Thieves in the Temple.

Action: promoting transparency, health, and competition.

By now you know that Charlotte, NC Police Chief Kerr Putney has released some of the body- and dash-cam coverage recorded during the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, also executed by police, apparently, for being black in America. What he's released is damning enough -- revealing that Mr. Scott had a book, not a gun, on him, both of these items apparently looking exactly the same in the "heat of the moment" -- but come Saturday, he won't have to release any more of it, because the notorious North Carolina law (is there any other kind these days?) HB 972, prohibiting the public from seeing any dash- or body-cam coverage, goes into effect. Hence Color of Change helps you tell the Department of Justice to withhold federal grant money from North Carolina as long as HB 972 remains on the books. The DOJ is well within its rights to do so, and states don't have a right to demand and receive federal assistance. If states need more money, they could always raise taxes on the rich and corporations, though the right-wingers who run things in North Carolina want to have it both ways. But they don't get all the say about everything in America.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Green Actions helps you tell the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to reject the proposed PennEast pipeline. The PennEast pipeline would transport natural gas over a hundred miles from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, but it would transport it through the Delaware River Watershed, which not only provides drinking water for millions of citizens, but also provides fishing and swimming activities -- plus, you know, other animals live there. Who do not deserve to die en masse just because some corporation wants to ship natural gas all around the place. Naturally, the proposed route would also dig up a good part of the Watershed, which all by itself endangers clean water, clean air, recreation, and wildlife, before we contemplate the spectre of a pipeline leak. Also, too, this'll be fracked gas, which means that in addition to possibly polluting the water in the Delaware River Watershed, it'll definitely pollute the water wherever it's fracked from. And that's the sort of thing we should be discouraging, not encouraging -- until gas drilling corporations can do it without poisoning our air and water. They probably think they can't, but that's not the American can-do spirit, is it?

Finally, you may have heard that Hewlett-Packard has just activated a "feature" in its OfficeJet Pro printers that prevents them from working with any ink cartridges other than brand-spanking-new HP printer cartridges. Which, as you no doubt know, cost an actual crapload of money, particularly if you're printing in color. You probably also know that third-party and recycled ink cartridges actually cost a lot less money -- if your printer doesn't simply shut down and refuse to work with them, that is. Now, here's the point where right-wingers would say it's their printer and they should be allowed to do whatever they want -- which would confuse you, if you also thought right-wingers supported competition. HP's move destroys any chance any fledgling business would have at giving the customer a better deal for their ink -- and if HP is afraid they won't be able to make money off their printers without charging an arm and a leg for their ink, then they're doing capitalism wrong. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell HP to stop forcing customers to use only expensive HP printer cartridges.

Around the table: media fact-checking, class-action lawsuits, extortionate drug prices, sentencing reform, and more Trumpian whining.

First, we take the wayback machine to three days ago, when the Trump campaign said that it's not the business of debate moderators -- or, indeed, the media -- to be "virtual fact-checkers." Or real fact-checkers, I suppose! I only bring this up to remind you that during Tha Bush Mobb years, right-wingers said pretty much the same thing -- that is, they literally declared that the media should be mere stenographers of the Bush Administration's pronouncements, and never tell readers whether or not those pronouncements were true. Because TEH WAR ON TEH TERRORZ!!!!!, you see. People who fear the truth always act like this -- and they never demand so little of the media when a Democrat's in the Oval Office.

Two ex-employees have sued Wells Fargo on behalf of current and former employees, not only for wrongful termination and unlawful business practices but also wage theft (including overtime pay for employees forced to work off-the-clock to meet Wells Fargo's absurd account quotas). Right-wingers in the Senate love bashing Wells Fargo now, but recall that these are the same folks who try to kill the class-action lawsuit in America by constantly calling it "frivolous." Corporations still file four out of every five lawsuits in America, but I never hear right-wingers say anything about that -- unless you point it out to them, of course, and then they act shocked that you would think such a thing about a matter they never discuss.

Remember hearing that Mylan "only" makes $100 on every EpiPen double-pack it sells? Now we learn that Mylan underestimated that figure by at least $60 per double-pack -- by actually counting corporate taxes it doesn't pay! Mylan arrived at the $100 figure in part by assuming it pays a 37.5% corporate rate, which of course it doesn't, not least because it's "relocated" to the Netherlands. Mylan's spokeshack responds, "(t)ax is typically included in a standard profitability analysis" blah blah freaking blah. And here you thought corporations counted profits by subtracting actual spending from actual revenues.

Politico reports that House Speaker Paul Ryan would really, really like to move bipartisan sentencing reform legislation, but is kinda afraid to partly because of the Trump Monster. Why I doubt this is true: one, most of the House's farthest-right members are in districts so gerrymandered they can't lose them; two, those downballot Republicans who are in competitive races can only benefit by differentiating themselves from the Trump Monster; and three, the objections raised by far-right Republicans could easily be answered by referring them to the bills already passed out of Judiciary. Also, a politician's default setting is "to lie."

Finally, after a debate performance so ill-received that even freaking John Podhoretz's negative review made me laugh out loud, Donald Trump wonders aloud to Fox and Friends if the "terrible" microphone he had to use during that debate was "set up that way on purpose." Of course he doesn't "want to believe in conspiracy theories," but he just has to wonder. But then, that's what winners do, right? Blame their bad performances on the equipment? Seriously, don't believe the notion that Our Glorious Elites don't want him to win. Of course they want him to win, because he's the personification of all their evil values (you know -- always demanding something for nothing, skimping out on your obligations to others, whining about misfortune you clearly deserve), and if he wins, he legitimizes those values. But they also win if he loses, because then they can pretend those values were his and his alone -- and then they'll just wait for the 2018 midterms, after which point Democrats will likely be unable to even filibuster bills in the Senate.

Action: 9.11 families, government spying, and bankster loopholes.

On Friday, President Obama vetoed H.R. 3815/S. 2040, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would have allowed families of 9.11 victims to sue the Saudi Arabian government over its alleged role in the attacks -- and might well have the happy effect of showing more Americans how damaging our blind alliance with Saudi Arabia is. The bill doesn't actually claim the government of Saudi Arabia did the deed, but merely allows 9.11 families to have their day in court over the issue. Mr. Obama vetoed the bill, apparently out of concern for the concept of "sovereign immunity" (an ancient legal doctrine which generally prevents states from being sued), but other laws (the Federal Tort Claims Act and the Tucker Act, to name two) have already modified the concept over the years, and anyway that's a bit rich coming from the guy who's still pressing a "free" trade deal that would vastly expand corporations' ability to sue governments and extort bailouts from taxpayers. So Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn in helping you tell your Congressfolk to override the veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.

