Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning internet freedom and ALEC.

Long story short: tell our FCC to bring back net neutrality, and tell big corporations to stop funding ALEC. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to bring back net neutrality, the principle that forces big telecom corporations to deliver all data with the same priority, and prevents those corporations from herding you into junk news ghettos or delivering corporate “partner” content before the content you want. This is why folks all across the political spectrum support net neutrality! Our government didn’t make net neutrality the law of the land until 2015, but corporations hesitated to violate its principles before then, and have only violated its principles since the Trump FCC’s 2017 repeal in ways that seem to benefit consumers – by packaging Netflix or Disney + for free with new accounts, for example. That might seem like a good thing, until you decide you don’t like Netflix anymore and have to pay extra for something like Hulu. So let’s make big telecom corporations do right by all of us again.

Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Voter ID laws, Stand Your Ground laws that never seem to protect Black folks the way they protect white folks, criminalizing protest – these are just some of the evil works of ALEC over the last decade-plus, but ALEC would starve to death without corporate funding, and our efforts over the years have already induced over 100 big corporations to drop ALEC, but there are lots of other big corporations in America still funding ALEC, not least among them Pfizer, Chevron, Blue Cross, Eli Lilly, Anheuser-Busch, UPS, FedEx, and, of course, the Koch Brothers. And don’t buy the BS line that these corporations only ally with ALEC for “economic reasons.” If anything, that’s even worse!

Action: concerning sedition, pollution, antibiotics, and student loans.

Long story short: tell Congress to investigate House Reps for helping to plan the January 6 attempted coup, tell President Biden to use federal policy to fight pollution and stop a liquefied natural gas train from being built, tell McDonald's to put its money where its mouth is in re antibiotic abuse, tell President Biden to cancel student loan debt, and tell big corporations to stop funding the campaigns of the folks who helped try to overthrow our government. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Win Without War helps you tell your House Reps to investigate (and, if need be, expel) the seven members who allegedly helped plan the January 6 attempted coup. Am I really writing that sentence? Yes, I am really writing that sentence. As you know, a Rolling Stone report from late last month that some of the coup's planners meeting with these seven House Reps "dozens" of times; if that's true, then these seven individuals need to go. One of them, perhaps not coincidentally, is Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, who's gotten himself in some, ah, other trouble this past week. You can't get away with threatening your co-workers at your job, but apparently folks like him think they can get away with anything, and not just because they sit in absurdly-gerrymandered seats. But is that how civilized people act?

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell President Biden to undo the damage Donald Trump did to the National Environmental Policy Act (or NEPA). Specifically, you'd ask President Biden to 1) strengthen environmental reviews of potentially polluting projects, 2) allow our government to take climate change into account during such reviews, 3) keep polluting corporations from having too much a say in such reviews, and 4) give the public more time to comment on regulations aiming to protect us from pollution. Yeah, Donald Trump did the opposite of all that, and not for "jobs," either -- he did it because the only other person whose opinion he respects is a boss, and bosses hate being told to stop polluting when their money's at stake. But that's what civilized people do, and we need to do more of it, like we did just a few short years ago.

Penn Environment helps you tell the Biden Administration to cancel all permits for New Fortress Energy's proposed liquefied natural gas (or LNG) pipeline. New Fortress would run a hundred LNG rail cars across Pennsylvania every day, when less than a quarter of that carries the energy equivalent of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and once LNG gets into our air, as I expect it one day will because a train car will inevitably derail, it will expand to 600 times its volume and blow up the second someone accidentally lights a match. LNG rail was banned in America until 2019, and I bet you can't guess whose grubby pawprints are on that one. We banned it for a reason -- the money it'll make some CEO isn't worth the damage a major accident could do. Thus we, as civilized people, must step in again.

Consumer Reports helps you tell fast food corporation McDonald's to start acting on its 2018 promise to get antibiotics out of its beef supply. I bet McDonald's executives sure enjoyed all the positive attention for making that promise, but that was three years ago -- and what an innocent time it was! -- and in a world where over two-thirds of all antibiotics go to healthy feed animals, rather than sick people and sick animals, and this predicament threatens to bring back a world where the next cut could kill you, so McDonald's needs to get off the pot and start doing the right thing. A lot of people eat a lot of beef at McDonald's, to the tune of over two billion burgers every year -- they can't even put it on the sign anymore! -- so McDonald's could lead here, and I mean really lead, not pretend to lead like they've been doing.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell President Biden to cancel student loan debt. Which is in his power to do, since our government backs virtually all student loans, and canceling student loan debt would stimulate the hell out of our economy. Why, some of these folks might even buy homes one day! I'll brook no oldhead talk like I paid all my debts, why can't they? First of all, oldheads have no clue what today's student loan debt is like, because unless they're helping put their children through school they have no idea what the cost of college is today. Second, we promised students they'd get good jobs and good lives if they just went to college, and what did they get? Debt so crippling they're trapped in bad jobs and can't make good lives for themselves. It's time we made up for our mistakes. It's what adults do, after all.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the campaigns of Republicans who gave aid and comfort to the January 6 attempted coup by voting against certifying the 2020 election. Again, they said they'd do it, but they keep funding these clowns, so one must conclude that they simply lied to get the good PR. Thus it's time, once again, for the Big Stick of Bad PR. This sure does seem like an intractable problem, but the more we call attention to it, the more it'll embarrass them, and the more corporations will adhere to our will. Hey, it worked when we got over 100 corporations to leave the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC), and when you see it work, you want to see it work all the time. And as Americans -- hell, as civilized people -- we deserve that much.

Action: concerning foreign policy, vote suppression, fuel efficiency, clean water, airline refunds, and pipeline pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to stop training Saudi killers, tell big corporations to stop funding ALEC and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, tell our EPA to strengthen fuel efficiency standards and get the lead out of our water pipes, tell the big airlines to refund all those tickets cancelled because of the pandemic, and tell President Biden to stop the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

In light of the news that an American military contractor trained several of journalist Jamal Khasoggi's killers, Win Without War helps you tell Secretary of State Antony Blinken to halt all American training of Saudi paramilitary operatives. I mean, when they turn that training into sawing up a journalist into little pieces, I wouldn't blame you for feeling a little responsible. Of course, you shouldn't feel as responsible as those handling the bone saws, but we shouldn't be enabling the murder of journalists, either. Certainly not because "the world is a dangerous place!" That's a quotation from former President Trump (yes, exclamation point in the original), and it doesn't justify just letting anything happen.

MoveOn helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC), while Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to cut ties with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Both ALEC and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have pushed reactionary right-wing policies at the state and federal levels for years, but now both organizations have pushed vote suppression in the name of fighting "voter fraud," which no reasonable observer has found in the 2020 election results. You would think big corporations wouldn't want to be associated with the Big Lie, but the truth is they want it both ways -- they want the good press of saying they're against voter fraud but they want to keep ties to organizations that promote it. We're here to tell them they can't have it both ways.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to roll back Donald Trump's roll back of Barack Obama's clean car standards, while the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to restore the waiver they used to grant to California to set stronger fuel efficiency standards than the rest of the nation. Which meant cars generally built their cars to California standards -- rather than have two sets of cars, one for California and one for the rest of the nation -- but so what? The end result is better cars that go farther on a gallon of gas and thus not only pollute our air and water less but also cost good Americans less money at the pump. It takes a special talent like Donald Trump to look at all that and say nah, Americans don't deserve that! But he's gone, for now, and restoring better gas mileage standards is one of the things we need to do to keep him gone.

Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to require that our government remove all lead pipes from our sewer system. Recall that no amount of lead is safe to drink, that any amount of lead can cause brain damage in children, and that more than half of all Americans still drink water from systems containing lead, and you'll see the urgency of this matter. And, not for nothing, but if you're poor or Black, you have a much higher chance of drinking from contaminated lead pipes. Turns out Donald Trump tried to weaken EPA rules governing lead pipes on his way out of office -- like a mustache-twirling villain who's tied you to the tracks! -- but the Biden Administration paused that effort. Now we need to tell them to do better.

Consumer Reports helps you tell big airline corporations to pay the refunds they owe good Americans for all those trips that the pandemic cancelled. That's some $10 billion, which ain't chump change, and they're doing pretty good at the moment, what with all the reopening and the $50 billion in bailouts they got via the CARES Act, so they don't really have an excuse not to reimburse good Americans for the travel they weren't able to do because of COVID. Hell, I'm old enough to remember when a big corporation would go out of its way to make refunds like this just to look better than anyone else. Corporations have so much power now they don't have to do things like that. But good Americans still deserve their refunds, and we ought to help them get them.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell President Biden to stop the construction of the notorious Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. You no doubt know the reasons: transporting tar sands oil is fundamentally dirty, pipelines tend to break and pollute everyone's drinking water, pipelines somehow seem to find their way through Native American holy lands. But here's another one: the Trump Administration approved this pipeline without doing a proper environmental review, too, just like he did with the Keystone XL pipeline, a project for which President Biden revoked the permit on the first day of his Presidency. Let's not let him think his work is done here, of course. The work of the righteous is never done.

Action: concerning Medicare drug negotiation, good and bad Presidential nominations, product safety, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to include the Lower Drug Costs Now Act in the American Jobs Plan, tell your Senators to confirm Rohit Chopra as CFPB Director, tell your Senators to reject Neil MacBride as Treasury Department General Counsel, tell your Congressfolk to pass the STURDY Act, and tell big corporations to abandon ALEC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to contact your Congressfolk where appropriate, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to include H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act, in the American Jobs Plan. They can do that, because H.R. 3 would give Medicare the power to negotiate the prices of many drugs, and that power would result in savings for whom? For the taxpayer, of course! You fund Medicare, after all! And then the American Jobs Plan could apply those savings to needed projects. You've been telling them to help fund the American Jobs Plan with corporate taxes, and so far they haven't listened. They may not listen when we tell them to help fund it with savings from Medicare drug negotiation. But let's put it more toward the front of the public mind that Medicare drug negotiation is fiscally responsible.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's nominee for Director of our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra. Mr. Chopra has been a warrior for consumer rights for decades, and would represent a huge improvement over Donald Trump's CFPB heads, Mick Mulvaney and Kathy Kraninger, who seemed to think their job was to help the banksters rather than the American people. Some of Joe Biden's Executive branch picks, like Lina Khan as SEC Chair, have been pretty inspired; maybe that's why our Senators haven't confirmed Mr. Chopra yet. Still, duty is duty -- and duty ain't just for us, obviously.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to reject President Biden's nominee to be Department of Treasury General Counsel, Neil MacBride. Did we just say some of President Biden's Executive branch picks have been pretty inspired? Mr. MacBride's nomination isn't one of them! Mr. MacBride has been a long-time corporate lawyer, and regardless of how one may feel about his corporate defendants, I would not say that experience is an asset when working for our government -- in fact, I'd say it's more an asset for him and his once and future employers. Seriously, they always try to say we need more people in government who understand the economy, but what they mean is "more people in government who'll compromise government in favor of corporate power." And if I may borrow a metaphor, you can be an expert on the swamp without being a swamp creature.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1314/S. 441, the STURDY Act. "STURDY" here stands for "Stop Tip-overs of Unstable, Risky Dressers on Youth," and William Carlos Williams it ain't, but the title does accurately describe what the bill would do, and that's a good thing for a bill to do. The bill would mandate that our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) issue vigorous safety standards for these dressers and test them for tip-overs. What would an opponent of this bill say? I find it hard to imagine, but I guess it'd be something like GUMMINT BAD REGULASHUNZ BAD. They're happy to repeat that mantra when one of these dressers fall over on one of their children or grandchildren.

Common Cause helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which has gone back into the vote suppression racket after famously bowing out of it after their work on Voter ID laws became well-known. I guess they didn't learn much from that, did they? Spreading Donald Trump's lies and funding "fraudits" of election results sure ain't the actions of someone who's learned their lesson -- unless they thought the "lesson" was "stay out of sight until the time is right." Big corporations need to learn a lesson, too -- that it doesn't matter how many nice things they say about helping Black folks vote if they're going to fund ALEC's vote suppression efforts. And the Big Stick of Bad PR still seems like the ideal weapon to teach this lesson.

Around the table: featuring mostly dispiriting Democrat weakness.

Chris Walker at TruthOut suggests that if Democrats run away from the "defund the police" movement, it could actually hurt them at the polls in 2022. You remember how well Jon Ossoff did in the 2017 Georgia 6th special? He lost. And you remember what happened when a Black Lives Matter activist ran for the same seat in the 2018 general? She won. Voters like it when you stand for something! And if you stand for something and you're not an idiot, all the better! This is why Republicans keep winning when they don't deserve to win! Not to mention that when ask folks if they want to "defund the police," they say no, but when you ask them if they want to "reallocat(e) portions of police budgets to create a new agency of first-responders...to deal with issues related to addiction or mental illness," they say yes, even though it's the same damn thing. (And, hate to pile on, but Rep. Maloney needs to understand that Republicans call Democrats "socialists" whenever Democrats take a breath, so maybe predicating your strategy on "making sure they don't call us socialists" is weakness.)

When I hear that two corporations control most of the podcasts in America, I immediately think that sounds like a job for our antitrust laws! Even though we've had a few generations of right-wing judges who will interpret antitrust law, how shall we put it, rather loosely. I'll admit I never got too much into podcasts, so it's a shame the podcast landscape will be fully-corporatized (and therefore lame!) before I ever do. And yes, I, too, remember when YouTube was good (i.e., before Google got its grubby mitts on it). We need to retrain our minds away from Facebook and Google and YouTube and toward, you know, the vast social network the internet could be.

When Jon Schwarz says "The Idea That Deficit Spending Is a Burden on Our Children Is the Dumbest Propaganda," he specifically means that "(e)very time the federal government sells a bond, it creates a liability for the government. But it also creates an asset for those who bought the bond, in exactly the same amount." Bonds can, of course, be inherited by children, more directly than the public debt can. Trouble is, naturally, that rich folks own most government bonds -- and every time our government cuts taxes for the rich, it issues more bonds to make up for the lost revenue, which means (as Al Franken told us many years ago in Lies and Lying Liars Who Tell Them) rich folks benefit from tax cuts coming and going, as they get lower taxes and the opportunity to buy more bonds.

When I hear that the nefarious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) is behind a lot of state-level bills aiming to "empower" poll watchers to keep folks of color from voting, I'm reminded that ALEC pushed Voter ID bills in the early 2010s, and then, when activists prodded corporations to end their membership in ALEC, ALEC said they wouldn't do stuff like that anymore and would just concentrate on economic issues. So, they lied about that, too. Not that I'm terribly surprised, but someone's gotta note it. (Also, let us remember that a lot of the same corporations that have spoken in favor of voting rights generally still bankroll the same right-wing politicians trying to suppress the vote.)

