Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: our Administration writes another Democrat attack ad for them! And other tales.

Did you know that 49 states have the ability to bill prisoners for their stay when they get out? And 46 states can put you back in jail for failing to pay your five-digit "debt" to the state. I put "debt" in quotation marks for a reason: you pay your actual debt to society by serving your sentence. And if you get saddled with a $50,000 bill for the cost of incarcerating you, you'll almost certainly never make enough to pay it back (most criminals can't find work as banksters, after all). You can't work it off in prison, either, and certainly not at 50 cents an hour. But wait, there's more! The problem is even worse in states that have privatized their prisons. What a racket!

Ho hum, our President said that tax "reform" would bring $5 trillion back into America -- from corporations that stashed it overseas and pretended it was money made in foreign countries -- but a mere $147 billion has come back. Nobody could have predicted that, given the choice between paying a low percentage on their "foreign" profits and no percentage, corporations would choose the latter! Well, except anyone who thought about it. You like how our politicians act like there's just no way to make corporations pay the taxes they owe? Even though they routinely kill bills that would do that? (And, in a peripherally-related note, Administration economic advisor Larry Kudlow tells the Economic Club of New York that it'll be time to go after Medicare and Social Security after the midterms -- you know, since tax "reform" blew another hole in the budget, not that Mr. Kudlow will say that. His statement is, of course, a Democrat ad that writes itself, and thus a Democrat ad we're not terribly likely to see.)

Michigan's reactionary state legislature passes a paid sick leave law which also makes the minimum wage the same for tipped workers as for everyone else -- but labor activists aren't celebrating. Both of these initiatives were going to go before the voters in November, but now that the legislature has passed them, they're not -- and the legislature can now change the law with a simple majority, instead of the three-quarters supermajority they'd need to overturn laws passed via ballot initiatives. You know how politicians talk about "polishing this turd" when they support bills they know aren't perfect? Well, this is kinda the opposite of that. You might even call it "turding" a bill.

Lisa Song and Al Shaw at ProPublica inform us that Hurricane Florence is very likely to destroy homes that have already collected federally-funded flood insurance payments. And naturally climate change is going to make all that much, much worse. Remember that time John Stossel all but admitted he built a house on the beach so he could collect flood insurance payments? Good times! Seriously, you can't tell people where to live, but it seems to me you can tell developers where to build.

Verizon ends its membership in the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) because of its association with the notorious David Horowitz. You may well be asking, as I did, "Stand Your Ground didn't do it, Voter ID didn't do it, climate change denialism didn't do it, but David Horowitz did?" Mr. Horowitz has, after all, been a sort of ambulance chaser of right-wing causes for decades. But, yeah, he says profoundly ugly crap that's unworthy of a civilized people. And anyway I'll take a hit to ALEC's pocketbook however I can get it.

Finally, Fareed Zakaria takes to the Washington Post an alleged "Threat to Democracy -- From the Left." How has this threat manifested itself? Well, two colleges disinvited right-wing speakers three years apart, the New Yorker changed its mind about having Steve Bannon on a panel last month, Roy Innis never got to debate William Shockley about racism in 1974 though he really really wanted to, and John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes said things about freedom of speech. Really, that's the whole argument. Here's a better, shorter one: the First Amendment only protects you from your government; it does not guarantee a public audience for your views, nor does it guarantee a reputation as a public intellectual. Even if one of our papers of record routinely prints your ramblings.

Action: concerning banksters, free speech, and product safety.

With the 10-year anniversary of the 2008 financial services armageddon having lately passed, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to break up the big banks via a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, which would make banks smaller by preventing them from indulging in the hifalutin investments that crashed our economy and will crash it again. As the first sentence suggests, we've already seen what happens when we don't break up the big banks -- and we're continuing to see what happens when we let banksters determine what our economy is going to look like, and it includes a lot of income redistribution upward from people who work to people who don't. But limiting the size of any institution that threatens to run roughshod over our freedoms is not some "radical" proposal, but one with a long history and precedent in America. You might even say a fundamental opposition to concentrated power created America.

Meanwhile, our Education Department would like to adopt a definition of "anti-Semitism" that would equate criticism of Israel or support of Palestine with anti-Semitism! All so folks can win civil rights cases against folks who do either one in an academic setting! Hey, that could be any of us, if we work in a school! Of course, Israel is not Judaism even if their far-right-wing government acts like they are, and when even the progenitor of the legal theory equating anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel says it can't be used in academic settings due to free speech issues, you have to wonder what our Education Department is really afraid of. Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell our Education Department's Office of Civil Rights not to equate pro-Palestinian activism or criticism of Israel with "anti-Semitism." Yikes, this from the Administration whose President said some Nazi wannabes are "very fine people."

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to ban poisonous paint strippers. A lot of paint strippers contain N-Methylpyrrolidone (or NMP) and methylene chloride, which cause respiratory problems and could lead to death; our EPA did propose a rule banning these paint strippers during the second Obama term, but you know what happened after that: a President openly hostile to regulations that protect good Americans happened. Walmart, Lowe's, and Home Depot have all lately banned these toxic products, but that ain't the boon it seems to be, as our EPA might use that as an excuse to declare that "the market has taken care of the problem," even though these three big corporations could all reverse their decisions tomorrow. And, ah, don't be the fool who retorts WHAT YOU THINK PAINT STRIPPERS SHOULD ONLY HAVE NICE CHEMICALS HA HA HA SNORT. Nobody should worry about dying because they use a paint stripper.

Action: concerning taxes, unconstitutional war-making, and product safety.

As long expected, Congressional Republicans have introduced H.R. 6760, known as the "Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act of 2018," but perhaps better known as "Tax Scam 2.0," the bill that would make permanent certain tax cuts Republicans passed late last year, and though Republicans spend a lot of time telling you these are really for, well, "families and small businesses," that's utter rubbish -- sure, the cut in the 25 percent bracket to 22 percent will stay, but that's not a whole lot of real money, whereas the 2.6 percentage point cut in the former 39.6 percent bracket is real money, and so is the Estate tax cut (which working folks like us never pay), and so is the pass-through business tax cut which mostly rich folks get. We might as well get the jump on this, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your House Rep to reject the work-hating, deficit-busting, working families-hurting "Tax Scam 2.0."

Meanwhile, several Congressfolk from both parties are still pushing for a War Powers Resolution vote on our participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you demand that your Congressfolk vote on the war on Yemen, as our Constitution and the War Powers Act mandate they do. Earlier this week, our Administration "certified," in testimony to Congress, that Saudi Arabia and the UAE "are undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure." Like bombing school buses? Like leaving Yemen teetering on the brink of famine? Defense Secretary Mattis has also said that American influence on Saudi Arabia and the UAE has saved civilian lives, which sure sounds like a rhetorical hostage crisis to me. You know what would save more civilian lives? If our government didn't feel like it had to go along with whatever Saudi Arabia wants, that's what. It's hard to say you have leverage over someone if you never actually use it.

Finally, hot on the heels of the news that some Playskool crayons you find in dollar stores or at online sellers like Amazon or eBay might have asbestos in them, Penn PIRG (which conducted the study) helps you tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to recall these and other products that might injure our children off our shelves. (As an aside, I sure do find the misspelling of "playschool" less funny as I get older.) Penn PIRG's findings also included markers with benzene and three-ring binders with phthalates, and while a Johns Hopkins toxicologist said the amount of asbestos found in the Playskool crayons isn't dangerous to "most" people, you have to wonder if "most" people includes children, and one of the Penn PIRG study's authors points out that if you get trace amounts of asbestos from several products (and you might!), you're still at risk for getting sick. So, yes, it seems like recalling the crayons would help save lives.

Around the table: featuring more of our President's lies, and more of the right's misdirections.

In ten brutal paragraphs, Jeffrey St. Clair lays out the horrible devastation in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria, and (of course) slams our President's absurd claims about how great his Administration handled it. Close to 5,000 dead, not "16," and our President never says who issues those rave reviews of his "performance" Jesus Mary and Joseph why is everything a damn performance anymore? Anyway, it really is well past time for Puerto Rican statehood -- I mean, given the number of times we've all had to tell people Puerto Rico is part of America, you know, maybe we should drive the point home.

Reed Richardson at FAIR reminds us that the whole "anonymous" kerfluffle just so happened to occur right around the time our Administration committed to further military involvement in Syria, which supports the hypothesis that our Administration, which loves drama, perpetrated the "anonymous" op-ed in the New York Times as a false flag operation. How do the libertarian-inflected folk who voted for our President because he promised a new-different-better foreign policy feel now, I wonder? Well, I don't wonder that much, because that was always a slim reed to hold onto.

Nicholas Powers at TruthOut reminds us that "Nike Uses Liberal Multiculturalism to Hide Abuse" -- specifically, abuse of the workers, in low pay and unsafe working conditions, who make Nike shoes. I've been obsessing lately over Hillary Clinton's suggestion during her campaign that we shouldn't break up the big banks because that won't solve racism or sexism or homophobia (gosh, I wonder why she lost!), and Mr. Powers's observations map pretty well onto that. (I do think he's overstating the effect 3D printing has on "making fully automated factories possible." 3D printers make knickknacks now, and get zero scrutiny from product safety regulators.)

Here's little-reported dung nugget from our President's August 30 Indiana rally: he slammed wind power, hitting on every last "problem" wind power supposedly has. In order: no, turbines don't kill that many birds; no, it's not the end of the world when the wind doesn't below because every form of energy has the occasional supply issue, and no "wind turbine syndrome" is not a thing, which anyone who's spent time in an actually noisy place already knows. He's taken all the crap-with-crap-sauce arguments fossil fuel PR hacks put out over the years and dumped them all in one paragraph! Our President really is everything wrong with our civilization in one person.

Finally, from the "I'm Pointing This Out So You'll Ignore It in the Future" file: long-time Republican donor Sean Klarman urges everyone to vote Democrat in the upcoming midterms, because "democracy is at stake," but you no doubt remember how many right-wingers urged you to vote for Mrs. Clinton in 2016 because democracy was at stake, so I hope you can forgive me for thinking this is a) just another attempt at corralling you into their game, instead of making them play our game, or b) ratfuckery from a big right-wing donor.

Around the table: R.I.P., *Village Voice*.

Uh oh: woman accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault while both were in high school, and Sen. Feinstein (D-CA), after some apparent dithering, refers the matter to the FBI. In a sane, healthy, and normal society, this allegation would finish his nomination; in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, I'm not even sure if this allegation gives some Democratic Senators (Heitkamp, Manchin, Donnelly, Jones) cover to vote against him. Of course, the right would no doubt prefer the story be about how Democrats handled it, and I bet our "liberal" media enables that narrative, since it's got drama and a penis in it. I'd be happy to be wrong about all of this, but I fear I'm not.

Speaking of sickness, immorality, and decadence, big pharma CEO says he had a "moral requirement" to jack up the price of a urinary infection drug by 600%. He also falls back on the old MUST! REWARD! SHAREHOLDERS! saw, and pretends that the choice we face as a civilization is either price-gouging or oblivion, which is what, class? A hostage situation, that's what -- don't prevent me from taking advantage of sick people, or the American economic system gets it! Gosh, how did businesses ever succeed in the days when you'd be ashamed to call price-gouging "moral"?

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says he could, theoretically, mind you, take on our President in an election and win, because he's "smarter." Of course he quickly backtracks, optimistically assessing that anyone other than a beltway insider was crying out for a Dimon 2020 campaign! Seriously, though, would Mr. Dimon be the first to crucify himself on his own pride against our President? No, he would not. (Also, too, he should check his I-earned-my-money routine -- even when comparing himself to the billionaire President who started out with a "small loan" of a million bucks from "Daddy" -- because all Jamie Dimon does, for real, is redistribute other folks' hard-earned wealth upward to himself.)

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), who's now what passes for a moderate Republican in the House, falls all over himself suggesting that staying in an orphanage might be better for kids than getting adopted by gay parents. Politicians ought to remember that high school kids are a) smart and b) not compromised by their employers, because they don't have them. I'm not sure this puts the kibosh on his re-election, though -- yes, New Jersey is one of the few states where being anti-gay is an electoral anchor around your neck, but Mr. Smith hasn't been as obvious about it as former Rep. Scott Garrett, one of the Republicans' few House losses of 2016. As persistent? Perhaps. But not as obvious.

I find the tale of how our President supposedly demanded that his architect remove braille signs from his building's elevators (in contravention of federal law) because "no blind people (were) going to live" there far more instructive than whatever came out in a book this week. If he was just screwing around with the architect, whom he also apparently called "weak," then he's a mean bastard, and if he actually demanded that someone else break the law on his behalf, then he's a coward. And his animus toward regulations "telling him what to do" (cf. all those health code violations at the "second White House," Mar-a-Lago) makes him the emotional equivalent of a 12-year-old boy.

Finally, on the occasion of the demise of the Village Voice after 53 years of greatness -- at the hands of yet another vulture capitalist who swore he'd revive it -- Art Forum treats us to remembrances of the Voice from some of its greatest writers, including Gary Indiana, Robert Christgau, J. Hoberman, and Greg Tate. Mr. Hoberman (I still remember his skeptical Schindler's List review!) calls the Voice "everything I loved about New York" and its writers "an indescribable mix of brilliant, talented, impossible people," and while I stopped loving New York long ago, I still love the work of at least two dozen of these impossible people (I hoped someone would mention Alisa Solomon, who used to be my go-to on gay rights). R.I.P., Voice.

Action: concerning data protection, corruption, and mergers.

Remember a year ago, when Equifax announced they'd been hacked, leaving the personal information of almost 150 Americans exposed? What do you suppose Congress has done about the matter since then? Go find an empty sheet of paper and hold it up, and you'll have your answer. Why, they even tried to cap class-action lawsuit awards to protect corporations like Equifax when they expose your data! But S. 2289, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would help protect good Americans from these little Equifax moments, by regulating credit corporations' cybersecurity, mandating annual inspections thereof, and instituting fines for non-compliance. I'd prefer jail time for these clowns instead of fines, but S. 2289 represents a better impulse after data breaches than "let's ensure no corporations get hurt!" Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans' data by supporting S. 2289.

Meanwhile, S. 3357, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, would engineer a wide swatch of reforms to our political system; some of these include keeping politicians from going into lobbying after they leave office, keeping lobbyists out of our government, getting more transparency out of Congress and federal contractors, and ensuring that regulations prioritize benefits to the people over benefits to corporations. S. 3357 would also make administrative law judges competitive civil service jobs, just like they used to be before our President reclassified them so he could pack immigration courts with his cronies, by. These and other reforms in S. 3357 will go some way toward ensuring that our elected officials don't spend all day ignoring the popular will and collecting perks from their big corporate donors. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support public integrity by passing S. 3357.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FCC to reject the proposed Sprint/T-Mobile merger, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Sprint and T-Mobile would like you to believe that they need to merge in order to better compete with AT&T and Verizon, but Jesus Mary and Joseph get bigger is not the solution to every problem. And that's not even to say these corporations haven't tried other things! But we know for certain that a bigger Sprint/T-Mobile corporation will not bequeath upon our civilization lower prices, more jobs, or better service. Why, gosh, I'm old enough to remember when economists said more competition resulted in lower prices, more jobs, and better service! I'm sure our corporate kingpins find all that "quaint," but they the only thing they're really good at is (everybody now) redistributing income upward from working people to themselves. And we deserve better than that.

