Thieves in the Temple.

Action: Puerto Rico, clean water, and public parks.

H.R. 5278, the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act -- yes, it spells PROMESA -- would essentially replace their democratically-elected government with a "control board" making the island's fiscal decisions. That's right, an unelected, antidemocratic "board" would decide matters of taxing and spending on the island, and this board would put the "needs" of creditors ahead of the needs of good Puerto Ricans by hiking taxes on working people, slashing government spending, and privatizing the island's public assets. We know these things will happen because the bill clearly states that the nation's crushing debt should be restructured only "in the best interests of creditors." H.R. 5278 would also let Puerto Rico's Governor unilaterally slash the island's minimum wage, and exempt the island from the Department of Labor's new overtime rules. It's as if Congress saw what Our Glorious Elites have been doing to Greece for years and got jealous, and demanded that they have someone to oppress so they, too, could insulate banksters from the consequences of all the bad loans they've made over the years. We'd better stop this insanity, or it'll become the norm all over the planet in the coming years, so Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell Congress to reject the PROMESA Act.

Meanwhile, Rep. Conyers (D-MI) has introduced H.R. 5313, the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity, and Reliability Act, or WATER Act. The WATER Act would establish a trust fund, spending up to $34.8 billion annually, on clean water and safe drinking water projects, most of them related to rebuilding pipes and plants. We saw what happened in Flint -- when an unelected "emergency manager" forced Flint to draw its drinking water from the polluted Flint River, and put chemicals in the river to clean the water that wound up corroding Flint's lead pipes -- and, brain damage from lead exposure being irreversible, we don't want that to happen again. And if we spend actual tax dollars upgrading our pipes, we can ensure it doesn't happen again. I suppose the right wing's response to all of that is to let the market decide! -- which would, I suppose, tacitly admit that Michigan's government caused this mess through their greed and incompetence. But the "market" should not decide whether kids suffer brain damage through lead exposure in their drinking water -- that is not a matter for markets, but for morals, and morality demands that we protect citizens of any age from the kinds of harm that curtail their freedoms. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the WATER Act.

Finally, in a spasm of technocratic autoerotica, the National Parks Service has proposed drastically expanding corporate sponsorship of national parks. Because, you know, the money just isn't there like it used to be! And why isn't it there like it used to be? Because used to be we taxed millionaire income at 91%, not 39.6%, and we didn't let corporations write all kinds of bogus "research and development" tax breaks into our laws. In some ways, you know, the old days really were better. But this is what happens when we fail in our duty to make sure the rich don't run roughshod over the rest of us -- not just corporate logos on tour buses, not just public employees finding their advancement tied to their corporate fundraising, not just (God forbid!) corporations getting to attach their name to the Grand Canyon like the parasites they are, but ultimately the complete subversion of public interests (preserving unique natural spaces) to private ones (making money), until corporations one day successfully expand the definition of "conservation" to include all kinds of things that plainly aren't conservation, like gas drilling. But you can throw a wrench into all these horrible works by telling the National Parks Service to keep our national parks unspoiled by corporate greed, as Sum of Us helps you do.

Around the table: environmental racism in Guatemala, and other issues.

Guatemalan activists fight the continued contamination of Lake Atitlán. Local government bodies are supposed to attend to environmental matters, of course, but they tend to ignore complaints and then say they've got no money when they can't ignore the complaints anymore. Then some larger, extra-national body moves in and imposes a solution that doesn't address the problem (unless you consider "a momentary shortfall in my cronies' wallets" to be a "problem"). And it's curious that indigenous populations seem to bear the brunt of environmental damage in Guatemala, just like non-whites do here in America.

Iraq and Afghanistan war vets are suffering serious health problems due to massive open-air "burn pits," designed to dispose of trash. Everything went into these pits -- medical wastes, weapons, plastics, metals, tires, even body parts -- and naturally Kellogg-Brown-Root (then a Halliburton subsidiary) built them not just in violation of our own clean air laws but also the military's own environmental regulations. Thus, any soldier who lived near one is in danger of having serious health problems, from respiratory issues to cancer. But, hey, bygones, as long as Tha Bush Mobb's cronies made money.

Get your surprised face ready: the National Low Income Housing Coalition can't find a single state in America where someone can afford a two-bedroom apartment on the federal minimum wage without paying more than 30% of their income. (That last part is important, as banks used to hold you to the 30% standard before giving you a mortgage -- until they stopped caring about making good loans, that is.) Even a $15/hour minimum wage wouldn't get you a two-bedroom apartment in more than 16 states, and likely not in the biggest cities of those 16 states, either. But please, right-wingers, tell me again how easy it would be for anyone to make it if they would just sell their souls and act like banksters.

The New York Times finds Hillary Clinton "Struggl(ing) to Find Footing in Unusual Race." That couldn't be because she's trying to beat a rich idiot while trying not to lose the financial backing of other rich idiots, could it? I didn't read that in the article anywhere, possibly because the New York Times has a similar problem. Hillary Clinton will have trouble beating Donald Trump because only two kinds of candidates have won elections since 1992: a) incumbents and b) candidates who've been able to sell themselves as a "different kind of politician." And Hillary Clinton is neither one.

Finally, Gary Johnson and William Weld secure the Libertarian party nods for President and Vice President. Convention balloting was unusually contentious, especially for Mr. Weld, a former Republican who governed Massachusetts more or less like a Democrat. Now, perhaps, the Koch brothers can open up their purported $900 million warchest for a Presidential ticket that doesn't have Donald Trump but still shares their values of limited government. I kid, of course.

Around the table: how Our Glorious Elites dismantle democracy, and other hard lessons.

H.R. 5116, currently in committee in the U.S. House, would allow FTC Commissioners to close meetings to the public. It would also allow the FTC to disclose a summary of such meetings, rather than the entire text thereof -- unless the FTC decides not to disclose even that much. When Our Glorious Elites can't win arguments on the merits, and can no longer change the subject, they start dismantling democratic institutions so we no longer even have arguments. But when I get action alerts about H.R. 5116, so will you.

New York City launches effort to provide "Mental Health First Aid." Which means more than suicide hotlines -- it also means training first responders so they can distinguish between folks dangerous to others and folks dangerous to themselves. (As an aside, we've become more aware of the pervasiveness of mental illness at pretty much the same time world governments have decided to serve their big corporate donors at the expense of their people. Gosh, could there be a connection between increased mental illness and lack of economic opportunity for anyone but the already very well-off?)

2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals throws out $1.3 billion judgment against Bank of Amerikkka, arguing that the government had not proven its "fraudulent intent" when it sold mortgages to investors -- even with "evidence of a subsequent, willful breach." I'd sure appreciate it if folks who complain about criminals getting off due to "technicalities" would talk exclusively about this ruling from now on. A good judge would certainly consider intent as a mitigating factor in sentencing, but would not allow folks to use intent as a shield against suffering any of the consequences of their crimes.

Chris Morran, writing at the Consumerist, tells you if those "DIY air conditioners" you see on Youtube keep you as cool as the kind that cost a couple hundred bucks at the store. Spoiler alert: they will not -- they might get a room three degrees cooler in 30 minutes, but then the room will start getting hotter again, while the best window units cut the temp 15 degrees in half that time and then keep it there. (I recommend you get a new AC, too -- your 20-year-old units might still work, but ones made recently are a lot more energy-efficient, as you'll see when you get your electric bill.

Finally, Jack Shafer, writing at Politico, suggests that Donald Trump's "systematic evasions, contradictions and deceptions" have made "a mockery" of the interview form. But haven't Mr. Trump's lies made a mockery of the journalists conducting those interviews, the ones who can't finish him despite his obvious lies and who never seem prepared for his counterpunches? The problem isn't a candidate who rejects appeals to reason in favor of appeals to emotion, but "liberal" media news jockeys too used to using interviews as a way of delivering eyeballs to their advertisers rather than, oh, I don't know, separating truth from fiction.

Action: birthright citizenship in the Dominican Republic, and the set-top box monopoly here in America.

As you may remember, back in 2013 the Constitution Court of the Dominican Republic stripped rights from tens of thousands of its natural-born citizens just because they had Haitian parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents who had entered the Dominican Republic illegally. Sound familiar? But that makes these born-and-raised Dominicans outcasts in their own land, unable to get consistent access to health care, education, above-the-table employment, or redress of grievances in court, all things that all citizens of civilized nations deserve. How would you or I cope with making barely any money, being unable to send our kids to school, and being at a higher risk for abuse and assault, for three years and counting? Not well, I would think, no matter how tough we were. And yes, sometimes I think our right-wingers look to nations like the Dominican Republic and wish they could do something like that here -- you know, like that "anchor babies" Constitutional amendment. But Amnesty International helps you tell the Dominican government to respect the basic human rights of all its citizens.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to end the monopoly the big cable corporations have over set-top boxes, then Free Press still helps you do that. As you know, you rent your set-top box from your cable provider, whether that's Comcast, Charter, or -- just kidding, whether it's Comcast or Charter, and if you want to watch TV, you have no choice but to keep renting that box, which means you could be paying thousands of dollars for that device before you even know it. But you've got other options, and not just from your Wii or PlayStation, either. And that's why the cable corporations will likely ultimately argue that they've got to keep control of your cable boxes because they're under assault from service providers like Netflix and Hulu (which generally use cable corporations to stream their content in the first place, but never mind) and won't be able to compete otherwise. But why not let the market decide? Or, more precisely, let the consumer decide, since that would be the catchphrase of the only kind of free market that could possibly exist in the first place?

Around the table: government spying, "vetting" Bernie Sanders, sugar in soda, vertical farming, and profiting from hardship.

Lo and behold, the Senate Intelligence Committee approves an appropriations bill that would permit the FBI to read your emails without a warrant. This is a giant middle finger to the American people, given that a Republican-held House just unanimously-as-in-everybody approved an email privacy bill that would require warrants for emails. Sadly, President Obama would probably prefer the Senate Intelligence Committee's approach, so we'll go to work on him; when I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, takes issue with the notion that Bernie Sanders would wilt as a general election candidate because he hasn't been properly "vetted." Mr. Johnson does a exhaustive job cataloguing the multitudinous criticisms Mr. Sanders has received, but I think it's also true that Republican attack ads will bring those criticisms far more attention than they've received so far. Of course, the notion that Republicans wouldn't run a scorched-earth campaign against any other Democrat is absurd -- if Jesus ran as a Democrat, Republicans would run a million ads calling him a dirty hippie.

Jennifer Chaussee, writing at Wired, tells us how "Sugar’s Not Just Bad for You -- It’s Bad for Coca-Cola’s Business." You may have thought that corporate welfare handouts like the subsidies that make high-fructose corn syrup so cheap would be good for Coke's business, but Coke actually relies heavily on cheaply-produced foreign sugar that isn't always so well-backed by foreign governments. Hence their move to alternative sweeteners -- which may also benefit sugar workers, who may be the worst-treated workers in the history of the world.

Jodi Helmer, writing at TakePart, analyzes the evolution of indoor "vertical" farming by profiling a New Jersey operation operating in what used to be a laser-tag center. Strange, isn't it, that farming sometimes has to go indoors to avoid pesticide use? And with climate change progressing and urban populations growing, we're going to need solutions that aren't chained to arable land -- solutions that make land arable. It's still more promise than realization, as evidenced by the fact that the AeroFarms operation in Newark grows only 10 kinds of crops (it started out trying to grow 200!), but this is also the kind of thing that individuals can do. Which means those of us who do it in ten years or so will be singled out as terrorists by big ag.

Finally, Hillary Clinton has hit Donald Trump hard for saying he "sort of" hoped the housing market would collapse shortly before it did, because then cash-flush guys like him could make a killing, so to speak. Mr. Trump's counterpunch isn't bad, I suppose, but a statement like "I feel badly for everybody" really relies on you being very, very tuned in to his stream-of-consciousness style, and saying "(w)hat am I going to do? I'm a businessman" invites you to fantasize that someone even more powerful has a gun to his head, just making him benefit financially from good Americans losing their homes. And in re benefiting from crises: George W. Bush spent eight years as President creating crises so Republicans could benefit politically from them, and banksters still create crises all over the planet so they can get rich off them. And I think Americans understand this a lot better than they did a decade ago.

Action: net neutrality, and fair taxation.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: the latest House Financial Services and General Appropriations bill would prohibit the FCC from enforcing net neutrality regulations until a court case against them is decided. And that's not all! The bill would also prohibit the FCC from regulating cable rates and from liberating you from the set-top boxes cable corporations force you to rent. Last year, we only got a block on net neutrality regulations; clearly the House wants to throw so much feces against the wall that we won't be able to bleach it all out. But we don't negotiate with Congress; we express our will and they do our will, and I can't imagine that the American people's will is to be less free on the internet and to be stuck with absurdly-high cable prices and one overpriced set-top box for all eternity. So Free Press helps you tell Congress to reject any appropriations bills that would undermine the FCC's good works on the people's behalf, including their net neutrality rules. I guess we ain't been loud enough. But we'll get loud enough, because that's all that ever helps us.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell President Obama to use the Treasury Department's authority to close the notorious "carried interest" loophole for bankster hedge fund managers. As you may recall, the "carried interest" loophole essentially allows hedge fund managers to pay taxes at the top capital gains rate (23.8%) rather than at the top income tax rate (39.6%), and we really should tax hedge fund manager income at the latter rate, since it is, you know, income. Congress was notoriously reluctant to pass legislation closing the loophole even when Democrats had a near-stranglehold on the House and the Senate -- but now President Obama is apparently mulling doing so, which would apparently entail redesignating hedge fund managers as "service providers" rather than as their clients' partners. Closing this loophole would raise a little over $1.5 billion annually, which doesn't sound like much in the context of a $4 trillion annual federal budget, but a little goes a long way if you spend it right. And you'd have a hard time arguing that hedge fund managers perform an important function in this economy, when mostly they just help executives bleed their corporations dry.

Around the table: Congress tries to install an undemocratic oligarchy in Puerto Rico, and other horrors.

Dave Johnson reminds us that Congress seems to want a "Flint-like solution" to Puerto Rico's debt troubles. That's right, they want an unelected board making Puerto Rico's financial decisions for them, and if you're tempted to say well, look how great the elected officials have been doing, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) remember that elected officials are still accountable to you, and that democracy is always better than oligarchy. And by the way, the oligarchy Congress wants for Puerto Rico might be run by a Treasury official who not too long ago helped his previous bankster employer saddle Puerto Rico with more usurious loans. So Congress will say he "knows" more about the situation than anyone, which is sort of like saying the arsonist who burns down your house should rebuild it because he "knows" your house.

You remember when our government got caught spying on just about all of us, how quickly they retorted that they were only collecting metadata and they weren't "looking at names" or "looking at content"? Well, now Stanford University researchers demonstrate just how easy it is to identify people through metadata. The researchers were able to identify over 80% of the study's volunteers by collecting metadata and (this part's important!) comparing it with the data volunteers had made public on the internet. Also, "(a)ll of this should be taken as an indication of what is possible with two graduate students and limited resources"; presumably the NSA, which employs more than two graduate students, could identify pretty much everyone.

