Thieves in the Temple.

Action: unemployment insurance, coal ash regulations, and the Keystone XL pipeline one more time.

Word on the street is that the Senate might vote on that somehow-elusive long-term unemployment extension for the first time in over a month; they could vote this week or next. I mean, what's the rush, amirite? Only two million families have gone without any sort of lifeline since long-term unemployment expired at the end of last year, and this is only an economy still creating jobs as a snail's pace. Yes, clearly, we wouldn't want to move too fast on this. (Did I need sarcasm tags for all that?) Seriously, we still have three unemployed folk for every job opening in America, so I brook no guff about how all the unemployed are "lazy" and prefer their $350 or so weekly to a job that would almost inevitably pay more. The AFSCME provides a toll-free number, 1.888.853.7037, with which you may call your Senators and tell them to get a move-on, and the Coalition on Human Needs provides an email tool with which you may do same. Remind your Senators not to try to "pay for" the unemployment extension by trying to force poison pills down the people's throats -- poison pills like, say, cuts to the Child Tax Credit or the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of a coal ash spill into the Dan River in North Carolina measuring over 30,000 tons so far -- that's a lot of coal ash! You yourself may not drink one-sixth that much water in your lifetime! -- the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the EPA to issue vigorous protections against coal ash contamination. What is coal ash? Coal ash is a residue from coal production, as you might guess; it usually contains arsenic, lead, and mercury, among other goodies. Used to be coal corporations just released coal ash into the air, but now they have to capture it and store it -- and, well, if they're not storing it properly, then accidents will happen. (Not incidentally, a little less than half of all coal ash gets recycled, usually into concrete -- which ain't much better, really, since all those health-hampering goodies get used again.) Guess who doesn't want the EPA to regulate coal ash and its storage? That's right, the coal corporations -- the same ones who don't want any decent clean air regulations. Well, they're not the boss of us. That's true even when our government acts like they're the boss of us.

Finally, today is the last day to submit comments to the State Department about the Keystone XL pipeline, and if you haven't submitted one yet, well, I know a few good organizations who'd like to help you do that -- like Public Citizen, the Environmental Defense Fund, CREDO, Friends of the Earth, Avaaz, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Center for Media and Democracy. Like I said, a few. You know the case against the pipeline well by now -- the pipeline will make climate change worse, by making it easier for dirty tar sands oil to move around; the pipeline's builder, TransCanada, has a not-terribly-good pipe safety record; the pipeline will deliver the vast majority of its oil to foreign customers, not American ones; the pipeline still runs over the Ogalalla Aquifer, a major source of heartland drinking water; the pipeline will actually create very, very few jobs in the long run and not terribly many in the short run; the pipeline won't create much corporate tax revenue because of tax loopholes; and the pipeline won't pay for the leaks it causes, thanks to even more egregious legal loopholes. You know the case, so make the case. Your counsel is more important than that of any corporate hack anyway.

Around the table: GMO hype, repo surveillance, minimum wage myths refuted, bankster dramas explained, and right-wing lies exposed.

Jonathan Latham at FAIR provides a devastating report on the hype surrounding various genetically-modified foods. And it's not just golden rice (which even Scientific American has lately flogged) -- Mr. Latham also delves into "fakethroughs" like disease-resistant Xa21 rice, virus-resistant sweet potatoes, and edible vaccines, and concludes, in a model of understatement, that "(t)hese misreports of biotechnology are endlessly useful to the industry." You want to believe in miracle foods that end hunger, but it sure seems like they just suck money into corporate CEO bank accounts instead.

Shawn Musgrave at BetaBoston writes about the "vast hidden surveillance network" propagated by repo corporations. That's right, repo corporations, in their effort to find cars in need of repossessing, take billions of license plate scans, which essentially amount to geolocation data for almost everyone in America at some point in time -- and that data can be sold to other corporations looking to make a buck. See, it's not just our government we have to worry about when we worry about privacy!

Bloomberg informs us that Washington state, which enacted the highest minimum wage in America back in 1998, has added jobs and lowered poverty faster than America as a whole has done for the past 15 years. You don't need to believe these two things are related to refute right-wing horsedoodle, since right-wing horsedoodle insists that all these things simply cannot happen together at all. In a related story, the Center for American Progress finds that raising the minimum wage to $10.10/hour would cut food stamp spending by $4 billion a year -- since, you know, all those people would be making more money and thus would be better able to pay their grocery bills. Why, that almost sounds like a conservative case for hiking the minimum wage!

Jesse Eisenger at ProPublica describes some of the recent bankster-dramas over federal regulation. Main theme: when banksters really want to fight a rule overseeing, say, collateralized loan obligations, they proclaim it'll hurt smaller banks, even if only three banks own over two-thirds of all collateralized loan obligations. You wonder how they can sleep at night, until you realize that they probably sleep in great comfort -- or they stay up at night worrying about the wrong things.

Finally, Media Matters has created the "Mythopedia" (you can find the site here, with a video how-to here) so that you might refute right-wing garbage with only a few touches on your computer or cellphone. Of course, right-wingers will make fun of you for not knowing every single thing in the world off the top of your head, but you're not necessarily trying to reach them; you're trying to reach those who might listen to them. (It's not available as a cellphone app as of yet -- you'll have to enter the website address into your cell's browser.)

Action: bad food policy, bad bishops, and bad mergers.

