Thieves in the Temple.

Action: fuel efficiency, work scheduling, and free speech.

Consumers Union helps you tell your Senators to reject efforts to weaken fuel economy standards. You may well be asking yourself: self, who sits at home and says you know what would be great? If gas cost more and our cars polluted more? Apparently, the answer would be the bipartisan group of five Senators who co-sponsored S. 1273, the so-called Fuel Economy Harmonization Act. So how does S. 1273 weaken fuel economy standards? Automakers get credits for exceeding fuel economy standards, and S. 1273 would allow them to increase the number of years they can use those credits to offset their performance in years they don't comply with the standards so well. S. 1273 would also dramatically increase the size of these credits over the years, doubling them in the short term and tripling them by 2022. The end result: cars that cost more to fill up and get fewer miles to the gallon. To think that people actually get rich coming up with crap like this! But we'll see how rich they are when they meet their Maker.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2942/S. 1386, the Schedules That Work Act, would require employers to give their employees their work schedule two weeks in advance, and pay employees more when they change their shift at the last minute or send them home because there's not enough work to do. The bill would also ensure that employees can request a schedule change without retaliation, and force employers to honor these requests if they can't come up with a business-related reason to deny it. Haters should note well that final phrase -- employers could still deny schedule change requests, just not merely because they feel like it. I know to some folks this'll all sound like we're handcuffing a business's ability to make money, but we're not -- if you're a manager, and you can't tell what your scheduling needs are in advance, then you're not a very good manager, and why should workers be made to compensate for a manager's incompetence? Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support more stable work scheduling for working families by supporting the Schedules that Work Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to protect the Johnson Amendment, which prevents churches from endorsing or campaigning directly for particular candidates, then Food and Water Watch helps you do that. You may recall that one of the biggest pitfalls of repealing the Johnson Amendment -- that big corporations could simply use churches to launder campaign donations to particular candidates in complete secrecy. You would be appalled, I would think, not just at the physical corruption in such a scenario, but the spiritual corruption as well -- a church that would agree to do that would become rotten to its core, and perhaps worse, would become a slave to a particular politician's or donor's wishes. Churches should not be subservient, and the best way to avoid that pitfall is for them to do their necessary work from outside the electioneering process. This is also why I tell folks not to "support" politicians and hope they'll do the right thing, but to make politicians do the right thing, regardless of allegiance.

Around the table: in which our populist instincts find little reflection in the "liberal" media.

U.S. Supreme Court rules that Arab and Muslim immigrants who were unlawfully detained and/or tortured can't sue high-ranking public officials for damages. Because national security, naturally -- how can Our Best and Brightest make "difficult but necessary decisions" if they're worried about getting sued? Seems to me if you did nothing wrong, your best course of action would be to win the lawsuit, especially since, as a member of Our Best and Brightest, you would have the means to fight it. And the Court left open the possibility that plaintiffs can sue far lower-ranking officials for damages, which is rather like King Solomon literally splitting the baby in half.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, describes the kind of "Jim Crow Scam" that could have tipped the Georgia 6th special House race to Republicans. In Georgia, of course, it's considerably worse than elsewhere -- community organizations register voters, call the state government to find out why their registrations didn't go through, get the run-around, and then get raided and shut down by the state. And Interstate Crosscheck does its dirty work here, too. Stop me if you've heard this before, but a better candidate -- not the perfect moderate, but the perfect populist -- could have won that race regardless. 6th District Democrats will disagree with me, but they're wrong -- the major difference between rank-and-file liberals and conservatives these days is tone, not substance.

Speaking of which: the stunning thing about appeals for Democrats to move right on social issues so they can win more elections (as Jim Naureckas at FAIR tells us) is that the data tells Democrats to move left on economic issues. Strangely, "liberal" media pundits never suggest that Democrats should ever target folks who are conservative on social issues but liberal on economic issues! I've long said that the pro-lifer who wants to tax the rich at 91% is more my ally than the can't-we-all-get-along pro-business pro-choicer; we know these people exist, and we also know that corporatist Democrats offer them literally no reason to vote Democrat.

Barry Ritholtz at Bloomberg soberly evaluates the Kansas tax-cuts-for-the-rich "experiment" under Gov. Brownback, and finds it wanting. We need not tabulate all the ways in which Mr. Brownback has thoroughly bollocksed up his state (though Mr. Ritholtz's own tabulation is quite valuable, and "underpromising and overdelivering" is good advice for any undertaking!), but I did not know that Kansas finishes high on the list of states that lose a lot of its residents to other states. What state is at the other end of the spectrum, welcoming the most new residents? Oregon -- which passed a massive tax hike on the rich back in 2010. Could that be mere coincidence?

Finally, on the occasion of Jeffery Immelt leaving General Electric with a $200 million-plus golden parachute, Sam Pizzigati reminds us that CEOs don't really earn all that damn money. GE once gave us "breakthroughs like the first commercial electric power station (1882), the first high-altitude jet engine (1949), and the first laser lights (1962)," but not now, not when it's so much easier to artificially create a fortune by becoming a monopoly, securing corporate welfare, and slashing jobs and pensions. And the sad part is that too many Americans think "well, he made a lot of money" is an accomplishment. And that's because we don't do accomplishments anymore. Feel free to conclude that the lust for mammon keeps us from dreaming of real good works that we might pass down to future generations.

Action: internet freedom, a cease-fire in Yemen, and campaign finance reform.

You still have a few weeks to tell the FCC you want to keep net neutrality regulations exactly as they are, so that you, not some corporation, can decide where you want to go on the internet -- but why not pressure your Congressfolk, too? Both Free Press and Common Cause help you call your Congressfolk and tell them you oppose the FCC's plan to roll back net neutrality regulations, and that they should oppose it, too. Congressfolk have too often imagined that there's some mystical "light touch" regulation the FCC could apply, but that's bunk -- net neutrality, as expressed by the FCC's Open Internet Order of 2015, already is "light touch" regulation: it isn't "big government telling us what to do" so much as it's our government preventing corporations from telling us what to do. Which they will do, if we let them -- they will determine what internet websites you can visit, after extracting tribute from those websites, of course, and they will determine how fast your pages will load. So let's get our Congressfolk on board with us, for once. We deserve that much.

Meanwhile, a vote to stop munitions sales to Saudi Arabia came closer than ever to passing the Senate earlier this month, and now the U.N. Security Council has unanimously called for a cease-fire in Yemen, where Saudi warmaking (aided and abetted by American arms) has driven that country dangerously close to famine. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with Move On to help you tell your Congressfolk to back the U.N. call for a ceasefire in Yemen. Why are we in Yemen again? The best face one could put on it is that we're trying to help keep order there -- Yemen is the poorest Middle Eastern country, with fairly weak governmental institutions -- but if that's the best face we can put on it, we probably should stay home. And that's not the best face you can put on Saudi Arabia's involvement in Yemen -- for years they've been financially supporting various tribal groups in their efforts to preserve their autonomy, which (again, at best) sure is a dangerous game to be playing. And with the Saudis' enemies, the Houthis, being some of the best ISIS-fighters on Earth, maybe there's no "best face" to put on this after all.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 20, the Government by the People Act, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. Yesterday saw the culmination of the special U.S. House race in Georgia's 6th district, an election in which donors spent over $50 million, making it the most expensive House race in history. And 2016 saw no less than nine U.S. Senate races in which donors spent over $70 million, including the Pennsylvania Senate race between a milquetoast Democrat and a far-right Republican, neither of whom got 50% of the vote, where donors spent an astounding $175 million. You can think of better things to do with $175 million, right? Like, oh, I don't know, create jobs? The Government by the People Act would set up a public campaign financing system, funding candidates six dollars for every one dollar they raise in small donations. And to think some folks actually say we need more campaign spending! But I watched those horrible Pennsylvania ads, and those donors might as well have flushed that $175 million down the toilet. How about we discourage that kind of waste?

Around the table: modern-day wage slavery in California, and other sad tales.

Anthony DiMaggio at Counterpunch argues that we've been overestimating economic populism as a factor in President Trump's support -- and thus underestimating factors such as racism, xenophobia, and "the elitist class war against the middle class and poor." Studies find Trump voters aren't poorer, more unemployed, or more from Rust Belt regions, while other studies show sexism and racism to be better predictors of Trump support, and still other studies find a disproportionate percentage of Trump supporters being well off. And when they say 70 percent of Trump voters don't have a college education, you can always remind them that the rate nationally is 71 percent.

U.S. Supreme Court will hear appeal of a District Court decision striking down Wisconsin's most recent redistricting map as unconstitutionally partisan. Justice Kennedy has long said he'd like to evaluate a standard that deals with partisan redistricting, but that doesn't mean he'll approve of the standard advanced by the original plaintiffs, nor does his joining the majority issuing a stay of the District Court's decision suggest which way he'll rule. One thing, though: if too many Wisconsin Republican legislators said out loud that they were trying to use the redistricting process to ensure permanent or durable Republican majorities, rather than respond to citizens' needs, that could piss off John Roberts.

Brett Murphy at USA Today looks at how California port trucking corporations force drivers into becoming "modern-day indentured servant(s)." Basically, these corporations turn their mostly immigrant truckers into independent contractors who "work toward" "owning" their truck, and then use their truckers' indebtedness to force them to work 16- and 20-hour days for little pay. And if they miss work for any reason, they seize their truck, and all the money they've paid toward it! Corporate hacks have their litany of excuses -- abuses are rare, drivers are lazy, unions make trouble, it's so hard to make money anymore. I suppose once major retail corporations start bowing to public pressure to stop taking advantage of this situation, we'll also hear you don't want your prices to go up, do you?

This New York Times article describing how Mr. Trump's business ties with Saudi Arabia and the UAE (and his lack of business ties with Qatar) are influencing his Middle East policy quotes Mr. Trump as saying Saudi citizens "buy apartments from me," spending "$40 million, $50 million" and then asking rhetorically "Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much." He and his votaries imagine he's just shooting-from-the-hip, but he's actually confessing that his own business ties (and not so much the people's will!) will set American policy, and confessing your wrongdoing as if it's nothing doesn't make it nothing. It sure doesn't make it "not wrongdoing."

Finally, Jon Schwarz at The Intercept alerts us to an actual historical mini-series on the History Channel called "America's War on Drugs" -- and notes that it's "the first time U.S. television has ever told the core truth about one of the most important issues of the past 50 years," i.e., that "the war on drugs has always been a pointless sham." It's not just a sham because President Nixon essentially created the "war on drugs" as a way of discrediting black and hippie protestors, but because of our own government's well-documented collusion with various drug cartels. Still, as Mr. Schwarz says, it's a big deal that it's on TV -- and not sequestered on a pay channel, even!

Action: fighting banksters and polluters.

H.R. 10, the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, passed the House a few weeks ago, because what's more American than giving banksters more tools to screw good people over? H.R. 10 is so awful that its defenders have few things to say in its favor, except that ALL REGULASHUNZ IZ TEH BADZ!!!! and IT HELPZ TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!!! Here in the reality-based community, of course, we know that regulations restricting financial predators are not, in fact, bad, and we also know that right-wing politicians love telling you that they do everything they do for small businesses when, in fact, they do everything they do for big corporate campaign donors. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the biggest problem small businesses have isn't government -- it's big corporations using their power to squash them before they have a chance to do great things. H.R. 10 still has to go before the Senate, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to tell your Senators to protect good Americans from financial predators and reject H.R. 10.

Meanwhile, state government officials in Arizona and Utah have urged the Trump Administration to lift a 20-year uranium mining ban in the area around the Grand Canyon. These officials claim that the uranium ban kills jobs, as if uranium poisoning wouldn't kill tourism jobs, and that Big Gummint shouldn't designate monuments in states, as if that's not at all self-serving. But now they also claim, in a spurt of Bush-Mobb caliber bullshitting, that uranium mining doesn't pollute groundwater. And what's to stop President Trump from claiming that his Grand Canyon will be the bigliest yugest Grand Canyon ever, one that will magically make even more tourism dollars while making his mining cronies rich? If you mess up the Grand Canyon, you've messed it up forever -- and if you put uranium into the River that provides drinking water for 40 million people, then you've messed them up forever, too. So Roots Action helps you tell your President and your Congress that the Grand Canyon should be a national monument.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Pennsylvania Assemblyperson to stop two pro-pollution bills passed by the state Senate, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. The two bills, as you may know, are SB 624, which would allow longwall coal-mining corporations to pollute public waters as long as they have a plan to clean it up later, and SB 561, which would require the state legislature to approve any and all Executive branch-issued regulations that could conceivably have a "significant economic impact." Of course, a lot of clean air and clean water regulations do have such an impact -- they drive health care costs downward. But I suspect that's not the "impact" Pennsylvania's state legislators care about -- I'm pretty sure they care about the impact such regulations might have on a corporate CEO's ability to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home. And as for SB 624, why would you trust a corporation's "plan" to clean up their mess? You make corporations clean up their mess, because that's the only way it can work.

Action: health care, drug policy, and Pebble Mine.

First up this week, of course, is the Senate's health care "reform" bill. The Senate's deliberation process, such as it is, has been so secret that even Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) has said she can't answer her constituents' questions about it because she literally hasn't seen any language from it -- and, of course, so secret that there'll be no committee hearings on it, and perhaps not even a copy of the bill for the public to read. Of course, from what we have heard about it, it'd merely hand out hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to the rich and cut more hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid -- supposedly the only "disagreement" among "moderate" Republican Senators is in how fast they'd make those cuts. Oh, and their other ideas are pretty crappy, too -- just try and explain the difference between the Obamacare mandate and "auto-enrollment." Go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to reject their secret health care bill, and if you've got a Democratic Senator, then Indivisible helps you remind them that they've got tools to fight this thing.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Jeff Sessions may be hot to stamp out the spread of marijuana, everywhere (remember how he said back in the day that he thought the Klan were OK until he learned they were pot-smokers?), but H.R. 2920/S. 1374, the CARERS Act, would end federal prohibition of marijuana (which, frankly, has never belonged on Schedule I with really dangerous drugs like heroin) and thus protect the 30 states that have legalized medical marijuana. Yep, Mr. Sessions wants to go after that, even, having already asked Congress to fund efforts to prosecute medical marijuana providers and patients. The CARERS Act would also loosen some of the restrictions around marijuana research, which would, at least, cut down on the number of people who reflexively shout YOUZ CANTZ PROVEZ TEH POTZ HAZ ANYZ BENEFITZ!!!! You can't shut down all the haters, of course, but you can contain them. So Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane drug policy by supporting the CARERS Act.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell the EPA to reject the proposed Pebble Mine project in southwestern Alaska. Wait -- you thought that was over and done with? Well, the change in Administrations has brought a change in the EPA's heart, if it can be said to have one anymore, as the EPA has "settled" a lawsuit with Pebble Mine's owners. If you've come to regard "settlement" as a dirty word thanks to Obama-era settlements with banksters, well, this one's even worse -- all the EPA got out of it was an end of lawsuits that might well have failed anyway, and now Pebble Mine's owners get to reapply for permits to mine for gold and copper in an area with a thriving salmon industry, one that provides about half the world's sockeye. Guess what happens to them if Pebble Mine ever becomes operational? They're all going to choke to death in polluted water, and the jobs they support will disappear along with them. Still, new permits require new public comments, which the Trump Administration doesn't care about, but is still legally required to solicit -- until such time as he declares martial law, I suppose.

