Thieves in the Temple.

I can see for miles.

As you know, the House's defense authorization bill allows the Pentagon to propagandize American citizens, so we can be treated to the same crap the Defense Department peddles abroad. But now the Senate gets a crack at the bill, so Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to oppose the pro-propaganda amendment. That's our government these days -- can't control the banksters but can spy on your facebook page, never there when we need them and always there when we need them to go away. One is also tempted to ask: what more could our government want, when the New York Times clucks approvingly at the disclosure of Barack Obama's "kill list"? When our nation's "paper of record" can examine government-sanctioned murder of innocents abroad without a scintilla of outrage, our elites hardly need our own government propagandizing us.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama drafted an Executive Order last year that would force corporations getting money from our government to disclose their political spending. He hasn't had the guts to actually issue this order, yet Republicans act like he did, introducing the so-called Keeping Politics Out of Federal Contracting Act (S. 1100), cleverly disguised as a bill that would prevent our government from awarding contracts to its political friends. Of course, that's a bait-and-switch: the problem disclosure aims to solve has nothing to do with the relationship between government and contractors and everything to do with the relationship between government and its owners, the American people, who deserve to know where all those bajillions of dollars better spent on actually hiring people come from. So Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to oppose S. 1100.

Finally, the commenting deadline has passed on the USDA's proposal to make chicken inspections far worse, but there's always more than one way to solve a problem: American Rights at Work helps you helps you petition the Obama Administration directly to keep more federal chicken inspectors on the line, and thus keep blood, feathers, bile and feces out of your chicken marsala or chicken parm or fried chicken or chicken soup. If the petition gets another 9,000 signatures over the next 24 hours or so, the Obama Administration must respond, and if you've already left a comment with the USDA, you can still sign the petition without worrying that you're muddying the data. Of course, you'll have to create an account before you sign the petition. If you don't want to be on their email list, you'll have to tell them.

Yours and mine.

You may have heard that the government of Bahrain imprisoned, tortured, and murdered many of its citizens during the 2011 protests there. But you may not have heard that the Obama Administration supplied its military with weapons during that time, and still does. The Administration may believe it needs to appease Bahrain (perhaps not surprisingly, a largely Shi'a nation ruled by Sunnis) in order to keep Bahrain allied against Iran, but I believe that if you supply a nation with weapons, and that nation uses those weapons against its citizens, the citizens will remember when they rise up, and all your realpolitik will be for naught. So Rep. Grijalva (D-NM) has introduced H.R. 5749, the Arms Sales Responsibility Act, which would prevent our government from selling weapons to nations that trample on their citizens' rights. (H.R. 5749 does allow Presidents to request exemptions, but Congress could reject them via resolutions of disapproval.) Peace Action West helps you tell your House Rep to support H.R. 5749.

Meanwhile, the Zero Tolerance Brigade strikes again! A Texas judge has sentenced 17-year-old high school student Diane Tran to a night in jail for missing too many days of school. Why, that's almost as bad as paying kids to go to school! There are, shall we say, mitigating circumstances: Ms. Tran's parents have essentially abandoned her and her siblings, and Ms. Tran works two jobs (one part-time, one full-time) to provide for her brother and sister, all while maintaining excellent grades in college-level classes at school. Well, no wonder she misses a few days here and there! But the Judge, one Lanny Moriarty (no, really, that's his name), wouldn't budge, saying "(i)f you let one of them run loose, what are you going to do with the rest of them?" Setting aside, for a moment, that Ms. Tran hardly "runs loose" between her multitudinous obligations: if judges can't show mercy to those who deserve it, then why the hell do we even have judges? Change.org helps you tell Mr. Moriarty to show some mercy to Ms. Tran.

Penny rants for Tuesday, May 29, 2012.

Taegan Goddard laments that the number one New York Times bestseller this week is "a widely-discredited book about President Obama that's filled with false claims and poor research." Pick your snark: 1) "why, that describes a lot of NYT bestsellers!" or 2) if it sold a million copies, that'd still be less than one-third of one percent of the U.S. population. Seriously, though I'm always saying we are a sick, immoral, and decadent culture, Mr. Goddard's point would describe that culture more precisely if anyone put very much credence in "the charts" anymore. There are so damn many bestsellers/pop songs/TV shows now that we can hardly keep track of them -- rather, we carve out personal "tastes" for ourselves, tastes that might overlap with others' and then again might not, and I don't think that's an entirely negative development. After all, "Honey" and "Rock Me Amadeus" were number one hits back in the day, and they're utter crap.

Meanwhile, George Will wrote a piece of hot-and-steaming earlier this month defending Citizens United v. FEC and excoriating Rep. McGovern's proposed anti-corporate personhood constitutional amendment, and entitled this brazen slab of dung "Taking a Scythe to the Bill of Rights," no less! Mr. McGovern has written a lengthy and thorough response -- which the Washington Post has not printed, lest it hurt Mr. Will's fee-fees -- but I think he doesn't go far enough. Mr. Will commits two original sins: 1) he conflates money with speech so he can completely disappear the word "money" from his argument, and 2) he acts as if Mr. McGovern's amendment would deprive actual living people of their rights. It wouldn't: if people could no longer band together to spend their gazillions of dollars to lie to the electorate, they would still be people, and thus would still have Constitutional rights. They just wouldn't have more rights than you and I, which I'm certain is the state of affairs Mr. Will really aims to protect.

Finally, we learn that recent polls showing Scott Walker (R) on top of Tom Barrett (D) in the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election in a week's time suffer from a conservative bias, in that they tend to oversample the number of voters who call themselves "conservative" based on 2006/2008/2010 exit polls. You have to wonder why they'd do that -- it couldn't have anything to do with all that out-of-state money Mr. Walker's getting, could it? We also learn that the Democratic brain trust (sic) in WI seems to be running away from the very impetus for this recall: Mr. Walker's law stripping collective bargaining rights from public-sector union workers. Are Democrats trying to prove they're the party of all of Wisconsin? If so, how would pummeling Mr. Walker for lying about his plan to strip collective bargaining rights conflict with that goal -- and when did Koch Industries become Wisconsinites? Dems might snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again -- unless the people of Wisconsin have something to say about it.

