Thieves in the Temple.

Leaderless and self-enlisted.

Hot on the heels of a New York Times report suggesting hydrofracking is even more dangerous than we thought, I learn that the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) has proposed allowing gas drillers to drill near the Delaware River. The Delaware gives 15 million folks drinking water, and you don't want to be lighting your tap water on fire, do you? You know, like good folks in other parts of the state do? Hence, Penn Environment helps you tell the DRBC to prevent anyone from drilling near the Delaware. It strikes me that opposing new gas drilling would be a profoundly conservative thing to do. What would a conservative do, if not remind us that the solution (gas drilling) can be worse than the problem (dependence on oil)? What would a conservative do, if not remind us that we should only implement new solutions once we're sure they're safe -- and we're actually pretty sure hydrofracking is not safe? See, this is why I don't call cookie-cutter TV right-wingers "conservative" -- because, you know, they're not.

Speaking of drilling-where-you-ain't-supposed-to, the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell the Obama Administration not to drill in the Arctic Ocean. What's rule number one in re offshore drilling? There will be accidents. What's rule number two? Don't drill if you can't clean up your mess. And we've got good reason to think a mess in the Arctic would be even harder to clean up than that mess in the Gulf. The Arctic is very, very cold -- think thirty-degrees-in-July cold. The Arctic has some of the most violent storms in the world. And the Arctic has icebergs the size of large buildings. And, of course, the oil companies' refusal to hire enough people to clean up a spill properly just makes all of that worse. Again: what would a conservative do? A conservative would remind us not to make the solution worse than the problem. A conservative might even tell us that solar and wind power would be a relatively uncostly way of weaning ourselves off of oil. No, conservatives do say these things, because I've heard them say them. TV "conservatives" don't say them, but, as I've said, they're a bunch of fakes.

Finally, Atrios has been calling the Washington Post "Kaplan Test Prep Daily" for years, and I've never figured out why. Until now: turns out the Post owns Kaplan University, one of many online, for-profit schools that seem to do a much better job taking your money than giving you an education that might get you a job. I figure that's so because almost 70% of Kaplan's students drop out within six years, because almost a third of their students default on their loans, and because Kaplan's classes are often many, many times more expensive than comparable community college classes. It gets better: Kaplan targets low-income folks and veterans, and they take federal money -- federal money we could, you know, be using on things that work -- meaning that whenever a student defaults on a loan, the taxpayer gets stuck with the bill. I need not mention that subsidizing Kaplan also subsidizes the Post's parade of disgusting, warmongering op-ed writers and "media critics," do I? So change.org helps you tell the Post to shut Kaplan down until it can be reformed into something vaguely resembling what it's supposed to be.

Bite your lip (get up and dance).

Rallies in solidarity with the Wisconsin protestors will take place all over the country on Saturday at noon. Keystone Progress provides info on the Pennsylvania rally, taking place in Harrisburg, while Jobs with Justice directs us to weekday rallies all over the nation. What's happening in Wisconsin (and Ohio and Indiana) could happen in any state, anywhere in the country, especially if Mr. Walker -- as disgusting a human being as has ever held office in the United States -- manages, somehow, to get his way, though three out of five Americans oppose his plan, a plan he's been lying about for weeks. It's really about the budget. Yeah sure.

But these aren't the only rallies going on this weekend. US Uncut -- an organization modeled on the very successful UK Uncut, which called attention to high-income and corporate tax deadbeats in Great Britain -- will hold rallies this Saturday in front of corporations that don't pay their fair share in taxes. You may find a rally near you here. In an era where even Barack Obama still tries to close offshore corporate tax loopholes, I imagine US Uncut's message would resonate pretty strongly with Americans -- even though the right-wing noise machine is considerably louder here than in the U.K.

Bam pow.

House Republicans, in their zeal to prove they can't do anything right, have cut funding for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Don't they know that Wall Street welfare queens still comprise the least popular special interest group in America? And how much will the House save by being deficit chickenhawks in this manner? $63 million, or less than four one-hundred-thousandths of one percent of the budget deficit, and rather less than the hundreds of billions of taxpayer money, your money, that just had to go to too-big-to-fail financial corporations after what they did to us. USPIRG helps you demand that your Senators fully fund the CFPB, so we can prevent another bailoutageddon.

