Thieves in the Temple.

Action: bad health care "reform," and bad telecom mergers.

H.R. 2575, entitled the Save American Workers Act of 2015 because its writer apparently has a lot of damn nerve, would "fix" the Affordable Care Act by changing the threshold for defining a full-time worker in America from 30 hours to 40 hours. Again, I am stunned that anyone would dare call this "saving American workers," since it ensures that corporations will be able to get more work out of their full-time workers without having to provide health insurance. And the CBO agrees, estimating H.R. 2575 would kick one million workers off their health insurance, but we don't need the CEO to see that. Jesus Mary and Joseph you can't just put words like "jobs" and "children" and "saving American workers" on any pile of dung and expect people to call it meatloaf. With 208 co-sponsors, the bill will almost certainly get a vote fairly shortly, so you can call your House Rep, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page. And you can also call House Majority Leader Eric Cantor who deserves to lose his next House election to a shrub (no, seriously, that's his new last name) at 202-225-2815 and tell him you're on to his rubbish. If he wants this bill to pass so badly, he can pay the price for it.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC and/or the Justice Department to prevent the Comcast/Time Warner merger, which would give Comcast a near-monopoly over cable services nationally and put it in every major national media market, then Demand Progress, Free Press, and Daily Kos still help you do that. The merger's defenders tell us that only when Comcast stands alone among cable providers will it be able to lower prices, offer better choices, fix infrastructure, and create jobs. How many times must I tell these pimps! Only competition will force Comcast to do any of these things, and this merger lessens competition. Like we're the stupidest people on Earth or something! I'm also tired of folks saying that Comcast isn't really competing with Time Warner but with services like Verizon and Dish, as if Comcast doesn't already have many times the customers as either of these two services. Oh, one more thing: if Comcast becomes this powerful, and the FCC still refuses to enforce strong net neutrality rules, then too many Americans will be stuck consuming whatever Comcast wants them to. In America, the land of freedom, that's intolerable.

Action: fair pay, Frankenfoods, and vouchers.

Congress wouldn't move on a minimum wage bill, so President Obama issued an Executive Order raising the minimum wage for federal workers on future contracts to $10.10/hour. Congress also won't move on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would (among other things) stop corporations from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay with each other; will Mr. Obama step in here, as well? He is well within his rights to do so, since you have to follow federal rules if you want to take federal money. Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell Mr. Obama to issue an Executive Order preventing contractors from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay with co-workers. What's the big deal, you ask? Many times, talking with your co-workers about what you're making is the only way you can find out you're a victim of pay discrimination. And why should our tax dollars -- since that is how federal contractors get paid -- aid and abet discrimination? Wait, let me guess -- federal contractors with a sincere religious belief that women should be paid less should be coddled by the taxpayer!

Meanwhile, the fight for proper labeling of genetically-modified food isn't going as well as you'd think an effort 90% of the people support would go, so I have two action alerts you may want to pursue. In one, PennPIRG helps you tell supermarket chain Giant to label the genetically-modified foods it sells, and in the other, CREDO helps you tell General Mills to label genetically-modified ingredients in all of its cereal products. General Mills has committed to labeling genetically-modified ingredients in Cheerios, which is no small thing, but General Mills also makes Chex, Golden Grahams, Lucky Charms -- and Honey Nut Cheerios (to my taste, at least, the superior product), which General Mills has apparently exempted from its Cheerios edict. Note to people who complain that we never compromise: it's labeling, not banning! Why are you afraid of labeling? If opposition to Frankenfoods is all ignorance -- and not, say, about heightened exposure to pesticides and increased incidence of cancer -- why not just prove it?

Finally, the school voucher movement won't go away -- S. 1968/H.R. 4000, the innocuously-named Scholarships for Kids Act, would convert almost two-thirds of federal education funding into vouchers for private schools, and S. 1909, the so-called CHOICE Act, would shovel most of the rest toward private schools. If Medicare vouchers are such a terrible idea, why are public school vouchers a better one? They'd both do the same thing: they'd siphon off taxpayer money that could be used to make our public services better, and give that money to private interests, which won't do a better job than our public services do and which will also keep as much of our taxpayer money for themselves as they can. You saw that note from PR Watch earlier today, I trust, which showed the true vampires of public funding to be, no, not teachers or janitors or workers soaking up overtime, but private prison CEOs and "cyber school" CEOs and waste management CEOs? Then you know what to do. Americans for the Separation of Church and State helps you tell Congress to oppose public school privatization efforts.

Around the table: reason in Arizona, racism in Texas, greed in the public sector, and science as a candle in the dark.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) vetoes that state's version of the "Turn Away the Gays" bill. Good for her, and good for everyone who agitated against it -- and bad for all the other states contemplating turning discrimination into "conscience."

Austin, TX police defend their arrest of a black man for drunken driving who scored an astounding 0.0 on their breathalyzer test. "Err on the side of caution" my ass -- the legal limit is 0.8; this looks exactly like a driving-while-black arrest to me. Turns out Travis County (where Austin sits) dismisses a lot of of its drunken driving cases, but an innocent still has to pay thousands of dollars to fight the charges. It's almost like that's the idea.

PR Watch instructs us that the "highest-paid public workers" aren't the teachers and inspectors and bus drivers working double-shifts so reviled by the right, but the corporate executives who privatize public services and then pay themselves exorbitant amounts of money -- the top six of them made over $100 million in taxpayer money between them over the last eight years. It's enough to make you think that the right wing hasn't been out to shrink the size of government so much as they've been out to steal taxpayer money for themselves.

Actor Alan Alda tells the New York Times that scientists need to "communicate better" -- that they "often don’t speak to the rest of us the way they would if we were standing there full of curiosity," and that "(i)f (scientists) can’t make clear what their work involves, the public will resist advances." Of course the public also resists advances because corporations swamp the media with anti-science propaganda, but Mr. Alda's still absolutely right. If scientists "communicated better," they'd certainly help ameliorate the problems caused by all the David Kochs and Jim Inhofes of the world.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, scientists detect water on a planet some 51 light years from Earth, meaning that it could possibly support life. I'm not sure what kind of life it could support -- the planet is a gas giant, much less dense than Earth and some eight times larger than Jupiter, and it's much closer to its parent star than even Mercury is to our sun, such that its "year" lasts only three days. Still, something could live there, which is an exciting possibility.

Action: a bogus "religious" "freedom" bill in Arizona, and keeping Amazon from handing over your customer info to the CIA.

First things first. Arizona's state legislature just passed SB 1062, which would let businessfolk and government workers discriminate against gay folks if they presume to hold a "sincere religious belief" that Leviticus is anything but a book about taking precautions with blood. You'd think Arizona's legislators wouldn't want so much attention after SB 1070, the nefarious "show me your papers" bill, but, apparently, they never learn. The bill now goes to Governor Brewer for approval, and both the ACLU and the People for the American Way help you urge Gov. Brewer to veto the bill. Is it any good, anymore, telling people that their religious "freedoms" don't get to trample on other people's actual freedoms -- that we all have "sincere beliefs" we don't automatically impose upon everyone else because, well, we're not more important than everyone else? Here's something that might make Gov. Brewer listen: businesses that exercise the "freedom" to have gay-free lunch counters will bring bad PR on themselves from all over America, and thus cost the state money. I hate to make it about money, but I also like to get the job done.

Meanwhile, Amazon recently got $600 million to provide "cloud computing" services to the CIA. And Amazon currently provides cloud computing services to you, if you're a customer. See where there might be a problem? Our government loves collecting information about us, and they might well use the "in" they've now got with Amazon to pressure them (or perhaps "pressure" them) to hand over information about what you're buying and watching. I've heard from good folks that "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear," but let's say you've watched the AMC show Breaking Bad on Amazon Prime. You're not doing anything wrong, right? But can you foresee the CIA asking for lists of people who've watched that show, because they think some of them might want to learn how to become a meth kingpin or build a wheelchair bomb? Can you foresee the CIA one day becoming so desperate for results that they harass or torture folks on that list until they confess to anything? If you can foresee any of that, then Roots Action helps you tell Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to promise his corporation won't provide customer info to the CIA.

Around the table: a minefield for myths!

Netflix will pay millions of dollars annually to stream its content via Comcast. The article doesn't tell us whether Netflix will pay Comcast more or less money than it currently pays the intermediary corporations who deliver Netflix content to Comcast; the agreement essentially gets rid of those intermediaries. But this is how the internet begins to end -- soon, only the biggest content providers being able to pay for their own "on-ramps," which do not differ from "paid prioritization," no matter what the Times says.

Exxon CEO joins lawsuit against construction of a water tower for fracking near his Texas home, citing the potential loss of property values. Naturally, the rest of the time, Mr. Tillotson heavily promotes fracking, pooh-poohing folks worried about dirty water and dirty air and increased risk of cancer; his interest in the lawsuit mentions none of these, so I suppose he's not a hypocrite per se. But that's a damn small thing to bring to the pearly gates.

