Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning "free" trade, lead poisoning, and campaign finance disclosure.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk that any renegotiated NAFTA must put people before corporations, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. "Putting people before corporations" is a pretty simple principle, really, but right-wingers love to muck it up by suggesting that people can't live without corporations. And some tell you that having corporations around is much better than living in a feudal society, which I suppose it is, but of course the choice we actually face is not between "corporations controlling everything" and "literally being a serf," particularly when the first could bring back the second if we're not careful. These "free" trade deals sure do bring out the worst in Our Glorious Elites, who constantly use misdirection and absurd claims like "you can't fight globalism." But we're not fighting globalism so much as fighting evil -- and yes, evil is the word to describe trade pacts that nullify our laws and outsource our jobs.

Meanwhile, S. 3192 is named the CLEARR Act, which is unfortunate, not just because "clearr" isn't really a word, but because there's another CLEARR Act out there, an pro-bankster bill numbered H.R. 2133. S. 3192 isn't about banksters, but about getting lead out of our water -- the bill would help communities replace lead pipes, mandate our EPA to report results of lead tests online, and more stringently punish municipalities that don't get the lead out of their citizens' water. As you know, there is no "safe" level of lead poisoning, and lead poisoning causes irreversible brain damage in children, brain damage you may not be able to spot for yearss. And with lead pipes still being used all over America, all it takes is another unaccountable smartypants to decide to use cleaning chemicals that just so happen to corrode lead pipes to cause another Flint. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight lead poisoning by passing S. 3192.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6239/S. 3150, the DISCLOSE Act, then a consortium of good government groups (including Common Cause, Roots Action, and People for the American Way, among others) still helps you do that. Super PACs and dark money groups spent upwards of $1.4 billion in the 2016 election, and almost none of the groups that spent that money had to reveal their funders. And though we all fancy ourselves the kind of people who don't believe anything we see in campaign ads, we also know that a group with a lot of money can dominate the national conversation on TV, print, and radio. The DISCLOSE Act would actually shine some sunlight on the folks who are so determined to get their cronies elected that they'd spend millions of dollars doing it. As long as folks can spend millions without accountability, we're more likely to be stuck with bad leaders. And we, as Americans, deserve better than bad leaders.

Around the table: starring 3D-printed guns and the FCC hack that wasn't.

Jon Stokes at the Los Angeles Times reveals "The Boring Truth About 3D-Printed Guns." If you know that 3D printing is mostly about making knick-knacks right now, you probably guessed at least one boring truth: that making a gun out of plastic is a recipe for making a gun that fires maybe once before melting. You may not have known that the ability to make guns out of parts is not a new thing, or (even!) that putting gun blueprint files on the internet is not a new thing. In re what to do, Mr. Stokes comes to more or less the same conclusion as Thom Hartmann did earlier this year -- "(s)omething like a federal license for simple possession of semiautomatic weapons."

Ho hum, a Washington Post report finds that rents are still going up for poor folks in America's most expensive cities but actually dropping for rich folks. Because rich folks are landlords' kind of folks -- and what are poor folks going to do, live in the street? How many times must I tell these pimps! This is not how a free market operates! Truly free markets don't give landlords the "freedom" to extract as much tribute from renters as possible -- truly free markets reduce payments that exceed required costs. The economists' word for "payments that exceed required costs," as you may know, is rent.

Have we reached the point where anti-Nazi protestors will now vastly outnumber pro-Nazi protestors, as happened this past Sunday at the "Unite the Right" rally? We can only hope! But we ought to remain vigilant anyway, lest, oh, I don't know, hypothetically speaking, some future Presidential candidate who panders to racists and says nasty crap about black and brown people all the time somehow gets elected. (At least we had the spectacle of the rally's organizer whining that "I have people attacking me left, right and center" at a rally called Unite the Right.)

FCC Inspector General does, in fact, report that the FCC lied to Congress about a hack attack that never took place. Remember that this "hack" just so happened to take place the same two days that a crapload of Americans -- having just watched John Oliver's latest righteous rant on HBO about the matter -- took to the FCC website to comment on their net neutrality repeal proposal. And you know, FCC Chair Ajit Pai can talk all he want about those other people who failed him, but that only makes him just another boss who only acts like the boss when things are going well. A real boss would take responsibility for failures on his watch, too. Then again, see his boss, our President.

I don't know what you've heard, but scientists have most certainly not figured out how to reverse aging -- they've managed to stop individual cells from aging in laboratory experiments. Specifically, they've delivered very small amounts of hydrogen sulfide (found in rotten eggs!) to some very old cells and made them start dividing again; cells tend to stop dividing when they get old, and then they accumulate in organs, and adversely affect the functioning level of other, younger cells. Next step, I imagine: trying to figure out how to deliver hydrogen sulfide a) only where it's needed and b) in amounts that aren't poisonous. That means don't go around huffing rotten eggs so you can stay young.

Finally, Negin Owliaei at the Our Future blog describes how the good citizens of Lancaster County, PA kept the notorious private prison corporation Geo Group from taking over the country's prison re-entry function. How did they win, when clearly the county government stood against them? They planned townhall meetings and packed county commissioner meetings, that's how, because if there's one thing politicians don't like, it's the people they're supposed to serve getting all up in their grills, like they're supposed to do. I wish the good folks of Lancaster County luck, since they kept Geo out, but they still have to convince the county that what they had (a group of non-profits helping prisoners readjust once they got out) wasn't broke and thus doesn't need fixing.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, pollution, and whistleblowing.

Late last week, the Saudi-led coalition bombed a school bus in Yemen, killing upwards of 29 children. And our own Defense Department can't say whether the coalition used U.S.-supplied munitions to do the deed, or if we refueled the planes that dropped the bombs, because CENTCOM doesn't track these planes. I have to say that seems awfully convenient. And for decades Congress has let Presidents do pretty much what they like overseas, and even now is mulling a bill that would abdicate even more of their Constitutional responsibility to declare war. And if you thought this President would "be different" and "put America first" and "be laser-focused on fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS," recall that the Houthi rebels Saudi Arabia keeps fighting are some of the finest fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth. Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end American support for this undeclared and unconstitutional war that has put over two-thirds of Yemen's people in need of immediate humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, you know all about the nefarious "cost-benefit analysis" that right-wingers constantly use to say regulations are "too costly" for businesses? Well, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) is now proposing to make their cost-benefit analyses even worse, by forcing the EPA to consider the "harm" its regulations might do to corporate profits before considering the health benefits of its regulations. Scott Pruitt may be gone, but this particular proposal, somehow entitled "Increasing Consistency and Transparency in Considering Costs and Benefits in Rulemaking Process," surely comes from his gnarled hand. One can only hope that this particular Administration initiative, like so many of their pro-pollution initiatives, will die an ignominious death before a federal judge, but in the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell the EPA to reject its plan to put polluters before people, and mammon before life.

Finally, the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our government to do a considerably better job protecting whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing at the Veterans Administration. We can't reasonably blame this state of affairs on our most recent President, but on his predecessor, Barack Obama, who seemed to have a visceral hatred of whistleblowers across our government, including VA whistleblowers. But hatred of whistleblowers is a bit hard to understand on the face of it when you consider that a whistleblower's complaint will either be proven in a court of law or it won't; you may be tempted, as I am, to consider that our government must hate whistleblowers because our government can't win the argument on the merits. But we the people have an absolute, inviolate right to stop our government from screwing us over, and whistleblowers are often our only way of knowing our government's doing that. So, as civilized people, we protect whistleblowers with laws.

Around the table: from a dead merger to a still-going special election.

Good news, everyone! The Tribune Media Group withdraws from the proposed Sinclair-Tribune merger -- and also files $1 billion lawsuit against Sinclair, alleging misconduct that precluded government approval of the merger. One is tempted, a la Sen. Truman, to just say let them kill each other. But one is also tempted to wonder if FCC Chair Ajit Pai, in demanding that a judge review Sinclair's ownership arrangements and thus effectively scuttling the merger, has made himself look better if investigators look into his own contacts with Sinclair before approving loosened UHF media ownership rules that benefited Sinclair.

From Sally Hardin at TalkPoverty we learn that our Administration's rollback of fuel efficiency standards will cost the average working family about $500 annually in fuel costs. So when you hear folks regurgitate our Administration's line that new cars will cost $2,100 to $2,700 less, keep in mind that you'll probably have your car longer than the four or five years before you start losing money. Our Administration valuing the short term over the long term; what a surprise! (But after you do that math, don't forget to heap on all the health care costs from all the added pollution we're going to have.)

Speaking of extremely surprising things, our FBI arrests U.S. Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) for insider trading. Mr. Collins could be overheard on the House floor last year declaring his intention to sell off some big pharma stock the day before that corporation announced the failure of a study involving its MS drug, but if you recall that Mr. Collins bought up $2 million worth of big pharma stock shortly before writing a bill speeding up FDA consideration of drugs -- and then bought another $1 million of stock after that bill passed! -- this arrest will seem, well, doubly unsurprising.

Ipsos poll finds 43% of Republicans think our President should be able to "close news outlets engaged in bad behavior." Presumably not with a la carte cable packaging, since that would be an example of the people closing down news outlets engaged in bad behavior. The good news? When you mention specific media nemeses like the Washington Post and the New York Times, the number goes down to 23%, and since about 25% of the American electorate will sign on to any noxious program as long as it diddles their rage glands, that number might actually represent progress.

Missouri voters repeal, by a 2-1 margin, the legislature's recent "right-to-work" law. That's right, 67 percent of voters hated "right-to-work" badly enough that they came out on a primary Tuesday to defeat it. And why were they voting on the repeal on primary day, versus, you know, Election Day? Typically because right-wing voters turn out more heavily for primaries than liberals do. So the "right-to-work" forces couldn't win even when they stacked the deck. Good job, Missouri!

Finally, Democrat Danny O'Connor still trails Republican Troy Balderson by less than a percentage point in the U.S. House special election in Ohio's 12th, but while Our Glorious Elites wonder how a Republican could almost-lose a district the party has normally won by 20 points or more since 1982, I wonder if, one one hand, maybe folks aren't as mad at Republicans as they were when Conor Lamb won the PA-18 special, but on the other hand, anyone who's willing to not-STFU about health care can make a race close just about anywhere. Then again, on the other other hand, maybe a straight-talking socialist could have beaten the Republican outright, conservatism being, these days, less a matter of substance than tone.

Action: concerning Social Security, taxes, and drilling on public lands.

You've heard of the Republican plan to fund a paid family leave plan with Social Security benefits, resulting in you getting less money when you retire if you've ever used paid family leave? Now it's a real bill! It's S. 3345, with no text or summary presently available at Congress.gov, which could be because, hey, this is a bill that robs your future Social Security benefits if you want paid family leave now. After all, where on Earth else could we possibly get the money to do that? From that $1.7 trillion tax "cut" giveaway to the rich Republicans enacted in December, maybe? Or even from the infinitesimally small payroll tax that would fund an actual paid family leave bill, S. 337, where folks making $50,000 annually would pay $8.50 a month. $8.50 a month! I've seen single servings of coffee that cost more than that! So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Rubio rob-the-future-to-pay-now plan -- doesn't sound very conservative when put like that, does it? -- and Moms Rising still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 337, the FAMILY Act, since that's a real paid family leave bill.

Meanwhile, speaking of that Republican tax scam, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and reject any further tax-cuts-for-the-rich Republicans (or our President) might contemplate. The Senate's talking about more tax cuts like there's no time for that, but don't you believe it -- if the House puts together a bill quickly enough, they'll move heaven and Earth to give more welfare handouts to their cronies. The massive corporate tax cut did not, as our President suggested, put $4,000 in every family's paycheck -- but it did result in a lot of massive stock buybacks, which concentrates power in corporate executive hands, because, yeah, they just don't have enough power already. And that 4% GDP growth from last quarter? You're not seeing any of that in your paycheck, either. You see, this is why America can't have nice things like paid family leave -- because our government cares more about its cronies than its owners, i.e., the American people. We'll just have to learn 'em.

Finally, our Administration plans to auction off two million acres of public land in six Western states so that gas and oil drillers can pollute it create jobs wean America off foreign oil redistribute yet more of our wealth as Americans upward, to themselves. Hence WildEarth Guardians helps you tell our Administration to scuttle these plans. We could go on (and we have!) about how gas and oil drilling spoil clean air and clean water, etc., and spoil wildlife habitat, etc., and these are very important things, but gas and oil drilling also put public lands off-limits to those members of the public who love the great outdoors. Surely it was love of the great outdoors (I doubt he conceived of pollution the way we do now) that moved the first President Roosevelt to start establishing national parks and monuments in the first place. How far we've fallen from him to our current President, the Whiner-in-Chief, for whom now is all and the future is for losers.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, campaign finance reform, and endangered species.

You already know that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh thinks Presidents should be exempt from criminal proceedings while in office because they're just so busy. But Judge Kavanaugh has also argued that our Presidents can simply ignore laws they believe unconstitutional, and that courts would then have to force them to comply. You can too easily imagine a President concocting such a "belief" in order to avoid executing the people's will. And the fact that "signing statements" existed before today doesn't justify actual unconstitutional behavior from our Presidents. Hence another reason to call your Senators and tell them to oppose the Kavanaugh nomination. Our Whiner-in-Chief acts like law and order is for "little people" like us and keeps "busy" watching Fox News and twittering hateful, noxious crap; he surely doesn't need another enabler on our Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Issue One helps you tell the Federal Election Commission (or FEC) to prohibit "personal use" of candidate leadership PAC money. Leadership PACs have been around since 1978, so that candidates can donate money to other candidates (which our Supreme Court will no doubt call a First Amendment right if they ever evaluate the matter!), but in practice, leadership PAC money far too often winds up funding expensive dinners, golf outings, Broadway musical tickets, five-star hotel stays, and vacations to foreign lands. Candidates will claim that was all "work," but we're not schmucks, not least because we know what work is actually like. And I bet they also claim that they just "have" to spend all that money on expensive outings with power players in order to do a good job. But you don't have to do that to do a good job; you need only stay in touch with your constituents. And big outings with rich people ain't "staying in touch with your constituents."

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to stop trying to weaken Endangered Species Act protections, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Congress hasn't been able to gut the Endangered Species Act, even when Republicans run the whole show, for one reason: killing off endangered species so big corporations can put yet another coal or copper or gold mine in the ground is actually very unpopular. Hence our Administration makes a series of obscure-sounding tweaks to Endangered Species Act enforcement -- allowing "economic costs" to be tabulated when deciding how to protect endangered and threatened species, allowing federal agencies to ignore scientific data before handing out oil and gas drilling leases -- that will be just as harmful as previous "reform" efforts coming out of Congress. Luckily politicians don't get all the say about everything: we do. But only if we speak out.

