Thieves in the Temple.

Action: battling drug price-gouging and climate change denialism.

By now you've heard about Mylan, the corporation that has raised the price of the live-saving medication EpiPen by over 400 percent since 2007. Mylan's CEO, Heather Bresch -- who happens to be Sen. Joe Manchin's daughter, so maybe she can help him out when he loses his 2018 re-election bid -- has been callous enough toward the outrage directed at her corporation that the notorious "pharma bro," Martin Shkreli, clearly sensing a soul mate, has defended her. Ms. Bresch's salary, of course, has also gone up dramatically since 2007, by over 600 percent; if you drew a direct line from the price hike to the salary hike, I wouldn't blame you. Hate to pile on, but Mylan is now also a foreign corporation, having "moved" to the Netherlands in one of those "corporate inversions" that enable big corporations to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. So, no use talking to Mylan any longer -- now it's time to talk to our government, and CREDO helps you tell the Obama Administration to stop big pharma price-gouging of life-saving medications.

Meanwhile, MoveOn helps you tell Enterprise, the auto rental corporation, to dissociate itself from the American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC. Enterprise is the biggest car rental corporation on Earth, and if you live in the Philadelphia area, you also know (and may use) Enterprise CarShare, which used to be Philly CarShare. There are plenty of reasons a corporation would want to disassociate itself from ALEC -- ALEC has promulgated more reactionary legislation (which often gets introduced verbatim into state legislatures) than any other organization over the last quarter-century or so. However, given that ALEC's second most fervent desire these days (behind redistributing worker income upward to CEOs, of course) is fighting any efforts to save our planet from climate change, Enterprise (which has made specific commitments to fight climate change) might well be embarrassed. Plenty of corporations have pulled out of ALEC over the last few years specifically over their climate change denialism; if we make enough noise, we may be able to get one more to do it.

Around the table: how vote suppression and "free" trade are *even worse* than you thought, and other hard lessons.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, describes "The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters." Yes, it's the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a.k.a. Crosscheck -- the database that pretends to identify "voters who've voted in multiple races across state lines" by matching fairly common names that just so happen to belong to predominantly black folk and folks of color. Plus, the database matches voters without checking their full Social Security numbers -- or, apparently, their middle names. Still not convinced? Out of over 7 million suspects flagged by the database, how many folks have actually faced voter fraud charges? Four. So, yes, Crosscheck is partisan and racist.

Chris Hamby at Buzzfeed reveals "The Court That Rules the World" -- and, spoiler alert, it's the "investor-state tribunal" created by "free" trade agreements. You won't just learn about the less-noxious origins of ISDS, and about corruption in Egypt and lead-laced water in El Salvador -- you'll also learn about "the system’s usefulness as a shield for the criminal and the corrupt," which "has remained virtually unknown." The ISDS virtually ended any attempts by good Egyptians and Salvadorians to clean up their countries; think that won't happen here if the TPP passes? (Of course, it already has -- Congress rushed to repeal country-of-origin labeling laws for meat late last year when the WTO ruled that such laws violated "free" trade deals.)

Louisiana 1st Circuit Court of Appeals panel rules that a Terrebone Parish sheriff violated the Constitutional rights of a blogger when he raided his house. The blogger, of course, had accused the sheriff and several other local officials of corruption. Turns out the alleged "defamation" perpetrated by the blogger wasn't a criminal offense -- because public officials can't be "defamed" in that manner -- and thus any search warrant procured by the sheriff lacked probable cause. The sheriff, at one point over the last month, referred to the accusations against him as "unsatisfactory." That's a pretty terrible way of saying people are wrongly accusing you. It's like he got lost in a thesaurus.

Washington Post writer Kent Babb chronicles the below-poverty-level life of minor league baseball players. If you're tempted to think that's an OK price to pay so you can one day get to The Show -- which plenty of poor minor league ballplayers also think! -- remember how few of them ever make it to the majors. And n.b. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred using the exact same excuse all corporate leaders use whenever they want to argue against the minimum wage: that "additional regulation could ultimately lead to smaller minor league rosters or fewer teams." You'll recognize this, of course, as a hostage situation: don't make me do the right thing, Mr. Manfred's really saying, or these jobs'll get it! But I think he's wrong -- I don't see major league ball clubs taking kindly to the suggestion that they can do without their rookie league or high A farm clubs.

Finally, Harry Boyte at Moyers and Company reminds us that "Consumer Culture is Killing Citizenship." Long story short: we care less about each other and more (or perhaps only) about ourselves. Long story somewhat longer: our commercialized culture, where city folks can see some 5,000 ads daily and children see 40,000 ads every year, stops us from being "makers of democratic society" and makes us instead into people who "brand() and sell() ourselves" and constantly ask "what's in it for me?" Will the Trump campaign, which "embod(ies) the logic of a culture where differences between salesmanship and leadership disappear," be America's wake-up call? Maybe, maybe not -- but we'll be out there banging our saucepan.

Action: clean water, and government spying.

The Army Corps of Engineers has approved -- via the notorious "Nationwide Permit 12" process, which allows the Corps to approve small segments of pipelines without the environmental review a big pipeline would get -- the Dakota Access pipeline, which would transport nearly half a million barrels of crude oil daily. But the Standing Rock Sioux have protested the pipeline, with increasing intensity over the last several weeks, since it would disturb sacred sites and put their water at risk of pollution. And they're not the only ones in danger, since Dakota Access would also run through Illinois and Iowa, in addition to both Dakotas. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell the Obama Administration to revoke permits for the Dakota Access pipeline. The Army does have the legal right to revoke a project's permits if they find that said project will cause undue damage to local water, and the law also permits anyone to suggest to the Army Corps of Engineers that it should revoke a project's permit -- and I presume "anyone" includes our President. So let's get cracking.

Meanwhile, Color of Change helps you tell the FCC to restrict law enforcement's ability to use cell-phone simulators, popularly known as "stingrays." Stingrays, as you know, pretend to be cell phone towers so as to force nearby cell phones to connect to it and give up all their information, so that police can track your location and intercept your communications. Generally, police use these devices without a warrant -- because you don't ask a judge for a warrant to spy on every phone in the vicinity so you can spy on one or two people, unless you want the judge to laugh at you. Don't be the one who says if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear, when our government will happily redefine "protesting your government's actions" as "wrong," and they'll use these devices to shut down your phone, too, if you happen to be recording their misconduct. And police officers under pressure to produce arrests and close cases will use stingrays to disproportionately harass folks of color. Of course, government that actually serves its owners, the people, really doesn't have to worry about any of these things.

Action: a "Wall Street sales tax" yea, official protestor harassment nay.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support an aggressive sales tax on Wall Street stock trades. Why? Because it would raise a lot of money -- until that point at which it fulfills its real purpose, to restrain lightning-fast computerized stock trading that adds nothing of value to the economy but which now makes up most stock trades. Trading in ever-more convoluted derivative products doesn't do as much for the economy as, you know, making stuff, selling stuff, and saving money. But though that may be obvious to you and I, banksters act like it's not, and pretend that a Wall Street sales tax (or financial transaction tax, or Robin Hood tax, take your pick) would somehow injure Mom-and-Pop stores and small businesses -- as if they're the ones creating all these hifalutin financial "instruments"! Of course, they don't really mean you'll injure them -- they mean they'll injure them, if they don't get their way. Remember when you were a kid, and acting like a spoiled brat got you shamed and put in the corner? Banksters have apparently never experienced such things. I guess it's up to us to teach them, then.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to investigate alleged attempts by the FBI and the DHS to intimidate peaceful protestors and activists, then Roots Action still helps you do that. Maybe it doesn't matter to these committees if the FBI has conducted "counterterrorism" surveillance on Occupy protestors or planted informants among Keystone XL pipeline protestors or compiled social media posts of Black Lives Matter protestors -- maybe they're all just "dirty hippies" (or worse!) to our Congressfolk. But you no doubt recall how our Congressfolk overreacted to reports of the IRS collecting information on Tea Party groups? This, when the Tea Party is a corporate-grown "protest" movement! Of course, corporate sponsorship explains Congress's priorities in most cases, but no matter -- our Congress has a duty to rein in the excesses of federal law enforcement officials, who will very likely never find a "terrorist" in any of these movements unless they make one themselves. And I'm sure that's come up in official meetings at the FBI and the DHS.

Around the table: corporate secrecy, petition abuse, prisoner abuse, federal student aid, discrimination, and voter fraud.

Suzanne Barlyn at Reuters tells the story of "How Delaware Kept America Safe for Corporate Secrecy." Long story short: Delaware makes buku bucks off corporate registrations, infamously easier there than elsewhere, and so state officials have hamstrung federal efforts to mandate disclosure of a corporation's real owners, which would be an essential tool in fighting money-laundering and terrorist-financing. How have they done it? Oh, the old-fashioned way -- through fake "compromises" and fake concerns about a "nurturing business environment."

FDA reports that many petitions they receive demanding that they withhold approval of a generic or biosimilar drug "do not raise valid scientific concerns and appear to have been filed to delay approval of competing medicines." In a related note, a Rutgers professor finds that big pharma corporations filed 92 percent of these petitions between 2011 and 2015, which are supposed to raise valid public health concerns, not force the FDA to respond to frivolous petitions aimed at hamstringing competitors. The good news? The FDA denies 9 out of 10 of them. But an even more corporate-friendly FDA -- one heavily influenced by a President Trump, say -- might not.

So, this summer's absolutely blown chunks, right? Well, just imagine what it'd be like if you were in prison, particularly in an even hotter area of the country. Prisons don't install air conditioning -- because of the cost, they say -- and then don't provide water and ice even as much as they say they will. But please do not be the fool who responds that we shouldn't treat prisoners like they're in "Club Med" -- as if basic climate control equals "Club Med," as if we have no obligation to treat each other like human beings, as if treating prisoners as badly as you can proves you have larger testicles than the next person.

Good news, everyone: the Department of Education has essentially barred ITT Technical Institute from accepting new students who are getting federal financial aid. When even the ACICS has said that ITT doesn't comply (and isn't likely to comply) with their accreditation criteria, you know it's bad. Since for-profit colleges would hardly exist without the government teat, this development could be the start of something good -- until a President Trump ensures that all his YUGE and BYOOTIFUL friends running these scam-houses get the "protection" from the public they "deserve."

Polling suggests that a vast majority of Americans support anti-discrimination laws protecting gays and transgendered folk -- a supermajority of Republicans, too -- and that a simple majority opposes "bathroom" bills aimed at oppressing the transgendered. The problem, as always, is whether those of us who feel this way will run through a wall for it, as our opponents will run through a wall for all their attempts to take this great nation backward.

