Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: Super Bowl myths, bad arguments about health care, bankster scams, charter school scams, and the ongoing Marco Rubio scam.

In advance of tomorrow's big game, FAIR notes that there's not actually very much evidence behind the "liberal" media assertion that a city that hosts the Super Bowl gets a big economic shot-in-the-arm. Cities can pay out more in security than they get in sales taxes, for example. And folks plug this kind of economic boom, naturally, whenever it's time for the taxpayers to host a tournament or build a new stadium for the home team. FAIR assesses the problem with some generosity (sports reporters may not know economics very well, and news reporters may not know sports very well) and finds some good reporting (and not all from Deadspin or Vice), but, as always, we deserve better.

Michael Strain, in an op-ed somehow entitled "End Obamacare, and People Could Die. That's OK," says it wouldn't be "immoral" to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Then follows a string of lousy analogies (the ACA is nothing like a 10 mph speed limit, for example) and hifalutin talk about the "value of a statistical life," which ordinary Americans, of course, find very persuasive. Also, he doesn't mention single-payer, though one could easily argue that it's immoral to keep an expensive, privately-run health insurance system around to satisfy your political philosophy when a single-payer system could cut health-care costs in half.

The incomparable Jesse Eisinger describes "Wall Street's Latest Housing Trick," the rent-to-own scam, in which you rent a house and also buy an option to buy it later. That "option" is, naturally, to buy the house at a price set above its actual value. Free marketeers of the early 20th century would have described such an option as something that distorted free markets, whereas today's "free" marketeers think banksters should do whatever they want and damn the rest of us. The good news: "People I spoke with said that the big players were not doing rent-to-own." The bad news: yet.

Wisconsin Republicans are pushing a bill that would "grade" public schools and then automatically change "failing" schools into charter schools. Which would do nothing for our students, and would divert taxpayer funds into the pockets of charter-school cronies, who, as you know, can declare "success" merely because they can kick failing students out at will, which public schools can't do. That's when states actually hold charter schools to standards like they should, and often they don't. I don't think it would be uncivil to call this a scam.

Finally, Sen. Marco Rubio, who might be running for President in 2016, wants to permanently extend the USA PATRIOT Act and the NSA data-vacuuming program, because, you know, terrorism. Mr. Rubio criticizes President Obama for, I'm guessing, doing what Mr. Rubio wants him to do while being President Obama, and if Mr. Rubio looks to set himself apart from folks like Ted Cruz, who generally opposes Big Gummint surveillance, then he should know that doing so makes him exactly like most other Republican Presidential hopefuls. And when someone asks Marco Rubio why he thinks Big Gummint should spy on ordinary Americans who aren't breaking the law, what does he do then? Hope his charm carries the day? He wouldn't be the first to overestimate the power of charm.

Action: against murdering environmentalists and torturing bloggers, and for a minimum wage hike.

The Sierra Club helps you tell the government of Ecuador to conduct a full and fair investigation into the death of Shuar indigenous leader/environmental activist José Tendetza days before a U.N. Climate Conference. Mine workers found Mr. Tendetza's body in the Zamora River in early December; they found his body tied up, meaning their government could not declare his death an accident or a suicide without facing some ridicule. Ecuador's Minister of the Interior nonetheless declared that Mr. Tendetza had been "strangled" to death, despite evidence of worse torture, and some eight days afterward, police raided Mr. Tendetza's home in an apparent attempt to prove he had stockpiled arms there. Why the hurry to prove that case, one wonders? No doubt some of you are asking, why bother telling a government that obviously allowed or even caused an activist's death to fairly investigate that death? It's certainly a reasonable question. And the answer is: because that's what we expect of a civilized nation, any civilized nation, and we do not grade civilizations on a curve.

If you missed previous action alerts telling the Saudi Arabian embassy to do what it can to stop the imprisonment and public torture of Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi, then Amnesty International still helps you do that. Sadly, the Saudi government continues to imprison Mr. Badawi for 10 years and 1,000 lashes, to be delivered in sets of 50 on Fridays, in public. We'll, that'll learn people who start blogs to discuss religious and political issues in Saudi Arabia! Officially, of course, Mr. Badawi's government convicted him of "insulting Islam," and setting aside whether discussing politics and religion itself constitutes an "insult" to "Islam," or whether any civilized nation should ever criminalize "insults" to various religions, or whether Mr. Badawi's punishment violates international proscriptions against torture: what is the matter with people that they can't even handle insults anymore? No amount of money or power, it seems, can help folks overcome the ugly sin of pride. And Mammon is surely pride's servant.

Finally, the new Congress may be Republican-controlled, but the vast majority of Americans still want their federal government to hike the minimum wage, so Moms Rising helps you tell Congress, again, to raise the minimum wage. The federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour now, as you know, and no matter how many right-wing pundits talk about when the minimum wage was only $2/hour and it never hurt them, the fact remains that the federal minimum wage would have to be over $10/hour now just to have the same buying power it had in 1969. A little thing called inflation happened between then and now, you see. And no a minimum wage hike will not result in a death spiral of unemployment, or else we'd be seeing that in Seatac, Washington, where the minimum wage is now $15/hour -- instead of what we're actually seeing, which is the opposite. When people who have to spend money have more money to spend, it creates more demand for services and products, which creates more jobs. Our leaders seem so ignorant of that, it's like their livelihood depends on it.

Around the table: whistleblowers, "job creators," police tracking, community broadband, and justice for an Arizona woman.

Dan Froomkin notes the recent espionage conviction of ex-CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, for the crime of talking to a reporter about a botched plan to give Iran fake nuke blueprints, and muses that our government will put you in jail for revealing our torture program, but not for actually torturing someone. The really bad news? It's going to take a long time to get people like John Brennan out of government, and thus a long time to change our government's attitude toward whistleblowers.

Suzanne McGee at the Guardian notes that several very famous, and very profitable, corporations are laying huge numbers of workers off this month. American Express is laying folks off even though its profits jumped 6.6% in one quarter -- but they promised their investors 8%, and their stock prices aren't as healthy as their profits. Seems to me the problem is making the stupid promises in the first place -- unless, of course, the stupid promises are how they justify getting rid of people. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, your job creators!