Robert Reich explains "Why Strongmen Are Losing the Fight Against Covid." Long story short: they all suck at governing, which you'd expect, since they're all good at whining. They're also good at drama and doing Jeff George victory laps, too. Note well that at least 40 percent of Republican voters still won't get the vaccine because their Personal Lord and Savior and his media minions can't do their job right. The good news? "40 percent of Republicans" maps out pretty well on my "25% of the electorate is batshit insane" notion, and we should be used to them by now. The bad news? These fools will keep COVID going long after we should have stamped it out, which I'm sure Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are counting on to bring them back to power.

Finally, I must admit that I found Friday's news dump was especially dispiriting, as President Biden dropped over half a trillion dollars from his American Jobs Plan proposal just to appease Republicans (who were, predictably, not appeased), while his Administration has also apparently abandoned plans to increase access to health care via a public health care option and/or letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, both of which are popular and seem ideal for the American Families Plan. I swear, Democrats are like a football team that goes into prevent defense at the end of the first quarter. If they lose the House and Senate next year, mark Friday, May 21, 2021 as the reason why.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Equality Act, and confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees; also, tell big corporations to stop donating to politicians who restrict voting rights. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below. Good hunting!

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Most folks aren't falling for the ZOMG TEH CHILD MOLESTURZ WILLZ THE VOTEZ!!!!! stupidity, as evidenced by polling finding that two-thirds of Americans support H.R. 1. Newt Gingrich used to say that if 70% of the people want something, they ought to get it, so only a little more education about what's really in the bill -- an end to legislative gerrymandering, automatic and same-day voter registration, 15 days of early voting everywhere, disclosure of campaign donations over $10,000, an end to particularly nefarious forms of racist vote suppression -- should get us over the hump. Even Joe Manchin might hear it then.

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would, as you likely know, plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act by creating a new standard with which our Justice Department could stop vote suppression efforts at the state level (specifically, it would subject any state or locality, not just ones in the South, with a record of vote suppression for extra scrutiny). Why haven't Democrats formally introduced this bill yet, or folded it into the For the People Act? I don't know, but does it matter? What matters is what we want, and what we tell our Congressfolk.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R> 5, the Equality Act. As we speak, states are mulling or passing bills outlawing transgender students from competing in the sports that match their gender. Of course they know no boys will become girls just to dominate girls' sports and sentence themselves not only to a lifetime of making less money playing sports but ostracization from their buddies, but as David Frum instructs us, it's not about winning, or even fighting, it's about looking like you're fighting. Let's remind them there are more important things in life -- you know, like fighting real discrimination that gay and transgender folks face all the time, like getting shut out by banks and landlords and employers strictly on the basis of sex.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's three USPS Board of Governors nominees, not least so they can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy before he runs our Post Office even further into the ground. His big, bold proposal for getting our Postal Service back on its feet: higher prices and worse service. When I say CEOs are overrated, this is kinda what I mean. Don't let folks say he's just doing what has to be done, because this is America! We don't have to have a Post Office that runs badly! Especially when they're only losing money because Congress mandates that they pre-pay 75 years' worth of benefits! It's a manufactured hostage crisis, again! OK, I've run over my exclamation point quota. Anyway, while you've got your Senators on the phone, you can tell them to pass H.R. 695/S. 145, the USPS Fairness Act, which would repeal that Congressional mandate.

Finally, since we spent a lot of time on voting rights today, Public Citizen helps you tell big corporations to stop donating to politicians who suppress votes. Much more useful, I would say, than merely criticizing them in public, though I don't say that's worthless, precisely. But as many smart people have said, these big corporations gave a lot of money to the politicians who passed laws suppressing the vote. And they've done this dance with us before: they used to say they supported the nefarious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) for "economic" reasons, not for Voter ID or Stand Your Ground reasons. It's a load of rubbish. Let's let them know that we know that -- and give them an opening to do better, for once.

Action: concerning COVID relief, the minimum wage, judicial gerrymandering, and right-wing Constitutional conventions.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Today's a good day to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass a vigorous COVID relief bill. Vox has a pretty good summary of what's presently in the bill our House is writing, which includes $1400 checks for folks making under $75,000, $400 in weekly expanded unemployment benefits through August 29, and a $15/hour minimum wage. And in addition to funding more testing and tracing and funding the states, localities, public transportation, and other entities that have suffered from reduced tax revenues during this pandemic, the bill would also expand COBRA subsidies through September, expand Affordable Care Act subsidies, and expand working-family tax credits like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit. And say only two things to folks who worry that a $15/hour minimum wage would "shock the economy": one, the bill gradually increases the minimum wage and won't reach $15/hour for several years, and two, we've spent so much time talking about essential workers during a pandemic that we ought to start paying them like they're essential.

Speaking of the minimum wage, you might also want to call Sens. Manchin (D-WV) and Sinema (D-AZ) and tell them to support the $15/hour minimum wage. (Phone numbers are 202.224.3954 and 202.224.4521, respectively.) Yeah, they "represent conservative states," but if they actually talked to the people they represent, as is their job; Sens. Manchin and Sinema might find a lot more support for the higher minimum wage than the phrase "conservative state" suggests. After all, polls tell us a majority of Republican voters want both the $15/hour minimum wage and the COVID bill passed via budget reconciliation, so it ain't us who are "out of touch." And too many of my fellow liberals keep misreading the politics, too! We can't coddle these Senators "to keep the majority." No one's going to vote Democrat in 2022 because "they sacrificed doing the right thing to doing it the right way." But a whole lot of people will vote Republican in 2022 because "Democrats had all the power and didn't do anything." We've seen this time and time again; how many more times must we see it?

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your PA state legislators to reject the "sore loser" judicial gerrymandering bill, HB 38, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Why "sore loser"? Because PA Republicans are mad that our state Supreme Court has mostly Democrats on it, and want to create "judicial districts" so they can get more Republicans on the Court. Period. If they wanted them on the Court so badly, they should have won all those 2015 Court elections they and their paymasters spent so damn much money on! Our activism against HB 38 has had positive effects: the House Judiciary Committee passed it, but narrowly, and now the state Senate Majority Leader says HB 38 won't pass the full legislature soon enough to get on the ballot by the May primary election. (HB 38, if it passes, would put the question of amending our state Constitution to mandate the creation of "judicial districts" on the ballot.) But HB 38 might make it through the legislature in time for the November election, and this is (to quote a phrase right-wingers love!) one baby we should strangle in its crib.

Finally, right-wing special interest groups (like ALEC!) want to stage an Article V Constitutional convention, which two-thirds of state legislatures could call and then use to pass a slew of anti-freedom constitutional amendments as soon as three-quarters of state legislatures ratify them. 34 state legislatures would have to call the convention; now guess how many state legislatures Republicans currently hold? That's right, 31, which is three states short, but with Republicans controlling the gerrymandering, ahem, redistricting process for the next decade, they may have their 34 with a quickness. They'd need 38 to enact the proposed amendments, but Article V gives no guidance as to how to conduct this convention, so you can only imagine how bad it'd get -- they'd make it "unconstitutional" to stop corporations from polluting, or stop vote suppression, or raise taxes on the rich, or even have Medicare or Social Security. Hence Common Cause helps you tell state legislators you oppose an Article V convention. They'll try to do this while no one's looking, so let's let them know we see them.

Around the table: in which the "white supremacy" zombie shows less resilience than "voter fraud" zombies.

I'm not sure why this excellent article from Sonali Konatkar bears the title "How to Cure America's Vaccine Paranoia," since it doesn't really offer a cure, but it does describe pretty thoroughly how we got to be so paranoid about vaccines, and the root causes don't come exclusively from the right -- liberals hate big pharma, "liberal elites" "priz(e) natural remedies over chemical ones" even when doing that doesn't work, and "Black and brown communities" are wary due to "historical government-sanctioned medical abuse." There's hope in that Americans accept the idea of a COVID vaccine more than they did -- but then our soon-to-be-ex-President still has over a month to screw things up even more than he's already done.

From DJ Cashmere at Yes! magazine we learn about Shannon Foley Martinez, a former neo-Nazi who now helps white supremacists get out of the white supremacy gig. Chief insight, if you needed it, is that white supremacists typically have some kind of "unhealed trauma" in their past -- could be rape, could be abuse suffered at the hands of an adult. The article also reminds us how right-wing politicians threw a tantrum about the spectre of right-wing terrorism that helped delay any kind of federal law enforcement response to it for about a decade -- though I'm less willing to imagine that these politicians have any kind of "unhealed trauma" in their past, unless not creating drama counts as "trauma."

Wondering why Mitch McConnell has this jones for a "liability shield" for corporations that injure good Americans through their COVID-related negligence? Sarah Jones at New York magazine tries to explain. There's been no "wave" of COVID-related lawsuits, and they're actually hard to file (let alone win!) in the first place, but you know big corporate lobbyists, always looking for an opportunity to push their preferred policies on the populace, and this pandemic has been one big opportunity, and who loves big corporations more than Mitch McConnell, who has literally spent his entire career trying to make them more powerful? A lawsuit shield is not only unnecessary, but (in its potential deterrent effect) harmful to actual sufferers with actual grievances.

Yes, that was Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert wondering out loud why there were no Republican electors casting votes at Colorado's state capitol building on Monday when Colorado went for Mr. Biden by nine points, but no, she's not stupid -- she's hoping other people are either stupid or too rage-addled to think straight. Hey, it's worked for her so far. Democrats might reasonably counter her by running a candidate who looks like they might actually fight for their constituents, instead of a candidate who "fits the district" by "not supporting radical ideas," many of which, you'll have noticed by now, are popular ideas (and not particularly radical -- certainly nowhere near as radical as QAnon, which Ms. Boebert has both embraced and rather unconvincingly un-embraced).

The Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez finds our soon-to-be-ex-President "looking for fraud in all the wrong places," by which he means "voter fraud." Long story short: swing states have actually updated their voting machines -- and introduced paper trails -- while a lot of other (mostly red!) states still use electronic machines that don't create paper trails, and these are much more vulnerable to actual vote manipulation. "In other words," he writes, "voter anxiety about election security is being stoked in states that have behaved responsibly, while states that have been less responsive to expert advice get a free pass, because highlighting their shortcomings does nothing to advance a partisan narrative." (Also, paragraph 11 does the best job I've seen of debunking Dominion-related "vote switching" rubbish.)

Finally, speaking of stupid "voter fraud" tales, the Center for Media and Democracy spots the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) at the heart of efforts by Pennsylvania state legislators to overturn election results there. So the next time some corporate ALEC member claims they only affiliate with ALEC because of economic issues and not all those controversial issues, you could respond but you support overthrowing a democratically-elected government. If you're feeling ornery, you could also respond you are objectively anti-democracy.

Action: concerning ALEC, media consolidation, and public lands.

You may have heard that Verizon has lately left the American Legislative Exchange Council because of ALEC's newfound BBF, David Horowitz, a notorious right-wing Muslim-basher. Yeah, I wish more corporations had dumped ALEC over their support for Voter ID and opposition to municipal broadband, too, but I take an opening where I get it, so People for the American Way helps you tell other big corporations, like AT&T, Comcast, and UPS, to leave ALEC. I admit I was a bit surprised to learn that corporations were leaving ALEC over climate change, but I'd be a lot less surprised to find corporations leaving ALEC over David Horowitz. America's big corporations do seem to have wholeheartedly embraced liberal positions on social issues -- mainly, I suspect, to divert your attention from their reactionary positions on economic issues. But, like I said, I take an opening where I get it, and it's ALEC's economic work I hate the most.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, then Free Press still helps you do that. Sprint and T-Mobile keep telling us this merger will be good for them, like we're supposed to be emotionally invested in that -- I'm such a churl I want only the things that are good for all of us, and having three big phone corporations instead of four ain't good for us. If four turns to three, then three can more easily turn to two, and two to one, and one was the number of political parties in the Soviet Union, and you know how that turned out. I don't make this analogy lightly -- one corporation monopolizing all of America's phone services would mean (especially in this post-neutrality age) one corporation deciding what you can see and hear. What do conservatives teach us? That concentrated power anywhere is evil. It's why we passed the Sherman Antitrust Act almost 150 years ago.

Finally, our Bureau of Land Management has proposed opening up almost all of New Mexico's Greater Carlsbad Cavern area to oil and gas drilling, and would even sell off some 50,000 acres for that purpose. Meaning it's no longer public land! Which you can only sell one time, I feel compelled to repeat with the italics hammer. Hence Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell our BLM to reject its plan to open up this area to oil and gas drilling. Read through Wild Earth Guardians's seven-point plan in the email you'd send and you'll be impressed with the breadth of its reasoning -- you would argue for prioritizing "securing public access to currently inaccessible lands" over corporate access and for strong safeguards against emissions and oil and gas leaks, among other things. So let's work on getting our policymakers to make some actual good policy, versus policy that enriches some crony or other.

Around the table: our Administration writes another Democrat attack ad for them! And other tales.

Did you know that 49 states have the ability to bill prisoners for their stay when they get out? And 46 states can put you back in jail for failing to pay your five-digit "debt" to the state. I put "debt" in quotation marks for a reason: you pay your actual debt to society by serving your sentence. And if you get saddled with a $50,000 bill for the cost of incarcerating you, you'll almost certainly never make enough to pay it back (most criminals can't find work as banksters, after all). You can't work it off in prison, either, and certainly not at 50 cents an hour. But wait, there's more! The problem is even worse in states that have privatized their prisons. What a racket!

Ho hum, our President said that tax "reform" would bring $5 trillion back into America -- from corporations that stashed it overseas and pretended it was money made in foreign countries -- but a mere $147 billion has come back. Nobody could have predicted that, given the choice between paying a low percentage on their "foreign" profits and no percentage, corporations would choose the latter! Well, except anyone who thought about it. You like how our politicians act like there's just no way to make corporations pay the taxes they owe? Even though they routinely kill bills that would do that? (And, in a peripherally-related note, Administration economic advisor Larry Kudlow tells the Economic Club of New York that it'll be time to go after Medicare and Social Security after the midterms -- you know, since tax "reform" blew another hole in the budget, not that Mr. Kudlow will say that. His statement is, of course, a Democrat ad that writes itself, and thus a Democrat ad we're not terribly likely to see.)

Michigan's reactionary state legislature passes a paid sick leave law which also makes the minimum wage the same for tipped workers as for everyone else -- but labor activists aren't celebrating. Both of these initiatives were going to go before the voters in November, but now that the legislature has passed them, they're not -- and the legislature can now change the law with a simple majority, instead of the three-quarters supermajority they'd need to overturn laws passed via ballot initiatives. You know how politicians talk about "polishing this turd" when they support bills they know aren't perfect? Well, this is kinda the opposite of that. You might even call it "turding" a bill.

