Thieves in the Temple.

The Supreme Court struck down DOMA on Wednesday, but that only helps gay marriages in the 15 states where it's legal; Pennsylvania is not one of these. Hence Keystone Progress helps you tell your Governor and state legislators to legalize gay marriages in the Keystone state. If you see that as an uphill battle, remember that gay marriage opponents have failed to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage five times since 2006, with their latest attempt in May attracting only 27 co-sponsors so far. Of course, they can still prevent gay marriages in Pennsylvania by doing nothing. But I'm going to go out on a limb and presume that there might actually still be some actual conservatives in Pennsylvania's legislature -- like the ones who scuttled Mr. Corbett's voucher bill in 2011 because it would have cost too much money -- and that the reactionary sheen the legislature's taken on since Mr. Corbett's election is just a fever, curable via application of the popular will.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama began his trip to Africa this week, and Amnesty International helps you tell Mr. Obama to condemn anti-gay discrimination while there. 38 African countries prosecute homosexuality as a crime, and four of these mandate the death penalty for said "crime." But why do we care what Mr. Obama says over there? Because what he said over here made a big difference, that's why -- even though his stated position back in May of 2012 wasn't that different from Dick Cheney's, even though he let Joe Biden lead the charge on that position change, it was still a big deal, because he's the President and what the President says matters to us, whether we want that to be true or not, whether we agree with him or not. And maybe, just maybe, what he says will matter to Africans, too. What's it going to hurt? Are things going to get worse for gays in Africa because of some perceived impertinence on Mr. Obama's part? It can't get much worse than death.

In other news, the New York City Council overrode a Mayor Bloomberg veto of their paid sick leave law this week, meaning that businesses with 20 or more employees will have to grant five paid sick days annually to their workers, and by 2015, businesses with 15-19 employees will have to do the same. It's not even every worker in New York City, but it is a start -- and, as you know, New York is a big place, so it could catch on. And yet America is also a big place, hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1286/S. 631, the Healthy Families Act, which would mandate businesses employing more than 15 people to offer seven days of paid sick leave annually. Mayor Bloomberg, just like a good right-winger, bemoans costs to businesses and unintended consequences for workers. But what of the consequences of having sick folk come to work because they have no choice and make their customers and co-workers sick? Or the consequences of having to train new workers because you've fired the ones who've missed a few days?

Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you leave a public comment on the EPA's proposed Tier 3 tailpipe emissions standards. Long story short: you'll be telling the EPA you'd like fewer tailpipe emissions, please, so your lungs don't clog up with smog and soot. Why you're bothering: because the oil corporations don't particularly want to clean up their act -- this, despite the automobile manufacturing corporations' support for cleaning up tailpipe emissions! I suppose a desperate right-winger could always try telling us that this is all part of Obama's nefarious plan to set the oil companies and the car companies against each other! And who knows? That might be right! But if the end result is cleaner air, less asthma, fewer lost work days, and fewer lost school days, then why exactly would I care? (Be quick with the comments, good peoples, because the EPA will stop taking them on this matter after July 1.)

As you know, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act on Tuesday -- but the Court also said Congress could "draft another formula" for pre-clearance of states "based on current conditions." I really wish I hadn't suggested, yesterday, that it'd be a cold day in hell before this Congress does that -- sure, it's easy (and too often correct!) to be skeptical of Congress's ability or willingness to do anything, but if Harry Reid's office wrote a new Section 4(b) or its equivalent tonight, he'd have at least 56 Senate votes for it tomorrow, and that might give John Boehner the oppportunity to prove to the world, at last, that he isn't the biggest fool ever to hold the House Speaker's gavel. Recall, also, that we expected little from the 2005-06 Congress, and they're the ones who reupped the law for 25 years, by huge margins. So the ACLU helps you tell Congress to repair the Voting Rights Act. What are they going to say? That they have too much on their plate?

Meanwhile, Public Citizen still helps you tell your Congressfolk to support constitutional amendments curbing the fiction of corporate "personhood." The relevant bills are H.J.Res. 20/S.J.Res. 19 (sponsored by Rep. McGovern and Sen. Udall of New Mexico, respectively) and H.J.Res. 21/S.J.Res. 18 (sponsored by Mr. McGovern and Sen. Tester, respectively). These bills have a few dozen co-sponsors between them, but their numbers include only one Republican, Walter Jones of North Carolina. It's sad to find only one Republican, out of the hundreds serving in Congress, willing to defy corporate power these days. Public Citizen also reminds us that 15 states -- California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont and West Virginia -- have publicly called for anti-corporate "personhood" amendments; if your Rep or Senator hails from one of those states, it wouldn't be untoward of you to remind them of that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Bureau of Land Management that their proposed regulations for fracking on public lands don't meet the most rudimentary standards of disclosure, then the Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch) helps you do that. Full disclosure of chemicals used in fracking is yet another promise Mr. Obama made, but perhaps BLM didn't get the memo -- they won't require fracking corporations to disclose the chemicals they're using before drilling, and they seem prepared to let corporate concerns about "trade secrets" overrule disclosure. How many times must I tell these pimps! Somebody's right to a "trade secret" doesn't overrule our right not to have poisonous crap in our air and water. The BLM proposals would even make emergency personnel jump through hoops to get information about what might be poisoning the person they're trying to treat! How do some people sleep at night?

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013. The bill would hike the minimum wage gradually over two years to $10.10/hr, would hike the minimum wage for tipped employees gradually over two years to 70 percent of the $10.10 figure, and would index both figures to inflation, so it doesn't have to be a damn political football every few years. And higher minimum wages don't "kill jobs," or Australia's unemployment rate would be higher than 5 percent with its $15/hr minimum wage. The only people who oppose the minimum wage right now, for-reals, are a) the corporate class that would rather pay nobody anything anyway and b) trolls who claim everything they say is "basic economics" and piss exclamation points all over the internet all day. Sometimes, I can't say whom I dislike more.

Meanwhile, Rep. John Delaney (D?-MD) has introduced H.R. 2084, which would (get your surprised face ready) allow corporations to bring back some of the profits they've stashed offshore while paying none of the corporate taxes they owe, but only if said corporations funded a public infrastructure project bank, which would presumably "give back" to the society that allowed them to stash their money overseas in the first place. So, we get an infrastructure bank (with a board of directors populated by folks chosen by tax-avoiding corporations in the first place!), but we can't even get the tiny tax rate previous tax amnesty efforts have promised? Ah, no -- I prefer to teach people that avoiding taxes that pay for services we all enjoy is wrong all the time. I think H.R. 2084 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming.

