Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning taxes, corporate profits, and judicial ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand our Child Tax Credit, reject corporate welfare, tax big corporate windfall profits, and pass real anti-corruption laws for our Supreme Court. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit from 2021 in their year-end spending package – and reject any attempts to hand out corporate welfare in that same package. Chances are I don’t have to explain what an extra $250 or $300 check per child, per month would do for a working family. But if you still hesitate when you hear that corporations need “incentives” to create jobs, remember two things: a) high corporate taxes and high taxes on the rich do more for job creation than corporate welfare handouts, and b) corporations don’t drive our economy; you drive our economy. I mean, you buy things, right? So you’re the job creator.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big corporations. Whenever you see high inflation and high corporate profits happen at the exact same time, you know corporations are screwing you over, but you may not be able to prove it in a court of law; our government has been bringing price-fixing lawsuits against corporations, but they tend only to bring the ones they can win, plus they don’t always win. And it should be hard to prove criminal liability, even when fighting corporate power. But nothing prevents us from taxing profits that are larger now than they were in past years. It ain’t about “punishing success,” not when, again, they’re “earning” record profits at the same time we’re suffering from high inflation. Anyone can “succeed” at that!

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Supreme Court ethics bill that actually has some teeth. You know, unlike the ethics guidelines our Supreme Court recently adopted, the guidelines that don’t actually hold our Justices accountable. Gosh, anyone can come up with voluntary guidelines, but it is getting harder, I think, to convince large numbers of people that voluntary guidelines are “the same” as laws with punishments for breaking them. And corruption at our Supreme Court is getting pretty bad – and our Justices know it, or else they wouldn’t even try to convince us they’re working on the problem. But it’s our job to solve problems in America. And it’s Congress’s job to do our will, and our will is that corruption be punished, for real.

Thieves in the Temple will not post for the remainder of the year, and will return in early 2024, so everyone have a safe and happy holiday season!

Around the table: more trials and tribulations of Teh Stupid Party.

Good news: a road in Detroit now has about a mile of wireless-charging infrastructure, which in a few years will be able to charge adequately-equipped electric cars. Since it’s not fully-realized technology (at least in the United States), Joe Biden probably won’t run on it, though you just know Donald Trump would pretend he gave everyone a free electric car if this had happened on his watch. And not for nothing, but this happened in one of those cities in which Republicans now say you’re never ever ever going to be safe again, even though both violent and property crime levels are half what they were 30 years ago.

UCal-Berkeley researchers find what you probably already intuited: that Artificial Intelligence (or AI) systems “Excel at Imitation, but Not Innovation.” I mean, yeah, AI can bullshit a college-level essay, but not particularly well, because insight demands a higher level intelligence than repetition, or even synthesis. Thus, “(i)nstead of viewing these AI systems as intelligent agents like ourselves, we can think of them as a new form of library or search engine.” Even I’ve noticed AI searches for information pretty well, but corporate CEOs will pretend that means replacing workers with AI is a good idea. At least they'll goose up their stock prices in the short term, which is all Our Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurs really care about anyway.

It sure looks like Rep. Mike Garcia (E-CA) sold a boatload of shares in Boeing right before his committee (run by Democrats that year, BTW) issued a pretty scathing report about Boeing’s negligence in 737 airline crashes, and then didn't report the sale as required by law. In a sane and moral world, his next re-election effort would be toast, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, where we all agree to the fiction that Donald Trump could be President again even if he’s in jail, I can’t say for sure what’ll happen. But the good voters of California's 27th Congressional district could say for sure what'll happen!

Ho hum, Rep. Don Bacon (E-NE) says there’s “probably not” very much evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors on the part of President Biden, but voted in favor of launching an impeachment investigation anyway. No use arguing that voting to start an impeachment investigation isn’t the same as actually voting to impeach, and certainly no use arguing that “we can’t find out if he’s done anything unless we launch an impeachment investigation" – I mean, if I started an impeachment investigation, that'd mean I already have enough information to impeach. This has been yet another installment of The Uselessness of “Moderates.”