Prime of life.

You know that the Energy Policy Act of 2005 exempted gas drillers from disclosing chemicals they use in hydraulic fracturing, but you may not know that the law made one conspicuous exception: if the frackers used diesel fuel, the EPA could regulate them. Certain politicians and industry groups assert that frackers simply don't use diesel fuel, but that's not exactly true: 16 gas drilling corporations pumped 32 million gallons of diesel fuel into the ground from 2006 to 2010, and the EPA knew approximately nothing about it. It's bad enough that we one day might be able to light our drinking water on fire like this unfortunate family, but you certainly don't want gasoline in your drinking water, either -- diesel contains carcinogens and ingesting it can damage your liver, your kidneys, and your central nervous system. So the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to ban diesel fuel from being used in hydraulic fracturing operations.

Meanwhile, Roots Action helps you tell Congress to investigate News Corporation and its Chairman/CEO, Rupert Murdoch. News Corp. and Mr. Murdoch have taken well-deserved hits in Great Britain for the infamous phone-hacking scandal, in which News Corp. employees hacked into private voicemail lines and bribed police officers for information -- one Parliamentary committee declared Mr. Murdoch "not a fit person" to run News Corp., finding that Mr. Murdoch had "turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness" to the whole affair. But News Corp. is an American corporation, and thus subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for anything illegal it might have done overseas -- and that's before we get into whether they hacked into 9.11 families' phones as well. As an aside, Mr. Murdoch said last year that his corporation has 53,000 employees and he couldn't be held responsible for everything they do. That's enough of an argument for keeping corporations small, don't ya think?

See America right.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 2400 would let folks go around tape-recording other folks if they have a "reasonable" suspicion they might be committing a crime or just talking about committing a crime, and it also lets police officers intercept communications without warrants. Even setting aside that feuding neighbors going around taping each other is currently illegal in Pennsylvania: whatever happened to getting a warrant from a judge? Every time our government demands that we concede our rights so that it might "have more power to catch criminals," we regret it. And, yes, we may not send as many crooks to jail because we hold to our rights, but the Founders understood that. And the best way to curtail law-breaking? Create an economy that benefits someone other than its richest members. The ACLU helps you tell your state legislators to reject HB 2400.

Meanwhile, don't-ask-don't-tell has been repealed, and polls consistently show over half the country supports gay marriage, a number which now includes even the President -- but the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, passed by the Gingrich/Dole Congress and signed by Mr. Clinton, still sits on the federal law books, preventing our military from recognizing same-sex marriages even in states where same-sex marriage is legal, and thus denying these married folks such benefits as health care and survivor's benefits that opposite-sex marriages receive. Hence, Freedom to Marry helps you petition Congress to repeal DOMA. I know, petitioning the same House Speaker who planned to spend millions defending DOMA seems like a waste of time, but it's not. He may not budge, and his insane caucus may not budge, but the next one might, or the next one, or the next one. In time, we will win.

In other news, Rep. Ellison introduced the End Polluter Welfare Act (H.R. 5745) over two weeks ago, and CREDO helps you see how much money we could have saved in useless fossil fuel subsidies if we'd passed the act the day it was introduced. Hint: in the time it took you to read the previous sentence, I bet an entire paycheck went by. Now, $480 million (as of this writing!) isn't a whole lot of money to the federal government. But when you consider the programs we could be saving or improving with that money, programs that actually help people and actually stimulate the economy, then yes, it's a lot of money. And when you consider that fossil fuel corporations already make boatloads of money and hardly need government handouts, then I'll bet it seems like a lot more money. The link above will help you tell your Congressfolk to support the End Polluter Welfare Act.

Finally, if you've missed any opportunities to protest the USDA's plan to let poultry processing corporations police themselves on the inspection line, the deadline for public comments is this coming Tuesday, and OMB Watch helps you oppose our government's plan to weaken chicken inspections. If anything, asking folks to find all the feathers and blood and poop and bile on three chickens every two seconds is a bit much, and that's all federal law requires. The USDA's plan would let poultry processing corporations speed that up to six chickens every two seconds, and would slash the number federal poultry inspectors on the lines. Recall that the USDA already tried this under Mr. Clinton, and that Mr. Bush couldn't even extend the program because it clearly didn't work. I mean, of course it gilded some CEO's plumbing somewhere, but that's not what I call "working."

The future will come.

What other damage did the House-passed defense authorization bill do last week? The bill actually makes propagandizing the American people legal. Yes, you read that right. Supporters of such a ridiculous idea (including, sadly, Rep. Adam Smith, who also co-wrote the failed anti-indefinite detention amendment) suggest that the al-Qaedas of the world can communicate too easily because of the internet, and though the terrorist knitting listserv is awesome!!!!!!, Mr. Smith has also gone so far as to suggest that certain ethnic populations within the U.S. need to be propagandized. So I guess he's saying it's really not about you, but about those people. Still, if our government were doing anything not abjectly stupid, there'd be no need to subject Americans to the same propaganda folks overseas already get. So Roots Action helps you tell the President and your Senators to reject the pro-propaganda section of the House defense bill.

Meanwhile, PBS has taken a lot of flack for a "partnership" with Chick-fil-A to sell kids' meals in bags branded with its "Martha Speaks" children's program -- over 50 million kids' meals just last year, in fact. And here I always thought public broadcasting created a commercial-free childrens' space -- one we need now, frankly, more than ever. And, really, PBS: partnering with fast food? Something that makes kids fatter faster than PBS could ever make them smarter? Of course, as we've slashed public broadcasting funding over the last few decades, and as public broadcasting's pledge drives still remain fairly unpopular (always interrupting my Doctor Who, they were!), public broadcasting has resorted more and more to corporate funding. A better solution would be to, you know, fund public broadcasting with more public funds, which I'm sure we can find by ending some of our dumb wars. Both Public Citizen and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood help you tell PBS to abandon its Chick-fil-A partnership.

