Thieves in the Temple.

Action: net neutrality, "liberal" media coverage of "free" trade, and the return of the Freedom Flotilla.

We didn't stop the House Appropriations Committee from passing that nefarious legislative rider effectively defunding FCC efforts to enforce net neutrality, but the fight isn't over, because now the full House will vote on the Financial Services and General Governmental Appropriations bill that contains the rider, and CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to stand tall for net neutrality and fight any efforts to undercut the FCC's efforts to enforce its net neutrality rules. As you know, the rider would forbid the FCC from spending any funds to enforce net neutrality rules as long as three lawsuits against net neutrality are working their way through the courts -- and that process, as you know, could take years, meaning we could go for years without our government enforcing the internet freedom rules we fought for. I'm not so old I've forgotten the day Republicans supported net neutrality because net neutrality meant freedom to their constituents, too. Now they only support whatever their big corporate donors tell them to support. But if we raise our voices enough, we'll beat them.

Meanwhile, how did NPR's Morning Edition cover Congress's granting of "fast-track" authority for "free" trade deals this past Thursday? By talking to three corporate lobyists and zero "free" trade or "fast-track" opponents, even though the number of "free" trade or "fast-track" opponents in America is considerably higher than zero. The Morning Edition mentioned that opposition, of course, and then allowed one lobbyist to answer, in much the same way President Obama did, that "(t)he critics are just wrong." If we're "just wrong," it shouldn't be that damn easy to describe the multitudinous ways we're wrong, but if lobbyists don't do that, you can go ahead and assume it's because they can't. But the pro-"free" trade folks don't have winning arguments -- they say we're "just wrong," or they say ZOMG TEH CHINESE WILL CONTROLZ TEH WORLDZ!!!!, or they say we have valid concerns that can be addressed after their pet "free" trade deals get passed. The FAIR link at the beginning of this paragraph helps you contact NPR's ombudsman and ask why "free" trade opponents get such short shrift during this "balanced" "debate."

Meanwhile, the Freedom Flotilla III is currently heading to Gaza, to deliver humanitarian aid and protest the Israel/Egypt blockade thereof, but Israel has this unfortunate habit of attacking these flotillas when they come around -- in 2010, Israeli forces attacked several ships in the Flotilla, and killed nine activists, all because of, guess what, "ties to terror organizations" that remain unproven five short years later. Freedom Flotilla II never got off the ground in 2011, largely due to international opposition from elite governments if not the citizenry they nominally represent, and with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu having just received the blessing of the voters at the polls to continue his reign of error, things could go badly again. So Just Foreign Policy helps you tell U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to ensure the Flotilla reaches its destination unscathed. This is hardly some bleeding heart liberal position, certainly not when former IDF military intelligence head Major General Shlomo Gazit calls for the Flotilla's peaceful passage -- he thinks Israel can win the argument by not attacking the Flotilla, so let's at least have that argument.

Around the table: starring the usual villains -- reactionary politicians, the "liberal" media, and corporate greedheads.

"In a fast-changing culture," asks the Washington Post, "can the GOP get in step with modern America?" Short answer: sure, just as the 76ers can make the NBA playoffs next season. But more likely Republicans will pretend to embrace societal changes in order to get power, and then once in power, do all they can do to roll them back. Hey, it worked for them in 2000. (Oh, and the first sentence of paragraph 15 should read "would be a profound shift," not "is a profound shift." "Liberal" media think we can't read.)

Despite the Supreme Court's ruling, five states plan to dig in their heels and oppose the new gay marriage reality in some way -- including preventing states from issuing marriage licenses at all! Which would never survive a Supreme Court challenge now, but in the meantime, dig how right-wing morons now all think they're Rosa Parks! Of course, Rosa Parks was personally oppressed by laws forcing her to the back of the bus, whereas no law compels heterosexuals to marry someone of their own gender.

Ho hum, CNN reports spotting an ISIS flag at a gay rights rally in London that turns out to be a flag depicting icons of sex toys. I'd be inclined to assign at least some of the blame for such confusion to the flag-maker, but not this time -- you see what you want to see, and I'd actually prefer to think someone totally trolled CNN, which should tell you my opinion of CNN.

ProPublica describes state/corporate efforts to kill community broadband efforts. If your tolerance for corporate whining is already low, don't read this article, lest plaints like "taxpayer money should not fund potential competitors to private companies" blow your blood pressure. (Seriously: big corporations won't build out to rural/poor urban areas in the heartland, but shouldn't have any competition? Bunch of diaper-loaded brats.)

Pennsylvania pharmaceutical corporation Mylan "inverts" into a Dutch corporation to avoid American taxes -- then wants FTC protection from a hostile takeover because they're still basically an American corporation! I've never rooted for a hostile takeover before, but I'm rooting for this one. By the way, excellent job messaging on the part of CTJ -- the post's full title is "Mylan to U.S. Government: We Want Everything for Free," as if they're the real welfare queens or something.

Finally, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says Republicans should take the anti-gay marriage plank out of their platform. But he adds that they should fight for the "religious liberty" to go on discriminating against people -- and the "religious liberty" "fight" will extend to the "conscience" of county clerks who give out marriage licenses -- so his promise is really a null one. Also, see first paragraph above.

Action: voting rights, and medical malpractice.

I know the Supreme Court's been on a bit of a hot streak lately, but let's not forget that they dealt a crushing blow to the Voting Rights Act just two years ago. H.R. 2867/S. 1659, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, would institute a new pre-clearance formula (which the Supreme Court's decision all but invited Congress to do), and this bill would, apparently, represent an improvement over the similar voting rights fix Mr. Leahy introduced in 2014 -- the new bill's preclearance formula, which would force states with 15 voting rights violations over the past decade, or only 10 if any one of those violations occurred statewide, to pre-clear changes in voting rights laws with the Department of Justice, would cover 13 states (versus five for last year's bill). Might Democrats actually be putting forward a strong bill, daring the Republicans to list their objections, and then trying to win the resulting argument? That's a lot to hope for, but why hope, when you can do? Hence both Common Cause and People for the American Way help you tell your Congressfolk to support the Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Meanwhile, Wendy Woods Esty of Brooktondale, NY, helps you tell New York state Senators to pass A. 285/S. 911, also known as "Lavern's Law." The bill would allow victims of medical malpractice to start the statute-of-limitations clock when they discover the malpractice, not when the malpractice occurred, so that folks like the late Lavern Wilkinson, a 41-year-old home health aide and single mother, will be better able to seek redress from the courts when their doctors do them wrong. (Ms. Wilkinson, of Brooklyn, NY, didn't learn of her lung cancer until after the statute of limitations had expired, and by then, the cancer had become terminal.) The state Assembly has already passed the bill, but state Senate leader John Flanagan has hasn't allowed the bill to come to a vote yet, despite considerably public outrage over Ms. Wilkinson's plight and support for the bill from several Republican Senators. But the Big Stick of Bad PR can be turned on anyone, especially politicians who take their marching orders from people who think all lawsuits are frivolous except the ones they like. So let's turn it on them.

Around the table: more stories about race, faith, and gay marriage.

Spiderman creator Stan Lee says Peter Parker should be straight and white, not because straight whites are better than everyone else, but because Peter Parker has always been straight and white. But Spiderman isn't history, it's myth, and origin myths, especially, can be rewritten and reinterpreted. A culture with 11 Spiderman origin myths might well be a richer one.

Charlotte, NC authorities determine that a fire consuming Briar Creek Baptist Church, a mostly black church, was an arson. Briar Creek Pastor Mannix Kinsey has already said he forgives the arsonist, and that "buildings...can be built over"; I hope he's not just saying that because he thinks it's what he's supposed to say, because I'd prefer to believe folks can be that secure in their faith.

New York Times warns against Greece leaving the EU and abandoning the Euro, because it might be painful. Greece has endured six-plus years of rather severe pain already, but I guess that doesn't count for the "liberal" media, especially now that the good citizens of Greece elected an actual leftist to be Prime Minister.

Texas Pastor Rick Scarborough now says that of course he didn't literally mean he'd set himself on fire if the Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage. No, he was merely referencing an obscure spiritual called "Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego" oh never mind this explanation is already boring me. Anyway, I knew he didn't have the guts to do it. So let's never speak of him again.

The inimitable Sen. Jim Inhofe (E-OK) says his gay friends also disapprove of the Supreme Court's recent gay marriage decision. What would the plaint of a gay Friend of Inhofe sound like? Of course we don't deserve the deepest and most intimate emotional connection love gives us -- not until electroshock treatments turn us straight? Mr. Inhofe also describes the Roberts Court as a "very liberal court," which I guess means he's waiting for a President Scott Walker to replace the Court's four nominal liberals with rabid raccoons.

Finally, the Straight Dope takes up the matter of whether car alarms actually protect cars (versus whether they just annoy neighbors). I hear them often enough it no longer even occurs to me that a car's actually getting jacked when I hear it, but that might just be me. Anyway, it seems like having a variety of anti-theft mechanisms -- which may or may not include car alarms -- might be the way to go.

Yesterday.

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, by a 5-4 margin, that the U.S. Constitution "protects the right of same-sex couples to marry." And as surely as, in Justice Kennedy's words, "(t)he nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times," the nature of progress is that we may not always see that as it's happening, either. But yesterday was a day we saw progress; it was a day that will fortify us through all the other days progress doesn't seem to happen fast enough. Yesterday was a great day.

Action: funding anti-pollution efforts, and giving special needs students in North Carolina more tools to fight abuse.

H.R. 2822, the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2016, is yet another appropriations bill that the corporatists in Congress have used to take the will of the American people hostage. I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say the electorate did not return both Houses of Congress to Republicans out of a deeply-held desire to defund new climate change standards, cut money for protecting endangered species, or keep EPA staffing levels so low they can't do the work the people have charged them with doing, yet H.R. 2822 would accomplish all of that nonetheless. Please, Lord, let one of these morons utter the phrase "we're doing this for our constituents," so that the world will know that a great number of our House Reps think that the big polluting corporations that threw nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars around in 2014 are their "constituents," versus whom you or I would say their constituents are, i.e., the residents of their districts. Friends of the Earth helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 2822 and to protect our air, water, and climate.

Meanwhile, Becky Bass of Monroe, NC, has begun a petition on Change.org that helps you tell the state of North Carolina to mandate that special education classrooms, therapy rooms, and resource rooms all equip themselves with cameras that can record audio as well as video. Why? Because children who are non-verbal (like her daughter, who has apparently come home with bruises) aren't able to tell their parents what happened to them at school. As with the police-wearing-body-cameras debate, we will hear, from both left and right, that putting cameras in schoolrooms is a lot like Big Brother. Well, not exactly -- the state putting cameras in your bedroom would be rather like Big Brother, as would the state putting cameras in private corporate offices. Putting cameras in the rooms where public servants serve us is rather more like our right as taxpayers. And if allowing the reactionary legislature of North Carolina to look less reactionary is the price we must pay to do justice here, I'm willing to pay it.

Around the table: from two positive Supreme Court decisions to the bright side of recent "free" trade battles.

U.S. Supreme Court decides, by 6-3 margin, to preserve Affordable Care Act subsidies for states that did not run their own exchanges. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, could not bring himself to believe that Congress intended to "destroy" the health insurance industry with the ACA, despite "more than a few examples of inartful drafting"; it's good to see him take a few halting steps outside the Prison of Literalism.

That was no better than the second-best Supreme Court decision of the day, though: the Court also ruled, by a 5-4 margin, that folks could sue to redress housing discrimination under the Fair Housing Act even if they couldn't prove intent to discriminate -- since if the result is racist, who cares what the "intent" was? Justice Kennedy even put the word "animus" in his majority opinion, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he did it just to piss off Justice Scalia.

Bill Scher warns that "Republicans Ignore the Pope at Their Peril." I doubt that, since Republicans never seem to suffer for all the mammon-worshiping they do, but Mr. Scher does a public service in noting how quickly Republicans inject religion into politics when it supports their ends, but how quickly they criticize Pope Francis for doing the same when it doesn't.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, arguably the most unpopular Governor in the land, is running for President, and we honor this event most appropriately, I think, by linking to this Onion article entitled "Bobby Jindal Not Sure He's Willing to Put Family Through Two-Month Presidential Campaign." You know what might actually be better, though? If he and all the others had a pretty solid five percent base of supporters who'd run through a wall for them, denying Republicans a nominee by convention-time.

Finally, Yes! magazine (who else?) does some serious bright-side looking after the nefarious "free" trade "fast-track" bill passed the Senate earlier this week. Long story short: we didn't stop it, but we did a lot of good anyway -- and the public will get to look at the TPP (at last! After all those wonderful early reviews!) for two full months before Congress can vote on it, which we can only hope will be like sunlight to a vampire.

Action: Social Security benefits, summer meals for kids, and GMO food labeling.

Not too long ago, the liberal blogger Eschaton called for an expansion of Social Security benefits, and this flew in the face of "conventional" "wisdom," which held that Social Security is totally unsustainable and future seniors (ahem!) will have to accept benefit cuts. As with so much "conventional" "wisdom," it's rubbish -- Social Security doesn't have any problems that can't be ameliorated by a growing economy and an end to the $119,000 cap on taxable income -- but it's good to see folks widening the palette of the possible. Just last Congress, two Senators (Messrs. Begich of Alaska and Harkin of Iowa) introduced legislation that would have increased Social Security benefits; there's no chance of such a bill passing in this Congress, but it's the right thing to do and we should push for it anyway -- especially now that corporations are doing their level best to ruin the pensions they're supposedly running on our behalf, so Social Security may be all we have left. So People for the American Way helps you tell the White House Conference on Aging that you support expanding Social Security benefits.

Meanwhile, US Action helps you tell Congress to support H.R. 1728/S. 613, the Summer Meals Act, and H.R. 2715/S. 1539, the Stop Child Summer Hunger Act. What would these bills do? The Summer Meals Act would operate summer food service programs (which you may generally find at summer school programs, public parks, and some private centers like the Y) in districts where more than 40% of children are eligible for free or discounted school lunch meals, while the Stop Child Summer Hunger Act would allow children who'd be eligible for free or discounted school lunch meals to continue to get that benefit (via a USDA-issued "summer EBT card" worth about $150 per child) during the summer months. The two programs sort of work hand-in-hand, which is nice when you see it. And who would oppose these bills? Some Scrooge McSmallgovernment who can't speak a sentence of fewer than a hundred words, that's who. I suppose they regard childhood hunger as a character-builder, though reasonable people regard hunger as a way of causing children pain and stunting their growth and reducing their ability to fight off illness.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Quaker (and Quaker's owner, PepsiCo) to support mandatory GMO labeling (and, ah, also to stop funding campaigns opposing GMO labeling), then Just Label It still helps you do that. Only this time, you'll be doing that over the phone, because their action tool will patch you through to Quaker HQ. Quaker prides itself on being health-friendly and family-friendly, but it's spent buku bucks to defeat state-level GMO-labeling initiatives (which have come close to passing in Oregon and Colorado, and somewhat less close to passing in Washington and California). And I remain unimpressed with assertions that opposing GMO crops is like denying climate change. Climate change denialism and GMO-positive science both come from where? Corporations. And there's no denying that genetically-manipulating crops in order to withstand proprietary pesticides and herbicides is short-sighted, dangerous, and nowhere near as conducive to feeding the hungry as it is to increasing corporate profits. The CEOs with their gilded plumbing in their 19 vacation homes? They're in food corporations, too.