Finally, we learn that Donald Trump's new campaign chief may not only have a domestic violence issue in his past, but isn't living at the address he's provided on his voter registration. In fact, the building at this address is set for demolition as we speak. Filing a fraudulent voter registration could, in theory, land Mr. Bannon in jail for up to five years -- though I bet no one in his neighborhood will ever see a Clear Channel billboard "reminding" voters of the price of voter fraud.

Around the table: from the "alt-right" to the latest Donald Trump "best-seller."

FAIR's Jim Naureckas takes us on a "guided tour" of the so-called "alt-right." Long story short: they're not just racist, but they're also not conservative -- I mean, do "rebellion" and "mischief" and "blasphemy" strike you as conservative values? Also, as quicker minds than mine have pointed out, the white supremacists' stated desire to be called "alt-right" smacks of political correctness. I mean, normally I call people whatever they want to be called, but not so much when they're being hypocrites.

Apple CEO Tim Cook says he won't bring back any of the $200 billion Apple holds offshore until the corporate tax system becomes more "fair." Of course, Apple doesn't move money offshore because it "has to" -- it moves money offshore because it can. And you can't even buy Mr. Cook's claim that "we sell stuff all over the world," when even a Senate committee tells us that Apple shifts its U.S.-earned profits offshore, and to Ireland, where its "subsidiary" won't pay any taxes at all. How do you know when CEOs are lying? When their mouths are open.

Speaking of Apple, China Labor Watch finds employee exploitation still runs rampant at Apple's Foxconn and Pegatron factories, where iPhones get made. It's actually worse at Pegatron, and you can't help but wonder if that's because the Foxconn facilities got all the attention earlier this decade. But Apple said they'd fix all this! That's why you can't trust corporations to just "do the right thing" -- you have to make them do the right thing.

National Labor Relations Board rules that temp employees can organize and bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions. Previously, corporations got over by claiming that their temp employees were only employed by their temp agency, but the NLRB ruled that temp workers are jointly employed by both their temp agency and the corporation for which they're actually doing the work, and thus can bargain with both employers jointly. If you're still stuck on the idea that temp workers work for temp agencies, remember that temp agencies and the corporations they staff work jointly on how those workers get paid, what work they'll do, and what the working conditions will be.

Finally, Donald Trump gets caught using campaign donations to buy up thousands of copies of his own book, so he can say it's a best-seller and spend none of his own money for it. It's a win-win! Except if you gave money to the Trump campaign, of course. It's not illegal, of course, to buy up copies of your own book to drive up book sales -- though, seriously, how many people have that kind of money? -- but it is illegal to do it with campaign funds. But don't worry -- Donald Trump will "fix" that, and all those other pesky laws civilizations depend on to restrain the unscrupulous, once he's President.

Action: drug monopolies, methane pollution, and overtime pay.

You've probably heard that the price of an EpiPen -- a drug that has saved the lives of many folks who'd otherwise die from anaphylactic shock -- has increased somewhere between 400 and 600 percent since the drug corporation Mylan acquired it from Merck some nine years ago. You might think Mylan must have made some pretty tremendous improvements to the EpiPen in order to justify that price hike -- especially since inflation has gone up a mere 16 percent during that time! -- but sadly, nothing's changed about the EpiPen but the price, and more and more folks who need it (food allergies being as common as they are) have to choose between that and paying the bills. The "free market" crowd is more than happy to tell us that this is the price we must pay for innovation and safety, but no one should have a monopoly on a life-saving drug, and no one should be allowed to charge extortionate prices for it. Would it be piling on to mention that Mylan's CEO's salary has gone up even more than EpiPen's price has? Both Moms Rising and MoveOn help you tell Mylan to cut the price of the EpiPen to a more reasonable level.

Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior has been hard at work updating standards for oil and gas pollution on public lands -- including methane, which we're going to see a lot more of in the future -- for the first time in 30 years (can you think of any technological developments that have happened over that time?). Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell Interior to mandate the most vigorous oil and gas pollution limits possible. It's bad enough that any oil and gas drilling goes on in public lands, but it we must have it, we need to protect public lands from air and water pollution. And methane, in particular, not only makes our smog problem worse (which then makes our asthma problem worse), but it exacerbates climate change at least 60 times worse than coal pollution does. Oil and gas drillers will pretend that you have to choose between befouling the planet and "cheap energy," but the only choice we need to make is between befouling the planet and CEOs getting filthy rich. And it's funny how when they talk to us, they pretend the methane mitigation industry simply doesn't exist.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to mess with the Obama Administration's new overtime rules, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Obama Administration's rules, as you know, would force employers to pay time-and-a-half for overtime to all workers making less than $47,476; that floor is more than double the current floor of $23,660. Of course, the Obama Administration has already compromised on this matter, since it originally proposed setting the floor closer to $60,000 annually -- but that's not enough for some people, who want to delay implementation of the rules because it's too much too quick. Two problems with that: first, employers had it the way they wanted it for decades, so their complaints now sound like whining. Second, this overtime rule is supposed to shake things up -- the whole concept of time-and-a-half is supposed to induce employers to see the folly of overpaying their current workers and hire more workers instead. It doesn't help our civilization coddle corporations, but hey, we've all got to make sacrifices.

Action: Social Security, prison gerrymandering, and fuel efficiency.

House Republicans still think slashing a quarter of a billion dollars from the Social Security Administration budget is a wonderful idea that will cause the American people to shower their love upon them! (Or, more precisely, get them to appear "serious" before the corporate donors who've had their knives out for Social Security since the beginning.) $250 million isn't much in the context of some $4 trillion annually in federal spending, but spending on people always gives you bang for your buck, and that missing $250 million means more field office closures and more obstacles to good Americans getting the help they need. And cutting SSA spending hardly seems like a good idea when more and more Americans use Social Security. Hence the Alliance for Retired Americans helps you tell Congress to abandon its plan to cut the Social Security Administration's budget. Remember: you worked for it, you paid into it, you fought for it, and you deserve to use it when you need it -- far more than right-wingers "deserve" to experiment upon us with their twisted anti-government philosophy.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the U.S. Census Bureau to stop counting prisoners as "inhabitants" of the districts in which they've been imprisoned, then CREDO still helps you do that. Yes, it may sound commonsensical to count prisoners as being a part of a district in which they're "living" more or less, but prison isn't a "home" in any meaningful sense, and prisoners already serve a sentence, with the loss of freedom that sentence requires; heaping additional, unearned punishments upon them -- such as diluting their political power by putting them in a district where they're counted but unheard -- is unconstitutional and cruel. You'd also find it easy to imagine, I'd think, states deciding to locate prisons in particular districts for the express purpose of diluting the political power either of prisoners or that district's other residents. It also stands to reason that, in a nation that still profiles people of color -- and imprisons them in numbers disproportionate to their population -- the Census Bureau's current practice is also de facto racist.

Finally, the EPA is re-evaluating its car fuel efficiency standards, and car-manufacturing corporations have started to push back against them -- though the automakers openly supported the standards years ago, and have had no discernable trouble meeting them thus far. It looks more and more to me like they only supported the standards (which would rise to nearly 55 MPG by 2025) so they could renege on that support during the planned 2016 review -- or that the Obama Administration may only have won automaker support by wink-wink pledging to cut the standards in that review. Of course, we get a say, too, hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell the EPA to keep fuel efficiency standards right where they are. And if folks tell you that automakers won't meet the 2025 target because people just prefer light trucks in greater quantities than the EPA thought, remind them that a) automakers said they'd do it; b) the technology exists for them to do it; c) it's a bit rich to act like automakers have nothing to do with consumer "preferences"; and d) that's not the can-do American spirit.

Around the table: Guantánamo Bay, the BDS movement, mass production, collective bargaining, and long-delayed justice.

YouGov poll finds a little over half of Americans think Guantánamo detainees should either face trial or be released. That's a little disappointing, actually, since the only alternative to trial or release would be to continue holding them there without charge. The good news, I guess, is that only 20% of Americans are willing to state for the record that they'd prefer those detainees to stay at Guantánamo, and since I've long assumed that around 25% of Americans are politically bat-guano crazy, maybe that's an improvement.

New Jersey government enacts law requiring state pension assets to divest from any corporation that supports the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement protesting Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestine. I still don't agree that this bill is unconstitutional, because I do not believe a "First Amendment right to getting a state to invest in your corporation" exists. Still, I expect New Jersey's government will have trouble rooting out all the BDS supporters in its portfolio, investment being a lot more convoluted these days. Also, the state has embarrassed itself, which can only help the BDS movement in the long run.

Target customers present a litany of complaints about the store's pharmacy since CVS has taken it over. A lot of the complaints -- disappearing discount plans, new (and less courteous) personnel, fewer varieties of generic drugs -- you'd expect, not that they're excuses (and CVS may regard them more as features than bugs). But apparently Target pharmacies used to have unique prescription drug bottles, with color-coded collars and very easy-to-read labels, and CVS (despite owning the patent for those bottles now) doesn't use them. Sounds like one more reason mass production is fool's gold.

Just when you thought the "bathroom bill" controversy couldn't get any worse, here comes North Carolina Gov. McCrory, embroiled in a difficult re-election campaign, putting out an ad in which a child molestation survivor endorses Mr. McCrory's efforts to force transgendered folks to use the public restrooms that correspond to their birth gender. You've already guessed the catch, right? The woman was not molested in a bathroom by a transgendered individual, but by her brother, at home; perhaps we should ban children of different genders from living together, then? The right constantly conflates everything they hate with everything else they hate (child molestors and transgendered folk are not the same thing, after all), and I'm beyond sick of it. The right's program, clearly, is to keep stoking rage in people ad nauseam because, gosh, rage wears people out and so the right has to keep finding new people to enrage, but it's the kind of program that can hollow out a civilization. (And BTW, let's not excuse the woman who was molested by her brother -- it goes without saying that he wronged her, but that doesn't excuse her wronging transgendered folks by referring to her attacker as "a teenager" when he was plainly more than that, which is the only way the ad can link transgendered folks to child molestors in the minds of viewers.)

National Labor Relations Board reverses Bush Mobb-era ruling, and declares that grad students at private colleges are employees of those colleges, and thus can organize and collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions. This is wonderful news for grad students, who are some of the most underpaid workers on Earth, all because they're "still learning," as if workers at every job aren't "still learning." Columbia University, naturally, foists a bait-and-switch on us -- "the academic relationship students have with faculty members and departments as part of their studies is not the same as between employer and employee," they say, but colleges, not "faculty members and departments," employ grad students.