Lisa Song and Al Shaw at ProPublica inform us that Hurricane Florence is very likely to destroy homes that have already collected federally-funded flood insurance payments. And naturally climate change is going to make all that much, much worse. Remember that time John Stossel all but admitted he built a house on the beach so he could collect flood insurance payments? Good times! Seriously, you can't tell people where to live, but it seems to me you can tell developers where to build.

Verizon ends its membership in the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) because of its association with the notorious David Horowitz. You may well be asking, as I did, "Stand Your Ground didn't do it, Voter ID didn't do it, climate change denialism didn't do it, but David Horowitz did?" Mr. Horowitz has, after all, been a sort of ambulance chaser of right-wing causes for decades. But, yeah, he says profoundly ugly crap that's unworthy of a civilized people. And anyway I'll take a hit to ALEC's pocketbook however I can get it.

Finally, Fareed Zakaria takes to the Washington Post an alleged "Threat to Democracy -- From the Left." How has this threat manifested itself? Well, two colleges disinvited right-wing speakers three years apart, the New Yorker changed its mind about having Steve Bannon on a panel last month, Roy Innis never got to debate William Shockley about racism in 1974 though he really really wanted to, and John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes said things about freedom of speech. Really, that's the whole argument. Here's a better, shorter one: the First Amendment only protects you from your government; it does not guarantee a public audience for your views, nor does it guarantee a reputation as a public intellectual. Even if one of our papers of record routinely prints your ramblings.

Action: concerning "free" trade, renewable energy, and climate change.

Ahead of a new (and liberal) Mexican President taking office in December, NAFTA renegotiation talks have resumed, possibly to hand Mexico's outgoing President a "legacy" item. Of course, some politician's legacy doesn't matter -- only our will matters, and with the heightened policy of a renegotiated NAFTA, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk that any renegotiated NAFTA should work for the American people, not for corporations. Word on the street is that the nefarious "investor-state dispute settlement" system (or ISDS) -- the system that would subjugate our laws to a corporate-friendly tribunal, who could exact tribute from the American taxpayer for having the temerity to pass clean air or clean water laws that "cost" some investor some money -- could be toast in a new NAFTA, but we have to make sure it's toast by speaking out. Even if it means our President gets the credit that we actually deserve.

Meanwhile, the coal-powered Navajo Generating Station will close in 2019, but Avenue Capital Group CEO (and big-time Democratic donor) Marc Lasry has mulled buying it and keeping it running for a few more years, which means more pollution, more intractable health care issues, and less renewable energy for the Navajo. And I guess, also, that it means gilded plumbing in Mr. Masry's 19th vacation home; apparently he loves buying up "distressed properties," but when a bankster buys a "distressed property," you can't even guarantee he'll try to fix it up -- he might be trying to bleed the value out of it through fancy financial betting. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell Mr. Lasry to scuttle plans to buy the Navajo Generation Station and invest in renewable energy in the Navajo Nation instead. I mean, as a member of our Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurial Class, he ought to be looking for the next thing, not the last thing.

Finally, after much popular pressure, ExxonMobil has followed BP, Shell, and Conoco Phillips in cutting ties with the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) -- having decided, perhaps, that being a fossil fuel corporation tied to unregenerate climate deniers might be the butt of too many jokes -- but one other big fossil fuel corporation still hasn't done it, so the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Chevron to cut ties with ALEC, too. Apparently they really are the last one, and chances are that associating with notorious climate-change deniers is not something Chevron will want to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. Most of these big fossil fuel corporations funded ALEC for decades, but now's not the time to smirk about that; now's the time to celebrate the fact that ALEC will have less money to push its right-wing ideas (and "model bills"!) on state legislatures. Hey, they said "starve the beast," so that's what we're doing.

Around the table: why Russiagate still comforts liberals, and other lessons.

Glenn Greenwald discusses with Daniel Denvir the "comforting answers" Russiagate "offers to despondent liberals." Long story short: "the Trump victory was a traumatizing and disorienting event for most people," leading folks to "crave an explanation that makes sense and that lets you feel like the world is safe and understandable again." Key reminder: the Russian troll effort was "primitive and pales in comparison to the amount of money spent on messaging by political campaigns, let alone US corporations and lobbyists." And regardless of who goes to jail over Russiagate, I still think the Democrat play-not-to-lose mentality and Republican vote suppression had more to do with the result than Russia could ever hope to have done.

Say, did you hear about that time the National Restaurant Association hired Frank Luntz's group to poll Americans about raising the minimum wage, which of course the "other NRA" opposes -- and found over 70% of Americans perfectly happy to pay restaurant workers more even if it meant higher prices? No? That's likely because the big restaurant lobby, as you might expect, isn't happy with the findings, even though it hired The Father of The Death Tax to get those findings. I am a little appalled that 29% of Americans opposed a minimum wage hike "even if the average food service employee can't make ends meet," until I remember that 25% of the electorate is batshit insane.

Jim Naureckas at FAIRNew York Times hack advising Democrats to be more like "liberals" and less like "progressives." Apparently "liberals" know better than to "eradicate" economic problems like the income gap -- apparently they'd be content with handing out welfare checks, rather than, you know, minimum wage hikes and job-creating taxes on the rich -- and "progressivism" is somehow "intrinsically opposed to conservation," which is as ridiculous as saying conservatism is intrinsically opposed to progress. Anyway, I've never called myself a "progressive," because it's long been the Democrat way of running away from the word "liberal," but articles like the Times's give liberals like me a bad name.

Another week, another Congressional special election in a deep-red district that's somehow a tossup in at least one poll, and we learn that the Republican nominee for Arizona's 8th, current state Senator Debbie Lesko, has "routinely" introduced bills that are little more than ALEC model bills with a few words changed. It'd be nice if her dependence on/work for ALEC scuttled her election bid, but certainly the news has arrived too late (the election's tomorrow), and besides, not everyone knows what the American Legislative Exchange Council is, or how nefarious their works have been over the decades.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted" file: Mitt Romney doesn't even get a majority of votes at the Utah Republican Convention to pick a U.S. Senate nominee (among others) for 2018, and will face a primary against a state Rep who got more votes. Mr. Romney thinks Utahns didn't care for him running at the convention and trying to get enough signatures to appear on the primary ballot anyway, and maybe he's right -- or maybe good Utahns, like everyone else, hate those whom they perceive as "Establishment" politicians.

Finally, in the wake of our newest Supreme Court Justice casting the deciding vote against a part of immigration law allowing detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants who have committed "violent" crimes, our President now wonders aloud if Justice Gorsuch is conservative enough. All together now: one counterexample does not destroy a trend. Also, too, why should a President expect Justices to toe his line? And why should we enable that sort of thinking? That's not what our Founders wanted, was it?

Around the table: the President is not America for the 443rd time, and other musings.

Louisiana and Minnesota legislators introduce anti-protest bills in the wake of protests over pipeline expansions in those states. And the Louisiana bill actually goes further than model ALEC "critical infrastructure" legislation in that you don't actually have to set foot on a pipeline site to go to jail. Again: if you have to pass laws to stifle protests, you've lost the argument. Adults admit when they lose arguments. I guess that means these legislators aren't adults. You know, just like our President.

Jessica Rich at Wired reminds us that -- in the wake of the news that 87 million Americans, not 50 million, may have had their personal info on Facebook compromised by Cambridge Analytica -- that we need basic internet privacy laws in America. Recall that Congress repealed FCC broadband privacy regulations in 2017 and a campaign ad may present itself: the Facebook scandal proves we need stronger privacy laws -- but your Republican Congressperson voted to gut federal privacy laws! Think Democrats will run that? Nah; running ads like that might make people think you'll actually work for them.

Alvin Chang at Vox draws a straight line from tax-cuts-for-the-rich in Oklahoma to the Oklahoma teachers' strike, now almost two weeks old. Over the last 14 years, the state legislature has cut the top bracket from 6.65% to 5%, which wound up depriving Oklahoma of some $350 million in annual education spending, such that Oklahoma kids now only go to school four days a week. You recall, no doubt, that tax-cuts-for-the-rich has put Kansas's public schools in peril, too, though at least Kansas didn't respond to hard economic times by sponsoring an "Oilfield Prayer Day," as Oklahoma did.

Ed Henry at Fox News may have won numerous plaudits for his unexpectedly scorching interview with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, but the network's other programs either a) ignored the interview or b) gave it as much pro-Administration spin as possible. And this is exactly how one would do evil propaganda -- put up the occasional negative report to say "see, we're not so bad," and then bury that negative report as deeply as possible on programming that gets the most eyeballs. It's rather similar to how they've been using Shepard Smith for years. Hell, it's how they've been using their internet reporting for years.

Finally, hot on the heels of two FBI raids of the office of our President's personal lawyer, our President calls the FBI raid "an attack on our country in the truest sense." If he has a serious point to make about, say, the way the FBI got its warrants for the raid, you'll never hear it underneath all his TEH UNFAIRNEZZ!!!! and TEH WITCH HUNTZ!!!! And one more time: the President is not America. I locate the greatness of America in our people and our traditions, not our President. Perhaps Dr. Johnson should have said that conflating yourself with your country is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Around the table: more thoughts about guns, health care, corporate crime, and "environmental terrorism."

Thom Hartmann at AlterNet offers "Two Simple Laws" that "Could Solve America's Epidemic of Violence." These would a) treat semi-automatic weapons exactly the same under the law as automatic weapons and b) regulate gun ownership the way we regulate car ownership. Remember, cars may be killing machines, but they also get us places; guns are just killing machines. Even if you don't want to ban guns outright, it's hard to argue against getting proper training and licensing before buying killing machines -- unless you're a snowflake, that is. Seriously, no whining about ALL TEH RED TAPEZ!!!! It makes you look stupid and lazy.

Jonathan Chait at New York magazine says our current Administration has fomented "a Golden Age for Corporate Crime." The SEC, whose job is to protect shareholders from malevolent executives, is of course bringing far fewer cases and hauling in far less money in penalties than Mr. Obama's 2016 SEC did over a comparable period of time -- please recall that Mr. Obama spent eight years bending over backward to please banksters after they destroyed our economy -- and the EPA, whose job is to protect our air and water from polluters, has of course collected less than half the money in fines that Tha Bush Mobb did in its first year in office (though, to be fair, Tha Bush Mobb was still trying to look like reasonable moderates back then). And that's before we get to the CFPB dropping a major case against a loanshark outfit, then lying that CFPB employees -- the same ones who'd spend years building the case -- made the call! It's enough to make a man wish these CFPB employees could sue their boss for libel.

Idaho Republicans announce plan to defy the Affordable Care Act, by letting insurers sell plans that don't meet the ACA's standards in re lifetime caps, covered conditions, and pre-existing conditions. The Otter Administration is placing one good bet in assuming that the current Administration won't bother enforcing the Affordable Care Act, but they're placing one very bad bet in assuming that the good citizens of Idaho will simply take it lying down, pre-existing conditions bans being, as you know, very popular. I'd like to remind Idaho populists hemming and hawing about running for office that this is the state that sent Frank Church to the Senate four times.

Ho hum, Blue Cross is pressuring its employees to donate to the Michigan Democratic gubernatorial candidate who doesn't support single-payer health insurance. And Gretchen Whitmer (whose dad use to run Blue Cross, no less!) is just like other weakling Democrats, refusing to answer direct questions about corporate contributions to her campaign while touting her willingness to "work with everyone," as if everyone's worth working with. What do you suppose the chances are that Blue Cross demands its employees donate to the Republican candidate once Ms. Whitmer wins her primary? It's a question worth asking!

When confronted with this lengthy report on how our government wants you to think environmental activists are "terrorists," you might well be compelled to ask: why aren't laws protecting vandalism on private property enough? After all, any activist who (for example) shuts off an oil pipeline valve knows they're breaking the law. I can only conclude that law and order simply isn't good enough for corporations who have lost the argument and won't change with the times. Bonus: ALEC can only come up with anecdotal evidence about "environmental terrorism" to make its argument -- and most of its anecdotes are rubbish!

Finally, Sen. Ted Cruz, talking with another right-wing hack, discusses that Simpsons episode where Homer goes all 2nd-Amendment and Lisa opposes him and utters this priceless flatugasm: "The Democrats are the party of Lisa Simpson and Republicans are happily the party of Homer, Bart, Maggie and Marge." If you want to say Democrats are so-smart-they're-dumb, you don't liken them to the Simpsons character who actually knows science, thinks hard about things, and plays a mean saxophone. Is it too much to ask that, after this, nerds never vote Republican in significant numbers again?

Around the table: the right-wing war on free speech continues!

Thought the slew of anti-protest bills had slowed since early last year? Well, not exactly: the National Lawyers Guild now counts 58 anti-protest bills introduced in 31 states since November 2016, and while a lot of these are the same bills from last year, now anti-government groups like ALEC are getting into the business of writing them. The bill prohibiting protests near "critical infrastructure" that passed in Oklahoma last year, for example? ALEC is exporting that legislation as we speak, as well as "campus free speech" bills like the one that passed in Wisconsin, bills that naturally curtail the free speech of protestors. Gosh, can't anyone defend themselves against criticism anymore?

Right-wing Florida state legislator says the Miami and Tampa sports authorities should cancel Lorde concerts because she supports the BDS movement aimed at getting Israel to withdraw from Palestine. I suspect Mr. Fine rather overinterprets state law (which I still believe to be constitutional, though odious), and he does so not because he believes in law and order, or even because he thinks Israel does no wrong -- he does so because the only thing a right-winger can do anymore is get in swordfights with other right-wingers. And he'll never lose an election until he runs against a populist liberal.

Scott Shackford at Reason finds a pair of Alabama law enforcement poobahs who oppose efforts to reform that state's asset forfeiture laws. I'll admit that when I encountered these guys saying police would have to arrest more people and also that police would arrest fewer people in successive paragraphs, I was tempted to say hey, Jonah Goldberg called, and he wants his imploding argument machine back. Mr. Shackford's work picking apart the lies of the pro-asset forfeiture crowd also rewards careful study.

We asked for it, and we got it: the FCC Inspector General will investigate FCC Chair Ajit Pai to see whether his agency's loosening of media consolidation rules constituted a "sweetheart deal" for Sinclair Broadcasting. Dig the FCC spokeshack suggesting that Mr. Pai's loosening, ahem, modernizing of media consolidation rules couldn't possibly be corrupt because he's been calling for those rule changes for years! Never mind what he might actually have said to Sinclair! Also, too, what are "the merits of his proposals"? I guess, for this FCC spokeshack, assertion equals proof.

Finally, I wish it were a more surprising development that a Nazi wannabe group in Florida said they let the accused Parkland, FL high school shooter train with them a bit, but of course the so-called Republic of Florida needs all the attention it can get, and of course in the Trump era groups like these no longer feel ashamed of their sincere desire to take rights away from other people or air their whiny grievances against women and Jews. Still, it might have been smarter for them to clam up, so that Dear Leader can continue to tell everyone that brown people commit all the terrorism. Anyway, let's never mention the Republic of Florida again.

