Thieves in the Temple.

Action: clean water, social media, and political advertising on the internet.

The EPA's been getting a lot of bad press for shutting reporters out of a two-day water contamination summit. Imagine that -- shut the press out of a story and you get bad press! Of course, the EPA also got bad press when reporters discovered earlier this month that the EPA tried to block the release of an HHS study on water contamination, so Food and Water Watch helps you demand that our government release the HHS water contamination study. With all the water contamination stories in the news over the past few years since the state government of Michigan polluted Flint's water supply in order to save money, I bet that study is, in fact, the "public relations nightmare" our government professes to fear. But people who do bad things, or enable people who do bad things, do not deserve protection from bad PR. Too many politicians act like "protection from criticism" is a Constitutional right. It's actually kinda the opposite.

Meanwhile, here's a wonderful idea: Sum of Us helps you tell the Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break up the Facebook monopoly on social media. You don't have to believe Facebook is evil (for the record, I do not -- Facebook has done a lot of good in all of our lives) to call for FTC action on this matter: you need only recognize that a) the Cambridge Analytica fiasco thorougly demonstrates that Facebook is out of its depth with regards to protecting good Americans' private data, and b) anything that gets too big needs to be broken up for the common good. Would the internet really break without Facebook's absolute primacy in our lives? No, of course not -- and you don't need to have interacted with other folks on Orkut or Tribe or Nerve to know that, either, not if you've ever used, you know, email. And when one corporation gets too powerful, it can and will run roughshod over small businesses, and over people. So let's fight that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to require campaign finance disclosure on internet ads just as they already require campaign finance disclosure on TV and print media, then Demand Progress helps you do that. (If you've already done it, though, don't do it again; that just muddies the data.) You know there are people in this world -- mostly rich people, and some people who want to be rich, and some other people who, for reasons that completely boggle my mind, are quite poor but think rich people are the best people ever -- who will actually tell you that they should be able to keep their campaign financing a secret. Why? They'll say that's because it's free speech, but money is not speech, even if money facilitates the spread of that speech. Some will even say disclosure is bullying! Go ahead and call them snowflakes when they do.

Action: overtime pay, and "secret" science.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4505/S. 2177, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Restoring Overtime Pay Act would hike the figure beneath which employers must pay time-and-a-half for overtime to around $48,000, up from $24,000, meaning more good Americans would make more money. You may recall that the Obama Administration tried to raise this standard, but a federal judge struck it down, ruling (correctly, I think) that it didn't properly take the executive/administrative job duties exception into account. But the Restoring Overtime Pay act would amend the National Labor Relations Act such that it essentially nullifies that exception for employees who make less than $48,000. Considering that I've always believed that "administrative" duties, for example, deserve overtime pay, I'll take it -- and so will a lot of American workers.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA to scuttle its effort to discard so-called "secret" science in its rulemaking processes, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. The EPA would supposedly only use "publicly-available" scientific data to make decisions about how to protect our clean air and clean water. To a lot of good Americans, that probably sounds like common sense. But it's actually nonsense: virtually all good science contains data that identifies good Americans, which means it contains private data (or, in the EPA's parlance, "secret" science), and the EPA has made plenty of good decisions about clean air and clean water without having to reveal the names of people who got asthma or cancer from dirty air and dirty water. Calling all that "secret" science is almost clever -- I say "almost" because I insist cleverness have some utility. And not be evil. So let's kill this pro-pollution effort.

Around the table: starring hubris, shame, corruption, greed, and gerrymandering.

Dave Lindorff explains, at some length, exactly why our current Administration is headed for disaster with North Korea and Iran. You should read the whole thing, because it covers just about everything, but long story short: our Administration will fail because they think they can bully their way to get whatever they want from these two nations. Long story somewhat longer: they've also subscribed, rather uncritically, to an American tradition of "negotiation" that demands that the other side give them everything they want before "negotiations" even begin. Of course, if you've ever heard, from anyone, that actual negotiations have to be win-win, this way of "negotiating" will seem strange to you.

It took me a minute to sort out exactly why I can't stand the "liberal" media's absurd habit of blaming right-wing excesses, particularly those coming from our President and his votaries, on "liberal smugness," but here goes: blaming the President on his opponents's "smugness" is a way of trying to silence criticism of the President, calling the President's opponents "smug" is a way of trying to keep us from shaming the President and his votaries when they deserve it, and why do we blame liberals for what right-wingers do in the first place? And why do we never right-wingers called "smug" when they shame people? I suppose pointing to the "smugness" of liberal critics is also a way of saying you can't win the argument on the merits.

National Democratic politicians suddenly release a plan to deal with governmental corruption, the "Better Deal for Our Democracy" -- and it's not at all bad. I mean, it has plenty of good proposals, but they also divide neatly into three categories (voting rights, ethics, campaign finance) that have broad support across the ideological spectrum. Question is: will they run on it? I mean, these are Democrats we're talking about, obsessed with polishing their civility trophies and appearing "bipartisan." They could fumble away this opportunity like they've fumbled away so many others. So we gotta stay on them.

Ho hum, Harley-Davidson makes big bucks from the Republican tax "reform" bill, then closes a heavily-unionized plant in Kansas City, displacing 800 workers, and announces a close-to-$700 million stock buyback. It gets worse: their York, PA plant will add 450 workers, many of whom will be temps and other contract workers, for a net loss of 350 well-paid, highly-skilled, permanent workers. It gets even worse! Harley will also open up a plant in Bangkok, Thailand, later this year -- not to outsource jobs, they assure us, but to avoid paying taxes in the United States. No, they said it out loud! Maybe whomever runs against noted Harley-rider Scott Walker in Wisconsin can tie all of this nastiness to him?

Finally, a Pennsylvania state Senate committee unanimously passes the famous anti-gerrymandering bill, SB 22, with the full Senate about to take it up presently. But the Senate State Government Committee did amend the bill, and not for the better: if the Commission can't approve a new redistricting map, for example, the legislature, not the state Supreme Court, gets next crack at it (though the hurdle for approving that map is still high at both points -- 7 of 11 Commissioners, then two-thirds of the legislature). But it's still worth your support -- at least until Daryl Metcalfe gets a hold of it and makes a grotesque mockery of it, like he did with those other two redistricting bills earlier this year.

Action: forced arbitration nay, arms sales to nations that abuse human rights nay, and treating prisoners like human beings yea.

As you likely know, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday (in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis) that corporations comply with current law and precedent when they force their workers into arbitration, thus denying them their day in court. But whatever we may think of the merits of the Court's ruling, the majority opinion pointedly did not preclude Congressional action on the matter, so the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban forced arbitration clauses (and class/collective action waivers) from employment contracts. A quarter-century ago, a mere eight percent of workers had forced arbitration clauses in their contracts; now well over half of all workers do, which means when those workers have grievances against their employers, their employers get to force them into an arbitration hearing that those workers frankly have very little chance of winning. And justice delayed is justice denied, so let's get to stepping.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to sell $1 billion in weapons to Bahrain -- after reversing restrictions on such sales to Bahrain imposed by President Obama -- at a time when Bahrain is detaining and torturing civilians, banning travel for citizens who criticize the government, stripping their critics of their citizenship, and amending its constitution to expand military "national security" powers in peacetime. But Congress, at least, gets 30 days to reject the weapons sale, and though it's true that arming bad actors sure does seem a bipartisan obsession, that doesn't change our duty. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support human rights across the globe by rejecting the proposed arms sale to Bahrain. It's one thing to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses, but it's another thing entirely to enable the abusers by selling them weapons. Maybe we'd be less hated around the world if we stopped doing that.

Finally, the Miami Correctional Facility of Bunker Hill, Indiana, eliminated in-person visits at the start of May, giving their prisoners just one week's notice before terminating just about their only contact with their families and loved ones. Because of drug trafficking, of course, even though it sure does seem like we could stop that with (at the very least) a few more honest eyeballs around the place -- or by punishing the prison guards who bring most of the drugs in! Really, if you can't keep drugs out of a prison, you have no business managing prisons. I'll brook no backtalk about how difficult that is, because anything worth doing is difficult. The reason we defend in-person visits, of course, is that prisoners who get these visits go back to jail far less often, so Roots Action helps you tell the Miami Correctional Facility to promote the rehabilitation of its prisoners by rescinding its ban on in-person visits.

Around the table: in which John Roberts dashes my hopes for a fair ruling on forced arbitration, and other disappointments.

The Supreme Court, in yet another 5-4, rules that corporations can force their employees into binding arbitration agreements that deny them the ability to band together in class action lawsuits. So much for my hope that Chief Justice Roberts might see forced arbitration, as a necessary condition of employment, as a violation of a worker's right to forge a good contract with an employer! We could very easily argue, by the way, that the authors of the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925 (which Justice Gorsuch uses like a crutch in his majority opinion) only intended for corporations to use arbitration in disputes with other corporations, but of course right-wingers only beat the "original intent" drum when it agrees with what they already want to do.

Leave it to Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News to notice that our Administration has changed its tune on Qatar -- just last year a "funder of terrorism at a very high level" -- at right around the same time a Qatari-funded firm is about to bail out one of the President's son-in-law's properties. Of course, our Administration turned on Qatar very quickly last year, not too long after Qataris did not put money into the 666 5th Avenue building in question, so Mr. Bunch's comparison to 1984 ("(w)e had always been at war with Qatar") is quite apt. Calling this Administration the most corrupt since President Harding's would also be quite apt.

Dean Baker, writing at TruthOut, reminds us that those who fear Big Gummint intervention in drug pricing are either unaware or hoping you're unaware that Big Gummint has already intervened to create high drug prices. Mr. Baker's more obsessed about the market-distorting effects of long-term patents than I am, but it's also true that our government has funded a lot of drug research and then let big pharma corporations -- rather than the good Americans who paid for all that research -- grab all the benefits. It wouldn't be untoward of you to call that "corporate welfare." (Nor would it be untoward of you, incidentally, to call the President's plan to "make foreigners pay more for drugs" "corporate welfare.")

Kansas Governor signs so-called Adoption Protection Act, which allows adoption agencies to refuse to let gay couples adopt children. You'd think politicians would be more concerned about protecting kids from bad parents, but, alas. Kansas's law differs from other state laws in that it actually allows adoption agencies that get taxpayer funding to discriminate against gay couples -- which, sadly, may eventually give our Supreme Court exactly the reason it needs to appear all Solomonic about the matter (i.e., they might strike down taxpayer-funded agencies' "right" to discriminate on the grounds of "religious" "conscience," but not that of private agencies).

Surprise, surprise, former Blackwater CEO/irredeemable asshole Erik Prince may have arranged a meeting between the Administration's campaign and the UAE in 2016, meaning he may have lied to Congress back in November when he said he had "no...formal communications or contact with the campaign" other than "papers" on foreign policy he sent to Steve Bannon. We also learn that an "unplanned" meeting between Mr. Prince and a Russian bankster might, in retrospect, have been a "planned" meeting. As of this writing, Mr. Prince hasn't threatened any reporters over this matter.

Finally, scientists are more hopeful that they will eventually discover a ninth planet (remember, Pluto got demoted last decade) in our solar system. Admittedly, they haven't observed the planet directly, and there may be other explanations for the clustering of trans-Neptunian objects just beyond the eighth planet, and, well, I hate to be an alarmist, but this could be yet another explanation for the phenomena scientists are observing out that way.

Action: campaign finance disclosure, better wages for working families, and rehabilitating prisoners.

Both Public Citizen and Common Cause help you tell the Federal Election Commission (or FEC) to mandate strong disclosure rules on internet campaign ads. (Only sign one or the other, though, otherwise it'll be like sending two comments on the same thing to the FEC.) Disclosure of campaign donors is far more common in TV and print ads, but, generally, our government doesn't get around to overseeing new things until it's far too late, i.e., after Russia allegedly spent a crapload of money influencing votes on Facebook. You know my opinion on that particular development: if Democrats would stand for something other than Not Being Republicans, it'd be a whole lot harder for a foreign country (or big donors) to swing an election their way. But we should demand the same transparency from internet ads that we demand from ads on the more traditional media. And if you're a big donor trying to influence an election, maybe you should have the guts to show yourself.

Meanwhile, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has proposed a corporate "freeloader tax" for corporations that don't pay their workers enough to keep them off of government aid programs like food stamps. The Republicans' most recent Farm Bill did impose new work requirements on food stamp recipients, but most food stamp recipients are already working, thus prompting the question (as put by the article at the link above): "Is the problem that people aren’t working enough? Or is it that they don’t receive a high enough wage or generous enough benefits from their employer?" Sen. Brown would impose a 0.25% tax (that's not 25 percent, "liberal" media dogs!) on corporations with 25 percent of their workers under the federal poverty line, a 0.50% tax for corporations with 50 percent, and a 1% tax for corporations with 75%. I'd go 1%, 2%, and 3% myself, but still, call your Reps and Senators about this plan. They won't see it coming.

Finally, H.R. 5682/S. 2795, the FIRST STEP Act, would make it easier for prisoners to rehabilitate themselves once in prison, by mandating the Bureau of Prisons to incarcerate them within 500 driving miles of their home, making various improvements to the federal compassionate release process, expanding home confinement sentencing for low-risk criminals, and increasing "good time credits" prisoners earn with good works. And the FIRST STEP Act would also provide additional funding for the drug treatment, counseling, job training, and education programs that prisoners need to get a leg up once they get out. If all this sounds like coddling to you, kindly reacquaint yourself with the purpose of imprisonment, which is not merely to punish but to rehabilitate. Hence Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell your Congressfolk to support actual prisoner rehabilitation by passing the FIRST STEP Act.

Action: internet freedom, bank regulation, and cable fees.

As you know, the Senate passed S.J.Res. 52, which aims to nullify the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, by a 52-47 margin, but in the House -- whose leadership has not scheduled a vote either on S.J.Res. 52 or its House companion bill, H.J.Res. 129 -- the task of even getting a vote will be harder: we would have to get more than half of the sitting House members to sign a discharge petition on the resolution, which would then force a vote on the resolution itself. The House has 193 Democrats, whom we presume would favor S.J.Res. 52/H.J.Res. 129, but you need 218 signatures on a "discharge petition" to force a vote, so we have our work cut out for us. Both the Electronic Freedom Foundation and Progress America help you tell your House Reps to support internet freedom by rolling back the FCC's anti-net neutrality rules. Only then will we be able to protect ourselves from corporations blocking and throttling websites and telling us where we can and can't go on the internet.