Meanwhile, you know the police use "Stingray" devices (which tricks cell phones into giving up all their info by pretending to be cell phone towers) to conduct all sorts of surveillance they're not authorized by a warrant to get. But you may not know that the Stingray's effects can be even worse -- they can keep protestors from reaching each other, and they can also keep folks from making 911 calls, which could mean the difference between life and death. Police could also use stingrays to spoof messages from other people's phones, a power that could not possibly be abused by the unscrupulous. Hate to pile on, but the FBI routinely makes local police sign agreements that prevent them from telling judges about their use. Folks still unconvinced can answer this question: if you know a technology will cause considerably more harm than good, why would you use it? Forgive me if I sound a bit conservative about this matter. Decide the Future helps you tell the FCC to prohibit local police from using stingrays. (The FCC has jurisdiction over the frequencies Stingrays use, which are the same frequencies that phones use.)

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to close the "carried interest loophole" that allows hedge fund managers to pay a lower rate on their taxes than many working families, then Sign Here Now still helps you do that. Hedge fund managers can make millions of dollars a day and still pay a lower rate than folks who work for a living! How is that conducive to freedom? A right-winger might argue that freedom thrives whenever we allow individuals to get the most freedom for themselves, but if those individuals can get enough freedom to dictate our lives to the rest of us, how are we then more free? And that's what tax loopholes for the rich do: they give the rich more power to run roughshod over the rest of us. And if you're having trouble figuring out what exactly a hedge fund manager does to earn all that money, you're not stupid or uneducated, you're just awake. Too many banksters make bajillions of dollars not by helping people make better products or processes, but by moving properties around in a giant shell game. As Americans, we deserve a lot better than that, and we must demand it.

Action: fighting voter suppression, police harassment of protestors, and gas chamber euthanasia for pets.

The Peace Team helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate the "Interstate Crosscheck" database for criminal violations. (You may also use this link, if you're using a smartphone.) "Interstate Crosscheck," as you know from the reports of Greg Palast and other journalists, is a massive database purporting to stop people from voting multiple times across state lines by tallying up all the folks with the same first and last names from different states. You can already see the problem with that, right? America is a big, big place, and plenty of people have the same first and last names! Worse, of course, is that minority folks tend to have the same first and last names more than other folks, which means the database disproportionately affects minority voters. But that's not all! The list doesn't even consistently check last names, Jr. or Sr. voters, or Social Security numbers. If that sounds as much like a voter suppression scam to you as it does to me, then tell the DOJ what you want them to do about it.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate police interference in protestors' monitoring of police behavior. One Michael Picard of Connecticut has lately filed a lawsuit alleging that, a little over a year ago, police officers harassed him and took the cell phone he was using to record their behavior -- only to fail to realize that they hadn't turned the phone off after taking it, thus accidentally recording what sounds an awful lot like two police officers conspiring to fabricate evidence and level frivolous charges against Mr. Picard in order to "cover our ass (sic)." Mr. Picard is a well-known local protestor -- opposed to DUI checkpoints, apparently, and wont to film police officers at those checkpoints -- but that doesn't matter, because he still has rights. And so do the rest of us -- police can't come up to you and tell you that filming them is "illegal," because it isn't; it's Constitutionally-protected free speech. It doesn't violate their rights as citizens, either, because they're public servants. And remember: their next target could always be you.

Finally, Caitlin Halliday, of Kaysville, UT, has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Utah state legislature to outlaw gas chambers as a method of euthanizing pets. Most pets have relatively quick and painless injections available to them, but 30 animal shelters in America (including seven in Utah) still euthanizes pets in a gas chamber, which euthanizes multiple pets at once. No one, I hope, is tempted to applaud the efficiency of these devices, especially not when death can take up to a half hour and where scared pets lash out at each other. Some people actually argue that gas chambers are cheaper than lethal injections. Well, I'm one of those old-fashioned people who thinks you don't make every decision in life based on monetary cost -- and certainly not decisions involving the suffering of your loved ones, which your pets most assuredly are. We should more often make decisions based on the cost to our souls, and I sure do hope the Utah legislature (which has already failed to pass a bill banning gas chamber euthanasia) can find their soul in this matter.

Around the table: with stories concerning "free" trade, fracking, education, voting, and free speech.

"Liberal" media coverage of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" continues to disappoint. Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches the New York Times not only pulling the same shenanigans as before -- they "report" majorities of Americans supporting "free" trade by playing shell games with the terms "free trade," "trade," and "trade agreements" -- but also cherry-picked the numbers from a cited study in order to make it seem like more Americans like "free" trade. Recall that the only thing threatening the passage of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" has been public opinion -- most politicians want it, most "liberal" media outlets want it, but the owners of government, the people, generally do not, or we wouldn't be hearing bad arguments from the best of our media outlets (and, of course, racist booga-booga about China from the worst).

The EPA plans to keep allowing offshore oil and gas drilling corporations to dump unlimited amounts of fracking wastewater in the Gulf of Mexico. You may recall that a very widely-covered oil spill occurred in that Gulf just six years ago, and at least one agency says the EPA's draft proposals violates the Clean Water Act. The proposal does mandate that offshore fracking outlets keep an inventory (which regulators may review at any time) of fracking chemicals, which could puncture the cult of secrecy surrounding fracking chemicals as a result of the 2005 energy bill keeping them confidential -- if the EPA enforces it. You think Donald Trump's EPA will enforce it? Of course not -- it's not YUGE or BYOOTIFUL enough.

The Department of Education strips the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (or ACICS) of its authority to accredit for-profit colleges. A welcome development, even if the ACICS showed signs of getting its act together in recent months, but of course I still don't understand why our government doesn't do all the accrediting itself on our behalf. Because Big Gummint is always wrong? What of our government? No use arguing that government doing the work puts bureaucrats between us and our goal, when private accreditation ensures another layer of bureaucrats between us and our goal -- a layer far less accountable to the people, of course, like that was the idea or something.

ProPublica looks at how various early voting regimes encourage (or fail to encourage) turnout. Key findings: in-person absentee voting and same-day registration seem to boost minority turnout the most (no wonder North Carolina tried to do away with them!), and voting by mail tends to boost turnout the first time it's used but not much thereafter (which doesn't discredit it, since a small boost in turnout following a large boost in turnout still represents an improvement). The jury's out on automatic voter registration, obviously, since only five states have it, and none have run it in an election yet.

Finally, Rob Boston at the Wall of Separation blog reminds us that arguing with street preachers doesn't actually violate their First Amendment rights. Which should come as no surprise, of course -- we should know already that the First Amendment doesn't flow in one direction at a time, and that the First Amendment shields you from your government, not other people exercising their First Amendment rights. But we should take every opportunity to smash the notion that criticism equals oppression, a notion I hear mostly from the right these days.

Around the table: what "accountability" and "responsibility" mean to banksters, and other hard lessons.

