Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning the Espionage Act, marriage equality, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act, protect marriage equality, and lower prescription drug prices. 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.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so that our government can’t use it to silence journalists and whistleblowers. You know, like they’re trying to do to Julian Assange for the crime of exposing American wrongdoing during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That embarrassed a lot of American elites, but embarrassing American elites ain’t no reason to use anti-spying legislation to silence journalists. And silencing whistleblowers? Who expose corruption at great personal cost? Anyone who says they love America should be ashamed of doing such a thing. Allow me to believe that shaming still works in America.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to codify marriage equality in our laws before our Supreme Court uses its dastardly “deeply-rooted rights” notion to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges. Because you know they’re just itching to do it – why, Justice Thomas said they should do it in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization which overturned Roe v. Wade. Hence we need our Congressfolk to act. It’ll take a while for a case to reach our Court that could outlaw gay marriage, but don’t let that make you complacent. Whenever our Court takes our rights away, it always seems like it’s too soon.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices already. Feel free to tell them exactly how in the space for comments – like, by letting Medicare negotiate drug prices, or capping insulin prices, or fining big pharma corporations when they raise prices faster than inflation. People like all of these ideas, and would it kill our Congressfolk to do some things that people actually like, and actually want them to do? As Drug Prices Are Too High suggests, it might even help them in the midterms this November.

Action: concerning financial predators, sexual discrimination, and Medicare overcharges.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, and tell the Biden Administration to enact the most vigorous Title IX protections possible and rebate Medicare premium overcharges directly to seniors. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5974/S. 2508, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act. Our laws currently cap loan interest rates at 36% for veterans, meaning veterans don’t have to put up with 300% death-spiral payday loans, and we were able to get that for veterans because, hey, nobody wants to be seen voting against veterans! Now we should extend that cap to everyone, because, really, we all deserve protection from financial predators. And again, I’d make that cap lower! And you can tell your Congressfolk that if you want, without worrying about those poor, poor banks. But I’d pass this bill, too.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the strongest Title IX revisions possible. Title IX, as you know, governs discrimination on the basis of sex in public schools, and the Trump Administration, as you may recall, gutted certain Title IX protections concerning sexual assault, because, you know, “(i)t’s a very scary and difficult time for young men today.” Even more difficult for the young women they rape, he somehow forgot to add. The Biden proposals would fix those, and they would also extend Title IX protections to transgender students, which, I mean, the word “sex” has a pretty plain meaning that even Justice Gorsuch gets.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell the Biden Administration to fix inflated Medicare premiums already. How did those premiums get inflated again? By Medicare’s decision to insure an expensive (and not very good) Alzheimer’s drug; the American people spoke out against that, and Medicare changed course, covering the drug only for patients in clinical trials. But the inflated premiums still remain! Our Administration ought to be rebating our seniors the money they should never have had to pay. They’ll talk about the importance of making sure taxpayer money doesn’t get stolen, but our government already knows whom they’ve overcharged, so that’s bunkum. Never tolerate bunkum from your government.

Penny Rants for June 29, 2022: good news for Democrats! Which is bad news *to* Democratic politicians.

For some reason, Kerry Eleveld’s report about the fall of Roe “disrupting” the Republicans-will-crush-it-in-November narrative starts off with reports about Democratic and Republican enthusiasm in the wake of Roe’s fall, when the big story, it seems to me, is that the generic ballot polls have been trending hard in the Democrats’ direction. NPR’s generic ballot poll, which was 47-44 for Republicans in April, is now 48-41 for Democrats; that’s a 10-point swing, basically, in two months. (A Politico/Morning Consult poll found a three-point swing toward Democrats in one week, albeit the week our Supreme Court overturned Roe.) Republicans had better hope gas stays at $5/gallon! Seriously, as I’ve said, people really hate politicians who take away things they count on, just like they did in 2017-18 when Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Nobody stopped them but the people. That’s how it’ll have to happen again.

Virginia Republican House candidate Yesli Vega – like most of today's Republicans, desperately trying to appear more anti-abortion than anyone who's ever lived – suggests that it’s a lot harder to get pregnant from rape than from consensual sex, “maybe because there's so much going on in the body” and/or “(b)ecause it's not something that's happening organically,” or because “the male” is doing it more “quickly.” Even worse than all that, though? She suggests that it must not happen all that often merely because she only saw it happen once in her decade-plus as a police officer, like she’s the center of all human experience or something. Admittedly, she may be a little harder to trap into a humiliating loss than Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin was, precisely because she’s clearly more prone to word salad, but it’s a long campaign, so I suspect she’ll give us other opportunities. Bonus: if Abigail Spanberger actually loses to her, she’ll have to confront the fact that the problem was never “defund the police” or “socialism” but her.

Finally, when I hear that Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) not only won’t say he’ll support President Biden in 2024, which, like, who cares, but won't say whether he'd run for President as a third-party candidate, I feel compelled to first take a deep breath and then ask: what sane person thinks Joe Manchin is the answer to anyone’s problems? Our chattering class always whines that there are just no moderates anymore whenever a moderate is President, but Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans stopped us from raising taxes on the rich. Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans took monthly $250 and $300 checks away from working families. Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans prevented American workers from getting four weeks of paid sick leave. And Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans kept child-care prices astronomically high for American families while pissing and moaning about inflation. And were he so dense as to run for President, that’s the ad I’d run over and over and over again until he slinks away into the oblivion he has most certainly earned.

Action: concerning the right to repair, Social Security, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to pass a right to repair bill, tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security, and tell your Senators to 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass SB 998, a “right to repair” law which would force corporations that make “electronics and appliances that contain embedded software” to make “information and parts” available to “consumers and independent repair shops.” (All quoted passages are per SB 998’s memorandum.) The bill would also force corporations to “fully disclose any contract provision standing in the way of full repair and reuse,” and while I’d prefer to just make corporations stop “standing in the way of full repair and reuse” – which is a monopolistic practice, after all – this bill will improve matters and deserves to pass.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits by $200/month, and raise the payroll tax ceiling so income over $250,000 can be taxed into the system to pay for it. With bankster Blake Masters actually running on privatizing Social Security in the Arizona Senate race, and with Sen. Lindsey Graham putting privatization on the table like anyone should run to him for advice, you know it’s just a matter of time before our “liberal” media start crying about Social Security running out of money like it never does. Better to get ahead of the drama by demanding more benefits and specifying how you’d (very easily) pay for them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as our fifth FCC Commissioner. Of course we don’t expect Ms. Sohn, as one of the architects of net neutrality, to get any Republican votes – only Republican voters like net neutrality, not Republican politicians! But a few recalcitrant Democrats are saying they just don’t know whether to vote for her. I don’t know why this is such a hard decision for anyone to make. She had me at “one of the architects of net neutrality.” Apparently she had Joe Biden there, too, because he’s nominated her twice. So our Senators need to do their damn job.

Penny Rants for June 28, 2022: you gotta read past the headline, and other concrete cold facts.

A lot of times you read a scary headline and expect the article’s text to explain it away, but the AP headline “More Than 1 Million Voters Switch to GOP in Warning for Dems” requires even more qualification than the article’s text gives. And that assumes that the research backing that finding (which relies at least in part on “statistical modeling”) is even valid! Only in paragraph 9 do we learn that while 1 million voters “switched” to the GOP, 630,000 others “switched” to the Democrats, which already makes the scare number smaller. And I keep putting “switch” in quotation marks for a reason: in the article’s one anecdote (I know, only one!), a Colorado man complains about vaccine mandates to explain his switch from Libertarian to Republican. You can thus easily imagine (more easily than the AP, apparently!) that many folks “switched” from independent or unaffiliated to Republican, and that most of them were probably already voting Republican. And finally, at the risk of piling on, this information pre-dates our Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and as I’ve said, people hate politicians who take away things they’ve come to rely on, as we saw during the Affordable Care Act debate in 2017.