Finally, a jury acquits Anthony Wright of raping and murdering his Philadelphia neighbor, over 20 years after being convicted of that crime. Kudos to you if you advocated for his release back in June. DNA evidence exonerated Mr. Wright of the crime nearly two years ago, but the state still hesitated to release him, even though some of his biggest supporters came from the victim's family; possibly the state was still embarrassed that police had coerced a confession from him all those years ago. Mr. Wright lost nearly a quarter-century of his life to injustice, but now he has his freedom, and he still has a future.

Action: religious freedom, and prison privatization.

H.R. 5272, the Do No Harm Act, would prevent businesses from demanding exemptions from federal laws that "prevent harm to others," including the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and thus ensure that folks don't use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 to claim a "right" to discriminate against other Americans. As I've said before, right-wingers have everyone believing that a federal law, by its mere existence, restricts freedom, but that's absolutely not true -- the Civil Rights Act, by its mere existence, promotes freedom by (to cite just one example) preventing employers from discriminating against potential employees on the basis of race, religion, or sex. Sure, employers have less "freedom" to hire only the people they feel like hiring, but employees have more freedom to make something of themselves in this world by having more job opportunities -- while employers are still free to run a good business. So Americans United for the Separation of Church and State helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5272, and thus support freedom for all Americans.

Meanwhile, you know the Department of Justice has decided to end its association with private prison corporations -- but you also know the Department of Homeland (sic) Security has not done so, and you also know that DHS uses private prison corporations a lot more than DOJ does. DHS uses private prison corporations to detain more than 20,000 immigrants each night, including unaccompanied children and asylum seekers, and, as you might expect, they make a mint doing that, too often by providing immigrants with substandard care (which, being private corporations, they're not required to disclose, even though they're taking taxpayer money). If you're tempted to respond they're just undocumented immigrants, you still must answer one simple question: should the taxpayer be paying more to do this job less effectively? And, really, you shouldn't be tempted to respond with that, since immigrants are still human beings and all human beings deserve to be protected from violence, abuse and neglect. Hence both Presente and CREDO help you tell the Obama Administration to reject the use of private prisons for detaining immigrants.

Action: police violence, "free" trade, and banking reform.

Color of Change helps you tell Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel to release body camera footage of the August 13 shooting of Sylville Smith in Milwaukee. (In Wisconsin, the Attorney General decides whether to release body camera footage.) Milwaukee's police chief has said that this footage will show that Mr. Smith was brandishing a firearm in the general direction of the officer who shot him, so why not settle that matter? I can't believe the "privacy concerns" of bystanders (the Attorney General's office has heard of "pixelation," I presume) would take precedence, nor can I believe that releasing the video would prejudice the Attorney General's investigation, since the footage shows what it shows and we don't need to get all post-structuralist about it. And do not be the one to tell me about Mr. Smith's many arrests, not just because we could also speak ill of the officer who shot him, and not just because "getting arrested" does not carry the death penalty in any civilized land, but because we have good reason to suspect that folks like Mr. Smith get arrested mainly for being black.

Meanwhile, just in case you thought I'd forgotten about the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" that Congress will ram down our throats after the election -- because, hey, the election's over and everyone will forget about it anyway! -- Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk, again, to reject the TPP when it comes up for a vote. And I'll be saying "tell your Congressfolk again" again and again before this is over, because they can't see past their own re-election prospects, which they imagine are in peril unless they do whatever their corporate paymasters want. The truth is precisely the opposite -- they are endangered precisely to the degree they refuse to bend to the will of their constituents, as is their job, and the will of untrammeled corporate power and the will of the people are as diametrically opposed as I've ever seen in my lifetime. The ones who don't see that outsourcing our jobs and nullifying our laws with "free" trade deals is profoundly unpopular will one day lose their own jobs in Congress. Even if it doesn't often seem like it, what's done in the dark will be brought to the light.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to pass S. 1709, the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, then Sign Here Now still helps you do that. As you know, bringing back the Glass-Steagall wall between traditional banking functions and risky securities investments has made it into both parties' national platforms this election year (though if you suspect either party's devotion to getting it done, you're not alone). Folks who like to pretend they're smarter than you by saying Glass-Steagall repeal didn't actually cause this or that precise negative phenomenon during the 2008 financial services meltdown need to answer one question: does keeping banks out of the speculation business reduce the risk that they'll lose all our money? If the answer is "yes" (spoiler alert: the answer is "yes"), then we need the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act. Folks like that should also know that their argument is a little like arguing that since a bicycling helmet didn't prevent you from breaking your jaw, you won't need one for any of the other head injuries you could get while bicycling.

Around the table: tabulating important developments for working families.

Victoria Law at TruthOut tells us why the Department of Justice's decision to end its contracts with private prison corporations doesn't actually "end" private prisons, even at the federal level. The DOJ's decision has no influence on the Department of Homeland (sic) Security, which does a lot more business with private contractors than DOJ does -- now housing over 60 percent of its immigrant detainees with private corporations, including the Corrections Corporation of America, which was about to go belly-up before DHS started handing out these contracts. The DOJ statement that private prisons "simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs and resources" is worth repeating, but their reform remains a very small one.

California residents will vote this fall on Proposition 61, which would prevent state agencies from paying more for prescription drugs than the Veterans Administration does. Why is this important? Because the VA, unlike Medicare, can actually negotiate drug prices, and thus pays less for the drugs veterans need than Medicare and most state Medicaid agencies. If Prop 61 passes, California would become the first state to put a cap on drug prices -- and California, as you know, is a pretty big economy with a lot of people in it. The good news? Polling shows supermajority support for Prop 61. The bad news? That probably won't be true after big pharmaceutical corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars fearmongering the people about it.

Richard Eskow at the OurFuture blog finds the "Fix the Debt" crowd is back to their old tricks. These include fearmongering and restricting options. An example of the former is the TV ad depicting disappearing bridges and teachers, as if the CEOs behind "Fix the Debt" don't already accomplish such disappearances with their income-redistribution-upward schemes, and an example of the latter is a "handy" calculator tool with which you can "figure out" how to "fix" Social Security which naturally makes you jump through hoops to actually try to raise revenues rather than merely cut benefits. At some point, such desperate arguments have to backfire on its progenitors. Doesn't it?

Northern California District Judge allows wage-theft lawsuit against McDonald's to proceed, even though McDonald's argues that franchise owners are responsible for any wage theft. I'm not thrilled with the "ostensible agency theory" (seems to me corporations either do right or wrong whether plaintiffs believe they are or not), but I'm far less thrilled with the whole point of the franchise model -- to avoid responsibility for wrongdoing, even if you're forcing franchise owners to do wrong.

Finally, domestic workers win important protections in Illinois with the passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The bill essentially amends four other Illinois state laws so that domestic workers can enjoy their protections, which now include a minimum wage, sexual harassment and discrimination protections, and a day of rest out of every seven. I'll confess I'm a bit shocked that Gov. Rauner, as insensitive a man as has ever been elected Governor, signed the bill; perhaps he knows a lot of domestic workers.

Action: forced arbitration, and food waste.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to force banks to stop putting forced arbitration clauses in your contracts with them, then the Courage Campaign still helps you do that. Forced arbitration clauses prevent you from taking your bank to court -- and banks typically put these clauses in fine print in the contracts you sign with them merely by opening an account with them. And then, when banks lose your money or charge exorbitant fees, you're stuck with taking them to an arbitrator -- and while the bank may not be paying the arbitrator, is surely doesn't select arbitrators with a pronounced habit of ruling against them. Arbitration, as you know, started out as a way of keeping corporations from clogging up the court system -- but corporations still file four out of five lawsuits in America, and they also get to take away your right to challenge them in court, and as part of a class, if need be. And tort "reformers" can tell you all the isolated anecdotes about "frivolous lawsuits" they want, and it still won't compare to a stolen right.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Americans actually throw away close to half the produce our nation produces, mainly because of the "unrealistic and unyielding cosmetic standards" we apply to our fruit and vegetables. Standards that result in fairly tasteless food, I should add -- the best green pepper I've ever tasted remains the runt we grew in our backyard. But this is the price we pay when we grow food to be sold rather than eaten, a price we can measure in actual dollars lost -- $160 billion annually, according to one government tally. And, hate to pile on, but this food waste "accounts for about 8% of global climate pollution, more than India or Russia." Just for more reference, India has a billion people in it. So now some American grocery corporations have decided to donate their unsold produce to charity -- most of the waste happens on the farm, before it even gets to the store, but you do what you can -- but WalMart has, apparently, not changed its policy of putting unsold produce in the trash. So Sum of Us helps you tell WalMart to change its ways and donate its unsold produce to charity.

Action: preserving overtime pay rules, and capping prisoner phone rates.

Right-wingers hate the Obama Administration's new overtime rules, which more than double the salary threshold under which employers must pay time and a half for overtime. But H.R. 5813, the so-called Overtime Reform and Enhancement Act, emanates from four nominal Democrats, including Kurt Schrader of Oregon; H.R. 5813 would implement the new overtime protections gradually over a period of three years -- which means, just so we're clear, food out of your mouth and out of your family's mouths -- and would prevent the new threshold from automatically rising as inflation rises, even though, you know, stuff costs more as time goes on. Naturally these Democrats "worry" about "implementing the increase overnight," but they're missing the point -- overtime protections prevent corporations from working their employees to death and force them to hire more employees, which they'd rather not ever do. And corporations already persuaded the Department of Labor to set the threshold lower; must it always be working people who compromise? Not in my America. The EPI Policy Center helps you pimp-slap H.R. 5813 into the oblivion it deserves.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reverse its recent decision to allow phone corporations to charge prisoners more for phone calls, then Demand Progress helps you do that. In October, the FCC capped phone rates for prisoners at between 11 and 22 cents per minute, but now that cap's up to 13 to 31 cents a minute (the rate varies depending on the size of the prison's population and whether federal or state governments run it), and naturally big telecom corporations are still whining they can't make any money. But I think there are more important things in life than ensuring corporate CEOs can gild the plumbing in their 23rd vacation home -- namely, that if you are already serving a sentence given to you by a judge so you can repay your debt to society, you do not deserve additional penalties heaped upon you merely because you can't fight them. Whenever I say things like this, people tell me I must "want prisoners to live coddled lives at taxpayer's expense" or some other species of horsedoodle. If you're tempted to follow suit, please read this entire paragraph again -- out loud, if you have to.

Around the table: the power of structural racism, and other ominous tales.