Kevin Drum finds the case of Julie Boonstra -- featured in an anti-Affordable Care Act ad funded by Americans for Prosperity -- so wanting that he wonders if anyone is "truly being harmed by Obamacare." Ms. Boonstra will actually pay a little less under her plan, will keep her doctor, will even get better treatment -- yet still went along with a right-wing plan to destroy a right-wing health care reform law. I know stories are more powerful than carefully-reasoned arguments, but that doesn't explain why the "liberal" media eats up these horror-stories-that-aren't, while caring little for success stories.

Wired's David Kravets finds AT&T's release of government surveillance requests wanting, as the report apparently omits requests for metadata. The Obama Administration released guidelines in late January for corporations to release records of government requests for information -- and, it seems, left bulk metadata collection out of the guidelines, hence (perhaps!) AT&T's failure to release them. I guess they're hoping that we get fed up with all the confusion, but if it looks like dung and smells like dung, we ought to just call it dung.

Finally, Yes! magazine explodes "the myth behind public school failure." Spoiler alert: we face "not an education crisis but a manufactured catastrophe," only exacerbated by 30-plus years of privatization. Chris Hedges explains it pretty well, too -- there's all this money governments spend on education, "and the corporations want it." Note well that corporatist solutions to the education "crisis" don't actually save the public any money.

Action: net neutrality, and free speech for whistleblowers.

The FCC has put forth its new net neutrality proposal, and Free Press tells us why it's bunkum. To sum: the FCC still asserts authority to enforce net neutrality regulations without reclassifying broadband providers as telecommunications services rather than information services, which we've only been telling them to do for-freaking-ever now, while suggesting it might resort to such reclassification if the big telecoms act badly. "If"? Verizon has asserted, in court, a First Amendment right to herd its paying customers to websites Verizon prefers, regardless of what said customers prefer, and reports of slow traffic to Netflix have been much too frequent in recent weeks. Hence both Free Press and the People's Email Network help you tell the FCC, again, to preserve net neutrality the only way they can: by reclassifying broadband service providers. Memo to pundits who think people won't run through a wall for net neutrality just because their Netflix is slow: have you ever seen how people get when their page won't load right away? If I were the FCC or a big telecom, I'd fear that reaction, writ a million times larger.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported late last week about a lawsuit alleging that Kellogg Brown Root requires its workers who wish to blow the whistle on fraud to sign "confidentiality" agreements barring them from speaking to government officials, under threat of firing or legal action! A KBR executive responds that the confidentiality agreements only aim to "protect the integrity of the internal review process," and that KBR forwards all accusations "supported by the facts" to "the proper authorities." If you believe any of that, you must have been in a coma during Tha Bush Mobb years. KBR still gets to feed an awful lot at the government trough these days, which I must attribute to their familiarity with the process; certainly I could not attribute that to their work rewiring buildings in Iraq, which work electrocuted at least one Green Beret while showering. Hence the National Whistleblowers Center helps you demand that the Department of Justice investigate KBR, since KBR may well have violated at least two federal laws with its confidentiality agreement.

Around the table: chained CPI is gone, let it rest in the deep grave.

President Obama drops Social Security benefit cuts from his current budget proposal. Many folks saw the offer (to tie cost-of-living increases to a slower-growing but irrelevant-to-seniors inflation index known as "chained CPI") as a good-faith effort to get Republicans to support higher tax revenues, but I always saw it as a craven capitulation, and I'm glad he's given it up. Give yourself a pat on the back if you're one of the many, many folks who've agitated against its inclusion in the budget discussion.

American sues Ethiopian government for (among other things!) infecting his computer with spyware so they could monitor his computer use. This predicament apparently afflicts many former Ethiopians who've fled the oppressive government of their home country, but I'm more worried that a government that isn't a major world player by any stretch of the imagination can spy on folks like this. Of course, I also wonder why a government so anxious to keep its power doesn't, you know, do good works for its people.

A release of some 27,000 email documents shows then-Milwaukee County executive Scott Walker (now, of course, Governor of Wisconsin) suggesting that some of his employees respond to articles critical of him and/or his ideas in 2010. I can't say he broke the law -- we have no evidence, for example, that he told them to do it while they were working for the people of Milwaukee County, and we know he fired at least one aide caught doing just that in 2010 -- but Mr. Walker generally seems to have had more knowledge of what his aides were doing than he had previously said he did. And, you know, being the hand inside internet commenter puppet-heads actually looks weak and petty.

The Brooklyn Nets sign center Jason Collins a 10-day contract, virtually assuring he'll be the first openly gay man to play in an NBA game. (10-day contracts for players filling a short-term need have been standard in the NBA for decades.) I recall fretting that teams would shy away from him after he came out late last year (after a dozen years in the league, five as a starting center or power forward), but I also recall thinking I'd probably never know that for sure, since he's essentially a third center now, and third centers are never that much in demand. I guess we're about to learn a few things.

Finally, we visit the small agricultural town of Feldheim, in Germany, which has become self-sufficient via development of renewable energy technologies. Tea baggers may want to close their ears, but Feldheim's story testifies to the utility of both capitalistic and socialistic impulses -- farmers there began to prosper in the late '90s when they leased their land to a local energy corporation, which built wind turbines on that land and then bought a Soviet military site and converted that into a solar farm; at around the same time, the town and the corporation joined together to start a biogas factory. Hey, I don't care how we do good works so much as that we do good works.

Action: fracking in Pennsylvania, and climate change.

Gov. Corbett (E-PA) has proposed lifting the state's moratorium on leasing public lands to gas drillers -- because he's got a hole in his budget, see, one that couldn't possibly be plugged with, say, a higher tax rate on millionaire income, one that can only be plugged by letting gas drillers come in and frack their way to big profits for them and dirty water for the rest of us. Gas drillers have already leased about half of Pennsylvania's state forests, though they haven't drilled much there, possibly because flammable tap water and wastewater geysers tend to be unpopular. But never fear: Gov. Corbett says "Nobody's going to see the difference." This guy's priceless! From calling a gas drilling impact fee "un-American" to speculating that gay marriage could be a lot like brother-sister marriage to "Nobody's going to see the difference," I can't imagine how this guy could be re-elected -- though I suppose his gas drilling cronies buy him another term. Penn Environment helps you demand that Gov. Corbett keep Pennsylvania's state forests safe from gas drilling.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA to set strong limits on carbon emissions, then Public Citizen provides one more. The EPA has proposed limiting carbon emissions from new coal and natural gas plants; you may want them to limit carbon emissions from old ones as well, and you're free to tell them so. The forces of corporatism stand ready to tell us that carbon regulations will kill jobs (who do they think will enforce and comply with the regulations, robots?) and hike energy prices (the corporations will do that anyway, with or without a pretext), but none of that will matter very much if the average temperature keeps rising and extreme weather events become more frequent. Just remember that our most visible climate change opponent, Sen. Inhofe of Oklahoma, tells us he was on board with reducing climate change until he realized how much it would cost, and out of the other side of his mouth he calls climate change a "hoax." Look, it's either a hoax or it's going to cost too much; it can't be both. And the only folks it will "cost too much" are overpaid CEOs.

Around the table: CEO pay, the minimum wage, labor relations, and why gay marriage isn't a slippery slope one more time.

Dean Baker fingers a culprit behind absurdly overpaid CEOs: "corporate cronyism," as in "(t)he corporate directors who are supposed to be holding down CEO pay for the benefit of the shareholders are generally buddies of the CEOs," often picked by the CEOs themselves! Remember this the next time someone tells you CEOs deserve all those millions because they "take risks." The biggest risk they take is that one of their cronies on the board might turn on them, which, given the evidence, isn't a very big risk.

Ralph Nader tells us why the Congressional Budget Office's report that a $10.10/hour minimum wage would cost the economy 500,000 jobs during the last six months of 2016 isn't the whole story. You'll be reminded that Ron Unz, editor of The American Conservative, supports a $12/hour minimum wage. Meanwhile, Mike Konczal suggests that the CBO's science isn't exactly the consensus among economists, and some of it isn't even well-tested. The CBO report also said, by the way, that a minimum wage hike would lift 900,000 people out of poverty over that same period. What, the "liberal" media didn't foreground that?

The Gap announces it will hike its minimum wage to $10/hour by June of 2015 -- which, admittedly, puts them in a better light than does their refusal to support better safety for Bangladeshi garment workers. Meanwhile, WalMart also says they'll "look at" supporting a minimum wage hike, but WalMart supported the 2007 hike, and has made positive noises about further hikes, so this feels like they're going backward. Still, if Congressional Republicans plan to keep doing nothing, we're fortunate to find corporations volunteering to hike wages.

