Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning child labor, pollution, railway safety, and paid family/medical leave.

Long story short: tell our Department of Labor to stop big corporations from using child labor, and tell your Congressfolk to reject the TAP American Energy Act, pass the Railway Safety Act, and enact a national paid family/medical leave 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.

Care2 helps you tell our Department of Labor to stop big corporations from using child labor in America. Thought we had that debate already, didn’t you? Thought we were past that, didn’t you? But I think we’ve seen over the past 20 years that there’s no pillar of civilized behavior Republicans won’t destroy to please their corporate paymasters. The question, of course, is whether a Democratic government will bend to their will – which, let’s be honest, has totally been their M.O. for all these years! – or do our will. The answer is the same as always: Democrats will do nothing until we make it impossible for them to do nothing, so we’ve got to get in their grills here just as we do elsewhere.

Environmental Action, People’s Action, and the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 1, the so-called TAP American Energy Act, which would allow more fossil fuel drilling on public lands, reverse all of the renewable energy initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act, and weaken clean air and clean water regulations. Public lands, renewable energy, clean air, and clean water are all actually popular with good Americans, which must be why Republicans are so hot to shit on them that they’ve actually made this bill their signature bill of this Congress. So let’s stop their latest attempt to inflict their stupidity and venality upon us.

Real Populists helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Railway Safety Act. With Transportation Secretary Buttigieg acting like his hands are always tied even when our laws say they’re not, our Congressfolk have to act, not that they’re all that anxious to do that, either. Why act when you can just look like you’re acting, after all? But even a few noxious Republicans have voiced support for ensuring rail cars have two-person crews (which the bill would mandate), and given how much the East Palestine derailment was in the news, it really shouldn’t be a heavy lift to demand stricter regulations on chemicals and bigger fines for breaking those restrictions. But if we say nothing, they'll do nothing.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid family/medical leave legislation. With the House in control of drama-addicted Republicans, and with the Senate’s Democratic majority once again limited by whatever Joe Manchin wants to do, chances of getting paid family/medical leave legislation is low. We should still demand it! Why let them tell us what’s possible? Virtually every other nation on the planet has it, so we should definitely not let them tell us what’s possible! Plus it would be relatively inexpensive – the Kirsten Gillibrand bill would have taken a mere $8 per month out of your paycheck if you make $50,000 annually. Eight dollars! So let’s not let fools dictate reality to us.

Action: concerning price-gouging, birth control, social media, and family separation.

Long story short: tell our FTC to investigate possible egg corporation price-gouging, tell our government to make birth control free again, tell Meta to hold Donald Trump to the same rules it holds all of Facebook’s users, and tell the Biden Administration not to restart family separation policies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Real Populists helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to investigate possible egg industry price-gouging. Egg prices went up so far so fast earlier this year it fueled a hundred Facebook memes, but of course whenever you see “high prices” and “high profits” in the same spot – and, surprise! You see it here, too – you have to at least investigate the possibility that it’s just price-gouging. Yeah, they said it was avian flu, but avian flu has been hitting wild birds hard and commercial flocks only sporadically, and how many eggs do we get from wild birds again? So there’s yet another reason we need our FTC to investigate.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the strongest birth control access rule possible. The Administration’s proposal rescinds the Trump Administration’s “moral objection” but not the “religious objection,” and provides an “Individual Contraceptive Arrangement” for folks whose employers have a “religious” objection. No one will ever convince me that your employer should force its own alleged “religious” or “moral” objections upon us in re covering birth control in health insurance, even though Hobby Lobby convinced our Supreme Court of that. But we must press the Biden Administration to expand no-cost access to birth control as broadly as possible.

Free Press helps you tell Meta (Facebook’s parent corporation) to hold Donald Trump to the exact same community standards it holds everyone else. Simply put: if they’re going to allow Mr. Trump back on, they shouldn’t hide behind arguments about TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!! every time he does something they’d ban you or I for. And I guarantee you he will do many, many more awful things on Facebook than you or I will ever do, and Mark Zuckerberg will throw up his hands and say well what can I do? It’s democracy! Facebook isn’t a democracy, of course, but a publishing house. Do we demand that Random House publish every manuscript it gets? No, we do not.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to abandon plans to bring back family separation at the border. One of the more shameful episodes of the Trump years and that’s saying something, President Biden pledged to end family separation once he took office, but hasn’t – he’s done it less and grandstanded less about it and that’s all I can say in his favor – but now he appears willing to reinstate the program formally, and for what? So right-wingers can simply ignore it and vote against him next time he runs just like they did with Barack Obama? You’d think Mr. Biden, having witnessed all that close-up as Vice President, would be more attuned to that. Hence we have to remind him.

Around the table: featuring foolish right-wingers and wise citizens.

Did a Florida school board really remove a movie about the first six-year-old girl to integrate into a previously all-white school because of one complaint from one parent who has admitted that she hasn’t seen the whole film? Yes, they did. Right-wingers have spent the last couple of decades claiming that liberals are weak, but only right-wingers are so frail they can’t bear to hear that racism exists. Get these people out of your life while you still can. If they can’t handle the most obvious truths about our nation’s history, why would they be there for you when you need them?

From the “Good News About Abortion From Red States” file: a Teton County, Wyoming judge has blocked that state’s abortion ban, ruling that a state constitutional amendment cooked up by right-wingers in 2012 to harness hysteria over the Affordable Care Act actually prevents the state from banning abortion. That amendment declares that Wyoming citizens have “the right to make their own health care decisions,” and though Wyoming legislators claim that abortion isn’t health care, you can guess how persuasive that is. You think right-wingers will start putting the brakes on their drama now that it’s bit them in the ass? I kid, of course – they have nothing to offer the electorate except drama.

When I hear that Republicans ought to get behind Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin because he’d be “a non-hostile alternative to Trump and a compelling centrist challenge to Biden,” I leap to say he’s not a centrist! Do centrists ban books, try to ban abortions, kill mask mandates, repeal protections for transgender kids, or put Andrew Wheeler in charge of regulating air and water? No, they do not. But this article is somehow even worse than its tagline – it acts like Mr. Youngkin should be proud of his ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth, rather than ashamed of it. And this is why people hate our "liberal" media – all they care about is the horserace.

In the wake of yet another school shooting, this one in Nashville, Tennessee, Rep. Tim Burchett (E-TN) says Congress is “not going to fix” the problem and adds that “I don’t see any real role that we could do other than mess things up.” Also, “as a Christian,” he thinks America needs a religious “revival,” one that electing ever more “religious” people to Congress somehow hasn’t achieved! If you took this flatugasm as an honestly-offered assessment, which I wouldn’t advise, you would still have to ask why anyone would want to be part of a body of legislators they profess to hate so much.

Finally, because the news can’t all be bad: Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has announced he’ll “pause” on his plan to kneecap Israel’s judiciary. The Netanyahu plan would reduce judicial review of the nation’s laws and give Parliament added power to overturn Supreme Court decisions, while also giving Mr. Netanyahu final say over judicial appointments, which I’m sure has absolutely nothing to do with his own pending corruption trial. This pause happened only after tens of thousands of good Israelis took to the streets in protest, the nation’s main union called a general strike, and soldiers threatened to avoid reporting for duty. They’ll all still need to work to make that pause permanent, but never let anyone tell you that speaking out doesn’t work.

Action: concerning drama, banksters, pollution, and abortion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean debt limit bill, and pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, and the Global HER Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to sign a discharge petition mandating a vote on a clean debt limit bill, one without any hostage-taking or drama. Seriously, no more drama! is the message our Congressfolk need to hear. They’ll pretend they’re hearing from constituents (or, possibly, “constituents”) about TEH RUNAWAYZ SPENDINGZ!!!!, but they really need to hear this simple message: no more drama! Do your damn job! Stop trying to force evil down good Americans’ throats! Social Security cuts, Medicare cuts – they know they can’t do them without drama. But it we get in their grills, they can’t do it at all.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, which would repeal Trump-era banking regulation rollbacks. You know, like the one that increased the amount of rubbish a bank could hold without submitting to stricter regulations. Stricter regulations could have prevented those bank failures (and the resulting bailouts – the fact that taxpayers didn’t pay for them doesn’t make it that much better!), but big bankster CEOs didn’t want them, because waaaaaaaaaaaah. Seriously, that’s the reason – who complains more about fulfilling obligations to society than a bankster?

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, and though I wince at the phrase “foreign mining” – mining and polluting near sacred San Carlos Apache/protected public land would be just as wrong if an American corporation did it! – the bill would permanently protect the Oak Flat area of the Tonto National Forest, thus ending a shameful chapter in the careers of former Sen. Flake (who once lobbied for the same corporation that wants to mine Oak Flat) and the late Sen. McCain, whose attention to clean air/clean water/religious freedom issues was always erratic. So let’s redeem their souls and protect some sacred public land.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Global HER Act, which would end forever the “global gag rule” that Republican Presidents reinstate the day they take office. I hate having to revisit this issue every time the Presidency changes parties even more than I hate the fact that electing a President from a different party even matters! And the fact is, the global gag rule hurts people all over the world – right-wingers pretend it prevents us from “exporting abortion,” but it actually prevents us from exporting health care to developing nations, since abortion is only one service health care organizations provide. So let’s end this battle once and for all.

Readings for March 28, 2023: special "algorithms suck!" edition.

You know, this just can’t be said enough: when you hear that Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg shouldn’t go after Donald Trump because of TEH SKYROCKETINGZ CRIMEZ!!!!, you have to understand that crime is not, in fact, skyrocketing. A lot of right-wingers seem to prefer to say “skyrocketing crime rate” without even backing it up, as if the mere fact of its utterance makes it true, but shootings, murders, rape, burglary, robbery, and grand larceny are all down, and while felonies overall are up, they’ve been higher. And even that is an incomplete picture of crime – our “liberal” media never means water pollution or wage theft when they discuss crime, let alone corporate crime. I hope if I say these things enough, they’ll take, but given how careless our “liberal” media are, I won’t hold my breath.

Matt Stoller describes “the monopolies behind the Adderall shortage.” . Long story short: the big pharma wholesalers that sell drugs to pharmacies are, basically, too big to run, and of course only three of them control 85% of the market! For years the wholesalers sold large amounts of controlled substances (of which Adderall is one) to obvious organized crime fronts; when they got caught, and settled with several state Attorneys General, they stopped selling controlled substances to pharmacies that raised “red flags,” but not only did the wholesalers create overly broad red flags (simply increasing demand for controlled substances is one of them!), but they also use (wait for it) algorithms to create arbitrary and hard drug-selling caps, all of which means the wholesalers don’t know their customers (the pharmacies) very well, if at all. Hence “too big to run,” and it gets worse: because of their market power, the big wholesalers force pharmacies into exclusive contracts that the pharmacies can’t even read, which keeps pharmacies from finding a non-corrupt wholesaler. I think the states did the best they could, but this sounds like a job for Big Government!