Action: concerning methane emissions, drones, and endangered species.

Another day, another EPA regulatory proposal that would allow big gas drilling corporations to pollute more, specifically more methane. Our Administration has had an absolute hard-on for dumping methane emissions restrictions since the get-go, and Republicans surprisingly failed to pass a resolution of disapproval that would have nullified the EPA's methane emissions rules last year, so they're trying to undo them from inside the EPA now. But methane packs an even bigger climate change punch than coal emissions do, and letting gas drillers vent methane without making them clean it up also deprives America of a) usable fuel and b) royalties if gas drillers are drilling on public lands. Yes, whenever methane floats away on public lands, money that belongs to the American people floats away with it. So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to keep methane restrictions strong.

Meanwhile, our Congress is working on a Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) authorization bill, and aims to use that bill to give our government the ability to shoot down drones it considers a "threat." And they don't mean the drones that we use in our unconstitutional war-making activities, but the drones journalists use to get documentation of detention center abuses. One might reasonably respond that if our government didn't do bad things to immigrants and refugees in the first place, they wouldn't need to shoot down any drones recording those things! But that'll fall on deaf ears with this Administration, which is, like Tha Bush Mobb, ignorant and arrogant about it. And while a quarter of the electorate worships them for that, the rest of us can let the Electronic Frontier Foundation help us tell our Congressfolk to reject any FAA authorization bill that allows our government to shoot down drones whenever it pleases.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Fish and Wildlife Service (or FWS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (or NMFS) to reject their proposals to base endangered species decisions more on economics and less on science and common sense, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. Don't be one of those folks who constantly says how's anyone supposed to make money? every time we try to protect endangered species, because that's actually evidence of weakness -- weakness of mind, in the inability to conceive of how business and nature could coexist, and weakness of spirit, in the unwillingness to make things work for anyone other than bosses. I mean, this is America, dammit, the can-do country of world history, and if we elevate mammon to primacy in all our decisions, we will destroy that can-do spirit, and we will deserve oblivion. But those of us with that can-do spirit will continue to fight.

Action: concerning conservation, marijuana, and self-driving cars.

Congress still hasn't reauthorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, though it'll expire at the end of this month, and though it has worked to reclaim American lands for decades now. And why not? Because they abhor hard work? Because dedicating oil and gas drilling fees toward buying up and reclaiming lands like the Appalachian Trail is TEH EXTREMIZTZ ENVIRONMENTALISTZ!!!!!? Because it's about conserving the past so the future can enjoy it and today's politicians only care about the present? Because a program that doesn't actually cost taxpayers anything must be a program that runs well and therefore must be destroyed? Whatever the reason, the Wilderness Society helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund with a quickness. And if they start talking about the LWCF needing "reform," you can remind them that when they say "reform" they usually mean "deform." There's no reason they shouldn't know we're on to them.

Meanwhile, our Administration has convened a Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee, with the apparent purpose of bamboozling the public not to support better marijuana policy, as most of us do. You'd think they'd have better things to do with their time, but let's one-up this "policy coordination committee" and let Drug Policy Alliance help us tell our Congressfolk to pass pending legislation which would improve our federal policy toward marijuana. The bills you'd support are the Marijuana Justice Act (H.R.4815/S.1689), which would remove marijuana from Schedule I and help communities ravaged by the "war on drugs," and the STATES Act (H.R.6043/S.3032), which would let states that have legalized the drug operate without federal interference. Why, even our President endorsed the STATES Act earlier this year! Of course, that was then, and for our President, tomorrow is always another country.

Finally, Congress is still itching to pass legislation that would actually allow corporations to put self-driving cars on the road without first determining if they're safe. This is, as you know, a matter of some debate, since self-driving cars have killed people on two occasions this year, and you and I still can't get one! But S. 1885, the AV START Act, would not only let self-driving car-manufacturing corporations glide past federal safety standards, it would prevent states from banning self-driving cars. I remember asking why folks are so excited about self-driving cars, but of course I know the real reason: putting these monstrosities out on the road will make someone a lot of unearned money. Indeed, it often seems like that's the only reason corporations do anything in America. Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from unsafe products by rejecting S. 1885.

Around the table: what we must do when the next financial crisis hits the fan, and other lessons.

Thomas Hanna at In These Times reminds us that the next time the banksters collapse the economy, we'll need to have a better response than "save the banks" -- like "require a public ownership stake, with full voting rights, in any financial institution that has to be bailed out due to its own fraudulent or speculative activities." I'd just say "nationalize the banks," and anyone who responds by calling that a BIG GUMMINT TAKEOVURZ!!!! ought to take a good look around and see what all that "freedom" for banksters has done for us. And public banks now make up about a fifth of the banks in Old Europe, while the Bank of North Dakota made sure that state didn't go in the tank after the oil and gas bubble burst there (oh, and North Dakota weathered the 2008 economic armageddon pretty well, too).

Chinese government bans one of its many non-state-sanctioned Protestant churches, for, you know, refusing to allow the government to install closed-circuit cameras within. The Zion church is one of China's many "black market" churches -- or, as we'd call them in America, churches. Memo to right-wingers still gnashing teeth over transgender folks in their bathrooms: this is what government oppression of religious freedom actually looks like. Then again, the lesson may be lost on them, since this tale also has actual Communists in it, rather than the "Communists" in America whose main crime is "not being a cruel and heartless Republican."

Surprise, surprise, North Korea still seems to be going to some trouble to conceal its nuclear weapons program. Also, North Korea doesn't appear to have gotten rid of any of its nukes, and appears to have made new ones. But what happened to we don't have to worry about it anymore? We must remember that all of our President's pronouncements have an expiration date, and that expiration date is generally "just after now."

Ho hum, Dept. of Treasury Inspector General finds that the outsourcing of IRS functions to private corporations is going very badly. Not just because they've only collected one percent of the money these deadbeats owe, but also because the IRS isn't holding these corporations accountable, and because private corporations are contacting taxpayers over the phone, just like pretty much every identity thief (and precisely unlike the IRS). This is the third time we've tried to privatize IRS debt collection; when will we learn? When we stop electing politicians whose one dream is to destroy everything about government that works, that's when.

Finally, Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis spoke to the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2017, which has, over the years, hosted a flotsam of racists and other unjustifiably aggrieved speakers. Naturally Mr. DeSantis calls the Freedom Center's apparent obsession with multiculturalism and diversity straight-shooting and truth-telling. But why would anyone expect any differently from a teabagger who has so obviously (and successfully) courted our President's support? And I wish I could say associating with this crowd would hurt him in Florida, as it would in, say, New Jersey.

Action: three alerts about pollution.

Flint isn't the only city in Michigan still suffering with poisoned water: now Detroit has lead and copper in its water at its public schools. And Detroit only began testing its public schools' water for lead this past year! Who knows how long its water has been tainted, or how many good Detroit kids got their brains permanently warped by lead? Hence Color of Change helps you tell Michigan's government to get the lead out of public school plumbing. Knowing Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a notorious right-winger who thinks corporations know everything and government knows nothing, he'll probably force Detroit to contract with Nestlé to get clean water or something, but the only way to really fix the problem is to replace the lead pipes out of public schools and then install filters to keep lead out. Why, that's the kind of infrastructure our President is supposedly all about! And it's about time our governments actually supported it, on their bosses, the people's, behalf.

Meanwhile, our Administration got its rocks off by shrinking the size of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, and now our Bureau of Land Management is opening up what used to be part of Bears Ears to uranium mining corporations, hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep uranium mining away from the Bears Ears area. Uranium mining not only pollutes nearby water tables, but leaves a lot of radioactive sludge everywhere it goes, and for what? So uranium mining CEOs can make even more money? So we can prop up a nuclear power industry that's never made money no matter how much corporate welfare we've thrown at it? So we can build nuclear weapons when we already have enough of those to destroy the world hundreds of times over? So we can stick it to the Obama Administration for letting Native American nations have some control over the Monument? None of this sounds very respectful of the traditions that sustain us as a civilization.

Finally, get your surprised face ready, as our Administration plans to delay implementation of the EPA's 2015 coal ash rule -- the one that would prevent coal ash, the waste from burning coal, from seeping into groundwater and thus putting good Americans at a higher risk of getting cancer -- so Environmental Action helps you tell the EPA to implement the damn rule already and start protecting people from this kind of pollution. Our Administration will be ready to respond that WE'RE PROTECTINGZ TEH COAL MINURZ!!!!!, but of course they're not -- not unless they're giving coal miners magic suits that protect them against carcinogens! No, they care only about other bosses, and not their real bosses, i.e., us. Our Administration has had several of its previous attempts to delay regulations struck down in court, but lawsuits take time to wind through courts, and in the meantime, people get hurt. If we act, we can stop that.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, war in Yemen, and drugs in our meat supply.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senator to reject the nomination of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court, you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' contact information and call them. I still think the best reason to deny his nomination is his zeal for expanding Executive power, but you may also want to note his opposition to net neutrality because it supposedly violates the First Amendment rights of ISP corporations to your Senator. Judge Kavanaugh would ensure that corporations have more rights than you, just as he'd insure that your President has more rights than you. And he's not a "nice guy," or jes' folks getting to the Supreme Court by dint of hard work and elbow grease -- he's a right-wing judicial activist, looking to ensure that we "little people" have as little say over our democracy as possible.

Meanwhile, Spain has cancelled a $10 million-plus arms sale to Saudi Arabia -- though not, apparently, a $2 billion warships deal -- which means that yet another nation has outclassed us in withholding weapons from the Saudi/UAE war against Yemen, a war which has left Yemen near famine. Hence, Win Without War helps you tell your U.S. Senators to help block our own planned arms sale to Saudi Arabia. After all, how can we guarantee it won't be used on kids coming back from summer camp? I know many folks will drink from the cup of cynicism and say war is just an evil game and there's no use demanding that war be "nicer." But that statement doesn't answer the question of why we're involved in it -- particularly when the Houthi rebels the Saudi/UAE coalition is targeting are actually some of the best al-Qaeda fighters on Earth. It also doesn't answer the question of why we're making war without a Constitutionally-mandated declaration of war from Congress. So folks: don't drink from the cup of cynicism. Cynicism doesn't nourish or sustain you.

Finally, Consumer Reports has found that trace amounts of very, very bad drugs have been making their way into our meat supply -- drugs like ketamine (used at raves and during animal surgeries), phenylbutazone (no longer approved for human use because, among other things, it suppresses white blood cell production), and chloramphenicol (a powerful antibiotic with powerful side effects). If your immediate answer to this news is well, meat has pretty much everything in it, well, you won't be so sanguine about it if it's your kid dying of aplastic anemia from chloramphenicol in his meat. And kudos to you if you recognized our agricultural system's addiction to using antibiotics in feed animals. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep these drugs out of our meat supply. They might have to hold our USDA accountable in order to do that. Again, don't drink from the cup of cynicism and assume that this Congress or this USDA will do nothing. Bad people want you to tie your hands behind your back; good people help you do the right thing.

Around the table: we need ourselves more than we need a "blue wave," part 234.

We start with a warning about treating politics like we treat team sports: Aaron Rupar at ThinkProgress calls our President "clueless" for demanding that Apple avoid Chinese tariffs and price hikes on its products by "mak(ing) (their) products here," but he winds up defending Apple for sending parts to China for assembly because "workers there are paid much less than they would be in the United States." A lot of professional liberals won't reckon with the destruction wrought by "free" trade because our President happens to be on the right side of the issue much of the time despite being a Republican, but those of us who fight for good ideas and good policy, instead of Democratic ideas or Democratic policy, don't have this problem. And Mr. Rupar also assumes that higher costs inexorably lead to higher prices, like corporations don't routinely use the specter of "higher prices" to resist any worker wage hike or any worker safety regulation.

Another day, another study demonstrating how the Republican tax "reform" actually fattens the wallets of CEOs, not workers. This study, from our Federal Reserve, concerned the tax amnesty in the recent tax "reform," where corporations got to pay a lower tax rate on income they "repatriated" from "overseas," and it finds that, much like the 2004 tax amnesty, corporations didn't use their unearned tax break to create jobs, but to (a man does get tired of writing this) buy back stock, which delivers unearned money to shareholders and concentrates corporate decision-making power in fewer hands. Also, too, more money for stock buybacks means less money for investment in making-stuff-selling-stuff-saving-money, though doing these three things (call me old-fashioned!) actually makes economies work. (By "work," I also kinda mean "not jumping from one bubble to the next.")

The incomparable Umair Haque reminds us that it's not the "prole" who becomes a fascist but the "frustrated bourgeoisie," "(t)he one whom capitalism promised to make a capitalist -- but only did it to sell him on capitalism." My first thought, honestly, was that this point maps quite well onto the notion that it ain't the poor Middle Easterners who commit terrorism, but the middle-class Middle Easterners who watch the poor suffer. A lot of Nazi wannabes would be upset to hear how much they're like the guys who flew planes into buildings on 9.11, but not all of them. That doesn't mean the folks who aren't upset at the comparison are somehow "not racist"; it just means they admire evil.

And now from the "Blue Wave Won't Change Nothing" file: Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in line to become Speaker again if Democrats retake the House, announces she'll reimpose the "pay-go" rule for House budgets. That would be the rule the Republicans constantly ignore when it doens't suit them. Again: Democrats never get any of benefit from playing the role of "the reasonable ones," because Republicans just act crazier, the rage-added eat it up, and the "liberal" media covers the rage-addled like they're the only people in America. And if a "pay as you go" rule seems like gospel to you, then honestly account for all the times you went into debt to get ahead. You know, like those times you bought a house or took on a car loan or a college loan.

The notorious Nestlé corporation has told the Australian government that its efforts to root various forms of slavery and sexual servitude out of corporate supply chains could raise prices for consumers. Which is what, class? A manufactured hostage crisis -- don't make my suppliers stop using child labor, or the low price of your Crunch bar gets it! Then again, perhaps they were emboldened by the Australian government's apparent refusal to impose financial penalties for modern slavery practices. Give big corporations an inch, and they'll take your past, present, and future.

Finally, Robert E Gutsche Jr at The Conversation reminds us that the latest Bob Woodward book about our Administration doesn't really tell us anything new. He's right to denounce our "liberal" media for caring about little other than salacious "scoops," but I wish his call for "journalism that joins the dots of bad language, misfires, and intentional wrongdoing to larger systems of power and to individuals who can be held accountable" was a bit more specific, criticism of salacious journalism being itself a species of salacious journalism if it doesn't offer more of a roadmap out.