Kellyanne Conway tells Republicans that they’d better embrace contraception if they want to blunt the effect of their own abortion extremism in 2024, and she’s probably right, but the far right-wing voters who hate any freedom for women won’t tolerate such a thing, and anyway Republicans (with a few exceptions, like Rep. Cole) have been banging the saucepan about the supposed evils of birth control for a few decades now, and nobody's memory's that short. I mean, folks don’t think that Hobby Lobby ruling – the one that said a “closely-held” corporation didn’t have to cover birth control in its health insurance planning, thus allowing people of means to inflict their “religious” “beliefs” on their employees – came about by accident, do they?

Finally, when I hear that 31% of Republican voters say they wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump if he gets convicted of a felony, I’m tempted to say that’s a telling result, since he can’t win without Republicans who would be holding their nose to vote for him (or making you think they're holding their nose to vote for him!), but it’s still almost a year out, and another year of wall-to-wall coverage of Mr. Trump’s various and well-earned trials might induce a lot of these folks to pretend they’re disgusted with all the drama and vote for Mr. Trump to “end” it. Granted, “ending the drama” would be a peculiar reason to vote for the biggest drama hound ever to be President, to be sure, but party loyalty leads to all sorts of peculiar arguments.

Action: concerning banksters, bombing civilians, and executive pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to close bankster tax loopholes, stop using taxpayer money to bomb Palestinian civilians, and curb excessive CEO pay. 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 pass the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act. You know how banksters pay a lower tax rate than nurses and bus drivers? That’s because our laws allow them to declare the money they make managing other people’s accounts as investment income, and, as you know, our laws have taxed investment income at a lower rate than regular working families’ income since Tha Bush Mobb’s notorious second tax “reform” law. I always say income is income, but I know a few like-minded folks would want the first few grand of investment income taxed at a relatively low rate, as a way of encouraging working families to invest more. But not millions of dollars! That’s just getting over, and we shouldn’t allow rich people to get over.

MoveOn helps you tell our government to stop funding Israel’s bombing of civilians in Palestine with our tax dollars. Key phrase is “of civilians” – no one wants Hamas to flourish, but Israel’s mostly bombing civilians in Gaza, and that’s exactly the sort of thing helps Hamas flourish! I’d say it’s almost like that’s the whole idea but I’m pretty sure it is the whole idea. Imagine being Benjamin Netanyahu, finishing first in nail-biter elections but having to cobble together coalitions that collapse every year, which means more nail-biter elections. If your hold on power is that tenuous, what do you need most? An enemy. Or, you know, good works that make people want to vote for you. Anyway, we don’t need to support mass murder of civilians with our hard-earned money.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to do more to curb excessive CEO pay, particularly in the health insurance industry. Health insurance premiums outstrip inflation (yes, even 2021-22 inflation!) every year by absurd amounts, and what’s one big reason for that? The 10 highest-paid health insurance corporation CEOs earning over a billion dollars between them last year, that’s what! But do they earn that money with better services and better care? That is to laugh! We can curb CEO pay in lots of ways, like bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income. And if they call that “class warfare,” just remind them that their high costs wage actual class warfare on us every day of our lives. All so they can make more money than they’ll ever spend, money they can’t take to the Pearly Gates.

Action: concerning junk fees, safe airways, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our FTC to fight junk fees, tell our FAA to protect our airways better, and tell our FTC to stop big oil corporation mergers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to take the most vigorous possible action against junk fees. Remember: folks who oppose FTC action want you never to know what you’re really paying for something until it’s too late, and why would they want that? So they can steal your money more easily, that’s why. And when right-wingers say big government regulations never work, a) remember they’re full of soup and b) ask them if never getting a transparent price is OK with them, because chances are they’ve been hurt by junk fees, too. I hope these rules do us some good before the 2024 election, because you think Donald Trump will protect us from junk fees? That is to laugh – that man is the human junk fee.