Massachusetts Supreme Court throws out conviction of black man for unlawful firearm possession, on the basis that police didn't have probable cause to stop him. But the more interesting finding? That when a black man runs from police, he's not in and of itself giving enough evidence of guilt to constitute "probable cause" -- that he "might just as easily be motivated by the desire to avoid the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity." This is not "judicial activism," of course, but the application of common sense to the law -- which does not, and cannot, mandate that black men be suspected and stopped by police, after all.

The incomparable Dave Lindorff reminds us that Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf has promised "accountability" and "taking responsibility" for his corporation's transgressions, but won't do anything that might suggest an actual commitment to accountability and responsibility, like resigning or giving back his unearned millions. Mr. Lindorff then imagines what that would be like if we all did that -- speeders can admit "accountability" and "responsibility" and then drive away, murderers can admit "accountability" and "responsibility" and then leave the courtroom untouched, and so on. But for many tax cheats, of course, this is already the reality -- as long as you're not one of the "little people," that is.

Mylan CEO Heather Bresch tells Congress that Mylan "only" makes $50 in profit per dose of EpiPen. Which almost certainly isn't true (surely Ms. Bresch counts overpaying herself as one of the "costs" that interfere with profits), but is rather beside the point -- if you sell millions of these every year, then you're still making a lot of money. Rep. Chaffetz (R-UT) gets in a lot of good shots during the hearing, but let's see if he supports any action afterward.

In other Mylan-related news, Mylan had some, ah, friends in high places helping it get the EpiPen into public schools -- none other than Gayle Manchin, head of the National Association of State Boards of Education, and, of course, the wife of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and, more interestingly, the mother of Mylan CEO Heather Bresch. How clever of Mrs. Manchin to put forward an initiative to get schools to keep more life-saving allergy medications on site -- and to get our government to give certain funding preferences to schools that complied! Still, this is a turd that can be polished by creating/allowing more competition for the EpiPen. That wouldn't be the only happy ending to this story, though -- when Sen. Manchin gets blown out in his re-election effort in 2018, he'll get to annoy his wife and daughter a lot more.

Finally, a solid one-third of U.S. Senators go on record supporting a public health care option, but Democrat "moderates" up for re-election in 2018 sound far more skeptical. How many times must I tell these pimps! They will not lose re-election because they support a public health care option, they'll lose because they oppose it -- poll after poll tells us that a majority of Americans support a single-payer system, which is rather to the left of a public option. The three Senators named -- Heidtkamp of North Dakota, Tester of Montana, and McCaskill of Missouri -- are all toast in 2018, if they insist on taking the road of cowardice.

Action: concerning refugees, police brutality, and antibiotic abuse.

You've heard that stupid Skittles rant lately emanating from Donald Trump, Jr.? About how you wouldn't eat from a bowl of Skittles if you knew three of them were poisonous, and how that's supposedly just like the choice we face when admitting refugees, ha ha ha? Setting aside the utter stupidity of the metaphor (if a single Skittle could kill a human being, what might it do to the other Skittles in the bowl? And how is a single terrorist attack a poison that destroys an entire country?), the metaphor isn't even apt: refugees have perpetrated precisely zero terrorist attacks in American history (perhaps because they themselves are running from terror in their own countries), meaning that particular bowl contains precisely zero poisonous Skittles. Hence the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase our support for refugees when they come to America. And let's only use the word "poison" as a metaphor for things that actually hurt our beloved country -- you know, like Donald Trump's ongoing quest to legitimize racists.

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of at least two more senseless killings of black men by police, the ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5221, the Preventing Tragedies Between Police and Communities Act, which would mandate state and local police departments receiving certain federal funding to train their officers in de-escalation, and would also mandate that states and localities require their officers to use de-escalation techniques before they use violence. Though certain individuals would like you to think that police always do the right thing and don't need to be told what to do by Big Gummint, de-escalation training is, frankly, not a big ask -- we already ask soldiers in war zones to perform half a dozen tasks before shooting to kill, and no matter what Donald Trump tells you, inner cities are not war zones, so why do we tolerate the notion that police officers have "no alternative" but to shoot to kill where black men are concerned? The America I love is not the country where we throw up our hands and decide we have no choice but to kill black men. Not on my watch, anyway.

Finally, The Consumerist told us not long ago that most big restaurant chains still rely too much on antibiotic-raised meat, Consumers Union helps you tell those big restaurant chains -- including Burger King, Applebee's, Starbucks, and Olive Garden -- to do better at keeping antibiotic abuse out of their meat supply chains. As you know, four out of every five antibiotics in America get used not on sick people or animals but on nominally healthy farm animals, partly so they'll produce more meat and partly so they'll endure miserable factory farm conditions better. But you may well be asking: OK, but why the big restaurant chains? Why not just avoid eating at them? For one thing, you're perfectly free to use more than one tool to complete a task, particularly when the Big Stick of Bad PR works pretty well in this area. For another thing, a lot of people eat at these restaurants, and you won't be able to convince them not to just by telling them that eating too much antibiotic-raised meat could bring about a world of superbugs that medicines can't cure anymore.

Around the table: should we make richer folks may more for minor fines? And other thorny questions.

Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic describes the "sliding scale" fines many European nations assess for minor infractions like speeding -- fines that depend on the income of the lawbreaker, meaning a speeding ticket for a wealthy man could run as high as $50,000. I'm actually finding myself averse to the idea that a police officer could look up your income as easily as all that -- though I certainly recognize that fines and fees disproportionately hurt the poor in America, and would prefer good, progressive taxation, at all levels of government, as a revenue-raising tool to those fines and fees. I have no compunction about applying such a "sliding scale" system to corporate malfeasance, however -- corporations aren't people, after all, and we'd never have to hear again about we shouldn't fine corporations for bad behavior because small businesses can't pay the fines.

Senators from both political parties are having an awful lot of fun bashing Wells Fargo for its lawbreaking, but Matthew Yglesias at Vox reminds us that Republican lawmakers have been trying to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency that helped discover the lawbreaking in the first place. I find Mr. Yglesias's thinking a bit foggy at times, but he hits it right on the head here: "Banking committee Republicans want to grandstand when banks get caught, while voting to make it much less likely that banks actually do get caught." Their number includes Sen. Shelby (R-AL), who excoriated Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf when he appeared before Mr. Shelby's committee but who also constantly whines about our government being a "nanny state." Well, if banksters act like big babies, maybe they need a nanny.

Normal Solomon catches AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka pushing for the Dakota Access Pipeline to proceed, saying "it is fundamentally unfair to hold union members’ livelihoods and their families’ financial security hostage to endless delay." I've been saying it's fundamentally unfair for corporate CEOs to hold jobs hostage to whatever they want, but here Mr. Trumka does their work for them. I mean, I'm always saying we have to build stuff to create jobs, but our options for "building stuff to create jobs" isn't limited to building fossil fuel pipelines -- we could build wind and solar farms, for example -- and it's a bit sad to see Mr. Trumka holding to old notions as surely as fossil fuel CEOs do.