Around the table: the moral of every story learned, at last!

Another day, another reminder that making a "blue wave" the be-all-end-all of your life is very shortsighted, to say the least: Matt Stoller at the Washington Post says "Democrats Can't Win Until They Recognize How Bad Obama's Financial Policies Were." No, really, as in Mr. Obama's response to the foreclosure crisis was nothing more and nothing less than "a wholesale attack on the American home (the main store of middle-class wealth) in favor of concentrated financial power." It goes on from there; by the time you get to the point where the Obama FTC goes after "such villains as music teachers and ice-skating instructors" rather than, you know, any of the dozen job-crushing monopolies you or I could name, you'll hopefully be reminded that you are the Great Person you've been waiting for, not some Democrat politician who'll sell you out in the name of "bipartisanship."

I don't know that Brett Kavanaugh committed perjury per se during all of his various confirmation hearings over the last decade-plus -- some of the arguments made at the link are stronger than others, and the strongest argument anyone will really care about (what, you think the average voter could give one rat's hind-quarter how much input he really had into William Pryor's nomination?) concerns his testimony about torture. But politicians never seem to be as offended by torture as the people are, so I doubt Democrats will make much of an effort there -- though it'd be easy for Democrats to paint Mr. Kavanaugh as a "coward" for trying to distance himself from unpopular policies when convenient.

And now, from Sam Levin at The Guardian, here's "The Dark Side of California's Ending Cash Bail." What is the downside to ending the unconstitutional practice of detaining folks in jail indefinitely before convicting them of a crime? Well, the law's writers decided they had to come up with some system to keep suspects in jail, purportedly out of concern for public safety, but they came up with "risk assessment" algorithms to predict who's a threat, and guess whom they're most likely to "predict" are a threat? Poor, black, and brown folks, that's whom, since they're the folks law enforcement will most likely arrest in the first place! Maybe in time we can polish this turd, but right now we've just given rageheads another tool to impose their biases on the rest of us.

Uh oh: Louisiana state police were apparently circulating a list of antifa members they got from a Nazi wannabe website. Oh, and it's not even a list of real antifa -- probably just folks Nazi wannabes don't like, which means you or I could be on it! That'd be a little ominous, of course, but it would also make me a little proud. Naturally the Louisiana police tried to block the list's release, saying that doing so could "compromise" an investigation and out a "Confidential Informant" (caps in original), because, as we know, there's just no way civilized people could protect actual confidential informants and pursue justice at the same time.

I know our President didn't really mean all protests should be illegal, just the ones that take place during hearings on his Supreme Court nominees hearings at our Capitol, but he said what he said, and anyway he's dead wrong: our government belongs to us, so we've got as much right to be at our Capitol as our Representatives do, and if they get all angry-dad on us, we have every right to say "are you effing kidding me?" and act like the bosses we are. Seriously, if protestors dog your every move, don't you wonder what you might have done wrong?

Finally, Michaela Haas at Yes! magazine shares with us "Seven Strategies to Turn Trauma Into Strength." You're always better off trying to turn the bad shit that happens to you into some sort of positive, and I can tell you from experience that meditation, self-compassion, gratitude, and you-need-a-mess-of-help-to-stand-alone (to name four of the seven strategies) are big helps in doing that. And yet I also feel compelled to caution you against using positivity against folks who seem to have more trouble overcoming their suffering than you'd expect. You know, the way right-wingers do to poor, black, and brown folks? It seems like "don't be like right-wingers" is the moral of every damn story I tell.

Action: concerning endangered species, mining pollution, and national forests.

The EDF Action says, in its latest email missive, that "(w)e are experiencing an unprecedented number of attacks on the Endangered Species Act," and they're right -- not only do we have Congressfolk proposing more bills that would hamstring the ESA, we have a President whose Administration seems determined to gut enforcement of the ESA from within. Luckily for us, the Endangered Species Act is actually very popular -- even three of four conservatives support the ESA, and the fervor of good Americans' support generally has increased over the years -- and our national emblem, the Bald Eagle, is one of the ESA's biggest success stories since its 1973 passage. Of course, we won't get to keep the ESA safe from "reforms" like mandating faster success or letting governors overrule the ESA unless we all speak out. Hence EDF Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempts to harm the Endangered Species Act.

Meanwhile, despite opposition from Alaska's Governor (the good Governor Walker!), a loss of investors, and the Pruitt EPA's own uncharacteristic refusal to allow production to proceed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is, as we speak, assessing Alaska's Bristol Bay for an open-pit copper and gold mine -- you know, like the Pebble Mine Project that's had so much trouble getting off the ground. It's had trouble getting off the ground for good reasons -- in addition to the reasons listed above, an open-pit mine would threaten wildlife, pour filth into the water, and just about destroy Alaska's vaunted sockeye salmon industry (and thus, you know, actually kill jobs). And some investors are sticking with the project, even though others have pulled out; you know what that means, right? It means we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against the Stirling Global Fund so that it pulls out of Pebble Mine, as Environmental Action helps you do.

Finally, sticking with our "Pristine Alaska" theme, Environmental Action also helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to keep Alaska's famous old-growth Tongass National Forest intact. Our Forest Service said last month it would evaluate whether the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which helps keep roads out of national forests, really applies to Tongass. Hmm, let's see: is the Tongass National Forest a national forest? I wanna be careful here; wouldn't want to get this wrong! (Looks at this paragraph four more times) Why, yes, the Tongass National Forest is, in fact, a national forest! Why do they need more roads in Tongass anyway? Because timber corporations want to cut more trees down, that's why -- even though some of these trees are a thousand years old. But which better helps us teach our children about what lasts and what fades away -- a thousand-year-old tree, or the office desk we make from it?

Action: concerning free speech and tax "reform."

H.R. 6054, the Unmasking Antifa Act, purports to be a bill preventing protestors from wearing disguises, but actually targets (as the bill's own title says!) the Antifa protestors who just so happen to oppose obnoxious racists who support our Administration. We could easily argue that bills targeting one set of protestors discriminate against those protestors -- just as we could have easily argued that bills "unmasking" Ku Klux Klan members do the same -- but you don't even need to go there to oppose this bill. If protestors want to disguise their identities, whether out of fear of being beaten up or out of simple cowardice, then the other good Americans watching them can decide for themselves how they feel about it; passing a bill attacking protestors who wear masks sure doesn't seem like trusting people, not government. Hence Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect free speech for everyone by rejecting H.R. 6054.

Meanwhile, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand answers from corporations over how they've spent their enormous tax cuts. You know, like how many of their employees got pay raises due to the tax "reform" bill (spoiler alert: very few), or how much money corporations are spending on stock buybacks versus wage hikes (spoiler alert: stock buyback money exceeds wage hike money by about a 37:1 ratio), or whether corporations gave their employees a pay raise anywhere near the $4,000 our President said would happen (spoiler alert: hahahahahaha). By asking them to account for this tax "reform," of course, you may well be inviting them to prevaricate about it, as Rep. Chauncey Gardiner Hultgren did last month, but at least make them make fools of themselves in public, that's what I say. I just wish they needed more prodding to do that.

Around the table: hard work and hard lessons about racism, betrayal, greed, activism, corruption, and weakness.

Here's some good advice from Briahna Gray at The Intercept: "Beware the Race Reductionist," i.e., the folks who say every policy proposal that doesn't directly attack racism first is either worthless or racist itself. Ms. Gray also devotes space to discussing "bad-faith" actors who can't reasonably attack programs like Medicare-for-All or "democratic socialism" (or fair trade, I'd add) unless they call them racist. The folks who actually think fighting racism is the be-all-end-all of activism (I was one once!) may hold us back, but they're still more our allies than the folks who claim that we shouldn't bother breaking up the big banks because that won't necessarily end racism.

Ho hum, even freaking Politico finds it easy to tabulate all the ways our President has injured worker safety regulations. Make no mistake, cutting mine safety inspections doesn't help the miners who have to go into less-safe mines keep their jobs -- it helps CEOs make more money. Counting on CEOs to hire more workers with whatever money they save from having to ensure their mines are safe, instead of keeping that money for themselves, is a fool's game. And counting on industry figures (let alone industry figures who have themselves been cited for safety violations!) to police their industries is also a fool's game. (Hate to pile on, but dig the National Pork Producers Council science and technology director who says that the effect of speeding up pork inspection lines on pork inspection workers is "really outside our area of expertise." And here you thought science and technology would have something to say about worker safety.)

I'm not sure it's good news that a Texas hospital slashed a patient's heart attack care bill from almost $109,000 down to a little over $330 after NPR ran stories about it. On one hand, I'm happy when our media shames corporations; on the other hand, I know our media doesn't cover everyone to whom this happens, and I'd certainly prefer our media do a little more shaming when health care bills go before legislatures, so we don't have this kind of BS in the first place. I mean, seriously, any politician trying to make it easier for hospitals to spring six-figure surprise bills for life-saving procedures deserves shame, right?

James Kilgore at TruthOut explains why this prison strike is getting more mainstream media coverage than the 2016 strike did. One reason: activists have kept working on issues like cash bail and immigration detention/deportation specifically and liberal economic and social issues generally. Another reason: activists have worked more closely with the prisoners themselves and not necessarily just on activism, and the movement has made some leadership, messaging, and tactical changes (not least the focus on boycotting commissaries, which allows prisoners to exercise some economic power). Of course, things no activist would plan (the Lee riot, prisoners valiantly fighting wildfires in California) also helped put the issues out front, but that always happens.

Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL)'s blind trust has somehow made investments into at least two corporations that have business before the state, and between these investments and the somehow-similar investments his wife made, the Scotts have cleared at least half a billion dollars. Even before you get to the part where both the trust fund and Mrs. Scott have invested in two dozen Cayman Islands-registered hedge funds, this all sounds like a tailor-made Bill Nelson ad. You know, if Bill Nelson's even awake!

Finally, about that massive document Brett Kavanaugh document dump Republicans orchestrated mere hours before hearings about his Supreme Court nomination were to begin: I hate to be a hardass, but Democratic Senators wouldn't be in this mess if they'd actually stop being such pusillanimous weaklings. They could start by winning elections with bold-but-popular proposals and then using their power to work for their bosses, the people, instead of counting on the inherent ugliness of Republicans to slide them into office and then letting their big donors do all their work for them. If they had worked for us all these years, Republicans would be in no position to kick sand in their faces now.

Action: concerning labor, bailouts, and genocide.

H.R. 6080/S. 3064, the Workers' Freedom to Negotiate Act, would amend the National Labor Relations Act to strengthen worker protections. The bill would (among many other things!) strike down "right-to-work" laws at the state level, keep taxpayer dollars away from corporations that violate worker safety laws, narrow the definition of "independent contractor" so corporations can't just willy-nilly reclassify their employees as such, and prevent corporations from using class action waivers as a condition of employment. That last item is important, since more than half of all employers now subject their non-union employees to these class action waivers, thus depriving them of their right to a day in court when these employers screw them over. ("More than half" should clue folks in that "just go get another job" isn't a good objection.) So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Workers' Freedom to Negotiate Act.

Meanwhile, our Energy Department still thinks bailing out the coal and nuclear industries is a good idea, even though coal is dying out and nuclear has never made money. I can already hear the right-wingers squeal BUTZ WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH COAL MINURZ!!!!! How many times must I tell these pimps! This bailout ain't about coal miners; it's about CEOs, as it always is with this Administration. The Energy Department's plan to subsidize "reliable" industries has met with plenty of resistance already, so now they're claiming that we need to do it for national security reasons. Remember Dr. Johnson saying that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel? Well, squealing "national security" is the modern last refuge of politicians who can't win arguments on the merits. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to push back against our Administration's fossil fuel bailout plan.

Finally, Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to push the U.N. to bring the perpetrators of the massacre of Rohingya Muslims to justice. The Burmese military started ethnic-cleansing the Rohingya a little over a year ago, burning down villages and killing thousands, while spurring almost a million more Rohingya to flee to other countries, where they now live in (as you'd expect) wretched refugee camps. Hence we ask our Congressfolk to pressure our U.N. Ambassador, Nikki Haley, to bring the Burmese military to justice; she did call for a worldwide arms embargo of Burma last year, so she may be sympathetic. I do wonder how reasonable-sounding folks will argue that we should leave Burma's military alone. Because without their military, they'd collapse? That military is the very reason Burma can't succeed as a nation. And that military deserves no lenient treatment after committing genocide.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court and the war on Yemen.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has begun to hold hearings on our President's Supreme Court nominee, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject Mr. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. You need not go on a lengthy rant (that'll keep other good citizens off the phones, anyway): you need only mention that Judge Kavanaugh has demonstrated, through his writings and his decisions, that he would empower the Executive branch far beyond what the Founders wanted. Our Founders, sick of George III as they were, wanted a relatively weak President, not a President with so much power that he can make wars all by himself and shield himself from prosecution for his wrongdoings. A Justice Kavanaugh would make our President -- this President! -- that powerful.

Meanwhile, Congress wouldn't vote last month to curb our involvement in the Saudi coalition's war on Yemen -- this, even after an airstrike aiming at a summer camp bus purportedly harboring Houthi rebels killed 40 children and 11 adults. Naturally, that airstrike used an American-made weapon -- in case you thought we limited our culpability in this catastrophe to logistics! -- and the Saudi/UAE coalition later stated that that taking out the bus in a populated area was a mistake, meaning they would have preferred to kill all those summer school kids in a more open area. If we'd had all this out in Congress, as the Constitution demands, we'd have far less of this crap on our conscience -- and far fewer foreign entanglements that turn bad ideas into "matters of national security." So Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop giving weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE so they can kill defenseless Yemeni.

Around the table: in which our Administration starts yet another long game against the American people.

U.S. State Department starts denying passports to Americans born to certain midwives who practiced in Texas's Rio Grande Valley during the second half of the 20th century, declaring that they can't verify those Americans' citizenship after said midwives admitted forging a handful of birth certificates. Didn't know being born poor and Hispanic just inside our borders was a crime, did you? Didn't know a midwife forging one or two birth certificates made thousands more birth certificates suspect enough to provoke criminal investigation, detainment, and even deportation? It's exactly as simple as this: if you disagree with our Administration, they want you gone -- unable to criticize them, unable to shame them, and certainly unable to vote them out of office. And this is only the beginning: the mostly black, brown, poor, and old folks born outside of hospitals at any time over the last 80 years are next.

So what happens when our Federal Trade Commission installs a Bureau of Consumer Protection Chief who used to represent corporations being investigated by the FTC, and Public Citizen files a Freedom of Information Act request to discover his conflicts of interest? The FTC pumps out almost 500 pages of documents and redacts nearly all of it. Because the documents don't relate to specific lawsuits, and also because trade secrets. Should I praise them for resisting the urge to declare BECAUSEZ TEH NASHUNUL SECURITEEZ!!!! No, I should not. I doubt our laws allow this sort of chicanery, so I suppose the FTC is just following the example of our President and his Cabinet, by daring you to stop what they're doing.

