Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning junk fees, private prisons, and clean water.

Long story short: tell our FCC to ban cable termination fees, tell big banks to stop financing private prisons, and tell our EPA to get lead out of our drinking water pipes post-haste. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to ban cable termination fees. You know, the onerous fees cable corporations charge to dissuade you from cutting the cord? They’ll probably whine that we have to do something with all the streaming going on nowadays, but ask yourself: how many people oppose onerous fees? There’s an easy way to figure that out: think of how many people you know, and then subtract the number zero, and that’s how many people oppose onerous fees. Only big corporations like them, and they’ve had all the say around here for far too long.

Eko helps you tell big corporate banks to stop financing private prisons. It’s not just because private prisons waste taxpayer money on bad services for our prisoners – and if you don’t care about serving prisoners and helping them rejoin communities, just turn in your Civilized Person card now, ‘K? It’s also about the atrocities, like concentration camps at our Southern border, which one of the most notorious private prison corporations, the Geo Group, helped build, and which courts both here and in Australia have found responsible for prison deaths. Some banksters have decided this is toxic, so now we work on the rest of them.

Finally, Earth Justice helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get as much lead out of our drinking water pipes as possible. Specifically, you’ll ask our EPA to rewrite the Lead and Copper Rule (which helps our government enforce the Safe Drinking Water Act) so that corporations that make drinking water pipes have to get the lead out of them as quickly as possible. Only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment would respond to the idea that “government should get lead out of our drinking water” with cries of AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!! and BIG GUMMINT SUX!!!!!, so let’s not let them have all the say about everything, either.

Action: concerning endless war, health care, and public banking.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to do all they can to get a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war, and pass both the EpiPen Act and the Public Banking Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you demand an immediate cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war. Pleased to see someone else refer to it as exactly that, since that’s exactly what’s happening – even the Iraq War’s most fevered supporters never called it the “U.S./al-Qaeda war,” and not just because that would have been absurd. But with the International Court of Justice lately saying that some of Israel’s actions might qualify as genocide – and with that court continuing to consider South Africa’s genocide complaint – I would think we have some momentum here. But we’ll only turn that momentum into good works if we speak out now.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the EpiPen Act. You recall how Mylan jacked up the price of EpiPens 500 – to around $600! – between 2009 and 2016, and controlled 90% of the EpiPen market back then? Well, the EpiPen Act would cap the price of two EpiPen doses at $60, or one-tenth of the price that made Mylan so much money, like any corporation should profit like that off a drug that people with anaphylactic allergies will die if they don’t have. Right-wingers love squealing about “price controls,” but I think most Americans would look a lot more sanguinely on the concept now – particularly with regard to live-saving drugs.

Finally, Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Public Banking Act, which would more easily allow states and localities to open public banks like North Dakota’s, which has helped good North Dakotans weather recessions and depressions for over a hundred years. You may have noticed several members of the Squad – Reps. Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Omar – among the bill’s sponsors. Our “liberal” media concentrates far too much on their alleged anti-Semitism and not a whole lot on their actual populism; one has to wonder why that is. It’s because media outlets are objectively pro-bankster. That’s the reason. Also sexism.

Around the table: of planes, rageheads, bad cops, and trillionaires.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Boeing airplane operators filed about one service difficulty report per day between 2020 and 2023, with Alaska Airlines filing the vast majority of them. Problems include not just windows blowing out in mid-air and denuding children but also fuel leaks and debris in fuel tanks and “malfunctioning stabilizing motors.” And while you may recall the Trump Administration shoving as much taxpayer money as it could Boeing’s way in 2020, the vast majority of these reports have come during Pete Buttigieg’s tenure as Transportation Secretary, and the FAA’s official response to The Lever’s report sure ain’t promising. “(S)ome airlines may file more reports than what is required”? Whoever wrote that needs to lose their job.

Oxfam International tells us that the world may have its first trillionaire within the next decade, and about the only consolation I can take from that is that, if history is any guide, that trillionaire will almost certainly not be Elon Musk, regardless of how good things look for him now. Of far less consolation: the person who does achieve trillionaire-hood will almost certainly be an even worse human being. In the meantime, more than half the world’s population has become poorer over the last three years, while the five richest men on Earth have more than doubled their worth over that same period, but please, right-wingers, keep whining about immigration and crime.

Pro-Palestinian protestors at Columbia University get hit with an Israeli chemical weapon – and college administrators chide them for holding an “unsanctioned” protest! After all, getting hit with skunk is something you ought to expect, since pretty much everyone can buy it at their local supermarket! Seriously, if only you had protested the way we wanted you to you’d have been OK goes well beyond scolding and into hostage-taking. Ask Rosa Parks how well the civil rights movement would’ve done if she’d just protested the way the state wanted her to. (And hey, wanna put some pressure on Columbia over this matter? Jewish Voice for Peace helps you do that.)

Families suing Koch Industries-owned Georgia-Pacific over the havoc asbestos has wrought in their lives condemn Koch for using a bankruptcy work-around called the “Texas two-step” to avoid paying out. Texas law allows corporations to divide into two corporations and then dump all their legal liabilities onto the second corporation – which then declares bankruptcy! I would never expect our Supreme Court to do its duty and assert that such bankruptcy arrangements hurt the rights of others to redress grievances, but that’s what they ought to do. In the meantime, boycott Dixie cups and Brawny paper towels. “Tear-a-square” paper towels are stupid anyway; I’ll always be a size-a-sheet man.

