Thieves in the Temple.

Action: government surveillance, Eskinder Neda, local media, and working families.

Our government does not need a warrant to access our email -- and that's not the result of some secret court decision or some secret Justice Department memo; that's actually the law. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 treats email left on a server as "abandoned" by the user, meaning that our government doesn't need to ask the user's permission to look at it. How much email were you using in 1986? Both parties have been pressing for ECPA reform in recent months, but the Securities and Exchange Commission, of all governmental bodies, is pressing to get Executive branch agencies exempted. Why, that would be like doing nothing at all! It's almost like that's the idea. So Demand Progress helps you tell our government that it should have to get a warrant before it can look at our email. Getting a warrant might seem quaint now, but warrants force two branches of government (the Executive and the Judicial) to work together in order to move against you, which is a whole lot better than one branch of government deciding it can move against you.

Meanwhile, in a perhaps related development, Ethiopian journalist Eskinder Nega remains in prison, having been convicted of "terrorism" in 2012, a charge that appears to be related entirely to his reporting on the Ethiopian government having put other journalists in prison on trumped-up terrorism charges. Ethiopian law criminalizes reporting the state declares "encourages" or "provides moral support" to groups the state has called "terrorists," which all sure does seem open to interpretation. But don't think this crap can't happen here -- our government declares certain groups "terrorists," and our government doesn't even bother changing the laws anymore to spy on people, so, frankly, we're not as far from here as we might like to think, and it would behoove us, then, to battle for the release of folks like Mr. Nega, wherever we may find them, lest a President Walker or a President Clinton decide one day to demand "more tools" to fight "terrorists" who happen to closely resemble their critics. So Amnesty International helps you tell the Ethiopian government to release Mr. Nega.

In other news, Free Press informs us that more than 200 TV stations have been sold this year, the most in over ten years, and they're getting sold mostly to big corporations like the notorious Sinclair Broadcast Group and the only slightly-less notorious Tribune Company and Gannett Company -- or to the shell they own. You know what more media consolidation means, right? It means fewer reporters doing local news and more newscasts with cookie-cutter content, in a land where, no matter what the internet would have you believe, the local TV news is still the first source of news for most people. You'd think we'd have more conservatives on board with local ownership of local news, and before Mr. Obama's election, we did -- yet the fight against media consolidation remains a conservative cause, as well as a liberal one. Hence Free Press helps you tell FCC Chair Tom Wheeler to stem the ongoing tide toward media consolidation. I've no particular hope that the ex-telecom lobbyist Mr. Wheeler will be substantially better on this (or any other) score than Mr. Genachowski. But I'd be happy to be wrong about that, and anyway, duty is duty.

Finally, hot on the heels of another day of fast-food worker strikes over pitiful wages, Keystone Progress joins with MoveOn to help you tell fast-food corporations to pay a $15/hour wage to their workers. We know they have the money to do it, we know it won't drive the cost of a Big Mac through the roof, we know it will put more money in the hands of the folks most likely to spend it and stimulate the economy with it -- and we also know that it will reduce fast-food workers' dependence on taxpayer money, since over half of fast-food workers get some form of public assistance every year. Just as we learned yesterday that we subsidize the banksters to the tune of over $900 million in food stamps and Medicaid assistance and the like every year, we also know that we subsidize fast-food workers to the tune of over $7 billion each year in similar public assistance. Well, gosh, wouldn't it be easier for the CEOs of McDonald's and Burger King and the like to just pay their workers enough to live on? Or would it be too tough to buy more corporate jets and gild more plumbing in some CEO's seventh vacation home?

Around the table: the Lord cries in heaven! Plus other tales.

The Center for Effective Government instructs us that corporate tax cuts don't create jobs. In stark terms: corporations that pay higher taxes are actually more likely to create jobs, while corporations that pay much lower taxes are far more likely to shed jobs. And collecting taxes at the nominal 35% corporate tax rate (versus 12.6%, the effective average corporate tax liability) would have cut our deficit by almost $400 billion. Am I beating a dead horse? In these times, beating a dead horse is an act of courage.

Surprise, surprise, the NSA sent its employees home for the holidays with talking points they might use in conversation with their family and friends. But surely the NSA knows by now (never mind how!) that hardly any family members who differ about politics ever talk about politics at the holidays anymore.

Study finds immigrants less likely to commit minor crimes or engage in "antisocial" behaviors than their American counterparts. I'd have expressed skepticism at the fact that the study relies almost entirely on self-reporting by subjects, but official crime stats tell a similar story, and the study also finds that the earlier young immigrants come here, the more likely they are to act in an antisocial manner. That's not a reason to "blame America," but it is a pretty good reason to blame our stupid, venal elites and the sick, immoral, and decadent culture they've made in America.

UCal Berkeley economist finds that food stamp use, at least during pregnancy and early childhood, actually increases economic self-sufficiency when those kids grow up. How? Well, when you can get access to food, you can get access to better health and reduced stress, too. And all of these things happen over the long term, which the right-wingers who slam food stamps hardest claim to care about. The article explains the nuts-and-bolts of Ms. Hoynes's research, plus it slams Newt Gingrich for birthing the fact-free culture that now envelops Congress and "liberal" media debate.