Civic Shout helps you tell our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) to start taking air traffic safety a lot more seriously. And if that means they have to use whatever lawful authority they have to ensure that we have enough air traffic controllers who get enough time off and don’t work themselves to the bone, then we’re just going to have to do that! I know “workers having enough rest and time off so they can stay sharp” is such a quaint concept – one that hinders big corporate CEOs from redistributing even more income upward, that’s for sure! – but air traffic controllers kinda have to be on their game all the time, especially with a New York Times report telling us that safety issues at airports are on the rise. So let’s make our government do the right thing.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our FTC to stop the proposed Chevron/Hess and Exxon/Pioneer mergers. I keep saying “proposed” because I don’t want people to think that they’re done deals just because our “liberal” media reports on them like they’re already done deals – I mean, that would be tremendously disrespectful of our input, don’tcha think? And not only are they not done deals, the Biden Administration has taken antitrust policy seriously for the first time in about eight Presidents. Another reason we’ve got to tell them to do the right thing: because ten thousand corporate hacks will tell them to do the wrong thing, and spread their BS about how some monopolies are good for people. As anyone who’s paid for anything lately could tell you, they’re not.

Action: concerning Social Security, government spying, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any Social Security death panels, curb unlawful government spying on Americans, and help states start their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems. 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 that you will tolerate no “behind closed doors” death panels for Social Security. Because if the American people wanted you to do it, you wouldn’t have to do it “behind closed doors”! Yet House Speaker Johnson, who clearly doesn’t understand the whole concept of representing your constituents even though his job title is “Representative,” still thinks he can get a closed door Social Security commission to cut your earned benefits without any debate or anyone watching. Too late! We’re already watching! These Republican clowns have no idea how close they are to losing everywhere, no matter how they’ve managed to gerrymander their districts. I’m not kidding; people are tired of their BS. So we’ve got to keep speaking out.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act, and also reject the so-called FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act. Too often these matters are like Goofus and Gallant strips, with Gallant striving to prevent our FBI from searching our communications without a damn warrant and keep private data collectors from selling our data to law enforcement, while Goofus thinks we’ll tolerate our government getting our data even more easily without a warrant. Our House could be voting on these bills today, so the time to act, even more so than usual, is now. After all, nobody wants to give up their Constitutional rights merely because politicians are always complaining about crime or terrorism.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act, which (as its title implies) would help individual states create their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance programs, through getting waivers more easily and securing federal funding to cover 95 percent of its residents within five years. Admittedly getting Medicare-for-All done at the federal level remains an uphill climb, but recall that Canada’s Medicare-for-All-style health insurance system – the one that delivers better care for less money than ours does – started in Saskatchewan. Remember also that Vermont aimed to create such a system until its Democratic Governor got cold feet, citing the “cost.” There was a cost, all right – Vermont’s had a Republican Governor since then. There’s a lesson there, somewhere.

Around the table: and it's *bad* drama, part 989.

Biden Administration asserts that it does, in fact, have the lawful authority to seize patents for drugs developed at least partially with taxpayer money, if big pharma corporations are charging too much for said drugs. Of course asserting authority isn’t the same as using that authority, but this is a good first step. Now watch as the big pharma corporations threaten to sue the Biden Administration into oblivion, as if anyone’s rooting for them to keep demanding so much money for these drugs that folks can’t get healthy anymore. Watch, also, as right-wingers whine about how Mr. Biden is “abusing his power,” though they seem to prefer a President who’s already vowed to abuse his power if elected in 2024.