”21 Bodycam Videos Caught the NYPD Wrongly Arresting Black Kids on Halloween,” announces ProPublica, so “Why Can’t the Public See the Footage?” I’m going to go out on a limb and say the answer is “because it would embarrass the NYPD.” Look, if you do bad things, you should expect to be embarrassed, and you should expect your friends and neighbors and family to shame you; all that’s called civilization , and too many powerful people think they’re above it. And if the NYPD remains in control over who can see body cam footage, that doesn’t mean “body cameras don’t work” – it means we should have more control, and the police should have less control, over who gets to see body camera footage.

Finally, a Christofascist who shall remain nameless because history will forget him assures us that folks “involved in election fraud” will be “struck dead by God.” Well, I guess so, eventually, though it seems He’s working awfully slowly, particularly in that Georgia case where everyone heard Donald Trump say he just wanted to find 11,780 – oh, wait, he means us! Everyone thinks God’s on their side, long after it’s obvious He’s not. But then, rage is a hell of a drug.

Action: concerning taxes, public transportation, and asylum rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop cutting IRS funding, better fund public transportation, and establish asylum-seeking as a human right. 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 Patriotic Millionaires and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to stop with the cutting IRS funding drama. When you hear that every dollar our IRS invests in auditing taxpayers above the 90th percentile brings in twelve dollars of revenue, you understand that cutting IRS funding doesn’t actually save money, but costs money, and you also understand that efforts to defund our IRS (which we might also call defunding the police) are really efforts to give the rich more tax cuts. Shame these “fiscal hawks” Republicans pretend not to understand any of that. But then, we’re better than they are, and it’s well past time for that to actually mean something.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act, which would, as its title suggests, invest $80 billion into our public transportation systems over the next four years. That would be $80 billion out of a projected $20 trillion in total federal spending, so don’t let anyone get all where-you-gonna-find-the-money about this. Better bus and rail transportation not only means less pollution, fewer carbon emissions, and cleaner air and water, it also means fewer temporarily insane people driving cars on our roadways. Your children and your children’s children will thank you for both.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to affirm seeking asylum as a fundamental human right. It’s a shame we have to tell Congressfolk to exercise basic compassion and mercy! But we have far too many drama hounds running around acting like asylees are all drug-runners, terrorists, and job-takers, when asylees are actually running from terror in their home countries. You’d like a place to go if you had no place to go, wouldn’t you? And the thing about rights is they occasionally interfere with your desire to do whatever diddles your rage gland. But that’s what they’re supposed to do! They’re supposed to outlast the fevers of the day!

Action: concerning Social Security, taxing the rich, and workers’ rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strengthen Social Security, start taxing wealth, and better protect workers’ right to organize. 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 expand Social Security benefits, not cut them. They pretend they can go “behind closed doors” to create their Death Panels to secretly cut Social Security benefits, but expanding Social Security benefits is something they actually can do, by raising the cap on income taxed into the Social Security system, as Civic Shout helps you tell them to do. Currently income over $168,600 doesn’t get taxed into Social Security at all, meaning Elon Musk would be done paying his annual Social Security taxes literally four minutes into the year. So let’s do something about that.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Reverse Community Harms (or OLIGARCH) Act, which would at long last start taxing wealth in America. The OLIGARCH Act would create four tax brackets for wealth, the highest of which would assess an 8% tax on wealth over 1,000,000 times the median household wealth. Rich folks will act like it’s a 100% tax on everything they have – Donald Trump said as much in 2019, with little correction from our “liberal” media – but don’t believe their hype. This tax will do nothing but good.

Finally, Cedar Key Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act. You’ve heard about Starbucks workers joining unions – but you haven’t heard about any contracts they’ve signed. Why might that be? Why, it might well be because Starbucks simply won’t talk to these workers, because our laws don’t punish corporations when they do that. The PRO Act would start to fix that problem, plus it would outlaw state-level right-to-work-for-less laws and coercive anti-union propaganda meetings. These would be good works, and we should encourage our Congressfolk to do them. But they won’t, unless we speak up.

Action: concerning the right to repair, children’s data, and old-growth forests.

Long story short: tell our FTC to protect our right to repair and prevent big tech corporations from selling kids’ data, and tell our USDA to protect old-growth forests from loggers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

US PIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to keep standing up for our right to repair. Our FTC has ramped up enforcement of existing laws, and though Republican FTC Commissioners have opposed our FTC’s monopoly-fighting efforts, they’ve supported enhancing good Americans’ right to either fix their own products or take them to independent repair shops to get them fixed. I mean, nobody approves of corporations making products impossible to take apart, or of being forced to take that product to an “approved” repair shop that might be hundreds of miles out of your way, so our FTC needs to hear from us.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our FTC to stop big tech corporations from selling kids’ data. Because our children are our future, or they’re just advertising targets, but not both! Treating people like consumers and nothing else is one of the two or three things corporations do well, I suppose – you know, along with finding loopholes in laws and redistributing worker income upward to executives – but that doesn’t mean we ought to put up with it. Our FTC is mulling new rules preventing kids’ data from being passed around like candy, but they’ll need our help to write good rules.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to enact the most vigorous protections for old-growth forests possible. Our U.S. Forest Service (which operates under our USDA) has proposed limiting logging of our oldest trees in our national forests, but they’ve left loopholes open that some logging corporation – and, like I said, if corporations do anything well anymore, it’s finding loopholes! – will drive a Mack truck through. Once a thousand-year-old tree is gone, it’s gone forever, and so is the complex ecosystem depending on it, not to mention the centuries of carbon it’s trapped. Maybe the past means something?