Around the table: with another reminder that you can't eat GDP.

Actual economist Dean Baker explains why last quarter's GDP growth was not "amazing." Long story short: two quarters of 2015 surpassed it, and even President Carter had a quarter with four times the GDP growth of this past one. Long story somewhat longer: we're not seeing wage growth along with GDP growth, we're not even seeing investment growth in significant amounts, and the rich are getting most of the benefits from the Republican tax scam. Remember, kids: you can't eat GDP.

Dan Alexander at Forbes suggests that our Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, has demonstrated a "Pattern of Grifting" at his businesses. Out of the over $120 million Mr. Ross might have stolen, if all the multitudinous complaints against him are true, he's paid at least $12 million in settlements and fines, plus his corporation returned $12 million to investors as part of an SEC settlement in 2016. Given how well his corporation was doing in 2016 (i.e., not), perhaps Mr. Ross looked at our President as an escape hatch. And maybe our President looked at Mr. Ross and saw a kindred spirit!

Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) says Republicans made a "big mistake" in trying to "reform" health care first. He's absolutely right that health care was tactically the wrong thing to try to do first, and maybe even that health care "reform" (recall that Mr. Heller's name was also on the notorious Graham-Kennedy bill that comprised the Senate's second failed health care "reform" bill) could have passed if they'd done taxes first. I suppose if you're conspiracy-minded, you'd find it odd that Republicans tried to do that first, since surely they knew the "resistance" had already made defending the Affordable Care Act its top priority.

Add Jonathan Last to the list of right-wingers who think Democrats can win in 2020 by going considerably further left. I disagree strongly, of course, that Howard Dean is all that liberal (he was, after all, the only state governor who chose to balance his state's budget during the '90s!) or that Barack Obama is all that liberal (n.b. virtually everything I've ever said about him), but Mr. Last's thesis that the more "mainstream" candidate tends to lose does map fairly well onto my thesis that the candidate who seems less like a politician tends to win, even if I would quarrel with how he describes many of these candidates (Mr. Mondale was the more liberal alternative in 1984 even if he was also the more "mainstream" one, and Mr. Bush the Lesser posed as a moderate in 2000 before governing as a far right-winger).

Finally, in advance of an Inspector General report on the matter, FCC Chair Ajit Pai admits that last year's alleged hack of the FCC's commenting system during its net neutrality repeal process never actually happened. And of course Mr. Pai blames underlings and the Obama Administration, just like his boss. He's gotta hope that he's slung so much fecal matter against the wall that a court hearing challenges to his net neutrality repeal won't be able to keep up -- also, just like his boss.

Action: concerning voting rights, "free" trade, and money bail.

The Voting Rights Act turned 53 yesterday, and that's as good an occasion as any to remind you to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2978/S. 1419, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, as CREDO helps you do. As you know, our Supreme Court gutted Sec. 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, ruling that it unfairly targeted Southern states -- but the Court all but invited Congress to replace Sec. 4(b) with a provision that doesn't unfairly target Southern states. The Voting Rights Advancement Act should satisfy the Court's interpretation, by requiring any state or municipality, from anywhere in the country, with an established record of voter suppression to submit election law changes to our Department of Justice for pre-clearance. I often say voting is the beginning of your duty as a citizen, but if you can't vote, it's a lot harder to get representatives who won't screw you over repeatedly. So we need the strong protections of the Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that NAFTA renegotiations are coming to a close, so Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that any trade deal America signs works for people, not corporations. Specifically, you'll demand an end to the "investor-state dispute settlement" system that nullifies our laws and extracts tribute from the taxpayer for the heinous crime of passing laws that "cost" investors money -- as if money is the only thing that matters in this world! -- and you'll demand better labor and environmental standards, which will dissuade American corporations from moving factories down to Mexico. In other words, you'll be supporting real law and order in America, a law and order that puts people ahead of money and action ahead of posturing. I know, I know, our Whiner-in-Chief loves posturing more than anything, which makes me think that (despite encouraging reports!) we're in for disappointment. But he ain't the last word on anything; we are.

Finally, H.R. 1437/S. 3271, the No Money Bail Act, would (as its title suggests!) outlaw the use of bail money as a condition for pre-trail release. If you read that sentence and you feel you're about to blow a gasket, maybe you should never navigate to this page again. But if you read that sentence and are willing to think about it for a minute, you'll see that a) it costs money to hold people in prison, so municipalities aren't exactly making out like bandits here, and b) holding people in jail before their trial violates the whole principle of innocent-until-proven-guilty that underpins our entire judicial system. That's before you get to the fact that most folks who can't buy their way out of prison are poor and/or black or brown, meaning the whole money bail system is what, folks? Classist and racist, that's what. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support real criminal justice reform by passing the No Money Bail Act.

Action: concerning government spying, agricultural pollutants, and antibiotic abuse.

In our Transportation Safety Authority's "Quiet Skies" program, federal air marshals spy on "suspicious" airplane passengers in a putative effort to stop terror attacks. What's that, you say? You've never been charged with a crime? You're not on one of those notorious terrorist "watch lists"? Doesn't matter -- if you ever got a tattoo, or fell asleep on a plane, or stared out into space, "Quiet Skies" might be spying on you. So Demand Progress helps you tell the TSA to end this fishing expedition known as "Quiet Skies." Because a fishing expedition is what this is -- it allows our government to collect information on Americans they couldn't otherwise collect, and once they have this information, they can use it to harass us whenever they want to look like they're "doing something." And it also dumps mountains of useless info on folks who actually fight terror. If it violates our rights and it doesn't work, then our government shouldn't do it.

Meanwhile, Monsanto's brand of the herbicide dicamba, rather pretentiously called XTendiMax, continues to leave a trail of death wherever it goes -- and because it gets into the air pretty easily, it sure does go a lot of places. Dicamba has been around for half a century, but Monsanto is the first corporation to create a version of dicamba for use specifically with (sigh) Monsanto's own genetically-altered dicamba-resistant crops -- and Monsanto may also be the first corporation to forbid independent scientists from, you guessed it, testing its ability to drift to other fields! Even with that revelation, we're probably going to see a lot more of dicamba this year -- except in Arkansas, which last year banned it from use during the growing season. Hey, that should give your state ideas! Environmental Action helps you tell your state's governor to ban dicamba within your state.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 3099, the Strengthening Antibiotic Oversight Act, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Their latest email missive puts it in a fairly succinct and original way: "(w)hen you're prescribed antibiotics, they always come with clear instructions and a defined dose. There are few instances in human medicine where prolonged antibiotic use would be appropriate. We should apply the same standard to farming." Yes, we should -- particularly when at least 7 in 10 antibiotics in America go not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy farm animals, and if you're surprised we haven't seen more antibiotic-resistant superbugs after fully digesting that fact, well, you're not alone. Oftentimes we feel alone when we fight antibiotic abuse, but we're not -- and we need to remind our Congressfolk of that, again and again and again.

Around the table: from a potential war averted to the conspiracy theory you can't escape.

Alex Emmons at The Intercept informs us that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson may have been fired not for criticizing Russia, but for actively opposing Saudi Arabia's apparent lust for war with Qatar. Which recommends him, if true. I didn't even need Mr. Emmons to remind me that of course our President said last year that Qatar "has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level." But I'm not sure I'd lay even a scintilla of blame for this still-possible war on Saudi Arabia's "'cradle to grave' welfare system" which "relies on high oil prices," since surely other, far less palatable Saudi Arabian programs also rely on high oil prices.

From Victoria Law at Wired we learn about JPay, an email messaging corporation that seems to be gouging prisoners and their families. JPay charges 47-cent "stamps" for each e-message going in or out, and has a virtual monopoly on this "market"; sadly a lot of "free" marketeers think this is how it's supposed to work, "freedom" apparently including the "freedom" to rig the game to keep a competitor from reaping the reward of doing a better job, and I presume they also think tapping a literally captive market in this manner (which includes kickbacks to the prisons) is clever and not exploitative. Luckily the rest of us find the whole concept of paying to send an email offensive.

Ho hum, then-Senator-now-Attorney-General Jeff Sessions was in up to his neck with two men convicted in a bribery trial. All three men were trying to keep the EPA from making an Alabama coal corporation pay to clean up a (mostly black) area of North Birmingham, and though two of them are now in jail, the EPA still hasn't cleaned the area up, or made the coal corporation pay for the cleanup (and Mr. Sessions still hasn't said if he has recused himself from any potential Justice Department investigation of the matter). It's hard to reassure folks with higher levels of cancer and respiratory ailments, folks who've been told not to let their kids play outside, that at least two bad man went to jail for bribery.

When you read about the battle to fight water privatization in El Salvador, and you hear both political parties mouth platitudes about their opposition to privatization though it's the obvious goal of one if not both of them, I wouldn't blame you for thinking about how things are here in America, where both parties declare their devotion to getting citizens good health care when taking away citizens' good health care is the obvious goal of one if not both of them. The good news? Over 250 communities around the world are taking back their water -- and just in time, too, as climate change wreaks its havoc. Our Glorious Elites still want to privatize everything, of course, but folks are wiser to their schemes now.

Finally, in case you were wondering, here's what all that QAnon stuff is all about. Long story short: it's the kind of conspiracy theory gobbledygook (apparently our military appointed the Whiner-in-Chief President so he could destroy a massive, government-run child pederasty ring) that's detail-free enough to allow, shall we say, a lot of imagination -- enough that its votaries can confidently say every piece of contradictory evidence is actually supporting evidence in disguise. I suppose I'd be more inclined to believe that Our Glorious Elites foisted QAnon upon us just to cause more chaos, since chaos is the only thing Republicans can count on to win elections anymore.

Around the table: more bad people doing bad things (plus the Michigan Supreme Court doing an actual good thing).

When you hear that our President wants to build a big border wall but still relies on foreign guest workers, I guess it's easy to nod your head and move on, but read David L. Wilson's article about the matter at TruthOut anyway, because it's very good -- among so, so many other things, you'll learn that some folks want to allow guest workers to come here year-round, which would destroy the only convincing argument for using guest workers in the first place, that their work is "seasonal." And it's not that convincing an argument, either -- school teachers' work is "seasonal," but we haven't exactly done irreparable harm to our civilization by giving them permanent employment.

Ho hum, CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney slashed fines for at least three out of five civil settlements against financial predators. Remember, of course, that oftentimes these fines don't go into our government's pocket but into the pockets of people who have been wronged by financial institutions, so the reduced fines don't just injure law and order, they injure civilization -- after all, we don't just punish wrongdoers, but we also make them make things right with the people they wronged. By the time you read about all the whining wrongdoers do about being poor, you'll start to think Mick Mulvaney is actually trying to become the biggest asshole in this Administration. Which is a high bar to clear.

Jessica Huseman and Blake Paterson at ProPublica and the Kansas City Star tell the story of how Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (now running for Governor) used failed anti-immigration ordinances in several small towns across America to make himself quite a pile of money. One bamboozled local official compared him to Harold Hill from The Music Man (which surely makes Mr. Hill spin in his fictional grave), going from town to town saying he could get anti-immigration ordinances passed and beat the ACLU in court when they inevitably sued; he left a trail of defeated and/or gutted ordinances in his wake, but not before extracting quite the hefty fees from the towns. In other words, he transmuted failure into millions of dollars. No wonder our President loves him! (As an aside, maybe Sen. Casey should pay attention to how his 2018 Senate opponent helped bankrupt the city of Hazleton with Mr. Kobach's help.)

Our Justice Department is investigating whether five big pharma/medical device corporations knew that the free medicine and supplies they gave to the Iraqi government back in 2004 would wind up funding terrorist activities that killed Americans there. The defendants' response? That our government "expressly encouraged" those freebies -- and that might be enough to get them off, which sure will warm the hearts of the families of dead soldiers who filed the suit to begin with. Add that to the list of things that would never have happened if Tha Bush Mobb didn't bully America into Iraq. You know that list? The one that starts off with "ISIS"?

Good news, everyone! The Michigan Supreme Court allows a redistricting initiative to appear on this November's ballot. Well, that's what Republicans get for bragging about how thoroughly they've gerrymandered Congressional districts! The other side's argument -- that something this far-ranging should really be decided in a constitutional convention -- will seem odd to you if you've noticed that a lot of constitutional amendments get passed without one. Now let's just hope the legislature doesn't decide to gut it in a lame-duck session, as they did when Michigan voters repealed their "emergency manager" law in 2012.

Finally, our President's daughter says that her father's "zero tolerance" policy that separated parents and children at the border was a "low point" for her. Why, I bet it was a "low point" for those parents and children who got separated, too! Not that she'd have done anything differently, since the issue is "incredibly complex" and "incredibly complicated" and (as the lawless always say!) "we are a country of laws," and, perhaps worst of all, that we shouldn't be "incentivizing" bad "behavior" by, you know, treating people humanely. That's how evil people get good people to go along with bad ideas! But the issue of immigration is actually not "incredibly complicated" -- rich jerks like her father want to be racist and pay foreign workers in dung pellets at the same time, and if we stop "incentivizing" that "behavior," we will go a very long way toward resolving the issue.

Action: concerning fuel efficiency, private prisons, and detainment.

Our Administration has proposed freezing fuel efficiency standards after 2021, and they also want to stop letting California set stronger emission standards, because hippie-punching. But get a load of this pile of dung: they claim that if cars get more miles to the gallon, folks will drive more and therefore expose themselves to more danger. By that logic, we should never do anything that helps people live longer, because they'll just "put themselves at more risk" with all that extra life! (The Administration is also wrong that lighter cars necessarily lead to more deaths in crashes, but then they don't appreciate science, or subtlety.) Our laws require they still take public comments on their plan, and Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, and Penn Environment all help you do that. Seriously, paying more for gas and pumping more filth into our air: who looks at that and says, yeah, great program? Only our 46% President and his enablers.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big banks to divest from private prison corporations, then both Moms Rising and the Courage Campaign still helps you do that. You may want to remind big banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase that they're making money off putting kids in jail, since private prisons handle most of our government's immigrant detainment functions, and since our President's notorious "zero tolerance" policy has had the side effect (or, possibly, "side effect") of putting a lot of immigrant children in detention. You'll also be reminded, if you read that previous sentence carefully, that letting private corporations handle government functions is a terrible idea -- putting people in prison is our job as a democracy, after all, so our government should handle it on our behalf, not farm it out to some corporation that only cares about enrich its CEOs. So cutting off their money supply would be a good work.