Finally, Tea Party radio host claims that "Jesus Christ is weeping in heaven" over Pope Francis's remarks excoriating mammon-worship (though the Lord is not crying, presumably, over the Pope's secret ministry to the homeless of Rome). Go ahead and click through to said radio host's World Net Daily piece, which defines "socialism" and "capitalism" however it pleases, pretends that only governments ever use the "threat of violence," and reads the Parable of the Talents as if it could only ever be about money. And then ask yourself how likely it is that the author ever actually does anything about his professed hatred for "crony capitalism" when there are food-stamp recipients for him to pick on. And then? Never think of him again.

Action: in which we provide for the *real* common defense -- against corruption and greed.

H.R. 3639, the confidently-titled Provide for the Common Defense Act, would restore sequestration defense cuts by cutting Social Security and Medicare. Because what could be more popular than taking from popular programs and giving to unpopular, waste- and corruption-filled programs? Specifically, the bill would increase deductibles for new Medicare enrollees after 2017 -- I hope young folks do remember that they will, one day, all be new Medicare enrollees -- and would attach cost-of-living increases to the dread "chained CPI," an index which, as we know, does not reflect the sheer number of fixed costs seniors face. To be fair, the bill also caps crop insurance payments, though it leaves other agricultural subsidies untouched. But on balance, this is a terrible way to "provide for the common defense." Remember when the 91% tax bracket helped provide for the common defense? I guess Congress doesn't. USAction helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 3639.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3309, the Innovation Act, could get a House vote as early as today, and this particular Innovation Act (authored by Bob Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, and co-sponsored by nine House Republicans and seven House Democrats) actually would help unleash innovation -- not to mention actually stop frivolous lawsuits -- by making it harder for patent trolls to buy up patents and then sue people willy-nilly for "violating" them. If H.R. 3309 becomes law, would-be patent trolls would have to specify exactly what part or parts of the patent they think the target of their lawsuit is violating, plus they would have to pay the defendant's court costs if they lose -- and that's a substantial deterrent to filing frivolous lawsuits, since most patent trolls bet on their ability to collect quick settlements rather than have their opponents go broke defending themselves. The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you email or call your House Reps and urge them to support the Innovation Act.

In other news, the Pennsylvania state Senate, though nominally dominated by law-and-order Republicans, plans to push through a bill (SB 411) that would virtually immunize gas drilling corporations from polluting nearby water tables. Because you learned from your parents that when you make a mess, you should lobby your state legislators to pass a law mandating that someone else clean up your mess, right? SB 411 allegedly builds on Pennsylvania's "Good Samaritan Law," which immunizes mining corporations that voluntarily treat acid mine pollution, but handing out a get-out-of-jail-free card to gas drilling corporations who know they're polluting the water we drink and bathe in and wash clothes and dishes with would be more accurately described as a loophole. And all the gas drillers would have to do to drive through this loophole would be to take the water from abandoned mine sites and use it to frack -- not, you know, treat it so that people might use it. Both PennEnvironment and the Sierra Club help you tell your PA state legislators to oppose SB 411.

Finally, in a slap in the face to all good Americans fighting the corruption of our democracy by mammon, the SEC has apparently decided not to issue a rule requiring that corporations disclose their election spending to their shareholders. The SEC has dragged its feet on this rule for years now, finally putting the issuing of said rule on its official agenda for 2013, then not issuing the rule and "disappearing" the rule from its 2014 agenda. Jesus Mary and Joseph did they think no one would notice? Do they think shareholders in America care about nothing besides money? Do they think shareholders don't care if their corporate boards waste their money trying to elect utter wastes of flesh like Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, who came within five percentage points of unseating Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2012 with the help of $40 million in big corporate bucks? Public Citizen helps you tell the SEC to do its damn job already.

Around the table: Fast food strikers, underpaid bank tellers, health care complaining, corporate tax dodging, and Scott Walker.

Fast-food workers will walk off the job in 100 cities today, protesting the not-terribly-coincidental nexus of high corporate profits and sub-living standard wages for workers. The worst I can say about these one-day strikes is that they're not finishing the job right now -- as evidenced by pro-corporate flacks whining about "labor groups." We'll know these strikes are doing really well when these same flacks start squealing COMMUNISM SOCIALISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!!!

Surprise, surprise: one-third of America's bank tellers rely on public assistance to get by, says U-Cal Berkeley's Labor Center, resulting in almost $1 billion annually in, essentially, a subsidy to banksters. And dig the "senior financial analyst" at bankrate.com, telling us that when profit margins are "squeezed" by "an increasing amount of bank regulation," then "you have to make tough decisions." For other people, he must mean, since bankster CEOs aren't exactly making diddly-squat.

R.J. Eskow writes that the Republicans are stepping right into a trap by slamming the Affordable Care Act -- because they're inadvertently slamming what's essentially a free-market-based health care reform. It's a pretty thorough argument, full of nuggets you can use on your Tea Party uncle at the Christmas dinner table if you're so inclined, but I'd feel more confident about its explanatory power if the "liberal" media had been vigorously reporting the problems the Administration's had outsourcing the website's building to private contractors, or the "Medicare exchange" Paul Ryan wants to set up, or even that the Affordable Care Act was born in a right-wing think tank over twenty years ago.

Citizens for Tax Justice advocates either reforming research tax credits or letting them expire. Major problems with the tax credit, per CTJ: laws and regulations define "research" too broadly, and allow corporations to deduct too much research they would have done without the tax credit anyway. This, in a land where we still don't have a cure for cancer, where most of our research seems to go into making our cell phones cooler or spying on citizens more efficiently -- but a lemon-lime shaving cream "earns" a tax deduction.

