -- and I'd make them read that statement on-air once every three or four hours every day for the rest of their lives. Hey, I've had enough.

Action: concerning taxes, abortion, discrimination, and ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit, protect abortion rights, pass the Equality Act, and strengthen ethics provisions for our Supreme Court Justices. 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 Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk not to pass a massive research and development tax break for corporations without first bringing back the expanded Child Tax Credit. You can also say expand the CTC and reject that slab of corporate welfare in the first place! But really, this is simple: working families should pay fewer taxes, because it's harder for them to make ends meet, while corporations flush in record profits should not get any tax breaks. They can write off their research and development already, because it's an expense; why are we letting them deduct that twice? And where's Joe Manchin's concern about inflation whenever the topic of corporate welfare comes up?

Both MoveOn and Change.org help you tell your Congressfolk to protect abortion rights in America. Abortion is health care -- for the woman whose fetus has no brain or organs, for the woman raped by her brother, for the woman who will die if she gives birth, for the woman terrorized by her partner over her pregnancy, and yes, also for the woman who knows she can't raise a child now because she has no money (not everyone can just go work for a hedge fund, after all!) or because she knows she won't raise that child right. And we've lately learned that between 60 and 66% of Americans (depending on the poll) think abortion should be legal in most circumstances, so I think the people have spoken here; now we must remind our representatives to listen.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. By the reasoning, if you can call it that, of Justice Alito's draft opinion, they'll overturn Obergefell v. Hodges at the first opportunity, so we need to codify equal rights for gays and transgender folks in our laws -- otherwise right-wing governments will continue to use the specter of gay and transgender folks to induce rage in our weakest Americans. Plus banks and landlords will be able to deny services to gay and transgender folks just because of who they are. That's what'll continue to be if we don't pass the Equality Act, and that reality should offend all of us.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation holding our Supreme Court Justices to the same ethical standards to which we already hold all other federal judges. It's tempting to blame Sam Alito for all of this -- since his draft ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade has convinced just about everyone who can still be convinced that our Supreme Court is just another political body -- but actually it's Clarence Thomas who didn't recuse himself from a decision involving his wife's involvement in the January 6 attempted coup. Remember: your job, as a citizen, isn't to "trust your government"; it's to make your government worthy of your trust.

Around the table: in which the right-wing dramasphere remains aflame.

Greg Palast absolutely skewers Dinesh D'Souza's new film, 2000 Mules, which aims to "prove" that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election he lost by seven million votes. Long story short: Mr. D'Souza says he has a crap-ton of evidence of election fraud but, strangely, doesn't present it -- I'm old enough to remember when we all considered that a tell! -- and even the geolocation data "proving" Black men visited vote drop-off boxes 20 times each actually is only "accurate" within 93 feet! The argument gets much, much worse from there, as you would expect if you were even distantly acquainted with Mr. D'Souza's work. But for some Americans, the only "truth" is their own unquenchable rage, and they're clearly Mr. D'Souza's intended audience here.

Another day, another FAIR article reminding us that our "liberal" media talks to far too many right-wing rageheads about transgender issues and not enough to, well, transgender folks themselves. Yikes, pimps, talk to trans kids! They know more about themselves than you do! And certainly more than folks who present themselves as "influencers" but just want to hook you on another rage drug. (As evidenced by the fact that Breitbart "covered" the Texas "child abuse" directive more than most other media outlets. They're probably spinning it as "we got more trans sources than the Washington Post!" They're hoping you don't know how to read a chart.)

New York and California bills would create workers' councils so that workers' viewpoints can be heard a bit better. California's proposed Fast Food Sector Council would also include franchisees, who are also pretty put-upon by their bosses. I don't have nearly as many problems at work as fast-food employees -- they work, after all, in an industry that "literally cannot comply with wage, hour, safety and health law and still make a profit" -- but for the last decade or so, my bosses have all seemed to understand not one part of the work I do, so I heartily applaud such a move. And I bet when you think about it, you do, too.

Uh oh: the Staten Island, NY District Attorney actually used asset forfeiture cash to buy facial recognition software. Why, that's two fists of evil, right there -- it's like selling arms to the Iranians in order to get the money to arm the Contras. Even better, Staten Island has stopped using it, because it, you know, sucks, which you or I could have told them for nothing. Also too, they used asset forfeiture cash so they wouldn't have to use tax money, because politicians have been selling us a no-tax fantasy the last 40 years or so. Ideally, taxes pay for things we all may need at some point or other. Ideally, they do not pay for facial recognition software that can't tell Black folks apart any better than your right-wing uncle can.

Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-OR), justifiably facing a primary challenge from his left, runs ads touting his support for overturning our Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling -- without mentioning that he's directed close to $400,000 of Super PAC money to his own campaign. There's the world I want and the world I live in, I can already hear him intoning, but don't you love how these center-right politicians run left once they get a primary challenge? His vote late last year for the Build Back Better Act -- after he vowed to vote against it! -- I would similarly not attribute not to a Damascus moment on his part.

Finally, right-wing media outlets have reported that Justice Alito has removed himself to an "undisclosed location" after his draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade leaked -- based on a single source who said it on Fox News but now can't remember "whether I saw in on Twitter or somebody told me." And for that the right-wing dramasphere blew up yesterday. Don't cry any tears for poor Ilya Shapiro; I'm sure this all went down exactly the way he wanted it to. It may take him years to figure out how thoroughly Our Glorious Elites have used him.