L.A. Police Chief wants Google to disable a feature in its popular traffic-monitoring app that tracks the location of police. While I suspect Mr. Beck's fear that people will use Waze to kill police is a bit overblown, I also wonder whether the app's users really need to know where the police are at any given moment as a function of their oversight duty as citizens. If folks just want to communicate the location of police to their social network "friends" so they can all avoid traffic tickets, then they're not being grown-ups, and I don't think a privately-made app has to facilitate their actions.

Sens. Booker (D-NJ), Markey (D-MA), and McCaskill (D-MO) introduce a bill that would prevent states from blocking its municipalities from creating their own community broadband service. Which, again, the FCC already has the power to do, and I'm not a big fan of either strategy -- better we do the David and Goliath act with the big telecoms at the state and local levels, which battles we should never lose on the merits. But the bill also doesn't help fund such community broadband efforts, and does apparently go out of its way to push public-private partnerships, which is exactly the kind of pre-emptive compromising Republicans never respect.

Finally, Arizona judge throws out prostitution conviction for a transgendered woman who was arrested while walking down the street. That means her case goes back to trial, but with the most "damning" "evidence" (she had priors for prostitution, but evidence of past crime obviously isn't evidence of present crime) discredited. Project ROSE sure does sound like the kind of Big Gummint cronyism right-wingers profess to deplore, but I bet they say little about it.

Action: net neutrality, campaign finance disclosure, and state fracking bans.

Congress did hold hearings last week on the as-yet-untitled-and-unnumbered Thune/Upton bill that would purport to achieve net neutrality objectives while hamstringing the FCC from achieving those objectives with the authority the Legislative branch has already given it; the hearings did not, apparently, result in a bill actually being proposed (congress.gov has no bills from either Sen. Thune or Rep. Upton at the time of this writing), but you can look at a "discussion draft" of the bill here. It's a short read, a little over six pages, and it confirms our suspicions that the bill does not actually achieve net neutrality -- it fails to define "reasonable network management," and it should, since that's the exception to all of its proscriptions on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. Plus it also strips the FCC of its authority to do these (and other) things, almost like that's the whole idea. So Common Cause helps you tell your Reps and Senators to reject the Upton/Thune net neutrality "solution."

Meanwhile, as we're all too aware, Republicans control both houses of Congress now, making passage of campaign finance disclosure laws -- especially in the Senate, whose Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, equates campaign finance disclosure law with "bullying" -- a daunting if not impossible task. But President Obama, who had some tough talk about "dark money" ads in his most recent State of the Union address, has the power (granted to the Executive branch by a past Legislative branch, and not repealed by the current Legislative branch) to change the game, and not even by putting pressure on the very, very recalcitrant Securities and Exchange Commission: he can issue an Executive Order mandating that any corporation that does business with our government disclose its political spending, and Public Citizen helps you tell the President to do just that. Right-wingers complain this violates corporations' "privacy," as if a corporation is a person and not a thing. But we have the right to know what corporations receiving taxpayer money -- our money -- do with it.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators and Governors to ban fracking in your state; just find the state in which you live and click on it, and write yourself a letter. Why ban fracking? Because gas drillers can't do it safely -- they can't do it without befouling the air and water, particularly the water, and they can't do it without ratcheting up climate change radically, since the methane gas escaping from fracking wells traps much more heat than even carbon dioxide does. And why do we dare hope our state will do it? Because New York state, sitting on a massive chunk of Marcellus shale, did just that, and their Governor, Andrew Cuomo, is certainly no liberal. Perhaps he hoped the science would tell him fracking was OK for our air and our water (certainly the gas drilling industry employs enough scientists who'll tell you that), but it didn't, and it may be a long time before the gas industry figures out how to get the gas out without allowing massive amounts of carcinogens and other toxins to enter our water tables and endanger our health. Certainly we don't need to be their guinea pigs until then.

Around the table: tales of right-wing scare numbers, plus game-changing observations about debt and drugs.

The Center for Effective Government notes how the Jan. 17 50,000-gallon oil leak near Glendive, Montana contaminated the town's drinking water, and reminds us that a Keystone XL pipeline would bring a lot more of the same. I pity the fool who says why do you talk about individual pipeline spills, when the vast majority of pipelines don't break? Because pipeline spills cause a lot more damage than their relative infrequency would suggest, that's why. It would be like someone causing a car accident that killed people and then huffily pointing all those other days this year he didn't cause an accident.

The Washington Post finally evaluates Rand Paul's claim that half of those on Social Security disability programs aren't really earning their benefits, and gives his claim "Three Pinocchios," which I find rather generous, given their analysis, which is well worth reading in full. But note that Mr. Paul's spokeshack tries to defend his boss by claiming he was answering a "spontaneous" question in public and speaking "without prepared remarks," as if it's too much for citizens to expect Senators to answer questions upon which they haven't been specifically briefed that day, or to speak extemporaneously without distorting issues.

As a public service, Yes! magazine distills five tips for getting and staying out of debt from the Occupy movement's Debt Resisters' Operations Manual. They are: avoid payday lending and other "fringe" loan services, make an offer to pay part of your debt (since selling your debt to a debt collector actually makes creditors very little money), know and defend your rights, think of other ways to get what you need without a credit check (like references and portfolios), and try alternatives, like bartering networks and local time banks. It's good to have options, especially in These Interesting Times.

CBO estimates that the Affordable Care Act will cost 20% less than previously forecasted over the next decade. Some of that's due to low inflation and some of that's due to states refusing Medicaid expansions, but the right wing is already squealing ZOMG TEH OBUMMERCARE SPENDZ $56,000 PER PERSON!!!! (They're dividing the $1.35 trillion price tag by 24 million expected insured.) This is, of course, a scare number -- they never tell you that's $56,000 per person over ten years, which means $5,600 per person annually, which is very likely a little over half what your employer pays to insure you.

Finally, Johann Hari argues that the main cause of drug addiction isn't necessarily the drugs themselves, but a life unconnected to people and things you love. Inspiration: a scientist follows up on a famous rat experiment -- the one where a rat in a cage drinks from a heroin-laced water bottle all day rather than a just-water bottle -- by putting a rat in a cage with all sorts of toys and food and tunnels and other rats in it, and finding that the rat never drank from the heroin-laced water bottle though it was always available. Could this be the paradigm shift we need in ending the War on Drugs? Perhaps, but we'll also need serious change in economic policy, too, so people have more opportunities to have the good life that'd keep them off drugs. At the very least that means talking taxing the rich, hard, so we can pay to provide those opportunities, and also because they're the ones standing in progress's way most of the time.