Volkswagen labor official suggests that the German automaker doesn't have to put any more factories in the South if workers can't unionize there. Well, Tennessee Republicans, it looks like you're not the only ones who can issue threats.

Finally, Mitch McConnell's primary challenger, Matt Bevin, says that gay marriages could lead to parent-child marriages -- "because at the end of the day a lot of this ends up being taxes and who can visit who in the hospital and there’s other repressions and things that come with it -- so a person may want to define themselves as being married to one of their children so that they can then in fact pass on certain things to that child financially and otherwise." "Where do you draw the line?" he demands. Right here: gay marriages will not lead to parent-child marriages, because children cannot consent to a relationship with an adult, and parents can already pass "certain things" on to their children. (Yes, I, too, wonder what Mr. Bevin means by "repressions.")

Action: safer credit cards, and less mountaintop removal mining.

You've no doubt heard about the massive security breach at Target, where hackers may have stolen personal information from 110 million people; similar though smaller data breaches have also recently occurred at Michaels and Nieman Marcus. How do thieves do this? Well, when you use your credit or debit card at a department store, you use a card reader, and this card reader stores (and encrypts) the data on your credit or debit card for a short while, but thieves use malware that "scrapes" that data from the card reader. All is not lost, though: in other countries, credit and debit cards use embedded microchips, rather than magnetic stripes (which technology is decades old). American retailers and manufacturers have balked at the idea, though, because of the cost of upgrading credit and debit cards and the point-of-sale devices that read them. And yet corporations are flush with profits right now, and surely they don't want another wave of bad PR visited upon them (indeed, Target has already decided to upgrade its readers). So Consumers Union helps you tell American corporations to make our credit and debit cards safe again.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell PNC Bank to stop funding corporations that use mountaintop removal mining. "Mountaintop removal" is, of course, a bit of a euphemism: coal corporations blow the tops off of mountains so they can get to the coal goodness below (because it's easier and needs fewer employees than strip-mining, why else?), and in the process they dump toxic carcinogens and heavy metals into the water table of the good folks living in the valleys below, so that kids in Appalachian coal mining areas have much higher incidences of birth defects and rather shorter life spans (not to mention blood-red water coming out of their tap). PNC Bank lends these coal corporations money, and though they said in 2010 they wouldn't fund individual mountaintop removal projects or lend to coal corporations who primarily use mountaintop removal mining, coal corporations have evaded these requirements and continue to get PNC cash. But there's hope: about 25% of PNC shareholders voted last April to call on PNC to look more critically at its coal funding, and as you know, getting 25% of shareholders to agree on something is actually a pretty big deal. So we can get this done.

Around the table: folly, folly, folly, and, also, folly.

Tennessee state legislature also pushes an anti-gay discrimination bill in the name of "religious freedom," one that would allow businesses like wedding vendors to "turn away" gay folks. Money quote from state legislator: "“I think it’s more wrong to force people to violate their conscience" than to protect gays from discrimination. But businesses provide a service, and once you're providing a service to other people who have rights just like you, your "conscience" doesn't reign supreme. Next up: state legislatures seek to nullify the 13th and 14th Amendments because the Bible tolerates slavery, and, you know, some people might have sincere religious beliefs about that.

"Horror at the world's largest solar farm days after it opens as it is revealed panels are SCORCHING birds that fly over them," screeches the headline on this London Daily Mail article. But we're looking at a giant plant of 300,000 mirrors reflecting sunlight to a giant water tower, not the photovoltaic panels you're likely more familiar with. I bet a lot of folks are going to look at the headline and think ZOMG SOLAR POWER KILLZ!!!!! And plenty of environmentalists who'd never get a second look from the "liberal" media will suddenly get exposure when they oppose solar power (and wind power, for that matter).

Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher, the man who gives Everyman a bad name, has taken a union job at a Chrysler plant. And he promptly took to Facebook about being "required" to join the union (which isn't true, actually -- he's just required to pay dues) and then seemed to defend private unions, saying they represent "a choice between employees and employers." So how does he really feel? Oh, who knows or cares? In any case, he's gotten the memo from his real paymasters that private unions are OK until all the public unions are gone, after which the private unions will most decidedly not be OK.

George Zimmerman, arguably the most hated man in America and for good reason, claims that "(t)he government, the president, the attorney general" or somebody has made him a "scapegoat," not that he can say what he'd be a scapegoat for because "I don’t know what they’re thinking or why they’re thinking it, all I know is that they’re doing it." Usually you can tell "what they're thinking or why they're thinking it" by what they're doing. Seriously, what a diaper-loaded brat -- I hope people point to him on the TV (where he always is anymore!) and tell their children that this is how not to be.

Action: reining in Presidential war-making power, and promoting postal banking.

The 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF), which Congress passed right after 9.11 to authorize our ongoing incursion in Afghanistan, is still in effect, and word on the street is that a lot of Congressfolk from both parties wouldn't terribly mind repealing it. In fact, H.R. 2324 would repeal the AUMF at the end of this calendar year; the bill currently has eight Democratic sponsors and two Republican ones. (One of the latter is the infamous Paul Broun of Georgia, but don't hold that against the bill.) If you wonder whether repealing the AUMF is really a good idea, consider that the Constitution grants the power to declare war to Congress, not the President, and then read those five words again: "authorization to use military force." That's a long way to go in order to avoid saying "declaration of war," isn't it? If we're going to go to war, we ought to at the very least be honest enough to call it that. And our current Administration now uses the AUMF to justify unmanned drone attacks, our NSA spying on us, and continued detention at Guantánamo Bay. So the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2001 AUMF and start reining in Presidential power again.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell President Obama to allow the U.S. Post Office to offer basic types of banking services, which might include savings accounts, debit cards, and small loans. Why? Two reasons: one, the Post Office did offer all these services until 1967, and offering these services again could keep a lot of low-income families from resorting to things like pawnshops and check-cashing joints and payday lenders. Keep in mind that you can find Post Offices in rural and urban areas where the big banksters don't want to go provide services to anyone, and these areas serve close to one quarter of the American people. The other reason? Offering basic banking services would help shore up the Post Office's finances, thus protecting the jobs and pensions of its workers. The best part? Mr. Obama can just issue an executive order directing the Postmaster General to, say, start a trial program implementing the USPS Inspector General's very positive recommendations about postal banking. Let Congress work itself into a froth about it -- they'd either be protecting a) the banksters who don't want to serve the communities the Post Office would serve or b) the predatory lenders who wind up "serving" those communities anyway. All that ain't good optics, as they say.

Action: state drone murders, better judges, and bad mergers.

Incredibly, the Obama Administration is mulling whether to kill an American al-Qaeda member with a drone strike. Let's stop the mulling: the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution tells us that "no person shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Thus the President doesn't get to kill an American, even one working for al-Qaeda, just on his say-so. We value our rights here in America, even if doing so results in bad things happening -- even if it gets us killed, or gets someone we love killed. I've said this before, but it bears repeating: your values aren't worth horsedoodle unless there's a good chance they'll inconvenience you. I mean, anyone can come up with a system of values that just so happens to benefit them in each and every situation they go through in life, but it takes wisdom to adhere to a value system that challenges you, that outlasts your short-sighted desires, and that fulfills you when you stare into the void. So Roots Action helps you tell President Obama that he doesn't get to kill anyone he likes because terrorism.

Meanwhile, we've blasted Senate Republicans plenty for blocking Mr. Obama's judicial nominations -- even nominations with wide bipartisan support -- but we haven't addressed the fact that a lot of these judges get wide bipartisan support because they're corporatists. Thus Daily Kos helps you tell Mr. Obama to appoint more public interest lawyers than corporatists lawyers to federal judgeships. Does that sound presumptuous? Does that sound like pie-in-the-sky thinking? Let the haters say so, for every great change that comes in America also comes with haters telling everyone how stupid it is. More than 7 out of 10 of Mr. Obama's judicial nominees have been corporate lawyers, and of course they're not all Snidely Whiplash, but corporations train their lawyers to think like corporate interests are the most important thing in the world. Meanwhile, fewer than one in 25 of Mr. Obama's judicial nominees have been public interest lawyers, and these folks who are more likely to stick up for working families than corporate lawyers. Not all public interest lawyers are peaches, either, but if I wanted to bet on justice getting done, I know which way I'd go.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop the Comcast-Time Warner merger, then both Common Cause and Free Press help you do that. We've spent enough time combatting the most nefarious myths of mergers -- that they "create jobs" (they kill jobs, as the resulting megacorporation cuts "fat" from the job rolls of the two former corporations) and that they lower prices (because they'll be competing with whom, exactly?). But we should also remember that we have no net neutrality regulations in America right now, and thus Comcast would have even more power in stopping us from, say, watching TV shows that aren't NBC shows (since Comcast owns NBC) or movies that don't come from Universal Studios (which, guess what? Comcast also owns). Comcast would also have more power to exact tribute from certain websites, meaning you might not see your favorite websites, but only the websites of their partners. No corporation -- no one -- should have so much power. But we can put a stop to that, if we have the will.