Meanwhile, the House does plan to act on S. 2155, the so-called Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which passed the Senate passed back in March -- because why would Congress ever vote on things that actually help good Americans? S. 2155's progenitors have sold the bill as a "pro-community bank" bill, arguing that loosening regulations on smaller banks will help them compete with big banks, but these smaller banks are already gobbling each other up at a more precipitous clip at least partly in anticipation of this bill's passage, and banks tend not to serve rural areas once they get bigger. Ultimately, you don't "strengthen" community banks by giving them the power to assimilate each other like some aspiring Borg; you strengthen community banks by restraining the big banksters. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your House Reps to protect community banks for-real for-real by rejecting S. 2155.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell your cable providing corporation to cut it out with all the absurd-sounding fees and just give you one up-front price. If that sounds a bit Quixotic, then consider how miserably unpopular your cable corporation actually is, and thus also consider how little your miserably unpopular cable corporation can afford any more bad PR, particularly about something that everyone hates. Seriously, a lot of good Americans find issues like media consolidation and net neutrality a bit esoteric on the face of it, and I don't blame them, but good Americans generally don't need to have the BS quotient of "broadcast TV fees" or "regional sports fees" explained to them. And yet the latest Consumer Reports email missive does explain the problem in an amusing way, by asking you to contemplate buying a box of cereal at the supermarket and suddenly getting slammed with "cardboard box fees" or "grain refinery surcharges." Hey, I share because I care.

Around the table: with important reminders about "far-left" policies, privatizing prisons, and political bad actors.

And here's the best headline I read all week: "The Surprising Popularity of 'Far-Left' Policies." The only way it could have been better is if they'd put ironic quotation marks around "surprising," because only Our Glorious Elites and their "liberal" media enablers would consider "protecting more public lands," "limit(ing) corporate tax loopholes," and "raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy" to be "far-left" positions, when in fact these policy proposals generally get majority support (and therefore bipartisan support) from Americans! But, as I've been saying for a long time, they love calling popular, good proposals "extreme," when their own solutions to everything -- make war on other countries so you can swing your balls around, cut spending that actually helps people, cut benefits for programs you've paid into all your life! -- are actually quite extreme.

The city of Tucson, AZ adopts resolution banning the privatization of its prison system. The even better news? Tucson isn't even the first locality to outlaw private corporations running their detention centers and jails, and a lot of the other localities that have done so are, like Tucson, in very red areas of the country. Of course, if you thought about it for a minute, you'd see that private prisons have no "market" incentive to improve prisoners' lives, because the more miserable they are, the less they'll be able to make it on the outside, and thus the more likely they'll become "repeat customers."

"Nearly Half of You Reading This Have Bullshit Jobs," announces the headline of this Daily Beast interview with the author of (you guessed it) the book Bullshit Jobs. The term "bullshit jobs" describes jobs that are a) quite well-paid and b) quite useless, the kind of job that exists to make other people look good, or at least not incompetent. They can range from the receptionist who takes one phone call daily but has to exist to make the boss look important to the "people who provide unnecessary supervision" to corporate-lawyer "goons." And they don't exist in spite of our "free" market ideology, but because of it, and its mania for quantifying everything. (Read the whole article; it contains, among so many other things, the best argument for a universal basic income I've yet heard.)

California Republican U.S. House candidate actually films herself harassing a transgender woman trying to use the bathroom at a Denny's. I won't name name this U.S. House candidate, since we shouldn't give jerks too much sunlight. But I will highlight her stupid argument, that a transgender woman was "invading my privacy" (italics in original) merely by a) being born male and b) wanting to use the women's room. Setting aside that following someone into a bathroom and then harassing them is an actual invasion of privacy, I could more easily argue that this House candidate is invading my privacy merely by being such an asshole that I noticed it. The good news? She'll be lucky to lose by only 50 points in this district, and thus she's the proverbial walnut in the batter of eternity.

Finally, upon hearing the so-far-unsubstantiated rumor that the Administration might fire Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, my first thought was: who on Earth do they think they're going to find to do that job better than she does it? By "that job," of course, I don't mean "informing the American people about what the Administration's doing," but the job of putting entire cartons of lipstick on the pigs this Administration keeps trotting out. Seriously, even Tha Bush Mobb's notorious last Press Secretary, Dana Perino, couldn't match the sheer will-to-lie of Sarah Sanders. Then again, I'd hate to report, in a few months, that I'd spoken too soon.

Action: violence against protestors, internet privacy, and forced arbitration.

The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand accountability for the Israeli slaughter of over 50 protestors in Gaza earlier this week. No use telling me that these protestors were "no angels," because civilized people don't shoot protestors or treat protestors as soldiers, period. And calling for "accountability" shouldn't send shivers through anyone's spine -- if these protestors truly provoked Israel, then Israel has nothing to worry about! But the government of Israel has, for too long, acted as if accountability is for other people, and our government has, for too long, enabled them. Folks who counter that we must "support Israel" at all costs clearly do not understand the true definition of "support" -- if you truly support Israel, you also stand up to Israel when it does wrong, just as you would to any of your family and friends. (And folks who counter with a sentence beginning with "well, what about" should be adults and learn how to concede points.)

Meanwhile, our Congress repealed FCC internet privacy protections last year with a "resolution of disapproval" -- and then Facebook got in a heapload of trouble for exposing its users' personal data to corporations such as Cambridge Analytica. Nobody could have predicted! So along comes S. 2639, the Customer Online Notification for Stopping Edge-Provider Network Transgressions Act (or CONSENT Act), which would require "edge-provider" corporations like Google and Facebook to get permission from customers to use, sell, or share their personal info. The FCC privacy rules covered internet service providing corporations rather than "edge providers," true, but it should be a no-brainer, at least, to do something about something that was just in the news. Which means what, class? That if Congress doesn't pass it, they have fewer than zero brains. Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Americans' online privacy by passing S. 2639.

Finally, contractors have sued Amazon for sexual harassment, but guess what? Same as Gretchen Carlson did at Fox News, these contractors have forced arbitration clauses in their contracts. Ms. Carlson was savvy enough to tape her boss's harassment, but she would have had no recourse in court, because Fox also put a forced arbitration clause in her contract, which would have greatly impeded her chance of getting justice. (Ms. Carlson has since become a fierce opponent of forced arbitration; no use complaining that's only because it happened to her, like we're only supposed to learn from thought experiment and never from experience.) Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Amazon's Board of Directors to dump forced arbitration clauses from its employment contracts. You can remind Amazon that it prides itself on being a "progressive" workplace, so it shouldn't keep its workers from getting the justice they deserve in a court of law.

Around the table: concerning internet freedom, executive pay, health care, clean water, and the folly of trying to get the President's votaries to "respect" you.

Senate passes "resolution of disapproval" aiming to nullify the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal by a 52-47 margin. I expected 50-49, didn't expect Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) to vote "yea," and I guess I owe Sen. Kennedy (R-LA) an apology for hemming and hawing for two months over whether to be the 51st vote -- or maybe I don't, since 50-49 (sans Sen. McCain, still being treated for brain cancer in Arizona) was pretty much the foregone conclusion. Another foregone conclusion: the House reportedly won't take up the bill. We'll just have to get in their grills until that conclusion is no longer foregone. (And I know, 52 is still 15 short of the total we'll need to override our President's eventual reflexive veto, but one thing at a time.)

U.S. House Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) has released the first report of CEO-worker pay disparity data mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and it's not pretty. The vast majority of the corporations the study tabulated have a 100-to-1 disparity between those corporations' CEOs and their average workers (not "lowest-paid," since then the disparity would be closer to the 300-to-1 figure that's become commonplace by now), but a handful of corporations have truly absurd ratios, like Six Flags, with a ratio of 1,920-to-1. Remember that most Americans think the ratio of executive pay to unskilled factory worker pay should be seven-to-one, which means we'd almost certainly prefer the executive-to-average-worker ratio to be even narrower than that.

From Politico we learn that Democratic Congressional candidates are running on "GOP Health Care 'Sabotage,'". For once, this actually is good news for Democrats -- unless they shoot their wad on this topic now and decide everyone's tired of hearing about it in October, and you know no one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like a Democrat. Particularly one with a lot of consultant "help." (It might also help if Democrats would remind everyone that double-digit premium hikes have been a constant feature of our privatized health care system for decades, lest Republicans blame the hikes that have happened on their watch on Obamacare, which has -- though this is nothing to put on your tombstone -- slowed the acceleration of premium growth.)

In a peripherally-related note, Paul Waldman at The Washington Post explains why Democrats can never hope to win the "respect" of our President's votaries. I'd have said "because they're bat-guano insane" and left it at that, though Mr. Waldman is more generous -- both to those votaries (who do have legitimate grievances, though not the ones they're constantly airing) and to Democratic politicians, who do natter on about "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" and "adapting to changing times" more than Mr. Waldman grants. His answer is not to "play the game" of pandering to right-wing voters, which is good advice, but the better advice is to do things that actually make their lives better. A rage-filled voter can go either way -- toward blaming the wrong people, or blaming the right people. Do things that make their lives better, and they'll blame Black Lives Matter and obscure liberal college professors a lot less.

Finally, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us that water contamination is also rampant in rural America, where agriculture's dependence on phosphorus results -- almost every other day in America! -- in a toxic algal bloom leaving carcinogens in our drinking water. She also reminds us (and I needed this reminder this week!) that Big Gummint programs offering money to big farming corporations to clean up their runoff isn't as good a tactic as simply mandating that they clean up their runoff. No need to object that mom-and-pop farmers get hurt, because there ain't that many of those left anymore, thanks to nearly 40 years of farm policy that puts corporations above people. And corporate profits above clean water.

Action: farm policy, GMO labeling, and the Iran nuclear deal.

The House plans to vote on the nefarious H.R. 2, the "farm bill" that'll set farm policy in the United States for the next five years, and Moms Rising helps you tell your House Rep to reject the House Farm Bill. Don't worry about people suddenly having nothing to eat if the Farm Bill doesn't pass, not just because that won't happen (Congress will just extend the old Farm Bill for a while if they can't pass a new one, as they've done the last two times), but because Americans don't let themselves be taken hostage, do we? The current Farm Bill is a cornucopia of evil, not just in cutting food stamps and imposing work requirements on them (for people who very likely either already work or are children or seniors, no less!), but in giving more subsidies to big farms, less assistance to farms trying to get off chemicals and monoculture, and more loopholes to corporations trying to put out pesticides, and more welfare handouts to factory farms. This bill deserves a humiliating death, so let's give it one.

Meanwhile, the USDA is considering labeling requirements for foods made with genetically-modified organisms (or GMOs), and surprise, their draft rule sucks! The USDA's standard would basically exclude sugars and oils (allowing more than two-thirds of GMO foods to go unlabeled!), would require labelers to use the nearly-unknown initials "BE" (for "bioengineered") instead of the far more well-known initials "GE" or "GMO," and would allow corporations to use various electronic means of labeling their food, without just, you know, writing some variation of this food has GMOs in it on the food label you're actually holding. But the USDA still has to take public comments on the proposed rule -- which they'll do for 60 days, in the hopes that well-organized food corporations will swamp us out. Let's destroy that hope by letting Just Label It help you leave a public comment opposing the USDA's inadequate GMO labeling proposal.

Finally, our President may have removed the United States from the Iran nuclear deal -- remember, when they tell you he's acting crazy like a fox, that George W. Bush's "crazy like a fox" act got us ISIS -- but the other six signatory nations can still keep the deal going, hence Roots Action helps you tell the other signatory nations to keep the Iran nuclear deal together. It is actually working, after all, and our President can't say it's not working without telling bald lies about it. Some will tell you you're "undermining America" by doing this, particularly by contacting Iran; others will even call you a "traitor." They can all go diddle their rage glands somewhere else. You never "undermine" your country by speaking out about what you think is right, and anyone can call anyone a "traitor," instead of taking the effort to persuade people they're right. And if this Administration's defenders resort to name-calling, they won't convince anyone of courage and character that they're right.

Around the table: a modest proposal for hedge fund managers who lose taxpayer money, and other items.

In re the slaughter of Palestinian activists by Israeli soldiers this past Monday, Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that "Media Can Tell Readers Who's Killing Whom -- When They Want To. The good news, this time, is that some "liberal" media outlets seem to want to, including the Washington Post, but you've still got a lot of the same tortured headlines (the ones that seem to say protests kill people, not "people kill people") that you get for police shootings.

Radley Balko at the Washington Post tells us why the so-called Protect and Serve Act (H.R. 5698/S. 2794, in case you were wondering) "is a response to a problem that doesn't exist," i.e., the "war on cops." Calling crimes against police "hate crimes" ignores the simple fact that "they are about as far removed from a vulnerable group as one can imagine," since they, you know, "carry guns and other weapons," "have the power to detain, arrest, and kill," and "literally have the entire government at their backs." Seriously, if you think black folks "whine" about the fear of being executed by a police officer without even a charge, let alone a trial, you should reacquaint yourself with the definition of whining, because demanding to make police officers a "protected class" is pretty much it. (Hate to pile on -- OK, I don't -- but Mr. Balko also reminds us that crime against police officers actually isn't skyrocketing, even though we as citizens are a lot more skeptical about police officers than we were even five years ago.)

Ho hum, our EPA has (so far) squashed an HHS study of water contamination from toxic chemicals, with at least one White House aide saying, in an email, that they couldn't get the HHS agency to "realize the potential public relations nightmare this is going to be." That's almost like saying it out loud! Of course, when your President says all kinds of things out loud that civilized people wouldn't say out loud, I guess you can't expect the underlings to do better. And no, saying it's "important for the government to speak with a single voice on such a serious issue" to head off the release of a study that'll give you bad PR is intolerable bullshit.

Also ho hum, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has basically dissolved the team in her department that investigated for-profit college abuses. And then hired some of the officials at for-profit colleges being investigated! How many times must I tell these pimps! For-profit colleges take taxpayer money! Punishing them when they're corrupt is a no-brainer! Thus more evidence that the only value of contemporary "conservatism" is executive profit, and also more evidence that when our President promised to "drain the swamp," he meant "get rid of all the liberals," which is, I'm pretty sure, exactly how his votaries understand it.

And even more ho hum, CIA Deputy Chief Gina Haspel, up for the big job there despite her well-documented past support and enabling of torture by CIA agents, now says torture was actually a bad idea -- thus giving Senators cover to vote for her, and (more importantly) allowing her to get away with the torture she's already supervised. You'll recall that Scott Pruitt also saved his nomination when he intoned that people cause climate change, a belief he sure hasn't acted on as EPA Administrator. When people talk about the moral breakdown of society, they should be locating it in occurences like these, not in gay marriage or birth control or "everyone making the cheerleading squad" or whatever diddles folks' rage glands these days.

Finally, Dean Baker suggests that, instead of harrumphing about whether Medicaid recipients "work enough," we should "focus() on whether the people at the top are working for their money." Meaning, of course, that if a rich hedge fund actually underperforms index funds while taking craploads of taxpayer money, maybe they should "work to pay off the fees the state paid them." They'd balk, of course, not just at making very little money and thus spending craploads of hours working them off, and they'd say things, out loud, like "we can't work under this kind of pressure." Hey, I have to do a good job everyday; why not a rich hedge fund manager?