Around the table: the drama-smashing machine.

U.S. State Department releases volume confirming American involvement in the overthrow of the democratically-elected leader of Iran in 1954, Dr. Mosadegh, which sparked that country's quarter-century slide into Islamic fundamentalism. This has, of course, been an open secret for decades, and you may recall Ron Paul bringing this up in every 2008 Presidential debate, but it's still good to have it from our government's own mouth.

I fancy myself an optimist, but I don't know that it's true that "A Progressive Electoral Wave is Sweeping the Country." It's a big country, with over half a million elected offices, so even citing 10 recent elections won by actual liberals doesn't necessarily describe a "wave" -- even if you add in the Democrats' surprisingly good showings in two recent Congressional special elections, good showings they owe to the actual liberals who ran in them. Paragraph 8 at least reminds us that most significant electoral change starts a long way away from Washington, which is likely why our "liberal" media don't see it until very late.

Kathryn Milano at the Roosevelt Institute informs us that, contrary to what right-wingers tell you, Dodd-Frank isn't "killing" community banks. Key takeaways: community banks are loaning and making more money than they did last year, and Dodd-Frank has always had tiered regulatory structures that demand more from big banks than the community banks. Really, big banks, not big government, are holding community banks back, and I can't see another way to keep big banks from distorting the economy than through vigorous regulation (including anti-trust regulation). File this one under "big corporations using small businesses as a human shield."

Homeowners sue Wells Fargo for modifying their mortgages without the homeowners' permission -- adding 10 years to the length of the mortgage in some cases. Doesn't matter if their monthly payments went down a bit, because people get to make that decision, not banksters, and people might not make that decision if it extends their mortgage well into old age -- a move which would, of course, also make the bankster a lot more money in interest. Boy, it sure is a good thing the House just passed a bill that would cripple the ability of federal agencies to root out this kind of corruption.

Finally, some House Reps, who imagine they really went out on a limb to pass Trumpcare, are supposedly very upset that President Trump has called the House bill "mean" and asked Senators to make it more "generous" -- and even say Mr. Trump could have trouble working with Congress on tax cuts and infrastructure as a result. Uh, no, he won't -- since they all want the same thing (i.e., tax cuts for the rich, and damn everyone else), no "negotiation" over these matters will be necessary. It's drama, people! So treat it as such.

Around the table: time for another exciting round of "who's the snowflake now?"

Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) says Congressfolk "absolutely" ought to cut down on public appearances (including town halls, which he absolutely talked about at length!) in light of the recent mass shooting that critically injured Rep. Scalise. That's rather insulting to the voters, when the vast majority of us are civilized people, and civilized people don't go around shooting people. Why do you suppose they'd want to conflate tough questions at townhalls with shootings? And Rep. Barletta is one of the fellows who actually charged people real cash money to go to his townhalls in 2011, so he's, like, a snowflake emeritus. Can't campaign ads address this sort of cowardice?

Researcher finds Georgia's voting system security to be almost absurdly vulnerable to hackers -- not long before the special House election in Georgia's 6th district that has the entire Beltway world aflutter. But if Jon Ossoff weren't just another let's-all-get-along-with-Republicans Democrat, he wouldn't have to worry about election hacking. America's not Iran -- you can't hack an election here unless it's already close, and here you can actually inspire large numbers of people to vote for you, versus repeatedly dragging out the spectre of The Republican Ogre Who Must Be Stopped This Time.

Kate Cox reminds us that "The Internet Can Help Treat Sick People in Rural America, But Most Lack Adequate Access." Not because net neutrality "stifles" such access, either (I know that argument's coming!), but because corporations simply don't build broadband out there because "there's no money in it." You know, the same reason we don't have an ebola virus after all these years. You know what would help rural broadband internet access? Good old public broadband funded by good old tax hikes on the rich -- and certainly not more haranguing from Democrats about how you've got to get on board with the future before the future's even arrived in your neck of the woods.

Here's something to think about: maybe mass killings of coyotes doesn't actually make livestock safer. Not that I really fault people for thinking that mass killing of predatory animals is Teh Only Way, but scientists have found that a) even the most experienced ranchers can't always tell exactly which animal killed their animals, b) killing predators tends to wreck the social structures of their packs such that their numbers actually get bigger, which makes them more dangerous, c) non-lethal means of discouraging predators (including guard animals and chemical repellants) actually protect livestock pretty well, and d) predators fulfill other important functions in ecosystems, functions you don't always see right away. Lesson: if a pen does the job, don't use a sledgehammer.

Finally, the government of China grants preliminary approval for nine previously rejected Trump trademarks. I'm sure this development is completely unrelated to the fact that Mr. Trump has stopped haranguing China for alleged currency manipulation. And no, right-wing snowflakes, that matter is precisely at the heart of the Constitution's emoluments clause. At least right-wingers can take comfort in the likelihood that Democrats will blow their chance to remove him from office by continuing to obsess about Russia.

Action: healthy school lunches, clean water, and campaign finance reform.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Department of Agriculture to keep, and not roll back, the school lunch nutrition standards set by the previous Administration, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The right has ginned up a "controversy" over what should be a very uncontroversial matter -- keeping junk food out of school lunches and putting more healthy food into school lunches -- and it's quite possibly even more ridiculous than the other fake outrages they peddle. For a time the "controversy" relied on anedcotes about kids not eating their apples, overblown accounts of states "having trouble" meeting the standards, and the tired right-wing trope of TEH BIG GUMMINT REGULASHUNZ IZ ALWAYSEZ TEH WRONGZ!!!! But now the controversy also relies on our Agriculture Secretary's rather flexible definition of "standard." You didn't know conservatism was all about not following the rules when you feel like it, didn't you? I kid, of course -- conservatism is not about that, even when the reactionaries who call themselves "conservative" act like it is.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state Senate passed SB 624 not that long ago; you may recall that SB 624 would amend state clean water laws so that corporations -- like, just to pull an example out of the air, corporations that practice longwall coal mining -- can pollute local streams with as long as they submit a plan to clean up their mess later on. Whether they actually follow through on their plan to clean up their own mess isn't even the point -- the water's polluted in the meantime, meaning you can't drink it, bathe in it, swim in it, or fish in it! If your kid didn't want to clean his room, but instead wanted to submit a cleaning plan to you so he could do it later, would you put up with that? Of course you wouldn't! And your kid isn't even planning to pollute your water! The state House Energy and Environmental Resources Committee has planned a vote on SB 624 for this coming Monday, so the Sierra Club still helps you tell your state Reps to oppose SB 624 (and also SB 561, a sort of REINS Act for Pennsylvania, which we need like we need a hole in the head).

Finally, Pennsylvania still barely has any campaign finance laws to speak of, not even gift-banning laws with any teeth, so Common Cause helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to pass a strong gift ban. It's bad enough that so many of our allegedly greatest legal minds think money is speech, but they also get their shorts in a bunch when folks try to ban gifts to lobbyists, saying that of course politicians can vote objectively even though they get gifts, though virtually any sentient life form would regard such gift-giving as a temptation, if not an outright bribe. Odd, how some people find themselves defending politicians' good nature! Still, avoid the temptation to throw up your hands and say people are just corrupt -- or worse, to say that human nature is corrupt and any law that tries to change that is a bad law. People do change over time -- we settle far fewer of our disputes with murderous violence than we used to, after all. And a world without corruption would be a better world than the one we've got, and that alone makes it worth fighting for.

Action: government spying, and Congressional corruption.

S. 1297 would permanently reauthorize Section 702 of the nefarious FISA Amendments Act -- the bill Congress passed in 2008, with the support of then-Senator Obama, who cited, of course, "the grave threats we face" as a reason to unconstitutionally spy on Americans. You may recall from Edward Snowden's whistleblowing that Section 702 specifically authorizes our government to collect emails, texts, and phone calls in bulk, without getting a warrant, and therefore without establishing probable cause before a judge. So let's get this straight: lone wolf terrorists and terrorist organizations are not "grave" or "existential threats." You know what an "existential threat" is? Nazi Germany in 1939 -- not al-Qaeda, not ISIS, and not the Orlando shooter, whom ISIS disowned upon learning he might have been in the closet. Terrorists aim to paralyze us in fear so that we make our societies less free, thus the only moral response is to stay free. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect American freedoms by rejecting S. 1297.

Meanwhile, S. 1189, the Close the Revolving Door Act, would ban Congressfolk from ever lobbying Congress on someone else's behalf after they leave office. That'd be a big deal, as too many Reps and Senators from both parties become lobbyists after retiring or getting defeated for re-election. The bill would also extend the ban on Congressional staff becoming lobbyists from one year after leaving their Congressional jobs to six. Does this restrict their free speech rights after they leave office? No, it does not -- the Constitution can't prevent you from redressing grievances with your Congressfolk, but the Constitution doesn't guarantee a "right" to make money doing that, either. Former Congressfolk who become lobbyists aren't "redressing grievances" so much as they're exploiting connections, and while the First Amendment also guarantees a right of free association, it doesn't guarantee a right to make money off your "free associations," either. If Congressfolk don't like any of that, I suppose they can always work for a living. So Rootstrikers helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight corruption by supporting S. 1189.

Around the table: tales of arms deal votes, Russian hacking, mass incarceration, a narrow primary vote, and more right-wing whining.

S.J.Res. 42, which would have blocked munitions sales to Saudi Arabia, fails by a 47-53 margin. The bad news? Five Democrats -- four of them up for re-election in states Mr. Trump won in 2016, three of whom are absolute toast at this writing anyway so why did they bother? -- voted against the resolution, basically finishing it off. But even the most cynical person -- the one who'd say the four Republicans who supported the resolution only did so because they knew it would go down -- would have to recognize, I think, that this close, dramatic vote is 20 votes better than what we got from a similar resolution last year. And we should watch this Todd Young, Republican Senator from Indiana; he did a lot of legwork to get this effort as far as it did, so he might actually mean it.

Don't get too riled up over the news that Russian hackers hit more voter databases than we previously thought -- because apparently those hackers didn't actually do any vote manipulation, possibly because state and local databases are all different, which is as good an argument as any for keeping some matters out of our federal government's hands. Seriously, one federal database, likely based on one national ID system, would be far more vulnerable to manipulation. States need to do more to secure their voting data, of course, but the same objections I've always had to obsessing over Russia -- that obsession distracts you from worse things, Republican vote suppression swayed the results far more, Democrats wouldn't have this problem if they'd stop nominating colorless centrists already -- still apply.

We tend to think of the era of mass incarceration in terms of what it's done to urban populations, but Issie Lapowsky informs us that more rural folks are going to jail, too. Pretrial incarceration, which really is unconstitutional and really should be against the law, has afflicted the rural population even more over the last 40 years than it's afflicted the urban -- pretrail jail rates have gone up over 400% among rural folks, versus around 300% in the cities -- and that's stunning. The reasons (high among them the lack of resources to get people to trial quickly enough) are, sadly, not stunning.

Bush Mobber Ed Gillespie beats Trump supporter in Virginia Republican gubernatorial primary by a single point. Now I'm old enough to remember when Mr. Gillespie told Republicans to characterize all criticism of George W. Bush as "political hate speech," so I don't Mr. Gillespie's narrowly-won advancement to the general election as some great victory for civilized society. And I rather expect Mr. Gillespie will court those Trump voters with considerable vigor. After all, it's not exactly like he has an uphill battle against Ralph Northam, in a state with a notoriously oppressive Voter ID law and a Clintonoid centrist in charge of executing it.

Finally, Newt Gingrich blames Kathy Griffin and that NYC production of Julius Caesar for "setting the tone" of a "biased" special investigation of President Trump's Russian ties. You didn't know Robert Mueller could be so easily swayed by a) a photo that virtually the whole of liberaldom condemned and b) a play about how badly an assassination of a state leader wound up going? Well, Newt Gingrich didn't know, either -- he'd praised Mr. Mueller's selection as special prosecutor as recently as last month. Why do we talk to Newt Gingrich about anything again?

Action: food stamps, and campaign finance reform.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any cuts to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, i.e., food stamps. A lot of folks really don't understand how the food stamps program works -- not just because right-wingers want to destroy all good federal programs, but because centrists pretend that pandering to people's shallowness is the path to victory. A lot of folks seem to think that the food stamp program works by taking their taxpayer money and giving it to folks who don't deserve it, but that's not how it works: it takes taxpayer money from all of us and gives it to anyone who needs it, which could be all of us, at some time or other. I mean, even the hardest-working folks suffer bad luck and reversals in life. If you really think too many of "those people" get your hard-earned money, then you have an obligation to change the system so that it's fairer. If that's even the problem -- if the problem is you're just a racist, then you need to change yourself.

Meanwhile, H.R. 20, the Government by the People Act, would create a public campaign financing program allotting six dollars for every dollar in small donations (donations $50 and under) made to campaigns. And thus the bill would amplify the power of small campaign donors; right now the really really big campaign donations seem to jump their donors to the front of any line to get their grievances heard, and our Constitution doesn't give you more rights just because you have more money. H.R. 20 wouldn't mandate participation by candidates in the public financing program, so reflexive Citizens United defenders can sheath that imaginary objection, and though it would likely have the effect of shaming candidates who forego participating in the system, there's no Constitutional "right" not to be shamed by your countryfolk, and anyone who pretends otherwise is a snowflake. Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to support real campaign finance reform by supporting the Government by the People Act.

Around the table: the Donald Trump chicken-egg question, resolved! And other lessons.

The incomparable Naomi Klein reminds us that Donald Trump "is not the crisis," but "the symptom of the crisis." Much happened before his election, after all -- we abandoned our commitment to helping each other and began worshiping the undeserving rich long ago, after all, and Mr. Trump is merely a culmination (not necessarily the culmination) of this decadent age. Among the many necessary reminders: Our Glorious Elites routinely associated the anti-"free" trade movement with terrorism after 9.11.

The incomparable David Dayen reminds us that Mr. "Trump Assigned Himself an Awful Lot of Homework That Isn't Getting Done." Most of Mr. Trump's very dramatic Executive Orders direct federal agencies to accomplish something; so far, his Orders have set 27 deadlines that have already passed, and his Administration's met less than half of them. These include a deadline for a progress report on vetting violent extremists worldwide. So add that to your list of reasons Donald Trump will have failed America when we have another 9.11-sized attack. (Oh, and if you're inclined to complain that all these missed deadlines are just bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, you have to explain why the President is even setting them in the first place.)

Dean Baker at TruthOut tells us why the Trump infrastructure plan is a "scam." I've been using the word "boutique" to describe his infrastructure plan (because it'll more likely spur development of "boutique" projects in wealthy areas of the country that don't need all that help), but "scam" is as good a word for it. One could imagine a hundred campaign ads painting Mr. Trump as the kind of scam artist you used to see all the time on late-night infomercials. Then one would remember that weakling Democrats would have to run them, and like the steam from your coffee cup, one's reverie would dissipate.