Terrence Heath at the OurFuture blog explores the influence of "structural racism" in the Freddie Gray murder. Folks who think structural racism doesn't exist, well, first off, have never talked to a real estate agent, and second off, don't know their history -- not just the part where a modern-day police sergeant tells a reluctant subordinate to "make up" a reason to stop a few black men, but the part where our government, all the way back in 1937, literally redlined which neighborhoods would get federal subsidies and which wouldn't, and guess which ones didn't. (Spoiler alert: those would be the neighborhoods with residents like Cab Calloway, Thurgood Marshall, and Billie Holliday.)

Weren't we worrying, not too long ago, that Hillary Clinton's choice of transition team head would be telling-and-not-in-a-good-way? Well, now we're here, with the news that former Senator and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar will head the Clinton transition team. Ken Salazar is not exactly Bernie Sanders, as you know -- he was pretty good at keeping the uranium miners out of the Grand Canyon, but otherwise he's a pro-fracking, pro-Keystone "free" trader, and he'll likely steer a Clinton Administration (if there is one, of course!) toward folks like himself. Now, that doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and go home -- it means we understand the obstacles we must hurdle. This is one of them. And our duty is unchanged.

The incomparable Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches the New York Times extolling "American power" in training Honduran cops to help reduce violence -- without mentioning that you have all this violence in Honduras in the first place because a right-wing regime overthrew a democratically-elected (but inconveniently liberal) President back in 2009 while our State Department got all Hamlet about the precise definition of "coup." When the Honduran government is the biggest murderer in Honduras, it's hard not to achieve a murder reduction at some point -- "ah, listen, fellas, could you maybe stack the bodies in the soccer field two-deep this month instead of three-deep? Bad press, you know? K thanks bye" -- and I can't help but think that the Times has come out with this article to answer the agitation by good Americans against our government's continued funding of Honduran police.

Uh oh: former Indiana Senator/current Senate candidate Evan Bayh now faces questions about his residency in Indiana, after CNN reports that he's usually used his Washington, D.C. address to buy homes, donate to candidates, and get fishing licenses. Residency issues felled Richard Lugar in 2012 after 36 years in the Senate, and though Mr. Lugar's issues were more pronounced, Mr. Lugar was also more popular -- but then Mr. Bayh has been sitting on over $10 million in campaign funds for six years. I still wish an actual populist, rather than a fake "moderate," would prove that a liberal populist is exactly the fellow who can win in a red state like Indiana. You know, like Byron Dorgan did in North Dakota for three terms.

Finally, you might have heard that Michael Moore told Bill Maher a few weeks back that he thought Donald Trump would win the Presidency, but after the last few, ah, difficult weeks Mr. Moore now believes Mr. Trump doesn't really want to be President and may now be actively sabotaging his campaign. He says it was all a negotiating ploy to extract more money from NBC, home of The Apprentice, and sadly that's far from implausible. He even says Mr. Trump would rather drop out than be a "loser," but that ship has pretty much sailed. Of course I still fear that Mr. Trump will win, because candidates who can present themselves as "outsiders" will always have an advantage over candidates who can't.

Action: protecting Social Security, and promoting freedom online.

Even the farthest-right Republicans know they can't privatize Social Security -- Mr. Bush tried it, with huge majorities in House and Senate, and couldn't even get a bill considered. But the far right has other ways to hurt the Social Security system we've fought for and paid for, and one of them is to cut the Social Security Administration's budget. Their proposed cuts would furlough employees, close offices, and prevent them from processing claims and fixing problems -- all so they can point to how badly Social Security is working and declare that the markets can do better. Anyone who can remember as far back as 2009, when the stock market crashed to about half its value the previous year, knows that's utter bunk. Hell, anyone who's watched any private corporation take over a government's function and line their pockets at the expense of the taxpayer knows that. But it's never enough to win -- we also must defend our victories, day in and day out, from the forces of evil. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to cripple the Social Security Administration.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to prevent cable corporations from selling your private info willy-nilly and end the cable corporations' monopoly on set-top boxes, then Free Press still helps you do that. What could possibly be the right's objection to good Americans getting to buy their own set-top boxes, instead of being chained to Comcast's or Charter's set-top box? And what could possibly be the right's objection to preventing cable corporations from misusing your personal information? We may sum up their objection to both thusly: cable corporations are big donors, and they're paying for our re-election. Sure, they tell you that the FCC proposals amount to Big Gummint Run Amok, but sometimes government has to step in to allow freedom to flourish. And these right-wingers have nothing to say about warrantless wiretapping or NSA data-vacuuming -- because it doesn't cost their biggest donors any money. The bad news: word on the street is that the right's empty and desperate arguments are working on at least two FCC Commissioners. But we can be the steel in their spine -- again.

Around the table: tales of greed and corruption, plus bonus desperate stupidity from the Mayor of 9.11.

Jessica Pishko at The Nation asks: "Is Angela Corey the Cruelest Prosecutor in America?" You may know her as the Florida prosecutor who charged 12-year-old Cristian Fernandez with murdering his two-year-old brother, or as the prosecutor who tried to put Marissa Alexander in jail after she fired a gun to scare her abusive husband (no "Stand Your Ground" law for her!), or as the prosecutor who somehow didn't charge Trayvon Martin's killer with manslaughter. But you may not know that her county, Duval County, puts a crapload of people in jail, a lot of them children -- this, while crime falls nationwide! -- or that her nominal counterpart as Public Defender, Matt Shirk, has (until recently) also left behind a trail of incompetence and corruption.

The Obama Administration begins an "aggressive push" to get the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" across the finish line. And, of course, despite boasting that he has the "better argument," he mischaracterizes his opponents as isolationists once again. No one opposes trading with other nations, but most Americans oppose "free" trade deals that outsource our jobs and let "investor-state tribunals" nullify our laws. Why does living in a "global economy" demand that we sacrifice the rule of law to corporations? And it sure would be nice if Politico didn't carry water for Mr. Obama by calling "free" traders "trade supporters" or entire states "trade-dependent," as if rhetorical hostage-taking were OK so long as it's not so obvious.

An Education Trust report finds that the top 138 private colleges -- which, together, control about 75 percent of higher education endowments -- "have mostly chosen not to prioritize educating students from low-income families." Well, they call them "hedge funds with colleges attached" for a reason. Colleges complain that a lot of their endowment money comes with restrictions, but (as the Education Trust suggests) it's not like it doesn't take two to tango there. So we can call this another data point suggesting that enabling absurd wealth does not "free" the rich to be super-generous -- if anything, it traps them in a cycle of greed.

A Breitbart poll -- promising to unskew mainstream polling showing Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump in the Presidential race -- finds Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump in the Presidential race. But liberals shouldn't gloat about that -- surely Breitbart's playing a long game here, and at the very least they're playing a long enough game that they'll put out a bunch of polls solidly agreeing with the mainstream, and then put out a bunch of polls "showing" movement toward Trump or even outright Trump leads, thus lending "data" to the theory that the whole thing was "rigged" if Mr. Trump loses. I suspect they're playing a longer game, of course: they're certainly trying to get their street cred in advance of what should be a historically brutal 2018 midterm for Democrats.

Finally, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani actually said that "before Obama came along, we didn't have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the US" and that "(t)hey all started when Clinton and Obama came into office." It's not the first time he's done this, but I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out what the Mayor of 9.11 could possibly have meant. Does he think 9.11 wasn't a plot of "radical Islamic terrorists"? Were they just guys who flew planes into buildings and killed 3,000 people? Or does he deem the 9.11 attack somehow "unsuccessful"? Perhaps people like Rudy Giuliani just say awful things because the only alternative would be to confess your spiritual corruption before the world.

Action: deep sea mining, and "planned obsolescence."

Nautilus Minerals, a Canadian mining corporation, plans to build a deep sea mine near Papua New Guinea, from which it would extract gold and copper as early as 2018. Other deep sea mining projects promise to harvest rare earth minerals commonly used in computers and smartphones. But you already know how mining on land pollutes ecosystems; what do you suppose mining in the ocean would do? Nautilus's SOLWARA 1 mine would operate near a rich and diverse ecosystem, and it would also operate near coastal communities whose economies depend substantially on what their fishers bring home -- and with a giant mining complex in the sea, they'd very likely bring home a lot less. So Avaaz helps you tell various actors, including Papua New Guinea's government and potential Nautilus investors, to abandon the SOLWARA 1 project. Would it be piling on for me to say that an actual conservative wouldn't go upending ecosystems he doesn't understand just for the sake of making more money -- or even for fulfilling a perceived market need that could well be rendered moot by future technological developments?

Meanwhile, speaking of "future technological developments," Sum of Us helps you tell Apple to end its practice of "planned obsolescence." Have you ever resisted downloading the "latest" system upgrade because you're afraid of what it'll do to your iPhone or iPad? Well, you're not alone: among many other problems, the "latest" upgrades tend to slow down your machines so that you'll, you know, be tempted to buy the newest machine -- which isn't very "green" of Apple, you know, since those "obsolete" machines are going to wind up in landfills. And though most folks are actually fairly resourceful and can get along for a very long time with what they've got, Apple doesn't even let you "downgrade" back to your old system anymore. Sure Apple has every right to try to make its hardware and software better, but "better" doesn't mean the same thing to all of its customers. And don't be the one who claims that Apple can't possibly support all that ancient software that someone might be using. Of course they can! It's just that the solution would be to create jobs for technicians, and how's a CEO supposed to redistribute income upward to himself that way?

Around the table: Wall Street taxes, think tanks, robocalls, voter registration, and the Disappeared President.

Robert Reich instructs us as to "Why a Tax on Wall Street Trades is an Even Better Idea Than You Know." You probably know why it's a good idea (would raise a lot of revenue, reduce banksters' political power, restrict useless high-speed trading, et cetera) but you may not know that Wall Street's objections are also utter horsedoodle -- financial transaction taxes have not sent corporations away to other lands, or else England's financial sector would be a lot smaller than it is, and this tax (the Robin Hood tax? the Wall Street sales tax? Take your pick) also wouldn't "hurt small businesses" unless they're engaging in high-speed trading, which, news flash! They're not. Always the big corporations hide behind the small businesses when they're being told to do the right thing!

Adam Johnson at FAIR catches the central hypocrisy of the "liberal" media's sudden discovery that corporate money compromises a lot of think tanks: that the "liberal" media has been quoting these think tanks for years. And, in the New York Times's case, at least, it's much worse: the Times has been letting the Center for Strategic and International Studies write op-eds arguing for, you know, more war-making, more government spying, and generally more paranoia and hysteria, which I doubt will end now that the Times has reported extensively on CSIS's big corporate donors. Key insight: "the think tank industry...is often based on laundering influence through ostensibly neutral-sounding 'institutes' or 'centers'." "Laundering" is about the perfect way to describe it.