Around the table: a horrible truth about terrorism, and other stories.

Ho hum, U.S. Military Academy study finds that right-wing terrorist attacks outnumbered Muslim terrorist attacks in America by a ratio of about nine to one. And yet our "liberal" media does not refer to these terrorists as "an existential threat." When right-wingers take this result personally, be sure to make them point out what's factually incorrect in the Military Academy study.

HHS Inspector General finds fraud and abuse still plague Medicare's Part D drug insurance program, with at least 1,400 pharmacies engaging in "questionable practices." Again: when right-wingers point to fraud as a reason "government just doesn't work," they're really saying they don't have the cojones to make it work. Citizenship is so hard, after all.

U.S. Supreme Court rules that law enforcement must serve Los Angeles hotel owners with a warrant if they want info on those hotels' guests. Bad news? It was another 5-4 win, with Anthony Kennedy (who's pretty good on law-and-order issues) joining the Court's nominally liberal wing. One would like to be able to count on more than Justice Kennedy's law-and-order streak.

"To Better Protect Workers," the Center for Effective Government announces, "We Need More Wage Inspectors and Stronger Enforcement." Which Republicans will block, because DEFICITZ!!!! Well, really they block it because it works, and you can't run against incompetent government when government is competent.

The Chicago Tribune runs a story on Scott Walker's little experiment in corporate welfare, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, an entity so corrupt that no one reviewed approximately one out of every 14 WEDC awards, totaling over $135 million. We can't discount the possibility that the "liberal" media has picked up this story so that when Scott Walker becomes President, they can talk about all the "adversity" he's had to overcome.

Very conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judge rules against corporations arguing that filling out the form saying you have a religious objection to birth control itself violates their religious freedom. I just hope he doesn't find pastors setting themselves on fire outside his door.

Action: healthy pensions, vigorous whistleblower protections, and continued conservation funding.

H.R. 2844/S. 1631, the Keep Our Pension Promises Act, would take away the ability of pension trustees to force potentially debilitating benefit cuts -- an ability they only just gained in last year's disgusting "cromnibus" spending bill -- and the Pension Rights Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support it, and thus keep pensions as strong as those who provided them promised they would be. I have no patience for folks who squeal ZOMG TEH PENSHUNZ AREZ UNDERFUNDEDZ BY TEH TRILLYUNZ!!!! They employ scare numbers -- if someone tells you pensions are "underfunded" by $2 trillion, for example, they're not telling you that that's $2 trillion over 40 years, and they're not telling you that America has over 300 state and local pension plans. Do all that division and the number suddenly isn't so scary! And they're also not telling you that these projections depend on the economy not growing at all, which is pretty much against everyone's self-interest. And let's not get started on the massive fees state and local pensions are paying to hedge fund managers for thoroughly mediocre advice. As Paul Craig Roberts said many years ago, pensions are about all that's left for our elites to steal. So let's fight to keep them.

Meanwhile, S. 1599, the Criminal Antitrust Anti-Retaliation Act, would, as its title suggests, protect workers from retaliation if they report antitrust law violations, whether they report such criminal acts internally or to our government. The bill (a Chuck Grassley/Patrick Leahy production) would also let workers file antitrust whistleblower claims with the Department of Labor, plus it would let them get a jury trial, like we all deserve no matter what corporatists or "forced arbitration" apologists think is "better for the economy." And the bill would also guarantee certain rights to the whistleblower, such as the rights to reinstatement, attorneys' fees, damages, and back pay. Barack Obama may not agree, but folks who blow the whistle on corporate or governmental wrongdoing are extremely courageous, knowing, as they do, that their employer or their government can turn their lives upside down, to the point where they're destitute and their families are pretty sure none of it was worth it. So the National Whistleblowers Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1599, and thus support good citizens risking a lifetime of trouble to do the right, honorable, and lawful thing.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to permanently authorize and fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund, CREDO still helps you do that. The LWCF, 50 years young now, expires in September, but some Congressfolk have lately been acting like they got a mandate from the electorate in November to gut it. Of course, the only mandate that matters to these Congressfolk is the one that comes from their corporate paymasters -- the mandate that mining and drilling corporations need more land to mine and drill in, and some CEO's 29th vacation home needs its plumbing gilded, the public be damned. Clean water, clean air, wildlife protection, big game hunting, fishing, camping, caving -- all useless to Republicans in their quest to service their big donors. Of course Republicans don't say that, because then they'd lose the argument -- they say that states should buy up private land for such uses, not our federal government. Rep. Bishop (R-UT) even says that when our federal government buys land under the LWCF, it takes revenue from states and localities (well, specifically, from children, nice hostage-taking there!). Like those states and localities aren't falling all over themselves to give up those revenues to induce corporations to do business there!

Around the table: fast, lean, and frightening.

By the time you read this, the "free" trade "fast-track" bill will likely have cleared the Senate. Now for the upside: all the TPP's secret negotiators haven't finished the deal yet, and once that comes up for a (very fast!) vote, we'll have yet another opportunity to express our will. Also, we are reminded, as the old saw goes, that we don't need a third party in America -- we need a second.

Charleston shooter Dylann Roof is a terrorist, but the Washington Post's Philip Bump labors mightily to argue that he's not. Because it'll just give him what he wants, a concern I never heard anyone in the "liberal" media voice over calling Osama bin Laden a terrorist. And though we should, as Mr. Bump says, call fewer folks "terrorists," we shouldn't wait until the white person does it before we voice that objection.

Tony Blair ally says Mr. Blair now thinks the Iraq War was a "mistake." Well, fuck him, too, then -- he won't feel any of the consequences of his actions, after all. How about some love for the people who were always right about the Iraq War being a mistake, and who fought against it from the beginning?

Dave Cieslewicz at Isthmus believes the real problem with Scott Walker is that he "believes in nothing." Scott Walker does believe in winning, but, as Mr. Cieslewicz demonstrates, that's basically the same thing as believing in nothing. And Mr. Cieslewicz catalogues Mr. Walker's various flip-flops in a manner I hope all of Mr. Walker's Presidential opponents will attend.

Texas pastor says he's willing to burn to death, so great is his opposition to gay marriage. Well, who am I to stand in the way of a man fulfilling his patriotic duty? I just hope that's the last time he burns.

Finally, President Obama used the n-word in an interview yesterday. I wouldn't have, but here's the thing: he gets to use the n-word and I don't, just as, if he weren't President, he would have to worry whether his next encounter with the police would be his last and I don't. I can't wait for the right-wingers to pretend to be outraged about this -- all the fake tears, all the cries of ZOMG OPPRESSION!!!! Bunch of damn whiners, they are, and they deserve the spankings they clearly didn't get enough of as children.

Action: keeping water public, keeping pregnancy private, and keeping families healthy with the FAMILY Act.

Missoula, Montana residents may have reclaimed their water from private corporations, but the city of Cascade Locks, Oregon still plans to let Nestlé haul away water for about one cent for every 40 gallons of water, and then sell that water for more than 100 times that amount. Nice work if you can get it! The Cascade Locks City Council would give up its rights to Oxbow Springs water for the promise of 50 created jobs and the promise that Nestlé will double the city's property tax revenue. I'd say it's nice that Nestlé will pay property taxes, if I thought fulfilling your obligation as a corporate citizen was all that impressive, or didn't know that the public will have to pay for all the infrastructure needed to move water in and out of town. Nestlé plays dumb, saying it needs the water merely to "respond() to consumer demand." Respond to consumer demand? What was the consumer demand for bottled water, exactly, before corporations started bottling it? More likely Nestlé means "our CEO's bank account's demand." Sum of Us helps you tell the Governor of Oregon to block Nestlé's plans and protect public water.

Meanwhile, corporations promote wellness among their employees, and sometimes give financial incentives to get their workers healthy. Toward that end they'll ask questions about their lifestyle and medical history -- but some bosses try to find out if their workers are pregnant before they're ready to announce it, and thus get an opportunity to discriminate against those pregnant employees. So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (or EEOC) to clarify that a boss can't force women to share the news of their pregnancies before they're ready to do so. The EEOC is apparently proposing to regulate corporate wellness programs, but their proposals don't actually address pregnancy in this manner, and they should. For as Noam Chomsky instructed us all those years ago, corporations are fundamentally anti-family, because some family matters (like pregnancies, illnesses and accidents) aren't as predictable as corporate bottom-liners would like. CEO attitudes toward things like paid sick leave are changing, but pregnant workers still need protection.

And speaking of paid sick leave, Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to co-sponsor H.R. 1489/S. 736, the FAMILY Act. The FAMILY Act would, as you may know, provide working families paid family medical leave for up to 12 weeks, at an amount not exceeding two-thirds of whatever they're making when they're working. And imagine that, in countries that provide fathers with paternity leave, women face less wage discrimination. It's not that big a surprise if you think about it, I suppose. Remember, also, that a 0.2% payroll tax (that's two-tenths of one percent, not "2 percent," "liberal" media) would fund the FAMILY Act, and the only people who could oppose that are the NO NEW TAXEZ EVAH!!!!!! crowd. Who don't get all the say about everything, at least not in my America. And for the fool who reflexively complains "they'll just pass the cost onto their customers": if they did that (which they won't, for the simple reason that the 0.2% tax would be split among employee and employer), that would raise the cost of a $10 dinner at Wendy's to $10.02. Complaining about that would just about qualify you as a whiner.

Action: "free" trade, arbitration fairness, and the ongoing fight against people who think they have a "right" to discriminate.

As you know, the House passed a different "free" trade "fast-track" bill late last week, and now that bill goes to the Senate. This bill doesn't have the "trade adjustment assistance" the last Senate-passed bill did, and "trade adjustment assistance" was presumably the inducement that got Senate Democrats on board in the first place, but these are Democrats we're talking about. Democrats are weak, especially in the face of money from corporations who'd rather have Republicans in their place anyway, and they might just settle for "assurances" that "trade adjustment assistance" will one day happen. So now's the time to lend some more steel for their spine: Both CREDO and Public Citizen tell Senate Democrats to reject "free" trade "fast-tracking." We can get too caught up in the "trade adjustment assistance" game, so let's just be frank with Congress: Congress should never abdicate its responsibility to debate and amend bills for the good of the American people, and "fast-track" requires Congress to do both, and for a bill we know will cost Americans jobs and nullify American laws so that corporations can make even more unearned money. (On a related note, this trade-related website is highly-amusing. It won't take much of your time.)

Meanwhile, ITT Technical Institute faces charges from several government agencies for deceiving their students and forcing them to take on high-cost student loans, and what does ITT's CEO have to say about it? That their "day in court is long overdue." That would be relatively innocuous, if it weren't ITT's habit of forcing its students to resolve disputes with the college via arbitration, instead of giving these students their right to "a day in court." ITT's contracts also prevent students from banding together as a class to resolve disputes. Corporatists suggest it's somehow wrong for good Americans to band together as a class to sue over a grievance they've all got -- because it costs some corporation or other money. But you know what would attract fewer trial lawyers? Doing less evil. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2079/S. 1122, the CLASS Act, and H.R. 2087/S. 1133, the Arbitration Fairness Act, and thus help all Americans get the day in court we deserve.

Finally, Washington, D.C. passed the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Act, which would prevent employers from punishing or firing workers who get pregnant, have an abortion, use birth control, or from having a dependent or spouse who has done any of the same -- but House Republicans are trying to block it! Because "freedom" apparently means nothing so much as the "freedom" to run roughshod over other people's rights when you think you're right about something. The House did pass a bill to block the D.C. nondiscrimination law, but the Senate didn't take it up (perhaps sensing a Democrat filibuster, since filibustering over abortion and birth control doesn't particularly offend Wall Street, at least not yet). So the House is trying to block the D.C. bill through the appropriations process, because House Republicans have apparently decided to take the appropriations process hostage so they can get whatever they want. But, again: it doesn't matter what they want, it matters what we want. So People for the American Way helps you tell Congress to keep its hands off the D.C. nondiscrimination bill.

Around the table: economists catch up to the rest of us about trade-related job losses, and other stories.

Surprise, surprise, economists are starting to find that cheap Chinese exports to the U.S. are killing American factory jobs after all. That's not a surprise to you, no doubt, but it is a surprise to economists who've adhered strictly to the rising-tide-lifts-all-boats supply-side school of economics for decades now. I'm not being sarcastic when I say that perhaps the tide is really turning against supply-side.

Digitalsmiths survey asks folks to pick their dream a la carte cable bundle, and the results may not surprise you: big three over-the-air networks occupy three of top four slots (with Fox coming in seventh), while PBS, Discovery, History, NatGeo, AMC (home of Walking Dead), Animal Planet, and Comedy Central (home of The Daily Show) also finish in the top 20, joined by only one "premium" channel, HBO. The Consumerist suggests this bodes well for Verizon's plan to offer "skinny" TV bundles (a basic set of channels plus two packs of ten similarly-themed channels), but I've looked at these bundles, and they're not really in the spirit of a la carte, the idea that folks would necessarily want to watch both Fox News and al-Jazeera America being more than a little absurd.

Justice Department charges over 240 people with over $700 million in Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Remember that we could catch more of these jerks if Congress would properly fund Medicare and Medicaid fraud efforts, and when Congressfolk say ZOMG TEH MEDICAREZ DOEZN'TZ WORKZ BECUZ FRAUDZ!!!!!, it really means they don't want to do the hard work of citizenship in a democracy.

Buried in this piece about Bernie Sanders wanting to "bring back the 40-hour work week" is Mr. Sanders's announcement that he wants to take back "family values" talk from Republicans. I'm really of two minds about that announcement. I'm not sure you announce you're going to do that so much as you just go ahead and do it, but then the "liberal" media never seems to notice when liberals do that, so perhaps he has to tell everyone he's going to do it so that the nth iteration of Bernie Sanders can just take the language back.

NRA board member claims that if the now-deceased pastor of the Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, SC, had allowed church members to carry guns while in church, he and the eight other victims might still be alive. But what is the likelihood that anyone who happened to be carrying a gun could have gotten off a clear shot in the chaos? People need to stop pretending their lives are action-adventure movies. And I really think living for something other than making yourself rich would make that pretense a lot less attractive.