You know that genetically-modified seed can be borne by the wind to farms that aren't growing it. You know this not merely because you know that plants reproduce by creating airborne pollen, but because you know a Washington state farmer couldn't sell his alfalfa overseas because GMO seed had contaminated it, and because you know Monsanto has become infamous for suing organic farmers for intellectual property theft when their Frankenseed contaminates other farms. Yet the USDA is taking comments in an apparent effort to learn how conventional/organic seed and genetically-modified seed can peacefully coexist -- which, given that organic farmers have to jump through a lot more hoops when someone else's Frankenseed contaminates their crop, sounds a little like asking how the bullied and the bullies can peacefully coexist. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell the USDA that GMO Frankenseed and conventionally-grown/organic seed can't, in fact, coexist peacefully.

Meanwhile, I remember posting about removing Bishop Robert Finn from his position as head of the Kansas City, MO Catholic diocese back in 2012, and I'm more than a little shocked to learn that Mr. Finn still heads up the diocese almost 18 months later, given that a judge convicted him of covering up Father Shawn Ratigan's possession of child pornography. Hence Catholic church-goer Jeff Weis of Kansas City has started a petition on change.org calling for Pope Francis to remove Bishop Finn from his post. As to those who suggest that removing Mr. Finn would somehow violate the good Catholic's mandate to "forgive" sinners, Mr. Weis splits that particular knot fairly cleanly: "As a Catholic, I believe in forgiveness, and I think Bishop Finn should be forgiven. But as a father, I don't think he should keep a job where he could put more children in danger." I'd add only that folks don't get to pick the price they pay for their sins.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to stop the Comcast-Time Warner merger, Common Cause still helps you do that. If you've had doubts that the Comcast-Time Warner merger will affect you, then Free Press helps dispel certain myths for you. You might think if you're someone who uses the internet to watch TV, the deal won't affect you -- until you consider that the same corporation that provides cable TV in your town is also the one that provides your internet. You might think Time Warner's customer service might improve -- until you consider that virtually no one thinks Comcast is a customer service maven, and that with more monopoly power in more major media markets they'll have no incentive whatsoever to improve. My all-time favorite, though, is the whole "there are so many sources of media now to choose from" canard, which you hear from right-wingers all the time, and which ignores the fact that one corporation could have the power to do all the providing of those sources -- or none of it. if it so chooses.

Action: children's online privacy, carbon emissions, and net neutrality.

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1700, the Do Not Track Kids Act. Sen. Markey (D-MA) introduced the bill back in November, but it seems stuck in the Commerce Committee, so you might want to call Committee chair Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), at 202.224.6472, and Ranking member Sen. Thune (R-SD), at 202.224.2321. S. 1700 would keep online and mobile applications from collecting personal information about children, which the Children's Online Privacy Act of 1998 didn't exactly foresee; S. 1700 would also prevent corporations from collecting geolocation info from kids, would require parental consent before corporations could disclose any private info belonging to kids under 12, and would give kids and/or their parents the means to erase such information from public networks. I can't imagine why this bill's stuck in committee, especially since Rep. Barton (R-TX) sponsors the House version, H.R. 3481. So your calls could start something.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3826, the so-called Electricity Security and Affordability Act, would hamstring the EPA's ability to regulate carbon emissions in at least four ways. Section 2 of the bill would forbid the EPA from issuing any standard for emissions reductions unless "such standard has been achieved on average for at least one continuous 12-month period" -- which essentially lets coal corporations write the regulations. You think they'll reduce carbon emissions any more than they have to? No -- that's why we make it a "have to." Section 2 would also prevent the EPA from using data from a demonstration project to write emissions rules, and Section 3 would let Congress set the effective date for any EPA carbon emissions rule, when the date they'd most like to set is "never." Finally, H.R. 3826 would also repeal the EPA's recently-issued carbon emissions standards. If Republicans want to cut red tape, why do they create so much of it? The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell Congress to reject H.R. 3826.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to enact net neutrality rules with teeth, then Roots Action and the People's Email Network help you do that. If the FCC won't enforce regulations that make your internet service providers treat all data they receive equally (or "neutrally"), what will happen? Verizon and Comcast and their ilk can slow down and/or block pages you want to see but they don't want you to see -- and that can be ominous (you think Verizon and Comcast would ever want people to see writings touting the importance of network neutrality, for example?) as well as mundane (Comcast owns NBC, so maybe they'll try to "dissuade" you from watching, say, The Simpsons or American Dad!). In either case, they're slapping you in the face -- after all, you paid for them to deliver you a service, and you have more of a First Amendment right to free association than they do. That's because you're a person, you know, and they're, well, not people. So assert your importance and demand net neutrality.

Around the table: from a good autism primer to a bad lobbyist.

Nick Walker provides a six-paragraph primer called "What is Autism?" Warning: if you're looking to understand autism solely in the context of how difficult autism is for non-autistic folks to deal with, you're not going to find what you're looking for there. But if you'd like to understand autism as autistic folks understand and experience it, then you should do fine. Paragraph five explains the perceived social "deficits" of autistic folks about as succinctly as can be done. (Try also, if you're left wanting more, Mr. Walker's longer and more personal piece "This is Autism.")

University of Maryland-affiliated study suggests that the American people, left to their own devices, could fix Social Security much better than our politicians could. The solution they come up with (tax income up to $200,000, raise payroll tax slightly, raise retirement age to 68) is noticeably to the right of what I'd push, but it's still a lot better than "cut benefits," which is the only answer the "liberal" media seems to regard as a serious one.