Finally, S. 3225, the Stop Shackling and Detaining Pregnant Women Act, would prevent our government from detaining pregnant immigrant women except under narrow circumstances -- if "credible, reasonable grounds exist to believe that the person presents an immediate and serious threat of hurting herself or others," per Sec. 2(a)(2) -- and would also prevent our government from using restraints on such women, with similar exceptions. S. 3225 would also require detention centers to give pregnant women the health care they need, which right-wingers would like, right, since they're all about caring for babies and such? I mean, if we are the nation that sets an example for the world, then let's be the nation that says "we take care of pregnant immigrants while we're figuring out whether to let them in." Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote our better natures by passing the Stop Shackling and Detaining Pregnant Women Act.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court and corporate crime.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to reject the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court, then you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers. Note well that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), after signaling some skepticism about the Kavanaugh nomination, now says he'll support the nomination, which, given Mr. Paul's history, is very, very far from a surprise. And, as Gene Healy at The American Conservative says, "the further he got from his service in Ken Starr’s office, the more Kavanaugh wanted the president cloaked in special immunities from civil suit and criminal investigation." His supporters would perhaps call that "maturity," but I'd call it "discarding your values because they inconvenience you," which should be a cardinal sin in America.

Meanwhile, as many Americans have observed, our Administration's Justice Department is all "tough on crime" and "law and order" and "zero tolerance" when it comes to violent crime and undocumented immigrants -- but not when it comes to corporate crimes like pollution, discrimination, and financial predation. Just about every regulatory agency does less law enforcement than it did even under the center-right President Barack Obama, and EPA finds, in particular, have dropped an eye-popping 94 percent during this Administration's first year. Why, the Comptroller of the Currency says the banks are his agency's "customers"! When will the American people become our government's "customers," I wonder? Public Citizen helps you tell our President and our Justice Department to stop looking at corporations as "partners" and start enforcing the laws that would restrain them from harming our country. Leadership: it's not actually that hard.

Action: concerning Medicare, dangerous chemicals, and campaign finance disclosure.

Yesterday was Medicare's 53rd birthday. In just 12 more years, it'll be old enough to get Medicare! But our Congressfolk seem determined to destroy Medicare before it reaches that milestone, what with Speaker Ryan's repeated voucherization votes and our House's budget proposing even more benefit cuts than our President has proposed. As Paul Craig Roberts said many years ago: our elites have stolen everything else, so our so-called "entitlement" programs (how generous of them, to let us feel "entitled" to the things we've fought for!) are all that's left. But, as I've said before: we worked for it, paid into it, and fought for it, and we deserve to have it when we need it; hence the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen, not cut, Medicare, Medicaid, and other services -- and pay for it by repealing last year's tax-cuts-for-the-rich.

Meanwhile, the EPA found in 2014 that the chemical trichloroethylene (or TCE) presents excessive risks to workers and consumers, and in 2016 proposed to ban its use in various industrial processes (including spot cleaning at dry cleaners). But then a little catastrophe called the 2016 Presidential election happened, and guess what? Our Administration is doing its damnedest to stall implementation of proposed TCE bans, this even though TCE is carcinogenic and toxic to our brain, kidneys, and immune system, and seems to turn up an awful lot at Superfund sites. Chances are that a federal court will tell the EPA to stop delaying already (and our Supreme Court won't weigh in on the matter even if asked), but why rely on that, when we can rely on people power? So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect their bosses -- i.e., us, the American people -- from the known health effects of TCE.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6239/S. 3150, the DISCLOSE Act, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Fact is our elected representatives don't listen to us and don't ever seem to pay much of a price for their failure -- folks want better health insurance, politicians say no; folks want corporations and rich folk to pay their share of taxes, politicians say no; folks want government to protect them from financial predators, politicians say no, and politicians rarely lose elections for their dereliction of their duty. And campaign finance is probably the biggest reason politicians don't do their jobs -- it's easier to do the will of big donors who guarantee funding for ad campaigns. The Supreme Court calls this state of affairs "free speech," but we can still shine a light on big campaign donors. Even if they claim to feel "bullied" by it.

Around the table: the real "cost" of single-payer, revealed! And other tales.

Did you know that a Koch brothers-funded "think tank" just said that Sen. Sanders's Medicare-for-All plan would reduce health care costs and boost worker wages? Well, they did! Of course, they didn't, ah, foreground that information -- they foregrounded the ZOMG TEH COSTZ OF TEH $32 TRILLYUNZ!!!!!! scare number, a number that covers ten years of spending and doesn't account for the fact that projections of current health care spending already have us spending a lot more than that. A pair of single-payer advocates also argue that the Koch-backed study underestimates the savings from a Medicare-for-All plan. Still, now you get to tell your right-wing uncle that even the Koch brothers think letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices will save almost $85 billion annually. Hey, they said it.

Ho hum, our Treasury Secretary thinks he may be able to deliver yet another tax-cut-to-the-rich without those pesky people's representatives in Congress having anything to do with it. Every time someone proposes some kind of capital gains tax cut, they say it'll goose up revenues big-time because a lot of people will sell their houses and such, but people sell their houses for a lot of reasons -- many of them even having to do with their family's needs! -- and the "windfall" (if it materializes!) never lasts long. For all that, I wouldn't mind indexing initial house purchase prices to inflation for the purpose of giving working families a capital gains tax cut when they sell their house. But I'd cap it at one property annually and $250,000 in an inflation-adjusted initial house investment, since we don't want to make our economy's addiction to property churning (which basically only benefits banksters) any worse than it already is now.

Jana Winters at the Boston Globe describes the Transportation Safety Authority's "Quiet Skies" surveillance program, in which federal air marshals spy on air travelers who haven't been accused of or charged with a crime. Ever use a laptop on an airplane, or have a "cold penetrating stare"? Then you might have been spied upon by a federal marshal! Don't politicians understand that Philip K. Dick novels are dystopian works, and not operations manuals? The good news: more than a few federal air marshals also think this is all bullshit.

Simon Davis-Cohen writes, in an admirably restrained manner I think, about the FirstNet network, a sort of "internet superhighway" "built specifically for police and public safety." Given the troubles Rekognition is having in, well, rekognizing people, you won't be impressed to learn that a police officer could, one day, take a photo of someone on his cellphone and find out if that someone is in a gang database, and not just because gang databases tend to be full of people who haven't actually committed any crimes. And, seriously, just because it's The Future doesn't mean Americans suddenly don't have habeus corpus rights anymore.

Finally, our distinguished President, proving he's no better than any other politician, claims that our media are "very unpatriotic" for "reveal(ing) internal deliberations of our government." He knows he works for us, right? And that he is not literally America, right? Oh, but he goes on to say "(f)reedom of the press comes with a responsibility to report the news accurately," quickly following with "90% of media coverage of my Administration is negative," as if you won't notice his casual equation of "accuracy" with a lack of "negative" coverage. Maybe Dr. Johnson was right, and patriotism really is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Action: concerning farmworkers' rights, humane treatment of prisoners, and EPA science.

I've long complained about farmworkers being left out of the worker protections the rest of us enjoy under the law, but H.R. 6230/S. 3131, the Fairness for Farm Workers Act, would begin to fix that, by repealing those parts of the Fair Labor Standards Act that exempt farmworkers from minimum wage and maximum work laws. When your Tea Party uncle squeals BUT WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH SMALL BIZNINZZIZ!!!!!, remind him that Secs. 2(a) and 2(c)(1)(B) and 2(c)(2)(B) all give farms with fewer than 25 workers three more years to get their act together; when he squeals BUT WHATZ ABOUT TEH FAMILY FARMZ!!!!!, merely point him to Sec. 2(b)(1), which allows arrangements between actual family farm owners and their immediate family members to continue. All we need now is a bill that'll let farmworkers unionize, and we'll have justice! The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support fair wage and hour standards for farm workers by passing the Fairness for Farm Workers Act.

Meanwhile, Roots Action helps you tell the Virginia Department of Corrections to release Kevin "Rashid" Johnson from solitary confinement and to stop moving him to other prisons out of state. Why? Because Mr. Johnson has spent much of his last 30 years in prison exposing abuses by prison administrators and staff -- which means he's also spent much of his time getting threatened, beaten up, and put in solitary for no good reason, not to mention getting moved to prisons in three other states between 2012 and 2018. All without actually charging him with anything! Seriously, if we want prisoners to do better for themselves and for their communities, then we shouldn't terrorize them when they actually do better for themselves and for their communities. But the Virginia Department of Corrections seems determined to teach Mr. Johnson (and everyone else!) that the only thing that matters is the state's self-interest. And that's not what a sane and moral society does.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to scuttle its proposal to radically reduce the amount of good science it can use to make policy decisions, then Breast Cancer Action still helps you do that. You know the drill: the EPA says it only wants to use "publicly-available" scientific research to make decisions about pollution in our air and water, but if you saw the words "publicly-available" and said well, that doesn't necessarily mean best, good for you. In this case, "publicly-available" kinda means the opposite of good -- plenty of good scientific research isn't "publicly-available" because it has good Americans' private health into and medical records in it. What would the end result be, then? More pollution, more health care issues, and a lot more money flying into fossil fuel CEO pockets so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. Why must it be this way?

Action: concerning a frivolous lawsuit, a "free" trade deal, and an evil war.

First things first: in what might be the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit, MGM is actually suing a thousand victims of last year's Las Vegas mass shooting, hoping to immunize itself from lawsuits those victims are filing. I suspect MGM's suit would likely fail in court -- the law in question, the 2002 SAFETY Act, would more likely immunize the security corporation MGM hired to cover the country music concert at which the mass shooting happened than it would immunize MGM. But winning probably isn't the point -- intimidating mass shooting victims into dropping lawsuits against MGM is probably the point. Which makes it a SLAPP lawsuit in addition to a frivolous one. And which puts mass shooting victims through the emotional ringer again, as if they haven't fucking suffered enough. Hence Melissa Holmes has started a petition at Change.org which helps you tell country music artists to boycott MGM until it drops its pre-emptive lawsuit stratagem.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk that any renegotiated NAFTA must serve the American people, not corporations, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. The harms "free" trade have done to good Americans are real -- not just in lost jobs, lost wages, and more pollution, but also in the nefarious "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system, which not only lets big corporations sue the American taxpayer for having the temerity to pass some labor or environmental legislation that "cost" them money, but allows those corporations to exact tribute from the American taxpayer for their "losses." Look, either entrepreneurs are our best and brightest or they constantly need bailouts from the taxpayer, but not both. And if "law and order" means anything, it certainly means "not letting external tribunals nullify our laws because it gave some corporate shareholder a sad." Seriously, you can't be "tough" and a weakling at the same time.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop American participation in the Saudi-UAE bombing campaign of the Yemeni port of Hodeidah -- an act which puts millions more good Yemeni at risk of famine -- then Just Foreign Policy and Change.org still help you do that. Our Congressfolk seem to inch ever closer to maybe voting against any further participation by our nation in the Saudi-UAE war against Yemen, but like Zeno's arrow they never hit their target, almost as if that's the whole idea. All we can do is tell them to stop supporting a war in which Congress never authorized our participation, a war that has caused unbearable pain and hardship for the Yemeni people, a war which just so happens to be killing off some of the best al-Qaeda fighters in the world (those being the Houthi rebels the Saudi-UAE coalition is so hot to exterminate). Seriously, when are we going to be smart in the Middle East?

Around the table: what "tough on crime" actually means to our Administration, and other sorrows.

U.S. District Court judge allows D.C. and Maryland attorneys general to proceed with a lawsuit against our President for violating the emoluments clause of our Constitution. Dig our President's argument that "the Founding Fathers had written this clause to stop officials from taking bribes — but not to stop them from doing business." Those of us who think public service is more important than making craploads of money won't be impressed with that. (If Mr. Kavanaugh ascends to the Supreme Court, though, I bet this story will have a happy ending for our President.)

As our President does a Jeff George Victory Lap about a 4.1% second-quarter GDP growth, Jake Johnson at Common Dreams reminds us that most of that largesse is going where it's been going for years -- to the rich. As you may recall, wages have actually gone down over the last year, so if you're looking for that $4,000 raise you were supposed to get from corporate tax cuts, I think it's safe to say you can stop looking. (As an aside, "you can't eat GDP" should be, like, the greatest Twitter hashtag, ever. I'll get on it.)

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reminds us that our Administration's "tough-on-crime" approach most certainly does not extend to corporate lawbreakers. This won't surprise you if you remember how many health-and-safety citations our President's Mar-a-Lago resort has received over the years, or even if you've noticed, ah, how many folks Mr. Mueller has indicted and/or convicted already. But it sure does seem like this Administration thinks rule are for "the little people," i.e., us, and not for the "important people," i.e., them. You might call that elitist. You might also call it un-American.

If you weren't already ROFLing over Joe Freaking Lieberman trying to advise Democrats not to embrace socialists, Branko Marcetic at Jacobin reminds us exactly how noxious Mr. Lieberman's four-term career in the Senate was. He ran to Lowell Weicker's right because he always was to Lowell Weicker's right, and he never met a "war on terror" he didn't like, but I think he was at his worst on health care, constantly moving the goal posts so he could scuttle the Clintonian reform plan and water down the Obama reform plan. You may recall that he also proposed an internet "kill-switch" -- you know, like the one the Egyptian government used before it fell! Could it be that folks like socialism more because of politicians like Joe Lieberman?

Finally, Chuck Collins at Yes! magazine says we can start fixing the crisis in affordable housing by taxing rich absentee real estate owners. Wealthy folks all over the planet are sinking their money into real estate they don't intend to occupy. But high-end real estate taxes -- like the one Vancouver levied upon unoccupied properties, or the one British Columbia levied on absentee owners, or the one San Francisco levied upon real estate transfers over $5 million -- can either use the revenue to fund affordable housing programs or, at least, discourage wealthy folks from driving up housing prices wherever they decide to use municipalities as "piggy banks." The haters will say it can't be done, but the haters ain't the boss of us.

Action: concerning drug pricing and private prisons.

H.R. 6505, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, would (as the title suggests) allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices for its Part D drug benefit program. You've no doubt heard of studies suggesting that letting Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices wouldn't actually bring drug prices down, but if that's true, how does the Veterans Administration pay 40% less for drugs than Medicare does? It boggles the mind that folks could argue that allowing the buyer of almost one-third of prescription drugs in America to negotiate drug prices "will have little effect on drug pricing." Maybe if the Medicare negotiators are complete incompetents! But we can replace them if they're incompetent, because they work for our government, and therefore for us, but all big pharma corporations will ever do is push everyone around and steal your money. Hence both Public Citizen and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to help lower drug prices by passing the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop using private prisons to detain immigrants, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Again, letting private prison corporations house immigrant detainees is a way of putting a wedge between the American people and the government that presumably works for us -- oh, sure, governments always promise to oversee private corporations that take on government functions, but how has that worked out for us? When private prisons put immigrant children in jail, sexually and physically abuse them, and force them to take psychotropics, what does our government do? They say how horrible all that is, and then they do nothing about it, since private prisons are, after all, doing necessary work. But if we make our government house immigrant detainees, then we can more easily shine a light on, and get rid of, serial abusers. And as a bonus, we'll have far less corruption -- and the corruption we do encounter we can more easily punish, since it's our government.