Action: concerning monopolies, racism, pollution, abortion, and bad media.

Long story short: tell your government to fight monopolies, environmental racism, and truck pollution; tell big corporations to stop funding anti-abortion politicians, and tell Verizon to drop OAN from their lineup. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous rules possible against mergers. Mergers hurt people -- through lost jobs, higher prices, and increased corporate power to do more harm. I bet "higher prices" sure resonates with good Americans right about now, but increased corporate power also means lower wages, dirtier air and water, and more dangerous products. It also means no Medicare drug price negotiation, if you've paid attention to Kyrsten Sinema's big donor gatherings. We can help put a stop to all of that, by telling our government what to do.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our EPA to help communities afflicted most by pollution -- meaning, generally, our poorest communities, which will also be Black or Brown communities most of the time. Right-wingers can sneer at the notion of "racist pollution" all they want, but big polluting corporations situate their most polluting facilities near the poorest neighborhoods for a reason -- namely, that the poorest communities are also the least powerful communities, and thus the least able to stop pollution from overrunning their neighborhood. Thomas Sowell might cringe to hear this, but there's only so much damn bootstrapping folks can do; they also need help keeping polluters out of their grills.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous heavy-duty truck emission regulations possible. I said "regulations" just to trigger right-wingers who think regulations are inherently evil! Heavy-duty trucks aren't the most common vehicles on our roads, but they do cause most of the air pollution that wrecks our lungs. And we might as well ask for zero emissions from our trucks; even if we don't get them, we stand a much better chance of getting something better than what we've got. And no, regulations don't kill jobs. Corporate executives kill jobs. You know they'd replace you with a mound of dung if they could get away with it.

People for the American Way helps you tell big corporations to stop funding attacks on abortion rights, mainly through their donations to anti-abortion politicians. They say they do it for economic reasons, which is an excuse almost calculated to offend someone like me more, but their intent doesn't matter when the result is a Supreme Court that's all but declared open season on every right not specifically imagined by a 250-year-old dead man. Don't brook any right-wingers saying it's their money and they can do what they want with it. It's your speech, too, and you can shame them and shun them if you like. Corporations don't have more rights than you.

Daily Kos helps you tell Verizon to drop the notorious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN) from their lineup. We got AT&T to do it, so now we get other corporations to do it. OAN purveys noxious right-wing propaganda with every breath their on-air personalities draw, but don't settle for throwing up your hands and saying they have the right to free speech. First off, people have First Amendment rights, not corporations. And second, insofar as a corporation has a right to speech, it doesn't have a right to publication of that speech, on a platform, anymore than I have a right to compel Random House to publish my books. We have to think harder about this stuff than we used to.

Around the table: in which right-wingers salivate at their new-found prospects.

What is "the anti-abortion movement's next target," according to Kiera Butler at Mother Jones? Birth control, of course. After all, the "reasoning" Justice Alito used -- that rights not specifically listed by our Constitution should be "deeply-rooted" in order to enjoy Constitutional protection -- would form the basis for overturning Griswold, which allows birth control and is only eight years older than Roe. I fail to see how privacy isn't a "deeply-rooted" value in America, though; one would think the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would ring a bell. Anyway, read the article to discover (among other things) how well "suspicion of vaccines" maps onto "suspicion of birth control."

Did we all get a good laugh over the guy who painted Mr. Trump's face on his lawn winning the Republican primary for Ohio's 9th U.S. House district? Well, note well that Ohio recently redrew that district so that it's now one Mr. Trump would have won by three points. Marcy Kaptur's a good egg, the sort who has long won over independents and right-leaning voters, but in the meantime, let's discover which nuclear power corporation Mr. Majewski worked for as an executive, if any, and let's also see his text messages leading up to January 6. After all, Ginny Thomas also said she "left before the riot."

Looking to blue states as abortion havens in a post-Roe world? Not so fast: not every state has laws that guarantee that right fully. Parental notification laws still apply in many of them, and not every state makes health insurance corporations cover them (or lets Medicaid cover them); even in California, abortion after fetal viability is illegal. And while judges don't often deny a minor's request to bypass parental notification laws (Texas judges denied 7% of such requests last year), that won't be much comfort to those who do get denied, because it just happened to 100% of them.

Does PayPal have the right to shutter accounts of left-wing media organizations, as they've done to at least two media outlets lately? Depends on the contracts those outlets signed, of course, but broadly, yes. Do we have the right to shame and shun them for it? Hell yes we do! Nobody buys that "some potential risk associated with this account" rubbish with Consortium News, right? Yeah, I may not agree with everything Consortium says about Russia and Ukraine, but PayPal cutting off their ability to collect money doesn't exactly attest to PayPal's confidence.

In another post-redistricting Rep-on-Rep House race that always leads you to wonder who pissed off whom, avid Trumphole Rep. Alex Mooney leads actual moderate Rep. David McKinley by 15 points in West Virginia's 2nd House district Republican primary. David McKinley may not be the only Republican politician I still like, but I can't remember any others at the moment. If he took on Joe Manchin in 2024 and won, I wouldn't be heartbroken, but chances are another Trumphole would beat Mr. McKinley in that primary, too. Anyway, Mr. McKinley's relative lack of success in touting his Joe Manchin endorsement should maybe caution the Penguin about that 2024 race.