Finally, The New Republic assesses Scott Walker's chances of winning the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination, and, sadly, they're right -- he can unite the teabaggers and the religious right and the corporations über alles wings of the party like no one else can, plus his political skills are not "an open question" as TNR says, because he's already proven himself a terrific BS artist who can punch and counterpunch on an even keel. So where is hope? That he somehow loses his gubernatorial re-election in 2014, that the various investigations into his ethical dealings finally bear fruit, that the teabaggers stage a tantrum of unprecedented size during the primaries, that the elites try to unite under the banner of someone even more under the radar like Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, or that Democrats actually nominate someone who can win for a better reason than "I'm not an ogre." I wouldn't lay money on any of these.

Around the table: the corporate surveillance state vs. a better world.

Sad news: America's prisoners currently outnumber America's high school teachers. America's prisoners also outnumber America's engineers, physicians, surgeons, lawyers, and social workers. That's what three decades-plus of screw-everyone-but-me economic theory and draconian criminal sentencing laws can do to a land. The good news? States seem to be waking up to the "draconian criminal sentencing" part, and our prison population has actually declined since 2009. Our work fighting screw-everyone-but-me economic theory is ongoing.

Here's an interesting thesis from Michael Lind: the right has a unified economic vision, but the left's vision is fragmented among three impulses -- protecting small producers, protecting unions, and promoting change through direct legislation -- and would be better served by concentrating on the last item, instead of protecting ever-diminishing numbers of small producers and union workers. I'd call protecting small producers a conservative economic vision myself, but the thing is, I don't think these three impulses comprise a fragmented vision -- in fact, I think one word describes them all: "freedom."

Essay from Roosevelt Institute scholar Thomas Ferguson and two others analyzes campaign contributions during the 2012 election. Perhaps the most devastating finding: that those sectors most involved in the "surveillance state," including telecoms and high tech, went big for Mr. Obama, who has not coincidentally expanded the surveillance state well beyond its size under Mr. Bush. A not-so-distant second: banksters were more likely to support teabaggers for Congress than any other sectors of the economy.

Speaking of American police states, David Rosen at Counterpunch reports on the private security state growing alongside the public one. He also discusses private sector surveillance of non-profits. You won't be pleased to learn how well our government integrates with corporations, and you may not be comforted to know how long this has been going on.

Alan Pyke at ThinkProgress tells us that if the minimum wage had increased over the years the way the earnings of the top 1% have increased, the minimum wage would be over $22/hour today. No doubt some right-wing smartypants stands ready to tell us that if minwage workers' earnings increased that much, then their bosses's earnings wouldn't have increased that much ha ha snort. To which I'd respond: we can only hope!

Finally, activists in 17 states across India are creating an organic seed bank called Navdanya. They hope it will help them fight the big corporate GMO takeover of Indian small farms and stem the rash of Indian small farmers committing suicide. You'll read about other "seed libraries," too. I hope I never see the day when our government kills organic seed preservers as "terrorists," but I can imagine it happening all too easily.

Action: the minimum wage, women's health, and safe toys.

The People's Email Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1010/S. 460, the Fair Minimum Wage Act. The Fair Minimum Wage Act would increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $10.10/hour -- or a mere 67 cents an hour less than the inflation-adjusted 1968 minimum wage would be. Yes, that means our minimum wage workers have (like most workers!) lost ground since 1968, and we don't measure the success of a society by how many vacation homes our top earners can buy -- we measure the success of a society by how many opportunities we can create for everyone in society to be the best they can be, and giving folks a minimum wage they can live on, raise a family on, and provide opportunities for their family on, is a good start. And the Fair Minimum Wage Act would stimulate the economy without increasing government debt -- give folks just scraping by more money, and they'll put most of it right back into the economy, whether they buy better food, get more schooling for themselves or their children, or even just buy more flat-screen TVs. After all, CEOs don't create jobs; people who buy stuff create jobs.

Meanwhile, the National Women's Law Center helps you support H.R. 3471/S. 1676, the Women's Health Protection Act, which would restrict states' ability to hold abortion clinics to higher standards than those states require of other health care providers. State laws that hold abortion clinics to stricter standards than hospitals and doctor's offices must meet do nothing more and nothing less than cheat -- you might turn away a lot of women seeking abortions in the short term, as state legislators in Texas and Mississippi and Virginia have done, but how many women will you have honestly convinced of the righteousness of your cause? And make no mistake: supporting the Women's Health Protection Act will not magically make you into someone who "doesn't care about the children" or "doesn't care about women's health." No one thinks abortion providers should be held to a lower standard than other health care providers, but I bet even pro-lifers will ultimately find it hypocritical to hold them to a higher one. We're not a society that'll do just anything to achieve a goal, are we? It's about time we fought to reduce abortions without all the grandstanding.

Finally, USPIRG provides its 28th annual "Trouble in Toyland" report, describing the kinds of toys you should avoid buying for children this holiday season. (You can also open their tips page on your cell phone; it might be best to open it from here.) Long story short: though the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 made our consumer product safety laws better, kids still get too many toys with lead in them, too many toys with toxic chemicals in them, too many toys that are really too loud for them, and too many toys that remain choking hazards. And by the way, in each of the above-named instances as well as many others, too many is still "one." No this isn't a whole lot of bellyaching about how everything's a mortal danger and we have to protect our kids from stubbed toes or whatever. Keeping your kids off a busy street during rush hour, for example, you can do, because you've identified at least two dangerous things about that scenario just by reading it. But keeping your kids away from the long-term developmental impairments some toys present is a bit harder, since things like lead and cadmium don't exactly wear a bell.