Finally, in the wake of the many PR hits the Red Cross has taken over failing to deliver good services to Hurricane Sandy sufferers, ProPublica offers "Five Tips for Donating after Disasters." Long story short: do research before giving, use your right as a donor to demand spending disclosure, consider more local groups, consider alternatives to traditional charities, and "think beyond the next disaster" by giving to alleviate the constant problems, like poverty, that make disasters much worse. As we all know, the urge to help fix things can stamp out the urge to help fix things right, but once we admit that, we can work to overcome it.

Around the table: water privatization, regressive tax policy, homosexuality as "religion," harvesting icebergs for water, and the Charleston murders.

In a stunning blow to privatization efforts everywhere, the town of Missoula, Montana, seizes its water system from the Carlyle Group via eminent domain under state law. The court ruling instructs us that (in CLDC's words) "public interest required public ownership" of the town's water system, and public ownership of said system was a "more necessary public use" than continued Carlyle ownership (and Carlyle was looking to bottle and sell Missoula's water). Dig how Carlyle called the city's water a "product" -- everything's just a "product" to a corporation! -- as if clean water hasn't been the single greatest health care advance of the last century, as if people don't need it to live. We'll fight this battle again, but I think folks care more about the public good than they used to.

Speaking of which, dig the abominable tax plan Rand Paul would usher in if we made him President. The Paul plan would repeal the progressive income tax, the estate tax, the payroll tax, and the corporate tax, and replace them with a 14.5% flat income tax and a 14.5% "value-added tax," which is essentially a national sales tax. That's going to be an easy one to campaign against: Rand Paul would make everyone pay 3 out of every 10 dollars in taxes, and that 14.5% sales tax will add up at the cash register every time. Need I mention that it'd give the rich yet another huge tax cut and would jack up the deficit? The large "no tax floor" is the only part of it I like; we could raise the personal exemption to the living wage level and be done with this plan forever.

The FRC's Craig James claims that "the whole homosexual movement is really like a religion and the religion is sex and they worship their own genitals." That's some cojones, there -- a presumed heterosexual lecturing gays about obsessing about sex. It's like the man has never watched any TV or movies, or talked to any of his teammates in any of his many football locker rooms. But that's what the far-right does: pretends homosexuality is all about sex, while pretending heterosexuality is never about sex. And Jesus Mary and Joseph enough with the "(t)hey're trying to shut down my beliefs talk" already. We're not trying to "shut down" your beliefs; we're trying to shut down your attempt to deprive a group of people of their rights.

The Straight Dope tackles the question of whether we could reasonably harvest icebergs for fresh water. Sounds like a good idea, right? But dragging an iceberg from where it is to a place where we might use it -- if it can be done safely, without, say, a storm breaking it up, or pushing it into a cruiseliner -- would melt away around 40% of it even if you surrounded it with a synthetic textile designed to reduce melting (and 90% of that iceberg is underwater, remember, so dressing it up for transport would be very difficult). And that's before we figure out how much fuel we're going to burn to bring it up from the Antarctic (a better bet for big icebergs than the Arctic). Other problems are legal (does someone own this iceberg?), ethical (do polar bears live on this iceberg?), and health-related (can we get the "penguin poop," and also some salt, out of this iceberg?).

Finally, the Charleston murders of nine black church-goers by one white supremacist have really brought out some seriously moronic "analysis" from the right, as Steve Doocy suggested the shootings had more to do with "the hostility toward Christians" than with the obvious racism of a man who said he was going "to shoot black people" because "you rape our women and you're taking over our country, so you have to go," and at least two Republicans running for the highest office in our land agree. America has come a long way on race relations -- a terrorist attack like this would never have received so much national attention 70 years ago, and certainly not 70 years before that -- but it's not a personal attack to say we still have a long way to go. Yet right-wingers still take it as such, which may be why they substitute their own imagined persecution for actual persecution.

Around the table: "free" trade, drought in California, website commenters, Uber drivers, Brownback tax hikes, and Scott Walker tries to recover from his worst gaffe to date.

Didn't I say they'd wait until we weren't looking? The House passes another "free" trade "fast-track" bill on Thursday, not even 48 hours after extending their deadline to get "fast-track" done in its entirety to the end of July. I'd give them credit for cleverness, but I never credit evil for anything. The good news? This bill (also different from the Senate bill) would go to the Senate without the "trade adjustment assistance" that induced Democrats to vote for the Senate version in the first place. The bad news? Senate Democrats (and the President!) sure sound like they're more likely to settle for "assurances" instead of action, which is even worse than the selling-out-for-so-little they were preparing to do. It's like they haven't served in the Senate with these Republicans for years on end and thus learned what "assurances" mean.

FAIR finds the New York Times hoping you'll blame the California drought on the foods you eat that grow in California, rather than, for example, climate change, or massive government subsidies for big-ag corn corporations, which keeps almost everything else off heartland farms. And the list of stupid crap the Times foists on the reader here is hilariously long -- from the Times's casual confusion of drought (caused by high temperatures and low rainfall) with water shortages (caused by our mismanagement of resources) to the Times's apparent belief that "thin slices" and "tiny wedges" are real units of measure to the Times's refusal to compare equal units of actual measure when they have the chance (0.33 oz. and 1.75 oz. are not, as you can see, the same thing). It's enough to make you think nobody at the Times does their own grocery shopping.

European Human Rights court rules that governments should hold websites liable for certain comments by anonymous users. That shouldn't make any damn sense to you -- nobody who thinks about the matter (or doesn't have an axe to grind against a particular website) imagines that comments on a website's post somehow "represent" the website. And under this regime, it'd be pretty easy for some big-money actor to force a website to play an endless game of whack-a-mole by anonymously posting hundreds of evil comments. Best to take a deep breath, remember that they don't have a First Amendment over in Europe, and take this as a lesson that stamping out "hateful speech" isn't best done by censorship, but by confrontation.

California Labor Commission rules that Uber should treat its drivers as employees, not contractors. Uber is one of the many so-called "sharing" economy corporations that has tried to make fast money off fudging the difference; it's nice to see some government body, somewhere, not putting up with that noise. And if you're thinking of driving for Uber, you should know that, as a non-employee, you get nothing from them other than pay (and sometimes not even that, as the claim sparking the ruling demonstrates) -- you crash your car, you get sick, you're on your own. That's the price of "virtually nonexistent operating costs."

Ho hum, Gov. Brownback raises taxes dramatically on the poor, then says doing so isn't really a tax cut, because when you look at "the totality of the picture," he cut a massive amount of taxes before (all for his rich friends, but never mind) and didn't raise as much money in tax hikes this time, so the net result is TAX CUTS! And when poor folks get steadily bled by the sales tax increases in the new Brownback budget, I bet they'll keep that in mind. Seriously, I hope "Brownback" one day becomes a synonym for "stupid, arrogant prick." I'd hoped "Bush" would be that, too, back in the day, but I never got to see that happen. A man can dream.

Finally, Scott Walker recovers as best he can, I suppose, from his gaffe in re attributing beliefs to British Prime Minister David Cameron that Mr. Cameron's office denied he had: "(w)hat I learned best from that is I should leave discussions like that that aren't done in front of the media to be treated privately, whether it was there or anywhere else," he says, adding that he won't comment any more on private meetings he's had with world leaders. Why he didn't know that to start with is a mystery -- has he never thought this rule could apply to, say, other Governors? -- but I don't know if his vaunted cool will overcome this gaffe, especially if Jeb Bush and/or Hillary Clinton throw tons of money at it. Normally Scott Walker turns weakness into strength; here I think he's just turning lemons into lemonade.

Action: war in the Middle East, coal mine cleanup insurance, and drilling royalties on public lands.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to finally debate, and then end, the war in Iraq and Syria, then Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you do that. Reps. McGovern (D-MA), Jones (R-NC), and Lee (D-CA) have introduced invoked the 1973 War Powers Act to bring forth a privileged resolution, H.Con.Res. 55, which aims to end the war President Obama started in Iraq and Syria late in 2014. President Obama says the 2001 AUMF gives him the authority to conduct air strikes (and, now, deploy ground troops) against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but it doesn't -- the Constitution says only Congress can give him that authority, which they declined to do last year, mainly out of cynicism. And I do not believe that since we broke Iraq and created ISIS, we should fix it with more bombing and more fighting that will, one day, help create a group of monsters that even ISIS would find uncivilized. Negotiating with regional powers to fight ISIS is the only way to go. If that means we have to talk to Iran (which 47 of our Senators thought was a great idea a few months ago), so be it.

Meanwhile, closer to home, did you know that our laws let large coal corporations avoid fully insuring themselves against mine-related cleanup costs if they have, in theory, enough cash to pay for their cleanups themselves? Well, coal corporations are making less money than they used to -- not so much because of ZOMG TEH REGULASHUNZ!!!! as because of the rise of natural gas and (to a much lesser extent) the rise of renewable energies -- and now Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal corporation out of St. Louis, still lobbies our government to give it a break on cleanup insurance despite claiming losses of over $750 million last year. And I suppose if the government sticks to its guns here, Republicans will squeal WAR ON COAL!!!!! They should answer this: is breaking the law OK when your big coal donors do it? We should fix the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act so that coal corporations buy private cleanup insurance entirely, to ensure they'll clean up their mess without a taxpayer bailout, but in the meantime, we need to enforce the law as it is. So CREDO helps you tell our government to force Peabody to clean up its toxic mess.

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to charge private gas and oil corporations more for the privilege of drilling on our public lands. If we must permit allow gas and oil drillers to pollute our public lands, we damn sure better get a fair price for that, but currently we're not even getting that -- we're getting a few dollars per acre for the right to drill on public lands. Which are, as I've said, our lands -- we are the owners of this land, and our government should be managing our lands in our interest. And if unfortunate realities mean they won't manage it in a way that protects our air and water, they should at least manage it in a way that gets us the largest financial return, and doesn't merely prop up unearned corporate profits. Personal to right-wing pimps: do not retort that doing so would hike energy prices, when CEOs have the power to pay themselves fewer millions of dollars every year and keep prices where they are, and certainly do not retort that charging more would "kill jobs," as if gas and oil drillers will suddenly replace all their workers with robots out of spite.

Around the table: FISA follies, children in same-sex couples, WalMart's "charitable" aims, the real cost of predatory loans, and a hole in Scott Walker's armor.

The Guardian asks: "Why Does a FISA Court Decide if Twitter Can Talk About its Dealings with FISA?" And then drops mic.

University of Colorado study finds "no differences in children raised by same-sex couples and different-sex couples." Key finding: studies that observe same-sex couples who raise children after their heterosexual relationships ended generally don't control for the heartbreak and stress children suffer as a result of divorce and/or separation (which is where a lot of "gay couples raise worse children" malarkey comes from). As more gay couples marry, we'll have more "apples-to-apples" data; I expect studies will find that gay marriages raise children about as well as heterosexual marriages do, given that they are, after all, human beings.

Over a dozen community groups file complaint with IRS that WalMart uses charitable funds essentially for business purposes. Specifically, they allege that WalMart's charitable foundation "appears to target its donations and influence its grantees primarily to assist Walmart to achieve...expansion goals" in New York, Chicago, Boston and other American cities. Yep, that sure doesn't sound like "charity" to me -- charity is supposed to help other people, not you. WalMart's spokeshack denies the allegations, though her denial would have been more effective if it came first, rather than after her irrelevant hackspeak.

Center for Responsible Lending report finds that predatory loans harm communities in the long term. Most consumers have more than one kind of predatory loan, and these loans tend to cause stress that leads to more predatory loans -- and surprise! Predatory loans seem to find lower-income folks more easily than they find than other folks. The long-term effects? More predatory debt means more property repossessed and foreclosed upon, more foreclosures means lower property values and less equity for borrowers, and ultimately folks hit with predatory loans have a harder time getting better loans and (even) jobs. The good news? The CARD Act and Dodd-Frank (mainly through the CFPB) have restrained predatory loans somewhat. The bad news? Republicans are anxious to gut these laws with every breath they take.

Finally, maybe Scott Walker has a weakness after all: Mr. Walker tells a story about British Prime Minister David Cameron telling him that he was concerned about President Obama's "leading from behind mentality," but the Prime Minister's office says, flatly: "The Prime Minister did not say that and does not think that." And now, finally, his Republican opponents and eventual Democratic opponent have a weapon to use against him: how can a man be President when he doesn't even understand what his allies are saying to him?

Action: torture, fair elections, and family planning funding.

We learned this week from the Guardian that the CIA has long had "explicit guidelines" for "human experimentation," specifically, that "(t)he CIA shall not sponsor, contract for, or conduct research on human subjects except in accordance with guidelines issued by the Department of Health and Human Services" and, moreover, that "(t)he subject's informed consent shall be documented as required by those guidelines." I'm guessing that HHS has never approved giving "war on terror"-related prisoners mefloquine, known to induce terror, or scopolamine, a putative truth serum. It gets worse: torture of prisoners often went on so long, and involved so many medical personnel, that it essentially became "human experimentation," which, as we've noted, requires consent from the subject -- which the CIA clearly didn't have. We can't rule out the possibility that our government fully understood that one could "interpret" torture as human experimentation in order to avoid calling it torture, as one former war-crimes investigator says. Any way you cut it, it's evil. Roots Action helps you tell Congress to prosecute torture.

Meanwhile, Rootstrikers helps you tell Congress to pass S. 1538, the Fair Elections Now Act. You likely remember the Fair Elections Now Act -- it's been around so long that, once upon a time, a Republican co-sponsored it; now its 18 sponsors are either Democrats or Bernie Sanders. Its passage is no less crucial now, though -- and is perhaps more crucial, now that two Supreme Court decisions have demolished whatever firewall we once had against corporate campaign finance, and more than four out of five Americans (as the New York Times reported last week) now says we need to "fundamentally change" or "completely rebuild" our election-funding system. The Fair Elections Now Act would create a fund that would match small donations (no, really small, like $5 or $25) on a six-to-one basis. The Act would not, in case you were wondering, prevent people from self-financing -- it would merely prevent them from getting public funding if they do. And let's hope we are not too decadent a society that we can't shame self-financers in an election.

Finally, some Congressfolk are planning yet again to completely eliminate Title X family planning funding, so Planned Parenthood helps you tell Congress to prioritize women's health above politics. You'll see the words "family planning" and you might think it's all about abortion, but it isn't -- our federal government cannot, by law, spend any money on abortions. No, Title X funding goes toward things like birth control, cancer screenings, HIV testing, and the like. And the effort to zero out Title X funding would disproportionally affect both low-income women and rural women who might not have access to these services if our government didn't help provide them. If you're still not convinced, recall that our health care system will have to treat the illnesses rural and low-income women get sooner or later, and the later one waits, the more it costs, not just them but all of us, since we all, ultimately, bear the cost of health care in America. See? Often times, the right thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do, and more often than right-wingers would like us to think, too.