You really won’t like this one: ProPublica catches big health insurance corporation Cigna having doctors reject insurance claims without even looking at them! Cigna, of course, says that’s not true, but doctors who’ve worked there say it is, and, gosh, whom do I believe – the corporation that never admits wrongdoing, or the worker whose testimony implicates them in wrongdoing? I kid, of course – I’ll take the latter, any day. What tool does Cigna use to reject all these claims? I hesitate to tell you the answer, but it rhymes with “Blaise Pascalgorithm.” Whomever came up with this roborejection process has apparently saved Cigna over $2 million annually from folks who would rather just pay a few hundred dollars than try to navigate some labyrinthine bureaucracy over the phone. But it’s possible to save $2 million and still lose your soul.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, endless war, internet privacy, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject yet more corporate welfare handouts, repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, do something useful about internet privacy instead of banning TikTok, and reject any effort to defund Medicaid or CHIP. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 866, which would, in its words, “enhance tax benefits for research activities,” and you know what that means: more corporate welfare handouts. “Research activities” are, by definition, expenses, which make them exempt from corporate taxes (since we only tax corporate profits!); why should corporations get to essentially deduct expenses twice? Oh, right – because all they care about is jacking up their stock prices, never mind the quality of their products or services, and they need an “incentive” to do the right thing. Actually they need laws that make them do the right thing, not handouts.

M Power helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious 2002 authorization to use military force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Didn’t we get out of Iraq, after all? Yes, we did, more or less, but all of our post-Bush Presidents have used the 2002 AUMF to justify all manner of appalling extralegal military intervention, and you may remember that the Iraq War didn’t go so well. Not just because it spilled American blood and squandered American treasure and killed hundreds of thousands of “liberated” Iraqis, but because the subsequent American occupation helped create ISIS, the terror organization that makes al-Qaeda look like a bunch of bureaucrats. So let’s have no more of that.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop posturing about banning TikTok and pass some internet privacy laws with teeth instead. Because there’s nothing uniquely awful about TikTok except its privacy issues, and if you fix the privacy issues, you don’t need to ban TikTok. Personal to the Republicans grandstanding about privacy now: y’all voted to repeal pretty good FCC internet privacy rules in 2017, and that makes you a hypocrite now. Maybe hypocrisy doesn’t matter to Republicans, but that fact doesn’t make me the weakling! Strong people hold to their values even when it’s inconvenient; they certainly don’t forget them for corporate money or whiners’ approval.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislation that would defund Medicaid or CHIP. Remember that time the New York Times found that Trump supporters actually liked Medicaid (but hated all the “those people” they thought were on it)? Maybe we had a chance to bond there, but never mind reaching out to masturbatory rage addicts – defunding Medicaid or CHIP is the wrong thing to do, both morally and fiscally. No deficit peacock ever struts around about defense spending even though you’ll find a crap-ton of waste and fraud there. So how about we stop making regular Americans pay for politicians’ mistakes?

Around the table: down with Drama Kings!

Good news on abortion rights from another red state, as the Oklahoma Supreme Court rules that the state constitution guarantees a right to an abortion “at any point in the pregnancy” when a doctor finds “with a reasonable degree of certainty” that denying the abortion would “endanger the woman’s life.” It’s a narrow right, to be sure, but it expands the only right offered by state law, which only allows abortion when a woman is in “actual and present danger” of dying. Personal to those who think the doctor’s determination is a loophole women will drive a Mack truck through: ain’t you the folks who say government should never get between doctor and patient? Or did you just mean you, and not “those people”?

University of British Columbia researchers find a way to get rid of the notorious PFAS “forever chemicals” from our water. The UBC process not only promises to get rid of 99% of all PFAS chemicals but obliterate them as well, via “special electrochemical and photochemical techniques”; destroying the chemicals would rid us of the problem of “more highly toxic solid waste that will be another major environmental challenge.” So maybe the big corporations will cajole our EPA into loosening standards well before the technology becomes widely-available? Hey, if I thought of it, I’m sure they did. In the meantime, I wish the UBC researchers the best of luck in solving an extraordinarily difficult problem.

From the “It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Guy!” file: big advertisers still haven’t returned to Twitter, almost six months after Elon Musk took over, at least in part because they have little confidence Mr. Musk can’t/won’t keep Twitter from becoming, to borrow Mr. Musk’s own phrase, a “free-for-all hellscape” where racists and other bigots run rampant. I think Twitter’s reputation as a not-free-for-all hellscape before Mr. Musk bought it is rather overstated, but let’s not set the bar too low here. And I’m not of the mind that we should just let big corporations eat each other – the law may not recognize Twitter (and other social media sites) as publishers per se, but that’s what they are, and that would make content moderation literally job one at Twitter, regardless of Mr. Musk’s distaste for that task.

Ho hum, now Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) wants to expand Florida’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” law to all the higher grades as well as the lower ones. Remember when your right-wing friends said “it’s not for all kids, it’s just for the really young ones who hardly understand sexuality anyway”? Now we know that they were either stupid or lying, neither of which is a good look, and anyway we ought to just go with “lying,” since the facts don’t justify giving right-wingers the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, Governor, come get your poll tax, if you have the guts.

Speaking of the Drama Kings, both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have now said that Mr. DeSantis would not be Mr. Trump’s running mate if Mr. Trump secures the Republican Presidential nomination in 2024, which should surprise no one, since both men are residents of Florida and Article II, Section 1 of our Constitution prohibits the President and Vice President from living in the same state. (The 12th Amendment, which largely rewrites the relevant part of Section 1, maintains this prohibition.) So, how about we never speak of this possibility again? No, not even to goad right-wingers into dreaming of the impossible; they do that enough anyway.

Finally, from the “Dystopia is Here Now!” file: clothing corporation Levi Strauss & Co. will use artificial intelligence-generated avatars in order to “increase diversity” among its models! And here you thought diversity was about helping real people get more opportunities to succeed in life, but not to the corporations that would never pay any worker any money if they could get away with it! I have to infer all of that, because Levis says it can’t fulfill its diversity obligations using just real people without explaining why. I mean, it's not like corporations can't find Black actors or models, as you know if you watch almost any TV.

Action: concerning education, banksters, and pollution.

Long story short: tell the Ohio legislature and a Florida texbook corporation to reject anti-education initiatives, tell the Biden Administration to keep the Silicon Valley Bank’s affordable housing promises, and tell our EPA to enact a more vigorous soot standard. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

You may have read my post from earlier today about Ohio’s “controversial beliefs” bill, which would be SB 83, the so-called Higher Education Enhancement Act; I said the details were even worse than the news hook (that the bill would ban the teaching of “controversial beliefs” in state-funded colleges), so here they are: it would ban mandatory diversity training, it would force professors to post all their syllabi online, and would ban any teaching that might cause “psychological distress.” You can reach the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jerry Cirino, at (614) 644-7718, and you can reach Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman at (614) 466-7584 and Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens at (614) 466-1366. You can tell them all you’re sick of the “hurt feelings” of bigots meaning more to them than the facts of history.

And now we’re on to Florida, again! The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell textbook publishing corporation Studies Weekly to stop erasing racism from its history texts. Apparently they’ve removed all references to race from its Rosa Parks lesson! That’d be like removing all references to Bernie Parent from a history of the Flyers’ mid-’70s Stanley Cup runs! Except not as evil, of course, for in Florida they act like they’ll hurt young white kids’ feelings by teaching them that Rosa Parks fought institutional racism, by white people, against Black people. Of course, kids ain’t really that fragile; grown-ups are. And fragile grown-ups shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Daily Kos helps you tell our government to keep the affordable housing-related promises the now-defunct Silicon Valley Bank made – specifically, by making honoring those commitments a condition of any SVB-related sale. One does get tired of always hearing that investors need to be “made whole” – and the Fed sure has bent over backwards to ensure that those investors were made whole! Nobody ever says the workers need to be made whole, and banks shouldn’t get off the hook for the promises they’ve made to communities, either. If the Biden Administration wants to prove that government works for Americans, keeping SVB’s promise to invest in communities would be a good start.

Finally, the Climate Reality Project helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to improve its soot pollution standard. The science tells us that the 8 microgram-per-cubic-meter standard would be much better than our EPA’s proposed 10 micrograms standard – it would more than double the reduction in health care costs over the next decade, because fewer folks will get sick, soot pollution helping to cause, as it does, a lot of health issues like heart disease, diabetes, and asthma. The costs to industry represent around two percent of that number, and though big corporations will complain that they have to pay it, this is America, where everyone makes sacrifices for the common good. Right?

Penny rants for March 27, 2023.

An Ohio bill would ban teaching of “controversial beliefs” at state universities. It’d also ban faculty strikes, and the details of the “controversial beliefs” ban are considerably worse than my summary in the first sentence might indicate, but my how I never tire of the “fuck your feelings” crowd using the alleged “feelings” of young people to justify never teaching about racism or sexism again. Yes, there was a point in my own life when I decided I’d heard too much about these things – youth is wasted on the young, just like they say – but you know what happened? I got over it, because anti-racists and anti-sexists were right, and getting over it, and accepting my part in both problem and solution, made me a stronger and more mature person. I guess actual growth experiences are too much to ask of right-wing snowflakes. Remember all this the next time one of them goes on about how “political correctness” (or whatever scare word they’re using now) is “worse” than actual racism and sexism. You don’t want any of these people in your foxhole.

You know why I don’t actually believe that a TikTok ban would “lose” President Biden “every voter under 35, forever”? Not just because Mr. Biden hasn’t actually called for one, and not just because said ban is mostly a right-wing dream, and not just because the Republican alternative to Mr. Biden would be a raging dumpster fire of a human being – I also note that the article quotes exactly five young voters, all from Arizona, and four of them don’t think a TikTok ban would affect either their vote or that of their peers. The fifth – whose testimony you get first, of course, and many paragraphs before the others’ – has this to say: “(President Biden is) maybe capable of doing a good job, but he’s not capable of gathering the troops, rallying the people. Especially the Democratic voter base. I don’t think he’s a strong candidate.” So given the opportunity to describe something Mr. Biden has done or hasn’t done that’s turned him off, this student opts for mere horserace anaylsis. We get too much of that from our “liberal” media, so it’d be nice if more of the children-who-are-our-future would abstain from it.