ProPublica provides a helpful map showing which states have the most restrictive voting laws, before and after Shelby v. Holder. Get your surprised face ready: the states that have moved most quickly to restrict voting rights are Southern states, which makes the Supreme Court's finely-wrought concern over the burdens faced by Southern states seem all the more perverse. But then I've found that right-wingers seem to feel sorry for the wrong people most of the time.

Ho hum, a corporation founded by a major Koch brothers donor has procured over $100 million in big gummint contracts over the last few years. In the context of federal budget deficits, $100 million ain't much, but in the context of your household budget and my household budget, it is -- not to mention that we could have spent that $100 million on things that actually got local economies moving. File this one under "folks who complain about government being too big really just want more taxpayer money for themselves."

Finally, a Republican lobbyist is really, really serious about getting a bill passed that keeps openly gay players out of the NFL -- unless a football team provides "entirely separate and distinct" facilities (that's right, they have to be both separate and distinct!), just like the South used to provide during the Jim Crow years. Presumably Mr. Burkman believes it'll keep the straight players from getting gay cooties -- and I guess he's afraid Michael Sam might really make the transition from pass-rushing defensive end to edge-rushing linebacker, which more objective observers are not sure will happen. Seriously, anyone heard of Jack Burkman before? Me neither. Now let's never speak of him again.

Action: Holocaust reparations, corporate intrusiveness, and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Holocaust survivor Leo Bretholz, now 93, has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell French railroad corporation SNCF to pay reparations to Holocaust victims. As you may recall, France was the country that prepared to bet on two possible winners during World War II, and SNCF transported over 75,000 good folks to Nazi death camps (with all but 2,000 dying there); the Nazis apparently paid per person and per kilometer -- instructing us, if anything does, that evil wears reading glasses -- and SNCF even kept sending invoices to the French government well after the Allies liberated Paris in 1944, which I bet President de Gaulle, who fought the Nazis from the first day to the last, found quite interesting. And unlike some 6,000 German corporations, SNCF has never paid a cent in reparations for any of that. For Mr. Bretholz, who jumped from one of SNCF's trains when he was 21, the cause has become even more personal, as SNCF is bidding to build a light-rail line in his home state of Maryland. While we should not forget the 1,700 SNCF railway workers whom the Nazis deported or killed because they fought occupation, we also should not let SNCF forget the time when their business was extermination.

Meanwhile, Capitol One recently changed the terms of its standard contract with its credit card customers; the contract stated that they could contact customers in "any manner we choose," and "any manner" explicitly includes the possibility of showing up at your house. Remember in Kafka's Metamorphosis, when Gregor Samsa's office manager actually showed up at his house to harangue him about not coming to work? Hopefully, you won't have mysteriously turned into a giant insect when Capitol One comes knocking! Capitol One might also call, email, fax, or text you -- oh, you have to pay your cell phone provider for texts other people send you? Well, too bad for you! -- and Capitol One also claims the right to "modify or suppress caller ID and similar services and identify ourselves on these services in any manner we choose," which promise their PR department had to walk back in subsequent days, for reasons you might easily imagine. But Capitol One hasn't revised their contract, and the contract's the thing that matters in a court of law, so Consumers Union helps you tell Capitol One to keep Big Brother tactics out of their contracts with customers.

Finally, the clock's running out on the Keystone XL pipeline (a matter about which many good folks got arrested yesterday). President Obama has the power to reject the pipeline, as he said he would if it significantly impacted our worsening climate-change problem. The oil corporation flacks who helped write the State Department's report have argued that the pipeline won't make climate change worse, because the tar sands are going somewhere anyway and it doesn't matter if it's that pipeline or some other pipeline or some railroad -- as if making transportation of tar sands oil easier couldn't possibly mean there'll be more of it! In any case, the Center for Media and Democracy put together a short but powerful film demolishing the case for Keystone XL. One thing I forgot: the Ogalalla Aquifer doesn't just supply drinking water to the heartland, it also supplies agricultural water to the heartland. One thing I didn't know: taxpayers will have to pay for any pipe leaks, because TransCanada, the corporation building the pipeline, won't have to pay into an insurance fund that pays for such cleanups. See, it's not just about the environment -- it's about right and wrong. Sum of Us helps you do the right thing.

Action: electronic privacy, and "burdensome" regulations.

The NSA claims it doesn't need a warrant to dig through your emails, because terrorism, but you may not know that the law already allows other law-enforcement agencies to dig through your emails without a warrant. How? Well, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act passed in 1986, and it considered any email left on a server for more than six months to be "abandoned," and if the user's "abandoned" it, the state doesn't need a warrant to look at it. Remember how much email you were using in 1986? Exactly. And how many of your emails are still out there on your server now, even after you've downloaded them to your computer? Quite possibly all of them -- and that's before we got to whatever, say, Amazon or iTunes has stored for you in "the cloud." But H.R. 1852, the Email Privacy Act, would mandate that government agencies get a warrant before looking at emails (and other documents) stored in the cloud. H.R. 1852 has over 180 co-sponsors, some of them Republicans; if it gets to 218, John Boehner will have little excuse not to hold a vote on it, spout though he will that it's a "job-killing" bill, or that it's Communism, or Benghazi, or something. Both Demand Progress and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1852.