Issie Lapowsky, writing at Wired, thinks Al Gore might be winning the climate change battle a decade after his Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. I tend toward optimism on this matter as well -- the EPA's Clean Power Plan, methane emissions regulations, and the falling prices of renewables are all good things -- but attend closely what Mr. Gore says about being able to "shap(e) policy and influenc(e) the way people think" as President, and you may be reminded that George W. Bush essentially legitimized climate change denialism just by being President, and that set us back about a decade.

Barack Obama goes to Vietnam -- a notorious labor rights crapzone, as well as the land where Nike outsourced so many of its manufacturing jobs all those years ago -- to promote the "benefits" of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership." Like his visit to Nike a year back, this is so tone-deaf it makes me wonder again if Barack Obama is trying to sabotage his own "free" trade deal. He still voices hope that Congress will pass the TPP, which makes me think Congress will do try to do it, probably after more racist fearmongering about China, and possibly after Donald Trump "reads" the TPP and decides it's the kind of "free" trade deal he can support.

Finally, Donald Trump appears to have avoided donating $1 million to veterans' groups, as he pledged to do in January, until the Washington Post confronted him about it a few days ago. Perhaps in Donald Trump's world, "I donated $1 million" can mean things like "I'm going to donate the $1 million when I get around to it, now stop harassing me," but I suspect folks who are not swimming in money like he is don't feel the same way. Nothing for it, then, but another round of anger at somebody, since anger is all Donald Trump has to offer.

Action: torture, internet privacy, and gay rights.

The CIA has apparently "accidentally" destroyed its copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report from the last Congress. No, it wasn't the only copy in the whole world, but understand that the torture report actually had little chance of seeing the light of day to begin with -- so far our government has only released the report's 700-page executive summary, and a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel has lately ruled that the Freedom of Information Act can't compel disclosure of the other 6,200-plus pages, since the FOIA doesn't apply to "Congressional documents." Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell President Obama to declassify the Senate torture report and ensure that the National Archives and Record Administration preserve it. Let's not pretend that other countries learning that we torture "compromises national security," nor let us suppose the National Archives should only record the good we do -- if we can't accept, and learn from, the evil we do, we have no business aspiring to be the greatest country on Earth.

Meanwhile, the FCC has proposed rules that would give consumers more control over how information internet service providers use, share, or sell their private information. I've heard a lot of reasonable folks say things like you should get used to not having any privacy on the internet, and while they mean to remind you not to be a blithering idiot in public or to avoid scams that sound too good to be true -- both worthwhile reminders no matter how often we get them! -- we should be able to have some privacy on the internet, and we should certainly be able to make big telecom corporations get our permission before doing anything with our private information, and we should get notifications from those corporations whenever that information gets stolen. Of course, big telecoms don't want to do any of this, supposedly because it would "confuse" consumers -- which certainly betrays their very, very low opinion of the people whose money makes their businesses possible. Don't we tend toward believing in folks' capabilities in a free country? Demand Progress helps you tell the FCC to mandate the most vigorous privacy protections possible for consumers on the internet.

Finally, in case you were wondering if the struggle for gay rights is over now that the Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage across the land, recall that many state legislatures have made foster care systems a battleground in their attempts to enshrine a "right" to discriminate against people who offend your "religious" "conscience." Some politicians think that if you don't want LGBTQ parents to foster kids because cooties, you should be allowed to prevent them from doing that -- and if foster parents don't want to foster LGBTQ kids, they should be allowed to do that. Just to make things clear: you have a right to be a bigot -- but you don't have a right to abridge other people's rights with your bigotry, or because of your bigotry. How strange, that folks pass up all the character-building opportunities meeting people unlike them can provide. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell HHS Secretary Burwell to forbid foster care services receiving federal funding from discriminating against LGBTQ kids or parents. I know, the right will call that Big Gummint, just like they never called the PATRIOT Act or warrantless wiretapping Big Gummint, but haters gonna hate, and we don't pander to hate, even if it carries a cross.

Around the table: "Get ready for the future; it is murder."

"A generation after Ronald Reagan denounced the 'welfare queen,'" writes Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, "the Grand Old Party is evidently on the verge of nominating its first welfare king." Long story short: Donald Trump is likely not releasing his tax returns because he might not be paying any taxes. "There is no shame in being on public assistance," Mr. Milbank also says. "But the corporate welfare Trump receives is nothing to be proud of — not least because Trump has claimed to represent the American worker and has condemned corporate executives who 'make a fortune' but 'pay no tax.'" So what will Trump supporters do when confronted with this information? They'll say he was taking the "good" tax deductions because he was creating jobs. Or they'll say he was sticking it to the man, though "sticking it to the man," when you avoid paying taxes, is really sticking it to yourself and all your countryfolk. Or they'll begin their next sentences with "Well, Hillary." Or they'll stick their fingers in their ears and go "lalalalala."

Surprise, surprise, "risk assessment" software that purportedly predicts a citizen's likelihood to commit future crimes tends to exaggerate the amount of crime blacks go on to commit while underestimating the amount of crime whites go on to commit. In other words, it's racist, if not in intent, then in result, which is more important. It is possible, I suppose, that the software spits out inaccurate results because it takes the fewer economic opportunities available to blacks into account, but judges actually set bonds and sentence folks based on what the software tells them. Judges shouldn't rely on bad information to make such decisions, and doing so here also doesn't show a whole lot of faith in people to rise above their circumstances. We still believe that people can rise above their circumstances in America, don't we?

Sarah Zhang, writing at Wired, suggests that the Ivanpah solar plant in California, ravaged by fire last week, has even bigger problems. Concentrated solar power (which uses mirrors to reflect the sun at a water tower to create electricity) takes its most frequent PR hits from "scorched birds and blinded pilots," but it also requires a lot of not-plentify empty land to work, and photovoltaic solar panels are actually cheaper now, not to mention more scalable. Still, I suspect that a lot of inattentive (or should I say "inattentive"?) "liberal" media punditoids will use the Ivanpah fire to whinge on about how solar power is "dangerous," when it's not the kind of solar power you're likely to have on your rooftop.

Susan Holmberg of the Roosevelt Institute says the best way to stop "short-term thinking" among executives is to limit their pay. She points to the rise of "performance pay" in the mid-'90s as a major factor in the explosion of executive pay packages; "performance pay" typically comes in the form of stock options, but that cuts the value of those stocks (by increasing their number), which leads to stock buybacks to boost the stocks' worth again -- which takes money away from research and development, paying workers, et cetera. All of which suggests that limiting executive pay is also the best job creation program.

Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court lets stand a District Court ruling which had struck down the Virginia legislature's redrawing of legislative districts earlier this decade. But the Court didn't rule on the merits of the District Court's decision, merely saying that the three plaintiffs (three Republican Congressfolk from Virginia, including Rep. Randy Forbes, whose 4th District became very Democratic after the Court ruling) lacked standing to sue, because they could not prove that overturning the District Court ruling would redress any of their grievances, especially considering that Mr. Forbes has now completely abandoned any prospect of running in the 4th. Writer Ian Millhiser reminds us that state legislatures will continue to gerrymander districts as long as it takes several years for the courts to fix them, which is yet another reason we need less partisan redistricting.

Action: email privacy, net neutrality, and public waters.

H.R. 699, the Email Privacy Act, passed the House by an astounding 419-0 vote, which is rare, especially for a good bill that actually protects the email privacy of Americans. And Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Grassley (R-IA) plans to bring the bill up for consideration by his committee this week. You see what's coming, right? Government agencies wanting exceptions to the bill so they can snoop on your emails "in case of an emergency," like "emergencies" don't somehow become more "common" as time goes on, or like making government agencies get warrants to look at emails is somehow onerous. Hence Save the Fourth helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 699 without get-out-of-jail cards for certain government agencies. And let's be clear: if the Securities and Exchange Commission wants to investigate bankster wrongdoing and wants to look at bankster emails, or Internal Revenue wants to catch tax cheats by looking at their emails, then they should have to get a damn warrant. If we work and fight to protect freedom and privacy, then we work for all of us, not just the people of whom we approve. If freedom and privacy aren't for everyone, then they're for no one, and I'm not having that, not in my America.

Meanwhile, over a month after the House passed H.R. 2666, the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, the bill's still sitting there in the Senate, awaiting action, even though it's been on the Senate Legislative Calendar for almost as long as it's been out of the House. What could they be afraid of? And don't say "a promised Obama veto," because I don't think the Senate is afraid of that per se, though the President did, in fact, promise to veto H.R. 2666 if it got to his desk. There may just be one thing they're afraid of -- getting their phone lines jammed by angry constituents who actually use broadband and pay for broadband who not only recognize H.R. 2666 as a lateral attack on net neutrality, but who wonder why on Earth anyone in their right mind would think "rate regulation" is an unqualified evil. After all, people who use broadband, and pay for broadband, are sick of their cable company jacking up their rates whenever they feel like it, and all of the solutions to that problem (breaking up monopolies, actually regulating rates) actually involve their government working on their behalf. So let Free Press help you tell your Senator to protect internet freedom by rejecting H.R. 2666.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject S. 2807, the so-called Preserving Public Access to Public Waters Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. How could we oppose a bill called the Preserving Public Access to Public Waters Act? Long story short: the bill doesn't do what it says it'll do. Long story somewhat longer: what the bill does instead is allow states to open federal waters to "residential and commercial fishing," as if the Secretary of the Interior might not have good reasons to close off National Park waters to fishing, as if states should have jurisdiction over federal anything. Seriously, if the states want the waters that badly, they should petition to their reps in Congress to formally turn them over to the state, not change the law so that "federal" and "state" are meaningless terms. And note well the phrase "residential and commercial fishing" -- like how they put "commercial" second like that's not what they care about most? In addition to letting states usurp federal power without due process, the bill also constitutes an attempt to hand over our waters (and the fish in them, fragile ecosystems be damned) to fishing corporations in a corporate welfare scheme -- all under the guise of letting grandpa do more fishing.

Around the table: more follies concerning presumptive Presidential nominees.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has repeatedly criticized Donald Trump and has refused to endorse him for President, has been telling Republicans in private to support him. And has also apparently said he still won't endorse Mr. Trump because it wouldn't help him; if you thought maybe he wouldn't endorse him because he thought he'd make a bad President, no one could blame you. This hypocrisy is unworthy of the first Senator to condemn the torture at Abu Ghraib.

Jim Naureckas, who's been on a pretty amazing run at FAIR lately, takes issue with the "zombie idea" that Bill Clinton "brought Democrats back to life" after a string of electoral failures. I agree that Democrats running to the right tends to result in Republican victories downballot, but to be absolutely fair, the Democrats were in their death throes in the South, and their elephantine House majorities (and Senate majorities, for that matter) never showed a party united in New Deal liberalism -- Southern Democrats tended to vote more or less like Republicans, which helps explain how Ronald Reagan got right-wing legislation through a Democratic House, as well as how Barack Obama had to pull teeth to get center-right legislation through a Democratic House.

Paul Krugman reminds us that the Clinton economic boom happened mainly for "reasons unrelated to politics," namely "that American business finally figured out what to do with computers." Also, raising taxes on the rich didn't prefigure disaster but more job creation, just like in Mr. Obama's second term. Sadly, "we can’t count on another spontaneous surge in technology-driven private investment to drive job creation," though I'd point to renewable energy and 3D printing as technologies that could be similarly creative in a second Clinton administration -- at which point too many people will believe that the Clintons are magic.

Another day, another heavily-linked Paul Buchheit op-ed chronicling the fall of the American middle class. Saddest indicators: more than half of Americans don't even have $1,000 in savings, less than one-third of folks aged 25 to 34 own homes, and current 40-year-olds in the poorest 1% can expect to live 15 fewer years than similar folks in the top 1%, though I bet the latter groups isn't all that upset about it. Of course, very little of this makes your average "liberal" media newscast, since there are Kardashians to follow around.

Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 7-1 ruling, overturns the sentence of a black man sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Georgia nearly 30 years ago. If it's 7-1, from this court, some pretty rank stuff must have happened, and indeed, prosecutors not only actively tried to keep blacks off the jury in this case but left a paper trail -- at one point referring to three black potential jurors as "B#1, B#2, and B#3" -- and that's a slam dunk even for Chief Justice Roberts, who shows off what's either dry humor or obsessive literalism in his majority opinion. (Do I even have to tell you the one dissenter was Justice Thomas, who thinks showing the proper deference to state judges trumps justice?)

Action: Guantánamo Bay detainment, endangered species, and school meal nutrition.

The ACLU helps you tell our government to free Mohamedou Ould Slahi from Guantánamo Bay posthaste. Our government has detained Mr. Slahi at Guantánamo since 2002; you suppose they found anything to charge him with during that time, spanning four different Presidential terms? No, they have not -- despite being beaten, isolated, and sexually assaulted, among other offenses, which, again, testifies to how little good torture does. (Please do not be the pimp who says YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT INTELLIGENCE HE GAVE THEM THAT THWARTED ANOTHER TERRORIST ATTACK HA HA HA HA DIRTY HIPPIE! Believe me, if Tha Bush Mobb had done any of that, Fox News would have televised the circle jerk they had afterward.) You may recall Mr. Slahi as the man who wrote a 500-page memoir, by hand, about his treatment at Guantánamo (got a few hours? Read it, minus some 2,500 U.S. government-mandated redactions, here); he had, back in the day, fought alongside mujahideen against the Communists in Afghanistan, then became disgusted when the mujahideen started shooting each other once the Communists fell. I suppose that's why we detained him. But that doesn't make it right. It doesn't even make it not evil.

Meanwhile, some Congressfolk have slipped attacks on the Endangered Species Act into the National Defense Authorization Act. Naturally they couldn't gut the Act merely by introducing stand-alone bills, even when they put words like "reform" into those bills, so they're putting their nefarious works into must-pass legislation. Trouble is, of course, that blocking defense authorization bills because you don't like one or two things in them is no longer unprecedented -- Republicans, you may recall, filibustered a defense authorization bill back in 2010 merely because it had a don't-ask-don't-tell repeal in it, happy to risk being called "weak on defense" if it meant hating on gays a little bit. President Obama has already threatened to veto the House's version of the NDAA, and the House didn't pass the bill with enough votes to override a veto. Let Congress try to convince America that people who don't like anti-endangered species bills equal "weak" people; that won't fly even with "liberal" media help. Still, Congress needs to hear from us about this, so Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to block any attacks on endangered species in the defense authorization bill.

