Thieves in the Temple.

Action: fracking vs. family farms, and trucks vs. fuel costs.

Penn Environment helps you tell the New Sewickley, PA Board of Supervisors to reject a Dallas-based gas drilling corporation's plans to build a compressor station right near an organic farm. New Sewickley is a town far out in western Pennsylvania, almost 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh (neighboring towns include Knob, Sunflower, Zelienople, and, of course, North Sewickley Township), which means, I suppose, that frackers think they can develop there without anyone noticing, except New Sewickley is also home to family farms, including the Kretschmann family organic farm. Think that farm will grow anything organic when the frackers are done with it? The compressor station would bring air and noise pollution, not to mention truck traffic, which is actually a matter of no small concern in New Sewickey. So let's keep frackers as far away from family farms as possible -- especially in those parts of Pennsylvania the frackers think we don't care about.

Speaking of truck traffic, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell the EPA to set more stringent fuel efficiency standards for commercial trucks. Do not brook any nonsense from right-wingers about REGULASHUNZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!!, because here's how this would actually work: trucks would have to go farther on less fuel, which would make the total cost of delivering goods around the country lower, since gas is a big part of that cost. And the corporations now spending less on fuel would either pass that savings on to consumers in the form of lower prices, or they'd use those savings on other necessary expenses. Hell, they might even create jobs with it. The Consumer Federation of America tells us that commercial truck fuel indirectly costs households a little over $1,000 annually. Presumably you, also, can think of things you could do with a thousand bucks. Also, less fuel means less pollution. Really, no one loses except a few already-overpaid CEOs.

Around the table: the ever-shifting definition of "intolerance," and other stories.

ProPublica finds plenty of activity on the federal health exchange, though the open enrollment period ended a little over three months ago. Some 8 million folks signed up during open enrollment, but apparently the last three months have seen almost one million "transactions" on the exchange, which could be new enrollments due to changed circumstances or changes/cancellations in health care plans. Dear Obama Administration: it sure would be nice to know more, since, you know, we are the people, a.k.a. government's owners.

The North Dakota agriculture commissioner's race has attracted a lot of big oil money, thanks to the appearance of a populist Democrat with a long list of specific reforms he'd bring to the job. North Dakota, you may know, produces more oil than some OPEC nations, but folks are getting worried about what'll happen to the land, air, and water, as they should be. On balance, I think the article finds the notion of a Dakota populist (hello, Byron Dorgan!) odder than history does. Best laugh line: an endorsement of the Republican incumbent from "a board member of a large North Dakota oil producer who asked not to be identified in case Taylor wins."

NJ state police captain (and former Sparta, NJ mayor) convicted of, among other things, using FBI databases to conduct personal business. Like what, you ask? Like conducting background checks on players from a minor league baseball team he followed -- now there's fantasy sports for you! -- and trying to vet a home health care aide he was thinking of hiring to take care of his mother, thus proving that Big Data is, among other things, one big damn gingerbread house.

Faced with seasonal price gouging, the town of Somerset, Kentucky decides to buy a gas station to compete with private gas stations. And opposing this move: a complete bunch of morons, including one corporate oil spokeshack who takes small businesses and jobs hostage -- hoping you won't notice that the city gas station employs human beings or that big oil corporations are the ones who really stand to lose -- and one convenience store owner who laments that the city took "the taxpayer money that I have paid them over these years" only to create "socialism." One wonders how he feels about the roads that bring customers to his store and the cops who would protect it -- let alone how he fails to see that the city-owned gas station really belongs to him and his fellow taxpayers.

Finally, Sen. Marco Rubio tells a far-right audience that gay marriage opponents are themselves victims of "intolerance," and even surmises that he'll be attacked as a "hater" and a "bigot" before his speech is over. Actually, the correct term for Mr. Rubio is "whiner," and perhaps also "narcissist," for thinking so many other people are thinking of him at any given moment. And by "intolerance" I'm pretty sure he means "failure to agree with everything I say."

Action: tax policy, and smarter sentencing.

H.R. 4935, the perhaps optimistically-titled Child Tax Credit Improvement Act of 2014, purports to end the "marriage penalty" by expanding the CTC to higher-income married couples, which I don't necessarily oppose, and indexes CTC income thresholds and credits to inflation, which I certainly support. But H.R. 4935 does not extend the lowering of the income threshold, meaning that, after 2017, you'll have to make $15,000 annually to get the refund, which doesn't make it as much of a help to the downtrodden as it's supposed to be, does it? I suppose Republicans think if you're not making $15,000 annually, then you're just not working hard enough, end of story -- a position which might be more than heartless in a world where corporations don't go far out of their Way not to hire people. Sadly, that's the world we live in, so such a position would be heartless. But down with them and up with us: RESULTS helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the Child Tax Credit remains a tool for folks to ameliorate and escape poverty.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote on the Smarter Sentencing Act (H.R. 3382 and S. 1410, for those of you keeping score at home) before they adjourn for the month of August. Don't let your Congressfolk tell you they have higher priorities than the Smarter Sentencing Act, when the vast body of evidence instructs us that Congress has no priorities. The Smarter Sentencing Act would give judges leeway in ignoring mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug criminals, would extend the Fair Sentencing Act's crack cocaine sentence reforms to those who received sentences before the Act's passage, and would reduce many other mandatory minimums. Note, also, the bipartisan nature of this bill -- it would be hard to get further apart ideologically in Congress than House lead sponsor Raul Labrador, the Idaho Republican, and Senate lead sponsor Richard Durbin, the Illinois Democrat. Unless you're talking the distance between Bernie Sanders and Mike Lee, or Richard Blumenthal and Ron Johnson -- who are, naturally, also Senate sponsors of the bill.

Around the table: redlining! It's for cars, too! And other follies.