Finally, when I hear that Gov. Greg Abbott (E-TX) wants to challenge our Supreme Court's 1981 ruling that all children in America, including those of undocumented immigrants, must get public education -- mainly because THEREZ AREZ SO MANYZ OFZ TEH IMMIGRANTZ NOWZ!!!!! -- I feel compelled to note that more folks routinely came over the border in the '80s and '90s than now, drama and hysteria over the "crisis at the border" notwithstanding. Indulge me in my belief that saying so means something, even though I expect that fact to "elude" Sam Alito, too.

Around the table: in which we dissect a really dumb Bill Gates rumor.

Joshua Prager, in an interview with ProPublica's Alexandra Zayas, describes how the pro-choice movement "lost the battle" for Roe v. Wade. But while the pro-life movement was considerably more creative (just look at all the phrases they made mainstream, like "partial-birth abortion"), fact is "it's much easier to try to knock something down than to defend it," and now the Supreme Court ruling, once it comes down, is "going to galvanize the tens of millions of people who are horrified about what’s happening now." We all saw this right after Donald Trump's election.

I hate to think the worst of anyone, even the Amazon executives who have promised to reimburse American employees so they can travel to get abortions (among other medical treatments), but I can't help but ask if this isn't just a scheme to fire workers. Workers can go get what they need, only to find their bosses (be they unscrupulous or merely under constant pressure to "reduce costs") rejecting their proof of treatment paperwork even if it's the most perfect paperwork ever, and hoping said workers just give up instead of fight for their job back. Hey, it's a big corporation, so we have to ask. (Occam's Razor might compel me to accept that this announcement more likely aims to distract us from Amazon's other announcement ending paid sick leave for employees with COVID.)

Starbucks has announced plans to raise wages and benefits -- but only for workers who aren't unionizing! "That’s not how labor law works and Starbucks knows it," says one union organizer, but here's what else Starbucks knows: raising wages for some people and not others divides workers, because what else can you do when you're Starbucks? Go back in time and treat all your workers much better than you did? Our Glorious Elites have no solutions to offer, only stratagems aimed to divide and conquer us. I hope all Starbucks workers have the wisdom to see through this nefarious plan.

This Roll Call profile of Rep. David Cicilline's relatively recent interest in/obsession with reining in monopolies gives us a quick history of antitrust law in America, mostly through the eyes of a staunch defender of bad antitrust policy; you'll be able to see through his cheerleading once you realize that he doesn't explain how antitrust policy specifically gives us an "advantage" over European economies -- or, more likely, once you ask who all that American GDP growth really benefited, exactly. So the article's not great, but it's good exercise for the mind.

Surprise, surprise, J.D. Vance didn't get more support from rural areas in winning the Ohio Senate Republican primary, but got about the same amount of support across the state. You know, in case you were thinking the Hillbilly Elegy author had some sort of magic key to getting rural votes -- the only "magic key" he had was Donald Trump's endorsement (though I'm pretty sure Mr. Trump's "J.D. Mandel" moment wasn't the big man losing his train of thought but simply hedging his bets), and again, it didn't mean more in rural areas. Ohio Democratic Senate nominee Tim Ryan sure hit him hard the day after the primary, though. Mr. Ryan may not be Sherrod Brown, but he's always hit a lot of the same notes, particularly the anti-war and anti-free trade notes. And that sneer when Mr. Ryan says "CNN"? I've seen that sneer in the mirror. I like his chances; I hope he stays focused.

Finally, Snopes.com does a fact-check on the theory that Bill Gates "owns most American farmland" "so he can cause food shortages," and finds it wanting -- Mr. Gates likely owns more American farmland than any American individual, but that comes to only 0.03% of all American farmland. (That's three one-hundredths of one percent, not "three percent" or "30 percent." I just know some troll's going to say it.) The interesting thing about this theory -- and if I ever have infinite time, I bet I'll discover far too many conspiracy theories are like this! -- is that it completely disappears big ag corporations from the conversation, though they'd be far more likely to cause food shortages than Bill Gates. And a lot of Twitter users have used ZOMG BILL GATEZ OWNZ ALLZ TEH FARMZ!!!!! to argue that we shouldn't worry about Elon Musk taking over Twitter, which is offensively stupid arguing, akin to saying you are only allowed to worry about one thing at a time! or if you think x is wrong, you're not allowed to say anything else is wrong. Yeah, I know, they're trolls. But as a famous philosopher once said, when a man lies, he murders some part of the world.

Around the table: more fallout from our Supreme Court's draft ruling.

What's even worse about Justice Alito's draft ruling overturning Roe v. Wade? That it opens the door to our Supreme Court doing so much more harm! As one observer writes, the ruling "disavows the entire line of jurisprudence upon which Roe rests: the existence of 'unenumerated rights' that safeguard individual autonomy from state invasion. Alito asserts that any such right must be 'deeply rooted' in the nation’s history and tradition, and access to abortion has no such roots." Of course abortion was legal in the United States until the early 1900s, so it actually has "deep roots." But can you think of any other rights they'll say aren't "deeply-rooted" enough? Yes, reader, you can! Like the right to gay and interracial marriage, the right to use birth control, and the right to keep your government out of your bedroom. As another observer put it: "Requiring civil rights to be 'deeply rooted in history' is a great way to say 'if you didn’t always have civil rights, then you should never have them,'" never mind that there is such a thing as arguing you should always have had these rights in the first place.