Supreme Court strikes down Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional, arguing that making several states and counties pre-clear electoral law changes with the federal government made sense in 1965, but that the specific discriminatory conditions 4(b) addresses have improved in those areas such that 4(b) places a burden on those areas today. The best I can say for the majority opinion is that it reads 4(b) very, very narrowly; the worst I can say for the dissent is that it takes eight pages to start winning the argument. The decision does open the door for Congress to pass a revamped 4(b), though I won't hold my breath.

Senate Agriculture Committee narrowly passes Begich/Murkowski GMO salmon labeling amendment to agricultural appropriations bill. Since the ag-approp bill is a must-pass, and the amendment passed with more than one Republican's support (Ms. Collins and Mr. Kirk also voted yea), GMO salmon labeling will likely pass the entire Senate -- though if the House passes a different bill, the amendment could be conferenced out. Still, good news.

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit again rules in favor of an obscure firm named Ultramercial which claims to have patented the idea of running web ads instead of charging website visitors for content. Now Ultramercial gets to file frivolous lawsuits against anyone else who might have this absurdly common idea, just as our Founders intended. Next up: I patent breathing, and sue everyone!

ProPublica's Nikole Hanna-Jones explains why class-based affirmative action may not be the sword that slices the Gourdian knot of American ambivalence over race-based affirmative action. Long story short: poor white kids generally don't get sequestered in bad neighborhoods and bad schools, and white/Asian kids account for more than four out of five poor kids who do well in school, suggesting that class-based affirmative action won't be de facto race-based as often as I'd have presumed.

Protests in Turkey may have disappared from "liberal" media news coverage, but the crackdowns have, er, not disappeared from the lives of good Turkish citizens -- lawyers get arrested just as they're about to read statements condemning the violence, doctors get detained as they're about to treat folks injured by tear gas or water cannons, good folks get hurt or sent to prison for no damn good reason other than opposing their government's actions. You have to wonder what the government is so afraid of. So Amnesty International helps you tell the Turkish government to stop beating up on its people just for disagreeing with them. As I mentioned before, the current government of Turkey has been in power for over 11 years, never coming close to losing its huge parliamentary majorities despite never getting more than 50% of the vote in an election. (Parliamentary elections can be weird, to folks used to observing U.S. elections.) Maybe the U.S. official response has been so muted because they're Our Bastards. But I'm such a sanctimonious purist that I hate all bastards.

Speaking of bastards, check out the pathetic wife-beater who went to the school where his wife taught and put it in lockdown -- and also the pathetic school system that promptly fired her because of the pathetic crap her pathetic husband pulled. You may be surprised to learn, however, that only six states -- six! -- prevent a school from firing someone because of the consequences of their domestic abuse. This is most emphatically not a matter of "excusing wrong-doing" -- it's a matter of making sure we punish the right people for their wrong-doing. The pathetic loser who pursued his wife into school got jail time, but what did his wife do wrong? "She married the loser" is not a good answer, since most of us have gone out with folks who turned out to be bad for us and most of us let that go on longer than we should have. Thankfully, H.R. 1229, the Security and Financial Empowerment Act, would correct the workplace discrimination problem, among others; you can read about it here, and phone your Reps and Senators afterward if you like. They'll never see it coming.

From the EVERTHING IZ TERRORIZM!!!! file: Tennessee Department of Environment official claims that baseless complaints about water quality comprise "an act of terrorism" "under Homeland Security." I guess if Mr. Smith feels "terrorized" by what most bureaucrats would find irritating, he can always go see a therapist -- unless, of course, he's just trying to intimidate folks into keeping their mouth shut about water so bad they have to boil it.

Paul Ryan blames Democrats for the farm bill's defeat in the House -- ignoring the poison pill amendment Republicans rammed through mere minutes before the vote -- but also reminds us that he didn't vote for the farm bill, either. Then he treats us to a paragraph of bloviating about Congressfolk "keeping their word" with each other, instead of the more pertinent problem of whether Congressfolk keep their word with the people they represent.

Republican Congressional aide still calls himself the "undisputed SNAP challenge champion," even though he actually failed to feed himself on food stamp money for a week. He had "an unexpected trip," after all, and so he couldn't do it the way he was supposed to. These Republicans, always needing to bend the rules to get anything done! Anyone heard of Donny Ferguson before this week? No? Now let's never speak of him again.

ProPublica tells us just about everything we need to know about Abigail Fisher's affirmative action case, which the Supreme Court just bumped back down to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Long story short: Ms. Fisher's whiteness almost certainly didn't keep her off the University of Texas's Austin campus, or her lawyers would have spent more time arguing that -- and she didn't even finish in the top 10 percent of her class or get a gang-busters SAT score, which somewhat undercuts her own "work hard and be rewarded" argument.

Finally, Maine Gov. Paul LePage has announced he'll no longer comment on stories published by three newspapers who have lately published stories critical of his Administration. Does Mr. LePage ever remember that he won with 38% of the vote?

The ACLU helps you demand due process for NSA data-vacuuming whistleblower Edward Snowden, if and when our government catches him. You will not, in signing on to this effort, demand that Mr. Snowden be found innocent of a crime (our government has charged him with at least two offenses covered by the 1917 Espionage Act); you will simply demand that he get everything an accused person in America should get, like access to a lawyer and decent treatment while awaiting trial. In other words, you'll be demanding that our government do better with Mr. Snowden that it did with Mr. Manning, who was forced to sleep naked on a sheetless bed in solitary confinement. Folks who follow politics like it's football admire Mr. Obama for keeping his internal affairs drama-free and leak-free. But those of us who follow events because we value freedom suspect Mr. Obama's relentless pursuit of whistleblowers (whether they expose NSA surveillance or FDA incompetence) has become a mania.

But wait! There's more! Eight U.S. Reps, including Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Todd Rokita (R-IN), have introduced H.R. 2475, which would force the FISA Court to reveal its legal reasoning behind NSA surveillance programs. The bill doesn't have any text entered for it at thomas.loc.gov just yet, but you would not be out of order to phone your Reps and Senators and express your belief that, as Justice Brandeis used to say, "sunlight is the best disinfectant." Meanwhile, H.R. 2399, a production of Reps. Polis (D-CO), Conyers (D-MI) and Amash (R-MI), would also force the FISA Court to reveal its secret opinions to Congress and (in summary form) to the public, while also restraining our government's surveillance power under the PATRIOT Act. And H.R. 2399's 34 co-sponsors include 14 Republicans, Walter Jones naturally among them, but Paul Broun and Tom McClintock also among them. You want to call your Congressfolk about H.R. 2399? Who will dare stop you?