UCLA researchers find "redlining," or racial profiling based on zip code, alive and well in the auto insurance industry. Drivers with similar records and similar cars could pay hundreds of dollars more annually if they live in urban areas; Detroit drivers pay such high premiums ($1,200 annually over suburban drivers) that half of them simply don't pay car insurance, which is behavior we'd want to discourage, right? Perhaps we ought to have a single-payer car insurance system, too.

D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel rules that the Affordable Care Act can't provide subsidies to states that haven't set up their own health care exchanges, based on, at best, a reading of the law so literal you may wonder if the judges in question have ever read any other judicial opinions. The panel's opinion likely won't survive the full force of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and indeed the Fourth Circuit ruled in exactly the opposite manner within two hours, but I'll say it: would it have been that damn hard to write the law more clearly? After all, it's not like it's going to sit next to Yeats on your bookshelf.

California U.S. District Court judge rules that state's death penalty unconstitutional -- not because of philosophical concerns about the death penalty itself, but because California's administration of the penalty is so dysfunctional. Fully four in 10 inmates currently on death row have waited at least 19 years for sentence to be carried out, which the judge finds inhumane, apparently both for the prisoner and for the victims' families, who, as you might expect, rarely get closure. I won't throw up my hands and say scrap the death penalty, but I will say governments have a serious responsibility to do it right.

SodaStream fires five dozen Palestinian employees from its Ma’ale Adumim plant after they went on a wildcat strike to protest an inadequate pre-work meal. If that doesn't sound like a big deal, consider that said employees were observing Ramadan, meaning they'd just fasted from sunup to sundown, were forbidden by corporate policy from bringing so much as a bag lunch to the workplace, and were facing an eight-hour overnight of operating heavy machinery. Hard to believe I'm about to say this, but where's Rick Santorum when you need him?

Finally, infamous non-scientist Ken Ham says it's no use looking for alien life forms, because they're all going to hell since they're not Gods' chosen people. Well, I sure hope these heathen aliens don't have powerful weapons! Let's not get too bogged down in this -- let's just imagine Ken Ham, after spending a lifetime telling everyone exactly who's going to hell and who isn't, dying and crossing over only to find Odin about to open a can of whoop-ass on him. And then let's never speak of him again.

Action: cutting off arms to Israel, and cutting off tax loopholes to corporations.

Amnesty International helps you tell our government to stop shipping arms to Israel. It comes down to what I've been saying all along: you can be someone's friend without endorsing every last thing they do or want to do -- moreover, being someone's friend requires you not to be an enabler. And frankly, Israel wouldn't be able to build a massive wall around Palestine without American guns and ammo. I don't think we're going to change Israel's behavior right away, which is tragic and not just for Palestine, either, but we are starting to see change in America -- we've never been as reflexively pro-Israel as our elites have been, but just the other day a reporter got on one of the big cable news channels and ripped the "liberal" media a new one for how it's covered Israel-Palestine issues over the years, and I think they've actually covered them more effectively lately. Does any of this mean President Obama will stand up to Prime Minister Netanyahu any time soon? I doubt it. But it does mean we are closer to justice, and closer to peace, than we ever have been.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that the Senate Finance Committee will, on this very day, begin considering legislation that would stop corporations from incorporating overseas just to avoid paying American taxes. There are, unfortunately, still people in America who think that's just grand, because those corporations are sticking it to the man. But "sticking it to the man," in this case, means sticking it to yourself, because corporate inversion leads to fewer tax dollars here in the U.S., which means fewer roads and bridges get fixes and fewer cops and firefighters get paid. There are other people in America who think corporations are somehow the oppressed and should do whatever they can to get out from under the yoke of Big Gummint -- which has ensured their profitability in these trying economic times and which gives them countless unearned tax breaks. Some oppression! In any case, both NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, and USAction help you tell your Senators you oppose corporate tax tricks.

Around the table: from GMO dangers to the "war on terror."

Environmental Sciences Europe republishes study finding that rats suffered extensive kidney and liver damage from eating genetically-modified corn. By the way, the peer reviewers who faulted the study for using Sprague-Dawley rats, which develop tumors more commonly than most rats, were all wet -- scientific studies commonly use Sprague-Dawley rats, and if Dr. Seralini's Sprague-Dawley rats were getting the same amount of tumors as your average Sprague-Dawley rat, the peer reviewers didn't actually say.

President Obama issues Executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against gays, with only one very narrow "religious beliefs" exception. Quite a few folks have already said they'll challenge the order, but I doubt even this Supreme Court will mess with the notion that if you take federal money, you ought to play by federal rules. The next one, the one that makes John Roberts look liberal? Probably.

Minnesota community organizers begin drafting legislation that would tax corporate owners who allow too many of their workers to receive public assistance. To avoid the tax, corporations would have to start paying their workers better. I'm not a fan of dedicating revenues raised from the "bad boss" tax to particular uses, as dreamed of starting in paragraph 26, but the plan would work even if it didn't raise revenue directly, because workers would make more money and improve economies.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott becomes just another Republican governor who won't say how he feels about gay marriage anymore, after making his bones strenuously opposing it. And hence yet another reason why people hate politicians.

Finally, Human Rights Watch finds that the FBI has run an awful lot of sting operations involving Muslims since 9.11. All too frequently the FBI comes up with the plot, the means, and even the money to commit a terrorist act; all they need after that is a Muslim mark, preferably someone who's very dumb or has mental health issues. While no one says a sting operation's a useless law enforcement tool, Human Rights Watch's report suggests that some of our FBI agents have delusions of grandeur -- or, worse, the FBI works harder at pretending to fight the "war on terror" than actually catching terrorists.

Action: real government spying reform, better breast cancer coverage, and chicken that doesn't make you sick.