Action: defending net neutrality, fuel efficiency, and good science.

Word on the street is that the Senate will vote today on S.J.Res. 52, the "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, and so you may use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to vote "yes" on S.J.Res. 52. The FCC, in repealing net neutrality, has allowed big internet service corporations to censor or slow down websites you want to visit, just because they can (or just because big corporations paid the necessary tribute to have their websites loaded more quickly), thus restoring the "freedom" of corporations to curtail your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet. The FCC's anti-internet freedom rules may die an ugly death in court -- which they may, since the FCC openly said they ignored most of the comments submitted to them on the matter-- but I'd be OK if Congress acted, too.

Meanwhile, the EPA and the DOT are now acting counter to the people's will and to common sense by rolling back fuel efficiency standards. You'd think making cars that get more miles to the gallon would be a no-brainer for our government, but they tell you that higher fuel efficiency standards mean more expensive cars, and what a shame it would be if you had to spend a little more now to save a lot more on gas later! Such good guys, looking out for us like that! If you buy that malarkey, of course, you should ask an auto corporation CEO if his high compensation package drives up car prices. Then they'll tell you that rising prices are really a very complex matter, with no one factor yadda yadda yadda. (Or they'll tell you I earned it, which is also not the same as you're incorrect and here's irrefutable evidence to prove it. If they can't say that, they lose! It's that simple!) So Consumer Reports helps you tell the EPA to cut it out with its efforts to destroy fuel efficiency standards already.

Finally, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to reject its plan to limit the scientific study the EPA can use to make decisions about our clean air and clean water. Mr. Pruitt's plan -- to limit EPA decision-making only to studies that can be publicly released -- might sound all common-sensical and such, but it actually isn't, because a lot of studies can't be publicly released because they contain personally-identifiable data, which would violate the privacy of those folks who contributed their experiences with carcinogens and toxins to those studies. But the EPA's proposal would, oddly, provide a lot of loopholes for big corporate "science" research. The result? Big fossil fuel corporations could push their own "science," "proving" that their pollution doesn't actually cause anyone to get sick, while the EPA could say nothing. So conservatives who complain about regulations making everything worse have no standing to ignore this EPA regulating that actually will make everything worse.

Action: farm policy, and nuclear waste storage.

Here's something else you might not know about H.R. 2, Congress's new, nefarious Farm Bill: Title IX would take consultative jurisdiction over pesticide harm to endangered species from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, so that the EPA has sole jurisdiction over the matter. Defenders of this move may argue that it "reduces bureaucracy" or "right-sizes regulation," but you already see the flaw in that reasoning: we would really leave pesticide oversight solely to this EPA? The whole reason we have several different actors look at the same thing is to prevent one bad actor from doing great harm; yes, it makes the process slower, but wouldn't a conservative argue for doing the right thing more slowly versus embracing a streamlined process above all? Hence Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the "Poisoned Pollinators Provision" of the Farm Bill.

Meanwhile, the House recently passed H.R. 3053, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, which would establish a massive nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain -- which the good citizens of Nevada have been fighting literally for decades now. Some proponents cite the danger of storing nuclear waste in over 100 areas of the country in order to justify concentrating it all in one location. Problem with that is trucks would have to transport all that waste all across America, and trucks have been known to crash on occasion, and that threatens the millions of good Americans who live near interstate highways with contaminated water and serious health care issues. Would we have these problems if we put the necessary effort into solar and wind power? No, we would not. Food and Water Action helps you to reject the House's plan to build a massive nuclear waste storage area at Yucca Mountain.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 818.

If you've noticed that you hear an awful lot of criticism of alleged "radical leftists" in the mainstream media but you don't actually hear these "radicals" themselves, well, you're not alone: Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs wonders why we can name virtually every talking head who slams "political correctness" and "social justice warriors" but hardly anyone who's politically correct or a social justice warrior themselves. You can answer this question in at least two ways: 1) because these talking heads who style themselves as "dissidents" are actually card-carrying members of Our Glorious Elites, and how do you get people to go along with ridiculous ideas if you can't deflect to some "common enemy"? And 2) waaaaaaaaah! (I remain convinced, by the way, that the real reason so many right-wingers use the "SJW" shorthand is that it shares two letters with "Jew.")

We learn from George Joseph and Liam Quigley at The Intercept that plainclothes police officers in New York City commit a rather disproportionate number of police shootings there: they comprise around 6% of the force, yet commit over 30% of the shootings. Why? Some observers suggest that plainclothes cops can get mistaken for robbers, but many others suggest that the lack of a "blue suit" gives them the "freedom" to "act like gangsters" -- and it is more difficult to get a badge number if it's not displayed, or a unit number from an unmarked car. Just so happens they don't wear body cameras, either.

Michigan state legislators push a Medicaid work-requirement plan that just so happens to target majority-black cities while leaving majority-white rural areas alone. I'm happy to oppose Medicaid work requirements for blacks and whites myself, and not just because most folks on Medicaid are already working like we should be proud of that as a civilization -- no, really, we should be proud of a civilization where everyone can get good-paying work and only need programs like Medicaid when times get tough, as times do for virtually everyone except the crowd who constantly hector us to work harder. (Also, dig the Chamber of Commerce lobbyist's "(w)e were just trying to be helpful" act. She must think we're all suckers.)

Ho hum, the New York Times reports on how "national Democrats have been embracing recruits near the political center" in red states. What's the definition of insanity again? And what authority do the same folks who lost 2016 all over the map now have to say "but here's how you win in Kansas"? After all, a liberal Sanders acolyte came within six points of defeating Rep. Ron Estes in Kansas's 4th early in 2017, in a district Mike Pompeo used to win by 30 points. The Times might even get this, at some level, because they simultaneously describe Rep. Conor Lamb (D-PA) as one of those "moderates" and as someone with a "populist economic message." (I will concede that Clarke Tucker, the star of this article, has a good shot in Arkansas's 2nd since if he makes health care his issue, as it looks like he'll do.)

Finally, our President wants to help out a Chinese corporation punished by his own Commerce Department. A corporation punished for violating sanctions against Iran and North Korea, no less! What will the President's votaries say when they learn he's suddenly so obsessed about Chinese jobs? Wait, let me guess: leave him alone give him a chance he knows what he's doing he got a great deal but her emails but Benghazi he shoots from the hip both sides do it fake news shutup traitor.

Action: internet freedom, and drug pricing.

The Senate will vote this week on S.J.Res. 52, the "resolution of disapproval" that would begin to unravel the FCC's net neutrality repeal; this is worth a phone call, today and every day, until the vote takes place. The FCC has lately announced that net neutrality will officially be no more as of June 11; one hopes that the big internet service providers aren't stupid enough to start charging for faster website loading and censoring and slowing down websites that very day, but they'll be able to do so, even if a lawsuit eventually overturns the FCC's action. Given the news that AT&T paid the President's lawyer, Michael Cohen, $600,000 for "consultation" on communications issues, do you suppose Mr. Cohen might have influenced the President as he chose his next FCC Chair, the notoriously anti-internet freedom Ajit Pai? Hey, it's a question worth asking!

Meanwhile, our President outlined yet another series of half-measures and non-measures about prescription drug prices that he of course called "the most sweeping action in history to lower the price of prescription drugs for the American people," but Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact policies that would really reduce drug prices, like allowing reimportation of drugs from Canada and allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices. The CBO famously found over a decade ago that letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices wouldn't lower prices very much, but that finding testifies more to how much corporate welfare big pharma corporations get -- when you hear, for example, that big pharma would respond to a more-empowered Medicare by raising a drug's launch prices, you might well ask why we should allow them to do that, particularly when our government funds so much of their research.

Around the table: containing two of the President's best stratagems for winning the midterms.

With both parties of Congress anxious to give our President even more unconstitutional war-making powers, it's left to Pat Buchanan to remind us not only that Israel struck Iranian forces in Syria first last week, but that the neocons who supposedly hated our President so much now control his foreign policy. Mr. Buchanan rightly reminds us that the notion that "Iran is on 'a quest for nuclear weapons'" is a "Bush-like assertion," and that "the foreign policy that America Firsters voted for" is "being replaced by the Middle East agenda of Bibi and the neoconservatives," but I bet these "America Firsters" were never that committed to ending foreign wars, especially now that their Personal Lord and Savior seems to favor one. Who wants to bet that this Administration will start banging the drums for war right around a month before the midterms?

Administration spokeshack says opposing torture-approving Gina Haspel for CIA chief would be somehow anti-feminist, and our "liberal" media seems to agree. I presume that a real feminist would know that women are, being human, as capable of evil as men are, and a real feminist certainly wouldn't let someone else's bean-counting get in the way of the truth. And, seriously, the CIA doesn't employ a single woman who can lead and who opposes torture? That seems unlikely, not just because the CIA is now almost half female, but because the world is a big place, much bigger than torture apologists tend to imagine.

Our President rolls back transgender protections for prisoners, meaning transgender prisoners will have to use the bathroom of their birth gender and get the crap kicked out of them by other prisoners as a result. Also, too, federal prisons will have to use "biological sex at birth" to determine housing assignments, which will also result in a lot of beaten-up transgender prisoners. I guess our President really doesn't care who gets hurt, as long as religious bigots get to diddle their rage glands.

There's so much to say about Vice President Pence's statement that "in the interests of the country, I think it's time to" end the Mueller investigation into his Administration, but I'll just say this: Mr. Pence should not act like the Administration "fully cooperat(ing)" with the Mueller investigation is some great gift to the American people -- "full cooperation" with a criminal investigation is, frankly, the minimum we, as Americans, have a right to expect from our government. (Is this what moved George Will to declare that Mr. Pence is even worse than our President? I don't know, but that statement certainly merits further evaluation.)

New NRA President Oliver North claims his organization is a poor, poor victim of "civil terrorism" by the multitudinous political activists who now oppose it. And, he adds, the NRA faces even worse opposition than even the civil rights movement did back in the day, though I suspect marchers who got the crap kicked out of them by police will beg to differ. All together now: waaaaaaaah! Remember: folks who present themselves as tough guys are more likely the real snowflakes.

Finally, we learn that our President would like the upcoming midterms to be "a referendum on his Presidency" and that he's far more likely to talk about himself at rallies than the candidates he's nominally supporting. Of course our President loves talking about himself, but this instinct may also be the Republicans' best path to victory in 2018 -- talking only about him erases the hopes and dreams of good Americans from the conversation, after all, and surely we remember how he rope-a-doped the Clinton campaign into talking only about him as Election Day approached in 2016, until TV became an onslaught of two-sided negative advertising that kept a lot of Americans home. If Democrats make this midterm all about our President's bad behavior, rather than what good Americans deserve from their government, then they deserve defeat.

Action: *a la carte* cable packaging, and postal banking.

So it's 2018 and we still can't buy our cable TV channels a la carte! I know, it sure does seem like social media and streaming video are winning the battle, but cable TV channels still make money from you merely by being part of a cable package you have to buy! And if you don't like, say, cable news channels, you can make your cable corporation block them, but you'll still pay for them, and as long as you're still paying them, they won't change their evil ways. So here's an idea: using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're viewing it on a smartphone), call your Reps and Senators and demand a la carte bill that'll force cable corporations to refund the cost of cable channels you won't watch and don't want in your house. A lot of cable channels cost less than a buck a month, but if hundreds of thousands of Americans got their money back, they'd get scared, and with added pressure we could get them to change their behavior.

Meanwhile, S. 2755, the Postal Banking Act, would allow the United States Postal Service (or USPS) to offer basic financial services, including savings and checking accounts, small loans, and debit cards. The USPS used to offer these services until around 50 years ago, so why start it up again? Because the Post Office could fill a niche for working families in rural and urban areas the big banksters don't serve, a niche that currently gets filled far too often by payday lenders trapping those families in a cycle of debt. Restarting postal banking would also help the USPS survive financial troubles that Congress created in 2006, by mandating that the USPS fund over 80 years' worth of pension obligations in advance, a hurdle our laws impose on no other entity. So, basically, it's a win for working families and a win for the Post Office, which kinda makes that two wins for working families. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help working families in underserved rural and urban areas by supporting the Postal Banking Act.

Around the table: rageheads gonna rage, part 374.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches a New York Times columnist alleging that certain opinions about free speech and identity politics are somehow "taboo," when in fact the Times ventilates these opinions all the time. This stratagem is as old as time itself: pretend your critics are way, way more powerful than you are, even though you have all the megaphones. And if the only defense you can muster for your arguments is that you have "free speech," then you're admitting you can't win the arguments on the merits! Our Glorious Elites: if they don't have everything, they act like they have nothing. I'd say they should try actually having nothing for a minute, but that'd probably send them into an even deeper spiral of self-pity.

David Cooper at the Economic Policy Institute studies the trajectories of the Wisconsin and Minnesota economies since 2010, and finds the Minnesota economy performing better for working families in just about every way. More jobs, more growth, higher wages, less poverty -- think Gov. Walker's 2018 Democratic opponent, whomever that may be, could maybe use all that information in a campaign ad? The inclusion of the word "Democratic" in the previous sentence should suggest the likelihood of that event.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will shut down its student loan office. Which is the natural outcome of returning some $750 million to bilked students and helping put the notorious Corinthian College out of business -- if you're objectively pro-financial predator, that is. CFPB head Mick Mulvaney says he wants to scale the bureau back so that it does "only what is required by law," but how much do you want to bet his efforts to do so have already violated existing law? I mean, it does seem like that's the Administration way: do whatever you want, even if it's illegal, and dare America to stop you.

It begins: a group of "deplorables" set up a billboard warning "liberals" to "get your guns if you try to impeach" our President. Absent undeniable evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors I'm inclined to let the man twist until 2020, but threats of violence are, as you know, not First Amendment-protected speech. And we've still got almost six months until Election Day; you think the threats will ratchet up a bit? Of course they will -- what else can a ragehead do but diddle his rage gland and let his mouth write checks his ass can't cash?

Finally, our intrepid Attorney General says the "ACLU effect" -- i.e., what happens when the ACLU speaks out about law-and-order matters -- caused a spike in Chicago homicides in 2015 and 2016. The trouble with that theory, of course, isn't just that Chicago ended its "stop-and-frisk" practices in 2015 without an actual ACLU lawsuit, but that the murder rate went down in 2017 without Chicago going back to stop-and-frisk! Seriously, though, what a scaredy-cat Jeff Sessions is. If you're that afraid of dissent, perhaps you need to go live in an actual police state.

Action: livestock shipping, overtime pay, and the "balanced budget amendment."