Action: concerning endless war, public banking, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end the Biden Administration’s bombing of Yemen, pass the Public Banking Act, and protect the Affordable Connectivity 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.

Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the Biden Administration’s bombing of Yemen. Not just because Congress did not issue a declaration of war against Yemen as our Constitution requires, but because, frankly, it’s not achieving its stated goal (to stop Houthis from attacking local ships). President Biden even said it’s not working! I can’t let it pass by that Houthis have historically fought well against al-Qaida, and yet we still support the UAE/Saudi war aiming to exterminate them. I don’t care if Iran supports them! Has nobody in power thought maybe the war-making itself is the problem causing all other problems?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Public Banking Act, which would, as its title suggests, help public banks flourish all over the land. Right-wingers will yell SOSHULIZM!!!!!, but seriously, who really wants to protect the big banksters who won’t lend in urban and rural areas? Only other banksters, that’s who, and they shouldn’t get all the say about everything. You may have noticed the Bank of North Dakota helped good North Dakotans get through the gas drilling bust of the last decade, and the Republicans who run North Dakota have done nothing to touch it. Why, it’s like they know it works! But we should all get to know that.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to save the Affordable Connectivity Program (or ACP), which allows over 20 million Americans to get internet access they otherwise couldn’t afford. Because cable prices are stupid high, amirite? But when I hear that Ted Cruz wants to kill this program because mean-girl, I must ask: isn’t Ted Cruz up for re-election this year? He must be feeling awfully good about his chances, to take such an objectively pro-inflation stand! But then I thought that after he abandoned good Texans for Cancun during that murderous 2021 winter storm. I sure would like to see good Texans remind him who’s boss this November.

Around the table: evil shows its ugly gnarled face, part 748.

First, some good news: our Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division has successfully stopped the proposed JetBlue/Spirit merger in court, thus guaranteeing that Spirit will still be able to offer lower prices to airline passengers. Because you know JetBlue was going to end that! And you know that because Spirit executives said so! The Antitrust Division literally hadn’t stopped an airline merger in over 40 years, so this is, as our President might say, a BFD. Personal to the corporate executives and the business press who can’t stop whining about this stuff: c’mon, fellas! Bootstrap yourselves! Oh, and Joe Biden: how about running for re-election on good works like this one?

And now some bad news: the Bernie Sanders resolution that would have required our State Department to report on Israeli human rights violations in Gaza failed by a 72-11 margin, and though some observers say “hey, it got 11 more votes than it probably would’ve gotten last year,” it still only got 11 “yea” votes out of 100. (If you really want to bright-side this vote, you may note that 17 Senators missed the vote entirely. How did they really feel about it? Surely they would have shown up to protect Israel, right?) The only Republican who backed the resolution was Rand Paul of Kentucky; I’m tempted to say he knows how to count as well as anyone else, but not without mentioning that he almost single-handedly made the USA PATRIOT Act significantly less repulsive in 2016.

“With Donald Trump's Iowa landslide,” writes Amanda Marcotte at Salon, “evangelicals reveal who they really are.” Yes, evangelicals really are fascists who see this patently un-Godly man as their best hope for gaining absolute power over the rest of us! Of course, right-wing evangelicals have revealed who they really are many, many times over the years – as Ms. Marcotte patiently and meticulously recounts! – but maybe we need all the reminders we can get. I will say that I don’t think regular Americans are falling all over themselves trying to reintegrate these evangelicals into the human community; I think only our “liberal” media tries to do that.

At the risk of diddling right-wing rage glands, ProPublica presents evidence that a solar energy project in Washington state isn’t respecting local indigenous cultural sites enough. Of course, the point of this article, I would think, is not never do renewable energy ever ha ha ha you stupid liberals, but rather do renewable energy right, and you shouldn’t have to run roughshod over folks’ rights in order to do the right thing. And generally, treaties with Native American nations already protect the right to continue ancient cultural practices, which makes this, guess what, a law and order issue as well.

Ho hum, Tucker Carlson’s still out there hawking viciously stupid crap about COVID vaccines, to the point that over one-third of Americans actually think the COVID vaccine has killed thousands of good Americans; now, most of those folks are actually insane, I’ll grant, but I’m bummed that lies about COVID vaccines have some appeal to the merely cynical among us. Hate to sound like a broken record, but Democrats can counter all of this insanity by providing good services to Americans without letting rich people whining about it. Joe Biden’s been the best at that in my lifetime, but that hasn’t exactly been a high bar to clear.

Finally, Nikki Haley actually says “we’ve never been a racist country” in an interview, and while her longer answer is actually considerably better – get-less-racist-every-day isn’t just pablum, and only a cynic or a liar would claim that the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act simply don’t represent progress – it’s still well worth it to note that “we’ve never been a racist country” is utter horseshit one could refute with a cursory investigation of American history. And the people who call everything racism are still more my people than the folks who want to scrub racism from history because it hurts their feelings. “We’ve never been a racist country” obviously aims at the latter, but of course their hearts are spoken for.