Meanwhile, Rep. Lee (D-CA) has introduced H.R. 780, which would, in the bill's words, "provide that funds for operations of the Armed Forces in Afghanistan shall be obligated and expended only for purposes of providing for the safe and orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan of all members of the Armed Forces and Department of Defense contractor personnel who are in Afghanistan." Can't put it plainer, can we? Right-wingers who yell that the bill puts the troops in harm's way should read the quotation above more slowly until they get it. If cutting Afghanistan funding entirely would have saved $90 billion, then I expect H.R. 780 would save us only slightly less. H.R. 780 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators. The bill has 48 co-sponsors, two of whom are Ron Paul and Walter Jones, and none of whom are teabaggers.

I'm a steady-rollin' man.

Did you know the House defunded AmeriCorps last Saturday night? Golly, I wonder why they did that on a weekend. I know someone in AmeriCorps, and maybe you do, too: they do good work, helping the less fortunate, especially in the Gulf of Mexico area, where they're helping rebuild communities devastated by Katrina. But, you know, the "liberal" media says it's time to make hard choices, and you know what that means? It means the less fortunate in America get to bear all the burdens of the hard choices Congress makes! Congress's mothers must be so proud of them! If, indeed, Congressfolk even have mothers. Sometimes I think they just sprung fully-formed from the head of some zombie Gilded Age railroad magnate. So change.org helps you tell the Senate to save AmeriCorps.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you tell the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to keep banks from dominating energy futures markets. What in the name of Ford are we talking about? A futures contract lets one party buy an asset (oil, grain, etc.) in the future for a price set today -- giving both parties price security in case of unforeseen circumstances. But when banks get involved, and when they dominate all the speculation on what future prices will be, the end result is usually higher prices -- after all, banks want to make money, and energy producers want to make money, so it's in everyone's interest to "assume" prices will be much higher in the future than they might otherwise be. "Everyone's" interest but yours, that is. The CFTC now has the authority to make energy futures markets considerably more transparent than they were before, but alas, the banks are trying to put a stop to that, and they have more Republican allies in the House and Senate now. So as usual, the only thing between us and Armageddon is, well, whatever we do next. Let's get to it.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the commonwealth of Pennsylvania hasn't followed the lead of eight other states in banning the chemical Bisphenol A (or BPA) from children's plastic food and drink containers, despite the danger it poses. BPA is, as you may know, a synthetic estrogen; it makes baby bottles and sippy cups and reusable water bottles and food storage containers stronger, but it also leeches into the food and drink inside, and then into your children's bodies. Scientists have linked BPA to cancer, diabetes, and other diseases, and thus eight states, Canada, and the EU have all banned it from certain children's products. Some right-wingers read that and say why should we do what Europe does? To which I'd respond: you should do what Europe does when Europe does something right. And they are right to ban the use of certain Frankenchemicals until we can prevent them from hurting us. Consumers Union helps PA residents tell their government to ban BPA from children's products.

Don't stop it now.

You may have heard that governments in Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen have cracked down on protestors over the last few days, resulting in a boatload of death and horror. You may not have heard -- because why would our "liberal" media tell you? -- that America supplies both Bahrain and Yemen (though not Libya) with millions of dollars in military aid, meaning that their bullets might have "made in U.S.A." printed on them. So Peace Action West helps you tell your President and your Congressfolk to stop funding crackdowns. I mean, we're Americans. We're good people, and our freedom and prosperity don't depend on governments who fire on protestors while they're mourning or sleeping. Does it?

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, pro-worker protestors continue to hold the state Capitol far more peacefully than the "liberal" media would have you believe. Also, the much-ballyhooed corporate-backed counter-protest fizzled, "liberal" media hacks continued to lie about what was going on, and Mr. Walker suddenly started flogging a $3.6 billion budget shortfall (for fiscal 2011-12, though he didn't say that), which, again, would have nothing to do with gutting collective bargaining rights and wouldn't change the far lower (and mainly Walker-inflicted) budget deficit Wisconsin faces this year. But the Wisconsin teachers' union plans to go back to work very shortly, so Bold Progressives helps you stand with the Wisconsin protestors.

A lesson in leaving.