Yes! Magazine describes some of the strengths and drawbacks of online activism. I have some interest in this subject, as you might imagine. To sum: best to couple online activism with volunteering and organizing. I know, I know.

Newt Gingrich supporter pleads guilty to 36 counts of voter fraud. Which Project Veritas made a half-hour video about, right? No?

At least two studies find that a Monsanto Bt pesticide damages folks' red blood cells. Admittedly, when Monsanto set out to make a pesticide with the Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium in it, scientists thought Bt only affected insects, but alas, apparently not. Monsanto would really be in the soup right now if it didn't have such powerful friends.

The Chipotle restaurant chain becomes the first U.S. restaurant chain to label genetically-modified organisms in its food. They'll be phasing GMOs out, too, so overall they've managed to outclass both Whole Foods (who'll get GMO labeling done by 2018) and Target (who'll phase GMO out of their Simply Balanced brand by 2014). I may have to visit a Chipotle again soon.

Finally, you can now find FactCheck.org debunking no less than 39 of our stupidest and most persistent political rumors in one spot. The majority of them are about Mr. Obama, enough to make me wonder if maybe it really is all about the racism. After all, you can make a strong case against the Obama Administration without resorting to any of the bullshit described at the link.

Mother Jones offers a primer on the massive Brazilian protests. Long story short: it ain't just about bus fare prices (though those can take up a quarter of a minimum-wage income in Brazil).

Entrepreneur Nick Hanauer explains why a massive minimum wage hike would be good for businesses. Of course he wants people to have money to buy stuff, but he also says this: "My investment portfolio includes Pacific Coast Feather Co., one of the largest U.S. manufacturers of bed pillows. Like many other manufacturers, pillow-makers are struggling because of weak demand. The problem comes down to this: My annual earnings equal about 1,000 times the U.S. median wage, but I don’t consume 1,000 times more pillows than the average American. Even the richest among us only need one or two to rest their heads at night." I've struggled to make this point so well. (Sadly, the comments mostly comprise a primer in how not to argue.)

Paul Ryan co-sponsors a Farm Bill amendment that would apply the dreaded "asset test" to food stamps -- meaning that if you have $2,000 in savings and/or a car worth $5,000, you can't get any. Silly Paul Ryan -- thinking that $2,000 can get you through even one catastrophe, or that a $5,000 car (the last one I bought for less than that cost me approximately one dollar in repairs for every six miles I drove) could be converted so easily to cash. If Mr. Ryan had ever worked somewhere besides politics or the family business, he might have a clue about these things.

Supreme Court rules that big corporations can force small businesses into binding arbitration agreements even if that prevents small businesses from redressing grievances in any meaningful way. Mr. Roberts thinks this is true even if said small businesses would otherwise sue big corporations for violating antitrust law. Antitrust law, good peoples! Next time your Republican uncle tells you Republicans (who gave us all five Supreme Court votes in the majority here) are "the party of small business," remind him of this case.

Speaking of antitrust law, the New Yorker explains "Why Monopolies Make Spying Easier." You probably already know the answer to that, but it's still worth reading about the internet of the '90s (what a time that was, eh?), Western Union's role in the 1876 Presidential election, and the halcyon days when America had thousands of phone companies. That's not a misprint.

HHS Inspector General finds some Medicare doctors as "very extreme in their prescribing" -- doctors who wrote an unusually large number of prescriptions, relied an awful lot on brand name drugs, or prescribed a high number of pain killers. We're not looking at more than three percent of Medicare doctors potentially doing wrong, but of course we ought to stamp out fraud wherever we find it. (And n.b. how many comments are intelligently critical of the article.)

Exodus International president shutters his pray-away-the-gay organization, apologizing for all the hurt he's caused. Normally I say great timing, guys! to such folk, but Mr. Chambers makes a fairly exhaustive list of sins, which isn't how you'd use an "apology" to keep lying to people.

Finally, the House's Farm Bill fails by almost 40 votes; partisan finger-pointing followed, which should only interest people who think this is all a big game. Mr. Obama deserves some credit, not only for saying he'd veto a bill like the House's that cut food stamps so deeply, but also for saying Congress might try to find savings in farm subsidies; these comprise two more acts of courage than I expected from him. But he did not say he'd veto the Senate Farm Bill, which cuts food stamps less than the House bill would have done and takes baby steps toward reining in subsidies, so let's not give him too much credit.

The House continues to mull the Farm Bill, and seems to have no interest in changing the status quo of agricultural subsidies -- namely, that the biggest agricultural corporations get the lion's share of them. Supporters of big agricultural subsidies love taking small farmers hostage when you oppose subsidies, but a mere four percent of American farmers get 75% of our subsidies while three out of five farmers get nothing. The good news? Reining in agricultural subsidies is now an actual bipartisan cause -- it wasn't a Democrat who proposed cutting off subsidies for corporations making over $250,000 in profits last year, but Rand Paul. So USPIRG helps you tell your House Rep to cut agricultural subsidies. And while we're discussing the Farm Bill, Moms Rising helps you tell your House Rep to stop cutting food stamps already. Yes, I've joined these two notions for a reason -- too many deficit hawks attack food stamps that help working families put food on the table in times of need, while leaving their precious corporate million-dollar handouts untouched. And then they expect respect! But they get none, as long as they toil for evil.

Meanwhile, the Regulatory Accountability Act is back; it's now H.R. 2122 and S. 1029, and the Center for Effective Government dishes the goods. This Regulatory Accountability Act would make a regulation's cost to corporations the primary concern of federal regulators -- versus their present primary concern, which is serving the interests of the American people. Nobody argues that "cost to businesses" shouldn't be a concern, but only a worshiper of mammon would make that the primary concern. And even if we only talk about money, what of the money regulations save? Clean air and clean water regulations, for example, save everyone money in health care costs and work time not lost due to illness. And this zombie RAA, like its forebears, piles on an extra layer of judicial review to every rulemaking notice -- plus it establishes a two-year expiration date for all rules, which only helps regulatory review agencies to sit on regulations its corporate influencers don't like. I think opposition to H.R. 2122/S. 1029 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming.