Thanks to America's few remaining journalists, we have learned that Indiana Governor (and Donald Trump running mate) Mike Pence once argued, in the right-wing Indiana Policy Review, that employers shouldn't hire gays. Why? Because they "are not, as a group, able-bodied. They are known to carry extremely high rates of disease brought on because of the nature of their sexual practices and the promiscuity which is a hallmark of their lifestyle." You knew that was rubbish, of course, as soon as you read "(t)hey are known," which is how they all put it when they're advancing something plainly ridiculous. And no use claiming "it was so long ago" -- just last year, Gov. Pence was the biggest supporter of Indiana's "religious liberty" law, until the Big Stick of Bad PR hit him.

Finally, Donald Trump discourses at length to a North Carolina rally audience about how much he loves "OPM," or Other People's Money. Which is pretty spectacular timing, given allegations that his charitable foundation literally used Other People's Money to pay off lawsuits. You and I would be ashamed to use Other People's Money in this manner, but big, bold, Donald Trump ain't got no time for shame. You think Naughty by Nature will let a Clinton ad riff off "OPP"?

Action: bankster misbehavior nay, public health insurance yea, and campaign finance disclosure yea.

As you know, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf answered questions before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday; he said he was sorry, etc., and would make amends, etc., etc., but note well that Wells Fargo has fired the employees who were ordered to open fake accounts for customers, while the executive who gave those orders hasn't given back any of her nearly $125 million in retirement money. After all, rules are for us "little people," not the "job creators" without whom, we are constantly told, we would be nothing. Hence CREDO helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to use its authority to "claw back" income from Wells Fargo executives who oversaw lawbreaking. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law passed in 2010 give the CFPB the authority to do that, and why not? They're ill-gotten gains, after all -- money those executives could not have made without lawbreaking. And people who complain about schoolkids getting "participation trophies" have no business excusing all the bonuses banksters hand out to themselves; they hand out so many anymore it's hard to tell what they did to deserve them. Besides coerce employees into breaking the law, that is.

Meanwhile, several big health insurance corporations are either leaving the Affordable Care Act-created health exchanges or threatening to do so, but let's not view this development as merely an opportunity to laugh at big corporations whining because their CEOs can't gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home boo-freaking-hoo, though it is surely an opportunity to do that, one we should not pass up. We can also press our advantage in other ways, such as agitating for a public health care option, as Presente helps you do. President Obama unconscionably used the public option as a bait-and-switch to get liberals to support a right-wing health care reform law -- one that has made our health care system better, to be sure, but how difficult is it to improve on that system, really? -- but that doesn't mean we can't press for a public option, even if we really want a Medicare-for-all system. A public option, whereby one would buy into Medicare or something like it (though I can't imagine why it wouldn't, or shouldn't, be Medicare) would give HMOs the vigorous competition they all say they like about capitalism. So let's give it to them.

Finally, H.R. 430/S. 229, the DISCLOSE Act, would mandate that corporations, unions, and "certain other entities" (including political action committees) disclose any campaign spending they undertake over $10,000; they would also have to identify all donors who gave over $1,000 toward such efforts. The majority in the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC decision seemed flabbergasted that anyone would want to restrict campaign spending when disclosure would seem to be an adequate replacement. Silly Supreme Court Justices! The DISCLOSE Act "only" got 59 out of 100 Senate votes in 2010, which, as we all know, means it's exactly as much a law as it would have been if it had received zero votes in favor. Still, since we now must amend the U.S. Constitution to get decent campaign finance laws back, we are perfectly right to insist on disclosure of big donors in the meantime, even if Super Great and Awesome Real American President Mitch McConnell, once a supporter of campaign finance disclosure, now thinks it's "bullying." Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the DISCLOSE Act.

Around the table: drug prices, antibiotic abuse, anti-competitive practices, and the strange, strange world of Donald Trump.

Why is Mylan, owner/extorter behind the EpiPen, trying to get the EpiPen placed on a federal list of "preventive medical services"? To lower prices for the people who need it, since most folks getting those services must (per the Affordable Care Act) get them for no out-of-pocket cost? Well, not quite: as the New York Times reports, getting on that list won't hurt Mylan's profits, but would mean our government and private insurers would have to pay the cost -- meaning, ultimately, we'll all pay for it, either through taxes or higher insurance premiums. That's at least the second time Mylan's tried PR sleight-of-hand. Getting more competition for EpiPen would be a better idea; expanding Medicare to include everyone would be a better idea yet.

Health advocacy coalition finds that most of America's 25 biggest restaurant chains aren't doing anywhere near enough to get antibiotic-free meat out of their supply chains. In case you were wondering, Panera and Chipotle do the best job, with Subway and Chick-Fil-A a little behind them. McDonald's still hasn't gotten antibiotics out of its pork, though it's gotten them out of its chicken, while Dunkin Donuts has actually gone backward by changing its antibiotics mandate to a suggestion. It'd be nice to just ignore what most of the big restaurant chains do, but most Americans aren't ignoring them. At least we're getting more commitment and more action out of them, but we've got a long way to go.

ProPublica looks at Amazon's pricing algorithm, and finds it wanting. Yes, the algorithm that purports to "find the lowest price" and put it in the "buy box" usually finds that price at Amazon or at a seller who's paid for product placement, regardless of where one might actually find the lowest price. And when you drill deeper on the "more buying choices" page, Amazon tends to omit shipping costs for the same categories of sellers -- which works if you've bought Amazon Prime (and get free shipping), but is rather misleading if you don't. Naturally, Amazon's spokeshack says price isn't everything, which is what they all say when they get caught with their pants down. Also, too, the EU considers practices like these anticompetitive, which our government would, too, if it didn't defer to the corporations who give mere lip service to the notion of "competition."

Donald Trump says "our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before," adding, just in case you missed it, "ever, ever, ever." Slavery, Jim Crow -- both wiped out with one rhetorical flourish! Still, if Donald Trump wants to press his point about inner-city poverty and misery in Presidential debates -- and a lot of right-wingers would like him to! -- Hillary Clinton could respond thusly: "well, inner cities are miserable because of predatory landlords like you, Mr. Trump, who took $850 million in tax breaks from New York City over the years, who even took a grant intended for small businesses destroyed by 9.11 in order to rebuild a building that wasn't even damaged by 9.11."