Around the table: good judges, bad banksters, aspiring admasters, hopeful waterkeepers, and movements without leaders.

U.S. District Judge strikes down Virginia's ban on same-sex marriage, finding it unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. I agree with that reasoning, but the U.S. Supreme Court may not -- the four most reactionary justices will probably insist that the 14th Amendment was really all about slavery and can never, ever be interpreted to be about anything else, though I can't say Anthony Kennedy would join them. As an aside, would Tony Perkins please STFU about "activist" judges? He's said not word one about the activist jurisprudence evident in Citizens United v. FEC.

Danske Bank, the largest bank in Denmark, announces plans to terminate bank accounts for 15,000 Irish customers, acknowledging that "some" folks (which could also be "most" folks) will be locked out of their accounts before they can move their money to another bank. Danske, which made over $1 billion in profits in 2013, seems to have utterly botched the job of notifying and reminding customers -- and after eight years of George W. Bush, whenever I see incompetence, I wonder if it's on purpose.

Pandora Media plans to enable political advertisers to target its users -- and Pandora thinks they have you pegged. Pandora plans to start with your zip code and then, you know, figure you for a Republican if you like country, a Democrat if you like jazz, et cetera, which won't make you happy if you, for example, love Merle Haggard and Thelonious Monk. But I suspect they're not too far off -- R&B users do lean only "slightly" Democrat in my experience, and Bruce Springsteen fans likely remember the "Rambo of Rock" signs at his Born in the U.S.A. shows.

Jill Richardson writes about "the best way to keep our water safe." Ways to keep our water safe range from things you can do relatively quickly (get more energy-efficient appliances and better insulation) to things you'd need a big chunk of cash to do (redesign your home and plant huge trees in your yard for shade) to things we'd need to do as a community (wean ourselves off of water-polluting coal and getting onto wind and solar), that last item taking the gold medal. Of course, it's all worth a go.

Finally, Allen Goldstein laments that social media and social justice movements have suffered from a lack of "program, party, and leadership." He cites "Facebook and Tweets," the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street as movements that failed without "program, party, and leadership," and the Tea Party as one that succeeded with all three. Of course, the Tea Party had massive amounts of corporate money behind it, too, and the Working Families Party and the Progressive Danes have done pretty well at the municipal level in New York City and Madison, Wisconsin respectively. I know, I know, I have to do more. I'm working on it.

Action: anti-gay laws in Russia, paid family medical leave, and voting rights.

You've heard, no doubt, about the nefarious anti-gay law Russia passed in 2013, which makes it a crime to spread "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations." Now Russia has applied the law to journalist Elena Klimova (Russia oppressing a journalist? Why, that's unprecedented!), who started the website Children 404 to help gay teenagers struggling with oppression find each other and help each other. Apparently, even helping minors tell each other that it's OK to be gay falls under "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations." Hence Amnesty International helps you tell Russia to free Ms. Klimova and stop applying the law in such a brutish fashion. Just as an aside, the Norton Critical Edition of Anton Chekhov's Short Stories contains an essay by Maxim Gorky describing his acquaintance with Mr. Chekhov, who comes across as a relentlessly humane, decent, subtle, honest, and illuminated fellow. I try to remember it, and the promise it offers, whenever I think of Russia as an irredeemably backwards land, more brutish, even, than in the most fevered dreams of American extremists.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3712/S. 1810, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act (or FAMILY Act), would, essentially, convert the unpaid leave workers take under the Family Medical Leave Act into paid leave, for those folks who apply for such leave to the Social Security Administration. Folks on FMLA wouldn't get full pay if the FAMILY Act passes, but at least they wouldn't have to constantly choose between work and caring for themselves or children or other loved ones. And guess which nation is the only one of all the high-income nations to offer exactly zero paid leave under these conditions? That's right, the U.S. of A. The FAMILY Act would also, not incidentally, extend FMLA protections to domestic partners, including those in same-sex relationships. Let the haters crow about FMLA abuse, as if the only way to fix that is through taking everyone's benefits away, and not, say, to enforce the law and punish fraudsters. For fraudsters hurt all of us -- and give our enemies an excuse to take away what we've fought for. USAction helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the FAMILY Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 3899/S. 1945, the Voting Rights Amendment Act, then the People's Email Network still helps you do that. You remember why we need the Voting Rights Amendment Act, right? We need it because the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, because they found the formula for determining which states/municipalities get extra scrutiny from the federal government to be outdated. But the Court also said Congress could substitute a new formula that would meet Constitutional scrutiny, and Congress would do that with the Voting Rights Amendment Act. The bill would apply extra scrutiny to changes in the law from states and municipalities that have broken federal election law five times in the previous 15 years -- meaning that, in theory, any state or municipality, and not just ones in the South, could come under additional scrutiny. That improves the law and addresses the Court's peculiar concern for the South. Hell, I'm not against pleasing everyone -- if you can.

Penny rants: a thorough application of Godwin's Law, and other labors.

Tennessee Volkswagen workers reject UAW representation in a close vote; they could have been the first workers at a foreign auto factory with union representation in the South. Volkswagen didn't stand in the way of the vote the way most American corporations do, which ("workers' councils" aside) may be evidence of confidence more than enlightenment; the if-they-can't-do-it-here noises have started, but they're coming from folks who don't take the long view -- or, more precisely, don't want you to take the long view. And the bigger story here may be that Republicans went all-out to pressure workers to vote against organizing, with at least one state Senator actually threatening reprisals against Volkswagen. But U.S. Sen. Corker, who also castigated Detroit auto workers for failing to give up benefits quickly enough during the 2008 auto industry bailout, may regret enabling President Obama's statements. I was a bit stunned to hear Mr. Obama say Tennessee Republicans "are more concerned about German shareholders than American workers," which sure is a short-run zinger, but remember that Mr. Obama is still hot to get the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" signed, which would put shareholders above workers on approximately this scale.

Meanwhile, Republican Senate candidate Milton Wolf, a cousin of Mr. Obama, has released some flatugasms on twitter that would make ordinary folks feel ashamed of themselves. Seriously, Mr. Obama treats "successful Americans" like Hitler treated "Jews & Gypsies"? Does Mr. Wolf really mean that garnering record corporate profits is exactly like getting gassed and turned into bars of soap? It gets better: "Other than killing Jews, what domestic policy of the Nazis do today's American liberals oppose?" he asks. Well, let's see: exterminating gays, confining women to children-kitchen-and-church, denying privacy rights to all citizens, conquering nearby nations as a means of expansion, harassing and imprisoning Catholics and political dissidents, subjugating private property completely to the perceived needs of the state, depriving folks not lucky enough to be born into the "master" race of their legal rights -- well, whaddaya know? Liberals oppose all of that. ("Conquering nearby nations" does count as a domestic policy, Mr. Wolf, since the Nazis explicitly expressed it as such.) If incumbent Sen. Roberts becomes ex-Sen. La-Z-Boy, then the world will be hearing a lot from Milton Wolf in the coming years. But not here. Let's never speak of him again.

Finally, Vice President Biden laments to a conference of House Democrats that "there isn't a Republican Party" anymore, due to its apparent splintering. "I wish there were," he went on, "I wish there was a Republican party. I wish there was one person we could sit across the table from and make a deal and make the compromise and know when you got up from the table that the deal was done." A Republican party unified enough that one person can credibly represent them in back-room negotiations over policy? Clearly Republicans don't even want that anymore, because they can only win in times of chaos and disorder, and thus they only foment chaos and disorder. And yet I must ask if Mr. Biden has considered the Democrats' role in all of this. Democrats have moved so far to the right over the years that Republicans have nowhere to go but further right, which looks more and more like nihilism the further right they go; if Mr. Biden would like to see a functioning Republican party again -- hell, if he'd like to see a functioning conservative movement again -- then he ought to encourage Democrats to try being Democrats again, which means fighting for their constituents all the time, and not just when doing so amuses their corporate paymasters.

Penny rants: breaking the back of hypocrisy since 2005.

Uh oh: Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell's primary challenger, Matt Bevin, has been crushing Mr. McConnell for his support of the 2008 financial services bailout -- but it turns out Mr. Bevin's firm itself praised said bailout in a letter to its investors. Only "don't call it a bailout," the letter said, though it did not follow with "it's been here for years." It gets better: Mr. Bevin's firm also praised the stimulus! Mr. Bevin's spokeshack first said his opinions about matters bailout- and stimulus-related hadn't changed, despite the written evidence that they had, and then said that Mr. Bevin's signing off on these statements was a "formality" that didn't imply that he approved of them. She can call that a "formality" if she likes, but the SEC calls that Mr. Bevin's obligation under the law, which tells me that Mr. Bevin's just another one who thinks laws are only for other people. This is bad, bad news for Mr. Bevin, unless he can convince large numbers of voters in Kentucky that his approval of the bailout matters less than the establishment press "opposing" him. Even that's unlikely -- folks really, really don't like the establishment press, but they really, really hate the bailout.