Surprise, surprise, CNN poll finds about half of Republican voters support Biden Administration policies aiming to halve carbon emissions by 2030, though given that pollution is actually quite unpopular, that number really ought to be much higher. Naturally, fewer than half of Americans approve of Mr. Biden’s handling of environmental issues, but even there you see good news – they may not approve because nearly three out of five Americans think the Administration isn’t doing enough, regardless of whether they approve of the things the Administration is doing. Also too, broad questions aren’t particularly useful. Remember when Mr. Obama’s approvals were low in 2012? How’d that work out for Mitt Romney?.

Texas Supreme Court blocks woman from getting an abortion at state Attorney General’s request, though her child would almost certainly be born dead and the birth would probably injure her badly enough that she wouldn’t be able to have children again. Next time someone tells you their health insurance shouldn’t have to pay for someone else’s abortion because of their “conscience,” ask them about this one, or about any ectopic pregnancies, or any other thing you can think of, and maybe also ask them if their conscience should get between an American and their doctor. Also too, Texas’s draconian anti-abortion law does allow women to get abortions if their lives are in danger or to “prevent substantial impairment of a major bodily function,” which begs the question: does Texas’s government really think childbirth isn’t a “major bodily function”?

Hoo boy Republicans think that pretending to be not such woman-haters about abortion will actually trick significant numbers of people into voting for them, but people won’t forget Republicans spending half a century making themselves into the woman-hating party just because individual Republicans claim “but I’m different.” And the masturbatory-rage crowd won’t be thrilled with their standard-bearers trying to nuance their positions, either. Republicans have to hope Democrats won’t hit them too hard on their “evolving” positions, and though they used to be able to count on Democrats to hit back soft or not at all, recent electoral returns suggest that day is done, particularly where abortion is concerned.

Finally, with Kevin McCarthy announcing his departure from our House of Representatives at the end of this year, Rachel Hadas at The Conversation looks over some classical dramas like Antigone, Ajax, and Julius Caesar and finds Mr. McCarthy a “slight unmeritable man” (in Mr. Shakespeare’s words) who was “not a hero.” “McCarthy does not qualify as a hero,” she writes. “To be humiliated, to fall, you have to have attained some height to begin with.” I keep saying that all Republicans do these days is drama and it’s never even good drama, and the “fall” of Kevin McCarthy seems to exemplify that trend.

Action: concerning child labor, banksters, and billionaires.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act, the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act, and the Billionaire’s 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.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act. What’s that, you say? There are already child labor laws on the books, so why do we need more? Partly because some state legislatures have loosened their own child labor laws, inexplicably – I mean, seriously, why do you do that if you’re concerned about winning elections? – but also because corporations flout those laws without getting appropriately punished. The Stop Child Labor Act would stiffen penalties for corporations that exploit our children, plus it would let kids sue those corporations over the harm done to them. So let right-wingers squeal TEH TRIAL LAWYURZ!!!!! at that development. They’ll be even lonelier than they are now.

Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act, which would, as its title suggests, get rid of the tax loophole that lets hedge fund banksters pay a lower tax rate than working families. This has been an anvil around our necks for years now, but of course Kyrsten Sinema, back when she was the 50th vote in our Senate last year, just had to demand keeping that loophole around as tribute for passing the Inflation Reduction Act! She’s a walnut in the batter of eternity, of course, but if we made people vote on this bill – and then, and this is important, ran ads against folks who voted against it – we might finally slay this fat and lazy dragon once and for all. And that’s worth the effort.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Income Tax, which would not convert billionaires into paupers, as right-wingers pretend – indeed, it wouldn’t even tax wealth under $1 billion, and if you can’t make it on $999,999,999, then you're a clown who deserves no one's attention. But the bill would raise over $500 billion in revenues over the next decade; think of anything we might do with $500 billion over 10 years? Like, maybe, expand the Child Tax Credit so more working families can have more breathing room? Hey, that’s just one thing we could do! And if we don’t make the rich pay more and working folks pay less, we’ll never get anything done in America. Taxing the rich was good enough for our grandparents, and it’s good enough for us.