You've no doubt heard about how tens of thousands of Wisconsin workers have come to Madison to oppose Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to strip state workers of collective bargaining rights. You may not have heard that Mr. Walker basically manufactured the "crisis" -- long story short, he entered office with a budget surplus, then rammed through a series of initiatives that put the budget back in the red, thus giving him the pretext to attack workers. And, er, what money does stripping workers of collective bargaining rights save, in the short or long run? Now the Democratic state Senators have left the state, so the Senate can't reach a quorum and pass Mr. Walker's proposal. There's a great deal more to say about this, but for right now, the AFSCME helps you stand with workers in Wisconsin. And Ohio, not incidentally, where Gov. Kasich plans to do whatever he can get away with doing to workers, too.

Meanwhile, I linked to Robert Reich's tax-hike-on-the-rich proposal yesterday, but I didn't give it as much space as it deserved. Mr. Reich's proposal grapples with the sheer absurdity of high-end income as no other proposal has -- he would tax incomes over $15 million at 70 percent, incomes between $5 and $15 million at 60 percent, and incomes between $500,000 and $5 million at 50%. I might begin that last bracket at $1 million rather than $500,000, but I've long felt (even as I've advocated for the Bush tax cuts for the upper two brackets to expire) that we shouldn't tax income at $250,000 the way we tax eight- or nine-digit CEO income -- you're doing well if you're making $250,000, but frankly, you're not in the club, and more to the point you're not doing the same damage to the economy that someone making hundreds of millions of dollars does. I think Mr. Reich's proposal merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming. And they'll need to be told again and again that the majority of the American people (even a majority of South Dakota tea partiers, apparently) want to tax the rich more.

H.R. 1 cavalcade of horrors!

The AFSCME helps you oppose H.R. 1, the Republicans' continuing budget resolution. H.R. 1 would not only cut a tiny slice out of the deficit by cutting a lot of services that help a lot of Americans, it would also cut off a lot of funding to states, thus causing states to lay off more Americans. It's win-win for Republicans! Meanwhile, if you want to make more specific suggestions, Just Foreign Policy lists three amendments you can call your Rep about -- one (Amdt. 232) cutting Afghanistan war spending by $90 billion, another (Amdt. 46) cutting troop levels in Europe, and a third (Amdt. 233) zeroing out funding for missile "defense." Also, William Hartung tells us how to cut defense spending responsibly, and Robert Reich proposes a massive tax hike on the rich. That should give your Rep something to think about.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Pennsylvania SB 9, a putatively anti-illegal immigrant bill, would deny public aid (including unemployment compensation) to anyone who can't produce government-issued ID. Sounds reasonable -- until you remember that the "threat" of folks getting state benefits without papers is way, way overblown, and that over 10 percent of Americans don't actually have government-issued ID, and that most of these Americans are poor. SB 9 starting to sound cynical yet? People got a right to fear that they'll lose control over their economic destiny. But the threat to that control doesn't come from illegal immigrants, who are just folks like us trying to make a living. The threat comes from unchecked corporate power. And SB 9 doesn't touch corporations; it just gives the state another hammer to smash poor people with. So the ACLU of PA helps you oppose SB 9.

All H.R. 1 Wednesday!

So, what are our new Republican overlords been up to? The House passed a bill to scrap the entire Presidential public campaign financing system. You have to wonder why they moved so fast. Were they chasing the ghosts of sociamalism? Or were they merely welcoming their new overlords, the corporations, which poured record amounts of money into the 2010 midterms? The bill will probably die in the Senate, and it's been a long time since I've felt joy at uttering that phrase, but the Repubs keep trying: Rep. Cole (R-OK) has put forth an amendment to H.R. 1 that would strike the check-off for campaign financing contributions from your tax form, effectively defunding the system. Public Citizen helps you stand in the way of that effort. I'm going to reserve judgment on the Price/Platts/Van Hollen campaign financing legislation, though; it doesn't look as good as (even) the Fair Elections NOW Act, and I believe in demanding what you want, rather than what you think you'll get.

And the Republican scythe continues to swing, as they use H.R. 1 to hamstring the EPA! H.R. 1 would cut the EPA's total budget by over 15%, but the EPA's 2010 budget was only $10.5 billion, so you have to wonder why the Republicans don't go after bigger fish, like, say, the war in Afghanistan, which most Republican citizens would like to end and which will cost around $90 billion this year. The EPA does a lot of good work keeping corporations from polluting your air and your water, on a relatively small amount of money. And this cut, surely, won't be the end, as Republicans go on to try to gut the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. So the Sierra Club helps you oppose the Republican effort to destroy the EPA. I do wonder why Republicans think gutting environmental protections is such a winner with the public. Surely the public doesn't believe, in any great numbers, the tenuous connection Republicans make between jobs and regulations.

