Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning "free" trade, renewable energy, and climate change.

Ahead of a new (and liberal) Mexican President taking office in December, NAFTA renegotiation talks have resumed, possibly to hand Mexico's outgoing President a "legacy" item. Of course, some politician's legacy doesn't matter -- only our will matters, and with the heightened policy of a renegotiated NAFTA, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk that any renegotiated NAFTA should work for the American people, not for corporations. Word on the street is that the nefarious "investor-state dispute settlement" system (or ISDS) -- the system that would subjugate our laws to a corporate-friendly tribunal, who could exact tribute from the American taxpayer for having the temerity to pass clean air or clean water laws that "cost" some investor some money -- could be toast in a new NAFTA, but we have to make sure it's toast by speaking out. Even if it means our President gets the credit that we actually deserve.

Meanwhile, the coal-powered Navajo Generating Station will close in 2019, but Avenue Capital Group CEO (and big-time Democratic donor) Marc Lasry has mulled buying it and keeping it running for a few more years, which means more pollution, more intractable health care issues, and less renewable energy for the Navajo. And I guess, also, that it means gilded plumbing in Mr. Masry's 19th vacation home; apparently he loves buying up "distressed properties," but when a bankster buys a "distressed property," you can't even guarantee he'll try to fix it up -- he might be trying to bleed the value out of it through fancy financial betting. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell Mr. Lasry to scuttle plans to buy the Navajo Generation Station and invest in renewable energy in the Navajo Nation instead. I mean, as a member of our Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurial Class, he ought to be looking for the next thing, not the last thing.

Finally, after much popular pressure, ExxonMobil has followed BP, Shell, and Conoco Phillips in cutting ties with the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) -- having decided, perhaps, that being a fossil fuel corporation tied to unregenerate climate deniers might be the butt of too many jokes -- but one other big fossil fuel corporation still hasn't done it, so the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Chevron to cut ties with ALEC, too. Apparently they really are the last one, and chances are that associating with notorious climate-change deniers is not something Chevron will want to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. Most of these big fossil fuel corporations funded ALEC for decades, but now's not the time to smirk about that; now's the time to celebrate the fact that ALEC will have less money to push its right-wing ideas (and "model bills"!) on state legislatures. Hey, they said "starve the beast," so that's what we're doing.

Around the table: with at least four lessons in how evil works.

Our Health and Human Services Department has been diverting funds earmarked for other purposes to pay to reunite the families it separated at the border. Among the programs affected are rural health programs, which reminds me that this whole imbroglio isn't a bug, it's a feature -- our HHS is literally taking money from rural Americans and giving it to immigrants so that rural Americans will conclude that ITZ TEH IMMIGRANTZ FAULTZ!!!!! Hey, you gotta keep the hate machine running somehow.

Administration "loyalists" are replacing long-time Veterans Administration employees at a rapid pace. And here, too: replacing good employees (including an "experienced scheduler," remember all those wait lists that were in the news in 2015?) with unqualified loyalists helps assure that the VA runs down, and when it does, our Administration will say THIS PROVEZ THAT TEH GUBMINT DOESN'T WORKZ!!!!! and privatize everything. When I say "incompetence is malice," this is kinda what I mean.

Former Sen. Joe Liebermann, himself a victim in a 2006 Democratic primary, rues the "outside the mainstream" politics of NY-14 Democratic House nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and urges NY-14 residents to vote for the man she vanquished in the primary instead. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez sure is making a lot of enemies among folks who are actually outside the mainstream -- if we measure the mainstream by what regular Americans think, rather than the fake "mainstream" of the Beltway chattering class. I didn't realize, though, that Mr. Crowley was on the Working Families Party line, which conjures up the prospect of a lot of right-learning Democrats voting the Working Families Party line. That could be trouble, but maybe some good can come of that, too -- like hard hats remembering that they actually have a lot of liberal opinions.

From the "How Reassuring Is This?" file: Janelle Shane tells us that "The AI Revolution Will Be Led By Toasters, Not Droids," since artificial intelligence works a lot better when it has a lot fewer tasks to handle. Which makes sense, though it also seems that the more single-task-centered AI bots aren't that good, either. The human mind, as I've said many times, is a wondrous and complex thing, and we barely know how it works, so we're probably not going to be creating C3POs anytime soon -- though a lot of banksters will make a lot of money off dumb investors before that's too obvious, and more than a few big corporations will fall because they move to AI far too quickly. (As an aside, that AI-generated "Spread Chicken Rice" recipe made me laugh out loud. Never, ever forget to seed your hearts before cooking!)

Finally, our Homeland (sic) Security (sic) Secretary says, in re the Nazi wannabes rioting in Charlottesville last year, that "it's not that one side is right, one side is wrong" and "(a)nybody that is advocating violence, we need to work to mitigate." What stunning wishy-washiness, and not just because our President's votaries squeal when liberals use words like "mitigate." Fact is, more people commit violence than advocate violence, and just about everyone who commits violence feels they had no choice! And, in this debate, one side is right and one side is wrong -- and these sides are, respectively, "everyone but white supremacists" and "white supremacists." Remember when I said we had to unlearn the post-modern notion that "there's no such thing as good and evil"? Yeah, this is why.

Action: concerning the Supreme Court, police brutality, and paid family leave.

If you haven't told your Senators to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, you can still 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 find your Senators' phone numbers and call them. We know Judge Kavanaugh would reflexively put corporations above people, would support discrimination-because-Jesus, and would fight clean air and clean water regulations, but I suggest you put one reason front and center in your phone call to your Senators: that Judge Kavanaugh thinks a President should be immune from criminal prosecution while in office, because he's so busy. (Watching Fox News all day, apparently.) But we now have a President who might actually merit criminal prosecution, and we also have a President who expresses open admiraton for brutal dictator-wannabes like Messrs. Erdogan and Putin. Corruption and totalitarianism is already a bad mix, so why would we add "immunity from prosecution" to it?

Meanwhile, a group of good government organizations helps you tell Our Justice Department to investigate police killings of black folks as well as rates of police brutality against folks of color. We know our Justice Department doesn't feel the way we do, but duty is duty, in a world where white mass shooters seem easy to apprehend, but "carrying a cellphone while black" seems too often a capital crime. Our Justice Department has made noises about "supporting" local police departments, and being their "partner," but what kind of partner lets you do whatever you like no matter who gets hurt without consequences? And in what universe does "support" equal "jackboot lockstep agreement"? Only in universes that don't really value freedom, which is, sadly, the universe our current Administration seems to inhabit. Still, that's why we're here -- to bring them back to reality, where we live.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 337, the FAMILY Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. We live in a time when mainstream Beltway opinion holds that we should cut Social Security benefits to pay for family leave benefits, but mainstream Beltway opinion is moronic as usual. That tax-cut-for-the-rich that we just passed? Repealing that could easily pay for the FAMILY Act, which would otherwise get its funding from a payroll tax of 0.4% -- which is to say, workers would pay 0.2% of their income and their employers would also pay 0.2% of those workers' income. That's two-tenths of one percent, not "two percent" or "20 percent," "liberal" media! We might as well do the math all the way: a worker making $50,000 would pay $100 annually for paid family medical leave insurance. $100! In an entire calendar year! When you confront numbers like that, I could forgive you for thinking our leaders are stupid. Or cowardly. Or greedy.

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making, discrimination, and "conversion therapy."

Here's an idea I wish I had under our last President: H.Res. 922 would mandate that Congress file articles of impeachment against any President who starts a war without a formal Congressional declaration of war as the Constitution requires. H.Res. 922 would include wars against "non-state actors" -- you know, since that's all the rage these days -- and would apply even if our President joins an existing war rather than starts one. People talk about "hamstringing the President," but (at best!) they confuse the President's duty to prosecute a war with some imagined "right" to start a war. And those who blanch at the idea that a law could mandate an impeachable offense should ask why making war on other nations without Constitutional authority doesn't immediately strike them as a "high crime." Win Without War helps you tell your House Reps to support Constitutional war-making by passing H.Res. 922.

Meanwhile, Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) managed to add an amendment to a House appropriations bill that would allow adoption service providers to refuse to deal with gay parents out of their "sincere" "religious" "convictions" and still get federal funding. Even if I could accept that we should allow such folks to discriminate as if only their "religious" "convictions" mean a damn, why should they also feel entitled to federal funding in order to further their bigotry? Oh, sorry, was I not civil enough? I think I've described the problem exactly as it is, and there is no "reaching out" to people who think they're going to get gay cooties from allowing loving gay couples to add to the stock of good parents in America. Hence Equality PA helps you tell your Congressfolk to strip the offending Aderholt amendment from the the Health/Labor/Education appropriations bill.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Max Johnson has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your state legislators to ban "conversion therapy" for gay kids. Some parents put their kids through this, and while I usually respect parents' rights to make decisions for their kids, but just as I do not assume parents have a "right" to force-feed their children poison, I do not assume parents have a "right" to force-feed their children an unscientific "therapy" with outcomes ranging from anxiety to depression to suicide. And you literally do not need to have an opinion one way or the other about homosexuality to oppose "conversion therapy"! You need only ask yourself: do I oppose forcing kids to reenact past sexual abuses and submit to "exercises" involving nudity and intimate touching? If your answer is "yes," then you also oppose gay conversion therapy. And your help fighting it will be much appreciated.

Around the table: no, our President is not a traitor! And other lessons.

FCC Chair Ajit Pai suspends the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, saying he's afraid Sinclair will sell some of its stations (in order to get under an FCC ownership cap) in "sidecar arrangements" allowing them to keep a stake in programming and revenues -- thus retaining control over stations they don't own, which is against the law. Next will be a hearing before an administrative judge; Comcast and Time-Warner abandoned their efforts to merge rather than face an administrative judge in 2015. I still wouldn't be surprised to see this deal come back from the dead, though. And why do we allow any person or corporation to own more than one station again?

Look, I want to believe just as badly as anyone else that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) could vote against the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. After all, Mr. Kavanaugh believes a President should be exempt from criminal prosecution because he's-so-busy, and he has also stated that our government's metadata-vacuuming program is "entirely consistent" with our Constitution's 4th Amendment (and also spoke of the program's alleged "critical national security need," as if he hadn't convinced himself of the previous statement). But Mr. Paul could be the deciding vote here -- Republicans have 51 of 100 Senators, but John McCain is gravely ill and hasn't voted on anything in months -- and my guess is he waits for Sens. Manchin, Heidtkamp, and Donnelly to vote yea before he votes nay. Because the best time to vote on principle is when it makes no difference!

Just as we should take the term "fake news" with about a pound of salt, Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that we might actually credit social media with the leftward shift in voters' beliefs over the last few years. And just as we figure our President calls things "fake news" because he doesn't like being criticized, we should also figure that the "liberal" media doesn't like social media first and foremost because it's upended their authority -- social media has allowed good Americans to filter the news they get more to their liking, and maybe traditional "liberal" media sources, corporatist and cowardly as they are, aren't really to anyone's liking. Also, too, social media certainly isn't worse than the "right-wing noise machine" that drove voters rightward during the '90s.

Uh oh: looks like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker also met with Marila Butila, the Siberian woman recently charged with trying to collaborate with certain Americans to influence American elections. They met during Mr. Walker's Presidential campaign launch in 2015, which reminds me, mainly, that we really dodged a fucking bullet when Mr. Walker's campaign went kaplooey later that year, because Mr. Walker would be doing all the things Mr. Trump is doing and doing them in a way that would probably seem civilized to most Americans. But I'd be perfectly happy if this revelation helped finish his try for a third term later on this year.

Our President sure did put on a show two days ago in Helsinki (no, this won't be the straw that breaks the camel's back for Republicans, either), but no no no a thousand times no our President did not commit treason by throwing our intelligence agencies under the bus and sucking up to Vladimir Putin. He committed a thousand other sins, certainly, but not that one, because Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution still says what it's always said, and Congress has not declared war on Russia. And just as we remain wary of our "liberal" media regardless of how much our President constantly whines about them, we should remain wary of our intelligence agencies, as we have always done, out of our duty as citizens.

Finally, I was profoundly disgusted with our President fist-bumping that notorious Turkish dictator wannabe, Mr. Erdogan. "Do(ing) things the right way," according to our President, doesn't just explicitly mean steamrolling over our Constitution's mandate that spending bills originate in Congress -- it also explicitly means firing tens of thousands of civil servants, sending hundreds of judges to jail, torturing and raping detainees, and arresting 60 children for treason. Think of all that the next time you think of President Big Balls fist-bumping Mr. Erdogan.

Action: concerning citizenship and breastfeeding.

The state of Assam, in India, is "updating" its National Citizens Registry, apparently for the first time in almost 70 years, purportedly as a way of attacking their "immigration problem." But they're asking good folks to prove their citizenship, and it just so happens that a lot of Muslim citizens can't -- they've lived there all their lives, but they may be (for example) farmers who never went to school, and thus can't prove their citizenship with school certificates. Remind you of anything? Like, say, the Voter ID madness in this country, where folks have to produce documents they might be too poor or old to have before they can vote? Up to seven million Muslim citizens might get "deleted" from citizenship rolls in Assam, so Avaaz helps you tell the international community to pressure the Assam government into dropping these plans. And not just because they might give our President any more ideas -- "deleting" folks from citizenship rolls is how a lot of genocides start.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that our Administration -- acting virtually alone in the world, as seems to be its preference -- almost scuttled a World Health Assembly resolution promoting the health benefits of breastfeeding, not just by trying to water down the resolution, but by threatening the sponsoring nation (Ecuador) with cuts in economic and military support. What prompted this tantrum? Apparently, infant formula-manufacturing corporations in America got in our Administration's ear about the matter. Not that our Administration needed very much convincing, I'm sure -- they stand with bosses in all things, and everyone else be damned. The benefits of breastfeeding over formula are not only obvious, but scientifically-proven, so Moms Rising helps you tell American infant formula-manufacturing corporations to stop trying to scuttle public health efforts. Sadly, I expect they'll be more responsive to popular pressure than our Administration.

Action: concerning anti-pollution funding and antibiotic abuse.

The U.S. House plans to vote on an Interior Minibus Appropriations bill very soon, and that sure sounds sexy, don't it? But this bill would do a lot of damage: it'd cut $500 million from various clean air- and clean water-related projects, it'd cut more than $30 million from a program that buys out career, non-political EPA employees, and would essentially amend the Endangered Species Act by putting restrictions on listings. They can't gut the Endangered Species Act because then everyone would hate them -- I mean, who supports making the bald eagle extinct? -- but they can administer death-by-a-thousand-cuts to such programs. I guess it's good news that a Republican-controlled government is settling for death-by-a-thousand-cuts, but that doesn't mean we have to let them do it. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your House Rep to reject the cruel and callous Interior Minibus Appropriations bill.

Meanwhile, S. 3099, the Strengthening Antibiotic Oversight Act, would (as its title says!) strengthen oversight of antibiotics by forcing food-producing corporations to justify any use of antibiotics in feed animals lasting over 21 days to our Health and Human Services Secretary. You may reasonably respond that our current HHS Secretary will merely take big ag corporations' word that they really really need to keep pumping their animals full of antibiotics no matter how quickly it brings about a world where antibiotics are completely ineffective and the next cut kills you, but we're going to get a good HHS Secretary again one day (though not likely before 2020!), and when that happens, it'll be that much harder to undo their work. S. 3099 also mandates that our government inspect various feed-related forms to see how much antibiotics big corporations put in their animal feed, which'll help no matter who the HHS Secretary is. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight antibiotic abuse by passing the Strengthening Antibiotic Oversight Act.