Adam Rogers at Wired explains why "If You Care About Cities, Apple's New Campus Sucks." Long story short: Apple "produced a building roughly the shape of a navel, and then gazed into it," a building that takes up 175 acres but looks inward rather than outward, failing to connect in any meaningful way to the community in which it sits, particularly in areas like housing and public transportation. Read the whole thing, though, because it's a hell of a deconstruction.

Finally, Montana U.S. House Rep. Greg Gianforte pleads guilty to assaulting a reporter, gets 40 hours community service. I should've known the moment he pled out that he wasn't going to jail, being a big politician with lots of money, but what can I say? I remain a creature of hope, and there is hope, I suppose, in the fact that he pled out so quickly. So if Mr. Gianforte challenges Jon Tester for Montana's Senate seat next year, will we get to anoint Jon Tester the Luckiest Man in American Politics?

Action: defending freedom fighters across the world.

Access Now helps you helps you tell the government of the United Arab Emirates to release human rights blogger Ahmed Mansoor. What did Mr. Mansoor supposedly do? Well, let's look at the charges: he did time in 2011 for insulting the President, Vice President, and Crown Prince of the UAE, and now he's charged with "publish(ing) false information that damages the country's reputation" and "spread(ing) hatred and sectarianism" on social media. So, in order, that's one charge only a snowflake government would file and two charges snowflake governments make up to punish folks who resist them. On the latter two charges the UAE has held Mr. Mansoor in solitary for three months, without access to a lawyer or his family, apparently because the state's too good for law and order. So let's wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against the UAE. (And, ah, if you're tempted to say this Can't Happen Here, recall that some Americans want to outlaw "fake news" and our own snowflake President wants "tougher libel laws.")

Meanwhile, H.R. 1299, the Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, still awaits Congressional consideration, so the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support human rights in Honduras by supporting H.R. 1299. H.R. 1299 would use that vaunted leverage we have that we never seem to use at the right time: it would cut off military and financial aid to soldiers or police in Honduras until such time as they stop killing activists. Berta Caceres is, of course, the famous Honduran activist who got killed in her own home last year, and since the 2009 coup, when right-wing militarists ousted the left-leaning and democratically-elected President of Honduras, over 100 such activists have died under, shall we say, mysterious circumstances. Our government may have sat back and watched the Honduran coup under President Obama, but that doesn't mean we stop doing the right thing, and it doesn't mean we wait for our government's permission to act, either.

Around the table: notes on the "war on terror" and political divides.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch explains why the British seem to get counterterrorism wrong. Long story short: Western adventures in the Middle East cause more terrorism than the internet does. Long story somewhat longer: folks actually about to commit terrorism can't seem to shut up about it, but the British government puts way too much effort into investigating and harassing foreigners obviously not about to commit terrorism. There may be no better writer about terrorism on Earth than Patrick Cockburn.

Speaking of warrantless wiretapping, our own NSA now says it's not going to tell us how many good Americans get swept up in their surveillance dragnet. Because it's too hard, of course -- which seems to be what all big talkers say when their mouths write checks their asses can't cash. Even Sen. Graham, no great fan of getting warrants before spying on people, suggests he might not reauthorize the NSA's spying authority because of this development, though I'm sure he'll back down. But if you get swamped in information about potential "terrorists," you make it that much harder to find real ones.

And now the New York Times wrings its hands over the growing "divide" in the Democratic party between the rank-and-file and the establishment, possibly "disrupt(ing) the party's path to a majority" in the 2018 midterms. Right -- just like the Tea Party's spirited inflexibility scuttled Republican attempts to retake the House in 2010. I kid, of course -- the "liberal" media only ever allows Republicans to make demands in America, while labeling the rest of us "extremists" if we want someone better than a center-right corporatist to represent us.

Billionaire hedge-fund manager takes to LinkedIn to criticize President Trump for choosing "conflict" over "harmony" and the good of the "part" over the "whole." I often hesitate to criticize folks for coming to the party late (you know, Parable of the Prodigal Son and all), but, frankly, what this guy's saying has been obvious to everyone who doesn't treat politics like a sporting event, and for a while now. Plus, he's a little New Age-y for my taste -- was there no other phrase to describe how Mr. Trump would stimulate the economy besides "ignite animal spirits"?

Finally, regarding the upcoming special election in Georgia's 6th U.S. House district, and Stuart Rothenberg calls the race "almost a must-win" for Democrats, because "it would have a significant impact on the political narrative of the summer and early fall" if they lost. Beware people who make a living "shaping the narrative" telling you that wins or losses will "shape the narrative." Also beware people who pretend that "narratives" shape elections, and democracy, more than people do. That New Age-y hedge fund manager already looks better.

Action: the Saudi arms deal, health care "reform," and pro-bankster legislation.

The Senate reportedly plans to vote today on S.J.Res. 42, which would prevent the President from sending munitions (though not all military aid) to Saudi Arabia, so either use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to vote in favor of the resolution, or use the toll-free number provided by Just Foreign Policy, which is 1.855.686.6927. Saudi Arabia would use those guns in order to keep the people of Yemen starving, just as they've been doing with the guns we've been giving them for years, and keeping the people of Yemen starving also just so happens to oppress some of the world's most effective fighters against ISIS. Why, it's almost like that's the idea. But getting the Senate to actually debate policies that lead to other people dying is a good thing. When you're done with your phone call, Just Foreign Policy asks that you report your call here.

Meanwhile, as you might expect, Republicans in the Senate used all the hoo-hah over James Comey's testimony to get their precious health care bill sent off to the CBO, which means they're much closer to throwing more than 20 million people off their health insurance than they've been letting on. So you might well suspect that when you hear that far-right Senators want to scuttle the whole Trumpcare effort, they're just feeding you drama to catch you off your guard. So both Roots Action and Social Security Works help you tell your Senators to reject the Trumpcare legislation in any form. But you may just want to tell your Senators that while you've got them on the phone about S.J.Res. 42. And you may want to add that you know the Senate's reported plan to wind down the Medicaid expansion more slowly than the House bill would do is not even the "compromise" it's been reported to be. You might even say you'd rather expand Medicaid to include everyone.

But wait, there's more! The House passed the nefarious Financial CHOICE Act last week -- you know, the bill that would give banksters more choices in how they screw us over -- and now the bill goes to the Senate, so both Consumers Union and the Sierra Club help you tell your Senator to reject the Financial CHOICE Act. Or, again, you could append it to your phone call about Saudi Arabia and the Trumpcare bill. Seriously, if they're going to try to set everything on fire at once, then they can take a 90-second phone call instead of a 30-second one, and anyway it's their job. Republicans in Congress have made no secret of their hatred for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or, indeed, for any regulations that actually keep financial predators from taking advantage of us, but they do seem to think that merely ventilating their hatred is somehow persuasive. Of course, as long as Democrats don't take on the banksters, as is the people's will, Republicans won't lose their jobs, which is about all that'll ever mitigate the harm they do.

UPDATE. Word on the street now is that the Senate will vote on S.J.Res. 42 tomorrow after 2 pm. Call your Senators anyway.

Around the table: campaign finance reform threatened by Democrats, and other sad tales.

From Richard Eskow at the OurFuture blog we get perhaps the best one-paragraph explanation of why you shouldn't support President Trump's boutique infrastructure plan: "If you needed a new stove or refrigerator, you wouldn’t give the keys to your kitchen to Olive Garden, then pay them to let you eat. You’d be opening your wallet for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of logic Donald Trump and his party are using to give away our shared wealth." The rest of the article's great, too, describing how private corporations would own our roads, our bridges, and our water systems, and charge us obscenely to use them. But please, right-wingers, complain about how TEH LIBRULZ HATEZ TEH JOBZ!!!! as if there are literally no other alternatives to whatever Mr. Trump wants to do. (Like, you know, paying for infrastructure by taxing the rich a lot harder.)

Sen. Risch (R-IA) relies on a very literal interpretation of what Mr. Trump said to Mr. Comey to justify his belief that Mr. Trump did not obstruct justice. I'm far from unsympathetic to the notion that our justice system should err on the side of not putting people in jail, but the law instructs us that one might obstruct justice merely by trying to corruptly influence an investigation, rather than issue "orders." Of course, like many Republicans, Mr. Risch seems more interested in saying "nothing to see here" and moving on to gutting Obamacare and our tax code.

Former Bernie Sanders advisor says we ought to connect with voters more traditionally, i.e., by actually going door-to-door and talking to them. Ms. Bond says, quite rightly, that Democrats seemed to think voters were very happy with the Obama era, when in fact they weren't, and if they'd actually talked to as many voters as possible -- their obsession with "big data," she says, leads them to ask "what is the smallest number of people you can talk to and win?" -- they might have seen that. Of course, then they might have had to do something about it, which might have offended their big donors. And that's why we trust people, not politicians.

Ho hum, Connecticut Democratic politicians are trying to destroy their state's Clean Elections Program, which keeps big money out of campaigns. They'll tell you it's because of budget shortfalls, but Connecticut's budget shortfalls are way bigger than the CEP's entire budget, so you know that's a lie (plus, as one observer points out, public campaign financing saves the public money, in corporate welfare tax breaks that don't get passed). More likely they're trying to kill it because incumbents want to stay incumbent, even when many of them got to be incumbents because of the level playing field the CEP instituted. It's hard out there for a pimp.

Finally, President Trump has apparently told the British government that he won't be visiting there until he can be sure his visit won't be met by protests. All together now: waaaaaaah!

Around the table: time for another exciting round of "who's the snowflake now?"

Legislators across America also seem to routinely block folks from their social media accounts. Of course, if you've created a Facebook page or a Twitter account for the express purpose of interacting with constituents, you don't get to block people -- you only get to block people from your own, private account, which, sadly, President Trump's account still seems to me to be, although Mr. Spicer sure ain't helping matters by telling reporters that they should treat his boss's twitterings as "official statements." Those Trumpsters think they're so deprived if they don't have everything both ways.

Things are so messed up now that even former right-wing talk show host Charlie Sykes says we need to put "truth" above "tribe." But this is an astoundingly good read (I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually the intro to his forthcoming book), arguing, among other things, that contemporary propaganda aims primarily to exhaust us, and also that a lot of folks "use information not to discover what is true, but rather to reinforce their relationship to their political tribe." We knew that already, but Mr. Sykes puts it really well -- and doesn't urge us all to come together behind right-wing ideas, as unscrupulous "bipartisanship" obsessives in both parties would have us do.

Seven state Attorneys General challenge EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's decision not to ban the controversial pesticide chlorpyrifos in late March. They claim the EPA has violated federal law by failing to ban it, since they also haven't determined a safe level of public exposure, and frankly that wouldn't be surprising, coming from an Administration so anti-law-and-order. The EPA also appears to be ignoring its own scientists' finding that chlorpyrifos threatens folks' health -- but they haven't even taken that information down from their website at this writing, which is really surprising.

Republican House candidate Karen Handel, running a close race in Georgia's 6th district, says, in a debate "I do not support a livable wage." Of course she means she doesn't support a law mandating such a wage, or even a minimum wage, but that's a quotation that should be featured in a thousand attack ads. I think she still beats Jon Ossoff, partly because Republicans will suppress the vote and partly because the election is still almost two weeks away and folks generally don't remember mistakes like Ms. Handel's for more than a week, but mainly because Mr. Ossoff is a wet bag of leaves.

Finally, in a truly impressive display, House Speaker Paul Ryan says President Trump may have asked former FBI head James Comey to drop that agency's investigation into then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn because he's "new at this." Then, when a reporter asks him why he seems to think that's an "acceptable excuse," Mr. Ryan says it's not an acceptable excuse, and then says now he knows why Donald Trump is so frustrated with media coverage! All together: who's the snowflake now?

Action: corporate welfare, clean water, and freedom of speech.

Did you know this was "infrastructure week," according to President Trump? Sure, other things crowded it out of the news, but Mr. Trump did propose privatizing our nation's air traffic control apparatus -- by letting a "non-profit" run it, though non-profits can pay their executives outrageous salaries and then jack up prices and fees to balance the books as easily as any for-profit. The rest of his infrastructure program is pretty much what you already expected -- some $200 billion in corporate welfare handouts that will purportedly attract $800 billion in investment, so private corporations can own our roads, our bridges, our schools, and our water systems, putting their profits above our services -- not by streamlining operations in order to deliver better service at the same price, but by simply dictating prices and services to good Americans held hostage by private ownership. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Mr. Trump's boutique infrastructure plan.

Meanwhile, the authors of H.R. 953/S. 340 have called the bill the Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act and the Sensible Environmental Protection Act, respectively, and you know what that means: that "regulatory burdens" mean only those "suffered" by big campaign donors, and "sensible" means "whatever pleases big polluters." Read the bills at congress.gov and you may not be that appalled by them, as they would allow a corporation to discharge "a pesticide authorized for sale, distribution, or use under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act" into our public waters without getting a permit. But you might also see problems with that: saying something is safe to kill bugs is not precisely the same as saying it's safe to discharge in large quantities into our rivers, lakes, and streams, and getting rid of permitting requirements for polluters would reduce our ability to know what pollutants are in the water we drink, clean with, and bathe with. Is filthy water a good price to pay for a little less bureaucracy? H.R. 953 has already passed the House, hence CREDO helps you tell your Senators to protect our clean water by opposing H.R. 953/S. 340.

Finally, President Trump still has a jones to dismantle the Johnson Amendment, that slice of our tax code that prevents all 501(c)(3) non-profits, including churches, from endorsing (or opposing) candidates for office. Mr. Trump and his kind say that the Johnson Amendment violates a church's First Amendment rights, but it doesn't -- it merely strips politicking preachers of their non-profit status, which is hardly the same as being put in jail for your speech. And since churches don't have the same reporting requirements as other non-profits, you would not have difficulty imagining big campaign donors using churches as massive money-laundering operations allowing them to evade campaign finance disclosure laws. And frankly, churches need as much protection from the Johnson Amendment as we do! The church-state wall works both ways -- it keeps the church from imposing its will on good Americans, but it also protects churches from corruption by politicians, and thus keeps them free to serve communities. People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to repeal the Johnson Amendment.

Action: "free" trade, oppression of activists, and climate change.

President Trump, as you know, has informed Congress of his intention to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, a.k.a. NAFTA. I'm quite pleased he withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," which more than one observer described as "NAFTA on steroids," but you can excuse me for thinking Mr. Trump doesn't really have the American people's best interests at heart, as evidenced by his stated intention to keep the most odious thing about NAFTA -- the "investor-state tribunals" that let corporations exact tribute from American taxpayers for having the temerity to pass laws that "cost" those corporations money (you know, like labor and clean air/clean water laws). And here you thought Donald Trump was the law and order President! I'd hope a good lawyer would argue at one of these tribunals that good environmental regulations actually save corporations money in health care costs, but I'd rather defend our right to make laws. Hence Sign for Good helps you tell the Trump Administration to negotiate a trade pact that actually does right by American workers.