Ho hum, our Administration creates a special "Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee" dedicated to persuading the public to abandon its will to legalize pot. And this Committee told other Administration departments to highlight "the most significant data demonstrating negative trends," while apparently avoiding finding anything out about how often folks consume pot or whether legalized pot reduces other drug use. Recalling that our Attorney General has a zeal for criminalizing pot should also remind you that criminalizing pot is mostly a way of putting more black people in jail. (No, John Ehrlichmann spelled that out for us years ago.)

I'm not sure that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals actually said you have a First Amendment right to feed the homeless. Their ruling actually says that Food Not Bombs has a First Amendment right to feed the homeless during their community organizing events in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, since feeding the homeless, in this context, comprises "an act of political solidarity meant to convey the organization’s message." So it doesn't appropriately shame governments that would issue thousand-dollar permits to individuals who give food to the homeless -- although I suppose we could all go out in well-named and well-promoted groups to feed the homeless. It'd be a whole lot simpler if we'd just stop pretending that our only obligation in America is to ourselves.

Kudos to Jake Johnson at Common Dreams for noting that our President has declared a pay freeze for 2 million of our federal employees while at the same time proposing a capital gains tax cut that would benefit the super-rich and virtually no one else. It is odd, isn't it, how they always say "we can't just keep spending money we don't have" when talking about paying workers, and never about, say, building nukes we don't need or giving the rich more tax cuts or handing out more "research and development" corporate welfare? OK, maybe it's not odd, per se, once we accept the fact that we are ruled by vampires.

Finally, maybe we shouldn't rush to celebrate Rep. Beto O'Rourke's challenge to incumbent Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as an "Obama-like" campaign. Mr. O'Rourke has a gift for speaking well, but so did Barack Obama, and we all know how his Presidency went: he coddled Our Glorious Elites instead of giving them the bitter medicine they earned, he extolled bipartisanship while half of the partisans tried to burn everything down, and he helped prepare the ground for a new President who seems to hate all the good and love all the evil in our world. So if Robert Rubin and Larry Summers have already gotten to Beto O'Rourke, we could be in for another turn of the vicious Republican/weak Democrat wheel, and as I've said, we've got to break that wheel.

Around the table: why the Democrats will fumble away the Oklahoma gubernatorial race too, and other lessons.

As actual liberals win the Democratic gubernatorial primaries in Florida and Arizona, Matthew Chapman at AlterNet speculates that Democrats may pick up the Oklahoma gubernatorial mansion as well, given that Democrats nominated a fellow who's won a lot of state-wide races and Republicans just nominated a "train wreck." Remind you of anything? Democrats will fumble this one away, too -- maybe Drew Edmondson's primary opponent, former Oklahoma state Senator Connie Johnson, didn't do enough to stand out, but I remember thinking she was a pretty damn good candidate and I would have liked to see her win. Mr. Edmondson, I bet, loses 51-48. Yes, even though Mary Fallin turned out to be very unpopular once good Oklahomans saw that all her tax cuts would have consequences. But people want to vote for people, not against people.

CFPB's student loan ombudsman resigns from the agency, specifically citing the agency's direction away from protecting students from predatory lenders under Acting Director/Man Who Wears Glasses So People Don't Punch Him in the Face Mick Mulvaney. So is this what right-wingers mean when they say good people aren't motivated to stay in government? I kid, of course.

Another day, another report finding that while worker pay is stagnating or going down, executive pay is going way, way up. Which you already knew, but it's still good to have yet another set of data points about it. Also, too, CEO pay went way up in large part due to exercised stock options -- which was, of course, an entirely foreseeable effect of cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, as corporations used almost all of their tax break ($37 for every dollar they spent on worker pay!) on stock buybacks, which goosed up stock prices, which made cashing in those options far more attractive. Why, it's almost like that was the whole idea.

Upon hearing that our President thinks Google searches are completely biased against him, a number of quick responses leap to mind: waaaaaaaah!, whining is losing, maybe do something good for America for once and you'll get better news coverage! But if Democrats were clever (c'mon, let's pretend!), they'd be wondering out loud if maybe our President would like a sort of "fairness doctrine" applied to our media -- you know, like the Fairness Doctrine the FCC enforced on broadcast media until the late 1980s. And I bet our President would support that idea! At least, until someone in his braintrust reminds him that such a doctrine would also apply to Sinclair, Breitbart, Newsmax, the News Corporation, et al.

Finally, several Democrats ask Federal Trade Commission to investigate Verizon's admitted throttling of Santa Clara County firefighter data in the middle of a wildfire. Since Verizon has already admitted wrongdoing, an FTC investigation would have to be conducted by blind, deaf, and dumb infants to fail to find said wrongdoing -- but then this is today's FTC, and thus likely to declare the matter settled because of all of Verizon's apologies. Law and order is for us little people, after all, not big corporations.

Action: concerning corruption and antibiotic abuse.

Sen. Warren (D-MA) introduced S. 3357, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, last Tuesday, which means she got overshadowed by other news that day, amirite? But S. 3357 would (among so, so many other good things!) ban politicians who serve at the federal level from ever lobbying after they leave office, prevent these same politicians from owning individual stocks while they're serving the public, and change rulemaking procedures so that big corporations can't have more say about federal regulations than the rest of the public. Oh, and it'd also force the IRS (and not the candidates, why didn't we think of that before?) to release eight years of tax returns for Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates and two years for candidates for Congress, but that's just icing on the cake. So Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 3357, and thus help restore ethics, integrity, and real law and order to our government.

Meanwhile, the FDA has proposed restricting antibiotic use in animals -- but would still let factory farm corporations use antibiotics on healthy feed animals, which is the main reason we're facing antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Don't let factory farm PR hacks tell you the "real" problem is with overprescribing antibiotics on humans, not in a world where four out of every five antibiotics go to animals-not-people, and too often factory farms use antibiotics merely to make their animals meatier or help them endure their squalid surroundings. If, one day, we live in a world where the next cut could kill us, we're sure not going to sit around the campfire and say well, we might all be dead now, but at least we preserved profits for factory farm CEOs! or at least chicken was cheap for a while! So Penn PIRG helps you tell our FDA to ban using antibiotics on feed animals for any reason other than illness.

UPDATE. I misidentified Sen. Warren's bill (first paragraph above) as S. 3397; it's actually S. 3357. Error corrected above.

Action: concerning government spying and carcinogens in food.

Google still gathers location data from users even after they disable location tracking on their phones. And worse, Google says they do it so they can better target advertisements to you! It's like they think buying stuff is the only thing anyone should ever be doing. Of course, we know it's more than ad targeting, because location tracking has become a sort of crutch for law enforcement over the last few years, and law enforcement doesn't need to get your permission to get that info, only Google's. No use saying if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear, either, because our government may decide that some benign doing of yours today (checking out some non-mainstream news website, for example) is a terroristic threat tomorrow. And, really, does any government or corporation deserve to know where we all are at all times? Demand Progress helps you tell Google to stop spying on its users.

Meanwhile, it's been a bad month for Monsanto and their notorious glyphosate herbicide RoundUp -- a jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million to a school groundskeeper who developed cancer after using RoundUp, the California Supreme Court wouldn't hear a challenge to glyphosate's inclusion on that state's famous list of carcinogens, and the Environmental Working Group reported finding dangerously high levels of glyphosate in two-thirds of the oat-based children's food products it tested. Gosh, they might be having a tougher time of it than our President, and they don't have a big chunk of the population that'll run through a wall for them like our President does. So Just Label It helps you tell big food-processing corporations General Mills, Kellogg's, and Quaker to make their food products free of glyphosate. Because, really, no one (and certainly not our children) should worry about getting cancer from oatmeal or granola bars.

Action: concerning prison strikes and student loan debt.

As you may know, prisoners all over America are going on strike -- with sit-ins, work stoppages, boycotts of commissaries, and even hunger strikes -- to call attention to the various indignities we visit upon them. No, we should not mistreat our prisoners, regardless of what they've done at least not if we're going to call ourselves civilized people. And if we're going to be the greatest nation on Earth, we should be confident enough in ourselves to treat prisoners humanely, and not least because it's the best way to rehabilitate them. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to listen to, and implement, the demands of the prison strikers. Your Congressfolk will find a lot of these -- paying prisoners in prevailing wages and not dung pellets, for example -- to be very difficult to accept, and some may have public tantrums about it, since, you know, it's OK because our President does that. But you're bigger than they are, so don't let that cow you.

Meanwhile, our Department of Education has proposed rules that would actually hinder good Americans' ability to get loans forgiven after predatory colleges rip them off. Because for-profit colleges are more important than Americans, apparently! I'm old enough to remember when my parents would laugh whenever an ad came on TV for a for-profit college, for back then, for-profit colleges were virtually synonymous with thieves. What has changed in the intervening years? They've bought themselves a gaggle of politicians, that's what! You may well be saying to yourself, self, why bother leaving public comments with a Department of Education that's just going to ignore them? I don't blame you for asking! Here's the answer: because they may break laws in ignoring the popular will, and we can get them in court if they do. Hence Consumers Union helps you tell our Department of Education not to make it so much harder for students to get relief from predators.

Around the table: the need for net neutrality, put more starkly.

Now free from the horrible tether of net neutrality, Verizon throttles California firefighter data in the midst of that state's wildfire -- and then has the cojones to suggest that if Santa Clara County firefighters don't like it, they can switch to a data plan that costs twice as much! I admit I feel a little ashamed for arguing that you should support net neutrality because you support the freedom to go where you want on the internet, and not that you should support net neutrality so that corporations can't hinder firefighters' attempts to talk to each other in the middle of a fucking wildfire.

In case you were wondering how right-wing news hacks were dealing with all those Paul Manafort convictions and Michael Cohen guilty pleas from last week, well, they're dealing with it about as well as you can expect -- saying the convictions are for "non-crimes," they're evidence of a "witch hunt," that further charges are "fake news," that Mr. Cohen was "coerced" into implicating our President, and also too WHAT ABOUTZ TEH DEMON-CRATZ!!!!! Pimps gotta pimp, I guess. (As an aside, I don't really care that some Fox News reporters are apparently leaving out of disgust, since they really should have been disgusted with their employer many, many years ago.)

But the rot has also reached the "liberal" media! No, really, I'm not impressed that a CNN host pointed out on-air that a pro-Trump "analyst" also advises our President's 2020 re-election campaign and is thus contractually obligated not to say anything bad about our President, because a network with actual ethics would never have hired such an individual in the first place. And therefore we can't dismiss the possibility that CNN knew of Mr. Astorino's conflict, and decided outing him on the air would be "great" drama. If only we had an a la carte cable packaging law -- say, one that would force our cable provider to refund us at cost for the channels we wouldn't watch -- we would have a way of punishing channels that make a mockery of American journalism.

Homeless advocate reminds us that simple charity toward the homeless -- by, you know, giving them food -- is against the law in so many areas of our great land. The folks who whine about TEH EIGHTY ZILLYUNZ GUN LAWZ!!!!!! might want to attend all the laws on the books that actually prevent acts of charity, but sadly, I bet a lot of them don't want to see homeless people around, either. Would it be worth it to retort that they ought to work toward some non-awful homeless policy if they don't want to see them around? No, it probably would not be worth it -- hate is a lot easier than love.

D.C. district court judge strikes down most of three Presidential executive orders that supposedly aim to get "underperforming" employees out of our government more quickly, but actually just harass federal workers. I was about to say "don't a lot of these things violate whatever contracts these workers have with our government?" But it's almost beside the point to say so, since we only have a year or so before our Supreme Court gets its grubby mitts on this case and concocts some pretzel logic to justify our President's actions.

Finally, Randolph County (GA) elections board smacks down a proposal to close seven out of nine polling places in the county, after weeks of public agitation against the proposal. But, ah, WSB, there's a better word than "controversial" for a plan to suppress the vote of mostly rural and black folks. And that word is evil. And if we pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act, we can fight this kind of evil a lot better than we can now.

Action: concerning monopolies and conservation.

Freedom from Big Tech helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission to start breaking up big tech monopolies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Why? Because they have too much power! You remember Orkut, Tribe, MySpace, and Friendster? Now they're either gone or mere husks of their former selves, because Facebook dominates all. You remember search engines like Momma and Ask Jeeves? Well, Google stomps all over them, too. And Amazon didn't just muscle B. Dalton, Encore, and Waldenbooks out of strip malls all over America, they sentenced uncountable small businesses to oblivion. How many times must I tell these pimps! Small businesses are more accountable to the communities they serve than any big corporation, and they innovate more, too -- which is why big corporations constantly buy small businesses out. But the bigger they get, the more they impose their will upon us, and we have every right to demand that our government -- which works on our behalf, ideally! -- put a stop to that.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission to reject the proposed Sprint/T-Mobile merger. You know the reasons to reject it: mergers kill jobs, raise prices, give consumers fewer choices, and concentrate power in fewer hands; the fact that neither one of these corporations planning to merge is AT&T or Verizon doesn't change any of that. We have, incidentally, another reason to reject the merger: that it might cut off access to smaller carriers that use the bigger carriers' lines, since the resulting bigger corporation can more easily push around smaller carriers. For example, Consumer Cellular -- you've seen their ads; they give inexpensive phone plans to folks over 50, and they even offer flip phones! -- uses T-Mobile's lines; you think the behemoth resulting from a Sprint/T-Mobile merger will give Consumer a better deal? Maybe that sounds like a first-world problem -- until you can't afford phone service.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which has given us such historic outdoors landmarks as the Delaware Water Gap and the Appalachian Trail. LWCF funding expires in just a few weeks, and Congress probably hopes you don't realize the LWCF is there -- and certainly we can't count on our President suddenly reminding us it's there, since the LWCF is about preserving the past for future generations and I just named two things our President doesn't give one rat's hind quarter about. But the LWCF dedicates certain offshore gas and drilling fees toward the task of buying up and preserving historic lands, and when it last expired in 2015, Congress only extended it for three years, despite initially authorizing it for 25 and then renewing it for another 25. Yes, that's another data point suggesting Congress really has gotten a lot worse over time. But we made them reauthorize it before, and we can do it again -- if we act.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering why posting has been relatively light lately, I'm working on the second Penny Rants volume, which will cover the years 2013-2016. I'll put that out in mid-October, and then I'll get to work on the third Penny Rants volume, which will cover 2017 and 2018; that'll be out in mid-January. I'll do some live shows to celebrate those two releases; I'll share more details about those as I get them. But, you know, save the dates, such as they are -- and thank you for reading, and for being good citizens.)

Action: concerning corporate power, food safety, and pollution.