Around the table: "Where's My Tax Cut?" And other mysteries.

Remember when our Administration claimed that the corporate tax cut alone would give families $4,000 more annually? Get your surprised face ready: wages actually went down from 2018's first quarter to its second quarter, and when you account for inflation, the drop becomes steeper. Wages had been inching up slowly over the Obama years, keeping close to inflation only because inflation was so low, but now wages are dropping back, and stock buybacks are shooting through the roof. You may be old enough to remember when the SEC banned corporate executives from buying back stocks! Anyway: something's trickling down, but it sure ain't wealth.

After the spectacularly unsuccessful effort to prosecute over 200 J20 protestors on felony rioting charges, some of those defendants are preparing to file formal complaints against the Assistant U.S. Attorney who led the prosecution. Well, if you use the legal system to oppress people, as Ms. Kerkhoff did by (among other things!) withholding evidence that hurt her case, you'd better win a lot more than that, since the people you fail to prosecute can use that very same legal system to come after you. But proving prosecutorial misconduct is a high bar -- the judge who sanctioned Ms. Kerkhoff for withholding evidence called her actions "intentional," but wouldn't call them "malevolent." You could argue she was greedy for a successful prosecution, but then you'd have to explain why she overcharged the defendants.

A Yahoo Finance report says that Wall Street "management" of public pensions has cost those pensions at least $600 billion over the last 10 years. That is to say that investing public pensions in index funds -- which merely follow the market -- would have netted $60 billion more annually than banksters investing in hedge funds and the like. And by the way, $60 billion annually is the low end of their estimate! But this story will have a happy ending: in the next round of right-wing hysteria over ZOMG TEH PUBLIC PENSIONZ WILLZ BANKRUPTZ USZ ALLZ!!!!!!!, the role of banksters in losing some $60 billion annually will go unmentioned. (As an aside, I kinda never want to hear banksters talk about the "secret sauce" in their investments again.)

Mike Lux asserts that "left-wing politics can win anywhere in the country," which is true, but blunts that assessment somewhat by suggesting that Democrats should hew close to the wishes of "grassroots leaders," as Republicans do. I mean, yes, Democratic "leadership" is incompetent if not malicious, and the party would benefit from adhering to grassroots leadership in the short term, but it'll become a trap in the long-term if grassroots leaders (versus, you know, grassroots Americans) get all the say about everything. I mean, that's what's happened to Republicans, particularly as their grassroots leaders have become mainstream politicos. (As an aside, I think Mr. Lux really brings home the weight of the Democratic failures of 2009 and 2010 in paragraph 4.)

Finally, Lornet Turnbull at Yes! describes how Buffalo residents are trying to fight gentrification in historically-black neighborhoods: by creating a community land trust, the first of its kind in the city. Land trusts rebuild neighborhoods and keep them affordable for future generations, i.e., keep land out of the hands of developers who only care about money, and who raise rents such that folks who've lived there for generations have to leave. Right-wingers would no doubt call this "socialism" (though there's actually very little government involvement), but I suspect a real conservative would applaud the land trust mechanism because it keeps rapid developmental change from uprooting traditional neighborhoods. In any case, I wish these good Buffalo residents luck.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, Social Security, and chemical plant regulations.

Word on the street is that Rep. Hoyer (D-MD) has decided he's not OK with the Saudi/UAE attack on the Yemeni port of Hodeidah after all; possibly he feels this way because he (like most House Democratic leaders) suspects he's about to become, to quote a phrase, a walnut in the batter of eternity, but I care less why people do the right thing than that they do the right thing. And I gotta say, with our Administration shedding allies right and left, it's a bit disconcerting that they've hung on like grim death to Saudi Arabia; why, it's like they're trying to do everything wrong. Anyway, Just Foreign Policy still provides a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your House Reps to vote on the war in Yemen before they recess for the month of August. I know, they've been pummeling Hodeidah for weeks now, but the time to do the right thing, and to stop doing evil, is always now.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6251/S. 3147, the Social Security Administration Fairness Act, would restore Social Security Administration funding and impose a moratorium on Administration office closures. Republicans know they can't just end Social Security, because voters would turn them out of office, so they try to inflict a death-by-a-thousand-cuts to Social Security, in this case by depriving seniors of the help they need to help navigate the system. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Administration Fairness Act. And speaking of death-by-a-thousand-cuts, our President has excluded Social Security Administrative Law judges from having to meet civil service requirements, which means he can eventually replace these judges with cronies who might decide to "deal" with the backlog of Social Security disability claims by dismissing them all. Hence Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore the independence of Social Security judges.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to stop trying to gut the Chemical Disaster Rule, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. The EPA just installed improvements to the Chemical Disaster Rule after the West, Texas chemical plant explosion that killed 15, injured over 160, and either damaged or destroyed 150 buildings. That was only five years ago! It was all over the news! It's like they think we have no memory of anything at all. Memory is, of course, one of the building blocks of civilization, so of course this renegade EPA wants to obliterate it, in the service of mammon. Would it be piling on to mention that a great many folks who live near chemical plants are low-income and communities of color? Don't say those people should just move, then, not unless you've miraculously come up with the solution to redlining.

Around the table: chronicling an unusually high amount of low-level corruption.

Our President pardons the two Oregon ranchers, currently serving five years for arson on public lands, who "inspired" the Bundy brothers' 2016 seizure of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Public lands belong to whom, again? To the people. That's kinda why they call them "public." The Hammonds and Bundys of the world, of course, act like they're the "public" and no one else is, but ain't nothing they can do our President can't make worse. Law and order!

Actual rich liberal populist wins Mexico's Presidential election, and the "liberal" media here in America hope for "business-friendly" change. I guess that's an improvement from saying Mr. López Obrador is "just like" our President (just like him, except in, you know, nearly all of his policy proposals!), but "business-friendly" shouldn't be everyone's first concern, when corporations go around ruining everything in the world just so they can squeeze it for money. Remember, kids: money doesn't last, but civilization does.

Ryan Cooper at The Week asks an obvious question: "If democratic socialism is so bad, why is Norway so great?" Important lessons: don't confuse democratic socialism with things like Communism (particularly as practiced by the Soviets) and don't put yourself in the position of arguing that elite individuals should control the economy but the people shouldn't. And wasn't our President complaining about not getting enough immigrants from non-"shithole countries" like Norway? (As an aside, the relatively high U.S. per capita income is undoubtedly goosed up by our world-leading supply of super-rich, which, as I've often said, doesn't mean you see a bump in your bank account.)

Uh oh: Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY) has been putting GPS tracking devices in campaign signs so he can locate the people who steal them! Which has led him, no, not to an Antifa or Black Lives Matter protestor, but to a retired pastor. I wouldn't steal campaign signs myself, but maybe Mr. Reed should have considered that getting all Captain Queeq about a campaign sign makes him look like a small man. And really, if you were to serve the good people of New York's 23rd district, instead of serving mammon, you wouldn't have to worry about who's stealing your campaign signs.

Double uh oh: shortly after voting for that massive tax "reform" last fall, Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), who personally stood to gain $2.1 million from that tax "reform," bought himself a million-dollar yacht. Naturally his spokeshack whines about negative campaigning and "partisan smears," and the fact that Mr. Buchanan disclosed the purchase is irrelevant, like following the law is some gift he gives to us or something. This little yacht purchase is exactly the stuff of classic (and relevant) campaign ads. I wouldn't lay money on his Democratic opponent having the guts to run it, though.

Finally, Democrats seem to be meeting the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination with "mixed messages," which is, admittedly, always a danger when a nominee is so completely awful on everything. But I can help with that problem! Here's the message: Judge Kavanaugh thinks Presidents should be even more powerful, which would make the American people less powerful. You're welcome, Democrats. (Full disclosure: Democrats never take my advice.)

Action: concerning gerrymandering, family leave, and nuclear waste.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: we've told Gov. Wolf to call a special legislative session to pass redistricting reform, but that won't mean anything if the legislature screws up the reform process again, so Fair Districts PA helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to do the right thing during a special session on redistricting reform. One of those "leaders" -- House State Government Committee Chair Daryl Metcalfe -- gutted not one but two redistricting bills in his own committee, and when House leaders successfully kept future redistricting bills out of his committee, legislators from both parties swamped those bills with hundreds of amendments. So, yes, we're demanding they come back during their time off to do their job because they've done an abominable job so far. They could redeem themselves by doing a good job this month, however.

Meanwhile, as several right-wing Senators work on a plan to divert Social Security funding into a paid family leave plan -- anything not to raise taxes on their corporate paymasters! -- Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 337, the FAMILY Act. The FAMILY Act would finally bring paid family leave to America by establishing the Federal Family and Medical Leave Insurance Trust Fund within the Social Security Administration. Monthly benefits would range between $580 and $4000, depending on your income, and an 0.2 percent payroll tax (that's two-tenths of one percent, not "two percent," "liberal" media!) would fund it. So when your right-wing uncle says IZ TEH GUBMINT GOINGZ TO DO EVERYTHINGZ!!!!, remind him that our taxes pay for our benefits, which any of us could use. Just remember: you won't convince him you're right -- but you might convince anyone else who might be listening that you're right.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject the proposed placement of a nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, then Food and Water Action still helps you do that. If you're tempted to respond well, you gotta put the waste somewhere, then you should ask yourself which is worse: storing nuclear waste in hardened containers near nuclear power plants, or transporting that waste across 44 American states and thus risking contamination from the inevitable trucking accident. And there's yet another reason we should reject nuclear power as a nation -- you know, along with the fact that you can get low carbon emissions from solar and wind, and the fact that power plants that present such a high risk of contamination from accidents and/or terrorist attacks tend to be so unpopular that they need massive government handouts to build them and keep them running. So, yeah, let's stop doing that.

Action: concerning the Supreme Court, immigrants in the Army, and offshore drilling.

Our President has nominated D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice Kennedy's retirement. I've received numerous emails exhorting me to tell Republicans to follow the "McConnell Rule" and refuse to consider the nomination until after the people seat a new Congress, but amused as I'd be to attack Mr. McConnell's bald and abject hypocrisy, and aware as I am that literally the only reason we have the President we have is the patently-undemocratic Electoral College, I will not be induced into hypocrisy myself; I called for hearings on Mr. Garland, and the Senate should hold hearings on Mr. Kavanaugh as well. But nothing prevents us from using 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) and calling our Senators and telling them to vote the Kavanaugh nomination down. For Judge Kavanaugh will do a lot of damage if the Senate confirms him -- among so many other things, Judge Kavanaugh has written that Presidents should be immune from criminal prosecutions while in office, which is exactly the sort of thing that warms our President's heart, and chills ours.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the AP's report that our Army is kicking out immigrant enlistees without warning or justification -- immigrants who had enlisted in part so that they could get on an expedited path to citizenship, no less! -- Win Without War helps you tell our Defense Secretary, James Mattis, to stop these discharges and investigate previous ones. We've offered an expedited path to citizenship to immigrant enlistees for over a dozen years now (that's right, right-wingers, you can't blame TEH OBUMMERZ!!!! for this one, either), but now, in the name of "zero tolerance" of immigration, we're going to break this promise, too, because AMURIKA!!!!! Mr. Mattis -- who could be getting fired over Twitter soon, being the last remnant of sanity in our President's foreign policy apparatus -- has shown courage in the face of our President's ball-swinging before; with our counsel, he could do so again. (BTW, right-wingers: none of these immigrants are slackers "taking advantage" of our good nature, because nobody thinks putting themselves in the way of bombs and bullets is an "easy" way to get citizenship more quickly.)

Finally, our President has issued an Executive Order loosening regulations put in after the Deepwater Horizon Spillageddon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, like we have no damn memory of anything at all. Because they "kill jobs," I suppose our President will say if he ever gets around to deciding he ought to justify what he's doing, but of course that'd be a lie -- clean air and clean water regulations create jobs for people who help corporations comply with them; what they don't do so well is redistribute income upward to oil and gas drilling bosses. Our President believes bosses are his only real constituency, but in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, becoming a boss doesn't even demonstrate superior talent at managing people or making good products or streamlining processes anymore -- it only demonstrates superior talent at corner-cutting, employee-screwing, and job-killing. Also, you know, the American people are the boss of the President, not the other way around. Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to halt all offshore drilling off America's coasts.

Around the table: in which bad people who do bad things get ostracized by their neighbors.

Hours after a federal court told Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin that he could not impose work requirements and deductibles (among other obstacles!) upon Medicaid, Gov. Bevin guts dental and vision benefits for Medicaid recipients. Another court will probably strike down Mr. Bevin's actions, but he'll cause a lot of damage in the meantime, to people who suddenly can't get health care because he's a drama-loving asshole. We'll see if he can get a clean cup of coffee anywhere in the state after this.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon reveals why voters believe all our President's lies about MS-13: because of decades of "lurid but false urban legends about how a cousin's friend's friend's sister heard about random gang violence aimed at strangers." When I hear that MS-13 has a mere 10,000 members in America (what army has ever conquered a country this size with a force that small, an army also scattered and aimed almost entirely at other immigrants!) I am reminded, as I often have been over the years, of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode in which an Admiral nearly turns the Federation over to fascism based on fear of the Dominion threat, and a Dominion operative reveals to Capt. Sisko that there are exactly four Dominion operatives on Earth at that moment. DS9 spent the '90s warning us about this kind of thing, and we've spent the subsequent two decades ignoring those warnings.

Jesus Mary and Joseph Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) might feel emboldened enough by Joe Crowley's loss in the NY-14 Democratic House primary to make another run at Nancy Pelosi's caucus leadership position. Ms. Pelosi is as corporatist a Democrat as they come, but recall that Rep. Ryan voiced his support for corporate tax cuts last fall, even saying that Democrats "can't just be the party of redistribution of wealth," never mind that Republicans are the party of redistribution of wealth upward. Then again, we learned all we needed to learn about Mr. Ryan when he abruptly became pro-choice on the day he announced his last challenge to Ms. Pelosi. I'm pro-choice myself, but gosh, your values aren't worth anything if they don't inconvenience you every once in a while.

Uh oh: Media Matters finds even more racist dung nuggets in Republican NJ-2 House nominee Seth Grossman's past. I have to say I didn't even know American Renaissance was operating anymore! But the really stunning revelation here is that Mr. Grossman's act is a bit behind the times -- his no-I-really-do-care-about-minorities and we-can't-say-what-we-think-out-loud-anymore-because-we're-not-free act comes from a time when you had to mask your racism a little better, but a certain President has proven you don't have to do that anymore. Mr. Grossman's act would do better in a state other than New Jersey, of course.

Finally, the Washington Post reports on the public shaming certain Administration figures face. Much of it without cuss words -- I mean, "(y)ou ought to be ashamed of yourself! Go look in the mirror!" is a perfectly civilized thing to say in public! Still, to hear Sean Spicer say that "(w)hen we went out, the goal was not to make a spectacle" is to laugh -- people in this Administration do nothing but make a spectacle out of themselves every minute of every day. And Mr. Scaramucci sounds like the kind of fellow who'd complain about your "meanness" if you yelled at him for smearing his feces all over your walls. Isn't there a point at which, if you're that worried that someone urinated in your $80 sushi plate, you need to at least wonder if maybe the problem's you?

Action: concerning gerrymandering, voting rights, and media consolidation.