We have movement on the corporate "personhood" issue: Sens. Tester (D-MT) and Udall (D-NM) have introduced Senate versions of Rep. McGovern's two constitutional amendments that would overturn Supreme Court rulings in Citizens United v. FEC (in which the Court held that corporations can make certain campaign contributions because they enjoy the "rights of personhood," including free speech) and Buckley v. Valeo (in which the Court struck down several campaign contribution limits due to free speech concerns). If you find yourself a little squeamish reading the McGovern/Udall amendment giving the federal government and the states the ability to restrict how much money can be spent on campaigns, remember that money isn't speech. If it were, then folks with more money would have more of a right to speech, and at that point we're not really talking about rights anymore, are we? Free Speech for People helps you tell Congress to end the absurdity of corporate "personhood."

Meanwhile, Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to support S. 338, which would permanently authorize funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The Land and Water Conservation Fund, in a wonderful burst of irony, collects oil and gas drilling fees in order to fund projects protecting parks, forests, and wildlife -- but in a far more bitter burst of irony, Congress has to appropriate those funds every year, and most years they divert that funding toward other, arguably less worthy projects. Hence the Florida Everglades, Arizona's Petrified Forest, and Virginia's Civil War battlegrounds don't get the attention they deserve, and neither do parks and recreation projects at the state level. And the Fund has an annual ceiling of $900 million by law -- a ceiling S. 338 would guarantee is fully-funded -- so deficit peacocks can't preen around it. Not that they really care about the deficit -- they care more about their oil and gas paymasters who want the public's land for themselves.

The House of Representatives has begun debate on its own Farm Bill, and where the Senate bill would cut food stamps by $4 billion over the next 10 years, the House would cut $20 billion over that period -- and that wouldn't actually reduce the deficit very much, but would cut off two million folks from food stamps, including almost 300,000 children who get free school meals. These social programs, you see, don't actually cost very much money in the grand scheme of things, but they do a lot of good for a lot of people, so cutting them actually hurts people more than, say, cutting $4 billion in annual oil subsidies would ever hurt an oil industry awash in profits. And hello! The economy still sucks out there, meaning more and more Americans have trouble just getting food to their tables. In this country of plenty, no less! The AFSCME helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose food stamp cuts.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep atrazine out of our drinking water. Atrazine is a fairly effective and inexpensive weed killer, and we use over 75 million pounds of it annually. But of course when I said "inexpensive" I only meant "for its producer": for the rest of us, who'll pay with breast and prostate cancer and birth defects and reproductive issues, atrazine is quite expensive, and we'll likely drink some of it today, since the United States Geological Survey has found atrazine in at least 80% of our streams and 40% of our ground water. The European Union banned atrazine back in 2004, but the EPA hasn't done anything about it despite acknowledging its toxicity, and atrazine's manufacturer, the Swiss corporation Syngenta, reported $1.6 billion in profits as recently as 2011. You know what that means, good peoples? That means it's up to us. As usual.

Next time you hear that your least-favorite CEO "gives back to the community" by serving on the board of your local orchestra, recall this tale, in which U.S. Bancorp CEO Richard Davis used his position on the board of the non-profit Minnesota Orchestra to lock out musicians who wouldn't take pay cuts up to 50%. That sure is some yeoman work on behalf of the community, isn't it? And who knew the orchestra was really all about the people who ran it?

Dick Cheney, still somehow a frequent guest on Fox News Sunday, tells us we can't know the details of surveillance programs because it's too dangerous and that since we "get to vote for senior officials, like the President of the United States, or like the senior officials in Congress," that we "have to have some trust in them." I eagerly await the pimp-slapping of Mr. Cheney administered by Zombie Ben Franklin.

Surprise, surprise: seven former Bank of Amerikkka employees claim that the Bank gave its staffers cash and gift cards if they met quotas for putting homeowners into foreclosure -- including homeowners in trial mortgage modifications. The really depressing part? How cheaply staffers could be bought. $25 in cash? A Bed, Bath, and Beyond gift card? Even the folks actually doing the dirty work don't reap the benefits the way their bosses, the banksters, do.

The Supreme Court strikes down Arizona's law requiring potential voters to produce proof of citizenship when they register -- by a healthy 7-2 margin, with curmudgeonly Antonin Scalia not only leading the charge, but asserting that federal election laws can pre-empt a lot of state election laws. Which I certainly didn't expect -- and which, ah, could also really suck, if we elect a Republican President and a Republican Congress anytime soon.

Finally, we learn yet another reason public schools don't have the funds they need to do the job we need them to do: corporations skimp on their tax obligations to the states. How do they do it? Same way they do everything else: by taking hostages. Does "give us tax breaks or we'll move to another state" sound familiar?

So Think Progress asked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) what he thought of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (or ENDA) last week -- wow, already I feel like I'm starting a joke. But it's no joke: Mr. Rubio did not directly answer whether he'd support ENDA, which he says he hasn't read, but says "I’m not for any special protections based on orientation." If he'd read the bill, of course, he'd know that ENDA does not mandate any "special" protections based on orientation -- unless he thinks "the right not be fired just because you're gay" or "the right to be protected from retaliation by your employer" are "special" protections. I said it before and I'll say it again: what's rights for us ain't "special" for them. Why, ENDA (H.R. 1755/S. 815) doesn't even establish any affirmative action programs and still exempts religious organizations! The right will have to make up objections to this bill -- and I'm sure they will. In the meantime, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass ENDA.

Meanwhile, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the Tribune Company not to sell their newspapers to the Koch brothers. But anyone (even good government groups that have been fighting the Koch brothers' pro-pollution agenda for decades) would have an interest in making sure the Koch brothers don't have the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and the Hartford Courant and five other newspapers. After all, one Koch brothers front group (Americans for Prosperity) gave us the Tea Party and another (Patients United) helped gut health care reform, and that's before we get to the Cato Institute (founded by Charles Koch), the Heritage Foundation (funded by the brothers), or the so-called Competitive Enterprise Institute (also funded by the brothers). With all these mouthpieces, why do they need eight more newspapers? I guess when you have too much, you're jealous of folks who have more -- or you're paranoid and you don't feel safe until you have more. That's what mammon-worship gets you.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," a "free" trade agreement known to many folks as "NAFTA on steroids." You remember the "giant sucking sound" of jobs out of America that followed NAFTA, right? The Trans-Pacific "Partnership," which now includes the United States and ten other nations, will be all that and more, for what we know of the treaty (since no one actually negotiating it will let anyone read it!) is truly awful: the TPP would make affordable generic drugs a lot harder to come by, would subject all environmental, labor, and financial reform laws to extra-legal "investor tribunals," and would allow corporations to censor the internet even when it suspects someone's violating someone else's intellectual property rights. Any of that sound like a good idea to you? That must be why they don't want anyone to know about it! Thanks to the few leaks we've gotten, they're too late on that. But we still have to speak out.