Around the table: concerning campaign finance, corporate welfare, tax "reform," and approaching rural Americans.

A Tampa Bay Times/WTSP-TV/TEGNA investigation finds dozens of "zombie campaigns" still spending money years after their candidates stop running for office. The culprits range from infamous Florida Republican Mark Foley still charging his campaign for $450 lunches 11 years after leaving Congress in disgrace and Democrat Robin Tallon, Jr. somehow spending large amounts of campaign money 25 years after leaving Congress all the way to folks I've long respected, like the late Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-OH), whose campaign spent over $4,500 in Ohio State football tix three years after he retired, and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), whose dormant Presidential campaign paid his daughter over $16,000 between 2015 and 2017. And at least eight campaigns spent money after their candidates died -- which means that Mr. Trump's 2020 re-election campaign will almost certainly survive us all.

In a related note, the Center for Media and Democracy informs us that ALEC's new national chair, a North Carolina state rep named Jason Saine, has spent nearly $20,000 in campaign funds on new suits. Mr. Saine says he needs his suits specially-tailored because he's "short and fat" (his words), and, sadly, his donors probably accept that reasoning, since they're getting what they're paying for -- a "representative" whose "conservatism" consists entirely of serving big corporations (pre-empting local anti-fracking laws, now there's small-government conservatism for you!) or stoking rage in the already rage-addled (limiting free speech on campus, because what's more "small government" than telling people what they can't say?)

EPI researchers inform us that the data proving that giving Amazon tax incentives corporate welfare to build another headquarters in a particular county "just isn't there." Or, more precisely, the data proving that Amazon job creation won't be offset by local job losses caused by Amazon (which, you know, closes down Mom-and-Pop stores with a vengeance!) just isn't there. You'd think states and localities would realize they have Amazon by the short-hairs, since Amazon has to build warehouses just to keep up its super-fast order fulfillment and shipping, but then again, they serve mammon, not you and I. (In a related note, Amazon's insistence that unemployment has gone down 4.8% "on average" in counties it's built in over the last five years isn't that impressive, considering that the national unemployment rate has gone down almost 4% during that time, while the U6 unemployment rate -- which adds in folks who've given up on the job search and part-timers who want to work full-time -- has gone down over six points during that time.)

Now this is truly remarkable: Paul Ryan proudly twittered that a public school employee was getting an extra $1.50 per paycheck thanks to the Trump tax "reform," and that would take care of her Costco membership for an entire year! Most folks aren't going to notice an extra buck-fifty a week, of course, and you may recall that Sen. McConnell (R-KY) slammed President Obama's Making Work Pay tax cut for only giving folks a piddling $7 extra a week. Meanwhile, the average one-percenter, per the Tax Policy Center, will get an extra $980 weekly from the tax "reform." I guess if Mr. Ryan ever had to count the cost of anything, ever, he'd have known to keep his mouth shut. And if a buck-fifty is the boon coming to most Americans from tax "reform," Republicans might actually be in trouble this November.

Finally, Ivy Brashear at Yes! magazine explains "Why Rural America Isn't a Lost Cause for Progressive Ideas." Short answer to title question: people hate what the politicians they've got have done to them, so why not pitch real hopes and dreams to them? How to do it: meet with rural folks on their turf, talk straight to them, and talk about their problems first and then describe how liberal ideas can solve them. You know what I'd add? Don't tell them the economy's changing and they all have to learn how to write computer code to keep up -- not just because they've got plenty of mainstream Democrats in their ear telling them to do that, but because it doesn't remind them that they have the power, and the right, to bend the world in their direction a bit.

Action: national monuments, methane emissions, and ALEC.

As you likely know, President Trump has announced his intention to reduce the boundaries of the Bears' Ears National Monument by 85% and reduce the boundaries of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by about half. And he even went to Utah to make these announcements, perhaps figuring that everyone in Utah believes exactly as big mining corporations executives do -- that public lands should be drilled and mined as much as humanly possible. And here, you might have been thinking, like me, that Utah's a damn gorgeous state and the people there probably want to keep it that way. There's some question as to whether the President actually has any authority in law to shrink the size of national monuments, but Mr. Trump loves doing crap first and trying to use the consequences of his actions against us later, so let's engage in a little pre-emption, as it were, by letting the Wilderness Society help us tell President Trump to abandon his plan to give up large swaths of these national monuments to mining and drilling corporations. Did I mention that five Native American tribes consider Bears Ears' land holy? Think maybe that's just another reason for President Trump to hate it?

Meanwhile, as you may recall, the Trump Administration wants to delay implementing the EPA's new methane emissions standards for two years, presumably so they can gut them after that (though saying so out loud, as they've done, won't help them win the inevitable lawsuits against them). Of course you already know why this is a crappy idea: not just because methane pollutes the air, not just because methane packs a much larger climate-change punch than coal, but because allowing gas drilling corporations to vent methane into the air wastes energy -- methane being, you know, an energy source -- and when gas drilling corporations vent methane on public lands, they're also cheating the American taxpayer out of well-deserved royalties. Of course, President Trump doesn't care about any of that, as long as some executive, somewhere, is raking in money he hasn't earned through hard work and good leadership. And "delaying" the rule for two years does what, exactly? Besides give more children asthma attacks and make more good Americans sick from carcinogens, I mean. So the Sierra Club helps you tell our government to put people ahead of polluters and stop trying to delay methane emissions regulations.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell the CEO of UPS to stop funding the radical right-wing legislative agenda of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. I've found that the corporations that still associate with ALEC think it's perfectly OK to say that they don't agree with ALEC on voting rights or climate change or gun rights, but they support ALEC because of their work on economic issues. If there was ever an argument tailor-made to repel me, that's the one. Of course, everyone doesn't think the same way I do (a matter about which many people are thankful, I'm sure), and plenty of corporations have abandoned ALEC for reasons that seem (to me, at least) to be of secondary importance to the fact that ALEC's main reason to exist is to keep corporations far more powerful than people. But if "ALEC is a bunch of climate change-deniers and I know you care about passing on an inhabitable planet to your posterity, don't you?" gets more corporations to abandon ALEC, I'm on board. I'm a demanding bastard, but I don't let the perfect murder the good. And depriving ALEC of the funding it uses to let corporations run roughshod over people? Doing that seems to me almost a textbook definition of "good."

Around the table: Greece's Barack Obama, and other tragedies.

Research deriving from "literally 'millions' of ocean measurements over time" shows oxygen levels already falling in our oceans -- which scientists have long predicted to be a result of climate change. That'll affect marine life in a big way, which may not impress you until you recall how many industries (like, you know, fisheries) rely on marine life. (In a related note, the Senate votes on Scott Pruitt for EPA Administrator today; you might want to call your Senators about that.)

In case you were wondering how it's going in Greece, well, people it's bad. If anyone needed to leave the EU it's Greece, but Alexis Tsipras is a lot like Barack Obama -- coming into office with a burst of hope and a clear mandate from the people (a mandate, I feel compelled to add, that the people gave Mr. Tsipras again in a national referendum on yet another lousy "bailout"), but he's completely bollocksed it up, and having seen this play before, I'm not willing to consider that he's playing a long game.

Betsy DeVos "fires back at protestors," saying their actions "demonstrate() just how hostile some people are to change and to new ideas." Uh, no: their actions demonstrate how the public at large reacts to bad ideas that have been failing our children for at least 20 years. And in case you were reminiscing about the Glory Days of the Republic During the Obama Administration, there was Mr. Obama's first Education Secretary criticizing the protestors, too.

David Dayen at The New Republic says Andrew Puzder didn't become Labor Secretary because "his beliefs included the one idea conservatives would not abide: support for immigration reform." Mr. Dayen, as astute an observer of American politics as one could imagine, believes the combination of Mr. Puzder's immigration politics, his undocumented housekeeper, and his domestic violence allegations finished him, not "fast-food workers protesting in the streets" or "his reign of terror" as a fast-food CEO. Perhaps he's right. But I also say our work is just beginning.

Finally, in a completely surprising development, the American Legislative Exchange Council, once "skeptical" about a Donald Trump Presidency, is now quite sanguine about the coming horror because of course they are! In other news, the Pope is Catholic, bears poop in the woods, and Democrat weaklings keep masturbating to dreams of a "Grand Bargain" with Republicans. Seriously, I keep saying that looking for fissures between right-wingers is a fool's game, and right-wingers keep proving me right.

Around the table: the good news behind the bad news.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers grants final permit allowing completion of Dakota Access pipeline. Of course, their reversal is so abrupt (occurring not even two months after declaring they needed to do more environmental impact study) that they probably didn't cross their t's and dot their i's, which will matter to a federal judge even if it doesn't matter to President Trump. Expect more media coverage of Mr. Trump's apparent investments in Phillips 66, one of the corporations behind Dakota Access.

Senate confirms Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary. Three things about that: one, I'm pleased that we could make Mike Pence come out and break a 50-50 tie in the Senate; two, I'm also pleased the Trump Administration had to delay Jeff Sessions's confirmation vote because they needed his vote in the Senate to get DeVos through, and three, she still has to follow the law as Education Secretary, and we have tools to make her do that.

Organization conceived as a "progressive answer to ALEC" sees hope for positive change at the state level in the coming years. You won't be surprised by much of what you read here -- the State Innovation Exchange (or SiX) gets "more requests and more enthusiasm" from folks in red states than in blue ones, the left has failed to organize for the long-term like the right did in the early 1970s (and for bad reasons, too!), and a lot of state legislators work part-time for little money, and are thus susceptible to organizations like ALEC (and SiX, we hope!).

Politico says Republicans are worrying about Donald Trump's budget blowing a hole in the budget. Oh, horsedoodle -- of course fiscal "hawks" will eventually back Mr. Trump's budget, because deficits only matter when a Democrat's President. And remember what I said last month: "liberal" media reports on Republican "fissures" are all feints, designed to keep you from doing your job as a citizen, which is to communicate your will to your Representatives.

Bush Mobb attorney/"torture memo" author John "the Ballcrusher" Yoo shares his "grave concerns about Mr. Trump’s uses of presidential power." But of course we shouldn't be so impressed that someone with a law degree sees trouble with Rudy Giuliani's utterance that Mr. Trump wanted a "Muslim ban." And let's not indulge in all that "miss Bush yet?" silliness, too -- if not for people like John Yoo, Mr. Trump wouldn't be getting away with what he's getting away with today.

Finally, we learn that the solar-energy sector now provides twice as many jobs in America as the coal sector. The oil industry still employs more folks than solar, but the gas industry doesn't, not quite. Still, you just know coal corporations will use this statistic to argue that the solar power industry just isn't that "efficient." And then they'll have the cojones to say environmental regulations kill jobs! Venal CEOs kill jobs more efficiently than any regulation ever could.

Around the table: tax hikes, border walls, state legislators, and conflicts of interest.

Tony Nitti at Forbes reminds us that repealing the Affordable Care Act will also amount to "Tax Cuts for the Rich" and "Tax Increases and Lost Insurance for the Rest." Small tax hikes on income above $250,000 fund the ACA, and tax breaks help lower-income consumers pay their premiums through the exchanges. If Republicans get rid of these things, as they're aching to do, the top 1% of income earners will see, on average, a $33,000 windfall -- while taxpayers making up to $89,000 will see a tax increase. If that isn't a middle-class tax hike, I don't know what is.

So, about that Donald Trump "mandate": Pew Research finds that less than four in 10 Americans think building that great big wall across our border with Mexico is a top priority. People constantly talk about how stupid Americans supposedly are, but I see this as an indication that we're not stupid -- why, it's almost like we know that 20-foot walls only mean 22-foot ladders! (Note well that it's not necessarily "inconsistent" that 62% want "most" undocumented immigrants be able to stay here legally and 58% of folks want to increase deportations -- it's not going to be the same 58% saying both, though there'll be some overlap, and folks don't necessarily know exactly how many undocumented immigrants are here or how many we're deporting.)

Robert Faturichi at ProPublica reports -- in an admirably restrained manner that more resembles unbiased journalism than anything the "liberal" media puts out -- on how right-wing lobbying groups like ALEC plan to keep state legislatures red. These ALEC people sure do have message discipline -- ALEC's vice president of policy tells us that state legislators aren't "the trailblazers of developing policies," but are rather "the retail consumers" of policy. How many times must I tell these pimps! Everything is not a business! And if legislators must be "consumers" of bills, they should go to their constituents, not special interest groups, to get their fix.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) got a lot of notoriety for pushing that whole Office of Congressional Ethics rollback that American citizens stopped last week, and Sue Sturgis at Facing South suggests Mr. Goodlatte might have had a personal reason to push ethics changes: his wife owns stock in a corporation that's trying to build a pipeline through West Virginia and Virginia, and Mr. Goodlatte has gone to bat for it. No use Mr. Goodlatte saying the pipeline doesn't run through his district, when he's tried to get the FERC to act on the pipeline. (He's also suggested it's important that his wife owns the stock, not him, which shouldn't fly with anyone who's ever planned finances with their spouse.)

Finally, the Wall Street Journal finds that businesses in which Donald Trump has at least a 30 percent ownership stake owe at least $1.8 billion to various creditors. Which is more evidence of what I keep saying: that the major drag on our democracy isn't taxes, but debt. I fear we're about to see that played out in a very, very big way for the next four or eight years, as Mr. Trump makes decision after decision that's completely inexplicable until you follow the debt trail.

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: messages of hope and caution.

In case you were wondering, President Obama does, in fact, plan to nominate someone to replace Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. He also pointedly refused to say he would nominate someone "moderate" just to "to ensure the process runs smoothly." Early scuttlebutt was that he would nominate D.C. District Court Judge Sri Srinivasan, who would be too pro-corporate for my taste, but would also present the Senate with a dilemma in rejecting a man for the Supreme Court they already approved by a 97-0 vote for the District Court. (And when Republicans say "he's only been at the D.C. Court for two years," Democrats could respond, "oh, you mean like John Roberts and Clarence Thomas?")

Robert Reich announces "The Death of the Republican Party," as well as its replacement by "warring tribes." It's worth a read, but "Libertarians," "market fundamentalists," "Wall Street titans," and "billionaires" actually do have a significant amount in common, and recall that we've been hearing about the "Death of the Republican Party" for many years now; as long as the banksters favor them, the party ain't going nowhere. It'll just become more reactionary, and there's no guarantee -- again, as long as the banksters favor them -- that the American people will turn on them en masse.

The Ford Motor Company severs ties with that right-wing bill mill, the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC). It may have something to do with ALEC's reactionary position on climate change, a position that Ford, as an automobile manufacturer, would at least want to appear progressive about, which means Ford may not actually want to be progressive about climate change. Still, the move denies ALEC real cash money, and don't think that doesn't hurt.