You may appreciate the long and complex discourse here about a First Circuit Court panel splitting evenly over whether a warrantless telephone pole surveillance camera – which, in the case before the panel, took over eight months of video footage of a suspect’s front yard – violates our Fourth Amendment Constitutional rights. Or you may, like me, make up your mind at “warrantless.” Whenever law enforcement won’t get warrants, you have to wonder why, and you also have to wonder why the three judges who didn’t find eight months of pole cameras unconstitutional didn’t wonder why. And one judge’s notion that our government won’t abuse telephone pole camera surveillance because the polls are so expensive? That is to laugh. You can justify any expense once you tell yourself the world will end if you don’t, and law enforcement routinely gets exactly that apocalyptic about drug dealers. If only they felt that way about banksters or polluters! And if they did, I’d still make them get their damn warrants.

Finally, I don’t know what Ron Johnson means to accomplish by suddenly saying yeah, now that you mention it, he knew all about lists of “alternate electors” his office tried to give to Mike Pence and oh yeah, he got those lists from Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA). People don’t just feel sorry for guys who can’t get their story straight about an attempted coup. (Rep. Kelly, for his part, denies the story, but that’s just drama.) I guess Mr. Johnson just figures he’ll run another feel-good ad everyone likes (maybe this one, though he’s dropped it pretty early in the cycle) and get re-elected no matter what he says or does, and given how well Democrats have run against him in the past, I can see why he placed that bet. Though he’s not running against Russ Feingold this time. If Ron Johnson is the man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name, Russ Feingold is the master of tying one hand behind your back in a campaign.

Action: concerning women's health and women's rights.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, tell Google to delete the location data of women who seek or get abortions, and tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer to schedule a vote on a bill that would help ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. 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 pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women’s Health Protection Act. Sam Alito wants the people to vote on this? Then let our Senators vote on a bill that would actually protect the right to abortion all over America, plus it would get rid of the hurdles (ultrasound bills, waiting periods, etc.) that states put in front of women to harass them. Well, worse than harass – you know how much trouble you have getting a day off from your boss? Now try getting two or three or four to jump through all these hoops. Our Senators don’t want to pass this bill. So we gotta blow up their phones and make them shake in their boots.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell Google to stop collecting abortion seekers’ location data, and also delete it from their servers. Even looking up an organization that helps people get abortions can get you in trouble these days, thanks to Google’s thirst for data they can turn into unearned money, as well as law enforcement’s constant quest for ways to get data that don’t involve going before a judge and getting a warrant. And really, we-the-people should have a lot more control over our data than we do; thanks again, Republicans! But, in this reality, we must pressure Google to do more than just try to get milk this catastrophe for good PR like other corporations do.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer to schedule a vote on H.J.Res. 17/S.J.Res. 1, which would remove the expiration date from the original legislation passing the Equal Rights Amendment, and thus make it part of our Constitution. 38 state legislatures have passed the ERA, after all – a few of them very recently, well after the original legislation’s expiration date which no other Constitutional amendment had! Thus our Senators should be able to pass this bill, remove the expiration date, and finally make the ERA the law of our land. But Sen. Schumer has to call for a vote first. Let's blow up his damn phone about this, too.

Around the table: the plain truth about evil.

When I hear that a truck-driving prick in Iowa went well out of his way to hit pro-choice protestors, injuring one, and then got released without charge after questioning by police, I feel compelled to ask how police would have responded to a liberal aiming his car at pro-life protestors. Because I think they would have moved heaven and earth to detain and charge that liberal. I hope I’m wrong, and I also hope my supposition forever remains a thought experiment.

Ho hum, the New York Times runs an article about trans health care that talks only to doctors and not to actual trans people. And it also gives far too much voice to those poor, beleaguered “reasonable” people who think “both sides” are too “extreme,” when only one side passes bathroom laws and examining-children's-genitals laws. And Jesus Mary and Joseph the number of kids who yearn to join an oppressed group so badly they mistakenly think they’re one of them is a grain of sand next to the mountain of kids who say nothing about their trans nature because they’re afraid of being bullied or killed. Sometimes I wish we weren’t so hard-wired for stories.

Whoever runs against Ron DeSantis for Florida Governor had damn well better run ads about his administration’s successful efforts to reduce care at nursing homes. Seriously, the phrase Ron DeSantis will kill your grandma would not be untoward! But Democrats would rather keep pretending they’re impotent as a fund-raising tactic. Of course, going for the throat wins races, and it even raises campaign funds, but most importantly, it stops evil. All we have to do is stand up to evil, and evil will fold. You know why? Because evil is a fucking coward, that’s why.

When I hear corporate executives say they’ll pay for their employees to get abortions, I think they're just trying to get the good PR they can't earn any other way. I'd be happy to be wrong, but when Amazon said it, I said it might be a way to fire employees who don’t get their paperwork exactly right, but it could even be worse – do you really want your boss to know you’ve had an abortion, when a new, more hostile boss could come in at any moment and make your life hell whether it’s legal to do that or not?

Department of Education agrees to cancel $6 billion in student loan debts of 200,000 folks who had sued the department alleging that their institutions of higher learning had misled them. This comes on the heels of our DOE’s decision to cancel all student loan debt for students who had attended the now-defunct-and-for-good-reason Corinthian Colleges – you remember, the for-profit college chain Marco Rubio called a “constituent” as if nobody Corinthian screwed over could have been his constituent? I can say little more, except that this is why we fight!

Finally, Arizona Republican Senate candidate/Trump endorsee Blake Masters has said we need to privatize Social Security, and the comment exists on video. Again, Sen. Kelly would be guilty of political malpractice if he didn’t run ten thousand ads about this. And between this and the fact that Mr. Masters has a face even a mother would punch, can the good citizens of Arizona please declare this guy’s chances of getting elected nil?

Action: concerning Social Security, payday loans, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security and cap interest rates for all Americans, and tell big corporations to stop donating to Republican insurrectionists. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits by $200/month and pay for it by raising the payroll tax ceiling, so income over $250,000 can be taxed into the system. With Rep. Larson (D-CT) strangely uninterested in moving his Social Security 2100 Act through his own committee, Sens. Sanders (I-VT) and Warren (D-MA) and Rep. DeFazio (D-OR) have advanced this proposal, and though it leaves a donut hole of income between $147,000 and $250,000, this proposal will improve Social Security’s finances and let our seniors (which will one day include, ahem, all of us) enjoy a more dignified and secure retirement. It’d sure be better than privatizing it! As our stock market proves every time it takes a tumble.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5974/S. 2508, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, which would cap all consumer credit at 36%, because our laws cap consumer credit at 36% for our veterans. You see, getting the cap in there for veterans, was always a way of getting a cap on our law books (who would refuse help to vulnerable veterans, after all?), so that one day we could all get a cap, so no one has to suffer the 300% death spiral payday loan ever again. Now I’d make that cap a lot lower! And if I did, banksters could still make money, just not buy-their-own-Congressperson money. But passing this bill will get a cap for everyone, and that’s better than what we’ve got.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell big corporations such as FedEx and Visa to stop shoveling big campaign donations to any Republican who votes against certifying the 2020 election. Because voting against certifying that election because of all of Donald Trump’s “stop the steal” rubbish makes those 147 Republican politicians the lowest of the low, and they don’t deserve any money, let alone the cush job they have obstructing things the American people tell them to do. Any of these “patriots” voting for Medicare drug price negotiation, for example? No, none of them are. And corporations shouldn’t give them money, particularly after saying they wouldn’t.

Penny Rants for June 24, 2022: special "the main cause of inflation is corporate greed" edition!