Finally, the House Education and Workforce Committee has passed H.R. 5003, the so-called Improving Child Nutrition and Education Act, and the full House may take it up soon. H.R. 5003 would cut funding for school meals for poorer students, would roll back nutrition standards for a la carte school meals, and would allow states who whine about how hard the standards are to achieve to lower federal standards for all other states -- all of which means more junk food and less fruit and vegetables. Funny that nominal "conservatives" would complain about letting the lowest-scoring kid in math class dictate the syllabus, but would think that's OK when states underperform other states in getting nutritious food to their children. How does any of this "improve" nutrition, or education? Does Congress think dealing with diabetes and childhood obesity builds character? Here's what's better for kids: eating healthy and being healthy, so they can take on the actual challenges of childhood and education and actually build character. The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 5003 and pass real school meal reauthorization legislation.

Around the table: from "thin-skinned authoritarians" to invisible women scientists.

Adam Gopnik, writing at The New Yorker, warns us that "thin-skinned authoritarians" like Donald Trump "do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can." Despite living through both George W. Bush and Scott Walker, I still wanted to believe that, once elected, Donald Trump would find it harder to impose his will than he anticipated, but I'll guard against that vain hope from now on. Also, Mr. Gopnik reminds us that "Hitler wasn't Hitler -- until he was," meaning that, like the "blizzard of lies" Mr. Trump foists upon us with "liberal" media help, each "shock" gets "tempered by acceptance." (Also, too, he has lots of Alexander Pope quotations, which always recommends a person.)

Shockingly, for-profit college corporation Apollo Education Group announces that two of its colleges, including the famous University of Phoenix, would stop putting forced arbitration clauses in student contracts. But there's a catch: Apollo is about to get assimilated into the Vistria Group, making it a privately-held corporation that will no longer be required to disclose litigation or investigations publicly -- so we may never know how well it's doing on its promise. Still, if the arbitration fairness movement can penetrate the for-profit college sphere, that's a good sign.

Greensboro, NC now allows "participatory budgeting," where the city's residents can decide how to spend at least some of the city budget. The city presently only allows residents to budget about one out of every thousand dollars, and some of you may regard this as a mere safety valve for citizen frustrations, but one out of a thousand dollars today can more easily turn into two or three or twenty tomorrow, and it doesn't always take much to improve folks' quality of life -- a bench at the bus stop or some shade at a public pool might do.

Abrahm Lustgarten, writing at ProPublica, wonders if the seemingly-endless climate change-induced drought in the American West has doomed the desert dam. Desert dams tend to hold water in giant artificial lakes with lots of surface area, meaning that the Glen Canyon Dam's Lake Powell, for example, loses over 160 billion gallons of water just to evaporation every year. When you can't keep reservoirs full, you start wondering if you should even keep them around at all, or whether you can combine two reservoirs into one, as at least one proposal would do with Lake Powell and Hoover Dam's Lake Mead (though surely you also see the hand of the Las Vegas casinos in that proposal).

18-year-old Texas stepdad accidentally shoots and kills his three-year-old stepson after pointing his gun at him and saying he would shoot him if he didn't stop jumping on the bed. It took some work to get this story out of witnesses, which says (to me, at least) that this actually was a tragic accident, and not the moronic hijinks of some Springer-cam wannabe. But that doesn't change the fact that people need to stop watching so much TV, not just because it makes violence seem as amusing as I presume it seemed to the shooter, but because it takes precious time away from being an actual hero to someone in your life.

Finally, Laurel Raymond, writing at ThinkProgress, tells "The Incredible Story of NASA's Forgotten 'Rocket Girls'" -- a group of female computers who (in the absence of adequate mechanical computing devices) crunched the numbers that helped send astronauts to the moon. It's not an entirely happy story -- in 2004 (under Tha Bush Mobb, I feel compelled to note), NASA took away the engineering position of a woman who had been an engineer there for almost half a century, only because she didn't have a bachelor's degree -- but it's a necessary and frequently uplifting story. Nathalia Holt's book Rise of the Rocket Girls will migrate to my reading list pronto.

Around the table: Donald Trump abandons his anti-"free" trade position, and other really, really big surprises.

American Friends Service Committee issues report finding that the "liberal" media has displayed (in TruthOut writer Mike Ludwig's words) "a pervasive tendency toward painting violent extremism as an inherently Islamic problem that is only solvable with the use of force." And surprise! The right-wing news sources were little worse than the others -- which must be at least partly because the others try to ape the right-wing sources. The best trick the "liberal" media pulls off? "AFSC found that 57 percent of news items characterized extremists to be psychotic, bloodthirsty and "irrational," but 61 percent of news items described just how "rational" these actors can be." Even the overlap between the two was more than 20 percent of news items. Nice work if you can get it!

Ruth Graham, writing at Slate, wonders if the "Christian left" can become "a real political force." Short answer: it already has been, all through American history, so why not now? Slightly longer answer: zeal may be "the missing ingredient" for liberal Christians, and given all the sins the right has committed with their zeal over the last few decades, it's easy to see why. But it's not devotion's fault devotion has a bad name to so many liberals. (To be fair: many liberals, having received undergraduate training, are loath to declare evil things "evil." Yeah, I know my Saussure, too, but the time for justice is always now, and our enemies really are evil.)

Mike Konczal steps up to remind us that when corporations become monopolies, the state needs to step in. And not just to break up monopolies, either, but to regulate markets as public utilities, just as the FCC has done with telecom corporations in its net neutrality rules. "Rather than tinkering with market incentives," he writes about public-utility regulation, "the state declares that businesses must adhere to certain principles of access, innovation, and fairness." I'm old enough to remember when conservatives used to insist on government action to ensure access, innovation, and fairness, but now right-wingers call all that "socialism," because the TV told them to.

In case you thought everyone had boarded the train away from "tough on crime" law-making, here comes Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) to tell us that he thinks we're not locking up enough people. Of course, he can't advance an argument without accidentally blowing it up -- "(l)aw enforcement is able to arrest or identify a likely perpetrator for only 19 percent of property crimes and 47 percent of violent crimes" is just as much an argument that things like mandatory minimums don't work. And, ah, saying don't reform mandatory minimums or else crime'll go up? I call that a hostage situation, and we don't do hostage situations in America.

Finally, note well that Donald Trump has now wavered in his opposition to "free" trade agreements. "I’m a free trader, but I’m only a free trader if we make good deals" is a nonsensical statement -- "free" trade deals, by definition, override our laws and outsource our jobs, and thus, by definition, are never good for America. Saying he could support "free" trade deals if they're adequately byootiful and yuge should finish off any notion that he'll be any different from any other Republican once in office -- watch him declare the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" one of the "good" "free" trade deals come November.

Around the table: will evangelicals flock to Trump? And other burning questions.

More than 60 years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling, a Governmental Accountability Office report finds the nation's schools increasingly segregated by race and income. The number of segregated schools has more than doubled over the last decade and a half, meaning these students have less access to Advanced Placement classes, less access to college, less access to opportunities for a better life, really. But I wish the article had explained why this segregation is happening (cough redlining cough) rather than just let the Dept. of Education yammer on about grant programs and a "new urgency" to fix the problem.

Surprise, surprise, the "liberal" media point to one New Jersey hedge fund manager moving to Florida as an example of how high income tax rates "force" millionaires to leave certain states for certain other states. Say it with me: one anecdote does not create a broad trend!New Jersey is still home to an admirably progressive income tax code despite Gov. Christie's best efforts, and most folks who move out (ahem!) actually wind up paying higher state income taxes wherever they go, but doing research and finding out the facts is hard work, and the "liberal" media hates hard work more than any imaginary welfare queen. The punchline: this hedge fund manager has apparently moved to Florida because his mother and sister live there.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), whose son is transgendered, cuts an ad in Spanish decrying the mistreatment of transgendered folks via "bathroom bills." Frankly, as a Republican Latina, she has a terrific opportunity to reach a lot of people who might otherwise settle for the bathroom jokes you've likely seen on Facebook, so good for her for taking it. And don't waste your time telling me that she only opposes mistreatment of transgendered folks because her son is one, as if we should only learn things by conducting thought experiments.

Joshua Holland, writing at The Nation, explains "What Everyone Gets Wrong About Independent Voters." Long story short, from the subtitle: "Most independents are just partisans who are turned off by partisanship," and the swing voter is a dying breed, though if it's "around 5 percent of the electorate," per the penultimate paragraph, then it's still enough to swing a close election, which is the kind of election we're going to have for the foreseeable future. Of course, the way to get someone to vote against their interests is to appeal to their independence -- Americans won't do evil unless they think they have to, and even then it still has to feel like their idea.

From the "Shoulda Seen This Coming" file: confronted with the reality that video evidence is easy to come by these days, South Carolina police agencies are now suppressing it, when they can, apparently to protect their officers. This is much easier to do with a body camera or a dashboard camera than with a citizen shooting footage on a cellphone -- but even the latter generally has to be publicly released before police departments will act. And no, the alleged "War on Cops" is not an excuse -- if you really value law enforcement, and public service, you'd punish officers who do wrong. (As an aside, this is a tremendous piece of reporting -- Radley Balko has really outdone himself, and that's saying a lot.)

Finally, Bill Berkowitz, writing at TruthOut, wonders if Christian evangelical voters will "walk down the aisle" with presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump. And concludes that they likely will, rather than vote for Hillary Clinton -- as one source puts it, "(i)t may not be a warm embrace, but a side hug will do." And n.b. what I said in the fourth paragraph above: evangelicals, like everyone else, will have to feel like they have no other choice than to vote for Mr. Trump, and it has to feel like their idea (which I think Ralph Reed reveals in the fourth-to-last paragraph, with all that malarkey about "forgiveness" and "mercy").

Action: clean water, and humane treatment of animals.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell the EPA to fix what went wrong with their now-infamous fracking study. What's that, you say? That if the ultra-liberal EPA says fracking's impact upon drinking water tables is not at all "widespread" or "systemic," it must be OK? Well, don't do a victory lap yet: our laws can't compel oil and gas drillers to share information about the chemicals they use (it's a "trade secret," which our government apparently feels is more important than our right not to drink cancerous crap), and hence had to rely on those corporations to give information voluntarily, which -- surprise, surprise! -- they didn't do. And for all its flaws, the study documented more evidence of drinking water contamination than the last EPA study on the subject during Tha Bush Mobb's first term, just not enough to call such contamination "widespread" and "systemic" -- and a majority of panel members on the EPA's own Scientific Advisory Board, composed of industry figures as well as scientists, have said the EPA needs to revise that conclusion. And they should, because cleaning up drinking water contaminated by fracking is, I'm told, frightfully expensive.

Meanwhile, did you know that American pig farmers often send their pigs to Hawaii to be slaughtered? Apparently, this is cheaper than feeding them at home (pig feed is apparently quite expensive), and it also allows certain big agricultural concerns to label the resulting pork "Hawaiian-made" even if the pigs started out in North Dakota. But one of the main reasons this is cheaper is that pigs get overstuffed into a poorly-ventilated ship for five days, and during that time they walk around surrounded by puke, feces, urine, and other dead pigs -- at least until the very-likely-overworked-and-underpaid livestock attendants get around to throwing the carcasses overboard. If, as Mahatma Gandhi once said, “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” well, I'd have to say we need to become a more perfect union in that regard. It doesn't matter that those pigs will soon be bacon or pork chops -- you don't treat a feed animal badly merely to save money, because that's mammon-worship, which is evil. Hence Change.org helps you tell shipping corporation Matson to stop shipping pigs off to Hawaii for slaughter.

Around the table: financialization hits the mainstream media, and other developments.

I am shocked to see this article in Time magazine, entitled "American Capitalism's Great Crisis," and subtitled "How Wall Street is Choking Our Economy and How to Fix It." Rana Faroohar sounds like a kindler, gentler Michael Hudson as she describes how the finance sector (i.e., the banksters) has taken over the economy such that very little bank money actually makes it to the economy, and how "(m)ost of the money in the system is being used for lending against existing assets such as housing, stocks and bonds," rather than the creation of new assets. However, where Mr. Hudson offers debt forgiveness as a solution, Ms. Faroohar doesn't -- possibly because her article is a condensed version of a much larger book, which will go on my reading list right quick.

Ho hum, Paul Ryan says the Obama Administration's new overtime rule is an "absolute disaster" blah blah blah, will kill small businesses blah blah blah. As "disastrous" as it was back in the late '60s, when we routinely had sub-4% unemployment rates and the overtime floor was actually higher, once you adjust for inflation? Yeah, those were "disastrous" times all right -- for takers like Paul Ryan who would redistribute income upward to his corporate paymasters.

Former two-term Massachusetts Republican Governor William Weld will seek the Libertarian Party's Vice Presidential nomination, in the hopes that he will be on the ticket with former two-term New Mexico Republican Governor Gary Johnson, seeking that party's Presidential nomination. But while Mr. Johnson is believable as a Libertarian, Mr. Weld -- who first won in Massachusetts in 1990 by running to John Silber's left, which wasn't hard -- just looks like he's trying to find a home, even though he was the Libertarian Party's nominee (as well as the Republican Party's nominee) for Governor of New York against Eliot Spitzer in 2006. Still, the Party must be pleased to have four gubernatorial terms at the top of their ticket, and they may even attract a few liberals disaffected with Mrs. Clinton's center-right economics and center-further-right "war on terror" positions. Think the Koch brothers will put their money where their mouths are and throw a few hundred mil the Libertarians' way? I kid, of course.

Los Angeles City Council unanimously passes ordinance requiring farmers' markets to accept food stamps. Perhaps that will stop right-wingers from complaining about poor people buying candy bars with their EBT cards! Again, I kid -- nothing stops right-wingers from complaining about the poor. Still, good Los Angelenos should be able to eat better (and eat better cheaper) this way, and we can chip away at the stereotype of farmers' markets as places ruled by yoga mats. (As an aside, I did not know that farmers could not sell their wares directly to customers in California until 1979. That doesn't sound like the sort of thing a truly free market would tolerate.)

Finally, Matt Taibbi writes about how Donald Trump is "Killing the Republican Party." He's not too sure the Republican Party will actually die, of course -- I figure they'll compete as long as they have money and rage-filled adherents, both of which they'll have for a long time -- but it's hard for me, even as someone who tries hard to avoid blasphemy, to disagree with statements like "(n)o hell is hot enough for them." At least there's optimism: "Money is important in politics," he says, discussing how well the Trump and Sanders campaigns have done, "but in democracy, people ultimately still count more."

Action: fighting discrimination, bankster whining, and Verizon's war on working families.

And just like that, Rep. Steve Russell (R-OK) has snuck a rider into the House version of the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 4909) that would allow faith-based groups to take federal money and then discriminate in hiring. What does that have to do with national defense, you ask? Oh, I don't know -- perhaps TEH CHURCHEZ MUST BE ALLOWEDZ TO DISCRIMINATEZ OR TEH TERRORIZTZ WINZ!!!! And again, President Obama has bent over backwards to preserve this "right" to discriminate by accepting Tha Bush Mobb's legal arguments in favor of faith-based discrimination, but it's not enough, because it's never enough -- religious bigots will always come up with something to throw a tantrum about, even (or especially!) when you coddle them. It's not all bad news, though -- Reps. Charlie Dent (R-PA) and Adam Smith (D-WA) have introduced an amendment that would strip the offending provision from the bill. So Americans United for the Separation of Church and State helps you tell your House Rep to strip Section 1094 from the defense authorization bill, and the ACLU helps you tell your House Reps to vote for the Dent-Smith amendment.