Around the table: starring the usual villains, like the "liberal" media, "free" traders, and frackers.

The incomparable Taegan Goddard says "Technology is Destroying American Democracy." The advent of scientific gerrymandering (they can include or exclude specific houses now!) might convince you that's true, but the Tea Party insurgency shouldn't -- the Tea Party insurgency worked so well not because of technology but because it had massive right-wing financial support. And he leaves out blogs, which arrived in force just as the "liberal" media finished evolving into a complete establishment mouthpiece, and which was the main place liberals resisted George W. Bush for six years. I'm more inclined to believe we simply haven't been using technology to our best advantage, and yes that includes me, too.

FAIR finds too many "liberal" media outlets blaming "Big Labor" for scuttling the "free" trade deal. If only Big Labor were big enough to do that on its own! Big Labor now claims 1 in 9 American workers, versus 1 in 3 just 40 years ago, yet the "liberal" media can't see past it. If you've been attending who's been providing the anti-"free" trade alerts you see at this blog, you'll see the same cross-section of consumer groups, environmentalists, and liberal activists that Newsweek (at least) saw when it covered the debacle.

Another day, another analysis of the EPA's fracking report demonstrating that it wasn't the "victory" for frackers they're claiming it is. Long story short: oil and gas drillers have been "largely uncooperative with researchers," a lack of cooperation that delayed the report for over two years; the EPA has limited access to fracking chemical information thanks to (you guessed it) the 2005 energy bill that allowed frackers to keep that info secret, and "(i)ncredibly, EPA did not include underground wastewater injection in its study, a common form of wastewater disposal that has been shown to pollute groundwater." There's more, of course, like the part where Pennsylvania frackers have twelve times the chemical mixing spells of Colorado frackers.

Ho hum, some rich folks in California wonder why they should have to ration their water, too, because ZOMG I HAVE TEH NEEDZ!!!!! A real conservative might say that if overuse of water winds up killing, say, the various industries surrounding lawns, golf courses and show horse farms, then that's just the genius of capitalism. That should tell you how many actual conservatives inhabit our uppermost classes.

Finally, the incomparable Eschaton catches David Brooks saying something entirely ridiculous about how "great" NAFTA has been for Mexico's economy. Long story short: it hasn't been great for Mexico's economy, and it hasn't (contra Mr. Brooks's claim) reduced the flow of undocumented Mexicans to the United States. We shouldn't be paying any attention to David Brooks, but the New York Times still pays him handsomely to churn out his beaux arts right-wing rubbish, and Presidents still seek out his attention. Maybe we should have a la carte buying options for New York Times columnists.

Action: "free" trade, Grand Canyon development, and antibiotic abuse.

Word on the street is that the House plans to bring up "trade adjustment assistance" again this week. What has changed between Friday afternoon and now, you ask? I'm at just as much a loss to answer that as you are, though Rep. Pelosi (D-CA) has called for Democrats to demand transportation appropriations reauthorization as part of any new "free" trade deal, which seems to me like that notorious Democratic pastime, giving up a lot to get a little. Anyway, the time to keep the pressure on is, as always, now, so both the People's Email Network and NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, help you email your Reps to oppose any "trade adjustment assistance" bill that would grease the skids for "fast-tracking" "free" trade agreements. You can also call your Reps using the toll free number, 1.888.410.0619, or you can find your Rep's phone number using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page. Indeed, this battle merits a phone call, if you're, you know, not already working three jobs and deciding which bills you can pay this month because the last couple of "free" trade deals took your well-paying manufacturing job away.

Meanwhile, as you may remember, Gruppo Stilo USA plans a massive development project in the small town of Tusayan, AZ, population 576, and a very thirsty 576, since they're having enough trouble getting enough water for themselves due to the massive drought which has dried up the Colorado River quite a bit. But Gruppo Stilo's development would build three million square feet of commercial space (including timeshares, a spa, and a dude ranch!) just a mile from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, plus it would add 2,000 homes. Some of them would be low-income housing, granted, but that's an act of altruism that'll go unremembered if nobody has any water to drink, since Stilo apparently hasn't figured out how to meet the water needs of thousands more people in an area where the water needs of hundreds of people go unmet. Would it be piling on to mention that this is sacred ground to the Havasupai, or that the wildlife in the area need water to drink, too? The Sierra Club helps you tell the U.S. Forest Service to reject further development in the Grand Canyon/Kaibab National Forest area.

Finally, USPIRG joins with MoveOn to help you tell the FDA to require that meat labels disclose whether the meat came from animals raised with antibiotics. You've seen some corporations voluntarily tell you their meat came from antibiotic-free animals, but "some" ain't enough, certainly not when nearly four out of every five antibiotics in America go not to the sick people or the sick animals who need it, but to healthy farm animals so they can survive their squalid living conditions and produce more meat (and thus more money for the CEO). The FDA has lately mandated more accountability from factory farm veterinarians, and I won't say that's worthless, but considering the stakes -- the "post-antibiotic era" the WHO has warned about -- and considering, also, that the vast majority of Americans want factory farms to stop abusing antibiotics, the FDA's moves have been far too incremental. This move would be incremental, too, but at least two increments are better than one. And I wouldn't worry about "rising food prices," not if the alternative is a world where the next cut you get could kill you.

UPDATE. Late last night the House voted to extend their deadline for considering the "free" trade package to the end of July. But we should keep the pressure up on them anyway; they'll most likely try to strike when no one's looking.

Around the table: from the extreme folly of "free" trade defenders to the extreme folly of calling cop-killers "courageous and brave."

And now, for the most offensive thing I've read this week: Larry Summers saying Congress should fully embrace "free" trade "fast-track" because ZOMG TEH ASIANZ WILLZ CONTROLZ TEH WORLDZ!!!!! Really, the relentless fearmongering and xenophobia of the first two paragraphs presented quite the challenge to my normally formidable blood pressure. The rest of the op-ed takes the only-somewhat-less-offensive Hillary Clinton approach of declaring that "free" trade opponents have valid "concerns," without explaining how passing a "fast-track" bill preventing Congress from amending a "free" trade bill or debating it properly could possibly address those "concerns." And no mention of how many "deep cultural values" previous "free" trade agreements have obliterated, I notice -- I guess if they're not here anymore, they weren't "deep" enough for Larry Summers. What a trove of good works he can take to the pearly gates.

Surprise, surprise: the International Energy Agency finds that global economies grew last year while carbon emissions actually dropped, blowing a hole in the right-wing theory that we can't fight climate change because jobs. An IEA economist even reminds us that "(t)he price of fossil fuels are heavily subsidized around the world," which threatens to expose the real reason right-wingers oppose any effort to fight climate change (i.e., that it would threaten their paymasters' corporate welfare). I will say that, as messaging, "the world must learn to live within its means" is a lot less effective than something like "let's kick climate change's ass!"

In an actual surprise, the U.S. Supreme Court won't review a pair of lower-court rulings invalidating North Carolina's mandatory ultrasound law. You'd think this activist court, which went far out of its way to take on corporate campaign financing and religious "freedom" cases, would have jumped at the chance, but their hands-off approach here doesn't necessarily mean they won't review rulings on a different law. The North Carolina law forced doctors to hold the ultrasound in front of a woman's face and describe the fetus in excruciating detail to her, which the Supremes may have decided was going too far this time.

Florida state House votes to reject Medicaid expansion while locking in very low premiums for their their own state health insurance plans, then some House members pretend they didn't know the premium amounts were in the bill, as if understanding and voting on bills isn't their job or something. The good news: the Florida Senate will probably scuttle the House effort. But it seems that some state legislators really are all about Big Gummint health insurance -- but only for themselves.

Finally, CNN talking head invites scorn for calling a Dallas man who shot up a police station "courageous and brave," even though she added "if not crazy as well." Objections are easy to tabulate: you're not "courageous and brave" if you shoot police officers or if you've got a truck full of explosives to hide behind, and ain't no overpaid media talkers gonna use those words to describe a Muslim or a black man pulling the same crap. Watching the clip, though, I suspect the real problem is that people just talk too damn much on cable news TV, just like they talk too damn much on talk radio, which tells me that these formats to a terrible job of delivering information people need. If only we could get cable channels a la carte, we could at least starve some part of the "liberal" media beast.

Action: another cowardly attack on net neutrality.

Sorry to hit you with another action post so soon, but this can't wait until tomorrow morning. Remember that anti-net neutrality provision from the finance/general governmental appropriations bill last week? We couldn't get it struck from the bill last week in subcommittee, but the full House Appropriations Committee will be marking it up tomorrow morning at 10 a.m., so we gotta act quickly. Free Press helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them to strike Title VI, Section 630 from the Financial Services and General Governmental Appropriations bill for fiscal 2016. You can find a list of House Appropriations Committee members here; sadly, the list doesn't provide phone numbers, but you can get those numbers here. Off the top of my head, I'd concentrate on Kentucky Republican (and Committee chair) Hal Rogers, at 202.225.4601; bill author Ander Crenshaw (R-FL) at 202.225.2501; Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID) at 202.225.5531; Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) at 202.225.6411; Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-KS) at 202.225.2865; Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) at 202.225.4806; Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) at 202.225.9730; Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) at 202.225.6506; Rep. Peter Visclosky (D-IN) at 202.225.2461; Rep. David Price (D-NC) at 202.225.1784; Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) at 202.225.2661; and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) at 202.225.1640. Tell your buddies who live in these districts that a phone call before 10 a.m. tomorrow morning will be especially important.

Don't be swayed by arguments claiming that Section 630 would only ban the FCC from spending money to enforce net neutrality regulations until lawsuits against net neutrality can be decided. For one thing, that's not exactly true: Section 630 would actually only be in effect until exactly three lawsuits against net neutrality can be decided, and why should those three lawsuits get special consideration from Congress? But more importantly, we don't know how long will it be until those three lawsuits get "decided." If the three lawsuits fail -- which I expect they will, since the plaintiffs can no longer avail themselves the "FCC has no authority" argument that won the last two famous lawsuits against net neutrality -- the plaintiffs will almost certainly appeal, and that will extend the ban on FCC enforcement of net neutrality, since Section 630 explicitly states that those lawsuits won't be considered "decided" until the "exhaustion of or expiration of the time for any appeals" has passed. That could be years, folks, and we can't have the FCC hamstrung from fulfilling its duty to do our will for that long. We have to win this now, and bring cowardly acts like Section 630 to the light of day.

Action: corporate taxes, corporate campaign spending, and paycheck fairness.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to close corporate tax loopholes like the one that allows them to "reincorporate" as "foreign corporations" to evade American taxes. The recent news hook, of course, is Monsanto's decision to assimilate purchase Swiss corporation Syngenta and then reincorporate in Great Britain, because, apparently, having the power to mandate what gets grown in America isn't enough power -- they also "need" the power to avoid paying the taxes that pay for services we all use in America, services like roads, bridges, libraries, police, and firefighters. Monsanto won't even be moving its corporate headquarters, let alone getting its seed out of American soil; they'll still be here, turning everything they touch to slime. But H.R. 415/S. 198, the Stop Corporate Inversions Act, would subject corporations to American taxation if most of their management occurs in America and if they do "significant domestic business" here, namely more than a quarter of their business. No ZOMG TEH JOBZ WILL DIEZ!!!! arguments will be admitted.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell President Obama to sign an executive order mandating that federal contractors disclose their political spending. Here I was, thinking that all the reversals his party suffered in 2014 might have reawakened Mr. Obama's populist streak; apparently, that was just a feint, as his SEC head still won't let publicly-traded corporate campaign spending come to a vote despite the millions who have demanded it, and he won't mandate that federal contractors do the same, which he can do without getting permission from Super-Great and Super-Awesome Real American President for Change and Hope Mitch McConnell. Citizens United v. FEC, as you know, invoked corporate "personhood" to declare that corporations can spend however much money bthey want, pretty much however they like, on political campaigns, but when corporations contract with the federal government, they are literally spending your money on political campaigns -- after all, federal contractors get paid in taxpayer money. So tell President Obama to do the right thing.

Finally, Republicans may control both Houses of Congress now, but that doesn't mean we stop fighting for equal pay for women, versus the 70-odd cents on the dollar women get paid on average. Hence both the National Women's Law Center and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to support the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R. 1619/S. 862) would help women get the pay they deserve (for do they deserve less money than men, really?) by forbidding employers from retaliating against workers who discuss their salary with each other (since this is usually how women find out they're being discriminated against), preventing employers from paying women differently on any basis other than "bona fide factors, such as education, training, or experience" (no, these factors don't explain the pay gap!), and tightens up penalties for pay discrimination. Personal to those who say the Paycheck Fairness Act is nothing more than a boon to trial lawyers: if your favorite corporations would simply do less evil, they wouldn't need to fight "trial lawyers" as much.

Around the table: from passing as black to passing as fair and balanced.

Kali Holloway writes about "Why It Was So Easy for Rachel Dolezal to Slip Into Black Skin." You'll be reminded of the black folks who "passed" as white, of "our nation’s legacy of slave rape" and "of secret relationships that ended with black men strung from trees" that helped produce "African Americans of every hue and skin tone," and of how, in America, virtually any deviation from whiteness renders folks non-white. You'll also learn how "transracialism" is a silly notion and how Ms. Dolezal's lifelong attempt to be black is "a sign of privilege itself." Really outstanding reading.

Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton discusses "free" trade in the wake of the fast track setback on Friday, and it's classic Clinton: admit that the liberals have "valid" "concerns," but still say President Obama should fight for "the best, strongest deal possible." Liberals have valid points, not just "concerns," and the "best, strongest deal possible" is no deal, but I'm pretty sure Ms. Clinton didn't mean either one of those things, though folks who really want her to be President might see that differently, just as folks expected differently from Mr. Obama because, well, they wanted to. Which is, as I always say, beside the point -- you don't wait for a President to come along and do what you want, you tell the President to do what you want.

Republican Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina says we need "a new definition" of "feminism," since the "liberal" one "isn't working." If you're still not sure what that definition is by article's end, you're not alone -- her definition seems to include a lot of the current definition, which already isn't about "man-hating" or pretending that homeschoolers can't be feminists, and her definition also seems to include a skittishness about Republicans getting criticized for being anti-feminist. And, ah, that bit about over-the-counter birth control? Many OTC drugs are still cheaper to the consumer when filled with a prescription, since your copay will often be lower than the OTC sticker price (especially when the copay is zero, as the Obama Administration has mandated for birth control). It's like she doesn't fill her own prescriptions or something.