Action: "free" trade, clean water, public gas, and GMO apples.

Missed any opportunities to express your opposition to the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade agreement? Well, Public Citizen provides another one. In his latest email missive, Public Citizen President Robert Weismann tells us that big corporations long ago embraced the "free" trade agreement, negotiated with little or no public oversight and (until 2007) fast-tracked through Congress, "to get what they could not achieve openly and democratically: weaker food and medicine safety standards, corporate-friendly energy and environmental policies, limits on Internet free speech, new privileges to raise medicine prices and offshore jobs, and more." The TPP will give the big corporations all of that -- which we know only from leaks, since the negotiators have never released so much as a draft of the pact -- largely by subjugating our laws, for which good Americans have fought and died, to "investor-state tribunals" who may overrule the laws of a nation so some corporation can be more gluttonous. They always come up with new ways to hurt us. That's why we fight.

Meanwhile, the nefarious H.R. 2728, the so-called Protecting States' Rights to Promote American Energy Security Act, passed the House last week, and now moves on to the Senate, which might vote on the bill (or its Orrin Hatch-sponsored doppelganger) shortly. The bill would prevent our government from enforcing fracking regulations on federal lands if states have issued different regulations covering the same land. Problem is, we're talking federal land here -- if we say it's a state "right" to regulate federal lands, then words like "federal," "state" and "right" have no meaning. Why would the House pass such a bill? Because states have issued fairly weak regulations on fracking, and weaker regulations mean gas drilling corporations spend less money making sure they don't set our drinking water on fire -- which means more money for gas drilling corporation CEOs. The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Senators to oppose a bill that would hamstring our government from enforcing clean water regulations on public lands.

Speaking of fracking, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter (D?) wants to privatize the publicly-owned Philadelphia Gas Works, which means (among other things) that the good people of Philadelphia will have less say (via their City Council) over whether gas drilling corporations can pollute their air and water, or make Philadelphia a hub for transporting fracked gas, replete with pipelines, refineries, and suchlike. Maybe making Philly the gas hub sounds like a good idea to a lot of people -- but at what cost? At the cost of polluted air and water elsewhere? At the cost of increased cancer and asthma elsewhere? And while I'm sure nearly every Philly resident has their own PGW-sucks story, that doesn't mean some private corporation will be better to you -- actually, they'll have less incentive to be better to you, since they're only accountable (in theory!) to their shareholders. Do we own democracy, or must we buy into it? I know the choice I'd make. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell Philadelphia City Council to reject the Mayor's PGW privatization plan.

Finally, and I really do wish this kind of stuff would just go away, the USDA plans to approve a genetically-modified apple called the GMO Arctic Apple. Genetically-modified to do what, you ask? Genetically-modified to not turn brown when it's cut and left out in contact with the open air. Really? Are we so weak a nation now that we can't eat apples that have gone a little brown? Apples that won't actually look spoiled when they are spoiled, I should add? And is this now the benchmark for proving what a great scientist you are, that you can make an apple that doesn't turn brown? I thought science was supposed to make our lives better, not make certain food-processing corporations a tiny bit richer -- richer from selling apples to people who will not know they're buying GMO apples, because they won't be labeled! And at the risk of piling on, the USDA hasn't actually vetted GMO apple claims through independent scientific inquiry, like, you know, any sane person would. So Friends of the Earth helps you tell the USDA to reject genetically-modified apples.

Around the table: the Pope's platform and other stories.

Pope Francis writes apostolic exhortation, saying (among other things) that "(a)s long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world's problems or, for that matter, to any problems." If that's how he feels, then why would I care if he's anti-abortion? Too many pro-choice politicians would let the Chamber of Commerce write all their legislation. They're less our ally than the Pope.

Mother Jones reports on our government's internet kill switch. Wait, what? you may be saying. And yes, though we managed to beat back a Joe Lieberman internet kill switch bill in the last Congress, Tha Bush Mobb, in concert with the big telecom corporations, devised a plan in 2006 to shut down communications networks in a time of "emergency," a plan called SOP 303 -- a plan Mr. Obama has, naturally, embraced since taking over. And there's legal precedent for such a plan going back at least to World War I, though not necessarily Constitutional precedent. Any good news? Maybe: an FOIA lawsuit may compel DHS (sic) to release SOP 303 early next year.

The Supreme Court will take up the Obama Administration's birth control mandate. A few corporate lackeys hope that the Court will rule on that the way they did on Citizens United, where the Court treated corporations as people for the purpose of making some political campaign contributions. But if John Roberts becomes Super-Literal Man -- that is, if he asks how a corporation can have a religion, or what specific religious doctrine prohibits paying for birth control -- they might find themselves disappointed.

Ho hum, the "liberal" media pounds away at another "Obamacare horror story" without giving you all the facts you need to know. Long story short: a woman in Washington state, who has a son with ADHD, didn't qualify for federal subsidies as the state had led her to believe -- but the state still found almost-free health care for her son via Medicaid. The woman might still be unhappy (which is totally understandable, given what she thought she was getting), but she can also still get good healthcare at about half the cost she might have gotten crappy healthcare last year -- if, ah, anyone had been willing to insure her last year.

Light posting notice.

Posting will be light today and tomorrow. In the meantime, I wish everyone a safe and happy holiday, and hope all of you have family and friends to share it with. We'll be back with two new posts on Friday.

Action: free speech, defense spending, and women's rights.