The world has seen video of the squalid conditions of ships that transport livestock; these "death ships" are, as you might imagine, overcrowded with inadequate access to food and water, and they're so hot that animals literally cook to death inside -- and then get thrown overboard! All because crowding more animals into less space means more money for corporate executives -- I say that to inoculate you against the hostage-taking argument they're bound to make that making us transport livestock more humanely means higher prices for you. Gosh, they never raise prices when they give themselves more money! Anyway, New Zealand has already banned shipping of livestock for slaughter, and when the World Organisation for Animal Health meets in just a few short weeks, more countries may follow suit. Would it kill people to eat what grows nearby, after all? Avaaz helps you tell the nations of the world to stop the live export trade.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4505/S. 2177, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The Obama Administration tried to raise the pay threshold below which corporations had to pay their workers overtime, so that more working families could get overtime pay, and also so that corporations would get tired of paying out all that money and just hire more workers. But a federal judge found that their overtime pay rule violated the National Labor Relations Act by failing to exempt white-collar workers, as the NLRA mandates; thus the Restoring Overtime Pay Act would amend the NLRA by creating an exemption-within-the-exemption for white-collar workers who make less than $48,000 annually, thus getting them overtime. I think it's a fairly clever way to deliver better opportunities for workers -- but only if we support it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject a "balanced budget amendment" that would force cuts in Medicare and Social Security and make raising taxes on the rich almost impossible, then CREDO still helps you do that. Politicians squeal about TEH DEFICITZ!!!!! every time our government works on behalf of the American people, and those same politicians never complain about deficits when they're cutting taxes for the rich or funneling corporate welfare to their cronies. But anyone who's ever bought a car, bought a house, or taken on a student loan knows that sometimes you have to spend more than you've got right now so that you can get ahead later. And hello! Nobody thinks this country's going belly-up anytime soon, so we're not exactly going to run out of lenders anytime soon. Our current President does often seem to be doing his damnedest to make America go belly-up, but this ain't his country -- it's ours.

Action: freedom of the press, payday lenders, and safe schools.

Amnesty International helps you demand that the Burmese government release journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. The government has charged them with violating Burma's Official Secrets law, after they met two police officers in a restaurant who handed them rolled-up papers. Sound like a set-up to you? And certainly such a set-up would have absolutely nothing to do with their ongoing investigation of the murder of ten Rohingya Muslims in western Burma! The government detained the two reporters for over three months before their first court hearing, and oh, the police said they presented a warrant to Wa Lone's family in order to search his house the day after the arrest, but the family says they didn't. Whom to believe? The family who has every reason to fall in line behind the government's official story, or the government that has every reason to lie? Their Rohingya massacre sure hasn't gotten them the best PR, after all.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, under former Director Richard Corddray, put together some regulations that do more to prevent payday lenders from trapping people in a downward spiral of debt. So naturally Congress is grateful that the CFPB actually did something to protect consumers, something Congress itself hasn't seen fit to do over the years. I kid, of course -- whether they find intolerable the mere existence of a single regulation that might actually help people or whether they're as mad as their President to undo anything that might have the name Obama on it, Congress has introduced H.J.Res. 122/S.J.Res. 56, another "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify the CFPB's payday loan rules. Why on Earth would you want to be pro-financial predator? Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support consumer protections by rejecting H.J.Res. 122/S.J.Res. 56.

Finally, on the heels of several local reports detailing the various health care risks Philadelphia children still face in their schools -- like asthma and lead poisoning -- Penn Environment helps you tell Philadelphia's Mayor and City Council to get rid of health care hazards in schools. You can still find lead in paint in Philadelphia public schools, and in some rooms lead dust levels were 150 times higher than federal standards allow. You can also find lead in outdated water fountains, asbestos in ceiling tiles, and mold and rat poop in classrooms, and these are not things we should tolerate in the Birthplace of Freedom, because they help cripple our future. Ultimately, as I've long said, Philadelphia property taxes are going to have to go up if we want to make our schools safe again. In the meantime, cleaning up the toxins and hiring more custodial workers sure won't hurt.

Around the table: in which another fight between right-wingers gets exposed as drama.

Our President pulls the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, incorrectly calling the deal "one-sided" and presuming that he'll get a "better deal" out of Iran than one that already verifies the absence of nuclear weapons development. Incomprehensibly he also seems to think this strengthens his hand with North Korea. The other five nations party to the deal have said they'll continue it (and Iran remains a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons), so it's just possible this is another meaningless ball-swinging exercise from our President. But the smarter bet would be to prepare for a PR offensive ending sometime in October with war against, ahem, regime change in Iran. This, after we all remember how regime change went in Iraq and Afghanistan!

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says the stock buybacks which are the main result of Republican tax "reform" are actually good for the economy, because they "return capital to shareholders," who then "recycle() that capital through the economy." Of course, we already know that corporations were already sitting on a ton of capital they weren't "recycl(ing) through the economy," and we also know that giving a shareholder a ton of money in no way guarantees they'll actually spend it, either on jobs or cheeseburgers. Is there a lie too evil for the Foreclosure King to tell?

In a related note, Dean Baker at TruthOut gives us some hope in These Interesting Times: with stock dividend yields falling, and with so much CEO pay tied to stock options, CEOs may -- just may -- be screwing themselves out of the absurdly high salaries to which they've become accustomed! And "the sight of top management getting rich while providing mediocre returns (for shareholders) may provide sufficient motivation for shareholders to organize." Ah, but I can just see Congress passing another stupid bailout if CEOs lose too much money. We should be out in the streets if that happens.

Don Blankenship's little "Cocaine Mitch" ad (in which he infamously talks about "China people") may have aided his effort to win the Republican Senate nomination in West Virginia, but Alec MacGillis at ProPublica reminds us that when one of Mr. Blankenship's corporations spewed out a larger-than-the-Exxon-Valdez coal slurry spill that polluted the water of over 25,000 good Kentuckians back in 2000, none other than Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell was there to help him avoid taking any significant responsibility for it. Which should remind you that a lot of these "outsider" candidates are really insiders, and a lot of their "fights" are just drama. And they're not even good drama.

Finally, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman quickly resigns his position after several women accuse him of sexual assault. They call it physical abuse, he calls it "role-playing," but with his resignation a mere three hours after the New Yorker's initial report of the accusations, I guess we know which one it was. What a damn waste -- Mr. Schneiderman's resignation won't make financial predation popular or anything, but folks who do good works in the public sphere need to stop making other people's lives hell in the private sphere. I really don't care how hard that is. Anything worth doing is hard.

Action: internet freedom, farm policy, veterans' health care, and automatic voter registration.

Word on the street is that tomorrow Democrats will force a vote on S.J.Res. 52, the "resolution of disapproval" that would roll back the FCC's net neutrality repeal, so today's as good a day as any to call your Senators and tell them to vote in favor of the resolution, and thus support real internet freedom for all Americans. The FCC had the stones to call their net neutrality repeal "Restoring Internet Freedom," but their repeal only "restores" internet "freedom" for big corporations -- as in freedom to prevent you from visiting websites, freedom to slow down the loading of websites, and freedom to demand tribute from websites in order to prevent either of these things from happening. What about your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than let some corporation tell you where to go? Clearly, that actual freedom is not as important to the FCC as those other corporate "freedoms." But with S.J.Res. 52, we can begin to take our freedom back.

Meanwhile, Congress is mulling another farm bill, since that needs to be reauthorized every six years, and in H.R. 2 they've concocted a real stinker of a farm bill: one that stretches the definition of "family farm" so that huge farms can take even more farm subsidies they don't need, one that rolls back incentives that help farmers get off chemicals and one-crop farming, one that exempts pesticides from clean water and endangered species protections, and one that tramples on state-level efforts to control factory farms. Oh, and it also imposes new work requirements on food stamps, as if too many working families aren't already on food stamps because their employers don't pay enough. In short, this is another pro-corporation, anti-people bill from Congress, and it deserves a humiliating death. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support small farmers and healthy food choice by rejecting H.R. 2.

In other news, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5671, the Burn Pits Accountability Act. So what are burn pits? Burn pits are what we used to dispose of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan, waste that could include human and medical waste, chemicals, paint, plastic, rubber, and even munitions. If that doesn't sound like an utterly toxic stew, I don't know what does! For all that, scientists haven't yet established a firm link between burn pits and Iraq/Afghanistan veteran illnessess, but the Veterans Administration maintains a Burn Pit Registry which can make establishing that link far easier, and H.R. 5671 would mandate that our Department of Defense ask soldiers whether they've been exposed to burn pits -- which they can do during health exams and separation interviews -- and then automatically register any veteran who answers in the affirmative. Thus the research -- and the healing -- can get a kick-start.

Finally, voter registration is now automatic in 13 states -- meaning citizens in these states become registered voters whenever they use state services like the Division of Motor Vehicles -- and Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to enact an automatic voter registration law. You know what some right-wingers say when confronted with the common sense notion that we ought to make it easier for people to vote? They say voting should be hard! No: the work of citizenship should be hard, but it does not logically follow from that statement that each and every task associated with citizenship should be hard. You shouldn't have to spend endless time on hold when you call your Reps and Senators, you shouldn't be completely deprived of townhall meetings because your Rep is a criticism-hating snowflake, and you shouldn't have to fill out piles of paperwork in order to register to vote just because some politicians want fewer people to vote.

Action: tackling foreign policy, intelligence, and immigration.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject S.J.Res. 59, the military force authorization that would actually expand the President's war-making powers, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Giving the President even more unconstitutional power is a bad idea, particularly when this particular President has loaded up his cabinet with folks who want to make war on Iran. But S.J.Res. 59 gives the President the power to add particular groups to his bad-guy list and then go ahead and bomb them, even if it results in what Ron Paul used to call "blowback," and it give Congress a power to veto these bad-guy list additions within 30 days that they'll never use, because they're Congress. Oh, and S.J.Res. 59 also expands the President's power to unconstitutionally detain people, and people might include you or I or those we love, particularly if any of us protest the next war and the one after that. So let's get to it, good peoples.

Meanwhile, Mike Pompeo's unfortunate ascension to State has left an opening for CIA Director, one the President wants to fill with CIA lifer Gina Haspel, who has (like Mr. Pompeo!) shown a lust for torturing suspects that should offend our citizenry, our heritage, and our civilization. We can't say for sure that Ms. Haspel tortured suspects herself (or, more likely, ordered other folks to do so), but we can say for sure that she oversaw torture in Thailand and that she oversaw the destruction of videotapes of CIA torture, and why gamble that she "wasn't that involved" when you can find someone better? Some folks will say she was just doing her job -- or they'll cynically invoke the CIA's long history of torture, as if that's a reason not to fight evil now! -- but we get only one life, and we really ought to make it a life the Lord would be proud of. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to block Ms. Haspel's ascension to the top of the CIA.

In other news, Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your U.S. House Reps to hold a vote on our involvement in the Saudi war against Yemen. Our involvement in the Saudi war against Yemen, of course, also includes our involvement in creating near-famine conditions, our involvement in the worst cholera epidemic in history, and our involvement in the collapse of Yemeni water, food, and health care infrastructure -- not to mention our involvement in the continuing destruction of Houthi rebels who have actually proven to be pretty good al-Qaeda fighters, which means we're essentially on the same side as al-Qaeda with regards to Yemen, and regardless of how thoroughly ISIS has surpassed al-Qaeda in evil, this is not the side you want to be on. The Senate has voted on our unconstitutional involvement refueling Saudi planes and furnishing weapons and helping them with targeting, but the House hasn't; it's well past time for our House Reps to do so.

Finally, H.R. 3923, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, would (as the title suggests!) strengthen standards for detaining aliens at detention centers, including ending mandatory detention and barring use of private prisons for detention. I can already hear the President's votaries demanding to know why we should be so nice to immigrants when we have other problems, but that is of course a false choice, one that implies that our government can only ever do one thing at a time (and, er, one that also implies that our government should be spending all of its efforts catering to other people's prejudices). A great nation can treat immigrants humanely and (to name just one thing we also spend a lot of time talking about at this blog) revive moribund Appalachian economies, too -- among other good works we could enumerate. In the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act.

Around the table: with next moves on net neutrality and the real "bad news" from a New Hampshire poll.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut explains "How Net Neutrality Can Survive the Trump Administration." Senate Democrats will force a vote this week on their "resolution of disapproval" that would begin the process of reversing the FCC's repeal, plus the OMB is still reviewing parts of the repeal, and several lawsuits are coming, all of which may give us a bit of breathing room until the midterms, when we might get a more net neutrality-positive Congress. If we stay on them, that is.

Ho hum, Utah prosecutor charges six animal rights activists with felony theft stemming from their exposure of rampant animal abuse at a Utah factory farm. Specifically, the activists took three turkeys who were so abused they were going to die anyway, as about a quarter or turkeys "raised" at factory farms do. Faced with the loss of their ag-gag law, "theft" of dying birds is what they come up with! I hope this prosecutorial effort dies the same death the ag-gag law did in federal court.

Also ho hum, the Tax Policy Center informs us that the Republican tax "reform" has not, in fact, "supercharged" our economy. We see no dramatic increases in GDP growth and job creation since the end of December, for example. And if the economy does wind up cratering, Republican apologists will just say it would have been a lot worse without the tax "reform" bill. Or perhaps they'll bust out that "nobody could have predicted" line, although TPC does suggest that the increase in Treasury bond yields could be a harbinger of increased inflation.

Even more ho hum, our Administration is suddenly unable to produce any evidence it considered any of the public input it solicited over reorganizing federal agencies -- or, indeed, any evidence that it received public input, though OMB claimed to have received 100,000 submissions. They keep moving the deadline back for releasing their plan to reorganize federal agencies, too. Well, that's our "law and order" Administration for us.

Our President apparently hired an Israeli intelligence firm to dig up dirt on the Obama Administration officials who negotiated the Iran nuclear deal. And why are they looking for information that doesn't actually have anything to do with Iranian behavior under the nuclear deal? Because they already know they're not going to find that kind of info (just as Mr. Netanyahu's drama from the other night didn't find that info), and when you can't win the argument on the merits, you resort to personal attacks.

Finally, a poll of New Hampshire Democrats puts Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in third place out of eight possible 2020 Presidential contenders, but that news isn't nearly as "bad" "for Bernie" as the headline says. Elizabeth Warren, who's less likely to run in 2020 than Mr. Sanders, is in first with 26%; if the poll hadn't asked about her, where do you think those votes would have gone? I'll tell you where most of them wouldn't have gone: to second-place finisher and two-term Vice President Joe Biden, also less likely to run in 2020. If anything, this poll is bad news for Deval Patrick (who just served two terms as Governor right next door in Massachusetts) and Terry McAuliffe (whose extensive ties within the Democratic establishment haven't resulted in a groundswell of voter support what a shock).