Finally, in the wake of J.P. Morgan Chase's two-no-three-no-six billion dollars in losses from "bad bets," I've got a few more financial reform action alerts. Both Americans for Financial Reform and PennPIRG help you tell the Federal Reserve to create a strong "Volcker rule," i.e. a rule that would shield bank customers from banksters' "bad bets." Also, change.org helps you tell the New York Federal Reserve Board to kick Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon off its board. And finally, CREDO helps you tell Congress to re-erect the Glass-Steagall protections that used to keep banks from dabbling in speculation. Opponents of that last idea like to tell us that the executive branch had effectively neutered Glass-Steagall by the late 1980s anyway, and thus its repeal didn't contribute to our ongoing economic Armageddon. Why on earth that should stop us from demanding that banks serve their customers before they serve their executives' greed for ten vacation homes, I can't imagine.

Who's in control.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban hydraulic fracturing, popularly known as "fracking." My guess is that our Congressfolk think fracking is a state issue and should be resolved at the state level, but given the damage to our water supply that fracking can do (and has done), and given our states' unwillingness to stand up to gas drillers on the people's behalf, I see no reason for Congress to stay out of the issue. The popular will prefers clean water to gas drilling CEOs getting richer, but I'm anxious to see what hideous rhetorical contortions teabagging House Reps and Senators employ in defying the popular will here. Nah, never mind -- they'll just be iterations of COMMUNISM SOCIALISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!! And I think we've all had quite enough of that.

Meanwhile, if you've missed opportunities to support the Safe Chemicals Act, Moms Rising still helps you do that. The cable news punditoids love to tell us that we don't need regulations anymore -- regulations have already cleaned up the planet, they say, thus their job is done. Funny thing is, we keep producing new chemicals and new chemical processes, and our knowledge about their effects has advanced over the years, so when we find that the chemicals in our toys and our sippy cups and our couches cause more infertility, more cancers, and more learning disorders (among other things!), then we must conclude that the 36-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act needs a little updating. Chemical corporations, of course, think everything's hunky-dory as long as their CEOs can gild their plumbing. But they ain't the boss of us.

Dry land.

Jim Inhofe (E-OK) still aims to bring S.J.Res. 37 to the Senate floor, because COMMUNISM SOCIALISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!!! S.J.Res. 37 would nullify the clean-air protections the EPA finalized earlier this year -- you know, the ones that would keep more mercury and acid gases and other pollutants out of your air, thus reducing your exposure to asthma and cancer and other illnesses. Mr. Inhofe has said that he favored fighting climate change "until I found out what it cost." Of course, having said that, Mr. Inhofe should support environmental regulations once he sees how much dirty air actually costs in expanded health care and lost work days, right? Nah, just kidding; reducing all those costs doesn't translate directly into more money for his corporate paymasters, so he doesn't care. The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Senators to oppose S.J.Res. 37. Don't brook any backtalk about the cost to small businesses. What small businesses are causing all this pollution, exactly?

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you tell the U.S. Department of Justice to stop oil companies and financial speculators from committing the fraud and market manipulation that drives up gas prices. How does oil speculation happen? Here's how five speculators did it in early 2008, according to federal regulators: they bought up some oil contracts, creating an artificial scarcity which drove up oil prices, and then they "bet" that the prices would fall -- which, of course, they did, as soon as the speculators sold the contracts they'd just bought! Nice work if you can get it! This kind of thing isn't just immoral, it's also illegal, and you're paying for it, with gas near $4 a gallon a full month before summer even begins. Lucky for us, the oil companies hate the oil speculators just as much as you and I do -- it does help make them look bad, after all! -- so we might have some momentum for change. Still, we'll only get change if we demand it.

Working together.

Word on the street is that Congress will vote today on the Smith-Amash amendment, which would ban indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and the ACLU helps you tell your House Reps, one more once, to support the amendment and temper the spectre of our government arresting and detaining us without charge or trial. And let's see Mr. Obama threaten a veto this time. Last time he got away with it, because neither he nor the "liberal" media foregrounded the real motive behind his veto threat: the amendment didn't give him enough power to detain folks indefinitely without charge or trial. And his signing statement indicating that, of course, he would never, ever abuse absolute power doesn't inspire confidence. (In other news, Senator Palpatine plans to relinquish his emergency powers once the crisis has passed.) Anyway, we have some momentum here, but let's not be complacent.

Meanwhile, the Senate plans to bring S. 797, the Paycheck Fairness Act, to a vote soon. The Paycheck Fairness Act would stiffen penalties for equal pay violations, stop employers from retaliating against folks who ask about their co-workers' wages, allow individual wage discrimination plaintiffs to bind together in class action suits, and require the EEOC to maintain records of wage discrimination complaints, among many other things. I wondered why Senate Republicans would allow this bill to come to a vote, having been unified in filibustering it last session, until I remembered that the House Republican majority rammed through its woefully-inadequate VAWA reauthorization last week -- if you're in the Senate, it's a lot easier to do the people's will when you know the House won't. But our task doesn't depend on their calculations, so Moms Rising helps you tell your Senator to vote for the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous alerts about the USDA's plan to let poultry-processing corporations speed up chicken inspections and police themselves on the inspection line, CREDO helps you tell the USDA to drop the plan. The USDA has extended the comment period to May 29, perhaps reflecting an inadequate amount of corporate-friendly comments. What would a pro-plan comment even look like? Yes, I would like to force inspectors look at their birds twice as fast, and if poop and bile and feathers turn up in my chicken casserole, I'll happily chow down, knowing that poultry processors will make more money! More seriously, plan proponents argue that the federal food inspectors are more needed elsewhere in the corporation, evaluating corporate bacteria-testing programs and suchlike. If that's true, then why not, I don't know, hire more inspectors, USDA? I understand that many folks are actually looking for jobs right now.

The man in black.