H.R. 1965, the Federal Lands Jobs and Energy Security Act (c'mon, fellas, commas are your friends!), would, among other nefarious actions, require you to pay a $5,000 fee if you want to protest any oil or gas drilling, even if it might be occurring in your backyard and thus poisoning your air and water. Do big corporations seriously regard peaceful protests as a violation of their "rights"? Well, demanding a fee so you can protest violates the First Amendment about as directly as I can imagine. Oh, and the bill would also force our government to approve all drilling permits within 60 days. How does one call this bill, which would permit drilling to proceed before we can determine it's safe, conservative? After all, I don't define "conservatism" as "doing big corporations' will and nothing else, ever." I think H.R. 1965 demands a phone call to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell Congress to stop with the hurtful spending cuts already and audit the Defense Department. Why audit the Defense Department? Not just because the Defense Department spends a lot of money, on projects of questionable utility -- because the Defense Department can hardly tell where the money goes. No, I'm not exaggerating: Reuters has reported, somewhat drily, that "fudging the accounts with false entries is standard operating procedure." Why, even ex-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in 2011 that he "learned that it was nearly impossible to get accurate information and answers to questions such as ‘How much money did you spend' and ‘How many people do you have?'" And yet our elites -- the stupidest, greediest, most venal people who have ever lived -- continue to natter on about cutting food stamps and cutting Medicare and cutting Social Security, as if that'll do anything but injure good Americans. It's well past time to change the conversation.

Finally, Amnesty International helps you tell Congress to support H.R. 3571, the International Violence Against Women Act. I know, I know, it was like pulling teeth to get Congress to do a proper Violence Against Women Act reauth that gave a hand-up to abused American women, but our duty is our duty. The International Violence Against Women Act would help fund organizations that change attitudes about women overseas, would train health care providers and law enforcement personnel to be more sensitive to signs of sexual and physical abuse in overseas clients, and would help girls go to school without, you know, getting shot in the head by the Taliban. Men in a lot of countries don't look down upon rape and abuse of women they way they should, and we're not being "imperialists" if we help them do better at that. I suppose Congress stands ready to say we just don't have the money to spend helping foreign women. To which I respond: a Congress that does not have the money to do the right thing, but throws away money on unconstitutional surveillance and corporate pork, does not deserve the honor of serving the American people.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns!

The United Methodist Church threatens to defrock a pastor for officiating a gay marriage for one of his children unless he renounces his support for marriage equality. Andrew Sullivan might tell me I'm oversimplifying -- I've read his heart-wrenching essays about his isolation from the Catholic church -- but I wouldn't want a church that doesn't want me or my loved ones. Luckily, Rev. Schaefer seems to feel the same way.

Surprise, surprise! The NSA has also been vacuuming in the communications data of British citizens since 2007. Without any suspicion of wrongdoing, naturally. That's a hell of a "special relationship" we've got going there.

ProPublica finds that the state of California has failed to collect over half of the fines it assessed (totaling about $1 million) to assisted living centers between 2007 and 2012. Why? A couple of reasons: some facilities just go out of business, others pay in drips and drabs, still others appeal. Also, California is fairly lax about inspections (though they do move to shut down offenders quickly).

Those folks still giddy over healthcare.gov's failures should take note of the horrors good Kansans undergo as a result of that state's handing over of its Medicaid programs to private insurers (all campaign contributors to Gov. Sam Brownback, by the way). Dig the government spokeshack who says the resulting loss of necessary services for people who need 24/7 care is rather like getting used to not getting a new car every year. It's sad that some people in government clearly know more people who get a new car every year than people who need to have machines suck the phlegm out of their lungs because they can't do it on their own anymore.

Ha ha, John Stossel goes out panhandling for an hour and makes $11, thus concluding that panhandlers working bankers' hours could make $23,000 a year! After all, it is extremely easy to project an entire year's earnings from one hour of panhandling. And let John Stossel try that act at 3 pm on a Sunday in, say, Fayetteville, AR, rather than on a crowded New York City sidewalk full of people who make a lot of money.

Action: Keystone XL, email privacy, and paid family medical leave.

Not too long ago, Public Citizen released a report documenting no less than 125 spots in Oklahoma and Texas where TransCanada had to dig their pipelines back up because they needed repairs. TransCanada calls these dings and dents and bad welds "anomalies," but they're occurring about every two miles, and we already know (from Greg Palast's reporting) that TransCanada finds proper pipe inspection to be a drag on profits, and therefore verboten. Set aside that there are 125 spots just in a section of pipe that comprises a little over one-tenth of the total proposed Keystone XL pipeline: how many pipe breaks does it take to cause a big damn spill that pollutes everyone's air and water? Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Congress to do its job and conduct proper oversight of the Keystone XL pipeline in Oklahoma and Texas. Yes, I'm figuring if Congress does its job, the pipeline won't get built.

Meanwhile, Techdirt helps you tell President Obama that he shouldn't be able to access anyone's emails without a warrant. Why tell Mr. Obama? Because Executive branch agencies have been trying to get even more power to access your communications -- which the NSA, as you know, already vacuums in -- and because at least one House bill (H.R. 1852, the Email Privacy Act) would revise the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to require that the Executive branch get a warrant before it can read your emails. Our government and our "liberal" media pretend everything is so complicated, but it's not: get a warrant from a judge, and no one's going to complain about it. Incidentally, H.R. 1852, a Kevin Yoder (R-KS) production, would also prevent our government from treating emails left on servers after 180 days as "abandoned," and therefore ripe for unwarranted scrutiny. How often do you purge all your emails from, say, your google inbox? Answer: more often after today.