You heard Justice Barrett wonder why we even need abortion when we've got adoptions and no-questions-asked baby drop-offs? Kathryn Joyce at Salon tells us why that's more ignorant than it sounds. Long story short: relinquishing a baby for adoption is actually very traumatic, to the point that almost no one does it at a drop-off, plus the processes we've used for adoption (including "homes for unwed mothers" and, more recently, "shepherding families") have brutalized women, plus a lot of families want the "right" babies and you know what that means. Too often our Supreme Court Justices sound like aliens from another planet -- remember how Antonin Scalia asked what's the big deal with taking a day off to get your voter ID sorted? I'll bet that man never have had to ask for a day off in his life! So Barack Obama wasn't so dumb to say a Supreme Court Justice have a sense of what someone else's life is like. The right-wing majority on our Court sure doesn't have enough of a sense of that.

What is The Hidden Reason for Starbucks Worker Organizing, according to Armando Vega at The American Prospect? The pandemic, of course! A lot of Starbucks cafés shut down at pandemic's onset, which cut the workforce and, perhaps more importantly, cut workers off from each other. Then the sharp increase in mobile ordering didn't drop off once cafés reopened, meaning Starbucks had far more work than it had workers to do the work. Then Omicron hit, and workers made dozens of reasonable suggestions for protecting themselves from the vastly increased risk of contracting COVID -- only to have management "laugh() in our face," in the testimony of one worker. So it goes far beyond workers simply getting a little distance from their jobs and seeing things more clearly.

Four writers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation discuss ways Elon Musk could improve Twitter, and yes they're all good ideas, even though I already know how Mr. Musk feels about "less automation" and more humans in content moderation, "humans" being something only to be "authenticated" in his now-infamous phrase. (And authentication has its own problems, as you know if you know people in any kind of trouble anywhere on Earth.) But why isn't "starve the beast and let it die" an option? I think Facebook, terrible as it is today, was a net positive 10 years ago, but Twitter is a swamp and has always been a swamp, even in those days it wasn't particularly eager to amplify the voice of white supremacists. I'd advise everyone on Twitter to leave and go back to using email listservs. It's harder work, but so are most things worth doing. And photos and videos don't slow down your connection as much as they used to.

Kimberly Tower and Camille Gélix at The Conversation discuss how Marine LePen "gain(ed) ground with youth voters" -- and why American right-wingers have so far failed to do same. They don't come out and say it, but where American politicians make a show of fighting corporate power, Ms. LePen makes a better show, with actual proposals supporting French "economic self-sufficiency," financial assistance for student workers, and tougher food-safety regulations on meat. Meanwhile, American right-wingers love energy exports more than energy independence, lambaste college students for not bootstrapping enough, and want corporations to do their own food inspections. Broadly speaking, Ms. LePen lost more decisively to Mr. Macron than I expected, but she also lost by less than she did in 2017, and unless folks like Jean-Luc Mélenchon can get more traction, I don't see this story ending well.

Finally, a Democrat decisively wins a special election in a Michigan state house seat that has been in Republican hands since time immemorial -- at least partly because her Republican opponent has lately said rape victims should "lie back and enjoy it," a "joke" I first heard 40 years ago and one which sure doesn't play well given, ah, recent developments at our Supreme Court. And yeah, that's not the only stupid thing that guy has said lately, but more interestingly, Carol Glanville seems fairly focused on things that might actually get people to vote for her! Now, I'm not saying this is a bellwether race. But I am saying that defeating evil is possible in any district, anywhere, if we but imagine it.

Action: concerning abortion, equality, ethics, power, health, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to codify abortion rights protections into our laws, pass the Equality Act, ensure Supreme Court Justices adhere to ethics standards, pass the Palestinian Children and Families Act and the PASTEUR Act, and confirm Alvaro Bedoya to our FTC. 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.

Avaaz helps you tell Congress to codify abortion rights protections into law. The easiest way for Congress to do that, in theory, would be for our Senate to pass the already House-passed H.R. 3755, the Women's Health Protection Act, but they've already refused to do that. Sen. Schumer says he'll bring it up for a vote again, so that (if nothing else!) everyone will see how their Senators voted, which could be a big deal on Election Day 2022, though I can't say for sure. One thing I can say for sure: it won't end here! If the leaked ruling overturning Roe v. Wade turns out to be the actual ruling, it will give our Court a pretext for going after gay marriage, birth control, and anti-sodomy laws, too. We'll have a very busy time fighting for what we already had, and we'll have to keep fighting for them. Which we'll do, because duty is duty.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act, which would protect gay, transgender, and others from discrimination. Because right-wing state legislatures have been attacking these folks just as surely as they've attacked voting rights and abortion rights the last year and a half! And, as I've said, it'll soon be open season on rulings like Obergefell Griswold, and Lawrence, so we've got to codify protections against discrimination into our laws. Gay and transgender folks don't deserve to be fired, frozen out of apartments and homes and loans, or hounded out of public restrooms merely because they are who they are, so let's stop politicians from enabling all those evil things. And quickly.