Chris Morran at The Consumerist tells you "What You Need to Know About New Rules Allowing Debt Collection Robocalls from Feds." The FCC's new rules (mandated by, you guessed it, a rider in the 2015 must-pass appropriations bill) allow our government to call us, on wireless lines, if we owe our government money. Thing is, with so many student loans federally-funded or backed, that could be a lot of people. And the rules allow your government to call you before you're even late, apparently because a student loan lobby told them it'd be good for you. At least you can tell them not to call you (though it you owe more than one debt -- if you owe to the IRS, for example -- you'll have to tell them once for every debt you owe).

Surprise, surprise, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner vetoes automatic voter registration bill, citing booga-booga about "non-citizens" being automatically registered to vote. Of course, he was for it before he was against it -- or, possibly, before he realized the bill would kick in before his 2018 re-election effort. And dig the state House Rep who thinks citizens will work harder to educate themselves about candidates if they have to work harder to register to vote! But I bet he still wants to make everything easier for his corporate donors, without any similar concern about how hard they're working.

William Rivers Pitt reminds us what's missing from most mainstream accounts of the ongoing dissolution (if that's what it is!) of the Republican Party: the role of George W. Bush in that dissolution. Disappearing the man who made Trumpism possible is how the Republican "establishment" gets to pretend it's somehow fundamentally different from Mr. Trump. But it's also how the Democratic nominee -- who, you no doubt recall, refused to disavow her vote for the Iraq war almost five years after she cast it the wrong way -- evades her own complicity in the various messes we're in now.

Action: marijuana rescheduling, and pesticide testing.

As you may know, the DEA has announced that it won't move marijuana off Schedule I. In a letter to two Governors and a New Mexico nurse practitioner, DEA Administrator said the agency gave "enormous weight" to the FDA's conclusion that marijuana "has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States" -- a conclusion made much easier by the fact that marijuana research remains almost prohibitively difficult to conduct! The DEA's letter does take credit for the doubling in "individuals and institutions registered with DEA" to conduct research on marijuana over the past two years, but that's rather like a middle infielder patting himself on the back for hitting two home runs in a season instead of one. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to force the DEA to reschedule marijuana, so that scientists and law enforcement can do their jobs. Remember that when fools tell you rescheduling would "hurt the police," that rescheduling would not prevent police from conducting drug raids. Some folks will say anything these days just to avoid progress.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the USDA to test food for glyphosate. Why? Because we swamp our farms and lawns with glyphosate and we have no idea how much of it we're eating, drinking, or breathing, and because scientists have linked glyphosate with cancer, childbirth issues, and cell function. And four European nations (France, Italy, Sweden, and the Netherlands) have suspended Monsanto's license to use RoundUp on crops (Roundup is the most famous brand name for Glyphosate), pending further study. Glyphosate has been around since the early '70s, and was the first widely-available pesticide to kill weeds without also killing crops, but that doesn't mean we should do nothing about glyphosate's harmful effects, because that's a hostage situation. Civilized people have a duty to confront problems and fix them, thereby maintaining civilization. And certainly we are a can-do people who can come up with better and safer pesticides, even if big ag corporations don't really want to go along.

Action: fighting oppression in Turkey and the Philippines.

The Turkish government, as you know, has cracked down hard on its citizens in the wake of the recent failed coup attempt there -- not just by blocking news websites or detaining journalists, but by "suspending" some 50,000 civil servants and detaining over 1,000 judges and prosecutors. Oh, and the Turkish government also detained 60 schoolkids -- for treason! The less spiritually advanced among us will find that comic, I suppose, but it's no laughing matter; kids look to adults for guidance and protection, not oppression. A government that arrests and detains that many of its citizens -- citizens who serve the public, no less -- is clearly a desperate government unworthy of the power its citizens have granted it. Luckily, Turkey has no right and no authority to prevent good citizens from speaking out against their willingness to oppress their citizens, so Amnesty International helps you tell Turkish President Erdogan to stop using a "state of emergency" as an excuse to abridge the human rights of good Turkish citizens. Remember: a good leader can stop turmoil without becoming a monster.

Meanwhile, newly-elected Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte -- long suspected of "cleaning up" Davao City with "Davao death squads" while Mayor -- has openly encouraged good Philippine citizens to kill people who use or sell drugs, resulting in the deaths of some 700 folks in recent weeks. Innocent, guilty, whatever! You may argue that those people know what's going on in their neighborhoods, but I would argue that too many of them will use Mr. Duterte's "suggestion" to cover up a petty revenge killing. We have a judicial system and a law enforcement system to pre-empt such things. So what can we, as Americans, do about this? Well, here's what we shouldn't do (and which, of course, our government has done): pledge over $30 million in aid for law enforcement training. Sure, "training law enforcement" could stem this vigilante violence -- except in a land where the President himself encourages it. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell our Secretary of State to cut off aid while these murders go on in the Philippines.

Around the table: the "war on terror," the war on set-top box choice, and various election-related notes.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept reveals that an FBI agent told one of last year's Garland shooters to "tear up Texas." As Mr. Hussain reminds us, "testing the willingness of suspects to take certain steps in a conspiracy is one thing; actively encouraging them to commit a violent, criminal act is another." And you certainly don't want law enforcement actively enabling terrorist attacks (or, God forbid, causing false flag attacks) to justify their continued relevance or their thirst for more power. At the risk of piling on, civilized people don't "plant the idea to actually conduct an attack in the mind of a suggestible or unstable person," but actively discourage such folks from having such ideas.

U.S. Copyright Office apparently agrees with big telecom corporations that the FCC's plan to promote set-top box competition would violate copyright laws. Think about it for a minute and you'll see that's a desperate argument, but let's go right to paragraph 7 anyway: "Once a copyright holder has released their work to paying customers, like cable subscribers, those customers have their own set of rights: to view TV programs at home or on the go, to skip around within the programs as they wish, to search for and organize the programs and other content they’re entitled to see, and to choose tools that enable them to do these things." As always, corporations love to pit their "freedoms" against your freedoms.

Eli Lake at Bloomberg thinks he knows why disgruntled Republicans aren't flocking to that Libertarian ticket with the two successful two-term Republican Governors on it. To sum, he thinks it's because the Libertarians "still act() like a fringy nerd fest" and because Gary Johnson is a "gangly ball of nerves who exudes the charisma of Don Knotts from his 'Three's Company' years." At the risk of sounding like a fringy nerd, that analysis is all glibness. And anyway, the real future Libertarians aren't on the right -- they're young and currently on the left because the Republicans have so thoroughly alienated them with all their Jesus-hates-gays-women-and-dark-skinned-people malarkey. Libertarians would do well to get to these youngsters before they suffer a few setbacks in life, or before they get wind of Thomas Piketty.

Just as I suspected, some professional liberals are getting a little antsy that so many right-wingers have endorsed Hillary Clinton lately. The Clinton campaign's attempt to reach out to Henry Kissinger was certainly a bridge too far for some -- as Greg Grandin writes, Mr. Kissinger "stands not as a bulwark against Donald Trump’s feared recklessness and immorality but as his progenitor." Hey, just like the entire Republican establishment from around 2002 forward. I agree with professional liberals on this, of course; Mark Cuban and Brent Scowcroft don't endorse you just so you'll save them from an Emperor Trump.

Finally, Donald Trump wonders what could possibly be wrong with calling President Obama "the founder of ISIS." I can think of one thing wrong with it off the top of my head: insofar as we can call any American President the "founder of ISIS," that President would be George W. Bush, not Barack Obama. I mean, the actual founders of ISIS certainly chose their path, but Mr. Bush was the one who put them all together in Iraqi detention camps. But then maybe Mr. Trump has actually decided, at this point, not to poke the hornet's nest that is The Folks Who Blindly Supported Bush Back in the Day, lest we all learn that this nest also holds all of Mr. Trump's most ardent votaries.

Action: religious freedom, and GMO labeling.

You've no doubt had your fill by now of folks like Donald Trump saying they'll prevent Muslims from coming to America. Well, H.R. 5207, the Freedom of Religion Act, would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act so that "an alien may not be denied admission to the United States because of the alien’s religion or lack of religious beliefs." The good news? This bill already has 112 House sponsors! The bad news? Only one, soon-to-be-retired Richard Hanna of New York, is a Republican. Wasn't it David Frum who said, many years ago, that Democrats hate their base while Republicans live in fear of theirs? Maybe they're not afraid of their base so much as they use their base. Whatever the case, clearly we're not shaming Republicans enough -- 9.11 happened on their President's watch, and now they do nothing but stoke fear and rage against anyone with brown skin who doesn't wear a cross around their neck. So Americans United for the Separation of Church and State helps you tell your Reps to support H.R. 5207, and thus support real religious freedom in America.

Meanwhile, you know that President Obama signed Congress's GMO-labeling "compromise" -- the one which might result in a strong federal GMO-labeling standard down the road, but which kills Vermont's GMO-labeling standard, and any others states might implement, right now. But you also know that most Americans would prefer knowing whether or not their food contains genetically-modified organisms, and that some corporations (including Kellogg's, General Mills, and Pepsi) have started to voluntarily label their GMO foods. So Consumers Union helps you tell corporations to support real labeling of GMO foods. People don't want to see toll-free phone numbers, website URLs, or QR codes when they want to know if their food has GMOs in it -- they want a simple label in plain English, like, you know, "this food contains genetically-modified organisms." A lot of corporations (the same ones who donated all that campaign cash so they could get their "compromise" bill passed in the first place!) would like to get away with labels that aren't really labels. But that's, you know, cheating, and why should we tolerate that?

Around the table: meet the new boss, same as the old boss, part 287.

Richard Eskow analyzes Donald Trump's big economics speech and, as you might imagine, finds it the same-old same-old Republicans have been peddling for years. Cut regulations blah blah blah cut taxes on the rich blah blah blah, plus overt contradictions sometimes delivered mere seconds after the talking points. It's good to be reminded, too, that Mr. Trump doesn't seem to remember that the Golden Age of American Post-War Prosperity "was made possible by government investment, which in turn was made possible by a tax code that asked far more of the wealthy and of corporations than we do today."

Of course Mr. Trump's also in trouble for hiring all white old men as his economic advisors, but the worse problem is that at least five of them are major campaign donors. I wonder what sort of advice they'll give! As one analyst says, "(h)e is following the path he has said was corrupt: raising large sums of money and then giving donors special access." Would it be piling on to note that the article describes one of the five big donors as "a billionaire investor and poker player"? I mean, that's what we need more of in government, right? Gamblers.