Matt Stoller instructs us, in a piece provocatively titled “On Inflation: It’s the Monopoly Profits, Stupid,” that more economists are (finally!) coming around to the notion that we’re not in a “wage-price spiral” but a “profits-inflation spiral.” I mean, you and I just looked at rising corporate profits and rising prices and figured that out, but it’s still good to get some data behind it, not just from Josh Bivens at EPI (who said a few months back that price-gouging caused a little over half of our current inflation), but also at least two Federal Reserve banks and Mike Konczal and Niko Lusiani at the Roosevelt Institute. Also too, “the most financialized sectors of the economy are the ones most adept at exploiting pricing power during the pandemic,” likely due to “cheap money from the Fed sloshing around Wall Street.” In other words, banksters ruin everything. And don’t forget how many CEOs brag about their ability to raise prices!

It’s easy to laugh at Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) having an absurd amount of trouble explaining away why staffers in his office tried to hand former Vice President Pence an “alternate slate of electors” right before January 6, and indeed I don’t know how yelling “IT WAS ALL STAFF TO STAFF!” even sounded good in his head, but remember that this guy has won two Senatorial elections, albeit not with more than 51% of the vote, and with our “liberal” media doing its damnedest to create a Republican wave, Mr. Johnson is, once again, one really inspired TV ad away from winning an election, and maybe this time he won’t even risk getting peed on by his grandkid while changing his diaper. Still, even if he serves as long as William Proxmire God forbid, his underlings will get tired of him throwing them under the bus. I’d prefer not to wait for that to happen, though. Two terms is at least two terms too many for the man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name.

Finally, I don’t know if our Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade today – Friday’s a good day to do something like that, since our “liberal” media reporters will be trying to get out of town already – but if they do, I think two things will happen. One, right-wing politicians will not celebrate! Sounds counterintuitive, to say the least, but how can you celebrate victories when you’re constantly ginning up outrage among your votaries over what they’ve lost? Besides, right-wingers are hunting bigger game – making birth control illegal and domestic abuse legal in the short term, taking away a woman’s freedom to do anything but submit to a man’s whims in the long term. Two, if you remember how Obamacare suddenly went from Democratic liability to Democratic weapon in 2017 and 2018, you know that people really, really hate suddenly losing something they rely upon. Of course right-wing politicians will always be able to get abortions for their daughters and mistresses, but regular folks will not take well to having legal abortions taken away – and they won’t take well to the Republicans who took them away.

Action: concerning health care, big tech monopolies, and Presidential power.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to cut health insurance prices, pass anti-monopoly legislation, and restrain Presidential power. 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend health care subsidies so that at least nine million Americans will be able to afford health insurance. The American Rescue Plan Act enacted these subsidies, but they expire later this year, hence the urgency. You’ve seen health care premiums continue to go up faster than even current inflation rates? Then you see the need, and what will right-wingers say in response? That we’re “broke,” as they refuse to tax the billionaires and corporations who’ve gained trillions of dollars in unearned income these last two years? That people who need health insurance should “just get another job”? “Just getting another job” is no solution in an economy that serves unearned wealth above all.

Both Consumer Reports and Antitrust Summer help you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation reining in big tech monopolies. The bills in question – H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 7030/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act – would attack tech monopolies at the margins, for sure (which may be why these bills have relatively strong Republican support), but we haven’t even been attacking at the margins for the last 40 years. Even Donald Trump’s policy of attacking monopolies that offended him personally was better than what we’ve been doing. But these bills would keep big internet corporations from discriminating against competing products on their platforms, which is certainly better than Trumpian drama.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to restrain Presidential emergency powers. Apparently some Congressfolk plan to do by amending the defense appropriations bill, which isn’t a bad idea, since that bill is all about, you know, national defense, and the American people need defending from bad Presidents who declare “national emergencies” to build their little vanity border walls and such. Think of that power in the hands of someone who’s good at being a fascist! They could shut down our internet, seize homes and public buildings, or commandeer planes and trains, and ain’t none of that going to come to any good. This is a law and order issue, good Americans!

Penny rants for June 23, 2022: special "right-wingers still suck" edition!

Texas's state police head testifies, at a state House committee meeting, that enough police were at the Uvalde school quickly enough, and were armed enough, to stop the massacre, and though the officers' failure to check an unlocked door sure doesn't make them look good, we should suspect a narrative that places all the blame on one guy, in this case Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo. But admittedly I'd also suspect a narrative that places all the blame on "lack of training," tired as I am of trying to make police into the Swiss Army knives of our civilization. What narrative would I not suspect? The one that finally admits that "more cops" isn't the answer to every conceivable problem, that "freedom" doesn't mean more and bigger guns for everyone so much as the freedom not to get mass-murdered, and that we can in fact keep semi-automatic guns off the streets without touching handguns or rifles. Can we get used to a world where we don't reflexively trust police? Of course we can! We're Americans, after all.

So now Trumpholes are putting up fake wanted posters on social media supposedly depicting folks who helped "steal" the vote for Joe Biden, and probably the only thing saving these Trumpholes from multiple defamation lawsuits is that potential plaintiffs don't know they're out there like that. Of course social media corporations suck at their job – by which I mean they’re failing to enforce their own standards for using their sites! – but dig this response from True the Vote's founder about "voter fraud": "I do think that when 80%+ of America is concerned about election integrity, something must be done to address the situation." We can easily guess that 80% figure doesn't describe what she wants you to think it describes, but why would "80% of America concerned about election integrity" mean the "something" that "must be done" should be "we should randomly accuse people of election fraud"? Hell, why does it mean "we should make it harder to vote"? This is what right-wingers do: identify "problems" and then tell you their solutions are the only solutions.

Finally, I haven’t been watching the January 6 hearings with any regularity, because I don’t need to be told who the assholes are, and how much of my rage do I really want to relive? But I will note the testimony of Shaye Moss and her mother, “Lady Ruby” Freeman, two Georgia election workers targeted by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani as “election stealers.” But most news reports haven’t foregrounded the fact that Trump supporters forced their way into Ms. Moss’s grandmother’s house and yelled that they were making a “citizen’s arrest” on the pair. Get ready for a lot more of that garbage as Republicans lose more elections. That only makes me angry, though – hearing that Ms. Freeman felt guilty over maybe being the “cause” of her family’s stress made me sad. I wish more Americans understood who really causes their pain, and I wish more bad people felt guilty about causing that pain. I don’t even mean Messrs. Trump and Giuliani, because they're irredeemable; I mean the would-be “citizen” cops, who may not be.

Light posting notice.

You've noticed posting has been light the last couple of days? Not unprecedented, right? Sadly, this time it's going to stay that way for a few more days, at least, until I can resolve some computer-related issues.

In the meantime, thank you for reading, and thank you, also, for being the best citizens you can be.