In a related note, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure our Supreme Court Justices follow the Federal Judge Code of Conduct. Once there was a time we could convince ourselves that it'd be somehow uncivil to make the highest Court in the land adhere to the same standards as all other federal courts, but no more. And I'm not the only person who thinks so! Polling has told us for years that more and more Americans look at our Supreme Court as a political body, with its own policy aims; Justice Alito's leaked draft sure hasn't helped that look! Neither has Justice Thomas's wife's actions in support of the January 6 coup, or Justice Thomas's alleged poobahs with Gov. DeSantis; it ain't just about Justice Thomas, though. All judges must bow to civilization.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2590, the Palestinian Children and Families Act, which would start to extract some accountability from Israel in exchange for American aid. The government of Israel continues to oppress the Palestinian people -- lately in the form of separating families and detaining Palestinian children in prisons where they're more likely to get COVID -- and yet we continue to give them military aid, apparently out of a belief that "support" means lockstep agreement with every policy. Support doesn't mean that, and neither does friendship. And Israel is the far more powerful actor here! Being the far more powerful actor means you must not use your power to oppress others, even if that oppression looks like "security." It never is.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Up-surging Resistance (or PASTEUR) Act, which would help fund the antibiotics of the future. And we're gonna need them! We presently use seven out of every 10 antibiotics not on sick people or sick animals, but on nominally healthy feed animals, and that means more superbugs and more of a possibility that we'll bring back the days when the next cut on your hand could kill you. All so big ag executives could make more money! (They'll say it was so we could have cheaper meat, but is that really a lot better if you can't survive a cut on your hand?) I'd spend directly on making antibiotics, rather than grant money to corporations to do it, but we can fix that later. We need action on this matter now.

Finally, today's as good a day as any to a) call Senate Majority Leader Schumer (here's his contact info) and tell him to schedule a vote on President Biden's nomination of Alvaro Bedoya to our Federal Trade Commission, and b) call your Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) and tell them to confirm Mr. Bedoya. Mr. Bedoya's opposition to government spying and expertise in digital privacy issues would be enormous assets to our FTC, plus he'd provide a likely third vote in favor of more vigorous antitrust prosecutions; perhaps for this last reason he couldn't get through the Commerce Committee (which deadlocked on his nomination twice), and required a discharge petition to get his nomination considered by our full Senate. But now they must act. We deserve no less.

Around the table: everyone's a terrorist! And other absurdities.

A now-former VP at Kelloggs, referring to the 10-week strike this past fall, told a meeting of lawyers and union-busters last week that "the union leadership" at his corporation "were behaving more like terrorists than partners." I said they'd call us all "terrorist" one day and I was right, but I feel compelled to note that "terrorists" and "partners" is one hell of a dichotomy to present when discussing labor negotiations, and not just because the other, truer word for "partners" is subordinates. Labor negotiators should of course be civilized, but being "civilized" may not even require civility, depending on the situation. And what are the specific "terrorist" tactics of Kelloggs workers? You won't learn that from Mr. Hurley's audio remarks, but you'll hear a lot about Joe Biden making an "inappropriate" statement and certain social media outlets being too powerful for arguably the biggest name in breakfast cereal and, of course, George Soros, because apparently right-wingers can't perform a whining rant without bringing him up.

You've heard of folks going north of the border for affordable prescription drugs? Now meet the family that went south of the border, to Mexico, to avoid yet another several-thousand-dollar health care bill. The kicker, of course, is that the Fierro family of Arizona has health insurance! Which costs them $1,000 every month! So you can see the attraction of spending $5 to get a doctor to pop your son's dislocated shoulder back in place. Recall that almost half of Americans don't have the money saved to cover a several hundred-dollar expense, and none of them are saving their way to health care happiness by skipping coffee and avocados.

Now Texas Gov. Greg Abbott thinks he can "invoke war powers" by declaring the migration of refugee-seekers from other lands an "invasion," which supposedly would comply with Article I, Section 10 of our Constitution. But words mean things, and folks running from oppression to seek sanctuary don't constitute an "invasion" unless you can prove they're all fronting, which he can't. So this looks to me like just another Greg Abbott drama, one where he flexes his muscles and accomplishes nothing, like his mass inspection of trucks coming through the border that (per Texas's own Agriculture Commissioner!) caught exactly zero would-be immigrants and produced exactly zero drug seizures.

Laura Ingraham opposes student loan debt forgiveness by saying her mother worked as a waitress until she was 73 to pay off her kids' college bills so why can't yours? Other Twitter users dunked on her in ways you might easily expect ("You let your mom work until she was 73 to pay your debts?"), though not too many pointed out the most pertinent fact -- that college cost a lot less when Ms. Ingraham went to Dartmouth. Which gives the lie to "(l)oan forgiveness just another insult to those who play by the rules." Ah, folks who took out loans to go to college whose tuition went up 600% in 35 years also "played by the rules," and a lot of them took out loans that actually cost more to pay off after 10 years, even after you "play by the rules" by making all your payments on time. By charging this much for college, and charging this much for loans, we have profoundly betrayed all those who played by the rules. Loan forgiveness would right that wrong. And if we can't right wrongs, what's the point of America?