S. 3348, the Accountable Capitalism Act, would (among many other good things!) make big corporations get a federal charter that can be revoked if the corporation behaves badly, require two out of every five members of a corporate board of directors to be elected by that corporation's workers, and ban any political contributions if they're not approved by three-quarters of that corporation's shareholders. Thus no shareholder would ever have to ask, again, "they spent my money on Josh Freaking Mandel?" Of course, banksters and their enablers will protest that corporations only exist to serve shareholders, but as Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism points out, that's not actually a legal requirement -- and whatever happened to making corporations accountable to the people, and to our civilization? I think the Accountable Capitalism Act warrants a phone call to your Senators. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration to help prevent contaminants from ending up in child food products. Seriously, if we can't protect our children, what good are we? Consumer Reports has lately found high levels of "heavy metals" in snacks, baby cereals, packaged fruits, and other foods intended for children; one of those heavy metals is arsenic, which Consumer Reports also found in rice and apple juice back in 2014. The FDA did begin writing guidelines limiting arsenic not too long thereafter, but guess what happened in the meantime? A Republican openly and aggressively hostile to any sort of government regulation somehow parlayed his 46% showing in the popular vote into an Electoral College majority, and so limiting the amount of arsenic, cadmium, and lead kids ingest in their food may not be so much of a priority at the FDA anymore. Unless we all raise our voices at once, that is.

Finally, Sens. Donnelly (D-IN) and Crapo (R-ID) have offered an amendment to the next Health and Human Services Appropriations bill, and their amendment would fund HHS investigation into "cancer clusters," or communities where more folks get cancer. The chemical safety law they unfortunately named after the late Sen. Lautenberg (who proposed far, far better chemical safety legislation before his death) does, at least, mandate that our federal government investigate "cancer clusters," which sure do seem to pop up next to aggressive polluters -- but that mandate has, naturally, gone unfunded by Congress. The Donnelly-Crapo amendment would, at least, fund that effort, hence EDF Action helps you tell your Senators to approve the Donnelly-Crapo amendment that would get folks who have been given cancer by pollutants a fighting chance at justice. All we want is a fighting chance, after all.

(Yes, I've heard the news. So when's that terrorist attack coming?)

Action: concerning "free" trade, consent, and campaign finance disclosure.

As NAFTA renegotiation drags on, Sign for Good still helps you tell your Congressfolk that any NAFTA renegotiation (which they'll have to approve, after all!) must put people before corporations and protect our clean air and clean water. "Free" trade defenders claim the problems we diagnose with these trade deals are "theoretical." But our recent experience proves they're wrong! In 2015, the World Trade Organization ruled that our country-of-origin labeling laws violated at least two "free" trade deals -- and then Congress rushed to repeal those laws rather than face punitive tariffs. Why should we let "free" trade deals nullify our laws like that? And why should we tolerate the existence of "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanisms that let corporate investors nullify laws that would protect our clean air and clean water -- and then exact tribute for the "hardship" of having to follow them? Given the low character of our corporate elites, none of this is "theoretical."

Meanwhile, this Change.org petition helps you tell the Virginia state House to impeach state 12th Judicial Circuit Court Judge T.J. Hauler for allowing an 18-year-old man to serve no jail time despite being convicted for raping a 14-year-old girl. I have just described everything you need to know about that case -- the age of consent in Virginia is 18, and any kind of "carnal knowledge" with youths between the age of 13 and 15 is a felony in Virginia, which means this was rape the moment he knew how old she was. No, there is literally no imagining that "she secretly wanted it" or "she asked him to tie that belt around her neck" or even that she said yes at any point -- we have age of consent laws precisely so we can protect younger people against the older people who'd abuse them. Still, Judge Hauler gave the offender zero years in jail, and wouldn't you know it, Judge Hauler has a history of going light on sex offenders. But maybe not for much longer!

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6239/S. 3150, the DISCLOSE Act, then a consortium of good-government groups including Common Cause and Issue One still helps you do that. The DISCLOSE Act would, as its title suggests, force more campaign finance disclosure for political ads that target a candidate for office -- for example, it would force disclosure of campaign ads that target a candidate's character without explicitly also endorsing another candidate, and it would force corporations to run an "I approve this message" disclaimer the way candidates for office have to do. In this, the "Age of McConnell" -- that is to say, the age of virtually unrestricted campaign contributions leading to virtually boundless corruption -- most folks want to know who exactly is spending buku bucks trying to manipulate them. And even our Supreme Court, notorious for conflating money and speech, says that's not too much to ask.

Around the table: some real health care activism, surrounded by venal politicians.

Ho hum, Republicans cherry-pick job growth rates in six states in order to claim that their tax "reform" law is creating jobs. Of course they're doing differential calculus (measuring the growth in the growth of job creation!) and presenting it to you as arithmetic -- in a nation that must add 140,000 jobs monthly just to keep up with population growth, hearing that Nebraska has added a mere 7,000 more jobs over the first six months of 2018 than over the first six months of 2017 isn't that impressive, which is why Republicans said ZOMG THATZ 250 PERCENTAGEZ HIGHERZ!!!!! And Democrats could just as easily twitter to the effect that the tax "reform" law is slowing job creation by citing, "for example," the negative "job growth acceleration figures" in Idaho, Montana, Kentucky, Minnesota, and Nevada.

From the "Technology Can-So Connect People" file: Fran Quigley at TruthOut describes T1International, a group of actual grassroots activists and diabetes sufferers connecting with each other to protest the absurdly high cost of the life-saving drug insulin. No one can say for sure exactly how the price of insulin has gone up 1,000 percent over the last quarter century (cough evil cough), but if folks in relatively well-off America are actually risking death by rationing their insulin (and, er, dying by rationing their insulin), you can guess how it is for folks in the developing world. But please, right-wingers, tell us again how Big Gummint fouls everything up, how the "free" market always provides a solution, and how someone who uses spreadsheets to count her carbohydrates is completely to blame for all her problems.

Surprise, surprise, our Administration's uncivilized policy of separating families who cross our border is taxing our Justice Department's ability to do almost any other meaningful work. Meaning, among other things, that now is a pretty good time to smuggle drugs or beat your wife and kids. And all so our President can diddle the rage glands of his most devoted worshipers! But here's a lawsuit I'm pretty sure will succeed no matter which knuckle-dragging federal judge hears it: that our Administration's willful interpretation of federal law has resulted in our Justice Department abrogating its duties that our laws say they must discharge.

I'll admit I'm not that emotionally-invested in our Administration revoking former CIA Chief John Brennan's security clearance after Mr. Brennan slammed them -- like John Brennan was some sort of hero before he proved the Stopped Clock Rule against an Administration that stops all clocks! -- but I notice that our Administration's PR brain trust, such as it is, hopes to roll out more security clearance revocations at "optimum times" so they can serve as "a distraction during unfavorable news cycles." Meaning they could release them pretty much any time at all, then, right? For this clown car of an Administration, everything's a nail and creating some new drama is the only hammer.

Finally, Travis Lupick at Yes! magazine writes a wide-ranging article about depression and mental health called "The Surprising Links Between Your Mental Health and Everyone Else's." You may recognize the key takeaway -- that people are "communal creatures" now living in a world that "erodes communities and isolates people" -- from Johann Hari's writings about fighting drug addiction by giving drug addicts more stuff to do and more people to connect with, and you'll hear from Mr. Hari here (he's faced down some demons of his own), as well as Dr. Gabor Maté ("(j)ust about every mental affliction is actually an adaptive response that then becomes a source of problems later on"), a Black Lives Matter activist, the founder of the Trauma Center in Boston, and a community activist who saved himself from drug addiction only after finding a community of other recovering drug addicts.

Around the table: a dying mule, still kicking hard.

"What Happens When a Pipeline Runs Afoul of Government Rules?" asks ProPublica regarding an on-again-off-again West Virginia pipeline project. "Authorities Change the Rules." In letting pipeline construction continue before legally-mandated environmental reviews have been completed, state and federal regulators have repeatedly abrogated their duties over the last two years, until finally a three-judge panel from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals halted construction. Law and order: it's only for us little people.

Speaking of which, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh may have perjured himself by testifying to the Senate under oath 12 years ago that he was far less involved with Charles Pickering's 2002 judicial nomination than he really was. Yeah, I'd question the wisdom of going after him for this, too -- if I didn't hear so much BUT HE LIEDZ UNDER TEH OATHZ!!!!! about Mr. Clinton in the late 1990s. I guess perjury means more to right-wingers when there's a Democrat and a penis involved.

When I heard that Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-IL) defended his vote for the Republican tax "reform" by asking his constituents at a townhall whether they were better off now than they were "two or four years ago" and most of them said "no," my immediate response was "well, I guess he won't be holding townhalls anymore, either!" But then I clicked through, and, gosh, this Randy Hultgren sure sounds like he thought Chauncey Gardiner was a real person worth emulating! "We all benefit when the economy is growing" and "I see so many people who are working" and "families are seeing growth and opportunity" and "jobs are good for people" are not reasonable responses to "I'm not seeing a whole lot of tax cut in my paycheck." And he defends himself from the charge of cutting taxes for the rich just like the rest of them, by citing the "average" tax cut, when the average of a rich person's tax cut and your tax cut won't put more money in your bank account.

Randy "Iron Stache" Bryce wins Democratic nomination to contest Paul Ryan's House seat, and Republicans promptly run a radio ad accusing him of "spen(ding) his life breaking the law" because of his nine arrests from the '90s. Did you see "arrests" and immediately ask "what about convictions?" If so, good for you -- and if you noticed all those arrests occurred during his twenties, when most men do the majority of their carousing, good for you again. Seriously, though, "breaking the law"? That's grounds for a slander suit, right there. (There's some good news, though: all of those center-right Democrats who said Bernie Sanders cost Hillary Clinton the election are now castigating Mr. Bryce's primary opponent for "trying to lose the seat for the Democrats" by bringing up his arrests in the first place. I kid, of course.)

Finally, I'm going to link to this one time, and only so that you know to avoid it like the plague upon our civilization it is: Nate Silver says Democrats have almost a 75% chance of winning back the House. Seriously, has he not learned a fucking thing from the 2016 election, when he forecast a 70%-plus chance of Hillary Clinton winning the Presidency right up until Election Day? Sorry to deploy two cuss words in a single paragraph, but I need to impress upon you the importance of my point: don't look at any of this horserace shit, ever, because it induces you to treat our democracy like a spectator sport, rather than the living, breathing thing that belongs to you and to which you must tend -- and you must tend to it every day of the year, not just Election Day, because you know from experience that, absent our counsel, Democrats will interpret any mandate you give them as a mandate to suck up to Republicans. And I hate to pile on -- OK, I don't -- but your democracy belongs to you, not to the smartypantses who create "models" "predicting" "what will happen."

Action: concerning free speech, killer weed-killers, and corporate welfare.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Cambodia to release housing rights activist Tep Vanny from prison. Ms. Vanny is currently serving a 30-month sentence (of which she's already served two years) for "intentional violence with aggravating circumstances," which sounds better than what they ring activists up on in Saudi Arabia, I suppose, but that's nothing to brag about. The Cambodian government convicted her solely on written statements of purported witnesses, which, like, any government can do; you might more reasonably suspect that they're really convicting her of agitating against her government's ongoing evictions of over 20,000 good Cambodians from her community under its notorious Economic Land Concession scheme, which is, apparently, how the government gives land away to foreign corporations for "development." Untrammeled corporate power: it really is a menace everywhere on Earth. Luckily the world has folks like Ms. Vanny to fight it.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the news that a terminally-ill man who used Monsanto's signature weed-killer Roundup in his job as a school groundskeeper won a $289 million judgment against Monsanto after getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Penn PIRG helps you tell the EPA to ban Roundup. I'll bet the tort "reform" crowd is just aching to call this a frivolous lawsuit because of the massive award, but they'd have to explain how a 42-year-old man got terminal cancer after using Roundup at his job for just two years, and they'd also have to explain Monsanto knowing (per internal documents) that Roundup causes cancer for decades while insisting in public (and still insisting, no less!) that it doesn't. They'd be better off realizing that not putting more potentially carcinogenic chemicals in our food and water is actually a conservative impulse. You know, instead of insisting that whatever's good for big corporations is "conservative."

Finally, S. 1885, the AV START Act, would actually let corporations sell self-driving cars without ensuring they conform to federal safety standards, and worse, would pre-empt states from passing their own laws regarding self-driving cars. Conservatism! It's all about advancing solutions that make problems worse! It's also about keeping states from doing anything about driverless cars that run people over! Seriously, aside from the prospect of collecting corporate welfare, why is anyone excited about driverless cars? Are they really a better transportation option than buses or trains? Are we really going to have fewer accidents when we get rid of people? And how offensive is it that we have to fight like dogs to get public investment in actual revolutionary technologies like solar and wind, but self-driving cars somehow wind up on the fast track? Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumers by rejecting S. 1885.

Action: concerning public water, airline fees, and animal experimentation.

First things first. Asahi-Schweppes (you may know Schweppes' tonic water and bitter lemon sodas from your grandparents' liquor cabinet) is pumping a few hundred thousand liters of groundwater from the town of Stanley in Australia, and then selling it as, well, "better" than what comes out of your taps, I guess. Thing is, Stanley has nut and fruit orchards which provide the town's 370 residents with a livelihood, and those orchards need groundwater to keep going. (Oh, and people already pay taxes so they can drink clean water, too.) The good folks of Stanley seem to have exhausted all their legal options; now it's up to us to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against Asahi for picking on a town of not even 400 people thinking they won't be able to stand up for themselves. So Sum of Us helps you tell Asahi to stop taking Stanley's water from them. Over 95,000 good folks have signed this petition, at this writing; I bet those 370 Stanley residents don't feel so alone now.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the FAIR Fees amendment to the FAA reauthorization bill. You just love being hit with unexpected airline fees for changing flights or checking bags, right? Of course you don't; nobody does, but if the FAIR Fees amendment passes, our Department of Transportation (or DOT) would have the authority to tamp down high airline fees. I guess right-wingers will squeal BIG GUMMINT!!!! at the thought of our DOT actually making sure these fees have something to do with the "services" airlines supposedly provide in exchange, but I'd just respond you like big airlines better? The three biggest airlines collected over $16 billion in fees in 2016 alone -- and none of us are getting across the country in five hours by train or automobile, so what do we call that? A hostage situation, that's what. And whenever predatory corporations take us hostage, we have to get our government to stop them.

Finally, the White Coat Waste Project has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell our government to retire and release lab animals at the end of federally-funded animal experiments. You don't have to oppose animal experimentation to see that letting them go to good homes is a much, much better idea than simply killing them off, which is what otherwise happens to those animals at the end of experiments. If you fear that the animals would never adapt to a life outside of being imprisoned in a cage, then I would urge you to have a little more faith in a living thing's resilience. And if you'd rather just kill them off so we can spend less taxpayer money, then I would urge you to a) slap yourself and b) contemplate more fully the idea that civilization should take some effort on our part to maintain, and maybe it should even cost more money than barbarism. You may also want to contemplate the fact that rich folks sure could be paying more in taxes.