Fair Districts PA still helps you tell Gov. Tom Wolf to call a special session of the state legislature to end gerrymandering once and for all in Pennsylvania. Word on the street is that Gov. Wolf wants legislators to come to a compromise on redistricting reform and then call a special session so they can vote on a bill. But legislators already have every incentive to keep things the way they are so they don't have to work to win elections or do the people's will, and since the legislature would, by law, have to pass redistricting reform by late July so it can take effect in November, it sure seems like they also have every incentive to run out the clock. They've gutted anti-gerrymandering bills and swamped them with amendments; do they seem like they want to do the people's will here? Our Governor would be better off dragging them back to work kicking and screaming.

Meanwhile, Color of Change helps you tell Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner to sign HB 4469, which would (among other things) require state and county prisons to provide voter registration forms to folks released from prison. A lot of folks who get out of prison think they've forfeited their right to vote just because they served time; I wonder where they got that impression? From politicians all over America who pretend to be "tough on crime" by depriving felons of the right to vote, maybe? HB 4469 would also ensure that folks in prison who have not yet been tried can still vote by mail. Folks awaiting trial aren't convicted criminals, after all! And if I thought of how easy it'd be to simply detain people you don't like on a maelstrom of charges so they couldn't vote, you can bet the politicians thought of it a long time ago. So let's help our politicians resist temptations such as these.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then Common Cause still helps you do that. I don't think any corporation should ever own any other corporation, but I certainly don't want one corporation being able to reach three-quarters of Americans through faux "local" news channels. Seriously, they're not being "local" if they're reading the same scripts or running the same must-run op-eds or running the same fearmongering "terrorism news desk" stories. Sinclair does all that, and once armed with all those Tribune Media TV channels, Sinclair will get to do all that in front of a lot more people who are running from the drama of cable news channels and hoping they'll get real news they can use from their local channels. They deserve a lot better than yet another big corporation looking to emotionally manipulate them.

Around the table: the President of France is not a good President either! And other lessons.

Good news, everyone: prosecutors have dropped all remaining charges against the J20 protestors. As you know, prosecutors tried to ring up over 200 Inauguration Day protestors on felony rioting charges, but they failed abjectly to do so. Of course, their own lipstick-on-a-pig statement that "21 people have pled guilty to charges for their conduct that day" hides the fact that they brought so little evidence to trial that they would have had to count on guilty pleas to get any guilty verdicts. I wonder how they got those guilty pleas.

Our Army has started discharging immigrant soldiers who joined the Army so they could establish a firm path to citizenship. Our Army told a few of them they were "security risks" because they had relatives abroad (why, nobody could have predicted that immigrants would have relatives in other nations!) or because the DoD hadn't completed background checks, which are, of course, more extensive for immigrants. Is there any promise this Administration won't break just to diddle the rage glands of its votaries?

Shira Tarlo at Salon reminds us that Andrew Wheeler, the coal lobbyist replacing Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator, won't be any better than Mr. Pruitt. He may not have Mr. Pruitt's peculiar taste for low-level perks, but a former colleague assures us he "does things by the book," which may mean he'll move more slowly than Mr. Pruitt, which is good -- or it may mean he knows all the loopholes he can use to make our air and water dirtier again, which is bad. Apparently he doesn't really want the job, either, though he might be doing it for a while.

Surprise, surprise! Juliette Legendre at Inequality.org finds the Presidency of France's Emmanuel Macron to be "an old-fashioned, right-leaning neoliberal determined to overhaul France’s hard-won social model under the guise of modernism and emancipation." Cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations, gutting labor laws, partially privatizing the national rail system, and declaring his opponents to be "slackers," "cynics," and "do-nothings" -- how preferable, really, is all of that to the shitshow we're enduring here in America?

Police union President talks of "an influx of tremendous outrage" from the community over the inclusion of two books on an eight-book summer reading list for incoming students at a South Carolina high school. Dig how he calls two books "almost an indoctrination toward distrust of authority figures" -- gosh, I wonder how many of our Founders complained that our Constitution was "almost an indoctrination toward distrust of authority figures." My favorite part is when we learn that one of the books this fellow fears actually has a good police role model in it. All together now: waaaaaaaaah!

Finally, Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic says Democrats will have to choose in 2020 between mobilizing whiter, Republican-leaning voters disgusted with Trump or mobilizing younger, less white, more liberal voters. I can make that decision for them! Mobilize the voters who are sick of an economy that serves only the richest Americans, because disgust with that economy pretty much resonates across age and race groups. Hell, it might even remind some Republicans that they're really Democrats.

Around the table: meet the new boss, same as the old boss, part 785.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: ISIS fighters have moved back into Raqqa, Syria, not even a year after coalition forces allowed 250 of their fighters to leave Raqqa with their families and all the weapons they could fit into a three-mile long convoy. It sure is a good thing our new national security braintrust isn't overly preoccupied with truly ridiculous projects like regime change in Iran! Oops, sorry; I forgot which evil alternate universe I was in for a moment.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigns/is fired, citing "unrelenting attacks on me personally" because waaaaaaaaaah! And our President's votaries now see Mr. Pruitt as One of Them, because he gets attacked by Those Librul Elites just like they do! Never mind that they'd never tolerate a Cone of Silence from a Democrat. (Also, a former coal lobbyist now runs the EPA, on an "interim" basis that I expect to last at least until the end of 2020.)

In the face of yet more "liberal" media hand-wringing over Just What Those Red State Voters Are Really Like, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us that the glue that really binds them (and their messy lives) to our President (and his messy life which is now our messy life) is sexism. "The anti-abortion campaign is all about punishing women for sex, not men," right-wingers don't "put a 'higher value' on marriage" so much as they "stigmatize not being married," by which they mean women not being married -- all true, and as long as men are trying to get sex from women (and imagining themselves somehow disenfranchised if they don't), this'll all remain a problem.

Ho hum, privatizing IRS tax collection functions has caused our government to lose money, which Nobody Could Have Predicted! Worse, private tax collectors more typically go after low-income working families than big fish, which Nobody Could Have Predicted, Either! We talk about this kind of stuff all the time, but our elected representatives never seem to listen. That's why we need to keep talking about it. Can't some enterprising Democrat somewhere run campaign ads about this? Or would that be uncivil?

Max Boot becomes another major right-wing figure (a la George Will) to openly root for Democrats to win back the House and Senate this fall. Of course, Hillary Clinton was able to find plenty of Republicans willing to endorse her and even shoot ads for her; how did that work out? And how much pull do folks like Max Boot and George Will really have with regular Americans? Hell, how much pull do they have with other elite right-wingers, most of whom, I imagine, are saying we're getting rid of regulations and getting two Supreme Court Justices out of all of this as we speak?

Finally, leave it to Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall to point out that simultaneously telling Democrats "we have to fight or we can't win" and "if we do fight, it will backfire and we also can't win" is utterly absurd. He also approves of the "Abolish ICE" slogan because at least it's got "clarity and power," like, you know, all right-wing slogans do no matter how stupid they are, plus "(i)f your political language tip toes around what you think or shows you’re not quite sure what you think or shows that you know what you think but may not be willing to act on what you think, that has bad consequences. It signals weakness and irresolution. It shows you may not have the resoluteness to act." Which explains how Scott Walker/Sam Brownback/Paul LePage/Rick Snyder/Rick Scott somehow won all those elections -- they're wrong about everything, but they're resolutely wrong.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, private prisons, and media consolidation.

In the wake of the implosion of anti-gerrymandering bill SB 22 underneath the weight of over 600 amendments, Fair Districts PA helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to call a special session of the state legislature to pass redistricting reform. If he does so, we'll be able to introduce HB 722 and SB 22 again -- possibly in improved form! -- and we'll be able to punish our legislators for taking the people's will and pooping all over it (since legislators will regard not having the month of July off as a punishment). Mr. Wolf absolutely has the power to call a special legislative session, and the people's clear support for redistricting reform gives him the reason to do it -- but does he have the will? Surely he'll want to consider that calling unpopular legislators back for a special session to do the job the people have clearly commanded them to do would be a smart political move, not a "risky" one.

Meanwhile, Moms Rising helps you tell Wells Fargo to stop investing in the private prison corporations that are (among other evils!) helping our Administration forcibly separate parents and children at the border. The Obama Administration started to move away from using private prisons for immigrant detainment -- since, you know, our government really should perform its own duties, not farm them out to someone's crony -- but this Administration, flush with private prison campaign money, has moved back in the wrong direction. Still, private prisons would have a much tougher go of it if they didn't get money from big banks. And you know Wells Fargo could certainly use all the good PR it can get! Indeed, it's been all but begging for good PR, after being caught opening checking accounts for customers without asking them (among other sins). If pulling out of the private prison game happens to benefit them at the same time it benefits us, I won't complain.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then Free Press still helps you do that. Sinclair Broadcasting already owns 193 "local" TV stations, which are enjoying a bit of a vogue as more people reject the obvious partisanship and hackdom of cable news channels, but Sinclair indulges in quite a bit of partisanship and hackdom itself -- forcing their "local" newsreaders to read a noxious script about "fake news" as if it's something those other people do, and forcing "terrorism news desk" items and must-run "opinions" from a former Administration spokeshack on their local stations. Buying up Tribune Media would enable Sinclair to force even more of this crap into even more households. What on Earth is wrong with local news stations having local ownership? And if you couldn't find a local owner, what on Earth would be wrong with worker-owned broadcasting stations?

Action: concerning taxes and animal bans.

On the occasion of the 6-month anniversary of the Republican tax scam, and the Republicans' stated intent to pursue another tax-cut-for-the-rich before the midterms, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Republican tax scam, oppose another tax-cut-for-the-rich, and enact tax policy that actually helps working families. A couple dozen dollars every week ain't nothing, but giving a couple dozen dollars to working families while giving billions to corporations and hundreds of thousands to millionaires just ain't moral -- ultimately, it's a way to bribe working families so that rich folks can get even more powerful. If Congress wants to help working families, they can tax the rich harder, so that they're less able to buy Congressfolk who'll write laws that help them run roughshod over the rest of us. Sounds a lot like common sense -- to anyone but a Congressdolt dependent on campaign funds to survive, that is.

Meanwhile, airline corporations have met with some much-deserved bad PR over avoidable pet deaths, the most famous (from almost a year ago) being the bulldog puppy who suffocated after a United Airlines attendant insisted the dog be put in the overhead compartment. So Delta Airlines (which had a dog die during a layover on one of its flights last month) has compounded the problem by banning pit bulls from their flights, even if they're service or emotional support dogs. I can't be the only one who's had nothing but positive experiences with pit bulls. And this ban happens to violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, since no one who has a seeing-eye pit is going to go through the trouble of training (and trusting) a dog of a different breed just to fly Delta. Hence Sara Enos has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Delta Airlines to get rid of their pit bull ban.

Around the table: starring fake Republican courage and bad Democrat advice.

David Wang at Cracked explains "Why You're Being Kept in a Constant State of Impotent Rage." The major points -- that we can entertain ourselves so much more easily than back in FDR's day, that we let corporations make too much of our lives like pop culture fandom, that "the same media that connects us profits by making us all feel like we're under siege" -- are, of course, indisputably correct and artfully-put. But I maintain that even if you're part of the problem, you can also be part of the solution -- indeed, I suspect it's impossible not to be both. (And, as an aside, that jerkwad who put up the "no gays allowed" sign got what he deserved -- the knowledge that he could lose money and good will for being a jerkwad.)

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) says flat out that a Supreme Court nominee who would overturn Roe v. Wade "would not be acceptable." Now here's why that's utterly meaningless: if Roe v. Wade comes up in the hearings, the nominee will either dance around the issue or make positive noises about Roe v. Wade and stare decisis, and then, having secured Ms. Collins's vote, he'll vote to overturn Roe v. Wade at the right opportunity. Look, if I've figured that out, I'm sure she has. And how many potential future Roe v. Wade annihilators has she already helped put on the federal bench during this Administration?

Sen. Ted Cruz R-TX) says flat out that the good voters of Illinois's 3rd district vote for anyone, even a Democrat, instead of Republican House nominee/Nazi symp Arthur Jones, even going so far as to say "(t)his bigoted fool should receive ZERO votes." He's absolutely correct about that, of course, but it's not exactly the height of courage to say "don't vote for an avowed Nazi" out loud; we're just more inclined to think so because our President has encouraged so many Nazi wannabes to come out of the woodwork, a matter about which Mr. Cruz has had little comment. And would Mr. Cruz have said anything if Mr. Jones wasn't running against the famously center-right Dan Lipinski, but someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Speaking of which, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's thumping of a 10-term incumbent in New York's 14th district Democratic House primary sends, to Ryan Grim of The Intercept, a "sobering message to Democrats reliant on big money: it won't save you." And you would think Democratic pols would find this not a "sobering" message but an uplifting one! And not just because our elected officials really don't like spending half their time trying to scare up campaign donations, but because, in America, we all think we want more money, but what we really want is freedom from money.

Finally, here comes Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois -- who lost her only competitive Congressional race, in a Democratic wave year, no less! -- to instruct us that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's politics won't play well in the Midwest. Really? "They have money, but we have people" doesn't catch the average voter's elbow? And telling your primary opponent that you'll have to go to your supporters before committing to support him should he win the primary isn't how most people already think democracy should work? This critique, mind you, comes from the woman who had half her limbs blown off in Iraq but when asked in 2006 if she supported the war, said "there's good and bad in everything," which came off more as wishy-washiness than zen equanimity. So, one more time: as much as your positions matter, how you talk about them matters more. Or, to put it another way, if you have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's politics but you talk about them like you're Tammy Duckworth, then yes, you'll lose, anywhere in America.

Around the table: it's Mitch McConnell's world, but we don't have to take it! And other hard-to-face facts.

What else did our Supreme Court get wrong when they upheld our President's Muslim travel ban? They forgot to consider that the Muslim ban actually violates two international treaties, and thus already violates U.S. law. Yes, that's what treaties become when our Senate ratifies them, and our Senate ratified both the the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Doesn't matter that our Senate entered reservations to both (or even that we might have agreed with some of those reservations), because our Constitution says international treaties become the "supreme law of the land." Of course bold thinkers still think international law shouldn't apply to them, because MURIKA!!!!

Alec MacGillis at ProPublica reveals "How Mitch McConnell Made Donald Trump." Mr. McConnell "has created the world in which we are now living" -- a world as accomplishment-free as his shrine at the University of Louisville library -- with his steadfast support for big campaign money and his obstruction of Democrats at every turn, which latter item, of course, also exposes the weakness of modern-day Democrats. But if this is, indeed, the Age of McConnell, then the age and the man certainly deserve each other.

Ho hum, CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney has slashed a fine against a South Carolina payday lender. Dig the CFPB spokeshack calling the payday lender -- which charged triple-digit loans and actually roughed up borrowers -- part of the "productive sector" of society! This really is the Age of McConnell! Mr. Mulvaney did receive over $60,000 in campaign donations from the payday loan sector while running for and serving in Congress, though the article doesn't say if Security Finance (what cojones, that name!) was one of his donors.

Josmar Trujillo at FAIR notes that even though the "liberal" media have stopped uncritically flogging stop-and-frisk as the solution to violent crime (and have even, in some cases, walked past support for stop-and-frisk back), they're now uncritically flogging secret gang databases as the solution. You might be in a gang database used by the police yourself, even if you're as young as one year old -- no lie! -- and you can't find out if you're in a gang database, which means what, again? Folks get arrested on the basis of evidence they can't challenge, which is, you know, not democracy. Personal to those who say we need to "support cops" by using these databases: you do know that "support" doesn't equal "jackboot lockstep agreement," right?