Action: concerning regulations, facial recognition, and child marriage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Corporate Capture Act, reject the REINS Act, and pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, and tell legislators in 20 states to ban child marriage once and for all. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Corporate Capture Act and reject the REINS Act. This is your basic Goofus and Gallant strip: the Stop Corporate Capture Act (a.k.a. Gallant) would require our government to disclose conflicts of interest inherent in rule-making comments, like when a corporation comments on a rule that would affect it, while the REINS Act (Goofus) would give our Congress endless attempts to nullify the regulations it has already authorized through legislation – which is just a way for right-wingers in Congress to destroy our clean air and clean water regulations. So our task is clear, and we should get to it.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, which would, as its title suggests, prevent our government from using this awful technology that can’t tell Black people apart better than your right-wing uncle can, but which law enforcement uses to put the wrong people in jail and harass protestors. They’ll say imposing a moratorium will prevent us from doing the research we need to get it right, but they’ve had plenty of opportunity to get it right, and they’ve screwed it up. So we need to stop them from hurting us any further. I can’t put it plainer than that.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell state legislators in 20 states to outlaw child marriage. You mean that’s still a thing? Yes, that’s still a thing, at least in 20 states, even though children cannot by definition consent to a sexual relationship, and I’ll tell you a secret: it ain’t we libertine liberals who tolerate child marriage and child molestation and grooming, it’s right-wingers. When Roy Moore went on his infamous quest to find a just-barely-teen girl to groom into a wife, he was hardly the only one! A litany of evangelicals and other right-wingers do that, too! Remember: whenever right-wingers call us a particular kind of evil, they are that evil. If you haven’t been looking at the world that way, start now. Everything will make a lot more sense.

Around the table: the time to call George W. Bush a liar was *always* now.

Michigan looks ready to repeal its notorious “right-to-work” law, a.k.a. the “right to work for less” law, because apparently there are no Kyrsten Sinemas in Michigan’s slim Democratic majorities. Right-to-work laws, as you know, starve unions of funding by enabling union workers to get services without paying dues, and Sonali Kohatkar has a good way of thinking about that: “(i)magine calling AAA and demanding its roadside benefits without paying the auto club’s modest yearly fee.” That’s perfect, right down to the word “modest” – my dues cost me around 35 cents an hour.

Fox News producer sues her employer for coercing her to “take the fall” when testifying in the Dominion defamation suit. She’s also suing over sexist and anti-Semitic commentary at the workplace, which, gosh, that is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! You suppose Maria Bartiromo, as notorious a right-wing shill as has worked in the “liberal” media these last few decades, will change her ways now that she’s discovered her employer thought she was utterly disposable? I kid, of course – I mean, she’s no Gretchen Carlson.

I’ll admit I was not hopeful about this Los Angeles Times opinion piece on “how to stop the polarization” in American politics, but the advice dispensed therein isn’t bad – helping right-wingers “communicate ‘what (they) are observing, feeling, and needing” sounds like a full-time job, but I agree that name-calling famous people is a hell of a lot better than name-calling your friends and neighbors, and I think it gives them the space to change their minds. I even think they appreciate being given that space, even if they don’t articulate it that way. I guess I’m still an optimist, then.

Some, ah, distinguished individual called in a bomb threat to a Tuesday hearing on New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million lawsuit against Donald Trump for allegedly inflating real estate asset values. Because take-your-country-back rallies take more work, apparently! This kind of soft terrorism actually makes me think more kindly of hard terrorism – folks who make death threats and bomb threats without intending to back up their words actually rank below mass shooters in my book, meaning they’re pretty much at the bottom of that book.

Jesus Mary and Joseph did Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) actually say he’s different from Donald Trump because his style of leadership includes “no daily drama”? Yes, he really did, and that’s hilarious, because he’s all about the drama! If calling everything you don’t like “woke” and banning books like it’s the 1930s and going after anti-racist education like it’s the 1830s and demanding menstrual records of teenage girls (and this is a not-at-all comprehensive list!) ain’t drama, then what is? Oh, almost forgot: come get your poll tax from me, Governor, if you can.

Finally, two former CIA agents with four decades’ combined experience in intelligence describe at some length how Tha Bush Mobb lied about their findings so they could sell the invasion of Iraq. I feel terrible for these two good Americans, who detail the many, many honest assessments our CIA gave to Tha Bush Mobb only to have them lie about it because they were going into Iraq and damn everyone else. But the Insider is wrong to say that now it’s “time to call George W. Bush a liar,” because that time was the fall of 2002. If you were paying attention and thinking for yourself then, you were calling him a liar.

Action: concerning "forever chemicals," soot pollution, prisoner price-gouging, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous rules against PFAS and soot pollution possible, tell our Justice Department to abandon rules allowing prisons to garnish even more money from prisoners and their families, and tell President Biden to get a good public servant on our FCC as its fifth Commissioner. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous PFAS regulation possible. Our EPA is setting limits on PFAS plastics, a.k.a. “forever chemicals,” in our drinking water for the very first time, and that’s a good thing, since PFAS chemicals are (as evidenced by their nickname) virtually everywhere, from non-stick saucepans to fast food wrappers to plastic water bottles. Also, they don’t break down once they’re in your system, and scientists have linked them to cancer, heart, and immune system issues. So let’s lend our EPA the steel they’re going to need in their spine to withstand all the corporate hackery they’re going to hear.

Evergreen Action helps you tell our EPA to strengthen its proposed soot standards. Currently they’re planning to limit soot particulates – which scientists have linked to asthma, diabetes, heart disease, and cognitive breakdowns – to 10 micrograms per cubic meter, rather than eight, and eight is a lot better. Yeah, I know, two micrograms doesn’t sound like a lot, but you'll also inhabit way more than one cubic meter in a day, and a lot of the biggest killers in America are also the smallest. And not for nothing, but you find a lot more soot in poor, Black, and Brown communities, because big polluting corporations tend to build their power plants near them. Why, it’s almost like they know.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice to abandon new Federal Bureau of Prison rules that allow prisons to garnish even more money from prisoners and their families. I could argue basic human decency and compassion, and I could argue that sentences should be about loss of freedom and not price-gouging, but note well that these changes will interfere with our ability to rehabilitate prisoners, all so some corporate executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. Is that why we build and maintain civilizations? No, it is not. And no use arguing but jails need money if you’re not going to tax the rich a lot harder.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell President Biden to nominate a good public servant to be the fifth Commissioner on our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC). I’m sad it won’t be net neutrality architect Gigi Sohn – who may have decided that even more abusive questioning from Senators wasn’t worth the trouble and can we really blame her? – but America is a big place, so she can’t be the only person qualified for the job. And the person Mr. Biden nominates had better champion internet freedom – for people, not corporations – and that person should also champion bridging the racial divide and the rural divide with regard to internet access. So let’s get on that.

Readings for March 22, 2023.

Sonali Kohatkar at Pressenza describes “Why Student Debt Cancellation is Reasonable, Not Radical.” Right-wingers love to use small business owners as a human shield, even though their own economic policies have driven most of them out of business (and, ah, small business owners have student loan debt, too!), but “student debtors are in trouble precisely because they didn’t get the same government benefits compared to their predecessors.” Remember when California’s state schools were tuition-free? That was true until 1967, when Gov. Reagan made Californians start paying – because, in the words of his advisors, an educated working class is a dangerous thing – and today’s students pay more than twice what students in the mid-’70s paid. Folks who think of this issue only in terms of Starbucks baristas majoring in gender studies won’t be convinced, but then nothing will ever convince them of anything, so how about we stop letting them set the terms of debate in America?

If you know someone who still thinks abortion should be illegalinallcasesnoexceptions, you may want to refer them to the story of Mayron Michelle Hollis’s ectopic pregnancy in Tennessee, a state with one of the “toughest” anti-abortion laws in America now that Sam Alito has worked his grotesque will. The story is harrowing from start to finish – and it’s still not over – and don’t brook anyone saying well she shouldn’t have gotten addicted to drugs ha ha ha snort high five where they ought to be saying “there but for the grace of God go I.” You probably won’t be surprised to learn that most of the legislators who voted for Tennessee’s abortion ban didn’t read it or understand it, but don’t feel sorry for them because they'll all face primary challenges from their right if they do their jobs. One of these Republicans should try fighting extremism, maybe? Anyway, I actually think the abortion issue is pretty simple to decide: if you’re against it, don’t get one, and don’t force everyone to be just like you.

Trinity Tran at TruthOut instructs us that “The SVB and Signature Bank Crashes Show Why We Need Public Banking.” The argument resembles conservative and moderate arguments in favor of Medicare-for-All: the private sector has screwed up so badly that our government couldn’t possibly do worse! And with our government swooping in to save every last dollar of the Silicon Valley Bank failure – even beyond the $250,000 FDIC threshold, do those rich clowns deserve that? – why not just cut out the middleman? And certainly we shouldn’t be giving welfare handouts to rich investors while decrying the “moral hazard” of, say, mortgage cramdown for families who only have one home. I’m starting to think I should just slap folks who use the phrase “moral hazard.” What, they're going to prove they’re substantial thinkers? Substantial thinkers don’t even have to theorize about public banking when they can just point to the Bank of North Dakota.

Action: concerning banking regulation, health care, junk fees, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the TABS Act, reject any proposed cuts to Medicaid and CHIP, and pass the Junk Fees Prevention Act and the Stock Buyback Accountability 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 Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (or TABS) Act, which would replace our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s independent funding mechanism – a mechanism good enough for other banking regulators – with the whim of Congressional funding. You’d think with all these bank failures, our Congressfolk would understand that we actually need a strong CFPB, but up is down in their world. I’m sure they’ll use this as a bargaining chip in debt limit “negotiations”; they might even succeed. But to hell with what they want, because they’re supposed to negotiate with us.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any proposed cuts to Medicaid or the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP). Again, to hell with what the deficit peacocks want! Medicaid and CHIP help a lot of good Americans, and they sure in hell ain’t breaking our budget’s back. Now, throwaway defense spending and low taxes on the rich? Those things are breaking our budget’s back. But Medicaid and CHIP are popular across the political spectrum, probably because even right-wingers have to use it! If you come to rely on something, you’ll hate the politicians who take it away, and you’ll punish them. Right, Sam Alito?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Junk Fee Prevention Act, which would vastly reduce the harm junk fees – like ticket fees, airline fees, and “early termination” fees – cause good Americans. Who likes junk fees that far outstrip whatever expense a corporation incurs to fix a problem or make something convenient? Nobody but the people who collect those fees, that’s who! And they ain’t a majority of a damn thing in America! OK, they may be a majority of bad people, but let’s not deal civilization yet another body blow because a majority of bad people demanded it. I have a feeling our descendants would not want that to be our epitaph.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would quadruple the stock buyback tax that only corporations will ever have to pay. Stock buybacks used to be illegal, and for good reason – not only do they concentrate corporate power in a few hands (and concentrated power in a few hands should concern all Americans regardless of ideological predisposition), but corporations tend to spend more on stock buybacks than on, you know, new equipment. Everyone needs to buy that every once in a while! And if they won’t do the right thing, then our government’s gotta step in on our behalf. This ain’t hard.

Around the table: come get your poll tax, Ron DeSantis!