Action: concerning "free" trade, lead poisoning, and campaign finance disclosure.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk that any renegotiated NAFTA must put people before corporations, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. "Putting people before corporations" is a pretty simple principle, really, but right-wingers love to muck it up by suggesting that people can't live without corporations. And some tell you that having corporations around is much better than living in a feudal society, which I suppose it is, but of course the choice we actually face is not between "corporations controlling everything" and "literally being a serf," particularly when the first could bring back the second if we're not careful. These "free" trade deals sure do bring out the worst in Our Glorious Elites, who constantly use misdirection and absurd claims like "you can't fight globalism." But we're not fighting globalism so much as fighting evil -- and yes, evil is the word to describe trade pacts that nullify our laws and outsource our jobs.

Meanwhile, S. 3192 is named the CLEARR Act, which is unfortunate, not just because "clearr" isn't really a word, but because there's another CLEARR Act out there, an pro-bankster bill numbered H.R. 2133. S. 3192 isn't about banksters, but about getting lead out of our water -- the bill would help communities replace lead pipes, mandate our EPA to report results of lead tests online, and more stringently punish municipalities that don't get the lead out of their citizens' water. As you know, there is no "safe" level of lead poisoning, and lead poisoning causes irreversible brain damage in children, brain damage you may not be able to spot for yearss. And with lead pipes still being used all over America, all it takes is another unaccountable smartypants to decide to use cleaning chemicals that just so happen to corrode lead pipes to cause another Flint. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight lead poisoning by passing S. 3192.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6239/S. 3150, the DISCLOSE Act, then a consortium of good government groups (including Common Cause, Roots Action, and People for the American Way, among others) still helps you do that. Super PACs and dark money groups spent upwards of $1.4 billion in the 2016 election, and almost none of the groups that spent that money had to reveal their funders. And though we all fancy ourselves the kind of people who don't believe anything we see in campaign ads, we also know that a group with a lot of money can dominate the national conversation on TV, print, and radio. The DISCLOSE Act would actually shine some sunlight on the folks who are so determined to get their cronies elected that they'd spend millions of dollars doing it. As long as folks can spend millions without accountability, we're more likely to be stuck with bad leaders. And we, as Americans, deserve better than bad leaders.

Around the table: starring 3D-printed guns and the FCC hack that wasn't.

Jon Stokes at the Los Angeles Times reveals "The Boring Truth About 3D-Printed Guns." If you know that 3D printing is mostly about making knick-knacks right now, you probably guessed at least one boring truth: that making a gun out of plastic is a recipe for making a gun that fires maybe once before melting. You may not have known that the ability to make guns out of parts is not a new thing, or (even!) that putting gun blueprint files on the internet is not a new thing. In re what to do, Mr. Stokes comes to more or less the same conclusion as Thom Hartmann did earlier this year -- "(s)omething like a federal license for simple possession of semiautomatic weapons."

Ho hum, a Washington Post report finds that rents are still going up for poor folks in America's most expensive cities but actually dropping for rich folks. Because rich folks are landlords' kind of folks -- and what are poor folks going to do, live in the street? How many times must I tell these pimps! This is not how a free market operates! Truly free markets don't give landlords the "freedom" to extract as much tribute from renters as possible -- truly free markets reduce payments that exceed required costs. The economists' word for "payments that exceed required costs," as you may know, is rent.

Have we reached the point where anti-Nazi protestors will now vastly outnumber pro-Nazi protestors, as happened this past Sunday at the "Unite the Right" rally? We can only hope! But we ought to remain vigilant anyway, lest, oh, I don't know, hypothetically speaking, some future Presidential candidate who panders to racists and says nasty crap about black and brown people all the time somehow gets elected. (At least we had the spectacle of the rally's organizer whining that "I have people attacking me left, right and center" at a rally called Unite the Right.)

FCC Inspector General does, in fact, report that the FCC lied to Congress about a hack attack that never took place. Remember that this "hack" just so happened to take place the same two days that a crapload of Americans -- having just watched John Oliver's latest righteous rant on HBO about the matter -- took to the FCC website to comment on their net neutrality repeal proposal. And you know, FCC Chair Ajit Pai can talk all he want about those other people who failed him, but that only makes him just another boss who only acts like the boss when things are going well. A real boss would take responsibility for failures on his watch, too. Then again, see his boss, our President.

I don't know what you've heard, but scientists have most certainly not figured out how to reverse aging -- they've managed to stop individual cells from aging in laboratory experiments. Specifically, they've delivered very small amounts of hydrogen sulfide (found in rotten eggs!) to some very old cells and made them start dividing again; cells tend to stop dividing when they get old, and then they accumulate in organs, and adversely affect the functioning level of other, younger cells. Next step, I imagine: trying to figure out how to deliver hydrogen sulfide a) only where it's needed and b) in amounts that aren't poisonous. That means don't go around huffing rotten eggs so you can stay young.

Finally, Negin Owliaei at the Our Future blog describes how the good citizens of Lancaster County, PA kept the notorious private prison corporation Geo Group from taking over the country's prison re-entry function. How did they win, when clearly the county government stood against them? They planned townhall meetings and packed county commissioner meetings, that's how, because if there's one thing politicians don't like, it's the people they're supposed to serve getting all up in their grills, like they're supposed to do. I wish the good folks of Lancaster County luck, since they kept Geo out, but they still have to convince the county that what they had (a group of non-profits helping prisoners readjust once they got out) wasn't broke and thus doesn't need fixing.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, pollution, and whistleblowing.

Late last week, the Saudi-led coalition bombed a school bus in Yemen, killing upwards of 29 children. And our own Defense Department can't say whether the coalition used U.S.-supplied munitions to do the deed, or if we refueled the planes that dropped the bombs, because CENTCOM doesn't track these planes. I have to say that seems awfully convenient. And for decades Congress has let Presidents do pretty much what they like overseas, and even now is mulling a bill that would abdicate even more of their Constitutional responsibility to declare war. And if you thought this President would "be different" and "put America first" and "be laser-focused on fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS," recall that the Houthi rebels Saudi Arabia keeps fighting are some of the finest fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth. Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end American support for this undeclared and unconstitutional war that has put over two-thirds of Yemen's people in need of immediate humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, you know all about the nefarious "cost-benefit analysis" that right-wingers constantly use to say regulations are "too costly" for businesses? Well, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) is now proposing to make their cost-benefit analyses even worse, by forcing the EPA to consider the "harm" its regulations might do to corporate profits before considering the health benefits of its regulations. Scott Pruitt may be gone, but this particular proposal, somehow entitled "Increasing Consistency and Transparency in Considering Costs and Benefits in Rulemaking Process," surely comes from his gnarled hand. One can only hope that this particular Administration initiative, like so many of their pro-pollution initiatives, will die an ignominious death before a federal judge, but in the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell the EPA to reject its plan to put polluters before people, and mammon before life.

Finally, the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our government to do a considerably better job protecting whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing at the Veterans Administration. We can't reasonably blame this state of affairs on our most recent President, but on his predecessor, Barack Obama, who seemed to have a visceral hatred of whistleblowers across our government, including VA whistleblowers. But hatred of whistleblowers is a bit hard to understand on the face of it when you consider that a whistleblower's complaint will either be proven in a court of law or it won't; you may be tempted, as I am, to consider that our government must hate whistleblowers because our government can't win the argument on the merits. But we the people have an absolute, inviolate right to stop our government from screwing us over, and whistleblowers are often our only way of knowing our government's doing that. So, as civilized people, we protect whistleblowers with laws.

Around the table: from a dead merger to a still-going special election.

Good news, everyone! The Tribune Media Group withdraws from the proposed Sinclair-Tribune merger -- and also files $1 billion lawsuit against Sinclair, alleging misconduct that precluded government approval of the merger. One is tempted, a la Sen. Truman, to just say let them kill each other. But one is also tempted to wonder if FCC Chair Ajit Pai, in demanding that a judge review Sinclair's ownership arrangements and thus effectively scuttling the merger, has made himself look better if investigators look into his own contacts with Sinclair before approving loosened UHF media ownership rules that benefited Sinclair.

From Sally Hardin at TalkPoverty we learn that our Administration's rollback of fuel efficiency standards will cost the average working family about $500 annually in fuel costs. So when you hear folks regurgitate our Administration's line that new cars will cost $2,100 to $2,700 less, keep in mind that you'll probably have your car longer than the four or five years before you start losing money. Our Administration valuing the short term over the long term; what a surprise! (But after you do that math, don't forget to heap on all the health care costs from all the added pollution we're going to have.)

Speaking of extremely surprising things, our FBI arrests U.S. Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) for insider trading. Mr. Collins could be overheard on the House floor last year declaring his intention to sell off some big pharma stock the day before that corporation announced the failure of a study involving its MS drug, but if you recall that Mr. Collins bought up $2 million worth of big pharma stock shortly before writing a bill speeding up FDA consideration of drugs -- and then bought another $1 million of stock after that bill passed! -- this arrest will seem, well, doubly unsurprising.

Ipsos poll finds 43% of Republicans think our President should be able to "close news outlets engaged in bad behavior." Presumably not with a la carte cable packaging, since that would be an example of the people closing down news outlets engaged in bad behavior. The good news? When you mention specific media nemeses like the Washington Post and the New York Times, the number goes down to 23%, and since about 25% of the American electorate will sign on to any noxious program as long as it diddles their rage glands, that number might actually represent progress.

Missouri voters repeal, by a 2-1 margin, the legislature's recent "right-to-work" law. That's right, 67 percent of voters hated "right-to-work" badly enough that they came out on a primary Tuesday to defeat it. And why were they voting on the repeal on primary day, versus, you know, Election Day? Typically because right-wing voters turn out more heavily for primaries than liberals do. So the "right-to-work" forces couldn't win even when they stacked the deck. Good job, Missouri!

Finally, Democrat Danny O'Connor still trails Republican Troy Balderson by less than a percentage point in the U.S. House special election in Ohio's 12th, but while Our Glorious Elites wonder how a Republican could almost-lose a district the party has normally won by 20 points or more since 1982, I wonder if, one one hand, maybe folks aren't as mad at Republicans as they were when Conor Lamb won the PA-18 special, but on the other hand, anyone who's willing to not-STFU about health care can make a race close just about anywhere. Then again, on the other other hand, maybe a straight-talking socialist could have beaten the Republican outright, conservatism being, these days, less a matter of substance than tone.

Action: concerning Social Security, taxes, and drilling on public lands.

You've heard of the Republican plan to fund a paid family leave plan with Social Security benefits, resulting in you getting less money when you retire if you've ever used paid family leave? Now it's a real bill! It's S. 3345, with no text or summary presently available at Congress.gov, which could be because, hey, this is a bill that robs your future Social Security benefits if you want paid family leave now. After all, where on Earth else could we possibly get the money to do that? From that $1.7 trillion tax "cut" giveaway to the rich Republicans enacted in December, maybe? Or even from the infinitesimally small payroll tax that would fund an actual paid family leave bill, S. 337, where folks making $50,000 annually would pay $8.50 a month. $8.50 a month! I've seen single servings of coffee that cost more than that! So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Rubio rob-the-future-to-pay-now plan -- doesn't sound very conservative when put like that, does it? -- and Moms Rising still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 337, the FAMILY Act, since that's a real paid family leave bill.

Meanwhile, speaking of that Republican tax scam, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and reject any further tax-cuts-for-the-rich Republicans (or our President) might contemplate. The Senate's talking about more tax cuts like there's no time for that, but don't you believe it -- if the House puts together a bill quickly enough, they'll move heaven and Earth to give more welfare handouts to their cronies. The massive corporate tax cut did not, as our President suggested, put $4,000 in every family's paycheck -- but it did result in a lot of massive stock buybacks, which concentrates power in corporate executive hands, because, yeah, they just don't have enough power already. And that 4% GDP growth from last quarter? You're not seeing any of that in your paycheck, either. You see, this is why America can't have nice things like paid family leave -- because our government cares more about its cronies than its owners, i.e., the American people. We'll just have to learn 'em.

Finally, our Administration plans to auction off two million acres of public land in six Western states so that gas and oil drillers can pollute it create jobs wean America off foreign oil redistribute yet more of our wealth as Americans upward, to themselves. Hence WildEarth Guardians helps you tell our Administration to scuttle these plans. We could go on (and we have!) about how gas and oil drilling spoil clean air and clean water, etc., and spoil wildlife habitat, etc., and these are very important things, but gas and oil drilling also put public lands off-limits to those members of the public who love the great outdoors. Surely it was love of the great outdoors (I doubt he conceived of pollution the way we do now) that moved the first President Roosevelt to start establishing national parks and monuments in the first place. How far we've fallen from him to our current President, the Whiner-in-Chief, for whom now is all and the future is for losers.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, campaign finance reform, and endangered species.

You already know that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh thinks Presidents should be exempt from criminal proceedings while in office because they're just so busy. But Judge Kavanaugh has also argued that our Presidents can simply ignore laws they believe unconstitutional, and that courts would then have to force them to comply. You can too easily imagine a President concocting such a "belief" in order to avoid executing the people's will. And the fact that "signing statements" existed before today doesn't justify actual unconstitutional behavior from our Presidents. Hence another reason to call your Senators and tell them to oppose the Kavanaugh nomination. Our Whiner-in-Chief acts like law and order is for "little people" like us and keeps "busy" watching Fox News and twittering hateful, noxious crap; he surely doesn't need another enabler on our Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Issue One helps you tell the Federal Election Commission (or FEC) to prohibit "personal use" of candidate leadership PAC money. Leadership PACs have been around since 1978, so that candidates can donate money to other candidates (which our Supreme Court will no doubt call a First Amendment right if they ever evaluate the matter!), but in practice, leadership PAC money far too often winds up funding expensive dinners, golf outings, Broadway musical tickets, five-star hotel stays, and vacations to foreign lands. Candidates will claim that was all "work," but we're not schmucks, not least because we know what work is actually like. And I bet they also claim that they just "have" to spend all that money on expensive outings with power players in order to do a good job. But you don't have to do that to do a good job; you need only stay in touch with your constituents. And big outings with rich people ain't "staying in touch with your constituents."

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to stop trying to weaken Endangered Species Act protections, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Congress hasn't been able to gut the Endangered Species Act, even when Republicans run the whole show, for one reason: killing off endangered species so big corporations can put yet another coal or copper or gold mine in the ground is actually very unpopular. Hence our Administration makes a series of obscure-sounding tweaks to Endangered Species Act enforcement -- allowing "economic costs" to be tabulated when deciding how to protect endangered and threatened species, allowing federal agencies to ignore scientific data before handing out oil and gas drilling leases -- that will be just as harmful as previous "reform" efforts coming out of Congress. Luckily politicians don't get all the say about everything: we do. But only if we speak out.