Finally, Robert Reich describes a zinger he gets off on a Trump supporter. Long story short: the man supports Trump because he's a great businessman, one who could turn a $200 million family fortune into a $4.5 billion fortune, and then Mr. Reich responds, "(b)ut if he had just put that $200 million into an index fund and reinvested the dividends, he’d be worth twelve billion today." The "$850 million in tax subsidies" is a little like twisting the knife, but hey, it's true. The more ominous sign from the anecdote? The Trump supporter acknowledges that Mr. Trump is "a little bit much," which is a hell of an understatement -- and which suggests that mainstream Republicans are now pretty used to him.

Action: fighting discrimination, greed, and more greed.

CREDO helps you tell Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell to ensure that child placement services receiving federal funding don't discriminate against children and adults on the basis of sexuality. That means no child placement service receiving federal funding can slow-walk an adoption of a gay or transgendered kid, or prevent gay or transgendered adults from adopting kids, or they'll lose their federal funding. I just can't wait for right-wingers to whine and cry and stamp their feet over this -- TEH GUBMINT IZ DISCRIMINATINGZ AGAINSTZ MY RIGHTZ TO DISCRIMINATEZ BECUZ TEH JESUSEZ!!!!! The Constitution guarantees that your free speech won't land you in jail, but it does not guarantee you that your free speech will automatically win you federal funding. It would be equally amusing/annoying to see nominal "conservatives" argue that their pet placement services can't survive without federal funding. Jesus Mary and Joseph if they placed children with parents on the basis of how good the parents are, rather than who the parents sleep with, maybe they'd do well enough not to need federal help.

Meanwhile, even as Mylan, manufacturer of EpiPen, continues to extort the patients who'd die without it, Congress seems helpless to do anything -- because that would require work, and most of these bozos make not working a point of pride! -- but the Executive branch can use its own powers to end this disgusting situation, so Social Security Works helps you tell President Obama to use all the levers he can to prevent drug corporations from charging absurd prices for life-saving medications. Happily Mr. Obama is less inclined to defer to Congress than he used to be, and he's also far from powerless in this matter -- the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 (that's Birch Bayh and Bob Dole, BTW) empowers our government to license other corporations to produce a federally-funded drug (like the EpiPen, and also like most other drugs) if the corporation that holds the patent doesn't offer it at a "reasonable price." And Mr. Obama doesn't have to go to Super Great and Awesome Real American President Mitch McConnell for permission. So let's tell him to do it. We are the owners of government, after all -- and, also, the real owners of the EpiPen.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to close the tax loopholes that allow hedge fund managers to pay a lower effective tax rate than working families, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. As you know, the "carried interest loophole" enables hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate (23.8%, at most) on the money they make because they get to call it "capital gains," rather than what it is: income for providing a service to investors. Your Congressfolk would rather do nothing about the loophole, because TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!! But a truly free market promotes freedom for everyone, not just certain individuals. And those of us who live in the real world know that the powerful use their power to protect their position, and protecting their position means the rest of us must be less free to become our best selves. Really, Our Glorious Elites' worship of mammon is coming very close to destroying us all. Closing the "carried interest" loophole won't fix all of that, but it would certainly be a very good start. After all, hedge fund managers aren't better than us.

Around the table: contains several unpleasant reminders about Tha Bush Mobb.

The New York Times describes the nearly $900 million in tax breaks he's collected from the city over the years to build his various projects. If Hillary Clinton wants to hit Mr. Trump hard again, she could do worse than call him "Donald Trump: Welfare Queen." Paragraph 11 -- which describes how Mr. Trump took advantage of a post-9.11 federal grant intended for small businesses to "rebuild" a property that he even said on 9.11 "wasn't affected" by the attack -- should be its own ad, if not an ad campaign.

Dean Baker at TruthOut marks the eighth anniversary of the Lehmann Brothers collapse to puncture various myths about the subsequent bailouts. Like that claim you heard that we'd have suffered a decade of double-digit unemployment without the financial services bailout? Actually, the claim was that we'd suffer a decade of double-digit unemployment without any stimulus actions whatsoever. And the bailout -- still the greatest humiliation George W. Bush visited upon the American people, and that's saying something -- doesn't even qualify as stimulus, really; after all, who got stimulated by that, except bankster executives dependent on their unearned bonuses?

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism tells us "How the SEC Enabled the Gross Under-Reporing of CEO Pay." Long story short: the SEC does actually try to measure money made from stock options (which constitute the bulk of CEO pay), but their measuring tool doesn't capture the inside information CEOs typically have about stock value, which means it doesn't capture what CEOs really make from executing those options -- and which ultimately means that CEOs at America's 500 biggest corporations don't actually make a "mere" 373 times what average workers make, but more like 949 times. That's right, for every buck you and I make, they make $949, and for contributing what to society, exactly, that someone else couldn't do? Recall that most Americans think the ratio is actually more like 30:1 -- and would prefer that it were seven to one.

Ho hum, 21 of the 27 states suing the Obama Administration over the EPA's Clean Power Plan are on track to meet the Plan's 2024 emissions reduction requirements. Several state Attorneys General retort that their lawsuit isn't about clean air so much as it's about state "sovereignty" and federal "coercion and commandeering." The Plan that allows states to figure out how to meet the standards on their own is "coercive"? Next time, a Democratic President should just tell them what to do and how to do it and make federal funding for all kinds of unrelated things contingent upon it, and maybe then they'll understand what "coercion" actually is. Right now, they just sound like a bunch of spoiled brats who never want to do anything they're supposed to do. Good readers, please let me know if you feel like I'm holding back about this.

You could almost imagine why Jim Newell at Slate would tell you "Gary Johnson Is Not Worth Any Liberal's Protest Vote," but it's still good to be reminded. Mr. Johnson would balance the budget solely by cutting spending, would replace income and payroll taxes with a national sales tax, and would vastly cut the kind of regulations that actually protect us from harm -- but, actually, it's not difficult to see why young folks flock to him. Sure, he's a genuine fellow, and the major party choices are uninspiring to say the least -- but young people all think they're going to live forever, and haven't faced that fact that their old age is going to be tough if Medicare and Social Security aren't there.

Finally, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence thinks Dick Cheney is a terrific role model for his own Vice Presidency. Because Tha Dicksta was "very active," you see, never mind that what Dick Cheney was very active about was the destruction of the country we love. Of course, where you and I see destruction, bold thinkers like Mike Pence see freedom -- and if that only means freedom for their corporate paymasters, well, too bad for us little people.

Action: "free" trade, fuel efficiency, and women's health.

I'll admit that things are looking up on the "free" trade front, with French and German leaders declaring the TTIP "free" trade deal all but dead, and Congressional leaders saying they won't bring the TPP up for a vote during the lame-duck period. I think they're lying, of course -- they could attach its ratification to one of the many must-pass spending bills Congress will leave to the last minute. Still, breathe deep and consider that the only reason our leaders haven't rammed these "deals" through already is that the public opposes them, which is exactly how it's supposed to work, but too often doesn't. So Sum of Us helps you tell Our Glorious Elites to end the use of the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) courts that "free" trade deals empower -- not only because they nullify our laws, enable pollution, and keep their rulings secret, but because they encourage corporations to shop around the world for trade-related problems that'll allow them to manufacture grievances with governments and extract taxpayer tribute. In other words, corporations use ISDS to file frivolous lawsuits.