Meanwhile, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressperson to help pressure Israel to drop charges against Palestinian activist Issa Amro. Mr. Amro founded Youth Against Settlements in 2003, after successfully campaigning to reopen Palestine Polytechnic University (where he was an engineering student), which the Israeli army had closed; for the past decade and a half he has preached nonviolence and civil disobedience against the Israeli occupation, and for his trouble he's been arrested dozens of times. Now Israel has indicted him on 18 charges, and some of these -- like "insulting a soldier" and "spitting in the direction of a settler" -- sure bear the mark of a state that can't win an argument on the merits. And you couldn't reasonably claim that Mr. Amro's commitment to nonviolence is a sham (if that were true, I think we'd know by now!), nor could you claim that Mr. Amro's aims are so unpalatable it doesn't matter what his methods are, particularly when we've founded a nation on precisely the notion that folks should be free to express themselves in a civilized manner, regardless of their ideas.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell ExxonMobil and Chevron to help fight climate change. This action alert comes hot on the heels of the news that an astounding 62% of ExxonMobil shareholders approved a resolution at last week's annual shareholder meeting calling for ExxonMobil to plan for the changes in its business model that fighting climate change would require; that resolution is non-binding, of course, but if you're a CEO, you ignore a six-in-ten majority of your shareholders at your own peril. Resolutions involving climate change and corporate lobbying also gained ground at the annual Chevron shareholder meeting. I've long said that shareholders don't care exclusively about money, and though the behavior of shareholders (particularly during the Obama years) has sometimes challenged that belief, I'm pleased to see my faith in them rewarded here. Yet I'm also quite irritated that shareholders ever had to tell fossil-fuel executives (our best and brightest, supposedly) to do the obvious. The sun and the wind always come back eventually, but fossil fuels will be gone sooner than we think.

Around the table: a potential public option in Nevada, responsible government in Kansas, and other items.

Don't look now, but Nevada's state legislature just passed a bill that could make Medicaid a public option there. The bill allows folks who qualify for Obamacare subsidies to use them to buy into Medicaid instead, an option that might be attractive to both Nevada and Nevadans simply because Medicaid generally pays doctors less than Medicare does. But if Gov. Sandoval doesn't veto the bill (and he may not), I suppose those "conservative," "states'rights" people in the Trump Administration could always come in to try to squash it. You can't judge by "positive" interactions with Tom Price's CMMS, after all.

Is Kansas finally ready to bounce back? The state legislature finally rolls back a big chunk of Gov. Brownback's "signature" tax-cuts-for-the-rich by overriding his veto of a sizable legislature-passed tax hike. To the Republican Rep who voted against the override by saying it was "(t)oo much, too fast," I might remind him of William Lloyd Garrison's axiom that you don't pull a baby out of a fire gradually. I might also be interested in his opinion of those actually too-much-too-fast tax cuts in the first place.

Michael Shermer at Scientific American reminds us of the key reason "Why Climate Skeptics Are Wrong": they don't point to a better theory that explains the data better. Also, they often "point to the occasional anomaly in a particular data set, as if one incongruity gainsays all the other lines of evidence." Of course, when you worship at the altar of mammon, you don't have to do science very well.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is following up on earlier ProPublica reports that Wells Fargo has been charging mortgage fees to customers inappropriately, often blaming bank-caused paperwork delays on the customer. And given that these were, you know, mortgages, the fees could be $1,000 or more. Nice work if you can get it! The CFPB is, of course, the agency Congress and President Trump are so hot to cripple, because worshiping at the altar of mammon also means you don't have to do morality very well.

The Town Hall project provides a list of the 193 members of Congress (out of 535 Reps and Senators) who have not held townhalls since the inauguration. Some "liberal" media flak no doubt stands ready to call the problem "bipartisan," but only 34 of the 193 are Democrats, meaning this is a problem is over 82 percent Republican. You'll see New Jersey House Rep. Frelinghuysen on that list -- the one who told activists to pipe down and let him do his work, the one who outed another activist to her employer, the one who should lose re-election to a shrub in 2018.

Finally, the Columbia Law School's Knight First Amendment Institute thinks President Trump is violating the First Amendment by blocking critics from his Twitter feed. But I think that depends entirely on whether Mr. Trump's Twitter account really is a "designated public forum," and not just the absurd rantings of a guy who happens to be President; under the latter, I think he would have First Amendment free association rights like anyone else, whatever we may think of him blocking his critics. But making the President use an official account that is a "designated public forum" would be well within Congress's rights.

Action: campaign finance, health care, and the "liberal" media.

H.J.Res. 31/S.J.Res. 8 would amend our Constitution to empower state and local governments to restrict campaign spending, like we used to do before the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC ruling. Two-thirds of Republican voters think the Court ruled wrongly in Citizens United, and virtually no one thinks unlimited corporate campaign spending is an unqualified good, so you know what that means: it means arguments against overturning Citizens United are desperately absurd. Mostly they rely on conflating money and speech, when money and speech are not the same thing -- the First Amendment protects the latter, but the former is property, and courts have long held that governments have a right to regulate property. But they also use scare tactics, like the threat of government shutting down newspapers or incumbents passing laws silencing opponents, i.e., things that never happened during the heyday of McCain-Feingold. So People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support real campaign finance reform in America by overturning the Citizens United decision.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the California state Senate passed a single-payer health insurance bill. The state Assembly still has to pass it, and then the mercurial Gov. Brown would have to sign it, but it's still a good step, and one we ought to try and repeat at the federal level, too. I know, I know, the Republicans who run Congress only seem to care about inflicting injury and hardship on working families, hence their zeal to take away protections for pre-existing conditions, give away taxpayer money more directly to health insurance corporations, and (hilariously!) "automatically enroll" people who don't have health insurance into health insurance, which is so different from the Obamacare mandate they profess to hate. So, yes, it's well past time to change the subject and demand that our Congressfolk enact a Medicare-for-All, single-payer health insurance system that we pay for with our taxes. Hey, we pay for all kinds of corporate welfare with our taxes, so why can't we pay for the general welfare, too? The Peace Team helps you demand a Medicare-for-All health insurance system from our politicians.

Finally, you may know that the Washington Post wrote essentially a hit piece against Social Security Disability Insurance by profiling, at length, a single family that's been getting disability payments for generations. Oh, BFD: one example of abuse (even one that's been going on for decades) doesn't constitute a trend, let alone an argument, and one of the challenges of civilization -- of maturity, even! -- is to resist the temptation to throw away good works because a very small number of people abuse them. Better to stop people from abusing them, so honest people can benefit from them! And you should remember that regardless of the sizable amount of good reporting the Post has done on President Trump, once e's gone they'll go back to foregrounding the "need" to "reform" "entitlements" (i.e., by giving away Social Security and Medicaid to private corporations) far more than they're doing now. We can help put a stop to such efforts, by telling the Washington Post to stop running distorted stories that support the President's anti-Social Security agenda, as Social Security Works helps you do.

Around the table: the ongoing chronicle of malicious Republicans, weak Democrats, and enabling media.

The estimable McClatchy D.C. bureau informs us that "GOP Media Plot Anti-Media Strategy for 2018 Midterms." And it could work! The "liberal" media deserves criticism, after all, for embracing sensationalism at the expense of truth, for turning our civic life into a glorified sporting match, and for letting their corporate paymasters dictate what gets covered and what gets buried. But I doubt Republicans level these criticisms at the media, and all Democrats have to do in response is tell everyone that only losers whine about the media. I kid, of course -- these are Democrats we're talking about.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt says coal corporations have created over 50,000 jobs since President Trump took office, but he overestimates that number by almost 49,500 jobs. Well, after all, simply taking jobs hostage whenever folks want you to stop polluting their air and water -- don't make my plant pollute less, or these jobs get it! -- only goes so far, and it doesn't go as far as it used to, frankly. So the forces of evil are reduced to telling balder and balder lies, and it sure doesn't look like the Sunday morning news shows were all that prepared for that.

Democrats actually contemplate attaching some conditions of their own to the next debt limit fight, which should occur in July. But of course they won't demand, say, a minimum wage hike before they vote to raise the debt limit (hey, it worked on The West Wing!), but they're merely going to demand that Republicans make their tax reform plans "revenue-neutral." And that's bad leadership: you only lead well when you remind voters of what they're fighting for, not merely what they're fighting against. Of course, if you do the former, you risk alienating your big donors, so, yeah, they'll totally bollocks this up, too.

Ho hum, Saudi Arabia pays the Trump International Hotel over a quarter of a million bucks over the past few months. No, this gets worse: they were putting up American war vets in $500/night rooms so they could go to D.C. and lobby against the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would allow 9.11 families to sue Saudi Arabia for its involvement in 9.11. After lying to them that such lawsuits could be turned on them by foreign governments, no less! And that's how far you have to go to get good people to do bad things.

Donald Trump whines that Democrats are keeping him from staffing our government, and is, of course, wrong. How is he wrong? He hasn't even nominated a lot of folks to staff our government, and those positions that require Senate confirmation can no longer be filibustered by a Senate minority. Always he blames someone else, even when it's obviously his fault. Remember that when the next big terrorist attack hits.

Finally, first-term U.S. House Rep from Louisiana writes a clumsy rant on Facebook saying, among other things, that America should hunt down and kill "radicalized Muslim suspects." Hey, asshole: you don't kill a suspect in America, "radicalized" or not. And if you think you should get to kill a suspect, maybe you need to go live in a police state.

Action: fighting cruel budgets, polluters, and banksters.

What's not to like about the Trump budget? Why, that it throws people off Medicaid so more poor workers will die, that it cuts food stamps so more kids and seniors will starve, that it cuts Social Security disability funding so workers who get hurt can become poor, that it cuts student loan programs so more students will be crushed by debt, and that it slashes renewable energy funding and clean air and clean water enforcement so Trump cronies can make even more unearned money and the rest of us can get sicker. OK, I don't know if Mr. Trump intended all those things with his budget, but intent matters a lot less than result, and those will be the results. And if anyone tells you that TRUMP HAZ TEH PAID FAMILY LEAVEZ HA HA YOU ARE TEH STUPIDZ!!!!!, remind them that Mr. Trump's six-week paid family leave program is, like his infrastructure plan, a boutique plan. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) and keep those anti-Trump budget phone calls to your Reps and Senators coming.

Meanwhile, I'm no great fan of the Paris climate accord, but I'm not above using Mr. Trump's withdrawal therefrom as a news hook to persuade you to tell your Governor to work harder to protect good Americans from the ill effects of pollution and climate change, as Penn Environment helps you do. When you can't get our federal government to do something, you can still get your state and local governments to do it -- indeed, it really ought to be easier, since you have fewer people to influence, and it's also how a lot of great change happens in America, and if today's state governments also seem only to respond to their biggest donors, that only means we must redouble our efforts. Renewable energy standards -- you know, the ones Rick Perry is so anxious to get rid of, how's that for "small government"? -- have come about entirely at the state level, and with Mr. Trump caring more about his fossil fuel cronies than the real job creators in the up-and-coming solar and wind industries, our state governments are our best bet for renewable energy investment, too. So let's get to stepping.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 10, the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, then People's Action still helps you do that. You might think that conservatism animates Republican politicians these days, but you'd be wrong -- nothing animates Republican politicians so much as delivering more unearned money to their biggest donors, whether through more tax-cuts-for-the-rich or more "relief" from the "burden" of regulation. But ask yourself: why is keeping banksters from cheating you a "burden"? Why is keeping financial predators from taking your home and your savings a "burden"? Frankly, the unchecked power of banksters, who do nothing but play casino games with our economy and want nothing so much as to make us all their debt slaves, is the real burden. And they crashed our economy not even a decade ago with their casino games, and given the "freedom" Congress wants to give them, they'll do it again and again and again -- and extract tribute in the form of bailouts again and again and again. Well, folks, we've got to break that wheel.

Action: selling arms to Saudi Arabia nay, crippling the Endangered Species Act nay, and drilling in ANWR nay.

If you've missed previous action alerts helping you tell Congress to stop President Trump's weapons "deal" with Saudi Arabia, then the Action Network still helps you do that. Also, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you write a letter-to-the-editor to your local media outlets condemning the President's Saudi arms deal. Letters-to-the-editor may sound quaint, but Congressfolk do pay attention to them, and one should communicate one's will to one's representatives in as many ways as possible. Our opposition to the $100 billion-plus arms deal goes well beyond Saudi Arabia's ongoing war on Yemen, a war which has left millions of Yemenis on the brink of starvation, though that war has injured the very same Yemeni rebels (the Houthis) who have been among the most effective fighters against ISIS in the region. Saudi Arabia tortures its political protestors and outlaws protest and beats up protestors. And if we're so strapped for allies in the region that we have to turn to this government, why do we still call ourselves America?

Meanwhile, H.R. 2134/S. 935, the so-called Endangered Species Management Self-Determination Act, would (among other things!) end protections for endangered species a mere five years after their listing. The bald eagle, you may know, needed 40 years of ESA protection to get off the list; one could merely ask one's Congressperson do you really want to mess with the bald eagle? I suppose the bill's supporters will claim they're merely forcing our government to "do the job more efficiently," but saving an endangered species is not necessarily something you put on a stopwatch -- you either do it right, however long it takes, or you fail, and then that species is gone forever. You would be quite right, of course, to suspect that this bill's authors merely intend to open up as much land to oil and gas drillers as possible, so as to keep that sweet campaign cash coming. Hence Environmental Action helps you write a letter-to-the-editor of your local publication demanding that Congress reject the Endangered Species Management Self-Determination Act.

Finally, we have so, so many reasons to oppose the Trump "Hard Power" budget, and we're going to get into more of those reasons tomorrow, but the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling out of the budget. The love of money, as the Bible teaches us, is the root of all evil, and Donald Trump has let the love of money write his entire budget -- any spending that might actually help someone make ends meet is out, while any spending that might make some crony or other richer is in. And make no mistake, drilling in the ANWR refuge will do nothing except make some oil drilling CEO richer -- no, it will not "reduce our dependence on foreign oil," since most scientists think there's not very much oil there to begin with. And it doesn't represent a blow against Big Gummint -- after all, keeping that region relatively free from pollution is a good thing. Government can do good things, when it listens to its owners, the people. And when it doesn't, you don't just destroy it -- you just speak out more.

Around the table: climate change, the "war on terror," health care, immigration, and the "liberal" media.

Before President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate change accord, Naomi Klein at The Intercept warned us that the Paris climate change accord was never all-that to begin with, having been consistently negotiated downward in order to appease American corporate interests. Which, of course, means Mr. Trump's withdrawal is little more than drama. While voluntary agreements (i.e, those without penalties for noncompliance) aren't worthless, I much prefer our citizens making our government curb pollution of our air and water -- and, of course, other nations' citizens doing the same.

The truly stunning thing about Mr. Trump's incessant twittering after the London attacks on Saturday? That he let approximately zero time lapse before bringing up his precious Muslim ban and how we need to "stop being politically correct," by which I guess he means we should scrap that whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing. In comparison, Tha Bush Mobb was positively measured in its immediate response to 9.11; heaven knows (and does not need to tell us!) how far off the deep end Mr. Trump will go if we have another one of those here. (As an aside, ah, terrorist attacks five days before the British snap election? Hey, I'd be a fool not to have noticed the closeness of the two events.)