Meanwhile, Congress empowered the Federal Reserve to stop guaranteeing a 6% dividend to large banks investing in the Federal Reserve, a corporate welfare handout for banksters adding up to around $7 billion annually -- but a Wall Street lobbyist has argued, in a public comment, that repealing the handout would be an unconstitutional seizure of property. But what couldn't we claim to be an unconstitutional taking, if banksters can claim a "right" to a higher dividend on investments in the Federal Reserve? Just about any public worker could argue against pay cuts or pay freezes, and no Wall Street lobbyist walks around defending that. And even though the Fed had been paying this rate to member banks for over a hundred years, that still doesn't mean the 6% dividend came down from Mt. Sinai. Seriously, but-you've-always-given-me-that isn't an argument, it's whining, and whining from the people who wrecked our economy is worse than any other kind. So Demand Progress helps you tell the Federal Reserve to ignore Wall Street bellyaching about their "right" to handouts.

Finally, in case you were wondering, the Verizon strike is still going on, after one month -- this, after eight months of working without a contract in the obviously vain hope that they could reach an agreement with management. Hence both National People's Action and MoveOn help you tell Verizon management to give a fair contract to their workers. You may be surprised to learn that pay isn't the central issue in the strike -- certainly Verizon workers don't want their pensions frozen or workers' comp payments cut, but among other things, Verizon workers are striking over the corporation's refusal to pay enough workers to keep up with demand for the corporation's FIOS service, and also over Verizon's preference that workers work in Verizon facilities away from their homes for as long as two months. Why would a corporation do such a thing? Well, they cite "business demands" and "changing markets" and suchlike, but it really does look like they're just trying to put stress on their workers by keeping them away from their families. They'll answer to their God for it -- but they'll also become even more unpopular in the meantime.

UPDATE. The House passed their version of the NDAA by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, and it included the nefarious Russell pro-discrimination rider described above. The Senate version of the NDAA doesn't have the Russell rider in it, and President Obama has threatened a veto of the NDAA; more details (and action alerts!) as they arrive.

Around the table: celebrating a few victories while remembering a few hard lessons.

Obama Administration Department of Labor issues new overtime rules guaranteeing time-and-a-half pay for any worker making less than $47,476 annually, up from $23,660. That's rather less than we asked for and a bit less than the Obama Administration originally proposed, but it's still more than double what it used to be, so congratulate yourself for fighting for economic justice -- and job creation, since the whole purpose of making corporations pay people time-and-a-half for overtime is to prompt them to hire more people they can then pay in straight time.

Hood River County (OR) voters, in a landslide, ban all commercial water extraction from the area. Nestlé (of course!) had petitioned to draw over 100 million gallons of water annually from the area, so they could then sell it at a massive markup as bottled water, but the good citizens of Hood County said no by a nearly 7-3 margin. Good for them -- more localities need to stand up to corporations, and refuse to be held hostage to the promise of money.

PR Watch finds the notorious Koch brothers funding a "Grassroots Leadership Academy" dedicated to establishing a better right-wing ground game. And also "to fight for freedom and against the progressive policies and false narratives of the left." They can't quite bring themselves to say the "fight for freedom" is against "progressive policies," which I count as a fault. And I'm pretty sure the course entitled "Making the Case for Economic Freedom" has nothing to do with the consumer's right to be free from corporate manipulation.

Public Citizen finds that, for at least four coal corporations, going bankrupt doesn't mean the money stops flowing. The CEOs who run these corporations into the ground still pay themselves millions of dollars in bonuses, and bankruptcy lawyers and advisers seems to make out even better, if that's possible. It is quite unfortunately that eight years of George W. Bush occupying the Oval Office didn't permanently stigmatize the whole idea of getting rich through failure." And this "war on coal" is a war on working families, who never enjoy the benefits of executives stripping their corporations clean.

Finally, internal NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden show the NSA working with other agencies in conducting investigations on Guantánamo Bay detainees. This was early in Tha Bush Mobb years, and the tone of some of these documents -- "(w)ater sports are outstanding" at Gitmo, one says -- is rather chilling. After all, what good is stoking fear and rage in the populace if you can't go snorkeling? File this one under "never forget."

Action: three works supporting basic human rights.

Did you know that being an albino in the African nation of Malawi might get you kidnapped or killed -- and get your limbs or organs sold to people who'd use them in religious rituals? What would the "religious liberty" crowd in America say about that? I kid, of course -- there are no transgendered folks using bathrooms in this story, so they don't care. But someone's "right" to use albino body parts in a religious ceremony certainly doesn't trump anyone's right to live and pursue happiness. That should go without saying, but so often,in these interesting times, I have to state the obvious. And oppressing someone because they're albino? The word for that is racism -- yes, even when it's targeted against the literally-whitest-of-the-white. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Malawi to protect albinos from exploitation and murder. Good folks can't live in fear of abduction or murder, or move their families around the country out of fear of abduction or murder. That ain't freedom, and a government that can't protect the rights of all its citizens has failed in its duty to its people.

Meanwhile, the California Coalition for Women Prisoners has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you demand that the state of California investigate a suicide epidemic at the CIW Women's Prison in Corona. It's OK to call it an epidemic, because the suicide rate there is eight times the national rate for suicide in womens' prisons and five times the rate in California state prisons, a state that's been notoriously bad at providing mental health care to inmates to begin with. The problem is so bad at CIW that the prison puts some folks on suicide watch in solitary confinement. You might well be thinking that solitary is the best place for a suicidal person, since they can't kill themselves in there. That would be very short-term thinking, however -- in solitary, you also don't get access to the people who might be able to help you get through what you're going through. If you were thinking that this particular phenomenon shows that we need more substantive prison reforms, I'd be more sympathetic -- but we already fight for those reforms here, and sometimes you also have to respond to emergencies.

Finally, with the Governor and state legislature of North Carolina refusing to back down on its nefarious "bathroom bill" law, CREDO helps you urge NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to pull the 2017 All-Star Game from North Carolina until the bathroom bill is dead and buried. This isn't some long-shot effort -- Mr. Silver is no fan of HB 2, and though he held out hope that he could "work() with elected officials to effect change," I think he can see just as well as anyone else that North Carolina has no interest in "working with" anyone on this issue, having expressed a willingness to forego billions of dollars in federal funding for their public schools rather than repeal the law, and having locked itself in dueling lawsuits with the Department of Justice over the matter. Now, some folks have wondered if boycotts against North Carolina punish its good citizens unfairly -- Henry Rollins, you may recall, asked that about Bruce Springsteen's cancellation of a concert there. But a state's citizens have a duty to hold their elected representatives accountable. And the NBA All-Star game will be held somewhere.

Around the table: the price of coddling banksters, and other lessons.

The New York Times finds that "Squatters See a New Frontier in the Empty Homes of Las Vegas," a city hit harder than most by the 2008 financial services meltdown and resulting foreclosure crisis. The article then focuses on an anecdotally-supported "trail of crime" squatters "often" bring with them (in addition to illegally occupying houses, apparently), losing an opportunity to ask if the squatters are victims themselves, let alone focus very much on how those houses got empty in the first place. But this is the price we pay when our government decides that coddling banksters from their screw-ups is better than protecting homeowners from unearned hardship. Next time, why not let the banks fail, and give some aspiring bankers a shot at doing better?

Kim Zetter, writing at Wired, presents a brief history of the FBI's hacking of the citizenry over the last two decades. Carnivore, keystroke loggers, Magic Lantern, CIPAV, watering holes -- in all these you'll see a pattern: the FBI introduces a tool, swears it's selective about what it captures, and surprise! It's a damn Hoover. Also, they can't tell you what they're doing because EVERYONE WILLZ DIEZ!!!!! But it seems we've gotten more leaks about specific FBI surveillance methods during the Obama Administration than we did during Tha Bush Mobb's reign. Maybe that recommends Mr. Obama -- though, again, being better than Mr. Bush isn't exactly hurdling a high bar.

Surprise, surprise, yet another poll demonstrates a huge majority of Americans support a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health insurance plan. I am surprised to find it reported in Politico -- though, of course, all the horse-race stuff afterward could have used some analysis. How much of that slim majority that wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act is composed of folks who'd want to replace it with single-payer, for example? After all, the numbers themselves suggest overlap, and other pollsters have considered the question.

The Huffington Post finds more and more mainstream media outlets using the word "Islamophobia" in headlines. I do remember being surprised (and pleased!) when Ron Paul used the term to describe the "Ground Zero mosque"'s opposition in 2010. Normally I hesitate to assign that much importance to diction, but characterizing folks' racism and rage as fear might make us regard their feelings as less significant, and that's a good thing. Of course, they'll whine about everyone calling them "phobic," just like they now whine about everyone calling them "bigots," but haters gonna hate.

Finally, Florida Republican Senate candidate Carlos Beruff calls President Obama an "animal." And when probable Democratic Senate nominee Patrick Murphy criticized him for it, a Beruff spokeshack accused Mr. Murphy of "resort(ing) to name-calling and the politics of racial division." And here you thought calling a black President an "animal" in front of a group of Republican supporters at a Florida country club was an example of ""resort(ing) to name-calling and the politics of racial division"! If I'm Florida Democrats, I'm putting up ads calling Carlos Beruff "the only real conservative in the race" right quick.

Action: arming Syrians, and drilling in national forests.

Another day, another report (this time from Amnesty International) that U.S.-backed (and Saudi-backed) Syrian opposition groups have perpetrated war crimes upon Kurds. Perhaps they decided that American and Saudi support was all they needed to finally put down those uppity Kurds. But several House members have lately offered National Defense Authorization Act amendments that would end or limit arms transfers to Syria (since that would surely make this situation much worse), so Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to support efforts to keep American weapons away from folks who would use them merely to cause mayhem. Really, of course, we should have a formal declaration of war from Congress to operate against whoever our enemies are in Syria, rather than a 15-year-old Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that the Obama Administration has interpreted far beyond the call of linguistic ambiguity. I wonder why they don't do that. (Spoiler alert: because they might accidentally reveal that they don't want to solve international problems, but that they'd rather enable American rage indefinitely so they can get re-elected and make more and more money for their paymasters.)

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the U.S. Forest Service to keep oil and gas corporations from drilling in the Wyoming Range in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. You probably know the drill by now: the Wyoming Range isn't just home to the biggest moose population in the state, but is also prime recreational ground for humans who love to camp, fish, and ride horses. And the Forest Service has actually proposed a ban on drilling leases in a 40,000-acre area of the Range, but the oil and gas drillers will be yapping in their ears non-stop, so we have to yap in their ears, too. And we shouldn't feel guilty about yapping in their ears, because we're the American people; a gas or oil drilling corporation is just a vehicle for some executive to redistribute worker income upward to himself. I pity the fool who reads this paragraph and squeals BUT TEH WYOMINGZ SHOULD HAVE TEH CHOICEZ!!!! The word "national" is present in the title of the Bridger-Teton National Forest, right? Let's check again: yes, it is right there. Some folks don't understand the difference between "state" and "national" anymore, or they pretend not to. We are not their enablers.

Around the table: what if Donald Trump's not really that rich? And other questions.

Alice Speri, writing at The Intercept, explains "How the High Cost of Justice Pushes the Poor Into Prison." Bail money is, as you know, a major problem -- the average bail detainee has to cough up eight months' worth of income to get out -- but lack of representation in civil cases may be an even bigger one, as the "right to an attorney" doesn't exist for civil cases, which (along with procedural confusion and onerous fees) "tends to channel people into the criminal system," after they commit the crimes of desperation that the civil system enables. BUT TEH POORZ COMMITZ MOST OF TEH CRIMEZ!!!! I can already hear right-wingers squealing, as if I hadn't written the previous paragraph.

A Southern pastor reveals "Ten Things You Need to Know About Bathrooms," i.e., the Department of Education's recent letter about transgendered students in bathrooms. Attend items 1 and 2, which reveal that the Department's letter is not an Obama "executive order" and that Title IX is over 40 years old, and especially attend item 5, which instructs us that you can't just put a dress on and go to the girls' room, but that parents must notify school administration of your gender change. Also, too, why would boys try to peek at girl business at school when "(t)hey can see all the boobs they want for free on the internet"?

This Kansas City Star article exemplifies incompetent "liberal" media reporting on "free" trade. The writer seems surprised that stances on "free" trade don't align neatly with party affiliation. But folks across the political spectrum have opposed "free" trade for a long, long time, so they aren't "switching" their positions (and they only "appear" to be if you haven't been paying any attention), and certainly changing positions doesn't all by itself constitute a "flip-flop." Note, also, how the writer allows Sen. Blunt to change the subject from "free trade" to "trade." And there's no "tangled political web surrounding trade," only politicians who refuse to listen to the people and who only do their paymasters' bidding. Let these "liberal" media morons get their jobs outsourced the way so many Americans' jobs have been outsourced, and they might get a clue.

A local New York business paper finds that Donald Trump has qualified for a New York state tax break only given out to folks who make less than $500,000 annually. Amusing as it is to think that Mr. Trump has hidden his tax returns because they'll reveal he isn't the high-roller he says he is, I suspect this $300 tax break only scratches the surface of some serious tax-code manipulation. And if that's the case, he's probably not going to be able to talk his way out of it, though a lot of Americans will secretly admire him for "sticking it to the man," blissfully unaware that, in this case, they're "the man."

Finally, Hillary Clinton says she'd put would-be First Gentleman Bill Clinton in charge of "revitalizing the economy" if she becomes President. Regardless of one's dim memory of 20 years ago is not good news. Bill Clinton didn't "revitalize the economy," but merely had the luck of being in office when the tech bubble inflated. That's before we get to all of Bill Clinton's other "revitalization" ideas, which included "free" trade deals and repealing Glass-Steagall, both of which have proven to be a pronounced drag on our economy.

Action: chemical plant safety, and money bail.