The House passed the USA FREEDOM Act earlier this year, but the bill no longer ends NSA bulk data vacuuming; the Senate version still does, but if we don't act, they could flush away the chance, too. Hence Firedoglake helps you tell Senate Judiciary Chair Pat Leahy -- who also happens to be the prime sponsor of the Senate's version of the USA FREEDOM Act -- to ensure the bill really reforms the government spying apparatus, or kill it. It's worth killing the bill if it does nothing, or worse than nothing -- a bill like that is only a tool a politician can use to tell lies. The good news is that the tide against NSA surveillance is turning such that House members who voted for the watered-down USA FREEDOM Act have since voted for real reforms (mostly concerning "backdoor" searches) in amendments to the latest defense appropriations bill. Maybe those reforms get conferenced out and maybe they don't, but it's never too late to express your will to your representatives.

Meanwhile, you may not know (as I did not) that breast cancer treatments often cause lymphedema as an unwanted and debilitating side effect. Lymphedema results from damaged or removed lymph nodes, which prevents lymph fluids from going where they're supposed to, which means arm swelling and, worse, recurrent infections that hamper recovery and lead to disability, disfigurement, or death, even. And health insurance corporations generally don't cover much in the way of lymphedema treatments, even though patients can do a lot of lymphedema treatments with the right equipment at home, and we want to encourage that, right? But H.R. 3877, the Lymphedema Treatment Act, would mandate that Medicare cover common lymphedema treatments and equipment, and so Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your House Reps to support the Lymphedema Treatment Act. Why tell Medicare to do it? Because, often, telling Medicare to do it prompts everyone else to do it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Obama Administration to reject its foolish idea to let poultry processing corporations inspect their own chickens and do it three times as fast as current government rules allow, then Food and Water Watch still helps you do that. You may be able to count on your oven to get rid of enough of the bad microbes you can't see in the chicken you buy in the supermarket, but no oven is going to get rid of the excess blood and feces and pus you'll get in the chicken you buy in the supermarket if the big chicken processing corporations get government inspectors off their property and use their own inspectors to try to inspect chickens three times as fast. I feel compelled to point out that not even Tha Bush Mobb could go through with a similar initiative during the early 2000s. I know the USDA is arguably the worst of the Obama alphabet agencies, but surely he doesn't want to be outclassed by George W. Bush yet again. Does he?

Around the table: signs of entropy and progress.

Dystopia has arrived! One Connecticut Republican gubernatorial candidate edits audio of another Republican candidate's words to make him say something he didn't say. Admittedly there's not that much daylight between what Mr. Foley said and what Mr. McKinney said he said, but a candidate capable of editing tape like that is capable of any evil, and the next one might, for example, excise the word "not" from a sentence uttered by his opponent. I'll feel a little better about this if Mr. Foley pounds Mr. McKinney in the primary.

Pro-life nurse sues family planning clinic after clinic doesn't hire her to do work her religious beliefs apparently prevent her from doing anyway. Obviously I'm no fan of allowing someone's alleged religious beliefs to rewrite job descriptions, but she might win this case because her prospective employer asked her directly about her affiliation with a pro-life group; said employer should have asked her whether she could prescribe birth control without noting her affiliation. He might even have been better off just calling her bluff and hiring her.

Study by Harvard and Yale researchers suggests that food aid actually prolongs civil wars. Which you wouldn't think, right? Except that oftentimes food aid gets stolen by warring governments, then kept from starving citizens and redirected to soldiers -- many of whom might also be starving anyway. Food aid also tends to depend on the largesse of the giving nation, rather than the needs of the receiving one, which you might more likely expect. Giving cash may be a better bet, at least in a more stable economy, but generally we ought to be tailoring our gifts to needs, rather than assuming our generosity will automatically make things better.

John McCain claims we might not have gone to war with Iraq if he'd been elected President in 2000. Given what an Iraq hawk he's been over the years, it certainly sounds strange, and obliquely blaming Colin Powell is pretty lame, but I don't reject the notion that a former POW would have been "more reluctant to commit American troops," nor do I suppose a McCain Administration would have automatically hired all those Project for a New American Century morons. Of course, we'll never know.

Ho hum, Turkish Prime Minister says Israelis have "surpassed Hitler in barbarism." Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestine is a heart-rending tragedy, but hello! The guy who teargassed, detained, and imprisoned his own nation's citizens for protesting in their own public squares doesn't get to criticize anyone for being a bully, let alone drop the H-word.

Finally, two HIV-positive Australians have seen their HIV virtually vanish following bone marrow transplants. The two men are still on anti-retroviral regimens, and scientists have found that the "latent reservoir" in which HIV can hibernate is much, much larger than they previously suspected. But still, this must be progress.

Around the table: a possible diabetes cure! And more stories of political venality.

FAIR takes the "liberal" media to task for rarely bothering to ask why undocumented children come mainly from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Spoiler alert: bad American policies -- including "free" trade, the "war on drugs," and interfering in Central American nations on behalf of their elites -- have empowered the gangs these kids run from. Eagerly awaiting the right-wing trolls and their WHYZ DOEZ YOU HATEZ TEH AMURIKAZ!!!!! comments, because it's always amusing to see nominal "conservatives" conveniently forget to start with the man in the mirror.

Philip Bump in the Washington Post discusses how Democrats and Republicans raise their campaign cash, at least in their respective parties' Governors Associations. Long story short: most RGA donors are corporations and organizations, and most DGA donors are individuals -- but most RGA money comes from individuals, because individuals who give to Republicans give a lot more money than individuals who give to Democrats. I include that last tidbit so you may defend against that inevitable moment when Karl Rove gets up on TV and says Republicans raise more money from people than Democrats do. It's not like his "liberal" media interrogator will stand up for you, after all.

California shuts down 11 oil/gas injection sites, and orders a review of over 100 more, because toxic fracking chemicals may have made their way into drinking water aquifers. In the middle of a lengthy drought, no less! Who could have predicted that? Also at the heart of the problem: California's decision to designate some aquifers too polluted or too deep to use as drinking water and thus OK for fracking pollution. Who could have predicted that fracking waste would spread to non-polluted, shallower aquifers?