I’ll admit I had trouble imagining why Republicans are suddenly so hot to repeal child labor laws at the state level, and I still have trouble reconciling their loudly-proclaimed “concern” over children’s education with their apparent desire to send them all to mills and mines 10 hours a day. I guess they’re just trying to suck up to their corporate donors at any cost, especially since quite a few of said donors have been caught violating child labor laws lately. More kids in the mines also helps break labor unions. Last I looked, though, I don’t think any normal people think child labor laws are too strict, or lament that they didn’t work more during their own childhoods.

Amanda Marcotte reminds us that Republican’s apparent inability to define what “woke” means “is a feature, not a bug,” because they can pretend it means anything at all at any time. We learn that Gov. DeSantis is particularly good, or should I say “good,” at mining this vein of vagueness, and I totally mention that because he’s trying to criminalize bloggers' criticism of him as we speak. In any case, I suggest we all go ahead and tell our right-wing friends, to the degree we still have them, that once they use the word “woke” in an argument, they’re conceding the point.

In a related note, Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) claims that our military is too “woke,” and to support this thesis tells a story about a ship that had to stop “following a Chinese ship” so they could “train everybody on transgender.” One thousand U.S. dollars says this incident never happened, even if “a retired, I think, captain” really told him so – which I also doubt. (At present, the U.S. Navy can find no record of such an incident.) This is the same man who says that reducing Medicare costs amounts to “Medicare cuts” and that poor people should pay more in taxes so they have “skin in the game.” Only in the Fascist State of Florida could he keep winning elections.

Something I hadn’t considered about Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News: if Fox News loses – which possibility ain’t exactly far-fetched, given all those Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson texts and Rupert Murdoch’s own testimony – then shareholders will also be able to file suit against them, meaning Fox could lose a whole lot more than the $1.6 billion Dominion wants, or the $2.7 billion Smartmatic wants. I doubt its most-devoted viewers will abandon them, though. Rage is a hell of a drug, but rage mixed with nonsense is even more potent, particularly if they think it pisses off liberals.

Sandpoint, Idaho hospital says it’ll stop delivering babies in two months’ time mainly because of the “legal and political climate” there. You may recall that Idaho has one of them-there abortion bans where relatives may sue medical providers for performing abortions, such that obstetricians have been leaving the state in droves, with no replacements coming. See, when you’re evil to everyone around you, eventually everyone leaves you. Did these right-wingers really think we needed them so badly that we would put up with any and all abuse? I can only hope their loneliness makes them take stock of what they’ve done a bit.

Finally, might I say that I am beyond disgusted with all the “don’t indict Trump or you’ll make him win” talk? Here’s the worst example of that, from “OMFG why does anyone listen to” Mark Halperin. I won’t list every objection I have with this piece, since those objections would total approximately one per point made, but let’s just leave it at these two: he says it’s unfair that folks aren’t spending the same amount of time on Hunter Biden as they are on Donald Trump, which is rather like saying we should have celebrated the scoring prowess of Marty McSorley the way we did Wayne Gretzky, and he also exhorts us to keep Trump supporters’ feelings in mind if the Big Man gets indicted, to which I must say: fuck their feelings. Everyone has to grow up sooner or later, and that includes folks who wallow in masturbatory rage and the pundits who enable them.

Action: concerning free speech, endless wars, tax cuts for the rich, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Florida legislators to reject an anti-free speech bill,and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq War AUMF, repeal the Trump tax cuts for the rich, and pass the Social Security Expansion 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.

Free Press helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject SB 1316, which would require any blogger who writes about Gov. DeSantis or state legislators register with the state or face heavy fines. Can you say "poll tax," boys and girls? And how do they justify such a thing? By saying all we want to know is who our enemies are? Here’s who your enemies are, Florida: everyone who thinks for themselves. And that’s most of us in America. I’m serious; no more than a quarter of Americans are mindless drones lapping up whatever right-wingers spew forth. They get a lot more media coverage than we do, but to quote a famous philosopher: they do not surround us; we surround them. So let’s remind everyone of that.

The American Friends Service Committee helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that “authorized” the Iraq War. And while the 2002 AUMF, like the 2001 AUMF that enabled all kinds of madness in the “war on terror,” is worse than a wad of used toilet paper, every President since Bush the Lesser has used it to justify all manner of extra-legal military adventures – think Obama in Libya and Syria and Trump in Iran and Syria. We can’t bring back dead soldiers or dead Iraqis, or those whom ISIS has exterminated, but perhaps we can begin to earn their forgiveness by repealing the 2002 AUMF.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, which would include the tax cuts in the top tax brackets and the massive cut in the corporate tax rate. Republicans are doing the helicopter dance about “deficits” and “debts,” but they all voted for the Trump tax cuts, which helped make trillion-dollar deficits in America the norm. So if they won’t force the rich to pay more in taxes now – you know, because DEFICITZ BADZ!!!!!! – then why should we listen to them about a damn thing? And if Democrats won’t have guts, we’ve got to have it for them.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act. When right-wingers play offense, what do we do? Play offense! Nobody roots for the team running the prevent defense at the end of the game! And taxing rich folks to pay for expanded Social Security benefits is actually quite popular, as you would imagine, given that most Americans, as I’ve said, are pretty smart. What are right-wingers going to do, pretend that taxing the rich is dumb? Taxing the rich, more than anything else, made ours the greatest middle class in history after World War II. So take no BS about this matter.

Around the table: why we need Hell, part 744.

I hope they’re right that “A Four Day Work Week is Closer Than You Think,” though I hasten to point out that most of the studies done on the matter get done outside the United States, and that those studies tend to concentrate on white-collar work (blue-collar work still exists, you know!). But I also hasten to point out that a four-day work week is also a job creation scheme, since (again, more so in blue-collar jobs) there’s still going to be the same amount of work to do. (In case you were wondering, workers made the same pay for fewer work days in these studies.)

Ho hum, our Fed Reserve Chair, having lately justified bailouts for Silicon Valley Bank because of the “systemic risk” its failure supposedly poses, approved a merger between SVB and Boston Private Bank and Trust by claiming the resulting behemoth posed no “significant risk” to our banking system. Of course now he’s promising a “thorough, transparent, and swift review” of the whole issue, but I presume the resulting review will only be swift. At least we have anti-monopolists at our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for as long as Congress allows us to have that.

French President Macron tries to unilaterally raise that nation’s pension age from 62 to 64 – a matter the good citizens of France have been protesting in the streets for two months now – and as a result faces a no-confidence vote in Parliament. He thought he had a hostage situation ready to spring on them: don’t oppose my will, or you’ll get a Le Pen government! And it may work, but his actual duty – to adhere to the people’s very obvious will – remains undone.

From the “What an Understated Headline” file: ProPublica reports that “Wealthy Executives Make Millions Trading Competitors’ Stock With Remarkable Timing.” I can see why a major news organization would put it that way – the information comes from that leaked trove of IRS files ProPublica acquired in 2021, which won't alone prove to a judge and/or jury that the timing was more than “remarkable” – but we’re not schmucks, and we also realize that stronger laws against insider trading and executives serving on multiple corporate boards would help stop this, ah, remarkable phenomenon. So would not worshiping at the altar of the stock market the way we’ve done for the last 40-odd years.

The Iraq War turns 20 today, and Jon Schwarz at The Intercept asks, of the war’s architects, “Where Are They Now?” Short answer: doing quite well, just like they don’t deserve, even Judith Miller, who I guess is the Useful Idiot of this clown car since her water-carrying couldn’t keep her out of jail. You’ll also learn that Donald Rumsfeld’s last vacation home was once the home of Edward Covey, “notorious for breaking unruly slaves for other farmers,” and that Ms. Miller’s last piece for the New York Times had a hilarious title – hilarious, at least, until you remember how many people it helped kill, maim, or torture.

Finally, and this also risks being a ho-hum, right-wing “activist” who dressed up as Julius Caesar at school board meetings to make some kind of point about transgender kids actually had a long, long history of bad and criminal behavior. Much as I want to say he’s paid his debt to society and that arrests and accusations aren't convictions, I also want to say that his trajectory from armed-standoff-with-cops (for which he served 17 years in the big house) to incoherent transgender protestor suggests that he's spent most of his time on Earth lapping up whatever the right’s dealers of masturbatory rage serve up at the moment. In a civilized society, you have to pay your debts and you have to do better in the future.

Action: concerning banksters, anti-trans posturing, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strengthen banking regulations, reject the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, and pass the Ensuring Women’s Right to Reproductive Freedom 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.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to make our banking regulations stronger. Specifically, you’ll ask Congress to insist that banks with over $50 billion in assets follower stricter regulations; that’s what the Dodd-Frank Act did in 2010, but in 2018 Congress raised that limit to $250 billion – and one of the most ardent supporters of that change was none other than the CEO of the Silicon Valley Bank that recently failed! Why, it’s almost like that was the whole idea. We shouldn’t stop there – I eagerly await the “outlaw hedge funds” action alert – but we can certainly communicate our will on this particular matter right now, while the iron’s hot, as it were.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would merely prevent any transgender or intersex kids from participating in school sports. Too many politicians don’t want to solve real problems – like, hey, we fund boys’ sports way more than we fund girls’ sports, and too many kids get sexually abused by folks they trust – but they sure do have time to swing their balls in our faces about transgender folks. And for the umpteenth time, no boys are going to become girls just to excel in girls' sports that (at best!) they'll spend the rest of their life getting paid less to do! It's like they don't remember what being a hormone-addled teenager was like – or hope you don't.

Free and Fair Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ensuring Women’s Right to Reproductive Freedom Act. This bill would prohibit state law enforcement from preventing women from crossing state lines to get abortions where they’re legal, and would not only empower state Attorneys General to enforce such a law, but for private citizens to get civil relief under such a law. Maybe Marco Rubio will call such a thing a boon for trial lawyers! Which would be a clever way of saying nothing about abortion, I suppose. Anyway, why do we need so many trial lawyers? Because we have so many powerful wrongdoers!

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise capital gains taxes on the rich, pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, raise Medicare taxes on income over $400,000, and pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy breaks down all the tax provisions President Biden has proposed in his budget, and they’re pretty good – the worst I can say about them is they don’t go far enough, but that’s still a lot better than, say, the positively poisonous “FAIR” Tax. One especially worthy item in the Biden budget is the proposal that would tax capital gains as income for folks making over $1 million annually. That would protect small homeowners while going after rich tax cheats, and if you can do both at once, it’s a good idea. You can call your Congressfolk and tell them to enact that, or to pass the Biden budget as a whole (which Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you do); either action would do us all good.

Care2 helps you tell Congress to pass President Biden’s proposal for a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax. I’ve suggested that his proposal would resemble Sen. Warren’s, which imposed a very small wealth tax on large estates, but actually our President’s proposal would impose a minimum 25% tax on households worth over $100 million, and would include unrealized assets (i.e., stocks and properties those households haven’t sold yet) in that calculation. And by demanding such a tax during a time of debt-limit hostage-taking, we’ll tell our Representatives that we won’t stand for more austerity drama. Personal to pedants stuck on the “$100 million” figure: you’re not one of them, either, so maybe don’t defend them?