In a related note, Mr. Boehner sure doesn't seem like he's even trying to win the war of ideas with his latest let-them-eat-cake-or-at-least-what-we-call-cake statement. "The federal government has added 200,000 new federal (sic) jobs (since 2009)...If some of those jobs are lost, so be it." This, after campaigning on jobs, jobs, and jobs! It gets better: according to the Center for American Progress, Republican budget cuts will ultimately kill almost one million jobs, two-thirds directly and one-third indirectly. (Mr. Boehner, for the record, didn't have an alternate scenario when questioned directly about it.) Maybe Mr. Boehner really wants that and doesn't have the guts to come out and say it -- hell, plenty of Republicans will tell you you're supposed to be creating jobs in the private sector rather than the public sector. Me, I think public sector jobs serve people. And that the people who work them are just as good as anyone else. And that the unemployed, at this stage, probably don't give a hoot whether they work for the government or for some corporation.

History of modern.

NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, also helps you slam the Republicans' deficit-cutting approach. I've attacked said approach on its own terms -- i.e., it does a bad job of cutting the deficit, plus it hurts people -- but NETWORK's tack is a bit different: "investment now will prevent bigger problems and increased costs down the road. Past generations have made responsible investments that have benefitted us, and it is our duty to pass the same prosperity and peace of mind on to the next generation. By cutting social programs in this fragile economic time, Congress would be undercutting the feeling of security that everyone deserves." So, yeah, what they said, too.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Pennsylvania's legislature contemplates SB 1, which would establish a school voucher program. Which would, as you know, divert funds from public schools to private (and mostly religious) schools, while not guaranteeing admission for students using the vouchers, nor guaranteeing that students could even fully fund their alternative education. Worse than all that: since when did it become government's job to subsidize its competitors? I guess school voucher proponents will accuse folks like myself of not being serious about education or not caring about kids, but I could just as easily say that their own refusal to fund public education more wisely demonstrates that lack of seriousness and caring. Anyway, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State provides the contact tool for Pennsylvania residents.

Also, the People's Email Network helps you oppose H.R. 3, the House Republicans' anti-abortion bill, if you haven't already. Good that Republicans are getting government out of your lives, isn't it? And the teabagger-Democrat "alliance," far overhyped during the recent PATRIOT Act extension debate, is, of course, about as nonexistent here, despite teabagger claims that social issues don't really matter. And the bill could get worse: future amendments could strip all Planned Parenthood funding (right around the time they've been the target of a propaganda campaign, what a surprise) and eliminate Title X funding completely. I suppose all must sacrifice in the name of deficit reduction. And by "all" Republicans clearly mean "people who can't cause corporate funding to dry up in an instant."

(By the way, here's the source of today's subject header, in case you thought I'd completely forgotten grammar or something.)

The analog kid.

So I look at proposed Republican spending cuts and Mr. Obama's proposed cuts and I must ask: are they kidding? Cutting $65 billion or $80 billion or $100 billion, almost all of it on people who need it, out of a deficit of over $1.6 trillion? If they were serious, they'd raise income taxes on the rich. And cut wasteful defense spending. And let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices. And end offshore tax havens for corporations. That's just off the top of my head, in approximately four seconds. You might want to call your Congressfolk with those ideas and others. Also, FreePress and CREDO help you tell Congress not to zero out PBS and NPR. They're both good services, don't cost that much, and the Republicans only want to get rid of them because they don't tell Republicans everything they want to hear all the time.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that state governments across the country are attempting to "cut deficits" on the backs of their workers -- Mr. Walker, Governor of Wisconsin, has even said the National Guard is "ready" to combat worker "unrest" after he takes all their rights from them. Obviously he hasn't been following recent events in Egypt. Anyway, American Rights at Work helps you tell your state governments to stop cutting deficits on the backs of firefighters, teachers, nurses, cops, and social workers. The government belongs to you, after all. You own it. And you pay people to provide services for you. And that part about public workers being vampires, sucking the lifeblood out of taxpayers? All lies, perpetrated by the real vampires, the politicians who want to deliver all taxpayer funds to their corporate cronies.