Meanwhile, our government mandated stronger auto mileage standards back in 2012, and auto manufacturing corporations embraced them. But if you thought that seemed too good to be true, maybe you were on to something: the EPA and the NHTSA are now reviewing the standards, and some automaking corporations are pushing them to weaken them. So Consumers Union helps you tell our government to keep fuel efficiency standards strong. Upon hearing that seven in 10 Americans think auto mileage standards should be stronger, I imagined right-wingers advancing the argument that those three-in-10 who disagree are an aggrieved minority who should get veto power over the standards. Majority rule is not always the right thing to do -- if seven in 10 Americans decided that the other three-in-10 should be their slaves, we would not permit that, because that would oppress the three. But higher mileage standards, frankly, don't oppress three in 10 Americans -- not even if they feel "oppressed" by less pollution, less climate change, and lower health care costs.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 448/S. 217, the Women's Health Protection Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Women's Health Protection Act would essentially repeal all the state-level laws we've seen over the last five-plus years -- which include laws requiring medically unnecessary ultrasounds, absurd physical plant requirements for abortion clinics, unnecessary hospital-admission privileges for abortion practitioners -- that don't actually protect women's health or even reduce abortions, but merely harass women who seek an abortion. Women already approach the decision to end a pregnancy with a gravity that I, as a man, cannot even contemplate, and mandating all the extra hoops and guilt trips demonstrates a profound disrespect for women that is precisely the kind of childish thing a man should put behind him. And, please, withhold the "just don't have sex if you don't want to have a child" lecture. A man, certainly, should know better than to preach abstinence to anyone -- particularly if he's going to turn around and tell his buddies about his latest conquest.

Action: arms control, coal pollution, and the Garland nomination.

The Senate may vote on S.J.Res. 39, which would scuttle over $1 billion in proposed arms transactions between our government and Saudi Arabia, as early as tomorrow, so Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Senators to support S.J.Res. 39, and thus curtail our involvement in Saudi Arabia's war with Yemen. It's nice to have some bipartisan heft to this bill, originally sponsored by Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, and since joined by fellow Republican Mike Lee of Utah and Democrats Al Franken of Minnesota, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, and Chris Murphy of Connecticut. The Saudi Arabian government has been killing civilians rather indiscriminately (and committing other human rights violations) in its war with Yemen, but S.J.Res. 39 would prevent Saudi Arabia from getting their hands on hundreds of tanks, grenade launchers, and machine guns. We have had a tendency to give our allies in the Middle East whatever they want, and they've acted as you'd expect someone to act when they get everything they want -- intolerably. But it's well past time we used our leverage more wisely.

Meanwhile, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hasn't updated coal corporations' water permits so they comply with the EPA's new limits on water pollution from coal plants, so the Sierra Club helps you tell the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to protect good Pennsylvanians' water from coal plant pollution. Actually, "hasn't updated" may be an understatement: Pennsylvania has let a lot of coal plant water permits expire, some for years at a time, and I wouldn't blame you for seeing the withered hand of Tom Corbett, with his infamous DEP led for many years by the notoriously secretive Michael Krancer, behind those delays. But we're supposed to get action on the environment from Democrat executives, aren't we? Tom Wolf has been in power almost two years, and we're still getting more arsenic, more mercury, more selenium in our drinking water from coal pollution than we should be. But remember: politics isn't a spectator sport, and nothing in the world prevents us from demanding more from our leaders than they're otherwise inclined to give, and if we speak out enough, we will see action.

Finally, Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination has now hung out there for six months, for no good reason. I mean, Republicans have their "reasons," like that a nomination during a Presidential election year is "unprecedented" (like Antonin Scalia should have had the foresight to die next year, and also, it's not) or that "the American people should have a voice" (like the people have no voice at any time other than Election Day, wonder why they'd want you to think that), but we know the real reason: they're afraid of losing the nominally conservative majority on the Court for the foreseeable future. Hence the Sierra Club still helps you tell your Senators to hold hearings on the Garland nomination already. It is a relatively old action alert, though, so you'll have to edit out some of the more dated information (if only the election were still 300 days away!). But the action alert does not compel you to demand his confirmation, only to hold hearings, which really is the least they could do. I'm OK with confirming Mr. Garland myself -- moderates tend to drift leftward once they're on the Supreme Court.

Around the table: prisoners on strike, journalists silent about mistreatment of journalists, corrupt politicians corrupting, drug-resistant infections still infecting, and Trump still Trumping.

The largest prison workers' strike in American history enters its second week. I'm no fan of free/cheap prison labor, either, and no, putting people in jail doesn't entitle us to do anything we want to them, because prisoners have specific sentences that detail their debt to society, and heaping more punishments upon them merely because they're incarcerated is cruel and uncivilized. Rageaholics waiting for the next "outrage" to be peddled to them by the "liberal" media will, of course, be unpersuaded by that argument, but they don't get all the say in America. I applaud the courage of the striking prisoners, who remain largely at the mercy of whatever retaliatory measures their captors can come up with, including but not limited to sudden charges of "terrorism."

North Dakota arrests Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman for "criminal trespassing," i.e., asking tough questions of Dakota pipeline security guards -- and the "liberal" media seems largely uninterested. You would think as journalists they would be aghast at this kind of treatment of one of their own -- but then, they probably don't consider Ms. Goodman "one of their own," because she doesn't hobnob with the powerful people they hobnob with. Here's a clue: if you're a journalist who cares about which rich and powerful person you're in with, you're doing journalism wrong.

The Guardian publishes some 1,500 pages detailing allegations of campaign finance law violations by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. The evidence the article presents is pretty damning -- if you thought Bill Clinton's "that depends on your definition of the word 'is'" was damning, just imagine the hifalutin legal contortions Scott Walker will have to employ to explain how statements like "I got $1m from John Menard today" doesn't subvert the law. "That depends on your definition of the word 'got'," he'll say! Of course, Mr. Walker may never go to trial, since these papers were all supposed to be destroyed.

Reuters finds that, 15 years after our government declared antibiotic-resistant infections a "grave threat," those infections have become a much greater threat. Worse than that, even, is that our state and federal governments don't even count deaths from those infections -- you're more likely to see Scott Walker talking about campaign money he's "got" than you are to see the word "MRSA" on a death certificate. But, yeah, let's keep using up that antibiotic hand soap. And let's keep prescribing antibiotics just to shut patients up. And, most importantly, let's make sure factory farms still use antibiotics indiscriminately on feed animals.