Action: concerning air traffic safety, campaign spending, and IRS funding.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get us more air traffic controllers, make campaign spending restrictions real again, and stop trying to cut IRS funding. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell Congress to address our air traffic controller shortage. As they say in their petition, “How many close calls is it going to take?” But what does the air traffic controller shortage have to do with, for example, a Boeing window blowing out in mid-air? Well, more well-trained and well-paid air traffic controllers would greatly help manage the next crisis – or the next hundred times, given the greedheads who run airline corporations these days. Remember when air traffic controllers almost single-handedly ended the 2019 government shutdown by walking out? Now imagine having enough of them!

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to amend our Constitution so we can restrict campaign spending again. In a world where even two-thirds of Republican voters think the Citizens United ruling was rubbish, this shouldn’t be hard – except that too many of our Congressfolk only care about money. I ran down most of the rubbish arguments against this amendment years ago (and also in my second book, have you heard of it?), but beware the right-winger who says but you need money to get your arguments across. Do you need unlimited money to do that? History says you don’t, or else Dr. King would have had a SuperPAC.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut IRS funding. Odd that Republicans, who constantly whine about “defunding the police," have such a hard-on for cutting funding that lets our IRS actually enforce our tax laws; why, it’s like they know that increased IRS funding also means more prosecution of rich tax cheats! They’ll tell you it means they’ll come after you and I, of course, but what an offensively stupid argument — our IRS was already going after working families almost exclusively, because we can’t afford big-money lawyers like rich folks can. So STFU, Republicans. Again.

Action: concerning sex for water, internet security, and health care.

Long story short: tell world governments to stop letting bad actors extract sex from girls in exchange for water, tell Apple to stop interfering with Beeper Mini’s works, and tell states to stop funding anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers.” Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell world leaders to make it illegal to force girls to have sex in exchange for clean water. This one’s easy! How shameful this still happens, and no use saying it only happens in “developing” nations, because a) no one on Earth should have to sacrifice their virtue to, you know, survive and b) the corporate drama kings who run things in America absolutely will inflict such “mutually-beneficial relationships” on us if we let them, likely after some crisis they let happen but could have avoided. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the rights we’ve fought for and won can disappear in an instant. And that’s why we fight.

Accountable Tech helps you tell Apple to stop interfering with the Beeper Mini app, which enables Android users to send secure text messages to Apple phones and vice versa. This one’s not as repugnant as the last one, but it is also easy! A big corporation prevents some of its customers from using their product in a secure manner, and then a small corporation comes along and solves that problem – only to see that big corporation try to crush that small corporation. Apple wasn’t a great corporation to begin with, but it’s really lost its way since Steve Jobs died. Happily we can help put them on the right path.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell states to stop using taxpayer money – i.e., your money – to fund anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers.” Maybe I can’t stop folks from going to one of these “clinics” and learning all kinds of wrong shit, but why should we fund them with our hard-earned money? Should governments force taxpayers to fund any other kind of health clinic that hands out wrong information? Imagine taxpayers funding “clinics” telling diabetics to drink all the Pepsi they want! If Pepsi donates enough money to the right politicians, that’ll happen in a New York minute. Hence another dystopia we must help prevent.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, Social Security, and workers’ rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to investigate human rights abuses in Gaza, reject any attempt to cut Social Security benefits, and stop trying to dump on exploited workers. 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.

Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand that our State Department investigate human rights abuses by Israel in Palestine. They shouldn’t be hard to find! Israel spent weeks indiscriminately firing missiles into Gaza before putting boots on the ground “looking” for Hamas, and now you can’t drink the water in Gaza and Israeli soldiers say things on video like “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza,” which probably reminds you of, you know, everyone who’s ever dehumanized an enemy. All of this, so Mr. Netanyahu can win another election when his current governing coalition collapses in six months or so. Seriously, Italy’s a more stable government now!

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a Social Security “commission.” Most politicians talk about the “crises” that “demand” we cut Social Security benefits for the good Americans who earned them – what a bunch of cowards these politicians sound like! (Of course, they’re liars, not cowards, and a liar is many orders of magnitude worse than a coward.) But why not tell them to expand Social Security funding instead? Billionaires have enough money to wipe their asses with these days, so it’s not like “we’re broke.” I mean, you and I may be, but America’s most certainly not.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.J.Res. 98, which would overturn a Biden Administration rule that protects working families. The rule would stop corporations from abusing their employees’ “joint employer” status; if you don’t already know what happens with that, you can probably guess by the name – a “joint employer” will spend all its time passing the buck from one to to the other so no one ever has to deal with a worker grievance or bargain with employees in good faith. The rule is a good work, but of course Republicans have to shit on it. So let’s not let them do that.

Around the table: corporate sickness, immorality, and decadence, part 492.

Wondering how a Boeing plane’s window could blow out in mid-air seven minutes into a flight? The Lever tells us how. Long story short: Boeing gave so much money to Congress that Congressfolk let them do whatever they wanted. Better they spent that money building a plane with windows that didn’t fly off in mid-air! Long story somewhat longer comes via Matt Stoller, who reminds us of many important details, not least of which is that Boeing is already essentially a government-backed corporation, meaning that folks who’d cry SOSHULIZM!!!! if we nationalized Boeing and then broke it up (as Mr. Stoller recommends) are hypocrites, not that they really care about anything but brandishing scare words so we do the bidding of their corporate paymasters.