The EPA is still taking comments on their proposed chemical plant safety rules, and the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to mandate the most vigorous chemical plant safety rules possible. You may be more likely to think about this matter than you were, not merely because the third anniversary of the infamous West, Texas chemical plant explosion just passed, but also because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has lately announced that they think arson is to blame for that explosion. You may well be asking, can the EPA really do anything about criminal acts? But of course they can -- criminals study plants and find weaknesses in them, so let's give them fewer weaknesses to find. And throwing up our hands and folding before the prospect of criminal activity wouldn't be very American of us, would it? Especially when you consider that the West explosion killed 15 good folks and injured over 200, destroyed a school, a nursing home, an apartment complex, and a few dozen homes, and left a 10-foot-wide, 90-foot-deep crater -- we do want these things not to happen, after all.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to pass H.R. 4611, the No Money Bail Act, then Color of Change still helps you do that. The No Money Bail Act has lately attracted a famous opponent -- Duane "Dog the Bounty Hunter" Chapman. A guy who makes money hunting down suspects opposes the concept of outlawing money bail, who'da thunk it? But his wife, in her new capacity as President of the Professional Bail Agents of the United States, has called the bill it "criminal welfare" and said it "shows nothing but blatant disrespect for our law enforcement." How police are supposed to feel "disrespected" by a bill that would prevent judges from holding poor people in jail indefinitely I can't quite figure out -- maybe she thinks police officers are just as emotionally-invested in bounty hunters as she is! And certainly my more libertarian readers will blanch at the term "criminal welfare," when folks being held on bond haven't been convicted. We still respect the difference between innocence and guilt, right? We'd better, if we want to stop our slide into immorality, decadence, and ultimately irrelevance.

Around the table: what's the matter with Democrats? And other burning questions.

Dave Johnson suggests we're seeing a surge of "gunboat diplomacy" from our government. Back in the day, the U.S. used "gunboat diplomacy" to intimate populist movements in other nations, essentially helping to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Guatamela at the behest of the United Fruit Corporation; now, as the government of Colombia allows production of a very inexpensive generic version of an absurdly expensive cancer drug -- one that costs twice the per capita income of Colombians by itself -- and the Obama Administration follows up by threatening to withdraw funding for a peace initiative between the Colombian government and a rebel group. But the corporation that makes Gleevec isn't even an American corporation, like UFC -- it's Swiss. I guess anyone's money is good enough for our politicians.

The National Employment Law Project finds that some employers in the so-called "gig" economy have decided that treating their workers as traditional employees is good for business. That flies in the face of "conventional" "wisdom," which states that labor costs must be cut no matter what, and I should mention that some "traditional" employers have sought to emulate Uber by trying to turn their traditional employees into "independent contractors" (cough Federal Express cough). I hesitate to celebrate the achievement of common sense too much, but I wish these corporations the best as the banksters try to grind them under their shoe by making them take on more and more debt.

FBI Director James Comey blames an apparent rise in crime rates in part on the "viral video effect," whereby police officers are cowed into ineffectiveness by the notion that someone might be filming them. I'd say "well, two can play at the viral video game," but we live in a world where the TV show Cops has just finished up its 28th season, so the citizenry has joined this game rather late (not having access to production teams or inexpensive video equipment until the last few years). Luckily, not even all big-city police chiefs are willing to sing in this chorus, as if they, too, know that unexpected citizen-driven accountability shouldn't put the scare in police officers.

From Alan Pyke at Think Progress, we learn "How A Giant Restaurant Conglomerate Teamed Up With Banks To Stiff Its Workers." Sadly, this tale will not be unfamiliar to you: Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, and other famous restaurant chains, now insists (per a report from a restaurant workers' group) on paying its workers in bank cards, which save Darden money and funnel bank fees from card use to banksters. Everyone's happy -- except Darden workers, of course, because bank fees don't make anyone happy except banks. (Darden replies by calling the group's report against them "completely false" -- except for a few things, which they then promised to change.)

Finally, the incomparable Thomas Frank lays bare more hard truths about the Democratic swing rightward over the last few decades. There are too many good points here to tabulate, but his main thrust is that the Democratic party is now the party of "the highly educated, white-collar professional class," and they look down on the blue-collar workers who used to be their bread and butter, and whom they've since abandoned. And I rather suspect they look down on blue-collar workers because they're afraid of the hard work blue-collar workers do. Hard work is really the cure for most things that ail us, that's what I say.

Around the table: government spying, frivolous lawsuits, euthanasia, corporate taxes, and the "liberal" media.

Philadelphia Police Department admits it put a Google Maps logo on a spy van. I'd be less annoyed about that if I knew the spy van was being used in an investigation on a specific matter using a warrant from a judge -- but the van was chock-full of surveillance equipment that has "fishing expedition" capabilities. Yes, we liberals already know the "right balance" between surveillance and privacy; it's called getting a damn warrant and collecting only the information you need to fulfill that warrant.

Alabama landfill operator sues three Uniontown activists who had been making noise not merely out of concern that the 10-year-old landfill was making residents sick, but out of a quite understandable sense that the landfill only got sited there because it was a historically-black area. If the landfill's suit sounds like a frivolous lawsuit to you, you're not alone -- but this is how corporations roll, calling any allegation, reasonable or not, part of an ongoing investigation or not, a "threat to their livelihoods." (In case you were wondering, the activists Alabama state regulators may have broken federal law -- specifically, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act -- by taking federal money and then allowing corporations to site numerous landfills right next to black neighborhoods.)

Dutch doctors allow a woman in her 20s to euthanize herself; she had been a sexual abuse victim through most of her childhood, and the doctors declared her resulting PTSD incurable. I'm no squealer about death panels, but I tend toward optimism in wondering if folks can recover from even the worst abuses, so of course I wonder if she chose to end her life, unencumbered by the self-interest of others -- we can all think of a number of folks (doctors looking to prove a euthanasia method works, insurers looking not to pay for chronic conditions) who would have some self-interest in having people kill themselves.

Donald Trump says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is using the Washington Post (which he also owns) to attack him -- apparently because he would "tax Amazon like they should be taxed." As you may know, I'm not sanguine on anyone owning more than one corporation, or any corporation owning any other corporation, but I have no idea what Mr. Trump actually means (a higher corporate tax rate? More sales tax collection?). But I do know that whatever he means, he'll be able to deny it later, depending on his audience. That's because he's a flip-flopper.

Finally, Atrios snaps out on "liberal" media types who somehow underestimated Mr. Trump's chances to become the Republican Presidential nominee. "First of all, we all didn't (underestimate him), you and your circle jerk did," he says, and sadly, "circle jerk" describes "liberal" media punditoids pretty accurately. And those Democrat voters who are also "blithering idiots" "aren't treated as Real Americans by every mainstream news outlet," "aren't given their own response to the State of the Union address," and "don't make up a third of the House of Representatives." A thorough and inspiring analysis, though not safe for workplace reading.

Around the table: more flip-flopping from Donald Trump, and other stories.

Federal officials rule that arson caused the notorious West, Texas chemical plant fire of 2013 that killed 15 good folks, including 12 first responders. I eagerly await all the right-wing squealing that HAHAHA LIBRULZ WRONG AGAINZ TEH REGULASHUNS WOULDNTZ HAVEZ PREVENTEDZ TEH ARSONZ!!!!, as if regulations never take malicious acts into account. (Yes, I think so little of right-wingers that they'll somehow find the destruction of a 37 square block area as little more than another occasion to laugh at liberals. Of course, I think much better of actual conservatives.)

Cross County (AK) district judge resigns after officials find thousands of nude photos of male defendants on his computer -- and he'd given some measure of mercy to these defendants in exchange for sexual favors. Sadly, some right-winger, somewhere, is at this very moment looking to make his bones with Breitbart or Fox or whomever by declaring this to be YET ANOTHUR EXAMPUL OF TEH LIBRUL VALUEZ SPREADINGZ TEH EVULZ!!!!, when the corruption here isn't in the homosexuality but in the abuse of power. Again, I expect that real conservatives understand the true nature of corruption, even if mere right-wingers don't.

Now Donald Trump is backing off his earlier claim that no-way-no-how was he ever allowing Social Security and Medicare to get cut as President. This isn't "straight talk," this is flip-flopping, and the fact that it comes from a "policy adviser" and not him directly means nothing -- he sells himself as the Greatest Boss on Earth, but can't control what comes out of the mouths of his advisers? It's going to be harder and harder for Trump Blueshirts to reconcile all these contradictions -- not that they won't keep trying, but blaming the "liberal" media for accurately reporting his statements only gets you so far.

American poultry plant workers are being denied bathroom breaks with such frequency that some have resorted to wearing diapers at work. Others pee or poop themselves because they can't wait (how's that baked chicken taste now?), or refrain from drinking water in a very physically demanding and dehydrating job. I hate to sound like a broken record, but I can't imagine a conservative standing for this 50 years ago, even one predisposed to say his workers do nothing but bellyache -- but I can all too easily imagine today's "conservatives" celebrating the "free" market so vigorously that they'll keep cheerleading the supervisors (themselves under quite a bit of stress to make money for the CEO) who threaten workers with firing if they go off to take a leak.

Issie Lapowsky, writing at Wired, analyzes right-wing complaints that Facebook's "trending topics" feature is biased against them. I'm always tempted to write off right-wing whining as mere why-are-my-peculiar-beliefs-not-reflected-everywhere variety, but when Ms. Lapowsky says tech corporations "lean left," I'm quite, quite skeptical -- while most tech execs may be socially left, they lean rather further to the right on fiscal matters, as their resistance to high taxes on the wealthy and more vigorous corporate taxation attests. (The most vocal and visible corporate supporter of corporate tax amnesty? That would be Apple.)

Finally, The Straight Dope answers the question: "Do Cigarette Filters Do Anything? Short answer: no. But how we got to the useless cigarette filter isn't quite as cynical story as you might think -- cigarette corporations actually did set out to make a filter that would keep all the bad stuff from getting inside you, but such filters apparently made the smoking experience so much less pleasurable that people smoked more, and more deeply, thereby canceling out the positive effect of the filter. The cynical solution came afterward. Quite edifying reading.

Action: executive pay, "conversion therapy," and automatic voter registration.

The best way to stop runaway CEO pay? Call all of a CEO's sources of income (dividends, stock options, et cetera) what they are -- income -- and then institute a 91% tax bracket on annual income above $1 million. That won't make CEOs "just stop working" once they hit a million bucks, nor would it be so bad if, say, actors stop working once they hit that million, because that would leave more work for other actors. And a CEO thus restrained won't let all that extra money sit in the corporate bank account, lest it be taxed -- but he'll build more facilities and pay more people to do more work, which will actually create jobs and stimulate the economy. And cutting CEO pay also curtails a CEO's ability to buy more corporate welfare from Congress. Short that 91% tax bracket, we can try to curtail CEO pay by telling large shareholders to curtail CEO pay in shareholder resolutions. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Blackrock, an asset manager with voting shares in just about every public corporation on Earth, to start voting against absurd CEO pay packages.

Meanwhile, you've probably heard about "conversion therapy," which purports to change gays into straight people, presumably because God hates gays or something. God made gays, so God hating gays would be hard to figure, but some of God's purported servants would inflict some pretty awful abuses upon gays in the name of "conversion," and these include forcible re-enactment of past sexual abuses and certain "exercises" involving intimate touching and nudity. Does that sound like therapy to you? Thankfully, this doesn't sound like therapy to just about any major medical or psychological professional organization in America. Professionalism does still count for something, right? Even when it doesn't give people the answers they want? And this isn't a matter "between consenting adults," either -- not when one of the "consenting" adults winds up wanting to commit suicide, which often happens during this "therapy." The Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has the authority to outlaw quack therapies because of the harm they do to consumers, so CREDO helps you tell the FTC to outlaw "conversion therapy."

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislature to make voter registration automatic, then Roots Action still helps you do that. As you know, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 let you opt in to getting registered to vote when you get a driver's license, but legislation lately passed in four states requires you to opt out of voter registration at the DMV, which streamlines the process considerably and allows more people to vote on Election Day. Voter registration used to serve a purpose, back in the day when paperwork didn't exist to the degree it does now, but these days registration has become a bit of a hindrance. Put a few beers in some right-wingers (and this is more true now than it was eight years ago, I'd say) and they'll tell you that hindering the vote is the whole idea! If people aren't going to vote the right way, they'll say, then they shouldn't be voting at all! Even I've had right-wingers say this to me! But they don't get all the say around here -- or, at least, they shouldn't.

Action: GMO labeling, and lead poisoning.

Vermont's GMO-labeling bill goes into effect in a mere seven weeks, and word on the street is that the nefarious anti-GMO labeling bill, S. 2609, may come back to the Senate floor before then. It's proponents perhaps believe that once one state starts mandating GMO labeling, corporations will simply put the label on everything they have, lest a can of corn intended for sale in New Hampshire accidentally falls off the truck in Vermont. They may believe this because big ag corporations tell it to them -- though, of course, food labels are not made by monks with quill pens. These are our biggest, brightest, boldest entrepreneurs -- who never seem to lack lame excuses for why people can't have nice things. So Food and Water Watch still helps you tell your Senators to reject S. 2609, which would make GMO labeling voluntary like that's ever worked before, and instead support S. 2621, which would make GMO labeling mandatory. This bill could come back on its own, or as an amendment to another bill; however it happens, we need to be ready.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to help keep kids safe from lead by passing S. 2631, the Lead-Safe Housing for Kids Act, then Color of Change still helps you do that. Four million children currently live in housing that gets some level of federal assistance, and any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, so this is pull-the-baby-out-of-the-fire-now time. And S. 2631 would, as you may recall, set lead limits much lower than they're currently set for federal housing, and would also mandate the Department of Housing and Urban Development (or HUD) to do far more thorough inspections of federal properties before letting families with children move in. The bill would also end the exemption for "zero bedroom" housing -- folks live in plenty of places that don't have proper bedrooms, after all. I struggle to understand what objection one would have to protecting children from lead poisoning in federal housing. Well, OK, understanding their reasoning, such as it is, isn't the problem -- understanding how they sleep at night is.

Around the table: "you're moving the debate in your direction, but you suck because you don't vote," and other absurdities.

Congress actually does something on behalf of whistleblowers in the Defend Trade Secrets Act, signed by President Obama today. Senators Leahy (D-VT) and Grassley (R-IA) successfully attached an amendment to the bill (which, for once, enjoyed actual bipartisan support) granting immunity to folks who reveal trade secrets to our government as part of a criminal investigation. They needed that, and they got it -- I wonder how often I'll ever say that again about something Congress does, although I try to remain hopeful.

Hillary Clinton says folks over "55 or 50" should be able to buy into Medicare if they want, which, while it wouldn't amount to "support for a public option," would expand public health insurance in America. But why not let any adult buy into Medicare, since the more folks join a pool (particularly younger, healthier folks), the lower the price is for everyone in that pool? (Oh, wait -- I think the answer to that question is "precisely"!) They say Bernie Sanders is dragging Hillary Clinton to the left by winning all these primaries, and I guess this is more proof of that -- though, of course, Hillary Clinton wouldn't be the first Democrat to make a good promise and then dash it on the rocks of "bipartisanship" or "the art of the possible."

Ari Berman, writing in The Nation, tells us that Donald Trump's only path to victory involves voter suppression. I've been arguing for a long time that Voter ID laws will suppress the vote of many of the folks who hate Mr. Trump the most (i.e., blacks and Hispanics), almost as if that were the whole idea. Mr. Berman suggests two other ways Mr. Trump could "suppress the vote" -- creating literal havoc at voting places and running a campaign so negative that large numbers of voters stay home -- but I don't think the second item qualifies as "suppression," because negative campaigning does not equal a gun to your head. And we shouldn't let the possibility of violence at the voting booth cow us, either -- not if we want to keep calling ourselves Americans. (As an aside, is Jim DeMint really that clueless about how nakedly-self-serving his pro-Voter ID claim sounds?)