Nine U.S. Senators ask the Department of Education to cut off Title IV funding to any for-profit college that uses forced arbitration clauses with its students. And the Dept. of Ed can do this without running to Super Great and Awesome Real American President Mitch McConnell or Boy Wonder Paul Ryan for permission, not because AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!! but because Congress delegated this authority to the Executive branch long ago. But the wheels of the Executive branch do seem to grind slowly -- how many weeks has it been now since hearing that President Obama was "seriously considering" campaign finance disclosure for federal contractors? And how many years since we started telling him to do it?

Finally, Thomas Piketty, author of the unexpectedly best-selling Capital in the 21st Century, says that with the success of Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic nomination race, "in many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections." I have dared to hope the same, and I hope Mr. Piketty is right -- but it sure does seem that Our Glorious Elites fight like cornered animals, and it has seemed that way to me for over a dozen years.

Action: war in the Middle East, big money in political campaigns, and the "sun tax."

With the situation in Syria deteriorating "in spite of" President Obama's unilateral air strikes, Just Foreign Policy helps you tell our government to give more help to Syrian refugees and negotiate with all parties, including Russia and Iran, to end the bloodshed. Right-wingers who think negotiation is for weaklings might want to check themselves to make sure they're not projecting, and when they point to the Iran negotiations as an example of how negotiating with your enemies is always wrong because you can't "trust" them, they should note the stringent inspection regime that agreement produced, and thus should not expect that just because Iran would be involved with these negotiations that we would simply "trust" Iran about anything in particular. They should also know that bombing everyone into the stone age is not a mark of strength, but a mark of weakness. Accomplishing peace, real peace where everyone's a stakeholder and everyone's accountable, is strength. Is it too much to ask that reasonable adults get more of the say about things in America than rage-filled right-wingers?

Meanwhile, Common Cause helps you tell the IRS to vigorously regulate the so-called "social welfare" non-profits that have been spending millions of dollars on political campaigning. 501(c)4 groups can keep their donors secret because they have, historically, been civic organizations doing things like publishing community newspapers and organizing community sports leagues, but groups like Crossroads GPS, the nefarious creation of Karl Rove, are somehow 501(c)(4) "social welfare" non-profits despite pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into political campaigns. Do they seriously want to argue that trying to elect knuckle-dragging Republicans who will clamp down on any government program that actually helps people promotes "social welfare"? I'd be glad to have that argument. The IRS's actual proposal suggests they're not the model of courage right now, their investigations into right-wing groups some years back being totally overblown by both the right and the "liberal" media, but the right thing to do is still the right thing to do, whether right-wingers whine about it or not.

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your state legislators to fight back against big fossil fuel corporations' attempts to cripple the solar power industry. So far, the "sun tax" initiatives pushed by groups like the Koch brothers -- you know, the ones that try to cripple home solar power creators' ability to sell their power to utility corporations, under the absurd reasoning that folks who spent tens of thousands of dollars to create their own power are "free riders" -- have occurred at the state level, and in the aftermath of the 2016 elections, however they turn out, that could well change, but we should fight for solar power at the state level before the battle goes nationwide. And that means going directly to the same state legislators far too prone to regurgitate whatever ALEC tells them to. We really do live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society when so-called "conservatives" try to stop people from making their own power, and try to destroy an industry adding jobs at twenty times the national average. But this is a democracy, so we can fix that.

Action: featuring political prisoners, banksters, and fossil fuel corporations.

First things first. The government of Iran has imprisoned Bahareh Hedayat since 2010, for "crimes" including "insulting the President," "insulting the Supreme Leader," protesting discrimination against women, and writing a letter encouraging other good Iranians to continue struggling peacefully for change. Oh, and also "gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security," which is what they all say when all their "charges" make them sound like whiny brats who can't take the heat. And Ms. Hedayat's sentence runs until 2020. Note to American right-wingers: this is what oppression actually is -- this is not criticism or shame from your friends and neighbors, this is a government actually taking people's freedom away because they said and did things that government didn't like. Still, the Big Stick of Bad PR works here as it does elsewhere; Iran's government may pretend it doesn't care very much what other folks think, but they live in a world with other people in it just like the rest of us, so Change.org helps you tell the Iranian government to release Ms. Hedayat.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1709, the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Sometimes you have to communicate your will to your Congressfolk hundreds of times before they get it, and we're better off thinking that doing something will help than throwing up our hands and giving up, because that would be throwing up your hands and giving up on democracy, and I won't have that, not in my America. Yes, it's disheartening that we're seven years into the Hope and Change era and banksters still run the damn show, but banksters are also the George Zimmerman of the economy -- they get away with horrible crap, but everyone hates them. The 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act would help keep banksters out of the speculation business, and thus force them to do the things that actually help economies, like loaning money to budding small businesses. Really, I don't want banksters to be so hated. I want them to stop doing the things that prompt the rest of us to hate them. And I'm happy to help them do that.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell ExxonMobil to cut ties with ALEC. ExxonMobil has, as you might imagine, more incentive to cut ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council than most: ALEC has become synonymous with climate change denialism, and a big fossil-fuel corporation like ExxonMobil would want to at least pretend they care about the world they're going to leave to future generations. And no amount of advertising about their "commitment" to reversing the effects of climate change would convince anyone if they still hung with ALEC. Of course they'll tell us that hanging with ALEC is solely about ALEC's reactionary economics, as if that is going to make any of us happy, but we know better. And ExxonMobil has one other incentive: having done a crapload of actual climate change research back in the day, they face the possibility of a RICO lawsuit, much like the one that punished the tobacco corporations for lying about the health effects of cigarettes. There's no need to keep that arrow in your quiver if you're not inclined to do so.

Around the table: yeoman work from five actual journalists, plus Jeb Bush blames Obama and Clinton for Iraq.

Brian Murphy, writing at Talking Points Memo, gives us a thorough exposé of Scott Walker's ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC, the lobbying organization responsible for so many horrible bills at the state level). You'll see the same theme, over and over again: Scott Walker breaking promises of more legislative transparency, instead springing right-wing legislative surprises on the people of Wisconsin, though they're not surprises to him or his ALEC buddies. Remember that when he tries to seem "moderate" after he gets the nomination.

And Steve Horn and Michael Aria, writing at Nation of Change, introduce us to the multitudinous lobbyists who benefited from Gov. Walker's $250 corporate welfare handout to the Milwaukee Bucks for a new stadium. Warning: a lot of these nefarious folks are Democrats, including Tom Barrett, who lost to Scott Walker in gubernatorial elections twice in a two-year period. In case you were wondering how Scott Walker keeps winning: a big part of it is that his Democrat opponents are corrupt weaklings.

Amanda Frank, writing for the Center for Effective Government's The Fine Print blog, debunks the "Texas Miracle" myth of low government regulation leading to a boom energy economy. Actual facts: not only does fracking pollute good Texans' drinking water, and not only do more than half of Texas schoolkids go to school near hazardous chemical facilities, but Texas still has a lot of poverty, a lot of uninsured, and a lot of good folks working full-time who still need taxpayer assistance to make ends meet. Come to think of it, pushing Rick Perry's "Texas Miracle" might do for Republicans in 2016 what Michael Dukakis's "Massachusetts Miracle" did for Democrats in 1988. Think they remember?

Jeff Gelles, writing at the Philadelphia Inquirer, tells the story of one Matthew J. Hartigan, who has spent nearly two decades trying to convince a multitude of creditors that he's not the Matthew J. Hartigan who's skipped out on property taxes in Northeast Philadelphia -- which he couldn't be, since he would have been 12 when the other Mr. Hartigan bought those properties. Good news? He's beaten back all comers so far. Bad news? Not everyone has the good fortune of being legally unable to purchase a property at the alleged time.

Finally, there's Jeb Bush, actually blaming Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the rise of ISIS. Haters will of course agree with Mr. Bush, but actually ISIS, too, is all George W. Bush's fault -- we can blame Mr. Obama for launching another unconstitutional war, one that will fail to eradicate ISIS no less, but no doubt Mr. Bush just thinks the President isn't killing enough people, even if he's hesitant to say so right now.

Around the table: featuring stories about crime, taxes, and paid leave.

Big oil corporation Shell has severed ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC), saying that ALEC's climate change stance "is clearly inconsistent with our own." Yeah, they're doing it to get good PR for themselves, but they're also depriving ALEC of contributions ALEC needs to continue its nefarious operations, so good for them. And good for you, for pressuring them and others like them.

In light of the various tax proposals floated by Republicans at their debates the other night, Kelly Phillips Erb provides a good summary of the progressive income tax, the so-called Fair Tax (which is a national sales tax), and the flat tax. I'd quarrel with her suggestion that our current tax code is convoluted because it's progressive -- it's convoluted because big corporations keep buying themselves tax breaks, and because cowardly Democrats keep tweaking the system so they can increase revenue without seeming to increase taxes -- but thank God she got the rate of the national sales tax right; it's 30%, not 23%, as Fair Taxers have long claimed by doing the math wrong. (But BTW: tithing is charity; paying taxes isn't, since we receive services in exchange for taxes.)

Netflix adopts a new paid leave policy allowing new moms and dads to take the entire first year of their child's life off, if they like. That only applies to the first year, of course -- they're not going to get a full year of leave to be spread out over, say, the first five years -- but the new policy won't apply to low-paid DVD distribution center workers, and Netflix has a notorious enough workplace culture that the salaried workers might be a bit scared to take the time off. But policy is policy, and I'd think Netflix would open themselves up to lawsuits if they discriminated, even for perceived work shortcomings.

From the "nobody could have predicted except everybody" file: four police officers in San Luis Obispo County (CA) get arrested for abusing children at a week-long boot camp. I will smack any pimp who claims that criticizing or charging these officers is "anti-discipline," as if the only two alternatives to any problem you might have with children are abusing them and doing nothing -- or as if the word "discipline" only means "beating people up" (as looking up the Latin root will instruct you).

Finally, The Straight Dope tries to discover if "any one crime" (i.e., drug use) is the main reason for the skyrocketing imprisonment rate in America. Long story short: it's not so much the "war on drugs" as the whole "tough-on-crime" ethos that has pervaded law enforcement since 1970 -- an ethos that has lately been unraveling, though rather too slowly for my taste.

Action: fracking, animal abuse, and ALEC.

Roots Action helps you tell Gov. Jerry Brown to end fracking and "extreme oil extraction" in California. Why? California provides almost half of America's fruits and vegetables, and is, as you know, enduring a protracted drought, yet while Gov. Brown has mandated that citizens use less water, he has not asked gas and oil drillers to curtail their activities, though their activities also impact California's water supply. And not just by putting carcinogenic fracking chemicals into the groundwater, either -- California regulators have caught oil corporations pumping wastewater right into the state's water supply, and scientists have caught oil corporations selling their wastewater to farmers to irrigate crops. Enjoy those strawberries! It'd be different if oil and gas drillers would take better care of the water that belongs to all of us, but they won't -- it cuts into a CEO's ability to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, you know. Corporations won't act responsibly until we make them, and making our government act on our behalf is our best tool toward that end.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2016/S. 1081, the Refuge from Cruel Trapping Act, would forbid our government from using "body-gripping traps," like snare traps and steel-jaw traps, in our National Wildlife Refuge areas, because, well, how would you like your leg caught in a steel trap? I can almost hear right-wingers squealing ZOMG HOW DO WE CATCH TEH ANIMULZ IF WE CAN'T USEZ TEH TRAPZ!!!! Perhaps not surprisingly, actually reading S. 1081 will answer that question: Section 2 specifically says "any cage or box trap or suitcase-type live beaver trap" is OK to use in Refuge areas. Refuge workers mostly trap small animals, as it happens -- and even trapping a larger animal, like a bear, might only require a larger cage or box trap and/or tranquilizer darts. Consider, also, that traps like steel traps will snap shut on any animal who happens upon it -- they're not "smart" traps that only shut on the animal you're trying to catch. So a Change.org petition helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight animal cruelty by supporting the Refuge from Cruel Trapping Act.

Finally, over 100 corporations have cut ties with ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, as their nefarious legislative projects at the state level (including Voter ID bills, "sun taxes," tort "reform" bills, and ag-gag bills) have become more well-known -- and this has helped deplete their operating budget, a much better way of describing "starving the beast" than you'll hear from the right. Still, over 400 corporations continue to associate with ALEC, and one of them is State Farm, so the Sierra Club helps you tell State Farm to cut ties with ALEC. Why? Well, several big corporations have lately left ALEC over ALEC's opposition to doing anything about climate change, and State Farm has promoted its own sustainability efforts on its official website, and with climate change causing more and more severe weather events, State Farm could one day soon be paying out rather more to compensate damage due to natural disasters than they take in. You'd think they'd be far-sighted about this matter, but corporations seem to care more and more about the short term these days, so they may need our help.

Action: land thievery, redistricting, and "ag-gag" laws.

Arizona's two U.S. Senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, snuck a rider into last year's National Defense Appropriations Act handing over a big chunk of the Tonto National Forest -- a part of the Forest that the San Carlos Apache use for its religious rituals, including coming-of-age celebrations -- to mining corporations. If you're wondering what exactly mining has to do with defense, you're not alone -- but if you're noting what big corporate campaign contributions have to do with the lawmaking process, you're ahead of the game, for the Tonto National Forest has enjoyed protected status (and been threatened with attempts to hand it off as corporate welfare) for over half a century. Stunning thing is, even this retrograde Congress appears to be reconsidering the McCain/Flake gambit, ahead of Apache leaders' planned cross-country trip from Arizona to Washington, D.C., and so Avaaz helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the legislative rider that took sacred Apache land away from them and gave it to mining corporations. After all, it can't just be Christians who have religious freedom in America, can it?

Meanwhile, hot off a victory in the Supreme Court for independent redistricting commissions and against big-donors-take-all gerrymandering, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2173, the Redistricting Reform Act, which would take redistricting out of the hands of state legislatures and into the hands of independent commissions more responsive to the will of the people. What have we learned about the redistricting process? That the folks who gerrymander districts can now exclude individual streets and even individual homes from districts just to ensure their paymasters' victory, and that when political parties control the process, they'll make the districts that'll get their party more seats in Congress -- not just in Republican-held legislatures like Pennsylvania's, but in Democratic-held legislatures like California's. And those who contend that H.R. 2173 is a mere "Democrat power grab" would do better to argue that independent commissions themselves are somehow anti-democracy. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're not prepared to make that argument.