The Tampa Bay Times's PunditFact finds that Fox/Fox News's on-air "talent" gets the facts wrong more than any other news network. NBC/MSNBC is a close second -- though that's partly because of right-wingers coming on NBC/MSNBC and making absurd claims, a rather more pronounced phenomenon than the reverse scenario is on Fox. CNN is a distant third, but I figured that was because their "on-air talent" doesn't say dumb things so much as they let politicians say dumb things; PunditFact's study specifically excludes statements made by politicians, so we may never know for sure. One thing I do know for sure: cable news sucks.

Right Wing Watch excerpts a World Net Daily interview with two of the actors in a putative thriller called Persecuted, concerning the persecution of Christians that could happen in the most Christian country on the planet -- Fred Thompson and Gretchen Carlson, perhaps you've heard of them. Ole Fred instructs us that the film is "realistic certainly to the extent that these things are possible," versus the realism of the impossible, I suppose. And note to Ms. Carlson: the Bill of Rights is not a religious document, the filing of a lawsuit isn't evidence of much of anything, and five anecdotes in one breath doesn't make an argument more persuasive.

Finally, an international research team injects the FGF1 protein into diabetic mice and finds that it reverses the symptoms, without side effects. One dose reversed symptoms for several days; several doses over a month essentially cured the mice -- without the bone loss or fat deposits in the liver that accompany other diabetes drugs. Let's figure out how it works, let alone how it might work in humans, but it's exciting news.

Action: divestment in Israel, holding corporate officials accountable, and justice for home health-care workers.

Avaaz helps you tell the CEOs of half a dozen well-heeled banks and funds to divest from Israel. No one believes Palestinians should choose violence in fighting their occupiers, but no one ought to believe Israel is blameless, either -- they're fighting Palestine because they're occupying Palestine. But Israel's government will respond to international economic pressure, and will respond asymmetrically, in the sense that a little economic pressure will provoke a more sizable response than we'd be inclined to think. Desperate governments don't just overreact by sending missiles after single terrorists in nations they control almost absolutely -- they also overreact by dreading how much worse the bad PR could get if they don't choose another path. I support Israel's right not merely to exist but to set a good example for other civilizations -- and they do in many other respects -- so I certainly hope Israel's government sees the light, as so many of its citizens (who are, after all, their government's bosses) already have.

Meanwhile, S. 2615, the Hide No Harm Act, would hold corporate officials accountable when they "forget" to inform the public of the harm their products or practices cause. Such a bill should be close to the heart of anyone who's lost a family member to a heart attack caused by Vioxx -- about which danger Vioxx's manufacturer, Merck, kept an unwise silence for over five years. Anyone who lost a family member to a General Motors car with a bad ignition switch might feel the same way, as would anyone who lost a baby in a Simplicity crib. Product safety is not something only squares care about -- product safety is something that affects us all, and (as Mr. Surowiecki suggested in his New Yorker article about bankster settlements) we'll get better safety info if corporate officials know that they will suffer for their negligence. Hence the Center for Effective Government helps you tell your Senators to embrace some real law-and-order thinking in this great land of ours, and support the Hide No Harm Act.

Finally, the Department of Labor has finalized its rule extending minimum wage and overtime protections to home health care workers, but is actually mulling giving home health care corporations another year to make more money off its workers ahem adjust to the new rules. I'm sorry, I actually have very little sympathy for bosses who get all diaper-loaded over having to pay their workers like they're human beings or something. America has well over two million home health care workers, folks who feed and dress and bathe and clean up after folks too ill to take care of themselves anymore, and news flash! That sector of the economy is only going to get bigger as the years and decades go on. Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the Department of Labor to extend protections for home health-care workers right away. People who need justice generally need it right now, after all -- not when "the Senate works its will," not when "bosses buy in," not when scaredy-cats stop whining, but now.

Around the table: the Sam Brownback Clown Car adds a famous passenger! And other stories.

And now yet another writer describes the ongoing self-immolation of Kansas thanks to Sam Brownback's little tax cut "experiment." Don't miss the part where Mr. Brownback touts 15,000 businesses created without mentioning the 16,000 businesses lost. Also, n.b. that Mr. Brownback said his tax cuts would be "like a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy." Apparently he's as lousy a doctor as he is a governor -- you only put a needle in someone's heart if you want them to die.

Also in Sam Brownback news: former Senator and Presidential candidate Rick Santorum endorsed Mr. Brownback in front of a crowd of 200 -- and not only suggested that Mr. Brownback's opponents attack him because he might succeed (and not, say, because they can amass a pretty solid body of evidence that he's failed), but said "the left is like the Eye of Mordor." You may recall that he invoked the Eye of Mordor in October 2006 while telling us why we needed to stay in Iraq. I suppose that's something -- it suggests he only invokes the Eye of Mordor when he's really, really desperate.

The New Yorker's James Surowiecki argues that we should punish bankster executives rather than corporations. Why? Because punishing banks like Citigroup (and J.P. Morgan Chase not that long ago) actually punishes shareholders, who have presumably already been taught not to tolerate recklessness by the Crash of 2008 and thus can't be further educated by a settlement with the Justice Department. And also because, you know, people who do wrong should be punished.

House passes appropriations bill that -- among other, even more spiteful things -- cuts the IRS budget by about 25 percent. While the IRS losing all those Lois Lerner emails looks like pretty obvious shenanigans to me, Congress's proper role in this matter is oversight, not cutting off the IRS's nose to spite its face -- though I suppose there's always the possibility that Republicans are objectively pro-tax cheat.

Former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, now running for the New Hampshire Senate seat, goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid a Guardian journalist's questions about the Hobby Lobby decision. He hides in the bathroom of a diner, then turns on a dime when he sees the reporter in a different eatery -- and finally one of his flacks threatens the reporter. Do our elites really wonder why people hate politicians so much?