Action: the Greek elections, the Robin Hood Tax, and fracking in the Chaco Canyon area.

Voters in Greece gave the leftist party SYRIZA a near-majority of Parliament seats on Sunday, and then SYRIZA then promptly formed a coalition government with the far-right, anti-bailout party Independent Greeks; some of the Independents' platform is unpalatable, but it would be nice to see populists on left and right come together to do some good for once. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell our government to encourage foreign governments to negotiate fairly with Greece. What's there to negotiate? Greece has had three-count-'em-three bailouts, but with austerity policies forced down its people's collective throat as a condition thereof, hence Greece still has a 25% unemployment rate. Syriza won the elections after promising more public investment, less cutting of public services and jobs, and a better debt repayment deal -- in short, Syriza promised a path that might actually result in economic recovery. We can help them on this path by encouraging European nations to negotiate a deal that better ensures Greece's self-sufficiency, versus the continued enrichment of EU cronies.

President Obama will submit a budget proposal to Congress soon, and Public Citizen helps you tell the President to include a financial transaction tax, also known as a "Robin Hood tax," in that proposal. Republicans will declare it DOA, but let's at least make them oppose what's actually in it -- let's make them argue that an 0.03 or 0.5 percent tax (that's respectively three one-hundredths of one percent and half of one percent, "liberal" media) is a job-killer or an economy-killer. Fact is, the vast majority of all Wall Street stock transactions are now done by computer software, and they don't build or re-build economies -- these transactions don't loan money to businesses so they can develop innovative products or processes, but merely allow banksters to make money without doing any of the work that helps great nations rise. And even the tiniest Robin Hood tax will raise billions of dollars annually in revenues, without hitting working families with higher taxes or Medicare and Social Security cuts. Why are these such bad things again?

Meanwhile, Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to protect the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico from fracking. Chaco Canyon, in the Four Corners region where four Western U.S. states meet, sits on a motherlode of shale gas, but gas drilling corporations have already demonstrated that they can't perform hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking") anywhere without polluting the air and water. They also can't do it without exacerbating the ill effects of climate change, because fracking releases a lot of methane into the air, and methane is much, much better at trapping heat than even carbon dioxide. There's a law and order element to this, too -- by its own account, the BLM has never properly researched the effects of fracking in the Chaco Canyon area, and its own resource plan forbids fracking in that area, but they've still approved nearly 120 fracking wells and have also leased some 20,000 acres in the Santa Fe national forest for gas drilling. If you can't ensure drilling in our national treasures is safe, maybe government is not the right place for you.

Around the table: a new government in Greece, a state-run media organ in Indiana, some bitter medicine in Alabama, and other stories.

Dave Lindorff tells us how the left-wing party SYRIZA's victory in Sunday's Greek elections will make life very difficult for the more center-right governments across Europe. Long story short: if Europe "thumbs its nose" at Greece, Greece could simply leave the Euro, which will strengthen Greece and weaken the Euro, but if they renegotiate bailout terms with Greece, other nations like Italy, Spain, and Portugal will want a redo, too. Come to think of it, Greece has really held the cards all along. It's about time we embraced the face that we do, too.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence apparently aims to create a state-run news service in Indiana. It will be called, no, not Pravda, but "Just IN," and state documents promise not only that it will "publish() information ahead of any other news outlet," but that it will also be the "voice of the state of Indiana's executive branch," because if there's one thing wrong with the "liberal" media, it's that Executive branches just dont have enough of a "voice" in them. Again, this is a strange thing for a nominal conservative Governor to do.

Koch brothers announce at annual retreat that their political network will spend nearly $900 million in the 2016 elections. Note well that four possible Republican Presidential candidates attended, and while Sens. Cruz, Rubio, and Paul made fools of themselves in a "candidate forum on economic issues," Gov. Scott Walker did not, which means he's the Golden Boy. Best laugh: an ad campaign called "We Are Koch," presumably not with this song as background music.

Gay Alabama state Rep tells her colleagues to stop using "family values rhetoric" in bashing gay marriage, lest she expose their apparently multitudinous marital infidelities. Well, it worked back when Barney Frank threatened to expose his famous "list" of gay Congressfolk, and it worked a few weeks ago when David Duke threatened to tell the world just how many Congressfolk-not-just-Steve-Scalise kowtow to racists like him, so I suspect it'll work here, too. And no it won't be like Bill Clinton, because people liked Bill Clinton.

Finally, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) suggests raising the minimum wage would hurt "teenagers," "minorities," and "people looking for their first job," thus demonstrating his ignorance of both anti-discrimination laws and the vast number of non-teenagers, non-minorities, and non-rookies in the workforce still making minimum wage because corporations don't feel like paying more. I'm old enough to remember when Tom McClintock was a gadfly, but now he could be California's next U.S. Senator! How far the Republican Party has come!

Action: a corporate tax amnesty, a Philadelphia paid sick leave bill, and a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at peril.

Word on the street is that Sens. Paul (R-KY) and Boxer (D-CA) are nearing completion on a transportation infrastructure bill that would raise revenue from -- wait for it -- a massive corporate tax amnesty. Oh, right, they call that a repatriation holiday now when our government allows corporations to bring back the money they've stashed overseas -- which they've stashed overseas in order to avoid paying their fair share of taxes in the first place, mind you -- at a reduced rate, this time 8%, instead of the standard 35% rate. I can't wait for the moment Mr. Paul says the low rate isn't such a big deal because 8% isn't that much lower than the 12% big corporations pay on average -- thus inadvertently refuting the right's claim that our 35% rate is a job-killing, economy-killing injustice. But you can call your Reps and Senators (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page) and tell them to make corporations pay their fair share, instead of promulgating gimmicks that induce more tax avoidance. Even dedicating the tax amnesty to necessary spending is too high a moral price to pay.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia City Council begins mulling a paid sick leave bill today, and Moms Rising helps you tell the Council to pass a strong paid sick leave bill. Which they've already done, you may recall -- they passed paid sick leave bills in 2011 and 2013, only to see them vetoed by nominally Democratic Mayor Michael Nutter; City Council missed overriding his 2013 veto by one vote. But things have happened since then -- more and more CEOs know now that paid sick leave helps their bottom line, and President Obama called for a national paid sick leave bill in his most recent State of the Union address. As we speak, some 40% of the city's workers can't get paid sick leave, meaning that when they get sick, they must choose between foregoing a day's pay (and perhaps losing their jobs) or going into work and getting their co-workers and their customers sick. Of course the city's big corporations (cough Comcast cough) complain that small businesses can't handle the cost, but what of the cost of firing and retraining workers, or the cost of lost business because a customer gets sick at your shop or restaurant?