A Republican-dominated Kansas House passes a massive anti-gay discrimination bill, one which allows private citizens and state officials to refuse to serve gays if they hold a "sincere religious belief" that homosexuality is an abomination. Then a quite-justified storm of criticism followed -- some of it coming from the state business community -- and the state Senate subsequently announced that, well, the bill has problems and needs a bit of rewriting. (First, I suppose, they'll have to figure out who wrote the bill, since the House Speaker doesn't seem to know for sure.) Folks are mainly mad because the bill would discriminate against gays in more or less the way Jim Crow laws discriminated against black folks, and while I share that anger, my anger also goes much deeper: I'm so, so sick and tired of bigots claiming they're being "discriminated against" because the law won't let their bigotry run roughshod over other people's real rights, and I'm so, so, so sick and tired of the weakest people in America getting attention with their whining and their tantrums whenever the world around them actually becomes a little kinder and gentler than they'd care to be. So I propose that, in the absence of a mechanism to eject Kansas from the union, we no longer call it Kansas. I propose, from now on, that we call it Flyover Country instead.

Action: soda-free happy meals, a big bad merger, and the minimum wage.

Moms Rising helps you tell Wendy's and Burger King to take soda out of kids' meals. You know, so we can help keep kids from becoming obese and getting Type 2 diabetes, since sugary beverages pump more added sugar into kids than all other sources of added sugar combined. I bet I'll hear some libertarian-types saying what are you, anti-choice? Those would be some damn inattentive libertarians, of course: we're not saying stop selling soda, we're saying stop selling soda as part of a combination meal. Go to almost any fast-food joint and the default drink in kids' meals is soda. Why does it have to be like that? Because soda is so cheap, which in turn is because our government hands out billions of dollars in subsidies to the corn syrup producers? There's no damn good reason for it. And though we've tried and failed (for the moment!) to get our government to stop doing that, certainly there's no harm in asking of our fast-food titans to make it harder for kids to get their hands on soda. The kids will have to talk their parents' ears off to get it -- just like we did in the old days, and we turned out fine.

Meanwhile, Comcast has announced plans to buy Time Warner Cable. See any problems with that? Here's one big one: Comcast is the nation's #1 cable provider, one that already owns NBC and Universal Studios, among other things. Who's #2? Time Warner Cable, of course. Combine the top two cable providers into one company and you'll have a monopolistic behemoth just about no one will be able to stop from jacking up prices and compromising our privacy and trampling over network neutrality. One of the biggest problems with the media today is that too few corporations own too much -- no sense telling me there are 500 channels when only four corporations own them -- and we can't get our cable channels to serve its customers better because, in most media markets, you'll have only one big cable company, with no competition to keep everyone honest. Hence Free Press helps you tell the Department of Justice and the FCC to block a Comcast/Time Warner merger. They might do it -- Justice blocked the AT&T/T-Mobile merger a while back, as you may remember -- but they have to hear from us first.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to hike the minimum wage to $10.10/hour, here are three more, from the Campaign for America's Future, Moms Rising, and NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby. Folks making minimum wage make a shade over $15,000 annually, and most folks who make minimum wage are women, and over a quarter of those women have children. And to all the haters: no one budgets absolutely perfectly or enjoys a life untouched by unforeseen circumstances. It's always better to give these folks a hand up rather than ridicule them. And no, hiking the minimum wage won't cause prices to go up or force small businesses to cut jobs (like small businesses have the luxury!) -- but, as our President said the other day, it will put more money in the pockets of working folks, which means they'll have more money to spend, which means businesses will have more customers and will hire more workers to keep up with the demand. We used to know how all that worked. I wonder what happened. Oh, right -- the rich got all the say about everything.

Around the table: includes more anti-Obama lies debunked like I should be spending any damn time doing that.

Apparently, not only did the CBO not say that the Affordable Care Act would kill jobs, the CBO said the Affordable Care Act would actually reduce unemployment. How? Roughly, the people who will benefit most from the Affordable Care Act will have more money to spend on stuff, which means businesses will need more workers to make that stuff. You know how that works, even if Republicans don't (or pretend not to).

Beware, good citizens, of this corporatist meme I hadn't heard about before: calling bills aiming to block local governments from banning pesticides or genetically-modified food "right to farm" bills. A right for whom, one wonders? After all, I know hundreds of folks growing tomatoes in their backyards who'd just love to get their hands on some Frankenseed. Kidding, of course -- nobody wants to recreate Monsanto's "achievements" in their backyards, and only big corporations "need" the "right" to contaminate.

Uh oh: Kansas Republican Senator Pat Roberts apparently doesn't actually spend very much time in Kansas, and folks (including at least one primary challenger) are starting to notice. He might not get "Lugared," though -- he's tacking noticeably to the right, he doesn't have Richard Mourdock fighting him in the primary, and (people forget this for some reason!) he hasn't committed an act of apostasy to the banksters, as Mr. Lugar did when he voted in favor of capping some of their fees.

Republicans who dig out the AMURIKAN CAESAR!!! line against President Obama may want to consider that he's issued fewer Executive Orders than any President over the last 100 years except for Bush the Better. They may also want to consider that not getting your way on every last little thing builds character, or that stamping your feet about a President exercising authority Congress delegates him makes you look like a diaper-loaded brat.

Finally, the House Armed Services Committee concludes that the Obama Administration did not order our military to "stand down" during the Benghazi terrorist attack, nor could our military have done very much to change the outcome of that attack. Next up on Fox News: how Barack Obama got to Buck McKeon. After all, the House Armed Services Committee Chair is retiring; do we dare call that mere coincidence?

Action: climate change and fracking waste management.

Sen. McConnell (E-KY) introduced S.J.Res. 30 back in mid-January; S.J.Res. 30 would nullify the carbon emission rules the EPA issued earlier that month. What happens next? Mitch McConnell realizes what a fool he's being and says "never mind"? Not the man who filibustered his own bill a little over a year ago! Here's what happens next: if the Committee handling the resolution (in this case, the Committee on the Environment and Public Works) hasn't reported the bill out within 20 days, 30 Senators can petition to have the resolution placed before the Senate anyway; we're past 20 days now, and with 41 Republican co-sponsors to S.J.Res. 30, I think enough Senators will petition to force a vote. Of course, "forcing" Democrats to vote in favor of cleaner air and less crazy weather might not be the electoral gold Republicans think it is. So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Senators to reject nullification of EPA climate change rules. And don't believe any rubbish Republicans peddle about EPA rules "hurting small businesses." Small businesses ain't the ones doing all the polluting.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is taking comments from the public about what to do with open-air fracking wastewater pits. Gas drilling corporations usually store their wastewater in open-air pits, which may have minimal or no lining protecting the soil from the wastewater; this just about guarantees that the carcinogens and heavy metals fracking wastewater comes with will get into our air and water -- whether the pits leak, catch fire, get flooded, or simply get exposed to air, which (among other things) causes benzene, which could give you cancer, to enter the air. The DEP's proposal would make some changes to open-air pits -- it would mandate fences around the pits, as well as liners under the wastewater -- but the pits would still be exposed to the air, which is, as we've said, a bad idea. So both Penn Environment and MoveOn help you tell the DEP to ban open-air pits entirely. Storing fracking wastewater safely shouldn't be so hard. Making unearned millions by storing it so poorly it befouls our air and water? That should be hard.

Around the table: a Moral Monday super-march on Sunday, and other stories.

You may not have seen it on the news, but over 80,000 good folks took to the streets in North Carolina this Saturday in a "Moral March on Raleigh," growing at least in part out of the "Moral Monday" protests against the reactionary policies of the McCrory Administration and the N.C. state legislature. You can find a list of said policies here -- the list may be quite dispiriting, but 80,000 good folks protesting against a state's legislative agenda is at least as impressive.

The FDA issued voluntary guidelines in December in re antibiotic abuse in feed animals, but the two biggest veterinary drug corporations have said they'll follow them. Turns out if the big drug-makers don't specifically label their drugs for "growth promotion" or "feed efficiency," farmers can't legally use the drugs for those purposes. Farmers could lie, of course, and say they're giving the drugs to "sick" animals, but the guidelines also require veterinarians to write prescriptions for drugs, meaning at least two parties have to lie to continue the abuse. I don't know if it'll work or not -- I always prefer mandatory regulations to voluntary ones -- but I'll reserve judgment.