Sara Van Horn at In These Times writes about an “Emerging Green Technology” in New York state that “Could Decarbonize Buildings and Provide Good Union Jobs.” Basically it’s a “networked” geothermal system, which allows one to dig one hundred-foot hole to serve several buildings, and it relies on a steady source of ground heat. But of course you know what right-wingers will say: socialism ethanol dead batteries wind turbine syndrome electric car graveyards you can’t use solar in wintertime stupid.

Speaking of electric cars, I bet right-wingers are dancing a jig over Hertz’s decision to dump 20,000 electric cars from its fleet, but as usual they need to take their chill pills. In a few years we’ll have more charging stations all across America, and the parts for these cars won’t be as hard to come by and thus the repair costs will come down. Anyway, I think Hertz is right to dump Tesla cars, since as we’ve lately learned, Tesla, like George W. Bush, doesn’t know what it’s doing and is arrogant about it.

Ho hum, right-wing state legislator from Michigan announces that “(h)onestly, I work for God and not for man. And so at the end of the day, I answer to one person, and that’s Jesus Christ.” Hey, Mr. Schriver: you work for your constituents. And he should count yourself lucky that he represents a gerrymandered district where the Republican typically gets about two-thirds of the votes, but then again he’d probably call himself blessed instead. In which case I’d say I’m glad someone’s blessed by his service!

What’s the funniest thing about Chris Rufo, the “architect” of right-wing drama over critical race theory, misrepresenting his “degree from Harvard” at the same time he was nitpicking Claudia Gay’s research? That Harvard apparently created the Harvard Extension School (from which he received a Master’s degree, and even I know people who have the real thing!) to give more people access to Harvard – meaning that Mr. Rufo has benefited from affirmative action at least as much as anyone he criticizes. Remember: good people have a sense of shame, but evil people don’t.

Finally, here’s some good news: our FDA has approved a Florida program aiming to important cheaper Canadian drugs for certain Floridians with certain medical conditions. It’s a good start, and if it lets Ron DeSantis whine about how slow the wheels of our FDA turn – or oppose a Big Pharma PR machine no one likes – well, I guess I’ll put up with it. Of course, if he did the latter with any consistency, he wouldn’t be wondering what to do about his disastrous showing in yesterday’s Iowa caucus.

Action: concerning health care and Social Security.

Long story short: tell an Ohio prosecutor to drop charges against a woman who miscarried, and tell your Congressfolk to reject any “fiscal commission” for Social Security and preserve the PEPFAR 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell Trumbull County, OH’s prosecutor to drop abuse-of-corpse charges against Brittany Watts. Because she miscarried and then tried to flush the corpse down the toilet, and folks who think that’s funny ought to think about all the times they handled a tragic situation badly. Used to be this kind of thing – charging a woman with a crime because she miscarried – only happened in other countries, but not now! Ha ha ha the future is so awesome! Seriously, miscarriage is a tragedy, not a crime, and folks who think mothers routinely pretend an abortion is a miscarriage must all have penises. Or be them.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislation that includes a “fiscal commission” aiming to cut Social Security and medicare benefits. That’s what these “behind closed doors” commissions aim to do, and they need to be “behind closed doors” because you could never cut Social Security in the light of day. Some folks call a Social Security “fiscal commission” a death panel, and good for them, but there’s another name for such a “fiscal commission”: fascist. Because any time you try to limit debate and feedback from the people, you’re being a fascist. End of.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (or PEPFAR), which funds the AIDS fight overseas and which right-wingers in Congress now want to cut, claiming the program – possibly the greatest/only achievement of the George W. Bush Presidency – promotes promiscuity and abortion and Satan and oh STFU right-wingers! That ship sailed once Elton John talked Nancy Reagan into talking Ronald Reagan into funding AIDS research because babies get it now. Elton John is going to heaven, and not just for “Philadelphia Freedom.”

Action: concerning voting rights, trans kids, and anti-gay politicians.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights and protect trans kids, and tell Rep. Walberg of Michigan to resign over his pro-murder-of-gays comments. 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 Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former bill would give all Americans same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration, and expanded mail-in and early voting, plus it would criminalize many forms of voter suppression and create redistricting commissions in every state; the latter bill would restore our government’s ability to stop vote suppression in any area of our country that’s suppressed votes. Who opposes this stuff? Haters, that’s who. And why should haters win?

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject a Republican bill that would nullify the Biden Administration’s mandate requiring anyone who adopts children to acknowledge a trans child’s gender. Gosh, our government actually does something kind for once, and Republicans can’t wait to shit on it. And, seriously, if you don’t want to acknowledge a trans kid’s gender, then don’t adopt the kid. Why should this be so hard? Because right-wingers need an endless supply of “villains” to keep their supporters in a constant state of masturbatory rage? Sorry, that’s not a good enough reason to do a damn thing.

Finally, Civic Shout also helps you tell Rep. Tim Walberg (E-MI) to resign from Congress immediately. Rep. Walberg has already announced plans to tell everyone he’s just being oppressed for having reactionary, ahem, traditional opinions about gays, but, ah, no: he went to Uganda to tell Ugandan politicians to “stand firm” in support of laws that mandate the death penalty for folks in gay relationships. Even American homophobes generally don’t want to kill gays, but Rep. Walberg imagines he’s a martyr when he’s just objectively pro-murder. So, no, demanding his resignation ain’t about his “opinion.” And what a whiner! Will right-wingers ever stop whining?