Action: concerning mass murder, education, monopolies, nukes, corruption, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to invest in counselors-not-cops in schools, pass the College for All Act, the American Innovation Choice Online Act, and the Open App Markets Act, reject funding for certain nuclear weapons programs, pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, 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.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our state, local, and federal governments that we need to invest in counselors and service workers in our schools — and not cops. The right-wing solution to every problem is “more cops,” but we live in a world where more teachers have foiled mass murderers in schools than cops have. And we just witnessed a mass shooting where police arrived but didn’t engage the shooter! And that’s not a good argument to put more cops in schools. I hope America has learned its lesson about making cops do every damn thing, but if not, I’ll keep teaching it.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2730/S. 1288, the College for All Act, which would eliminate tuition and fees at for all students at two-year community colleges, and for all working- and middle-class students at four-year public universities. (The bill would also eliminate tuition and fees for some students at private, historically Black universities.) This would be the way to do “free college”: by giving the most help to working families, who are most of the folks attending community colleges and public universities. If you’re an upper-class dude who wants to go to Harvard, you still can — and if you need financial help, this bill will do that better, too.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 7030/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act. The former bill would cover online platforms with more than 50,000,000 active monthly American users, and would prevent them from discriminating against competing products on their platforms and selling your private data willy-nilly; the latter bill would prevent app stores from discriminating against competing products or forcing app makers to use certain payment systems as a condition of using the market. Big tech corporations hate these bills, but what offends them doesn’t necessarily offend regular people, so let’s not let that stop us.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject more funding for the SLCM-N and B83 nuclear weapons. How useless are these weapons? So useless that President Biden, no great friend of reduced defense spending over the last half-century, has requested that our Congress not fund these weapons! The SLCM-N is a nuclear, sea-launched cruise missile, but our Navy already has conventional cruise missiles on its subs; would you like to be the one who launched the wrong missile? The B83, meanwhile, has the biggest yield of any nuclear weapon, but how well does “high-yield” do against IED-wielding terrorists? And remember: the first one to drop the bomb always loses.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7706/S. 4177, the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would make our Supreme Court Justices follow the same Code of Conduct as all other federal judges and prevent federal judges from holding any investments except those in “non-conflicted” funds (i.e., funds diversified enough that a judge or Justice would gain little or nothing by ruling a certain way in a certain case). We talk about the first item in the context of Justice Thomas’s wife running around trying to overturn the election on January 6, but the second item is also important, corruption being evil and all.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner already. Our Senate let that nomination twist in the wind so long that President Biden had to renominate her, but they’re still letting that nomination twist; why, it’s like they want to make sure net neutrality never comes back but they don’t want the blame for it! Voters love that sort of courage. And Senators from West Virginia (you know who) and Arizona (Mark Kelly this time!) say they just haven’t evaluated the nomination enough. They can’t do in 18 months what I did in 10 seconds? Ms. Sohn is one of the architects of net neutrality; that should be enough.

Action: concerning Medicare, COVID, workers, guns, pollution, and cruelty.

Long story short: tell our President to fix inflated Medicare premiums and use his Executive powers to fight the COVID pandemic, tell Delta’s CEO to do better by Delta flight attendants, tell Facebook to enforce its gun sale ban, tell our EPA to reject the proposed Pebble Mine project, and tell North Carolina to protect bears from being hunted at bear sanctuaries. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fix inflated Medicare premiums by rebating overcharges back to seniors. You may recall the issue: Medicare raised its premiums by 15%, the biggest hike in history, largely due to their decision to cover a very unproven and very expensive Alzheimer’s drug; now that Medicare has (under popular pressure, probably including yours) reversed course and will only cover the drug when used in clinical trials, the price hike ain’t necessary. So they should give the money back! They’re claiming it’s too hard, but how hard it is to issue rebate checks? They have no damn excuse and we shouldn’t tolerate it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to use the powers Congress has already granted him to keep fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, Congress should have already approved another COVID package, but our President sure ain’t helpless — he can use the Defense Production Act to manufacture more Paxlovid, for example, or he can use "march-in" rights to break through the corporate stranglehold on vaccine patents so that more folks worldwide can get the vaccine (more folks worldwide getting vaccinated, of course, means less COVID for us in the future). And those aren’t the only things he can do! He’ll do nothing, of course, if we don’t get on him about it.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Delta’s CEO that you support Delta flight attendants’ efforts to unionize. They’re the only flight attendants who haven’t unionized yet — which may well be why Delta flight attendants have to put up with staffing cuts and forced overtime and illegal shifts and their bosses changing their schedule without notice, sometimes after you’ve already flown a thousand miles and were kinda counting on getting home to pick up your kids from day care. Naturally Delta has responded to the workers’ wishes not by trying to fix the problems, but by trying to stop them from forming a union. If Delta won’t learn, we’ll have to learn ‘em.

Free Press helps you tell Facebook to actually enforce its rules banning gun sales on Facebook pages. Hey, it’s their rule! And currently you have to break that rule 10 times before they even look in your direction, and by then, the kid who could’ve cured cancer might be dead in a bloody heap in his biology class. Facebook also lets folks post “calls to arms” on its site, because free speech I guess, even though demanding that everyone actually take up weapons for your cause isn’t necessarily First Amendment-protected speech. Telling everyone to tell Facebook to actually enforce its own rules and stop actively making the world a worse place? I’m pretty sure that’s First Amendment-protected. And necessary!

Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to protect Alaska’s Bristol Bay from the notorious Pebble Mine project. Yes, it still walks, despite all the head shots we’ve given it! And not just us, either — even Scott Pruitt’s EPA was none too eager to rubber-stamp copper mining in the Bristol Bay, home to (among other things) the last great wild salmon fishery employing tens of thousands of good Alaskans. And plenty of potential financiers have pulled their support from Pebble Mine as well. And when all that happens, some too-rich dude will stillsay no one likes it, so I’ll make a killing off it! Sadly, that won’t be the only killing going on if our EPA lets this project proceed.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell North Carolina legislators to ban killing bears in bear sanctuaries. Yes, our world is so sick, immoral, and decadent that we have to tell legislators to do that, lest some too-rich dude come along and threaten sanctuary workers’ jobs if they don’t let him bag a trophy. Thinking maybe this was a workaround for a population-control issue at sanctuaries? If so, you were giving the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission too much credit! The Commission said it was about letting hunters hunt more, and also about bear-human conflicts later resolved by (get this) bear-proofing food lockers! Like I said, sick, immoral, and decadent — unless we fight.

Around the table: how to defeat evil, part 355.

Durango, CO mobile home residents band together to fight off a bankster corporation trying to buy the land out from under them — and win. Problem: if you own a mobile home, you may not own the land underneath it, so banksters are buying up those lands in order to extract usurious rents from folks whose homes (despite the name “mobile”) are actually very hard to move. A big help came in the form of a recently-passed Colorado state law mandating that corporations that own trailer park land and want to sell it have to give the mobile home owners a chance to buy it. Other entities (the Colorado Coalition of Manufactured Home Owners, Resident Owned Communities USA, the Elevation Community Land Trust) also help these folks keep their homes where they are.

Congress has flubbed an opportunity to address shipping monopolies in its ocean shipping reform bill, as our House has decided to accept a weaker Senate version of the bill in order to get something done. The Senate bill would still do a considerable amount of good, but I nonetheless feel compelled to ask: is this how Amy Klobuchar casts herself as a “maverick”? There was a good amount of mavericky buzz around her Presidential candidacy for a few weeks in 2020, after all. But like Kyrsten Sinema, she appears not to have learned that a real maverick bucks the elites and supports the people, not the other way around.

Far too many people are asking how something like D.A. Chesa Boudin’s recall could happen in a place as liberal as San Francisco. The article makes some good points — for example, that right-wing big money donors retain a lot of power in California even if they don’t actually win very many elections — but maybe San Francisco just isn’t that liberal! Only libertarian-or-worse tech bros can even afford to live there now! Seriously, though, if Democratic politicians really want to reform our criminal justice system so that it’s not all punish-punish-punish all the time, they need to brand Republican politicians (but not regular Americans!) as hysterical when they whine about crime, and they need to brand their own solutions as “common sense." It’d also help if they’d remind everyone that crime might be up in 2021 over 2020 because in 2020 we were all afraid we were going to die if we even went outside.

Ho hum, Chicago Housing Authority leases out land intended for low-income housing to billionaire soccer owner instead because of course they did. People don’t still argue that sports practice facilities and training offices stimulate our economy, do they? Because helping people find a place to live actually stimulates economies! People who have places to live tend to put down roots and spend money locally; billionaire soccer team owners, on the other hand, hoard their assets and live off of low-interest loans, neither one of which gives you the bang for your buck that helping people find a place to live does. Right-wingers will call that “liberal math,” but I’ll call it common sense. I’ll also call it common sense that if you say you’re going to make apartments livable again, you ought to do it, rather than just sit on it or give it to some big-box retailer.