Speaking of things the House would like to do, here comes a yet-to-be-numbered bill, the SCRUB Act, which stands for "Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily Burdensome Act." But the bill would establish a burdensome nine-member commission to review and override regulations solely because of their "cost" to the "economy." Will such a commission count, say, the cost of treating illnesses, and the cost of the resulting lost work days, that laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act save our economy? Of course not -- they're mainly concerned about the "cost" to some coal CEO's bank account, since to them CEOs are The Economy. And if Americans don't like the idea of some trade-pact "investor-state tribunal" overriding our nation's laws every time some big corporation wants to dump some Frankenslurry into our water, why would we like giving a similar power to some commission? We've already got "commissions" for that; they're called the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Executive branch agencies the House and Senate establish through law. I think this bill warrants a phone call in opposition to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming.

Around the table: corporate taxes, military spending, unions in decline, and typical right-wing hypocrisy.

Citizens for Tax Justice provides yet more evidence that corporate taxes aren't "too high" -- after all, if they were, the 288 "consistently profitable" members of the Fortune 500 wouldn't be paying an average tax rate almost 16 percentage points lower than the 35% rate, nor would almost a tenth of them have a net zero tax rate over the last five years. And the 125 multinational corporations in the sample actually pay, on average, 12% more in taxes to foreign lands than they do to our government. I guess the right-wing answer to all that would be BENGHAZI!!!!!!

Senate Republicans filibuster a $24 billion health care expansion for veterans out of alleged budgetary concerns. Because they're the pro-soldier party, after all! Seriously, if you could lay all of the non-controversial bills the Republican filibustered since 2007 end-to-end in a 30-second TV ad, they would all lose their re-election bids. If I still find Republicans in Congress next year, I'll assume it was because Democrats were too lazy or cowardly to put that ad together.

Speaking of the "pro-solider" party, Tha Dicksta said last week that Mr. Obama's proposed defense cuts prove he "would much rather spend the money on food stamps than he would on a strong military or support for our troops." Well, guess what? As Secretary of Defense under Bush the Better, Mr. Cheney himself authorized similarly deep cuts in military spending and troop numbers. He'll say this is different, because the Cold War was ending then and this "war on terror" is so much different because it's, you know, ongoing and you can never know when you'll need to trump up some intelligence so you can invade the wrong country again. All right, he wouldn't actually say that last part, but you get the point.

L.A. Times business writer asks "Are Unions Necessary?" And, gratifyingly, begins with "Short answer: yes." Mr. Hiltzik's somewhat longer answer: "One simply can't explain the decline of union representation without acknowledging the role of employer opposition and its empowerment by government policy" -- which sometimes includes empowerment by law, but not always, since individual governments enforce the law to varying degrees of effectiveness. Read the whole thing, though -- particularly the takedown of the UNIONZ DON'T HELP TEH NON-UNIONIZEDD PEOPLEZ HAHAHA ZING! meme.

Finally, a vehement opponent of Medicaid expansion in Arkansas state legislature has fed at the big gummint trough to the tune of over $1 million from Medicare and Medicaid. During his early 20s he broke his neck in a serious drunk-driving accident (whether he or his friend was driving, he "can't remember"), and having no health insurance at the time, he needed (and still needs) help from our government. His list of excuses for opposing the expansion makes him look like someone who simply forgot all of that happened -- which is, no doubt, his wish for you. Too late now.

Action: bad health care "reform," and bad telecom mergers.

H.R. 2575, entitled the Save American Workers Act of 2015 because its writer apparently has a lot of damn nerve, would "fix" the Affordable Care Act by changing the threshold for defining a full-time worker in America from 30 hours to 40 hours. Again, I am stunned that anyone would dare call this "saving American workers," since it ensures that corporations will be able to get more work out of their full-time workers without having to provide health insurance. And the CBO agrees, estimating H.R. 2575 would kick one million workers off their health insurance, but we don't need the CEO to see that. Jesus Mary and Joseph you can't just put words like "jobs" and "children" and "saving American workers" on any pile of dung and expect people to call it meatloaf. With 208 co-sponsors, the bill will almost certainly get a vote fairly shortly, so you can call your House Rep, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page. And you can also call House Majority Leader Eric Cantor who deserves to lose his next House election to a shrub (no, seriously, that's his new last name) at 202-225-2815 and tell him you're on to his rubbish. If he wants this bill to pass so badly, he can pay the price for it.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC and/or the Justice Department to prevent the Comcast/Time Warner merger, which would give Comcast a near-monopoly over cable services nationally and put it in every major national media market, then Demand Progress, Free Press, and Daily Kos still help you do that. The merger's defenders tell us that only when Comcast stands alone among cable providers will it be able to lower prices, offer better choices, fix infrastructure, and create jobs. How many times must I tell these pimps! Only competition will force Comcast to do any of these things, and this merger lessens competition. Like we're the stupidest people on Earth or something! I'm also tired of folks saying that Comcast isn't really competing with Time Warner but with services like Verizon and Dish, as if Comcast doesn't already have many times the customers as either of these two services. Oh, one more thing: if Comcast becomes this powerful, and the FCC still refuses to enforce strong net neutrality rules, then too many Americans will be stuck consuming whatever Comcast wants them to. In America, the land of freedom, that's intolerable.

Action: fair pay, Frankenfoods, and vouchers.

Congress wouldn't move on a minimum wage bill, so President Obama issued an Executive Order raising the minimum wage for federal workers on future contracts to $10.10/hour. Congress also won't move on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would (among other things) stop corporations from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay with each other; will Mr. Obama step in here, as well? He is well within his rights to do so, since you have to follow federal rules if you want to take federal money. Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell Mr. Obama to issue an Executive Order preventing contractors from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay with co-workers. What's the big deal, you ask? Many times, talking with your co-workers about what you're making is the only way you can find out you're a victim of pay discrimination. And why should our tax dollars -- since that is how federal contractors get paid -- aid and abet discrimination? Wait, let me guess -- federal contractors with a sincere religious belief that women should be paid less should be coddled by the taxpayer!