Action: undocumented immigrant children, and the minimum wage.

As more and more undocumented children show up on our borders, President Obama mulls proposing changes to "streamline" the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which changes would actually speed up deportations and give undocumented immigrant children fewer chances to tell their story or get humane child care. And hello! We wouldn't exactly be deporting them to safe places. That's kinda why they're here, in fact. Who signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act? George W. Bush, of course; that must make five positive accomplishments for Mr. Bush as President, six if I count his impassioned defense of the Ramadan stamp. Is Mr. Obama trying to be worse than Bush, again? NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, provides a toll-free number, 1.866.940.2439, with which you may call your Reps and Senators; alternately, NETWORK also provides an email tool with which you may tell your Reps and Senators to keep the protections undocumented immigrant children have.

Meanwhile, you recall that President Obama issued an executive order mandating that new federal contracts include a minimum wage of $10.10/hour, indexed to inflation, as well as a hike in the tipped worker minimum wage; Republicans stamped their feet about it, yet strangely forgot to include it in their vaunted frivolous lawsuit against Mr. Obama's "abuses" of executive power, just as they forgot to include the war in Libya or NSA data-vacuuming. But I digress. The Department of Labor will accept public comments on the executive order until July 28, and you can bet that federal contractors will leave plenty of comments about how they can't gild the plumbing in their seventh vacation home make any money if they pay their workers in more than dung pellets boo-hoo. Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the Department of Labor you support a $10.10 minimum wage for federal contract workers. Why the National Women's Law Center, you ask? Because a disproportionate number of minimum-wage employees are women, and a disproportionate number of tipped workers are also women.

Around the table: "one missile, one terrorist," and other follies.

Israeli missile kills eight Palestinians at a Gaza cafe as they were preparing to watch the World Cup. An Israeli colonel later said the missile aimed at a single terrorist, which is like trying to kill an ant with a sledgehammer. I'm not sure which is worse -- that they might be telling the truth, or that they don't care if everyone knows it's a lie.

Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO) introduces a bill called the Stop the EPA Act, which would require both Houses of Congress to approve each and every rule the EPA makes. Again: Congress has already empowered the EPA to make rules, so this bill is like demanding 10th, 11th, and 12th innings because you're three runs down at the end of the 9th. Can't some Democrat beat Mr. Graves in 2014 by calling him "pro-pollution" in ads? It's not like Missouri's 6th is that red.

Ho hum, Duke University study finds that Congressional candidates tend to be moderates. The study essentially finds that Republicans as far right as Paul Ryan run for Congress nearly ten times as often as moderate Republicans, while Democrats as far left as Nancy Pelosi run five times as often as moderate Democrats. But Nancy Pelosi is a corporate Democrat, and thus hardly a foil for Mr. Ryan -- in fact, if the study used, say, Alan Grayson as the Ryan foil, we might not find such a disparity for Democrats. We might even suspect that Republicans run so far right to pull Democrats further right, thus locating the "center" where the right used to be.

Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC), addressing a panel on women's issues, says that "men do tend to talk about things at a higher level" and should "bring it down to a woman's level." I'm willing to grant that Ms. Ellmers actually meant something different, but she didn't say something different -- and claiming it's "both offensive and sexist to take my words and redefine them to imply that women need to be addressed at a lower level" exhausts my patience. I do not live in a world where "bring it down" means "bring it down to a higher level."

Finally, Joe Conason writes an op-ed entitled "Borderline Behavior: GOP Demands Action, Blocks Solutions, and Always Complains." That's not merely a succinct summary of the Republican m.o., it's a terrific pun on "borderline"! But hang around for Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) telling the world that he's sure it doesn't cost $3.7 billion to deal with undocumented children at the border because he's been on Orbitz and you can fly a kid back to central America for $200! Ron Johnson: he gives the "Citizen Legislator" a bad name.

Action: renewable energy, Arctic drilling, and the utter lack of compassion routinely displayed by the House of Representatives.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4916, the POWER Act, which would extend renewable energy tax credits to projects that reuse waste heat from energy consumption. I remember reading about one such project in France in 2009 -- which reused heat generated by the Metro to heat nearby apartment buildings -- and I thought, "I bet right-wingers would call this kind of thing 'socialism,' especially when they hear France is doing it." But fully half of H.R. 4916's sponsors are Republicans (two from New York state, two from Nevada), so I have hope that this bill might, one day, be at least that noncontroversial vehicle for all manner of poison pill amendments. We'd beat such amendments back, of course, but aside from their obvious climate-change and job-creation benefits, waste heat-capturing technologies can be implemented wherever waste heat is generated, meaning that hospitals, police stations, and other places that really can't ever shut down will have one more tool to keep themselves going in a blackout.

Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior is taking public comments on the matter of handing out oil drilling leases, and the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell Interior that you oppose drilling leases in the Arctic. The Alaska Wilderness League tells us that "oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean is bad for three reasons. Oily sea creatures. Blankets of heat-trapping soot on Arctic ice. Melting icebergs that leave polar bears starving." Those are all good reasons not to drill in the Arctic, but we have others, as you know -- namely, that we don't know enough about Arctic ecosystems to know how our oil drilling will affect them, and we also can't clean up oil spills in frigid waters as well as we can (at least in theory, right, BP?) in more temperate waters like those of the Gulf of Mexico. Don't conservatives tell us that we shouldn't go bullrushing into projects without being aware of their ill effects? Then the conservative thing to do in the Arctic, it would be seem, would be not to drill for oil. Remember: the conservative thing to do is not the corporatist thing to do, as the "liberal" media would have you believe.