Chris Brooks at In These Times describes “How Amazon and Starbucks Workers Are Upending the Organizing Rules.” What the labor establishment used to do in a painstaking, incremental manner — and boy has “painstaking and incremental” looked like stagnation for many years, amirite? — today’s young organizers are doing a lot more quickly, and though Mr. Brooks doesn’t discuss it, I can’t help but think the pandemic helped that along, not just by reminding us that life is short, but by giving workers space to look at what they put up with just to have a nickel and a nail to rub together. When they write the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, they'll say unions went dormant in the '80s not just because Ronald Reagan was willing to bury them, but because the unions themselves got ossified, and only new blood could revive them.

Finally, is calling Generation X the “Trumpiest” generation, as Politico does with flimsy anecdotes and even flimsier evidence, the stupidest thing ever said? OK, your average Republican politician says The Stupidest Thing Evah pretty much daily, but how does anyone forget that Generation X’s parents are really the Trumpiest generation? Of course, expanding the definition of “Generation X” so that it also includes the last 10 years of Baby Boomers sure does help you if you’re out to say “Gen X is TEH TRUMPIESTZ!!!!” It also helps to exclude non-whites from your definition of “Generation X.” Seriously, this couldn’t have all just been lazy argument, could it? I’m more likely to suspect malice than mere stupidity these days — and I’m also more likely to describe “just say something provocative” as malice.

Action: concerning taxes, health care, pollution, and pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich, help more Americans get health insurance, fund conservation and energy efficiency efforts, and pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to strengthen and pass the Millionaire’s Surtax from last year’s Build Back Better Act. The Millionaire’s Surtax would tax income above $10 million at an additional 5% (making an effective tax rate of 42% on that income) and tax income above $25 million at an additional 8% (making an effective tax rate of 45%). But some of our Senators want to lower those rates, when they should be levying such surtaxes on income above $1 million. It is a "Millionaire’s Surtax," after all! Most Americans want higher taxes on the rich, so our Senators should do our will, not the will of their biggest donors, who do not outnumber us.

Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Senators to keep expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies so that three million more Americans can continue to have health insurance. Our House already passed legislation to keep these subsidies going, so all our Senate has to do is pass that very same bill, easy-peasy. They need not attach poison-pill amendments or complain about the cost or say "just get a job" or say "I just can’t get there"; they need only pass the bill. It’s not like constituents who need the subsidies are "lazy." It’s more like the health insurers charging whatever they like just because they can are lazy! There. I said it, and I'm glad.

NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to close the Medicaid coverage gap, where two million Americans make too much to get Medicaid but not enough to get Affordable Care Act subsidies, and so don’t have health insurance. Sounds pretty absurd, right? Like the Medicare "donut hole" and the Social Security payroll tax ceiling, the gap exists because Congressfolk negotiated to win votes on the bills that created these programs, and given that exactly zero Republicans voted for the Affordable Care Act, this gap should seem even more absurd. Close the gap, and two million more Americans don’t have to lie awake at night wondering if they can make ends meet.

Stand.Earth helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 425/S. 1639, which would help fund conservation and energy efficiency programs. President Biden has lately invoked the Defense Production Act not just for baby formula but also for renewable energy products like tariff-addled solar panels; right-wingers will squeal TEH BLACK HELICOPTURZ!!!!!, but President Biden has done the right thing with lawful authority already granted to him by our Congressfolk. Now they just have to reauthorize a program that (among other things) helps buildings get more renewable-friendly, which also makes them less pollution-friendly and saves money. Who could be against all of that? Besides a hysterical right-winger, I mean.

Finally, the National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would force workplace bosses to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant workers, like more sit-down work and more bathroom breaks. Anyone who’s ever had an enlarged prostate should be able to understand how a woman carrying something considerably larger in her abdomen needs to pee more, and a boss who "just can’t find" sit-down work for a pregnant employee probably isn't trying hard enough. With great power comes great responsibility, right? And to right-wingers telling hysterical stories about what pregnant workers will be able to "get away with," you need only say this: read the bill.

Around the table: more thoughts about how bad people kill good ideas.

Researchers in Liberia find that offering a small amount of cash and eight weeks of behavioral therapy to folks at risk of committing crimes actually reduces crime, and now that experiment is coming to Chicago. Although the Chicago program offers job training in place of cash, this is still exactly the kind of thing right-wingers will easily lie about — as opposed to all the things they labor absurdly to lie about now, of course — because we can all imagine a lot of Americans saying well-where’s-mine, as well as what’s-next-giving-them-drugs? and of course so-we’re-giving-crooks-therapy-now? Here’s the thing, though: you can always respond "well, more cops and more guns sure ain’t doing the job, so how about we try something that works?"

When I hear that some 44% of Republicans think mass shootings are just the price of freedom in America, I find that maps pretty well onto my supposition that about a quarter of the American electorate is batshit crazy. These Republicans are just doing what their thought leaders tell them, but it’s still a sad statement, and dare I say an un-American one. I mean, what kind of can-do American just gives up at the thought of mass murders of children? Also, the 56% who don’t believe mass shootings are "just the price of freedom" will still almost certainly vote for insane Republicans just because they're not Democrats, and then guess what? Nothing will get done.

Ever wonder why you don’t remember your own birth or all the milestones (first words, learning to walk) your parents never shut up about? Vanessa LoBue at The Conversation explores the nature of infant memories. Long story short: babies do form memories from the start — they recognize their mother almost right away and remember more faces as the months go on — but they don’t form (or can’t retrieve) autobiographical memories, or stories about themselves, until they’re 2 or 3, possibly because they don’t use language until about that time, or possibly because the hippocampus isn’t fully developed yet.

Again we hear that Social Security will pay all of its planned benefits through 2035, and again our "liberal" media covers this as a catastrophic event, with no apparent memory of the time they said Social Security would be tapped out in 2016, for example. I say "apparent" memory because I actually doubt they really don’t remember; I think they just gin up hysteria about Social Security because it grabs eyeballs and makes them money. I’ll give our "liberal" media some credit for admitting that raising the payroll cap is a way of strengthening Social Security (though I’ll give liberal blogger Atrios more credit for that!), but all these sky-is-falling predictions about pension plans never take into account that the economy grows most of the time.

Starbucks closes an Ithaca, NY store that had unionized, leading the newly-unemployed workers to call for a boycott. I've wondered why Starbucks hadn’t done this already — remember how quickly Walmart closed the Quebec store that unionized in 2007? — but with over 100 stores unionizing, I think Starbucks actually might have acted too late. And anyway, the bigger story here is that the workers at this Ithaca Starbucks went on strike in April after discovering a clogged, maggot-ridden grease trap one morning that management wouldn’t do anything about when informed. Now management is "doing something" by closing the store! That’s not very can-do of them, though, is it? After all, maggots and grease aren’t forever.

Finally, Dan Pfeiffer confronts the question "Why Do Democrats Suck at Messaging?" If you’re like me, though, you already know the answer: as with the song "Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96," it's the money — as in "big campaign donors pay people to suck at messaging and keep Republicans in office which keeps campaign donations coming, rinse, repeat." Thus the sight of Dan Pfeiffer talking to people with money about this question is truly absurd — I mean, he’s a smart dude, so I don’t get why he doesn’t get how he comes off there. He makes a few good points, but if you don’t start with how big campaign donors infect both parties, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Action: concerning pollution, labor, corruption, conservation, and education.