Hot on the heels of the news that J.P. Morgan Chase's $2 billion "bad bet" might actually be more like a $3 billion "bad bet," Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Keith Ellison bring us the SAFE Banking Act, which would limit how big any bank could get, by capping the amount banks can hold in deposits at 10%, among other things. But when your Republican friends howl SOCIALISM COMMUNISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!!!!!!, please remind them that a 10% cap hardly puts bankster CEOs in the poorhouse, and then remind them that conservatives used to favor small banks that were more responsive to local communities, and that "removing big government barriers," in this case, means removing the laws that allow cancerous big bank growth, because the small bank's greatest enemy is the big bank. The Campaign for America's Future helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the SAFE Banking Act.

Meanwhile, I did not know that the University of Virginia medical school still uses cats to demonstrate proper intubation of premature infants. Once immobilized, cats get plastic tubes shoved down their throats, sometimes as often as twenty times in a single session, and since I imagine students are doing the intubation at least some of the time, those cats must hurt bad at the end. Like a cat would ever choose a life like this! This can't still go on at Virginia when over 9 out of 10 medical schools have stopped using cats for this purpose, and when human patient simulators can do the job quite adequately -- they can breathe and cry and even turn blue when you do the intubation wrong. We can revisit the issue when human patient simulators become sentient, but for now, Change.org helps you tell the University of Virginia medical school to use human simulators for training purposes instead of cats.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the provocatively-named End Polluter Welfare Act, which would end all subsidies and tax credits for the fossil fuel industry. I wish the word "welfare" hadn't become such a bad word, but I'm fine with turning it on America's real "welfare queens," the corporations. And I'm more accepting of subsidies and tax credits for emerging technologies -- especially technologies like solar and wind, which would really make the world a much better place -- but not technologies that have been around for-fracking-ever and are making money hand over fist. And the fossil fuel industry gets almost six times what the renewable industry gets, and the renewable tax credits tend to expire, while the fossil fuel tax credits don't. And, er, pollution sucks, you know? Breathable air and water don't suck; in fact, they're kinda nice. Essential, actually. And we'd have more of it if we made more of our power from solar and wind.

The country is young.

As you may know, the House will consider the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2013 this week, and because this is a must-pass bill, proposed amendments will receive a lot of attention. The Smith-Amash amendment preventing indefinite military detention of American citizens is just one of them. Reps. Kucinich (D-OH) and Conyers (D-MI) will offer an amendment forbidding "signature" drone strikes, in which you may or may now know whom you're killing; Reps. Conyers, Jones (R-NC), and Paul (R-TX) will offer an amendment declaring that nothing in the NDAA authorizes military force against Iran; and various amendments from Reps. Smith, Jones, McGovern (D-MA) and Lee (D-CA) would force the President to move our military out of Afghanistan far more quickly than he's doing now. Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your House Rep to vote in favor of the aforementioned amendments.

Meanwhile, you probably heard that J.P. Morgan Chase just lost two billion dollars on a "bad bet," i.e., in six weeks' worth of derivatives trading. You may not have known (though you likely won't be surprised) that J.P. Morgan Chase's CEO, Jamie Dimon, is one of the most strident opponents of further financial sector regulation. And you also may not have known that Mr. Dimon is one of the directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which advises the Federal Reserve System on regulating banks such as, just to pick an example out of a hat, J.P. Morgan Chase. How does that happen? CEOs will tell you they sit on regulatory boards because only they understand the industry well enough to regulate it. If that sentence broke your BS detector, I can't blame you, because that's classic fox-guarding-the-henhouse stuff. So Daily Kos helps you call for Mr. Dimon to resign from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Finally, the medical device safety bill working its way through the Senate still allows medical device manufacturers to bypass actually testing their devices if those devices are "substantially equivalent" to an already-approved device. Which sounds fine, until you realize that many "already-approved" devices have been found to be dangerous, and that the vast majority of medical devices were never adequately-tested in the first place. It's simply not good enough to rubber-stamp hip replacements and heart defibrillators and vaginal mesh because they're "substantially equivalent" to similar implants that have already been recalled because they hurt someone. But apparently the medical device corporations get whatever they want from the Congress of Screw You. Consumers Union helps you tell Congress to fix the "substantially-equivalent" loophole.

Nobody's city.

The House passed the Sequester Replacement Act of 2012 (now H.R. 5652) last week, and the Senate will vote on it this week. H.R. 5652 is considerably worse than I thought: $500 billion a year in Medicaid cuts, food stamp cuts, environmental cuts, education cuts, housing cuts, child care cuts, and such like, plus big Medicare cuts after the first ten years and, of course, a trillion bucks a year in tax-cuts-almost-entirely-for-the-rich. Because, you know, they're the "job creators," as recent unemployment figures so clearly spell out. (Remember: as David Wong said, the real "job creators" are the folks who buy the products who make the rich their money -- and, I'd add, the folks upon whose labor the rich depend.) The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Senators to vote against H.R. 5652. They should vote against it even if they "feel the need" to "demonstrate" that "we need to do something about the deficit" (I'm looking at you, Joe Manchin and Ben Nelson!).

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, the nefarious new drill-everywhere-hurt-everyone law, Act 13, actually prevents doctors from disclosing the chemicals used in hydrofracturing, or "fracking," to their patients. Again: Republicans complain about "government getting between doctors and their patients"? Now, doctors may not actually know what chemicals are being used, since Tha Bush Mobb exempted fracking chemicals from disclosure laws almost seven years ago, but nothing prevents a scientist from testing the water and finding out what's in it (indeed, that's the only way we know right now), and nothing prevents a doctor from talking to that scientist, or a patient with health problems from talking to that scientist. But Act 13 prevents a doctor from talking to a patient about it. What do the gas drilling corporations and their lackey politicians have to hide? That they think their "trade secrets" are more important than you having the information you need to get healthy again? Food and Water Watch helps you tell your state legislator to lift the "gag rule" on Pennsylvania doctors.