Meanwhile, the fight for proper labeling of genetically-modified food isn't going as well as you'd think an effort 90% of the people support would go, so I have two action alerts you may want to pursue. In one, PennPIRG helps you tell supermarket chain Giant to label the genetically-modified foods it sells, and in the other, CREDO helps you tell General Mills to label genetically-modified ingredients in all of its cereal products. General Mills has committed to labeling genetically-modified ingredients in Cheerios, which is no small thing, but General Mills also makes Chex, Golden Grahams, Lucky Charms -- and Honey Nut Cheerios (to my taste, at least, the superior product), which General Mills has apparently exempted from its Cheerios edict. Note to people who complain that we never compromise: it's labeling, not banning! Why are you afraid of labeling? If opposition to Frankenfoods is all ignorance -- and not, say, about heightened exposure to pesticides and increased incidence of cancer -- why not just prove it?

Finally, the school voucher movement won't go away -- S. 1968/H.R. 4000, the innocuously-named Scholarships for Kids Act, would convert almost two-thirds of federal education funding into vouchers for private schools, and S. 1909, the so-called CHOICE Act, would shovel most of the rest toward private schools. If Medicare vouchers are such a terrible idea, why are public school vouchers a better one? They'd both do the same thing: they'd siphon off taxpayer money that could be used to make our public services better, and give that money to private interests, which won't do a better job than our public services do and which will also keep as much of our taxpayer money for themselves as they can. You saw that note from PR Watch earlier today, I trust, which showed the true vampires of public funding to be, no, not teachers or janitors or workers soaking up overtime, but private prison CEOs and "cyber school" CEOs and waste management CEOs? Then you know what to do. Americans for the Separation of Church and State helps you tell Congress to oppose public school privatization efforts.

Around the table: reason in Arizona, racism in Texas, greed in the public sector, and science as a candle in the dark.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) vetoes that state's version of the "Turn Away the Gays" bill. Good for her, and good for everyone who agitated against it -- and bad for all the other states contemplating turning discrimination into "conscience."

Austin, TX police defend their arrest of a black man for drunken driving who scored an astounding 0.0 on their breathalyzer test. "Err on the side of caution" my ass -- the legal limit is 0.8; this looks exactly like a driving-while-black arrest to me. Turns out Travis County (where Austin sits) dismisses a lot of of its drunken driving cases, but an innocent still has to pay thousands of dollars to fight the charges. It's almost like that's the idea.

PR Watch instructs us that the "highest-paid public workers" aren't the teachers and inspectors and bus drivers working double-shifts so reviled by the right, but the corporate executives who privatize public services and then pay themselves exorbitant amounts of money -- the top six of them made over $100 million in taxpayer money between them over the last eight years. It's enough to make you think that the right wing hasn't been out to shrink the size of government so much as they've been out to steal taxpayer money for themselves.

Actor Alan Alda tells the New York Times that scientists need to "communicate better" -- that "often don’t speak to the rest of us the way they would if we were standing there full of curiosity," and that "(i)f (scientists) can’t make clear what their work involves, the public will resist advances." Of course the public also resists advances because corporations swamp the media with anti-science propaganda, but Mr. Alda's still absolutely right. If scientists "communicated better," they'd certainly help ameliorate the problems caused by all the Koch brothers and Jim Inhofes of the world.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, scientists detect water on a planet some 51 light years from Earth, meaning that it could possibly support life. I'm not sure what kind of life it could support -- the planet is a gas giant, much less dense than Earth and some eight times larger than Jupiter, and it's much closer to its parent star than even Mercury is to our sun, such that its "year" lasts only three days. Still, something could live there, which is an exciting possibility.

Action: a bogus "religious" "freedom" bill in Arizona, and keeping Amazon from handing over your customer info to the CIA.

First things first. Arizona's state legislature just passed SB 1062, which would let businessfolk and government workers discriminate against gay folks if they presume to hold a "sincere religious belief" that Leviticus is anything but a book about taking precautions with blood. You'd think Arizona's legislators wouldn't want so much attention after SB 1070, the nefarious "show me your papers" bill, but, apparently, they never learn. The bill now goes to Governor Brewer for approval, and both the ACLU and the People for the American Way help you urge Gov. Brewer to veto the bill. Is it any good, anymore, telling people that their religious "freedoms" don't get to trample on other people's actual freedoms -- that we all have "sincere beliefs" we don't automatically impose upon everyone else because, well, we're not more important than everyone else? Here's something that might make Gov. Brewer listen: businesses that exercise the "freedom" to have gay-free lunch counters will bring bad PR on themselves from all over America, and thus cost the state money. I hate to make it about money, but I also like to get the job done.

Meanwhile, Amazon recently got $600 million to provide "cloud computing" services to the CIA. And Amazon currently provides cloud computing services to you, if you're a customer. See where there might be a problem? Our government loves collecting information about us, and they might well use the "in" they've now got with Amazon to pressure them (or perhaps "pressure" them) to hand over information about what you're buying and watching. I've heard from good folks that "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear," but let's say you've watched the AMC show Breaking Bad on Amazon Prime. You're not doing anything wrong, right? But can you foresee the CIA asking for lists of people who've watched that show, because they think some of them might want to learn how to become a meth kingpin or build a wheelchair bomb? Can you foresee the CIA one day becoming so desperate for results that they harass or torture folks on that list until they confess to anything? If you can foresee any of that, then Roots Action helps you tell Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to promise his corporation won't provide customer info to the CIA.