Action: wind power, prisoner rights, and Arctic drilling.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission lets gas drilling corporations conduct hydrofracturing (a.k.a. "fracking") on public lands, but thinks wind power is too dangerous to wildlife to allow onto public lands! Because of all the wind turbines that go rampaging through the forest, no doubt! Seriously, the Game Commission should really have said all that out loud before doing it. Fracking involves, among other things, leaking methane into the air, poisoning our air and water with carcinogens, and building pipelines that carve up land and run the too-high risk of spilling more poisons; what about that isn't dangerous to wildlife? Wind turbines, on the other hand, carve up rather little of the ground if you do it right, and fossil fuel corporations kill far more birds than wind power does. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell the Pennsylvania Game Commission to end its double standard for wind power development on public lands.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 2520, the Inmate Calling Technical Corrections Act. What would S. 2520 do? It would stop phone service corporations from extorting absurdly-high phone rates from the families of prisoners. And why should we care? Because prisoners who can stay in contact with their families go back to jail less often, because judges don't sentence prisoners to absurdly-high phone call rates, because families shouldn't be punished with those high rates either, and also, you know, because we're not cruel bastards. Speaking of which, our current FCC Chair apparently thinks the problem can be solved by stuffing burner phones into dead cats and throwing them over prison walls -- even though the very same corporations that "provide" phone "service" in prisons also provide prisons with cell-phone jamming devices! So let's speak out, not merely to treat prisoners and their families more humanely, but to better ensure this Administration's just humiliation.

Finally, as you may know, the Republican tax "reform" bill opens up the Arctic Refuge to drilling, even though we've been saying for years that the small amount of oil we'd get out of the Arctic Refuge doesn't outweigh the damage we'd do to clean air and water. Luckily, the Interior Department has to go through many public comment periods before anyone can drill in the Arctic, and though this Administration will try to go through those public comment periods as quickly as they can, so that fewer good Americans comment on the matter, they still have to go adhere to the process, because law and order. Hence the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell Interior Secretary Zinke to reject new drilling leases in the Arctic Refuge. He doesn't care what you think -- unless you've got some free trips or a $150,000 door you can give him, amirite? -- but, as always, it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want.

Around the table: power, corruption, and lies, part 864.

Against the advice of EPA career staffers, most of whom he's going to throw under the bus before too long anyway, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt approves waiver exempting large swath of southeastern Wisconsin from smog rules -- and Gov. Scott Walker's favorite corporate crony, Foxconn, just so happens to sit there. But, ah, is Mr. Walker absolutely sure he wants to run on all that corporate welfare he handed out to Foxconn?

David Mislin at The Conversation explains how "Anti-war Protests 50 Years Ago Helped Mold the Modern Christian Right." Mainly, a lot of Protestants left the anti-war churches -- most of which had never protested a previous American war -- and joined the more fundamentalist ones. You do have to wonder, of course, what role racism also played, given all the tension over (among other things!) open housing laws in the mid-'60s.

Ho hum, ThinkProgress finds that Rep. Martha McSally (R-AZ), now running for Jeff Flake's Senate seat, has totally broken her pledge to vote against her party 20% of the time. I never would have made such a pledge in the first place ("that was four pro-party votes; I sure hope the next one's something uncontroversial!"), but she did attack her opponent's bipartisan bona fides back in 2014, so she made her bed. For the record, she's voted the President's way 97% of the time since January 2017. That's a campaign ad waiting to happen -- but Kyrsten Sinema would likely be the one running it, so forget about seeing it.

With the West Virginia Republican U.S. Senate primary less than a week away, an Evan Jenkins campaign ad doctors a photograph of Patrick Morrisey so that it looks (vaguely!) like he's shaking hands with Hillary Clinton, when in the actual photo he was shaking hands with the President. I expect this to backfire on Mr. Jenkins bigly, though not necessarily to Mr. Morrisey's benefit (Don Blankenship is also running, and oh boy would he get buried by the right campaign ad). In any case, the Jenkins flack who said the campaign was just "tak(ing) creative license while arranging images in order to help make a substantive point" is an evil bastard whose career in politics should be over, though of course it won't be.

Get a load of House Speaker Paul Ryan claiming that the end result of Democrats winning back Congress would be "subpoenas and gridlock." In reverse order: this clown couldn't repeal Obamacare even though Senate Democrats couldn't filibuster it, and even the Republicans' list of evil achievements is actually pretty small, basically comprising tax-cuts-for-the-rich and a few overturned Obama Administration rules. And as for subpoenas, that is to laugh: a Democrat politician's default setting is don't rock the boat. There won't be subpoenas until and unless the President's guilt is obvious to a deaf, dumb, and blind infant. Who was it who called Paul Ryan the stupid person's idea of a smart person?

Finally, while it's grotesquely easy to tabulate the multitudinous ways in which "400 years of slavery" isn't a "choice," as Kanye West suggested to TMZ a few nights ago, let's not let pass the putative genius saying he admires the President because he did "the impossible." So, by implication, Mr. West thinks it's less impossible for black folks to overcome redlining, police brutality, and environmental racism than it is for a white billionaire to become President. Success really does make people forget where they came from.

Action: Medicare, fuel efficiency, and Social Security.

S. 2708, the Choose Medicare Act, would (as its title suggests) let good Americans to buy into Medicare via the Affordable Care Act exchanges, which would make Medicare, essentially, a public option for folks under 65. Medicare works astoundingly well for a health insurance program that only includes people who are very likely to get sick; how much better would it work if younger, healthier people also bought in? The Choose Medicare Act would also let employers choose Medicare for their employees, which a lot of them will do, if they're actually sincere about cutting costs. And the Choose Medicare Act would (finally!) let Medicare negotiate drug pricing, which would certainly do a lot more to keep drug prices down than the corporate welfare handouts of the recent tax "reform" law. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand access to good health care for Americans by supporting the Choose Medicare Act.

Meanwhile, both Sum of Us and Public Citizen help you tell automobile manufacturing corporation Ford Motors to stop trying to gut the fuel efficiency standards set by the Obama Administration. Yes, despite their kind words about the standards in 2012, and despite their little PR campaigns in which they say they deplore climate change, they're trying to gut those fuel standards now that a Republican occupies the Oval Office, even though these standards actually save money for regular folks like you and I and save in long-term health care costs for regular folks like you and I. Sadly, corporate executives are not regular folks like you and I, and they "suffer" from being made to make their cars get more miles to the gallon by making less money. This, even though their choice in life is either to be rich or to be rich! Our choice in life, of course, is more stark: we'll either be free or we won't. Strike a blow for freedom by telling Ford to stop running us down.

Finally, Republicans have tried to privatize Social Security, and failed; they've tried to cut Social Security benefits, and failed; they've even tried to cut Social Security customer service funding, and failed. And they failed at each of these because we've stood in their way. But I guess they've got to get a win somewhere, so they're planning to let Social Security field office leases lapse without renewing them. You know, the way corporations like to let people leave without replacing them? Trouble with that, of course, is that people still need Social Security offices to serve their needs, and people who need Social Security offices did work for it and pay for it all their lives, did they not? Social Security Works helps you tell our government to stop closing Social Security offices that help good Americans enjoy the dignified retirement they deserve.

Around the table: how Democrats will lose in 2018, and other lessons.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims to have evidence that Iran "lied" about the nuclear deal -- but only proves that Iran wanted to build a nuclear weapon before the deal, a fact no one has actually disputed. Iran's intentions aren't particularly relevant, after all -- Iran's actions are, and 55,000 documents from an apparently unlocked warehouse later, we can't say they're building nukes now. Which makes Mr. Netanyahu's address what, class? Drama, that's what. No wonder our President loved it.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (E-PA) guts yet another anti-gerrymandering bill in his committee, one that also had the support of more than half the members of the lower house. I was going to say he's left quite the trail of slime over the years, but then I realized how insulting that'd be to slime. Is it too much to ask that the man who talks like he's never going to lose an election again lose his next election? I don't care if Zombie Charles Manson beats him.

Branko Marcetic at Jacobin looks at the Democrats' "Red to Blue" list of approved Congressional candidates, finds it wanting. The woman who lost bigly to John McCain in 2016, the dude Steny Hoyer likes so much he told one of his primary rivals to get out of the race, the guy who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory against Sam Brownback in 2014, the woman who worked in Tha Bush Mobb's foreign policy apparatus, and so on -- it's bad when the guy running in Utah's 4th is one of the more courageous candidates. If Democrats can't win back the House despite all the wind at their back, this is why.

Former HHS Secretary Tom Price said that repealing the individual mandate penalty in the Republican tax "reform" will result in higher prices for those who use the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Because healthy people will drop out, you see -- gosh, where have we heard this before? Oh, right: from almost every single American who thought about the matter for 20 seconds. What a stalwart defender of the forgotten man he was, back when he had the power to do something!

Now Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) says "there's no evidence whatsoever" that the recent Republican tax "reform" bill -- for which he voted, because of course he did -- has helped American workers. He's not quite in Sen. Corker territory, I suppose, but The Economist really needs to attend Mr. Rubio's "ideas" more closely, so they could tell us that he would like to "increase()" the "child tax credit" so that very rich people could get it too, and that his "provision for paid family leave" would steal from Social Security to pay for it. Marco Rubio: he gives empty suits a bad name.

Action: defending science, public water, and health care.

EPA Administrator Scott "Their Fault!" Pruitt has advanced a proposal that would, he says, eliminate "secret" scientific data from the EPA's decision-making process. What he's not telling you, of course, is that a lot of this data is "secret" for good reason -- data containing personal or medical histories cannot be publicly released, because that would violate good folks' privacy, and plenty of scientific data upon which the EPA bases decisions contains the personal and medical histories of folks pollution made sick. See how this will work? If some carcinogen released as a by-product of some fossil fuel corporation's production process gives you cancer, the EPA would never be able to use the data from your experience to ban it! And if this ban had been in place in the past, we'd still have lead in our gasoline! I'd call it clever, if it weren't also evil. Hence CREDO helps you tell the EPA to reject this fake "secret" data proposal.

Meanwhile, Nestlé may have won its battle to steal even more public drinking water from the good citizens of Michigan, but we can still fight Nestlé's effort to continue taking Ontario's groundwater using expired permits, as Sum of Us helps you do. If your permit expires to do something, you'd think you'd stop doing it, wouldn't you? Not big, bold, and ball-swinging Nestlé! No one tells Nestlé what to do! Certainly not the state of California, which told them to stop sucking water out of the San Bernardino National Forest, and certainly not the state of Michigan, which ignored the (literally!) 99.9% of public comments opposing Nestlé's plans. Well, OK, Oregon told them to go scratch last year, but that's about it for state governments, even though people generally like to keep their clean water in their tap, and not in Nestlé bottles at an insane markup. Perhaps we can make Ontario more like Oregon in this regard.

Finally, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield (yes, the result of yet another mega-merger between two already too-big corporations) has decided to reduce reimbursement rates on certain breast pumps. Doesn't sound like a big deal yet? Well, the breast pumps in question are common, inexpensive electric breast pumps you can get without a prescription, and if mothers can only get a manual breast pump, a lot fewer of them will breastfeed, which means a lot fewer kids will get breast milk, which most doctors (and your own common sense) say is the best kind of milk for newborns. But surely conservatives are at this moment rising up to denounce some health care corporation getting between you and your doctor, right? I kid, of course -- to today's "conservatives," big corporations always know best. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to reconsider its decision to help make it harder for mothers to breastfeed their children.

Action: war-making, "free" trade, and clean water.

The good news? Congress might actually repeal the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF), just like we've been telling them to do for years. The bad news? Congress wants to replace it with an even worse one. S.J.Res. 59 would actually broaden the President's ability to start new wars against new "enemies" without a Constitutionally-mandated declaration of war from Congress, and would only let Congress reject these new wars after they begin -- you know, when most Congressfolk would be too cowardly to do that! Don't believe the hype that we must not ever "hamstring the President's ability to respond," because that is precisely the point of giving war-making power to Congress. Hence the Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject yet another unconstitutional AUMF that enables the President to wage war at will.

Meanwhile, multinational corporation Cooke Aquaculture has lately threatened to use the "investor-state dispute settlement" system in NAFTA to try to nullify a Washington state law against the open-sea net-pen fish farming it just so happens to practice! And this story gets so, so much better: Cooke lost hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon into the open sea (thus causing havoc in local ecosystems!) when its Cypress Island net-pen farm collapsed last summer, then lied to the state about the causes of the collapse and how many fish it lost! So, of course, when you've done so bad a job that the state has already revoked more than half of your net-pen leases, naturally you try to use NAFTA to get taxpayer-funded corporate welfare. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Cooke Aquaculture to abandon its efforts to use NAFTA to punish the good citizens of Washington state.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 1088 would actually roll back regulations that protect clean water for the good citizens of the commonwealth, by (among other things!) allowing fracking corporations to keep their toxic chemicals completely secret, exempting corporations from the responsibility of supplying folks with clean water when they pollute the water table, and letting drillers build their wells closer to your home and to your rivers and streams. I'm sure they'll also tell you that relaxing regulations on the smaller drilling wells is a way of right-sizing regulations for small businesses, which I'm sure you'll totally agree with once you're able to set your brown tap water on fire. Seriously, SB 1088 is a giant pile of fecal matter, and Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to protect good Pennsylvanians' clean water by rejecting SB 1088.

Around the table: the real reason Republicans keep falling, and other lessons.

J.F. Sargent reveals "The Real Reason Social Media Makes Hollywood So Nervous." Surprise! It's the same reason social media makes traditional print/TV media so nervous: it "has destabilized centuries-old power structures and amplified voices that have historically been ignored, silenced, trampled and punished." Yes, social media is "also vulnerable to the worst impulses of mob-mentality, petty grudges, rumor-mongering and cruelty," but if that latter picture is the only one Hollywood wants to focus upon -- and not, say, the very social-media-savvy #MarchForOurLives movement -- you have to wonder why.

No, the polio vaccine did not "cause cancer," any more than vaccines "cause" autism or "cause" disease because they generally have a tiny piece of the disease they're inoculating against -- you know, to teach the body what it's fighting? -- inside them. OK, the story FactCheck tells gets into considerably more detail than that, and is totally edifying, but sheesh, too many people don't know jack and yet are so proud of their University of Google degrees.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt will return from his Capitol Hill testimony to an agency "demoralized" by Mr. Pruitt's repeatedly throwing EPA employees under the bus during his testimony. Nobody could have predicted! And Administration votaries will continue to look at Mr. Pruitt, and his employer, as a "fighter," even though both men "fight" mainly by blaming all their problems on other people. Then again, most Administration votaries blame all their problems on other people -- and usually the wrong people.

Rep. Pat Meehan (R-PA), who had announced his retirement due to a sexual harassment scandal, has now resigned his seat. Which means another special election, likely in July or August, and what appetite will Republicans have to hold onto that seat, particularly since the districts will all change for the 2018 election? Seriously, this is a no-lose proposition for Democrats. Then again, they've demonstrated quite the aptitude for losing those.