Around the table: starring a bunch of bad people, acting badly!

Ari Paul writes quite the elegy for the New York Daily News after its owner, a media corporation somehow named Tronc, fires half of its editorial workers. The Daily News has given tabloids a good name, by focusing on the local government issues the other New York papers are either too haughty (cough New York Times cough) or too crazy (cough New York Post cough) to cover. But killing off editors and expecting writers to do-that-job-too is a good way of crippling a paper's ability to cover local politics. And even a Times editorial board member says that now "(u)nscrupulous developers and corrupt politicians can breathe a sigh of relief." In a sane and moral society, such people would never have a moment's peace. And you know what that means.

Federal lawsuit digs up evidence of Michigan Republicans actively trying to give their party an advantage in redrawing House districts; one of them boasts of concentrating "Dem garbage" into a small number of districts. If you're the hopeful kind, as I generally advocate you should be, you might think that spelling out how you're trying to create a partisan advantage -- versus, you know, redrawing districts to better represent the people -- might raise a red flag even with someone like Chief Justice Roberts. But lately our Supreme Court has been far less interested in the actual animus of right-wingers than the "animus" supposedly generated by liberals.

What's left for charter school advocates now that their failure is plain? Well, according to Jeff Bryant at the OurFuture blog, all that's left is to "recast their failed agenda as a success." And, I guess, to claim they're "fact-based" and then not produce any facts -- or, at least, any facts that stand up to scrutiny -- and claim that you're the one who's "ideological." Nice work, if you can get it! When your Tea Party uncle tells you that charter schools "do better" than public schools, you can remind him that charter schools can take anyone they want and kick out anyone they want, and yet they still can't win a 500-yard dash with a 490-yard head start.

Beleaguered U.S. House Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) plans to run for Speaker of the House if Republicans still hold the House after the midterms. Because when no less than eight former Ohio State University wrestlers come forward and say you knew about the team doctor sexually abusing wrestlers 30 years ago while you were assistant wrestling coach and you did nothing about it, not only do you not resign, not only do you not "retire at the end of your term to spend more time with your family," you run for Speaker of the House! Moral values!

Finally, our distinguished gentleman of a President slams the FCC's sudden unwillingness to rubber-stamp the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, saying that it would deprive America of a "great and much needed Conservative voice for and of the People" (odd capitalization in original). I guess he means the merger would provide yet another "conservative" "voice," since we only have (aside from Sinclair as it's currently constituted) Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Newsmax, World Net Daily, Breitbart, and am I leaving any of them out? I wouldn't expect our President to grapple with Chairman Pai's stated objection to the merger, but the more pertinent question, of course, is whether one corporation should own so many media outlets -- a phenomenon which tends to annoy conservatives as well as liberals.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure and gestation crates.

Good news, everyone -- the DISCLOSE Act is back! This time it's H.R. 6239/S. 3150, and it'd do the same thing it's wanted to do since its initial introduction back in 2010 -- shed some sunlight on folks spending billions of dollars to influence your vote. Most Americans agree that money isn't speech, and most Americans agree that more money in political campaigns is a bad thing -- and most Americans also agree that they want to know who's behind campaign ads. What are Our Glorious Elites afraid of, then? They're afraid of losing wealth and positions they never earned in the first place, that's what. No use arguing that "it takes a lot of money to build an effective campaign," because our Constitution isn't about "effective campaigning" but about redressing grievances with your representatives, and any articulate citizen can do that. Hence a group of good-government groups helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support the DISCLOSE Act.

Meanwhile, Mercy for Animals has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Brazilian corporation JBS, which is the world's largest meat-processing corporation, to stop putting their feed animals in gestation crates. You may recall the nefarious "gestation crate" from previous action alerts; the entire European Union has banned them, as has Canada and 10 American. Gestation crates are about two feet wide and around six and a half feet long; think it'd be enjoyable to spend your entire life in one of those, as a lot of feed animals do? Pigs can't turn around in them, and it drives them bananas, as it would do to any intelligent and social animal. And these crates don't even have a bottom, so that animals' poop and urine can be sprayed out from underneath them with minimal effort. Only a big corporation would think a gestation crate is a splendid idea, but they don't get all the say around here.

Around the table: starring unsolicited advice from an unwanted quarter.

Hoo boy: group of Nazi wannabes based in Alabama starts a Russian-language page extolling all the alleged similarities between Russia and the American South. You know, "same general gene pool," "similar values," and, of course, "our common faith," though I bet they'd be surprised at how they'd really worship in Russiabama. I can't dismiss the possibility that they started this page just to piss off liberals. I can, however, dismiss the possibility that I'll ever speak of this particular clown car again.

Our Administration's Energy Department places new restrictions on the oversight the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board performs. Worse, the order essentially mandates that Energy Department employees stonewall the Board -- how else to interpret an order to speak to the Board "with one voice," an order executives usually know better than to put in writing? The Energy Department says its order will "decrease costs," including, I would think, the "costs" of the problems advisory boards are always telling you to fix. But cleaning up a lab accident (or, heaven forbid, a meltdown) would cost a lot more.

From the "Dystopia is here!" file: a TruTV game show called Paid Off helps contestants pay off their student debt if they can answer questions correctly -- and helps losing contestants call their Congressfolk to tell them do something about student loan debt. I bet there'll be a hundred TV shows like this in the future; there should already be a game show for writing off your health care debt. I suppose Paid Off will do some good, but what a shame it's come to this. And note well that for many right-wingers this is exactly how the "free" market is supposed to work.

Former FBI Director James Comey, who had lately advised all Americans to vote Democrat this fall, now says we should avoid voting for the "socialist left" (presumably in Democratic primaries) and vote instead for "sensible, balanced, ethical leadership." Pardon me if I regard his counsel as yet another attempt to drag the center ever further right. After all, right-wingers call anyone to their left a "socialist" anymore, and suggesting that, say, a House candidate who supports Medicare-for-All and taxpayer-funded higher ed is by definition insensible, imbalanced, and unethical is a bit rich, particularly in a world where right-wing policy prescriptions are actually insensible, imbalanced, and unethical. But even more to the point: Democrats have spent the last quarter-century getting behind the kind of center-right Democrats who might best meet Mr. Comey's criteria, and what's that gotten us? It's gotten us a sick, immoral, and decadent society, and an insane Republican party. So, thank you for your input, Mr. Comey, but I think you've done enough.

Finally, after the Iranian President says, rather colorfully, that our President shouldn't "play with the lion's tail" with regard to possibly blocking Iranian oil exports, our President responds by twittering a lengthy threat to Iran in all capital letters. And I realize: this is how trolls do it! Trolls write in shouty caps whenever someone gets under their skin! And they must have been absolutely ecstatic to see their President "stick it" to Iran exactly the way they would! I just hope they wiped their screens off afterwards.

Action: concerning endangered species, national parks, and fairer sentencing.

Everyone likes the Endangered Species Act, right? As evidenced by the fact that Congress has been trying to destroy it for years and have failed? Well, now Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke apparently aims to succeed at gutting the ESA, in proposing several rule changes that would force the agency to take "economic impacts" into account during rulemaking, weaken protections for threatened species, solicit less public input, and insulate wildlife agencies from the consequences of their actions. But it gets better! Apparently one of Interior's proposals would have them write species-specific regulations for every "threatened" species, even though one rule currently covers all of them. And here you thought conservatives were all about "streamlining regulations," not making them so cumbersome they can't be enforced! So the Sierra Club helps you tell our Interior Department to scrap its plans to "overhaul" enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.

Meanwhile, the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado draws 300,000 visitors annually and features dunes as high as 700 feet -- but of course our Administration is suddenly anxious to let fossil fuel corporations drill for oil and gas as close to the Dunes as they can get! And thus our President would give massive corporate welfare handouts to the very same fossil fuel corporations that are rapidly losing ground to renewable energy, and take a dump all over our national parks. It's like killing two birds with one stone! One more time: the oil and gas you pull out of the ground doesn't last forever, and the money CEOs make from pulling oil and gas out of the ground doesn't last forever -- but national parks can be part of our heritage forever. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its plan to open up some 18,000 acres near the Great Sand Dunes to fossil fuel drilling.

Finally, the U.S. Sentencing Commission has proposed new sentencing guidelines for 2019, and they're taking comments thereon until August 10, so Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell our Sentencing Commission what you think of their proposal. As you might expect, it's got good and bad bits in it. The Commission has proposed studying the effects of incarcerating parents on minor children, as well as whether the Bureau of Prisons is actually motioning for compassionate release as often as they should; neither of these is a policy change per se, but both could lead to policy changes in the future. But the Commission has also ruled out reduced sentencing for first offenders; those of us not completely ruled by our hormones would find treating first offenders exactly the same as folks who've committed many crimes not precisely civilized. So make sure the Commission hears from you.

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making, untrammeled executive power, and unscientific policy-making.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.Res. 922, which would make Presidential war-making without express approval from Congress an impeachable offense, then Just Foreign Policy still helps you do that. And if you still find yourself a little wary of actually defining an impeachable offense, rather than leaving that up to a particular House -- which would not be an indefensible position! -- the bill's authors, Reps. Jones (R-NC) and Gabbard (D-HI) are ready for you: "the absence of impeachment standards creates an appearance that impeachment is a partisan exercise, which undermines its legitimacy and deters its use." That's from the text of H.Res. 922. And yes, this could have applied to President Obama after he bombed Syria in 2015, claiming authority from the 2001 AUMF. Tough toodles! If your values don't inconvenience you every so often, they're probably worthless values.

Meanwhile, the Senate hasn't taken up Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to our Supreme Court yet, but that shouldn't stop you from using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers and tell them to reject his nomination. We already know that Judge Kavanaugh has said that Presidents shouldn't face criminal charges while in office because they have so much to do already -- an opinion that surely makes our Founders spin in their graves -- but we also know that he has too often deferred to "national security" claims in allowing Executive branch overreach while serving on the D.C. Circuit Court. And that bodes ill for his willingness to be a check on Executive power, which'll be one of his main jobs on the Court. It bodes ill for a lot of other things, too, but a Judge who'll let the President do whatever he likes and the people be damned is the worst kind of Judge.

Finally, Scott Pruitt may be no more at the EPA, but his nefarious legacy (or, at least, that part the courts haven't struck down yet) lives on, not least his proposed "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science" rule that would force the EPA to use only "publicly-available" scientific data to make policy decisions. Problem is that a lot of very good scientific studies have a lot of private identifying info in them, and the proposed rule would prevent the EPA from using them! I'd call it clever, except that "evil" is a more accurate term, and I'm too old to praise evil for its cleverness. This "transparency" rule will force the EPA to ignore most scientific studies, which means more "freedom" for polluters and more cancer, more asthma, and more intractable health care issues for the rest of us. And that's why I call it evil. Breast Cancer Action helps you tell the EPA to abandon its so-called "transparency" rule, and let real science drive its decisions.

Around the table: melting snowflakes since 2005.

And just like that, Congressional Republicans cave to our President and decide not to reimpose penalties on Chinese corporation ZTE, which, lest we forget, violated American sanctions on Iran and North Korea. The next time you see a Republican slamming our President, remember that this Republican does what this President wants him to do 99% of the time. But would it kill a Democrat to simply say "law and order!" sarcastically whenever these things happen?

University of Alabama study finds that terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims get 357% more media coverage than terrorist attacks perpetrated by anyone else. And before you retort that TEH MUZLIMZ COMMITZ TEH MORE TERRORIZMZ HA HA HA SNORT!!!!!, attend the finding that, actually, "white and right-wing" terrorists commit twice the terrorism of Muslim extremists. If, upon reading that, your next retort begins with "well, what about," stop. Just stop. And admit you're wrong. You'll feel a whole lot better.

"States Purged 16 Million Voters From the Rolls Before the 2016 Election" does indulge in scare numbers a bit -- some 12 million voters got purged from the rolls before the 2008 election -- but the problem it describes is real. And the Brennan Center for Justice found that voter purges went way up in areas that used to be subject to pre-clearance under Sec. 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, the section our Supreme Court struck down in 2013. I sure hope whomever takes Interstate Crosscheck to the Supreme Court does a better job arguing our case than the folks who argued Husted and Janus did.

From NBC News we learn that "moderate Democrats" held a retreat last week to try and figure out how to neutralize the more progressive movement within the party. Like the French building an ever-longer Maginot Line, the Third Way types drone on and on about how they're "tired of losing" without ever realizing that they're the main reason Democrats lose. And three words for folks who think folks like us couldn't win in the Midwest: Sanders won Michigan. (As an aside, did NBC really call the convention a "safe space" for moderates? Yes, they did! What snowflakes they must be!)

How terribly surprising to learn that the EPA went to great lengths to protect former Administrator Scott Pruitt from a desk cleaned with formaldehyde, at virtually the same time the EPA also went to great lengths to bury an EPA report warning about the dangers of formaldehyde! It gets better: the new desk Mr. Pruitt ordered came from California, where formaldehyde is more strictly regulated, so the EPA aired the desk out in a warehouse for a week out of an abundance of caution! So, long story short: snowflake EPA workers protect their snowflake Administrator while having no intention of protecting, say, the American people. Did I mention snowflakes?

Finally, we learn how a Facebook group for sexual assault survivors got taken over by trolls who promptly started harassing the victims. With threats to call their abusers or call child protective services on them, among other evil works. Facebook sure seems anxious to apply just about every solution to this problem except hiring more workers to monitor groups, which they could do if only they'd break off some of that billionaire income in the front office. Hire humans to do jobs! It really does make a difference. In the meantime, if you think it's "funny" or "subversive" to pull stunts like harassing sexual assault victims online, could you do us all a favor and scratch "ASSHOLE" into your forehead with a knife so we all know to shun you when we see you on the street?

Action: concerning "free" trade, renewable energy, and climate change.

Ahead of a new (and liberal) Mexican President taking office in December, NAFTA renegotiation talks have resumed, possibly to hand Mexico's outgoing President a "legacy" item. Of course, some politician's legacy doesn't matter -- only our will matters, and with the heightened policy of a renegotiated NAFTA, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk that any renegotiated NAFTA should work for the American people, not for corporations. Word on the street is that the nefarious "investor-state dispute settlement" system (or ISDS) -- the system that would subjugate our laws to a corporate-friendly tribunal, who could exact tribute from the American taxpayer for having the temerity to pass clean air or clean water laws that "cost" some investor some money -- could be toast in a new NAFTA, but we have to make sure it's toast by speaking out. Even if it means our President gets the credit that we actually deserve.