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) thinks it's "unlikely" Congress will reach a deal to "reform" America's health care system this year, and even says the House bill is "dead on arrival" and is "not a good plan." But don't get complacent! Mr. Burr most definitely does not say that Republicans won't pass something health-care related -- what will stop Republicans from, for example, simply repealing all those taxes-on-the-rich that fund Obamacare? All these Republicans want are tax cuts for their big donors, after all, and if those tax cuts can cripple Obamacare, that's just gravy.

I would bet that even the most hardened nativist would pause before applauding ICE's arrest and deportation of a man who was on his way to picking up his newborn son from the hospital after life-saving surgery. Or am I giving them too much credit? I can also imagine them arguing about law and order, a phrase I never hear them utter when polluters put cancer in our air and water, and I can also imagine them arguing you have to have the courage to make hard decisions, which courage is always much easier to muster when someone else will bear the consequences.

Finally, Michelle Goldberg at Slate reminds us that the "liberal" media wrings its hands over "the rage of Trump voters" while never wondering if Hillary voters might also have feelings worth considering, let alone fearing. I'm all for redressing the legitimate (i.e., not racist) grievances of Trump votaries, but I also find odd the media's "lopsided concern for the tender feelings of people who march around in 'Fuck Your Feelings' T-shirts." And what an utter surprise to see the Washington Post's Robert Samuelson, that banal apologist for Our Glorious Elites, arguing that we shouldn't impeach Mr. Trump because it might offend his votaries. Can you say hostage crisis, class?

Around the table: yet more tales of corruption and venality.

Brian Klaas at USA Today puts it about as well as it can be put: "Donald Trump's Business Ties Explain a Lot of His Dictator Worship." For example, we can assume Mr. Trump praises Mr. Duterte because he's got a Trump Tower in Manila, or that he stops slamming China because one of his businesses got a lucrative trademark deal there, or that he congratulates Turkey's President for "winning" a referendum that destroys democracy there because he's got two buildings in Istanbul. And that's before we get to his conflicts of interest in Saudi Arabia, of course.

Speaking of conflicts of interest, the Trump Administration now routinely grants waivers to employees so they can meet with the organizations they used to work for! And here you thought your government was supposed to serve the American people! David Dayen, bless him, serves up the conflicts you already know about first, and then dives deep into the one you haven't heard about (Andrew Olmem, once a lobbyist, now an assistant to Gary Cohn), one uniquely positioned to help a former bankster client avoid regulatory scrutiny. Because he "knows the issues," of course!

Joshua Cho at FAIR serves up a study whose results will disappoint you but not surprise you: the "liberal" media, in covering Trump cabinet appointees between Election Day and Inauguration Day, talked to Republicans more than Democrats by about a 5-2 ratio. Because they control all the branches of government, you see, and therefore their viewpoints "deserve" more airtime! Except that back when Democrats controlled our government in 2009, you may recall, Republicans still got disproportionate airtime during stimulus bill coverage, presumably because their "minority" viewpoints need to be heard! It's almost like they think you have no memory of anything that's ever happened.

House overwhelmingly passes bill making "sexting" between teenagers could get said teenagers 15 years in jail. No one approves of sexting, but imposing a mandatory minimum sentence that could equal the offender's entire lifetime up to that point is rather like taking a sledgehammer to a mosquito -- n.b. the story of how our government let a sexual abuser off the hook by trying to nail him on child porn charges. The bill's motto appears to be: when in doubt, punish someone who can't fight back, and punish them real, real hard. Pick on someone your own size, Congress.

Finally, there's so much to say about Vice President Pence's statement that "the left" is obsessed with climate change "for some reason," but let's just leave it at this: most people think our government should do more about climate change than it's currently doing, yet our government wants you to think it's only "the left" that wants it. This is what Our Glorious Elites always do: they take what's broadly popular and suggest it's actually an "extreme" position. Given that their favorite solution to every problem (i.e., cutting government spending that actually helps government's owners, the people) is itself an extreme position, Our Glorious Elites have a nasty pot-kettle-black problem.

Action: ADA "reform," birth control, and renewable energy.

Just when you thought some things were safe from this Congress, along comes H.R. 620, the so-called American Disabilities Act Education and Reform Act of 2017, reminding us that when Congress says they're going to "reform" something, you should be scared. H.R. 620 would require disabled folks to give a written notice directly to any business owner who they think has violated the act (by, for example, not providing a wheelchair ramp), and then gives that business owner nearly half a year to make progress toward fixing a problem. They could no longer file a complaint with the Department of Justice or files a lawsuit on their own, since, hey, that actually works better. H.R. 620 is all about hurting people so that business owners don't have to follow the law, which is precisely the problem with America today. You may use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators about this matter. Don't brook any whining about the ADA "causing frivolous lawsuits," not when corporations file four out of every five lawsuits in America.

Meanwhile, thanks to a leaked rule proposal, we now know that the Trump Administration plans to allow employers to block their employees' access to birth control coverage if it conflicts with said employer's "religious beliefs." Because, after all, your employer's "religious beliefs" are so much more important than yours! Seriously, I'm sick of the notion that bosses have earned more rights than the rest of us -- though, of course, the apotheosis of the beliefs that bosses-are-great-and-people-suck is now our President. Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the Trump Administration to stop trying to take women's rights away in the name of "religious freedom." Oh, and to anyone itching to lecture me about how hard CEOs have worked for the "right" to tell people what sort of health care they can have: you don't "work" for rights. You have rights because you're an American. And you don't have "more rights" because you have more money. You have more power, but not more rights, and it's time to learn the difference. (That's before we get to whether Our Glorious Elites have earned anything.)

Finally, Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry has lately suggested that the Administration might actually fight state-level renewable energy standards! How would he do that? Well, apparently he'd start by commissioning a study on "grid reliability" that will say guess what, since it's headed by a Kochhead? That coal and oil and gas and nuclear are "more reliable" than sun and wind, even though sun and wind will actually be around forever and, you know, storage of energy before it's used is an actual thing. And what could we call this little idea of Mr. Perry's? We could certainly call it corporate welfare, since it clearly aims to prop up the dirty fuel industries, and thus also the outlandish salaries of their CEOs. But we could most certainly not call it conservative for our federal government to attack standards that good Americans want and have fought hard to pass at the state level -- standards that have helped solar and wind become more competitive, price-wise. So Penn Environment helps you tell the Energy Department to stop trying to kill state-level renewable energy standards.

Action: food stamps, drug prices, and Presidential tax returns.

Trumpians say "it's time for good people to stop paying for bad people" in our federal budget. But they're not talking about taxpayers paying for welfare handouts for banksters and big pharma and nuclear power plants; they're talking about things like food stamps, as if only "bad people" (and not, say, children or seniors) use them. Trouble, of course, is that we now live in a society where (as Neal Gabler instructed us a year ago) nearly half of us would have big trouble scaring up $400 if we had an emergency, so the next time you cross the street against the light, you could be utterly broken financially as well as physically, and then you might need food stamps to make ends meet. Would that automatically make you a "bad person"? Of course it wouldn't -- and if we funded food stamps like civilized human beings, we could be there for each other, and not incidentally, for ourselves, since trouble doesn't discriminate. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Mr. Trump's proposed food stamp cut.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1776/S. 771, the Improving Access to Affordable Prescription Drugs Act, then Sum of Us still helps you do that. Want yet another measure of the sickness, immorality, and decadence of our society? Then consider how easily the notorious "Pharma Bro" could hike the price of the life-saving medicine Daraprim by over 5000 percent and then act all surprised anyone thought that was uncouth. Consider also how Mylan could hike the price of an EpiPen -- something you might need to deploy within 10 seconds to save someone's life! -- by over 400 percent. Consider how often cable news punditoids talk about us having to live with high drug prices as the price of research and development, without noting that research and development are expenses and thus don't get taxed as corporate profits! So if you're as sick and tired as I am of all the rhetorical hostage-taking, then the Improving Access to Affordable Prescription Drugs Act is for you.

Finally, supporters of H.R. 305/S. 26, the Presidential Tax Transparency Act, are now circulating a "discharge petition," which would require the bill to get a full vote before the House if more than half its members (218 of 435) sign it. Then House Speaker Paul Ryan wouldn't be able to deploy his usual excuse for refusing to consider a bill (that doing so would step on the tootsies of his precious little Committee Chairpersons!). The bill would, as its title suggests, force Presidential candidates to release their tax returns, as Mr. Trump famously refused to do during the campaign (and now he says he won so it doesn't matter nyah-nyah-nyah). It used to be tradition for Presidential candidates to do this, but Mr. Trump killed the tradition, so now it's gotta be law. And though the bill couldn't force a sitting President to release his tax returns, guess who's already declared his candidacy for re-election in 2020? Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Presidential Tax Transparency Act.

Around the table: right-wingers ramp up the hysteria!

Adam Johnson catches Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen comparing folks who protested a eugenicist to "fascists" and the Manchester bomber. Charles Murray deserves protest everywhere he goes (though he doesn't deserve violence), but Mr. Cohen has been a long-time backer of Mr. Murray's work suggesting that black folks are "naturally" less intelligent than white folks, which may explain why Mr. Cohen plays the fascist card so quickly. (No, you need a little more than an act of violence to be a fascist. After all, many fascists are well-placed enough that they never have to commit acts of violence themselves.)

From the "Don't Call It Stupid" file: the Trump Administration's little immigration database appears to expose some undocumented immigrants to (further) domestic violence and sexual abuse by putting their personal info out there. Remember: when they respond WE WERE JUSTZ TRYINGZ TO HELPZ TEH VICTIMZ!!!!!, don't believe they didn't know what they were doing -- our government still has a few lawyers in it, despite Mr. Trump's best efforts. And if you're tempted to defend Mr. Trump here, ask yourself if immigrants deserve to be raped or beaten up merely because they don't have papers.

Ain't no terrorist attack so bad a Republican's self-pity can't make it worse, and so it goes with the Multnomah County, Oregon GOP Chair, who says Republicans maybe ought to go out with private security forces like the notorious Oath Keepers because things are so "dangerous" for them. A racist attacks two women of color on the train and then kills two folks (and injure a third) who defended those women, but Republicans continue to think everything is all about them. Of course he goes on to talk about "a closing of the mind" to viewpoints we fought World War II over. I guess he's sad we won that war. Waaaaaaaah!

Ho hum, Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE) refuses to tell an NPR reporter -- three times! -- whether Americans have a "right" to eat or not. That and his incomprehensible grammar ("I would hope that we can look to"?) would be career-ending in a sane and healthy society -- but in the one where the Nebraska legislature has so gerrymandered Mr. Smith's district that he typically wins re-election with 75% of the vote, he will never suffer the consequences. And if someone who says Americans have no rights were to knock him off in the primary, that wouldn't be anything to celebrate.

About half of the 8th-graders from the South Orange (NJ) Middle School refuse to have their picture taken with House Speaker Paul Ryan. Adults seem to have no idea what civilized behavior is anymore, but children still do, and that's something. I haven't checked, but I bet that as we speak more than a few right-wingers are attacking these kids, either as pretentious fools or (worse!) "pawns of their parents." After all, attacking children is one of the last refuges of the scoundrel.

Finally, comedienne Kathy Griffin is 500% wrong for putting a photo of her with a severed and bloody Donald Trump's head on her Twitter feed. No one who really believes in the promise of America would murder the President, or joke about it. Also, to hell with her apology, because too often in America we see someone getting attention for doing or saying something awful and then getting more attention for the apology. That's not "the way the world is," or even "the way the business is" -- it's merely another indicator of our sickness, immorality, and decadence.

Action: fighting banksters, pollution, and low wages.

H.R. 10, the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, could get a vote before the full House any day now, and, as you know, under H.R. 10, the only folks getting any more "choice" are the banksters, who still demand and get welfare handouts from our government despite being approximately the most unpopular people in America. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're looking at it on a smartphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject H.R. 10. Do not brook any hysteria about the crushing burden of regulations, as if regulations against onerous fees and interest rates hurt the crooks who peddle them than those fees and rates hurt us. And certainly don't brook any hysteria about the crushing burden of regulations on small businesses, because H.R. 10 isn't for small businesses -- it's for the big banksters who grind small businesses to dust under their $500 shoes. And certainly don't brook the unctiousness of "moderates" who think we can find a "balance" between what we want and what they want. You can find no "balance" with evil people who live to steal other people's money.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) stands poised to enact regulations protecting good Pennsylvanians from the air pollution emanating from natural gas drilling operations. Stop me if you've heard this before: the news rules aren't a bad start, but they could be better. For example, they presently only cover new gas drilling operations, when those are the ones less likely to pollute in the first place, and the old ones are still pumping out carcinogens, toxins, and smog. Oh, and methane -- can't forget the natural gas emission that packs a climate change punch many, many times harder than coal emissions do, and thus give the lie to the gas industry's contention that more gas drilling would help ameliorate the effects of climate change. Of course, methane isn't just a pollutant -- it's a form of energy, and ventilating it into the atmosphere at will not only dirties the air, it also wastes energy, and thus also wastes money. No use telling me gas drillers just can't keep methane out of the air, because this is America, the can-do country. Both Keystone Progress and the Sierra Club help you tell the DEP to enact the most vigorous gas drilling regulations possible.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to raise the national minimum wage to $15/hour via the Raise the Wage Act, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. Again: do not brook any of the hysteria coming from the right about how a $15/hour wage will destroy all small businesses -- the Raise the Wage Act would raise the minimum wage gradually, over the next eight years, and once minimum wage workers have more money in their pockets, they'll spend a lot of it at these same small businesses. Do not brook any hysteria about how it would raise unemployment, either -- if you work, like, anywhere, you already know that employers can't cut jobs any further than they already have and still get things done. And certainly do not brook slippery-slope arguments like ZOMG WHY DON'T WE JUSTZ RAISEZ TEH WAGEZ TO $40 AN HOURZ!!!!! The Raise the Wage Act would index the minimum wage to inflation; if it's ever $40/hour, you can be sure inflation will have gone up 267% in the meantime. Seriously, people who argue like that disgust me. Why not just say I got nothing? The honesty would be refreshing!

Around the table: when a pro-hearing aid bill becomes an anti-gun bill, and other absurdities.

Surprise, surprise, President Trump's boutique infrastructure plan would include tolls on existing interstate highway lanes and privatizing rest stops on those highways. One more time: the private sector doesn't do things better; it just redistributes income from workers to executives "better." And I bet Congress and the President aren't really "headed for a fight" about this matter -- one Republican Rep says "I don't like paying for a road twice," which, like, hallelujah, but then adds "(e)verything's on the table." Profile in courage!

Dean Baker calls a financial transaction tax (a.k.a. the "Robin Hood tax" or the "Wall Street sales tax") "The Best Solution to Income Inequality." Why? Because the cost will borne entirely by Wall Street, rather than Main Street. Mr. Baker also reminds us that a) folks don't care about the number of trades they make so much as the amount of money they make, and b) banksters can't argue that "more trades makes the market more efficient," as "(s)omeone would be hard pressed to argue that capital was better allocated in the housing bubble years than fifteen or twenty years earlier when volume might have been less than half of its current level."