Finally, if you haven't told Mr. Obama to pressure the USDA to revoke their approval of Monsanto's Frankenfalfa, CREDO still helps you do that. Make no mistake, Mr. Obama sold us out on this one (not that he doesn't sell us out fairly frequently) -- the genetically-modified alfalfa seeds will find their way on the wind to contaminate other, organically-grown alfalfa seeds, and any animal who eats that alfalfa will also be contaminated. Seems to me citizens have the right to avoid genetically-modified food if they want, but the government doesn't want us to enjoy that right -- they think the "right" of a corporation to "engineer" these ever more Rube Goldbergian "plants" is more important than any rights a consumer might have. But, then, what do we know? We're only people, not big important too-big-to-fail corporations. It's not like we're the true font of wisdom and works in a democracy or anything. Why would anyone think that? (Sarcasm gland now quite tired, must rest.)

Other arms.

Public Citizen encourages us to call our Congressfolk today and demand decent legislation in response to the BP spillageddon. The Oil Spill Commission released its report a month ago, after all, so what's the delay? Is defunding Planned Parenthood because it was the victim of an obvious right-wing propaganda campaign really more important than taking steps to make sure we don't pollute another huge body of water? Turns out Rep. Markey (D-MA) has introduced H.R. 501, the perhaps aptly-titled Implementing the Recommendations of the BP Oil Spill Commission Act of 2011, replete with departmental reorganizations, stricter safety standards, and repeal of tax subsidies. Your Congressfolk will no doubt be anxious to learn that you haven't forgotten about the Gulf, just because the "liberal" media has.

It's true that House Republicans don't seem to like domestic programs, but they've long been unfriendly to the international program to collect nuclear materials, too. Mr. Obama requested a $320 million increase in the federal program to secure weapons-grade materials, so that the Executive branch could specifically go after loose nuclear materials (a big problem since the fall of the Soviet Union), but Congress didn't include said increase in its December spending bill. So Council for a Livable World helps you advocate for the nuclear materials program. I suspect that when Republicans tell us that defense spending cuts must be on the table, that they mean to cut good programs like this one, programs that don't even cost half a billion dollars, while leaving absolute boondoggles like the missile "defense" program untouched. I'd like to think better of Republicans than that, but I'd also like to have proof that I should.

Finally, the House's attempt to ram through a PATRIOT Act reauthorization this week failed -- the House leadership tried to pass the bill under a motion to suspend the rules, in which the House suspends rules pertaining to debate and amendments on a bill, but in exchange the bill needs a two-thirds vote, not a majority vote, to pass. Normally the House uses this procedure when the bill isn't controversial, but sometimes the House misjudges -- as with that no-brainer 9.11 responder health care bill last year, which the Republicans held hostage and the Democrats, inexplicably, didn't run ten thousand campaign ads about. And the House misjudged again with the PATRIOT Act extension, no, not because Tea Party Republicans really, really believe in the Constitution, but because enough establishment Republicans voted against it. So the House will bring it up again, and the Electronic Freedom Foundation helps you urge your Congressfolk to vote no on PATRIOT Act extensions.

Living in the material world.

Another year, another $135 billion Wall Street banksters are paying themselves in bonuses. And they seem to think they're doing work. Turning the American economy into a shell game? Not work. Outsourcing manufacturing jobs to countries where workers get paid less so CEOs can fatten their bottom lines? Not work. What is work? Here's a clue: if it feels as good as stealing money, it's not work. If it helps people help themselves, if it helps people help other people, well, you're getting warmer. Public Citizen provides a petition to Wall Street banksters telling them to change their ways. But I don't think there's any reasoning or imploring or persuading to be done here. The text of my note, for example: "We hate you because you hurt so many people. Just in case you were wondering." Maybe they'll shut that message out, or maybe they'll keep building their self-pity armor with it, I can't say. But I'm being honest. Sooner or later, honesty has to be worth something.