Finally, you remember the Bob Barker-narrated video from the other day, showing animal abuse in factory farms? Quite harrowing, that thing was -- and in a state with an "ag-gag" law, if you'd shot that film, you could be heading off to jail. Because freedom! Freedom for big agricultural corporations to continue doing whatever-it-takes-no-matter-how-cruel to make more money for its CEOs, that is. "Ag-gag" laws are, as you might expect, largely a creation of the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC), which used to promulgate "stand your ground" gun laws and anti-minority "voter ID" laws until they became politically unpopular. ALEC no doubt anticipates that folks' feelings about eating meat are more ambiguous, but you don't need to be a vegetarian to know that slamming chickens' heads against walls isn't a good way to deliver meat to your dinner table -- that raising animals yourself is the best way, and dealing with a local farmer you know and trust is the second-best way. CREDO helps you tell Congress to outlaw "ag-gag" laws at the state level, so that we can be a more humane civilization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: ALEC's tax exempt status, paid family medical leave, and fast-food commercials aimed at children.

Did you know the nefarious American Legislative Exchange Council -- a.k.a. ALEC, the organization responsible for so many regressive laws at the state level -- has registered itself as a charity? Yes, ALEC is a 501(c)(3) entity, and 501(c)(3) entities are usually corporations that do charitable, religious, scientific, or literary work -- a lot of amateur sports organizations are also 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entities. Does ALEC's work weakening unions, disenfranchising voters, cutting corporate taxes, or watering down environmental regulations sound like charity to you? Note, also, that a 501(c)(3) has to be either a public charity -- and must by law have very broad public support (i.e., not from a few rich donors) -- or a private foundation which exists mainly to make donations to other good causes. Sounds like ALEC found a loophole and drove a Mack truck through it. So Common Cause helps you tell the IRS to investigate ALEC's tax status. And no, we are not a "lynch mob" "out to get ALEC." We are good folks prodding our government to enforce the law.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support paid family medical leave via H.R. 1439/S. 786, the FAMILY Act, Moms Rising still helps you do that. Apparently John Oliver -- he of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver -- delivered another inspiring ten-minute-plus rant excoriating American politicians for failing to support paid family medical leave in America. The United States is one of two-count-'em-two countries that don't give new mothers paid medical leave; Papua New Guinea is the other. That's not something we want to chant WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. I suppose the BUT WHOZ WILLZ PAY FOR ITZ!!!!! crowd will want to know how we're going to afford it, so n.b. that the FAMILY Act would impose an 0.2% tax (that's two-tenths of one percent, not "two percent") on the wages employers pay. Boy would I be annoyed to hear anyone respond that "they'll just pass that cost on their customers." I mean, any of their customers might need paid family medical leave one day, and would thus benefit from the tax more than corporations could hurt them with it.

Finally, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood joins with Corporate Accountability International to help you tell McDonald's to stop all marketing aimed at children. Why? Because children have got it in their heads that fast food is really neat and cool, when actually it's a major cause of the epidemic of juvenile obesity and Type 2 diabetes. And when right-wingers admonish us to simply "toughen up" and not get our kids fast food all the time, ask them why McDonald's has so many toys and mascots and Happy Meals. Surely they don't think that stuff is aimed at responsible adults! And of course it's not -- it's aimed at children, who we know can't make very many decisions affecting their welfare at a young age. And yet corporations insist on doing it, relentlessly, such that weary parents get worn down. If you know you're doing that, and you know you're wrong for doing it, then why do you keep doing it? And why should we allow you to evade responsibility for doing it, while, again, heaping all of the blame on the victim?

Around the table: do corporations need us more than we need them? And other questions.

Paul Buchheit at Nation of Change lists all the ways corporations really owe us. Right-wingers like to say we owe them -- that without corporations giving us jobs out of the goodness of their hearts, we'd all be screwed -- but fact is, without taxpayer money still funding the majority of all basic research in America and the vast majority of research conducted at universities, they'd be screwed. I don't need to literally be paid back for that, as Mr. Buchheit suggests -- I'd just like corporate titans to stop pretending they don't need us more than we need them.

Arkansas minimum wage worker talks to Washington Post about the minimum wage, then gets fired -- without having said anything mean about her job or her employer, even. Her boss relates the story of her firing differently, but he also said he'd sue if the writer published the article, and may have tried to disguise his voice in an attempt to evade further questioning from the Post. It'd be comic if it weren't, you know, tragic.

Well-funded special interest groups (including ALEC) push states to repeal "prevailing wage" laws. Prevailing wage laws prevent governments from driving wages downward by offering to pay workers less in a locality than other workers get. Noting that the Davis-Bacon Act was sponsored by two Republican Congressmen and signed by a Republican President (none of these from the party's progressive wing, either), you kind of have to wonder why any self-respecting conservative would support giving government more power to outbid contractors and drive wages down. Naturally, the answer would be, "a conservative wouldn't" -- but a reactionary corporatist would.

Medicare Part D spent $4.5 billion on Hepatitis C drugs last year, which ordinarily wouldn't be bad news, since Hep C had no cure until 2013. But ProPublica ominously intones that Medicare spent "taxpayer money," which is, like, its job -- sure, it spent a lot more on Hep C drugs in 2014 than in 2013, and drugs are often ridiculously-expensive when they're new and even more so when they're life-saving, but we shouldn't have had to wait until paragraph 24 to be reminded that the law creating Medicare Part D prevented Medicare from negotiating better drug prices.

Finally, the incomparable Ta-Nehisi Coates describes some of the history behind the deliberate creation of ghettoes in Chicago during the 1960s, and the Federal Housing Authority's complicity therein. If you're familiar with redlining, none of this will particularly surprise you, but it's nonetheless a crushingly sad story of "black people playing by the rules," then "effectively declared outside the law and thus preyed upon."

Action: government spying, climate change, and paid family medical leave.

H.R. 1466, the Surveillance State Repeal Act, would, as its title suggests, repeal both the USA PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 -- because you might as well go big, and the aforementioned laws are two of the worst humiliations ever visited upon the American people by the Congress that purports to represent them. These two bills have birthed (or sanctioned) the massive surveillance state begun by George W. Bush and expanded by Barack Obama, which latter development should not have surprised anyone who watched Barack Obama the Candidate rail against warrantless wiretapping only to see Barack Obama the Senator vote for the FISA Amendments Act because of "the grave threats we face." And thanks to Edward Snowden's revelations, we also know that sunsetting the most controversial PATRIOT Act provisions hasn't delivered the oversight its supporters promised -- or else our government's spying upon us wouldn't have gotten so much worse over the years. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Surveillance State Repeal Act.

Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell oil corporation Royal Dutch Shell to sever ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Why? Well, mainly because ALEC has given us some of the most anti-freedom state legislation ever, which includes Voter ID laws, "Show Your Papers" laws, ag-gag laws, "three strikes" laws, tort "reform" laws, tax-cuts-for-the-rich laws, anti-community broadband laws -- need I continue? And Shell's CEO has said that climate change is an actual, real thing that we can and should fight, whereas ALEC says it's not, and with other corporations (now including British Petroleum!) lately cutting ties with ALEC for its climate change denialism, Shell is also feeling the pressure. And ALEC has also been supporting efforts to make home solar power users pay a "sun tax" out of the absurd belief that solar power users are "free riders" on the electric grid. No oil corporation should want to be caught up in any of ALEC's madness -- people are already suspicious enough of oil corporation motives, after all.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support paid family medical leave, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Most of us get 12 weeks of unpaid family medical leave, thanks to the Family Medical Leave Act, but try not getting paid for three months so you can take care of a newborn baby or a sick parent, or so you can get that surgery you've been putting off. You'll find yourself behind on your bills and with creditors knocking at your door, if you're lucky enough to still have a place to live. But the FAMILY Act (H.R. 1439) would allow you to make up to two-thirds of your salary while you're out taking care of business, and despite the squeals of the WE'RE BROKE!!!!! crowd, a .2% tax (that's one-tenth of two percent, "liberal" media, not "2 percent") would fund the entire thing, and then finally we could be like the 177 nations on Earth that have, for example, paid family leave for new mothers. Really, do you want to let your can-do pride put you in the poorhouse? Why not avail yourself of an insurance program that you pay into?

Action: smarter sentencing, climate change, and food stamps.

H.R. 920/S. 502, the Smarter Sentencing Act, is one of those rare instances of a bill that's actually bipartisan in the way the people's will is actually bipartisan -- you know, versus thinks like "free" trade deals, where the elites on both sides come together in a "bipartisan" manner to screw the people over. The Smarter Sentencing Act goes further than much other sentencing-related legislation we've supported here: it would cut mandatory minimum drug sentences in half, give judges more flexibility in sentencing drug offenders, and allow folks sentenced to crack-related crimes before 2010 to get their sentences reduced. And did I mention bipartisan! Senate sponsors range from Sheldon Whitehouse on the left to Ted Cruz on the right; House sponsors range from Barbara Lee to Raul Labrador. I wish this bipartisan smart-on-crime trend yielded more results -- politicians have been making these noises for a decade now -- but that just means we have to keep pushing. Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Smarter Sentencing Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer to end its association with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Since folks started organizing to sever corporate ties with ALEC in 2012, over 100 corporations (lately including Google, Facebook, and eBay) have stopped associating with the group responsible for writing the Voter ID bills and right-to-work bills (among so many other backward, pro-corporate bills!) so many states have passed over the years. Why Pfizer? Because ALEC has lately declared its "skepticism" in re climate change, and Pfizer has declared the opposite; you'd think Pfizer wouldn't want to associate with folks who think climate change is a hoax perpetrated by an environmental lobby they want you to think is far more powerful than it actually is (so that you don't think the fossil-fuel lobby is as powerful as it is, naturally). And, once we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR, perhaps Pfizer will do the right thing and help starve the ALEC beast of the money it needs to continue working on behalf of its corporate paymasters.

Finally, Republicans are still strutting around like they own America -- an impression they got, perhaps, from the national Democrats' second Election Day lie-down in four years -- and as a result they're actually talking about cutting our food stamp program further. Congress successfully cut food stamps by almost $9 billion over 10 years in the nefarious 2014 Farm Bill reauth, but still Republicans yammer on about fraud and inefficiency, though they haven't been able to actually prove any claims about fraud and inefficiency. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk that you won't tolerate any more cuts to food stamp programs that working families need. Why do they need it? Because too many American corporations still act in an utterly immoral manner -- sitting on trillions of dollars in "earnings," extracting handouts and bailouts from weakling Congressfolk, spending money on stock buybacks instead of investing in America. And when corporations act like that, people suffer. It's well past time politicians started acting like people are more important than corporations.

Around the table: Republicans demonstrate How Not to Be, part 447.

"Cookie-Cutter ALEC Right-to-Work Bills Pop in Multiple States," announces PR Watch. You'll see the uncanny similarities between ALEC's model "right-to-work" bill and the "right-to-work" bill in New Hampshire, and you'll get to track "right-to-work" bills Missouri, New Mexico, West Virginia, and other states. ALEC is even trying to get those bills passed at the local level, which usually requires enabling legislation ("enabling," what a perfect word!) at the state level. But we'll fight at every level.

The Consumerist describes an unlikely ally we have in our battle against payday lenders: faith-based groups. It's always heart-warming to hear a religious figure say things like "(t)his is not a liberal versus conservative issue, this is simply a right or wrong issue," and more so to see churches educating their communities or establishing their own alternative loan programs to serve them. But it's a shame we have to be even a little surprised when faith-based groups join a battle against evil.

The Economic Policy Institute finds that more education doesn't guarantee you'll be safe from declining wages -- that folks with "some college" are finding their wages declining the fastest, and even folks with advanced degrees aren't getting ahead. So when your right-wing uncle (or next Republican President) says the solution to getting ahead is just getting more schooling -- preferably in "something useful"! -- you have yet another arrow in the quiver. If you want to pile on, you might mention how awful student debt has become.

Richard Eskow wonders if strong populist support for Social Security and Medicare will help determine who advances in the Democratic primary to succeed retiring Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski. Rep. Donna Edwards has outflanked Rep. Chris Van Hollen in her zeal to protect these compacts so far -- and I don't see Mr. Van Hollen, a figure in House Democratic leadership for some time, retorting that he was "willing to consider" cuts to Social Security and Medicare because he's a leader and leaders have to work with the other side. Jesus Mary and Joseph you don't work with the other side when they're trying to burn everything down, you work around them.

Finally, just as several Republican Senators are admitting that maybe that letter to Iran wasn't such a hot idea, at least two Capitol Hill aides have advanced a novel interpretation of Republican intentions: that the letter was "a 'cheeky' reminder of the congressional branch’s prerogatives," and that the Obama Administration "has no sense of humor." Depends on which cheek they mean, I suppose. Seriously, though: grown-ups don't hide behind "jokes."

Action: improving the "Do Not Call" list, stopping religious extremism in Texas textbooks, and persuading AOL to abandon ALEC.

It's been over a decade since the creation of the "Do Not Call" Registry, and it's mostly worked pretty well -- but neither the Do-Not-Call Implementation Act of 2003 (which created the registry) nor the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007 ever targeted calls from non-profits or political organizations, so Change.org helps you tell the President, Congress, and the FTC to keep non-profits and political organizations from calling people all the time. Of course you've noticed that a lot of political organizations are now "non-profits," but this issue goes deeper than that: if you have a First Amendment right to free association, then why should you have to put up with calls you don't want and which do not redress some grievance under the law (i.e., as calls from bill collectors do)? I suppose some folks say that a political organization's right to call you is sacrosanct, but it's not -- the First Amendment doesn't run in only one direction at once, and some organization's First Amendment rights aren't better than yours.

Meanwhile, the Texas state Board of Education still plans to inflict fundamentalist Christian thought on public school students. We'd ignore them or make fun of them, I suppose, except that Texas buys so many textbooks that textbook publishers will more likely make all their textbooks like Texas's -- which must be why right-wingers have been pushing this ideology on Texas school boards for decades now. Clever, I suppose. But not as clever as it is cowardly -- why are Texas right-wingers so afraid of people finding out that God did not, in fact, hand down the Constitution from Mt. Sinai, but that our Founders hashed out, over a period of years, a very innovative political system that not only gave us the broadest protections for free speech ever given, but protected everyone's right to worship as they see fit? Of course, the question is rhetorical -- fundamentalists don't want to have "a voice in the public square"; they want to have the only voice in the public square. Hence both Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and People for the American Way help you fight religious extremism in public schools.

Finally, the exodus from ALEC continues! The American Legislative Exchange Council, responsible for so much right-wing legislation at the state level for decades but now notorious for pushing Voter ID and pro-pollution legislation (among other things!), has lost the chair of its corporate board, the software corporation SAP America. That's a big deal, but America Online still refuses to respond to pressure to abandon ALEC as well. There are still those who say well, they can do what they like, it's a free country -- as if it's somehow not a free country, also, for those who would pressure them. Like I said, the First Amendment doesn't run in one direction at a time, and a corporation's First Amendment rights aren't bigger than ours. The First Amendment protects you from your government -- it does not protect you from critics, activists, advertisers, or consumers, though so many on the right act like it does, at least when someone criticizes them. So Common Cause help you tell AOL to break away from ALEC and all the damage it's done with its nefarious agenda.