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted" file: Oklahoma's state budgeting problems are so awful now that a lot of kids are only going to school four days a week. The good news? Not every kid in Oklahoma likes it -- some of them, for example, don't like all the rushing around you do when you try to cram five days of work into four. Still, I worry that too many of them will remember this as some kind of Golden Age, even after they're grownups and the ill effects of their education take their toll -- how many of them will say "a four-day school week never hurt me" as they suffer through their umpteenth consecutive year without work?

Hoo boy: former Fox News punditoid recalls how that network (among other things!) made the news "like pro wrestling" and "performance art," and how they "fixed" panel debates so that right-wingers always won. Fox News punditoids getting their scripted "last word" 24 hours beforehand, a Fox News "star" telling his guests what to say -- these are, of course, the hallmarks of folks who can't win arguments on the merits. And remember, kids: if we could buy cable channels a la carte, we wouldn't have to put up with this garbage.

Finally, from the "When Do They Feel Shame?" file, gun rights groups contort bill allowing over-the-counter hearing aids into an anti-gun bill, quite likely because Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is one of its sponsors. Go ahead and try to follow their reasoning, if you dare. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is also one of its sponsors, and has rebutted these groups' talking points, but apparently to no avail. What a shame that some gun rights groups make all gun rights supporters look bad.

Action: the Saudi arms deal, school lunch nutrition standards, and airline fees.

As you know, President Trump has announced a $100 billion-plus arms deal with Saudi Arabia, a country which beats up its protestors, doesn't let women drive alone, treats its political prisoners like dog poop, and bombs the crap out of precisely those Yemeni rebels who are actually fighting ISIS effectively. But we don't have to take that, because Congress can pass a "resolution of disapproval" under the Arms Export Control Act, and just so happens H.J.Res. 102/S.J.Res. 42 would prevent Mr. Trump from giving the Saudis munitions (though it wouldn't scuttle the whole deal). Don't listen to your Tea Party uncle when he says how dare you oppose the President in foreign policy making! Not just because the President isn't supposed to "make foreign policy" per se, but because you just know your Tea Party uncle felt differently when the President's name was Obama. So Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Saudi arms deal. Don't wait, though, because Congress only has 30 days to pass that resolution once the deal's announced.

Meanwhile, because the Trump Administration apparently feels compelled to take a dump on every accomplishment of the Obama Administration, the new Secretary of Agriculture, former Georgia Governor Sonny Purdue, has announced his intention to roll back the school lunch nutrition standards that represent approximately the only positive accomplishment of Mr. Obama's USDA. Republicans have been all hot to scuttle these standards since the USDA enacted them. Why? Are they objectively pro-childhood obesity? Are they objectively anti-children's health? Perhaps they are, in fact, objectively anti-child. It's not "uncivil" to say so; it's giving them some of their own to say so. And you may consider anecdotes of kids pocketing apples and school districts having "trouble" getting their foods up to the new standards to be not merely wildly exaggerated but hysterical -- the real "issue" here is that the standards don't kowtow to junk food manufacturing corporations enough. So Moms Rising helps you tell the Department of Agriculture to keep the new school lunch nutrition standards where they are.

Finally, good Americans enjoy flying our friendly skies less and less these days; they may or may not fear being forcibly removed from their flight because their airline overbooked, but they have almost certainly dealt with hidden fees making plane rides cost more. Hence PennPIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1037, the FAIR Fees Act, which would empower the Secretary of Transportation to keep airlines from charing fees that are "not reasonable" or insufficiently-related to airlines' costs. Bill sponsor Sen. Markey (D-MA) instructs us that at least three airlines "charge more money for the second checked bag than the first," even though you'd kind of expect it to be the other way around, given that the airline has already sunk costs into carrying checked luggage at all. Also, some airlines charge a lot more than others for things like aisle seats, carry-on bags, and flight cancellations. No use arguing that the "free" market will punish the airline corporations that heap more fees upon customers -- not when there are fewer and fewer airlines to begin with, and fewer of them flying to where folks want to go. So let's bring some sanity back to airline pricing.

Around the table: politicians who need "safe spaces," and other abject follies.

Justice Department decides not to prosecute a Mexico-based, Citigroup-owned bank on drug-laundering charges. They got a settlement instead, just like President Obama used to do! I'm not even sure the admission they broke a reporting law represents progress! Obviously this action contrasts with our Justice Department's "zero tolerance" policy toward drug users, but n.b. that the Trump Administration also fights nonviolent offenders who want to get their guns back while letting banksters launder drug money. Law and order!

While visiting Sicily on his European tour, President Trump needed a golf cart to get around the streets of Taormina, while seven other world leaders walked. I wouldn't bother with stuff like this, except that the Great Man has been yelling at us for years about how everybody but him is "low-energy." And now his votaries make excuses for him about how "exhausted" he is! Yes, doing evil is exhausting. That's just one reason to do as little evil as possible.

Here's something I hadn't considered about Mr. Trump's little "Victims of Immigration Crime" hotline: the Trump Administration can cover any PR reversals over deporting someone by saying hey, a citizen had a complaint, we gotta act! We'll see how much power citizen complaints have when some Trump crony pollutes a water table from which good Americans drink! But, as with too many Guantánamo Bay detainees, ratting out your neighbors not only isn't evidence, it isn't even probable cause. (I do love that good Americans clogged up the hotline with fake complaints about space aliens, though.)

Surprise, surprise, Fox News hacks cheer on Greg Gianforte's alleged assault of a Guardian reporter. But, seriously, they're criticizing the reporter for entering Mr. Gianforte's "safe space"? How much "safe space" do politicians "need" from the "liberal" media? And, really, who's the "snowflake" here? Right-wingers really have morphed into a twisted stereotype of everything they purport to hate about liberals. When Mr. Gianforte casts a vote in the House, I bet they give him a participation trophy.

Finally, middle school teacher in Texas gives out fake end-of-year "awards" to students, which include "Most Likely to Cry About Every Little Thing," "Most Likely to Become Homeless in Guatemala," and, of course, "Most Likely to Become a Terrorist." Adults can do this sort of thing to each other if they all agree it's funny and keep it to themselves, but adults can't do this to kids, lest they earn the "Most Likely to Think You're Hip and Ironic When You're Just Sick and Twisted" award.

Around the table: meet the Senate health care "reform" effort, same as the House health care "reform effort."

If this Bloomberg report on Senate Republicans health care "reform" efforts is true, then we're in for a world of hurt. Sen. Portman (R-OH) has expressed skepticism about a Medicaid rollback -- his state, unlike other Republican-run states, has accepted the Obamacare Medicaid expansion with vigor -- but now he's proposing a longer phase-out, which is still a phase-out. Also, their "reinsurance" idea is nothing but corporate welfare -- corporate welfare they "hope" will keep premiums down, wink-wink. And not that I really care, but how is "auto-enrollment" significantly different from the Obamacare mandate?

Greg Gianforte wins Montana U.S. House special election -- even after allegedly bodyslamming a Guardian reporter who asked him about the House's health care bill. I had high hopes for Rob Quist, and maybe I still should -- where Mr. Trump won by 20 points and Mr. Zinke won the House race by 16, Mr. Gianforte only won by 7, and if Mr. Gianforte winds up in jail soon (he may have money, but that's all he's got), I presume they'll have to do this again. The road back to relevance is going to be harder for Democrats in solidly Trumpian areas, even when Berniecrats run. Still, no way another "problem-solving" "bipartisan" milquetoast comes within 7 points of Mr. Gianforte.

Another day, another reminder that the ZOMG TEH ROBOTZ ARE TAKINGZ OURZ JOBZ!!!!! argument is pure hysteria. Folks who fall prey to hostage crises ("don't raise the minimum wage or the robots will take all the jobs!") would do well to remind themselves that though robots do replace people in particular circumstances, "particular circumstances" still doesn't equal "always." You might be able to talk me into replacing CEOs with robots, though. I mean, they'd be no less inhuman than the ones we've got!

Despite Mr. Trump's incessant posturing about guns, his Justice Department is fighting claims by former nonviolent offenders to have their gun rights restored. Wondering whether fidelity to 2nd Amendment rights would win out over Mr. Trump's bottomless hatred/exploitation of petty criminals? Well, wonder no more. And no use arguing they're just continuing the "tradition to defend federal laws in court" -- how many voting rights violation cases has Mr. Trump's Justice Department dropped like a rock?

Jeremy Mohler and Donald Cohen at The American Prospect put the central problem of privatization quite well: "(f)or decades, the corporate world has increasingly become the exemplar of good governance, and the market has come to stand for economic efficiency," but "(d)espite claims of greater efficiency, the reality is usually higher fees and costs, reduced services, lower wages, and loss of public control." And big money for corporate executives -- which is why our 46% President is America's biggest cheerleader for privatization.

Finally, Neal Gabler at Moyers and Company calls Roger Ailes "The Man Who Destroyed Objectivity." Others may argue that Jacques Derrida deserves that title, but Mr. Derrida didn't create a cancer on society like the Fox News Channel. Critical point: Mr. Ailes, who "got his start in entertainment," "turned television news into tabloid news," so that we now have a world that not only enables right-wingers to spew obnoxious filth without suffering the consequences, but we also have a world where telling the truth isn't sexy anymore because it doesn't look like TMZ.

Action: "free" trade, paid family leave, and health care.

The Trump Administration notified Congress a while back that it intends to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, also knowns as NAFTA (or, perhaps, SHIFTY) -- but Mr. Trump has also decided not to get rid of the most odious thing about NAFTA, the "investor-state tribunal" that allows corporations to nullify our laws and exact tribute from the taxpayer for having those laws in the first place. Thus we have every reason to fear that Mr. Trump would scrap NAFTA only to give us something that would be an even larger corporate welfare giveaway than NAFTA already is -- you know, just like he's planning to do with his health care "reform" plan, his tax "reform" plan, and his HARD POWER! budget. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell your Congressfolk the kind of trade deal you'd like to see in NAFTA's place -- like eliminating the "investor-state tribunal," including strong environmental and labor standards, and rules that would keep medicine costs down. Alternately, you could use the tools in the upper-right hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) and tell your Reps and Senators what you want over the phone.

Meanwhile, former WalMart worker Jasmine Dixon has begun a petition at CREDO Mobilize which helps you tell WalMart to institute a good paid family leave policy for all its hourly-paid employees. We haven't managed to get paid family leave laws passed at the federal level (mainly because Republicans are all like this guy), and though we have managed to get some state and local initiatives passed, certainly no law prevents us from petitioning one of the nation's largest employers (particularly one of the nation's largest employers of low-paid workers) and prodding them to do the right thing -- not least because WalMart has responded to the Big Stick of Bad PR before. No use retorting that you should have to earn paid family leave; everyone needs paid family leave sooner or later, and saying you have to "earn" it is a little like saying you have to "earn" clean air and clean water. Of course, Our Glorious Elites secretly believe that as well, but given that Our Glorious Elites also believe banksters are the Greatest People Evah, they're not the folks who should be telling us what "earning things" is all about.

Finally, as you know, the CBO has scored the House's health care bill, and found it would ultimately deprive 23 million folks of insurance over the next decade, versus the 24 million figure it found for the bill's previous iteration. But you may be surprised to learn which "liberal" media outlet decided to use that 1 million uninsured difference to mislead. USA Today tweeted that "#BREAKING: CBO says House Obamacare repeal bill covers 1 million more people than prior draft." I'd have expected that kind of spin from Fox News! USA Today received a crapload of critical comments afterward, and have since issued a series of tweets that I suppose aim to "correct" their rubbish headline. But their more accurate tweets didn't get nearly as much social media play as their more Trump-friendly one, and I can't help but think that was a deliberate calculation on their part, since it gets them attention coming and going. But USA Today isn't generally a bad paper, so if you contact them using information at the above link, you can tell them they should avoid the appearance of using sensational, misleading headlines to generate drama.

Action: health care, and climate change.

Didn't think I'd forgotten about the "American Health Care Act," did you? Of course not -- though the Senate no doubt wishes we would. The Senate may be a more conservative body than the House ("conservative" as in "less likely to upend entire systems"), but don't count on them to "moderate" the House bill's ill effects. I generously count two Republican moderates in the Senate, whereas I also count three far-right Senators who've already made demands similar to or worse than the House bill; in a 52-member caucus, it ain't hard to see which group has more pull. So go ahead and call your Senators, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (bottom if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to reject not just the American Health Care Act, but all of the assumptions underpinning it. After all, spending money on working families isn't evil, health insurance corporations don't deserve more freedom than people do, and no one should be denied skin cancer treatment because they once had eczema.

Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell ExxonMobil and Chevron, who are both about to hold annual shareholder meetings, to stop blocking our efforts to curb the ill effects of climate change. Shareholder power hasn't proven to be a panacea for capitalism's ills -- too many corporate boards simply ignore their shareholders when their wills diverge now -- but at least their shareholder meetings will draw some media attention, and therefore the possibility of the people wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. This has worked in getting more and more corporations to abandon the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) merely because of ALEC's climate change denialism, so perhaps we can make it work here as well. And chances are your pension fund is a shareholder in ExxonMobil or Chevron, so it's not like you don't "deserve" a say about what's happening. Even if I could possibly agree that one should "purchase" democracy by buying shares in a corporation, that is.

Around the table: time for another exciting round of "When's That Terrorist Attack Coming?"

Uh oh: Jonathan Chait figures out that the Trump budget assumes that $2 trillion in miraculous economic growth over the next decade will pay for both $2 trillion in tax cuts and enough growth in government revenues that the budget will balance -- but they can't both be true. The Administration's responses are even worse than I imagined they'd be, but let's not congratulate ourselves on the Administration's "$2 trillion math error," because that's exactly the kind of "mistake" evil people make when they're pretty sure circumstances (when's that terrorist attack coming again?) will cover them.

Administration Budget Director Mick Mulvaney insists that his President's multitudinous attacks on federal programs that actually help people actually show compassion for the taxpayer. Now here's why that's a pile of dung: anyone who pays taxes may, theoretically, need to avail themselves of the programs for which those taxes pay -- not just programs ensuring clean air, clean water, and working roads, but also programs like food stamps and Medicaid. In America, we should invest in each other, not redistribute income upward to the undeserving wealthy, as is Mr. Mulvaney's fervent wish.

Jesus Mary and Joseph why is anyone reporting that "Paul Ryan and the White House are barreling toward a tax reform show-down"? There will be no showdown -- only the drama they pretend to have so they can distract the people from the real evil they're about to do. We learn, at least, that the Republicans want to sell their "border tax" by saying it "ends the 'Made in America' tax," which is a pretzel of a notion to try and sell, and where were they when the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act came up for a vote? Filibustering it, of course.