Around the table: a minefield for myths!

Netflix will pay millions of dollars annually to stream its content via Comcast. The article doesn't tell us whether Netflix will pay Comcast more or less money than it currently pays the intermediary corporations who deliver Netflix content to Comcast; the agreement essentially gets rid of those intermediaries. But this is how the internet begins to end -- soon, only the biggest content providers being able to pay for their own "on-ramps," which do not differ from "paid prioritization," no matter what the Times says.

Exxon CEO joins lawsuit against construction of a water tower for fracking near his Texas home, citing the potential loss of property values. Naturally, the rest of the time, Mr. Tillotson heavily promotes fracking, pooh-poohing folks worried about dirty water and dirty air and increased risk of cancer; his interest in the lawsuit mentions none of these, so I suppose he's not a hypocrite per se. But that's a damn small thing to bring to the pearly gates.

Kevin Drum finds the case of Julie Boonstra -- featured in an anti-Affordable Care Act ad funded by Americans for Prosperity -- so wanting that he wonders if anyone is "truly being harmed by Obamacare." Ms. Boonstra will actually pay a little less under her plan, will keep her doctor, will even get better treatment -- yet still went along with a right-wing plan to destroy a right-wing health care reform law. I know stories are more powerful than carefully-reasoned arguments, but that doesn't explain why the "liberal" media eats up these horror-stories-that-aren't, while caring little for success stories.

Wired's David Kravets finds AT&T's release of government surveillance requests wanting, as the report apparently omits requests for metadata. The Obama Administration released guidelines in late January for corporations to release records of government requests for information -- and, it seems, left bulk metadata collection out of the guidelines, hence (perhaps!) AT&T's failure to release them. I guess they're hoping that we get fed up with all the confusion, but if it looks like dung and smells like dung, we ought to just call it dung.

Finally, Yes! magazine explodes "the myth behind public school failure." Spoiler alert: we face "not an education crisis but a manufactured catastrophe," only exacerbated by 30-plus years of privatization. Chris Hedges explains it pretty well, too -- there's all this money governments spend on education, "and the corporations want it." Note well that corporatist solutions to the education "crisis" don't actually save the public any money.

Action: net neutrality, and free speech for whistleblowers.

The FCC has put forth its new net neutrality proposal, and Free Press tells us why it's bunkum. To sum: the FCC still asserts authority to enforce net neutrality regulations without reclassifying broadband providers as telecommunications services rather than information services, which we've only been telling them to do for-freaking-ever now, while suggesting it might resort to such reclassification if the big telecoms act badly. "If"? Verizon has asserted, in court, a First Amendment right to herd its paying customers to websites Verizon prefers, regardless of what said customers prefer, and reports of slow traffic to Netflix have been much too frequent in recent weeks. Hence both Free Press and the People's Email Network help you tell the FCC, again, to preserve net neutrality the only way they can: by reclassifying broadband service providers. Memo to pundits who think people won't run through a wall for net neutrality just because their Netflix is slow: have you ever seen how people get when their page won't load right away? If I were the FCC or a big telecom, I'd fear that reaction, writ a million times larger.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported late last week about a lawsuit alleging that Kellogg Brown Root requires its workers who wish to blow the whistle on fraud to sign "confidentiality" agreements barring them from speaking to government officials, under threat of firing or legal action! A KBR executive responds that the confidentiality agreements only aim to "protect the integrity of the internal review process," and that KBR forwards all accusations "supported by the facts" to "the proper authorities." If you believe any of that, you must have been in a coma during Tha Bush Mobb years. KBR still gets to feed an awful lot at the government trough these days, which I must attribute to their familiarity with the process; certainly I could not attribute that to their work rewiring buildings in Iraq, which work electrocuted at least one Green Beret while showering. Hence the National Whistleblowers Center helps you demand that the Department of Justice investigate KBR, since KBR may well have violated at least two federal laws with its confidentiality agreement.

Around the table: chained CPI is gone, let it rest in the deep grave.

President Obama drops Social Security benefit cuts from his current budget proposal. Many folks saw the offer (to tie cost-of-living increases to a slower-growing but irrelevant-to-seniors inflation index known as "chained CPI") as a good-faith effort to get Republicans to support higher tax revenues, but I always saw it as a craven capitulation, and I'm glad he's given it up. Give yourself a pat on the back if you're one of the many, many folks who've agitated against its inclusion in the budget discussion.

American sues Ethiopian government for (among other things!) infecting his computer with spyware so they could monitor his computer use. This predicament apparently afflicts many former Ethiopians who've fled the oppressive government of their home country, but I'm more worried that a government that isn't a major world player by any stretch of the imagination can spy on folks like this. Of course, I also wonder why a government so anxious to keep its power doesn't, you know, do good works for its people.

A release of some 27,000 email documents shows then-Milwaukee County executive Scott Walker (now, of course, Governor of Wisconsin) suggesting that some of his employees respond to articles critical of him and/or his ideas in 2010. I can't say he broke the law -- we have no evidence, for example, that he told them to do it while they were working for the people of Milwaukee County, and we know he fired at least one aide caught doing just that in 2010 -- but Mr. Walker generally seems to have had more knowledge of what his aides were doing than he had previously said he did. And, you know, being the hand inside internet commenter puppet-heads actually looks weak and petty.