The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can't patent human genes -- a decision so obvious they let Clarence Thomas write the opinion. Myriad still gets to patent artificial genes, of course -- but nobody's challenged their right to patents on artificial genes, so it's hardly, as USA Today writes, a "lifeline."

Moxie Marlinspike at Wired explains, much better than I've done thus far, why "I didn't do anything wrong" won't protect you from pervasive government surveillance. Long story short: you don't know you're not breaking a law because there are 27,000 pages just of federal law, technology collects so much more information than it used to do and can store it for so much longer, and very often we grow as a society when we break bad laws. Ask Rosa Parks about that one.

Waaaaah, a bunch of damn diaper-loaded brats in the House of Representatives refuse to help their own constituents navigate the Affordable Care Act. Memo to Tim Huelskamp: your job is to help your constituents navigate the law, whether you agree with it or not. And memo to Jason Chaffetz: the President doesn't make the laws. And it's a damn right-wing law to begin with -- blessed by both the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney, until Mr. Obama embraced it!

At the risk of opening a hole in space-time, let's note that Rick Santorum said something indisputably true last week -- that Republicans should have reached out to the workers who also "built that" in 2012. He may be a bit optimistic about the working class's willingness to listen to Republicans about anything -- though even that could change if Democrats keep doing next-to-nothing about the economy.

Congratulations are in order for the people of Iran, who elected moderate rightist cleric Hassan Mohani to succeed far-right ideologue Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as President over the weekend. But an earlier draft of that Reuters article claimed a Mohani victory would be a "surprise." Certainly no one who's actually lived under a hard-line regime, one that likely cheated its way to victory four years ago, would call it a "surprise."

Hard to believe, Harry, but Bill O'Reilly's really worried now about the surveillance state -- in a way he wasn't when it was Mr. Bush conducting the surveillance. You'd think something changed in the meantime. Well, he was always against government spying on him.

Finally, the Obama Administration has apparently raised the "social cost" of carbon emissions in its regulatory calculations, which could (among other things) make cost-benefit analyses reflect something other than lost corporate profits, for once. It's enough to make you think all these Clinton/Obama Third Way Democrats are actually smart -- until Jim Inhofe calls it a "carbon tax" and Glenn Beck claims the government is trying to tax your breathing. And when you realize Mr. Obama's bigger number is itself a compromise, you remember you're always better off fighting.

DC Circuit Court of Appeals tosses organic farmers' lawsuit against Monsanto -- but also makes Monsanto promise not to sue farmers whose seed has been inadvertently contaminated with Monsanto Frankenseed for "intellectual property theft." That's not a great victory for us -- how a corporation escapes punishment for "inadvertently" contaminating the world with its Frankenseed and then suing small farmers for "benefiting" from having that seed blow onto their crops is beyond me. Also left unsolved: organic farmers still won't be able to earn a USDA organic certification if Monsanto Frankenseed contaminates their crop -- and Monsanto could still battle each-and-every farmer whose seed they've contaminated in an attempt to "discover" if the contamination was "inadvertent," which litigation would still wreck small farmers while hurting Monsanto's bottom line rather little. Republicans who hate "frivolous lawsuits" might want to turn their attention to what's happening here, maybe? Soon Monsanto takes on the rest of the world, which opposes genetically-modified food and is starting to turn back American wheat at the border. I hope we don't have to learn a painful lesson about who's more powerful then.

Meanwhile, Citizens for Tax Justice reminds us why we need a corporate income tax. Apparently some folks have been saying that, since corporate profits eventually go to shareholders, we should just abolish the corporate income tax and adjust personal income tax rates accordingly. Sounds appetizing, doesn't it? But behold: corporations don't eventually pass on all their profits to individuals -- most of their profits go into tax-exempt entities like pensions and university endowments -- and corporations can also hold onto their profits for years before disbursing them. So, yeah, when you've argued from a completely inaccurate premise, the whole thing pretty much falls apart. Furthermore, most dividends go to high-income individuals anyway, so the corporate tax winds up doing at least some of the work a progressive income tax code should be doing. Of course, dividend taxes shouldn't be lower than income taxes in the first place; even Ronald Reagan said so. But hopefully we've nipped this whole argument in the bud -- though you can't underestimate the "liberal" media's ability to ignore good arguments, since they were still peddling rubbish about the Bush tax cuts and small businesses as late as last December.

Remember ag-gag laws? The ones that would hamstring activists trying to expose abusive practices at factory farms? Well, they've proven unpopular enough that even though four states passed ag-gag laws in 2012, 12 states haven't been able to replicate that success this year -- even Tennessee's Republican Governor, Bill Haslam, vetoed one after massive public pressure. Which pressure we'll keep up, by telling our Congressfolk to prohibit ag-gag laws at the federal level. I suppose you have to give the pro-ag-gag folks credit, not just for designing their laws so that you actually must report any abuse you witness before you can determine if it's a pattern even worth reporting, but for deploying phrases like "farm protection legislation" when the laws really only "protect" big factory farms. They even insinuate that just because a practice is "standard," it's OK. But we can think of lots of things that once were "standard" but we'd never accept now.

Meanwhile, you know that big pharmaceutical corporations make money hand over fist, but did you know that they occasionally pay off the generic drug manufacturers to wait a few years before coming out with cheaper generic drugs? The FTC calls this practice "pay for delay," and they estimate that "pay for delay" costs American consumers an extra $3.5 billion annually. That's a nice chunk of change! I suppose since big pharma pays it out to generic drug corporations, they can cry poor and thus convince Congress to turn a blind eye to anything else they might be doing, but no doubt they've calculated that they can pay generic drug makers a relatively small amount now so they can make a lot more later. What a boon the "free" market is! Of course high-cost drugs actually make people less free -- or, you know, dead, which is hardly the kind of freedom our Constitution ensures. So PennPIRG helps you tell Congress to stop this awful practice.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to speak out against our government's data-collecting mania, I've got two more. Access Now helps you pressure the major internet corporations to push Congress to stop the Obama Administration's data vacuuming endeavors, and a slew of organizations (including OpenMedia and Demand Progress) help you tell Congress to investigate the NSA data-vacuuming program. Folks have told me that since they're not doing anything wrong, we shouldn't worry. But while our Constitution prevents our government from prosecuting you for things you did before Congress made those things illegal, nothing prevents our government from deciding to fight "new" terrorist "threats" whose "profile" your photos and tweets and blog posts and shopping habits magically fit. So even if you're not flying planes into federal tax buildings, you need to fight this.