Finally, Sen. Gilibrand (D-NY) and Rep. DeLauro (D-CT) will soon introduce the FAMILY Act (it's not a bad acronym!), which would let folks using family medical leave under the Family Medical Leave Act to be paid up to two-thirds of their regular salary while they're on family medical leave. Less than one in eight Americans get paid family medical leave via their jobs (the Family Medical Leave Act grants 12 weeks annually of unpaid leave), and the United States is the only industrialized nation which does not guarantee its citizens paid leave. Of course, the corporate talking heads will tell you that the FAMILY Act would hurt small businesses, but that's an opinion that just so happens not to be shared by very many small businesses. The FAMILY Act would hike payroll taxes by about $1.50 per week to pay for the program, and though I'd rather we break off a piece of a re-enacted 91% tax bracket to pay for it, it's not a terrible burden. Moms Rising helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support the FAMILY Act.

Around the table: including various health care fibs and the return of Monty Python.

Commonwealth Fund finds that wait times for medical appointments are, in fact, not longer in single-payer countries than they are here. Then again, those of us who've actually had to see the doctor know full well we have to wait for appointments in Our Glorious Free Market System. Oh, and by the way, our healthcare system is still way more expensive than it has to be, because it's a Glorious Free Market System.

Speaking of Universal Healthcare Lies, factcheck.org catches Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) telling folks that Consumer Reports told people not to sign up on healthcare.gov because of fraud. Actually, Consumer Reports told people that they might want to wait a bit to sign up on healthcare.gov because the site might be working better by then, not because of fraud. Don't expect Mr. McCarthy to clear the air, since being a Republican means never having to say you're sorry.

Hawaii state Rep, fed up with the homeless situation, starts taking a sledgehammer to the shopping carts the homeless use to store their belongings -- though he brings the carts he finds in good condition back to local markets. I hope the writer intends dry sarcasm with phrases like "novel approach" and "pitching in," because anyone who'd take a sledgehammer to a person's last few possessions is six ball bearings short of Captain Queeg.

Mother Jones informs us that WalMart could pay their employees almost $15/hour if they'd just stop spending $7.6 billion annually to buy back their own stock, which drives up their stock prices. I'd challenge anyone who retorts that it's their money to tell me how goosing up your portfolio in this manner is somehow work.

Ho hum, the Washington Post hypes Paul Ryan's as-yet-unreleased plan to combat poverty, quoting no less than six right-wing sources for "analysis" (like their fingers are too broken to dial Citizens for Tax Justice or Public Citizen!) and conveniently forgetting how miserable Mr. Ryan's former Roadmap to Nowhere would have been for poor people. I guess they think it's only important to point out these clothes have no emperor when the empty suit's running for national office.

Finally, the five surviving members of Monty Python's Flying Circus plan to get together for their first live show since 1998. It would be hard to underestimate Monty Python's influence on my generation. I just hope they've written dynamite new material, like Kids in the Hall did for their 2002 shows.

Action: blocking a "pro-states' rights" anti-environment bill, and keeping corporations from deducting their wrongdoing from their taxes.

We opposed H.R. 2728, a bill that would have prevented our federal government from enforcing environmental regulations on federal lands if states opposed them, but of course the House of Screw You passed it, and Sen. Hatch (R-UT) has lately offered a companion bill, S. 1743. As you may recall, they call H.R. 2728 the "Protecting States' Rights to Promote American Energy Security Act," and you can tell Congress cares more about protecting "states' rights" than they care about protecting, you know, people. H.R. 2728 gives states unwarranted power over federal lands, which only makes sense if you hate all federal government involvement in anything anywhere. But, ah, pimps? They're our lands. They belong to us. And our government is our tool for protecting them. The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Senators to oppose H.R. 2728 or s. 1743, when the Senate considers either one.

Meanwhile, our advocacy had some effect on the J.P. Morgan Chase settlement -- the Justice Department will not permit J.P. Morgan Chase to deduct $2 billion of the settlement, which saves the taxpayers some $700 million. That means, however, that the remaining $11 billion (which, as we noted earlier, actually encompasses two settlements) will be tax-deductible, meaning we'll be on the hook for at least $3 billion nonetheless. But who says we have to quit? Behold: S. 1654, a Jack Reed (D-RI)/Charles Grassley (R-IA) production, would keep corporations from deducting (and we quote from the bill's text) "any amount paid or incurred (whether by suit, agreement, or otherwise) to, or at the direction of, a government or governmental entity in relation to the violation of any law." PennPIRG helps you tell your Senators to stop corporations from deducting their wrongdoing from their taxes.

Around the table: blows against sanity!

After multitudinous Republican filibusters against President Obama's Executive branch appointees, Senate Democrats vote to bar filibusters against all such appointees except Supreme Court Justice nominees. I still think that's a big mistake -- don't Democrats remember that Republicans wanted to do exactly this in 2005? I opposed it then, and I oppose it now. Still, hearing Mitch McConnell say Republicans have been very fair to Mr. Obama's nominees doesn't exactly garner my sympathy. You may recall that Mr. McConnell is the man who filibustered his own bill late last year.

Oklahoma's state-owned National Guard facilities will no longer offer benefits to any married couples, rather than give spousal benefits to same-sex couples. Pro-family policies at work! Those same-sex couples can get spousal benefits at one of five federal National Guard facilities, but that might be a long drive, since Oklahoma ain't a small place; I'd be interested to see if the Supreme Court calls that an "undue burden" upon same-sex couples. But isn't this a long way to go, Oklahoma, just to appease bigots?