Kansas Republican legislators report that Gov. Brownback appeared to get "choked up" during negotiations to close the state's $400 million budget hole -- a hole he created with his massive tax cuts for the rich, you remember. They also report that he said he's made cuts that were "really difficult to do before" (yes, pooping all over everything is actually difficult, but that doesn't mean it's worth doing!), that he talked about the criticism he's received in public ("waaaaah, I pooped all over Kansas and nobody likes me now!"), and that, naturally, he coupled his emotional display with a hostage crisis: come to an agreement to close the budget hole, or 6% of every department gets it! Remember: this was all an "experiment" to him, though not to the good Kansans who have to go without public services as Sam Brownback's cronies rape the treasury.

Daily Kos diarist notes that a Fox News (sic) talking head called child molester Josh Duggan "curious," while calling the black girl Texas police threw to the ground at that infamous pool party "no saint." Is it just wishful thinking on my part, or was there really a day when right-wingers tried harder to be less obvious?

Action: "free" trade, abortion, and child trafficking.

So what the hell happened on Friday? Here's the best summary I've seen yet: the House did pass a "free" trade "fast-track" bill on Friday -- but their bill didn't include the "trade adjustment assistance" (i.e., for folks whose jobs get taken away by "free" trade agreements) the Senate bill had in order to gain more Democratic support and evade a Democratic-led filibuster. Now one of two things could happen: the House and Senate could go to conference over the "free" trade "fast-track" bill (not terribly likely), or the House could hold another vote on a "trade adjustment assistance" bill, either the same bill or a similar bill with more sweeteners for Democrats (more likely). I did worry that House Democrats might actually vote for a bill that cuts Medicare benefits just to hang onto trade adjustment assistance, but they didn't. Still, they're Democrats; they could fold at any moment. So the People's Email Network helps you tell your House Reps to vote against any "trade adjustment assistance" bill that would enable the "free" trade "fast-track" bill to become law.

Meanwhile, the House passed H.R. 36, which would enact a ban on abortions after 20 weeks, last month, and Sen. Graham (R-SC) has introduced S. 1553, which would presumably do the same; H.R. 36 would, as you know, prevent virtually no abortions, since almost all abortions happen before the 20-week mark. H.R. 36 does provide exemptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother (possibly because some House Republicans revolted against the bill earlier this year), but it also carves out exemptions to the exemptions. I think the 20-week abortion ban is mere grandstanding, which I despise, and if we really want to reduce abortions, and we do, we need to support birth control, since we're not going to reduce the amount of ill-considered sex people have (and have had for thousands of years) by shouting at them or making them jump through endless hoops. And this seems to me a conservative viewpoint, since it's about dealing with people as they really are. Planned Parenthood helps you tell your Senators to oppose the 20-week abortion ban.

Finally, Sara Kruzan provides a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Senate to pass H.R. 469, the Strengthening Child Welfare Response to Trafficking Act of 2015, so that foster care workers can better identify and help children who are caught in sex trafficking rings. The foster care system is where predators often go to get the kids they force into prostitution, and not everyone who works in the foster care system has been trained to spot the warning signs. Ms. Kruzan herself, born to a man who spent long stretches in prison and a woman who suffered severe depression, got trapped in a child trafficking ring when she was 11 -- and shot and killed the man who put her there when she was 16. Naturally, since this happened in the get-tough-on-crime mid-1990s, Ms. Kruzan got tried as an adult and got life without parole. Amazing logic, that children who can't consent to sex because they're not adults can go to jail for murder even though they're not adults. Ms. Kruzan kept fighting until she got paroled after 19 years, but not everyone in a child sex ring is even as lucky as that. And we can, and must, do better.

Around the table: "free" trade follies, corporate subsidies, no-fly lists, imaginary crime waves, and bankster attempts at insults.

An interesting sideline to yesterday's "free" trade drama: President Obama came to Capitol Hill to persuade Democrats to vote for the thing and wound up alienating them. Which means that folks who think Mr. Obama has actually been trying to sabotage the "free" trade deal will cite this event as evidence, as I'm sure they already cite his head-scratching decision to try to sell "free" trade at freaking Nike corporate headquarters as evidence. Of course, our job is the same no matter what 13-dimensional chess game he may or may not be playing: that we communicate our will to our representatives until they do it.

Elon Musk's corporations -- which include the famous electric car- and battery-maker, Tesla -- have received nearly $5 billion in state and federal subsidies. Obviously I support spending government money (i.e., our money) on more advanced technologies, but I'd prefer our government hire its own researchers and developers to accomplish that aim, rather than hand out 10-year property tax abatements (like the one SolarCity has procured for building a solar panel factory in Buffalo), which are essentially tax cuts for the rich. Loans are fine, too, though guaranteed loans are not. And Jesus Mary and Joseph it's not like Elon Musk doesn't have money.

Surprise, surprise, al Jazeera asks if the FBI has been using "no-fly" lists to coerce Muslims into informing on their communities. At least one lawsuit says yes, and with the four plaintiffs suddenly getting removed from federal no-fly lists days before their court date, you have to wonder. As Paul Craig Roberts instructed us many years ago, the no-fly list has over a million people on it, and if a million people were really that much of a threat, you'd think we'd be having major terrorist attacks, like, every day.

Speaking of fearmongering, FAIR catches the New York "liberal" media outlets suggesting that crime is worse under Tha Liberal You Love to Hate, Mayor Bill deBlasio. We learn (among so many other things!) how the New York Post was able to suggest that "You're 45% More Likely to Be Murdered in deBlasio's Manhattan" -- the number of murders in Manhattan between January 1 and the end of May of 2014 was 11, see, and for that same time period in 2015 it's 16! See? You will die 45% more times! -- than, er, in deBlasio's Manhattan of 2014, since he took office on January 1 of that year. How many murders in Manhattan under tough-on-crime guy Mayor Giuliani in 2001? 102, of course -- or about 63 more than we're on a pace for this year. Crime wave!

Finally, there's JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, suggesting that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), an outspoken critic of banksters, really doesn't understand global banking. And then Mr. Dimon patiently negotiates each and every one of her criticisms of the financial sector so you will understand why he thinks so! I kid, of course; why do work when it's easier to insult your opponents? Naturally Ms. Warren's response has received a lot of ink, but she had already pre-empted his argument back in April: "The finance guys argue that if you're never in the club, you can't understand it. But I think they have it backwards. Not being in the club means not drinking the Kool-Aid." I have only one quibble: saying they "drink Kool-Aid" might actually give them too much credit for good intentions.

Action: "free" trade, controlling banksters, and Pfizer's ties with ALEC.

The House plans to vote on "free" trade "fast-track" today, and Public Citizen, Food and Water Watch, and Sum of Us all help you email or petition your House Rep and tell them to reject "free" trade "fast-track." But you'll want to call, too: Campaign for America's Future helps you call, and NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, provides a toll-free number, 1.888.410.0619, that you can also use to call your House Reps. If "fast-track" does pass the House -- and that would likely be a one-vote victory with that last vote coming after a particular House Rep gets his or her arm twisted for several hours -- we'll keep fighting, by demanding that President Obama release the names and corporate affiliations of those who have had special access to TPP negotiations, as Common Cause helps you do, and by telling our Congressfolk to force publication of the TPP (which can be done by any member of Congress in a number of ways), as Demand Progress and a host of other organizations help you do. And remember, also, that if "fast-track" passes, that doesn't mean the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" automatically passes; it just means Congress won't be able to amend it, or debate it for more than an hour. But we'll bring the noise to that fight, too.

Meanwhile, our government has been very busy granting waivers from extra regulatory scrutiny to banksters who have actually been caught doing bad things (like rigging interest and exchange rates) so they can continue to provide retirement advice and planning to good Americans -- because someone who says "Yes, I committed a felony to steal more money from more people" is exactly who you want running your retirement program. So CREDO helps you tell the Department of Labor to hold public hearings on any bank waivers they're evaluating. The SEC, naturally, has already voted to give out these waivers, but the Department of Labor also gets a say in the matter. Oh, and speaking of the SEC, CREDO also helps you tell President Obama to replace Mary Jo White as the SEC's head. Ms. White has voted with Republicans to grant exactly those waivers we were just discussing, plus she ignored the millions of comments she got about campaign finance disclosure for publicly-traded corporations and shelved the proposal indefinitely. Her SEC has also allowed most lawbreakers to settle without admitting guilt. Mr. Obama needs to get someone in there who'll protect American shareholders, not banksters.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to end its toxic association with the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC), then the League of Conservation Voters still helps you do that. As of this date, over 100 corporations have ended ties with ALEC, mostly over their support/promulgation of racist voter ID laws (and also over "Stand Your Ground" laws, which I personally don't blame for tragedies like the Trayvon Martin shooting, but I'm likely not in the majority opinion there), but lately they've been hemorrhaging members over their insistence that climate change isn't happening and attempts to deal with it will kill jobs (rather than the truth, which is that it'll "kill" a CEO's ability to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home). Yet Pfizer's official position on climate change is that yes, it is happening and yes, we should do something about it, so why hang on to ALEC? Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast to cut their ties with ALEC, as well. Because if you're going to dream, you might as well dream big.

Around the table: a few victories, plus some unsettling findings.

Former Bush Mobb Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld not only says Mr. Bush (not Mr. Cheney, you may notice) was wrong about fomenting democracy in Iraq, but that he raised his objections to that idea at the time. The man thinks we don't remember that he was an original member of the Project for a New American Century -- or, perhaps, he'll one day tell us he "raised objections" to the Project's creation at the time! Seriously, I long for the day when the "liberal" media finally treat Bush Mobbers like lepers.

Study finds that some 50 American hospitals charge uninsured customers at least ten times the actual cost of health care. And get your surprised face ready: most of these hospitals are for-profit hospitals. I wonder how right-wingers will blame this on the Affordable Care Act, which is, after all, reducing the number of uninsured Americans these hospitals can prey upon.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) has developed a curriculum for high school kids that teaches them how important it is that all governments everywhere balance their budgets all the time, no matter what the cost. The curriculum will presumably not teach kids that when they buy a house, a car, or a college education, they'll almost certainly go into debt, and won't be able to prance around like peacocks saying they'll just go without what they can't afford, or refuse higher-paying jobs while declaring I don't have a revenue problem, I have a spending problem.

Some good news out of Nigeria: that nation passed a ban on female genital mutilation in late May. But while "history has been made" with the ban, history is going to need to continue to be made with enforcement of the ban, which is not only a cultural problem (many folks have practiced female genital mutilation for thousands of years) but a law enforcement problem as well, since Nigeria's government hasn't demostrated a lot of appetite for enforcing the law.

Finally, after much negative publicity, Senatobia school superintendent Jay Walker has dropped charges against the Walker family for "disturbing the peace" -- i.e., cheering on their family's graduates while black -- at a high school graduation ceremony. Mr. Walker waited until the day before the court date to drop the charges, though, which suggests that he had tormenting the family in mind, which in turn suggests that he has a heart of stone. You'd think a man with such power would have more wisdom as to how to use it. You'd certainly think he'd have better things to do with his time.

Action: net neutrality, political prisoners, genetically-modified food, and Arctic drilling.

Another day, another emergency: some fool in the House of Representatives has attached, to a must-pass House financial services appropriations bill, language that would prevent the FCC from using any budgeted funds to enforce the net neutrality rules it proposed earlier this year. Because millions of people from across the political spectrum speaking with one voice against corporate control of the internet means, apparently, nothing to Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-FL) (whose phone number is 202.225.2501, by the way), and because any must-pass appropriations bill can and must be taken hostage on behalf of anyone's corporate paymasters! But remember: the fight for justice isn't over until you draw your last breath, because any time you can get your government to do something good for America, you still have to keep fighting the corrupt corporate lackeys who want to take it from you. And take it they will, unless we speak out. So Free Press helps you tell your House Reps to reject any attempt to hold our government's funding hostage to corporate extremists who want to destroy net neutrality.

In other urgent matters, earlier this month the Saudi Arabian Supreme Court upheld the sentence of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi of 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes, putatively for "insulting Islam" and for violating Saudi Arabian information technology laws, but actually for bringing together good Saudi citizens online to speak freely about political and religious matters. Yes, this still happens in the world, and don't think a lot of your fellow Americans wouldn't like it to happen here, too -- though, of course, they wouldn't like it to happen to them. I tell the Saudi Arabian authorities the same thing I tell right-wingers in this country afraid of being told "happy holidays!" when they're out shopping: if your faith is strong, you don't need government intervention to prevent it from being insulted. Mr. Badawi, meanwhile, isn't in very good health, but the Saudis could start lashing him again as early as tomorrow. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the Saudi Arabian government to free Mr. Badawi immediately and stop oppressing political prisoners.

Meanwhile, the USDA is, no doubt because they're being compelled, beginning to overhaul their system for regulating genetically-modified crops, and Friends of the Earth helps you tell the USDA to enact vigorous reforms that protect the environment and protect good Americans from harm. We know where it gets us when we don't keep a vigorous watch over GMOs: we get GMOs invading organic farms (and then GMO manufacturing corporations suing said forms for "intellectual property theft" I kid you not), and we get carcinogenic pesticides sprayed on crops like they were water. I do not, incidentally, accept arguments that "we've always messed with crop genetics," for two reasons: one, we've never messed with crop genetics in a way such that we can't anticipate the outcome, and two, we've never messed with crop genetics for the sole purpose of making crops more resistant to proprietary pesticides. And the pro-GMO "science" comes mostly from the corporations making the GMOs (since they tend to throw lawyers at researchers who purchase seed and experiment on their own). Think maybe they might be a little biased?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Obama Administration to keep corporations like Shell from drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. We know drilling in the Arctic is a bad idea because cleaning up the inevitable spill is even harder than it is in more temperate areas of the world, and also because we don't know enough about the wildlife in the region to know what awful effects drilling will have. We do know enough about the endangered bowhead whale, however, to know that the noise of drilling, ice-breaking, and seismic testing is deafening, as in literally deafening. You might well be saying, well, that's a shame, but we need to get ourselves free of Middle Eastern oil, but setting aside the many other ways we could be getting off foreign oil, you may not be considering that whales won't just use sign language if they're deaf -- they're going to lose their ability to communicate with other whales, which is life-or-death to the bowhead whale. Which makes Arctic drilling cruel as well as foolish.

Around the table: "Courageous" news flackery, mercy for Corinthian students, a bad ag-gag law, Scott Walker's lousy job-creation record part 228, and another moron morons it up on Twitter.

CNN is not only starting up its own PR hackery shop, it's calling it "Courageous." No, this is not an Onion article -- "Courageous" (and I suspect I'll always put that in quotation marks) will deliver "news-like content on behalf of advertisers," but they promise they'll be "clearly labeling that and differentiating that." Remember back in 1996, when Roger Ailes promised everyone Fox News wouldn't be a right-wing news outlet just because a guy like him helped create it? Then you already know how much that promise means.