Action: concerning internet freedom, education, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our FCC to promote internet freedom, tell school boards to stop lying about climate change, and tell our FTC to stop big fossil fuel corporation mergers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate network neutrality, the principle that you, and not some big telecom corporation, should decide where you want to go on our internet. Don’t believe the hype that “net neutrality will lead to higher prices,” because you’ve just spent almost three years watching big corporations raise prices for any damn reason. It’s hard to take someone hostage by threatening to do something you're already doing all the time! And if we bring net neutrality back, that means we can stop big corporations from censoring websites, or from slowing down websites that haven’t paid them tribute. You say they’re doing little of that now, and that may be, but if we don’t make it illegal, sooner or later they’ll do it all the time, and then it’ll be too late.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell state school boards to stop lying to children about climate change. Yes, the right-wing fever that’s swept school boards across America extends even here, as the Texas Board of Education just rejected seven textbooks for including material about climate change. One Texas Republican even said, “America's future generations don't need a leftist agenda brainwashing them in the classroom to hate oil and natural gas.” Imagine that! All common sense and scientific truth is now a “leftist agenda”! If only the leftist agenda were that good! Seriously, there ain’t gonna be any future generations if we let big oil and gas corporations make our planet unlivable. And politicians who are too weak to handle that truth deserve to live on government cheese.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Chevron/Hess and Exxon/Pioneer Natural Resources mergers. Because big corporate mergers are always bad! Yes, I said always! So corporate shills on financial cable news shows can call me an “extremist”! Look, they either care about small businesses or they don’t, and letting already too-big fossil fuel corporations get even bigger basically means they don’t. What’s that I hear? Small businesses aren’t going to drill for oil ha ha ha snort? But they’ll have to deal with oil and gas corporations pretty much as a condition of existence, and if those oil and gas corporations are too big, they'll squeeze small businesses with impunity. And that’s un-American. Listen to all my extreme language today!

Action: concerning taxes, AI, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit without poison pills, protect American workers from AI, and pass the Affordable Insulin Now 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 Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 that put $250 and $300 checks per child in working families’ bank accounts. You know, I feel like I don’t need to justify that action any further – fewer kids in poverty, more money for strapped working families, what else needs saying? – but it’s December, which means it’s end-of-year budgeting time, which means Congress will try to pass a bunch of noxious crap they’d never get through without it being an “emergency,” so go ahead and tell your Congressfolk to pass a CTC expansion with no poison pills attached! That means no corporate welfare and no more tax cuts for the rich – do the right thing, and nothing else.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect American workers from the spectre of Artificial Intelligence (or AI). We just watched the Hollywood actors’ union fight management’s attempts to replace them with AI-generated doppelgangers, but that won’t just happen to them – it’ll happen to any American worker who has a CEO who twirls his mustache at the prospect of replacing all his workers (and all their “costs”) with mounds of dung, and “any” includes you and you and you and I. Hell, it’s already happened, for real, at call centers all over the world. You ever try to fix a problem and wind up yelling “operator!” into the phone? Then you know what I’m talking about. Our economy needs more people in it, and fewer “big,” “bold” “entrepreneurs” who live to kill our jobs.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act, which would extend the benefit Medicare recipients get – namely, their insulin costs capped at $35/month – to all Americans. What a shame that we have to stop big pharma corporations from charging literally an arm and a leg for insulin, and what a shame we have idiots like Herschel Walker telling us that if we just eat right we won’t have to use insulin, which will definitely not impress anyone born with diabetes (or those who are rationing their insulin while keeping spreadsheets about their calorie intake). And if anyone starts ranting about “price controls,” you have a number of good rebuttals. Like you say “price controls” like it’s a bad thing. Or 1973 called; it wants its right-wing talking points back.