Long story short: tell our EPA to enact vigorous cross-state pollution rules, tell Dollar General bosses to treat their workers fairly, tell New York’s Governor to keep the Manhattan D.A.’s moribund Trump investigation going, and tell our government to protect the Castner Mountain Range and move more vigorously against predatory for-profit colleges. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous cross-state air pollution rule possible. I did not know they call this rule the "Good Neighbor Plan"! That’s actually pretty good messaging — which means, of course, that Democratic politicians just about never describe it that way! Nothing prevents us from describing it that way, of course — of describing states that limit the pollution that travels with the wind to other states as "good neighbors." And the politicians who would fight that rule, and doom kids in downwind states to higher levels of asthma and cancer? OK, I’d call them a lot of things, but "bad neighbors" would do.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Dollar General bosses to start paying their workers fairly and ensure they have safe workplaces. It’s not so damn much to ask! Especially since Dollar General’s CEO makes 934 times what the average Dollar General worker makes! And to those who'd say but what will happen to the low prices we all love at Dollar General? I would respond refer, again, to the CEO making 934 times what the average worker makes! Too many working folks worry about other working folks making "too much" money at their favorite shopping spots. They gotta fight the real enemy.

Daily Kos helps you tell New York Governor Hochul to transfer the now-dormant Manhattan D.A. office’s investigation into the Trump Organization either to the state Attorney General’s office or to another District Attorney within New York state. If the Trump axis pressured Alvin Bragg into abandoning the investigation, then the people need another weapon to hold the powerful accountable. Besides, state courts have already established that she has the legal authority to do it, so she ought to do it. It might help bring law and order back to our great nation.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to designate the Castner Mountain Range around the El Paso area as a National Monument. The Castner Range has been a pretty good flood control tool over the years — what’s that? You haven’t heard of much flooding in that area? Well, now you know why! — and its proximity to the Franklin Mountains State Park means we’ll be able to protect a much larger area from pollution. And not for nothing, but the Castner Range is home to numerous sites of archaeological and religious significance to Native American folks; a big part of being conservative, it would seem to me, is conserving areas of historical importance, not rubber-stamping any and all development.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Biden Administration to move vigorously against predatory for-profits colleges. The Biden Administration has lately forgiven a few billion dollars in outstanding federally-banked loans used at Corinthian Colleges, and that’s a big deal, but there are other predatory for-profit colleges using federal loans to bilk college students, so our Administration has more work to do. Our government’s record on this hasn’t been good for over a decade now: the Obama Administration enabled too much of this crap, and the Trump Administration enabled far more of it; now we need justice.

Action: concerning baby formula, child care, gas prices, big ag, and "forever chemicals."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to break up baby formula monopolies, help working families better afford child care, tax big oil windfall profits, break up monopolistic big ag practices, and keep "forever chemicals" off our farmlands. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell Congress to pass legislation ensuring we never get this short on baby formula again. Right-wingers tell us we're here because we have too many regulations gumming up the works, but that's ridiculous -- we're short on baby formula because four big corporations control the entire market, and a food safety issue at one of them has emptied our shelves. Thus we tell our Congressfolk to break up corporate monopolies; after all, as our President says, capitalism without competition is exploitation, and the only "efficiency" we really "gain" from monopolies is the efficient redistribution of income upward from workers to executives. I'd rather have babies not starve myself.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation expanding preschool and helping working families afford child care. It is a bit breathtaking that legislation about child care specifically has floated around for years, but now our President has embraced it, and the only reasons it hasn't passed, basically, are a) the opposition of Republicans and b) the Joe Manchin Drama Machine. But child care costs have plagued families for decades -- like health care, corporations charge what they want because they can! -- and families need relief now. Expanding preschool can also help deliver that relief; after all, if kids are in preschool, they're not in some private child care service. See? Big Gummint helps sometimes.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a big oil corporation windfall tax. As I've said, anyone who can't see the link between record profits and record-high gas prices by now simply doesn't want to see it. And folks (including Democratic politicians!) who claim that taxing unearned profits of oil corporations will "decrease the supply of oil" are all but saying not only that oil corporations have all the power, but that they should have all the power. It's rhetorical hostage-taking: don't make oil corporations pay their share of taxes, or the gas supply gets it! And if you're pro-freedom, you don't take that from anyone.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act, which would ban new factory farms, split up existing factory farms into smaller operations, and end the stranglehold middlemen have over meat production and sales. Yeah, this is a theme with us -- bigger is badder -- and it's a theme because bigness infects every part of our economy, and most Americans, be they liberal or conservative, oppose concentrated power. Right-wingers give lip service to small businesses, but they aim to give all of our power to large corporations. Because that keeps the big campaign donations coming! But we outnumber them, so we must overpower them.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep PFAS chemicals off our farmlands. You can find PFAS chemicals -- which scientists link to certain cancers, birth defects, and immune system issues -- in firefighting foam, fast-food packaging, waterproof jackets, and non-stick saucepans, but you can also find them in agricultural wastewater treatments, meaning you can also find them in our food, water, feed animals, and agricultural workers. They call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" because our bodies can't break them down; they should call them everywhere chemicals too! Odd how the more "efficient" they make our food-producing apparatus, the less healthy it becomes.

Action: concerning Medicare, mass murder, the war on Yemen, discrimination, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell President Biden to rebate seniors for wrongly-inflated Medicare premiums, and tell your Congressfolk to address gun violence and end the War on Yemen, and tell your Senators to pass the Equality Act 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.

First things first. Social Security Works helps you tell our Biden Administration to give seniors rebates on their inflated Medicare premiums. What happened? Our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) hiked Medicare premiums this year, in anticipation of being forced to cover a bad and expensive Alzheimer's drug -- but then massive popular pressure forced our Administration to cover that drug only for clinical trials, meaning those premium hikes don't need to be there. Hence, our Administration should rebate those premium hikes to actual senior citizens using Medicare. Really, it's pretty simple math, both morally and politically, so let's make sure they do it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to do something effective about gun violence. There will be room, at the end of Moms Rising's long missive, for you to say Congress should a) amend the National Firearms Act so that it covers semi-automatic weapons as well as automatic weapons and b) require gun owners to register guns, get shooting licenses, and buy liability insurance, just like we all have to do with cars. And what a burden that is upon us, I tell you! Seriously, the only "burden" is on those gun corporations that manufacture weapons of mass murder, and we must of course weigh their imaginary "burden" against our actual burden of possibly being shot dead by some rage-addled man at any moment.

Both Daily Kos and the Center for Rights and Dissent help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 87, the War Powers Act resolution aiming to end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. It's well past time for Congress to assert their war-declaring powers and put an end to this madness. One sentence from a Roots Action missive about this matter really hits home for me: "If Yemenis were treated with the value accorded Ukrainians by U.S. media, this war would have ended long ago." Yes, it would have -- millions of Yemeni children have either died from or suffered from malnutrition. So let's get our government to -- finally! -- do the right thing.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Ohio has lately passed a law allowing school officials to inspect children's genitals to make sure they're not trans athletes -- this, from the state that sent Jim Jordan to Congress. But the Equality Act would put a stop to such insanity, by adding "sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)" as one of the classes of folks you can't discriminate against in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- which would also prevent banks, landlords, and employers from discriminating against gay and trans folks. If our Senators won't stop injustice, what good are they?

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Our Senators worked so hard to obstruct her nomination that it expired at the end of 2021; President Biden dutifully renominated her, and our putative Democratic majority finally worked through all the obstructions to clear her for a vote back in March, but here we are, three months later, waiting for our Senate to put a real internet freedom warrior on our FCC like we deserve. And their excuses for inaction are getting even lamer -- oh, the Fraternal Order of Police doesn't like her? Please. West Virginia and Arizona residents will want to target their Senators especially -- and we should contact our President, too.

Around the table: featuring some of the usual suspects -- monopolists, corporate welfare kings, weak Democrats.

Actual epidemiologist David Martinez, who's worked on both COVID vaccines and COVID treatments, informs us that future COVID vaccines will have to adapt to (and predict) new COVID variants. Flu shots do this now, and they don't always predict ascendant variants perfectly because, as they say, the future is the hardest thing to predict. But better to go with what we know works, and to improve on what works, than to trust the "truth" of social media "influencers" looking for eyeballs, or right-wing media "personalities" who gin up rage for ratings.