Meanwhile, too many people are pushing the myth that "the Tea Party scuttled PATRIOT Act reauthorization yesterday." Looking at the roll call, and then looking at Ms. Bachmann's own list of the Tea Party Caucus membership from 2010, I see that exactly seven caucus members (out of 52, 47 still in the House) voted against the reauth. True, the vote failed by exactly seven votes, but 19 other Republicans also voted against it, and 7 of 47 doesn't exactly speak to "Tea Party muscle." And the two potentially-rogue Repubs mentioned by the L.A. Times article yesterday (Gohmert and Chaffetz) voted for the bill, as did Ms. Bachmann. Tea Party favorite (and non-Caucus member) Ron Paul voted against, of course, but he's been voting against the PATRIOT Act since the beginning. I swear, even the good members of the "liberal" media are grading the Tea Party on a curve. I'd think, as nominal conservatives, teabaggers would be upset at that.

Down to zero.

Both the EFF and the ACLU help you oppose PATRIOT Act extensions. The House would like to extend three expiring provisions of the PATRIOT Act, quickly, before anyone knows what they're doing. But those provisions let government root around in your library records willy-nilly and wiretap without actually specifying person or place to be tapped, among other things. You'd think Tea Party Republicans in the House would be aghast at this brazen extension of big government power! Nah, just kidding. We all know the Tea Party Republicans are frauds -- they only hate the "big government" that might actually work on behalf of its owners, the people. Big government that might harass you or wrongly put you in jail? They don't seem to have a problem with that.

That's not the only thing the House is doing, of course -- they're trying to cut the budget on your back. No cutting in defense or homeland (sic) security, where fraud and waste run like rats on a ship, but big cuts in housing and transportation, where programs generally work pretty well and pretty cheaply. Those Tea Partiers sure do bring a new perspective to government, don't they? NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby and yes I hope Glenn Beck gets a shock every time I put the words "Catholic" and "social justice" together, helps you tell your Congressfolk not to show the government's owners, the people, the back of their hand so damn much. How does Congress cut housing programs in the middle of a foreclosure crisis where banks foreclose on properties without even demonstrating that they own them? Regretfully I must conclude: a Congress that does that is simply evil, and must be stopped.

Finally, in case anyone thought I just celebrate anyone who sticks it to the banks, let me say that this fellow, a "credit terrorist" who ostensibly helps folks avoid getting their lives ruined by creditors, is a jerk. He used to be a bill collector himself, but changed his ways when a collection agency came after him too aggressively in 2003; I'm not opposed to redemption through self-interest, but that particular Damascus moment is particularly unimpressive. Why not earlier, I wonder -- before his own bankruptcy, say? He's spent much of his spiritually-awake time collecting tips that might help debtors against creditors (better ones than these, I hope), but he's also been spending that time running up credit card bills, to the point where he's now absconded to China with almost $40,000 in cash advances he intends never to repay. Even wiped his butt in the airport with a collection notice, which I'm sure would be a more effective statement if I didn't get the feeling he stages such dramas all the time.

UPDATE. The Los Angeles Times makes way, way too much of "tea party" opposition to PATRIOT Act extensions -- only one quotation from a skeptical Republican House Rep, plus a notation that Rep. Chaffetz (who does show flashes of independence) hasn't decided how to vote yet. That's two frickin' people. More evidence, please.

There are more snakes than ladders.

The ACLU helps you oppose H.R. 3, the House's anti-abortion bill. Much has been made this week of the bill's insistence on making exceptions only for "forcible rape" -- which is, as you know, a redundancy -- but that's just how the bastards got us to stop talking about what's in the rest of the bill. If this bill passes, no woman who gets health care from the federal government could ever get abortion coverage; no woman who gets a subsidy to buy insurance on the federal health care exchange could ever get abortion coverage; businesses that cover abortion would have to pay usurious taxes for the "privilege," and public hospitals could refuse abortions to women with life-threatening emergencies. All this about a procedure that's still legal. A bunch of damn grandstanding is what it is -- none of these Republicans are going to spend any money putting up babies in good homes, for example. So put a stop to it, citizen.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you defend Planned Parenthood from yet another despicable propagandistic campaign. You may have seen a heavily-edited video in which Planned Parenthood "counsels" sex traffickers -- said video having made it to Mr. Breitbart's Big Government website, just like the heavily-edited O'Keefe/ACORN video and the heavily-edited Shirley Sherrod video before it. But you probably haven't seen videos of Planned Parenthood reporting said "sex traffickers" to the Department of Justice, which seems to me to be the more interesting story. If Planned Parenthood knew what was happening to it, why doesn't the "liberal" media seem to know? They're still covering the imbroglio as if it's just a story of something that just happened to be, rather than ignoring an obviously made-up propaganda campaign against an organization that helps people's lives suck less. It's not "bias" to point to a pile of dung and say, hey, that's a pile of dung! Even when the dung-is-meatloaf lobby pretends to be outraged when you do.