Finally, our political class seems determined to turn the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into a puppet agency of Wall Street. What, they can't wait until Scott Walker becomes President, and he does that on his own? Seriously, I shudder to think that politicians hate the CFPB because the law mandates it to put the interests of consumers and borrowers ahead of the interests of banks, and not just because banks are approximately the least popular corporations in America these days, but also because politicians seem to care more about ensuring the sugar flows into their campaign accounts than they do about doing their job, which is to serve the people, all of whom are consumers and borrowers sooner or later. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the CFPB and thus protect American consumers and borrowers from being wronged by big corporations. The CFPB has done a lot of good work -- on foreclosures, payday lenders, debt collectors, and the like -- and has much more good work to do. But only if we fight for it.

Around the table: notes about working families, media folly, and venal politicians.

North Carolina's two Senators push to amend Keystone XL bill to allow exploratory oil and gas drilling along the Atlantic coast. States would get some income back for allowing said drilling, but not as much as the oil and gas corporations stand to gain from actually finding oil and gas, and not as much as states will lose in tourism and other shore-based industries when the next Spillageddon comes.

How else does Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback plan to balance his state's budget without taking back any of the tax-cuts-for-the-rich that helped cause his state's budget woes? By cutting education spending and deferring pension plan payments, of course! And why not? After all, he'll be Scott Walker's Secretary of Commerce or something by the time it all blows up. Silver lining: the courts may stop him, though that might provoke cries from the ZOMG WHY TEH COURTZ DEFYZ TEH WILLZ OF TEH PEEPULZ!!!!! crowd.

Wonkette notices the kid-glove treatment a certain pair of young white criminals have been getting from the "liberal" media lately, and wonders if the media would be calling them "star-crossed lovers" or "Bonnie and Clyde" if they were black. The article also notices what too few media pundits notice anymore -- that the issue of consent plays a role in analyzing what an 18-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl do together.

Bureau of Labor Statistics finds union membership down 0.2 percentage points over the last year, to a mere 11.1 percent. That's about one in nine; even in 1983, well after President Reagan won his showdown with the air traffic controllers' union, it was still one in five. Also, public-sector unions have about the same number of total members as private-sector unions, so the next time your right-wing uncle says he can "understand" why the private sector needs unions but not the public sector, remember that he's essentially arguing for cutting union membership in half in America.

Finally, U. Mass-Amherst economists say the fast food industry could quite easily survive a gradual increase to a $15/hour minimum wage. Which you already knew, but it's nice to have some research behind it. Key finding: a higher minimum wage would reduce the costs of finding and training new workers, because (surprise, surprise!) a higher income is less of an inducement to quit.

Action: unlawful detainment, waste coal regulation, and truth in food-labeling.

The ACLU helps you tell the Department of Defense to free Mohamedou Slahi from Guantánamo Bay. Mr. Slahi fought with mujahideen in the early '90s against the then-Communist government of Afghanistan, but claims that after that government fell and mujahideen started shooting each other, he severed his ties with al-Qaeda -- which seems likely (despite his family ties to a bin Laden "spiritual adviser" who went on to denounce the 9.11 attacks), since our government has detained Mr. Slahi at Guantánamo for over a dozen years and hasn't charged him with a crime. It gets worse: a military commission wouldn't prosecute him in 2003, finding that Mr. Slahi's "incriminating statements -- the core of the government's case -- had been taken through torture," and a federal judge ordered his release nearly five years ago for similar raeasons. Yet he remains in Guantánamo, because TEH TERRORISTZ KILLZ TEH BABIEZ!!!!! Mr. Slahi has also written a nearly 500-page memoir, by hand, about his detainment; if you have a few hours, you can read it (in somewhat redacted form) here.

Meanwhile, closer to home, both Pennsylvania Senators have been pushing to exclude waste-coal burning plants from mercury limits. Waste coal is actually the waste product of regular coal-burning, which means it's much, much higher in toxins like mercury, sulfur, and lead than ordinary coal. The coal industry's solution to having piles of waste coal sitting around has been to burn it, even though doing so produces much less electricity than burning regular coal and, naturally, pumps a lot of those toxins right back out. Sen. Toomey says strong mercury regulations would force waste coal plants to shut down, which would leave the waste coal sitting around. But he doesn't say burning waste coal doesn't even get rid of it -- most of it becomes waste coal ash after that! Also, waste-coal burning is not the only way to deal with waste coal -- planting beach grass on top of waste coal piles actually keeps toxins out of our air and water quite well. The Toomey-Casey legislation failed in the Senate last week, but it'll be back, so Penn Environment helps you oppose excluding waste-coal plants from clean air and clean water protections.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell General Mills to stop claiming their high-fructose corn syrup-laden products have no high-fructose corn syrup. How does that happen? Well, General Mills claims that products containing HFCS-90 are free of high-fructose corn syrup. Now look at those initials again. And look at the words "high-fructose corn syrup" again. Beginning to see the problem? Of course General Mills isn't dumb enough to put "HFCS-90" on the label; they just call it "fructose" instead. But HFCS-90 is a very concentrated form of high-fructose corn syrup, whereas fructose is the sugar you get from apples, blueberries, strawberries, and the like. The good news? High-fructose corn syrup has suffered so many richly-deserved PR hits over the years (namely for its role in keeping junk food cheap and, therefore, helping our children become obese -- and also for our government's role in subsidizing its production so it remains cheap) that food corporations not only have to hide it, they have to tell really dumb lies in order to hide it. I call that progress. But that doesn't mean we stop demanding more progress.