Finally, more than one analyst has suggested that maybe Donald Trump has really jumped the shark this time, by making his big "birther" press conference into an "infomercial" for his new hotel in Washington. The theory goes like this: if you piss off the press (this time, by making them wait for your big announcement by promoting your hotel), you're finished. How I know it might be true this time? I remember how Scott Walker couldn't get traction last year after treating the media with open disdain. Also, Jake Tapper gets off not one but two zingers about it. (As an aside, Mr. Trump can't even admit his big birther mistake without blaming someone else for it; is that leadership? Hell, is that grown-up behavior?)

Around the table: an *even worse* boss than Donald Trump, and other amazing stories.

Lawsuit seeks to end Georgia's practice of throwing out voter registration forms that don't precisely match information in other state databases. Apparently even an extra hyphen in your name can get you disenfranchised -- and, surprise, surprise! Black folks seem to get their voter registration forms thrown out at a disproportionate rate. That reminds me of the "Interstate Crosscheck" database, which states use to disenfranchise voters with similar names to voters in other states -- another tactic that just so happens to hurt minorities at a disproportionate rate. All to catch the phantom "voter fraudster," which Tha Bush Mobb's Justice Department couldn't even find in any significant numbers.

How's this for cojones? Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf blames his employees for all those fake accounts Wells Fargo created for its customers. Those would be the same employees under constant pressure to meet sales quotas -- though of course Mr. Stumpf never actually said "break the law or I'll fire you," and while that may be the only evidence John Roberts would admit in a fraud case, the rest of us aren't so literal that we screen out the truth. And our leaders wonder why we don't respect them anymore!

Donald Trump's campaign deletes lengthy press release/diatribe against the "FDA Food Police" and "inspection overkill" from its website. You think they heard, maybe on the news or something, that food poisoning is unpopular? Or did they learn that the most recent food safety overhaul in Congress (passed in 2010) actually had broad bipartisan support in both Houses? Strangely, throwing up for hours on end because of something you ate is a far worse prospect, for most Americans, than stricter regulations on farmers and food production facilities -- and, truth be known, regulations are really only unpopular with a) the corporations that have to comply with them and b) the rageaholics they can manipulate into being angry about that, in addition to all the other things they're angry about.

House Democrats urge the Justice Department to investigate the Donald J. Trump Foundation, at least in part because of that suspicious campaign donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. I just can't wait for the first right-winger who calls such a thing "unprecedented," as if Mr. Trump's opponent didn't get investigated for her private emails and for the Benghazi disaster. (And if you confront a right-winger thusly, and they quickly say well, hers was justified, it's perfectly OK to remind them that they've just changed the subject -- which was that a Trump investigation would be unprecedented -- and that changing the subject concedes the point.)

Finally, dig this ad by Missouri Secretary of State/U.S. Senate candidate Jason Kander. I'm not behind background checks for terror suspects, because that's a loophole an aspiring dictator can drive a Mack truck through, but the ad really is a masterful document -- he acknowledges Sen. Blunt's attacks on his gun-control positions without repeating them, then talks about his military service and his record in the state legislature, all while putting a rifle together blindfolded. If this ad is any indication of his political skill, Mr. Kander has a good chance of winning his race -- polling presently puts him between three and seven points behind the incumbent, but Roy Blunt ain't exactly beloved by the Show Me State.

Action: fighting slavery, banksters, and monopolies.

As you may know, the government of Uzbekistan forces its good citizens to pick cotton during their annual harvest. Doesn't matter what you do for a living -- you could be a nurse, a teacher, a college student, or a business owner -- you're out there picking cotton 10 hours a day. And while Uzbekistan has improved some work conditions and started to phase out child labor on the cotton fields, they've also cracked down hard on the good Uzbeks who continue to press for an end to the practice. But the President who has enforced this policy for the last 25 years, Islam Karimov, has lately died, which (sad as it may be for the Karimov family) does provide us an opportunity to agitate for the abolition of forced labor. I would invite right-wingers who claim that taxation is slavery and regulations are oppression to look at what's happening in Uzbekistan to see what slavery and oppression are really like. (Or they could work on a Hawaiian fishing boat, but I digress.) Hence the International Labor Rights Foundation helps you tell the Uzbekistan government to end forced labor in that nation.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5983, the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, would give the banksters even more power. Didn't Wells Fargo just get fined nearly $200 million for opening up accounts people didn't want and even charging fees on those unwanted accounts? But Congress's only impulse, it seems, is to keep your government from protecting you from banksters. Hence H.R. 5983 would (among other things!) prevent our government from breaking up too-big-to-fail banks, let retirement investors put their own greed ahead of their clients' needs, gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, repeal the Durbin Amendment limiting the fees businesses pay to banks for debit card use, force all financial regulations to be approved all over again by Congress, and repeal the CEO-to-employee pay rule Dodd-Frank mandates. In other words, H.R. 5983 is an absolute fecal storm, and no amount of lying about "protecting small businesses" (by making them pay higher fees to banks? Really?) can cover that. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Financial CHOICE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell American and European governments to reject the proposed Monsanto-Bayer merger, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Bayer is a German corporation (a real one, unlike so many of today's "foreign" corporations like Burger King, which "moved" merely to avoid paying their fair share of American taxes), so European regulators might have as much to say about it as ours do. Or more; our government just greenlighted Charter/Time-Warner, after all. Who would benefit from one corporation having so much so much say over chemicals and agriculture? Nobody but Bayer's executives. And Monsanto's endless line of GMO seeds that don't deliver healthier food in higher yields but merely withstand its own proprietary pesticides better would continue, to the greater detriment of us all. And let's not even get started on what farmers would have to do to survive under an even bigger big ag conglomerate. I mean, giving farmers, not big corporations, more power over the food supply would be the conservative thing to do.

Action: anti-science legislation, harassment of protestors, and antibiotic abuse.