Our Government Accountability Office (or GAO) can't say whether Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke broke the law by reportedly threatening both Alaska Senators -- because Interior wouldn't cooperate in the GAO's investigation! They act like they have no idea how such things look -- either because they're really that cynical or they want you to be that cynical, or (at least) accept that much cynicism. But all this really means is that good folks regard anything that comes out of Mr. Zinke's mouth as the word of a dishonored man.

Finally, unions may be down as badly as we've ever witnessed in our lifetimes in the wake of our Supreme Court's Janus decision, but George Lakey at Waging Nonviolence reminds us that unions have been down before, and have surged back -- specifically, after the Great Depression, when GM workers, backed by the United Auto Workers union, occupied their plants (without causing any damage to them, since GM would have used that to justify violence against them), and then used their success at GM to reach out to the more interracial workforce at Ford. That means coming back is going to take a good deal more than we've given thus far -- but don't complain about that to civil rights marchers!

Around the table: summarizing the latest in bad news.

I told you the Supreme Court wasn't done: the Court rules, in Janus v. AFSCME, that making government employees who are not union members (but work in union shops) pay certain union-related fees violates their First Amendment rights. Conflating money with speech is a persistent fault of the Roberts Court, but did the AFSCME make the best possible case? I mean, if a Supreme Court Justice won't figure out for himself how to distinguish between fees funding a union's political spending and fees funding spending on (for example) services that support workers in the workplace, it shouldn't be that hard to figure it out for him. (Then again, Justice Alito's opinion indulges in right-wing scaremongering about the "mounting costs of public-employee wages, benefits, and pensions.")

Both the Government Accountability Office (or GAO) and the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General plan to investigate our President's handling of family separations at the border. I wonder how long it'll be before our President loudly declares the GAO and all these pesky Inspectors General to be part of the "swamp" he says he wants to drain (recall that he wanted to replace all of our Inspectors General right after taking office, before being told, you know, how that would look).

In a related note, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds us that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. In other news, voter fraud is not particularly common, the "liberal" media is not particularly liberal, "moral values" are not particularly about whatever hurts gays and women, and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are not particularly real. Sometimes I do not understand why 25% of the electorate prefers to remain in a constant state of rage about utter bullshit.

The "liberal" media won't shut up about "civility" this week, but this New York Daily News article reminds us that a cookie shop owner refused to serve then-Vice President Biden in 2012 and nobody wrung their hands about "civility" then. Why, that's a better example of right-wing hypocrisy than the one I came up with off the top of my head the other day! It may be too much to hope that I'll only have to say this once, but protecting civilization is a lot more important than protecting civility.

Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez pulls off a stunning upset in the New York 14th House District Democratic primary, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says no bigs, it's just one district, takes all kinds of Democrats, yadda yadda yadda. Gosh, is Ms. Pelosi showing smarts here? Republicans win so often at least in part because they pretend to be so different from one another, though of course they're all cut from the same reactionary cloth, while Democrats have a well-deserved reputation of strangling new blood in its crib in their insane zeal for victory without work. Maybe, just maybe, Ms. Pelosi's finally getting it.

Finally, I know everyone's upset about Justice Kennedy's retirement, but as Mother Jones reminded us several hours before his announcement, Justice Kennedy hasn't been a swing vote, like, at all this past term. Yes, he was, over the years, better than we could have expected on gay rights and criminal justice reform, but n.b. that Chief Justice Warren was the swing vote in the cellphone warrants case. And Justice Kennedy was as corporatist as the rest of them -- recall that he wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United v. FEC.

Action: concerning disaster prevention, renewable energy, and Yellowstone Park.

The EPA has proposed getting rid of every disaster prevention measure in its Chemical Disaster Rule, because of course they are. The West Fertilizer Company chemical explosion that killed 15, injured over 160, and either damaged or destroyed over 150 buildings was not that long ago! And it was all over the news! And a chemical accident happens almost every other day in America, so why the hurry to get rid of what little our government has done to protect us since then? Because Scott Pruitt knows his days as EPA Administrator are numbered, just as surely as the right wing establishment in America knows its days are numbered, and they are grabbing everything that isn't nailed down. Actually taking steps to protect good citizens costs CEOs money, after all, and CEOs have yachts to gas up and vacation homes to buy! Public Citizen helps you tell the EPA to scuttle its plan to roll back protections against chemical disasters.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3671, the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act (or OFF Act), would get our electric grid entirely "off" fossil fuels and onto renewable energy by 2035, and if your first impulse is to say golly, that's only 17 years away, keep in mind that you could, in theory, power America's entire electric grid by covering a mere 100-square-mile area of Nevada with solar panels, so this isn't a very big ask. The OFF Act would also repeal fossil fuel subsidies, help out low-income homes trying to get more energy-efficient, and provide rebates for folks to buy clean energy cars. When some right-winger tells you this all sounds like welfare, go ahead and ask him where he was all those times our government gave corporate welfare handouts to fossil fuel corporations. In the meantime, Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support renewable energy by supporting the OFF Act.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell our Interior Department to ban mining in or near Yellowstone Park. Interior is mulling whether to open up some 30,000 acres of public lands in the northern part to gold and silver miners, among others. Hey, wasn't the California gold rush over 160 years ago? Yes, it was, but even in our post-gold standard era some folks never seem to get over the fever. We all know that mining in or near public lands tends to lead to pollution and wildlife habitat destruction, and word on the street is that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke might actually agree, having supported a mining ban at Yellowstone while he was in Congress, but you'd be quite justified to fear that our Administration would prefer only to listen to other bosses trying to extract the value from public lands for themselves. But that only means we need to speak out until they do our will. After all, you can only spend money once, but when public lands are gone, they're gone forever.

Action: concerning the Muslim ban, internet freedom, and immigration.

As you know, our Supreme Court upheld our President's Muslim ban yesterday, and though that might sound like the last word, it's really not, because Congress can choose to restrict our President's power to discriminate against people he doesn't like. Congress legislating and the Executive branch executing; what a novel idea! Hence the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to rescind our President's Muslim ban. Surely Congress will be all over this like white on rice, right? Actually, they've held exactly zero hearings on our President's Muslim travel ban since he put out his first one right as he was taking office, though they sure have devoted a lot of time to figuring out exactly how hard to screw families crossing the border and exactly how to hold DACA reauthorization hostage to border wall funding. But, as the owners of government, we can make our will known. Indeed, we-the-people making our will known is the only thing that has ever done any good in America.

Meanwhile, the FCC's net neutrality repeal took effect on June 11, as you know, giving Congress 60 working days (such as they "work") to nullify the repeal with a "resolution of disapproval" under the Congressional Review Act. The Senate has already passed such a resolution, and now it's up to the House; Stop the FCC still helps you tell your House Rep to support the discharge petition that will force Speaker Ryan to bring the House version of the "resolution of disapproval" to a full House vote. Don't brook any silliness from your Rep that "it's a lost cause because the President will veto it anyway." He almost certainly will veto it, but you should still do the right thing! You should still send a message that you support freedom for Americans to go where they want on the internet, rather than "freedom" for corporations to censor and throttle websites and turn our internet experience into cable TV. And we should make the President defend his veto. If he can.

Finally, you've also no doubt heard that our President would much rather just deport undocumented immigrants without due process -- after all, it's not like any of them could be running from terrorism or anything! And it's certainly not like a strong nation gives everyone due process, even when it's inconvenient. And Congress, of course, is no better than our man-child President -- Rep. Goodlatte's draconian anti-immigration bill failed last week, of course, and Speaker Ryan's "compromise" bill, get your surprised face ready, isn't much of a compromise -- it would allow our President to continue separating families at the border, cram immigrant families into our President's crony private prisons, and hold DACA reauthorization hostage to the President's border wall funding. He should ask Israel how well that wall is doing for them! Hence the ACLU helps you call your House Rep and demand they reject the Ryan "compromise" immigration bill.

Around the table: the dictator our President aspires to be, and other sad tales.

As Turkey's President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seems to have won another re-election, the incomparable Juan Cole reminds us how much of the Erdogan blueprint has been eagerly adopted by our own President. Filling the judiciary with "far-right ideologues" (thanks for being such a check on Presidential power, Mr. McConnell!), fomenting mistrust of the press for all the wrong reasons I feel compelled to add, allying with right-wing religious fools, and attempting to "shape the officer corps" (though I'd say not in Secretary Mattis's image per se) -- it happened there, and it's happening here, too. At least we haven't gotten to the point where our President's opponents all find themselves in jail like Mr. Erdogan's did. Yet.

Our Supreme Court upholds our President's Muslim ban in an entirely unconvincing manner -- accepting extremely debatable opinion, that ZOMG WE CAN'T VET ALL TEH IMMIGRANTZ!!!!!, as incontrovertible fact, just as they did in their Ohio caging law ruling earlier this month. At least Justice Sotomayor, in her dissent, points out that the majority, in its equally-notorious Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, looked at Colorado Civil Rights Commission members' opinions about religion with a proctoscope, but didn't think our President's stated opinions about keeping Muslims out of America worth noting. Aside from Justice Roberts's opinion on cellphone location warrants, this Court has really been stinking it up this term, and they're not done.

Caroline Chen at ProPublica notes that big pharma corporations underwrite some 75% of the FDA's scientific review budget, and then the FDA "Rush(es) Risky Drugs to Market." Why, it's almost like that's the idea! A long time ago, someone had the brilliant idea that they could cut taxes by making corporations pay "fees" funding essential government functions -- like, you know, regulating drugs so they don't hurt people! Note well that Uloric's own manufacturer found that many more Americans die from heart disease while they're on Uloric than if they're on some other gout medication, and Uloric costs $24,000 a year! And then there's Nuplazid, the drug that's supposed to treat hallucinations in Parkinson's patients that actually causes hallucinations. You will not be heartened to read about the FDA's approval process for that particular drug, which costs $33,000 annually.

Well, I was actually on Sarah Huckabee Sanders's side for once, sort of, but then one of our papers of record started bemoaning the lack of "civility" in American life, a concern I didn't hear uttered when, for example, folks hung President Obama in effigy. Once again, when liberals stand up for themselves, Our Glorious Elites suddenly wonder why we can't all get along. (BTW, I oppose kicking Ms. Sanders out of a restaurant just because she's evil, but I certainly do not oppose people gathering to heckle Ms. Nielson or Mr. Miller at separate restaurants. You'd better be able to handle that if you're an adult, let alone an adult working for the most powerful man on the planet.)

Finally, I was going to say something about the various absurdities at which right-wing media figures are grasping in order to justify our President's policy of separating parents and children when they cross the border, but then Tom Tomorrow's latest cartoon nailed the entire spectrum of this right-wing rationalization in one frame. One frame, out of six! And then two frames later he mocks the Civility Police, and then in the next frame he captures the entire spectrum of our Administration's often-contradictory responses to criticism about the affair. This one's absolutely brilliant and right about everything -- and I wish that meant more.

Action: concerning immigration, education, and clean water.

What else can we do do to hinder our President from turning America into a land without due process? Well, consider that you may be invested in a pension fund that invests in private prison corporations -- including the ones in which our President would detain immigrant families seeking asylum "indefinitely." But don't flagellate yourself about "how I benefit from the harm done to others," not just because that's what our President and his votaries would like you to do, but also because even if you are "part of the problem" -- any problem! -- nothing on Earth prevents you from also being part of the solution. That is the promise of America. And pension funds hate the Big Stick of Bad PR just like every other corporation on Earth, so Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to divest from the private prison corporations that our government would use to detain immigrants indefinitely.

Meanwhile, Michigan's state Board of Education aims to scrub its social studies curriculum of almost any mentions of civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, or climate change. Oh, and it wouldn't talk of "core democratic values," either, because, get this, it sounded too partisan. All together now: waaaaaaaaaah! One of the big names behind the new "standards" is state Senator Patrick Colbeck -- can I mention he's a Republican, or would that be too partisan? -- who just so happens to be running for Governor. A guy who can't stand the notion that America has screwed up and yet has striven to do better shouldn't be running for village idiot, let alone Governor. (Also, too, he thinks the KKK didn't start out as a racist organization.) Hence Jeff Gaynor of Ann Arbor, MI has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Michigan state Board of Education to scuttle its plan to right-wash history in its K-12 social studies curriculum.

Finally, the Pennsylvania state legislature is mulling SB 1189, which would, get this, reclassify the Delaware River Basin Commission's (or DRBC's) fracking ban in the Basin as a taking of property, meaning the DRBC would have to buy out all the landowners with gas shale underneath their property in order to enforce the ban! If you noticed that the simple act of banning fracking in an area doesn't actually "take" anyone's property, and that good Pennsylvanians (possibly including yourself!) have already made their will known by commenting on the DRBC's fracking ban, you're not alone. Fracking puts dangerous chemicals into our drinking water, and momentarily cheaper energy is, frankly, too high a price to pay for losing our clean water (and thus the bedrock of decent health care!) forever. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to support our will and our right to clean water by rejecting SB 1189.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, the Bristol Bay, and antibiotic abuse.

SB 22, the Pennsylvania anti-gerrymandering bill, continues its tortured path through the state Assembly: though Daryl Metcalfe couldn't simply gut the bill like he did the last few anti-gerrymandering bills, he did personally introduce over 120 amendments, and a Montgomery County Democrat actually outdid him, introducing more than twice as many. That's how evil people operate in legislatures, by introducing so many amendments that everyone just throws up their hands and gives up. Not us, though! Fair Districts PA helps you instruct your PA state House Rep to vote "yea" on exactly one amendment, the Samuelson amendment (A08876), and then pass SB 22, as thus amended. The Samuelson amendment (available here, for your perusal) would establish an 11-member Commission to redistrict the state, and if they fail to do so by the specified deadlines, would allow the state Supreme Court to redistrict the state. That's worth all the trouble.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is taking public comments on whether to put an open-pit copper and gold mine and a natural gas pipeline in the middle of Alaska's Bristol Bay region, home to Alaska's sockeye salmon industry supporting some 14,000 jobs. Gosh, when put like that, it sure sounds appetizing, doesn't it? I guess they're hoping for comments reading yes, I would like to pollute the Bristol Bay, kill off the unique wildlife that lives there, and destroy all those jobs in Alaska's world-famous salmon industry. It's a trifecta! But Environmental Action helps you tell the Corps to reject the idea of putting mines and pipelines in the middle of a pristine and economically viable area of Alaska. I know, the EPA has decided to uphold Obama-era mine-waste standards in the Bristol Bay that make it well-nigh impossible to put gold and copper mines there. But we don't have nice things without hard work.

Finally, PennPIRG helps you tell big restaurant chain corporations to purge their supply chains of antibiotic-dependent meat. As you may know, America uses four our of every five antibiotics, no, not in sick people or sick animals, but in nominally healthy feed animals, partly because the antibiotics make the animals meatier, and partly because they help the animals endure the squalid conditions of factory farms. You know what using antibiotics like that also does? It creates "superbugs" that resist antibiotics, thus threatening a return to the days before antibiotics, when the next cut could kill you. Get the big chains (including McDonald's, Subway, and KFC) to stop using the pumped-up meat, and the "free" market might actually work its magic for once. We've managed to get a lot of the big chains to use more antibiotic-free chicken, but not beef, not yet -- and beef is the big game here, so to speak. So let's get to it!