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to support President Biden’s proposal to raise Medicare taxes on income over $400,000. Currently rich folks pay 3.8 percent in Medicare taxes on their income, but President Biden would raise that to 5 percent, again, only on income over $400,000, which, again, almost certainly ain’t you or I. In fact, that number represents only one out of every 50 taxpayers – go to most parties and you won’t see literally anyone there who’d pay more money (and again, only on that part of their income over $400,000) in Medicare taxes. And it would help keep Medicare solvent, so let’s do it.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Stock buybacks used to be illegal, because they concentrated corporate power in a few hands, rather than dispersing it among a multitude of shareholders, and if you’ve watched corporations ruin America over the last few decades, you know that “corporation” and “concentrated power” are two terms you should never read in the same sentence. This bill would quadruple the tax on stock buybacks, which would help discourage stock buybacks and thus help break this concentration. So let’s help do that.

Around the table: banksters never stop bankstering, and other horrible truths.

Surprise, surprise, months after cops shoot an activist at a Cop City protest in Georgia, an autopsy reveals that said activist had their hands up when they shot them, which revelation also just so happens to contradict official police testimony about the matter. C’mon, even NPR’s reporting it! Nice to see the very first sentence refers to the activist being “shot and killed by Georgia State Patrol,” though – and maybe I’m just being a jerk about this – that sentence also uses the passive voice. For an active voice example, see the first sentence of this paragraph.

Also surprise, surprise, former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) – he of the Dodd/Frank financial service reform legislation of 2010 – has lately been trying to ease the banking regulations he worked to pass on behalf of the recently-shuttered Signature Bank. Wait, let me guess: they were my boss, so of course I pushed for lighter regulation!. I would retort that you should never let your source of income capture your values like that. And yeah, that’s hard, but so is anything worth doing.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon instructs us that the recent collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank reminds us that “Tech Billionaires Are Just as Bad as Wall Street Bros.” “Beyond the thin veneer of social liberalism,” she writes, “Silicon Valley libertarians have the same ugly views about the economy that old school Republicans have: the government has no role in regulating business but the taxpayers should be on the hook for bailing out rich people from their own mistakes.” But Ms. Marcotte thinks we might actually be getting over our culture-wide man-crush on tech bros, and I sure hope she’s right. In a sane, moral, and decent society, she would be right.

When I hear that an ivermectin “influencer” suddenly died, likely because of the side effects of taking ivermectin for a decade, I remind myself that one must temper any glee one might have at a jerk getting his final comeuppance, not merely because it isn’t particularly kind, but also because this fellow still has legions of followers, and he’s helped them give ivermectin to children. But we should also temper our glee because when ivermectin abusers rail against “our failed western medicine which only cares about profits and not the cure,” they’re not entirely wrong.

When I hear that Nazi wannabes yelled and screamed and said “sieg heil” at a drag story event for kids, I have to say that I just don’t understand how some people can be so evil. And when I hear these morons claim that drag queens “groom” kids merely by existing, I remember that I watched a lot of Monty Python’s Flying Circus growing up, and it didn’t make me want to dress in women’s clothes any more than it made me want to blow up penguins on top of TV sets.

Finally, Novo Nordisk announces it’ll slash prices of several of its insulin products, and though we’ve got much further to go before we make health care affordable again, never let anyone tell you the Big Stick of Bad PR doesn’t work, or that giving Medicare the power to negotiate drugs doesn’t work. Certainly don't let people tell you that “government doesn’t work.” Obviously it does, if we make it.

Action: concerning the freedom to work, immigration, law and order, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC to outlaw noncompete clauses, tell the Biden Administration not to bring back Trump-era immigration policies, tell our Justice Department to disclose data about deaths in police custody, and tell our Postal Service to reject the DeJoy privatization plan. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban noncompete clauses in employment contracts. “The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy.” Who said that, some object of “free” marketeer hero worship? No, it was our own FTC Chair, Lina Khan, and though that does bode well for our efforts, you know that corporations – also somehow the object of “free” marketeer hero worship – will be flooding our FTC with their comments about how they can’t lose trade secrets when they lose employees, even though we already have other laws to deal with that. So we’ve got to show up.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Biden Administration not to bring back the notorious asylum ban and family separation plans. Everyone hated the Trump Administration for doing these things, so why would President Biden bring them back, inflicting cruel and needless hardship on folks who thought they were getting away from all that? Because he’s “moving to the center,” I suppose, though the “center” doesn’t comprise an “average” between right-wing cruelty and left-wing compassion. And anyway, no right-winger will ever support him for it, or acknowledge he did it. Really, there’s no upside here, for President Biden or anyone else. But he’ll do it, unless we get in his grill about it.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our Department of Justice to disclose how many good Americans die in police custody. Because the law demands it, that’s why! I don’t care if the police unions don’t like it! If they don’t like it, they can stop killing people in custody! One wonders why anyone dies in custody – I mean, isn’t law enforcement in control at that point? Too often the answer is because cops thought they deserved it, which isn’t very law-and-order of them, nor of us. And to those who think we should just put up with it because crime, I can only say: go live in a real police state.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell our USPS to fire Postmaster DeJoy and reject his 10-year plan to cut services, slash jobs, close Post Offices, and raise prices. Because a plan to cripple our USPS in this manner is also a plan to privatize our USPS! And we should fear that even more with our Postal Service, since our Constitution literally mandates that we keep the mail moving, and right-wingers would love for big corporations to gouge us at the same time they’re “fulfilling” that mandate. It’s all fun and games until a diabetic doesn’t get their insulin because they didn’t sign up for spam emails from some private mail carrier. You know late capitalism, so you know that’ll happen.

Action: concerning voting rights, defense spending, health care, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, cut defense spending, lower prescription drug prices, and strengthen the food stamps 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would authorize our Justice Department to pre-clear any voting rights changes from any state or locality with a history of vote suppression – and not just certain Southern states, as the original Voting Rights Act mandated (and which mandate our Supreme Court struck down in 2013). Granted, most of the states and localities suppressing the vote the hardest are still in the South, but this bill would restore the teeth our Supreme Court knocked out of the Voting Rights Act. And we all need that bill to have some more bite again.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the People Over Pentagon Act. We spend as much money on defense as the next eight countries on that list combined, and how did that do for us in Iraq and Afghanistan? I’ll tell you how well it did: it proved the old conservative saw that you can’t just throw money at a problem! But, as any liberal will tell you, you can improve good Americans’ lives by spending tax money wisely, and ensuring that defense contractor CEOs can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home while depriving good Americans of, say, paid family/medical leave or health care funding definitely isn’t wise. But they’ll keep doing it, until we make them stop.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. I guess with Eli Lilly’s announcement that it’ll cap insulin prices, our Congressfolk will say it proves that “only private sector action creates lasting change.” But, ah, insulin is just one drug, other big pharma corporations haven’t capped insulin costs, and without our FTC’s announcement of action against the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (or PBMs) that jack up prices as much as or more than big pharma greed, Eli Lilly might not have capped those costs, either. Of course I mention that FTC action because it proves government can help create lasting change in America – but only if we demand it.

Finally, Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, otherwise known as food stamps. Because weakening it is a stupid idea! Yes, I, too, have heard stories about folks getting food stamps when they’re not supposed to, but that’s a separate issue from ensuring everyone who needs them can get them. No, really, fraud is always a separate issue. You’re supposed to stamp out fraud and bring fraudsters to justice! That’s the law-and-order position! But you’re not supposed to let the mere presence of fraud make you throw up your hands and stop doing the right thing. That’s what bad people want, and why should they get all the say about everything?

Around the table: pushing back against bankster horror.

Biden Administration announces that the Deposit Insurance Fund, and not taxpayers, will make depositors whole after the Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed; DIF funds come from fees assessed to banks, not taxes per se. I did not know the DIF currently had $100 billion in it! So feel free to push back against know-nothing right-wingers who declare it “just another bailout,” and also feel free to ask if any of them did a damn thing in 2008. I mean, many right-wingers did, but many also did not!

Ho hum, Silicon Valley Bank employed two former aides to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to lobby our government for weakened banking regulations, such as the kind that permitted Silicon Valley Bank to fail last week. Yes, the 2018 legislation weakening Dodd-Frank reforms (which were themselves not so vigorous to begin with) was a bipartisan mess, but few lobbied for it harder than Rep. McCarthy did. Presumably he will feel the appropriate amount of shame and make amends for his mistakes. I kid, of course.

Norfolk Southern sure is having a bad winter, as another train derailed in Alabama as its CEO testified before a group of angry Senators, the second such derailment since the East Palestine derailment, though neither of those, thankfully, carried toxic and/or carcinogenic chemicals. But heartened as I am to see Sen. Vance (R-OH) actually argue for something that might make a difference, I sure hope this event doesn’t become another in a long list of times our Senators grilled a CEO hard before letting him do whatever he wanted.

Pew Research Center poll finds that a staggering 83% of Black folks think our economic system either “needs major changes” or “needs to be completely rebuilt,” and I’m sure right-wingers will use this data to assert that “Black folks can’t govern themselves.” But given most Americans’ experience with capitalism, particularly lately, that argument won’t convince anyone outside the Batshit Insane Quarter (hereafter referred to as the BIQ) of the electorate, and likely not all of them, either.

Jason W. Osborne at The Conversation notes that the seemingly-exponential growth of legalized gambling “may pose a threat to college athletes,” and if you’ve ever heard (name of sport) is rigged! in your work locker room, you already know there’ll be more and more threats against athletes perceived to have cost gamblers money. And it’ll get worse, as gambling replaces work as the main money-maker in our economy for too many Americans – not that I could blame them much, since we’ve all watched financial predation replace work as the main money-maker in our economy over the last few decades.

Finally, I guess I feel a little sorry for Tennessee’s Lieutenant Governor after he got caught slapping heart-emojis on photos of a particular half-naked gay man on social media, though I must also note that his “evolving” views on LGBTQ+ issues have done nothing about the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Tennessee. But his spokeshack’s suggestion that he was just connecting with a constituent demands mockery! We shouldn’t have to send butt-grams to get our elected officials’ attention, after all.

Action: concerning abortion, education, internet freedom, and school meals.

Long story short: tell Walgreens to dispense abortion medication to all Americans, tell Florida legislators to reject efforts to ban anti-racist education from college classes, tell President Biden to fill the last FCC seat with a good public servant, and tell our USDA to enact the most vigorous school meal nutrition standards possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both UltraViolet and More Perfect Union help you tell Walgreens to stop refusing to dispense abortion medication even in states where it’s still legal. As you know, Walgreens said last week it wouldn’t dispense mifepristone in 20 states, which happened to be the 20 states whose Attorneys General sent a letter to Walgreens threatening to sue them over same. Of course, abortion is still legal in some of those states, and our FDA gave its blessing to nationwide distribution of mifepristone last year. Well, I know something even better than 20 state Attorneys General applying pressure: the American people applying pressure. So let’s get to that.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell Florida lawmakers to reject any legislation that would abolish Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (or DEI) programs at universities. Florida colleges have begun to dismantle their DEI programs on their own, and fascists love it when people are fascist to themselves before the brownshirts come to beat them up. And that’s why we have to step up here, too. There are more important things than the drama of right-wing “hurt feelings," and one of them, as I know from lived experience, is the knowledge and wisdom that these programs contain.