The Brooklyn Nets sign center Jason Collins a 10-day contract, virtually assuring he'll be the first openly gay man to play in an NBA game. (10-day contracts for players filling a short-term need have been standard in the NBA for decades.) I recall fretting that teams would shy away from him after he came out late last year (after a dozen years in the league, five as a starting center or power forward), but I also recall thinking I'd probably never know that for sure, since he's essentially a third center now, and third centers are never that much in demand. I guess we're about to learn a few things.

Finally, we visit the small agricultural town of Feldheim, in Germany, which has become self-sufficient via development of renewable energy technologies. Tea baggers may want to close their ears, but Feldheim's story testifies to the utility of both capitalistic and socialistic impulses -- farmers there began to prosper in the late '90s when they leased their land to a local energy corporation, which built wind turbines on that land and then bought a Soviet military site and converted that into a solar farm; at around the same time, the town and the corporation joined together to start a biogas factory. Hey, I don't care how we do good works so much as that we do good works.

Action: fracking in Pennsylvania, and climate change.

Gov. Corbett (E-PA) has proposed lifting the state's moratorium on leasing public lands to gas drillers -- because he's got a hole in his budget, see, one that couldn't possibly be plugged with, say, a higher tax rate on millionaire income, one that can only be plugged by letting gas drillers come in and frack their way to big profits for them and dirty water for the rest of us. Gas drillers have already leased about half of Pennsylvania's state forests, though they haven't drilled much there, possibly because flammable tap water and wastewater geysers tend to be unpopular. But never fear: Gov. Corbett says "Nobody's going to see the difference." This guy's priceless! From calling a gas drilling impact fee "un-American" to speculating that gay marriage could be a lot like brother-sister marriage to "Nobody's going to see the difference," I can't imagine how this guy could be re-elected -- though I suppose his gas drilling cronies buy him another term. Penn Environment helps you demand that Gov. Corbett keep Pennsylvania's state forests safe from gas drilling.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA to set strong limits on carbon emissions, then Public Citizen provides one more. The EPA has proposed limiting carbon emissions from new coal and natural gas plants; you may want them to limit carbon emissions from old ones as well, and you're free to tell them so. The forces of corporatism stand ready to tell us that carbon regulations will kill jobs (who do they think will enforce and comply with the regulations, robots?) and hike energy prices (the corporations will do that anyway, with or without a pretext), but none of that will matter very much if the average temperature keeps rising and extreme weather events become more frequent. Just remember that our most visible climate change opponent, Sen. Inhofe of Oklahoma, tells us he was on board with reducing climate change until he realized how much it would cost, and out of the other side of his mouth he calls climate change a "hoax." Look, it's either a hoax or it's going to cost too much; it can't be both. And the only folks it will "cost too much" are overpaid CEOs.

Around the table: CEO pay, the minimum wage, labor relations, and why gay marriage isn't a slippery slope one more time.

Dean Baker fingers a culprit behind absurdly overpaid CEOs: "corporate cronyism," as in "(t)he corporate directors who are supposed to be holding down CEO pay for the benefit of the shareholders are generally buddies of the CEOs," often picked by the CEOs themselves! Remember this the next time someone tells you CEOs deserve all those millions because they "take risks." The biggest risk they take is that one of their cronies on the board might turn on them, which, given the evidence, isn't a very big risk.

Ralph Nader tells us why the Congressional Budget Office's report that a $10.10/hour minimum wage would cost the economy 500,000 jobs during the last six months of 2016 isn't the whole story. You'll be reminded that Ron Unz, editor of The American Conservative, supports a $12/hour minimum wage. Meanwhile, Mike Konczal suggests that the CBO's science isn't exactly the consensus among economists, and some of it isn't even well-tested. The CBO report also said, by the way, that a minimum wage hike would lift 900,000 people out of poverty over that same period. What, the "liberal" media didn't foreground that?

The Gap announces it will hike its minimum wage to $10/hour by June of 2015 -- which, admittedly, puts them in a better light than does their refusal to support better safety for Bangladeshi garment workers. Meanwhile, WalMart also says they'll "look at" supporting a minimum wage hike, but WalMart supported the 2007 hike, and has made positive noises about further hikes, so this feels like they're going backward. Still, if Congressional Republicans plan to keep doing nothing, we're fortunate to find corporations volunteering to hike wages.

Volkswagen labor official suggests that the German automaker doesn't have to put any more factories in the South if workers can't unionize there. Well, Tennessee Republicans, it looks like you're not the only ones who can issue threats.

Finally, Mitch McConnell's primary challenger, Matt Bevin, says that gay marriages could lead to parent-child marriages -- "because at the end of the day a lot of this ends up being taxes and who can visit who in the hospital and there’s other repressions and things that come with it -- so a person may want to define themselves as being married to one of their children so that they can then in fact pass on certain things to that child financially and otherwise." "Where do you draw the line?" he demands. Right here: gay marriages will not lead to parent-child marriages, because children cannot consent to a relationship with an adult, and parents can already pass "certain things" on to their children. (Yes, I, too, wonder what Mr. Bevin means by "repressions.")

Action: safer credit cards, and less mountaintop removal mining.

