Thieves in the Temple.

Action: fighting voter suppression, police harassment of protestors, and gas chamber euthanasia for pets.

The Peace Team helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate the "Interstate Crosscheck" database for criminal violations. (You may also use this link, if you're using a smartphone.) "Interstate Crosscheck," as you know from the reports of Greg Palast and other journalists, is a massive database purporting to stop people from voting multiple times across state lines by tallying up all the folks with the same first and last names from different states. You can already see the problem with that, right? America is a big, big place, and plenty of people have the same first and last names! Worse, of course, is that minority folks tend to have the same first and last names more than other folks, which means the database disproportionately affects minority voters. But that's not all! The list doesn't even consistently check last names, Jr. or Sr. voters, or Social Security numbers. If that sounds as much like a voter suppression scam to you as it does to me, then tell the DOJ what you want them to do about it.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate police interference in protestors' monitoring of police behavior. One Michael Picard of Connecticut has lately filed a lawsuit alleging that, a little over a year ago, police officers harassed him and took the cell phone he was using to record their behavior -- only to fail to realize that they hadn't turned the phone off after taking it, thus accidentally recording what sounds an awful lot like two police officers conspiring to fabricate evidence and level frivolous charges against Mr. Picard in order to "cover our ass (sic)." Mr. Picard is a well-known local protestor -- opposed to DUI checkpoints, apparently, and wont to film police officers at those checkpoints -- but that doesn't matter, because he still has rights. And so do the rest of us -- police can't come up to you and tell you that filming them is "illegal," because it isn't; it's Constitutionally-protected free speech. It doesn't violate their rights as citizens, either, because they're public servants. And remember: their next target could always be you.

Finally, Caitlin Halliday, of Kaysville, UT, has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Utah state legislature to outlaw gas chambers as a method of euthanizing pets. Most pets have relatively quick and painless injections available to them, but 30 animal shelters in America (including seven in Utah) still euthanizes pets in a gas chamber, which euthanizes multiple pets at once. No one, I hope, is tempted to applaud the efficiency of these devices, especially not when death can take up to a half hour and where scared pets lash out at each other. Some people actually argue that gas chambers are cheaper than lethal injections. Well, I'm one of those old-fashioned people who thinks you don't make every decision in life based on monetary cost -- and certainly not decisions involving the suffering of your loved ones, which your pets most assuredly are. We should more often make decisions based on the cost to our souls, and I sure do hope the Utah legislature (which has already failed to pass a bill banning gas chamber euthanasia) can find their soul in this matter.

Action: lead poisoning, elephant endangerment, and poultry processing workers.

H.R. 4879/S. 2776, the TEST for Lead Act, would require public schools to test their water -- water used for drinking, washing, or food prep -- for lead contamination; schools built before 1996 would have to test for lead at least twice a year, while schools built after that would have to test for lead once. You will not be surprised to learn that the home base for both House and Senate sponsors of the TEST for Lead Act (Rep. Payne and Sen. Booker, both Democrats of New Jersey) is the city of Newark, where some 30 K-12 schools have been cited by both city and state officials as contaminated sites, most if not all of them containing high levels of lead. This, when any level of lead causes brain damage which kids aren't just going to be able to shake off. Hence Jamani Montague has created a petition at DIY Roots Action which helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the TEST for Lead Act, and thus protect children's health. Lead contamination in water has been in the news for months on end, thanks to the ongoing (and entirely avoidable!) ordeal in Flint, MI, but our leaders have done nothing about it; passing the TEST for Lead Act would, at least, improve upon that sorry record.

Meanwhile, the European Union has lately signaled its opposition to a global ban on ivory trading, despite the fact that elephants are in danger of disappearing from Africa within a quarter-century, at the rate they're being killed for their tusks. That rate, by the way, is "about every 15 minutes," or almost 100 per day -- so no wonder Tanzania and Mozambique, for example, have lost more than half of their elephants just since 2009. World leaders will go to the Convention on International Trade in International Species (or CITES) conference in Johannesburg this fall to discuss what, exactly, should be done. A better question might be: what, exactly, does ivory do? Does it power the world's electric grid? Does it feed the world's hungry? And even if it did those things, we would still, as a civilization, be obligated to manage such resources in a way that doesn't lead to an animal's extinction, certainly out of self-interest if nothing else. But killing all the world's elephants for trinkets, whether trinkets of religious significance or not, is unconscionable. Hence Avaaz helps you tell world leaders to help the plight of elephants worldwide by giving them the most vigorous legal protections available to them, including a ban on the global trade of ivory.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big ag corporations to treat their poultry processing workers with significantly more respect and dignity, then Add Up still helps you do that. Previous action alerts have helped you tell the Department of Labor to enforce fair labor standards for workers at these corporations, but it's time to go to the corporations themselves, and let them know that the Big Stick of Bad PR can be inflicted upon them. These corporations deny workers breaks to the point that workers have told Oxfam that they drink less water (never a good idea when you're doing hard work!) and even worn diapers to work so they don't lose their jobs. Should anyone be wearing adult diapers to work, if they don't actually need them? And if we don't stamp this meanness out right quick, any of us could very well find ourselves denied bathroom breaks at our jobs. It's not like working in a poultry processing plant is easy, you know -- workers denied breaks will sooner or later become very frustrated workers, and they may even take out their frustrations on the animals they're working on, which is another thing we don't tolerate as a civilized society.