Free Press helps you tell President Biden to fill the fifth seat on our Federal Communications Commission post-haste with a public interest-minded nominee. Sadly, that nominee won’t be Gigi Sohn, who withdrew from consideration after a brutal two-year-plus attack from big telecom corporations and their nefarious allies, but while I presume Ms. Sohn was the best person for the job – never mind what Kyrsten Sinema thinks! – I don’t presume she’s the only person for the job. And our FCC needs all five Commissioners, not just to bring back network neutrality, but also to spend recently-authorized infrastructure money fairly. So let’s remind our President of his job here.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Agriculture to enact the strongest school meal nutrition standards possible. Better school meal standards was virtually Tom Vilsack’s only accomplishment as Mr. Obama’s USDA Secretary, but I’m happy to report that since Mr. Vilsack has been fully on board with President Biden’s anti-monopoly program, which means he can actually triple his good works in just a few short years, by improving those school nutrition standards even more. Republicans will hate it, but then they’re objectively pro-childhood obesity and pro-childhood diabetes anyway, so why listen to them? Seriously, they really do suck.

UPDATE. I totally forgot to write that individual introductory paragraph today, and I apologize for that. I've corrected that mistake now.

Penny rants for March 13, 2023.

Good news in the battle against monopoly power: not only has our DOJ (and three state Attorneys General) sued to stop the proposed JetBlue/Spirit merger, but Transportation Secretary Buttigieg announced his department would also move against the merger, and, as you may recall, Transportation can stop a merger without even going to court to do it. So American corporatists are saying et tu, Pete Buttigieg? as we speak. I don’t think the Biden Administration’s picking low-hanging fruit here, either, because Spirit is actually a good airline trying to get market share the old-fashioned way: by offering good service at lower prices. Certainly don’t get too upset that JetBlue’s stock prices fell, because America has to stop worshiping at the altar of the stock market. The stock market is not the be-all-end-all of our economy, it measures speculation more than anything else, and Our Glorious Elites have conditioned us to treat it like a big game decades before DraftKings brought sports gambling to every cellphone.

Cops arrest protestors for “domestic terrorism” at the infamous Cop City site in an Atlanta forest, and how good is their case against them? This good: “The probable cause stated in the warrants against the activists is extremely weak. Police cited arrestees having mud on their shoes – in a forest. The warrants alleged they had written a legal support phone number on their arms, as is common during mass protests. And, in a few cases, police alleged protesters were holding shields – hardly proof of illegal activity – which a number of defendants even deny.” And thus we learn that their aim is not to send protestors to jail, but to make them fight their charges, because the more they have to fight their charges, the less they can fight the cops. I always said they’d come after us with “terrorism” charges, and I was right. But please, right-wingers, tell us again how you support our police! And ask yourself if you’d support them if they treated you this way. And if you respond “they would never treat me this way,” ask yourself if there really should be one law for you and another for people you disagree with.

NPR reports on medical tourism in Mexico, with a shallow attachment to a ZOMG TEH CRIME WAVEZ!!!!! news hook (at least one of the four South Carolina residents abducted in Mexico earlier in March went there for a tummy tuck) and some rather incomplete information. Yes one would imagine follow-up care would be difficult if you get an operation in a foreign country, but the article cites CDC advisories about infections in countries that aren’t Mexico I wonder why, and anyway what are Mexico’s nosocomial infection rates vis a vis the U.S.? The article does not tell us, and we did just learn more about how bad some American hospitals can be. You remember, cockroaches in the operating room? OK, they were Florida hospitals, but Florida is still a part of America at the present time. Anyway, why do we have medical tourism again? Oh, right: because our health insurance industry does its damnedest not to pay for your medical needs. It’s not because getting a tooth pulled in Mexico City is on anyone’s bucket list, that’s for sure.

Action: concerning child labor, health care, immigration, and product safety.

Long story short: tell Iowa state legislators to reject a bill that would loosen child labor laws, and tell your Congressfolk to defend Medicaid and CHIP and pass the DREAM Act and the Sunshine in Product Safety 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.

Care2 helps you tell Iowa state legislators to reject Senate File 167, which would loosen child labor laws so that corporations could put 14-17-year-olds to work in such carefree childhood vocations as demolition, mining, and meatpacking. Perhaps even worse, the bill would let corporations off the hook in civil suits for any kids they neglected, sickened, injured, or killed at the workplace! Because trial lawyers bad! No: putting kids to work in dangerous occupations is bad, though maybe it’s not as snappy a bumper sticker slogan. Look, either children are the future, or they’re just another workforce for fat-cat bosses to use and discard. They ain’t both. And if we have any say about it, they ain’t the latter.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to defend both Medicaid and the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) from Congressional debt-limit hostage-takers. Maybe they won’t get Social Security and Medicare cuts and then again maybe they will, but we need to put them on notice about Medicaid and CHIP as well. Medicaid is less popular than Social Security and Medicare, because of the absurd perception that it only helps lazy people, but it’s no less important than any of the other programs they’ve taken so much flak about cutting. And Republicans already let CHIP expire once, so they don’t care about kids, and why should they keep getting away with that?

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk pass the DREAM Act, which, as you no doubt remember, would help immigrant children whose legal standing in America has lapsed, but who’ve met certain standards of service and education, to remain in America (and keep contributing to American culture) rather than get deported back to the countries they’ve never known. Because that’s cruel! And to those who reflexively respond AMURKIA FIRSTZ!!!! to everything because they can’t argue their way out of a paper bag: the DREAM Act would help, at most, some 1.9 million folks out of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in America, so this is not so damn much to ask.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sunshine in Product Safety Act, which would let our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) warn the American public about dangerous products without having to get permission from the corporation that manufactured the dangerous product first. Yes, you read that right! Currently we can’t spread the word about dangerous products lest we hurt some corporation’s fee-fees! That’s because Congress amended the Consumer Product Safety Act to give corporations an effective veto over product safety announcements in 1981. Still we deal with the bitter fruits of the Reagan Revolution. This is why we fight.

Penny rants for March 10, 2023: special "our 'liberal' media still sucks!" edition!

So Speaker McCarthy (E-CA) gave all this January 6 footage to Tucker Carlson, and Mr. Carlson concocted a January 6 narrative so phony that even Republican Senators have slammed it. Sen. Romney (R-UT) even sounds like a media theorist attacking him: “The American people saw what happened on Jan. 6. They’ve seen the people that got injured. They saw the damage to the building. You can’t hide the truth by selectively picking a few minutes out of tapes and saying this is what went on. It’s so absurd. It’s nonsense.” Sadly, we have to wait until paragraph 18 to get this analysis, which we should have gotten in paragraph one. Yeah, I know, Sen. Tillis calling Mr. Carlson’s January 6 gaslighting “bullshit” is a good sound bite, but Mr. Romney’s analysis is something everyone needs to know. And with Republican Senators (and our “liberal” media) now desperate to change the subject, we’re even less likely to know it.

In an absolutely related note, FAIR instructs us that “Scary Headlines Hype Dangers Rarely Faced by Tourists in Mexico.” 32 million tourists visit Mexico annually, and even Portland, OR currently has a higher murder rate than Mexico City, but let’s hype up a handful of drug-related murders and extend that to an entire country just so we can compare it to Iraq! Yes, isolated incidents never seem isolated if they happen to you, but people think crime is bad because “you see it on the news all the time,” when those half-dozen clips of violent crime you see on the news every day (some of which get repeated for days on end, right, Tucker Carlson?) would never stack up next to all the clips you could see of people getting through their day without any violence at all – clips you don’t see because they’re not titillating enough. It’s well past time we said to our media: enough of the drama!

In case you forgot about the tire fire Twitter’s become under Elon Musk, note that Mr. Musk just told his managers to nominate their best employee – and then fired them and replaced them with those employees, who are, of course, making less money. If you’re wondering why folks don’t just up and leave Twitter, remember that more than a few of them would also have to leave the country if they did, and remember that they’re also making less money. Some “free” marketeers still yell (yes, shouty-caps is yelling!) that this “fire-and-promote strategy” is just life in the private sector, but “(y)ou now have good devs (i.e., developers) managing, and not doing dev. That means you have less effective dev. You need good administrators to do the administration so the good devs can do dev.” Managers and workers use entirely different skill sets, but then so much wisdom dies at the “free” market altar. I hope all the fired managers on Twitter find more exciting and ennobling work elsewhere.

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “FAIR” Tax, any extension of the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, and any attempt to repeal the additional IRS funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Mininum Income Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to pass the so-called “FAIR” Tax, which would replace our income, corporate, payroll, and Estate taxes with a single 30% sales tax, which would be like immediate 30% inflation. And given all our talk about Social Security lately, we should note that, in addition to the 893 other reasons we should reject the “FAIR” Tax, it’ll eventually cause Social Security to fail. You remember the “FAIR” Tax would replace the payroll tax, which funds Social Security, and with ITEP telling us the rate would have to be more like 60% to raise the same money, well, you see where that’s going. Kill this beast before it kills us.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to make the Trump tax cuts permanent. The “FAIR” Tax, in addition to all its other evils, would represent a massive tax cut for the rich, and so do the Trump tax cuts, where that 2.6-point cut at the top end represents hundreds of thousands of dollars for many, many undeserving rich. But I have good news for you: the Trump tax cuts didn’t keep Democrats from taking our House back in 2018, so don’t get spooked by any “they’re coming for your tax cuts” BS. Did you even notice you got a tax cut? It’s entirely possible you didn’t. You sure didn’t get a couple hundred grand like some folks did!

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to repeal the additional IRS funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act. No, our IRS isn’t coming for your money! At least, not more than it was when it was underfunded and understaffed and only went after the folks who filled out their Earned Income Tax Credit or Child Tax Credit wrong. Now our IRS has the money to go after rich folks, and I have more good news for you: Republicans’ fearmongering over IRS funding didn’t exactly deliver the sturm und drang electoral showing they were counting on in 2022. So don’t believe their hype here, either.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, one that’ll actually get at the massive amounts of wealth billionaires hoard and never pay taxes on because they don’t actually sell off those assets. Don’t believe anyone who tells you billionaires deserve to keep what they got! These clowns trip over their own penis in public every day! And not for nothing, but even if our Supreme Court eventually strikes it down – and since it’s something that’d actually help people, they’re no doubt masturbating over that opportunity as we speak – that’ll be just another nail in the coffin of their reputation.