Around the table: with another reminder that you can't eat GDP.

Actual economist Dean Baker explains why last quarter's GDP growth was not "amazing." Long story short: two quarters of 2015 surpassed it, and even President Carter had a quarter with four times the GDP growth of this past one. Long story somewhat longer: we're not seeing wage growth along with GDP growth, we're not even seeing investment growth in significant amounts, and the rich are getting most of the benefits from the Republican tax scam. Remember, kids: you can't eat GDP.

Dan Alexander at Forbes suggests that our Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, has demonstrated a "Pattern of Grifting" at his businesses. Out of the over $120 million Mr. Ross might have stolen, if all the multitudinous complaints against him are true, he's paid at least $12 million in settlements and fines, plus his corporation returned $12 million to investors as part of an SEC settlement in 2016. Given how well his corporation was doing in 2016 (i.e., not), perhaps Mr. Ross looked at our President as an escape hatch. And maybe our President looked at Mr. Ross and saw a kindred spirit!

Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) says Republicans made a "big mistake" in trying to "reform" health care first. He's absolutely right that health care was tactically the wrong thing to try to do first, and maybe even that health care "reform" (recall that Mr. Heller's name was also on the notorious Graham-Kennedy bill that comprised the Senate's second failed health care "reform" bill) could have passed if they'd done taxes first. I suppose if you're conspiracy-minded, you'd find it odd that Republicans tried to do that first, since surely they knew the "resistance" had already made defending the Affordable Care Act its top priority.

Add Jonathan Last to the list of right-wingers who think Democrats can win in 2020 by going considerably further left. I disagree strongly, of course, that Howard Dean is all that liberal (he was, after all, the only state governor who chose to balance his state's budget during the '90s!) or that Barack Obama is all that liberal (n.b. virtually everything I've ever said about him), but Mr. Last's thesis that the more "mainstream" candidate tends to lose does map fairly well onto my thesis that the candidate who seems less like a politician tends to win, even if I would quarrel with how he describes many of these candidates (Mr. Mondale was the more liberal alternative in 1984 even if he was also the more "mainstream" one, and Mr. Bush the Lesser posed as a moderate in 2000 before governing as a far right-winger).

Finally, in advance of an Inspector General report on the matter, FCC Chair Ajit Pai admits that last year's alleged hack of the FCC's commenting system during its net neutrality repeal process never actually happened. And of course Mr. Pai blames underlings and the Obama Administration, just like his boss. He's gotta hope that he's slung so much fecal matter against the wall that a court hearing challenges to his net neutrality repeal won't be able to keep up -- also, just like his boss.

Action: concerning voting rights, "free" trade, and money bail.

The Voting Rights Act turned 53 yesterday, and that's as good an occasion as any to remind you to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2978/S. 1419, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, as CREDO helps you do. As you know, our Supreme Court gutted Sec. 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, ruling that it unfairly targeted Southern states -- but the Court all but invited Congress to replace Sec. 4(b) with a provision that doesn't unfairly target Southern states. The Voting Rights Advancement Act should satisfy the Court's interpretation, by requiring any state or municipality, from anywhere in the country, with an established record of voter suppression to submit election law changes to our Department of Justice for pre-clearance. I often say voting is the beginning of your duty as a citizen, but if you can't vote, it's a lot harder to get representatives who won't screw you over repeatedly. So we need the strong protections of the Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that NAFTA renegotiations are coming to a close, so Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that any trade deal America signs works for people, not corporations. Specifically, you'll demand an end to the "investor-state dispute settlement" system that nullifies our laws and extracts tribute from the taxpayer for the heinous crime of passing laws that "cost" investors money -- as if money is the only thing that matters in this world! -- and you'll demand better labor and environmental standards, which will dissuade American corporations from moving factories down to Mexico. In other words, you'll be supporting real law and order in America, a law and order that puts people ahead of money and action ahead of posturing. I know, I know, our Whiner-in-Chief loves posturing more than anything, which makes me think that (despite encouraging reports!) we're in for disappointment. But he ain't the last word on anything; we are.

Finally, H.R. 1437/S. 3271, the No Money Bail Act, would (as its title suggests!) outlaw the use of bail money as a condition for pre-trail release. If you read that sentence and you feel you're about to blow a gasket, maybe you should never navigate to this page again. But if you read that sentence and are willing to think about it for a minute, you'll see that a) it costs money to hold people in prison, so municipalities aren't exactly making out like bandits here, and b) holding people in jail before their trial violates the whole principle of innocent-until-proven-guilty that underpins our entire judicial system. That's before you get to the fact that most folks who can't buy their way out of prison are poor and/or black or brown, meaning the whole money bail system is what, folks? Classist and racist, that's what. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support real criminal justice reform by passing the No Money Bail Act.

Action: concerning government spying, agricultural pollutants, and antibiotic abuse.

In our Transportation Safety Authority's "Quiet Skies" program, federal air marshals spy on "suspicious" airplane passengers in a putative effort to stop terror attacks. What's that, you say? You've never been charged with a crime? You're not on one of those notorious terrorist "watch lists"? Doesn't matter -- if you ever got a tattoo, or fell asleep on a plane, or stared out into space, "Quiet Skies" might be spying on you. So Demand Progress helps you tell the TSA to end this fishing expedition known as "Quiet Skies." Because a fishing expedition is what this is -- it allows our government to collect information on Americans they couldn't otherwise collect, and once they have this information, they can use it to harass us whenever they want to look like they're "doing something." And it also dumps mountains of useless info on folks who actually fight terror. If it violates our rights and it doesn't work, then our government shouldn't do it.

Meanwhile, Monsanto's brand of the herbicide dicamba, rather pretentiously called XTendiMax, continues to leave a trail of death wherever it goes -- and because it gets into the air pretty easily, it sure does go a lot of places. Dicamba has been around for half a century, but Monsanto is the first corporation to create a version of dicamba for use specifically with (sigh) Monsanto's own genetically-altered dicamba-resistant crops -- and Monsanto may also be the first corporation to forbid independent scientists from, you guessed it, testing its ability to drift to other fields! Even with that revelation, we're probably going to see a lot more of dicamba this year -- except in Arkansas, which last year banned it from use during the growing season. Hey, that should give your state ideas! Environmental Action helps you tell your state's governor to ban dicamba within your state.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 3099, the Strengthening Antibiotic Oversight Act, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Their latest email missive puts it in a fairly succinct and original way: "(w)hen you're prescribed antibiotics, they always come with clear instructions and a defined dose. There are few instances in human medicine where prolonged antibiotic use would be appropriate. We should apply the same standard to farming." Yes, we should -- particularly when at least 7 in 10 antibiotics in America go not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy farm animals, and if you're surprised we haven't seen more antibiotic-resistant superbugs after fully digesting that fact, well, you're not alone. Oftentimes we feel alone when we fight antibiotic abuse, but we're not -- and we need to remind our Congressfolk of that, again and again and again.

Around the table: from a potential war averted to the conspiracy theory you can't escape.

Alex Emmons at The Intercept informs us that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson may have been fired not for criticizing Russia, but for actively opposing Saudi Arabia's apparent lust for war with Qatar. Which recommends him, if true. I didn't even need Mr. Emmons to remind me that of course our President said last year that Qatar "has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level." But I'm not sure I'd lay even a scintilla of blame for this still-possible war on Saudi Arabia's "'cradle to grave' welfare system" which "relies on high oil prices," since surely other, far less palatable Saudi Arabian programs also rely on high oil prices.

From Victoria Law at Wired we learn about JPay, an email messaging corporation that seems to be gouging prisoners and their families. JPay charges 47-cent "stamps" for each e-message going in or out, and has a virtual monopoly on this "market"; sadly a lot of "free" marketeers think this is how it's supposed to work, "freedom" apparently including the "freedom" to rig the game to keep a competitor from reaping the reward of doing a better job, and I presume they also think tapping a literally captive market in this manner (which includes kickbacks to the prisons) is clever and not exploitative. Luckily the rest of us find the whole concept of paying to send an email offensive.

Ho hum, then-Senator-now-Attorney-General Jeff Sessions was in up to his neck with two men convicted in a bribery trial. All three men were trying to keep the EPA from making an Alabama coal corporation pay to clean up a (mostly black) area of North Birmingham, and though two of them are now in jail, the EPA still hasn't cleaned the area up, or made the coal corporation pay for the cleanup (and Mr. Sessions still hasn't said if he has recused himself from any potential Justice Department investigation of the matter). It's hard to reassure folks with higher levels of cancer and respiratory ailments, folks who've been told not to let their kids play outside, that at least two bad man went to jail for bribery.

When you read about the battle to fight water privatization in El Salvador, and you hear both political parties mouth platitudes about their opposition to privatization though it's the obvious goal of one if not both of them, I wouldn't blame you for thinking about how things are here in America, where both parties declare their devotion to getting citizens good health care when taking away citizens' good health care is the obvious goal of one if not both of them. The good news? Over 250 communities around the world are taking back their water -- and just in time, too, as climate change wreaks its havoc. Our Glorious Elites still want to privatize everything, of course, but folks are wiser to their schemes now.

Finally, in case you were wondering, here's what all that QAnon stuff is all about. Long story short: it's the kind of conspiracy theory gobbledygook (apparently our military appointed the Whiner-in-Chief President so he could destroy a massive, government-run child pederasty ring) that's detail-free enough to allow, shall we say, a lot of imagination -- enough that its votaries can confidently say every piece of contradictory evidence is actually supporting evidence in disguise. I suppose I'd be more inclined to believe that Our Glorious Elites foisted QAnon upon us just to cause more chaos, since chaos is the only thing Republicans can count on to win elections anymore.

Around the table: more bad people doing bad things (plus the Michigan Supreme Court doing an actual good thing).

When you hear that our President wants to build a big border wall but still relies on foreign guest workers, I guess it's easy to nod your head and move on, but read David L. Wilson's article about the matter at TruthOut anyway, because it's very good -- among so, so many other things, you'll learn that some folks want to allow guest workers to come here year-round, which would destroy the only convincing argument for using guest workers in the first place, that their work is "seasonal." And it's not that convincing an argument, either -- school teachers' work is "seasonal," but we haven't exactly done irreparable harm to our civilization by giving them permanent employment.

Ho hum, CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney slashed fines for at least three out of five civil settlements against financial predators. Remember, of course, that oftentimes these fines don't go into our government's pocket but into the pockets of people who have been wronged by financial institutions, so the reduced fines don't just injure law and order, they injure civilization -- after all, we don't just punish wrongdoers, but we also make them make things right with the people they wronged. By the time you read about all the whining wrongdoers do about being poor, you'll start to think Mick Mulvaney is actually trying to become the biggest asshole in this Administration. Which is a high bar to clear.

Jessica Huseman and Blake Paterson at ProPublica and the Kansas City Star tell the story of how Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (now running for Governor) used failed anti-immigration ordinances in several small towns across America to make himself quite a pile of money. One bamboozled local official compared him to Harold Hill from The Music Man (which surely makes Mr. Hill spin in his fictional grave), going from town to town saying he could get anti-immigration ordinances passed and beat the ACLU in court when they inevitably sued; he left a trail of defeated and/or gutted ordinances in his wake, but not before extracting quite the hefty fees from the towns. In other words, he transmuted failure into millions of dollars. No wonder our President loves him! (As an aside, maybe Sen. Casey should pay attention to how his 2018 Senate opponent helped bankrupt the city of Hazleton with Mr. Kobach's help.)

Our Justice Department is investigating whether five big pharma/medical device corporations knew that the free medicine and supplies they gave to the Iraqi government back in 2004 would wind up funding terrorist activities that killed Americans there. The defendants' response? That our government "expressly encouraged" those freebies -- and that might be enough to get them off, which sure will warm the hearts of the families of dead soldiers who filed the suit to begin with. Add that to the list of things that would never have happened if Tha Bush Mobb didn't bully America into Iraq. You know that list? The one that starts off with "ISIS"?

Good news, everyone! The Michigan Supreme Court allows a redistricting initiative to appear on this November's ballot. Well, that's what Republicans get for bragging about how thoroughly they've gerrymandered Congressional districts! The other side's argument -- that something this far-ranging should really be decided in a constitutional convention -- will seem odd to you if you've noticed that a lot of constitutional amendments get passed without one. Now let's just hope the legislature doesn't decide to gut it in a lame-duck session, as they did when Michigan voters repealed their "emergency manager" law in 2012.

Finally, our President's daughter says that her father's "zero tolerance" policy that separated parents and children at the border was a "low point" for her. Why, I bet it was a "low point" for those parents and children who got separated, too! Not that she'd have done anything differently, since the issue is "incredibly complex" and "incredibly complicated" and (as the lawless always say!) "we are a country of laws," and, perhaps worst of all, that we shouldn't be "incentivizing" bad "behavior" by, you know, treating people humanely. That's how evil people get good people to go along with bad ideas! But the issue of immigration is actually not "incredibly complicated" -- rich jerks like her father want to be racist and pay foreign workers in dung pellets at the same time, and if we stop "incentivizing" that "behavior," we will go a very long way toward resolving the issue.

Action: concerning fuel efficiency, private prisons, and detainment.

Our Administration has proposed freezing fuel efficiency standards after 2021, and they also want to stop letting California set stronger emission standards, because hippie-punching. But get a load of this pile of dung: they claim that if cars get more miles to the gallon, folks will drive more and therefore expose themselves to more danger. By that logic, we should never do anything that helps people live longer, because they'll just "put themselves at more risk" with all that extra life! (The Administration is also wrong that lighter cars necessarily lead to more deaths in crashes, but then they don't appreciate science, or subtlety.) Our laws require they still take public comments on their plan, and Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, and Penn Environment all help you do that. Seriously, paying more for gas and pumping more filth into our air: who looks at that and says, yeah, great program? Only our 46% President and his enablers.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big banks to divest from private prison corporations, then both Moms Rising and the Courage Campaign still helps you do that. You may want to remind big banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase that they're making money off putting kids in jail, since private prisons handle most of our government's immigrant detainment functions, and since our President's notorious "zero tolerance" policy has had the side effect (or, possibly, "side effect") of putting a lot of immigrant children in detention. You'll also be reminded, if you read that previous sentence carefully, that letting private corporations handle government functions is a terrible idea -- putting people in prison is our job as a democracy, after all, so our government should handle it on our behalf, not farm it out to some corporation that only cares about enrich its CEOs. So cutting off their money supply would be a good work.