Action: concerning immigration, clean water, and social media.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate Gov. Abbott’s anti-immigrant dramas, tell our EPA to get rid of all lead pipes in America, and tell social media corporations to better protect their users from political campaign lies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for human rights abuses. Like what, you ask? Like busing asylum-seekers to liberal cities, which may be juicy drama to right-wingers but is cruel to folks fleeing oppression in other lands; why, he even bussed asylum-seekers to Los Angeles as a tropical storm approached. Oh, and he also put razor wire in the Rio Grande and then literally pushed asylum-seekers back into the river. Anyone who uses people as pawns to prove a “point” is evil, especially like this. So let’s do something about it.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to switch out all the lead pipes in America. Because lead pipes leach lead into our drinking water and cause brain damage in our children! Most reasonable people would agree with that; some less reasonable people would try to convince you that we should leave it to the “free” market, which ha ha ha what a crock. But after Donald Trump told Iowa ralliers that we have to “get over” school shootings, how long before some other prick says we have to “get over” pollution? Hey, if I thought of it, I know they have.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell big social media corporations to better protect their users from election lies, while Eko helps you helps you tell Meta, specifically, to stop allowing ads claiming that elections in the U.S., Brazil, and Italy were “stolen.” Literally none of this should be controversial! It’s only “controversial” to folks who want to lie to you because otherwise you won’t vote for knuckle-draggers! And for “stolen” election lies, I have literally zero patience. Some folks whine like diaper-loaded brats whenever they don’t get their way; right-wingers have had us convinced for years that we call those people “liberals.” But no: they’re right-wingers.

Action: concerning health care, drama, and housing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to lower health care costs, stop their big-drama impeachments, and stop cutting funding for affordable housing. 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.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass legislation lowering health care costs and making them more transparent. Specifically, you’ll ask them to make hospitals disclose costs in dollars and cents – yeah, we have to actually tell them to do that – and mandate “site-neutral payments,” where a service costs the same whether it happened in a hospital or doctor’s office. How would folks argue against that? By saying the “free” market knows best and we must bend the knee to it? The “free” market sure doesn’t seem very free for good Americans, does it? One might even call it costly.

Daily Kos helps you tell House Republicans to stop their big-drama impeachments, while Civic Shout helps you tell House Republicans specifically to stop impeaching our DHS Secretary. Why are they impeaching Joe Biden? For drama, of course! And some of them have the gall to say they have to impeach him in order to find out why they’re impeaching him, which sure sounds like a fishing expedition, and don’t they have a government to fund past this month? They want to impeach Secretary Mayorkas over the border. I guess they find Brown folks really threatening!

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase, not cut, investment in housing assistance. These guys, I tell you – they don’t want any immigrants to come in unless their presence cuts wages for everyone, and they don’t want to help anyone stay out of the damn cold; it’s all pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps with them, as if landlords aren’t raising rents absurdly high because they can, as if homelessness ain’t up 12% over the last year, as if redlining still doesn’t keep Black and Brown folks from living where they want. But if we don’t speak out, the cruel and heartless will win. And the cruel and the heartless should never win.

Around the table: our sick, immoral, and decadent culture, part 876.

Back in late December Reuters published an excellent investigation of all the problems Tesla cars have been having – which the corporation has known about, and has been blaming on drivers. Ha ha ha it’s your fault your front right suspension has completely collapsed while you were driving! But we make the best cars! And come on, give us some room to grow, we haven’t been around for 400 years like Ford! This could only happen in an America where shareholder wealth is more important than customers’ lives.

French researchers find that hydroxychloroquine may have killed almost 17,000 folks, in six countries (Italy, Belgium, France, Turkey, Spain, and the United States) over a period of four months (March to July 2020) at pandemic’s beginning. One is tempted to say that must be a very small percentage of folks who died from COVID (the U.S. reached 2,000 deaths almost every day in April of 2020, for example), but you won’t find that reassuring if it happened to someone you love. What a hoot it was to have our President tell people to take it, saying “what do you have to lose?”

Americans for Tax Fairness study finds that Americans worth $100 million and up are holding an astounding $8.5 trillion in untaxed wealth. How is this possible? Because most ultra-rich wealth isn’t exactly liquid – it consists of unsold (or “unrealized”) real estate and hifalutin investments, which rich folks then use as collateral to take out low-interest loans to subsidize their lives (apparently adding five points to the prime interest rate didn’t stamp out these low-interest loans as I’d hoped). Thrilling that efforts to tap into this untaxed wealth “have virtually no support among Republicans.” Remember that if Donald Trump tries to run to Joe Biden’s left, because he’s shameless enough to do that.

When I hear that ISIS has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack on an Iranian ceremony (commemorating the Revolutionary Guard commander assassinated by President Trump in 2019), I am reminded that every fundamentalist thinks his fundamentalist forebears are sellouts. Remember when young right-wingers took shots at William F. Buckley, Jr., after he came out against the Iraq War? Like any of those little snot-noses would have been anything without him! Anyway, think the Tha Bush Mobb gamed out a member of the “Axis of Evil” finding itself in the crosshairs of a terrorist threat midwifed by the Iraq war? Of course they did! The “war on terror” is just the gift that keeps on giving! And it’s well past time we broke this wheel.