Cedric Lawson at inequality.org takes a clear and sober look at mass incarceration entitled "Eliminate Profit from Punishment." Here are, for me at least, the two most sobering notes: that Marissa Alexander (the woman who fired a gun in the general direction of her abusive husband and who somehow could not enjoy immediate protection from Florida's vaunted "Stand Your Ground" law) may have been swallowed up by the prison system simply because some prison could have made money off her, and some for-profit prison corporations actually sue states when they don't give them enough prisoners. That doesn't make a great case for privatization of this essential function of civilization.

With Mr. Trump falling in many recent polls, First Read speculates on whether the Republicans will keep blockading President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. You heard it here first: Republicans will continue to blockade the Garland nomination, and any other nomination a Democratic President would make to the Supreme Court, until they win back the Presidency, no matter how many years or decades that takes, no matter what absurd excuses they must employ. Yes, they will go that far -- I mean, the alternative is losing the Supreme Court for the next few decades. I hope I'm wrong, but usually I'm wrong because I haven't foreseen how far Republicans will go to keep or take back power.

Finally, scientists find that contact with certain microbes in farm animals actually reduces asthma in children. If you like talking about the old days, you'll find a certain kinship with the notion that our homes are so clean now that we don't get enough of the bad stuff that makes us stronger, but scientists who studied Amish and Hutterite children found that the Amish simply don't get very much asthma, and, not coincidentally, their children have much more contact with farm animals (whereas the Hutterites live on large industrial farms, now there's another reason to oppose big ag). We're not all going to live near farm animals now, of course -- but we may learn enough from the Amish experience so that we can all benefit. Sometimes, when folks "drop out" of the mainstream and live the way they want to live, they teach the rest of us something.

Action: monopolies, and voting rights.

Dow and DuPont have proposed merging into one elephantine corporation worth some $130 billion -- which, gosh, would be like the Yankees and Red Sox merging into one baseball team, except that while a Yankees/Red Sox merger would do little harm to our country other than create one superteam that wins the World Series every year, the proposed Dow/DuPont merger would make two of America's biggest seed manufacturers into one seed manufacturer with the ability to dictate markets to their liking, and that means less choice for small farmers and less choice for us as food consumers. I assume Dow and DuPont's hacks will say their merger will be "better for farmers and consumers," without bothering to explain how, but you know that fewer corporations owning more stuff is worse for competition and innovation, not better. And no one who fears big government interference in markets has any business excusing big corporate interference -- especially since corporations only answer to their shareholders, and not the American people. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell the Department of Justice to block the proposed Dow/DuPont merger.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5779/S. 3252, the Automatic Voter Registration Act of 2016, then CREDO still helps you do that. I'll brook no eye-rolling about "dead voters voting" and "people voting 20 times," because we've come a long way since the days when voter registration actually reduced fraud. How do I know this? Because if it were really happening today, Tha Bush Mobb would have found more than 80-odd instances of voter fraud in eight years, because you know they were looking very, very hard. Sadly, a lot of folks aren't going to hear that -- after the, ah, close Presidential election of 2000 and the Ohio state government's very public machinations in delivering their state to Mr. Bush in 2004, we've started to get in the habit of declaring every election that doesn't go our way "rigged," and now our Republican Presidential nominee is so bold that he can make that charge three months before Election Day! Still, saying an election is "rigged" is a serious charge, requiring evidence and such. And good Americans shouldn't need to jump through hoops to vote.

Around the table: helpful reminders about forced arbitration, CEO pay, and the actual relationship between good government and freedom.

The Consumerist lists 87 corporations that force you into binding arbitration in their customer contracts, thus "Taking Away Your Right to Sue." Spoiler alert: you'll recognize most of them -- and you can't get too far away from most of them, since they're so huge. Comcast and Charter both have forced arbitration clauses (with class-action bans!), and guess which two corporations now hold a virtual monopoly on American broadband cable services? Oh, and you want to go to Walgreen's instead of CVS? Well, they both have forced arbitration clauses, too. (Maybe you're lucky and you still have a Rite-Aid nearby -- or you live in North Dakota, where big-box pharmacies can't operate as such.)

It is always good to be reminded that CEOs make 276 times what the typical worker makes. Good news, though -- just 15 years ago, that statement would have read "376 times"! (Bad news, though -- the biggest gains on the graph occur during Bill Clinton's Presidency.) But you know what else it's good to be reminded about? That most Americans think that ratio is around 30 to 1 -- and would vastly prefer a ratio of around seven to one. I keep telling folks Americans are good people -- and, with effort, we can correct our countryfolk's mistaken impressions about how bad the income-redistribution-upward scheme is in America.

Dean Baker, writing at TruthOut, wonders if Uber will "go under" because of its unwillingness to expand to areas of America that might actually regulate it with some vigor. To which I say: we can only hope! Seriously, though, Uber objects to municipal requirements about fingerprinting and background checks. That's not very big and bold of them, is it? And since they pulled out of Austin, TX, six new companies have filled the gap. Competition! It's the American way! And it only came about because the good citizens of Austin forced their government to do something. Which means the way to more freedom might just be a more active government. I apologize in advance if that statement has caused any right-wingers' heads to explode.

The Koch brothers say they won't help Donald Trump win the election, but Adele M. Stan at AlterNet reminds us that the Koch brothers already are helping Mr. Trump -- by using their vaunted ground game to help downballot Republicans. "It’s as simple as this: If you get voters to the polls in order to vote for the Senate or House candidate of your choice, chances are good they’ll vote for the presidential candidate who appears on the same ticket. The Koch network’s favored candidates are, of course, all Republicans." I guess this is yet another reason why Gary Johnson is not an option for the Koch brothers (you know, in addition to "the Koch brothers only talk a good game about criminal justice reform and staying out of dumb wars.")

Finally, some bad news: U.S. District Court Judge throws out lawsuit from third-party Presidential candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein aiming to get them into Presidential debates. Sadly, the judge's case looks sound -- the plaintiffs couldn't reasonably establish exactly what their "injuries" are, and when the plaintiffs argued that the Commission on Presidential Debates's 15 percent polling threshold for debate inclusion denied them their First Amendment rights, the Judge reminded them that the First Amendment protects them from their government and that the CPD is a private entity. I'm pretty sure someone thought of that back in the day, anticipating this very lawsuit.

Action: against various communication clampdowns by law enforcement.

Baltimore County police shot and killed Korryn Gaines last week; the police had been attempting to serve a failure-to-appear warrant stemming from a March 10 traffic stop. But Ms. Gaines was livestreaming her standoff with police over Facebook as it happened, and the police asked Facebook to suspend her account while the standoff was going on. And then they shot her. Now, at least one account of the traffic stop that catalyzed this tragedy makes her seem rather paranoid, but paranoia doesn't warrant a death sentence, and I can't help but feel if she were white, the police would have regarded her as harmlessly paranoid. The police, for their part, said they did what they did mainly "to preserve the integrity of the negotiation process with her," but that's a two-way street -- clearly Ms. Gaines didn't want this "process" to be secret, and in publicizing it as she did, she took the risk that the police wouldn't look as bad (and/or she wouldn't look as good) as she thought. Sadly, though, that ship has sailed, so Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to handle such police interactions differently in the future.

The 2016 Summer Olympics started in Rio late last week -- and the agency that oversees communications in Brazil, Anatel, has given its military the authority to shut down the internet while it's going on! Is this the way civilized people treat special events from now on -- as excuses to abridge the freedoms of law-abiding citizens? You may well respond that special events are magnets for terrorists, but why should everyone pay for the actions of a few? And you know what else is a magnet for terrorism? Clamping down on good Brazilians' ability to communicate with each other. (You know what else is a magnet for terrorism? Structuring these events so that only "VIP"s can go to them, and holding the people at a distance -- but maybe I shouldn't get started.) It sure doesn't help that Anatel isn't actually a government agency, but an agency that stands independently of the Brazilian government and thus also independently of the Brazilian people. Hence Access Now helps you tell the Brazilian Ministers of Justice and Defense to "keep the internet on" during the Olympic games.

Around the table: our ongoing descent into turmoil and madness leavened with appropriate doses of hope and faith.

Brian Barrett at Wired reminds us that "America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets." Oftentimes these voting machines and/or their software are five or ten years old, in a world where computer technology moves much more quickly than that. And voting problems won't necessarily manifest as vote-switching -- they could manifest in slower-running voting machines, which could prompt good citizens to give up and go home (yes, you just heard Karl Rove's antennae going up). Some states conduct audits of their voting machines, but others don't, and for the worst of reasons -- "a lack of money and political will." (No, those really are bad reasons -- you better find the will if you're serving the public, and that includes finding the will to raise the tax revenues so you can serve the public well.)

Future Great and Glorious Real American Leader Donald Trump says Tim Kaine's tax hikes caused a lot of unemployment in Virginia, while Mike Pence's tax cuts caused a lot of job growth -- hoping, perhaps, that you'll ignore that Mr. Kaine was Governor of Virginia during the financial sector meltdown of 2008, when everyone's unemployment rate went way up, and Mr. Pence didn't take over in Indiana until well after the meltdown, by which time it was virtually impossible not to oversee a declining unemployment rate. Oh, and the punchline? The $4 billion in tax hikes proposed by Mr. Kaine didn't pass the state legislature. So they didn't even happen. They say Donald Trump is dumb, but he's no dumber than George W. Bush, who was not dumb -- and who promulgated statistical trickery like this all the time back when he was Our Personal Lord and Savior.

Surprise, surprise, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report finds that the Department of Energy still harasses and intimidates whistleblowers. Though this smells very Bush Mobb, the "war on whistleblowers" is a uniquely Obama development, and I have never been able to fathom why -- I mean, sure Barack Obama never wanted to run an administration as loose-lipped as Bill Clinton's, but why does the hammer have to come down upon DOE employees who point out hazards at nuclear power plants? I mean, if one of those plants goes, there's no shutting the barn door.

Microsoft pitches facial expression recognition software at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions. It's not the sort of facial recognition software that's causing problems in our government's databases, but it might be even worse, since one could figure out who you are using other easily available data. And Microsoft's people are quite evasive when asked whether this could become a government spying tool. There's hope, though -- you'd need to give consent to have your expression scanned, and saying "you give consent merely by walking into this auditorium" might not cut it legally.