In other news, S. 2245/H.R. 4965, the so-called Preserve the Waters of the United States Act, would actually prevent the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers from deciding which waters are protected by the Clean Water Act and which aren't. The bill aims specifically at one proposed guidance, EPA-HQ-OW-2011-0409/76 Fed. Reg. 24479 (May 2, 2011). Sounds petty, doesn't it? And what's the point, exactly, of preventing the Executive branch from, you know, executing the law? If the Clean Water Act's authors wanted this, they would have made it so in the law. So, do the bill's authors mean "preserving the waters" from our government's efforts to actually keep them clean -- or was the title a mere printer's error, the real title being "Preserve the Corporate Profits of the United States Act"? In any case, American Rivers helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote against this so-called "preservation" bill -- and actually let the American people prod the Executive branch into doing the job we elected it to do, and Congress mandated it to do.

Ship of fools.

Congress plans to vote on a National Defense Authorization Act this week. But wait, you say, didn't they just pass one? Yes, they did just pass one for fiscal 2012, but it's not unusual for Congress to begin the next one well in advance of the expiration of the previous one, though whether that helps Congress get it done on time is, of course, open to debate. Anyway, Reps. Adam Smith (D-WA) and Justin Amash (R-MI) have proposed an amendment that would state that our military can't arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely without charge or trial, which would correct the serious error committed by the infamous Secs. 1021 and 1022 of the 2012 NDAA. Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Smith-Amash amendment.

Meanwhile, here in Pennsylvania we managed to beat back HB 1904, which would have let our state government give away the Allegheny National Forest to gas drillers, but Gov. Corbett still plans to gut the Keystone Fund, which funds hiking trails, stream restoration, and recreational facilities in the state parks that drew 38 million visitors in 2010. Mr. Corbett, you may remember, told us he'd permit all kinds of gas drilling in all kinds of places yet still protect the environment. Well, how does he think that's done, by wishing? No, it's done by spending money, and those two words ain't curse words. The Keystone Fund has done an admirable job of restoring public lands since 1993, and Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to keep it fully-funded.

In other news, Karl Rove's organization, Crossroads GPS, has apparently organized itself under Internal Revenue Code 501(c)4 status, which means they don't have to disclose the names of their donors. But dig this: 501(c)4 organizations "must be operated exclusively to promote social welfare" and can't have political activity as its primary purpose. Anybody out there see any other purpose to Crossroads GPS? Mr. Rove's organization, of course, argues otherwise, but, frankly, if it looks like dung and it smells like dung I don't need to taste it because Karl Rove says it's meatloaf. CREDO helps you tell the IRS to deny Crossroads GPS its 501(c)4 application, so we can shine a little light on them.

Finally, Kansas plans to pass SB 313, so-called anti-abortion legislation that would a) allow doctors to withhold information about a baby's disability, b) allow doctors to tell patients that abortions cause breast cancer, though that's not true, and c) make public hospitals turn away sick women who need abortions for health reasons. What compassionate conservatism! And Republicans whine about government "getting between you and your doctor"? Now, frankly, I'd disrespect someone who'd abort a baby because they find out it has Down's Syndrome, but that someone still deserves to know what they'd be getting into, and you're not a hero to any cause if you withhold that information. The ACLU helps you tell Kansas's Governor and legislator to kill this bill.

Penny rants for Friday, May 11, 2012.

Yeah, I heard the news: Barack Obama feels gays should be able to get married -- and he also thinks it's a matter for the states to decide! Though gay marriage is no more "a matter for states to decide" than, say, Jim Crow laws were in the '60s, I'm not mad at him -- in a healthy civilization, the President leads with the bully pulpit more than he shoves his will down everyone's throat, and, yes, his speechifying ability means more in that context. I do worry that Mitt Romney's blasé reaction might be part of some long possum game from the Ragehead Party. And I do wish Mr. Obama would have this courage about, say, the PATRIOT Act -- as it is, we're left hoping that the 2013 sunset wasn't an accident, and that some spirited Republican (say, Rand Paul, who held the Senate hostage for seven hours on the eve of the last PATRIOT Act reauth) will do Mr. Obama's dirty work for him. That's not much of a hope, even for fans of nine-dimensional chess.

Meanwhile, Rasmussen has begun to poll a hypothetical three-way race between Messrs. Obama, Romney, and Ron Paul. You may well be asking yourself: self, when did Ron Paul ever suggest he'd run as an indie? (For the record, he has repeatedly said the opposite.) I suspect Mr. Rasmussen, himself a Republican whose brand has taken a lot of well-deserved hits over the years, is creating a non-story -- and blaming it on a hypothetical Democrat "wish" I've never heard anyone express in space-time, no less! And the narrative that Mr. Paul would throw a three-way race to Mr. Romney carries a lot less weight when you notice that Rasmussen has Romney winning 49-44 as of May 10 anyway. Do a significant number of Paulites hold their nose and vote for Mr. Obama? Of course they do! But that hardly makes an indie Paul candidacy a danger to Mr. Obama. Was Ross Perot a danger to George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole, when exit polls had him stealing as many votes from Mr. Clinton as from his opponents?

Finally, I wish I could just ignore these bastards, but the editor of the Greene County (VA) Republican Committee newsletter thinks we'll have "no coarse but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November." Everybody loves democracy, until it stops giving them the results they want! Why will we have no other "coarse", Mr. Diaper-loaded Brat? Because "(t)his Republic cannot survive for 4 more years underneath this political socialist ideologue." You mean the one who cuts payroll taxes, freezes federal workers' pay, and lets Monsanto do what it likes? The one who passes the Heritage Foundation's health reform plan and allows banks to remain "too big to fail"? That "socialist"? Barack Obama is less a "socialist" than any President since Grover Cleveland save Messrs. McKinley, Harding, Coolidge, Reagan, and Bush the Lesser, and anyone who's given two minutes of thought to the matter knows that. I just wish people who can't think straight couldn't shoot straight, either.

One piece at a time.