Meanwhile, the coal-powered Navajo Generating Station will close in 2019, but Avenue Capital Group CEO (and big-time Democratic donor) Marc Lasry has mulled buying it and keeping it running for a few more years, which means more pollution, more intractable health care issues, and less renewable energy for the Navajo. And I guess, also, that it means gilded plumbing in Mr. Masry's 19th vacation home; apparently he loves buying up "distressed properties," but when a bankster buys a "distressed property," you can't even guarantee he'll try to fix it up -- he might be trying to bleed the value out of it through fancy financial betting. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell Mr. Lasry to scuttle plans to buy the Navajo Generation Station and invest in renewable energy in the Navajo Nation instead. I mean, as a member of our Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurial Class, he ought to be looking for the next thing, not the last thing.

Finally, after much popular pressure, ExxonMobil has followed BP, Shell, and Conoco Phillips in cutting ties with the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) -- having decided, perhaps, that being a fossil fuel corporation tied to unregenerate climate deniers might be the butt of too many jokes -- but one other big fossil fuel corporation still hasn't done it, so the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Chevron to cut ties with ALEC, too. Apparently they really are the last one, and chances are that associating with notorious climate-change deniers is not something Chevron will want to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. Most of these big fossil fuel corporations funded ALEC for decades, but now's not the time to smirk about that; now's the time to celebrate the fact that ALEC will have less money to push its right-wing ideas (and "model bills"!) on state legislatures. Hey, they said "starve the beast," so that's what we're doing.

Around the table: with at least four lessons in how evil works.

Our Health and Human Services Department has been diverting funds earmarked for other purposes to pay to reunite the families it separated at the border. Among the programs affected are rural health programs, which reminds me that this whole imbroglio isn't a bug, it's a feature -- our HHS is literally taking money from rural Americans and giving it to immigrants so that rural Americans will conclude that ITZ TEH IMMIGRANTZ FAULTZ!!!!! Hey, you gotta keep the hate machine running somehow.

Administration "loyalists" are replacing long-time Veterans Administration employees at a rapid pace. And here, too: replacing good employees (including an "experienced scheduler," remember all those wait lists that were in the news in 2015?) with unqualified loyalists helps assure that the VA runs down, and when it does, our Administration will say THIS PROVEZ THAT TEH GUBMINT DOESN'T WORKZ!!!!! and privatize everything. When I say "incompetence is malice," this is kinda what I mean.

Former Sen. Joe Liebermann, himself a victim in a 2006 Democratic primary, rues the "outside the mainstream" politics of NY-14 Democratic House nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and urges NY-14 residents to vote for the man she vanquished in the primary instead. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez sure is making a lot of enemies among folks who are actually outside the mainstream -- if we measure the mainstream by what regular Americans think, rather than the fake "mainstream" of the Beltway chattering class. I didn't realize, though, that Mr. Crowley was on the Working Families Party line, which conjures up the prospect of a lot of right-learning Democrats voting the Working Families Party line. That could be trouble, but maybe some good can come of that, too -- like hard hats remembering that they actually have a lot of liberal opinions.

From the "How Reassuring Is This?" file: Janelle Shane tells us that "The AI Revolution Will Be Led By Toasters, Not Droids," since artificial intelligence works a lot better when it has a lot fewer tasks to handle. Which makes sense, though it also seems that the more single-task-centered AI bots aren't that good, either. The human mind, as I've said many times, is a wondrous and complex thing, and we barely know how it works, so we're probably not going to be creating C3POs anytime soon -- though a lot of banksters will make a lot of money off dumb investors before that's too obvious, and more than a few big corporations will fall because they move to AI far too quickly. (As an aside, that AI-generated "Spread Chicken Rice" recipe made me laugh out loud. Never, ever forget to seed your hearts before cooking!)

Finally, our Homeland (sic) Security (sic) Secretary says, in re the Nazi wannabes rioting in Charlottesville last year, that "it's not that one side is right, one side is wrong" and "(a)nybody that is advocating violence, we need to work to mitigate." What stunning wishy-washiness, and not just because our President's votaries squeal when liberals use words like "mitigate." Fact is, more people commit violence than advocate violence, and just about everyone who commits violence feels they had no choice! And, in this debate, one side is right and one side is wrong -- and these sides are, respectively, "everyone but white supremacists" and "white supremacists." Remember when I said we had to unlearn the post-modern notion that "there's no such thing as good and evil"? Yeah, this is why.

Action: concerning the Supreme Court, police brutality, and paid family leave.

If you haven't told your Senators to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers and call them. We know Judge Kavanaugh would reflexively put corporations above people, would support discrimination-because-Jesus, and would fight clean air and clean water regulations, but I suggest you put one reason front and center in your phone call to your Senators: that Judge Kavanaugh thinks a President should be immune from criminal prosecution while in office, because he's so busy. (Watching Fox News all day, apparently.) But we now have a President who might actually merit criminal prosecution, and we also have a President who expresses open admiraton for brutal dictator-wannabes like Messrs. Erdogan and Putin. Corruption and totalitarianism is already a bad mix, so why would we add "immunity from prosecution" to it?

Meanwhile, a group of good government organizations helps you tell Our Justice Department to investigate police killings of black folks as well as rates of police brutality against folks of color. We know our Justice Department doesn't feel the way we do, but duty is duty, in a world where white mass shooters seem easy to apprehend, but "carrying a cellphone while black" seems too often a capital crime. Our Justice Department has made noises about "supporting" local police departments, and being their "partner," but what kind of partner lets you do whatever you like no matter who gets hurt without consequences? And in what universe does "support" equal "jackboot lockstep agreement"? Only in universes that don't really value freedom, which is, sadly, the universe our current Administration seems to inhabit. Still, that's why we're here -- to bring them back to reality, where we live.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 337, the FAMILY Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. We live in a time when mainstream Beltway opinion holds that we should cut Social Security benefits to pay for family leave benefits, but mainstream Beltway opinion is moronic as usual. That tax-cut-for-the-rich that we just passed? Repealing that could easily pay for the FAMILY Act, which would otherwise get its funding from a payroll tax of 0.4% -- which is to say, workers would pay 0.2% of their income and their employers would also pay 0.2% of those workers' income. That's two-tenths of one percent, not "two percent" or "20 percent," "liberal" media! We might as well do the math all the way: a worker making $50,000 would pay $100 annually for paid family medical leave insurance. $100! In an entire calendar year! When you confront numbers like that, I could forgive you for thinking our leaders are stupid. Or cowardly. Or greedy.

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making, discrimination, and "conversion therapy."

Here's an idea I wish I had under our last President: H.Res. 922 would mandate that Congress file articles of impeachment against any President who starts a war without a formal Congressional declaration of war as the Constitution requires. H.Res. 922 would include wars against "non-state actors" -- you know, since that's all the rage these days -- and would apply even if our President joins an existing war rather than starts one. People talk about "hamstringing the President," but (at best!) they confuse the President's duty to prosecute a war with some imagined "right" to start a war. And those who blanch at the idea that a law could mandate an impeachable offense should ask why making war on other nations without Constitutional authority doesn't immediately strike them as a "high crime." Win Without War helps you tell your House Reps to support Constitutional war-making by passing H.Res. 922.

Meanwhile, Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) managed to add an amendment to a House appropriations bill that would allow adoption service providers to refuse to deal with gay parents out of their "sincere" "religious" "convictions" and still get federal funding. Even if I could accept that we should allow such folks to discriminate as if only their "religious" "convictions" mean a damn, why should they also feel entitled to federal funding in order to further their bigotry? Oh, sorry, was I not civil enough? I think I've described the problem exactly as it is, and there is no "reaching out" to people who think they're going to get gay cooties from allowing loving gay couples to add to the stock of good parents in America. Hence Equality PA helps you tell your Congressfolk to strip the offending Aderholt amendment from the the Health/Labor/Education appropriations bill.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Max Johnson has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your state legislators to ban "conversion therapy" for gay kids. Some parents put their kids through this, and while I usually respect parents' rights to make decisions for their kids, but just as I do not assume parents have a "right" to force-feed their children poison, I do not assume parents have a "right" to force-feed their children an unscientific "therapy" with outcomes ranging from anxiety to depression to suicide. And you literally do not need to have an opinion one way or the other about homosexuality to oppose "conversion therapy"! You need only ask yourself: do I oppose forcing kids to reenact past sexual abuses and submit to "exercises" involving nudity and intimate touching? If your answer is "yes," then you also oppose gay conversion therapy. And your help fighting it will be much appreciated.

Around the table: no, our President is not a traitor! And other lessons.

FCC Chair Ajit Pai suspends the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, saying he's afraid Sinclair will sell some of its stations (in order to get under an FCC ownership cap) in "sidecar arrangements" allowing them to keep a stake in programming and revenues -- thus retaining control over stations they don't own, which is against the law. Next will be a hearing before an administrative judge; Comcast and Time-Warner abandoned their efforts to merge rather than face an administrative judge in 2015. I still wouldn't be surprised to see this deal come back from the dead, though. And why do we allow any person or corporation to own more than one station again?

Look, I want to believe just as badly as anyone else that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) could vote against the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. After all, Mr. Kavanaugh believes a President should be exempt from criminal prosecution because he's-so-busy, and he has also stated that our government's metadata-vacuuming program is "entirely consistent" with our Constitution's 4th Amendment (and also spoke of the program's alleged "critical national security need," as if he hadn't convinced himself of the previous statement). But Mr. Paul could be the deciding vote here -- Republicans have 51 of 100 Senators, but John McCain is gravely ill and hasn't voted on anything in months -- and my guess is he waits for Sens. Manchin, Heidtkamp, and Donnelly to vote yea before he votes nay. Because the best time to vote on principle is when it makes no difference!

Just as we should take the term "fake news" with about a pound of salt, Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that we might actually credit social media with the leftward shift in voters' beliefs over the last few years. And just as we figure our President calls things "fake news" because he doesn't like being criticized, we should also figure that the "liberal" media doesn't like social media first and foremost because it's upended their authority -- social media has allowed good Americans to filter the news they get more to their liking, and maybe traditional "liberal" media sources, corporatist and cowardly as they are, aren't really to anyone's liking. Also, too, social media certainly isn't worse than the "right-wing noise machine" that drove voters rightward during the '90s.

Uh oh: looks like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker also met with Marila Butila, the Siberian woman recently charged with trying to collaborate with certain Americans to influence American elections. They met during Mr. Walker's Presidential campaign launch in 2015, which reminds me, mainly, that we really dodged a fucking bullet when Mr. Walker's campaign went kaplooey later that year, because Mr. Walker would be doing all the things Mr. Trump is doing and doing them in a way that would probably seem civilized to most Americans. But I'd be perfectly happy if this revelation helped finish his try for a third term later on this year.

Our President sure did put on a show two days ago in Helsinki (no, this won't be the straw that breaks the camel's back for Republicans, either), but no no no a thousand times no our President did not commit treason by throwing our intelligence agencies under the bus and sucking up to Vladimir Putin. He committed a thousand other sins, certainly, but not that one, because Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution still says what it's always said, and Congress has not declared war on Russia. And just as we remain wary of our "liberal" media regardless of how much our President constantly whines about them, we should remain wary of our intelligence agencies, as we have always done, out of our duty as citizens.

Finally, I was profoundly disgusted with our President fist-bumping that notorious Turkish dictator wannabe, Mr. Erdogan. "Do(ing) things the right way," according to our President, doesn't just explicitly mean steamrolling over our Constitution's mandate that spending bills originate in Congress -- it also explicitly means firing tens of thousands of civil servants, sending hundreds of judges to jail, torturing and raping detainees, and arresting 60 children for treason. Think of all that the next time you think of President Big Balls fist-bumping Mr. Erdogan.

Action: concerning citizenship and breastfeeding.

The state of Assam, in India, is "updating" its National Citizens Registry, apparently for the first time in almost 70 years, purportedly as a way of attacking their "immigration problem." But they're asking good folks to prove their citizenship, and it just so happens that a lot of Muslim citizens can't -- they've lived there all their lives, but they may be (for example) farmers who never went to school, and thus can't prove their citizenship with school certificates. Remind you of anything? Like, say, the Voter ID madness in this country, where folks have to produce documents they might be too poor or old to have before they can vote? Up to seven million Muslim citizens might get "deleted" from citizenship rolls in Assam, so Avaaz helps you tell the international community to pressure the Assam government into dropping these plans. And not just because they might give our President any more ideas -- "deleting" folks from citizenship rolls is how a lot of genocides start.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that our Administration -- acting virtually alone in the world, as seems to be its preference -- almost scuttled a World Health Assembly resolution promoting the health benefits of breastfeeding, not just by trying to water down the resolution, but by threatening the sponsoring nation (Ecuador) with cuts in economic and military support. What prompted this tantrum? Apparently, infant formula-manufacturing corporations in America got in our Administration's ear about the matter. Not that our Administration needed very much convincing, I'm sure -- they stand with bosses in all things, and everyone else be damned. The benefits of breastfeeding over formula are not only obvious, but scientifically-proven, so Moms Rising helps you tell American infant formula-manufacturing corporations to stop trying to scuttle public health efforts. Sadly, I expect they'll be more responsive to popular pressure than our Administration.

Action: concerning anti-pollution funding and antibiotic abuse.

The U.S. House plans to vote on an Interior Minibus Appropriations bill very soon, and that sure sounds sexy, don't it? But this bill would do a lot of damage: it'd cut $500 million from various clean air- and clean water-related projects, it'd cut more than $30 million from a program that buys out career, non-political EPA employees, and would essentially amend the Endangered Species Act by putting restrictions on listings. They can't gut the Endangered Species Act because then everyone would hate them -- I mean, who supports making the bald eagle extinct? -- but they can administer death-by-a-thousand-cuts to such programs. I guess it's good news that a Republican-controlled government is settling for death-by-a-thousand-cuts, but that doesn't mean we have to let them do it. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your House Rep to reject the cruel and callous Interior Minibus Appropriations bill.

Meanwhile, S. 3099, the Strengthening Antibiotic Oversight Act, would (as its title says!) strengthen oversight of antibiotics by forcing food-producing corporations to justify any use of antibiotics in feed animals lasting over 21 days to our Health and Human Services Secretary. You may reasonably respond that our current HHS Secretary will merely take big ag corporations' word that they really really need to keep pumping their animals full of antibiotics no matter how quickly it brings about a world where antibiotics are completely ineffective and the next cut kills you, but we're going to get a good HHS Secretary again one day (though not likely before 2020!), and when that happens, it'll be that much harder to undo their work. S. 3099 also mandates that our government inspect various feed-related forms to see how much antibiotics big corporations put in their animal feed, which'll help no matter who the HHS Secretary is. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight antibiotic abuse by passing the Strengthening Antibiotic Oversight Act.