It's another year, another attempt to fund the D.C. voucher program, and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State helps you oppose it. The D.C. voucher program, which helped students go to private and parochial schools in Washington, D.C., didn't hype D.C. students' lives like it was supposed to do, and when a government program doesn't do the things it's supposed to do, you don't keep funding it. Especially when you can tell on the face of it that it's not going to work -- a voucher doesn't guarantee admission to a private school, nor does it guarantee, even, that a student could afford a private school, and it certainly doesn't guarantee "choice" if more than four out of five voucher-holders wind up going to parochial school. What the hell is the problem with funding our public schools properly? It's what people across the ideological spectrum want. It's just not what any of their representatives in Congress want. You have to wonder if it's because they like diverting your tax money to private interests. So hammer 'em with letters and phone calls until they finally get it -- or look like fools and jerks for not getting it.

Finally, American Rights at Work helps you tell the federal government to stop slashing the deficit on the backs of public workers. Why? Because freezing and slashing pay and benefits for nurses, cops, inspectors, park rangers, nuclear clean-up crews and the like won't balance the budget. But doing all that will slow the economic recovery, because all those people spend money and keep the economy going. Won't solve the problem, but will make the problem worse -- golly, it's almost like that's the idea! And if it's Congress's idea, it's just as surely Mr. Obama's idea, since he told us he was going to freeze federal workers' pay long before the News Corporation began its campaign to demonize public workers. All that means is we're going to talk longer and louder -- after all, Wall Street pay is back up at record highs again. These are the people who destroyed our economy. Think some of them might contribute their unearned largesse toward this awful, soul-destroying deficit Republicans are so upset about?

Yesterday's not here.

Per Americans for Financial Reform, today is a "national call-in day" to tell state Attorneys General to investigate the foreclosure imbroglio fully and demand good solutions; here's the phone script. As you probably know, over 40 state Attorneys General have launched investigations into bank malfeasance during the foreclosure crisis, but the banks are pushing for a "quick" solution that lets them off the hook. You know, as you might expect. But, as the Ibanez case suggests, the banks may well be guilty of failing to establish ownership of the mortgages upon which they're foreclosing -- actually, a concurring opinion in Ibanez referred to "the utter carelessness with which the plaintiff banks documented the titles to their assets." In other words, they didn't follow the law, and they didn't follow the law so that they could cut corners and make more money. And now they're trying to make even more money by kicking people out of their homes. I don't think we ought to be a society that rewards such behavior.

Meanwhile, Penn Environment helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Corbett to keep restrictions on gas drilling in state forests. Is there a news hook here? Sadly, there's always a news hook where gas drilling's involved -- a Talisman Energy well erupted last week in Tioga state forest, spewing forth thousands of gallons of toxic waste onto the land for almost four hours. And the punchline? Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection found 151 violations during well inspections at Talisman last year. You still remember the sixteen-hour gas geyser in the Moshannon State Forest last year, right? And you still remember folks lighting their tap water on fire? Well, at least the government still protects areas in the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon, among other state forests. But only for now -- and only if we speak out in force to Mr. Corbett.

Finally, Congressional Republicans have begun attacking the EPA in earnest -- no, not for any of the reasons they give ("regulations kill jobs," "regulations cause taxes," et cetera), but just so their corporate paymasters can go on polluting. Sadly, some Senate Democrats seem poised to join the effort, particularly those who believe in "clean coal." Penn Environment provides an email tool opposing H.R. 97, the aptly-named Free Industry Act, which would amend the Clean Air Act so that it specifically doesn't regulate carbon dioxide, methane, or a host of other gases which are dangerous in large amounts. But the Meteor Blades link above suggests we'll be fighting a slew of legislation looking to destroy as much of the EPA's authority as they can. I'll keep you posted with new action alerts as I get them.

A wave crashed on the rocks.