Hoo boy now Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) says it "may be true" that COVID vaccines cause AIDS. That should be weapons-grade PR against the Senator, no matter how many ads he runs in which he plays catch badly with his grandson, but that man has been spewing out filth for decades now, and Democrats keep underestimating him. Well, by "Democrats" I really mean Russ Feingold, and he's not running this time, thank God, so maybe now they have a shot, so to speak, at defeating him. (How do vaccines "induce AIDS," you ask? Google it and you'll find a line of "reasoning" that rivals QAnon for sheer stupidity, plus is full of big scare words. Naturally "America's Frontline Doctors" also figure in the drama.)

Finally, anyone else think the "leak" of a draft of a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade was an inside job? An "attack" by the "radical left" my ass -- any liberal in a position to leak the draft not only knows it would have intimidated exactly zero of the five (or six!) right-wing Justices prepared to endorse it, but also knows that even though more Americans support abortion rights than oppose them, the other side has more folks who'd run through a wall for their position. Right-wingers would totally leak the draft for three reasons: one, to keep the base ginned up; two, to give independents six months to forget all about it before Election Day, and three, and most importantly, to remind the base that they've actually done something for them. People like it when you do something for them; it's well past time for Democrats to commit to that lesson, rather than whine about how they "just can't get to yes" on things 80% of Americans want. (As an aside, Alexander Cockburn used to say that the day our Supreme Court actually overturns Roe v. Wade, Republicans will wander in the wilderness for decades. I sure hope he's right.)

Action: concerning labor, immigration, corruption, cluster bombs, and law and order.

Long story short: tell President Biden to do better by American workers, tell our government to roll back the notorious 287(g) program, tell state legislators to ban non-disclosure agreements between corporations and legislators, tell President Biden to stop our military's use of cluster bombs, tell the Manhattan D.A. to drop murder charges against Tracy McCarter, and tell our DOJ and USPS to investigate Louis DeJoy for corruption. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to use his lawful authority to expand worker power in America. How would he do this? He could raise the overtime floor so more good Americans can get time-and-a-half when they have to work more than 40 hours in a week; he can force federal contractors to give their workers adequate overtime, sick leave, and vacation time; he can issue new workplace safety standards to protect outdoor workers (like farm and construction workers) and warehouse workers, among other things. And he doesn't have to go to One True Great and Real Super-American President Joe Manchin for any of it -- he can just issue Executive Orders, which our laws allow in these matters, and walk away. And then his approvals might finally go back up! People like it when you do good works, after all.

The ACLU helps you tell our government to roll back the notorious 287(g) program, which nominally gives local law enforcement officers the job of federal immigration officials in an effort to combat crime, but which, in practice, leads to totally non-violent and non-criminal brown-skinned folks getting deported for busted taillights or driving without a license. So 287(g), as our government has practiced it the last five years, doesn't reduce crime and doesn't get rid of the "worst" undocumented immigrants! You would also have to ask why we always seem to be in an immigration "crisis" when we already have so many tools at our disposal, and you might have to conclude that right-wingers don't want to stop undocumented immigration, because then how would they create drama and hysteria? Hey, if I see it, I say it.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state legislators to ban non-disclosure agreements (or NDAs) that legislators sign with corporations. Because it's profoundly undemocratic! Legislators are supposed to account to their constituents, and a non-disclosure agreement interferes with that. Naturally proponents of corporate NDAs say they "protect sensitive negotiations," but why are they sensitive in the first place? Because if you found out that, say, your Mayor was negotiating to outsource parking meters to a big corporation, you'd be mad? Because they were using your money in a way you'd never approve of if they made their deals in the light of day? Doesn't matter how nice people are when they defend these things; evil doesn't need a Snidely Whiplash mustache anymore.

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions and thus ban the use of cluster bombs by our military. Because they're indiscriminate killing machines, that's why! And they don't just kill over large areas, they also kill over time, because a lot of them don't explode right away. Thus good Vietnamese still get injured, maimed, and killed by cluster bombs we dropped there 50 years ago. Hey, that war's been over since 1975; is it sane, moral, or decent that the Vietnam War still kills people? Think of what your life would be like if some enemy nation dropped cluster bombs in your county, and you never knew if one was going to blow you up on the way to Wawa or ShopRite or the movie theater. Sounds awful, doesn't it? So let's not unleash such horrors on other folks.

Color of Change helps you tell the Manhattan District Attorney to drop charges against Tracy McCarter, accused of murdering her ex-husband. Who repeatedly beat her up, and after she left him, which took guts, he got drunk and assaulted her, and she stabbed him to death in self-defense. Somehow the state refused to present a grand jury with evidence of her abuse, saying it wasn't "substantial enough," which is kind of a bass-ackwards way of admitting there was abuse and anyway shouldn't the jury have decided that if they were mulling charging her with murder? The new Manhattan D.A. even declared his support for Mr. McCarter on the campaign trail; guess what he's been doing since then? I mean, besides giving up on prosecuting Donald Trump. That's right, not a word from him about Ms. McCarter. We ought to try to change that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department and U.S. Postal Service Inspector General to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy for personally profiting from the COVID tests our USPS delivered to households in January. Don't brook any silliness about he did some good, why shouldn't he personally profit from it? That is the mark of sickness, immorality, and decadence -- you're supposed to do the right thing because it's the right thing; if you benefit from it, how do you really know you're doing the right thing? I mean, anyone can cobble together a system of values based on what's gotten them goodies in the past; how about we put together a system of values that sustains and nourishes a civilization beyond what it does for us? Or is that old-fashioned?