Finally, NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, notes that the House just passed a bill making an expired corporate tax cut permanent -- a bill that would cost some $280 billion over 10 years, and a bill that did not provide any offsets to its cost. Perhaps the House leadership will tell us that the tax cut (which essentially allows corporations to deduct the cost of depreciating equipment much more quickly) will "pay for itself," but Citizens for Tax Justice will convince you otherwise -- this economy isn't recovering as quickly as it should because both people and corporations don't want to spend their money, so giving corporations more money that they won't spend makes no sense. And this House has just approved an unpaid-for and unnecessary tax cut for its corporate paymasters totaling some $28 billion annually -- but won't authorize spending less than $4 billion to take care of undocumented children at the border, nor $6 billion for extending long-term unemployment insurance. Hence NETWORK helps you give your House Rep what-for on this matter.

Around the table: it's assholes all the way down.

In case you were wondering whatever happened to the great Santelli, well, here's the Tea Party godfather getting schooled by a CNBC colleague about all the wrong predictions he's made -- about the economy tanking, about runaway inflation, about the dollar's collapse. It's painful to watch a grown man yell like that when someone tells him he's wrong, and I suspect the only reason Rick Santelli still has a job on TV yelling and flailing and bugging his eyes out is that he's not a liberal -- you know how quickly liberals get called "uncivil" merely for disagreeing with assholes like Rick Santelli.

Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that the state of Texas must issue a license plate with a Confederate flag on it, for First Amendment reasons. Generally I think our government should let people act like idiots as long as they're not actively depriving other people of their rights, but that doesn't necessarily mean the state has to go out of its way to help you be an idiot, and I don't think Texas's refusal to issue the plate actually deprives Confederate sympathizers of their First Amendment rights -- don't idiots have bumper stickers and custom plate numbers so they may adequately broadcast their idiocy?

U.S. District Court judge finds that the Huntsville City (AL) School District actually hasn't made all the "good faith" efforts it could have to end desegregation in its public schools. The district had actually submitted zoning plans increasing racial segregation in schools, and its school officials haven't accounted for their progress in desegregation (as mandated by our government) for over two decades. How many years ago was Brown v. Board of Education again?

U.S. Federal Trade Commission sues Amazon for letting children run up millions of dollars in purchases on their parents' credit cards while playing cell phone games like Tap Zoo and Ice Age Village. They're not spending that money on DVDs or candy bars, either -- they're just spending it on credits to keep playing. Do parents need to monitor their children's cell phone use? Of course. But that doesn't mean corporations have no responsibility whatsoever to give parents the tools they need to monitor their children's cell phone use effectively.

Finally, Dick Cheney tells the world that the President's "number one responsibility" is to "support and defend the U.S. Constitution" and thus "defense spending" should always take precedence over spending on "highways and food stamps." Read the whole link, as Daily Kos's Laura Clawson absolutely destroys his argument, but I have one question: why is anyone talking to someone who's always wrong about everything, let alone sponsoring an event featuring him, as the supposedly non-partisan Politico did?

Action: net neutrality Tuesday!

Today is the last day you can submit public comments to the FCC about their critically-flawed "open internet" (or net neutrality) plan. CREDO helps you write the FCC, while Sum of Us helps you call the FCC -- and why not? Shouldn't we should occupy their phone lines as surely as we occupy their email inboxes? The Consumerist, of course, still helps you tailor your comment to the FCC's proposal; they also provide a withering takedown of big telecom corporations' arguments against net neutrality, which seem to amount to WAAAAH I HATEZ TEH REGULASHUNZ!!!!!

I've attached here my own comment, which I submitted to the FCC yesterday; you may find it instructive as you consider what to say in your own comment.

The FCC has asked the public for comments on docket 14-28 on the Open Internet, and as both a user and a producer of web content, I offer my comment for consideration by the commission, in the hope that we may preserve a free and open internet for all Americans. And, since I was trained at school many years ago (never mind how many) to refute my opponents' arguments fist, I will dispense with that task.

Net neutrality opponents typically claim that regulations like those that 14-28 would issue "stifle innovation and investment," a claim that mainstream media news organs (which accept advertisement money from big telecoms, or may even own or be owned by them) often treat as gospel. But the greatest innovations of the internet era -- including broadband, weblogs, alternative news sites, video sharing, and social networking -- all occurred while big telecom corporations observed a net-neutral file-sharing arrangement. And, as Chairman Wheeler has said, "investment increased for both edge providers and in broadband networks" since the FCC's 2010 Open Internet Order; Chairman Wheeler adds that "since 2009, nearly $250 billion in private capital has been invested in U.S. wired and wireless broadband networks." I should add that this investment spike occurred in an economically-depressed atmosphere. And believing that regulations inherently "stifle innovation," as so many net neutrality opponents seem to believe, requires that one also believe that any law stifles freedom, which we know not to be true, or that laws cannot promote freedom, which we also know not to be true. Certainly the Clean Air Act, for example, hasn't "stifled innovation" of energy producing corporations that have to figure out how to engineer their plants so they pollute less, nor has it stifled the freedom of the folks who are much freer from asthma and cancer than they'd be without the Clean Air Act.

On to the FCC's proposal, then. The FCC has asked whether it should ban internet "fast lanes" outright. I say that yes, it must, because faster delivery of content from corporations that pay more for it would not "encourage innovation," but would actually stifle innovation. Large corporations are temperamentally conservative -- no large corporation came up with, nor would have come up with, Instapundit, YouTube, Daily Kos, Google, or Facebook, since all these innovations were, at one time or other, disruptive of the corporation's main mission, which is to preserve and increase profits. But internet fast lanes would also stifle innovation: all of the aforementioned innovations (two of which are have since become big telecoms themselves, while one of them owns a third) came from small, independent actors, who would not have been able to give their innovations to the world if they had to pay an exhorbitant fee to the established players just to get adequate service. Simply put, the startup costs of a viable media operation have never been lower -- when I started my own weblog, Thieves in the Temple, server space cost me a little over a dollar a month, and even now, as I'm building a larger audience for the blog than it's ever had, advertising costs are far from prohibitive, which I attribute to the disruptive technologies that much larger corporations didn't pursue until they saw that people liked them. An extra layer of "fast lane" fees would almost certainly kill this blog, and why shouldn't it live or die on its merits, rather than at corporate America's will?