David Dayen instructs us that we shouldn't be jumping for joy over the $13 billion settlement JP Morgan Chase made with our government. Apparently the reported $13 billion includes other costs from another settlement, but the bigger deal is that the principal reductions might actually hurt homeowners, as their reductions get counted as income and thus subject to unexpected tax hits.

In a peripherally-related note, Jesse Eisenstein at ProPublica notes that Mr. Obama's nominee for Commodity Futures Trading Commission, one Thomas Massad, is a bit of a blank slate. He could be the fellow who supposedly pushed back against Bank of America while running the bailout, or he could be the fellow who frequently clashed with bailout special inspector general Neil Barofsky, a man who should be a hero to Americans. I'm leaning toward the latter, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

Finally, Monica Potts at The American Prospect describes a fairly successful program that helps poor New Yorkers save money by diverting some of their tax refunds into a savings account, and then matching the money they save (at about 50 cents on the dollar) over the course of a year . Such programs just so happen to have a lot of conservative support -- building as they do on the Earned Income Tax Credit, a Reagan-era achievement -- but guess how eager today's "conservatives" are to take such programs national.

Action: "free" trade and corporate campaign finance disclosure.

A hundred protestors met the beginning of the latest round of Trans-Pacific "Partnership" negotiations in Salt Lake City, a mere week after Wikileaks published a draft of the "deal"'s Intellectual Property chapter, which confirmed our worst fears about internet freedom under a TPP regime -- that it would incorporate the most draconian provisions of the failed SOPA and PIPA bills from early 2012, as well as the ACTA agreement the European Parliament rejected later that same year, preventing you from freely accessing the internet and shutting down content providers (ahem!) merely on suspicion of copyright infringement. This odious "free" trade "deal" would, of course, also subject our environmental laws and labor laws (as well as those of any other nation) to "investor-state tribunals" who could overrule them on some corporation's behalf. I don't think our forebears struggled and died just to see our laws laid to waste by big corporations. Thus both Watchdog.net and CREDO help you tell Congress to reject this nefarious "partnership."

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Securities and Exchange Commission to force publicly-traded corporations to disclose their political contributions, then Daily Kos and the People for the American Way still help you do that. Because it is the SEC's job, after all, to protect investors from abuse by corporate CEOs, and because the money CEOs spend to try to elect utter fools like 2012 Ohio Republican U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel doesn't actually belong to the CEOs, it belongs to the investors who've put money up in those corporations --in other words, it's your money. And if the Supreme Court is going to pretend that corporations are people and should give as much money as they like to political campaigns, we can at least shine a light on what corporations give to whom. And while some investors may only care about their own bottom line, I think most investors care about more than how much money they have, and don't necessarily want a Congress full of people who only give their constituents the back of their hand.

Action: paid sick leave and the minimum wage.

Surprise, surprise, the Pennsylvania legislature wants to pass a bill (HB 1807) that would prevent municipalities from passing their own sick leave and/or paid leave laws. Small government at work! Astoundingly, four out of every 10 Pennsylvania workers currently can't earn a damn day off, and since this reactionary legislature is too busy pretending that corporate welfare handouts are the magic pill for whatever ails our economy, municipal councils are left to do the work of helping workers and customers. Ah, but our reactionary legislature is not too busy to administer the back of its hand to those towns and cities whose governments show compassion and common sense! Moms Rising helps you hand out the beatdowns to your Pennsylvania state legislator. Brook no nonsense about the cost to small businesses -- small businesses lose when folks can't keep their jobs when they get sick or need to care for a sick relative or need to resolve domestic violence issues, because then those folks don't have money to spend at small businesses.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support a $10/hour federal minimum wage, Democracy for America provides one more. Voters in New Jersey, you may recall, voted to hike their state's minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $8.25/hour, while the $15/hour minimum wage initiative maintains a (very!) slight lead in the city of SeaTac, Washington, where votes are still being counted as of this writing. I must confess that, as much as I never, ever get tired of right-wingers telling us the minimum wage will cause unemployment when it's the greed of their corporate heroes that causes unemployment, I also never, ever get enough of right-wing idiots who screech "well, then, why not a $40/hour minimum wage?" whenever a minimum wage hike comes up in conversation. Hey, pimps? No one has advocated for a $40/hour minimum wage. This is a $10/hour minimum wage. Got it, right-wingers? Not $40, or whatever scare number you like to employ in your endless attempts at stoking rage in other people. $10. It's not a slippery slope.

Around the table: corporate Scroogery nay, fair use yea.

Ohio WalMart holds food drive so that its employees can contribute food to other employees. No, this is not The Onion -- this is our sick, immoral, and decadent society, where overpaid executives making millions of dollars congratulate the generosity their poorly-paid workers exhibit toward their coworkers.

ProPublica reports that Karl Rove's dark money organization, Crossroads GPS, received fifty donations of over $1 million in 2012 -- including individual donations of $22.5 million, $18 million, and $10 million -- but we'll never know who these folks are, since Crossroads GPS is a "social welfare non-profit." You have to wonder why someone with $18 million to throw around doesn't do something good with it. Then again, that $18 million donor might well be asking why Crossroads GPS spent his or her money trying to elect the likes of Josh Mandel and Richard Mourdock.