Around our table: lesson #3088 in "why 'more Democrats' isn't the solution to our problems."

California state Assembly members blow massive holes in the state Senate's gold-standard net neutrality bill, to the point where the Senate bill's original author tries to withdraw it from consideration. And they announced their amendments late at night and then voted on them the next morning without debate, sorta like Daryl Metcalfe did to those anti-gerrymandering bills in Pennsylvania. And in case you were thinking all our problems would be over if we just elected more Democrats, note well that Democrats absolutely dominate both houses of the California state legislature, and they not only let this happen, they helped it to happen.

Here's something you may not know about our President's plan to let "small businesses" offer crappier health care plans that let insurers evade Obamacare coverage mandates: it has a loophole that allows big corporations to join "small business associations," as long as it doesn't upend a total size requirement, I presume. I mean, I'm not sure how else to read paragraph 17's report that "(u)ntil now, the Labor Department...often looked at the size of each company, rather than the group as a whole, to determine if it was a large or small employer." Thus will big corporations be able to foist crappy health insurance on their employees! (As an aside, it sure is odd that whenever we say "making insurers cover maternity care," our opponents say "burdensome regulations." I wonder why that is.)

Jessica Huseman's ProPublica report on the court case that struck down Kris Kobach's pet show-me-your-citizenship-papers-if-you-want-to-vote law catalogues a mighty dung-mountain of incompetence and malice, and is thus well worth the considerable amount of time it takes to read it, but I want to highlight, if I may, how Mr. Kobach came up with all those scare numbers about TEH THREE MILLYUNZ VOTEDZ ILLEGULLYZ!!!!! The academic who came up with that number found less than 40 folks out of 32,000 who said they were non-citizens registered to vote in 2008 -- and then said anywhere from 38,000 to 2.8 million folks had voted illegally, which is a range wide enough to be utterly meaningless. Naturally Mr. Kobach fell in love with the bigger number, just like our President. Look at them balls swing!

Ho hum, Factcheck.org reminds us that Presidents Bush the Lesser and Obama did not, in fact, separate families at the border with the sheer zeal of this Administration. And, you know, "they did it too" is bad argument even when it's correct -- it's a way of saying "I'm not going to defend my position on the merits, but I am going to subtly accuse you of hypocrisy for not crying out when the other guy did it." When they deflect to insulting you, they're announcing they're losers. I wish everyone understood that.

I was, frankly, hoping for more from this article, entitled "The Hope of a Blue Wave is Dangerous to Democracy." I take the author's point about everyone being overconfident about the 2016 elections, too (wasn't Chuck Schumer measuring drapes for the Majority Leader's office?), but I'd hoped for a larger message -- that "hoping to get more Democrats in office" has already disappointed the hell out of us, certainly, but more that democracy isn't about who we support but about what we do, every single day of our lives. It's a lesson those folks who went to townhalls to press their representatives about health care seem to have learned well, but we all need to learn it.

Finally, I do not believe that the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, VA, has a "right" to kick Sarah Huckabee Sanders out, even for being the face of our Administration's evil propaganda machine. People can eat where they like -- I mean, a big chunk of the civil rights movement was about that! And a big chunk of the gay rights movement is about similar matters! -- and the First Amendment right to free association does not flow in only one direction at a time. And, as any cook or waiter will tell you, there are subtler and more effective ways to get someone not to eat at your restaurant anymore.

Action: concerning health care, the Grand Canyon, and the Census.

Our President still obsesses over destroying the Affordable Care Act, our Congress still obsesses over destroying Medicare and Medicaid -- what's a citizen to do? Slice the Gourdian knot of health care absurdity in America by telling your Congressfolk to pass S. 1804, the Medicare for All Act, as Social Security Works helps you do. The Medicare for All Act would, as its title suggests, expand Medicare to include all Americans, which would end a lot of absurdities we've come to believe are just part of life, like ballooning premiums, surprise health care bills, and getting kicked off insurance for having pre-existing conditions. America spends more on health care than any other developed nation, and gets less for it -- nearly one out of every 10 Americans still don't have health insurance, and health insurance corporations charge pretty much whatever they want and dare you to do something about it. Expanding Medicare to include everyone? That'd be doing something about it.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Interior Secretary to make a temporary moratorium on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon permanent, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. Naturally President Obama's first Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, imposed the moratorium, but if Mr. Obama did it, then our current President must take a dump all over it, never mind that uranium mining there would absolutely poison the Colorado River, which runs through the Canyon and provides water to over 35 million Americans, not just for drinking but also for farming (the Colorado River provides water to the Imperial Valley in California, which produces over $1 billion annually in crops). If our President cares more for uranium mining bosses than for, you know, regular folks, then regular folks must stand up to him. I do wonder if it would impress our President to know that bighorn sheep live in the Grand Canyon, since the word "bighorn" does have the words "big" and "horn" in it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to scrap its attempt to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Some folks are still saying so what? when they hear about that, but it is, actually, a big deal -- our Constitution mandates that the Census count everyone living in America, citizen or not, but a lot of good folks whose papers are in order, but who have had trouble navigating our bureaucracy, will simply refuse to fill out the Census form if it asks them about their citizenship. Why? Because they don't want to give racists in our government more ammunition to hurt them, that's why. Can you blame them? And Census data helps determine the size of Congressional districts, as well distribution of federal funds, which means less representation and less money for districts with immigrant populations. Look, these folks pay taxes, and one of the services they get for their tax money is a Census that works for everyone.

Action: internet freedom, corporate welfare, and workplace democracy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your U.S. House Rep to nullify the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, then Stop the FCC still helps you do that. Net neutrality officially ended last Monday, as you know, and though the big telecom corporations haven't started censoring websites or slowing websites down or forcing you to watch junk news videos before your websites load or herding some of your websites into internet "slow lanes," but the only reason they haven't done these things yet is because they're not completely stupid -- they know it's better to take your freedoms away a bit at a time, rather than rush to take them all away at once. And net neutrality is about your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than have a bunch of big corporations tell you where to go. The Senate already passed a "resolution of disapproval" aiming to nullify the FCC's repeal; now the House must do the same. But they won't, unless we demand it.

Meanwhile, our Administration's Department of Energy has concocted a truly moronic scheme to force utilities to buy a set percentage of their electric power from coal and nuclear. Brought to you by the same people who call renewable energy standards "welfare handouts"! Coal corporations are failing, not because of some "war on coal" drama, but because natural gas is considerably cheaper, and solar and wind are price-competitive now. And nuclear power plants have never made any money. How do we know? Because our government keeps giving them "loan guarantees," which only "guarantee" that taxpayers bail them out when they fail! I wish I could believe that this chunk of corporate welfare is all about our coal miners, but it's not -- the only people our President cares about are other bosses, and he sees the rest of us as just tools. So the Sierra Club helps you demand that our Energy Department scuttle its plan to force utilities to buy more from failing fossil fuel corporations.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5728/S. 2810, the Workplace Democracy Act. The Workplace Democracy Act would amend the National Labor Relations Act to curb corporations mislabeling their employees "independent contractors," to keep corporations from forcing employees to attend anti-union presentations, to force more good-faith negotiating efforts between corporations and unions, to allow employees to choose a card-check election instead of a secret ballot election to join a union, and to repeal "right-to-work" laws at the state level -- among other things! The only other thing I would ask for would be to allow farm workers to organize. But this bill is the gold standard of labor legislation in these times -- and when we have strong unions, we have better wages and better working conditions. So don't believe the right-wing hype that unions "make us less free," because all they do is make corporations less free to hurt us.

Action: concerning immigration, slavery, and renewable energy.

I'm guessing by now you've heard tape of the wailing of immigrant children who've been separated from their parents at the border, replete with a Border Patrol agent's attempted gallows humor; naturally our President blames everyone but himself for these separations, our Attorney General throws Pauline letters at anyone who says his policy is cruel, our HHS Secretary simply denies any of this is even happening, and certain Administration supporters call the children "crisis actors" -- all ways, you notice, of avoiding admitting that you support separating children from parents, since saying you support that makes you, you know, look like a cruel bastard. "Zero tolerance" policies generally being bad policies in any endeavor, People for the American Way helps you tell our government to end its policy of separating children from parents during border crossings.

Meanwhile, Turkmenistan is yet another nation that forces its citizens to work in the cotton fields during harvest time -- which isn't "bringing everyone together for the common good" so much as forcing free people into slavery for the enrichment of crony cotton executives -- and it also tends to, ah, mistreat activists who try to call attention to this depravity. Hence the government of Turkmenistan has kept Alternative Turkmenistan News (or ATM) reporter Gaspar Matalaev in a labor camp for the better part of two years after he interviewed and photographed folks during said harvest. Hence the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell Turkmenistan to release Mr. Matalaev. (You'll be pleased to learn that our government banned the importation of cotton from Turkmenistan last month -- though if our President ever decides he has cronies there, that could change in a New York minute.)

Finally, an organization called Brown's Last Chance helps you tell California Gov. Jerry Brown, term-limited (again!) in 2018, to put California on a surer path away from fossil fuels and toward renewables before he leaves office. Look up the word "mercurial" in the dictionary and you'll see Jerry Brown's picture, but Mr. Brown has been making an awful lot of noise lately about the danger climate change presents to our planet, so he might be inclined to a) stop giving permits to fossil fuel corporations for new drilling and b) phase fossil fuels out of California's energy grid. I'm frankly more concerned about the health effects oil and gas drilling have on the clean drinking water of good Californians -- you don't have health without clean water, and Mr. Brown's record on this matter, which includes letting farms spray fracking wastewater on their crops how do you like those strawberries now? rather undercuts his public handwringing about his legacy. Good thing we're here to help.

Around the table: with a completely unsurprising finding about American attitudes toward diversity.

Contra what you may have gathered from the 2016 election, Pew Research Center finds that almost six out of 10 Americans think having a lot of different ethnicities and nationalities here in America is a good thing. Also, too, less than one in 10 Americans think it's a bad thing -- and even among the furthest-right Republicans, only one in six think it's a bad thing. So how did we get this President, then? Because Democrats demanded you get behind a center-right candidate merely to avoid having a monster, and because Republicans got behind their man, thinking they'd at least get a Supreme Court Justice out of it. So if both parties enable virulent racists in different ways, then maybe they should stop enabling them?

Jonah Walters at Jacobin argues that Juneteenth -- or June 19, the day the U.S. Army announced to the slaves of Texas that they were free -- should be a national holiday. Yes, if we revere Independence Day, we should revere Juneteenth, too, and when right-wingers trot out their special rights disrespecting the Founding Fathers well what about tripe, remind them that slavery is bad, and we should celebrate when we triumph over slavery and give more freedom to more good Americans.

During the introduction to this lengthy piece about the life and times of Administration immigration policy expert/man desperately in need of a punch in the nose Stephen Miller, one of Mr. Miller's high school classmates speaks thusly: "(p)eople laughed at him because he was a buffoon, he was a performer, he thrived on spectacle. I’m very conscious now, looking back, that he was treated the same way that Trump was -- he wasn’t taken seriously." At once I saw that "taking someone seriously" doesn't mean pretending anything they have to say is worth carefully considering, but rather means seriously shaming them so that they don't take their hatred outside their homes ever again. (And, yeah, we should also have known that someone who loves drama the way Mr. Miller does would get fairly far in this sick, immoral, and decadent society. I mean, I wish ignoring these bastards was an option, but we're too far gone for that now.)

Toward the end of this article about Amazon's notorious facial "recognition" software, an Amazon spokeshack unfurls this dung nugget: "Our quality of life would be much worse today if we outlawed new technology because some people could choose to abuse the technology...Imagine if customers couldn’t buy a computer because it was possible to use that computer for illegal purposes?" Wow, not only is that a rhetorical hostage situation ("don't criticize our product, or all innovation and progress will stop forever!), it completely ignores critics' substantive complaint that not only is the product evil, the product also sucks (i.e., because all black people look alike to it).

Now this I did not expect: a U.S. District Court judge not only strikes down Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach's proof-of-citizenship-to-vote law, but requires him to take six hours of continuing legal ed. I was going to say, well, that's going to look awful good as he runs for Governor! But then, Mr. Kobach's base (now the same as our President's base, given their closeness) consists mainly of people who think ignorance of "Evidence 101" is a badge of honor. Ain't no judge going to tell me what I should already know, no sir! (Even when they learn Mr. Kobach is a Yale law school graduate, they'll decide he was learning the ways of the librul elites so he could better take them down.)

Finally, the Supreme Court may have given its blessing to Ohio's vote suppression scheme, but Greg Palast assures us that their decision, unlikely as this may sound, is "not the last word." Why? Because the Supreme Court was able to bless the Ohio scheme by assuming that a voter failing to return a postcard has actually moved -- but if plaintiffs can establish that Ohio has removed a significant number of voters who haven't moved, then the linchpin of the Court's assumption falls out, and their argument collapses. Would the Supreme Court admit such a thing? Likely not this Court. But other courts will hear it in the meantime -- and states that suppress the vote this way will not enjoy the Big Stick of Bad PR being administered to them.

Action: "free" trade, spying on protestors, and immigration policy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to sign on to a letter opposing the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system commonly found in "free" trade pacts like NAFTA, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Hilariously, ALEC circulated a letter supporting the job-killing, law-nullifying ISDS mechanism earlier this year -- and a staggering twelve legislators signed on. Then Public Citizen circulated its anti-ISDS letter, and by the end of May garnered almost four times the signatories ALEC got. Just about everyone in the real world opposes an unaccountable court system with the power to nullify our laws and exact tribute from taxpayers for the "harm" caused by said laws. Unfortunately, most of the folks who do support such an unaccountable court system are in Congress and in our President's cabinet -- and that's why we have to keep fighting.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell Amazon to stop selling their should-be-notorious Rekognition spyware to local police departments. Spying software that can find a mere hundred faces in a crowd (and, ah, isn't so good at correctly identifying the non-white faces) sure sounds like bad spying software, until you consider its real purpose: to harass protestors into silence. In an era where our government tries to hang felony rioting charges on over 200 J20 protestors, it's not hard to see the purpose of being able to "rekognize" a hundred people in a crowd and then follow them around until they give up speaking truth to power. Of course, as a real law-and-order devotee, you would also see a broad invitation to violate these good Americans' rights, by gathering information on them without probable cause. No, protesting our government isn't "probable cause." It's being an American.

Finally, the Tahirih Justice Center has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell our Attorney General to reverse his decision to deny asylum to folks running from domestic violence. He doesn't give a damn what you think, believing himself and the Administration to which he belongs to have been "ordained" by God, but our duty remains our duty. I'm going to go ahead and make the same two points I made the other day, because Mr. Sessions clearly has no answer for them if he's resorting to the letters of Paul to justify his actions. One, it'd be different if the governments these good folks are running from could actually protect them from domestic violence, but guess what? They can't. Two, if you think we shouldn't be letting folks in who are running from real trouble but we should be letting folks in just to work the President's hotels and wineries, you really have no standing to debate this issue at all.

Action: fighting unconstitutional war-making and bad GMO labeling standards.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject S.J.Res. 59, an Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) which would greatly expand our President's unconstitutional war-making power, then Win Without War still helps you do that. It doesn't matter which gang of war-mongering weaklings now control our foreign policy, and it doesn't matter what the President's name is -- all of our Presidents since 9.11 have abused the original 2001 AUMF, and by giving present and future Presidents the authority to declare certain forces as being "associated" with the Taliban/al-Qaeda/ISIS and wage war upon them, S.J.Res. 59 would further damage Congress's Constitutional right to declare war. And don't believe the hype that S.J.Res. 59 would provide for "adequate Congressional review," not if you've attended how Congressfolk actually vote when confronted with the "threat" of being called "weak on terror" by rage-addicted fools.