Excellent news: the Department of Education, after much pressure from good citizens like you, has decided to expand debt forgiveness to Corinthian students. Corinthian, you recall, is the for-profit college chain that folded in April after DOE assessed record fines. Personal to those who screech ZOMG TEH TAXPAYERS HAZ TO PAYZ FOR TEH LOANS!!!: where were you when our government gave out these loans? Cheering them on, probably -- or calling the Obama Administration's modest efforts at reforming federal student loan programs "socialism." No, I don't think I'm exaggerating about that.

North Carolina's reactionary state legislature overrides a Pat McCrory veto of an ag-gag law Vice suggests might be "the worst in the nation." That's right, it was too tough a pill even for Mr. McCrory, arguably the most reactionary Governor in America and that's saying something, to swallow. If the legislature wants to know why folks can't just go to the police when they see something (hint: because the law they wrote cites "duty of loyalty to the employer" as if that means a damn), then I want to know why existing laws against theft don't protect corporations from "espionage."

Ho hum, Scott Walker's Wisconsin also ranks dead last among U.S. states in "business start-up activity," which is exactly the sort of thing a man trying to sell his competence would hang his hat on. Here's what happens next: a) Scott Walker blames Obama, though the nation's economy as a whole is doing better than Wisconsin's; b) Scott Walker laughs and says his critics are always out to get him (even if these critics now include the Ewing Marion Kaufmann Foundation), and c) if the "liberal" media gets up the nerve to report it (once they're done fellating him for riding a Harley in Iowa), he'll complain about how campaigns are so "negative." How to avoid negativity: don't do evil.

Finally, Minnesota native/abject moron posts, to Barack Obama's new Twitter account, an image of the famous "Hope" photo with a noose around Mr. Obama's neck. Then, naturally, he suggests it's everyone else's fault that they didn't understand he was really complaining about Mr. Obama's "communism" -- because, as we know, hanging Communists is a much more vivid image from American history than hanging black folks. Several quite justified Secret Service visits and at least one job loss later, it pleases me to note that we will never have to speak of Jeff Gullickson again.

Action: country-of-origin labeling, war in the Middle East, sexual assault in the military, and Keystone XL, Jr.

First things first. The House of Representatives plans to repeal country-of-origin labeling (or COOL) laws for meat, fruit, and vegetables -- laws we've only had for a few years -- today, ostensibly because the World Trade Organization ruled last month that our COOL laws violated the TBT and GATT, but I suspect they're using the WTO's ruling as an excuse to gut laws they wanted gutted anyway. And isn't this the kind of thing we've been complaining about with "free" trade? And wasn't that President Obama telling us a few weeks back that when "critics warn that parts of this deal would undermine American regulation -- food safety, worker safety, even financial regulations," that "(t)hey're making this stuff up" and that "no trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws"? Well, that sure came back to bite him. Just remember, though: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want. So Consumers Union helps you tell your House Reps to keep our country-of-origin labeling laws, even if it means we have to bow out of "free" trade agreements.

Meanwhile, Reps. McGovern (D-MA), Lee (D-CA), and Jones (R-NC) have introduced H.Con.Res. 55, which would direct President Obama to "remove United States Armed Forces deployed to Iraq or Syria on or after August 7, 2014, other than Armed Forces required to protect United States diplomatic facilities and personnel, from Iraq and Syria," no later than the end of 2015. Once the House takes up this bill -- and they will, since it invokes the War Powers Act -- they'll finally be compelled to debate the unilateral war President Obama began in Iraq and Syria against ISIS 10 months ago. But we shouldn't let Congress mouth off that they'd have given Mr. Obama more power if he only had an inkling of how to fight ISIS, because that evades the point: that they shirked their Constitutional duty to authorize the President to fight the war, as well as their responsibility to tell him how to fight it. Change the subject, lose the argument, that's what I say. I think H.Con.Res. 55 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming.

In other news, the Senate filibustered the Military Justice Improvement Act last year, but it's back this year, as an amendment to the defense authorization bill (specifically, it's S.A. 1578 to S.A. 1463 to H.R. 1735, H.R. 1735 being the House-passed defense auth bill and S.A. 1463 being the Senate's amended version of the House bill). S.A. 1578 would help reform the military's ability to handle sexual assault cases (and other cases) by taking the decision to prosecute sexual assault out of the chain of the command and giving it to military prosecutors. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that most of the 45 filibustering Senators' views of the Military Justice Improvement Act were of the "who cares it's women" and "let's not give Obama a victory on anything" variety, but I suppose some Senators are truly concerned about taking power from commanding officers. But do we expect the President to micromanage affairs in the legislative branch, because he's "above" them? So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to vote for S.A. 1578 and help sexual assault victims in the military.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Obama Administration to exercise its authority on the people's behalf to conduct an environmental review of Enbridge's proposed expansion of its Alberta Clipper tar sands pipeline, then the Sierra Club helps you do that. President Obama has made much of the State Department's process in evaluating the Keystone XL pipeline -- he made so much of it, in fact, that he vetoed Congressional legislation designed to make him approve the bill, while leaving open the possibility that he'd approve it once the State Department's evaluation was done. But the State Department approved an Enbridge scheme to move nearly twice as much oil through its pipeline, and then build a bypass of that pipeline, without the required environmental impact review or public notice -- required because the Alberta Clipper passes through northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Did I mention that the pipeline that burst into the Kalamazoo River in 2010 belonged to Enbridge? Let's see if we can put a stop to this madness.

Around the table: featuring perhaps the stupidest thing a Senator ever said on Twitter.

FAIR finds the AP describing "incidents involving white law enforcement and black suspects." Got that? If you're at the receiving end of a police officer's bullet, you must have been a suspect! Even if you're a seven-year-old girl sleeping on a couch! "Telling, too, that in its description of police killings in the news over the last several months...the only thing AP sees fit to describe as 'violent' are the protests." No, it's not "reading too much" to note these items -- as Rush Limbaugh used to say, words mean things.

The "liberal" media has continued to trumpet the YAY FRACKINGZ DOESN'T HARMS TEH DRINKING WATERZ!!!! line of argument after the EPA released its fracking report last week, but Wonk Wire presents even more reasons to be skeptical. I guess the "liberal" media will just ignore everything Mr. Fox said because he was once an "avant-garde filmmaker," though that description is not a terribly precise instrument for dismantling any points he's made.

Sen. McConnell (E-KY) suggests to a right-wing radio host that the Senate probably won't be confirming any of President Obama's judicial nominees. Which is very mature of him! Does Mr. McConnell remember how he felt about Democratic obstruction of far fewer Bush Mobb judicial appointees? I kid, of course -- he remembers and doesn't care, like all irredeemably corrupt souls.

Ho hum, the "liberal" media says Hillary Clinton isn't using her husband's "triangulation" strategy, which they say brought white voters from red states back to the Democrats, but adopting President Obama's strategy of mobilizing the voters who are already likely to vote for you in more swingy areas. I wonder if the Obama strategy would work in 2016, too, especially against a really good politician like Scott Walker, but "troubling the party" my ass -- it's really the "liberal" media that's mad she's not running as hard to the right as they'd like. And there's really no law of physics saying that you must run to the right to reclaim red state voters. There are a lot of populists in red states, after all.

Finally, Sen. John Thune says approximately the stupidest thing ever said on Twitter: "Six million people risk losing their health care subsidies, yet @POTUS continues to deny that Obamacare is bad for the American people." Ah, how did those six million folks get their subsidies in the first place? From the Affordable Care Act. It's not just stupid, it's classic hostage-taking: give up Obamacare, or I'll blow the brains out of these subsidies you only got through Obamacare in the first place! Maybe U.S. Senators should stay away from Twitter.

Action: "free" trade, the Endangered Species Act, and fairness for pregnant workers.

Word on the street is that the pro-"free" trade caucus in Congress is getting closer to getting the votes it needs to pass the "fast-track" bill the Senate passed a few weeks ago. See? Congress can-so get things done, if those things are horrible things. Just so happens that Tom Tomorrow, who writes the marvelous This Modern World cartoon, has (as is his wondrous habit) summarized everything wrong with TPP fast-tracking in a mere six panels. "They don't have specific objections to the trade agreement they're forbidden by law from discussing specifically" would be hilarious, if I were less spiritually-advanced (or maybe more spiritually-advanced, I can't decide). Of course, Our Glorious Elites attack us without disclosing the rules they've written, like making it illegal to keep the TPP a secret (which sure has deterred Wikileaks, I notice!) or preventing our members of Congress from taking any notes about the TPP when they go in to read it. What do they have to hide, you wonder? Public Citizen, Food and Water Watch, Sum of Us, CREDO, and the Union of Concerned Scientists all help you tell your House Rep to oppose "free" trade "fast-tracking," while CREDO helps you call House Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and tell her to declare her opposition to "fast-track," if indeed she does oppose it. She voted against it back in 1998, and doesn't seem to be whipping votes for it this time, but we should pressure her to do more.

Meanwhile, Congress also seeks to lay waste to the Endangered Species Act -- but should it be a cautionary tale that Rep. Richard Pombo tried that in 2005, only to lose re-election in his heavily Republican district in 2006? The only caution we should take is this: politicians who want to get rid of the Endangered Species Act won't come out and say so; they'll say they want to "reform" it, mainly by making the regulatory process more convoluted and giving politicians the option of just ignoring scientists whenever they want to let their cronies seize a plot of land so they can turn it into a money-making graveyard. Politicians love to add more hurdles to a regulatory process and then turn to you and say "see? The regulatory process doesn't work!" It's a little like an arsonist demonstrating that housing just doesn't work by setting your house on fire. At least half a dozen bills that would in some way cripple the Endangered Species Act have already been introduced in this Congress, so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop screwing around with the Endangered Species Act.

Finally, H.R. 2654, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, has been reintroduced in the House, and both the National Women's Law Center and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to support it. H.R. 2654 would prevent employers from refusing to make reasonable workplace accommodations for pregnant employees unless the employer can prove it would significantly impact the business's operation; the bill would also prevent employers from denying employment strictly on the basis of pregnancy, retaliating against employees who become pregnant, requiring pregnant employees to take unnecessary leaves, or shunting pregnant workers off to other functions as a punishment for getting pregnant. I mean, we know corporations are basically anti-family -- since having a family interferes with the corporation's bottomless hunger for money -- but as civilized people we know we should not be making it harder for people to get pregnant, and we shouldn't be making it harder for them to keep their jobs, either. So let's be civilized, and too bad if being "civilized" is the opposite of being corporate.

Around the table: from Democratic "leftism" to the deleterious health effects of processed sugar.

Another day, another fool (this one a sitting House Democrat, but still a fool) claiming that the Democrats are going "too far left" -- but thank God we still have Bill Moyers around to school a fool. Of course the first thing wrong with Mr. Delaney's screed is the title: "The last thing America needs? A left-wing version of the Tea Party." I was thinking first, not last. But I'm sad to report the "left-wing version of the Tea Party" won't be Occupy -- the time for them to challenge Democrats in House and Senate primaries was 2012, when they were still on everyone's minds.

Paul Krugman tells us that the Texas "economic miracle," one allegedly spurred by "low taxes on the rich and harsh treatment of the poor," isn't what it appears to be. Mr. Krugman concedes that Texas's "permissive land-use policies" "have kept housing cheap" and therefore drawn folks to move there, but Texas's economy, we learn, has benefited from other factors -- the recent fracking boom, the long-term movement of Americans southward -- that can't be created by a legislature. Say that to your right-wing friend and he'll say see? Government can't do anything! Go ahead and tell him (do I need to gender-equivocate here?) that changing the subject is just a way of conceding the point.

MediaMatters's Eric Boehlert sees "More Bad News for Rush Limbaugh," as a vanguard Indianapolis radio station kicks him off its airwaves after 22 years. I'd hesitate to call this bad news for right-wing radio in general, though (one Republican radio consultant says it is, but he could be playing possum) -- new right-wing radio hosts seem to pop up all the time, faster than we can whack them, and where are the left-wing Rush Limbaughs who might inject our discourse with the coarse humor it needs? Nowhere, that's where. That's because liberals are nice.

A ProPublica/NPR report finds that the Red Cross raised $500 million for Haitian earthquake relief and built a grand total of six permanent homes. Every charity has problems in Haiti we could probably all recite, but the Red Cross has a few unique ones -- its apparent (and possibly racist) insistence on relying on workers who don't speak the language, its insistence on fundraising at least in part to close other operational deficits, and, of course, micromanaging from a home office that seems to understand fundraising better than it understands work. Even better than the part where the Red Cross starts a "hand-washing campaign" without adequate access to soap and water: the part where a Red Cross spokeshack accuses ProPublica and NPR of "creating ill will in the community which may give rise to a security incident"! Can you say hostage situation, boys and girls? Don't report on our failings, or the security of these good people gets it!

Finally, Dr. Jeff Ritterman writes in TruthOut that the McGovern Commission's 1977 declaration that we need to get fat out of our diet was wrong -- we need to get the processed sugar out of our diets. Happily Dr. Ritterman reminds us that when the fat went out of food, the taste went out with it, and when the taste went out, the sugar went in -- and thanks to our government's subsidization of high-fructose corn syrup, sugar was cheap. He goes on to explain exactly how excess sugar makes your body run badly, and he does this better than anyone else I've ever read.

Action: government spying, and two Pennsylvania budget matters.

The USA FREEDOM Act passed, but that doesn't mean we stop fighting our government's attempts to worm its way into every nook and cranny of our lives, as Amnesty International helps you tell President Obama to do what he can to ban mass governmental surveillance. You'll ask him to amend the Reagan-era Executive Order 12333, which the NSA has been using to justify mass surveillance across the planet, and you'll also ask him to make surveillance a lot more transparent, end surveillance-sharing among nations, and ensure that surveillance only happens when our government gets a warrant, which is all we freedom-lovers have ever asked. If you'd like to remind Congress that they're not off the hook just because they managed to pass a law, then Roots Action still helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the far-better Pocan-Massie bill, H.R. 1466, the Surveillance State Repeal Act, which would repeal both the USA PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act and thus put government surveillance on a more Constitutional footing. You'll want to edit the email to reflect that the USA FREEDOM Act has now passed, but good hunting.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has pledged to restore the education funding (as well as funding for environmental protections, domestic violence programs, and a litany of other things) that Gov. Corbett cut, but Republicans seem determined to keep it cut. The whole BUT WE'RE BROKE!!!! line of argument doesn't persuade as many people as it used to -- it still persuades too many people, since any number of people in excess of zero would constitute too many -- but then Republicans might be counting on the whole "budget's gotta get done by the end of June" thing (a hostage situation, you may realize) to induce Gov. Wolf to do their will. Why we're even talking about their will, of course, is everything wrong with politics right there -- we should be talking about the people's will, and if the people really wanted these education cuts, they'd have re-elected Tom Corbett, instead of bucking one of the largest Republican waves ever and tossing him out. Keystone Progress helps you remind your elected representatives to do your will, not theirs, and restore funding for vital public services from which we all benefit.