Healthcare.gov ain't the only government website having problems -- Recalls.gov, now a little over 10 years old, still suffers from a variety of issues, including user-unfriendly design, cumbersome search features, and a frustrating lack of organization. Users also call the mobile recalls.gov app "absolutely useless," which is no small matter in a world moving ever more of its tasks to the cell phone. Still, we should fix it, not ditch it.

Finally, U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin upholds the legality of Google Books. Judge Chin ruled that Google Books constitutes "fair use" of copyrighted works under the Copyright Act, further noting that Google Books is more a research tool than a book-reading tool (indeed, Google goes to some length to prevent folks from using it as such) and thus adds value to the works, rather than depriving their copyright holders of value. (You can read his opinion here.)

Action: the Women's Health Protection Act, fracking in the Delaware River Basin, and NSA spying.

H.R. 3471/S. 1696, the Women's Health Protection Act, would prevent state and local governments from passing laws that unfairly target abortion centers. We need this bill because of the rash of anti-abortion legislation in states these past few years, legislation that has pretended to be about the "health of women" but which actually subjects abortion clinics to far more stringent regulations than other health care centers, in order to make abortion unavailable to as many women as possible. Last I looked, abortion is a legal medical procedure, and anti-abortion activists would do better to try to make abortion illegal, rather than weigh down abortions with unnecessary tests, restrict doctors from prescribing particular drugs, or mandate the size of janitorial closets in abortion clinics, all of which represent, to me, the coward's way out. Not that I believe anti-abortion activists are cowards -- but I certainly believe politicians are cowards. Planned Parenthood helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Women's Health Protection Act.

Meanwhile, we've kept the Delaware River Basin Commission from allowing fracking in the Delaware Valley so far -- but the Commission plans to mull the matter again within the next few months. What has changed, exactly, since the last time the Commission decided not to open the Delaware River Basin to fracking? Has fracking become safe? Has it stopped lighting tap water on fire, stopped making water brown and gelatinous, stopped shooting dangerous chemicals into the air? Have corporations begun to get serious about stowing the waste so that it doesn't leech into the water table? The only thing that's changed, as far as I can tell, is that Barack Obama got elected for a second term as U.S. President, and we've been learning lately that he's a pretty pro-fracking individual, no matter what noises he makes about keeping our water safe. As of this time, we can have clean water, or we can have gas drillers getting rich off hydraulic fracturing of shale; we can't have both. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission to ban fracking, not enable it.

Finally, Roots Action still helps you tell Congress to reform the NSA data-vacuuming program that has violated the civil rights of so many good Americans. Specifically, you'd ask Congress to pass the USA FREEDOM Act, which would stop the willy-nilly collection of Americans' private data unless it related to a specific counterterrorism investigation -- and you'd also ask Congress to oppose a competing bill, the so-called FISA Improvements Act, which would for the first time give express Congressional consent to the NSA's spying, and would explicitly allow the NSA to collect such data without anything even remotely resembling probable cause, an act even the nefarious FISA Amendments Act of 2008 did not dare to contemplate. The FISA Improvements Act, sadly, has already moved out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Select Intelligence Committee, despite having only one sponsor, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein. Meanwhile the USA FREEDOM Act, with 19 Senate sponsors including three Republicans, can't get out of Judiciary. We might have something to say about that.

Around the table: banksters, corporate taxes, Medicare costs, and Chris Christie hype.

If you're not the paranoid sort, a U.S. District Judge offers four theories why banksters don't go to jail. The four theories, in a hurry: law enforcement has other priorities like counterterrorism and accounting fraud; smaller, easier cases build reputations more quickly and thus lure Congressional funding more effectively; our government's own actions enabling mortgage shenanigans makes it anxious to point the finger at others; and our government has long preferred going after corporations rather than people. None of these theories are necessarily incompatible with the banksters-buy-their-way-out theory.

Citizens for Tax Justice tackles a "study" done by a corporate front group. The "study" supports a "territorial" tax system, whereby profits putatively earned overseas never get taxed in the U.S. -- but won't tell us that most of these profits are actually earned in the U.S. and get sent "overseas" as part of a tax avoidance scheme. The study also tells us that ZOMG $22 BILLION ADDED TO GDP EVERY YEAR!!!! is a really big number, when it's actually not (it's only one-tenth of one percent of GDP) -- whereas the $50 billion in annual federal budget savings if we stop letting corporations defer "overseas" "earnings" actually is a big number (it's over five percent of the 2013 deficit). Math is our friend, and so is context.

ProPublica finds that fewer than 1,000 doctors and internists are inflating Medicare drug spending by prescribing brand-name drugs when they don't have to. Perhaps not coincidentally, "(m)any of these physicians also have accepted thousands of dollars in promotional or consulting fees from drug companies" -- nearly half, in fact. And part of the problem stems from a low-income subsidy that gives doctors no incentive to prescribe cheaper drugs. All of these problems could be fixed, though with all the whining Congress does about the cost of Medicare, they strangely don't seem up to it.

Finally, from the "meet the new boss/same as the old boss" file: David Sirota does the most thorough job I've seen explaining exactly how New Jersey Governor Chris Christie isn't some "new kind of Republican." Mr. Sirota describes Mr. Christie's support for NSA data-vacuuming, corporate welfare, and cutting taxes on the wealthy while cutting services for working families -- and tabulates Mr. Christie's many blows against the environment as well. And it's certainly better to tabulate these sins than buying his straight-talking act, or recalling too fondly that one time he defended a Muslim state judge.