Meanwhile, in a related note, Saudi Arabia has begun its attack on the Yemeni port of Hodeidah -- an attack that threatens to exacerbate Yemen's near-famine conditions, since some 80% of Yemen's food imports go through Hodeidah, and an attack that we are enabling, with intelligence on air strike targeting. If you think you missed the part where Congress declared war on Yemen, well, you didn't: we have assisted Saudi attacks on Yemen, in violation of our Constitution and our laws, since the beginning of the Obama Administration. And for what? To extend Saudi power in the region? To destroy of some of the best ISIS-fighters out there in the Houthi rebels the Saudis are trying to crush? These are questions worth asking! Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell your Congressfolk to invoke the War Powers Act against our enabling of the Saudi attacks on Yemen.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to dramatically improve its proposed GMO labeling standard, then Just Label It helps you do that. They actually to put a sunflower with a smiley face to signify that a food has genetically-modified ingredients! And they'd use the term "BE" (for "bio-engineered), a term nobody knows, rather than the term "GMO," a term everyone knows. And they're also allowing labels to point you to a we address or use a QR code instead of just writing "this food has GMOs in it." Gosh, it's like they have something to hide! And there is nothing conservative about the USDA proposal. A real conservative would call all that smiley-face QR code crap "bureaucratic red tape." A real conservative would say we should clearly label GMOs so consumers can make their own decisions. And a real conservative would wonder if GMOs will cause more problems than they solve.

Around the table: concerning automation, corruption, wage theft, tax cuts for the rich, more tax cuts for the rich, and rogue ICE agents.

With all the anti-worker hysteria of ZOMG TEH AUTOMATIONZ WILL KILLZ ALL TEH JOBZ!!!!!, Neil Irwin at the New York Times highlights a number of very reasonable solutions we could implement to prevent such a job-ocalypse. These do not include a universal basic income, which right-wingers will use to destroy Medicare and Social Security -- they include work-sharing programs, codifying "maximum employment" policies in law, and shortening monopoly protections for trademarks and patents. But they should also include bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, which really is the thing that will prevent executives from throwing living-breathing workers under the bus for their not-very-well-working machines.

Ho hum, Florida Gov. Rick Scott's decision to issue "emergency contracts" for hurricane cleanup will cost Florida taxpayers at least $28 million more than if he'd relied on existing contracts for hurricane cleanup. I am, of course, reminded of Florida Republican U.S. House Rep. Carlos Curbelo instructing us last August that doing hurricane cleanup the right way saves more money than doing it the quick way, but Gov. Scott spent valuable time and money doing the whole rebidding process over again. Why, that's something you'd do if you were trying to help out your cronies, not protect taxpayers from "special interests"! The POGO general counsel's statement that Mr. Scott's decision did not reflect "good business sense" should be a Democrat campaign ad, but then again, these are Democrats we're talking about.

Sam Pizzigati wonders why big corporations, which can afford not to commit wage theft, still do so. Decline in unions yes, attacks on regulation certainly, but also the simple fact that "(t)he outrageously generous rewards that have become so commonplace in Corporate America give the executives who run our top corporations an ongoing — and almost irresistible — incentive to behave outrageously." Best way to fight the problem at its source? "(E)nd" "eye-popping CEO pay packages." At the risk of beating a dead horse, bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income would be the best way to do that -- certainly better than the so-convoluted-they-must-be-designed-to-fail ways center-right Democrats have come up with over the years.

Remember when tax "reform" supporters in the White House claimed that their tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-for-corporations would put an extra $4,000 in every family's bank account? Well, it's fair to ask where that "$4,000 Raise" went, as Leo Gerard does. Wages actually went down 0.1% for non-supervisory workers from May of last year to May of this year once you factor in inflation -- and I think you would only "forget" to factor in inflation when you're trying to lie about economic policy! -- while less than five percent of American workers got raises or bonuses. Most of that tax-cut largesse, as you probably recall, goes toward executive stock buybacks and higher dividends for shareholders. I may have mentioned this before, but you could run a lot of good ads along the "Where's My Tax Cut?" meme -- you could even send out bloodhounds to find it, like Mitch McConnell did in those ads for his first Senate campaign back in the day. But again, Democrats would have to run these ads, and they wouldn't be civil.

Greg LeRoy at CityLab informs us that workers at Amazon's second headquarters, wherever they build it, will very likely be paying their state taxes directly to their employer, since whichever states "wins" the bid to host HQ2 will be giving massive corporate welfare handouts to Amazon. Where is the state that will stand its ground and say no, you clowns already get to deduct your expenses, so further "deductions" would be immoral, since it would cheat present and future generations of the services they pay for with their taxes? I don't know, since 18 of 50 states are in the running, and maybe the other 32 would like to be, but can't be, for various reasons, possibly including that Amazon would consider a lot of those states "flyover country."

Finally, ICE agents detain 62-year-old man who has permanent resident status and has been in America for literally almost half a century -- over an 18-year-old domestic violence complaint for which the man had already completed probation and anger management. Even if you want to spend valuable time and money combing through all these records for the "bad" immigrants -- hell, even if you want to assert that domestic violence should carry a worse sentence than that! -- you have to respect our nation's traditions and laws enough to leave people alone who have already paid their debt to society as mandated by the court that convicted them. Then again, for a lot of Americans, generally the ones who complain about "law and order" the most, there really is no law and order; there is only whatever satisfies their prejudice and their rage.

Action: internet freedom, email privacy, and robocallers.

Roots Action helps you tell your state government to contract only with internet service providing corporations that respect net neutrality. Net neutrality, as you know, is the principle that demands that ISPs treat all network traffic the same, and that's the same principle that allows you, and not some corporation, to determine where you want to go on the internet. It's also the same principle that the FCC repealed late last year, because for them, corporate "freedom" to bilk us and herd us into junk news ghettoes is more important than our actual freedom to associate freely on the internet. But the state of Montana has already declared it won't contract with corporations that don't respect net neutrality; if enough states follow suit, those corporations are more likely to throw up their hands and keep things more or less the way they are. The FCC will hate it, but they're walnuts in the batter of eternity, and we're not.

Meanwhile, here's a welcome development: the Email Privacy Act, once unanimously passed by the House only to fall to some truly disgusting Senatorial machinations, is now a part of the House's version of the defense authorization bill. Now, the Senate will pass its own version, which might or might not include it, or the two bodies might conference it out -- but that's where we come in, by using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to tell our Senators to include the Email Privacy Act as part of the defense authorization bill. Unlike the poison pills they usually try to attach to defense authorization bills, the Email Privacy Act actually relates to national security, since it would require our government to get a warrant whenever it wants to look at personal emails left on a corporate server. So give your Senators a call; they won't see it coming.

Finally, if you have a cellphone, you're almost certainly getting phone calls from numbers that look like real people but are actually robocallers trying to separate you from your money; I can't tell you how many of these phone numbers I've put through a reverse lookup at Whitepages.com only to find they're "suspected spam" and/or "flagged as scam or fraud." Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell our FCC to enact the most vigorous possible regulations restricting the power of robocallers to disrupt our lives. Yeah, the FCC is in charge of that, and they don't give one rat's hind quarter about you or I; they only care about their corporate cronies. But said corporate cronies have no particular interest in protecting robocallers, since they're a) extremely unpopular and b) generally small-time crooks at best. And if robocallers induce folks to use their cellphones less frequently, corporations will care about that. So let's get cracking.

Around the table: news about nukes, monopolies, and right-wing snowflakes.

I've been quite patient, but since our President is doing the dance-with-no-pants about it, I'll say it: this nuclear "deal" between our President and North Korea is a nothingburger on a dung bun. I'd ask how any sane person pulls out of an Iran deal that actually keeps Iran from making nukes and then signsa "deal" with North Korea that only gets "assurances" that North Korea will denuclearize, but I know that question answers itself. Could this be the moment when we finally -- finally! -- see significant numbers of mainstream Republicans breaking off from our President? I mean, they're all proud of what defense hawks they are, and while the President's votaries love him, he can't get re-elected without the support of those other Republicans. If they keep mum through this, I shudder to think what will shake them out of their stupor.

John C. O'Day at FAIR notices that the "liberal" media seems happy to report on our President's authoritarian tendencies, but then goes blind about them when they have to confront the fact that we wage war all over the planet and have enough nukes to destroy the world 200 times over. (Dig especially the narrative twist at the end of the third paragraph.) Now, maybe the "liberal" media think that's "balance." You know what I think -- that symmetry isn't balance, and balance isn't fairness. Fairness doesn't obsess over whether all the negative columns are the same size; fairness gives everyone their due, as they've earned it. Yes, I am a little impatient about these matters.

The incomparable David Dayen explains why "The AT&T-Time Warner Merger Ruling Is Bad for the Country." Long story short: modern thinking about antitrusts (first developed during the Reagan era, of course) posits that judges should only evaluate big corporate mergers on the literal dollar-and-cents cost to consumers, "when common sense clearly demonstrates the dangers of concentration." You know, the more power concentrated in the fewer hands, the worse off we all are? You knew it before I said it, but contemporary judges, who study for years to get where they are, pretend they don't know it. It's a damn shame. (Dear trolls: don't spout off about "precedent," since there's plenty of actual precedent -- not to mention the plain text of antitrust law! -- to do antitrust protections the right way, too.)

Virginia Republicans send 2017 almost-gubernatorial nominee/Confederate flag-hugger Corey Stewart up against Democratic incumbent Tim Kaine in this year's U.S. Senate race. Mr. Stewart has promised a "vicious" campaign against Mr. Kaine; maybe he'll outdo Ed Gillespie in that regard. But do you suppose Mr. Stewart will have the smarts to challenge Sen. Kaine on his support for giving the President even more war-making power? After all, wrapping yourself in the Confederate flag will only take you so far, even in Virginia. (Mr. Kaine, for his part, would do better to put "taking health care away from folks" first in any list tabulating Mr. Stewart's bad ideas.)

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) -- the man who gives empty suits a bad name -- not only calls criticism of Twitter's CEO for ordering from Chick-Fil-A during Pride Month "bullying" but is even fundraising off it. Ugh, one more time: criticism is not bullying. Gosh, does Mr. Rubio ever hear criticism from any of his friends? Or are they all tired of how he acts when he does? If he really thinks folks are being "bullied" every time someone disagrees with their regressive views on homosexuality, then he's a damn snowflake. Snowflakes deserve representation, of course, but (like the rest of us) they deserve much better than to be represented by other snowflakes in Congress.

Finally, Democrats score yet another special election victory in Wisconsin -- in the Senate 1st District election that Wisconsin's snowflake Governor, Scott Walker, tried his damnedest not to hold! Republicans have held this Senate seat for 40 years, by the way -- and it's up again in five months, and a lot can happen in five months, so who knows, they might take it back. But probably not if now-Sen. Frostman foregrounds health care, tax cuts for the rich, and clean water as his main issues, as he does on his campaign website.

Action: black lung disease, wastewater, and EPA funding.

First things first. The Black Lung Disability Trust Fund -- which, as you can tell by the name, helps coal miners with their extensive health issues -- has never been funded properly, such that the GAO now informs us that it's billions of dollars in debt. Even better, the tax on coal corporations which funds the trust will go down by more than half later on this year! Right-wingers will demand that we fund the trust some other way than making that those "poor" coal CEOs pony up more money, but that's a real Pandora's box right there -- after all, why not fund the trust by, oh, I don't know, repealing corporate tax cuts and tax cuts for the rich? Because SOCIALISM COMMUNISM NAZISM, that's why. So get a head start on solving this problem for-real for-real by allowing Change.org help you to tell your Congressfolk to support coal miners over coal executives by properly funding the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.

Meanwhile, did you know that the state of Pennsylvania has been spraying gas and oil drilling wastewater on our roads to, get this, keep the dust down? Where carcinogenic and radioactive elements can easily drift into the air or work their way to our water tables? I will smack the next pimp who responds that well, dust is a problem on Pennsylvania roads, as if the mere existence of a problem automatically validates any conceivable solution. A more crafty pimp would say that this "solution" allows gas and oil corporations to "dispose" of their waste without resorting to, say, open-air pits, but, again, the mere existence of a bad solution doesn't automatically validate any other conceivable bad solution. I don't like radioactive and cancer-causing crap when it's on my California strawberries; why would I like it on my roads? Penn Environment helps you tell the state DEP to stop spraying down our roads with wastewater.

Finally, Congress is still trying to gut EPA clean air and clean water programs. How many times must I tell these pimps! Clean air and clean water programs are not BIG GUMMINT GONE AMOK!!!!, nor do they "hurt small businesses" (which certainly don't pollute at the rate fossil fuel corporations pollute!) -- these programs protect the American people, because without clean air and clean water, you can't have healthy Americans. And when you have healthy Americans (will right-wingers follow this line of reasoning?), you have lower health care costs. See? Clean air and clean water programs actually save money -- they just don't deposit those savings directly into fossil fuel CEO bank accounts, so Congress doesn't care about them. So we make them care. The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to put Americans before big donors by fully funding clean air and clean water programs.

Action: unconstitutional war-making, drug policy, and GMO labeling.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is still mulling S.J.Res. 59, the authorization to use military force that would replace the 2001 AUMF (good), but actually expand the President's unconstitutional authority to wage war wherever he likes (so bad it's not worth the good). And this bill has a bipartisan sheen, with three Democratic co-sponsors out of six total. So why is the Senate taking so long to consider it? Because they know it's a pile of dung -- and, more to the point, they know we know it's a pile of dung. I suppose they'll wait until right before the election to jam it through, and squeal about TEH NASHUNUL SECURITEEZ!!!!! when we oppose them, though they're taking so long with it we could easily retort that it must not really be that important. Now would be a good time to call your Reps and Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to reject S.J.Res. 59.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6043/S. 3032, the STATES Act, would allow states that have legalized marijuana to enforce their own marijuana laws without interference from our federal government. Oddly, our President has endorsed this bill, setting up yet another quarrel with his Attorney General, Mr. Sessions, who acts like pot is the root of all evil. Less oddly, though, the STATES Act has almost as many Republican sponsors (in both House and Senate versions) as Democratic sponsors. Why, it almost looks like actual bipartisanship, in that both parties seem to like it and the American people seem to like it! Why do I suspect we're being set up for a massive disappointment -- say, when the House version passes, but the Senate weighs it down with poison pill amendments? None of that will matter if we speak up loudly enough, so the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane drug policy by passing the STATES Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to enact a real genetically-modified food-labeling standard, and not the BS one they're trying to enact, then MoveOn still helps you do that. Some things haven't changed with the change in Administrations, and one of them is the USDA's determination to pretend they're enacting a "clear" GMO labeling standard when they're obviously trying their damnedest not to. You don't exempt sugars and oils from your standard, since just about everything has one or other in it. You don't exempt gene-editing from your standard as if "gene editing" somehow isn't "genetic modification." And you certainly don't let corporations put hifalutin scanning codes or website addresses on their labels in lieu of a simple statement like this product has GMOs in it. The USDA also literally put a happy face on some of their sample GMO logos! You have to ask: what are they so afraid of?