Legal scholars pressure the Obama Administration to drop support for a Bush Mobb legal memo from 2007 that allows faith-based charities to take federal money and still discriminate in hiring. I'll say it one more time: you take the people's money, you follow the people's rules, and the people's rules say don't discriminate. And the scholars make an important point not emphasized often enough: that no one is putting a gun to any religious charity's head and making them apply for federal grants. The only way to counter that argument would be to prove that the charity would go completely under without federal grants, and boy is that a long way to go just to avoid hiring gays.

Rulings by Pennsylvania and New Jersey judges suggest that folks could get sued not just for texting while driving, but for texting someone who's driving (who then causes an accident and kills someone). At least both judges have said you'd have to know the recipient was driving to even be considered as a defendant in a lawsuit (and the burden of proof would remain on the plaintiff, as it should). Thing is, no law of physics compels you to respond to a text immediately. We understand that we should pick up a phone call immediately, but we also understand that a text, like an email, can sit there until we're ready to respond -- unless, you know, you're just completely unable to look up from your phone for a minute, a habit that can get you killed.

Finally, Kate Aronoff, writing at Waging Nonviolence, describes the "liberal" media's tendency to cast young voters as shallow fools who believe in all the right things but don't vote. Worse than their stereotyping, worse than their ongoing blindness about Bernie Sanders's effect on young folks, and worse than their tendency to wish for a "savior" who can harness all that millennial energy to a more "useful" purpose is their subtle insistence that the only way to express yourself in a democracy is to vote -- for someone who will sell you out to their real paymasters, if recent experience is any guide. You vote one day out of the year; what do you do the other 364 days? You do what millennials are already doing -- organizing, protesting, and influencing the debate.

Action: cluster bombs, GMO mushrooms, and methane emissions.

Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your House Rep to help end cluster bomb production and use abroad. Typically soldiers drop cluster bombs from planes, and then these bombs shoot munitions off in multiple directions (now there's a precise instrument!), but they also frequently don't shoot off, and sit there for years on end, essentially a landmine dropped from the sky. Now, if you're of the mind that we should hold onto any weapon we can make, note a couple of things: one, that cluster bombs are notoriously unreliable weapons as described above, and two, that federal law already prohibits their export (unless they're unusually reliable), as well as their use in civilian areas. I guess the question for cluster bomb supporters then becomes: how flagrantly do you want to violate the law, and how many civilians must die in order to soothe your bottomless rage? And while the United States has not signed the international cluster bomb ban, the Convention on Cluster Munitions (or CCM), over 100 nations have -- which means we're behind the curve. Is that what America is like?

Meanwhile, the FDA is mulling the approval of yet another genetically-modified food, this one a mushroom genetically modified to -- produce higher yields? Withstand its natural enemies? Hell, even withstand some proprietary pesticide? No, not even: these mushrooms are whiter. I guess someone decided that folks would be more amenable to eating mushrooms if they weren't so dark. Haven't they tasted mushrooms? It's either your thing or it's not, and no artificial brightening is going to change that. Apples that don't brown, mushrooms that are brighter -- what's next? Redder strawberries? Greener cucumbers? I mean, the follies are endless -- and not conducive to our health, frankly, since (for example) we might actually want to know if we've left our apples out too long before we feed them to our children. Hence USPIRG joins with MoveOn to help you tell the FDA to "perform substantial and meaningful safety tests" on these mushrooms before approving them. Of course, I'd prefer that the FDA reject them -- the folks behind GMO foods aren't even trying to convince us they're better than what we've got.

Finally, the EPA proposed new methane standards for gas and oil drilling back in August, and may finalize them any day now, but there's still time to tell the EPA to strengthen these standards, as the Environmental Defense Fund helps you do. The EPA's standards, as they look now, will do more to protect us from methane emissions than our government has ever done before -- and you no doubt know that methane emissions drive climate change far more "efficiently" than coal emissions do -- but the standards could force gas and oil drilling corporations to monitor for methane leaks more frequently, and by removing more exemptions to the monitoring requirements. Why force corporations to monitor their own activities more? The cynical might respond that's because the EPA is always so underfunded that it can't possibly conduct enough of its own inspections, and while EPA underfunding remains a persistent issue, it's more important to remember that a fossil fuel corporation should be the first to know if it's got a problem, and should be the first to fix the problem. After all, that's what we expect from ourselves.

Around the table: "free" trade, "entitlement" "reform," and other fictions.

Hillary Clinton says she opposes the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," that Congress shouldn't vote on it before or after the November election, and that we need a "fundamental rethink" of future trade agreements. That's an awfully big commitment -- it doesn't just mean "during the lame duck session," which she may want you to think it means; "after the election" would cover at least up to November 2020. But when she goes back on her word, as I expect she will, she'll probably still say she was taken out of context.

Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, wonders why "entitlement" "reformers" talk about how we can't "afford" Social Security and Medicare, but not so much about how we can't afford corporate tax loopholes and military spending. Oh, but it's even worse than that: when they talk about military spending, they're more likely to talk about veterans' pensions (apparently we can't afford that, either!) than weapons boondoggles or wars fought off-budget. I've also noticed that our "liberal" media never talks about closing corporate tax loopholes without talking about the absolute necessity of reducing the corporate tax rate. This is why we can't have nice things in America.

Uh oh: Republican Rep. Steve Knight says "I think Social Security was a bad idea" at a candidate debate. There's no way to claim he was taken out of context, either. His statement is ready-made for a Democrat attack ad; now watch them pass it up because it's "uncivil," or because their 13-dimensional chess game requires them to keep a Republican Rep in a district President Obama only lost 50-48 in 2012. (On the other hand, the Senate Majority PAC pulls no punches in this ad attacking Nevada Republican Rep./Senatorial candidate Joe Heck for calling the foreclosure crisis "a blip on the radar.")

Rupert Stone, writing at Newsweek, reminds us that science teaches us that torture doesn't get us very good intelligence. Among other things, torture damages the brain enough that terror suspects can hardly keep their heads together enough to answer questions intelligently. Millions of Americans squeal in response: but what about the incontrovertible science of my inexhaustible rage? Also, they saw on TV that it works.

Finally, Bill Scher picks out Donald Trump's secret weapon in his attempt to appear populist: "incoherence." You can pick out pretty much whatever you like from what Donald Trump says -- if you think he wants to give the rich a tax cut, you can find support for that, and if you think he wants to raise taxes on the rich, you can find support for that, too. And given that so many of Mr. Trump's supporters believe whatever reflects best on their Personal Lord and Savior, I expect "incoherence" to remain a valued strategy for Mr. Trump. Hey, it worked for George W. Bush.

Action: school meal nutrition, and veterans' benefits.

And now we learn that the House version of the Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill would, in fact, roll back the USDA's improvements to school meal nutrition standards. You know, the ones that cut back on junk food options and ramp up food and vegetable options for kids while in school? Is it too soon to call the House objectively anti-health? And their bill also cuts back on assistance for poorer children of working families. House Republicans not only seem unacquainted with the notion that junk food corporations shouldn't have all the say about everything, they also seem unacquainted with the notion that you have to spend money to save money -- spending a little money on better nutrition for children now saves a lot more money in health care costs later on when those kids aren't obese and/or diabetic adults. Strange, that the "party of business" doesn't get that. But who am I kidding? Republicans are haters, simple and plain -- do something good and they're against it. They'll answer to their God for it, but in the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your House Rep to reject the House's version of the Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to stop cutting veterans' benefits, then the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America still helps you do that. In an apparent response to public pressure (what, you think they have pangs of conscience?), the Senate stripped out a proposed 50% cut to veterans' childrens' housing using transferred Post-9.11 GI Bill benefits. But the House bill (the notorious H.R. 3016) still contains that cut, and the Senate version still cuts Post-9.11 GI Bill housing benefits by $3.4 billion over the next five years. You know, I can think of better solutions to funding "crises" like these -- don't send our soldiers off to bomb the crap out of faraway places to achieve impossible goals, or invest in actual job-creation projects (like fixing our outdated sewer systems, amirite?) that result in more tax revenue flowing back to our government. It's possible that such solutions could only be implemented by a Congress with a completely different character than this one. But we're all about helping people build character.

Around the table: where people learn science, and other surprises.

Donald Trump now says he'll likely raise taxes on the rich, contra his stated proposal cutting the top tax bracket from 39.6% to 25%. This is a flip-flop I would welcome, if I believed anything Donald Trump says. If you really, really want to believe it -- and I don't blame you! -- consider that he suggests that his original proposal was just a starting point in negotiation. So how does a tax hike on the rich seem like the likely end result of that negotiation, given that these are scaredy-cat politicians he'd be negotiating with? Nah, just kidding -- he's not that stupid; he just hopes you are.

Airline passenger gets a UPenn economist in trouble with the feds after watching him "scribble furiously" on a piece of paper. Turns out he was doing a differential equation, and not planning the destruction of the aircraft, since people always do that right before the plane takes off! After all, it's not at all like people would plan such a thing in secret, with lots of time to spare to work out the plan's kinks! Also, he's Italian, not Middle Eastern, in case you thought Italians had fully integrated into whitehood.

NFL players got a lot of ink with regard to traumatic brain injuries, but Reagan Jackson, writing at Yes! magazine, reminds us of a forgotten face of the traumatic brain injury: the domestic abuse survivor. Nearly one out of every four American women suffers abuse at the hands of an intimate partner, and that abuse often results in a TBI, but hardly anyone has studied the matter -- until now, as a domestic violence shelter in Phoenix has partnered with a local medical research institution to research that the research center's CEO says could result in 20 million TBI diagnoses resulting from domestic abuse every year. I shudder to think that not very many men will be moved to action by that prospect.

Ellen Rand, writing at New American Media, talks about a time when elderly gay couples sometimes go back into the closet: when one partner is receiving substantial nursing care. A 2011 study found just over one in five gay folks feeling they could be "out" in a nursing home, with half reporting that staff would refuse to provide very basic care, like feeding or toileting. So, in case you thought our work on LGBT rights was done, it's not.

Finally, Sarah Zhang, writing at Wired, reminds us that "No, Harvard's Mumps Outbreak Doesn't Mean Vaccines Are Bunk." Long story short: before the MMR vaccine (which covers mumps, measles, and rubella), we had around 186,000 cases of mumps annually, and now we have no more than 2,000, which says that the vaccines work. Too many people act like science is evil because its results aren't as absolute as all those '50s B movies they watched as kids taught them it should be.

UPDATE. Now Mr. Trump says he was really saying that the rich would pay more than his proposed tax rate, but less than they're paying now. You could be excused for thinking his statement that "I am willing to pay more, and you know what, the wealthy are willing to pay more" meant that he and other wealthy folk are willing to pay more now.

Action: in which we fight religious persecution and anti-abortion legislation.

China Aid has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the government of China to release Guiyang pastor Li Guozhi, better known as Yang Hua. The Chinese government has revealed their evil here in their ever-more absurd actions: first fining his church more than $2000 per day for not having the proper permits to expand the church, then arresting him for "obstruction of justice" when he tried to keep government officials from destroying a church-owned hard drive, then moving him to a different detention center for "illegally holding state secrets." If that doesn't sound like the actions of someone acutely aware that they can't win an argument on the merits, then nothing does! Officially atheist and Communist China has formally recognized five separate religious groups, but maintains an iron group over their activities, even going so far as to appoint Catholic bishops in defiance of the Vatican; thus Yang Hua's Living Stone church is, in China, a "black market" church -- or, as we'd call it in America, a church. This is what religious persecution really looks like, in case all the whining of American right-wingers about transgendered folks in "their" bathrooms had confused you.

Meanwhile, the Alabama state legislature has passed two bills, SB 205 and SB 363, that would block women's access to abortions -- SB 205 by forcing clinics within 2,000 feet of a school to close (as if abortion clinics spread abortion cooties to children, I suppose), and SB 363 by outlawing "dismemberment" abortions (known to the medical community as dilation and evacuation abortions) "unless necessary to prevent serious health risk to mother," which means SB 363 wouldn't actually prevent very many D&Es. But don't worry -- SB 205 would make a lot more D&Es necessary in the first place, by closing down more abortion clinics and thus making it harder for women to get to the doctor before the second trimester! I have no animus toward folks who believe abortion is evil, but I have plenty of animus toward the politicians who pander to them, who make no effort to make abortion illegal by amending the U.S. Constitution, or to make abortion far less frequent by supporting widely-available birth control. They merely making women jump through all these hoops to get abortions -- which winds up increasing abortions. Why, it's almost like that's the idea. Hence the ACLU helps you tell Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley to veto both SB 205 and SB 363, and thus protect women's health.

Around the table: why we need local media, and other lessons.

Senate Finance Committee holds hearing on corporate taxes that concentrates almost entirely on reducing the corporate tax rate, and not on closing corporate tax loopholes, as most Americans would prefer. Congressfolk don't listen to their constituents -- now there's a shock! Of course, given that Sen. Rubio defined his 2014 intervention arguing for Education Department leniency toward Corinthian Colleges as something he did "on behalf of his constituents," it's not at all clear that Congressfolk really understand what a "constituent" is. Probably they just think it's anyone who gives them lots of money.

Jeff Nesbit, writing at Salon describes a "right-wing lie factory" even "more insidious than Fox News." Backed financially by shadowy Koch brothers-related groups, the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity (originally housed in a Montana taffy shop, apparently just so it could have a "physical address") produces "news" stories pushing the same anti-government, anti-tax, and anti-regulation line you've come to expect from right-wing news sources -- but it takes advantage of the continuing dissipation of local media outlets by providing them with cheap copy. Which is yet another reason we ought to fight for real local news sources that hire real reporters and do real stories. I wish it were of more comfort that when right-wing dark money groups fund "citizen journalism" like this, they show they can't win arguments on the merits.

Two high-level intelligence officials state that our intelligence and defense workers have an "unbelievable" amount of child pornography on their work computers -- but the NSA professes ignorance of exactly how widespread that problem might be. That sure does seem unlikely, doesn't it? We know what that means -- and, sadly, it almost certainly does not mean that the NSA's spying powers aren't all they're cracked up to be. But if you can't protect children from sexual predators, you certainly have no business purporting to protect America from terrorists.

Hoo boy, Exxon suggests that the lawsuits against them for lying about climate change violate their First Amendment rights, and numerous right-wing media outlets parrot their argument. But the charge against them is that they knew climate change was happening, but told their investors and shareholders the precise opposite, which we would more aptly describe as fraud. And just as the First Amendment doesn't protect you from any criticism you deserve, it doesn't protect you from any fraud you've committed, either. (And I feel compelled to mention, in light of yesterday's discussion of habeus corpus, that while individuals on death row only get a year to appeal their convictions, corporations get for-freaking-ever to challenge decisions against them.)