With the completely shocking news that FAA officials have ordered the grounding of over 170 Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliners after a window blew out on one of its planes while it was in the air, let’s take the wayback machine to 2019, when two Boeing 737 Max planed crashed in five months. You may not be surprised by the story’s critical elements: shareholder wealth being more important than customers’ lives, banksters running out engineers and making absurd demands of them because love of money. Yes, engineers should run more of America than they do. Certainly banksters shouldn’t! Banksters ruin everything!

You already know that Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley has lately omitted slavery while listing Civil War causes – but you may not know that she managed to deploy the phrase “I had Black friends growing up” in explaining that omission. Her larger point, apparently, was that slavery was so obvious it didn’t need to be mentioned. Of course describing slavery in the passive voice, i.e., “(i)t is a very talked about thing,” reveals that Nikki Haley fears offending assholes. Never fear offending assholes! Assholes live to be offended, and if you don’t offend them, they’ll just pretend you did!

Finally, Donald Trump actually claims that we could have “negotiated” the Civil War rather than fight it. Of course we should not “negotiate” enslaving Black men, women, and children – and that was why we fought the Civil War; just read President Lincoln’s private letters, in which he won’t STFU about how much he hates slavery and how happy he’ll be when it’s gone – but we should also remember that The Dealmaker only makes deals that benefit him, and he’d prefer making deals that benefit only him. Sadly, he’ll probably have the sense to skip over the next rhetorical step – World War II is something that could have been negotiated! You’d never have heard of Franklin Delano Roosevelt! – and just blame Teh Libruls for the Holocaust.

Action: concerning Social Security, Medicare, and the Israel/Palestine war.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any Social Security/Medicare “commission” and demand a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war. 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 reject any effort to create a Social Security or Medicare commission. Because we all know a better way to describe a Social Security or Medicare “commission” would be a Social Security or Medicare death panel, and unlike the “death panels” right-wingers whined about in 2009, these would be real death panels, dedicated solely to taking food out of our mouths. And the reason they’d create a death panel, instead of just putting things up to a vote? Because we’d stop that damn vote, that’s why! Also because they hate democracy. But mainly because we’d kill that death panel dead!

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war now. No, I won’t call it the “Israel/Hamas” war, because I know who the real targets of this war are: the good citizens of Palestine. You know, just like the real targets of the October 7 attack were those Israeli citizens who’d be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause! Yes, this issue is full of suck, but that fact doesn’t justify letting Mr. Netanyahu kill civilians indiscriminately. It’ll take “many more months” to destroy Hamas, he says? What a lie! He wants Hamas around forever! Otherwise, Israeli voters might fire him!

Action: concerning monopolies, price-gouging, and corporate Trumpholes.

Long story short: tell our FTC to block big oil mergers, tell big corporations to stop price-gouging, and denounce Home Depot’s founder for endorsing Donald Trump for President. 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 stop the proposed Chevron/Hess and Exxon/Pioneer Natural Resources mergers. Yeah, I always say “proposed” even though business “journalists” always treat proposed mergers like they’re done deals. Why, it’s like they want to brainwash you into accepting that they’re done deals! But they’re not, especially when our Federal Trade Commission seems to care about the pain corporate monopolies inflict on working families. Said pain includes lost jobs and higher prices, and I think good Americans have had enough of that in their lives.

In a related note, Civic Shout helps you tell big corporations to stop their price-gouging. Big corporations (which include monopolies) have the power to charge us whatever they want! Corporate lackeys like Larry Summers still say inflation and profits have nothing to do with each other, but when you see high inflation and record corporate profits at the same time, you know better. Does telling corporations to stop gouging us sound like a useless thing to do? Maybe it does. But we need to put them on notice that we know what they’re doing, and we also need to put them on notice that we’re watching what they’re doing.

Finally, Civic Shout also helps you denounce Home Depot’s founder for endorsing Donald Trump for President. Why, it’s like he doesn’t care that Donald Trump tried to overthrow our government! I guess we shouldn’t expect better from another “entrepreneur” who could never have made money back in the days we demanded that corporations account to all of us, and not just their shareholders. But it’s time they all felt the shame they deserve to feel. And then after that, how about we just not shop at Home Depot ever again? I bet there’s an Ace Hardware near you. And Ace Hardware stores are all co-ops!

Action: concerning the Child Tax Credit, medical debt, and IRS funding.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit without handing out more corporate welfare, cancel all medical debt in America, and fully fund our IRS. 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 expand the Child Tax Credit – but without tacking on the kinds of poison pill legislative riders they love to tack on to popular legislation. Like, you know, corporate welfare, which politicians call “tax breaks” or “tax incentives,” but which are really welfare handouts to the most undeserving “people” of all. And there’s no “you got yours, so I gotta get mine” argument to be made here – our Congressfolk aren’t supposed to “negotiate” with us, they’re supposed to do our will.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to cancel all medical debt in America. Right-wingers can’t even say if you didn’t want the debt, you shouldn’t have spent the money about medical debt! What do they want you to do, stay sick and then die? Wait, the answer to that question may not be rhetorical. But we don’t take on medical debt like we take on credit card debt – these days we too often find ourselves with medical debt because the boundaries of our health insurance networks changed without our knowing. Anyway, Congressfolk are such “Christians,” so how about they act like it for once?