The CBO strikes back against reports that it said the Affordable Care Act would "cost 2.5 million jobs." To reiterate: the CBO told us that workers would work less because the ACA would help ensure that they don't need to keep bad jobs just to keep their healthcare, and they estimated that this "voluntary cutback" of hours would amount to 2.5 million full-time jobs. As MIT economist Jonathan Gruber says, "Voluntary reductions are not a cost of the healthcare reform law, they are a benefit." None of that matters to Republicans, though -- they'll keep pounding that JOB KILLAH!!!!! myth as long as the "liberal" media enables them.

Another day, another Republican claiming that Affordable Care Act taxes hit small businesses and working families the hardest, when, in fact, it hits folks making over $200,000/year the hardest. Which isn't the same thing. And working families and small businesses can get subsidies from the ACA. And the medical device manufacturers who will get hit hardest, big shock, aren't small businesses. Remember: if Republicans claim some policy hurts "small businesses," you can assume they really mean "my rich friends."

Finally, a college football player who projects as a mid-round pick in April's NFL draft came out as gay on Sunday, and Think Progress rounds up the best and worst reactions to the news. The worst reactions (Meadowlands Miracle-maker Herm Edwards, sadly, has one of them) are all a bit mind-boggling -- I especially wish Patrick Crayton (once a decent punt returner, but I had to look that up) would stop trying to dig his way out of a hole. There's hope, of course: Dave Kopay, who played eight years in the NFL and came out after his retirement, testified that none of his teammates cared about his sexuality as long as he hit and blocked, and I'm pulling for today's players to act the same.

Action: reining in financial speculation, giving a hand up to the unemployed, and helping children get health insurance.

Both Public Citizen and Americans for Financial Reform help you tell the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (or CFTC) to rein in financial speculation in oil and food commodities trading. The CFTC could limit the total amount of futures trading that goes on and/or limit the amount of trading one actor could do, and you don't need to know anything about futures trading to know that these would be good things -- as our Founders would tell us, concentrated power in anyone's hands is evil, and individual speculators can drive up the price of oil and food dramatically, and hurt millions of working families across the country, if we let them. Hell, they already have -- remember when Enron caused rolling blackouts all across California in 2002? Or when food speculators jacked up food prices in Egypt, thus kick-starting the Arab Spring of 2011? Or, you know, when banksters almost destroyed our economy in 2008? It's never been a better time to join the make-stuff-sell-stuff-save-money school of economics, and rein in the power of hifalutin financial "instruments" to wreak havoc in our world. (By the way, CFTC comments are due today; I apologize for the late notice.)

Meanwhile, as you know, Republicans again filibustered an attempt to extend long-term unemployment benefits late last week, so the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to stop blocking the unemployment extension. Official unemployment may be down to 6.6%, but the more pertinent U6 figure -- which includes part-timers looking to work full-time and folks who've given up looking for work -- still sits at 12.7%, and we're still looking at a corporate America that values profits over people, where we still have three applicants for every open position in America despite record corporate profits. Lately Republicans have been telling us it's wrong to extend unemployment benefits without addressing job creation. But you know what Republican "job creation" would look like -- it'd look like the rich man's tax cuts and corporate deregulation that resulted in a net creation of a little over one million jobs during eight Bush Mobb years, or fewer than during Mr. Obama's first term alone. Yet Republicans still keep beating the same dead horses. What's the definition of insanity again?

Finally, the Children's Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) expires at the end of 2015, but CHIP will lose some funding later this year, so we might as well tell Congress to renew and strengthen CHIP, as Moms Rising helps you do. You remember the battles we had over extending and expanding CHIP in 2007 and 2008? Those were great times, weren't they? Many Republicans fought Mr. Bush's vetoes in 2007 and 2008, but that party's since disavowed any kind of spending that might help people, and given that they crossed a line with unemployment insurance, what's to keep them from crossing the line with CHIP? The fact that it's for the children? That won't stop Republicans anymore. Do they not remember that they passed CHIP out of the House in 1998 -- most of the "nay" votes at that time were Democrats, no lie -- or that CHIP adheres to their principles by giving matching block grants for states so they can use those funds with some flexibility (either to establish their own children's health insurance program or to expand Medicaid to cover those children)? Well, I'd like to be wrong about Republicans. But usually I've been wrong by underestimating their venality and cruelty.

Around the table: the usual catalogue of contemporary hypocrisy and venality, plus bonus *Star Trek* reference.

American officials say that the NSA is actually only vacuuming up about 30% of all American telephone metadata, at least in part because of the explosive proliferation of cell phones over the last decade. Whenever I hear stuff like this, I think of the Star Trek episode "Charlie X," in which the Enterprise crew foil a godlike adolescent by overwhelming him with stuff to control. I also remind myself that these American officials could be fibbing.

New York police department tests the notorious Google Glass as a surveillance tool. I'd say it's fine, as long as you get a warrant, which law enforcement doesn't like doing anymore now that Messrs. Bush and Obama made that OK. But there's hope: Google will start selling the glasses to the public later this year, which means we'll be able to spy on the spies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says the FCC can't save net neutrality. Why? Their argument essentially boils down to "the FCC stinks at its job" and "government overreach is also bad," but our duty as citizens is to make our government do its job correctly, not throw up our hands at the difficulty of that task and hope for a series of solutions that won't even happen without our government doing our will.

Speaking of bad government, John Boehner says he can't push immigration reform because of the "widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws." You mean the administration that's deporting more immigrants more quickly than any other in history? And where does he get off complaining about this administration's "untrustworthiness" when the last one acted as if enforcing the law wasn't even part of its job?

Wellesley College students protest the placement, outside, of a statue of a man sleepwalking in his underwear -- part of an art exhibit, but not a part installed inside the museum. I don't think the whole inside-outside art-life thing is bunkum, nor do I think consumers of art should only get the art they want or expect, but I get tired of being told "it was meant to evoke response," because any idiot can provoke a "response" these days, and too many idiots do just that. I just hope this thing doesn't cause an accident.

Finally, former Navy chaplain and anti-gay activist says that folks who are "not going to get eternal benefits in Heaven" don't deserve any "government rewards here on this Earth." What provoked that? Oh, he's mad about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, because he thinks it'll let men use women's bathrooms, though he doesn't cite any language from the bill that would support that claim, possibly because doing so would require reading and reflecting. I'd never heard of Gordon Klingenschmitt before, though given the circumstances of his Naval discharge perhaps I should have; still, let's never speak of him again.

Around the table: unemployment drama, creationist twaddle, corporate whining, Tunisian progress, and a bionic breakthrough.

Long-term unemployment extension fails in Senate again, this time by 58-40. That's 58 votes in favor of extending long-term unemployment benefits, since a majority can't get anything done in Congress anymore. I'd say this is the kiss of death for Republicans running for re-election, given the popularity of unemployment benefits among even fairly conservative folk, but Republicans were a lot more obnoxious about unemployment benefits in 2010, and we remember how that turned out.

Creationist Ken Ham, fresh off his debate with Bill Nye, compares Mr. Nye either to Eve or the serpent in the garden of Eden, damned if I can tell what the hell he's saying. Seriously, though: has Ken Ham considered that the serpent is the good guy in the Gnostic version of the Garden of Even story? Just kidding: a guy like Ken Ham doesn't consider anything, and is proud of it. Even Pat Robertson would like Ken Ham to shut his yap.

National Labor Relations Board moves to shorten period between a petition for a government-supervised union election and the actual union election, which corporations hate, because they're haters. OK, they hate it because the move would give them less time to propagandize and/or harass their workers into voting the way they want them to vote, but some pro-labor analysts wonder whether it'll do any good, since corporations can just schedule more intense anti-union meetings with their workers. I don't agree -- at some point, all these meetings just interfere with the job, and managers will complain about it.

Think Progress tells us about Tunisia's new constitution, which guarantees freedoms our own Constitution doesn't even have. The Tunisian National Assembly apparently wrote environmental protections, equal pay rights, access to health care, and safe working conditions (among other things) into their nation's constitution -- even in America, we're left to infer most of these from our Constitution's text. Of course plenty of countries have plenty of terrific laws they don't or can't enforce, but this is still a happy event -- except, perhaps, for right-wing attention hounds looking for something to scream SHARIA!!!!! at.

Finally, scientists develop a bionic hand that would actually its wearer to feel sensations in his or her fingers. The hand is kind of bulky and can't currently operate without a slew of external wires, but scientists can work on that, even if the Ken Hams of the world say it offends God.

Action: internet freedom in Turkey, "liberal" media spin, and net neutrality.