Finally, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says "you have to wonder" if the fear of assassination is driving all these Republican retirements in Congress! OK, so I've dutifully wondered, and the short answer is no. The somewhat longer answer is no, you whiny snowflake. The somewhat-even-longer answer is no, they're not retiring because one out of the last bajillion mass shooters can be positively identified as a liberal -- they're retiring because they fear accountability from voters in November, just like they feared accountability from voters at all those townhalls they didn't have. Why does Rep. Brooks want to disappear voters from his analysis, I wonder?

Action: clean water, renewable energy, paper ballots, and nukes.

H.R. 5609, the WATER Act, would help America rebuild our drinking water infrastructure, but right-wingers love seeing bills like this and asking BUT WHEREZ IZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!! One can, of course, answer that question in at least two ways. One, the bill pays for itself by expanding the amount of money made by controlled foreign corporations that can be taxed. Second, Flint still operates without a guarantee of clean water to its good citizens four years after the state of Michigan poisoned its water in a bid to save money -- and that very same state government has just agreed to let the Nestlé corporation pump out even more clean water per minute from the Great Lakes Basin at a pittance. If that doesn't register with you, then frankly your authority to complain about BIG GUMMINT SPENDINGZ!!!! is limited. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support clean water infrastructure by supporting the WATER Act.

H.R. 3671, the OFF Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, would, as its title suggests, help wean us off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy sources. The bill would mandate (among other things) that 80% of our electricity come from "clean energy" sources and 80% of our cars be zero-emission cars by 2027. But the bill doesn't just issue mandates that enterprising, can-do Americans should be able to meet -- it also offers the retraining and financial assistance that would help fossil fuel workers transition to a renewable energy economy. Other countries produce far more of their energy from renewable sources than we do; the only reason we lag is that we coddle fossil fuel corporation CEOs, who should, frankly, be leading the charge to renewable energy, not blocking it. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a renewable energy future by passing the OFF Fossil Fuels Act.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Public Citizen helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to fund a paper ballot voting system for Pennsylvania. We have reached an unexpected watershed in America, with our Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee actually calling for paper ballot elections in America (as a way of fighting Russian meddling, though it works just as well to keep computers from disappearing our votes), while Pennsylvania's own Secretary of State, Robert Torres, has mandated that the state phase out paperless voting machines by the end of 2019. You may have noticed that a major election year will be happening before then, and Pennsylvania will be many tens of millions of dollars short in its effort to replace paperless voting machines, so let's impress upon them the urgency of finding this money. Surely they can find some corporate welfare to cut.

Finally, Congress is actually contemplating building more "usable," "low-yield" nuclear weapons. To deter Russia, of course, although both Russia and America have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world hundreds of times over already; what more "deterrence" is needed, or even possible? Proponents also say "low-yield" nuclear weapons give us more flexibility, though we already have low-yield nukes, and "low-yield" sure doesn't mean harmless -- a low-yield nuclear weapon will still wreak far more havoc than any military objective could possibly be worth. (You see, if you poison someone's home, forever, they tend to stay angry at you, forever, and be a source of potential conflict, forever.) One should hence question the wisdom of making nuclear weapons more "usable." The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the construction of any new "low-yield" nuclear weapons.

Around the table: untangling webs of corruption and weakness.

The Intercept gets an audio recording of current House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) telling a candidate for Colorado's 6th U.S. House district to get out of the way of the party's more corporate choice for that seat. If you're still tempted to say "get people who can win" (and, ah, haven't considered how that worked out in 2016), remember that the party gives a leg up in endorsements and fundraising to their preferred hacks, and then uses this "success" in endorsements and fundraising to justify more help! But if these hand-picked candidates are so great, why not let the primary voters choose them? Because no one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like a Democrat, that's why.

What's worse? That Mick Mulvaney came out and said if you gave to his House campaigns, he'd talk to you, and if you didn't, he wouldn't? Or that he came out and told banksters that if they want to hamstring the agency he now (nominally) leads, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they should give more money to Congressfolk? I kid, of course -- there is actually no point in trying to decide which is the pile of dung the flies have found and which is the pile they haven't found yet. Here's a lesson for Democrats, though: Republicans didn't prevent people like Mick Mulvaney from running for Congressional seats in 2010, and they won back the House that year, and look how he's made so little go such a long way!

Ho hum, the six biggest banksters saved nearly $3.6 billion in taxes just last quarter, thanks to the massive Republican tax "reform." Also, "(b)ank executives have said the majority of the savings from the lower tax rates will be returned to shareholders in the form of higher dividends and stock buybacks," i.e., not job creation. Some enterprising Democrat should run ads like that famous Mitch McConnell ad from 1984 where hound dogs looked for his opponent, except these hound dogs would look for that supposed $4,000 boon everyone was supposed to get from corporate tax cuts. Then again, you know, Democrats.

Been hearing about the "massive fundraising advantage" Democrats allegedly have in the upcoming midterm elections? Well, don't believe the hype: NBC informs us that "(m)ajor national Republican and Democratic party groups" have spent over $48 million just on the seven Congressional special elections since January 2017, and Republican groups are outspending Democratic ones by a 3 to 1 margin. Getting a lot of bang for their buck, too, I see! Seriously, remember that when you hear that a candidate has raised x amount money, you have no idea what PAC or SuperPAC is going to inject y+z money into that race. Also, too, getting excited over who's raised what is horserace politics, and thus beneath your dignity as a citizen.

Finally, speaking of special elections, Republican Debbie Lesko won Tuesday night's special election in Arizona's 8th, but by a mere six points, in a district Republican Trent Franks had typically won by over 28 points in his races. I won't say, as one local Democrat consultant does, that a swing of 15 points here (the President won this district by 21) means a swing of 15 points everywhere, but I will say that Hiral Tipirneni's excellent showing means that Democrats can make a winning argument everywhere. Unless they bully all the liberals out of their Congressional primaries, that is.

Action: ranked-choice voting, food stamps, torture of autistic students, and the Sinclair/Tribune merger.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to create a ranked-choice (or instant runoff) voting system in Pennsylvania. A ranked-choice system allows you to designate first, second, third, and so on choices for elected offices, rather than simply designating one choice (very likely while holding your nose). The top two vote-getters then advance to a runoff election (hence the term "instant runoff"), and if your first choice didn't make it to the runoff, your second choice would get your vote (or your third, if your first and second choices don't make it, and so on). That means you'd never have to worry about "throwing away your vote" on a "spoiler" candidate again. Ranked-choice voting could help us break the wheel of voting for political parties that too often seem to conspire against us. And that's worth fighting for.

Meanwhile, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the upcoming Farm Bill if it winds up cutting benefits for low-income working families. Yeah, Congress is working on a Farm Bill again, and by "Congress," in this case, I mean Republicans. And you know what that means: more regulations that make it harder for good Americans to get the help they need -- because Republicans only like the regulations that actually constitute a burden! -- and more rules kicking more Americans off the food stamp program. They got some nerve, passing trillions of dollars in tax cuts mainly for the rich and then saying that big corporate tax cuts will trickle down to the poor! I rather suspect the poor are used to something else trickling down upon them from the rich. Food stamps: you pay for them, so you should be able to get them when you need them. This is not a very difficult principle to understand, or at least it shouldn't be.

In other news, you may recall that horrid 2002 video of the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts administering electric shock "therapy" to an autistic student 31 times in seven hours for refusing to take off his jacket. The Rotenberg Center is literally the only American program for disabled children using remote electric shocks as punishment, which is nothing to yell WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. Between 2014 and 2016, our FDA debated and then wrote regulations banning these shocks. Then what happened? A man who fervently hates all regulations that actually help good Americans got elected President, and since then, the FDA has done nothing about the matter. Typical. So the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the FDA to implement regulations banning electric shocks, and thus help end the torture of special-needs students in America.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC and the DOJ to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. There's no need to theorize about what could happen when one corporation owns over 200 TV stations nationwide and can reach into every corner of the country, because we've already seen from Sinclair what that means: trading favorable coverage of the President for more access, mandating that their anchors support the "war on terror" after 9.11, and forcing all their newsreaders to recite from the same script about "fake news." It ain't far from there to imagine the Administration itself writing their "news" copy, and then what would separate us from your average developing-world dictatorship? You know, aside from the fact that we have a lot more weapons? Our Glorious Elites' lust for mammon will bring the rest of us hardship and misery -- unless we speak out in numbers our government can't ignore.

Action: redistricting in Pennsylvania and Delaware, marijuana policy, and Medicaid work requirements.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe may have gutted HB 722, the redistricting reform bill -- an action which should cost him his job, though he's left such a long trail of slime I wonder what it'll take to get his district's voters to put someone-anyone-else in there -- but Fair Districts PA is on top of it, by helping you tell your PA state legislators to support SB 22 and a new House companion bill, HB 563. HB 563 is actually stronger then SB 22, in that it does more to prevent municipalities and counties getting split up across districts, and why not? The spirit of compromise is overrated, especially when the forces of evil only see your efforts to compromise with them as weakness, and take it as a cue to demand more and more and more from you. So let's give them some of their own medicine, and see how quickly they whine that we're mean to them.

Meanwhile, in a related note, Delaware's state legislature is also mulling an actual bipartisan bill, SB 27, that would create an independent commission to redraw state districts every 10 years, rather than continue to let politicians draw up their self-serving Rorschach blot districts that ensure their re-election but don't serve their constituents. Some folks may reasonably ask why we should take redistricting power from our representatives, rather than make them draw fair districts, since we're constantly trying to make our representatives do their job in so many other areas. Answer's simple: representation is a tool of democracy, not an end product, and if we can create a representative body that'll do a better, fairer job, we should. Hence Common Cause Delaware helps you tell Delaware state legislators to support fair redistricting by supporting SB 27.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4815/S. 1689, the Marijuana Justice Act, would remove pot from Schedule I classification under the Controlled Substances Act -- which is so, so overdue, since pot is nowhere near as dangerous as other Schedule I drugs like heroin -- and would end criminal penalties for folks who use or distribute pot. The bill would also expunge previous convictions for pot use or distribution, reduce funding to states that make a disproportionate number of pot-related arrests, and would even establish a Community Reinvestment Fund directed at helping "communities most affected by the war on drugs." So, this bill would legalize pot, empty the jails of folks convicted of using or selling pot, and even reinvest money in communities devasted by the "war on drugs." Sounds pretty comprehensive to me! And then in a few years we can lump pot in with tobacco and alcohol, like we should have been doing all along. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Marijuana Justice Act.

Finally, back in Pennsylvania, the reactionary state legislature is as we speak trying to impose various work requirements on Medicaid recipients, so Moms Rising helps you tell Pennsylvania politicians to stop trying to make it harder for good citizens to get Medicaid when they need it. Republicans were sure they could attack Medicaid and get away with it, but surprise, surprise! People actually get Medicaid, and very few, if any, of them regard themselves as cheats or freeloaders! Imposing work requirements for Medicaid recipients would have some honor if a) anyone could prove Medicaid fraud was all that widespread with more than a few anecdotes about "someone I know," or b) if more than half of Medicaid recipients weren't already working because they don't get paid enough, or c) if Medicaid's whole reason for being wasn't to help folks through rough spots in the first place. But alas, no -- some folks just settle for being mean to people they don't know. Let's make that harder.

Around the table: featuring lessons from a Nazi wannabe rally in Georgia.

"Militarized Cops At Tiny Georgia Neo-Nazi Rally Arrest Counterprotesters For Wearing Masks" is a headline you should never have to read in a civilized society, but yeah, that happened over the weekend. And they used an anti-KKK law (no protesting in white hoods, get it?) to do it! Which just goes to show that making laws to keep people from demonstrating -- even Nazi wannabes who would very much like everyone who opposes them to die -- just isn't a good idea. The good news? These little Nazi wannabe rallies are drawing fewer and fewer people. Maybe they really are vampires shriveling up in sunlight!

From the "All Corporate Media is Bad!" file: Comcast makes MSNBC's Morning Joe program run an eight-minute plug for "Comcast Cares Day," celebrating how magnificent Comcast is. Comcast owns MSNBC, as you know, as well as at least eight other NBC channels that also ran some version of that plug. It's good to be reminded, also, that Morning Joe threw Comcast's CEO softball questions on the air during Comcast's aborted attempt to assimilate Time-Warner, and that Comcast did its damnedest to stamp out coverage of the hated Trans-Pacific "Partnership." I guess it's good news that Comcast, still one of America's most hated corporations, didn't get what it wanted in either battle. And the fact that they continue to use David Fricking Cohen as one of their public faces suggests they have no idea how to win hearts and minds.

White man with no pants kills four and wounds four at a Nashville Waffle House, and a black man stops him from doing further harm by taking his rifle from him, suffering burns to his hand and forearm in the process. I sure hope I'm wrong about this, but I fear that I'm going to be hearing in a few days that James Shaw "is no angel." Because I'm already hearing about how "troubled" the shooter is.

In a completely unsurprising development, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) voted for the nomination of Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State in committee, after saying he wouldn't. Sen. Paul said he changed his mind after "receiving assurances" that Mr. Pompeo also opposes the Iraq and Afghanistan oh Jesus Mary and Joseph why do I bother? Unlike his father, Rand Paul only has principles when it doesn't matter; when it does, those principles are always negotiable. And given that the Pompeo nomination already had enough votes to succeed, why didn't he simply "stick to his principles," since it no longer mattered? Seriously, I don't see his endgame here -- it's not like he's ever going to be President.

Finally, a study finds that the President's most devoted supporters aren't driven by "economic anxiety" but by fear of losing their status in society -- or, as the study's author puts it, "It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all." All together now: waaaaaaah! My opinion doesn't count for everything anymore! But if you tell these voters that this is America and you should create your own damn status, they'd just respond that black people have their status handed to them -- a patently absurd contention if you have the ability to think clearly for seconds at a time -- and by the time you respond that what they call "handouts for blacks" are actually just attempts to keep white people from depriving blacks of their rights, these voters will have moved on to whatever else diddles their rage gland. The good news? Only 25% of the electorate is batshit insane, and the rest of us can -- and must -- contain them. It is the job of civilized people, after all.

Action: "free" trade, endangered species, Census data, and the Tongass Forest.

As you no doubt heard, our President floated the idea of getting back into the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal that he got us out of -- an action that would completely undo his one good work as a President. Of course he doesn't deserve sole credit for getting us out of the TPP, or even more than half the credit -- we deserve most of the credit for tanking the TPP, given that our activism against it killed it in the first place, and don't forget that we faced down unified and powerful support for the TPP from virtually all of our government and media elites. And the TPP remains just another "free" trade deal that would outsource our jobs and nullify our laws; for our President even to suggest re-entering it might well send a message to NAFTA renegotiators (who are working as we speak) that maybe they can go ahead and make that deal even worse. So Public Citizen helps you tell our leaders, one more time, to reject "free" trade deals that put corporations ahead of people.