Action: concerning drug prices, pollution, law and order, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell other big pharma corporations to lower insulin prices, tell our EPA to enact the strongest soot standards possible, tell President Biden to fire DHS Inspector General Cuffari, and tell our USPS to reject the DeJoy plan to privatize our Post Office. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell big pharma corporations Novo Nordisk and Sanofi to lower their insulin prices in more or less the manner Eli Lilly has lately done. I hate relying on corporate good will to do the right thing, because they’ve been awash in money so long they have no idea what right and wrong is anymore, but I’m not above using the leverage that presents itself, either. The Big Stick of PR has clearly already worked on Eli Lilly – with a vital assist from our FTC’s announcement that they’ll crack down on the Pharmacy Benefit Managers that jack up drug prices as much as big pharma greed does. And we can make it work on other big pharma corporations, too.

Both the Environmental Defense Fund and Penn PIRG help you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous soot standards possible. Power plants create a lot of soot, as you may know, and those fine particulates can really mess with your breathing – and worse, considering that soot carries a lot of toxins and carcinogens in them. You may remember addressing this matter a decade ago; you may even wonder why we’re addressing it again. One answer is because we don’t always get everything we need the first time we fight for something; another answer is because 10 years is a long time to learn a lot more about how pollutants hurt us. And we’re past worrying about how executives will cope, right?

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell President Biden to fire Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) Inspector General Joseph Cuffari already. Mr. Cuffari has become notorious for keeping knowledge of DHS wrongdoing away from Congress – and thus from us, since Congressfolk represent us – and he also interfered with our Congress’s investigation of the January 6 attempted coup, by failing to inform Congress that the Secret Service had deleted certain texts sent on that day, and even preventing his own office from recovering those texts. So, yeah, if a guy interferes with our right to know just to preserve his power and/or prestige, his ass needs to go.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to end Postmaster General DeJoy’s plan to privatize our Postal Service. Because that’s what a plan to slash jobs, cut services, and raise prices obviously is! People like Louis DeJoy live to screw things up and then claim “the private sector can do better,” which is like spreading feces all over your walls to justify hiring a cleaning service. But privatizing the delivery of life-saving medicines won’t result in better service or lower prices, because everything they privatize ultimately becomes more expensive – and less accountable to us, since it’s “theirs” now. So let’s keep our Postal Service ours.

Action: concerning Social Security, refugees, banksters, and the minimum wage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act, reject the TABS Act, and raise the minimum wage. 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.

Both Civic Shout and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would ensure that income over $250,000 gets taxed into the system for the first time. Yes, currently Social Security doesn’t tax income over $160,200 annually, meaning that only working people pay into the system; the fat-cat class is exempt! I suppose right-wingers would argue that since they don’t need Social Security they shouldn’t have to pay into it, but that’s exactly the sort of everyone-for-themselves masturbation that’s gotten this country into the trouble it’s in. Rich folks need to pay more into Social Security, for the good of all Americans.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would help some 78,000 Afghan refugees living in America to get legal immigrant status. I can already hear the right-wingers saying when are we going to provide for our own people? As if a great nation has to choose! And, you know, as if giving legal status to a refugee really injures someone else. I didn’t ask for Tha Bush Mobb to invade Afghanistan, nor did I ask the Obama and Trump Administrations to stay there, so I also didn’t ask for tens of thousands of Afghan refugees. But I’m not an evil bastard, either, so I’ll still demand we take care of them, because that’s what great nations – and great civilizations – do.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (or TABS) Act, which would repeal our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB)’s independent funding mechanism, and instead subject it to the whim of Congressional funding. Other banking regulators have independent funding mechanisms, so why not our CFPB? Because banksters hate our CFPB, and Republicans live to suck up to their bankster overlords, that’s why. This may all be moot, since our Supreme Court obviously has the long knives out for our CFPB. But we should still tell our Reps how we really feel about their drama.

Finally, the Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour or more, since $15/hour has been a calling card for so long that inflation’s outrun it a bit. Don’t brook any right-wingers telling you good luck getting that through this Congress ha ha ha snort. Congress passed a minimum wage hike in 2007 why? Because they wanted to? Because Democrats had impregnable majorities in either House? No, because we demanded it. And don’t brook any where’s it going to stop? hysteria from right-wingers, either. That’s a loser’s argument. It’s going to stop when we get justice. Which is what they’re really afraid of.

Around the table: where there's no safe space for fascists, corporatists, and whiners.

Terrorists have apparently poisoned at least 50 girls’ schools in Iran over the last six months, sickening at least 400 girls, and I hope the attackers get the justice they deserve, even if they come from Iran’s fundamentalist government, as some folks suppose. And can you blame them for supposing? In the meantime, the mere notion of farther-right activists in Iran who oppose educating girls gives that government some quite-undeserved breathing space – look, they say, something to distinguish us from the Taliban! Of course, distinguishing between flavors of fascism for purposes other than scholarship is offensive, more suited to the likes of Richard Spencer than to civilized people.

At least one legal expert thinks Fox News might really be in the soup after Rupert Murdoch’s recent admission that he knew Fox peddled a lot of election-denialism crap though he didn’t believe it – and that they might even be in the soup for more than the $1.6 billion Dominion’s asking in their now-famous defamation lawsuit. Fox can throw all the fecal matter against the wall they want – “our executives didn’t specifically order it,” “ZOMG TEH FIRSTZ AMENDMENTZ WILLZ DIEZ!!!!!” – but few would lament Fox News finally getting some of the karmic blowback it’s long deserved. Its votaries, of course, will just slog on, their persecution complex intensified, and if we’re very lucky, they won’t blow up any voting machines.

Ho hum, former Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) has rejoined the bankster industry from whence he came in 2010. After spending a dozen years defending the notorious “carried interest loophole” (which allows hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate than just about everyone you know) from widespread public opposition, he has joined, dig this, a hedge fund corporate board, which is a step up from becoming a lobbyist, lately the more common landing spot for ex-Senators. At least this won’t be the job Kyrsten Sinema gets in 2025, since Mr. Toomey’s a considerably more accomplished shiller than she is. Yes, I know she’d be upset to hear that.

I shouldn’t be spending any damn time on this matter, but no we have not recently “concluded” that COVID came from a lab accident. Rather, another federal agency has issued a “low confidence” report asserting that COVID more likely came from a lab accident than from exposure from an animal; the very phrase “low confidence” should not inspire your confidence, but some folks either don’t read or only read what they want to read. Note well, also, that the Energy Department’s “low confidence” report didn’t prompt any of the four other agencies that have reported about the matter to change their conclusions. Personal to those already typing “BUT TEH DEEPZ STATEZ!!!!!” in response: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Good for Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, who runs an online service that gets abortion medication to those who need it. She operates from the Netherlands, which, as you might imagine, makes it a bit more difficult for right-wing drama kings in American state legislatures to get at them, and I wouldn’t hold out hope for a Republican President, either, since he’s going to be an incompetent drama king, too. Yes, even if their name’s not Trump! Anyway, this is all very simple: if you’re against abortion, don’t get one. I wish more pro-life folks followed that advice, instead of telling their doctor they’re going to hell for giving them the abortion they asked for.

Eli Lilly announced it would cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35/month, and though I, too, am happy to say this proves that shame works, Matt Stoller reminds us that our FTC also had a lot to do with Eli Lilly’s new cap, by declaring in June that it would start going after the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (or PBMs) that probably do even more to jack up drug prices than even big pharma does. (Basically, PBMs demand bribes in order to make drugs available to health insurance corporations, and the bribes are really big now.) Remember this the next time your right-wing uncle tells you that government doesn’t work. It does – if we make it work.

Finally, when I hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (E-GA) has literally demanded a “safe space” where right-wingers don’t have to listen to liberals anymore, I’m reminded that this isn’t a new tack at all: Nazi wannabes were demanding the exact same thing, using the exact same words, as long ago as 2016, and of course at the same time as they slammed liberals for demanding actual safe spaces for people who actually suffer from actual discrimination, and not just the shame and shunning of the community for bad behavior. These right-wingers probably think they’re satirists, too, but then a lot of awful people hide behind “satire.”

Action: concerning sexism, slave labor, monopolies, and product safety.

Long story short: tell Florida state legislators to reject legislation that would ban women’s studies courses, tell Volkswagen to get Uyghur slave labor out of its supply chain, tell our Transportation Department to stop the proposed JetBlue/Spirit merger, and tell our FTC to ensure that corporations only slap the “recyclable” label on actually recyclable products. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Care2 helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject HB 999, which would essentially ban all gender and women’s studies courses from state colleges. Because waaaaah! Really, is there another reason? My younger self had his share of faults, but he did me a solid by buying the text to a collegiate women’s studies class, so I could read it when I had time, and I have to tell you that when I read it, I didn’t cry like a diaper-loaded brat about all the harm men have done to women over the millennia, nor did I blame everyone but myself for my feelings. And what I learned, I’ll use to make our civilization better. Jesus Mary and Joseph the weaklings in charge of things in America disgust me. And this is why we fight.

Eko helps you tell Volkswagen to stop making money off Uyghur forced labor in China. The Uyghurs, you may recall, are Muslims whom the Chinese round up and send to concentration camps like they’re an aspiring Nazi Germany or something. You know, I think I may have accidentally mentioned something that the German corporation Volkswagen might not want brought up – like that Volkswagen was a Nazi project to begin with! Not a terribly successful one before the war, but how times change! China tortures over a million Uyghurs, but they couldn’t do it without Volkswagen’s help, which is why we’re busting out the Big Stick of Bad PR.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to stop the proposed Jet Blue/Spirit airline merger. Our laws already grant the Transportation Secretary the authority to apply a “public interest” standard to block mergers, and Mr. Buttigieg wouldn’t even have to put his case before a judge if he did, and surely airline consolidation doesn’t serve the public interest! More Perfect Union also points out that Spirit currently runs nonstop flights out of Detroit while JetBlue doesn’t; think JetBlue will keep those nonstops if they buy Spirit? I kid, of course. But Mr. Buttigieg might want to think about that before he runs for statewide office in Michigan.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) that we should only see “recyclable” labels on products that can actually be recycled. I’d say that sounds like common sense, but it actually sounds simpler than common sense. You’ve likely challenged our EPA to force corporations to stop putting the “widely-recyclable” label on products you can’t actually recycle widely, but this matter concerns corporations lying to consumers, so we can also make it an FTC matter. Don’t let anyone tell you this isn’t a big deal, because if you can’t recycle it, you have to incinerate it, and incineration pollutes our air and water with deadly toxins. So, yeah, we gotta do that right.

Readings for March 6, 2023.