Speaking of Pennsylvania budgeting, Republicans are also resisting any attempt to force gas drilling corporations to pay a severance tax on the gas they extract from our lands, like they do in every other state (even ones considerably redder than Pennsylvania). Because FREEDOM! And nothing means freedom like gas drillers paying nothing for the privilege of extracting gas from public lands and polluting our drinking water with their filthy fracking chemicals. Seriously, how much is enough for these clowns? They already set our drinking water on fire and render it brackish and gelatinous; should they really get to do all that for free? And again, the Governor who called an impact fee "un-American" and acted like he had to do whatever gas drillers wanted because JOBZ!!!! is gone from the Governor's mansion, defeated in his re-election effort as if a massive Republican wave hadn't swept across the land. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Pennsylvania state legislators to stop blocking efforts to enact a severance tax on gas drillers.

Around the table: from the EPA fracking report to the Tom Coburn Primary.

The EPA reports that fracking has not "led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources" in America, though it has found instances of fracking-caused contamination. But that's a change from the EPA's 2004 report, which asserted that fracking "poses minimal threat" to underground drinking water sources and which found no incidents of contamination, and the EPA also instructs us that fracking pollution could happen -- to a large degree through the incompetence of gas drillers, and when does that ever happen? Also, we learn that oil and gas drillers cooperated very little with the EPA on their study, which might explain how they (more or less) got the results they wanted. In other words, it would be premature, at the least, to say "the science supports fracking" now.

In a stunning coincidence, Scott Walker's budget would cut $250 million from the state university system, and he wants to spend $250 million on building a new stadium for the Milwaukee Bucks! When Mr. Walker raises the awful spectre of the Bucks moving somewhere else, of course, you'll release this as a classic hostage situation -- you better let me throw away a crapload of taxpayer money on corporate welfare for my cronies, or the basketball team gets it! The Bucks have been in Milwaukee as long as I've been alive (they won an NBA title back in 1971, with a fellow named Lew Alcindor at center), but enough with the sports-stadium hostage crises already.

Ho hum, Gov. Sam Brownback is now looking to hike taxes on the poorest Kansans to get out of the budget hell he's put the state in with his massive tax cuts for the rich. I do recall predicting that he'd ultimately raise taxes just like Tax Cutting Saint Ronald Reagan did, and where President Reagan hiked payroll taxes, Gov. Brownback would hike sales taxes, which (like payroll taxes) hit working families much harder than the rich. I sure hope he's happy with what he's done -- and I sure hope his 2014 Democratic opponent Paul Davis is happy he didn't have the guts to call for a repeal of all the Brownback tax cuts, thus cementing his loss.

Former Microsoft employee, after spending years trying to bring computers to classrooms across the world, has decided that technology in the classroom doesn't do as much good as good teachers and administrators do, and could even make bad situations worse. Admittedly, you could make a similar argument about almost technology's interaction with almost anything -- technology is only any good if it helps us become closer as people.

Finally, in case you were wondering who would win the Tom Coburn primary, the incorrigible former Republican Senator from Oklahoma runs down the list of Republican Presidential candidates, and I do mean "runs down." Jeb Bush is named Bush and won't win, Rick Perry isn't "capable" enough, Rand Paul "scares me to death" on foreign policy, and Ted Cruz and Scott Walker are "not ready for prime time" -- plus Scott Walker didn't really win his 2012 recall so much as "Republicans around the country did it for him" OOOH SNAP! He likes that Chris Christie "answers questions directly" just like the famously prickly Tom Coburn does, and thinks Mike Huckabee could "attract votes from both sides," which was more true in 2008 than it is now. The winner's Marco Rubio, by the way, which perhaps says more about the others than it does about him.

Action: the minimum wage in Pennsylvania, "zero tolerance" follies in Mississippi, and GMO salmon in Costco stores.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your legislators to hike the state minimum wage to $10.10/hour, index that wage to inflation, and eliminate the separate minimum wage for tipped workers (who would then make the regular minimum wage). There is currently a bill before the state House, Rep. Kim's HB 250, which would raise the minimum wage to $10.10/hour over a period of one year, and would narrow the gap between the minimum wage for tipped employees and the minimum wage for the rest of us, but why not ask for more? Asking for more, and fighting for more, means you get more. And raising the minimum wage to $10.10/hour would increase paychecks for over 1.2 million Pennsylvania workers (i.e., those who currently make between the state's current minimum wage of $7.25/hour and $10.10/hour) and would, as you may remember, boost the state's minimum wage back to its earning power in the late '60s, when it was only around $2/hour, as so many right-wingers love to remind you, but $2 went a lot further then than it does now.

Meanwhile, you may have heard about the Walker family of Tate County, Mississippi, who strangely find themselves facing sizable fines or even jail time for the heinous crime of cheering for their daughter at a high school graduation ceremony. Apparently the school has a "no yelling" policy at graduation ceremonies, which covers such things as a father yelling "you did it, baby!" or an aunt yelling a graduate's name. But the school superintendent not only kicked them out of the ceremony -- which action they didn't contest, apparently -- but filed "disturbing the peace" charges against the family several days later. Because ZERO TOLERANCE, BABY! Anyone else think being escorted from the premises is payment enough for yelling out against school policy? Anyone else think a white man filing charges against a black family for being happy during a happy occasion looks a little racist? Anyone else think the Big Stick of Bad PR can shame another jerk into not abusing his power? Color of Change helps you tell the Senatobia school district superintendent to stop being such a jerk and drop the charges against the Walkers already.

Finally, over 60 grocery corporations across America have committed to reject selling genetically-modified salmon -- like the one Aquabounty has developed that they assure us is safe (which totally does not sound like self-interest!), but which reproduces faster than two teenagers with a six-pack of Keystone pounders and a Bat Out of Hell cassette, and threatens to leave too much of that hormonal chaos in the salmon you find on your plate. And among these 60 corporations are some fairly big ones, like Kroger and Safeway, but Costco, which is also a very, very large grocery seller, hasn't indicated whether it'll ban GMO salmon from its shelves yet. So both Friends of the Earth and the Organic Consumers Association help you tell Costco to commit to not selling genetically-modified salmon in their stores. This matter could well be of considerable urgency, as the FDA mulls approving the aforementioned Aquabounty GMO salmon as an animal drug, not a food. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Aquabounty won't be marketing GMO salmon as an "animal drug" in grocery stores.

Around the table: surveying the surveillance state, and other tasks.

Ken Dilanian at Talking Points Memo summarizes the USA FREEDOM Act, which passed on Tuesday after several sections of the PATRIOT Act expired late Sunday night. Does the USA FREEDOM Act represent a step forward for us in reclaiming the rights the PATRIOT Act took away? Yes. Was it a bill worth supporting? No. And if we had supported it, saying this is the best we can do -- which we did do, as late as November, with better versions of the USA FREEDOM Act -- then something worse would have passed, something that would have pleased Great and Bounteous All-Seeing and All-Knowing Real American President Mitch McConnell. We'll be talking about this matter again.

The New York Times finds that nearly three in five Americans (including one in three Republicans) think we need to take urgent government action to address the growing gap between rich and poor. The Times also finds that, contra Pew's rather optimistic assessment, more than half of Americans oppose "fast-tracking" "free" trade deals and that almost two of three Americans want "some form of trade restrictions." Left out in the article (which does link to the survey) is the news that nearly three of four Americans think corporations have "too much power."

Ho hum, CNN reports that some health insurance corporations are contemplating massive premium hikes for their policies on the federal exchange, and they're calling that "Obamacare sticker shock." We don't learn until paragraph 9 that most corporations won't get the rate hikes they seek, since state insurance commissioners can simply deny such hikes in 36 states; they could have put that information earlier, but then "Obamacare sticker shock" might have seemed like drama or something. (Click through, if you dare, to the article entitled "You'll Pay a Lot More to See the Doctor with Obamacare," which begs the question, "more than when folks were routinely taking their kids to the ER for the sniffles because they didn't have any insurance?" I mean, yes, a single-payer health care system would be a lot better, but Affordable Care Act hysteria is quite offensive.)

Hillary Clinton calls for at least 20 days of early voting in every state. The proposal is classic Clinton: it sounds bold, it would do some good, it would earn a lot of popular support, but it wouldn't solve the really big problems folks have when they try to vote, problems that begin and end with the malice of politicians who don't want the "wrong kind of people" to vote.

Pennsylvania state judge rules that McDonald's franchises therein can't pay their employees in prepaid bank cards, and Chase decides to refund said employees any fees they might have incurred by using the cards. The defendants plan to appeal, and might well find a judge willing to accept their argument that prepaid bank cards, which incur fees at the whim of the bank that issues them, are somehow exactly the same as cash, check, or direct deposit, but the current ruling and Chase's reaction are both causes for celebration.

Finally, Ted Cruz claims that John F. Kennedy would be a Republican today because he proposed a massive tax cut and Republicans are the party of tax cuts. You may recall that President Kennedy proposed cutting the top tax rate from 91% to 70% (which Congress didn't accomplish until after he died); the current top tax rate, that same tax rate which elicits so many don't-tread-on-me tantrums from the right, is 39.6%. For such a bright fellow, Ted Cruz sure sounds stupid sometimes.

Action: "free" trade, robocalls, and domestic violence.

CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to oppose "free" trade "fast-tracking" because of the damage "free" trade deals could do to our environment. (The Union of Concerned Scientists provides a similarly-themed action alert.) Apparently the European Union has decided to put off banning over 30 pesticides linked to cancer and infertility, all because they don't want to run afoul of that other massive "free" trade treaty, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (or TTIP). To think that the mere threat of a "free" trade agreement could prevent a continent-wide legislative body from protecting its good citizens from ingesting pesticides that could harm them! And that's not the only "free" trade news hook lately, as the WTO ruled that our country-of-origin laws violate both the TBT and GATT (which has given Congress an excuse to try to repeal those laws). What we don't always understand -- and given that Tha Bush Mobb acted like this wasn't the case in re the Geneva conventions, we have good reason to be confused -- is that when the Senate ratifies a treaty we negotiate with other nations, it becomes the law of the land. So let's tread carefully here.

Meanwhile, the FCC has lately ruled that the big telecom corporations can, in fact, voluntarily help consumers block robocalls, robotexts, and telemarketing calls, without running afoul of federal "call completion" rules, which (as you might imagine) mandate that big telecoms shouldn't let so many calls drop, especially in rural areas where they haven't built out very much. I wonder why this was even an issue -- if a consumer has the technology to block calls, how does a big telecom get blamed for not "completing" them? I suspect the big telecoms were throwing that out there just to muddy up the debate, since that's what they do best. Some left-leaning writers have suggested that the FCC rules would cripple market research and political polling -- both of which do benefit society generally and which are exempt from Do Not Call lists for that reason -- but if the consumer makes the decision to reject robocalls, I don't think such "crippling" will happen. So Consumers Union helps you tell big telecom corporation CEOs to provide free tools to consumers so we can block robocalls from reaching our phones.

Finally, a Louisiana domestic violence worker has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Google to stop giving addresses for domestic violence shelters and putting them on their maps. Won't that prevent domestic violence victims from finding help, you ask? Not realistically, no -- domestic violence victims may not escape their situations for a long time, for reasons you can easily imagine, and generally not until they've made many contacts with with domestic violence workers. A domestic violence shelter is not the kind of thing you just go looking for -- unless, of course, you're a domestic violence abuser, in which case you're more than likely going to stalk your ex, an obsession made far easier by giving out information about domestic violence shelters, and that could be life-or-death for the victim. And why ask Google? Because domestic violence abusers may not think to use a different search engine (since, as Robert Reich pointed out the other day, Google is so big it's become a verb) -- and other search engines will follow Google's lead anyway.

Around the table: from "free" trade-related campaign contributions to the EPA limiting carbon emissions from airplanes.

Well, the Guardian doesn't mince words: "Here’s how much corporations paid US senators to fast-track the TPP bill" is the headline, and the number relating to "how much corporations paid" is -- well, it doesn't matter, really; just know that it's a relatively small number, smaller, I'd think, than the amount of money these corporations hope to make off the TPP, and n.b., also, that while corporations spent less than half as much getting Democratic votes as they did getting Republican ones, Democrats up in 2016 got a lot more than the average.

Juliana DeVries's article in The Nation, "You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History," sounds like clickbait, but it's not -- it isn't just a friend of the Boston Marathon bombers who could be prosecuted for clearing his browser history during a terrorism investigation, but it could be you, too, even if you don't know a federal investigation is looking for whatever information you've just deleted. Seems unfair, doesn't it? And people get their shorts in a bunch when I say law enforcement personnel sometimes act like spoiled brats.

Amanda Frank at Center for Effective Government notes that fracking proponents oppose both federal and local laws and regulations governing fracking, calling that (politely, I think) a "paradox." Seriously, though, small government advocates need to explain exactly how banning cities and municipalities from enacting their own bans on fracking serves the concept of "small government," rather than the more Earthly concerns corporations have with their own bottom line. My guess is their answer is some form of ZOMG YOU ARE TEH COMMUNIZTZ!!!!

Speaking of "paradoxes," FAIR catches the New York Times describing the large crowds Bernie Sanders has been getting in Iowa while simultaneously telling readers that he's "unelectable." "Unelectable" is what the haters call you when they can't refute your arguments. In a related note, I notice the "liberal" media have also been berating Mrs. Clinton for her stand on "free" trade, but haven't hounded the ten thousand Republican candidates about that matter. Could it be that a Republican saying "yes, I support outsourcing our jobs and nullifying our laws!" wouldn't qualify as "news" to the "liberal" media?

Finally, some good news: the EPA will set limits on airplane emissions, and could begin that process as soon as the end of this week. Let me take a sip of some Hatorade, so I may glean what right-wingers' objections will be: ZOMG EPA KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!!, ZOMG CLIMATE CHANGE IZ TEH HOAXEZ!!!, it's dumb for our federal government to regulate a global industry. Of course, it's not dumb, when our aircraft account for almost 30 percent of all carbon emissions from aircraft, but even setting that aside, do we routinely give up on doing the right thing because other people aren't doing it?

Action: torture in Uzbekistan, campaign finance reform, and better SEC Commissioners.