Around the table: the completely predictable behavior of right-wing fools, part 232.

Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy issues report finding that lower-income earners pay a bigger chunk of their earnings in state and local taxes than higher-income earners, and right-wingers react predictably. When you hear BUT WHEREZ TEH FEDERAL TAXEZ!!!!, you have at least two possible responses: 1) "by changing the subject, you're conceding the point?" and 2) "haters gonna hate."

Surprise, surprise, House Republican Transportation Committee Chair says the votes just aren't there to hike the gas tax -- which isn't a big deal to me (I say gas taxes are yet another tax that hit lower-income working families hardest), except that he's talking up another corporate tax amnesty as a way to pay for infrastructure repairs. Anything but tax banksters, apparently.

Elderly black man shopping for coffee creamer at a Florida WalMart attacked by not-as-elderly white man who saw him take a handgun out of his car and holster up, not knowing (or perhaps not caring) that he had a permit to carry concealed. I'm not opposed to citizen involvement in public life, but I sure do wish stupid people wouldn't give citizen involvement in public life a bad name.

10 Virginia McDonald's employees sue corporation for racial discrimination, alleging that they fired several employees because the stores had "too many black people" and/or "didn't fit the profile." The plaintiffs also allege other sexual and/or racial harassment. McDonald's is trying to hide behind "franchising," but if you've come to think the whole concept of franchising is a way to avoid accountability for wrongdoing, you're not alone.

Finally, right-wing talk radio blowhard says President Obama's State of the Union address had secret Muslim messages in it. It sure is a good thing no one in human history has ever used the word "pillar" to mean anything other than the Five Pillars of Islam, or Ms. Rios would be an abject fool.

Around the table: government spying, taxing banksters, "free" trade, a Republican "re-focus," and Charles Grassley's latest act of good governance.

Obama Administration abandons plan to allow third party to collect and store Americans' metadata, saying it's unworkable. The Administration still hasn't abandoned plans to allow the big telecoms to collect and store that data. You know what a better idea would be? Only allow our government to collect and store data when they get a damn warrant from a judge.

The incomparable David Dayen says at least one of Mr. Obama's proposals from his SOTU address might prevent another big financial meltdown: forcing banks to pay a small tax on their borrowing. I guess the right will call this anti-small business or something, which of course it's not -- banksters rarely lend to small businesses anymore anyway, and make most of their money (or crash and burn!) turning our economy into a casino where only they win.

Former Reagan Administration counselor to the Secretary of Commerce argues that the latest "free" trade deals won't create jobs, raise American living standards, or cement alliances that can be used against burgeoning Chinese economic power. Why? Because previous "free" trade agreements haven't delivered on these promises either. Note well paragraphs four through six, as Mr. Prestowitz absolutely eviscerates the "free"-trade-makes-you-richer argument.

"Talk of Wealth Gap Prods G.O.P. to Refocus," the New York Times announces. Refocus their propaganda, more like -- Jeb Bush created a SuperPAC! Mitch McConnell held a retreat with fellow Republicans! Well, Mitt Romney did back a minimum wage increase, as he's done before, and that's something. But the rest of it is theatre until Scott Walker becomes President of a Republican House and Senate, at which point they will pass a big tax-cut-for-the-rich and start a war to keep everyone quiet, just like they always do.

Finally, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) says hospitals seizing working folks' wages might be breaking the law, and tells one Missouri hospital to stop. Mr. Grassley actually wrote the part of the Affordable Care Act that mandates that hospitals at least try to determine whether their patients can pay before suing them, so he knows of what he speaks. But wait, what's that? A Republican Senator up for re-election in 2016 who's not only on a good-government kick, but wrote part of Obamacare? Iowa teabaggers, unite against this monster! Maybe you can send an actual arsonist to the Senate in his place!

Around the table: net neutrality, fair housing, bond ratings, body cameras, the Keystone pipeline, and religious folly.

The Consumerist helpfully runs down recent bad arguments against net neutrality. But you probably already know that ZOMG FEES GETZ PASSED ON TO TEH CONSUMERZ!!!! was a line of poop, since broadband prices always go up faster than inflation simply because big broadband corporations feel like raising them. That's what corporations do when they have no competition in their markets -- which makes Senators' claims that the Communications Act is "antiquated" even more ridiculous.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could gut the Fair Housing Act. Four decades of jurisprudence uniformly established that the Fair Housing Act could apply remedies wherever the result was segregation, regardless of intent, but I bet the Supremes decide you have to flaunt your racism to commit actual acts of racism, which notion would offend most intelligent folks (though perhaps not those with something to hide). And right-wingers say liberal judges are activists!

Uh oh: the Securities and Exchange Commission has suspended Standard & Poor's authority to rate a big chunk of the bonds market. Oddly, the SEC didn't evaluate data from the 2008 financial meltdown, but from S&P's rating of commercial mortgage bonds from 2011 -- the Department of Justice is investigating S&P's actions during the meltdown, with observers suggesting a settlement (sigh) is coming -- but if ratings agencies haven't learned anything about banksters, that's not good news.

Activists in Los Angeles oppose body cameras for police -- but not for the reasons you might think. I find only one of Stop LAPD Spying's four objections (suggesting that cameras are just a band-aid solution) even remotely convincing -- if police officers sabotage cameras or use them to spy on people, you find out and you punish them for it. I mean, if we refused to do anything good because we fear unintended consequences, we'd be right-wingers.

Katherine McFate explores some not very well-covered aspects of the Keystone XL battle. Like, that Keystone has little or nothing to do with "American energy independence" -- it would be an American pipeline enabling a Canadian corporation to sell oil overseas. Also, the pipeline sits over drinking water for two million Americans and several thousand acres of farmland, and TransCanada has a terrible pipe safety record -- its Keystone I line, running from Alberta to Illinois, sprung 14 leaks in its first year running, one of which spewed out 21,000 gallons of crude tar sands oil. But, on the other hand, OBAMA TEH DICTATUR!!!!!

Finally, Colorado resident files a discrimination complaint with the state after a bakery refuses to bake him a cake with an anti-gay message. Some people really need to take a deep breath and ask themselves: is "hating gay folks" really the only thing I want people to remember about my religious beliefs?