Action: ending the "war on terror," and starving climate change deniers of funding.

So we're over 13 years into the "war on terror." Now raise your hand if you feel safer because of it. Go ahead, don't be shy. Anyone? Didn't think so. This year the Obama Administration -- headed up by a Nobel Peace Prize winner, no less -- hit a new low by conducting air strikes in Syria and Iraq without any Congressional authorization whatsoever. Hard to believe he's been outclassed by Tha Bush Mobb, and as an added bonus, precisely none of the folks who loved Tha Bush Mobb now also love Barack Obama! It's like he took our hopes on his back so he could dash them. Fortunately, I never placed my hopes in him: I placed them in America, and I still do. So even though various Congressfolk have introduced more than half a dozen let's-kill-brown-skinned-folks-over-there bills, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk end the "war on terror" instead. You know what will work a whole lot better than just bombing everything? Treating the nations of the Middle East like they're comprised of human beings, and collaborating with them to end the threat from ISIS, since none of them are too fond of ISIS, either.

Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Shell to stop funding ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Why? Well, because Royal Dutch Shell's CEO has made some very interesting comments about climate change lately. "Let me be very, very clear," he began (that's two "verys," for those of you keeping score at home), "for us climate change is real and it's a threat we want to act on," and also "we're not aligning with skeptics." What a breath of fresh air -- we're used to big oil corporations not just pooh-poohing the threat posed by carbon-based pollution and the higher average temperatures and the spike in extreme weather events it causes, but then hiring their own scientists to tell us that it's not happening, or isn't a threat, or isn't caused by fossil fuel corporations belching filth into the air. However, Shell still funds ALEC, which has bravely taken up the flag of climate change denialism. You'd like Shell to put its money where its mouth is, and if they need some steel in their spine to do that, surely we can lend some of ours, because we've got plenty.

Around the table: from prisoners getting fleeced to ALEC getting isolated.

Daniel Wagner at the Center for Public Integrity describes the new frontier in separating money from prisoners and their families. Some private corporations now charge exorbitant fees for "handling" prisoners' money -- virtually guaranteeing that prisoners stay in debt -- at a time when governments are shifting more of the prisoners' day-to-day costs onto families. Making a prisoner's family buy his or her toilet paper doesn't sound particularly conducive to rehabilitation, nor does holding their money orders hostage so they'll switch to a fee-heavy, online system. This might change when a judge comes out and says that punishing prisoners and their families beyond what the prisoner's sentence actually mandates is unconstitutional.

Laura Gottesdeiner at al Jazeera describes in a lengthy report how the latest boom in North Dakota's boom-and-bust oil cycle has resulted in polluted local farmlands. The main culprit: a wastewater known as "saltwater" (because it's actually much, much saltier than the oceanwater we normally think of as "salt water") that, when it leaks, sterilizes land and poisons animals. I don't expect oil drilling CEOs to care very much, but I hope the oil workers putting in 80-hour work weeks are attending this matter -- unless they think the food they're going to eat is always just going to come from some faraway place.

Slovakian firm wants to convert billboards into housing for the homeless. The don't-help-until-it's-an-emergency model we use to deal with the homeless in America has turned out to be far more costly than, say, Utah's and Charlotte's programs that simply put the homeless up in spare housing, but I feel compelled to note that most American billboards are higher off the ground than they are in Slovakia. I'd hate to think something like that would sink a project like this, but it might. I'd be happy to be wrong.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signs bill that would hold corporations responsible for acts of negligence against temp workers committed by their employment contractors. The law makes some unreasonable exemptions (the trucking industry?) alongside reasonable ones (businesses with fewer than five temp workers almost certainly aren't packing temp workers like sardines into trucks or levying "fees" so onerous they amount to wage theft), but this is a big deal for an often-abused segment of the workforce -- though I do worry that the Supreme Court will one day rule that of course corporations can't be held responsible for what their contractors do, in a land where so many corporations use contractors in the first place precisely because they don't want to be held accountable for the wrong they do their workers.

Finally, we learn about some other corporations that have also abandoned ties with ALEC, as big tech corporations like Google and Facebook have lately done. You may be surprised to find News Corp. among them -- until you remember that the former News Corporation split off into 21st Century Fox and News Corp. in 2013, and the new News Corp. only owns a few newspapers (like the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal) in America. The bigger surprise might be the inveterate right-wing corporation Overstock.com, but Overstock only worked with ALEC for a year anyway. That leaves oil corporation Occidental as the most notable corporation splitting from ALEC -- because hearing an oil corporation express concern that it might be linked with climate change deniers is actually news, in a world where we're used to hearing about oil corporations funding climate change deniers.

Action: stopping war in the Middle East, regulating payday lenders, and prompting corporations to cut ties with ALEC.

I've received notices asking for support for the Congressional Progressive Caucus's plan to "limit" President Obama's current war in the Middle East, but I haven't passed any of them along, because I'd rather stop war in the Middle East. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote on approving Mr. Obama's war, and also vote "no" on approving his war. Just as the 2001 AUMF is no excuse for claiming the authority to bomb anyone you like anywhere you like, the upcoming election is no excuse for inaction on Congress's part. It's like they've all completely forgotten that doing the right thing actually very closely resembles doing the politically-smart thing. And it certainly would not be untoward of us to turn out any Congressfolk who blithely tells us that the reason they're not carrying out their Constitutionally-mandated duty is the election. Our political class has become so sick, immoral, and decadent that they no longer hesitate to say such things out loud. But we can do something about that.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is mulling new rules that would crack down on the havoc wrought by payday lenders -- including limiting the number of roll-overs for a single loan and curtailing lenders' ability to reach into your bank account -- and Americans for Payday Lending Reform (a project of National People's Action) helps you tell the CFPB to keep as many good Americans as possible out of the payday loan cycle of debt. "Cycle of debt" is an accurate term for a process where eight in 10 payday loans don't get paid off in two weeks and more than half of payday loans get rolled over ten times. That's not "a way for folks who can't get credit to get credit," as payday loan industry defenders claim -- it's a way for another group of non-workers to redistribute worker wealth upward to themselves. I suppose it's a small comfort that no matter how rich a payday loan CEO gets, the real banksters will never see him as One of the Boys -- but only a small comfort.

Finally, internet giants like Google, Yelp, Yahoo!, and Facebook executives have all announced their intention to cut ties with ALEC, but eBay stands out as a a major internet corporation that hasn't done so yet, hence the Sierra Club helps you tell eBay to end its association with the American Legislative Exchange Council. Why the Sierra Club, you ask? While the Sierra Club has expanded its portfolio a bit lately, but ALEC's stance on climate change (they say it's a fraud) and renewable energy (they're big-time sun-taxers) relate directly to the Sierra Club's familiar mission -- as does ALEC's past stances on "ag-gag" bills (they just hate investigations of animal abuse on factory farms) and disclosure of fracking chemicals (spoiler alert: they're against that, too). If eBay looks a little Republican to you (their founder, Meg Whitman, was the unsuccessful Republican nominee for Governor of California in 2010), remember that they're just as susceptible to bad PR as the next corporation.

Action: patenting genes, rewriting textbooks, and associating with ALEC.

The Federal Court of Australia -- which sits just under that nation's High Court -- ruled last month that corporations can patent breast cancer genes, on the grounds that isolating genetic material from the human body essentially created something new. Our own Supreme Court ruled quite differently, you may recall -- that corporations can't patent genes, since genes occur in nature, but could patent artificially-manufactured genes. What's the trouble with giving corporations patents over human genes, besides its utter absurdity? Those corporations could monopolize cancer treatments and dictate the terms upon which people live or die, much like the fabled "death panels" the Affordable Care Act did not create. The decision's supporters tout the new business the Court's decision will supposedly bring to Australia, which sure will make all those people affected by cancer feel a lot better. Well, my mom died in horrible pain and suffering, but at least the economy got a little boost! You know what comes next: the big stick of bad PR, which has prompted other Australian corporations to drop their patent applications. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Myriad Genetics to drop its application for a patent on the BRC1 gene.

Meanwhile, the Texas state Board of Education is, again, considering rewriting all their textbooks so that whiny, cowardly, diaper-loaded right-wingers never suffer an emotional boo-boo from anyone's hard truths ever again. This time they're considering a social studies text that would describe Moses's "direct influence" on the Constitution -- you know, 10 Commandments, 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights? For when have we ever had ten of anything else? The text would also "inform" us that "states' rights," not slavery, caused the Civil War, and would claim that scientists disagree a lot on climate change, which they don't. We might just ignore Texas in these matters and let them go their own disastrous way, except that Texas, as you might expect, buys a lot of textbooks, and thus has far more influence on how textbooks get written than, say, Wyoming -- I mean, why else would the far right make Texas an educational battleground, as they have for more than three decades? Hence People for the American Way help you tell the Texas Board of Education to stop injecting religious ideology into their books. Note well that I said "religious ideology" and not "God" -- God is not nearly as weak as some of His most annoying votaries would have you believe.

Finally, you've surely heard by now that Google has announced it will quit ALEC; you may not have heard that Facebook has announced same, and these corporations would follow in Microsoft's footsteps. But some internet titans still associate with the American Legislative Exchange Council, which has lately abandoned promoting Voter ID and "Stand Your Ground" laws (after getting those laws passed in as many legislatures as they could, naturally) and now traffics in corporate welfare handouts and climate change denialism, which latter item (I'm still sore it's not the former, but I guess I shouldn't expect too much from a big corporation) has prompted much of the recent exodus. So Common Cause helps you tell AOL to cut its ties with ALEC. (Common Cause originally aimed their action tool at both AOL and Yahoo!, but Yahoo! has since cut ties with ALEC as well.) And Public Citizen helps you tell Google to quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as well as ALEC. State and local Chambers of Commerce still fulfill important functions in America, but the national organization suffers from some serious Obama Derangement Syndrome, and is now no better than a national ALEC. Climate change denialism is but one of their symptoms.

Around the table: ladies and gentlemen, the smartest man in the Republican Party! And other follies.

In the middle of explaining how he'd replace the Affordable Care Act with a "free-market system" with vouchers and risk pools, Rep. Paul Ryan unfurls this gem: "Whether they choose to do that or not (that is, whether good citizens actually buy health insurance with the voucher he'd give them or not) is not really something you can necessarily actually capture in scoring." In other words, he can't prove his plan works -- which is understandable, because you can't score bullshit. He also doesn't explain why the Affordable Care Act is "so fundamentally flawed in its architecture," though I guess he figures if he uses the word "architecture" you'll just take his word for it. He really is, as someone once said, the dumb person's vision of a smart person.

Joe Conason says Americans appear to have amnesia about national security issues, as they seem to prefer Republicans to handle foreign affairs right now. Of course we'd be fools to discount the possibility that Mr. Bush knew his little Iraq adventure would blow up in someone else's face and that Republicans might benefit from that, but it'd also help to explain why this appears to be "amnesia" -- it'd help to explain, for example, that our "liberal" media has virtually no attention span, and carried water for the Bush war in Iraq while helping to demonize those of us who opposed the war from the beginning.

Remember that bankster CEO who complained that most folks who hate banks just don't have enough "skin in the game"? Robert Reich reminds us that ordinary folks already have too much "skin in the game," in that we suffer from Wall Street disasters while banksters don't. Fun fact: even gamblers can get their gambling debts forgiven more easily than regular folks can get their student loans forgiven. And if a Senator were to introduce a bill correcting that obviously absurd state of affairs, the banksters would strangle it in its crib.

Another year, another putatively pro-business association claiming that federal regulations are much more expensive to businesses than they really are. Long story short: like previous reports, they brandish scare numbers (ZOMG $1.7 TRILLYUNZ!!!!!) without telling you that their big, bad numbers accumulate over decades, that they count penalties for breaking the rules that most businesses don't break as "costs," and that they don't count the health benefits resulting from following the rules against the "cost." After all, hours (and therefore work) not lost due to illnesses from dirty and air and water don't help the CEO buy his 19th vacation home.

It's not just local police departments that get killing gadgets from our military -- school districts get them, too. School districts! That's not a comment on Kids Today, since every generation has complained about Kids Today. That's a comment on how little faith our educational system has in its ability to manage our children, who surely cannot be that threatening to adults. The good news? Most school districts are sending them back. And that's a comment on the awesome power of bad PR.

Finally, after much public pressure, Google executive Eric Schmidt has said Google will end its association with ALEC, the state legislative affairs group responsible for so much right-wing legislation at the state level over the years. I'm such a stubborn bastard that I still wish ALEC's regressive views on economics, rather than their regressive views on climate change, prompted Google's executives to quit -- but I'm not so stubborn that I won't take it. Next up on Fox News: Google joins the lynch mob against ALEC!

Around the table: some evangelicals feel left out of the Republican Party, boo hoo! And other follies.

"Some Evangelicals in Republican Party Are Feeling Left Out," the Washington Post reports. Do they mean the whiners, the ones who think anything less than everything is nothing? Who cares what whiners think? Regardless of Americans' slow embrace of gay marriage or some sham "libertarian" movement within the GOP, the whiners will one day defend President Scott Walker to the death just like they did President George W. Bush, and they won't hesitate to smear reasonable folk as traitors again.

Get your surprised face ready: a U.S. Conference of Mayors report suggests that though the jobs have come back, the wages haven't. Specifically, the Conference found that jobs recovered specifically in the areas hardest hit by the 2008 recession -- manufacturing and construction -- now pay, on average, about 23% less than they did before. I guess more Free Market Fairy Dust will solve that problem -- after all, how could giving big corporations even more room to outsource manufacturing jobs, for example, possibly go wrong?

Don't put your surprised face away yet: the Environmental Integrity Project found that over 30 gas drilling corporations had illegally used diesel fuel in fracking operations, and had falsified documents relating to that use. The EIP combed through FracFocus, a database of chemicals used in fracking, and if they found 30 corporations breaking the law merely by looking through an industry-supported database with mere voluntary reporting requirements, then you could be excused for thinking the problem's actually much worse.

Remember that $276 billion (over 10 years) "bonus depreciation" corporate tax break the House passed last month? A Bloomberg BNA survey of 100 corporate leaders finds that the vast majority of them don't think the bonus depreciation tax break actually does what supporters say it does -- which is spur short- or long-term investments in machinery and other infrastructure. You probably agree, if you've noticed that giving corporations more money mostly leads to corporations hoarding more money.

Another day, another ad blaming the Affordable Care Act for for something it didn't actually do. The Crossroads GPS ad depicts a woman claiming she had to get a job to get health care because of "Obamacare," but who has since admitted she chose to get another job three years before the Affordable Care Act health care exchanges even came online -- though she still insists that the ad "captured the heart of my message," which was, apparently, MAKINGZ TEH PEEPULZ BUY TEH HEALTH INSURANCEZ IZ BAD FER TEH SMALL BIZNIZZEZ!!!!!, even though the ACA's employer mandate -- still not in effect, I feel compelled to add -- actually excludes 96 percent of all businesses. One more question for Crossroads GPS: why criticize a law for inducing someone to get a job, after criticizing that same law for being a "job-killer"?