Finally, S. 3225, the Stop Shackling and Detaining Pregnant Women Act, would prevent our government from detaining pregnant immigrant women except under narrow circumstances -- if "credible, reasonable grounds exist to believe that the person presents an immediate and serious threat of hurting herself or others," per Sec. 2(a)(2) -- and would also prevent our government from using restraints on such women, with similar exceptions. S. 3225 would also require detention centers to give pregnant women the health care they need, which right-wingers would like, right, since they're all about caring for babies and such? I mean, if we are the nation that sets an example for the world, then let's be the nation that says "we take care of pregnant immigrants while we're figuring out whether to let them in." Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote our better natures by passing the Stop Shackling and Detaining Pregnant Women Act.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court and corporate crime.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to reject the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court, then you can still 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 find your Senators' phone numbers. Note well that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), after signaling some skepticism about the Kavanaugh nomination, now says he'll support the nomination, which, given Mr. Paul's history, is very, very far from a surprise. And, as Gene Healy at The American Conservative says, "the further he got from his service in Ken Starr’s office, the more Kavanaugh wanted the president cloaked in special immunities from civil suit and criminal investigation." His supporters would perhaps call that "maturity," but I'd call it "discarding your values because they inconvenience you," which should be a cardinal sin in America.

Meanwhile, as many Americans have observed, our Administration's Justice Department is all "tough on crime" and "law and order" and "zero tolerance" when it comes to violent crime and undocumented immigrants -- but not when it comes to corporate crimes like pollution, discrimination, and financial predation. Just about every regulatory agency does less law enforcement than it did even under the center-right President Barack Obama, and EPA finds, in particular, have dropped an eye-popping 94 percent during this Administration's first year. Why, the Comptroller of the Currency says the banks are his agency's "customers"! When will the American people become our government's "customers," I wonder? Public Citizen helps you tell our President and our Justice Department to stop looking at corporations as "partners" and start enforcing the laws that would restrain them from harming our country. Leadership: it's not actually that hard.

Action: concerning Medicare, dangerous chemicals, and campaign finance disclosure.

Yesterday was Medicare's 53rd birthday. In just 12 more years, it'll be old enough to get Medicare! But our Congressfolk seem determined to destroy Medicare before it reaches that milestone, what with Speaker Ryan's repeated voucherization votes and our House's budget proposing even more benefit cuts than our President has proposed. As Paul Craig Roberts said many years ago: our elites have stolen everything else, so our so-called "entitlement" programs (how generous of them, to let us feel "entitled" to the things we've fought for!) are all that's left. But, as I've said before: we worked for it, paid into it, and fought for it, and we deserve to have it when we need it; hence the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen, not cut, Medicare, Medicaid, and other services -- and pay for it by repealing last year's tax-cuts-for-the-rich.

Meanwhile, the EPA found in 2014 that the chemical trichloroethylene (or TCE) presents excessive risks to workers and consumers, and in 2016 proposed to ban its use in various industrial processes (including spot cleaning at dry cleaners). But then a little catastrophe called the 2016 Presidential election happened, and guess what? Our Administration is doing its damnedest to stall implementation of proposed TCE bans, this even though TCE is carcinogenic and toxic to our brain, kidneys, and immune system, and seems to turn up an awful lot at Superfund sites. Chances are that a federal court will tell the EPA to stop delaying already (and our Supreme Court won't weigh in on the matter even if asked), but why rely on that, when we can rely on people power? So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect their bosses -- i.e., us, the American people -- from the known health effects of TCE.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6239/S. 3150, the DISCLOSE Act, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Fact is our elected representatives don't listen to us and don't ever seem to pay much of a price for their failure -- folks want better health insurance, politicians say no; folks want corporations and rich folk to pay their share of taxes, politicians say no; folks want government to protect them from financial predators, politicians say no, and politicians rarely lose elections for their dereliction of their duty. And campaign finance is probably the biggest reason politicians don't do their jobs -- it's easier to do the will of big donors who guarantee funding for ad campaigns. The Supreme Court calls this state of affairs "free speech," but we can still shine a light on big campaign donors. Even if they claim to feel "bullied" by it.

Around the table: the real "cost" of single-payer, revealed! And other tales.

Did you know that a Koch brothers-funded "think tank" just said that Sen. Sanders's Medicare-for-All plan would reduce health care costs and boost worker wages? Well, they did! Of course, they didn't, ah, foreground that information -- they foregrounded the ZOMG TEH COSTZ OF TEH $32 TRILLYUNZ!!!!!! scare number, a number that covers ten years of spending and doesn't account for the fact that projections of current health care spending already have us spending a lot more than that. A pair of single-payer advocates also argue that the Koch-backed study underestimates the savings from a Medicare-for-All plan. Still, now you get to tell your right-wing uncle that even the Koch brothers think letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices will save almost $85 billion annually. Hey, they said it.

Ho hum, our Treasury Secretary thinks he may be able to deliver yet another tax-cut-to-the-rich without those pesky people's representatives in Congress having anything to do with it. Every time someone proposes some kind of capital gains tax cut, they say it'll goose up revenues big-time because a lot of people will sell their houses and such, but people sell their houses for a lot of reasons -- many of them even having to do with their family's needs! -- and the "windfall" (if it materializes!) never lasts long. For all that, I wouldn't mind indexing initial house purchase prices to inflation for the purpose of giving working families a capital gains tax cut when they sell their house. But I'd cap it at one property annually and $250,000 in an inflation-adjusted initial house investment, since we don't want to make our economy's addiction to property churning (which basically only benefits banksters) any worse than it already is now.

Jana Winters at the Boston Globe describes the Transportation Safety Authority's "Quiet Skies" surveillance program, in which federal air marshals spy on air travelers who haven't been accused of or charged with a crime. Ever use a laptop on an airplane, or have a "cold penetrating stare"? Then you might have been spied upon by a federal marshal! Don't politicians understand that Philip K. Dick novels are dystopian works, and not operations manuals? The good news: more than a few federal air marshals also think this is all bullshit.

Simon Davis-Cohen writes, in an admirably restrained manner I think, about the FirstNet network, a sort of "internet superhighway" "built specifically for police and public safety." Given the troubles Rekognition is having in, well, rekognizing people, you won't be impressed to learn that a police officer could, one day, take a photo of someone on his cellphone and find out if that someone is in a gang database, and not just because gang databases tend to be full of people who haven't actually committed any crimes. And, seriously, just because it's The Future doesn't mean Americans suddenly don't have habeus corpus rights anymore.

Finally, our distinguished President, proving he's no better than any other politician, claims that our media are "very unpatriotic" for "reveal(ing) internal deliberations of our government." He knows he works for us, right? And that he is not literally America, right? Oh, but he goes on to say "(f)reedom of the press comes with a responsibility to report the news accurately," quickly following with "90% of media coverage of my Administration is negative," as if you won't notice his casual equation of "accuracy" with a lack of "negative" coverage. Maybe Dr. Johnson was right, and patriotism really is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Action: concerning farmworkers' rights, humane treatment of prisoners, and EPA science.

I've long complained about farmworkers being left out of the worker protections the rest of us enjoy under the law, but H.R. 6230/S. 3131, the Fairness for Farm Workers Act, would begin to fix that, by repealing those parts of the Fair Labor Standards Act that exempt farmworkers from minimum wage and maximum work laws. When your Tea Party uncle squeals BUT WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH SMALL BIZNINZZIZ!!!!!, remind him that Secs. 2(a) and 2(c)(1)(B) and 2(c)(2)(B) all give farms with fewer than 25 workers three more years to get their act together; when he squeals BUT WHATZ ABOUT TEH FAMILY FARMZ!!!!!, merely point him to Sec. 2(b)(1), which allows arrangements between actual family farm owners and their immediate family members to continue. All we need now is a bill that'll let farmworkers unionize, and we'll have justice! The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support fair wage and hour standards for farm workers by passing the Fairness for Farm Workers Act.

Meanwhile, Roots Action helps you tell the Virginia Department of Corrections to release Kevin "Rashid" Johnson from solitary confinement and to stop moving him to other prisons out of state. Why? Because Mr. Johnson has spent much of his last 30 years in prison exposing abuses by prison administrators and staff -- which means he's also spent much of his time getting threatened, beaten up, and put in solitary for no good reason, not to mention getting moved to prisons in three other states between 2012 and 2018. All without actually charging him with anything! Seriously, if we want prisoners to do better for themselves and for their communities, then we shouldn't terrorize them when they actually do better for themselves and for their communities. But the Virginia Department of Corrections seems determined to teach Mr. Johnson (and everyone else!) that the only thing that matters is the state's self-interest. And that's not what a sane and moral society does.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to scuttle its proposal to radically reduce the amount of good science it can use to make policy decisions, then Breast Cancer Action still helps you do that. You know the drill: the EPA says it only wants to use "publicly-available" scientific research to make decisions about pollution in our air and water, but if you saw the words "publicly-available" and said well, that doesn't necessarily mean best, good for you. In this case, "publicly-available" kinda means the opposite of good -- plenty of good scientific research isn't "publicly-available" because it has good Americans' private health into and medical records in it. What would the end result be, then? More pollution, more health care issues, and a lot more money flying into fossil fuel CEO pockets so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. Why must it be this way?

Action: concerning a frivolous lawsuit, a "free" trade deal, and an evil war.

First things first: in what might be the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit, MGM is actually suing a thousand victims of last year's Las Vegas mass shooting, hoping to immunize itself from lawsuits those victims are filing. I suspect MGM's suit would likely fail in court -- the law in question, the 2002 SAFETY Act, would more likely immunize the security corporation MGM hired to cover the country music concert at which the mass shooting happened than it would immunize MGM. But winning probably isn't the point -- intimidating mass shooting victims into dropping lawsuits against MGM is probably the point. Which makes it a SLAPP lawsuit in addition to a frivolous one. And which puts mass shooting victims through the emotional ringer again, as if they haven't fucking suffered enough. Hence Melissa Holmes has started a petition at Change.org which helps you tell country music artists to boycott MGM until it drops its pre-emptive lawsuit stratagem.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk that any renegotiated NAFTA must serve the American people, not corporations, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. The harms "free" trade have done to good Americans are real -- not just in lost jobs, lost wages, and more pollution, but also in the nefarious "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system, which not only lets big corporations sue the American taxpayer for having the temerity to pass some labor or environmental legislation that "cost" them money, but allows those corporations to exact tribute from the American taxpayer for their "losses." Look, either entrepreneurs are our best and brightest or they constantly need bailouts from the taxpayer, but not both. And if "law and order" means anything, it certainly means "not letting external tribunals nullify our laws because it gave some corporate shareholder a sad." Seriously, you can't be "tough" and a weakling at the same time.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop American participation in the Saudi-UAE bombing campaign of the Yemeni port of Hodeidah -- an act which puts millions more good Yemeni at risk of famine -- then Just Foreign Policy and Change.org still help you do that. Our Congressfolk seem to inch ever closer to maybe voting against any further participation by our nation in the Saudi-UAE war against Yemen, but like Zeno's arrow they never hit their target, almost as if that's the whole idea. All we can do is tell them to stop supporting a war in which Congress never authorized our participation, a war that has caused unbearable pain and hardship for the Yemeni people, a war which just so happens to be killing off some of the best al-Qaeda fighters in the world (those being the Houthi rebels the Saudi-UAE coalition is so hot to exterminate). Seriously, when are we going to be smart in the Middle East?

Around the table: what "tough on crime" actually means to our Administration, and other sorrows.

U.S. District Court judge allows D.C. and Maryland attorneys general to proceed with a lawsuit against our President for violating the emoluments clause of our Constitution. Dig our President's argument that "the Founding Fathers had written this clause to stop officials from taking bribes — but not to stop them from doing business." Those of us who think public service is more important than making craploads of money won't be impressed with that. (If Mr. Kavanaugh ascends to the Supreme Court, though, I bet this story will have a happy ending for our President.)

As our President does a Jeff George Victory Lap about a 4.1% second-quarter GDP growth, Jake Johnson at Common Dreams reminds us that most of that largesse is going where it's been going for years -- to the rich. As you may recall, wages have actually gone down over the last year, so if you're looking for that $4,000 raise you were supposed to get from corporate tax cuts, I think it's safe to say you can stop looking. (As an aside, "you can't eat GDP" should be, like, the greatest Twitter hashtag, ever. I'll get on it.)

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reminds us that our Administration's "tough-on-crime" approach most certainly does not extend to corporate lawbreakers. This won't surprise you if you remember how many health-and-safety citations our President's Mar-a-Lago resort has received over the years, or even if you've noticed, ah, how many folks Mr. Mueller has indicted and/or convicted already. But it sure does seem like this Administration thinks rule are for "the little people," i.e., us, and not for the "important people," i.e., them. You might call that elitist. You might also call it un-American.

If you weren't already ROFLing over Joe Freaking Lieberman trying to advise Democrats not to embrace socialists, Branko Marcetic at Jacobin reminds us exactly how noxious Mr. Lieberman's four-term career in the Senate was. He ran to Lowell Weicker's right because he always was to Lowell Weicker's right, and he never met a "war on terror" he didn't like, but I think he was at his worst on health care, constantly moving the goal posts so he could scuttle the Clintonian reform plan and water down the Obama reform plan. You may recall that he also proposed an internet "kill-switch" -- you know, like the one the Egyptian government used before it fell! Could it be that folks like socialism more because of politicians like Joe Lieberman?

Finally, Chuck Collins at Yes! magazine says we can start fixing the crisis in affordable housing by taxing rich absentee real estate owners. Wealthy folks all over the planet are sinking their money into real estate they don't intend to occupy. But high-end real estate taxes -- like the one Vancouver levied upon unoccupied properties, or the one British Columbia levied on absentee owners, or the one San Francisco levied upon real estate transfers over $5 million -- can either use the revenue to fund affordable housing programs or, at least, discourage wealthy folks from driving up housing prices wherever they decide to use municipalities as "piggy banks." The haters will say it can't be done, but the haters ain't the boss of us.

Action: concerning drug pricing and private prisons.

H.R. 6505, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, would (as the title suggests) allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices for its Part D drug benefit program. You've no doubt heard of studies suggesting that letting Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices wouldn't actually bring drug prices down, but if that's true, how does the Veterans Administration pay 40% less for drugs than Medicare does? It boggles the mind that folks could argue that allowing the buyer of almost one-third of prescription drugs in America to negotiate drug prices "will have little effect on drug pricing." Maybe if the Medicare negotiators are complete incompetents! But we can replace them if they're incompetent, because they work for our government, and therefore for us, but all big pharma corporations will ever do is push everyone around and steal your money. Hence both Public Citizen and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to help lower drug prices by passing the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop using private prisons to detain immigrants, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Again, letting private prison corporations house immigrant detainees is a way of putting a wedge between the American people and the government that presumably works for us -- oh, sure, governments always promise to oversee private corporations that take on government functions, but how has that worked out for us? When private prisons put immigrant children in jail, sexually and physically abuse them, and force them to take psychotropics, what does our government do? They say how horrible all that is, and then they do nothing about it, since private prisons are, after all, doing necessary work. But if we make our government house immigrant detainees, then we can more easily shine a light on, and get rid of, serial abusers. And as a bonus, we'll have far less corruption -- and the corruption we do encounter we can more easily punish, since it's our government.