First things first: 1,600 Palestinian prisoners have staged a hunger strike in Israel; ten are in the hospital, with two of those near death. Why? Because they (and some three thousand other Palestinians) are being detained without charge, without trial, without family visits, even. Sound familiar? Thanks to the recent Defense Department authorization act, the President now has the power to detain American citizens without charge and without trial, though of course Mr. Obama opines that he'd never abuse that kind of power. But if you resort to indefinite detention without charge, you've clearly lost sight not only of what's right, but of what works. And if you're thinking those 4,600 Palestinians all meant to do Israel harm, I'll reiterate: indefinite detention. Without charge. If it's wrong when we do it, it's wrong when they do it, too. Just Foreign Policy helps you tell the State Department to tell Israel to either charge or release their detainees.

Meanwhile, the Congress of Screw You continues wringing their hands over reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. The Senate bowed to popular pressure as is their fracking job and passed a good VAWA reauthorization in late April, but of course House members have introduced two competing VAWA reauths: H.R. 4271, which includes protections for Native Americans, undocumented immigrants, and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender folks, and H.R. 4970, which doesn't include any of that, because SOCIALISM COMMUNISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM THE GAY IT BURNS!!!!! Or because Democrats want to "pick a political fight" -- as if no one has ever tried to improve a law at reauthorization time before! Anyway, True Majority helps you demand that the House pass H.R. 4271, the right version of VAWA.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to protest billions of dollars in subsidies for junk food, PennPIRG provides another one. You know how this works: our government shovels billions of dollars into big corn, facilitating the production of high-fructose corn syrup, making cola drinks and "juice" drinks unnaturally cheap, making our children unnaturally fat. Some folks tell me we shouldn't rush so quickly on high-fructose corn syrup, that we should worry about what we're going to replace it with. Hey, these are big, big corporations, with large amounts of money, making all these high-fructose corn syrupy drinks; they've got the money to use cane sugar and beet sugar (as Ocean Spray has already done with some iterations of its Cranberry Juice Cocktail) or, heaven forfend, to use actual fruit sugar. Some CEO will have to delay purchasing his 13th vacation home, but we all have to make sacrifices for the common good.

Penny rants for Wednesday, May 9, 2012.

So Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar lost his primary yesterday -- and lost big, by over 20 points -- to Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock. Apparently Mr. Lugar's outstanding ad attacking Mr. Mourdock's desire to junk Social Security came too late -- though not too late, of course, for Rep. Donnelly, whom Mr. Mourdock faces in the general election. I'm a bit sad about Mr. Lugar's loss, not because I think he's a "moderate," or even because I like some of the things he's done over the years, but because now folks think a "moderate" is someone who deviates from the party line two percent of the time, or someone who's not a rage-filled reactionary, or someone who actually gives a crap about government. Mr. Mourdock, for his part, assured us that his definition of "bipartisanship" means Democrats bow to Republicans, and I'm sure Mr. McConnell will discourage such bluntness going forward. And in case you thought Mr. Mourdock represents some kind of populist strain of voter, Gaius Publius will set you straight. One of Mr. Lugar's final acts of "apostasy," apparently, was his support for limiting credit card swipe fees, which seems to have angered the banksters.

Meanwhile, some idiot at a Romney rally dropped the "t" word on President Obama, and Mitt Romney waited until he spoke with reporters to condemn it. But I'm not willing to beat up on Mitt Romney over this -- the questioner got big applause twice when accusing Mr. Obama of stepping all over the Constitution (where she was between 2000 and 2008, I can't say), but got stone silence when she accused Mr. Obama of treason. Possibly, Mr. Romney decided the silence did his job for him; I'd rather he corrected her impression, preferably by actually referring to Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, but actually, I felt a little bad for him -- dig him saying the Constitution was "probably inspired." Probably? Teabagger Nation snorted, doesn't he know that God Himself handed the Constitution to the Founders on Mt. Sinai? Mitt Romney really doesn't like pandering to rageheads, though no one made him run for President of the Ragehead Party, and no one made him pander to people who'll vote for him anyway just because he's not The Hated One. Seriously, if Satan had Mitt Romney's money, he could have won this nomination.

Everything counts.

The House couldn't get their massive malpractice "reform" bill, H.R. 5, through Congress -- so they've slipped it into their new budget bill, H.R. 4966! H.R. 5, as you may recall, would have imposed a $250,000 cap on noneconomic damages, even if you need to spend more to control your pain and suffering. And in a wonderful expression of "states' rights," H.R. 5 would prevent states from protecting patients' rights while allowing states to protect medical providers more! Funny that malpractice "reform" only seems concerned with what patients might get, as if patients are all corrupt, But four out of five lawsuits filed in the U.S. are filed by corporations, not people. If Congress wants to look for "frivolous lawsuits," they should look there. Public Citizen helps you call your House Rep -- or if you missed the Coalition for Human Needs's contact tool yesterday, you can add your objection to malpractice "reform" to the letter opposing H.R. 4966.

Meanwhile, guess what '90s icon is back? No, not the Foo Fighters or bad disaster flicks, but mad cow disease! A transfer station in Hanford, CA found the mad cow disease in a dairy cow selected for random testing two weeks back. As it happens, cow milk doesn't transmit the disease, and the cow was never ticketed for human consumption, but now's as good a time as any to note that only one in 900 cows ever get tested for mad cow in America -- in Europe, where mad cow disease killed over a hundred people all those years ago, every cow over the age of 6 gets tested -- and cows often get mad cow from eating "chicken coop waste," which does, indeed, include actual chicken waste, as well as meat from other cows. Any of that sound like a good idea to you? Consumers Union helps you tell the FDA and the USDA to update rules pertaining to mad cow testing. You'd advocate for a) more testing and b) less God-awful crap in cow feed. You'd be surprised what you'd find.

Thundah.