Finally, PR Watch informs us that while over 70 corporations have ended their association with ALEC -- the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that churns out right-wing legislative initiatives mostly at the state level -- but many corporations remain, namely big pharmaceutical corporations, big tobacco corporations, and, well, Big Koch. The Koch Brothers are a lost cause, but surely big tobacco and big pharma are always in need of a PR boost -- or, more precisely, should always live in mortal fear of a PR disaster. Perhaps that should be the next frontier in anti-ALEC activism.

Around the table: populism vs. "populism."

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes perhaps the single most offensive op-ed I've read this year, in which he actually argues that we should borrow the workings of more totalitarian states like China in order to "make democracy dynamic again." The notion of an "unapologetically elitist" "Simpson/Bowles-type commission to push populist reforms" would be merely hilarious if his "populist reforms" weren't the kind of Beltway autofellatio that's actually unpopular with Americans. The best part will be when he complains that we folks just aren't sophisticated enough to understand that when he said we should have less democracy, he wasn't really saying we should have less democracy.

Dick "Tha Dicksta" Cheney suggests that President Obama scrapped missile defense systems just because Vladimir Putin told him so. No word on whether Mr. Putin was shirtless when he gave Mr. Obama the order, but could it be possible that Mr. Obama scrapped missile defense because missile defense doesn't work, and only benefits defense contractors who'd rather not build something useful? And why on Earth is Mr. Cheney walking around in public without a paper bag over his head after everything he's done?

Navy reservist suspended for two weeks after refusing to hide wait times for appointments at the Veterans Administration. You'd think the King of Everyone Getting Along would welcome the testimony of government workers who want government to work better, but Mr. Obama generally treats whistleblowers like they've just leaked wartime troop movements, regardless of what they've actually said. And no, this isn't a mark of George W. Bush's tenure, Bush-league though it may seem.

Three North Carolina Republican state Senators introduce bill making it a felony to disclose fracking chemicals. Because some corporation's "right" to "trade secrets" trumps everyone else's right to drinking water that doesn't catch fire and doesn't turn gelatinous if left out too long! No fracking currently goes on in North Carolina, but that'll change soon -- and we'll see if the Moral Monday folks can counter the will of a reactionary legislature that cares about nothing except money.

Philly.com blogger tells us how "Tom Corbett Just Won Re-election." Sympathetic as I am to how-Democrats-will-screw-it-up-this-time narratives, and noting that Democratic nominee Tom Wolf pounds an I'm-an-outsider-can't-we-all-get-along message that has stranded better candidates at 48 percent, I still think listing Mr. Corbett's leftward moves (or non-moves -- refusing to appeal reversals on Voter ID and gay marriage hardly required him to lift a finger) doesn't prove he's been playing us; it merely proves that he's not completely brain-dead. Plus, dude always looks mad even when he's got nothing to be mad about. People get tired of that.

Jim Hightower delivers the messaging goods when discussing the Koch Brothers' obsession with making solar power users pay a Sun Tax: "Koch Brothers Demand More Government Intervention and Taxes," runs the headline, "they want states to tax homeowners as punishment for becoming innovative energy producers" runs the last line of paragraph five, and here's how the final paragraph begins: "Now we know what the Koch-ALEC complex means by 'free markets' and 'liberty.' They mean that corporate energy interests should be free to stifle our individual liberty." You'd almost wonder why the Crusty Centrists of the Beltway don't find Mr. Hightower's words to be "pitch-perfect populism." OK, not really -- we all know the answer is "money."

Action: banning electric shock "therapy" for special-needs kids, and promoting community broadband in rural America.

Remember back in May of 2012, when we discussed how the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts, a school for special needs students, punished Andre McCollins, an autistic student, for not taking off his jacket? And do you remember how they punished him with hours of electric shocks, leaving him permanently brain-damaged, not to mention burned? Well, the FDA is now mulling whether to ban using electric shock devices in this manner, and former JRC worker Gregory Miller has started a petition on change.org to help you tell the FDA to ban such torture devices used on special needs kids. "Torture devices" is not hyperbole -- when schools' mania for discipline becomes such that they give kids electric shocks for (in Mr. Miller's words) "closing their eyes or tearing a paper cup," they're engaging in torture simple and plain, and maybe we ought to keep their toys from them when they do that. Obviously, no one opposes actual discipline, but abusing children like this is not discipline, nor is it "tough love," nor is it the fruit of "zero tolerance" policies. It's just evil.

Meanwhile, AT&T has been pushing state legislators to make community broadband networks illegal -- even in rural areas in which AT&T has no intention of building out. And toward this end they've apparently enlisted the aid of the dastardly ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, since ALEC has so much experience writing "model legislation" which somehow closely resembles state legislation designed to serve big corporate paymasters at the expense of good citizens just trying to make a better life for themselves. Again, I do not exaggerate: the ALEC agenda is anti-freedom, because when the law serves only big corporations, the rest of us have no freedom. And the push against local, government-owned broadband is a push against the people's broadband, because the people own their government. Thankfully, the people who actually own AT&T, their shareholders, are about as fed up with AT&T spending their money to keep rural areas broadband-free as the rest of us, so Sum of Us helps you tell AT&T to tell their shareholders about their war against rural broadband.

Penny rants: from "free riders" to "fragile" people.

The fight over solar power comes to North Carolina! Did you know solar power is growing faster in North Carolina than in any other state except California? Hell, did you know there was a "fight" over solar power? Well, dig this: big fossil fuel corporations are trying to tell us that solar power users are free riders on the utility system and thus should have to pay exorbitant fees to the utility corporations. No, really -- Duke Energy's North Carolina operations president actually said that if you're producing your own power, and even selling back some of your excess power to utilities, you're not "paying your fair share." What disgusting arrogance! Ask anyone who's put solar panels on their roof whether taking out that five-digit home equity loan in order to do it makes them feel like a "free rider"! No, as usual, utility monopolies like Duke Energy are the "free riders," and if I were inclined toward psychoanalysis, I'd say they were merely projecting their inadequacies on folks who make their own power. (And if you catch that faint fecal smell of ALEC in Duke's proceedings, you're not alone.)

I'm not entirely on board with Tom Nichols's essay "The Death of Expertise." Yes, I've said myself many times that merely having an opinion doesn't mean that opinion's any good or (even) that anyone else needs to hear it, and no reasonable person would disagree that some folks know a great deal more about some things than the rest of us -- my only real areas of expertise being Doctor Who production details up to 1989 and the Billboard Hot 100 singles charts up to 1983, I stand on the shoulders of giants every time I sit at the computer. And I won't lie: "children who should be instructed, not catered to" is more my worldview now than when I was an undergraduate, never mind how long ago that was. But plenty of "experts" also make arguments merely to please their financial backers, and actual experts often don't make enough of an effort to speak to the layman, persuasion perhaps being an entirely different area of "expertise." And though I'm not an expert in journalism, I don't need to be one to see that one big reason we have so few "gatekeepers" anymore is that media organizations fired them so their CEOs could make more money.

Peter Beinart argues in The Atlantic that, with Chris Christie's GW Bridge troubles in New Jersey, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is the real Republican front-runner for the 2016 Presidential nomination. Mr. Beinart makes some compelling points -- Rand Paul can raise millions of dollars over the internet at the drop of a hat, has organizing advantages in Iowa and New Hampshire, and appeals to the big business wing of the party better than his father (who once told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show that corporatism is evil) ever did. I'd also argue that his "anti-interventionist foreign-policy views" won't hurt his chances, because his anti-interventionism has thus far amounted to zero legislative accomplishments, perhaps by design. But Rand Paul will get into trouble whenever he tries to reconcile his father's teachings with the wacky beliefs of primary voters, and he risks finding himself exiled to Bachmann/Cain/Perry country with a quickness. Remember, also, that Scott Walker can appeal to both elites and primary voters while sounding calm and reasonable.

Finally, Glenn Beck says he "played a role" in "tearing the country apart" during his nearly two-year run on the Fox News Channel. I'd have merely ignored that statement (crocodile tears, what else is new?) if he hadn't gone on and said: "I didn’t realize how really fragile the people were." What man routinely calls people who disagree with him "socialists" and "Communists," tells Democrats they should "shoot" perceived radicals "in the head," suggests that a Muslim Congressman "prove to (him) that you are not working with our enemies," says you should "run" from any religion that says it promotes "social justice" just like his own religion does, tells Katie Couric no one should be mad at the things he does because he's just a "rodeo clown" -- and then says people upset by the sheer aggressiveness of his nonsense are "fragile"? When you sling shit around like that, people aren't "fragile" if they feel some kind of way about the smell and the clean-up. With that, let us never speak of Glenn Beck again.

Around the table: somebody make this madness stop!

Daily Kos diarist Brainwrap explains how tax brackets really work. Long story short: making one dollar over the limit for the 39% tax bracket, for example, doesn't mean all your income gets taxed at 39% -- you still pay 10% on your first $10,000 of taxable income, 15% on your next $20,000 of taxable income, 25% on your next $50,000, and so on. Some members of our "liberal" media still use the old well-I'll-just-stop-working-on-my-400,001st-dollar saw, so we still need to explain how it really works.

PR Watch reports on two more corporations that have cut ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. That makes 72 corporations that have voluntarily cut ties with ALEC since we intolerant liberals inflicted our clearly very Hitleresque technique of shaming corporations with such ties. But every silver lining has a dark cloud: one of the two corporations who've cut ALEC ties, Xcel Energy of Minnesota, still pursues an ALEC-esque program of promoting onerous utility fees on solar rooftop owners. You know, because solar panel owners are "free riders" on the grid, despite putting upwards of $20,000 into putting panels on their roofs in the first place. Who knew being a "free rider" could be so expensive?

David Callahan at Demos asks why rich folks (according to several surveys) don't think of themselves as "rich." Short answer: because they all know someone who's richer, and more precisely, they're competing with those people. I would think, though, that knowing all that would help you not become a freaking vampire just to get rid of that gnawing feeling of (relative) poverty.

Speaking of vampires, alleged New Yorker Sean Hannity threatens to leave New York in the wake of Gov. Cuomo's comments suggesting that extreme conservatives "have no place" in New York. One is tempted to say oh, go already, especially after he says he'll take all the jobs that depend on him with him, too, and suggests that some of those who work for him won't have any work to do when he's gone. What intolerable arrogance, to think you're the lynchpin of that many lives -- or to think you're so irreplaceable when there are plenty of right-wing drama kings who could do your radio and TV shows just as well.

Finally, Amazon patents technology for "anticipatory shipping," whereby it ships items to its shipping hubs, and even to customer's addresses, based on analyzing such data as previous searches, wish list items, and even how long a cursor hovers over an item. The patent talks about "building goodwill" this way, but I expect shipping unasked-for items to folks' homes will backfire in a big way -- nobody needs to take time out of their busy day to return a package to avoid getting charged for it. I wonder why they didn't think of that.

Around the table: reassuring the kids that Santa is white! Plus other absurdities.

The FDA has, rather unexpectedly, issued two new regulations aimed at curbing antibiotic abuse on factory farms. One regulation would prevent drug manufacturers from listing the promotion of animal growth as an indication on its drug labels, and another would require factory farms to get a veterinarian to approve prescriptions in animal feed. These rules don't ban the misuse of nearly four out of five antibiotics produced in America on feed animals, but I expected nothing from the FDA, so I suppose our pressure amounted to something.

Teen who kills four innocent people while driving drunk gets probation because he's rich. No, I'm not exaggerating: the teen's defense lawyer literally argued that his client couldn't function in civilized society because years of suffering zero consequences of his actions due to his parents' wealth had made him "emotionally flat," and the judge agreed that, yes, expensive counseling would be better than jail. Thus does our three-decades-plus worship of "free market" ideology make us a less moral society.

Study finds that fossil fuel and cement production from just 90 corporate entities produce nearly two-thirds of all carbon emissions on Earth. So the next time right-wingers claim that climate change legislation would regulate your breathing or kill small businesses, you can remind them that the big polluters do most of the world's polluting.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez comes up with a surprising reason why ALEC has such influence in state houses -- because legislators in many states don't have the resources to research initiatives on their own. Indeed, they may not even be working full-time or have full-time help. Mr. Hertel-Fernandez also finds that the "conservatism" of particular legislatures predicts ALEC's success. Still, while I'm sure ALEC reaches out to these legislators pretty well, nothing prevents a part-time legislator from seeking out help from, say, Public Citizen or Common Cause.

Finally, Fox News host Megyn Kelly finds it necessary to note on-air to "all you kids watching at home" that Santa is "just white." Why the children of America would need reassurance that a nonexistent person is white is beyond me. Only insecure adults need that sort of assurance. (She adds that Jesus, who at least did really exist, is also white, though the evidence suggests otherwise.)

Action: starving ALEC, and saving bees.

You remember when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin dead, and the "Stand Your Ground" laws promulgated by the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) were front-page news as a result? Or when ALEC's "Voter ID" laws in state legislatures received similar scrutiny? In the wake of all that, and with the help of committed citizen activism, over three dozen corporations left ALEC, and that has (according to The Guardian) dried up ALEC's funding a bit. But riding to ALEC's rescue, it seems, are big internet corporations like Google, Facebook, and Yelp. Why? I mean, they're all mammon-worshipers, but why now? Possibly because ALEC has lately declared that it's getting out of social policy and sticking with economic policy from now on? Like we should all bow down on our knees and give thanks! We ran down their economic policy goals yesterday -- more privatization, more pollution, more "freedom" for big corporations and less freedom for people. So Roots Action helps you tell Google, Facebook, and Yelp to abandon ALEC, while People for the American Way helps you tell everyone else.

Meanwhile, the USDA has rendered its verdict on neonicotinoids, deciding there's "not enough evidence" to ban them (adding that several factors cause bee colony collapse, which doesn't mean we shouldn't ban neonicotinoids) and calling for "more research" before it can take any action. One hopes the bees don't all die before then. And both the USDA and the EPA have also claimed that the cost of a neonicotinoid ban "could" outweigh the benefits. "Could," huh? Must we never do anything right if it "could" upset some CEO's effort to gild the plumbing in his ninth vacation home? And to think people will call this approach "conservative"! It's not conservative -- contrary to what you've heard, hating the environment isn't "conservative," and the USDA's judgment certainly doesn't protect the interests of small farmers against larger actors abusing their power. And it sure ain't liberal, either, because liberals don't approve of just any old innovation. Still, if our government won't listen, perhaps some of our big corporations will, so MoveOn helps you tell Lowe's and Home Depot to stop selling neonic-soaked garden plants.