You may have heard about that building collapse in Philadelphia late last week, the one that killed six folks shopping at the Salvation Army thrift shop next door; you may also have heard that the crane operator might have been quite, quite high while demolishing the building. You may not have heard, however, that OSHA inspected the site last month, but didn't shut it down, despite numerous local complaints. Well, that will surely comfort the families of the dead.

Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) said Mr. Snowden's leaks to the press in re Mr. Obama's collection of Verizon phone data was "an act of treason." Setting aside my visceral disgust with anyone who demonstrates difficulty understanding Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, Ms. Feinstein insists these are legal activities, and therefore, presumably, known to any self-respecting terrorist, so it's hard to say Mr. Snowden's loose lips have even sunk any ships.

Some "liberal" media punditoids take a different tack in re bashing Mr. Snowden: narcissism. Don't any of you little people dare try to change the world, they seem to say, because that would be narcissistic of you -- never mind that most objective observers would say that if anyone suffers from the ravages of too much self-love, it's Our Glorious Elites. Postscript: you may not be prepared for David Brooks's ramblings on the subject. They're profoundly awful.

The Washington Post's Neil Irwin seems sanguine about the rate at which the economy's adding jobs. And though he wishes the economy would add more higher-paying jobs, if more people were working, he tells us, wages might be even lower, and anyway it's better than the alternative, which is Spain. Actually, another alternative might be Australia, where the minimum wage is $15/hr and the unemployment rate's a little over five percent, but strangely this doesn't rate a mention.

Northeastern Colorado county mulls seceeding from the state, complaining that Democrats in the state legislature have gone just absolutely wild. What a bunch of whiners these wannabe secessionists are! If they were leaving the country I'd just say let them go, but if they go the way of West Virginia they'll put two more Republicans in the Senate, so perhaps we should also encourage the secession of Atlanta and its suburbs from Georgia.

The Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to finalize rules requiring coal corporations to stop discharging toxic coal ash into our waterways. That would mean less mercury, arsenic, and lead in your drinking water. So what would the EPA have coal corporations do instead? The EPA would force coal corporations to transition out of using ponds to store their coal ash waste and into using "dry bottom ash systems," some of which you can read about here, if you're up to it. The forces of corporate power, in addition to yelling COMMUNISM SOCIALISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!! at every attempt to make sure we drink clean water, will tell us that forcing coal corporations to move to dry systems will make your utility bills go up. We could make many objections to that, but let's just boil them down to one: is that the world we want to live in, where the big corporations always hold us hostage so we don't make the world a better place? OK, two: if you can't drink the water, your cheap energy doesn't matter.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. Congress passed the Equal Pay Act fifty years ago, when women made about 59 cents on every dollar their male counterparts made, and now women make 77 cents on the dollar -- which is better, certainly, but which also isn't a dollar on the dollar, which is what women deserve. It's hard to imagine objections people could have to closing loopholes and tightening enforcement of what's already the law. OK, it's not that hard to imagine: a lot of right-wingers claim the bill is a boon for trial lawyers, as if women should redress allegations of corporate illegality somewhere other than the courts. Or maybe they'll tell us corporations have a First Amendment right to keep information about what they're paying their workers private -- as if workers have no First Amendment right to find out if their boss is screwing them! Argument-by-dog-whistle is no way to advance civilization.

University of California-San Francisco Medical Center begins phasing out meat raised from animals pumped with antibiotics. Where America's grocers hesitate, a major West Coast hospital (which will serve over 650,000 meals this year) jumps in, praise the Lord.

Entrepreneur uses recycled cell phones to help developing nations step up their medical care, to the point where text-message reminders from doctors dramatically ramped up childhood vaccinations in one region in India. Moral: when we give folks tools that actually help them do what they need to do, they'll use them quickly and enthusiastically.

Worker hourly pay drops a rather precipitous 3.8% during the first quarter of this year. On balance, worker pay has barely kept ahead of inflation these last four years, yet remain productive. Well, in my experience, most workers are pretty good people trying to do the best at their jobs regardless of how miserable they are -- though only the bad workers ever seem to get the press.

Chicago Sun-Times fires all its photographers, and starts training reporters to shoot pictures with their iPhones. They do this just three months after laying off seven editors, because it's not like editors and photographers have expertise or anything. And they trot out the old business is changing line -- as in, it's getting harder and harder to gild my plumbing when I don't do real journalism anymore and all these workers insist on having money to buy food and raise children.

Finally, the National Journal notes that young voters and minority voters tend not to turn out in midterm elections the way they do in Presidential elections. Well, perhaps this is the year Democrats finally figure that out, and start organizing to turn out those voters! Just kidding -- these are Democrats we're talking about.

Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian reports that the Obama Administration requested, and received, FISA permission to collect phone log data of all Verizon customers. Now Senators from both sides of the aisle have been quick to respond that data-vacuuming program isn't a new one, that they've been briefed on its existence for seven long years now, that it's authorized by Sec. 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and that, in Mr. Chambliss's words, "we have collected significant information on bad guys." I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on that, and not just because Mr. Chambliss didn't name any "bad guys" or even because "collecting significant information" on bad guys isn't the same as stopping bad guys -- plenty of government officials have testified that all this data-vacuuming we're doing has overwhelmed them with bad intel. When we demand warrants and probable cause, we're not merely protecting the innocent from government oppression -- we're setting a bar that sifts the malcontents from the real terrorists. Demand Progress, the ACLU, and Free Press have the action alerts.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to halt all field trials of unapproved genetically-modified crops, Organic Consumers still helps you do that. You could get away with planting unapproved GE crops in the field if and only if you could be absolutely sure that none of the Frankenseed will escape the field and find its way onto someone else's field. Given the fact that wind blows seed just about everywhere, and animals carry seed just about everywhere, how likely does that seem? The Frankenwheat found in an Oregon wheat field got field-tested in 15 other states. And Monsanto is now doing open-air field tests of a slightly-different glyphosate-resistant Frankenwheat in North Dakota and Hawaii. The USDA has responded with its best Alfred E. Neumann impression, telling us that the FDA found the Frankenwheat safe in 2004. The FDA in 2004? My God, that was Mr. Bush's FDA! An FDA even worse than Mr. Obama's! Why should I take their word for a damn thing?