Around the table: "Where's My Tax Cut?" And other mysteries.

Remember when our Administration claimed that the corporate tax cut alone would give families $4,000 more annually? Get your surprised face ready: wages actually went down from 2018's first quarter to its second quarter, and when you account for inflation, the drop becomes steeper. Wages had been inching up slowly over the Obama years, keeping close to inflation only because inflation was so low, but now wages are dropping back, and stock buybacks are shooting through the roof. You may be old enough to remember when the SEC banned corporate executives from buying back stocks! Anyway: something's trickling down, but it sure ain't wealth.

After the spectacularly unsuccessful effort to prosecute over 200 J20 protestors on felony rioting charges, some of those defendants are preparing to file formal complaints against the Assistant U.S. Attorney who led the prosecution. Well, if you use the legal system to oppress people, as Ms. Kerkhoff did by (among other things!) withholding evidence that hurt her case, you'd better win a lot more than that, since the people you fail to prosecute can use that very same legal system to come after you. But proving prosecutorial misconduct is a high bar -- the judge who sanctioned Ms. Kerkhoff for withholding evidence called her actions "intentional," but wouldn't call them "malevolent." You could argue she was greedy for a successful prosecution, but then you'd have to explain why she overcharged the defendants.

A Yahoo Finance report says that Wall Street "management" of public pensions has cost those pensions at least $600 billion over the last 10 years. That is to say that investing public pensions in index funds -- which merely follow the market -- would have netted $60 billion more annually than banksters investing in hedge funds and the like. And by the way, $60 billion annually is the low end of their estimate! But this story will have a happy ending: in the next round of right-wing hysteria over ZOMG TEH PUBLIC PENSIONZ WILLZ BANKRUPTZ USZ ALLZ!!!!!!!, the role of banksters in losing some $60 billion annually will go unmentioned. (As an aside, I kinda never want to hear banksters talk about the "secret sauce" in their investments again.)

Mike Lux asserts that "left-wing politics can win anywhere in the country," which is true, but blunts that assessment somewhat by suggesting that Democrats should hew close to the wishes of "grassroots leaders," as Republicans do. I mean, yes, Democratic "leadership" is incompetent if not malicious, and the party would benefit from adhering to grassroots leadership in the short term, but it'll become a trap in the long-term if grassroots leaders (versus, you know, grassroots Americans) get all the say about everything. I mean, that's what's happened to Republicans, particularly as their grassroots leaders have become mainstream politicos. (As an aside, I think Mr. Lux really brings home the weight of the Democratic failures of 2009 and 2010 in paragraph 4.)

Finally, Lornet Turnbull at Yes! describes how Buffalo residents are trying to fight gentrification in historically-black neighborhoods: by creating a community land trust, the first of its kind in the city. Land trusts rebuild neighborhoods and keep them affordable for future generations, i.e., keep land out of the hands of developers who only care about money, and who raise rents such that folks who've lived there for generations have to leave. Right-wingers would no doubt call this "socialism" (though there's actually very little government involvement), but I suspect a real conservative would applaud the land trust mechanism because it keeps rapid developmental change from uprooting traditional neighborhoods. In any case, I wish these good Buffalo residents luck.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, Social Security, and chemical plant regulations.

Word on the street is that Rep. Hoyer (D-MD) has decided he's not OK with the Saudi/UAE attack on the Yemeni port of Hodeidah after all; possibly he feels this way because he (like most House Democratic leaders) suspects he's about to become, to quote a phrase, a walnut in the batter of eternity, but I care less why people do the right thing than that they do the right thing. And I gotta say, with our Administration shedding allies right and left, it's a bit disconcerting that they've hung on like grim death to Saudi Arabia; why, it's like they're trying to do everything wrong. Anyway, Just Foreign Policy still provides a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your House Reps to vote on the war in Yemen before they recess for the month of August. I know, they've been pummeling Hodeidah for weeks now, but the time to do the right thing, and to stop doing evil, is always now.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6251/S. 3147, the Social Security Administration Fairness Act, would restore Social Security Administration funding and impose a moratorium on Administration office closures. Republicans know they can't just end Social Security, because voters would turn them out of office, so they try to inflict a death-by-a-thousand-cuts to Social Security, in this case by depriving seniors of the help they need to help navigate the system. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Administration Fairness Act. And speaking of death-by-a-thousand-cuts, our President has excluded Social Security Administrative Law judges from having to meet civil service requirements, which means he can eventually replace these judges with cronies who might decide to "deal" with the backlog of Social Security disability claims by dismissing them all. Hence Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore the independence of Social Security judges.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to stop trying to gut the Chemical Disaster Rule, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. The EPA just installed improvements to the Chemical Disaster Rule after the West, Texas chemical plant explosion that killed 15, injured over 160, and either damaged or destroyed 150 buildings. That was only five years ago! It was all over the news! It's like they think we have no memory of anything at all. Memory is, of course, one of the building blocks of civilization, so of course this renegade EPA wants to obliterate it, in the service of mammon. Would it be piling on to mention that a great many folks who live near chemical plants are low-income and communities of color? Don't say those people should just move, then, not unless you've miraculously come up with the solution to redlining.

Around the table: chronicling an unusually high amount of low-level corruption.

Our President pardons the two Oregon ranchers, currently serving five years for arson on public lands, who "inspired" the Bundy brothers' 2016 seizure of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Public lands belong to whom, again? To the people. That's kinda why they call them "public." The Hammonds and Bundys of the world, of course, act like they're the "public" and no one else is, but ain't nothing they can do our President can't make worse. Law and order!

Actual rich liberal populist wins Mexico's Presidential election, and the "liberal" media here in America hope for "business-friendly" change. I guess that's an improvement from saying Mr. López Obrador is "just like" our President (just like him, except in, you know, nearly all of his policy proposals!), but "business-friendly" shouldn't be everyone's first concern, when corporations go around ruining everything in the world just so they can squeeze it for money. Remember, kids: money doesn't last, but civilization does.

Ryan Cooper at The Week asks an obvious question: "If democratic socialism is so bad, why is Norway so great?" Important lessons: don't confuse democratic socialism with things like Communism (particularly as practiced by the Soviets) and don't put yourself in the position of arguing that elite individuals should control the economy but the people shouldn't. And wasn't our President complaining about not getting enough immigrants from non-"shithole countries" like Norway? (As an aside, the relatively high U.S. per capita income is undoubtedly goosed up by our world-leading supply of super-rich, which, as I've often said, doesn't mean you see a bump in your bank account.)

Uh oh: Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY) has been putting GPS tracking devices in campaign signs so he can locate the people who steal them! Which has led him, no, not to an Antifa or Black Lives Matter protestor, but to a retired pastor. I wouldn't steal campaign signs myself, but maybe Mr. Reed should have considered that getting all Captain Queeq about a campaign sign makes him look like a small man. And really, if you were to serve the good people of New York's 23rd district, instead of serving mammon, you wouldn't have to worry about who's stealing your campaign signs.

Double uh oh: shortly after voting for that massive tax "reform" last fall, Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), who personally stood to gain $2.1 million from that tax "reform," bought himself a million-dollar yacht. Naturally his spokeshack whines about negative campaigning and "partisan smears," and the fact that Mr. Buchanan disclosed the purchase is irrelevant, like following the law is some gift he gives to us or something. This little yacht purchase is exactly the stuff of classic (and relevant) campaign ads. I wouldn't lay money on his Democratic opponent having the guts to run it, though.

Finally, Democrats seem to be meeting the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination with "mixed messages," which is, admittedly, always a danger when a nominee is so completely awful on everything. But I can help with that problem! Here's the message: Judge Kavanaugh thinks Presidents should be even more powerful, which would make the American people less powerful. You're welcome, Democrats. (Full disclosure: Democrats never take my advice.)

Action: concerning gerrymandering, family leave, and nuclear waste.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: we've told Gov. Wolf to call a special legislative session to pass redistricting reform, but that won't mean anything if the legislature screws up the reform process again, so Fair Districts PA helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to do the right thing during a special session on redistricting reform. One of those "leaders" -- House State Government Committee Chair Daryl Metcalfe -- gutted not one but two redistricting bills in his own committee, and when House leaders successfully kept future redistricting bills out of his committee, legislators from both parties swamped those bills with hundreds of amendments. So, yes, we're demanding they come back during their time off to do their job because they've done an abominable job so far. They could redeem themselves by doing a good job this month, however.

Meanwhile, as several right-wing Senators work on a plan to divert Social Security funding into a paid family leave plan -- anything not to raise taxes on their corporate paymasters! -- Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 337, the FAMILY Act. The FAMILY Act would finally bring paid family leave to America by establishing the Federal Family and Medical Leave Insurance Trust Fund within the Social Security Administration. Monthly benefits would range between $580 and $4000, depending on your income, and an 0.2 percent payroll tax (that's two-tenths of one percent, not "two percent," "liberal" media!) would fund it. So when your right-wing uncle says IZ TEH GUBMINT GOINGZ TO DO EVERYTHINGZ!!!!, remind him that our taxes pay for our benefits, which any of us could use. Just remember: you won't convince him you're right -- but you might convince anyone else who might be listening that you're right.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject the proposed placement of a nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, then Food and Water Action still helps you do that. If you're tempted to respond well, you gotta put the waste somewhere, then you should ask yourself which is worse: storing nuclear waste in hardened containers near nuclear power plants, or transporting that waste across 44 American states and thus risking contamination from the inevitable trucking accident. And there's yet another reason we should reject nuclear power as a nation -- you know, along with the fact that you can get low carbon emissions from solar and wind, and the fact that power plants that present such a high risk of contamination from accidents and/or terrorist attacks tend to be so unpopular that they need massive government handouts to build them and keep them running. So, yeah, let's stop doing that.

Action: concerning the Supreme Court, immigrants in the Army, and offshore drilling.

Our President has nominated D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice Kennedy's retirement. I've received numerous emails exhorting me to tell Republicans to follow the "McConnell Rule" and refuse to consider the nomination until after the people seat a new Congress, but amused as I'd be to attack Mr. McConnell's bald and abject hypocrisy, and aware as I am that literally the only reason we have the President we have is the patently-undemocratic Electoral College, I will not be induced into hypocrisy myself; I called for hearings on Mr. Garland, and the Senate should hold hearings on Mr. Kavanaugh as well. But nothing prevents us from using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) and calling our Senators and telling them to vote the Kavanaugh nomination down. For Judge Kavanaugh will do a lot of damage if the Senate confirms him -- among so many other things, Judge Kavanaugh has written that Presidents should be immune from criminal prosecutions while in office, which is exactly the sort of thing that warms our President's heart, and chills ours.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the AP's report that our Army is kicking out immigrant enlistees without warning or justification -- immigrants who had enlisted in part so that they could get on an expedited path to citizenship, no less! -- Win Without War helps you tell our Defense Secretary, James Mattis, to stop these discharges and investigate previous ones. We've offered an expedited path to citizenship to immigrant enlistees for over a dozen years now (that's right, right-wingers, you can't blame TEH OBUMMERZ!!!! for this one, either), but now, in the name of "zero tolerance" of immigration, we're going to break this promise, too, because AMURIKA!!!!! Mr. Mattis -- who could be getting fired over Twitter soon, being the last remnant of sanity in our President's foreign policy apparatus -- has shown courage in the face of our President's ball-swinging before; with our counsel, he could do so again. (BTW, right-wingers: none of these immigrants are slackers "taking advantage" of our good nature, because nobody thinks putting themselves in the way of bombs and bullets is an "easy" way to get citizenship more quickly.)

Finally, our President has issued an Executive Order loosening regulations put in after the Deepwater Horizon Spillageddon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, like we have no damn memory of anything at all. Because they "kill jobs," I suppose our President will say if he ever gets around to deciding he ought to justify what he's doing, but of course that'd be a lie -- clean air and clean water regulations create jobs for people who help corporations comply with them; what they don't do so well is redistribute income upward to oil and gas drilling bosses. Our President believes bosses are his only real constituency, but in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, becoming a boss doesn't even demonstrate superior talent at managing people or making good products or streamlining processes anymore -- it only demonstrates superior talent at corner-cutting, employee-screwing, and job-killing. Also, you know, the American people are the boss of the President, not the other way around. Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to halt all offshore drilling off America's coasts.

Around the table: in which bad people who do bad things get ostracized by their neighbors.

Hours after a federal court told Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin that he could not impose work requirements and deductibles (among other obstacles!) upon Medicaid, Gov. Bevin guts dental and vision benefits for Medicaid recipients. Another court will probably strike down Mr. Bevin's actions, but he'll cause a lot of damage in the meantime, to people who suddenly can't get health care because he's a drama-loving asshole. We'll see if he can get a clean cup of coffee anywhere in the state after this.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon reveals why voters believe all our President's lies about MS-13: because of decades of "lurid but false urban legends about how a cousin's friend's friend's sister heard about random gang violence aimed at strangers." When I hear that MS-13 has a mere 10,000 members in America (what army has ever conquered a country this size with a force that small, an army also scattered and aimed almost entirely at other immigrants!) I am reminded, as I often have been over the years, of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode in which an Admiral nearly turns the Federation over to fascism based on fear of the Dominion threat, and a Dominion operative reveals to Capt. Sisko that there are exactly four Dominion operatives on Earth at that moment. DS9 spent the '90s warning us about this kind of thing, and we've spent the subsequent two decades ignoring those warnings.

Jesus Mary and Joseph Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) might feel emboldened enough by Joe Crowley's loss in the NY-14 Democratic House primary to make another run at Nancy Pelosi's caucus leadership position. Ms. Pelosi is as corporatist a Democrat as they come, but recall that Rep. Ryan voiced his support for corporate tax cuts last fall, even saying that Democrats "can't just be the party of redistribution of wealth," never mind that Republicans are the party of redistribution of wealth upward. Then again, we learned all we needed to learn about Mr. Ryan when he abruptly became pro-choice on the day he announced his last challenge to Ms. Pelosi. I'm pro-choice myself, but gosh, your values aren't worth anything if they don't inconvenience you every once in a while.

Uh oh: Media Matters finds even more racist dung nuggets in Republican NJ-2 House nominee Seth Grossman's past. I have to say I didn't even know American Renaissance was operating anymore! But the really stunning revelation here is that Mr. Grossman's act is a bit behind the times -- his no-I-really-do-care-about-minorities and we-can't-say-what-we-think-out-loud-anymore-because-we're-not-free act comes from a time when you had to mask your racism a little better, but a certain President has proven you don't have to do that anymore. Mr. Grossman's act would do better in a state other than New Jersey, of course.