Around the table: scams concerning privatization, Army recruitment, outlet stores, the "liberal" media's new favorite Senator, and Senate "sanity."

Rick Perlstein writes a lengthy analysis of how the city of Chicago (run just about entirely by Democrats, mind you) has privatized so many of its public assets over the last two decades. If you're attentive, you'll note that the same problem so many describe with Big Gummint bureaucracy -- that it "thrive(s) whether it effectively delivers services or not" -- doesn't exactly disappear with the advent of privatization, where "(c)ompanies frequently get paid whether they deliver the goods or not." The difference? Your government belongs to you, so you can do something about the former. And even when your government does it badly, it usually does it more cheaply.

Former Army sergeant and his wife create a fake Army website designed to take advantage of the Army's now-thankfully-defunct Referral Bonus Program -- and make $4 million "referring" soldiers who were likely already going to enlist! Nice work if you can get it! This is yet another reason we shouldn't fight stupid wars, because it was a dearth of volunteers for stupid wars that led to these referral bonus programs. I'm no more pleased with this quotation from Sen. McCaskill (D-MO): "No one envisioned that someone would be bold enough to put up a fake Army website...and make $4 million in the process." If you're going to create this kind of program, you have to envision the, er, boldness of criminals. You'd have thought Tha Bush Mobb would have had an easy time with that.

Cliff Weathers provides a fascinating account of how outlet malls, once the go-to place for discount shopping, no longer provide better deals than your average neighborhood mall does. You'll learn about the history of outlet malls (they were originally "factory stores," located right next to factories and mainly for that factory's workers), and you'll learn how modern-day outlets manipulate you into thinking you're getting things for cheap. Some of their nefarious ways: they put their outlets out in the middle of nowhere so people stay all day and buy more, they sell more cheaply-made stuff that wouldn't sell in a neighborhood mall, and they manipulate reference prices so customers think something's a deal when it's not.

FAIR tells you "What Corporate Media Don't Want You to Know About Joni Ernst," the Iowa Senator who delivered the Republican response to the President's State of the Union address. Warning: it's not just that they won't tell you the more bat-guano stuff she's said (Obama's a dictator, local law enforcement can arrest people trying to enforce the Affordable Care Act however that would work, the U.N. wants to force Iowa farmers off their land), it's that they all seem to be pilfering from the same PR release, one that mentions her hog-castrating ad and her status as the first woman in Congress from Iowa and her Iraq war experience. Ms. Ernst could be our next Vice President, so maybe the "liberal" media could be, you know, not so lazy?

Finally, Senate Majority Leader/One True King of Bipartisanship Mitch McConnell (E-KY) says the Senate absolutely positively will not adopt a budgeting rule preventing Congress from shoring up Social Security disability using money from the seniors' trust fund, unless of course Democrats go along. But of course Mr. McConnell can make this "stand on principle," knowing that the House has already adopted such a rule, and that both Houses need to pass spending bills, so the anti-Social Security forces have no less leverage than they did before Mr. McConnell's utterance. I'd say that's clever, but I only admire good works.

Action: "free" trade, the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, and children's health insurance.

Another year, another well-received State of the Union address from President Obama -- but why, in the middle of all that welcome talk about hiking capital gains taxes and closing corporate tax loopholes, did he assert that "free" trade deals would open foreign markets for American goods? Newsflash: our trade deficits with our "free" trade deal "partners" always go way up -- meaning we buy way more of their stuff than they buy of ours. Does that sound like a way of creating jobs here? "Free" trade deals outsource American jobs to foreigners in no position to demand good pay, and they don't create markets for American goods, but instead make America the dumping ground for goods cheaply made by those same wage-slave foreigners. This is why these "free" trade deals also subjugate our environmental and labor laws to "investor-state tribunals": so that cheap goods that would violate those laws can still flood our markets. And here's the kicker: everyone knows this, be they liberal or conservative. So let's all get together for some real bipartisanship, shall we? Both Public Citizen and Friends of the Earth help you tell Congress to reject "free" trade deals and "fast track" proposals.

Meanwhile, we have expanded Republican majorities in Congress now, as you know, which means the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, or ANWR, is less safe than it was last month. And yet H.R. 239, the Udall-Eisenhower Arctic Wilderness Act, is an actual bipartisan bill, because its two sponsors so-far include one Democrat (Jared Huffman of California) and one Republican (Mike Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania). H.R. 239 would designate the Coastal Plain of the Arctic Refuge a wilderness area, protecting it from any oil drilling for all eternity. Why do we stop drillers from going into the Arctic? Well, as Shell's numerous adventures there remind us, we don't know how to drill well enough to avoid catastrophe, and even Arctic drilling supporters have never proven we'll ever get very much oil out of ANWR, or very much price relief at the pump -- all of which tells me ANWR drilling is a scam to make a few oil executives rich. The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your House Rep to support H.R. 239, and protect at least part of ANWR from oil drillers forever.

Meanwhile, Congress has to renew the Childrens' Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) by September 30 or six million children will lose health insurance coverage. CHIP has helped cut the rate of uninsured among children in half during the 17 years it's operated, and it works the way conservatives would want it to work -- by giving block grants to states and letting them determine how best to spend the money. In other words, reauthorization should be fairly uncontroversial -- but then extending unemployment insurance and raising the debt limit were fairly uncontroversial until a few years ago, and reallocating Social Security trust funds to the disability fund was also fairly uncontroversial until a few weeks ago. So there's no telling what horrible things Republicans will do to get more power -- and while putting a fairly popular program in jeopardy wouldn't seem like a path to more power, weakling Democrats need to learn that, in the long run, an evil vision always defeats no vision. So MoveOn helps you tell your House Reps to stand up for CHIP.

Action: net neutrality, sexual assault, and corporate welfare.