H.R. 4966, the Sequester Replacement Act of 2012, would replace about a quarter of a trillion dollars in scheduled defense cuts -- cuts resulting from the August 2011 debt limit "deal" and the subsequent failure of the so-called Super Committee -- with a quarter trillion in cuts to social services. All their cuts to food stamps, health care, and social services won't actually do much about the deficit, but it will hurt a lot of people, a lot more people than it would have hurt before Our Ongoing Economic Armageddon began in 2008. And that's a winning formula for Republicans! Seriously, if they had an ounce of sense instead of a ton of rage, they'd be trying to replace the scheduled Medicare cuts, not the scheduled defense cuts. The Coalition on Human Needs helps you oppose the House's attempts to hurt even more good Americans. And Citizens for Tax Justice can help you suggest better deficit-cutting tools to your Congressfolk.

Meanwhile, Congress passed the Local Community Radio Act in 2010, thus permitting the development of low-power FM radio stations across the land, so that maybe you won't have to listen to the same twenty damn songs and the same damn banal banter on the same damn ten radio stations all the time. But now the FCC gets to set rules governing the new community radio stations, and that could be tricky -- the FCC could restrict the number of stations that can apply for LPFM licenses in a given area, or they may allow the big telecoms to set up "local" stations that only repeat canned national broadcasts. If the FCC does these things, they'd make a mockery of both the law and the popular will -- conservatives and liberals both wanted the Local Community Radio Act, and the FCC shouldn't act like big corporations comprise its only constituency. So Free Press helps you tell the FCC to promote real local broadcasting on LPFM stations.

Finally, the Healthy Families Act (H.R. 1876, S. 984) would mandate businesses with more than 15 workers (for at least 20 workweeks annually) to give its employees the opportunity to earn an hour of sick time for every 30 hours worked -- up to seven full sick days a year, unless the business wants to do more. That's right, not everyone gets paid sick time these days, and everyone does get sick -- and folks with children have children who get sick, while folks with elderly parents have, you guessed it, elderly parents who get sick. The Healthy Families Act would make it a lot easier for folks to take paid time off for these matters, as well as for resolving domestic violence matters. And it'd be a whole lot better than having sick folks come to work, or spending all the time and money to train their replacement because you fired them for calling out sick. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Healthy Families Act.

Searching for the face of Jesus.

If you saw WalMart: The High Cost of Low Prices, you probably remember Chinese factory workers working eighteen hours a day for a pittance. Well, shrimp factory workers revolted in Thailand last month, after seeing their wages slashed and their passports seized by management -- and that factory just happened to process shrimp for a WalMart supplier. These workers already sacrifice months of pay just for the "opportunity" and then don't make enough to outrun their debt, making them wage slaves. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility, not to mention great PR backlash, so Sum of Us helps you demand that WalMart submit to independent monitoring of its supply chain. WalMart does conduct internal reviews of their suppliers' human trafficking, and though they're not necessarily failing because of greed or malice, the result's the same.

Meanwhile, change.org helps you tell a Massachusetts school for special needs students to stop using electric shocks as punishment. Some of you may be surprised that such things happen, but they do: back in 2002, a teacher at the Judge Rotenberg School in Canton strapped down and electrified special needs student Andre McCollins for hours because he refused to take off his jacket. And there's video. I used to work with special needs adults, and yes, working with them made me more of a disciplinarian than I ever was, but it didn't make me into a torturer. Mr. McCollins now has permanent brain damage because of his "punishment." For not taking off his jacket, I feel compelled to repeat with the italics hammer. People who do that aren't handing out "tough love" or enforcing zero tolerance policies. They're being monsters.

Finally, though gas drillers have it better in Pennsylvania than they do anywhere else in America, the Pennsylvania legislature seems to think that's just not enough, and thus plans to open the Allegheny National Forest to gas drilling, via HB 1904, which may get a vote this week. Well, of course, they'll say HB 1904 only puts the Allegheny Forest under state protection rather than federal protection (disingenuously so, I'd say after perusing the bill), but it just so happens that'll make it easier for the state to let gas corporations drill in our only national forest, where good citizens hike, fish, hunt, and camp. I don't need to mention that fracking will befoul the air and water there, do I? I guess I do, since our legislature never listens. Penn Environment helps you oppose opening the Allegheny National Forest to gas drilling.

Penny rants for Friday, May 4, 2012.

More evidence that Google has the FCC in its hip pocket arrives courtesy Chris Soghoian at Wired. Last weekend, Google released a minimally-redacted FCC report concluding that Google intentionally intercepted private WiFi communications in its Street View project. You may well be asking: didn't the FCC release that report? Well, yes, the FCC did release a heavily-redacted report two weeks earlier, blacking out the parts that described Google intentionally intercepting communications -- you know, the parts the public deserve to know about. Mr. Soghoian correctly demands Congressional investigations of both Google and the FCC, but I bet Darrell Issa, as conscious of all the googles in Google's bank account as anyone, passes up a chance to include the FCC's shenanigans in his "most corrupt Administration in history" narrative. That'd be a shame, because some good might actually come of it.

Meanwhile, Alyssa Rosenberg writes a complex critique of the Fox TV show Glee: "Glee is an immoral show, but not for the reason cultural conservatives (sic) believe. It’s become a show that’s not just sloppy but exploitative and manipulative of serious societal issues and human experiences." You mean it's immoral to discard complex situations as soon as they require more than an episode's worth of commitment (or as soon as they don't fit a particular week's song selection)? As someone who has long accepted that bad art is also bad civics, I totally agree: pop culture purveyors generally don't commit to their creations enough, settling for titillation and arousal more often than not, and thus don't commit to their customers enough. And I don't think it's coincidence that pop culture uses "trauma as a sparkly toy" while our elites in politics and business only seem to care about short-term profits.

Show me.

As you may have heard, Mr. Obama took a secret trip to Afghanistan, and announced that, yes, we're going to keep a lot of troops there until the end of 2014, and leave some troops there afterward. You'd think he'd have remembered, in that context at least, that we've already killed Mr. bin Laden. But Rep. Lee (D-CA) remembers, and still has H.R. 780 out there. H.R. 780 would only permit funding for the orderly withdrawal of our long-suffering troops and contractors from Afghanistan, instead of keeping the war going. Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 780, and thus support an end to this quagmire. Roots Action also helps you tell your Senators that any "agreement" with Afghanistan should be a treaty and therefore subject to a two-thirds vote in the Senate. All in all, no bin Laden plus no al-Qaeda presence worth mentioning in Afghanistan equals no more reason to spend blood and treasure there, and most Americans agree.