Donald Trump advises West Virginians not to vote in tomorrow's primary, because he's got it all wrapped up now. All this work we do fighting the notion that democracies and elections are about the politicians and not about the people, and here comes this bigmouth to poop all over it. Never mind that West Virginians will be selecting gubernatorial nominees tomorrow -- apparently, they don't matter, because they're not Trump. What disgusting narcissism. (Yeah, he walked it back later, but is it too much to ask that nominees not be narcissists in the first place? We expect that from each other, after all.)

Finally, Alexa Strabuk, writing at Yes! magazine, takes us back to mid-1960s California, and the Filipino grape laborers who went on strike for better pay and working conditions and ultimately helped give birth to the United Farm Workers. The owners of the Delano grape field where they worked kept Filipino and Chicano workers separated, so that they could use one group to break any strikes conducted by the other -- but Filipino workers reached out to Cesar Chavez's National Farm Workers Association, and though the two groups experienced tension over the next five hard years, they won largely because (in one contemporary's words) of the "genuine solidarity" between the two groups. Sadly, Filipino involvement in these struggles has been largely forgotten over the years -- at least partly because Our Glorious Elites would rather not tell stories about different people uniting to fight them. But not entirely forgotten, of course.

Around the table: free speech, corporate taxes, forced arbitration, *habeus corpus*, the minimum wage, and the Catholic vote.

Iowa agricultural newspaper fires editorial cartoonist of 21 years after his last cartoon points out that three big ag CEOs made more money last year than over 2,000 small farmers combined. Some have cried First Amendment on this, but it's not a First Amendment issue -- the First Amendment protects Rick Friday from our government, not from his employer. But it would certainly be appropriate for a few thousand letter-writers to descend upon Farm News and shame them for their cowardice in the face of big ag CEO criticism. Why are big ag CEOs so sensitive to criticism? Because they know, in their heart of hears, that they're not real farmers.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) introduces bill imposing an exit tax upon corporations that become "foreign" corporations via inversion. After all, folks who renounce their citizenship have to pay the taxes they've been deferring, so why not corporations, too? As Rep. Doggett suggests, if corporations want to enjoy the rights of personhood, they ought to fulfill the obligations of personhood, too -- I mean, rights come with responsibilities, don't they, Zombie Russell Kirk? All that would be weapons-grade PR, in a sane and healthy society. Still, rebuilding a sane and healthy society is our task, so when I get action alerts about the Corporate EXIT Fairness Act, so will you.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposes new forced-arbitration rules for banks, which would only permit banks to put forced arbitration agreements in customer contracts if they don't also ban class-action suits. That's progress, though I'd prefer an outright ban on forced arbitration, and of course even though the CFPB did appear to listen to bankster "concerns," they're still on the attack -- one of their more devoted servants, Rep. Duffy of Wisconsin, has sent a letter to the CFPB demanding to know if the Bureau talked to any trial lawyers, no doubt so they can brandish "trial lawyers" as scare words. After all, people use scare words when they can't win arguments.

Liliana Segura, writing at The Intercept, takes us back in time to the passing of the "other" Bill Clinton crime bill, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which has given us, among so many other things, the "habeus corpus reform" that limits the number of appeals death-sentenced prisoners can file. If you believe in putting someone to death for a crime, you'd think you'd want to get it exactly right, but in that stuffy mid-'90s air, only the rageheads got heard, and President Clinton, in true President Clinton fashion, sought to get ahead of Republican rage by stealing their thunder, never mind whom it might hurt. The "liberal" media calls that "bipartisanship," but I call that weakness.

Now Donald Trump finds himself "open" to a minimum wage hike, though he's said in the very recent past that he's against it, and has even said that workers make too much money. And that's not just from my memory of recent events -- the article at the above link actually recounts all of that! And the headline begins with "In Reversal"! Maybe, just maybe, all that wall-to-wall coverage of every filth-drenched uttering emanating from Donald Trump's mouth hole will do some good now that he's the presumptive nominee -- certainly it's all easy to dig up, and if there's one thing the "liberal" media likes, it's easy. Sadly, though, a lot of folks who secretly never found his utterings all that disgusting will hear "I'm very different from most Republicans" and figure that's permission enough to vote for him. Of course, George W. Bush wasn't "like most Republicans," either -- until he won.

Finally, Sister Simone Campbell, writing at the Philadelphia Inquirer, describes how the "Pope Francis effect" could transform Catholic voting habits in 2016. "(A)ttempts to control the 'Catholic vote' through issues of personal sexuality -- often nothing more than a crass political calculation -- will no longer work as well, if at all," she writes, and though I think the "chattering class" has always oversimplified the Catholic vote anyway I sure hope she's right. After all, answering and fulfilling the Pope's call for a politics that works for all of us requires courage, and courage isn't a one-day act but an every day act.

Action: renewable energy, vulnerable ecosystems, and fair redistricting.

Apparently shareholders at both Exxon and Chevron are preparing resolutions that would tell both corporations to move away from fossil fuels. That's not an absurd proposition -- no law of physics compels energy corporations to develop their energy from non-renewable sources if renewable alternatives exist; only the weight of decades of development, and of hard-to-kill paradigms, compel that. As you know, shareholder resolutions can work even if they come nowhere close to winning: even a resolution that wins one out of four votes signals to executives that one out of every four shareholders might be willing to dump their stock if things don't turn around, and no executive wants that to happen on their watch. So why don't we hear more about shareholder resolutions like these? Partly because we're not likely to have money to throw around buying voting stock in numerous corporations (though if you have a pension fund, you likely are invested in these corporations), but mainly because executives really, really, really hate them, for the reason described above. But Exxon and Chevron are having their annual general meetings in just a few days, so the time is right to strike. Vote Your Pension helps you tell Exxon and Chevron to move away from fossil fuels and into renewables.

Meanwhile, S. 2807, the so-called Preserving Public Access to Public Waters Act, would essentially give states veto power over certain "recreational or commercial fishing" restrictions at national parks. You may well be thinking, what's wrong with giving your grandfather more right to go fishing in public lands? But you should ask yourself why S. 2807 also specifies commercial fishing. Turns out S. 2807 doesn't tell you why we have fishing restrictions in the first place: to help vulnerable marine populations rebuild. And if states get veto power over these federal regulations, more development will move in, which means vulnerable ecosystems will crumble. In other words, this ain't about grandpa -- it's about unscrupulous corporate actors who look at national parks and only see money they could have made. I'll brook none of this "states always know better" silliness, either -- giving states power over what happens on federal property located within those states is an absurd proposition, and state political officials are more vulnerable to being, ah, influenced by local unscrupulous actors. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 2807, and ensure that our federal government continues to make necessary decisions about national parks.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to support HB 1835/SB 484, which would create an independent redistricting commission in the Commonwealth, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Pennsylvania conducted its primaries at the end of last month, but too many good Pennsylvanians still get general elections with only one candidate running unopposed, which is about as pure an opposite of "choice" as you can get. Even with all the gerrymandering going on in America, Pennsylvania still exceeds the national average for unopposed legislative elections by almost 20 percent! How can the people ever get what they deserve from their government if their elected officials are never looking over their shoulder at the popular will? The only people who want legislative elections to be predictable are the people already in power, and how popular are they again? Especially in Pennsylvania, where the election of a Democratic Governor has apparently completely paralyzed the legislature's ability to produce a budget that doesn't show good Pennsylvanians the back of their government's hand? The power of the few is never more important than the power of the many.

Around the table: how do the fools survive, part 322.

U.S. Justice Department declares that North Carolina's notorious "bathroom" bill, HB 2, violates Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 as well as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and has given the state until Monday to declare that it won't implement HB 2. Over $2.2 billion in education funding is at stake, but then again maybe that's the way North Carolina Republicans want it -- Republicans have this habit of fomenting (or taking advantage of) chaos in order to ram their bad solutions down the people's throats, and in the wake of losing all that federal money, the state could ram solutions like a completely-privatized school system down the people's throats. History, at least, won't look kindly on the state legislature that destroyed its state's education system so it could force transgendered folk to go to the wrong bathroom.

America's Last Conservative, Paul Craig Roberts, tells us that Greece is a "colony of the private banks. I was about to say how surprised I was that it's taking Greece so long to figure out that they could merely exit the EU and print their own currency, until Mr. Roberts reminded me that Greek government officials got their country into this mess by taking bribes to take on unpayable loans, and surely the bribes are still coming. I must confess I do find it difficult to accept how easily folks can be bought. Mr. Roberts now thinks Greece is too far gone, even, to exit the EU, but he does tend to be pessimistic.

Atrios reminds us of what charter school advocates seem to have forgotten: "closing down schools and reshuffling teachers and moving kids around all the time has an incredibly negative effect on a child's education and mental/ emotional well-being." Going to new schools all the time is traumatic for kids, after all. Of course, these charter school "experts" don't get it because their paycheck depends on them not getting it. You can also look at the buildings charter schools have "repurposed" and easily wonder "how can a kid learn in there?" That's what blind worship of "boldness" and "innovation" gets you.

Jennifer Sabin, writing at Huffington Post, expresses horror that so many Americans are now openly racist in the era of Donald Trump. I feared it would be like this -- that Mr. Trump would make racism OK again, in large part by re-naming anti-racism efforts "political correctness," at which point racism becomes mere "free speech." We can start fighting back by re-naming "political correctness" "not acting like a prick." (Of course we know why Mr. Trump also says things like "we're going to love each other, and cherish each other" -- no one can call Malia Obama all kinds of racist crap, after all, unless they truly believe they're good people, who just happen to be "provoked.")

Finally, in case you needed reminding that the New York Times's Thomas Friedman is the World's Worst Pundit, Dean Baker reminds us by summarizing the worst parts of Mr. Friedman's latest whinefest about the parties failing to work together in a "bipartisan" manner to pass "centrist" legislation that's neither centrist nor popular. One does at least look at what's broadly popular in determining where the "center" is, after all. Right? Not Tom Friedman -- he "make(es) up absurd positions, attribut(es) them to the people he doesn't like, and us(es) this as an excuse to throw them out of the discussion," all to support things like the "Grand Bargain" that would have cut Social Security and Medicare, which are, again, broadly popular programs which will not bankrupt the nation. But what of bankster-held debt, which will bankrupt the nation? That doesn't register with him. "(G)reat source of insight into establishment thinking" or not, let's never speak of him again.

Action: helping Bosnian whistleblowers, protecting the Grand Canyon, and reclaiming Oak Flat.

If you think the Obama Administration War on Whistleblowers is bad (and it is), dig this item out of Bosnia -- small mining corporation Tuzla Kvarc exposes government corruption, and said government retaliates by a) seizing Tuzla Kvarc property, b) conducting inspections designed solely to harass them, c) destroying one of Tuzla Kvarc's buildings in the middle of the night, and d) filing criminal charges against Tuzla Kvarc for not having a mining license -- when a local official's demand for bribes in exchange for that very license started this whole mess! So Tuzla Kvarc hasn't been able to pay its workers in four months, and some of those workers have gone out on hunger strike, some refusing even water and medical care, to draw attention to their plight. I presume that this is what conservatives used to mean when they talked about overarching government power -- though, by the evidence, they've done a very bad job fighting it here in America, where our government now can't do anything for you but can do anything to you, and only acts with relative restraint because we're richer than Bosnia. So Roots Action helps you tell Bosnian Prime Minister Denis Zvizdic to stop oppressing Tuzla Kvarc. Because the Big Stick of Bad PR does-so work.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to create the Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. You'd think something like the Grand Canyon would be a national monument already, not just because, hello, it's the freaking Grand Canyon, but because the Colorado River runs through it, and that river supplies drinking water to seven states and the nation of Mexico. Yet it's not -- possibly because no one imagined a future where severe drought is a normal rather than an exceptional circumstance, and possibly because no one imagined that so many loggers, developers, and uranium miners would demand the right to exploit the area for its resources. So it's up to us, at the very least, to remind folks that one of our great national treasures, the Grand Canyon, isn't as well-protected from destruction as they might think, and that they need to do something about that. And we shouldn't worry that right-wingers will declare such a National Monument designation to be a sign of untrammeled communism, fascism, or socialism, because they say that stupid crap no matter what we do. You'd think President Obama would be acutely aware of this fact; nonetheless, we should remind him of it.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, you may recall that the Arizona Senatorial delegation slipped a bit of corporate welfare into the most recent must-pass defense authorization bill, one that would transfer national park land (and San Carlos Apache holy land) in Oak Flat to a Rio Tinto-owned mining corporation, because money, I guess. No, really, because money -- Rio Tinto has long contributed to Sen. McCain's campaigns, and Sen. Flake actually used to work for a Rio Tinto subsidiary years ago, so one could well say that one hand washes the other. The Oak Flat area sits in the Tongass National Forest in Arizona, and sadly also sits on massive copper reserves, and Rio Tinto-owned Resolution Copper (which now owns Oak Flat) would create a crater literally two miles wide and a thousand feet deep to get at the copper. It sure doesn't sound like there'll be a whole lot left in that area for the rest of us, particularly the San Carlos Apache. But H.R. 2811/S. 2242, the Save Oak Flat Act, would repeal the land giveaway; the House's main sponsor is Rep. Raul Grijalva of New Mexico, and the Senate's main sponsor is Bernie Sanders of Vermont, perhaps you've heard of him. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Save Oak Flat Act.

Around the table: free speech, bankster tricks, medical errors, "smart" houses, and the Bank of North Dakota.

U.N. Special Rapporteur tells us that "countering violent extremism" could become a "perfect excuse" for governments to crack down on freedom of expression. And an "excuse" is all it is -- governments' repression of free speech enables violent extremism, and if governments were serious about countering violent extremism, they would starve extremism of its oxygen by treating their own citizens fairly and avoiding meddling in the affairs of other nations' citizens. And anyone who guffaws at that statement is a weakling. Cynicism does weaken you, after all.

ProPublica and the Washington Post (along with two German media outlets) report on how Wall Street banksters help German corporations avoid dividend taxes, which of course means Germany has to tax its less well-connected citizens and small businesses even harder to make ends meet. Apparently German corporations loan shares to banksters, who then transfer the shares to German financiers exempt from dividend taxes (less fees, of course!), and those financiers transfer the shares right back to the original shareholder (ditto). You can't even do this in America! And you probably can't in Germany, either -- one U. Michigan law professor says that "(r)egardless of whether you have an obligation to your shareholders, that does not extend to things that you know have no motivation other than reducing taxes," which latter item is actually illegal in Germany.

Uh oh: a Johns Hopkins study suggests that medical errors would be the number three cause of death in America if we only tabulated medical errors correctly. Numbers one and two, just for your reference, are heart disease and cancer; number four is respiratory disease. Medical errors can include diagnostic errors, unrecognized surgical complications, medication mix-ups, and other errors in "judgment, skill, or coordination of care," per Johns Hopkins. Citations of international coding guidelines aside, you can see why our government might not want to confront this problem so directly.