The House apparently is mulling whether to force internet service providers to store all records of their users' activities, in case the police need to view them later. Can you say police state, boys and girls? Can you say the government thinks you're all criminals, boys and girls? Even if you could convince me that law enforcement just needs ISPs to do this -- which, given the number of fingerprints we leave all over the internet every time we visit a website, you couldn't -- you could never convince me that every American citizen is just a criminal waiting to happen. The vast majority of Americans are not criminals, and given the choice between visiting a burden on the citizenry and lightening a burden on law enforcement, I'm always going to choose the citizenry, just as Mr. Blackstone and the Founders would have me do. A call to your House Reps might nip this in the bud. It's not like they'll see it coming.

Oh, but the Senate might be preparing something even worse: Sens. Carper (D-DE), Collins (R-ME), and Lieberman (I-CT) -- wow, true bipartisanship! -- introduced legislation in the last Congress that would give the Executive branch the ability to cut off "critical infrastructure" in times of "crisis" -- meaning the President would essentially have a "kill switch" on the internet, just like the President of Egypt used on the good citizens of Egypt last week. Apparently, Sen. Collins plans to reintroduce the bill soon, which brings the phrase "tone-deaf" to a whole new level. Mr. Mubarak just used a "kill switch" on his people, in an obvious attempt to squash dissent, and we think it's a good idea for Mr. Obama (or any other theoretical President) to have the same? And, like I used to say when Mr. Bush was wiretapping Americans without warrant, you really have to imagine someone you don't like having that sort of power in order to fully understand the danger. Free Press helps you tell your Senators to oppose any bill that would give the President such overreaching power.

Finally, Consumers Union helps you tell the FCC to mandate that big telecoms alert you before you go over your monthly limit of cell phone minutes. The big telecoms hate this idea; bet you can't guess why. And by "bet you can't guess why" I sorta mean "obviously because the big telecoms make a mint off overage fees." We wouldn't even be asking the FCC to make the big telecoms get rid of the overage fees; we'd simply ask for some notice. Really, what the hell's the harm? Big telecoms don't get to gild their plumbing? Actually, the big telecoms are claiming that such a limit would violate their First Amendment rights (see, John Roberts? You loosed a monster!) by forcing them to, you know, send a single text to each and every user about to go over their limit. Of course, sending you texts about offers and deals you don't want isn't a burden to them, though it may be a burden to you. But why care about your rights? After, you're only an American -- you're not a really big and important thing, like a corporation. (I don't have to start putting sarcasm tags on my posts, do I?)

Behold: the unstoppable power of the Italics Hammer!

Sens. Vitter (R-LA) and Paul (R-KY) have introduced S.J.Res. 2, which would amend the U.S. Constitution so that children born on American soil to undocumented immigrants can't gain citizenship by the fact of their birth, as the 14th Amendment currently guarantees. That we're even considering such a repugnant notion begs the question: what kind of nation are we? Are we a weak nation, that can't deal with some 400,000 blameless babies born to foreign parents out of a nation of 300 million people, that can't keep undocumented immigrants off American soil in any other way? Like, say, by adjusting quotas on immigration so that they bear some relationship to reality, or by passing the Employee Free Choice Act and/or amending the National Labor Relations Act to permit farmworkers to organize, so that workers can more ably prevent their employers from trying to give their jobs away to the undocumented? If you believe America is a strong nation, as I do, then I think a phone call to your Senators opposing S.J.Res. 2 is in order. And if you want to call Ron Paul and tell him to take his son out to the woodshed for saying citizenship is a privilege -- as jaw-dropping a moment as Paul the Lesser has foisted on us in his brief political career -- you're free to do that, too.

Meanwhile, Sen. Franken (D-MN) has introduced S. 31, the Prescription Drug and Health Improvement Act of 2011, which would give Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers. As stunning as it is that Mr. Bush's Medicare Part D drug program didn't give Medicare this authority (it's almost as if he wanted the program to fail!), it's just as stunning that the massive health care overhaul passed last year didn't solve the problem, either. Much as I laud Mr. Franken for trying again on an issue that really ought to get everyone's support, I wish he'd called the bill the "Saving Medicare Money and Cutting the Deficit Act," because that's what the bill really does. I think you may also want to call your Senators to support S. 31. And you may ask your more reactionary Senators: if you're not going to get rid of a program, isn't it still your job to get the program to run as well as it could? Presumably, if a program runs as well as it could, and still runs badly, that would make their argument against the program for them. I wonder why they don't see that.