Comcast sends cease-and-desist order to a pro-net neutrality website called Comcastroturf.com, saying the website's name is "confusingly similar to the (Comcast trademark) because it sounds the same, looks the same, and is spelled similarly to Comcast." The good news? If Comcast actually filed a copyright infringement suit against Comcastroturf.com, a judge would laugh it out of court in about 30 seconds. The bad news? Comcastroturf.com still couldn't sue under a federal SLAPP law, because it doesn't yet exist. Still, ain't nothing so pitiful as a big corporation that can't take a joke. Waaaaaaaah!

Finally, the Department of Labor decides it'll implement the 2016 "fiduciary rule" after all -- but activists wonder if the Trump Administration will actually enforce it. Like them, I suspect not -- but failing to protect pensioners from fund managers' selfishness (as the rule would do) would likely invite legal challenges, and trying to junk it as part of Mr. Trump's effort to randomly kill regulations would almost certainly invite more. Plus, sooner or later we'll get a President who'll enforce it, even if he's another center-right Democrat.

Action: fair budgeting, and worker rights.

I've got plenty of action alerts that'll help you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Trump budget: from Food and Water Watch, the Sierra Club, the National Women's Law Center, Americans for Tax Fairness, Social Security Works, Student Debt Crisis, and Moms Rising. Also, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you write your local paper to oppose the Trump budget. But, really, this demands a phone call, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone). You could tell your Congressfolk that slashing Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, anti-pollution enforcement, renewable energy funding, food stamps, public lands administration, and student loan programs is just plain evil -- or you could tell your Congressfolk that in a better budget like the People's Budget, one which would actually create jobs and advance our environment and make taxes fairer, we invest in each other, whereas in the Trump budget we invest in more corporate welfare handouts to Mr. Trump's rich friends.

Meanwhile, the city of London will review Uber's license to operate there at the very end of this month, so Sum of Us helps you ask Transport for London to reject Uber's license, and thus its ability to operate in London, unless and until it respects its drivers' rights, including the right to paid a decent wage for good work. As it happens, London is Uber's only foothold in Europe, largely due to good Europeans' agitation against it; Uber casts itself as the future of the economy, but it's very old-school in one fairly important way: it exploits the labor of its workers on its way to sky-high stock prices and executive compensation -- in short, it redistributes income from its drivers to its executives. And it doesn't have to be that way! Using cell phone apps to get rides is not at all evil in itself, nor is folks making money part-time with the resources they already own. But with its insistence on calling employees "contract workers," and thus avoiding those pesky minimum wage and safe workplace laws, Uber isn't encouraging innovation, but exploiting it. And we don't need to stand for exploitation.

Around the table: from racial gerrymandering to Republican whining.

U.S. Supreme Court upholds federal district court ruling striking down two North Carolina Congressional districts, concurring with the lower court that the state legislature deliberately sought to dilute black voting power by adding black voters to those districts. The Court highlights the utter perversity of the Republicans' argument in re the 1st district -- that the Voting Rights Act mandates that black voters get black representation, even if that means getting less representation in other districts, apparently -- and Republicans may regret arguing that they redrew the 12th district on partisan-not-racial grounds if the Court ever gets around to ruling on partisan redistricting.

Justice Gorsuch didn't participate in the above case, but he did dissent (along with Justice Thomas, who, for reasons unknown to me, joined the 5-3 majority in the North Carolina case) from the Court's decision not to hear an appeal that could have struck down McCain-Feingold bans on large contributions to political parties. One can only hope Justice Gorsuch will be writing a lot of dissents over the course of his career, but we'd be unduly optimistic to think that'll be what happens in the short term.

Mark Travant at the OurFuture blog suggests that the Trump Administration "reality show" distracts us from Republican attempts to cut Medicaid. I'll admit I've been more obsessed with protecting Medicare over the years, but Medicaid provides insurance to over 60 million Americans, whereas Medicare insures over 40 million. So between those two, we're about one-third of the way to insuring everybody. Right-wingers will respond but everybody's already paying, but I'll respond that folks with millionaire income aren't paying enough, and that we could be spending what we're spending a lot more effectively -- you know, like they do in Canada.

Forget about Jon Ossoff's run in Georgia's 6th (his ads are still marred by "cut the deficit" and "high-tech jobs" messaging, which, like, yawn) -- Rob Quist has a real shot at grabbing Montana's at-large House seat for the Democrats. Partly he's got a shot because he's an unapologetic liberal populist, but he's also got a shot because his opponent (Republican Greg Gianforte) once sued the state to keep good Montanans from fishing on public lands near his land. That pushes all of Montana's buttons, but Mr. Gianforte already lost the 2016 gubernatorial race in Montana due in large part to this controversy, so I worry that Montana voters might be tired of hearing about it. I guess we'll see.

Finally, a Mississippi state House Rep says on Facebook that folks who remove Confederate statues -- statues "erected in the loving memory of our family and fellow Southern Americans," he says -- should be "LYNCHED!" (Shouty caps in original.) Even his fellow far-right Mississippi Republicans have slammed him for it, but he's so far apologized only for using the word "lynched" (or, rather, "LYNCHED!"), not for his sentiment. I'm sure his less-than-half apology was part of the plan all along -- to create drama and get attention coming and going. Here's your attention, clown: waaaaaaaaah!

Action: net neutrality, and pregnant workers.

The FCC, as you know, voted late last week to begin the process of dismantling that agency's 2015 Open Internet Order, despite receiving almost six in 10 pro-Internet Order comments -- a number that jumps to 96 out of 100 when you discard, as you should, the "spam" comments signed by folks who had their private information stolen in a data breach. The FCC's vote begins a new public comment period, so The Consumerist helps you leave your public comment with the FCC about the 2015 Open Internet Order, which enthroned net neutrality as a legal principle. You know what the FCC did in its 2015 Open Internet Order: it used authority granted to it by Congress in law to reclassify broadband internet as a "common carrier," thus giving it the legal authority to regulate traffic over the internet. And the Open Internet Order does not, for example, make ISPs prioritize pro-government internet content over any other kind -- all it does is prevent internet service corporations from giving special treatment to some kinds of internet traffic. But if the new FCC Chair's plans gets his way, your ISP will be able to control where you can go and what you can see on the internet. Imagine having to watch some cable news jerkwads yell at each other before visiting your favorite political blog! It offends the civilized mind.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2417/S. 1101, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act -- which we've seen before in previous Congresses, shame Republicans acted like this guy and wouldn't let it come to a vote -- would, among other things, ensure that employers make "reasonable accommodations" to pregnant workers, and would prevent employers from denying jobs to pregnant folks just because they're pregnant. That latter item is especially important, for when do you need a job, money, and health insurance (since you usually get that through your job in America) more than when you're with child? What did Republicans have against this bill? You know, the usual: BIG GUMMINT HANDOUT OBAMA SOCIALISM COMMUNISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!! Today they might drop the "NAZISM" from their lazy Susan of complaints, but still, they've got nothing that would constitute a cogent argument. Not ZOMG WHAT IF WE HAVE TO HIRE ONLY TEH PREGGERS!!!!! The bill doesn't say that. And certainly not ZOMG TEH PREGGERZ WILL BE IN TEH BATHROOMZ ALL TEH DAYZ!!!! The bill doesn't say that, either -- recall the phrase "reasonable accommodations"; pregnant women use the bathroom more than you or I do, for reasons you might easily imagine, but they don't need the toilet moved from the bathroom to their desk. So both Moms Rising and the National Women's Law Center help you tell your Congressfolk to support the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Around the table: health care, cybersecurity, cable news, celebrity candidates, and the absence of protestors.

Former health insurance corporation official says insurers have been defrauding Medicare Advantage program for years. Our taxes fund Medicare Advantage, as you may know, but private health insurance corporations deliver the service; nobody could have predicted that privatization of a part of Medicare could possibly lead to the same kind of overcharging you routinely see with Medicare! The only thing a private corporation does "better" than our government? Redistribute income from regular folks to executives.

President Trump finally delivers on a promise to revamp our cybersecurity efforts -- and his Executive Order doing so basically repeats President Obama's efforts. But they're different, you see, because now Mr. Trump can put his name on them, and thus make them YUGE and BYOOTIFUL! You'll be so cybersecure, you'll get tired of it! You'll beg President Trump for another ransomware attack, you'll be so bored with all the security! The new order is apparently better than the order his Administration tried to write in February, but let's not grade Mr. Trump on a curve.

The Fox News (sic) Channel is apparently starting to slip in the cable news ratings, thanks in part to its pronounced apathy toward all the latest Trump scandals. But I'm not sure this would be so if a certain 8 pm ratings giant were still at Fox, and I'm not going to celebrate just because other bad cable news networks are starting to win by following the sensationalism (even if it just so happens to be running in the other direction for once). And Fox has largely replaced its Trump non-coverage with even worse junk news. So, yeah, this is still fecal all the way down.

Ryan Teague Beckwith at Time tells us how "The Rock's Presidential 'Campaign' Shows We've Learned Nothing." Mr. Beckwith is of course concerned that the "liberal" media keeps giving celebrities soft coverage that tells us nothing about what they'd be like in an actual leadership role, but I read Mr. Johnson's comments (particularly about "disagreement") and I see another way for Our Glorious Elites to foist a corporate center-right Democrat upon us. Yes, the Rock is better-spoken and more sympathetic than Mr. Trump, but let's not let that be the only bar he ever has to clear.

Finally, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross praises the utter lack of protests greeting Mr. Trump in Saudi Arabia, a country that arrests, beats, and kills protestors. I was tempted to slam him for his utter cluelessness about Saudi Arabia's bad habits, too, or about the fact that his Administration demands protest every second of every hour of every day, but the worst thing about his remarks is that he seems to think the absence of people with "a bad placard" in the street is a good thing, an opinion I'm sure he held, and voiced, during all those Tea Party protests in 2009. If he likes police states so much, maybe he should stay in Saudi Arabia.

Action: soldiers' benefits yea, arming terrorists nay, and automatic voter registration yea.

Word on the street is that Congress may consider legislation to force our soldiers to pay to get Post-9.11 GI Bill benefits. Said benefits include four-year tuition-free education at a public college or university (or an equivalent tuition break at a private one) for all soldiers who a) serve three years active duty, b) serve extended active duty while on reserve, or c) get wounded while serving. If you're sitting at home wondering why it would be controversial to make soldiers pay for their benefits, please consider whether a), b), and c) might just constitute "payment." And if you're sitting at home sighing that deducting pay from a soldier's future paychecks is the kind of sacrifice they have to make to keep the Post-9.11 GI Bill program solvent, please consider why our politicians always ask the soldiers to sacrifice and never, say, defense contractors. If you fail to consider these things, please go ahead and slap yourself. The rest of us can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and call our Reps and Senators and tell them to do right by our troops.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard of the $100 billion-plus arms deal™ President Trump and the government of Saudi Arabia have planned -- but you may not have heard about H.R. 608/S. 532, the Stop Arming Terrorists Attack, which would prevent our federal government from "providing covered assistance" (i.e., money, intelligence, or weapons) to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Tahrir al-Sham, or groups associated with them. By the looks of it, that sure would include nations like Saudi Arabia, which most certainly provides "covered assistance" to these corporations. Now, the bill would also require the Director of National Intelligence (or DNI) to determine who, exactly, falls under the bill's proscriptions -- and you can easily imagine a DNI simply "not finding" that Saudi Arabia has funded or helped terrorist groups. But forcing a DNI to ignore the plain truth for political reasons is not without its benefits -- the DNI would have to justify his findings every six months to Congress, made up of people who, at least nominally, represent our interests. So while you've got your Reps and Senators on the phone about soldiers' benefits, you can tell them to support the Stop Arming Terrorists Act as well.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to support automatic voting registration, then USPIRG still helps you do that. Under laws like Oregon's 2015 automatic voting registration law, your state government would register you to vote every time you interact with a state agency -- most often your state motor vehicle division -- unless you go through the effort of opting out. Oregon's law seems to have helped voters under 30, as the share of those voters voting jumped 20 percentage points from 2012 (37%) to 2016 (57%). Those who would bemoan such a state of affairs, or who would complain that automatic voter registration will simply increase the number of Democratic voters, might want to reacquaint themselves with the whole one-person-one-vote thing. And folks who call automatic voter registration TEH MANDATORY REGISTRASHUNZ!!! might want to reacquaint themselves with the term "opt-out." And folks who call it "forced voting" really just need to stop fronting. And all of the above could also just figure out how to get more folks to vote the way they do! Persuasion: it's the world's oldest profession.

Around the table: in which we hear novel interpretations of "Glass-Steagall" and "bipartisanship."

Fran Quigley at TruthOut argues that we ought to turn the pharmaceutical industry into a heavily-regulated public utility. If you're feeling a little wary about doing that, consider that Big Pharma already feeds at the trough of Big Gummint money -- in fact, they might not be able to survive without it. What we have now, ultimately, is as precise a perversion of the "free market" as you can imagine -- one where corporations take our taxpayer money, create monopolies, and then use that monopoly power to dictate prices and availability to us. That state of affairs does sound like something our Founders would want us to fight, does it not?

Drew Mitnick at the AccessNow blog explains how the WannaCry "ransomware" was able to attack so many health care computer systems. Some fairly common vulnerabilities exist -- nearly a third of folks who get "phishing" emails still open them (even if phishing didn't actually cause the WannaCry attack), and most folks using Microsoft Windows are using older, unpatched versions -- but another major problem is our government hoarding all the vulnerabilities it creates or knows about so it can conduct intelligence-gathering against other targets. Unmentioned in the article is that hospitals (WannaCry's main target) are notoriously bad at keeping up with the latest computer software, and therefore the latest in computer security. Also unmentioned: maybe Microsoft shouldn't have a near-monopoly on systems software?

Treasury Secretary/bankster Steve Mnuchin says he really, really wants a "21st Century Glass-Steagall Act," but he doesn't "support separation of banks and investment banks." In other news, Mr. Mnuchin likes Star Wars except for all the parts set on other planets, he likes Ska music except for all the Jamaican influences, and he also likes cop shows except for all the crime-solving. Is it too much to ask that everyone, and not just Sen. Warren, point out that these clowns not only lie, but they lie obviously? Tha Bush Mobb was subtle by comparison.

Former U.S. House Rep. Anthony Weiner pleads guilty to felony obscenity charge, which ends federal investigation into nasty photos and messages he sent to a 15-year-old girl last year. 15 years old! And therefore not old enough to consent to any kind of sexual relationship with an adult, including one involving "only" lewd pictures and texts. Mr. Weiner will likely get at least a year and a half in jail, so now we can finally say: let's never speak of this man again.

Finally, Eric Boehlert at MediaMatters asks "What Happened to the Press's Obsession with Bipartisan Votes" in re Trumpcare. Of course he knows why: when Democrats are in charge, the "liberal" media regards failure to get Republicans on board with their agenda as a sure sign of failure, but when Republicans are in charge, you don't hear a damn peep from them about the "importance" of everyone "getting along." Remember, kids: when you can't work with someone, you work around them -- and you never scuttle your house-rebuilding plans because the arsonist doesn't "get on board."

Action: financial predators, "conversion therapy," and national monuments.