The Turkish parliament will mull amendments to its 2007 internet censorship law this week, and could well make internet censorship in Turkey much worse. Can you imagine our government routinely censoring websites? Can you imagine the list of censored websites approaching 30,000? Can you imagine our government handing out fines or jail time for comments you make on Facebook? That's what "government control of the internet" looks like -- not (as some right-wing idiots say) our government forcing the big telecom corporations to treat their network traffic neutrally -- and it happens all the time in Turkey. And the amendments under consideration will make this situation worse: they'll give government officials the power to block websites at will without so much as a judge's review, they'll force small businesses to retain all their internet records for a year, and they'll crack down on cafés that don't block websites the way the government would have them do it. We're not Turkish citizens, but we love freedom, and we know there's no such thing as bad PR. So Access Now helps you tell the Turkish President to reject internet censorship.

Meanwhile, the New York Times tried to tell us earlier this week that the public would prefer President Obama to talk less about income inequality and more about "opportunity" -- just as Republicans would, and what a happy coincidence, that! The evidence for this conclusion? A single Pew poll from late January that found almost 70% of Americans wanting our government to do something to ameliorate income inequality, while a little over 80% wanted our government to do something to ameliorate poverty. Over two out of three Americans wanting our government to attack income inequality may not sound like a rightward lurch to you and I, but to the Times, it demonstrated "'broad consensus' that government should help people escape poverty, but 'substantially less agreement' that government should act to reduce the gap between the rich and everyone else." How "substantially" different can one supermajority really be from another? And, ah, doesn't the fight against poverty overlap with the fight against income inequality? If you want to take the New York Times to task for its folly, the link above will tell you how.

Finally, the FCC has received over one million comments from good citizens like you urging the FCC to restore net neutrality; FCC Chair Tom Wheeler supposedly described the public reaction as "boffo," but he also used to be a lobbyist for the same big telecoms which aim to kill network neutrality once and for all, so we can't just hope he'll do the right thing. So Free Press helps you call your Congressfolk and urge them to tell Mr. Wheeler to save net neutrality. A lot is at stake: if you like your favorite liberal blog, for example, consider the possibility that it won't be able to afford whatever tribute the big telecom corporations want to exact, which means you either won't be able to see it or it'll load so slowly that you'll go to some other website that's paid its tribute and thus loads more quickly. Will that website will be better? Maybe, but given the sensationalism and titillation our big telecom corporations seem to prefer, what are the chances, really? More likely you'll be stuck with a choice of clips from TLC reality shows, when you really want to read about the GMO labeling fight. We must not let this happen, not in our America.

Around the table: from right-wing lies to municipal fiber-optic goodness.

Talking Points Memo highlights some of the lousy reporting about the CBO report on the Affordable Care Act. Long story short: the CBO report didn't actually say the ACA would cost us 2.5 million jobs over 10 years, but that folks would retire earlier and work less at least partly as a result of getting better health care, to the tune of 2.5 million job-equivalents over 10 years. Note well how many "liberal" media bubbleheads avoid telling us that and instead spend their time trying to handicap the future, as if our democracy is a big horse-race, or as if their "analyses" have absolutely nothing to do with how that future comes into being.

Huffington Post/YouGov poll finds that over half of Americans think our current budget deficit has increased under President Obama, which is precisely the opposite of the truth. We haven't forgotten that Mr. Bush fought two wars off-budget? Or that little $700 billion financial services bailout Mr. Bush rammed down our throats? The wars, the bailout, and Tha Bush Mobb tax cuts all helped make the deficit $1.2 billion at Mr. Obama's inauguration; now it's $514 billion. It's a good thing our strong "liberal" media makes this point so consistently. Nah, just kidding -- I wanted to see if I could type that without my fingers seiz

Rep. Pete Sessions (E-TX) unfurls this flatugasm: "I believe it is immoral for this country to have as a policy extending long-term unemployments (sic) to people rather than us working on creation of jobs." After all, how could you possibly do both? It is a well-known scientific fact, after all, that Congress only has the power to work on one task, ever.

WalMart says fourth quarter sales and profits will likely be down, and fingers food stamp cuts as one of the causes, since about one in five WalMart shoppers uses food stamps. Of course I also question the wisdom of moves like selling 32" HDTVs for under a hundred bucks on Black Friday long before the market supports that, but I bet they're only saying food stamp cuts are hurting their profits because they must think no one's going to hear them. Too late now.

Finally, the Thom Hartmann Show describes The Gig, the publicly-owned fiber-optic broadband network in Chattanooga, Tennessee that moves data 50 times faster than the average American broadband network and costs less than, for example, a month of broadband from Comcast in my area. And if Chattanooga had let, say, Verizon build its network, would it be as fast? Would it be as cheap? I think not -- they'd care about what's in it for them, when Chattanooga has much more of an incentive to care about what's in it for Chattanooga's people.

Action: Haiti, education for the disabled, and GMO labeling.

Last month marked the fourth anniversary of the earthquake that struck southern Haiti, killing over 100,000 good Haitians and displacing perhaps a million more, while also destroying or severely damaging almost 300,000 Haitian buildings. Now only half of the rubble has been cleared, and nearly 300,000 Haitians still live in temporary camps -- and nearly half of these camps do not even enjoy basic health services. Worse than all of that? Relief efforts have spent over five dollars on temporary housing for every dollar they've spent on permanent housing; I understand the importance of triage, and I know Haiti was none too prosperous to begin with, but this is four years later, and we can do better than that. Hence Action Aid USA helps you tell Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to introduce the Assessing Progress in Haiti Act. It doesn't sound like much, but these assessments can shine enough light to get things moving, and Mr. Reid doesn't have to worry about whether the House will pass this bill -- it already has. Mr. Reid's proven to have some clout on the Hill -- his refusal to move "free" trade fast-track has, at the very least, saved us from the TPP for a few more months -- and he ought to use his clout here.

Meanwhile, Jamie Principado of Littleton, CO has begun a petition on change.org that helps you urge the House of Representatives to pass HR 3505, the TEACH Act, which would help disabled students gain equal access to educational materials. Mr. Principado attended Florida State University with the goal of becoming a teacher of blind students like himself, but discovered that FSU's online classes didn't mesh with his screen reader very well, and then FSU's administration didn't try to resolve his issues, instead telling him that he try an "easier" major, which every motivated student loves hearing from people who think they're too busy to help anyone. The TEACH Act (the acronym's not too bad) would enhance federal laws so that they do not merely hand out "accessible" materials, but ensure that those materials really are accessible by the technologies disabled students use; the bill creates no new mandates, but merely makes the mandates that already exist work more efficiently. HR 3505's main sponsor is Republican Thomas Petri of Wisconsin; other co-sponsors include Democrat Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Republican Jon Runyan of New Jersey. What's the House waiting for? Our input, I suppose.

Finally, the Grocery Manufacturer's Association of America has been pushing for a weak, voluntary genetically-modified food labeling law, one that a) might lull large segments of the population into thinking that big food corporations actually care about food labeling, b) would hamstring the FDA's ability to regulate genetically-modified foods, and c) would let corporations label their Frankenfoods as "natural." We need not get debate whether going-against-nature-is-part-of-nature-too to understand that GMO foods are not necessarily safe just because the people making gazillions of dollars from them say they're safe. Of course, the GMA (not to be confused with GMOs) has also threatened to sue any state that dares pass a GMO-labeling law; we've discussed the legal implications of such efforts in the second paragraph here. (Spoiler alert: GMO labeling laws are not unconstitutional, though big food's corporate lawyers have BS'd their case in a way I might admire if I were not more spiritually advanced.) So the Organic Consumers Association helps you tell the FDA to reject any plans they might have to issue weak, voluntary GMO-labeling laws. Because, very often, corporations need to be made to do the right thing.

Action: smarter sentencing, robocalls, and paycheck fairness.

Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee passed S 1410, the Smarter Sentencing Act, by a surprising 13-5 vote late last week; the bill still needs to get through the full Senate and the full House, but that 13-5 is encouraging, as is the bill's list of sponsors (4 of 10, including Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul, are Republicans). S 1410 would halve most mandatory sentences and widen "safety valve" exceptions for federal drug offenders, and would apply the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 retroactively for federal crack offenders -- but it would also establish new mandatory minimums for federal cases involving terrorism, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. I see why they've added the new mandatories -- domestic violence offenders, in particular, rarely get the jail time other offenders do -- but I still think we ought to let judges judge. The House bill is HR 3382, introduced by Rep. Scott (D-VA) and Labrador (R-ID); it's more a start than an end product, but Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell your Congressfolk to support it.

Meanwhile, the FCC issued regulations in mid-October mandating that telemarketers should only call you if you agreed in advance, in writing, that you'd like to hear from them -- they still have to get your written consent even if they claim an "established business relationship" with you. Sounds common-sensical, right? But apparently corporations are still placing robocalls without so much as a text message from their targets indicating consent. And that's something the FCC ought to know about, regardless of whether corporations are pressuring them to be lax in enforcing this regulation. So Consumers Union helps you tell the FCC to better enforce its rules preventing robocallers from pestering you, if in fact robocallers are pestering you. What could be more inviolable in America, after all, than a contract between two parties? And why do our elites always seem to argue that the larger individual parties need to be "free" to run roughshod over the rights of other parties to be left the hell alone?