Meanwhile, Wild Earth Guardians uses the occasion of Earth Day to remind us to tell our Congressfolk to keep their hands off the Endangered Species Act. Since the Endangered Species Act sure does seem to attract efforts to destroy it in the name of "reforming" it, "hands off the Endangered Species Act" does seem like the best thing to say to our Congressfolk right now. And these "reformers" aren't exactly interested in making the Endangered Species Act work more efficiently -- their real program is opening up more land to fossil fuel drillers, pesticide manufacturers, and loggers. That's right, it's all about the money. And it's not even about working families' money, but corporate CEO money, some of which (the part those CEOs don't use to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes) will presumably come back to these Congressfolk in the form of campaign donations. Addiction to big corporate money is a sickness, to be sure, but we don't have to tolerate it.

In other news, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep the Census Bureau from asking folks about their citizenship or their immigration status in 2020. It may sound common-sensical to you that the Census Bureau should ask folks whether they're really citizens or not, but let me explain why it actually isn't. First off, folks with cloudy immigration status already avoid the Census; the danger here is that folks whose immigration status is actually quite solid, but who have had trouble cutting through bureaucratic red tape in the past, will avoid the Census. Second, the Census doesn't just count people -- the Census also helps determine the size of Congressional districts, as well as our federal government distributes funding, which means less representation and less money for districts with immigrant populations. In short, the Census citizenship question is actually a backdoor way to deny government services to folks of color -- services they're paying for with their taxes even if they're not citizens! -- and why should we put up with that?

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject road building and logging in the Tongass National Forest. You know, it strikes me as a conservative position to argue that we should keep 1,000-year-old trees around, because they teach us a lot about history and science. Certainly a conservative wouldn't say it's better to cut them down and make them into things that don't last nearly as long, right? But today's "conservatives" seem to think that anything that makes some executive money is an unqualified moral good. And some of them think that mastering the natural world in this manner is itself an unqualified moral good, though that philosophy does sound almost exactly like a conservative stereotype of a liberal philosophy. But civilized people of either political persuasion always concern themselves with teaching our children about what lasts and what fades away -- and civilized people teach Congress about that, too.

Action: war-making powers, torture-supporting nominees, the quality of mercy, and the "balanced budget amendment."

Another day, another "bipartisan" attempt to find that elusive "balance" between following our Constitution's war-making procedure and letting the President bomb whomever he likes. S.J.Res. 59 would authorize our President to use military force against "the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and designated associated forces," but not just them, not really -- also against anyone else the President designates as "associated forces." Congress would get to reject such designations, but they'd have to do so within 60 days -- can you say "run out the clock," boys and girls? -- and they'd functionally have to reject new inclusions by two-thirds, so they can override the expected Presidential veto. No, terrorists are not "existential threats" -- they don't hurt us anywhere near as much as we hurt ourselves fearing them. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject this attempt to give the President more unconstitutional war-making powers.

Meanwhile, you didn't think I'd forgotten about the nominations of Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State and Gina Haspel to be CIA Director, did you? Word on the street (as of this writing) is that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will not report Mr. Pompeo out favorably -- the Committee has an 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats, with all Democrats and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) reportedly opposed -- but the full Senate might well vote on, and confirm, him anyway. And if Mr. Pompeo ascends to State, Ms. Haspel will be up for CIA Director; both individuals, as has been well-reported, support torture and generally frown upon privacy and human rights issues, and like other recent Administration hires including Zombie John Bolton, Mr. Pompeo seems anxious to start a war somewhere -- in Iran, he hopes, where he's in line with Administration dogma against the Iran nuclear deal, even though it's working. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to reject the Pompeo and Haspel nominations.

In other news, the family of one David Diaz has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell California Gov. Jerry Brown to free Mr. Diaz, given the increasing uncertainty surrounding his conviction in a 1997 shooting. The victim of that shooting says Mr. Diaz didn't do it, and no less than three witnesses now say police pressured them into identifying Mr. Diaz as the shooter. Sounds like reasonable doubt to me! If you still think Mr. Diaz should serve out his sentence because "he was 19 and Hispanic so he must've been guilty of something," please do two things: 1) slap yourself and 2) slap yourself again. Maybe a third time, if that's what it takes. Our Founders quite correctly oriented our laws so that the burden of proof rests with the accuser, not the accused, and folks who squeal about law and order all the time when confronted with this fact may want to stop bragging about how much they love our Constitution.

Finally, the House passed its nefarious "balanced budget amendment" last week -- though not by a two-thirds margin, which is what you need to amend our Constitution. So why is the Senate taking it up this week? To be jerks, of course, because if our Senators can do one thing well, it's be jerks. No, our government does not need to "balance its budget like we do," because a) we don't and b) the rest of the world actually has a lot of faith in the credit of the most powerful country on the planet. And a "balanced budget amendment" will result in what, class? Cuts to Medicare and Social Security, that's what. And do we deserve that, after having worked for them and fought for them and paid into them all our lives? No, we do not. Maybe Congress could balance the federal budget better if they stopped giving welfare handouts to the rich and to corporations! Anyway, CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the "balanced budget amendment."

Around the table: why Russiagate still comforts liberals, and other lessons.

Glenn Greenwald discusses with Daniel Denvir the "comforting answers" Russiagate "offers to despondent liberals." Long story short: "the Trump victory was a traumatizing and disorienting event for most people," leading folks to "crave an explanation that makes sense and that lets you feel like the world is safe and understandable again." Key reminder: the Russian troll effort was "primitive and pales in comparison to the amount of money spent on messaging by political campaigns, let alone US corporations and lobbyists." And regardless of who goes to jail over Russiagate, I still think the Democrat play-not-to-lose mentality and Republican vote suppression had more to do with the result than Russia could ever hope to have done.

Say, did you hear about that time the National Restaurant Association hired Frank Luntz's group to poll Americans about raising the minimum wage, which of course the "other NRA" opposes -- and found over 70% of Americans perfectly happy to pay restaurant workers more even if it meant higher prices? No? That's likely because the big restaurant lobby, as you might expect, isn't happy with the findings, even though it hired The Father of The Death Tax to get those findings. I am a little appalled that 29% of Americans opposed a minimum wage hike "even if the average food service employee can't make ends meet," until I remember that 25% of the electorate is batshit insane.

Jim Naureckas at FAIRNew York Times hack advising Democrats to be more like "liberals" and less like "progressives." Apparently "liberals" know better than to "eradicate" economic problems like the income gap -- apparently they'd be content with handing out welfare checks, rather than, you know, minimum wage hikes and job-creating taxes on the rich -- and "progressivism" is somehow "intrinsically opposed to conservation," which is as ridiculous as saying conservatism is intrinsically opposed to progress. Anyway, I've never called myself a "progressive," because it's long been the Democrat way of running away from the word "liberal," but articles like the Times's give liberals like me a bad name.

Another week, another Congressional special election in a deep-red district that's somehow a tossup in at least one poll, and we learn that the Republican nominee for Arizona's 8th, current state Senator Debbie Lesko, has "routinely" introduced bills that are little more than ALEC model bills with a few words changed. It'd be nice if her dependence on/work for ALEC scuttled her election bid, but certainly the news has arrived too late (the election's tomorrow), and besides, not everyone knows what the American Legislative Exchange Council is, or how nefarious their works have been over the decades.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted" file: Mitt Romney doesn't even get a majority of votes at the Utah Republican Convention to pick a U.S. Senate nominee (among others) for 2018, and will face a primary against a state Rep who got more votes. Mr. Romney thinks Utahns didn't care for him running at the convention and trying to get enough signatures to appear on the primary ballot anyway, and maybe he's right -- or maybe good Utahns, like everyone else, hate those whom they perceive as "Establishment" politicians.

Finally, in the wake of our newest Supreme Court Justice casting the deciding vote against a part of immigration law allowing detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants who have committed "violent" crimes, our President now wonders aloud if Justice Gorsuch is conservative enough. All together now: one counterexample does not destroy a trend. Also, too, why should a President expect Justices to toe his line? And why should we enable that sort of thinking? That's not what our Founders wanted, was it?

Action: pollution, internet freedom, and overtime pay.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Sierra Club helps you tell your state legislators to oppose a slew of pro-pollution bills -- HB 209, HB 1237, HB 1959, HB 1960, and HB 1792. These bills would, generally, make it harder to issue or enforce clean air and clean water regulations, and thus easier for fossil fuel executives to redistribute income upward to themselves. You can look up all these bills if you like, but I'll just say this: HB 209 is a real peach of a bill, one that would mandate that two regulations go down for every new one that comes up -- after all, it's not like regulations fulfill specific legal obligations or anything! -- and would establish, get this, an Office of the Repealer. Just imagine a man in a cape and tights going around yelling I AM THE REPEALER! and explaining to little Johnny that his tap water catching fire is the price of progress. Is that something legislators could take to the Pearly Gates, let alone their constituents?

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats still can't find a 51st vote for S.J.Res. 52, the resolution of disapproval that would overturn the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, and I think I know why: Republican John Kennedy of Louisiana, who's been doing a Hamlet act about supporting S.J.Res. 52, has signed on to a sham of a net neutrality bill sponsored by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who has fought internet freedom her whole damn career. Their bill would ban blocking and throttling websites, but doesn't address the issue of "paid prioritization," which would let ISPs allow some websites (from big media corporations that can pay out the nose for it!) to load faster on your computer than others, and "paid prioritization," as you might imagine, would stamp out small businesses trying to get heard on the internet. So don't believe the hype, and let Common Cause help you tell your Congressfolk that only S.J.Res. 52 will bring back our internet freedom.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunties to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4505/S. 2177, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The Restoring Overtime Pay Act would essentially restore the Department of Labor's Overtime Pay rule mandating that folks who make less than $48,000 annually must be paid time-and-a-half when they work overtime. And the bill would render moot the dispute over Labor's apparent overreach in crafting the rule, by essentially making the $48,000 limit an exemption to the white-collar overtime exemption. So what's left for right-wingers to squeal about? That overtime pay rules "kill jobs"? Strong overtime pay rules create jobs, by forcing corporations to hire more people instead of overworking the ones they've got. And it's really right-wingers' Personal Lord and Savior the Corporate CEO who kills jobs in America. So, again, don't believe the hype.

Around the table: tabulating bad arguments and their even worse consequences, plus some felons on parole get good news.

Federal prosecutors aim to criminalize many of the J20 protestors still up on felony rioting charges by citing their union membership -- specifically, their membership in International Workers of the World (a.k.a. the "Wobblies"). This is how desperate our government's case against J20 protestors has become -- invoking century-old whipping boys in order to scare up convictions. Hearing liberals constantly smeared as "Communists" seems almost modern by comparison, almost like that's the whole idea.

Adam Johnson at FAIR tabulates 26 "liberal" media editorials on the President's Syria strikes and finds, guess what, zero opposed. There's plenty of reason to oppose the Syria strikes, among them that Congress didn't authorize them as the Constitution mandates, and usually when a baseball player goes 0-for-26 he gets a couple of days off. What a shame that the "liberal" media pundits who constantly demand we waste more blood and treasure on stupid war-making never grab some deep pine.

Jeff Bryant at the Our Future blog tells us "Why Teacher Uprisings May Move to Blue States, Too.". Short answer: because the blue states deserve it, too, being as they've been full of corporate Democrats embracing austerity policies and pushing "school choice" as a way to funnel taxpayer money away from functioning public schools and into the coffers of cronies. The good news? Change only comes from the people, and it sure looks like that change is coming.

Get a load of all the high-level Republicans, including "straight talker" Ron Johnson, saying it's "too early" to talk about supporting the President's re-election effort in 2020! Of course the President filed to run in 2020 literally the day he took office in 2017, but this wishy-washy act from Congressional Republicans sure did work pretty well for them in 2016, so I can see why they're doing it. It might not work as well in the future, though, because The Man Who Couldn't Possibly Beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 has now been President for a year and a quarter, and that trail of slime he's left everywhere he's gone is a little harder to step over now.

Finally, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announces plans to restore voting rights to felons on parole -- by pardoning mass numbers of them. I couldn't care less that he's doing it because he fears he's going to lose his next gubernatorial primary to Cynthia Nixon, because it's the right thing to do -- felons' voting rights should never have been taken away in the first place. Naturally state Republicans call it an "outrageous power grab," as if their refusal to restore voting rights to felons is somehow not an outrageous power grab. All together now: waaaaaaaah!

Action: financial predation, compassionate release, and food safety.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has, apparently, not taken even one enforcement action against banks or debt collectors or credit card corporations over the last four months, and now it's soliciting public comments on a proposal to get rid of the "civil investigative demand" tool for its investigations, hoping that since you're not a lawyer, you won't say anything about it. But even if you're not a lawyer, you can look at the law describing the tool and see that its authors obviously built in safeguards to prevent governmental abuse. I must conclude, then, that the corporations who'll whine the most about this see any regulation of their activities as "abuse." Don't let the whiners win: Public Citizen helps you tell the CFPB to fulfill its legally-mandated duty to protect consumers from financial predators by preserving the civil investigative demand tool.

Meanwhile, S. 2471, the Granting Release And Compassion Effectively Act (or GRACE Act), would, as its title suggests, make it easier for criminals who are terminally ill to get a compassionate early release -- largely by requiring prisons to do better in notifying terminally prisoners of their options, and allowing prison staff and a prisoner's family members to help filing release requests -- and also make it easier for families to visit their terminally ill relatives while they're still in prison. We should interpret none of this as "being weak on law and order," since our civilization does (and should) value the quality of mercy. And the GRACE Act doesn't even ask all that much of us! I mean, Hollywood dark comedies aside, we don't presume that folks who can barely stand up for any length of time will go out and rob banks, do we? Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support merciful treatment of terminally ill prisoners by passing the GRACE Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our USDA to abandon its efforts to let pork processing corporations control far more of the pork inspection process, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Our USDA has already tried this with chicken earlier this year, but our activism against their attempts caused them to fail; perhaps they're figuring that fewer people eat pork than chicken and thus won't care as much. But folks do eat bacon, sausage, pulled pork, scrapple, and the like, so I suspect our USDA will find that it's calculated incorrectly. Speeding up processing lines and letting pork processing corporations do their own inspections won't just result in bad meat and sicker people -- in a nation where every incident of food poisoning in America seems to find its way to the news, I feel compelled to state again -- but it'll also result in more workplace injuries and more miserable workers. All that so pork processing executives can make more money! Does that sound like America to you?

Around the table: more thoughts about hubris and greed.

'Tis the season for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's "10 Things You Should Know on Tax Day." Roll call! American taxes are actually fairly low, and everyone pays them! The Republican tax "reform" gives most of its cuts to the wealthy! Tax cuts for the rich and corporations don't create jobs! The number of folks who pay the Estate Tax is now absurdly low! Plus charts.