Word on the street is that Sen. Thune (R-SD) and Rep. Upton (R-MI) will propose a net neutrality "solution" of their own, and both houses of Congress will start debate on it today -- which you'd find puzzling, if, like me, you've searched congress.gov and found no net-neutrality bills proposed by either Messrs. Upton or Thune. But if you read the Upton/Thune op-ed about their proposals, the fog begins to lift: Messrs. Upton and Thune say they'll ban blocking, throttling, and "tiered service," but why not present proof in the form of a bill available to the people to read? And their own words damn them elsewhere: they call Title II "an antiquated legal framework" without explaining why it's antiquated, refer to "the unique challenges...mobile carriers face" without describing any of those "challenges," and resort to booga-booga about "years of litigation" and "even more uncertainty for consumers and job creators" when consumers have already spoken with certainty about their will and the big telecoms (I suppose that whom they mean by "job creators") haven't slowed their infrastructure investments. Hence Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Upton/Thune "net neutrality" bill.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell the Princeton Review to collect and make public data on sexual assault at colleges. Why? So prospective students can rate colleges better, that's why -- the best science department in the world doesn't matter if the college is going to hang you out to dry when you get raped. Roughly one in five women get sexually assaulted on college campuses these days, and you have no need to listen to the folks who say that college kids are so hopped up on their hormones and their freedom that consent is so fluid a matter for them -- as the old slogan says, no means no, even if you really, really want that no to mean yes. And folks should not be terribly worried that the Review would collect all this information through surveys, because they collect all the other information folks trust -- information about class size, fire safety, even the quality of food in the cafeteria -- through surveys. And finally, those who think survey questions about rape on campus are "inherently untrustworthy" because of TEH EMOSHUNZ!!!!! might as well give up on civilization ever accomplishing anything worthwhile, if we can't train people to see through self-serving answers on surveys.

Finally, Friends of the Earth helps you tell Congress to repeal fossil fuel corporation tax breaks. In 2014, fossil fuel corporations spent over $80 million on elections (well, $80 million that we know of), and for that they'll continue to get nearly $10 billion annually in tax breaks that established industries don't need. And check out this handy website which instructs us what we could be getting for all that money we waste on welfare handouts for oil and gas corporations. It really is instructive -- you find that handouts for corporations are very, very expensive, but giving good citizens a hand up, in the form of (for example) subsidizing children's health insurance or hiring more food inspectors, is actually rather cheap. Don't be the one who says ZOMG OIL COMPANIEZ ONLY MAKES TEH SEVEN CENTZ PER TEH GALLUNZ!!!!, because that's like saying CEOs making $20 million annually annually are underpaid since that's only about $3 for every breath they draw. And if you're the one who says well, $10 billion isn't that much money in the context of the $4 trillion budget, then you'd best not be the one who argued for zeroing out NPR (cost $350 million) in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Around the table: what happens to Muslims when they condemn terrorism! And other stories.

The New York Times's Charles Blow details "How Expensive It Is to Be Poor." Long story short: a lot of folks work but don't make enough money to get out of poverty; poor folks spend a bigger slice of their income in taxes, transportation, and fines for minor infractions of the law than rich folks do; and poor folks have far less access to banks than others and thus pay a lot of money in check-cashing fees and money order fees, and it's a lot tougher to get credit if you can't get a bank to serve you. If you find you can't relate, you might do better considering yourself blessed than finding fault with others who can relate.

Remember the "zombie cookies" we talked about last week, the ones you can't really delete from your computer, tablet, or smartphone? Well, after ProPublica reported on that last week, the corporation that makes those cookies has said it'll stop using them by early next month. Did they finally figure out how stupid they sounded when they said "clearing cookies is not a reliable way for a user to express their desire not to receive tailored advertising"? Sometimes it's actually a blessing when corporate executives and/or their PR hacks are so rock stupid.

Katherine McFate at the Center for Effective Government tells us that Rep. Van Hollen's bill resuscitating the long-dead "Robin Hood" tax on Wall Street transactions doesn't go far enough -- that it would spend the $100 billion or so it would take in every year on tax cuts for working folks, rather than on infrastructure repair. Of course I'd rather assess a much higher Robin Hood tax (1%, versus Van Hollen's 0.1%), and while I don't generally like to earmark revenue hikes to particular initiatives, I think we ought to be spending more on infrastructure improvements anyway -- for at least as long as interest rates are going to be close to zero.

The incomparable Duncan Black suggests that coverage of the recent huge drop in oil prices hasn't happened very much from an oil consumer's point of view. Personally I think the media coverage has been too apocalyptic, and likely because a Democrat's President (if oil prices had dropped under George W. Bush, the "liberal" media would be doing the helicopter dance in front of us as we speak), but it hadn't even occurred to me that the human interest aspect had been strangely missing from media coverage.

Finally, a Muslim group holds a conference entitled "Stand With the Prophet Against Terror and Hate," and find themselves confronted by some of the, er, classiest counter-protestors ever. But there's a silver lining: the next time any of these morons holding up signs saying "you are not Americans" complain that TEH MUZLIMZ NEVER SPEAK OUT AGAINSTZ TEH TERRORISTZ!!!!!, we get to remind them of how bratty they acted when Muslims did just that.

Action: campaign finance reform, the Comcast/Time-Warner merger, and methane emissions.

Tomorrow, January 21, will mark five years since the Supreme Court issued Citizens United v. FEC, which opened the floodgates for corporate spending on political campaigns under the absurd notion that corporations enjoy "the rights of personhood." Good folks will be rallying against the decision, and the havoc it's wrought, all over the country tomorrow; you can find a nearby rally here, courtesy a broad coalition of groups including Common Cause, MoveOn, and USPIRG. Alternately, both Public Citizen and the League of Conservation Voters help you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment reversing Citizens United. Be prepared for your Congressfolk to instruct you that, yes, they hate corruption, too, but a Constitutional amendment would allow all kinds of booga-booga to happen, like the silencing of churches, the passing of laws restricting one candidate from running ads at all, and such like -- though none of these were features of the pre-Citizens, McCain/Feingold landscape, and none would survive any kind of judicial scrutiny. But take heart that the haters no longer merely ignore your will -- now they try to discredit your will. They will fail.

Meanwhile, Consumers Union has proposed an innovative way to combat the proposed Comcast/Time-Warner merger if (and I have no idea what will happen, actually) both the Department of Justice and the FCC don't stop it -- they want to take the matter to the states, and so they help you tell your state Attorney General to stop the Comcast/Time-Warner merger if it violates state or federal antitrust laws. Several state Attorneys General are apparently contemplating this very thing, and if the merger goes through, Comcast will control nearly 60 percent of the national cable TV market and nearly half the residential high-speed broadband market as well; chances are that figure will be even higher in some states. And petitioning your state Attorneys General might actually be even better than petitioning the FCC or the DOJ -- your state Attorney General would be more likely to run into you, or others who believe as you do, than anyone in Washington ever would, and would thus be more susceptible to public pressure. And remember, folks: freedom is for people, not corporations.