Richard Eskow notices all the right-leaning folk (Meg Whitman, Mark Cuban, Brent Scowcroft) endorsing Hillary Clinton, and wonders if Mrs. Clinton will be "Tempted to Tack Right." I mean, Democrats look for any excuse to tack right, but this is, sadly, a good analysis -- and suggests that Donald Trump isn't in this race to punk Republicans, but to punk us. (And don't be heartened by the CNN poll suggesting that a quarter of "self-identified conservatives" would vote for Mrs. Clinton. A lot of the farthest right folks in this country call themselves "independent" rather than conservative.)

Finally, Breitbart News publishes a photo that's supposedly of a well-attended Donald Trump rally that's actually of the Cleveland Cavaliers' victory parade after winning the NBA championship. They said it was a mistake. I can't prove it wasn't, I suppose, but I'd be a schmuck to believe them.

Action: reinstating Glass-Steagall, and preserving fuel efficiency standards.

You may not know this, but both major political parties have put reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act -- and thus preventing banks from engaging in both traditional banking functions and financial speculation -- in their platforms. Has the "liberal" media trumpeted this event as a point of bipartisan agreement? I kid, of course -- we all know the "liberal" media only calls far-right initiatives that have one famous Democrat on-board "bipartisan." And I couldn't say why the Republicans did it -- perhaps they're trying to help out John McCain's re-election effort? -- but fact is both parties have said Glass-Steagall should come back, so now we're going to hold them to it. Hence Sign Here Now helps you tell Congressional leaders to pass H.R. 3054/S. 1709, the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act. Don't believe the hype that we shouldn't reinstate Glass-Steagall because "Glass-Steagall repeal wasn't a precise cause of the 2008 financial services meltdown," as if other kinds of meltdowns couldn't possibly occur when your bank gambles your money away on hifalutin derivative schemes.

Meanwhile, both the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Environmental Defense Fund help you tell the EPA and the NHTSA (the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration) not to weaken their automobile fuel-efficiency standards. The EPA and the NHTSA jointly finalized these regulations back in 2012, but are now conducting a mid-term review of the standards, and could weaken them, although that's a profoundly stupid idea. These days, when most folks shop for cars, they look at fuel efficiency first, and strong fuel efficiency standards not only cause less pollution, they help insulate consumers from the volatility of gas prices. It's hard to imagine what justification the EPA and the NHTSA could have to weaken the standards -- perhaps it's the price of getting early buy-in from automakers and/or oil corporations. I sure wouldn't put it past the Obama Administration. But that literally doesn't matter -- our government's deal with its owners, i.e., us, supersedes all other deals they make with special interests, and we need to hold up our end by demanding strong fuel efficiency standards.

Around the table: why ordinary Americans support Trump, and other lessons.

The incomparable Thomas Frank tells us why so many "ordinary Americans" support Donald Trump. Long story short: it's not bigotry, even if the bigotry is the proverbial loudest wagon in the Trump parade; "(a) map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America." Plus the Democratic Party -- which would have, in years past, defended workers from the aforementioned "economic misery" -- has become "the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a 'creative class' that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps," and boy oh boy do they look down upon the working-class white folks who support Mr. Trump.

Adam Johnson at FAIR writes about how establishment Republicans "Lament Loss of a Reasonable, Competent GOP that Never Was." Max Boot's recent foray onto the New York Times editorial page to decry the rise of the "Stupid Party" is particularly offensive, not just because Mr. Boot's one solution to every problem is to invade someone, but because he bemoans the party's "reflexive aversion to elites." Hello? Our Glorious Elites are the worst people on the planet. And Mr. Boot is another one who thinks of Paul Ryan as a "thoughtful" person, possibly because he can make a chart (or, more likely, hire someone to make a chart). For a group of people who are always saying liberals have destroyed all societal standards, right-wingers sure do grade their heroes on a curve.

At least 11 far-right Kansas state legislators lost their primaries to somewhat less far-right challengers earlier this week. Now, see, that's how the New York Times should have written that lede, but instead they go on about the ongoing battle between "conservatives" and "moderates" in the Kansas Republican party, when we can only call some Kansas Republicans "moderates" in relation to the reactionaries (not conservatives! You have to earn that title, too!) who have been bollocksing everything up in that state. Words mean things, after all.

Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI), the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name, says, among so many other things, "the climate hasn't warmed in quite a few years. I mean, that is proven scientifically." Naturally, Sen. Johnson uses the passive voice here -- it is proven scientifically rather than scientists have proven, because such assertive phrasing apparently gives even Ron Johnson pause. It gets worse -- he thinks anyone trying to save the world is a "Utopian" aiming to "control" your lives, and thus comparable to Stalin, Chavez, and "the nutcases in North Korea." The good news? Even the Koch brothers are triaging his race for re-election.

Finally, Libertarian Presidential nominee Gary Johnson says "my head's been in the sand" on race-relation issues and Black Lives Matter has convinced him that discrimination "has existed" and "does exist." We'll see exactly what happens after "slap, slap, wake up," but Mr. Johnson's running mate, William Weld, helpfully adds that "the number of male black youths who are without jobs" is a "national emergency" requiring "the government to respond," which statement, I think, will really annoy long-time Libertarians. Then again, Messrs. Johnson and Weld are looking to widen their base, and what are long-time Libertarians going to do? Vote for Trump?

Action: transparency in elections, and fishery management.

Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a couple of bills that would help restore freedom and transparency to our elections. S. 6, the We the People Act, would combine the efforts of previous Congressional bills that would have forced disclosure of campaign contributions and slowed the revolving door between Wall Street banksters and our government; S.J.Res. 5 would amend the Constitution so we could reverse the deleterious effects of recent Supreme Court decisions vastly increasing the amount of money that flows into our elections; S. 1538, the Fair Elections Now Act, would institute a public campaign finance system for federal elections whereby small donations could be matched with federal funds; and S. 1659, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, would force Justice Department pre-clearance of voting rights law changes in states or localities which have demonstrated a clear pattern of vote suppression. Who could possibly oppose these things? Congressfolk who worship only at the altar of mammon, that's who -- and sadly, that's most of them. But they want to be good people, so we should speak out and try to help them be good people.

Meanwhile, Congress has the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in its sights. Why? Because the Magnuson-Stevens Act manages U.S. fisheries very well, keeping fish populations from collapse, rejuvenating some species, and reducing "unintended bycatch" (when fishing concerns accidentally catch fish they don't actually intend to catch). You can see where this is going, right? Some Congressfolk, it's true, want to destroy anything about our government that actually works well and works on behalf of the American people, but many more Congressfolk have more mundane aims in mind -- reducing protections for fish opens up waters for the big agricultural and fossil fuel corporations who'd like to "save money" by polluting fish habitats. But well-maintained fishing populations also means a well-running fishing industry -- and jobs for people who work in it -- whereas gutting those protections only means that CEOs redistribute more worker wealth upward to themselves. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to gut fishery conservation laws.

Around the table: scrutinizing some of the plans of our Presidential candidates, among other things.

The incomparable David Dayen at the New Republic describes the hurdles good liberals would have to clear in order to get heard in a Hillary Clinton Administration. The chief hurdle is the transition team Mrs. Clinton will put together if she wins -- transition teams wind up hiring basically the entire executive branch, and, in the words of one insider, "(p)eople are not spending time talking to people they don’t know really well." So if Mrs. Clinton were to stack her team with the same center-right corporatists Mr. Obama (and Mr. Clinton) did, you could expect it to be about as hard to get heard by her Administration. Still, our duty is to get heard, so we just need to take that into account at the beginning.

Donald Trump says he's going to spend more than Hillary Clinton on infrastructure by, essentially, taking on more deficit spending. I mean, that's what government bonds and loan guarantees are -- he sure won't tax the rich to pay for all that bridge-building. The Times doesn't need to do Mr. Trump's PR for him by calling this "another indication that the Republican presidential nominee is prepared to break with the fiscal conservatism that his party has evangelized over the past eight years," (eight?) particularly since the Times doesn't identify any of the other "indications." And, ah, you know he doesn't mean any of this anyway, right? And even if he did, he'd likely stiff as many workers as he could, because that's his way. Still, I expect his I'll-spend-more-than-Hillary-what-a-loser infrastructure plan will turn heads.

Private college executives criticize Mrs. Clinton's plan to make public college free for families making less than $125,000. Because of course they do! But would private colleges would be so utterly helpless before the prospect of more affordable public college education that there'd be an "exodus of middle-class students"? Is money really all that matters to young students and their families? And wouldn't the competition from the Clinton plan induce private colleges to do more to attract such students? I mean, that's what a bold and bright entrepreneur would say. Whiners, of course, don't say that.

U.S. District Court judge denies Uber's attempt to force an antitrust lawsuit into binding arbitration per Uber's terms of service -- because Uber can't actually prove that Uber users have agreed to that forced arbitration clause! Uber, apparently, doesn't even make you check a box indicating that you've even read their terms of service, and puts its forced arbitration clause deep into an agreement full of "highly legalistic language that no ordinary consumer could be expected to understand." Consent: it's actually really important.

Molly Knefel at FAIR notices the "liberal" media offering up its love of that "better billionaire," Michael Bloomberg -- you know, because he's "better" that other billionaire-maybe who's running for President. This is a quite praiseworthy article, listing Mr. Bloomberg's numerous sins against the New York electorate while Mayor (racist stop-and-frisk policies, cutting or eliminating numerous vital public services). She also subtly suggests in the last three paragraphs that the punditoids who praise Mr. Bloomberg are getting their talking points from the same place. I hope we hear more from this public school teacher named Molly Knefel.

Finally, Mediaite catches Fox and Friends hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade complaining that TEH NO ONEZ IN TEH LIBURULZ MEDIAZ COVERED TEH BENGHAZI MOTHER!!!! while she spoke at the Republican National Convention -- except that CNN and MSNBC did cover it, and Fox News, their own employer, did not. Could Messrs. Doocy and Kilmeade really be this dumb? It's a moot question, after eight years of Tha Bush Mobb -- the answer to the stupid-or-evil question is always evil.

Action: payday lenders, and national parks.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to enact the most vigorous payday lender rules possible, then Stop Payday Predators still helps you do that. I know some of my readers have been trapped in the payday loan spiral, and I'm sorry they had to go through that, because payday lenders are really like legalized loan sharks -- they look for vulnerable people in communities (usually communities of color) underserved or unserved by traditional banks, and when you don't pay off the first loan, they roll it over into another loan, and another, and another, until you're paying over 300 percent interest annually on these loans. Don't believe folks who say payday lenders really aren't predators because not enough people default on their loans to meet their definition of "predator," because, again, 300 percent interest! Who but a predator extracts that from you? And if the CFPB's proposals don't go far enough, that's why we have public commenting periods -- so we can tell them to go far enough.