Action: clean water, and humane treatment of animals.

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

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

Action: sentencing reform, safer pork processing, voting rights, and campaign finance.

Word on the street is that the House may actually be ready to move on sentencing reform -- not on S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, but on two bills that would, put together, accomplish most of what S. 2123 would accomplish. H.R. 3713, the Sentencing Reform Act, would allow judges to issue sentences shorter than mandatory minimum sentences for certain non-violent drug offenders; it would also reduce mandatory minimums for other offenders and make the crack/powder cocaine sentencing reforms of 2010 retroactive, as S. 2123 would do. And H.R. 759, the Recidivism Risk Reduction Act, would direct our government to build a "Post-Sentencing Risk and Needs Assessment System" that would help give prisoners the kind of productive activities that would help them avoid breaking the law again -- and that is the slab of S. 2123 that H.R. 3713 doesn't address. So the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 3713 and H.R. 759, and thus bring some sentencing reform to America.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has allowed a few pork processors to run high-speed pig slaughterhouses, which (and stop me if you've heard this before!) run some 20 percent faster than most slaughterhouses and have (sigh) less government oversight. Because, as we know, running slaughterhouses even faster is automatically better in every way! It creates even healthier pigs than factory farms already do with their filthy housing and antibiotic overuse! And slaughtering pigs faster never results in more food contamination, injured workers, or increased cruelty at the hands of overworked, frustrated workers! Of course, this USDA program is only a "pilot program," but that's how the USDA does its dirty work -- pork processing corporations don't want to give up all that money they're redistributing upward from workers and consumers to themselves, nor do they want to welcome federal inspectors back into their facilities if they can help it. Hence CREDO helps you tell the USDA to stop their high-speed pig slaughter program.

Finally, Sign for Good helps you tell Congress to enact four reforms that would expand voting rights and curtail the deleterious effect of big money in political campaigns. Which are almost the same thing, if you think about it -- votes mean rather little when Congressfolk only talk to the corporations that give them the most money. The bills that would directly expand voting rights are, of course, the Voting Rights Advancement Act (which would give the Voting Rights Act the teeth the Supreme Court knocked out in Shelby v. Holder) and the Voter Empowerment Act (which would increase citizen access to online and same-day voter registration). The campaign finance initiatives are the "Democracy for All" constitutional amendment (which would amend the Constitution to allow federal and state governments to make campaign finance laws again) and the Fair Elections Now Act (which would create a small donor-based public campaign finance system). Corporatists can speak very, very loudly with their money, but the people are still stronger -- if we make ourselves heard.

Action: patent trolls, money bail, and cage-free eggs.

Congress didn't pass comprehensive patent reform legislation last year, but S. 2733, the VENUE Act, would only allow plaintiffs to bring patent infringement suits in judicial districts where defendants actually work and/or where they have allegedly committed the infringement. The VENUE Act would also mandate that both parties have "a regular and established physical facility" "not primarily for the purpose of creating venue," which would close the loophole patent trolls exploit, where they go fishing for a judicial district that seems more sympathetic to patent infringement claims than others -- like, say, the Eastern District of Texas, which hears almost half of all patent-infringement suits in America. We need further reforms to stop patent trolls from filing these frivolous lawsuits that don't protect property but merely extract tribute from folks who actually make stuff, but the VENUE Act would do some good. The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell the Senate to begin reforming our patent system by passing the VENUE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4611, the No Money Bail Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The No Money Bail Act would do pretty much what it sounds like it'd do -- it would prevent our federal government from extracting money for bail in federal criminal cases, and would also cut off certain federal grants to states that continue to use money bail. But if we can't demand money for bail, I can already hear right-wingers saying, how are we going to protect the public? Oh, gosh, I don't know -- maybe by doing police work? If the state suspects you of a crime, but doesn't have enough evidence to detain you and can't prove you're a flight risk, why should you have to pay to go free? Particularly when money bail hits the poor a lot harder than everyone else? I look forward to the day we stop punishing drug addicts and start treating them, because then a lot of the problems with our criminal justice system will fall away. Until then, we argue for the right thing, and we demand the right thing.