Around the table: on "Establishment" Democrats, asylum seekers, internet freedom, and voting rights.

Here's a great article by Richard Eskow at the OurFuture blog, reminding us that "Establishment Wins are Bad for Democrats -- and the Country." I mean, if the Democratic establishment was so great, Hillary Clinton would be President right now and Democrats would control the Senate. Say what you want about Republicans (I do!), but they sure know how to get new blood every few years or so, while Democrats constantly wage war on all their new blood. (Mr. Eskow also reminds us that Tha Bush Mobb paved the way for our current President, and yes people sure do look at those years with rose-colored glasses anymore. I remember those years; they sucked. And the subsequent eight years of a Democrat establishment sucked only a little less -- and also paved the way for our current predicament.)

Our Supreme Court, in yet another 5-4 decision, upholds the state of Ohio's ongoing effort to purge voters from the registration rolls for missing one election. It's bad when the dissent accuses the majority of having simply misread the law. Justice Alito essentially argues that the right to vote -- specifically, the right not to be deregistered simply because you haven't voted, a right actually codified in federal law -- is less important than the "right" of states to "clean up" their voting rolls. Call me old-fashioned, but I think state administrations should serve people, not the other way around.

Attorney General Sessions orders immigration judges to curtail asylum grants to gang violence and domestic violence victims. If the countries from which they came could actually protect these good people from such violence, I'd agree with Mr. Sessions's decision, but since they can't, it just looks cruel. And Mr. Sessions has no business saying America can't let everyone in, when America finds it fairly easy to let in cheap labor for our President's resorts and our President's winery. Seriously, once we end corporate "free" trade deals, enact a $15/hour minimum wage, and repeal the exclusion of farm workers from the National Labor Relations Act's protections, our government will be in a far better position to be as compassionate as its people are.

The ACLU instructs us as to "How Net Neutrality Will End." Long story short: as I said yesterday, freedoms die better a bit at a time. Long story somewhat longer: "Once June 11 comes and goes, we should expect the ISPs will do little to nothing in response. Then, after some time has passed, they will point to their inaction as proof we were wrong to distrust them and their promises not to violate net neutrality in the absence of a federal mandate. And guess what will happen next? Drip. Drip. Drip. And before we know it, a flood will have washed away the free and open internet we all rely on." Pay special attention to the second sentence in that quoted passage, since that'll also be the Republicans' answer if Democrats actually run pro-net neutrality ads this year. Remember, also, that most big telecom corporations are monopolies in the media markets in which they operate, so when one of them starts censoring websites, you and I can't just "go buy from someone else."

Republican candidate for the New Jersey's 2nd U.S. House district says "(t)he whole idea of diversity is a bunch of crap and un-American." There's really no putting lipstick on that pig (the "whole" idea? Really?), especially in a country where most folks think the whole idea of who-you-know elitism is un-American. Now, maybe this fellow thinks facing a right-wing Democrat in the general election lets him be as obnoxious as he wants to be (I wonder where he got that idea!), but in New Jersey, which the President lost by 14 points and where a seven-term incumbent Republican got turned out of New Jersey's 5th for being too stridently anti-gay, he could mark himself as someone too obnoxious to hold public office.

Finally, a U.S. District judge in Indiana has issued an injunction against an Indiana state law that would automatically deregister voters who appear on the notorious "Interstate Crosscheck" database. That'll probably hold until after the midterms -- but eventually the Supreme Court will gets its hands on it, and given how they ruled in the Ohio case (second paragraph above), they'll probably reinstate it. Where is the plaintiff who will assert that deregistering a voter based on appearance in a ridiculous database constitutes punishing someone without proving they committed a crime? I mean, that's the law-and-order argument, and I'd like to see Neil Gorsuch squirm in his seat after being confronted with it.

Action: fighting for internet freedom, law and order, and clean water.

Net neutrality officially ended yesterday. You may not have noticed, possibly because the big telecoms are awaiting the results of a litany of lawsuits against the FCC's net neutrality repeal, or possibly because they're waiting to see if the House follows the Senate's lead and passes the "resolution of disapproval" that would reverse the FCC's repeal -- but most likely because Jesus Mary and Joseph even the big telecoms aren't that stupid! If Comcast or Verizon were to suddenly, say, put data caps on everyone's broadband today, or start censoring websites today, their customers would clog their phone lines for days! No, the big telecoms know, just like all corporations know: deprive people of their freedoms a little at a time, and they tend not to notice -- or revolt. Let's stop this catastrophe by telling our House Reps to sign on to the discharge petition that would force a vote on the aforementioned "resolution of disapproval," as Consumer Reports helps us do.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the UAE plan to attack the Hodeidah port in Yemen, through which 80% of the nation's food exports pass through, which would make the already-near-famine conditions in Yemen considerably worse. I know someone is responding to that news with a shrug and a well, that's war, you hit your enemies where it hurts them the most. The problem with that philosophy -- besides, you know, the cruel way it makes a game of life and death -- is that Yemen is not our enemy, and our government continues to arm Saudi Arabia in its war against Yemen, in violation of both our Constitution's War Powers clause and the 1973 War Powers Act. Hence Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Congressfolk to use our leverage as the most powerful nation on Earth to stop this planned attack on Yemen. Why, even the Washington Post opposes this attack -- and they usually cheer on our war-making! That should be a sign.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5609, the WATER Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. What would the WATER Act do? The WATER Act would allocate $35 billion annually to improving clean water and wastewater infrastructure. You remember our President running on infrastructure, right? And you remember how the state government of Michigan poisoned Flint's drinking water? And you've been hearing about how thousands of American neighborhoods have twice the lead poisoning levels as Flint did? It's hard to imagine your Congressfolk opposing making good Americans' drinking water cleaner, isn't it? I kid, of course -- it's not hard to imagine our Congressfolk being the cruel and heartless people they too often actually are. That's why we communicate our will to them -- and it's also why we shame them when they ignore our will. (We could turn them out of office a lot more easily, too, if Democrats would actually stand for things.)

Action: fairer sentencing, governmental corruption, and equal rights for gays.

First things first: the Pennsylvania state legislature will vote this week on whether to implement a "risk assessment" tool for sentencing guidelines. Philip K. Dick stories make good movies, not good laws, and if you saw "risk assessment" and thought "another way to put black people in prison for longer," you win a prize! I guess our state legislators want credit for recognizing that folks of color do, in fact, have it harder than white folks do in many ways, but you and I could think of a thousand better ways to fix that. And, strictly speaking, we can't predict whether an individual will commit more crimes once out of prison -- and it is individuals we'd be sending to jail, after all! -- and moreover we shouldn't, not if we really believe in rehabilitating prisoners, not if we really believe in giving folks a second chance after they've paid their debt to society. Hence Color of Change helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject "risk assessment" for sentencing.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to get rid of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, then Climate Truth still helps you do that. It is kind of a shame that if he does get fired, or resign under pressure -- and almost half of Congress has called for his head at this writing! -- he'll be remembered not as the man who tried to gut clean air and clean water laws and wasn't even particularly good at that, but as the man who pulled every lever of power he could in order to get perks for himself and his family. Our President, you may recall, declared his support for the beleaguered Mr. Pruitt months ago, possibly (as some have speculated) because he wanted Mr. Pruitt on hand in case he fired his Attorney General, Mr. Sessions. But now that yet another Fox News bloviator with the President's ear, Jeannie Pirro, appears to want Mr. Sessions's job, maybe that'll make Mr. Pruitt obsolete in our President's eyes. Even if it puts yet another Fox News shouting head in our government, it'd be good to get rid of Scott Pruitt.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2282/S. 1006, the Equality Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Equality Act would extend Civil Rights Act protections to gays, so that (to give a few examples) landlords couldn't kick them out for being gay, bosses couldn't fire them for being gay, and businesses couldn't deny them services because they're gay. Do you suppose this is a useless task because this Congress, which seems only to care about hurting the American people and delivering more taxpayer money to their corporate cronies, would never pass it? Please disabuse yourself of that notion if you have it, because fighting for justice is never useless -- if nothing else, we can get members of Congress on the record about whether they'd vote for the Equality Act or not, and if they say they'd vote against it, regardless of whatever nonsensical justification they might offer, we have many tools to embarrass them in public. Remember: civilized folks do shame those who deserve it.

Around the table: in which we examine gutting pre-existing condition bans, letting businesses turn away folks of color, and other stupid ideas.

Our Administration plans to argue that the Affordable Care Act is null and void now that its mandate no longer carries a financial penalty. Are there really that many people out there who still feel so angry that Barack Obama passed the Heritage Foundation's health care plan from the '90s? Because I bet more people would be angry if our Administration succeeds in getting rid of the pre-existing conditions ban, which is what striking down the Affordable Care Act would do. And not even five months before midterms!

Thanks to the vagaries of social media algorithms, yesterday I came across Neil Clark's 2014 requiem for Pete Seeger in The American Conservative called "Pete Seeger's Conservative Socialism," and Mr. Clark explains why healthy civilizations need conservatism better than I've done any of the 500 times I've tried to do it. I don't mean, of course, that healthy civilizations need what passes for contemporary "conservatism," with its corporatism, nativism, and politically-correct swordfighting -- I mean something more like "a vision of the ideal society" "rooted firmly in the past," a vision that fights selfishness instead of worshiping at its altar, and a vision that just so happens to reject "culture wars" and asks whether technological advances will wind up making our problems worse. We need real conservatism to root us so we can make real progress in delivering justice to those who deserve it; too bad the "conservatism" you see on TV is all people shouting at you.

South Dakota state legislator claims that businesses should be able to turn away folks of color if they like -- adding that "(p)eople shouldn’t be able to use their minority status to bully a business," which, like, wow, misunderstand the nature of power much? Always these clowns want businesses to have more rights than people! The legislator later apologized for his statement (after scrubbing it from his Facebook page, of course), but, ah, what apology is possible once you've said you're pro-discrimination? And didn't he get the memo from our President, that apologies for your obnoxious comments are no longer necessary?

Mitt Romney says our President will "solidly" win re-election in 2020. I'm inclined to agree that our President, despite his abominable term thus far, is in a very good position for re-election, but I utterly disagree with Mr. Romney's reasoning that Democrats likely nominating a "fringe" candidate (cough Bernie Sanders cough) is one of the reasons why. I would argue -- indeed, have argued -- that nominating yet another let's-all-get-along-but-inevitably-compromised moderate is the surest way to ensure our President's re-election. You don't beat a freak with a candidate like that.

Should we be that upset that the DNC has adopted a rule stating that all Democratic Presidential candidates must declare themselves to be Democrats? I mean, yes, it looks like it's aimed squarely at Bernie Sanders, and it gives the appearance of having learned exactly the wrong lesson from 2016, but Mr. Sanders actually has run in numerous Democratic primaries in Vermont and won them, only to decline the nominations and then run in general elections as an independent. So the rule change might more likely affect the attempt of some billionaire (cough Mark Cuban cough Tom Steyer cough) or some movie star (cough The Rock cough) to run in Democratic primaries.

Finally, gosh what a mess Scott Pruitt has gotten himself into because he can't keep his grubby hands off of anything. Surely Chris Christie (the first, and fired, head of the Administration transition team) would have found an EPA Administrator who'd gut clean air and clean water regulations without being so obviously corrupt. Alas, we have Scott Pruitt, who uses people, and uses them up. Our President must find him quite the kindred spirit.

Action: expanding Social Security yea, birth control "gag rules" nay, and corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations nay.

You may have heard of the sure-looks-coordinated attacks on Social Security from various local Fox TV stations in late May, so now Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits, not cut them. If your right-wing uncle demands to know where they money for that is going to come from, remind him that income over $128,400 doesn't even get taxed into Social Security. And certainly push back against the Social-Security-running-out-of-money hysteria, because the Social Security Trustees report for 2018 tells us that Social Security will pay out full benefits up until 2034 (and then pay out almost 80% of benefits thereafter); if we taxed income over $128,400 into the system, we could make Social Security fully solvent even further into the future and expand benefits so our seniors can have more to live on. Why would we not do this? Because our leaders are worse than thieves? Should we really let that stop us?

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed a regulation that would deny federal Title X funding to any family planning organizations that provide abortions, or refer folks to other abortion providers. This would, naturally, have the effect of denying any basic family planning help (including birth control and STD testing) to poor working families, since they're the ones who most depend on the agencies that get federal funding. And these agencies would very likely stop referring families to a procedure that's, you know, legal. All this, so our Administration can keep diddling the rage glands of right-wingers! I still hope that pro-lifers will one day see how the right has used them all these years; if right-wing politicians really cared about abortion, of course, they'd put a Constitutional amendment up for a vote, but I guess they think it's better "politics" to keep pro-lifers angry than to work to give them what they want. In any case, the Administration "gag rule" is bad public policy, so the ACLU helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its "gag rule" proposal.

Finally, our Administration has also proposed forcing utilities to buy from coal and nuclear power plants. Does that sound like the "free market at work" to you? They're hoping it sounds more like "securing the electric grid" to you, and they're also hoping that solar and wind power -- which are starting to compete, price-wise, with the more traditional energy sources -- will strike you as "insecure" power sources. They're not, of course -- the coal industry is full of its TEH SUN SETZ TEH WIND DIEZ!!!! billboards, but the sun always comes up in the morning, the wind always picks up again, and there is such a thing as battery storage. Meanwhile, giving bailouts to industries that are flailing -- not so coal miners won't lose their jobs, but so coal CEOs won't lose their 19th vacation homes -- doesn't exactly testify to a commitment to national economic security. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Energy Department to scuttle its plan to give welfare handouts to big coal and nuclear power corporations.

Around the table: what about America don't right-wingers get? And other questions.

Buried deep in this account of the sudden disappearance of a political cartoonist's work from the pages of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is its new editorial director, one Keith Burris, claiming that our activism against this Administration constitutes "a mania, a fever, a hissy fit by the self-anointed guardians of all that is good and enlightened in America." Setting aside that, just as "Bush derangement syndrome" more aptly described the behavior of Bush Mobb supporters, the "mania," "fever," and "hissy fits" all come from the President and his votaries: does Mr. Burris not know that this is America? In America, we are, all of us, in fact, "self-appointed guardians" of civilization. That's how America is supposed to work. It's what separates us from aristocracies, monarchies, and dictatorships. And if you think I look down on you for no good reason, your task, as an American -- as a guardian of civilization! -- is most pointedly not to whine about it. Your task is to prove me wrong, and change my mind. If you can't, you may want to consider whether that's your failing, not mine.

Our President can't stop jerking off to our low unemployment numbers, but we should remember that the "official" unemployment rate doesn't count people who've stopped looking for work, or people who work part-time but would rather work full-time. Worse, the U6 rate that supposedly counts these people -- now at 7.6%, or about twice the official unemployment rate -- may not even be that accurate! Economist Robert Pollin suggests that when you consider that the percentage of adults in the workforce is considerably lower than it was 10 years ago, the real unemployment rate could be as high as 11%. That's before you get to the fact that we don't make the money we used to, for reasons including the decline of unions and the rise of outsourcing. (Mr. Pollin also says our government needs to invest in a "Green New Deal" that creates renewable energy jobs, and of course he's right about that.)

Perhaps sensing he's under fire for avoiding meeting with his Consumer Advisory Board as mandated by law, CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney fires all 25 members of the Consumer Advisory Board, and tells them they can't reapply, almost certainly as a prelude to packing the Board with banksters. And dig the CFPB spokeshack suggesting that the fired Advisory Board members are upset because they might lose their "taxpayer funded junkets to Washington" where they're supposedly "wined and dined by the Bureau"! I hope most Americans understand that if you cared that much about perks, you'd never go into consumer protection advocacy.