Meanwhile, you may have also missed previous opportunities to tell the National Park Service to abandon its plan to pollute our national parks with ever-more corporate advertising, but the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood still helps you do that, too. Currently our national parks are relatively free from the ravages of corporate advertising, but the National Park Service would have its members actively solicit corporate donations to fund our parks, and would even lift current the Service's current restrictions on naming rights. That's right, you might one day go to Coca-Cola Yosemite National Park, or Rio Tinto Grand Canyon National Park. I'm old enough to remember when sports stadiums gave away naming rights for the first time; the media actually thought it was a big deal, a bit shame-worthy, even -- and those stadiums were all privately-owned. Yet we own our national parks, and now the "liberal" media hardly utters a peep about the Park Service's aims. That demonstrates how sick, immoral, and decadent our civilization has become. But we live in a democracy, so we can reverse that decadence -- not in a day, but in time.

Around the table: no, Donald Trump is *not* mentally ill, and other hard lessons.

Corporate trade lobbies ask that the entire D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hear their challenge to the FCC's net neutrality rules. As you know, a three-judge panel that ruled in the FCC's favor back in June; I can't blame the big telecoms for wanting to take their chances with eight more judges, I suppose, but their arguments remain desperate -- to the degree one can even argue that the net neutrality regulations are "unprecedented" (which would be tough, since the big telecoms were already observing net neutrality principles beforehand), that's mainly because the internet is a pretty unprecedented technology, one more responsive to customers than any other media, and thus looking to the narrowest possible precedent wouldn't promote freedom for those customers.

Pope Francis says we shouldn't "identify Islam with violence," and adds that "in nearly all religions there is always a small fundamentalist group." I don't know why he said "nearly," but it's otherwise an important reminder -- maybe even as important a reminder as "terrorism grows when there is no other option and when money is made a god." Naturally we'll I guess we'll be hearing from Donald Trump about what a LOOOZER!!!!! the Pope is (hey, he's gone after Gold Star families, so why not the Pope?). Plus we'll get to hear more from other right-wingers about Pope Francis's "Communistic tendencies." He'll be the Barack Obama of the next decade if he's not careful.

Ho hum, Think Progress finds that the 10 states that require drug testing of welfare recipients spent over $850,000 in 2015 on those drug tests -- and found 321 drug users. Why, it's almost becoming harder to find a drug-using welfare-recipient than someone actually committing voter fraud! Seriously, though, the whole thing boggles the mind -- not only that they could have spent all that money, you know, helping people, but that they seem to think that drug dealers all take EBT cards now.

Hillary Clinton gets her first endorsement from a Republican House Rep, in part because he finds Donald Trump "profoundly offensive and narcissistic." Probably you'll read the article and say, "oh, it's Richard Hanna, I should've known," and since Mr. Hanna (NY-22) is one of the last three or four moderate Republicans in the House (and he's not seeking re-election this year, possibly because he's tired of getting primaried from the right), I don't exactly expect a whole lot of other dominoes to fall from that side of the aisle.

Finally, let's dispatch with a quickness the notion that "Donald Trump is acting so erratically that he must be mentally ill." Firstly, insinuating that Donald Trump is mentally unstable profoundly insults folks who struggle with actual mental illnesses. And secondly, and perhaps more importantly, he behaves the way all Our Glorious Elites behave, though he's more obnoxious. I'm serious about that -- bragging about how great you are, telling "easily disprovable lies," and "fly(ing) into a wounded rage at mild criticism" are all behaviors that have afflicted Our Glorious Elites for many, many years now, and suggesting that Donald Trump is fundamentally different from them is, unfortunately, another way of insulating them from the criticism they deserve from civilized people. Why, it's almost like that's the idea!

Around the table: governments torturing citizens, banksters exploiting prisoners, and Donald Trump.

Amnesty Internation announces they have "credible evidence" that the Turkish government is cracking down on the Turkish people with arbitrary detainment, torture, and rape. That followed President Erdogan's emergency declaration, which followed the "suspension" of some 50,000 civil servants, the detainment of almost 1,000 judges and prosecutors, and the suspension of over 2,700 more judges. Also, too, they detained 60 schoolkids for treason. Arresting kids for treason! You might say Mr. Erdogan's actions are explicable, given the apparent coup attempt in mid-July, but I'd just say a leader who feels he must go to such lengths to restore "order" is no kind of leader at all. Not that he was a peach to begin with, of course.

Arun Gupta at The Nation describes the latest (legal!) scam perpetrated in the prison system: they take the prisoners' cash and give them ATM cards when they get out -- ATM cards that are larded with hidden fees. Anyone else think law enforcement will get money from banksters to arrest people on bogus charges, take their money, and given them fee-laden ATM cards when they put them back on the street that night? Of course, prisoners who serve longer sentences get this done to them, too. Don't be the fool who says who cares? They shouldn't have done anything wrong! After all, you might spend a night, or a year, in the clink someday -- maybe for something you can't even imagine could be a crime now! -- and then you'll see what it's like to keep paying after you thought you were done paying.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence tells right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, apparently with a straight face, that "name-calling" has no "place in public life," all because President Obama called Donald Trump a demagogue. Examples of Donald Trump's own name-calling are, of course, easily accessible, apparently, to everyone except Mike Pence (and Hugh Hewitt, who didn't question Mr. Pence on "name-calling" any further). But I wouldn't presume (as the Politico writer does) that this is Messrs. Trump and Pence "getting tangled up in mixed messaging on tactics." I'm pretty sure the "mixed messaging" is the tactic -- being a Republican (let alone a Trump votary!) requires exactly this sort of mental disconnect all the time.

Finally, speaking of Mr. Trump, what to make of his declaration at an Ohio rally that "I'm afraid the election's gonna be rigged, I have to be honest"? That he's not so confident in Voter ID laws delivering him unearned victories in Wisconsin and North Carolina after all? That he's trying to gin up anger and resentment among votaries who can't possibly see how he could have lost? Or that, like a baseball manager in last place by mid-May complaining about injuries, he's just getting his excuses ready? Number three sounds the most reasonable, but I bet it's number two. Then again, with Donald Trump, it's always number two.

UPDATE. I originally identified Mr. Erdogan as the Prime Minister of Turkey, a position he held until 2014; he is now that nation's President. I've corrected the error.

Action: fairness for farm workers, and clean air.

The Chipotle restaurant chain gets some of its food from Taylor Fresh Foods, apparently the world's biggest name in pre-cut produce and pre-packed salad -- but also a big name in workplace injuries, chemical spills, and surveillance of and retaliation against workers. Taylor's Tracy, CA facility has faced some 70 citations for state health and safety violations over the past year, including a chemical spill that sent 20 employees (two of them pregnant!) to the hospital. The NLRB has also hit Taylor (and its associated temp agencies) for over 50 violations, including the one that prompted Taylor to announce it would pay some former employees over $260,000 in back pay (which, of course, we'd like to see them actually do). Did I mention that Tracy facility workers have been trying to organize, or Taylor's numerous recalls for possible e. coli and salmonella contaminations? And Chipotle itself has been whacked with the Big Stick of Bad PR over contamination and illness at its restaurants, so the International Labor Rights Forum helps you helps you tell Chipotle to induce better behavior from Taylor Fresh Foods.

Meanwhile, Western Pennsylvania suffers from poor air quality and the rising rates of asthma and cancer that go with it, but Royal Dutch Shell has decided to build a giant ethane cracker plant near the Ohio River in Beaver County anyway. You may recall that the Corbett Administration handed out a $1.7 billion (over 25 years) tax break for Royal Dutch Shell back in 2012, in the hope that Pennsylvania wouldn't lose a "bidding war" with Ohio and West Virginia over the facility and the jobs it would supposedly bring. (Estimates ranged from 400 to 10,000 jobs in 2012, but I'd bet the actual number would be near the low end.) Ethane cracker plants convert oil and gas to polyethylene, which manufacturers use in many, many products, but these plants also spew forth a lot of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are organic only because they contain carbon, and they not only exacerbate climate change, but they also combine with nitrogen oxides to create smog, which exacerbates the kind of health problems described above. So MoveOn helps you tell the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to reject the Shell ethane cracker plant.

Around the table: attaching a dollar figure to the harm caused by banksters, and other revelations.

UMass-Amherst economist says that banksters wind up costing the average American household well over $100,000 over the course of a lifetime. Not just with credit card late fees, ATM fees, and overdraft fees -- and, for poorer families, with payday loans -- but with a lot of retirement funds, whose managers have limited or no fiduciary responsibility to work on your behalf, and who charge exorbitant fees for funds that perform little or no better than the stock market does as a whole. What are banksters good for? For redistributing your wealth upward -- to themselves.

National Labor Relations Board upholds appeal of earlier ruling permitting the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America to endorse a boycott of Israel. The Israeli legal center bringing the original suit (and the appeal) cited labor law preventing unions from encouraging workers at "neutral employers" (that is, employers not involved in a dispute between the union and its workers' employer) to stop work or go on strike in arguing that unions also could not encourage workers to "cease doing business with Israelis and Israeli companies." If it seems like a bit of a leap from one to the other, well, you're not alone. And now I'm rather interested in rolling back the law preventing unions from encouraging other workers to go on strike, as it seems a plain violation of their First Amendment rights.

New CFPB rules mandate that debt collectors now have to make some effort to prove that debtors actually owe them any money. New rules would make debt collectors limit their number of weekly contacts, notify debtors when statutes of limitation have passed on old debts, and get a whole lot more information about your supposed debt than just your phone number -- among many other absolutely needed reforms (though not all the reforms we'd like, of course). But please, Republicans, keep mouthing off about how the CFPB is just another "bureaucracy" preventing honest businessfolk from making money, when it's actually a tool to keep banksters from running roughshod over our lives.

University of Zurich study suggests that internet trolls are more obnoxious, not less, when they're using their real names. But only in limited contexts, it seems to me -- the study looked at comments on online petitions, where you have to give your real name but can request the petition manager to withhold your name from public exposure; the study doesn't look at, for example, Facebook or Twitter comments, though it seems to me you'd more likely find obnoxious behavior there than on online petitions. So clearly, this subject needs further research.

Finally, 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals strikes down North Carolina's Voter ID law, finding that the state legislature went very far out of its way to "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision." Gov. McCrory of course replies with the whole you-need-ID-to-buy-Sudafed-so-you-should-also-need-it-to-vote, as if he's never, ever heard anything anyone has ever said about the matter. And no Republican appeal of this law will ever survive Supreme Court scrutiny, not when your legislature not only goes very far out of its way to find out exactly how many non-whites their law will hurt and not only enacts that law anyway but writes all of their doings down.