Matt Stoller reminds us that Transportation Secretary Buttigieg actually has a lot of authority to fight mergers like the proposed Jet Blue/Spirit merger. Furthermore, Mr. Buttigieg can, by law, apply a “public interest” standard to mergers (versus the “may substantially lessen competition” standard the Clayton Act sets), which gives him a leg up over our Justice Department; while two more airlines merging in an already low-competition industry sure does seem like it would “substantially lessen competition,” our DOJ would have to get a federal judge to agree – which is, ah, real hit-and-miss even with Democrat-appointed judges – whereas Mr. Buttigieg wouldn’t even have to go to court. In a world where our FCC Chair kept a hedge fund from buying a cable corporation without even having a working majority – and read that, because that’s a great story! – Mr. Buttigieg is rapidly running out of excuses, not to mention time to recover in the public eye before he runs for President or Senate or whatever.

Constance Grady at Vox explains how “Brad Pitt was the only winner of the Aniston-Jolie tabloid battle.” How did he win? Mainly, it seems, by having a penis! Tabloid writers wrote about Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie largely in terms of their motherhood, or lack thereof – Ms. Aniston tried to have a baby with Mr. Pitt but couldn’t, and when she didn’t reveal her infertility issues at the time (maybe because they weren’t any of our damn business!), the tabloids said she “put career over family.” Ms. Jolie, meanwhile, adopted a child early in the 2000s, but even after mothering six children with Mr. Pitt, she found herself back where she started after splitting from him, even facing accusations of having a “white savior complex.” Mr. Pitt, meanwhile, gets kudos as a dad for merely expressing pride in his children, and tabloid writers transcribe word from “sources close to (him)” like Moses handed it down from Mt. Sinai. Ladies and gentlemen, your "liberal" media at work!

ProPublica tells you how you can file your taxes for free with limited interference from some corporation. As you may recall, our IRS must by law offer a “free filing” option for folks with relatively simple returns, but they let their “partner” big tax-prep corporations obscure that option (both in Google searches and on their own websites) so they could still make you pay. Nice work if you can get it! But ProPublica broke that story (as it related to TurboTax) two years ago, and our FTC has since taken action against TurboTax owner Intuit, so now things are a bit easier. Two key points: you have to make less than $73,000 annually to take advantage of this service (though some of our IRS’s corporate partners have more stringent requirements), and you have to start guided tax prep at irs.gov, not at a corporation’s website. It’s not ideal – ideal would be more like our IRS filling out the forms for you for free, since they already have all your info from your employer. But it is better.

Action: concerning voting rights, taxes, and paid family/medical leave.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, reject the “FAIR” Tax, pass the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, and pass legislation creating a paid family/medical leave system. 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would let our government stop states and localities with a history of vote suppression from changing their laws so they can suppress votes even more – which, you may recall, our government could do until our Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. Our Court said it unfairly targeted Southern states, but the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act would explicitly state that our Justice Department could scrutinize any state or locality that suppresses votes. Nobody should vote against this bill, but we still need to get in our Congressfolks’ grills about it.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to pass the so-called “FAIR” Tax, which would replace all income, corporate, payroll, and Estate taxes with a single, 30% sales tax. That would be like 30% inflation on everything you buy! Care to imagine how big your rent or mortgage would be? And when you remember that payroll taxes fund Social Security and Medicare, you might think paying 30% more for a gallon of milk would be a bad way to fund that. We need to get back to taxing the rich and corporations, not least so they can’t control us anymore, but the “FAIR” Tax only takes us in the opposite direction, toward more misery and chaos. If we speak out, we can kill it in its crib.

Speaking of taxing the rich, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, which would ensure that the richest Americans pay at least 20% of their wealth every year, and if that seems like a lot, remember that they’re billionaires and they’ll still have a lot left over. You’ve gotten by on a lot less than a billionaire, I guarantee you that, but while the pandemic might have cost you your job, billionaires somehow only got richer! As I’ve said, we need to limit the amount of damage billionaires do to our civilization, and the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax will help us start to do that again. But not if we don’t fight for it.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation granting paid family/medical leave for all Americans. Because only six other countries on Earth don’t have it! Those other countries, by the way, are the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Nauru, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea – yes, even Russia offers paid family/medical leave! We could get this done through budget reconciliation, but we won’t have a chance at that unless we communicate our will to our Reps and Senators in numbers they can’t deny. Don’t let folks tell you it would “cost too much.” You know what costs too much? Workers coming in sick or worried about their sick loved ones because they can’t get a day off!

Action: concerning Social Security, taxes, representation, and conversion "therapy."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security, reject any Trump tax cut extension, make our House of Representatives larger, and ban conversion “therapy.” Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would tax income over $250,000 into the system for the first time, and would not only expand benefits by over $2,000 annually, but would start counting inflation the way it actually affects seniors, who can’t just switch to cheaper drugs or cheaper health care the way younger folks can (and who, ah, don’t buy a whole lot of fancy clothes or iPhones or TVs, either). Used to be half of America’s seniors lived in poverty; now 10% do, thanks to Social Security. That’s why right-wingers hate it. But they don’t get all the say about everything.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to extend the Trump tax “reform.” The income tax bracket cuts of that “reform” expire at the end of 2025, but while you may have saved, say, $1,500 annually from that tax “reform,” rich folks have saved several hundreds of thousands of dollars more, so when we say the Trump tax “reform” mainly benefited the rich, we’re not lying. Or being “jealous” – Jesus Mary and Joseph if money mattered that much to me I’d have more of it than a hundred Donald Trumps. Anyway, the rich need to pay more, and most Americans agree, so we should reject any extension of their unearned tax cuts.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to make our House of Representatives larger. This won’t “grow bureaucracy,” because when our House legislated about the matter, over 110 years ago, America had about one-quarter the population it has now, so yeah, more House Reps would actually serve good Americans better. And you’ve seen the size of some of these districts, right? I don’t just mean huge single-district states like Wyoming and the Dakotas, either – try imagining the task of visiting all of Arizona’s 2nd district, which at over 20,000 square miles is larger than nine states and D.C. So yeah, we actually do need more House Reps.

Finally, Cedar Key Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, which would, for once and for all, outlaw “conversion therapy,” the horrific snake-oil method by which folks purport to turn gay folks straight. “Conversion therapy” “works” through such “methods” as having gay folks re-enact childhood sexual abuse while not wearing any clothes, which our Surgeon General derided as unscientific two decades ago. So it’s actually not so great that 20 American states have banned the practice since then; something like that should be banned everywhere. The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act would do that – but only if we speak out about it.

Action: concerning junk fees, immigration, and taxes.

Long story short: tell our CFPB to end credit card junk fees, tell President Biden to abandon the Trump-era asylum ban, tell our IRS to actually crack down on rich tax evaders, and tell our government to make tax filing free. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to outlaw credit card junk fees. Your credit card corporations doesn’t need to charge you $35 and $50 and $100 late fees when $8 will actually cover their costs! They only need to cover their costs! They don’t need to profit from your misfortune! Profiting from your misfortune is evil! Let me know if I’m not being absolutely clear here. And make no mistake, the banksters will still make money if we cap their credit card fees – it just won’t be as easy for them to make enough money to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, that’s all. And that’s not a hardship for a healthy civilization.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to scuttle his plans to revive the Trump-era asylum ban. This supposedly “conservative” notion – that we should default on the side of assuming that potential asylees don’t have a case, or that we should require them to seek asylum in a neighboring country, never mind how dangerous that country is! – actually increases immigration-related bureaucracy, as I’m sure Donald Trump intended. Naturally the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Trump ban; maybe Mr. Biden thinks our Supreme Court will overrule them. Better to evaluate asylum claims carefully, like civilized people would.

Daily Kos also helps you tell our IRS to actually crack down on wealthy tax-evaders, as intended by the Inflation Reduction Act. We need our IRS to prove that it can actually work the way we intended it to work. Anyone can screw up and then claim TEH GUBMINTZ DOESN’TZ WORKZ!!!!! – right, George W. Bush? – but getting our IRS to catch a couple of rich tax cheats will help defeat the right-wing zombie lie that more IRS funding means more poor people get harassed. If you’ve been awake these last few years, you know our IRS was so under-funded it could only go after the poor! That's why we must make our IRS do the right thing.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Daily Kos also helps you tell our government that tax preparation should be easy and free, and not corporate welfare for big tax-prep corporations. Think about it: your employer has already given our IRS all the info it needs to fill out a tax form, and you very likely don’t invest in the kind of convoluted schemes designed to evade our laws, so why do you need to get someone to help you fill out your taxes? Because our IRS made a deal with corporations that they wouldn’t create a free tax-filing option if those corporations did – and then they made those free options almost impossible for you to find! And we deserve better than that.

Readings for March 1, 2023.

The MIT Technology Review tells us “Everything You Need to Know About the Wild World of Heat Pumps”. “Everything” may include the news that they work better at severely cold temperatures than you’ve heard. And if you’re wondering how you squeeze heat out of 25-degree air, well, long story short: the refrigerant starts out in liquid form, but has a very low boiling point (-15 degrees), so heating it even a little in a heat exchanger (and heating it with 25-degree air is surely heating it a little!) turns it into a gas; then putting that gas through a compressor it makes it considerably hotter, until its temperature reaches 100 degrees, and then it dumps off heat into your house via another heat exchanger, and in doing so turns back into a liquid, and the cycle begins again. And don’t let your right-wing uncle pooh-pooh it because it runs on electricity and thus equals fossil fuels, because that’s really only true in West Virginia (which gets some 97% of its electricity from coal), and you shouldn’t let the perfect murder the good.

Sonali Kohatkar at Znet instructs us that “Tipping Is Not a Reward – It’s an Insult,” and when you consider that tipped employees’ federal minimum wage is much lower than the standard ($2.13/hour, versus $7.25/hour), and that more than two-thirds of tipped workers are women, and that tipped workers are more likely to suffer in poverty than non-tipped workers, you’ll find it hard to disagree. When you find that other cultures think tipping is actually “rude” or “petty,” and you may find it even harder to disagree. And remember that tipping not only allows bosses to pay their workers less, but forces customers to evaluate their workers, when that’s surely a boss’s job. A male customer might decide not to tip a female worker who doesn’t respond positively to their come-on, which does not speak particularly well of tipping as an employee-evaluation tool. (No use responding that a boss could treat a female worker the same, because there are actually laws against that, and there are no laws against bad tipping.) It sure is amazing how much of what’s “just the way things are” in America don’t actually have to be.

Speaking of which: Steven Greenhouse at The Guardian explains how Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s have been able to avoid actual unionization at their stores, despite workers winning all those union elections. Long story short: because our laws don’t punish corporations for engaging in delaying tactics or other forms of union-busting. Naturally, the PRO Act would have fixed that, by giving corporations 120 days to negotiate a contract with a union representing their workers and forcing those negotiations into arbitration if they don’t meet that goal. Of course, even though the PRO Act passed our House, our Senate didn’t bring it up, since Republicans would have filibustered it as a unit. They still should have brought it up, and forced Republicans to go on the record as favoring endless delaying tactics after a successful union vote, a tactic of which I’m pretty sure even a lot of regular Republican voters wouldn’t approve.