Congress has a number of appropriations bills to pass, as you know, and Congress would like nothing better than to use the threat of a government shutdown to ram through all sorts of legislative riders that wouldn't stand the light of day if they tried to pass them on their own -- legislative riders that would hamper the EPA's ability to enforce the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, for example. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject anti-science legislative riders in upcoming budget bills. Your average right-wing Congressperson -- who will generally be smart enough not to say that they oppose pro-science protections because they tend to cost their big donors money -- will probably hang their head unctuously and declare that we just don't have the money to protect folks from pollution. At that point, you're perfectly free to ask, "do we have endless money to take care of the intractable health care problems that pollution causes?" Of course, their big donors won't bear the cost of those problems -- but we will.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate allegations of police harassing, and retaliating against, folks who film and otherwise monitor their behavior. You probably already know that, try as they might, police officers can't simply tell you to stop running your smartphone camera in their general direction, because that violates your First Amendment rights. Still, if you use your smartphone camera to document police misconduct, they might try some stuff, like taking your camera from you and/or sending a handful of armed officers to arrest you for unpaid traffic tickets, and that just adds to the list of stuff you have to fight -- and discourages others from speaking out. But just as television blew the lid off the Vietnam War by showing its horrors, the age of smartphones has put police brutality out front-and-center. It's not that the good old days were better; it's that the good old days covered up better. But this genie ain't going back in this bottle, and police officers are public servants who should not get special protections (like protection from their own misconduct) while they're serving the public.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell McDonald's to get antibiotic-raised beef, poultry, and pork out of its supply chains, and thus out of its meals. It'd be easy to say, oh, to hell with them, they're McDonald's, fast food shouldn't even exist, but that would be letting the perfect murder the good -- we live in a world where plenty of people eat at McDonald's every day, and since we're not likely to observe the disappearance of fast food in our lifetimes, we might as well agitate for better behavior from fast food purveyors. And McDonald's, like the other fast food corporations, has shown itself to be responsive to the Big Stick of Bad PR, which we wield here for very good reason: overuse of antibiotics in feed animals makes bacteria more resistant, until we find ourselves in a "post-antibiotic world," where the slightest cut can be deadly -- just like it was in the old days! Surely even the most reactionary individual doesn't want a return to such "innocence," and surely even the most corporatist individual can see the limits of just letting food producing corporations do exactly as they please.

Action: "free" trade, immigrant veterans, and lead poisoning.

A few dozen organizations have coordinated to make today "TPP Call-In Day" -- as in, call your Reps and Senators to tell them you don't want them to pass the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," a "free" trade deal the Obama Administration is still pushing. Americans across the ideological spectrum abhor the "free" trade deal that will outsource more American jobs and allow corporations unprecedented power to nullify American laws, via the "investor-state tribunal," through which corporations could allege that laws protecting air and water and workers cost them money, and thus exact a bailout from the American people. Most of our Congressfolk are actually talking a good game about this -- I was floored to hear from our state's junior Senator that he actually opposed it, because I'm old enough to remember when there wasn't a "free" trade deal Pat Toomey didn't like. But fact is, they're only talking a good game, and there's still plenty of time for them to pull a gotcha on the American people. So use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page -- or use this toll-free phone number, 888-659-7351 -- and call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject the TPP.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5695, the Veterans Visa and Protection Act, would establish a visa program for non-citizen military veterans, so that those veterans will ultimately be able to naturalize as American citizens -- and so our government can stop deporting them. It's one thing to come to America to make a better life for yourself, but it's another thing entirely to come to America and risk your life to defend our country. A lot of these veterans, unfortunately, think that military service automatically confers citizenship, but it doesn't -- and our government hasn't always been clear about what a non-citizen veteran needs to do to become a citizen (and, in less sunny moments, I suspect our government deports non-citizen veterans because they won't be able to get health benefits once they're deported). Now I bet some folks would hear about H.R. 5695 and worry that a terrorist will use a veteran visa program to infiltrate our country and cause mayhem, but becoming a soldier to accomplish that? That sure is a long game. The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Veterans Visa and Protection Act.

Finally, the lead crisis in Flint, MI may have passed from the nightly news, but it's still a crisis for the good people of Flint -- the state of Michigan, as far as I can tell, has handed out water-testing kits and water bottles, and that's what they're bragging about, and Congress has done even less than that, although they have plenty of options, including funding relief, funding childhood lead prevention programs, establishing water testing programs at schools and child care centers, and reauthorizing the Drinking Water Safe Revolving Fund. Some Congressfolk will attempt to exact spending cuts elsewhere (and not in oil corporation subsidies, for example!) in exchange for these necessary programs. But when half a million children have lead in their blood, and any amount of lead causes brain damage, then treating emergencies like the Flint water crisis as opportunities to make pet spending cuts elsewhere is unconscionably cruel, and unworthy of civilized people. The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to do right by the folks in Flint, and stop lead poisoning in their drinking water.

Around the table: right-wingers are the *real* whiners, part 292.

Charles Blow at the New York Times finds Hillary Clinton's characterization of half of Donald Trump's voters as belonging to a "basket of deplorables" (racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, etc.) is morally apt. I'd argue it's probably about statistically accurate, too -- I recall Bush the Lesser's approvals bottoming out around 25%, and deciding that meant about a quarter of America is bat-guano insane, and, well, if somewhat less than 50% of Americans support Mr. Trump, and half of them are nuts, you've got about the same percentage. (As an aside, I think she chose the phrase "basket of deplorables" precisely because it doesn't roll of the tongue -- rageheads can feel rage about anything, of course, but they can't win many folks to their side on the merits, particularly if they might have to explain what "deplorable" means, or how they fit into a metaphorical "basket.")

Adam Davidson at the New Yorker cautions us against getting too elated about the record fine the CFPB just handed out to Wells Fargo for signing up its customers for accounts they didn't want. You'll recognize most of the problems -- the fine represents an infinitesimal slice of Wells Fargo's profits, no executives got fired though they're responsible for what happens at their corporation, and other banksters are probably getting away with as much but are cleverer about covering it up -- but you may not immediately recognize the big problem: the phrase "bank cross-selling" is so ingrained in corporate-speak that it doesn't get a rise out of most Americans for the unethical, should-be-illegal practice it is. I'll do my best to change that.

With the 15th anniversary of 9.11 behind us, here's an October 2001 report from Jim Naureckas at FAIR, which reminds us that, contra what the "liberal" media tells us, retaliating with bombs and guns against terrorists doesn't exactly stop terrorism. And, of course, whenever blowing up people didn't deter terrorism, the "liberal" media just said we didn't blow up enough people. You might be inclined, if you're a reasonable person, to think that violence breeds violence. You might also be inclined, if you're a reasonable person, to think that rushing in and violating other nations' sovereignty -- as we have done incessantly in the Middle East for decades -- also breeds violence.

Donald Trump would like to have a debate with Hillary Clinton without moderators. That might actually be a good idea, but Mr. Trump can't help but crap all over it by saying he wants a debate without moderators because he thinks moderators will be unfair to him. Everyone else has to put up with a moderator who may ask them things they don't like, but why should he? The whining coming from the right is unconscionable these days -- they demand exemptions from any rules that might make them look bad, and blame any hardship they've earned on someone else's "bias," but don't you dare talk about redlining or police brutality, or they'll say those people just have to "follow the rules."

Speaking of whining, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin fears that, if Hillary Clinton is elected, "the tree of liberty" might need to be "watered" by the "blood" not just of "tyrants," but "patriots." You might also translate all of that as whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine. Hillary Clinton is a center-right politician, and when far-rightists whine about how horrible America will be if she becomes President, you don't have to be scared. You have to ridicule and shame these people. That is your patriotic duty.