Finally, the Washington Post reports on the public shaming certain Administration figures face. Much of it without cuss words -- I mean, "(y)ou ought to be ashamed of yourself! Go look in the mirror!" is a perfectly civilized thing to say in public! Still, to hear Sean Spicer say that "(w)hen we went out, the goal was not to make a spectacle" is to laugh -- people in this Administration do nothing but make a spectacle out of themselves every minute of every day. And Mr. Scaramucci sounds like the kind of fellow who'd complain about your "meanness" if you yelled at him for smearing his feces all over your walls. Isn't there a point at which, if you're that worried that someone urinated in your $80 sushi plate, you need to at least wonder if maybe the problem's you?

Action: concerning gerrymandering, voting rights, and media consolidation.

Fair Districts PA still helps you tell Gov. Tom Wolf to call a special session of the state legislature to end gerrymandering once and for all in Pennsylvania. Word on the street is that Gov. Wolf wants legislators to come to a compromise on redistricting reform and then call a special session so they can vote on a bill. But legislators already have every incentive to keep things the way they are so they don't have to work to win elections or do the people's will, and since the legislature would, by law, have to pass redistricting reform by late July so it can take effect in November, it sure seems like they also have every incentive to run out the clock. They've gutted anti-gerrymandering bills and swamped them with amendments; do they seem like they want to do the people's will here? Our Governor would be better off dragging them back to work kicking and screaming.

Meanwhile, Color of Change helps you tell Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner to sign HB 4469, which would (among other things) require state and county prisons to provide voter registration forms to folks released from prison. A lot of folks who get out of prison think they've forfeited their right to vote just because they served time; I wonder where they got that impression? From politicians all over America who pretend to be "tough on crime" by depriving felons of the right to vote, maybe? HB 4469 would also ensure that folks in prison who have not yet been tried can still vote by mail. Folks awaiting trial aren't convicted criminals, after all! And if I thought of how easy it'd be to simply detain people you don't like on a maelstrom of charges so they couldn't vote, you can bet the politicians thought of it a long time ago. So let's help our politicians resist temptations such as these.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then Common Cause still helps you do that. I don't think any corporation should ever own any other corporation, but I certainly don't want one corporation being able to reach three-quarters of Americans through faux "local" news channels. Seriously, they're not being "local" if they're reading the same scripts or running the same must-run op-eds or running the same fearmongering "terrorism news desk" stories. Sinclair does all that, and once armed with all those Tribune Media TV channels, Sinclair will get to do all that in front of a lot more people who are running from the drama of cable news channels and hoping they'll get real news they can use from their local channels. They deserve a lot better than yet another big corporation looking to emotionally manipulate them.

Around the table: the President of France is not a good President either! And other lessons.

Good news, everyone: prosecutors have dropped all remaining charges against the J20 protestors. As you know, prosecutors tried to ring up over 200 Inauguration Day protestors on felony rioting charges, but they failed abjectly to do so. Of course, their own lipstick-on-a-pig statement that "21 people have pled guilty to charges for their conduct that day" hides the fact that they brought so little evidence to trial that they would have had to count on guilty pleas to get any guilty verdicts. I wonder how they got those guilty pleas.

Our Army has started discharging immigrant soldiers who joined the Army so they could establish a firm path to citizenship. Our Army told a few of them they were "security risks" because they had relatives abroad (why, nobody could have predicted that immigrants would have relatives in other nations!) or because the DoD hadn't completed background checks, which are, of course, more extensive for immigrants. Is there any promise this Administration won't break just to diddle the rage glands of its votaries?

Shira Tarlo at Salon reminds us that Andrew Wheeler, the coal lobbyist replacing Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator, won't be any better than Mr. Pruitt. He may not have Mr. Pruitt's peculiar taste for low-level perks, but a former colleague assures us he "does things by the book," which may mean he'll move more slowly than Mr. Pruitt, which is good -- or it may mean he knows all the loopholes he can use to make our air and water dirtier again, which is bad. Apparently he doesn't really want the job, either, though he might be doing it for a while.

Surprise, surprise! Juliette Legendre at Inequality.org finds the Presidency of France's Emmanuel Macron to be "an old-fashioned, right-leaning neoliberal determined to overhaul France’s hard-won social model under the guise of modernism and emancipation." Cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations, gutting labor laws, partially privatizing the national rail system, and declaring his opponents to be "slackers," "cynics," and "do-nothings" -- how preferable, really, is all of that to the shitshow we're enduring here in America?

Police union President talks of "an influx of tremendous outrage" from the community over the inclusion of two books on an eight-book summer reading list for incoming students at a South Carolina high school. Dig how he calls two books "almost an indoctrination toward distrust of authority figures" -- gosh, I wonder how many of our Founders complained that our Constitution was "almost an indoctrination toward distrust of authority figures." My favorite part is when we learn that one of the books this fellow fears actually has a good police role model in it. All together now: waaaaaaaaah!

Finally, Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic says Democrats will have to choose in 2020 between mobilizing whiter, Republican-leaning voters disgusted with Trump or mobilizing younger, less white, more liberal voters. I can make that decision for them! Mobilize the voters who are sick of an economy that serves only the richest Americans, because disgust with that economy pretty much resonates across age and race groups. Hell, it might even remind some Republicans that they're really Democrats.

Around the table: meet the new boss, same as the old boss, part 785.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: ISIS fighters have moved back into Raqqa, Syria, not even a year after coalition forces allowed 250 of their fighters to leave Raqqa with their families and all the weapons they could fit into a three-mile long convoy. It sure is a good thing our new national security braintrust isn't overly preoccupied with truly ridiculous projects like regime change in Iran! Oops, sorry; I forgot which evil alternate universe I was in for a moment.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigns/is fired, citing "unrelenting attacks on me personally" because waaaaaaaaaah! And our President's votaries now see Mr. Pruitt as One of Them, because he gets attacked by Those Librul Elites just like they do! Never mind that they'd never tolerate a Cone of Silence from a Democrat. (Also, a former coal lobbyist now runs the EPA, on an "interim" basis that I expect to last at least until the end of 2020.)

In the face of yet more "liberal" media hand-wringing over Just What Those Red State Voters Are Really Like, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us that the glue that really binds them (and their messy lives) to our President (and his messy life which is now our messy life) is sexism. "The anti-abortion campaign is all about punishing women for sex, not men," right-wingers don't "put a 'higher value' on marriage" so much as they "stigmatize not being married," by which they mean women not being married -- all true, and as long as men are trying to get sex from women (and imagining themselves somehow disenfranchised if they don't), this'll all remain a problem.

Ho hum, privatizing IRS tax collection functions has caused our government to lose money, which Nobody Could Have Predicted! Worse, private tax collectors more typically go after low-income working families than big fish, which Nobody Could Have Predicted, Either! We talk about this kind of stuff all the time, but our elected representatives never seem to listen. That's why we need to keep talking about it. Can't some enterprising Democrat somewhere run campaign ads about this? Or would that be uncivil?

Max Boot becomes another major right-wing figure (a la George Will) to openly root for Democrats to win back the House and Senate this fall. Of course, Hillary Clinton was able to find plenty of Republicans willing to endorse her and even shoot ads for her; how did that work out? And how much pull do folks like Max Boot and George Will really have with regular Americans? Hell, how much pull do they have with other elite right-wingers, most of whom, I imagine, are saying we're getting rid of regulations and getting two Supreme Court Justices out of all of this as we speak?

Finally, leave it to Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall to point out that simultaneously telling Democrats "we have to fight or we can't win" and "if we do fight, it will backfire and we also can't win" is utterly absurd. He also approves of the "Abolish ICE" slogan because at least it's got "clarity and power," like, you know, all right-wing slogans do no matter how stupid they are, plus "(i)f your political language tip toes around what you think or shows you’re not quite sure what you think or shows that you know what you think but may not be willing to act on what you think, that has bad consequences. It signals weakness and irresolution. It shows you may not have the resoluteness to act." Which explains how Scott Walker/Sam Brownback/Paul LePage/Rick Snyder/Rick Scott somehow won all those elections -- they're wrong about everything, but they're resolutely wrong.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, private prisons, and media consolidation.

In the wake of the implosion of anti-gerrymandering bill SB 22 underneath the weight of over 600 amendments, Fair Districts PA helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to call a special session of the state legislature to pass redistricting reform. If he does so, we'll be able to introduce HB 722 and SB 22 again -- possibly in improved form! -- and we'll be able to punish our legislators for taking the people's will and pooping all over it (since legislators will regard not having the month of July off as a punishment). Mr. Wolf absolutely has the power to call a special legislative session, and the people's clear support for redistricting reform gives him the reason to do it -- but does he have the will? Surely he'll want to consider that calling unpopular legislators back for a special session to do the job the people have clearly commanded them to do would be a smart political move, not a "risky" one.

Meanwhile, Moms Rising helps you tell Wells Fargo to stop investing in the private prison corporations that are (among other evils!) helping our Administration forcibly separate parents and children at the border. The Obama Administration started to move away from using private prisons for immigrant detainment -- since, you know, our government really should perform its own duties, not farm them out to someone's crony -- but this Administration, flush with private prison campaign money, has moved back in the wrong direction. Still, private prisons would have a much tougher go of it if they didn't get money from big banks. And you know Wells Fargo could certainly use all the good PR it can get! Indeed, it's been all but begging for good PR, after being caught opening checking accounts for customers without asking them (among other sins). If pulling out of the private prison game happens to benefit them at the same time it benefits us, I won't complain.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then Free Press still helps you do that. Sinclair Broadcasting already owns 193 "local" TV stations, which are enjoying a bit of a vogue as more people reject the obvious partisanship and hackdom of cable news channels, but Sinclair indulges in quite a bit of partisanship and hackdom itself -- forcing their "local" newsreaders to read a noxious script about "fake news" as if it's something those other people do, and forcing "terrorism news desk" items and must-run "opinions" from a former Administration spokeshack on their local stations. Buying up Tribune Media would enable Sinclair to force even more of this crap into even more households. What on Earth is wrong with local news stations having local ownership? And if you couldn't find a local owner, what on Earth would be wrong with worker-owned broadcasting stations?

Action: concerning taxes and animal bans.

On the occasion of the 6-month anniversary of the Republican tax scam, and the Republicans' stated intent to pursue another tax-cut-for-the-rich before the midterms, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Republican tax scam, oppose another tax-cut-for-the-rich, and enact tax policy that actually helps working families. A couple dozen dollars every week ain't nothing, but giving a couple dozen dollars to working families while giving billions to corporations and hundreds of thousands to millionaires just ain't moral -- ultimately, it's a way to bribe working families so that rich folks can get even more powerful. If Congress wants to help working families, they can tax the rich harder, so that they're less able to buy Congressfolk who'll write laws that help them run roughshod over the rest of us. Sounds a lot like common sense -- to anyone but a Congressdolt dependent on campaign funds to survive, that is.

Meanwhile, airline corporations have met with some much-deserved bad PR over avoidable pet deaths, the most famous (from almost a year ago) being the bulldog puppy who suffocated after a United Airlines attendant insisted the dog be put in the overhead compartment. So Delta Airlines (which had a dog die during a layover on one of its flights last month) has compounded the problem by banning pit bulls from their flights, even if they're service or emotional support dogs. I can't be the only one who's had nothing but positive experiences with pit bulls. And this ban happens to violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, since no one who has a seeing-eye pit is going to go through the trouble of training (and trusting) a dog of a different breed just to fly Delta. Hence Sara Enos has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Delta Airlines to get rid of their pit bull ban.

Around the table: starring fake Republican courage and bad Democrat advice.

David Wang at Cracked explains "Why You're Being Kept in a Constant State of Impotent Rage." The major points -- that we can entertain ourselves so much more easily than back in FDR's day, that we let corporations make too much of our lives like pop culture fandom, that "the same media that connects us profits by making us all feel like we're under siege" -- are, of course, indisputably correct and artfully-put. But I maintain that even if you're part of the problem, you can also be part of the solution -- indeed, I suspect it's impossible not to be both. (And, as an aside, that jerkwad who put up the "no gays allowed" sign got what he deserved -- the knowledge that he could lose money and good will for being a jerkwad.)

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) says flat out that a Supreme Court nominee who would overturn Roe v. Wade "would not be acceptable." Now here's why that's utterly meaningless: if Roe v. Wade comes up in the hearings, the nominee will either dance around the issue or make positive noises about Roe v. Wade and stare decisis, and then, having secured Ms. Collins's vote, he'll vote to overturn Roe v. Wade at the right opportunity. Look, if I've figured that out, I'm sure she has. And how many potential future Roe v. Wade annihilators has she already helped put on the federal bench during this Administration?

Sen. Ted Cruz R-TX) says flat out that the good voters of Illinois's 3rd district vote for anyone, even a Democrat, instead of Republican House nominee/Nazi symp Arthur Jones, even going so far as to say "(t)his bigoted fool should receive ZERO votes." He's absolutely correct about that, of course, but it's not exactly the height of courage to say "don't vote for an avowed Nazi" out loud; we're just more inclined to think so because our President has encouraged so many Nazi wannabes to come out of the woodwork, a matter about which Mr. Cruz has had little comment. And would Mr. Cruz have said anything if Mr. Jones wasn't running against the famously center-right Dan Lipinski, but someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Speaking of which, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's thumping of a 10-term incumbent in New York's 14th district Democratic House primary sends, to Ryan Grim of The Intercept, a "sobering message to Democrats reliant on big money: it won't save you." And you would think Democratic pols would find this not a "sobering" message but an uplifting one! And not just because our elected officials really don't like spending half their time trying to scare up campaign donations, but because, in America, we all think we want more money, but what we really want is freedom from money.

Finally, here comes Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois -- who lost her only competitive Congressional race, in a Democratic wave year, no less! -- to instruct us that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's politics won't play well in the Midwest. Really? "They have money, but we have people" doesn't catch the average voter's elbow? And telling your primary opponent that you'll have to go to your supporters before committing to support him should he win the primary isn't how most people already think democracy should work? This critique, mind you, comes from the woman who had half her limbs blown off in Iraq but when asked in 2006 if she supported the war, said "there's good and bad in everything," which came off more as wishy-washiness than zen equanimity. So, one more time: as much as your positions matter, how you talk about them matters more. Or, to put it another way, if you have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's politics but you talk about them like you're Tammy Duckworth, then yes, you'll lose, anywhere in America.

Around the table: it's Mitch McConnell's world, but we don't have to take it! And other hard-to-face facts.