Finally, President Obama did bring up paycheck fairness in his State of the Union address -- even dropped in a Mad Men reference. Women still make about 77 cents for every dollar a man earns; if you adjust strictly for similar qualifications and experience, that figure would rise a bit, but it still wouldn't be a dollar for every dollar a man earns, and you'd hesitate, I'd think, to adjust for similar qualifications and experience when you consider that women face pressures men don't face that result in dissimilar qualifications and experience to begin with. S 84/HR 377, the Paycheck Fairness Act, still sits out there waiting for Congressional action; the bill would bolster the Equal Pay Act by (among other things) preventing employers from retaliating against workers who talk about their wages with their co-workers, since that's often the only way women find out their employers are discriminating against them. The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act already.

Around the table: an actual plan to save the Post Office, and other stories.

Bill advances through California state legislature requiring law enforcement to get a warrant before conducting drone surveillance. The state's lower house passed the bill 59-5, meaning the bill has attracted actual bipartisan support; it still must clear the Senate (which might try to weaken the bill -- by, say, letting law enforcement hold onto data longer than six months) and be signed by Gov. Brown, whose photo accompanies the word "mercurial" in the dictionary.

David Dayen describes how the U.S. Post Office can "save itself": by providing banking services, as it did up until 1967. The move would make the Post Office money and keep tens of millions of good Americans who don't live near banks or can't afford bank fees away from check-cashing joints and payday lenders -- and President Obama might not even need Congressional approval to do it. Let Republicans squeal AMERICAN CAESAR!!!!! or SOSHULIZM!!!! at a man trying to help more people get basic financial services, that's what I say.

Mr. Obama states that Congress, not he, must reschedule marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act -- but the law actually says the Attorney General can do it. Mr. Obama should reschedule pot -- it certainly doesn't belong in Schedule I, nominally reserved for drugs with no medicinal use, while much worse drugs like coke and meth bask in the relative sun of Schedule II. Possibly Mr. Obama doesn't want to get impeached over it (see previous paragraph), which I insist is a pickle he wouldn't be in if he'd done more with his 70-seat House majority and 20-seat Senate majority during 2009 and 2010.

Right-wing law professor makes the case against early voting, and it's partly what you might expect (Election Day is a solemn affair), but it's also partly what you'd never expect -- a discussion of two science fiction writers who have written about the moment when "the nanocircuitry that will inevitably be in everyone’s head constantly polls everyone about every decision and aggregates the results." Setting aside whether or not we should use fiction as evidence of arguments ostensibly rooted in reality, I can think of a few neuroscientists who might not find such nanocircuitry "inevitable."

One good development coming out of the Farm Bill: negotiators stripped out a Steve King (E-IA) amendment which would have hamstrung state governments from regulating agricultural products made within those states but which can be sold in other states. You'd have thought Mr. King would support "states' rights" in this instance, but since he's not a real conservative, he supports whatever big agricultural corporations want, which is NO REGULASHUNZ EVAH!!!!!

Finally, Jim Hightower describes a local innovation in Wisconsin, where otherwise-unused cheese brine gets added to rock salt to prevent rock salt from running off into the water supply. You know why I love doing this? Because I get to learn that "(y)ou want to use provolone or mozzarella" to mix with rock salt, because of their own relatively high salt content.

Action: Texas vs. Mr. Munoz, fracking on public lands, and the Keystone XL pipeline.

First things first: you no doubt know that the state of Texas forced Marlise Munoz's family to keep her on life support for nearly two months because she was pregnant when she suffered the apparent pulmonary embolism that left her brain dead. Texas law doesn't allow health care providers to apply advanced directives (like the one Ms. Munoz had one, expressing her wish to be taken off life support if brain dead) to pregnant patients, because SANKTITIEZ OF LIFEZ!!!!!! But Texas law apparently also regards brain death as legal death, which is why Judge Wallace was, ultimately, able to enforce Ms. Munoz's stated wish. And yet Ms. Munoz's husband, who fought to have her wishes enforced in court, now faces crushing medical bills. The state forces you to ignore your own wishes and then makes you pay out the nose for that? I do not believe Barry Goldwater would call any of that conservative. Thus Daily Kos helps you tell the state of Texas and the John Peter Smith hospital to absorb Mr. Munoz's medical bills. Yes, of course I would have loved to save the child's life. No, I do not believe in running roughshod over other people's rights to do that.

Meanwhile, President Obama's State of the Union address did instruct us that "climate change is a fact" -- and what a shame we regard that as progress, after years of George W. Bush almost single-handedly making climate change denialism mainstream -- but Mr. Obama also committed to continuing to develop natural gas. Of course Mr. Obama was careful to tell us he would be mindful of our safety when developing new sources of gas, and even told us natural gas would result in fewer carbon emissions (which, hello, is far from a sure thing!), but fracking continues to pollute our sources of clean water for drinking, bathing, and washing, so how do we intend to accomplish that? Gas drilling corporations already get more than enough assistance from our government, so the Sierra Club helps you tell Mr. Obama to end oil and gas fracking on public lands. Yes, Mr. Obama's support for higher renewable energy funding and for EPA carbon emission regulations comprise a good start, but we have the duty to ensure he doesn't just start the job of saving this planet from pollution.

Finally, the State Department finally put its Keystone XL report out on Friday, and while it does concede that the Keystone XL pipeline will "contribute to cumulative global GHG emissions" -- to the tune of adding the carbon emission equivalent of 5.7 million new cars on the road -- it also says "(a)pproval or denial...remains unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands," which is a way of throwing up one's hands and walking away from one's responsibilities. But the State Department's Inspector General still hasn't released a report examining potential conflicts-of-interest concerning the report's writing -- which had heavy involvement from a corporation that used to do business with TransCanada, the pipeline's builder. And we still should consider TransCanada's horrible pipe-safety record, all the oil-train derailments that have plagued our continent lately, and the report's stunning finding that the Keystone XL pipeline will create exactly 50 jobs. So both the Sierra Club and CREDO help you tell your government to reject the Keystone XL pipeline and protect good Americans from its ill effects.

Around the table: inequality and capitalism, Pete Seeger and the South, and George Zimmerman's next endeavor, among other stories.

NYT op-ed describes forthcoming book by economist Thomas Piketty, which suggets that inequality is a feature of capitalism, not a bug, and that capitalism ultimately destroys democracy unless we impose "confiscatory tax rates" on our wealthiest members. The assertion that Mr. Piketty's book "defies left and right orthodoxy" doesn't convince me at all -- the main problem the two quoted left-of-center economists seem to have with Mr. Piketty is his pessimism. I also suspect Mr. Piketty's book would only represent "watershed" thinking among decadent elites, not normal folks like us.

Chris Kromm at the Institute for Southern Studies writes about how Pete Seeger's experiences in the South shaped his career. Mr. Seeger passed away last week at the age of 94, as you no doubt know. We go from the moment Mr. Seeger first saw Samantha Bumgarner play the banjo in North Carolina to Mr. Seeger's work assisting Texan folklorist Alan Lomax to his association with Arkansan (and later co-Weaver) Lee Hayes -- and this only takes us up to 1940.

Citizens for Tax Justice laments the sheer number of tax cut proposals emanating from 14 states and the District of Columbia, mostly from Republican-dominated states but n.b. that Democrat Andrew Cuomo of New York gets the biggest paragraph. The good news? A lot of these proposals meet solid resistance, even in states like Oklahoma -- and you remember how badly Louisiana Gov. Jindal's regressive proposals crashed and burned in illiberal Louisiana last year.

Paul Waldman proposes that right-wingers' irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton could aid her in a 2016 Presidential bid. Unless, of course, Republicans just pretend it never happened, which they're very good at, and which the "liberal" media is very good at enabling -- and which whitewashing will be made easier, not harder, by the fact that you'll have people voting in 2016 who were mere infants when the House impeached Bill Clinton.

Damon Linker asks if a defamation lawsuit by a leading climate scientist will "doom" the National Review. I'm not exclaiming we can only hope! only because defamation is, and should be, a difficult charge to prove, albeit one Mark Steyn is making easier by running his mouth. But William F. Buckley, Jr.'s commitment to "excommunicating" the "cranks" has always been overrated -- the man was once a white supremacist himself! -- and the magazine certainly doesn't perform that task for the conservative movement now.

Finally, George Zimmerman, lately acquitted of wrongdoing for his shooting of Trayvon Martin, plans to take part in a celebrity boxing match for charity. At least one rapper has stepped up and said he'd like to join the match, but I suspect the number of people who'd like to throw a punch at Mr. Zimmerman is much, much longer than that. (At least one commenter warns, half-jokingly or less, of the possibility Mr. Zimmerman might hide a handgun in his spit bucket.)