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell President Obama and the EPA to enact more vigorous methane emissions standards than they've thus far done. What's the problem with the EPA proposal, which does, after all, regulate methane emissions for the first time, and proposes cuts of over 40 percent by 2025? The problem is essentially the same as the problem with the EPA's original carbon emission proposals: they affect only new oil and gas drilling operations, when there are, you know, plenty of oil and gas drilling operations already. The good news? The EPA did eventually propose carbon emissions regulations for existing power plants. But no law prevents us from demanding that they step up sooner. After all, methane traps some 80 times the heat that carbon dioxide does, and though methane doesn't yet comprise 10% of all the pollution we spew into the air, that number's growing, and it's going to grow a lot faster as states give over more of their lands to gas drillers. And no, the methane mitigation industry won't fix it. The power of the law will fix it.

Action: anti-Social Security demagoguery, racism, and Keystone XL.

CREDO helps you tell Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to cut out the attacks on Social Security disability recipients. "Over half of the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts," he said. "Join the club. Who doesn’t get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts? Everybody over 40 has a little back pain." See what he did there? He moved from "anxious" to "a little anxious" and from "their back hurts" to "a little back pain" -- all that backtracking, as if he knows he's full of it. And being "anxious" or "having back pain" won't get you SSI benefits -- you get SSI for things like post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition involving rather more than "anxiety," and one frequently brought about by our "war on terror" against which Mr. Paul, despite his Libertarian reputation, offers the meekest criticisms. Ask an Iraq or Afghanistan vet with PTSD if they're "a little anxious." Ask someone who lost a leg in a car accident, or slipped and fell on their back or their head at their job, if they have "a little pain." Really, it's like Rand Paul hasn't lived in the real world.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard about Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), now the number-three man in the Republican House leadership, and his 2002 address to the David Duke-affiliated group European-American Unity and Rights Organization (or EURO) -- not to mention his own self-description as "David Duke without the baggage," by which he presumably did not mean to remind you of Mr. Duke's multitudinous trips to the plastic surgeon. The House leadership has not moved to unseat him, and I've avoided helping you suggest that they do, because, well, why bang your head against a wall? But here's something that would do some good: Presente! helps you tell the many corporate donors associated with Mr. Scalise to disassociate from him. Mr. Scalise's "leadership" PAC has garnered millions of dollars in support from corporations such as UPS, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, and none of them would want the PR black eye of being associated with a man who's made no more than a pro forma effort to disavow the racist beliefs that, sadly, helped him get where he is today.

Finally, the House, as you know, passed H.R. 3, which would force Executive branch approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, though without a veto-proof majority. But the Senate, for some reason, hasn't acted on H.R. 3 with similar haste -- I don't imagine they won't eventually pass it, but their relative inaction on the matter is a bit puzzling, especially considering they couldn't possibly have been moved by recent demonstrations in Washington against the pipeline, since Senators tend to think of demonstrators not as good, concerned citizens, but as dirty effing hippies. Anyway, the Sierra Club helps you tell President Obama to veto the bill. Folks write a lot about Keystone's effect on climate change -- it will facilitate the production and sale of tar sands oil, the extraction of which emits a lot of carbon -- but we also need to remember that situating the pipeline over heartland water tables where oil spills will cause serious damage to the drinking water of good citizens is at least as important. Without clean water, we don't have good health, after all.

Around the table: hope for Reading, PA -- and four more helpings of contempt for right-wing fools.

Abby Scher at Dissent describes the efforts of Reading, PA to re-emerge from poverty and desolation as a "solidarity city." Among their plans: embrace localism constructively, use tax breaks to grow small businesses instead of using them to lure large corporations who leave in a few years, and encourage the growth of worker co-ops, public banking, energy efficiency, and urban agriculture. Reading has a crapload of poverty, but their infrastructure is pretty good; I wish them success in their efforts.

Bill Moyers interviews MIT economist Simon Johnson about the seemingly inexplicable attacks from the right against financial services reform. If Mr. Johnson is correct, and President Obama has signaled he'll defend the Affordable Care Act to the death but allow "open season" on Dodd-Frank, it is a shame, because Dodd-Frank is the better bill -- or would be, if the relevant federal agencies would do their jobs and enforce its mandates. Mr. Johnson performs a tremendous public service by reminding us that small banks actually grow the economy by loaning to businesses, while big banks, "with their fundamentally anti-social behavior," play casino games with our economy.

Now we know what taxes Gov. Brownback of Kansas is willing to raise to get his state out of tax-cut hell: taxes on cigarettes and booze. He still wants to move to a "zero income tax" situation, because "(s)tates with no income tax consistently grow faster than" I'm sorry I couldn't type the rest of that without spewing water all over my laptop. And I'm no fan of cigarette and liquor taxes -- some call them sin taxes, but I think taxing addicts isn't particularly compassionate.

Some right-wingers have been spreading the notion that Governors should call out the National Guard to stop gay marriages. One of them asks, not particularly rhetorically, whether "76 percent of the people voting can be wiped out by a single federal court decision?" Well, yes, occasionally -- because, by freaking definition, we don't subject rights to a vote! And we have three branches of government precisely so that any one branch can correct the excesses and abuses of any of the other two! If "76 percent of the people" voted to bring back slavery, a judge could remind everyone of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution! And if 76 percent of the electorate voted to, say, pay all World Net Daily readers no more than $6/hour at their jobs, you can bet any amount of money they'd all be squealing like pigs for a judge to step in.

Finally, Markos Moulitsas (the "Kos" in Daily Kos) levels a slew of entirely appropriate and trenchant criticisms against one New York Times columnist who stands at the ready to defend 30-year-old rich kids who shoot their parents dead when they cut off their allowance. No duh the rich are people too, but my guess is Mr. Leiber thinks he's smarter than everyone else because he tries to have empathy for rich spoiled brats, rather than for the Trayvon Martins of the world, which I suppose he regards as a plebeian taste.