You've no doubt heard about the massive security breach at Target, where hackers may have stolen personal information from 110 million people; similar though smaller data breaches have also recently occurred at Michaels and Nieman Marcus. How do thieves do this? Well, when you use your credit or debit card at a department store, you use a card reader, and this card reader stores (and encrypts) the data on your credit or debit card for a short while, but thieves use malware that "scrapes" that data from the card reader. All is not lost, though: in other countries, credit and debit cards use embedded microchips, rather than magnetic stripes (which technology is decades old). American retailers and manufacturers have balked at the idea, though, because of the cost of upgrading credit and debit cards and the point-of-sale devices that read them. And yet corporations are flush with profits right now, and surely they don't want another wave of bad PR visited upon them (indeed, Target has already decided to upgrade its readers). So Consumers Union helps you tell American corporations to make our credit and debit cards safe again.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell PNC Bank to stop funding corporations that use mountaintop removal mining. "Mountaintop removal" is, of course, a bit of a euphemism: coal corporations blow the tops off of mountains so they can get to the coal goodness below (because it's easier and needs fewer employees than strip-mining, why else?), and in the process they dump toxic carcinogens and heavy metals into the water table of the good folks living in the valleys below, so that kids in Appalachian coal mining areas have much higher incidences of birth defects and rather shorter life spans (not to mention blood-red water coming out of their tap). PNC Bank lends these coal corporations money, and though they said in 2010 they wouldn't fund individual mountaintop removal projects or lend to coal corporations who primarily use mountaintop removal mining, coal corporations have evaded these requirements and continue to get PNC cash. But there's hope: about 25% of PNC shareholders voted last April to call on PNC to look more critically at its coal funding, and as you know, getting 25% of shareholders to agree on something is actually a pretty big deal. So we can get this done.

Around the table: folly, folly, folly, and, also, folly.

Tennessee state legislature also pushes an anti-gay discrimination bill in the name of "religious freedom," one that would allow businesses like wedding vendors to "turn away" gay folks. Money quote from state legislator: "“I think it’s more wrong to force people to violate their conscience" than to protect gays from discrimination. But businesses provide a service, and once you're providing a service to other people who have rights just like you, your "conscience" doesn't reign supreme. Next up: state legislatures seek to nullify the 13th and 14th Amendments because the Bible tolerates slavery, and, you know, some people might have sincere religious beliefs about that.

"Horror at the world's largest solar farm days after it opens as it is revealed panels are SCORCHING birds that fly over them," screeches the headline on this London Daily Mail article. But we're looking at a giant plant of 300,000 mirrors reflecting sunlight to a giant water tower, not the photovoltaic panels you're likely more familiar with. I bet a lot of folks are going to look at the headline and think ZOMG SOLAR POWER KILLZ!!!!! And plenty of environmentalists who'd never get a second look from the "liberal" media will suddenly get exposure when they oppose solar power (and wind power, for that matter).

Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher, the man who gives Everyman a bad name, has taken a union job at a Chrysler plant. And he promptly took to Facebook about being "required" to join the union (which isn't true, actually -- he's just required to pay dues) and then seemed to defend private unions, saying they represent "a choice between employees and employers." So how does he really feel? Oh, who knows or cares? In any case, he's gotten the memo from his real paymasters that private unions are OK until all the public unions are gone, after which the private unions will most decidedly not be OK.

George Zimmerman, arguably the most hated man in America and for good reason, claims that "(t)he government, the president, the attorney general" or somebody has made him a "scapegoat," not that he can say what he'd be a scapegoat for because "I don’t know what they’re thinking or why they’re thinking it, all I know is that they’re doing it." Usually you can tell "what they're thinking or why they're thinking it" by what they're doing. Seriously, what a diaper-loaded brat -- I hope people point to him on the TV (where he always is anymore!) and tell their children that this is how not to be.

Action: reining in Presidential war-making power, and promoting postal banking.

The 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF), which Congress passed right after 9.11 to authorize our ongoing incursion in Afghanistan, is still in effect, and word on the street is that a lot of Congressfolk from both parties wouldn't terribly mind repealing it. In fact, H.R. 2324 would repeal the AUMF at the end of this calendar year; the bill currently has eight Democratic sponsors and two Republican ones. (One of the latter is the infamous Paul Broun of Georgia, but don't hold that against the bill.) If you wonder whether repealing the AUMF is really a good idea, consider that the Constitution grants the power to declare war to Congress, not the President, and then read those five words again: "authorization to use military force." That's a long way to go in order to avoid saying "declaration of war," isn't it? If we're going to go to war, we ought to at the very least be honest enough to call it that. And our current Administration now uses the AUMF to justify unmanned drone attacks, our NSA spying on us, and continued detention at Guantánamo Bay. So the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2001 AUMF and start reining in Presidential power again.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell President Obama to allow the U.S. Post Office to offer basic types of banking services, which might include savings accounts, debit cards, and small loans. Why? Two reasons: one, the Post Office did offer all these services until 1967, and offering these services again could keep a lot of low-income families from resorting to things like pawnshops and check-cashing joints and payday lenders. Keep in mind that you can find Post Offices in rural and urban areas where the big banksters don't want to go provide services to anyone, and these areas serve close to one quarter of the American people. The other reason? Offering basic banking services would help shore up the Post Office's finances, thus protecting the jobs and pensions of its workers. The best part? Mr. Obama can just issue an executive order directing the Postmaster General to, say, start a trial program implementing the USPS Inspector General's very positive recommendations about postal banking. Let Congress work itself into a froth about it -- they'd either be protecting a) the banksters who don't want to serve the communities the Post Office would serve or b) the predatory lenders who wind up "serving" those communities anyway. All that ain't good optics, as they say.