Around the table: how an apology *should* sound! And other truths.

HHS Inspector General finds that private Medicare Advantage plans denied over 80,000 requests for pre-authorization of medical care in 2019, even though Medicare proper would have covered that care. Medicare Advantage also denied payment for claims nearly one-fifth of the time, even though (again) Medicare would have required payment. And how many people give up rather than challenge these denials? Think on all of that when you imagine that privatized Medicare is "better." Privatized Medicare is better for health insurance CEOs, but not for our seniors.

Former white supremacist Evan McLaren -- who, among other things, marched for the wrong side in Charlottesville in 2017 -- disavows his association with white supremacy in a statement published on Substack. We've been burned by others who "left" the movement only to still hate Jews, but Mr. McLaren's statement took my breath away, frankly; I'll quote the last paragraph in its entirety: "I apologize to everyone who was affected in any way by my past activities. The main purpose of this statement, however, is not to apologize. I do not realistically expect to repair my public reputation, to the extent that it meaningfully exists, or to heal rifts with people I have alienated. I don’t hope or expect to be forgiven. My only purpose here is that, on those occasions when someone happens to explore the Internet search results related to my name, they might also find this statement as an indication that, while I was a source of toxic energy and opinions in the past, I am at least not that anymore." Now that's an apology -- no ifs about it! Joe Rogan might do well to study it before his next screw-up.

From the "I Shouldn't Have to Explain This" file: no, California will not "legalize infanticide" by passing AB 2223, because "don't automatically investigate stillbirths" and "never, ever investigate stillbirths" are not the same thing. Of course the right-wingers who created this drama in the first place knew that; they were just hoping you didn't know that. Now you do, and you can move on to more important things, like making sure polluters and financial predators go to jail.

Nick Vachon wonders "Where Are All the 'Pro-Worker' Republicans Now?" after Amazon and Starbucks workers win organizing efforts, but of course he poses the question rhetorically: Marco Rubio's "support" for Amazon workers hinged entirely on Amazon's refusal to sell some of his favorite right-wing books. No, I'm not inferring here; he spelled that out! And I can't help but think he supported the Bessemer, AL Amazon workers because he suspected their effort would fail. I guess there's a limit to how much point-scoring Republicans will try to do against these "woke" corporations. And, frankly, Democrats are little better, what with their deep abiding love of white-collar workers and their utter cowardice in pushing populist (and popular!) solutions. I could help them with that.

Kevin Kuehn and Kevin King at The Conversation discuss teenagers' self-harming behavior and how to combat it. I wouldn't pay too much attention to recent teen self-harming data -- teens were in lockdown for a big chunk of 2020, after all -- but you won't be surprised to learn that "participants reported higher levels of distress right before they self-harmed or thought about suicide, and reported significantly reduced levels of distress immediately following." I mean, you wouldn't do it otherwise! I would suggest that self-harm gives at least some teens the illusion of control over situations over which they otherwise have very little or no control. Remedies for self-harm include more connection with more people (as with drug addicts) and validating feelings that prompt self-harming behavior without validating the behavior itself.

Finally, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) vows to investigate the "origins of COVID," which scientists have already determined, should Republicans win the Senate and he get a Committee Chair. Maybe he should concentrate on winning re-election first! If Charles Booker focuses on insulin prices and Ukraine policy -- two subjects he's discussed a lot already, and two areas where Rand Paul's weak -- Mr. Paul could be in for a big surprise. (No, the fact that Mr. Booker's a Black Lives Matter activist won't be a liability in the state that killed Breonna Taylor.)

Action: concerning the Child Tax Credit, drug prices, Social Security, tax filing, animal cruelty, and our FCC.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit, lower prescription drug prices, reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits, let most Americans file their taxes for free, pass the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, and confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC. 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.

NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit that delivered $250 and $300 checks into working families' bank accounts through most of 2021. Inflation was 8.5% last month; think those checks would have come in handy as working families bought groceries and clothes and school supplies? Yes, I think they would have. But Republicans don't want working families to have them -- every last one of them voted against the CTC expansion in the first place, we must remember. I repeat for the benefit of angry independent voters: every last Republican voted against the CTC expansion. In the meantime, your Reps and Senators need to know that working families need the expanded CTC, and rich folks have to pay more in taxes to fund it, well, we're all in this together, right?

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. What's the news hook this time? Rep. Kurt Schrader (D?-OR) saying in a TV ad that he's fought for Medicare drug price negotiation when he actually did his damnedest to water down Medicare drug price negotiation proposals -- then also claiming that lowering drug prices would "stifle innovation"! I've said it before and I'll say it again: no rich corporation innovates on a damn thing; innovation comes only from necessity, and a corporation that's gamed the system so that all of its decisions result in it getting richer never faces necessity. That's just one reason we need to communicate our will to our Congressfolk, again and again and again until they do our will.