Meanwhile, the problems just keep piling on for News Corporation's embattled head, the nefarious Rupert Murdoch. A British government investigation found Mr. Murdoch "not fit to run an international company" due to his lack of regard for the law in News Corp.'s hacking into cell phones and bribing police officers, and now the News Corp. board has declared its "full confidence" in Mr. Murdoch, suggesting that a parting of the ways may be in the offing. I must confess I'm a little disappointed that Mr. Murdoch suffers now for only a small part of the harm he's done the world, but either we're a culture of laws or we're not, and Mr. Murdoch may have done some phone-hacking on 9.11 victims' families here in the U.S., too, where it's also against the law. So Free Press helps you ask Congress to investigate the allegations. Mr. Obama's Justice Department is investigating the matter, but Congress has power, too.

Finally, if you've missed previous alerts concerning the Department of Agriculture plan to let food processing corporations do more inspecting of chicken carcasses, Food and Water Watch provides another one, and Daily Kos points us to a petition on the White House's "We the People" website, which will get a response from the Obama Administration when it gets 25,000 signers. I suppose plan supporters think the chicken processors know the business better than some bureaucrat -- which not only insults the men and women who work for our government on our behalf, but also insults the intelligence of anyone who understands human nature: left to their own devices, corporate decision-makers will always do whatever makes them the most money, and what makes food processing plants the most money is doing more inspections more quickly, regardless of how much bile or bruising or feces gets by their inspectors. Should we let burglars "regulate themselves" next?

Four sticks.

S. 1517, the 21st Century Works Progress Administration Act, would spend $250 billion to employ the unemployed on infrastructure and public works projects, and would fund that effort via a 5.4% excise tax on millionaires and billionaires. Puts people to work, gets important projects done -- that's exactly what we've needed for many years now. The bill's even paid-for, as Republicans love to screech about, though generally when we see good bills that are paid-for Republicans object to how they're paid-for. But I think they're losing the debate -- over 70% of Americans now think millionaires and billionaires aren't paying enough in taxes, and corporate tax avoidance has been a major story in the "liberal" media for over a year now, this despite the "liberal" media being owned by a lot of the corporations doing the avoiding. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers helps you tell Congress to move on S. 1517, and get this economy moving again, for real.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1505, the so-called National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act, would not actually do very much in the way of protecting federal lands or promoting national security. The bill would put Homeland (sic) Security in charge of land use decisions better made by the Secretary of Interior or the Department of Agriculture, and would permit Homeland (sic) Security to waive any environmental regulation within 100 miles of the Mexican and Canadian borders. That's right, the Canadian border, too, which would essentially permit DHS to "allow," say, Keystone XL pipeline construction as a "national security issue." And they thought we wouldn't pick up on that! The punchline, of course, is that Mr. Obama's DHS actually opposes H.R. 1505. When was the last time a government agency refused sweeping new powers? The Wilderness Society helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose H.R. 1505.

In other news, Congress appears poised to really frack up the Farm Bill, and the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Congress to support healthy and sustainable foods. A Farm Bill that supported healthy and sustainable foods would be a marked improvement over our current situation, where the corn industry gets buku bucks to produce high-fructose corn syrup that helps keep soda pop cheap and children fat. UCS finds obstacles smaller farmers face that the big ag corporations don't, and proposes a number of solutions. These include expanding small-scale loans to organic/sustainable farms, expanding crop insurance to small farms, and including fruit and vegetables in farm subsidies. You may also want to advocate an end to corn subsidies. It may not fly with Monsanto, but it will fly with the vast majority of the American people who'd like healthier food choices.

Finally, if you've missed any previous alerts on the Safe Chemicals Act, I've got three-count-'em-three more: from Breast Cancer Action, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Moms Rising. In case you're just tuning in, we want stricter safeguards on the chemicals that go into our household products, and the big chemical corporations don't, because SOCIALISM!!!!!!, I guess. The last time Congress passed toxic chemical legislation was 1976, and we've learned a lot since then -- that chemicals can leach out of furniture and food cans and plastics into our bodies and cause cancer and infertility and early puberty, for example. Also, the EPA only tests a few hundred chemicals out of the 85,000 or so currently on the market; the Safe Chemicals Act would mandate that they all get tested. We can't keep finding out what's in our toys and food containers after the fact. That's true even if expanded chemical testing costs some CEO his bonus this year.

Dollar sign.

"Partners" in the Trans-Pacific Partnership "free" trade agreement come to Dallas on May 8 for ten days of negotiations. Now, when I say "partners" I most assuredly do not mean you and I, who do not even have access to the TPP proposals that over 600 corporate "advisors" have. But we know from leaks that the TPP would undercut our efforts at financial regulation, environmental regulation, and food safety, plus it would let corporations shove even more American jobs overseas, plus it would let corporations challenge and even defeat our laws before "tribunals." If we don't have laws, what do we have, exactly? So Public Citizen helps you demand that U.S. Trade Rep. Ron Kirk release the TPP proposals. That may sound like a small thing to ask for, but the TPP proposals will be unpopular, and the refusal to release them will only be slightly less unpopular.

Meanwhile, the Congress of Screw You moves very slowly on matters directly concerning the American public, but is anxious to push anti-regulatory schemes like H.R. 4078, the Regulatory Freeze for Jobs Act, which would block implementation and enforcement of all regulations for at least two years. Like what they did there, "for Jobs" -- as if "freezing" government regulations actually creates jobs? It doesn't -- regulations actually create jobs, for the people who have to interpret the regulations and the people who have to implement them. Don't believe me? You could believe the Economic Policy Institute, or Public Citizen, or the Institute for Policy Integrity. And who said we could only have clean air and clean water when the economy's good? OMB Watch helps you tell your House Rep to oppose H.R. 4078.