The Samsung SmartThings platform has enough flaws in it that hackers were able to set off fire alarms and unlock doors remotely. Which nobody could have predicted! Maybe this "Internet of Things" I'm tired of hearing about will be good enough for us to use in a decade or so -- but unlike the automated supermarket checkout, which has just now stopped sucking after ten years or so, the home security platform controlled from your smartphone could be thoroughly discredited by then, the stakes being, as you can imagine, much higher.

Finally, Ellen Brown notices that the state-owned Bank of North Dakota is still prospering despite the collapse of that state's brief oil/gas drilling boom, and wonders if a state-owned bank could work in a much larger state like California. Short answer: yes -- and with no additional cost to taxpayers. How did the Bank of North Dakota not-just-survive-but-thrive during the drilling sector's fall, by the way? By "increasing its lending into a collapsing economy," that's how -- precisely the opposite of what just about every privately-held bank does in times of trouble. Of course, they're only in the business of making themselves richer; the Bank of North Dakota has to serve the people of North Dakota. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

Action: lead standards, payday lenders, and sentencing reform.

H.R. 4694/S. 2631, the Lead-Safe Housing for Kids Act, would strengthen federal standards for lead-contaminated dust or soil. This is a big deal, because a lot of federal housing still has lead paint in it, even though we've known for decades that any amount of lead a child takes in causes brain damage, and our regulations haven't kept up with the science. The Lead-Safe Housing for Kids Act would add an "elevated blood lead level" standard to the Residential Lead-Based Paint Hazard Reduction Act of 1992, and would update the Lead-Based Paint Poisoning Prevention Act to require HUD to conduct a proper lead paint risk assessment before letting a family with a child under 6 into federally-supported housing -- and a "visual inspection" of a property won't be assessment enough. And the bill would also end the exemption that "zero-bedroom housing" currently gets from lead paint standards. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Lead-Safe Housing for Kids Act, and thus also support tougher lead-paint standards and healthier children.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is, as we speak, putting the finishing touches on rules that would limit the damage payday lenders could do to debtors -- which, as we know, generally involves gigantic fees and automatic loan roll-overs that keep working families in debt. Naturally, the payday lending industry is doing its damndest to fight new rules concerning payday and car title loans, among others, but really, this should be easy -- it's not often that our government helps good Americans defend themselves from unscrupulous lenders who aim to put them in a cycle of debt they can only escape with extreme difficulty. And any Congressdope who defends payday lenders (cough Debbie Wasserman-Schultz cough) should crumble before negative attack ads excoriating them as, oh, I don't know, objectively pro-greed. Or objectively pro-debt. Or objectively pro-financial predator. Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the CFPB to enact the most vigorous possible curbs to payday lending abuses.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, then the Friends Committee on National Legislation still helps you do that. (Note: you'll be telling your House Rep to support two bills that, taken together, do basically all the same things that the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act would do.) Why do I keep tugging your elbow about a bill that flatly doesn't do everything we'd like a sentencing reform bill to do? Because the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act does represent progress -- it does provide relief from the mandatory minimums that make our judges less effective, that treat low-level drug offenders as if they're, oh, I don't know, banksters or something. And what did we learn from Nixon Administration official John Ehrlichmann? That the "war on drugs" has always been a lie, that our government knew it was a lie, and that our government invented it to discredit anti-war and civil rights protestors. So of course we should encourage our government to move in a more positive direction.

Action: veterans' benefits, and whistleblower protections.

I have some relatively good news on the veterans' benefits front: though the House passed the nefarious H.R. 3016, which slashes benefits provided to our veterans and their survivors by the Post-9.11 G.I. Bill, the Senate Armed Services Committee has released their version of the omnibus veterans services bill without those cuts. Whose brilliant idea was it to cut veterans' benefits in an election year anyway? Seems to me even the lamest candidates in the most gerrymandered districts could utterly humiliate incumbents merely by advertising their vote on H.R. 3016. Anyway, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the House's attempt to cut veterans' benefits. If we're going to keep sending our troops to foreign lands to do impossible tasks, not that we ever should, and thus risk having entire generations return to us as mere shells of people, we at least have the obligation to take proper care of them when they get back -- and not sacrifice them to some obscure fiscal or philosophical point.

Meanwhile, the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce has the False Claims Act in its sights. Why? Because the False Claims Act punishes those who would defraud our government, and thus also defraud the people who own our government and who pay taxes to our government. That would be you, and also me. No doubt the Chamber's spokeshacks can utter inanities about so-called whistleblowers bringing frivolous lawsuits as if we don't have people called judges who can help defend us against frivolous lawsuits, but, really, this should be very easy: why does the Chamber hate patriotic Americans who expose wrongdoing by federal contractors? Can it really be that they value federal contractor profits more than they value decent Americans who risk everything, including their family, their life, and their livelihood, to protect the taxpayer? Hence the National Whistleblowers Center helps you demand that Congress protect the False Claims Act from right-wing attacks. Let's remind Congress that corporate apologists don't get all the say about everything around here: we do.

Around the table: the failure of welfare "reform," and other lessons.

Gordon Long interviews America's Greatest Economist, Michael Hudson, about how "Wall Street Has Taken Over the Economy and is Draining It." Not incidentally, he resolves the are-our-elites-stupid-or-are-they-evil question thusly: "The successful error of monetarism is to force countries to have such self-defeating policies that they end up having to privatize their natural resources, their public domain, their public enterprises, their communications and transportation, like you’re seeing in Greece’s selloffs. So when you find an error that is repeated, it’s deliberate. It’s not insane. It’s part of the program, not a bug." Also, there'll be a new Michael Hudson book in three months' time, with the promising title of J is for Junk Economics.

George Will sounds the alarum against a Donald Trump nomination. But he never fully explains why he thinks Mr. Trump is "the most anti-conservative presidential aspirant" in Republican history -- all we really learn is that "conservative essentials" "includ(e) the manners and grace that should lubricate the nation’s civic life," but those aren't conservative values, they're civilized values. In other words, Mr. Will would have been more accurate to describe Mr. Trump as the most "anti-civilization presidential aspirant" in history.

Retro Report wonders how well the Clinton Administration welfare "reform" of 1996 has gone. Long story short: ending "welfare as we know it" worked OK during the years of the internet bubble, but when jobs (and then, in 2008, nearly the entire economy) disappeared during Tha Bush Mobb years, not so much. And then states used the welfare money they got from our federal government to plug other, unrelated holes in their budgets. And it got worse from there, until now 46 million Americans are in poverty, with about half of these making less than $10,000 annually, which doesn't cut it anywhere in America. Total time of video: 13 minutes, 24 seconds.

Shaun Richman, writing at In These Times, describes "The Legal Argument That Could Overturn Right-to-Work Laws Around the Country." As one legal scholar says, right-to-work laws "compel() one private party to provide benefits to another private party with no compensation" -- which is to say, the union has to provide services to workers who don't have to pay dues to the union under right-to-work. Stick around for the part where Mr. Richman describes a time when unions actually competed for the same workers in the same workplaces -- and agency fees didn't exist.

Finally, the Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan -- poet, priest, and lifelong activist against war and economic injustice -- has died at the age of 94, his advanced age perhaps testifying to the utility of doing good works regardless of how Our Glorious Elites receive them. He's most famous for participating in the burning of hundreds of draft cards in Maryland during the Vietnam War; I suspect Our Glorious Elites are glad he's better known for that than for declaring that poverty, racism, greed, and militarism were all outward expressions of the same injustice. Also n.b. that he was a Gerard Manley Hopkins fan, which always recommends a person. R.I.P.

Action: "banning the box," and keeping corporations from taking our water.

President Obama has issued an Executive Order removing the box that asks if you have a criminal record from applications for federal employment, and good for him, but this order doesn't address the millions of Americans who work for federal contractors, so the ACLU helps you tell the President to "ban the box" for federal contractors' workers as well. To do this, Mr. Obama needs not run for permission to Great and Awesome Real American Super-President Mitch McConnell or the Boy Wonder, Paul Ryan. So what's the problem with the "box," you ask? First off, criminals who get out of jail have already repaid their debt to society, so it's not fair to make them keep paying that debt by having them check a box that has a better-than-even chance of landing their job application in the proverbial circular file. Second off, if removing that box gives them a better shot at landing a job (and it does!), then it also gives them a better shot at truly rehabilitating and contributing to society -- and not landing back in jail. Often the merciful thing to do also turns out to be the smart thing to do.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the U.S. Forest Service to keep Nestlé from drawing water from the San Bernardino National Forest, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Forest Service will need some more convincing -- they've proposed extending Nestlé's contract in the San Bernardino National Forest for five more years, although the original permit expired in 1988 and hadn't been evaluated by our government in the meantime. Perhaps they figured the world didn't end in the meantime, so bygones! But something has happened in the meantime, something that should enter into the Forest Service's decision-making -- a massive drought has afflicted Western states for several years now, suggesting it's maybe not such a good idea to let a private corporation siphon off water that belongs to the people, just so that corporation can sell it as bottled water. We must always remind our public servants of two things: one, that they're supposed to serve the public, and two, they're not supposed to sell off our resources to their cronies.

Around the table: lessons about law enforcement, looking to saviors, and the bottomless folly of the "liberal" media.

Heard of those FBI "Shared Responsibility Committees" purportedly designed to get social service help to would-be terrorists before they become terrorists? A letter obtained by The Intercept suggests that these committees are little more than a way for the FBI to get more informants. Folks may never confide in their clergy, their teachers, or their social workers again. And, as a Muslim advocate says with admirable understatment, "it’s not clear why an agency tasked with arresting people would also be handling community interventions." Then again, since these committee members get zero legal protections, I'm not sure how many will ever join such a committee.

John Laurits, writing at Nation of Change, suggests that Bernie Sanders has a much wider path to the Democratic Presidential nomination than most folks think. But never mind the noise Sanders supporters might make at the convention if the delegate total is close enough, which it may well be. The more interesting question is: what concessions would Mr. Sanders have to make to superdelegates to secure the nomination? And, given that he won't be working with a filibuster-proof Senate majority and very likely won't have a Democratic House majority, either, how many of these concessions would he make freely?

USA Today interviews Nike CEO Phil Knight, without highlighting the overseas worker abuses that made him and his corporation famous back in the 90s -- worker abuses he may be prepared to repeat, given Nike's recent announcement that it wouldn't allow the Worker Rights Consortium to monitor its factories anymore. Instead, they let him spew forth about how "free" trade "always" works (for whom?) and how America is losing its "entrepreneurial edge." Those gosh-darn Americans, so unwilling to pay wage slaves in dung pellets to make non-essential and overly-expensive consumer products!

Hedrick Smith, writing at the Our Future blog, warns us that most of the big SuperPAC money will be spent "down-ballot" on House and Senate races rather than the Presidential race. I've been thinking for a while now that most folks simply place too much energy in the Presidential race, when Our Glorious Elites know that where the right has made gains the past few years, they've made those gains at the state level. Aside from setting a good example, I am somewhat at a loss as how to convince folks to realize that the other 1,460 days of a Presidential term matter more than Election Day.

Finally, TruthOut takes us in the wayback machine to 1934, when an avowed Socialist ran for Governor of California as a Democrat -- and Our Glorious Elites cut him down. Possibly when folks warn of the onslaught of negative advertising that will befall Bernie Sanders if he becomes the nominee, they're thinking of what happened to Upton Sinclair: quotes from his novels taken out of context and used to prove his "communism" and "atheism," newsreels interviewing "real people" shown at move houses all around the state, and a steady drumbeat of fearmongering about unemployed folks moving from all over to California. Worse, the Democratic establishment, state and national, obstructed Mr. Sinclair. Worse, he compromised with them. So what's the lesson? Believe in yourself, not some savior -- or realize that you are a savior.

Around the table: email privacy, "religious liberty," journalistic disclosure, voting trends, frivolous lawsuits, and failed dolls.

Good news: the House of Representatives has unanimously approved H.R. 699, the Email Privacy Act. We've fought for this bill's passage, so congratulate yourselves -- and then get ready to get this bill past the Senate. Last year, Sens. Leahy (D-VT) and Lee (R-UT) introduced S. 356, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act, which is virtually identical to H.R. 699; this bill, however, only has 28 Senate sponsors (vs. the 315 House sponsors H.R. 699 had). The good news? 10 of these 28 sponsors are Republicans, so maybe the bill has a shot -- if we act. As soon as I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Not all the news is good, though: Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has signed the notorious counseling pro-discrimination bill, which would allow counselors to avoid giving help to gay clients if that would conflict with their "sincerely-held principles" (a House amendment changed the wording from "sincerely-held religious beliefs"). Possibly Mr. Haslam looked at the overwhelming votes in favor of the bill in House and Senate and decided to throw the far-right a bone. Still, I'm long past tired of people whining that they have to serve people they don't "agree" with in order to do the jobs they've already agreed to do. It's like they just don't want to be grown-ups.

Ho hum, Vox's Matthew Yglesias writes a very, very positive piece on Goldman Sachs's entry into commercial banking -- without disclosing that Goldman Sachs funds a Vox podcast. And Vox has performed similar services for Comcast in the past. I hope Mr. Yglesias doesn't respond that Goldman Sachs only funded the podcast, not the particular piece he wrote -- but I also fear he'll tell us that that corporate sponsorship really doesn't mean all that much, because isolated anecdotes hifalutin jibber-jabber.

Hispanic voting rights advocate predicts that nearly two million more Hispanics will vote in 2016 than in 2012. And most of them will vote against Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, who've both been swordfighting over who'd build the bigger wall, but I'm not seeing a figure actually describing the "skyrocketing" rise in registration among Hispanics, and of course Voter ID laws may well suppress this turnout, just as its supporters intended it to do.

Paul Kiel, writing at ProPublica, describes how Nebraska became a paradise for collection agencies to sue people over relatively small medical bills. Why? Because it only costs $45 to file a lawsuit in Nebraska, which makes suing over $200 medical bills a relatively cost-effective option for collectors -- and makes working families more susceptible to having their checks garnished and their savings accounts emptied out, when higher filing fees would, at least, force creditor and debtor to work together so debtor can stay afloat. Have any doubts that's the reason? Then note how, when a legislator proposed raising that cost by one dollar -- one dollar! -- he met with a storm of resistance from state collectors. Some folks will do anything to protect their frivolous lawsuits.

Finally, remember that "Hello Barbie" doll that could have compromised children's privacy with its artificial intelligence and wi-fi connection? Well, it's hardly selling, and reviews from folks who've bought it aren't very good, with almost a filibuster-proof majority of Amazon reviewers giving the thing one star out of five. One! Not even two! Yet Mattel hardly seems chastened -- a spokeshack said it was "representative of Mattel’s relentless goal to push boundaries and question limits" -- and the business press helpfully points to its capacity to "create buzz." Hey, whatever gets you through the night.