PennPIRG helps you tell your House Reps to reject the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, which would (among other things!) cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's ability to protect citizens from predatory lending. And where does a big chunk of predatory lending occur today? Why, in student loans, of course, since over 40 million Americans have them (and that's about one out of every eight of us). Earlier this year the CFPB sued the notorious Navient, America's biggest student loan servicer, for "systematically and illegally failing borrowers at every state of repayment," which sure does sound harsh. But the Financial CHOICE Act would hurt the CFPB's ability to go after bad actors, and thus leave more and more Americans open to getting ripped off. And here you thought conservatism was about cracking down on ripoff artists! I mean, that's what law and order is all about, right? Sadly, the reactionaries who call themselves "conservative" think any law restricting anything a corporation might do is itself evil. Let's not let them have all the say about everything.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2119/S. 928, the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, so that "conversion therapists" can't try to "convert" gay folks. The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act would empower the Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to go after "conversion therapy" practitioners under its mandate to prosecute "unfair or deceptive trade practices." And given that scientists don't consider homosexuality to be a disorder anymore, and don't consider it something anyone can reasonably change, you'd be hard-pressed to call "conversion therapy" anything but deceptive. And, ah, we've gone over what "conversion therapy" entails, right? Among other things, it entails "exercises" full of nudity and inappropriate touching, "role play" full of violence, and the actual re-enactment of past sexual abuses, because who doesn't just love going through that again? Don't brook any silliness from your Congressfolk claiming they can't support the bill because "they're not scientists," because you don't need a doctorate in psychology to know what a snake oil salesman looks like.

Finally, as you know, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at knocking down a bunch of National Monuments. And as you may know, the Department of the Interior has separated the commenting processes for one recently-designated monumen (Bears Ears) and for the entire national monument "review" process in general. I expect this matter to die in court, as a lot of Mr. Trump's best-laid plans seem to do, but in the meantime, duty is duty, so American Rivers helps you tell our Department of Interior to, in American Rivers's words, stop "selling off our monuments." That is what the Trump Administration intends to do, after all -- sell off our public lands to fossil fuel drillers -- and though they're less subtle about their aim than any other President we've experienced or could imagine, that's of no great comfort if he succeeds. For Mr. Trump and his votaries, everything on Earth, including the water we drink and the air we breathe, ain't worth nothin' unless it can be converted to money. But to paraphrase a famous philosopher: if money is all you want, then money is all you'll get.

Around the table: special counsels, tax "reform," health care, immigrant arrests, and net neutrality.

Dept. of Justice appoints former FBI head Robert Mueller as Special Counsel in charge of investigating matters relating to possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign and Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 Presidential election. But a special counsel isn't an independent counsel (which, sadly, doesn't exist anymore, the law authorizing it having expired in 1999), and, as smarter people than I have pointed out, appointing Mr. Mueller allows Republicans to claim they've done something and demand that we now let them get on with the important work of depriving people of health care and giving more welfare handouts to the rich.

Speaking of which, apparently the Koch Brothers are readying a massive ad campaign promoting their vision of tax "reform." Should I be heartened that "government doesn't have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem" is so 2011 already? Or that the "window" for getting something big done seems to be closing? I'd be more heartened that polls consistently show a majority of folks think the rich ought to be paying more in taxes -- if another sizable national organization would start a massive ad campaign arguing that the rich should pay more. You're not going to get that from weakling Democrats, after all.

In case you needed it, Megan Molteni at Wired reminds us that "Denying Health Care to Diabetics Makes Just About Zero Sense." Not just because overeating or eating badly is just one factor in the largely-genetic disorder that's Type 2 Diabetes or the autoimmune disorder that's Type 1 Diabetes, but also because the vast majority of the health care costs associated with diabetes come from the complications of diabetes, like heart trouble. Managing your diabetes reduces the complications and therefore the costs, but apparently the Trump Administration would "save money" by cutting off all help to folks trying to manage it. And that's why we shouldn't put assholes in charge of things!

From The Guardian we learn that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) has arrested more undocumented immigrants during the first three months of Mr. Trump's term than they did at a similar point in 2016 -- but way fewer than ICE did at a similar point in 2013. The right sure doesn't give Barack Obama enough credit for all the arresting and deporting of undocumented immigrants he did! I wonder why. Also, under Mr. Trump's ICE, arrests of undocumented immigrants with no criminal record have more than doubled, despite the candidate's promise that he'd go after serious criminals first. Given that immigrants with no criminal records make up more than half of the difference between the 2016 and 2017 figures, I think it's pretty obvious some padding is going on. Donald Trump, padding numbers so they look more impressive -- who'da thunk it?

Finally, the FCC voted to start repealing net neutrality rules yesterday -- another public comment period will follow, with the FCC aiming to issue new rules in August -- and here we learn not only that net neutrality opponents conflate vigils and leafletting with "violent protest," but that in at least two massive anti-net neutrality bot campaigns, folks who've been hit by data breaches "wrote" at least two-thirds of the comments. No use arguing that in a smaller pro-net neutrality bot campaign folks hit by data breaches also "wrote" one-third of the comments, because all of that is evidence that the FCC currently can't or won't run a competent public commenting process, and I can't imagine this kind of incompetence is legal. What a shame it'd be if a judge had to strike down Mr. Trump's attempts to gut net neutrality, too.

Action: anti-gay bills, media consolidation, and private prisons.

Jesus Mary and Joseph when will this madness stop? Now Texas's state legislature is contemplating a slew of anti-gay bills, including one that would curb gays' right to adopt children, another taking aim at their right to get married, plus, of course, another "bathroom bill." And along with these bills (and many others, for as one activist ruefully notes, "Texas just does it bigger") comes the litany of excuses: we're protecting people's right to exercise their religious beliefs boo-hoo, we're trying to make bathrooms safe oh come on. No one has a right to use their "sincere religious beliefs" to abridge the rights of others, and if you're familiar with actual statistics on child molestation, you know that you'd be better off banning heterosexual male adults from public bathrooms than transgendered folks. Of course, we wouldn't do that, either, but hey, just saying. You may want to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom, if you're on a smartphone) to find and call Texas legislators and give them the spanking they deserve over this matter.

Meanwhile, we were just talking last week about the Sinclair Broadcast Group digging their tentacles even deeper into America's local TV stations, and now Free Press helps you tell the FCC to stop the proposed Sinclair-Tribune merger. The FCC, under its intrepid new chair, Ajit Pai, has lately loosened rules governing how many UHF TV stations a single corporation can own -- perhaps thinking that nobody watches UHF anymore, so who cares? -- except that, well, people do watch UHF TV stations, particularly good folks underserved by cable corporations, and if this deal goes through, Sinclair will be able to reach seven out of every 10 Americans. The problem isn't so much that Sinclair is an unregenerate right-wing network, or even that they might have colluded with the Trump campaign to get quid pro quo goodies later -- the problem is that they push cookie-cutter news content on local TV stations, thus enabling those stations to do less of the local news and analysis that is their very reason for existence. And, really, a monopoly is a monopoly, regardless of what "the rules allow." I mean, we're not blind here in America.

Finally, just as President Obama was beginning (and I do mean beginning!) to get our federal government out of the corporate-welfare-for-private-prisons business, along comes new President Trump to pull us right back in. And, you know, if you remember Mr. Trump saying, at the very first Republican debate, that he just puts out the money and the politicians do whatever he wants, you have every right to suspect that somebody, somewhere, paid for this obviously-foolish policy move, and maybe even broke the law doing so. Hence Rootstrikers helps you tell the Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to investigate possibly illegal contributions coming from the GEO Group. The GEO Group just got a $100 million-plus contract to operate a Texas detention center for immigrants, and just so happens to have pumped six figures into a Trump-aligned SuperPAC and six figures into the Trump inaugural ceremony beforehand. And GEO, like other private prison corporations, generally takes public money to run prisons badly. You have to wonder why we, as taxpayers, would put up with that.

Around the table: in which we wonder, again, *when's that terrorist attack coming?*

Turkish President's security detail attacks protestors at the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. yesterday -- the same day he visited President Trump at the White House. I bet a lot of winking went on between the two Presidents. And I wouldn't put it past our President to wonder out loud, very soon, why he shouldn't be allowed to get away with doing such a thing.

Reed Richardson at FAIR chronicles the "13 Resets in 13 Months" phenomenon, where President Trump seems to get endless chances from the "liberal" media to "start over." It doesn't matter that you have to constantly start over when you constantly screw up -- the "liberal" media has no business speculating on what he "could" do to start "winning" again, and the sooner they get back to the not-titillating-but-still-vital work of giving the American people the information they actually need, rather than the horserace coverage that's only as satisfying as junk food, the sooner we can become a sane and moral society again.

Miss USA says health care is a "privilege" you get because you get a job, then backtracks after the backlash. But I won't pile on her, in either direction; I'm pretty sure she said it was a privilege merely because she thought she was describing the landscape -- in America, we assume that health insurance comes with a job, when in fact our health-insurance-through-your-employer system is actually fairly unique on the planet. What's wrong with saying you pay taxes, you get health insurance?

Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) thinks he's found "the real criminal" behind Mr. Trump's disclosure of classified information to the Russians: the person who leaked that story to the press. Mr. Risch should consider that Mr. Trump may have sent an Israeli intelligence agent to an early grave regardless of whether anyone outside the room heard it or not, and he might also want to consider the difference between a "weasel" and a whistleblower. But then, he sleepwalks his way to re-election every six years, so I doubt he'll ever consider anything very carefully again.

Finally, speaking of the Great Man, Mr. Trump instructs us that "(n)o politician in history has been treated more unfairly" by the media than he. Set aside that the "liberal" media, even if they seem a little chastened about it now, was his biggest enabler on the path to victory: what Mr. Trump is doing here is whining. And here you thought being a conservative was all about, you know, not whining. I'd say that actual conservatives have got to be tired of his whining by now, but, sadly, there aren't very many actual conservatives left in America -- they've been mostly reactionaries for some time now. So when's that terrorist attack coming?

Action: foreign wars, "smart baby monitors," and the Bears Ears National Monument.

The Trump Administration has made a deal™ with the United Arab Emirates to sell weapons for $2 billion -- this, though the UAE (like the U.S.!) has worked with Saudi Arabia in their war on Yemen, and this war has pushed that nation to the brink of famine. And, ah, over what, exactly? Over the possibility that Saudi Arabia would have less influence in Yemen, thanks to a civil war upsetting a power-sharing structure that was a house of cards to begin with? This is why they bomb funeral processions and destroy Yemeni infrastructure? Yes, al-Qaeda and ISIS have both set up shop there, but (stop me if you've heard this before!) the Saudi war aims to destroy the one group that has actually effectively fought ISIS in Yemen. And here you thought this was exactly the sort of crapshow Donald Trump would stop us from getting drawn into! Anyway, as I've suggested, he doesn't get all the say about it -- Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to block the Administration's UAE arms deal at least until we can keep Yemen out of famine. Because famine is unconscionable anywhere on Earth.

Meanwhile, Mattel plans to release a "smart baby monitor" called Aristotle, one that would enable you to see what your child's doing in another room, but would also talk to your child. Why is that better than a baby monitor and parental interaction? I don't know, but Aristotle doesn't just interact with your child, but collects data about whatever it sees -- like patterns of sleep, eating, and changing -- and given that it can connect to online retailers, it might well share that data with them, so that your child's "interactive" experience can soon be cluttered with advertisements! Far too often in our sick, immoral, and decadent culture, "smart" devolves into "what makes more unearned money," but I'm so old-fashioned I only care about making parenting more efficient, which technologies like the oven, the washing machine, and the refrigerator have already done. Hence the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell Mattel to abandon their privacy-destroying, commercial-haze-inducing Aristotle. And maybe stop giving the author of Poetics a bad name while they're at it.

Finally, we learn that the Department of the Interior has declared that all comments about Antiquities Act monuments (including the Bears Ears National Monument) must be submitted after May 12, meaning if you submitted one beforehand, you'll have to do it again. Also, for whatever reason, the comment period on Bears Ears only lasts 15 days, while the comment period on other national monuments lasts 60 days. I don't see any of that surviving a legal challenge (why single out one monument over others is but one question a lawyer would have); it's enough to make one wonder if Mr. Trump is actually trying to run our government so badly that we have no choice but to dive into the arms of whomever the Democrats nominate in 2020. But we can't get caught up in 13-dimensional chess, of course -- we have to do our duty as citizens, which is to communicate our will to our government. Hence WildEarth Guardians still helps you tell the Department of the Interior to leave the Bears Ears National Monument alone. Because drilling on public lands ain't worth more than the people's will.

Around the table: where the *real* "purity tests" come from, and other lessons.

Michael Hiltzik takes us in the wayback machine to a time when "Anti-Communist Hysteria Almost Destroyed the University of California." Long story short: UC's institution of a loyalty oath in the early 1950s drove a lot of its faculty away -- a few by choice, 30 more by firing after refusing to take the oath. At least the U.S. Supreme Court ordered them reinstated two years later; today you can more easily imagine a Justice Roberts combing through arcanities to excuse inaction, or a Justice Gorsuch openly wondering why Big Gummint should have to do anything about anything.

From Noelle Sullivan at TruthOut we're reminded of another reason U.S. health care prices are so jacked up: "the cost of health care itself." When you get to the part where "there are many other ailments that companies won't fund research for, specifically because these ailments aren't good investments," you'll be reminded of the scientist who said we'd already have an ebola vaccine if anyone thought they could make money from it. It's really not "Communism" or "socialism" to say that we shouldn't leave health care up to the "free" market. I'm happy to leave the movie industry up to the "free" market, after all.

Surprise, surprise, President Trump has appointed a bankster lawyer to head up the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (or OCC), which has the power to pre-empt state laws curbing bankster misbehavior. You know, like charging onerous ATM fees, which states often legislate against more quickly than our federal government does. And if a state passes a law about a matter our federal government doesn't address, and that law doesn't abridge our Constitutional rights, why does our federal government get to nullify it? Does that sound particularly conservative? And more to the point, why do we even have national banks again?

This is a generally good article about the rise of "the Resistance" and the Democratic Party's own resistance to that resistance -- particularly when Jeet Heer points out that "the Resistance" is born not just of anger but abandonment, and abandonment by Democrats -- but I've got a bone to pick with paragraph 26, which blithely assumes that Bernie Sanders applied an "ideological litmus test" to Jon Ossoff and thus "threatened 'to create divisions where none previously existed.'" The party of "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" applies an ideological litmus test to the rest of us all the time, mostly by declaring their pet center-right candidates the only "electable" ones, and if Mr. Heer really thinks no "divisions" "existed" before then, then he didn't read his own article.

Two more things about the story where Rep. Frelinghuysen outed a protestor as an executive at one of his big donor's banks: where does he get off in paragraph nine suggesting that people protesting Republican policies are "ma(king) it difficult for us to meet our constituent needs"? The agenda we're protesting makes it difficult for him to meet his constituents' needs! And where does he get off suggesting that "highly orchestrated" speech somehow isn't free speech? He said exactly the same thing about the Tea Party, right? (And no, "I'm not suggesting people don't have a right to speak" doesn't get you off the hook right after you suggest people don't have a right to speak. That's not how argument works. That is, however, how lying works.)