Matt Stoller discusses how banksters are "gobbling up" baby formula manufacturing corporations like that won't make our problems even worse. Along the way he presents even more evidence of monopolists saying I want higher prices out loud. And yet folks still blame higher wages and/or more government spending for inflation, and I don't think they're "not getting it," I think they don't want to get it. But let them be complicit with this massive income-redistribution-upward scheme -- we can shame and shun them once they're out in the open, and then God'll sort 'em out at the Pearly Gates.

Ho hum, Atlantic City casinos plead pandemic-related poverty to get corporate welfare, and good citizens suffer, since cities run on tax dollars, after all, and if big corporations pay less, regular Americans pay more. And the crushing irony? The casinos actually did what any self-respecting corporation would do -- invest more heavily in online gambling after predicting that its on-site gambling would plummet due to COVID -- and still demanded, and got, the PILOT tax break! I guess right-wingers will tell us next that they "earned" the tax cut by doing the right thing! Tell that to the good citizens of Atlantic City who have one real grocery store in the casinos' shadow and whose kids have the highest level of lead exposure in the Garden State.

The National Rifle Association planned to hold a massive fundraiser at a farm owned by a nominal Democrat running for Senate in Missouri. Said candidate, Trudy Busch Valentine (yeah, of those Busches), apparently convinced the farm's board to cancel the event, but only after the Intercept published its article, and ain't no scrubbing 15 years of her family funneling money to the NRA. Actual Democrat Lucas Kunce should run ads about this, in addition to all the legitimate issues (monopolies, financial predators) he can run winning ads about. Only the furthest right folks in America still approve of the NRA, after all, and there ain't enough of them to win elections on their own; all we need to beat them is a Democrat who stands for something other than "winning," which is all a lot of losing Democrats (like Ms. Valentine) stand for.

The Biden Administration will forgive any remaining federally-backed debt owed due to attendance at the notorious Corinthian Colleges, the for-profit college chain which went defunct in 2015 after a raft of corruption-related allegations. Forgiveness, here, includes both the end of future loan payments and a rebate for past loan payments on still-outstanding loans, and this money will go mostly to folks who went to Corinthian for vocational training, exactly the folks who too often get left out of the student loan debt conversation. Now cue some crying from Marco Rubio, who called Corinthian Colleges a "constituent" back in the day, a label he has never affixed to any good Floridians who got the shaft from Corinthian.

Finally, yes, Virginia, Republicans have actually advanced a climate change "plan" that consists almost entirely of corporate welfare to the fossil fuel industry. "Streamlining permitting" mostly means "skipping reviews that would catch and prevent pollution," and the Republican plan doesn't actually set any goals for reducing emissions -- after all, why would you ever want to measure your progress? -- so you'd be right to wonder if Republicans simply concocted the worst plan they could think of, just so they could gin up rage about it. Shouldn't work, right? People hate pollution, after all! Still, Republicans have created a new constituency out of book banning this year, so I can't say they'll fail here.

Around the table: tabulating even more drama from right and center-right!

National Republicans appear to be putting one of Steve Bannon's plans into action, by training an "army" of poll workers and linking them up with local Republican D.A.s. In the short term, I expect this plan could work pretty well in places like Michigan -- though it'd work better if their gubernatorial candidates could get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, amirite? -- but it won't work as well in places like Hawaii. I'm pretty sure 2022, which Republicans figure will go their way wherever they like though voters could prove them wrong, is just a dry run for a much bigger operation in 2024, when the party's biggest dick runs for President again.

Political Wire's Taegan Goddard, writing about why he has a membership model for his website, describes pretty well why the advertising model doesn't really work for our internet anymore. If you still think the world is all publications going out and getting advertisers so they don't have to charge customers, note well that the internet advertising model involves very little active involvement from publishers; too many middlemen control the process, hence you're bound to see an ad you can't stand. Like so much of modern life -- Amazon, social media, Bluetooth-enabled appliances, pharmacy benefit managers -- internet advertising cartels may make things easier, but they don't make them better. And they don't even make things easier for you, unless you're a CEO who hates doing real work.

Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Charles Booker runs a campaign ad with a noose around his neck. I wish it were 42 seconds shorter, of course, and at first I thought attacking Rand Paul for holding up anti-lynching legislation might be a mistake, since Mr. Paul eventually co-sponsored a similar anti-lynching bill that became law and will be more than happy to tell us that repeatedly. But what if that issue's a feint? After all, Mr. Paul will still happily tell you that Medicare-for-All is slavery, and his problems with the Civil Rights Act were the first thing anyone learned about him! And those charges will stick while he thinks he's brushing the other one aside. At least, I hope it works that way. And folks won't just remember the noose around Mr. Booker's neck; they'll remember him removing it at ad's end. All in all, pretty good, but, at the risk of sounding like Gordon Lish, make it 30 seconds -- or 15.

I'm pleased to see that professional athletes (and their bosses) have doubled down on their support for gun control legislation even though (because?) professional whiners like Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) didn't like it. (Want me to evaluate Mr. Rubio's complaints about China's treatment of Uyghurs and the NBA's complicity therein? Nah, screw that -- every time Marco Rubio seems sympathetic or smart, it's a feint, meaning to draw you into some offensive drama you'd otherwise never let yourself get bogged down in.) Watch out for Philadelphia Union soccer player Alejandro Bedoya, who says "(i)t ain’t freedom that we have to now look over our backs all the time." I'd like him to become a political consultant at career's end; America suffers too much from all the numbnuts who do that now.

When I hear, for the 443rd time, that Joe Manchin really, really wants to do something about prescription drug prices by the end of the year, I am compelled to note that it's a bit rich to hear the guy most responsible for Democrats Not Doing Enough suggesting that Democrats didn't do enough. Also, he better not forget to check with America's Other One True Great and Awesome Real American President, Kyrsten Sinema, who vetoed Medicare drug price negotiation and higher tax brackets on the rich and on corporations in 2021. My advice to Democrats, not that they'd ever take it, would be to cut through the Manchinema drama, produce a bill that addresses all their "concerns," and make everyone vote on it immediately. And if certain people vote it down because "it would strangle innovation" or "it's not bipartisan enough" or "it didn't go through the committee process," then let their words hang them. We don't need more Democrats as much as we need better Democrats.

Finally, buried in this horserace account entitled "Biden battles CEOs in inflation blame game" -- everything's a "game" when losing causes someone else to suffer, right, Politico? -- we get this shameful whinefest from an unnamed "CEO of one of the country's largest banks": "They said everything was going to be different under Biden and they would be more engaged with us, and they weren’t." And all I can say is: having all the power ain't enough? We shouldn't ask banksters for advice about anything, since they've amply demonstrated over the years that they don't care about anyone but themselves; really, we should be breaking their sorry asses up into much smaller and less harmful banks, which work I hope our FTC will begin soon.

Action: concerning banksters, law and order, pollution, immigration, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FDIC to stop predatory lenders, tell President Biden to do more for police reform, tell our EPA to curb cross-state pollution, tell our government to protect DACA recipients, and tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our FDIC to stop predatory lenders from laundering their three-digit interest loans through banks our FDIC supervises. These banksters also work through furniture stores, pet stores, car mechanics, and the like, offering loans for love seats and pets and car repairs and the like that don't charge interest if they're paid off in 90 days -- but charge up to 225% interest if they're not, which they generally won't be, since folks don't have much in savings anymore, and just try to turn such a loan down when they've got your car in the shop! Scheming sure is easier than working, but there's no reason we should allow this kind of scheming, particularly through federally-insured banks.