U.S. District Judge rules that our Administration cannot, in fact, deny municipalities certain law enforcement funding because they won't go beyond the law in cooperating with the Administration's efforts to find undocumented immigrants. All the Administration would have to do is get the right warrants, but ball-swingers don't do that -- instead, they tell bald lies about immigrant "crime spikes" and violate the Constitution and the law, particularly the Administrative Procedure Act. Remember the Administrative Procedure Act, because it helps prevent the Executive branch from doing whatever the fuck it likes, and it may hang a few other Executive branch initiatives (like maybe the FCC's net neutrality repeal) before too long.

Finally, we learn that advertisers have been fleeing the Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham programs at the Fox News Channel. Apparently their pro-Administration stance doesn't endear them to advertisers anymore, and I'm sure Mr. Hannity's brain-dead conspiracy theories and Ms. Ingraham's attacks on school shooting survivors don't help. In the absence of a la carte cable packaging, which would allow us to simply not pay for channels that disgust us, shaming advertisers into abandoning shows is about our best tool for bringing morality and sanity back to America.

Action: the "war on terror," living wages, and immigration policy.

Amnesty International helps you demand that our government account for its actions in Raqqa. As you may know, ISIS left Raqqa, its self-styled "capitol," late last year, but (as you may also recall) 250 ISIS fighters got to leave Raqqa with their families and all the weapons they could carry in a literally three-mile-long convoy. The good citizens of Raqqa should have been so lucky! We bombed the crap out of Raqqa, reducing it to rubble and killing entire families of civilians despite yammering on about "precision" bombing. What do you suppose we were aiming at, precisely? Perhaps we were aiming at "perpetuating the 'war on terror' forever so that voters will feel no choice but to cling to bad leaders." Of course, crippling a city's ability to function while getting no assurance that a well-armed ISIS won't be back sure doesn't sound like the result of good leadership. But perhaps good leadership can begin again -- with accountability.

Meanwhile, Good Jobs Nation (along with other good government groups) helps you tell the Disney corporation to start paying its workers a living wage. Disney rakes in the dough, and its CEO made $36 million last year, but Disney's workers are like the rest of us, trying to figure out which bills they can get away with not paying this month because they don't make enough money. Oh, and an astounding two-thirds of Orange County (CA) Disneyland workers report not being able to put enough food on the table, with 10 percent of them reporting recent homelessness. Disneyland wages have gone down over the years, in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, and no, these ain't all young kids getting their first job -- a little over two out of five workers are over 30, with a little less than one in five are over 54. Don't they all deserve a job that pays enough for them to make ends meet? They are human beings, after all.

Finally, Roots Action (along with other good government groups) helps you tell Attorney General Sessions to stop splitting up children from their parents during border crossings. We told Congress to rein in this activity the other day, but really it's Mr. Sessions's job to do it, since he insists on a "zero tolerance" policy toward border crossings -- never mind whether some of these folks might have a legitimate case for asylum! -- which results in the forced separation of children and parents. The bad news? The President's most devoted followers really do believe this is the best (i.e., "toughest") way to go about things, and they may even think so because these immigrants are generally brown and black. The good news? These people didn't just emerge -- they're the same people the right-wing noise machine has been marching around from one manufactured outrage to another for decades now. And they don't get all the say around here!

Action: the Equality Act yea, state-sanctioned racism nay, and investigating Betsy DeVos yea.

In light of the Supreme Court's Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado decision -- which reversed a lower court decision concerning a cake shop that wouldn't bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, but affirmed that our Constitution doesn't bestow a "right to discriminate" to businesses that serve the public -- the ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2282/S. 1006, the Equality Act. What would the Equality Act do? It would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that its protections explicitly include gay and transgender folks, which would go a long way toward fighting the "religious" "conscience" objections, since no one (at least for now!) asserts a right to discriminate against people of color based on, for example, the Hamitic myth. But too many good Americans claim a "right" to discriminate simply by saying "Jesus told me." Replace the word "Jesus" with, say, the word "Moloch," and you'd see how absurd that is.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell the FBI to drop the "Black Identity Extremist" label it's been using to spy on black activists. You and I may see peaceful black protestors in the streets, but the FBI sees "violent extremists," and it's no use arguing that they're just preparing for the worst, not when this kind of "preparing for the worst" causes violence. And not with this President in office, the one sieg-heiled by various Nazi wannabes before he was inaugurated, the one who didn't know hate crimes were on the rise after his inauguration though he already knew who was criticizing him on Twitter, the one who thinks black NFL players should maybe be deported for not standing at attention while the national anthem is playing. I mean, seriously, where's the "white identity extremist" label describing a far, far larger share of domestic terrorism? Nowhere to be found -- unless the FBI is contemplating a "fine people" label that means the same thing.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell the Department of Education's Inspector General to investigate some of the strange doings of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. You remember Ms. DeVos, don't you? The one who couldn't get confirmed by the Senate without Vice President Pence's tie-breaking vote? Her tenure hasn't exactly taken off from there -- you could point to protestors following her everywhere or her failure to visit impoverished public schools or her apparent cluelessness in a recent 60 Minutes interview, but the Inspector General won't investigate that stuff, because it's just embarrassing. Now, her order to scuttle thousands of civil rights cases because they had a backlog? Her getting rid of the unit that looks into for-profit college fraud? Her delay of loan forgiveness for students defrauded by said for-profit colleges? The Inspector General sure as hell could look into all of that, because it might represent law-breaking.

Around our table: how print media dies, and other lessons.

Sarah Posner at The Nation discusses why the Supreme Court's recent Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling "Is Not as Harmless as You Think." Long story short: while the Court affirmed that the decision doesn't confer a right to discrimination on the basis of "religious" "conscience," the Court sure did turn over every rock in Colorado trying to find some evidence of "animus" against religion, and everyone who's ever heard a public official say religious bigots are knuckle-draggers now has a reason to try again. (Justice Kennedy's obsession with "animus" hasn't come out of the blue, though -- his finding of an "animus" against gays in Colorado's notorious Amendment 2 led him to strike it down.)

Why is the Denver Post laying off journalists left and right, you may be wondering? Well, in a CounterSpin interview, we learn that the banksters who bought the Post demand double-digit profits and think the best way to accomplish that is to hemorrhage jobs. And make the writers fill a three-byline quota daily (as if stories don't depend on work or something!), which results in even more rewritten PR releases. It's hard for those of us who work for a living to comprehend, but the biggest money-makers in America don't have better ideas or even better processes anymore; they just know how to suck the marrow out of an almost-dead body. And then they call themselves "job creators" and look down on you and I for "not working as hard as they do"! It's fucking un-American, frankly.

Ho hum, a lot of people who wrote that steaming piece of a tax "reform" bill are now going to work as lobbyists for the big corporations who benefit the most from that legislation. If you respond that this is as-it-should-be-because-it's-always-been-this-way, you'll want to consider more closely whether these folks might have written legislation the way they did because they knew they could cash in on their "expertise" more easily. You might also think of some other things that used to be always-this-way (you know, like segregation) and maybe demand a little more of your values than you're doing now.

After our President disinvited the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles from a White House visit in yet another manic fit of whining self-pity, the Fox News (sic) Channel, in reporting on the matter, showed photographs of several Eagles players, including tight end Zach Ertz, supposedly kneeling during the anthem, when these players were actually praying before the game. After Mr. Ertz dressed them down publicly on Twitter, Fox News admitted the error and apologized for it, but defensive end Chris Long wasn't impressed, and he shouldn't be: FNC knows full well that their million-plus votaries have already seen the report and diddled their rage glands over it, so Mission Accomplished! (As an aside, our President sure seems to have summoned a thundercloud in Reggie Bush.)

Finally, some good news: a Maine Superior Court justice has ruled that Maine Gov. Paul LePage (E) must implement the Medicaid expansion voters approved last year. You know, it's easy to take pot-shots at Paul LePage for his apparently bottomless cruelty, so let's just recall that he grew up a very poor Franco-American, suffered at the hand of an abusive, alcoholic father, was literally homeless for about a year as a pre-teen, and even though he worked hard in high school still couldn't get into college until a Maine state legislator named Pete Snowe (yep, the late husband of the former U.S. Senator) convinced said college to give him his entrance exam in French and vouched for his ability to catch up with his English. Let all that sink in, and then be sad at how thoroughly he's forgotten where he came from.

Action: internet freedom, voting security, and immigration.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Rep to vote in favor of H.J.Res. 129, the "resolution of disapproval" that would invalidate the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, then you can call your Reps using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone). Rep. Doyle (D-PA) has filed a discharge petition to force a vote on H.J.Res. 129, and if we assume that all 193 House Democrats will sign it (as of May 24, 124 had done so), we'll still need 25 Republicans to get on board, since a discharge petition needs 218 votes to force a vote. All that means is that we'll have to phone them until they do come on board -- and net neutrality has been an actual bipartisan cause in the past, so it shouldn't be so damn hard. But we have less than a week before the FCC's net neutrality repeal goes into full effect -- so, for the sake of our freedom to go where we want to go on the internet, instead of where some corporation would prefer us to go, we must act.

Meanwhile, we've known for a long time that our elections could be a lot more secure -- and now, even our Congressfolk seem to agree, what with the Senate Intelligence Committee calling for paper ballot elections. Hence Sign Here Now helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that will really secure American elections. Specifically, you would ask Congress to do four things: one, audit elections to ensure they're running right; two, require paper ballot elections (or, at the least, paper trails for electronic ballot elections); three, allow all Americans to vote by mail; and four, develop a plan to respond to foreign attacks on our elections. I don't care that much that Congress is more afraid of TEH RUSSIANZ!!!!! than the nefarious American forces trying to steal your vote; I care more that Congress does the right thing. And we should certainly demand that they do the right thing. You'd think they wouldn't need any prompting to do the right thing, but here we are.

Finally, our Administration has gotten into the nasty habit of separating immigrant children from their parents when they try to cross the border together -- because they're treating border crossings as criminal cases, not civil cases, and when you do that, you must, by law, separate parents and children. So, naturally, our President blames TEH DEMOCRATZ!!!!, because they don't march in jackboot lockstep with his agenda. Sad! The linked report from two sentences ago describes, in some detail, how child-parent separation in this instance is a result of many laws and policies, but Congress can fix this, no, not by just doing whatever the President wants, but by pursuing legislation that restrains him and his bottomless desire to stoke rage in his acolytes. Thus the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to force our President to pursue more humane immigration policy that doesn't force the separation of parents and children.

Action: Puerto Rico, Palestine, and the Equal Rights Amendment.

In light of the New England Journal of Medicine study suggesting that the actual death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria is at least twelve times higher than the official death count, Climate Hawks Vote helps you tell your Congressfolk to do more to ensure Puerto Rico's recovery from the Hurricane. Specifically, you'd ask Congress to offer Puerto Rico more aid and more debt forgiveness, help Puerto Rico rebuild so that it stays in public hands and uses more renewable energy, and investigate our Administration's incompetence in helping Puerto Rico rebuild. I rate the first two items as the most important -- banksters have saddled Puerto Rico with debt the way they saddled Greece with debt, and those same banksters would love nothing more than to privatize Puerto Rico's power grid. They call it an opportunity to steal more of the people's wealth, but I call it an opportunity to do things right, and we should make the best of it.

Meanwhile, with "liberal" media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict so weighted toward Israel, Roots Action helps you tell "liberal" media outlets to provide more coverage of Palestinian activists and victims, and more context for reports of violence in the region. Roots Action's petition also helps you demand that reporting on Israeli killing of Palestinians "use the active voice," which is to say, none of this "such-and-such number of people died in a clash" when the actual story is "Israeli forces killed x number of Palestinians." You know that "liberal" media types, who are so proud of knowing so much more about writing than you or I, will be insulted to be told to use active verbs. As you know, they have the same problem discussing police killings -- though not Palestinian killings of Israelis. The American people are nowhere near as one-sided about these issues as our elites in government and media are -- and our media need to recognize that.

Finally, Illinois recently became the 37th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. But wait, you may be asking, didn't the Equal Rights Amendment expire decades ago? Well, it's true that Congress did write the Equal Rights Amendment with an expiration, but it's also true that the Constitution plainly does not require an amendment to be passed within a certain period of time -- in fact, Congress first passed the 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (concerning Congressional pay) in 1789, but the 38th state didn't ratify it until 1992, or 203 years later, if you're keeping score at home. So United4Equality helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them to support H.J.Res. 53/S.J.Res. 5, which would excise the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment, thus bringing it back to life. (Don't believe it if ERA opponents try to tell you that changing the amendment would, or should, require a revote -- Congress changes laws all the time, and doesn't require revotes on those laws when they do!)

Around the table: describing yet another measure of the cost of this Presidency.

Ho hum, our Administration plans to try, again, to force utilities to buy their power from otherwise-failing coal and nuclear power plants, under the guise of "national security." You'd think a truly strong nation wouldn't be so reliant on power sources that are losing more and more money (particularly nuclear power plants, which rarely if ever make money and too often require "loan guarantees," which we might better describe as "taxpayer bailouts"). And no, this isn't about protecting coal miner jobs; it's about gilding the plumbing in coal and nuclear CEOs' 19th vacation homes.

Gregory Shupak at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media, when covering the Israel-Palestine conflict, just about never considers a one-state solution within which Israelis and Palestinians would have equal rights. No use telling me that these folks "just can't get along," when you know as well as I do that all kinds of folks get along quite well until some selfish actor starts blaring in their ear. Also, too, one side having vastly superior firepower and foreign economic support does tend to make conflicts "historic."

Beth Schwartzapfel at The Marshall Project explains why those $2 or $5 co-pays prisoners need to see doctors are actually quite onerous. Long story short: because they hardly make any damn money to begin with! Long story somewhat longer: when you make literally five cents an hour, as those at the bottom of the wage scale do in Oklahoma, a $4 co-pay is more like a $580 co-pay. And if you're tempted to say well, co-pays discourage unnecessary doctor's visits, you may want to consider whether it actually discourages necessary doctor's visits, and thus increases inmate health care costs, which of course are borne by the taxpayer one way or the other. How about that -- the compassionate solution is also the fiscally-responsible solution.

I'd taken it for granted that the NFL could force its players to stand and "respect" the flag and the national anthem, however stupid they'd look for doing so, but Kathy Wilkes at In These Times argues that the NFL owners' recent actions might actually be illegal. Suing our President for attempting to "influence or threaten to influence a private employment decision" might be an uphill battle (even on the merits!), but the players have a much better case against the NFL if it imposed its ban without bargaining with the players at all, as sure seems to be the case.

Finally, in a truly shocking development, we learn that the cost to the taxpayer of sending our President to his Mar-a-Lago resort has so far exceeded the cost to the taxpayer of Robert Mueller's investigation of said President's possible lawbreaking in re his ties to Russia. Now guess which "cost" our President has been whining about on Twitter. You may also recall that the cost of sending our President to Mar-a-Lago also dwarfs at least one other "cost" our President has found onerous -- that of taking care of the health care needs of our transgender soldiers. The good news? His venality, though it knows no bounds, doesn't reflect on the American people -- it reflects on American elites, who have spent the last several decades screwing everything up. They deserve each other.