The FCC also asks if it should reclassify broadband as a Title II "common carrier," which would essentially allow it to regulate broadband as a public utility. Again, I say it must, because broadband has basically become a public utility, as television was before the advent of cable, as water and electricity service were once luxuries that have now become necessities. I think Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act (as the D.C. Circuit Court suggests would provide authority for net neutrality regulation) concerns itself mainly with internet access in public schools and infrastructure investment, and thus isn't the better tool for enforcing vigorous net neutrality regulations than Title II reclassification.

The FCC also asks whether the Open Internet rules should apply to wireless broadband. Again, it must. I assume that wireless broadband will one day (though perhaps not soon) become the industry standard for broadband, but I do not see what is otherwise unique about it that it should be exempt from net neutrality rules. Wireless technology isn't that good, frankly, but the technology will improve not when corporations are "free" from having to give all content equal treatment, but when consumers demand it, and when one corporation delivers it and sets the market standard higher. Large telecom corporations, again, don't need to be let out of the rules so they can spend money to make the necessary upgrades to wireless systems; they have the money now and can spend it now, except that most of them are too stuck in their ways to do it. Again, this is a case where the government would promote freedom (for the consumer, that is) by mandating a corporate behavior, rather than assuming that letting corporations do what they want itself constitutes "freedom."

Finally, I support ending "legal restrictions on the ability of cities and towns to offer broadband services to consumers in their communities." Such restrictions enacted at the state level seem to me little more than a welfare handout to large telecom corporations, whose leaders, ironically enough, often brag about how they can do broadband better than any government could. If they were so sure about that, they would not mind the competition from state and local governments as much as they seem to do. And ending restrictions on municipal wireless services would also help rural and urban communities gain such services, since the big telecom corporations rarely build out into these areas of the nation. You don't deserve worse service just because you live in rural America, and we should concern ourselves, as a nation, with getting rural areas broadband service, and not so much with figuring out what carrot and what stick will induce large telecoms to do it.

Again, I urge your commission to write the most vigorous net neutrality rules possible, so that we may protect the consumer and the small businesses responsible for most internet innovation. Large corporations don't need our government looking out for their interests -- their wealth and position assure them a seat at the policy-making table. But ensuring the most freedom for the most people means, generally, that our government must protect the smaller actors in a marketplace. Doing so does is not "anti-freedom," because we should not measure freedom exclusively as a function of how rich our richest citizens can get. Doing so is pro-freedom, because we all benefit, and we all become more free, because of the small business innovation that is itself free of the corporate mindset. I thank you for your time and attention.

Around the table: twelve lost years, a long walk, a sad relapse, and two tales about Florida.

David Cay Johnston asserts that Tha Bush Mobb tax cuts actually cost Americans some $6.6 trillion in income over the 12 years they were in effect. Then he describes some of the things we could have done with that money, including paying off all student loans, car loans, and credit card debt. You remember what happened instead, right? Right-wingers spent eight years calling reasonable people "traitors," then took a big dump on the economy, then called reasonable people "socialists" and pushed the same policies that got us into this mess.

The Republican Mayor of Belhaven, NC embarks on a 273-mile walk to Washington, DC to call attention to the plight of his town, which just lost its last hospital after its owner, the private health care corporation Vidant Health, decided to close it. Mr. O'Neal, who supports the Affordable Care Act's offer of a Medicaid expansion -- which, of course, the reactionary state government of North Carolina refuses to accept -- actually utters the phrase "immoral business plan" when discussing the former owner of said hospital. Joining the words "immoral," "business," and "plan" will make him a pariah in the Party. I wish him the best on his pilgrimage.

Leon County Circuit Court judge throws out Florida's most recent Congressional redistricting map, finding that political consultants "made a mockery of the Legislature’s transparent and open process of redistricting" and ran a "shadow redistricting process” aimed at protecting incumbents (though perhaps not Allen West, whom I recall having a little trouble figuring out where to run for re-election) and strengthening Republicans' hold on Florida's districts. At least two districts will have to be redrawn -- "at least" because those two districts border other districts -- but probably not in time for 2014.

Robin McKie of the Guardian visits Miami, FL and finds a city dealing with climate change right now. And though Miami plans to spend $1.5 billion dealing with sewer and drain issues, its porous limestone foundation and low elevation -- Miami will likely see six to 10 feet of sea-level rise before the century's out, and much of Miami isn't six feet higher than sea level right now -- will likely doom it. The climate change denialism among its leaders (like Sen. Rubio and Gov. Scott) certainly doesn't help.

Finally, some bad news: remember the infant scientists thought might have been cured of HIV after aggressive early treatment? Turns out the HIV has come back, and just ahead of a major HIV study hoping to expand upon the HIV's continued absence. Still, the baby managed to fight off a relapse for two years (a few months of that without the benefit of drug therapy), so there must be something there we can learn from.

Action: fighting in the Middle East, animal experiments, and paid familiy leave.

Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk and your President to broker a ceasefire in the latest Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Why? Because we know one's coming anyway, and we might as well save some lives. I mean, look how much good all their fighting has done so far -- one side drops bombs from planes, the other side shoots rockets, people get hurt, people die. But Israel's 45-plus-year occupation of Palestinian lands hasn't looked like self-defense for a very long time -- in fact, it looks rather like self-destruction, and many good Israeli citizens have come to that conclusion as well. And I brook no folly from those who would have you instruct you that anyone who doesn't march in lockstep with the Likud isn't a "friend of Israel." I don't believe in enabling my friends as they continue to hurt themselves by pursuing bad ideas to their dogged end, and neither do you.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the big tobacco corporations to stop telling their cigarettes on animals. I'm not particularly anti-animal testing, or even particularly pro-rat, but come on -- blowing cigarette smoke and diesel fumes straight into the noses of rats? News flash: cigarette smoke causes cancer. Everyone knows it. Lung cancer is the biggest killer among types of cancer in America, and the biggest contributor to lung cancer is smoking cigarettes. I know, I absolutely pounded that passage with the italics hammer, but seriously, do the big tobacco corporations think they're going to prove the rest of us wrong with studies like this? Maybe Philip Morris (the conductor of the diesel fumes study) thinks it'll be able to prove cigarette smoking is safer than other things. In other news, getting your arm chopped off is not as fatal as getting your head chopped off, but it's still something you'll want to avoid.

Finally, S. 1810, the FAMILY Act, is still awaiting a Senate committee vote; the FAMILY Act would allow employees to take up to 12 weeks a year in paid family leave (at about two-thirds your normal wages), versus the 12 weeks of unpaid leave American workers can take now thanks to the Family Medical Leave Act. For those squealing HOWZ WILLZ YOU PAY FOR TEH BILL YOU LAZY LIBRULZ!!!!: the FAMILY Act would cost approximately four cents per $10 of wages. I'd prefer to bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaires to pay for that (and other things!), but I'm not about to let the perfect murder the good. Speaking of which: if some folks abuse the Family Medical Leave Act, you don't get rid of family leave, you find and punish those committing the fraud, not least because the existence of fraud allows fools to cloud our moral judgment. Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to support the FAMILY Act.

Around the table: more stories about health care and crime.

Ho hum, the national percentage of Americans without health insurance is the lowest since at least 2008 -- and has dropped almost five percentage points in the last year. Of course, it'd be lower if we had Medicare-for-All -- much lower, as in zero -- and the Affordable Care Act will remain a punching bag for Republicans, even though it's as Republican a bill as they come, but we should celebrate progress, I suppose.

Good citizens of Detroit have begun to protest the city's water emergency, and the police have begun to arrest them. You won't be surprised to learn that federal investment in municipal water has sharply decreased over the last 40 years, or that the state-created "emergency managers" -- unelected bureaucrats in charge of imposing austerity regimes on good citizens -- "manage" almost exclusively poor/black areas of Michigan. We're still awaiting the shutoff notice for the Joe Louis Arena, given that they're over $50,000 in arrears on their water bill, which is over $49,850 more in arrears than other good folks getting their water shut off.

Former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who served several years in the big house for corruption-related charges, now thinks our collective mania for throwing people in jail is a bit overdone. Remember that I try to avoid bashing people for coming to their senses about a bad policy after it affects them -- after all, how many lives can we lead at once? And Mr. Cunningham's case against mandatory minimums and other forms of madness would be powerful, because he clearly has some stories to tell -- if the "liberal" media is ever interested in relating them, that is.

First Read's Chuck Todd nails it in re the House's lawsuit against President Obama: "The lawsuit focuses on the White House’s decision to delay the employer mandate, which happened in 2013. If the one-year delay was so egregious, why wait a year to address it with this lawsuit?" The only smart thing about what Republicans have done here (no, it's not bringing up their bottomless hatred of the Affordable Care Act again) is they've slammed Mr. Obama for doing something most people didn't like -- and something a Republican President would have happily done for his corporate cronies, no less. Recall how well their ZOMB OBAMACAREZ CUTZ TEH MEDICAREZ!!!! line worked for them in 2010, and how quickly they moved to destroy Medicare afterward.

Finally, the Washington Post alleges that the immigrant children crisis at the border somehow makes immigration less of a sure winning issue for Democrats. My objections to the article number approximately one per point made, but let's just say I must have missed the part where Republicans actually give a damn about immigrant kids, or about anything other than criticizing Mr. Obama, and the"liberal" media really needs to get out of the habit of declaring everything excellent news for Republicans, because it gets in the way of reporting.

Action: oil-by-rail information disclosure, and net neutrality.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your state governor to publicize information about crude oil shipments by train. You'd think this would be a no-brainer, given all the accidents oil and gas trains have been having lately, but big rail corporations are trying to keep all that information secret. Perhaps because they think it's a "trade secret"? When you have to be evacuated from your house, when you can't drink or bathe in your water for weeks on end, when first responders can't get to the scene in time because they had no idea oil trains would be passing through, when you lose loved ones as good folks in Quebec did earlier this year, you certainly won't be thanking God that at least those rail corporations were able to keep information from their competitors! The national Department of Transportation issued an emergency order back in May mandating that railroad corporations tell state emergency commissions how often trains with large oil payloads pass through, as well as their specific routes and what counties they'll cross. It's hard to believe that still sounds like BIG GUMMINT OVERREACH!!!! to some folks, but it does. That's why we have to speak out.

Meanwhile, deadline for net neutrality comments to the FCC is Tuesday, July 15 -- why Tuesday? Who knows? -- and Sum of Us and CREDO help you tell the FCC to leave you, and not some corporation, in charge of your internet experience. For net neutrality would insure that, instead of big telecoms letting Miley Cyrus videos download faster to your computer than the blogs and news sites and entertainment sites you prefer, the big telecoms would have to treat all traffic equally (or "neutrally"), which means the internet remains the internet and doesn't become like cable TV which is all 557 channels and nothing on. If you're feeling especially ambitious (and why not? It's the internet, after all), the Consumerist still helps you tailor your message more precisely to the FCC's plan, which is important, as folks do like it when you actually respond in more or less the manner they've asked you to. And, with any luck (or, more likely, with a lot more hard work), we won't have to pay tribute to Comcast or Verizon just to start an internet-based business or keep the internet as a "marketplace of ideas." As American citizens continuing the greatest experiment in representative government in world history, we deserve to have the internet the way we made it.