Roots Action helps you tell President Biden to go much further than his police reform Executive order does. The order bans military vehicles for police departments -- unless those departments say they'll use them only for disasters and the like. A police department that says they need a tank for disasters won't use it on protestors? Yeah sure. We're hearing these days that police "need" even more military equipment so they can deal with school shooters, but I think their inaction during the Uvalde mass murder has pretty much exposed that argument's bald spot for everyone to see. Those cops didn't act like your TV heroes, after all, and more weapons ain't gonna change that.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our EPA to finalize the most vigorous cross-state pollution rule possible. Cross-state pollution (particularly with nitrous oxide) is a real thing; air pollution doesn't just say whoa hold up when it gets to a state line, after all, nor can downwind states simply build barriers to keep upwind states' pollution out. You can already hear right-wingers whine how are those poor, poor power plants supposed to control what crosses state lines? Here's a response: same way you control your urge to say racist crap: just don't do it. Far too often I sound like the real conservative when I talk to right-wingers. Why, it's like they're not really conservative at all!

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to permanently protect recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program. The DACA program helps immigrants who arrive here as minors stay here, as long as they meet fairly strict standards (military service, college attendance, no felonies). After all, forcing them to go back to nations that don't know them, to make them pay for decisions they had nothing to do with, is cruel. And though our Supreme Court protected DACA recipients last time they ruled on the matter, don't think they'll do it again. They've been killing precedents like kitchen ants lately.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Our Senate has finally -- finally! -- confirmed the last two Biden nominees to the USPS Board of Governors, so they ain't got no excuse now: Louis DeJoy has got to go. He tried to sabotage voting-by-mail, he had investments with a (now-former) USPS Board member, he had his hands in the corporation that just so happened to make COVID tests for our USPS, and he's implemented a higher-cost, worse-service plan that no executive in his right mind would have implemented anywhere 50 years ago. And note well that "worse service" could well mean "you don't get your life-saving meds when you need them."

Action: concerning guns, climate change, taxes, child care, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to do something about mass-killing machines already, fight climate change, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, cap child care costs for working families, tax corporations at a minimum of 15%, and lower prescription drug prices. 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.

Today's as good a day as any other to call your Congressfolk and tell them to a) amend the National Firearms Act of 1934 to include semi-automatic guns as well as automatic ones and b) require gun owners to register their guns, get shooting licenses, and buy liability insurance. Thom Hartmann describes this plan in more detail here. Don't believe any right-wing hype that this program would "kill our freedoms," because item a) already exists and keeps automatic weapons off our streets and item b) is what we already do for automobiles. And this plan wouldn't infringe on your right to own a handgun or a hunting rifle! (If you turn your hunting rifle into a semi, see item a).)

The Green New Deal Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight climate change now. You may have heard lately that our One True Great and Real American President Joe Manchin has started talking about a climate package with Senate Majority Leader Schumer again, but forget about that, at least until they actually produce a package that may or may not improve on what we've already got. Best thing right now is simply to communicate your will that Congress do something about climate change before we're all the proverbial frogs in the proverbial pot of boiling water. In the end, their dramas don't matter; our will matters, and lasting change comes when we express our will in numbers they can't deny.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion and cap child care costs at 7% of a family's incomes. The original Build Back Better Act would have done both of these things, and neither one is on the table in the Manchin/Schumer discussions, but that only means we have to keep telling them we want these things. Millions of kids went right back into poverty when the CTC expansion ended -- and inflation didn't go down, you'll notice! -- and child care has become so absurdly expensive it now rivals health care expenses as the thing corporations will charge whatever they want for because you have to have it. That ain't America, folks.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax corporate profits at a minimum of 15% and stop letting them pretend they're making money overseas when they're making it here. This, too, relates to whatever discussions Messrs. Manchin and Schumer are having, and the 15% minimum tax appears to be the only thing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) would agree to do regarding corporate taxes. I said "appears," of course, because she doesn't "negotiate through the press." And here you thought accounting for herself to her constituents via our press was part of her job! That's because we're not galaxy brains like she is. Anyway, corporations need to pay more in taxes and we need to tell our Congressfolk that until they do it.

Finally, both Public Citizen and Drug Prices Are Too High help you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices. Public Citizen's email tool specifically mentions Medicare drug-price negotiation, while Drug Prices Are Too High's petition suggests that maybe supporting lower drug prices would help them in the midterms! And it should -- Medicare drug price negotiation foe Kurt Schrader lost his primary last week, and another Medicare drug price negotiation foe, Kathleen Rice, decided not to run for re-election; such fates should befall any politician who opposes the clear will of at least 80% of Americans. Including Kyrsten Sinema, up in 2024.

Around the table: on "solutions" and drama.

When you hear that police prioritized keeping themselves safe over confronting the Uvalde shooter as he murdered 21 kids, you may be tempted to think that makes sense, that your first duty to yourself is to keep yourself safe. But you must also remember that right-wingers dismiss any criticism of police shooting unarmed Black folks by saying hey, they put their lives on the line everyday! Plus we watch too many cop shows; fictional characters put their lives on the line 22 times a year with nary a scratch, and that, too, gives everyone the wrong idea.

Surprise, surprise, "YouTube’s Biggest Info Channels Carry Corporate News, Not Alternative Views," and could that be because Google owns it? It's a question worth asking! Corporations aren't necessarily early adopters of new technology, but they eventually come to dominate new technology because of their power, which sure argues against untrammeled corporate power as well as anything else. Should we be comforted that 81 of YouTube's 100 most-subscribed news channels come from the Global South (with more than half of them coming from India)? No, we should not -- big is big, and no matter what language it speaks, really it speaks the language of money.

Study finds that more than one out of every five Republican state legislators belongs to some far-right Facebook group. Some of these legislators defend themselves by saying the groups are made up of jes' folks -- certainly not by folks radicalized by right-wing politicians! -- but hopefully it's not news by now that right-wing groups go out of their way to find (and foreground) "normal"-looking people among their numbers. Hopefully it's not also news by now that right-wing politicians and media outlets manufacture a lot of the "wants" and "needs" jes' folks have. They also whine well, what about the far-left websites? Hopefully it's not news by now that far-left websites don't get the big social media welfare that far-right websites do, and besides, "well what about" equals "I can't win the argument on the merits."

Recall my joy that Jamie McLeod-Skinner unseated Kurt Schrader in the Oregon 5th Democratic House primary? Well, it works both ways, as a bankster-backed group has poured $1 million into defeating Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), declaring its aim to "elect solutions-oriented Democrats." Anytime you hear someone utter a phrase like "solution-oriented Democrats," understand that the only "solution" they'll tolerate is the one that lets big corporations make more money, no matter how much that hurts people. Also, hedge fund managers are speculators and who therefore shouldn't get all the say about everything, or even very much of a say about anything. The good news: Rep. Tlaib looks ready to win this fight.

The Center for Media and Democracy looks at the "Right-Wing Families" who "Bankroll (the) Most Extreme GOP Candidates Nationwide. See the Uhleins give money to folks like Rep. Paul Gosar (E-AZ), a man abandoned even by his own family, and see the Toppers indulge their love of racists and insurrectionists or do I repeat myself? I mention this in case you were thinking there's a significant difference between the "corporate wing" of the Republican Party and the "extremist wing." I'd say there's no difference -- the Republican Party has only one wing, the drama wing. And frankly it's a bit of an aerodynamic miracle that it's still airborne.

Finally, my fellow liberals have done plenty of chortling at Donald Trump's rally for Liz Cheney's opponent in the upcoming Wyoming House Republican primary, but I noticed that Mr. Trump continually attacked Ms. Cheney for being a war-monger -- her dad was Vice President during the Iraq War, after all -- which reminds us, I would hope, that Mr. Trump is nowhere near as stupid as folks think. But if Mr. Trump's anti-war argument resonates with large numbers of Wyoming Republicans, just remember that 20 years ago they were all calling you traitor for opposing the Iraq war, and if pressed about that matter now they'd almost certainly deny it. We all deserve, at the very least, that folks remember where they stood when it mattered.