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our IRS. Don’t believe the profoundly offensive horseshit that “now the IRS will go after little people.” Hello! Our IRS has only been going after “little people,” because they can’t afford lawyers like rich people can. Republicans are already bent on defunding our IRS – which you may read as “defunding the police” if you like, since that’s what it is – and they do that only because they do whatever their rich donors tell them to do. But if they hear enough from us, they’ll have a lot more trouble doing what they want to do.

Action: concerning drug prices, fake war images, and food safety.

Long story short: tell our government to fight high drug prices, tell Adobe to stop selling fake AI war images, and tell our government to improve food safety. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to take on big pharma corporations and their absurdly high-priced drugs. Specifically, you’ll ask HHS to enact the most vigorous “march-in” rules possible, so that when big pharma corporations overcharge for drugs our taxpayer money helped create – which, ha ha, is most drugs, because big pharma corporations are such socialists! – then our government can “march in” and license the drug to another corporation which’ll make it more cheaply. Because medicine shouldn’t be the kind of thing that costs an arm and a leg! Literally!

Win Without War helps you tell Adobe’s CEO to stop peddling fake AI-generated images of the Israel/Palestine war that have somehow made their way to our internet. Selling fake war images should pretty much strike everyone as, you know, wrong, but our big corporations are such cultural relativists, such postmodernists, and every right-winger who says corporations should be allowed to do whatever they want is thus also a cultural relativist and a postmodernist. I don’t find these terms offensive myself (OK, maybe “postmodernist”), but I know right-wingers do, and they deserve some of their own.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to improve food safety standards and practices. Because food poisoning always makes the news, and FDA officials say that existing food safety practices can’t prevent intentional food poisoning (as apparently happened with WanaBana products recently), so clearly they’ve got to up their game. And one more time: the existence of food poisoning does not prove that “government is bad” or “regulations are useless”; it merely proves that anything worth doing is hard work. We don’t shrink from hard work, do we?

Around the table: the truth is obvious, part 987.

Good news, everyone: America now produces 40% of its electricity without pumping out more carbon emissions. I’m old enough to remember when Alaska paced the nation in renewable energy with a mere 25%, that figure goosed up by the 80 zillion miles of coastline Alaska could use to develop hydropower. If right-wingers want to call our decreased dependence on coal a “war on coal,” they might want to address why no one calls the antibiotic era a “war on bacteria,” but they’ll probably just settle for posting alleged pictures of electric car graveyards, when electric cars are no more the be-all-end-all of renewable energy than ethanol production ever was.

Ho hum, despite right-wingers’ incessant attempts to claim that the January 6 rioters were “antifa,” everyone they accuse of being antifa turns out to be just another garden-variety Trumphole. Because they all keep saying they’re Trumpholes on social media! Of course right-wingers never cared about proving their point, but only asserting it enough times that tired people will just accept it. And they certainly don’t care about their point being disproven, because they’ll just ignore it and try to enrage people about something else.

the Wisconsin state Supreme Court has found state legislative maps unconstitutional, and will redraw districts themselves if the state legislature won’t. If you’ve noticed Democrats getting more total votes statewide in state legislative races yet still winning only one-third of the seats, you have already anticipated this outcome. And if you’re still hearing right-wingers whine about the court’s “partisanship,” then you know they have no shame. (As an aside, I wince whenever someone calls a state a “purple” state, because bruises are purple, too.)

Surprise, surprise, very, very few British citizens now think Brexit has really benefited their nation, and while I was never particularly against Brexit regardless of how many assholes also supported it, I also thought Greece needed to leave the EU way, way more than England did. Why, the EU let England keep their own currency! Anyway, anyone who believed the $350-million-more-for-health-care per week lie was a fool, though I’m sure most of the folks who mouthed it didn’t really believe it. But though I’m sure Brexit delivered victory to the Tories in 2019, I still think inflation will mean more to British voters than Brexit does now. If only today’s Labour party wasn’t somehow even worse than Tony Blair’s.

Bruce Schneier is about the only person I’d ever listen to about the possible benefits of Artificial Intelligence (or AI), and though I’m sure he’s absolutely right that AI can, in fact, streamline a lot of processes for the better, there’s a reason we think inside a lot of boxes concerning AI: because we understand that Our Glorious Elites will never give up power without a fight, and they’ll leverage AI only to keep that power, which means, at this stage of what folks optimistically call Late Capitalism, preserving their nearly-unlimited power to skim money off all our doings while sitting on their asses. And then they’ll just tell us to work harder if we don’t want to spend all our money on rent.

Trumpholes are threatening the lives of the Colorado state Supreme Court justices who struck him from that state’s primary ballot because of course they are. The best people support Donald Trump! And they include the kind of person who’d threaten someone’s life in an online forum composed only of dittoheads but who would never have the guts to kill someone in real life. I just can’t wait until these fools whine that their threats are somehow “free speech,” when our First Amendment doesn’t protect terroristic threats.

Finally, you weren’t wondering what Joe Lieberman was up to, but I feel compelled to note that he’s now stumping for third parties, and he sounds as stupid as ever. It’s easy to say “I’ve never seen this much anger at the two major parties” when you a) are perfectly happy to pretend righteous anger against Republicans and masturbatory rage against Democrats are the exact same thing and b) never, ever look for anything else that might be happening around you. And can we not call him a “maverick” in headlines, please? He spent a quarter-century in the Senate sucking up to corporate power; “mavericks” don’t do that.