What else did our Supreme Court get wrong when they upheld our President's Muslim travel ban? They forgot to consider that the Muslim ban actually violates two international treaties, and thus already violates U.S. law. Yes, that's what treaties become when our Senate ratifies them, and our Senate ratified both the the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Doesn't matter that our Senate entered reservations to both (or even that we might have agreed with some of those reservations), because our Constitution says international treaties become the "supreme law of the land." Of course bold thinkers still think international law shouldn't apply to them, because MURIKA!!!!

Alec MacGillis at ProPublica reveals "How Mitch McConnell Made Donald Trump." Mr. McConnell "has created the world in which we are now living" -- a world as accomplishment-free as his shrine at the University of Louisville library -- with his steadfast support for big campaign money and his obstruction of Democrats at every turn, which latter item, of course, also exposes the weakness of modern-day Democrats. But if this is, indeed, the Age of McConnell, then the age and the man certainly deserve each other.

Ho hum, CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney has slashed a fine against a South Carolina payday lender. Dig the CFPB spokeshack calling the payday lender -- which charged triple-digit loans and actually roughed up borrowers -- part of the "productive sector" of society! This really is the Age of McConnell! Mr. Mulvaney did receive over $60,000 in campaign donations from the payday loan sector while running for and serving in Congress, though the article doesn't say if Security Finance (what cojones, that name!) was one of his donors.

Josmar Trujillo at FAIR notes that even though the "liberal" media have stopped uncritically flogging stop-and-frisk as the solution to violent crime (and have even, in some cases, walked past support for stop-and-frisk back), they're now uncritically flogging secret gang databases as the solution. You might be in a gang database used by the police yourself, even if you're as young as one year old -- no lie! -- and you can't find out if you're in a gang database, which means what, again? Folks get arrested on the basis of evidence they can't challenge, which is, you know, not democracy. Personal to those who say we need to "support cops" by using these databases: you do know that "support" doesn't equal "jackboot lockstep agreement," right?

Our Government Accountability Office (or GAO) can't say whether Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke broke the law by reportedly threatening both Alaska Senators -- because Interior wouldn't cooperate in the GAO's investigation! They act like they have no idea how such things look -- either because they're really that cynical or they want you to be that cynical, or (at least) accept that much cynicism. But all this really means is that good folks regard anything that comes out of Mr. Zinke's mouth as the word of a dishonored man.

Finally, unions may be down as badly as we've ever witnessed in our lifetimes in the wake of our Supreme Court's Janus decision, but George Lakey at Waging Nonviolence reminds us that unions have been down before, and have surged back -- specifically, after the Great Depression, when GM workers, backed by the United Auto Workers union, occupied their plants (without causing any damage to them, since GM would have used that to justify violence against them), and then used their success at GM to reach out to the more interracial workforce at Ford. That means coming back is going to take a good deal more than we've given thus far -- but don't complain about that to civil rights marchers!

Around the table: summarizing the latest in bad news.

I told you the Supreme Court wasn't done: the Court rules, in Janus v. AFSCME, that making government employees who are not union members (but work in union shops) pay certain union-related fees violates their First Amendment rights. Conflating money with speech is a persistent fault of the Roberts Court, but did the AFSCME make the best possible case? I mean, if a Supreme Court Justice won't figure out for himself how to distinguish between fees funding a union's political spending and fees funding spending on (for example) services that support workers in the workplace, it shouldn't be that hard to figure it out for him. (Then again, Justice Alito's opinion indulges in right-wing scaremongering about the "mounting costs of public-employee wages, benefits, and pensions.")

Both the Government Accountability Office (or GAO) and the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General plan to investigate our President's handling of family separations at the border. I wonder how long it'll be before our President loudly declares the GAO and all these pesky Inspectors General to be part of the "swamp" he says he wants to drain (recall that he wanted to replace all of our Inspectors General right after taking office, before being told, you know, how that would look).

In a related note, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds us that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. In other news, voter fraud is not particularly common, the "liberal" media is not particularly liberal, "moral values" are not particularly about whatever hurts gays and women, and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are not particularly real. Sometimes I do not understand why 25% of the electorate prefers to remain in a constant state of rage about utter bullshit.

The "liberal" media won't shut up about "civility" this week, but this New York Daily News article reminds us that a cookie shop owner refused to serve then-Vice President Biden in 2012 and nobody wrung their hands about "civility" then. Why, that's a better example of right-wing hypocrisy than the one I came up with off the top of my head the other day! It may be too much to hope that I'll only have to say this once, but protecting civilization is a lot more important than protecting civility.

Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez pulls off a stunning upset in the New York 14th House District Democratic primary, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says no bigs, it's just one district, takes all kinds of Democrats, yadda yadda yadda. Gosh, is Ms. Pelosi showing smarts here? Republicans win so often at least in part because they pretend to be so different from one another, though of course they're all cut from the same reactionary cloth, while Democrats have a well-deserved reputation of strangling new blood in its crib in their insane zeal for victory without work. Maybe, just maybe, Ms. Pelosi's finally getting it.

Finally, I know everyone's upset about Justice Kennedy's retirement, but as Mother Jones reminded us several hours before his announcement, Justice Kennedy hasn't been a swing vote, like, at all this past term. Yes, he was, over the years, better than we could have expected on gay rights and criminal justice reform, but n.b. that Chief Justice Warren was the swing vote in the cellphone warrants case. And Justice Kennedy was as corporatist as the rest of them -- recall that he wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United v. FEC.

Action: concerning disaster prevention, renewable energy, and Yellowstone Park.

The EPA has proposed getting rid of every disaster prevention measure in its Chemical Disaster Rule, because of course they are. The West Fertilizer Company chemical explosion that killed 15, injured over 160, and either damaged or destroyed over 150 buildings was not that long ago! And it was all over the news! And a chemical accident happens almost every other day in America, so why the hurry to get rid of what little our government has done to protect us since then? Because Scott Pruitt knows his days as EPA Administrator are numbered, just as surely as the right wing establishment in America knows its days are numbered, and they are grabbing everything that isn't nailed down. Actually taking steps to protect good citizens costs CEOs money, after all, and CEOs have yachts to gas up and vacation homes to buy! Public Citizen helps you tell the EPA to scuttle its plan to roll back protections against chemical disasters.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3671, the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act (or OFF Act), would get our electric grid entirely "off" fossil fuels and onto renewable energy by 2035, and if your first impulse is to say golly, that's only 17 years away, keep in mind that you could, in theory, power America's entire electric grid by covering a mere 100-square-mile area of Nevada with solar panels, so this isn't a very big ask. The OFF Act would also repeal fossil fuel subsidies, help out low-income homes trying to get more energy-efficient, and provide rebates for folks to buy clean energy cars. When some right-winger tells you this all sounds like welfare, go ahead and ask him where he was all those times our government gave corporate welfare handouts to fossil fuel corporations. In the meantime, Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support renewable energy by supporting the OFF Act.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell our Interior Department to ban mining in or near Yellowstone Park. Interior is mulling whether to open up some 30,000 acres of public lands in the northern part to gold and silver miners, among others. Hey, wasn't the California gold rush over 160 years ago? Yes, it was, but even in our post-gold standard era some folks never seem to get over the fever. We all know that mining in or near public lands tends to lead to pollution and wildlife habitat destruction, and word on the street is that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke might actually agree, having supported a mining ban at Yellowstone while he was in Congress, but you'd be quite justified to fear that our Administration would prefer only to listen to other bosses trying to extract the value from public lands for themselves. But that only means we need to speak out until they do our will. After all, you can only spend money once, but when public lands are gone, they're gone forever.

Action: concerning the Muslim ban, internet freedom, and immigration.

As you know, our Supreme Court upheld our President's Muslim ban yesterday, and though that might sound like the last word, it's really not, because Congress can choose to restrict our President's power to discriminate against people he doesn't like. Congress legislating and the Executive branch executing; what a novel idea! Hence the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to rescind our President's Muslim ban. Surely Congress will be all over this like white on rice, right? Actually, they've held exactly zero hearings on our President's Muslim travel ban since he put out his first one right as he was taking office, though they sure have devoted a lot of time to figuring out exactly how hard to screw families crossing the border and exactly how to hold DACA reauthorization hostage to border wall funding. But, as the owners of government, we can make our will known. Indeed, we-the-people making our will known is the only thing that has ever done any good in America.

Meanwhile, the FCC's net neutrality repeal took effect on June 11, as you know, giving Congress 60 working days (such as they "work") to nullify the repeal with a "resolution of disapproval" under the Congressional Review Act. The Senate has already passed such a resolution, and now it's up to the House; Stop the FCC still helps you tell your House Rep to support the discharge petition that will force Speaker Ryan to bring the House version of the "resolution of disapproval" to a full House vote. Don't brook any silliness from your Rep that "it's a lost cause because the President will veto it anyway." He almost certainly will veto it, but you should still do the right thing! You should still send a message that you support freedom for Americans to go where they want on the internet, rather than "freedom" for corporations to censor and throttle websites and turn our internet experience into cable TV. And we should make the President defend his veto. If he can.

Finally, you've also no doubt heard that our President would much rather just deport undocumented immigrants without due process -- after all, it's not like any of them could be running from terrorism or anything! And it's certainly not like a strong nation gives everyone due process, even when it's inconvenient. And Congress, of course, is no better than our man-child President -- Rep. Goodlatte's draconian anti-immigration bill failed last week, of course, and Speaker Ryan's "compromise" bill, get your surprised face ready, isn't much of a compromise -- it would allow our President to continue separating families at the border, cram immigrant families into our President's crony private prisons, and hold DACA reauthorization hostage to the President's border wall funding. He should ask Israel how well that wall is doing for them! Hence the ACLU helps you call your House Rep and demand they reject the Ryan "compromise" immigration bill.

Around the table: the dictator our President aspires to be, and other sad tales.

As Turkey's President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seems to have won another re-election, the incomparable Juan Cole reminds us how much of the Erdogan blueprint has been eagerly adopted by our own President. Filling the judiciary with "far-right ideologues" (thanks for being such a check on Presidential power, Mr. McConnell!), fomenting mistrust of the press for all the wrong reasons I feel compelled to add, allying with right-wing religious fools, and attempting to "shape the officer corps" (though I'd say not in Secretary Mattis's image per se) -- it happened there, and it's happening here, too. At least we haven't gotten to the point where our President's opponents all find themselves in jail like Mr. Erdogan's did. Yet.

Our Supreme Court upholds our President's Muslim ban in an entirely unconvincing manner -- accepting extremely debatable opinion, that ZOMG WE CAN'T VET ALL TEH IMMIGRANTZ!!!!!, as incontrovertible fact, just as they did in their Ohio caging law ruling earlier this month. At least Justice Sotomayor, in her dissent, points out that the majority, in its equally-notorious Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, looked at Colorado Civil Rights Commission members' opinions about religion with a proctoscope, but didn't think our President's stated opinions about keeping Muslims out of America worth noting. Aside from Justice Roberts's opinion on cellphone location warrants, this Court has really been stinking it up this term, and they're not done.

Caroline Chen at ProPublica notes that big pharma corporations underwrite some 75% of the FDA's scientific review budget, and then the FDA "Rush(es) Risky Drugs to Market." Why, it's almost like that's the idea! A long time ago, someone had the brilliant idea that they could cut taxes by making corporations pay "fees" funding essential government functions -- like, you know, regulating drugs so they don't hurt people! Note well that Uloric's own manufacturer found that many more Americans die from heart disease while they're on Uloric than if they're on some other gout medication, and Uloric costs $24,000 a year! And then there's Nuplazid, the drug that's supposed to treat hallucinations in Parkinson's patients that actually causes hallucinations. You will not be heartened to read about the FDA's approval process for that particular drug, which costs $33,000 annually.

Well, I was actually on Sarah Huckabee Sanders's side for once, sort of, but then one of our papers of record started bemoaning the lack of "civility" in American life, a concern I didn't hear uttered when, for example, folks hung President Obama in effigy. Once again, when liberals stand up for themselves, Our Glorious Elites suddenly wonder why we can't all get along. (BTW, I oppose kicking Ms. Sanders out of a restaurant just because she's evil, but I certainly do not oppose people gathering to heckle Ms. Nielson or Mr. Miller at separate restaurants. You'd better be able to handle that if you're an adult, let alone an adult working for the most powerful man on the planet.)

Finally, I was going to say something about the various absurdities at which right-wing media figures are grasping in order to justify our President's policy of separating parents and children when they cross the border, but then Tom Tomorrow's latest cartoon nailed the entire spectrum of this right-wing rationalization in one frame. One frame, out of six! And then two frames later he mocks the Civility Police, and then in the next frame he captures the entire spectrum of our Administration's often-contradictory responses to criticism about the affair. This one's absolutely brilliant and right about everything -- and I wish that meant more.

Action: concerning immigration, education, and clean water.

What else can we do do to hinder our President from turning America into a land without due process? Well, consider that you may be invested in a pension fund that invests in private prison corporations -- including the ones in which our President would detain immigrant families seeking asylum "indefinitely." But don't flagellate yourself about "how I benefit from the harm done to others," not just because that's what our President and his votaries would like you to do, but also because even if you are "part of the problem" -- any problem! -- nothing on Earth prevents you from also being part of the solution. That is the promise of America. And pension funds hate the Big Stick of Bad PR just like every other corporation on Earth, so Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to divest from the private prison corporations that our government would use to detain immigrants indefinitely.

Meanwhile, Michigan's state Board of Education aims to scrub its social studies curriculum of almost any mentions of civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, or climate change. Oh, and it wouldn't talk of "core democratic values," either, because, get this, it sounded too partisan. All together now: waaaaaaaaaah! One of the big names behind the new "standards" is state Senator Patrick Colbeck -- can I mention he's a Republican, or would that be too partisan? -- who just so happens to be running for Governor. A guy who can't stand the notion that America has screwed up and yet has striven to do better shouldn't be running for village idiot, let alone Governor. (Also, too, he thinks the KKK didn't start out as a racist organization.) Hence Jeff Gaynor of Ann Arbor, MI has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Michigan state Board of Education to scuttle its plan to right-wash history in its K-12 social studies curriculum.

Finally, the Pennsylvania state legislature is mulling SB 1189, which would, get this, reclassify the Delaware River Basin Commission's (or DRBC's) fracking ban in the Basin as a taking of property, meaning the DRBC would have to buy out all the landowners with gas shale underneath their property in order to enforce the ban! If you noticed that the simple act of banning fracking in an area doesn't actually "take" anyone's property, and that good Pennsylvanians (possibly including yourself!) have already made their will known by commenting on the DRBC's fracking ban, you're not alone. Fracking puts dangerous chemicals into our drinking water, and momentarily cheaper energy is, frankly, too high a price to pay for losing our clean water (and thus the bedrock of decent health care!) forever. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to support our will and our right to clean water by rejecting SB 1189.