Pursuant to the point that tax cuts for the rich and for corporations don't actually create jobs, Sam Pizzigati relates the story of Toys "R" Us's success during the New Deal era and its recent bankruptcy at the height of the let's-not-tax-corporations era. Once the highest tax bracket dropped to around 28 percent, "(b)ehaving entrepreneurially in the classic sense -- identifying an unmet consumer need, meeting that need with style and panache -- would now not be enough for many of America’s wealthiest. Patiently building up a business could eat up too much time. Behaving ruthlessly could pile up the millions quite a bit quicker." And so it went for Toys "R" Us, which squeezed advertisers, manufacturers, and workers, made its CEO very, very rich, and fell prey to private equity vultures.

Dean Baker reminds us that the relatively poor performance of Harvard's endowment over the last 10 years proves that "Hedge Fund Managers Get Rich Even When They Mess Up." Add that to the relatively poor performance of certain state pension funds who have apparently been bamboozled into thinking hedge fund managers know what they're doing! If they're not handing work to hedge fund managers out of sheer corruption, of course. Tha Bush Mobb taught us, I hope, to consider the possibility that what looks like incompetence might just be malice.

Alleged "moderate" Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) says he'll resign his seat in the coming weeks, rather than at the end of his term. And you know what that means: another special election in Pennsylvania! And the last one went so well for Republicans! Voters will fill the 15th district seat (much of which will go into the new 7th district, once the new district maps take effect with the general election later this year) as early as July -- or as late as November, though that latter option sure sounds like a recipe for mass confusion. Usually I'd say Republicans are better at exploiting chaos, but I don't know anymore. They've had a lot more practice lately, and seem to be worse at it.

Finally, CNBC catches Goldman Sachs analysts asking if "curing patients" using gene therapy is "a sustainable business model." They cite the example of Gilead Sciences's massive sales drop after developing a very good Hepatitis C treatment, one with a cure rate over 90%. More cures means less patients, you see! And there you have the very reason we are a sick, immoral, and decadent society: Our Glorious Elites don't say curing Hep C is something we ought to be doing because it's an unqualified good, like we do -- they wonder if it can make money. Thus gene therapy research might well give us eugenic manipulation, which only the rich would be able to afford, but not cures for diseases regular folks get, because only the former "makes money"! Are we actually in an episode of Black Mirror?

Action: protecting clean water, internet freedom, and the Grand Canyon.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency to enforce Clean Water act standards in Pennsylvania. Apparently the Keystone State ranks second out of 50 states for exceeding these pollution standards, and this is yet another thing you don't want to be shouting WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. Yet the EPA has, as you might expect, scaled back on its enforcement of the law, given that our Administration apparently only thinks "law and order" is for black folks and that all regulation keeping corporations from polluting is a "burden" on them. Corporations exceeded permitted pollution levels over 600 times during 2016 and 2017, with one Montgomery County prison exceeding its waste pollution limit 80 times. I guess they figure they'll just break the law and dare us to stop them. How like our President they are! But that doesn't mean we have to put up with it.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your city's Mayor to pledge only to do city business with internet service-providing corporations that honor net neutrality principles, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The FCC may have gutted net neutrality at the federal level, but that doesn't stop folks at the state and local levels from demanding that the Verizons and Comcasts of the world still treat all internet traffic the same, so that you can decide where you want to go on the internet, rather than letting corporations tell you where you can go. Of course, ISPs would only have to observe net neutrality principles when they do business with city governments if this effort is successful -- but if they just give up and decide it's too hard to distinguish every bit of network traffic to see exactly where it's going, we won't complain.

Finally, our Administration still has a jones to open up the Grand Canyon area to uranium mining. Why? To save mining jobs for The Forgotten Man, as our President would say? Ah, no -- uranium mining will first and foremost enrich mining CEOs, because our President only cares about other bosses. And a lot of folks who would get mining jobs probably would also prefer not to be sickened by uranium-tainted drinking water, and just so happens the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to good citizens in five American states, runs through the Grand Canyon. (Psst: that's how it became a Grand Canyon.) The Obama Administration imposed a 20-year moratorium on uranium mining in or near the Grand Canyon, but, you know, Obama did it, so it must now be undone. Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to reject uranium mining in the Grand Canyon.

Action: discrimination, fossil fuel funding, and campaign finance reform.

S. 2525, the so-called First Amendment Defense Act, would not "defend the First Amendment" so much as give various bigots the "right" to discriminate against people they fear will give them cooties. No, their position does not deserve more civility than that. The First Amendment prevents our government from putting you in jail for your speech and prevents our government from establishing a state religion, but refusing to serve people because they're gay isn't "free speech," it's discrimination, and when our laws say you can't refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple because "conscience," our government isn't "establishing a state religion," but preventing you from discriminating against people who also have rights. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to protect everyone's rights by rejecting the First Amendment Defense Act.

Meanwhile, U.S. Bank's CEO said last year -- in the wake of popular pressure following the Dakota Access protests -- that his corporation would stop financing gas and oil pipelines. But, possibly because we can't look at everything at once, U.S. Bank has pumped some $2 billion into these pipelines, including nearly $500 million into Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation behind Dakota Access. Just so happens, however, that U.S. Bank's annual shareholder meeting is later on this week, so Climate Truth helps you tell U.S. Bank to divest from oil and gas producers. You know what would help get us off oil and gas, besides big energy corporations throwing money into solar and wind? Big banks deciding to invest more in solar and wind! I mean, don't our best and brightest entrepreneurs always look to the future and plan ahead? We may have to pressure them a bit harder to get them to be those people.

Finally, H.R. 4077/S. 1959, the Honest Ads Act, would put online political ads under the same scrutiny the law already gives to print and broadcast ads, meaning voters could more easily find out who's funding them. We couldn't find out who's funding these ads as easily as we could if Congress had passed the DISCLOSE Act on any of the multitudinous opportunities they had to do that, but online political ads have escaped even the amount of scrutiny other political ads get, because the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 specifies only print, broadcast, and "satellite" communication. Recall that in 1971 ARPANET was in its infancy, and it'd be 20 years before the High Performance Computing and Communication Act (authored by one Sen. Albert Gore, Jr.) kick-started the internet. So Issue One helps you tell your Congressfolk to support campaign finance reform by passing the Honest Ads Act.

Around the table: from an apparent "free" trade reversal to the "retirement" of the House Speaker.

Remember when we could say "at least he got us out of that awful Trans-Pacific 'Partnership'"? Well, now our President is contemplating re-entering talks on the hated "free" trade deal. And by the looks of this article our "liberal" media is all set to enable him -- we don't even hear a substantive word about "free" trade opponents (a group which includes, like, everybody) until paragraph 18. The good news? A President Hillary Clinton would have already rejoined TPP by now, and thus sent her party on the road to massive losses in the House and Senate in November.

Chauncey DeVega at Salon reminds us how Republicans manage to keep their votaries and hurt them at the same time: by redirecting their rage at "individuals and groups they view as the Other." That's why the fever ain't breaking, Mr. Obama! The sad part about all of this is that we could just have easily said "Republicans leave the vast majority of their voters' bellies empty" but "fill their voters' hearts and minds with rage, hate and resentment" when Mr. Bush was President.

In a truly revolting development, Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R) guts HB 722 -- which would have created an independent commission to handle redistricting -- with an amendment that puts power back in the hands of politicians. This he did, apparently, without showing his amendment to anyone first -- which is what folks always do when they've got the superior argument! -- and naturally his rewrite also cuts the state Supreme Court out of the process entirely, because waaaaaaaah! Could the good citizens of Butler County please turn this monster out this year? A shrub could do a better job.

Ho hum, Republicans who helped write the recent tax "reform" bill just so happen to be getting, on average, over $300,000 from "pass-through" business tax cuts. If I were Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), I'd use that information to absolutely savage probable Republican opponent Rep. Jim Renacci, who's one of the 15. If I were Rep. Jacky Rosen, the probable Democratic nominee in this year's U.S. Senate race in Nevada, I'd use that information to savage incumbent Sen. Dean Heller. And they both might be game for that! I just hope the consultants don't get in their ear first.

Our President apparently plans to pardon former Bush Mobb crony Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the only person convicted of anything over the Valerie Plame scandal back in the day. But how much good is this really going to do for Republicans in the short term? Scooter Libby isn't some martyr whose framed visage hangs on every rage-filled voter's wall, and even if the President's votaries care about nothing except "pissing off the liberals" (which is quite possible!), I still don't see them doing victory laps around the voting booths on Election Day because of it.

Finally, on the occasion of U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan's announcement that he'll retire from the House at the end of this term, Sam Fullwood III at ThinkProgress examines Mr. Ryan's legacy of "Cruelty Toward the Poor." But I doubt we're seeing the "curtain come() down" on his career of evil, because now he can earn millions of dollars spewing the same filth by becoming a lobbyist, a think tank fellow, or (God forbid!) a cable news commentator. In other words, Mr. Ryan's reward for quitting will be a promotion and a significant pay hike. Nice work if you can get it!

Action: "free" trade, Medicaid, and Pebble Mine.

Word on the street is that NAFTA negotiators are working around the clock so they can get a "deal" done by June, so Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk, again, that "free" trade deals are supposed to work for us, not exclusively for big corporations. Word on the street is, also, that (contrary to what the President said last year) the Administration actually does want to get rid of "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanisms, which, if true, like, hallelujah, but naturally big corporate negotiators are trying to put a stop to that, and you have already seen how well our President stands up to other bosses. To the fools who say if ISDS is so bad how come we're not hearing about all the times it gets abused ha ha snort: you wouldn't say it's OK to leave a pile of gas-soaked rags in the middle of a boiler room because most days the building doesn't blow up, would you?

Meanwhile, closer to home, the reactionary Pennsylvania state Assembly is looking for ways to make it harder for poor people to get Medicaid when they need it, under the auspices of fighting fraud they can't prove is rampant and wouldn't take real steps to fight anyway. No, they'd rather say that everyone who needs Medicaid is a loser who just won't go find a job, when a) they're wrong and b) the whole point of programs like Medicaid is to support folks when times are hard and they can't find a job, which if right-wingers had their druthers would be, like, always, so averse are they to government intervention of any kind. It really is like they designed their whole philosophy to be a self-perpetuating rage machine. Hence Keystone Progress helps you tell your PA state legislator to stop making Medicaid recipients jump through flaming hoops on a unicycle before getting the help they need.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell First Quantum not to invest in the infamous Pebble Mine project, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Pebble Mine project does seem to be on its last legs, not just because everyone knows it'll pollute Alaska's Bristol Bay and thus also destroy the world's largest sockeye salmon industry, but because even Scott Pruitt's EPA has maintained Obama-era restrictions on mine waste disposal in Bristol Bay. And yet so often we have seen how hard it is to kill off bad ideas once and for all -- they keep popping up like a game of zombie whack-a-mole -- and we also know that an investment most people shun tends to bring in last-minute investors like, well, dung brings in flies. And a lot of these investors don't just take advantage of the buy-low-sell-high adage: they're looking to extract value from failure, like our banksters do. And why should we enable that?

Action: police training, and media consolidation.

H.R. 1870/S. 814, the Police Training and Independent Review Act, would require states to a) train police officers more thoroughly on "ethnic and racial bias, cultural diversity, and police interaction with the disabled, mentally ill, and new immigrants," and b) appoint independent prosecutors to investigate (and, if necessary, prosecute) all deaths-by-law-enforcement. States that fail to do these things would have certain federal assistance programs cut by 20%. I know some folks stopped reading as soon as their eyes hit the words "ethnic and racial bias," but really, this is not too much to ask of our police officers. Hence the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your Congressfolk to support better training and accountability for police officers by supporting the Police Training and Independent Review Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then Free Press still helps you do that. Sinclair would have the ability to reach 70 percent of Americans if the merger goes through, which is reason enough to reject it (though certainly that video of Sinclair anchors reciting the exact same script about "fake news" is a bad look). Want another reason? Here it is: Sinclair's Chair has apparently told the President, out loud, that "(w)e are here to deliver your message." I mean, gosh, even Fox is cagier than that! And the above-linked article also warns us of yet another reason to reject the merger, and thus curtail Sinclair's reach: Sinclair is still trying to get chips installed in new cellphones which "would enable authorities to broadcast direct to any American’s phone." Strangely, the FCC has resisted mandating that chip so far -- but just wait until President Even-Worse comes along.

Around the table: the President is not America for the 443rd time, and other musings.

Louisiana and Minnesota legislators introduce anti-protest bills in the wake of protests over pipeline expansions in those states. And the Louisiana bill actually goes further than model ALEC "critical infrastructure" legislation in that you don't actually have to set foot on a pipeline site to go to jail. Again: if you have to pass laws to stifle protests, you've lost the argument. Adults admit when they lose arguments. I guess that means these legislators aren't adults. You know, just like our President.

Jessica Rich at Wired reminds us that -- in the wake of the news that 87 million Americans, not 50 million, may have had their personal info on Facebook compromised by Cambridge Analytica -- that we need basic internet privacy laws in America. Recall that Congress repealed FCC broadband privacy regulations in 2017 and a campaign ad may present itself: the Facebook scandal proves we need stronger privacy laws -- but your Republican Congressperson voted to gut federal privacy laws! Think Democrats will run that? Nah; running ads like that might make people think you'll actually work for them.

Alvin Chang at Vox draws a straight line from tax-cuts-for-the-rich in Oklahoma to the Oklahoma teachers' strike, now almost two weeks old. Over the last 14 years, the state legislature has cut the top bracket from 6.65% to 5%, which wound up depriving Oklahoma of some $350 million in annual education spending, such that Oklahoma kids now only go to school four days a week. You recall, no doubt, that tax-cuts-for-the-rich has put Kansas's public schools in peril, too, though at least Kansas didn't respond to hard economic times by sponsoring an "Oilfield Prayer Day," as Oklahoma did.

Ed Henry at Fox News may have won numerous plaudits for his unexpectedly scorching interview with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, but the network's other programs either a) ignored the interview or b) gave it as much pro-Administration spin as possible. And this is exactly how one would do evil propaganda -- put up the occasional negative report to say "see, we're not so bad," and then bury that negative report as deeply as possible on programming that gets the most eyeballs. It's rather similar to how they've been using Shepard Smith for years. Hell, it's how they've been using their internet reporting for years.

Finally, hot on the heels of two FBI raids of the office of our President's personal lawyer, our President calls the FBI raid "an attack on our country in the truest sense." If he has a serious point to make about, say, the way the FBI got its warrants for the raid, you'll never hear it underneath all his TEH UNFAIRNEZZ!!!! and TEH WITCH HUNTZ!!!! And one more time: the President is not America. I locate the greatness of America in our people and our traditions, not our President. Perhaps Dr. Johnson should have said that conflating yourself with your country is the last refuge of a scoundrel.