Action: concerning junk fees, banksters, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC to outlaw junk fees, tell our Federal Reserve to force banks to have more cash on hand, and tell President Biden to put better people on our USPS Board of Governors. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous anti-junk fee rule possible. From concert and airline tickets to utility bills and even rent, good Americans are getting slammed with fees that seem to come in at the last minute, when you’re already emotionally-invested in the sale. Being up-front is a simple principle, right? Yet big corporations can’t stop whining about any effort to actually make them be up-front! WAAAAAH WE CAN’TZ MAKES TEH MONEYZ REGULATORYZ BURDENZ NANNY STATEZ!!!!! All of which put together doesn’t add up to even one-tenth of we deserve to know how much we’re going to pay before we buy something. Don’t corporations have responsibilities anymore? Or is that just for us “little people”?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Reserve to force banks to increase the amount of capital they have on hand, so that they – and, by extension, we – can weather their bad decisions better. Banksters of course hate the idea that they should actually have real cash money in their vaults, because then how can we take the risks that make us rich, er, grow the economy? They say all of that like it’s not the very reason we demand they have more money on hand! We all lived through the Bankster Armageddon of 2008, and we all know that it wasn’t subprime mortgages that collapsed the economy but banksters’ hifalutin “financial instruments” that “create” “wealth” but destroy jobs and small businesses and lay waste to our livelihoods. So our government needs to make them do better.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to replace two expiring terms on our USPS Board of Governors with two folks who’ll fight to make our Postal Service actually better. I mean, of course, as opposed to the rubbish plan promulgated by current Postmaster DeJoy; his “better” involves slashing jobs, cutting services, and charging good Americans more money for the services that are left. That kind of “better” is typical of a corporate executive who doesn’t actually know how to do anything of value. Sound harsh? Tough! I’m right, and corporate America is wrong! “Increasing” “value” for “shareholders” (read: executives) is exactly the kind of thing that kills civilizations, but I don’t actually think our civilization deserves to die. As long as we can keep it, that is.

Around the table: brought to you by the word "drama."

You’ve been hearing that Americans just don’t “get” how well our economy’s doing? And you’re not particularly inclined to blame them, even though wage growth is actually outpacing inflation for the first time in decades? Well, Paul Waldman reminds us that the vast majority of folks who tell pollsters that the economy’s doing badly are Republicans, which totally tracks! Particularly since Republican poll respondents seem to think our economy’s worse than it was in 2009 or 2010 – which, like, we’re not stupid, OK? – and also since Americans generally act like this is a good economy, i.e., by starting businesses or spending more money.

At least one California corporation thinks that electric car batteries can be used for solar power storage systems even if they’re so depleted that the cars can’t use them anymore, so I guess that’s for your right-wing friends who can’t stop whining BUT WHEREZ WILLZ WEZ PUTZ TEHZ EXPIRUDZ BATTERIEZ HA HA HA HA STUPIDZ LIBRULZ!!!!!! If you still have right-wing friends, of course. (Oh, and if they whine that TEH ELECTRICZ BATTUREEZ CAUSEZ MOREZ OFZ TEH FIURZ!!!!!, well, they’re full of soup about that, too.)

Good West Virginians could be paying more to clean up coal corporation pollution, and let us note that state legislators of both parties have failed to fund the state’s abandoned mine clean-up program (and way before coal corporations started going belly up), while West Virginia’s Republican Governor just fired a critical clean-up fund advisor, and President Biden has somehow failed to even nominate a new Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement administrator (who could force West Virginia’s government to act). The story even features the gnarled hand of Tha Bush Mobb promising to issue new, stronger regulations and then, stop me if you’ve heard this before, never getting around to it or explaining why. Of course Tha Bush Mobb was never the place to learn to clean up your mess.