Muhammad Bekzhanov has been imprisoned for 16 years in Uzbekistan, nominally for (get your surprised face ready) committing acts of terrorism, but more likely for heading up the newspaper of the political party Erk, a party banned by the state. Mr. Bekzhanov tried to get asylum in neighboring Ukraine, but instead found himself extradited back to Uzbekistan, then tortured into confessing to several bombings. His torture has included being beaten by rubber truncheons and plastic bottles filled with water (if you think that last item's not so bad, remember how much water weighs), and also given electric shocks and suffocated; it's been bad enough over the years that he's now deaf in one ear and has contracted TB, and he told his wife "the only thing he asked of God was to let him die." Now, if Barack Obama did that to Tea Party leaders, or if George W. Bush had done that to anti-war protestors, you wouldn't stand for that, right? So why stand for it in Uzbekistan? They get away with it because they think no one notices. Amnesty International helps you convince them otherwise, and tell them to stop torturing, and start freeing, political prisoners.

Meanwhile, H.J.Res. 22 would amend the U.S. Constitution to allow state and federal governments to "regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections." It would also allow said governments to "distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such entities from spending money to influence elections." The bill has 126 co-sponsors, but, sadly, all but one are Democrats, and the lone Republican, North Carolina's incorrigible Walter Jones, often seems like he exists to be a thorn in his party's side, not that I generally oppose such a course of action. That's especially unfortunate in a land where, as the New York Times has told us, more than four of five Americans think our campaign finance laws need at least "fundamental" rebuilding, and nearly four of five believe that the law should limit the spending both of individuals and "groups not affiliated with a campaign." So Public Citizen helps you tell your House Rep to support the amendment (or thank them if they already support it).

Finally, President Obama has the chance to nominate two (of five) SEC Commissioners this year; one has to be a Republican, because Republican Daniel Gallagher is resigning, but the other is Luis Aguilar, whose term expires this month. And though neither one of the nominees has to be toadies for Wall Street banksters, this seems to be the direction in which Mr. Obama is leaning -- which, I know, right? It's so hard to believe. Like the FCC, the SEC has five Commissioners, evenly divided between the political parties except for the SEC Chair, who obviously serves at the pleasure of the President -- though perhaps not the American people, so disappointing has Mary Jo White's tenure as SEC Chair been. Hence CREDO helps you tell President Obama to nominate folks to the SEC who'll fight (to use one of his favorite turns of phrase from his first term) someone who works for Main Street, not Wall Street. The SEC does have one proven reformer, Kara Stein, who has made the Volcker rule stronger and opposed the SEC's habit of giving out securities law waivers like they were candy. America is a big country, so it can't be that hard to find another one.

Around the table: the Iraq "mistake," the "free" trade "consensus," a hedge fund manager "gives back to society," and other absurdities.

The Rev. William Alberts describes "The Vocabulary of War Criminals." His essay is brought to you by the words "mistake," "hindsight," and "faulty intelligence," words that those of us who always opposed the invasion of Iraq never have to use in this context. A better word for what Our Glorious Elites did, Rev. Alberts instructs us, would be "criminal."

The Pew Research Center finds a large majority of Americans (58%) agreeing with the proposition that "free" trade agreements have been good for our economy. But of course they asked that question before they asked whether "free" trade agreements slow down the economy, depress wages, or lead to job loss, and while the answer to that first question is neck-and-neck, it hasn't been in past years, and plenty more folks believe that "free" trade agreements depress wages and lead to job loss than believe the opposite -- which renders the first result questionable, to say the least.

A hedge fund manager wishes Hillary Clinton would "stop crapping all over what I do for a living." And then goes on to explain all of the vital functions hedge funds serve in society! I kid, of course -- he merely says his hedge fund donates to universities, charities, and "cultural institutions," and of course none of that is tax-deductible! If Mrs. Clinton wants to compare hedge fund managers and truck drivers without drawing the ire of fact-checking bean counters, she might want to read this Center for Effective Government blog post, entitled Meet the 25 Hedge Fund Managers Whose $2.2 Billion Tax Break Could Pay for 50,000 Highway Construction Jobs." You're welcome, Mrs. Clinton.

Ruth McCambridge at Nonprofit Quarterly takes reporters to task for flogging news about "the nation's first non-profit grocery store" -- by naming four other non-profit groceries, reminding us about the long history of food co-ops across America, and noting that the "first non-profit grocery" in question, Daily Table, sells nearly-expired food in low-income neighborhoods, as if they hate the people who live there or something.

Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress predicts that the Supreme Court will rule that lawsuits alleging racial discrimination in housing will have to prove not that the result of a landlord's actions were racist, but that his intent was racist. I suspect he's right, since the Roberts Court (in an act one might reasonably call judicial activism) went rather far out of its way to take up a matter that lower federal courts had unanimously concurred upon, and also since this Court has been no friend to racial minorities. I also remember that Justice Scalia attacked Justice Kennedy's opinion striking down Colorado's anti-gay Amendment 2, writing that looking for an "animus" in a law was impossible, but then, being a right-winger means never having to be consistent.

Finally, our federal government approves three solar farms, to be built on federal land in Clark County, NV, which may ultimately produce enough power to serve over 130,000 homes. But being, as I am, extremely suspicious of folks' repeated calls for "fewer burdensome regulations," I would like to know what the "streamlined permitting process" entailed. I shudder to think that if any of these solar farms fails spectacularly, we'll find out.

Action: country-of-origin labeling, the newest Time-Warner merger attempt, and car computer security.

Late last month, the House Agriculture Committee -- which should perhaps be known as the House Big Ag Committee -- voted by a staggering 38-6 margin to get rid of country-of-origin labeling for chicken, pork, and beef, this not more than 48 hours after the World Trade Organization (or WTO) had ruled that American country-of-origin labels "unfairly discriminate" against imported meat. Soon the WTO will impose "retaliatory tariffs" against the U.S., which should make "free" trade even more unpopular, but n.b. that the WTO's ruling didn't say country-of-origin labeling is wrong, merely that America's implementation thereof unduly restricts free trade as per the Technical Barriers to Trade agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. After all, 60 other nations have COOL laws or regulations that don't bother the WTO, so repealing ours, rather than tweaking it, seems rather like overkill. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the repeal of country-of-origin labeling -- even if it means we have to back out of certain "free" trade agreements.

Meanwhile, we may have helped stop the Comcast/Time-Warner merger, but now another corporation has emerged as a suitor for Time-Warner's name and resources: Charter, America's third-largest cable corporation, and it's a measure of how thoroughly the others have monopolized their respective areas of the nation that I'd never heard of them before. Charter also plans to buy the Tampa- and Orlando-based Bright House cable corporation, which, like, maybe should be left alone to succeed or fail on its own merits? Can we do that? Can we not treat every corporation as a money pit to be sucked dry? Anyway, allowing the second- and third-largest cable corporations in America to merge is little better than allowing the second- and first-largest cable corporations in America to merge, and a Charter/Time-Warner merger would allow the resulting behemoth to serve (such as they do) two out of every three broadband customers in America, which isn't the recipe for innovation, lower prices, or better customer service. So Free Press helps you tell the FCC to reject the proposed Charter/Time-Warner merger.

Finally, you know you should keep a wary eye on your private information when you're on your home computer or your cell phone, but, yes, here's one more thing to worry about: the two dozen-plus electronic systems in your automobile, and the newer the car, the less safe your data could be. The GPS device in your car you probably already guessed would be a problem, but think of all the things your car does that are now computerized or computer-aided: steering, accelerating, and braking could all be controlled from outside your driver's seat, at least in theory. Now we don't know of a single incident in which a car has been hacked in this way, but we know it can be done, and I'm pretty sure you won't be impressed if it's only been done once if it's been done to you. Moreover, all the wireless systems in your car sure could be transmitting your habits and routes to third parties without your consent. Consumers Union helps you tell Congress to mandate computer security for car drivers, which number includes most Americans.

Around the table: helping you bust at least 56 myths!

Joseph Palermo reminds us that most Republican complaints about Iraq ignore their crucial role in destroying Iraq -- that Mr. Bush, not Mr. Obama, first negotiated troop withdrawals, that even one-third of Congress "got it right" by voting against going to war there, that the Downing Street Memo confirmed for us that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," and so many other things. It's good to be reminded of these things, since so many folks don't want to remind you of the wrong they did.

Somewhat underreported during former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley's announcement of his run for the Democratic nomination for President was the presence of activists protesting Mr. O'Malley's "zero tolerance," "broken windows," data-controlled anti-crime policies while Mayor of Baltimore. The Wire creator David Simon discussed this matter during the Baltimore riots (and one might wonder whether his Thomas Carcetti was Martin O'Malley with better crime policy grafted on). The timing may just not be on Mr. O'Malley's side, given that so many politicians in both parties are tired of "broken windows" policing.

The Washington Spectator's Jud Lounsbury describes "Scott Walker's Long Crusade," and it's an indispensable document of the trail of slime he's left through state and national politics -- including some not-well-known bits, like the "Good Government Package" he somehow failed to get passed as state legislator and his leaving his father's church in 2006 for one further to the right. And about telling Nancy Reagan that his recall victory was on the same day Ronald Reagan died: why would anyone say something like that to her?

Ho hum, Brit Hume says on Fox News Sunday that it's "hard" for President Obama "to put on his big boy pants and deal with national security." That was just the punch line, of course: before that, Chris Wallace asked a leading question to an AP scribe about Mr. Obama not really having his heart in PATRIOT Act renewal and the AP reporter agreeing, without providing any evidence. But remind me again: Barack Obama was the President who got Osama bin Laden, right?

Finally, IFLscience.com presents a chart of 52 of the "world's most contagious falsehoods." Coffee lovers will take heart that caffeine's status as a diuretic is not all that important (basically, you won't urinate eight ounces more just by drinking eight ounces of coffee than you would have it you drank eight ounces of water), and I suppose some right-wingers will be pleased to hear someone else saying George Washington didn't smoke weed. Also, Hollywood creates a lot of myths, like the Salieri-Mozart "rivalry" and Viking horned helmets.

Action: "free" trade, oil pipeline safety, and antibiotic abuse on factory farms.

The "free" trade "fast-tracking" bill -- which allows the President to present "free" trade deals to Congress and demand an up-or-down vote with little debate and no opportunity to amend, wonder why -- now goes to the House. But though we're still pressuring the House -- which Public Citizen and Food and Water Watch still help you do -- we're also pressuring U.S. Trade Rep. Michael Froman, who supposedly once said that if Americans knew what was in the TPP, they'd hate it. So Demand Progress helps you tell Mr. Froman to release any emails exchanged between himself and big Wall Street banksters regarding the TPP. The Obama Administration claims that "free" trade deals won't derail financial reform efforts here in the U.S., but even Bloomberg has found that claim inaccurate, and European nations, apparently thinking their banks aren't free enough to play in the casino economy, are lobbying to reduce capital requirements Dodd-Frank imposes upon banks. So getting any Froman/bankster emails would go some way toward illuminating this quandary -- and reminding more Americans that "free" trade deals, as our elites are writing them, don't serve our interests.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard that an oil pipeline burst just off Santa Barbara, California a few weeks back, putting 100,000 gallons of crude oil into the Pacific and smothering many, many thousands of animals there, so Avaaz helps you tell California's Attorney General and Santa Barbara County's District Attorney to file charges against Plains All American, the pipeline's owner, and its CEOs. Those who would respond that we don't "know" if Plains All American actually did anything wrong would betray an incredible naivete, not just of the role a civilized society plays in enforcing right and wrong, but also of the politics of pipelines, where corporations routinely skimp on pipeline safety to save money -- indeed, Plains has been been in the news for big oil spills before. And remember that "save money" really means "redistribute money upward to their CEOs" -- per page 124 of this SEC report, Plains All American's CEO has averaged over $5 million in compensation annually since 2012, and stands to make almost $87 million more if he gets canned with or without cause. Nice work if you can get it!

Finally, USPIRG helps you tell the USDA to force food corporations to label meat raised with antibiotics. Maybe the USDA doesn't care what you think, packed as it is with corporate big ag types, but that doesn't change our duty to communicate our will. And our will, here, is that corporations don't pump their animals full of antibiotics to the point where most antibiotics get used on nominally health feed animals rather than sick people or sick animals. Antibiotic abuse makes bacteria stronger, after all, until one day it becomes so strong that antibiotics can't kill it, which means the next cut could kill us. And though the newly-developed antibiotic Teixobactin has killed MRSA in lab trials, it's still a couple years away from routine use in people, and, as you can imagine, a couple years is a long, long time for bacteria. Of course, McDonald's has announced it won't use chicken raised with antibiotics, and Perdue is also phasing out antibiotics in most of its chicken -- and both of these are good starts that require us to keep pushing.

Around the table: greed is still evil, and John Glenn is still pretty awesome.

The New York Times provides us with one of the worst-ever examples of punditoids scolding Democrats for going too far left. But maybe it's good news, in a way -- apparently, at this moment, the Times can't find anyone willing to perform this scolding but a veteran of three Republican administrations (one who's clearly angling for a fourth, or he would have mentioned that skepticism of tough-on-crime laws comes from both parties these days). Still, hearing Democrats are going "too far left" when they won't fight "free" trade, won't bring back the 91% tax bracket, won't expand Medicare to include everyone, and won't pass even modest labor reforms is profoundly insulting to actual liberals.

PR Watch notes that Gov. Scott Walker (E-WI) has been removed from his position as the chair of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. But I wouldn't get too caught up in the did-he-jump-or-was-he-pushed argument (as both the "liberal" media and Mr. Walker would want, I'm sure), because if you get caught up in that, you might not notice just how corrupt the WEDC got once Mr. Walker privatized it. When a man contributes to the Walker campaign and then his corporation gets buku bucks from the WEDC even though some days his corporation's credit cards worked and some days they didn't, that should be a lot more interesting than whether Mr. Walker resigned from the WEDC or got fired.

U.S. District Court of New York judge throws out lawsuit filed by for-profit colleges against impending Department of Education rules aimed at reining in their abuses. For-profit colleges maintain, somehow, that limiting the size of student loans "hurts students." Why? Because if they told the truth -- that such rules actually limit the amount of vacation homes in which for-profit college CEOs can gild their plumbing -- no one would go along with it. Well, except maybe Marco Rubio, since these are his "constituents."

Report says that private health insurance corporations' overhead costs have "exploded" under the Affordable Care Act. But the report's authors employ scare numbers: the $273 billion figure is over 10 years, and $1,375 per newly-insured person per year works out to less than $115 per month; think very many insurance plans are that cheap? Still, I take their point that Medicare's overhead is less than one-tenth that of private health insurance corporations on the exchange; indeed, it's just one reason I've long supported Medicare-for-All.

Finally, former astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn said this to the Associated Press: "I don’t see that I’m any less religious by the fact that I can appreciate the fact that science just records that we change with evolution and time, and that’s a fact. It doesn’t mean it’s less wondrous and it doesn’t mean that there can’t be some power greater than any of us that has been behind and is behind whatever is going on." No truth to the rumor that he then dropped his mike and walked away.