For the last week, hundreds of thousands of good Turkish citizens have been peacefully protesting -- first, the planned closing of Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul, and then their government's reaction. Their government has been beating them, kicking them, and using tear gas on them (sometimes even firing tear gas canisters into folks' homes!), while claiming that foreigners with their foreign social media have been foreignly corrupting Turkey with their foreignness, and also their foreignness. But since beating peaceful protestors is wrong, Amnesty International helps you tell the Turkish government to can it already. The Turkish government ought to be happy to see so many people out in the streets because they give a damn about what happens in their country, but they're not -- they're a government whose ruling party hasn't been seriously challenged in over ten years, and they've become more restrictive of its citizens' media and free speech rights as the years have gone on. So they might want to listen this time, or they'll become a relic with a quickness.

Did you know corporations could patent genes? Apparently they can, and they have patented over 40 percent of the human genome, even though typically you don't get to patent stuff that occurs in nature. But if some corporation or other has patented almost half your genes, that means said corporation can legally stop, say, your doctor from drawing your blood and testing any part thereof patented by someone else. This doesn't happen very often in practice, praise the Lord, but Myriad Genetics has patented two genes (BRCA1 and BRCA2) that can cause breast and/or ovarian cancer if they're mutated, and one in 400 women may carry the mutated gene. But you may never find out if you're one of them, because Myriad has been stopping any clinic that tests for breast or ovarian cancer from actually testing for those mutated genes. The Supreme Court is mulling whether to allow this madness to continue, but in the meantime the ACLU helps you tell the U.S. Patent Office to stop issuing genes for patents until the Court makes up its mind.

Meanwhile, the WalMart strikes continue in advance of the corporation's annual shareholders' meeting, and WalMart has responded by getting a restraining order from an Arkansas judge forbidding anyone from walking onto WalMart property unless they're shopping. Some of these shareholders might be shopping for somewhere else to put their money, maybe? So American Rights at Work and Jobs for Justice help you tell WalMart to make their workers' lives better. It ain't as if they ain't got the cash -- four Walton family members rank in the world's top 20 billionaires, with a collective worth of over $107 billion. I suppose some folks respond well, that must be how they got so rich! But they should look in the mirror and ask themselves: is that how we want to get rich? By cutting our workers' hours and making them work odd hours and paying them less than they need to live on so they have to get food stamps and Medicaid? Really, anyone can do that. But not everyone can go on strike when they're already living on the edge. That takes courage.

The Supreme Court rules, in Maryland v. King, that it's A-OK to take DNA from suspects without a warrant because DNA is like, you know, fingerprints and stuff, and John W. Whitehead eviscerates their logic. Warning: you'll find Antonin Scalia on the right side of an argument, as happens more often than the Stopped Clock Rule would explain. What the hell is the matter with getting a damn warrant? Life ain't 24.

Sen. Lautenberg's untimely death has already led right-wingers to warn New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) that selecting some moderate to replace him in the interim will finish him in 2016. More likely, Mr. Christie tells far right-wingers to go to hell, sooner rather than later, and those right-wingers vote for him in large numbers anyway in 2016, given how much of a rage they've let themselves get whipped up into over SOSHALIZM!!!!!! -- and if Mr. Christie does win in 2016, which is far from unlikely, he's going to do a lot of their bidding anyway.

Conor Freidsdorf at The Atlantic notes that Bill O'Reilly planned to repeat his 2008 radio rant against right-wing "Kool-Aid-drinking idiots" on his more-widely-viewed TV program that night, but backed down in the face of pressure from then-Fox head Roger Ailes. What Mr. Freidsdorf forgets is that Bill O'Reilly criticized right-wing talk radio for opposing the Bush bailout -- the one time right-wing talk radio was on the side of the angels! -- and while Mr. O'Reilly only alluded to Rush Limbaugh in that rant, he called out Barney Frank and Chris Dodd by name.

Finally, former Rep. Allen West (R-FL) has converted his House campaign account into a federal Political Action Committee, called the Deep Strike PAC. It sounds like a damn porn film!

Remember when San Jose Mercury-News reporter Gary Webb detailed an unholy trinity comprising the CIA, the Contras, and inner-city crack cocaine dealers? And remember how other big newspapers conducted an unfair smear campaign against him, making him persona non grata in the journalism biz and partly causing his suicide? Well, one of his inquisitors, an ex-L.A. Times reporter named Jesse Katz, has apologized for the whole thing. Great timing, dude -- even the suicide was nine years ago. I hope Zombie Gary Webb eats his brain.

Bad news, everyone: the Vermont state Senate did pass a GMO labeling law -- but it would only go into effect if four other states pass similar laws. To allay corporate "concerns" about having to label their food differently, I presume. You'd think these Frankenfood manufacturers all hired monks with quill pens to write their food labels.

Citizens for Tax Justice reports that Apple, lately the subject of Congressional investigation for tax avoidance, is hardly alone among multinational corporations in sending money to overseas tax havens. But we've been talking about this for years now, and all our Congressfolk do is pretend that making it worse (a territorial tax system? Are you kidding?) will solve the problem. We need to get new Congressfolk.

Actress Jean Stapleton, most famous as All in the Family's Edith Bunker, dies at 90. That's a big chunk of my childhood gone -- that voice (which wasn't her voice at all, as you know if you saw her in anything else!) filled my living room in the '70s. And Edith wasn't dumb or naive, no -- All in the Family often ended with five minutes of her explaining the meaning of the first 20 minutes to Gloria.

Also, U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) dies at 89. I always liked him -- he was my Senator for many years -- but I had forgotten that he's the main reason we have a national drinking age of 21, the main reason you can't smoke on airplanes, and the main reason over 350,000 Jews and others were able to leave oppressive regimes after 1990. That's a pretty good CV, especially for a Senator who spent his entire career in the post-New Deal era.