In case you were wondering, yes our “liberal” media gave a lot more coverage to Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark than they’ve given to Donald Trump’s “vermin” remark, and it’s no use objecting that people are so numb to what Donald Trump says now that of course our media didn’t say much about it, or that maybe we shouldn’t respond to everything he says with more coverage, or, even, that Mr. Trump may not have meant you or I per se when he said “vermin.” Because guess what? No one murdered a “deplorable,” but someone will absolutely murder a “vermin.” (Of course, when he then tries to say it’s all Mr. Trump’s fault, I’ll remind everyone that murder is absolutely something for which one needs to take personal responsibility.)

When I hear that drama hound Jesse Watters at Fox News found a clip of President Biden drinking a milkshake through a straw and thought that was unmanly or something, all I can say is gosh, Mr. Watters, hate yourself much? And though we could tabulate all the layers of this hypocritical onion (Mr. Watters didn’t get upset that time His Personal Lord and Savior himself used a straw on a smoothie!), better to tell all your friends and neighbors to vote against drama in 2024, and fight drama every day until Election Day 2024.

David E. Clemenston at The Conversation reminds us that folks judge people like now-expelled Rep. George Santos (E-NY) as “trustworthy” “almost entirely from perceptions of their demeanor, not the words they utter,” and though he talks about Mr. Santos as someone who “speaks with certitude” and “has a charming, friendly, and interactive manner,” his point maps on to something I’ve been thinking for a long time. The advantage Republicans have today is tone, not better arguments – they sound like go-getters and problem-solvers, where too many Democrats sound like they’re just trying not to anger anyone (particularly their big donors!), and whether people articulate it or not, they hate politicians who sound like that.

Finally, staying with the George Santos Experience, Steve Bannon’s so full of rage about his expulsion – because rage is, apparently, all he can feel – that he says if “They want a civil war, they got one!” Seriously, a “civil war” over the expulsion of George Santos? Just as junkies only care about junk, dramatic people only care about drama, and if Donald Trump wins in 2024, dramatic people like Steve Bannon will be running this country into the ground again. So let’s do everything we can to prevent that from happening. Yes, even if it means re-electing a boring old Democratic President who’s actually doing a good job.

Action: concerning foreclosures, junk fees, and Twitter.

Long story short: tell our VA to help veterans stay in their homes, tell our FTC to fight junk fees, and tell big corporations to abandon Twitter. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Veterans Administration (or VA) to prevent veterans from being foreclosed out of their homes. Our VA allowed veterans to defer mortgage payments during the pandemic – you remember when unemployment was 14%? – but now our VA is telling veterans either to pony up five figures or refinance their homes post-haste, though they’d be refinancing at much higher interest rates now. Hence at least four Senators have asked our VA to extend the mortgage-deferment program and pause all VA loan foreclosures, which sure seems like kindness to me. I guess some folks would rather throw veterans out on the streets when it sure wasn’t their fault a pandemic slammed into America. But I think a capitalist system that benefits the rich more than it benefits anyone else can take the hit.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous anti-junk fee rule possible. Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is also working on an anti-junk fee rule, but out FTC’s purview is broader (i.e., not just the banking industry), so their rule could do even more good – but only if we speak out. And this ought to be a lay-up! No one likes finding out that the good or service they bought actually costs more than they thought it was going to cost, after all, and no use saying that’s just how things are, get used to it, not when you don’t actually have to get used to it, since no law of physics or morals compels us to accept any abuse a corporation heaps upon us in the name of TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!! People before markets!

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Twitter, or X, or whatever; plenty of corporations have stopped advertising on Twitter, but not all corporations, and no corporations should help fund a hellscape where assholes can bully the disadvantaged and then claim DISCRIMINASHUNZ!!!! whenever someone stands up to them. Beware of hostage-taking in opposing arguments! Plenty of disadvantaged folks still use Twitter or X or whatever, they’ll say, and they’ve spent years building audiences and making connections there, so boycotts only hurt them! But I suspect these disadvantaged folks would say the same thing anti-apartheid activists said in the late ‘80s: “seriously, you’re worried about things getting worse for us?”