National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits, including efforts like the notorious TRUST Act, which would allow Congress to fast-track Social Security cuts without debate. Does that sound like democracy to you? Or does it sound like a way to steal what belongs to the people without having to account to the people? I kid, of course; it sounds exactly like the latter, and though of course Republicans love anything that lets them bypass democracy, you'd hate to think that Democrats would be so cowardly that they'd support a system that lets them do unpopular things without facing the anger of the people. Again I kid! Of course that's right in their wheelhouse. And that's why we fight their efforts to the death.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to let most Americans file their taxes for free. This is already legal! Our IRS already has all the info on your W-2, and can autofill the blanks on your tax form without the assistance of any third party! And yet we still trundle off to joints like H&R Block to "get our taxes done." Why? Because of a "deal" our IRS cut with tax prep corporations years ago that allows them to (among other things) offer "free" tax filing at the end of a bureaucratic labyrinth you won't likely have the patience to get through. I say if you have leverage -- and if you have the law behind you, you have leverage -- you use it for more than getting next-to-nothing out of big corporations. So let's tell our government to do that.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7398, the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, which would, as its title suggests, ban most wildlife killing contests; the only exceptions would be certain kinds of birds and invasive species. I guess some folks will tell you wildlife killing contests help keep down populations of predators, but not only do scientists find that's not true, they also find that the animals who feed on the bullet-ridden carcasses get poisoned and/or killed as well. And certainly don't brook any silly allegations that this bill is "anti-hunting." It's not "anti-hunting," it's anti-sadism, it's anti-cruelty, it's anti-uncivilized behavior. Killing animals is a desultory job if you have to do it; celebrating it as a "game" just cheapens your soul. And don't we have enough of that?

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm pro-internet freedom warrior Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission. How do you know she'd do a good job at our FCC? Not just because she helped get strong net neutrality rules enacted during Mr. Obama's second term, but because big media lobbyists have fought her nomination to the death! Currently our FCC only has four Commissioners, which means they can't bring back net neutrality or ensure that rural and urban areas get their fair share of infrastructure money because every vote will end 2-2. Ms. Sohn will break those ties, and she'll break those ties in the direction of the people's will. Seriously, no one opposes net neutrality except big corporations and their lackeys. And they shouldn't get all the say around here.

Around the table: shot by both sides, part 844.

Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute finds that higher corporate profits make up about 53% of inflation, which maps on well to Matt Stoller's "back of the envelope" calculation from earlier this year that corporate profits made up about 60%. His lengthy disquisition on why "macroeconomic overheating" isn't causing inflation is worth reading, but so is his reminder -- because we need another one! -- that the whole world is experiencing inflation, which means that no one should blame your stimulus checks.

Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times asks (because someone was going to sooner or later, I guess) "Is Elon Musk Really That Bad?" Somehow Mr. Manjoo erases the family diamond mine from Mr. Musk's "troubled childhood in South Africa," and don't we all feel fairly confident that at least 80% of good South Africans had a more troubled childhood than Mr. Musk did? And listing ways Mr. Musk could improve Twitter certainly doesn't prove he would improve Twitter, let alone that he will, or has. That whole passage about Mr. Manjoo driving a Model S in California is hysterically tone-deaf, and I'm not even sure the Tesla car itself represents a great achievement, at least not until working families can afford it, which we've been waiting for now for over a dozen years. As I recall, the Toyota Prius became budget-friendly more quickly! Anyway, Bess Levin provides a more convincing list of good reasons to dislike the guy.

Our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) has found that about 60% of Americans -- and, quite troublingly, a larger percentage of American children -- have had COVID-19 through the end of February. Their previous finding was that about 40% of Americans had COVID through late January. This may be why we're not living through another hellish spike at the moment -- too many Americans have had the disease. Still, keep masking up for the sake of your immunocompromised friends and neighbors. They sure deserve better than the claptrap internet "influencers" have been peddling.

When I hear that Rep. Lauren Boebert (E-CO) rather strongly dislikes Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) and doesn't want to be caught dead with her in the same room anymore, I am reminded, as I hope you are also reminded, that this is all drama, designed to distract you from what they all want to do -- which is, basically, to deny you agency in your own civilization and to make sure a very small number of elites run things, which those elites have done and will continue to do very, very badly, because they only care about themselves. Also too, everyone saw that photo of Reps. Boebert and Greene taunting President Biden during his most recent State of the Union address, so no one's going to believe any reports of a "rift."

When I heard that David Brooks had written an op-ed which concluded with the statement "Democrats are going to have to find a posture that is tough on disorder, and tough on the causes of disorder," I said this had better not go the way I think it's going to go. Reader, it did -- his complaints about crime, education, border security, "politiciz(ing) everything," and "overstimulating the economy" all miss the mark on "the causes of disorder," at least as I've been explaining them for nearly 20 years. What causes disorder in America? The greed, folly, and venality of our ruling classes, that's what. You want to get "tough on disorder," you go after polluters and financial predators, instead of lamenting that crime is up in 2021 over 2020 like we weren't all locked down in 2020.

Finally, when Beltway knuckleheads say that President Biden is trying to "to crack the Manchinema puzzle" in passing whatever part of his domestic agenda he can still get passed, I want to grab them by the lapels and scream there is no puzzle! Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema exist to foment drama, and they'll lead the rest of the caucus on until the very last minute and then snatch the football away. Best thing Democrats could do right now is cobble together a proposal based only on things they've already agreed to do, and then hold a vote on it. If these two vote against it -- and I bet they would! -- then Democrats should move on to ensuring they get more seats in Congress next term so they don't have to deal with them anymore. Yes, Democrats can increase their majorities in 2022. I mean, they're running against insurrectionist crybaby book-banners who all voted against funding the police and against tax cuts for working families.