The Senate takes up the Farm Bill again this week, and we've already had a win and a loss: a Durbin-Coburn amendment began the hard work of limiting crop insurance subsidies for big corporations, but a Gillibrand amendment that would have restored over $4 billion in food stamps got shot down, with 28 Democrats helping the Republicans do the shooting. And they call that fiscal sanity! But Food and Water Watch helps you email your Senators about amendments to the Farm Bill. Their list is pretty comprehensive; it includes, among others, two Barbara Boxer (D-CA) amendments that would force labeling of genetically-modified food, a Begich (D-AK) amendment that would ban genetically-engineered salmon, a Gillibrand (D-NY) amendment that would tackle antibiotic abuse in factory farm animals, a slew of factory farm-spanking amendments authored by Democrats Tester and Rockefeller as well as Republicans Grassley and Enzi, and a Shaheen (D-NH) amendment limiting crop insurance payouts to $50,000. The big agricultural concerns will try to drown us out, but they're nothing compared to us. After all, we're people.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Pennsylvania state Senate is actually mulling legislation (SB 975) that would legalize payday loans extracting 300% annual interest. Sigh. They're calling SB 975 a "micro-loan" bill, but if it looks like dung and smells like dung you don't need to eat it because Pennsylvania politicians call it meatloaf. And back in 2002, the state legislature actually passed a tough payday lending law -- one that limited the size of loans to $500, limited fees to $75, and limited interest to 20% for the first $300 and a mere 7.5% for any money over $300. Pennsylvania law also doesn't allow borrowers to take out a second payday loan until they've paid off the first, which keeps them out of an endless cycle of debt brought on by a temporary cash crisis. So why break something that's been working well for over a decade? I'd hate to think it's because the big banksters want to get into the payday loan business, but we can't discount the possibility. Keystone Progress helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject SB 975, and keep our payday loan laws strong.

H.R. 12/S. 123, the Voter Empowerment Act of 2013, makes online voter registration easier, makes intimidating voters harder, helps more disabled folks vote, and lets felons vote again once they get out of jail. And the bill directly addresses, and prohibits, voter "caging." You remember "caging," right, from Greg Palast's 2004 BBC Newsnight report? Where the state (in this case, Florida) sends fundraising solicitations or address verification letters to certain (i.e. black) voters, and then puts the voters who don't respond on a special list alleging that they might not be eligible to vote? Clever, huh? Why do people in power waste valuable time and attention on such matters, when they could just, you know, do something valuable for the folks they serve? The Brennan Center for Justice provides more information, and you can use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to urge your Reps and Senators to support the Voter Empowerment Act. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, Congress still works on the Farm Bill, and shows little or no interest in reforming one of the greatest injustices built into the Farm Bill for decades -- that giant multinational corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Archer-Daniels-Midland somehow collect the vast majority of agricultural subsidies. Indeed, between 1995 and 2011, less than four percent of America's farmers collected 75 percent of all of these subsidies. I pity the fool who raises his hand to say, but that makes sense, because those corporations are bigger! But if a pimp needs a slap I'm game to give it: big corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and ADM shouldn't be getting more government help than the small farmers who need it more -- and certainly not to keep the price of corn syrup (and therefore soda and other junk foods) artificially low, which also keeps our children artificially fat. So USPIRG helps you tell your Senators to fight big subsidies for big agricultural corporations.

In other sad food news, an Oregon farmer has discovered genetically-engineered wheat growing on his farm. He didn't plant it, and even better, this particular strain of GE wheat never even received government approval for planting. And this wheat is one of them-there glycophate-resistant strains! Hey, we were going after glycophates in pesticides not too long ago! Now, nobody necessarily broke the law in planting this strain of wheat -- most likely, the strain was part of a field test. But maybe there should be a law against that, since we can't contain the ill effects any more than we can contain the wind or the animals that carry the GE seed from field to field. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell the USDA to halt all field testing of genetically-modified crops. Note well that many trade partners have outlawed GE crops, and that organic crops won't be organic once tainted with GE seed. These alone should be incentive enough for the USDA to act -- even if, you know, they don't take public service seriously or something.

Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), you may have heard the litany of flatugasms coming from (male) Fox News contributors lately, concerning Pew Research's finding that a record number of families with minor children (40%) now feature the mother as the breadwinner. No use slamming these fools any more than their own words (and their own co-workers) have slammed them -- best to remember, as Moms Rising reminds us, that women still earn 77 cents on their male counterparts' dollar, breadwinners or not, and mothers and women of color fare rather worse than that. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to pass H.R. 377/S. 84, the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act would give us better tools with which to enforce the Equal Pay Act -- such as prohibiting employers from disciplining workers who discuss their salaries with their co-workers, and putting gender-based discrimination on equal legal footing with other forms of wage discrimination. I'd be hard-pressed to imagine legitimate objections to either of those items.

Good news: Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) will automatically restore voting rights to non-violent felons who've completed their obligations to civil society. Personally I don't think felons should lose any voting rights, even while they're in prison -- the prison term is the price they pay for what they've done, right? -- but this is a good start.

Another day, another right-winger claiming that Comcast and Verizon have a "First Amendment" right to carry whatever networks they want. Sadly, this right-winger is D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh, one of Mr. Bush's most notoriously unqualified employees. Doesn't even know the difference between a service provider and a bookseller -- and he seems to think our First Amendment right to decide what we want to watch isn't part of the question.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) says she's against pay equity laws because "women don't want the decisions made in Washington. They want...to make those decisions for themselves." And in a world where you don't get pay increases just because you deserve them, how does she think women get pay equity? Does she know the meaning of the words "our government"? And I noticed "I didn’t want to be given a job because I was a female" -- she must think it's OK to just change the subject if you're losing the argument.

New York Mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner (D) says he's developed "an almost rhinocerosly thick skin" in re all the nasty things people say to him. Which are all deserved, by the way -- if you're going to be the Single Payer Health Care Guy, you don't also get to be the Takes Pictures of His Cock and Sends Them to Young Female Twitter Followers Guy. And "rhinocerosly" is not a word. I'm old enough to remember when making up words ended campaigns.

New York Times economics writer gives us "The Trouble with Taxing Corporations." Never mind that his proof that it's so much trouble consists of exactly three anecdotes in 33 paragraphs, or that his proposed solutions (the national sales tax? Over my dead body!) are mostly right-wing -- this notion that doing something about corporate taxes might be the right thing to do, but we should give up doing it because it's so hard? I'd dare call that un-American.