Finally, a lot of supermarket chains (including Kroger, Food Lion, and Target) have moved toward cage-free eggs -- meaning that the hens who lay the eggs don't live in tiny cages -- but Publix hasn't, and they have more than 1,100 stores in six Southeastern states. Egg-laying hens typically live in "battery cages," so named because of the arrangement of cages more or less like battery cells, but you could be excused for thinking a different kind of battery goes on, because these hens live absolutely miserable lives: often crammed eight or 10 to a cage the size of a filing cabinet drawer, these hens suffer from many of the same problems other factory-farm chickens do (dirty conditions, increased illness, no space even to stretch their wings), plus others -- they live in the dark and have their beaks trimmed, so they don't peck at or cannibalize other birds, though, of course, they wouldn't do these things if they weren't living in those damn cages! So Change.org helps you tell Publix to get with the times and move toward cage-free eggs.

Action: overtime pay, and cat declawing.

The Department of Labor has proposed overtime pay rules mandating that anyone making less than $50,400 annually must be paid time-and-a-half for any hours worked over 40 in a week or eight in a day -- but Republicans plan to introduce a resolution of disapproval to stop it. Of course, we advocated for a rather higher ceiling (at $69,000), which illustrates, again, the folly of trying to find "middle ground" with corporate America. Anyway, under the Congressional Review Act, Congress can block the overtime pay rule, and set in motion a 60-day period during which the President can't veto the resolution -- meaning that, if Mr. Obama waits too long, and a Republican wins the Presidency, Congress could "run out the clock" on the new rule. Hence CREDO helps you tell President Obama and Labor Secretary Perez to implement the new overtime rules now, so Congress has less leeway to "run out the clock." Democrats in the Senate could, I suppose, filibuster the resolution and block its passage. But no matter what happens, though, we'll communicate our will to our government, as is our duty.

Meanwhile, Change.org helps you tell the state of Colorado to ban cat declawing. (FYI, I don't get squeamish easily, but I found the photos accompanying the petition quite unnerving.) Folks say declawing a cat is a lot like removing your fingers from the first knuckle upward, but it's actually worse than that, since your fingers don't have retractable knives in them. Cats without claws are often far less secure cats, more prone to biting as a way of compensating for the weapons they've lost, and if you really can't get your cats to avoid destroying your furniture (you know, by paying more attention to them, playing with them, redirecting them to scratching posts, or taking them to the vet to find out if they've got a health issue), then maybe you shouldn't have cats. As it happens, a mere five cities in America (all in California) have banned declawing, but 22 mostly European countries have banned it, demonstrating that declawing cats is another way America absolutely positively does not have to Be Number One.

Action: freedom for Omid Kokabee yea, a Senate vote on sentencing reform yea, and the extinction of elephants nay.

First things first: Iran convicted University of Texas/Austin physicist Omid Kokabee of having "connections with a hostile government" (i.e., ours) back in 2012, after the Iranian government (despite its best efforts, which included denying Mr. Kokabee access to a lawyer until his trial began) couldn't make a charge of "colluding against national security" stick. Perhaps not coincidentally, Mr. Kokabee had long refused to use his expertise on behalf of the Iranian military and intelligence forces, even after being offered financial assistance to pursue his Ph.D. in Iran. More scientists ought to be like this fellow, but the government of Iran arrested him in 2011 as he was winding up a visit with family and then held him mostly in solitary confinement for the next year-plus, so you can see why so many of the world's scientists might not be their best selves. Mr. Kokabee is his best self, though, so Change.org helps you tell Iran's Supreme Leader to free Mr. Kokabee.

Meanwhile, S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, has passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and is awaiting action by the full Senate -- but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hasn't yet permitted a vote on the bill, so the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell Sen. McConnell to put the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act to a full Senate vote. Maybe this kind of stuff just isn't that important to him, but he's got big responsibilities now, among them his stated aim to make Republican governance seem not all that scary, and so he should be fine with hearing from all of the American people about this, not just fat-cat elites in his home state. He might want to consider that if he can get a bill passed that reduces the deleterious effect of mandatory minimum sentences and eliminates solitary for juveniles, he can brag about it whenever Democrats complain that all he wants is chaos and disorder. It's a price I'm willing to pay to get more justice for more Americans.

Finally, the worldwide ivory trade is threatening the world's elephants with extinction, but more and more international online marketplaces (including Amazon and Google) are refusing to sell trinkets made with ivory -- Yahoo! Japan, where online ivory sales nearly quadrupled between 2010 and 2014, being a conspicuous exception. Scientists teach us that elephants are more than intelligent enough to know they're being massacred into nonexistence, and for what? We can now make durable materials in ways 19th century scientists would have called alchemy; losing the elephant from the face of the Earth forever ain't worth another ivory cane handle or another ivory carving of the Buddha or the Virgin Mary. Luckily for us, Yahoo! itself hasn't been doing well almost anywhere in its operations, losing money and hemorrhaging workers faster, even, than poachers can illegally kill elephants; Yahoo! sure could use a PR boost, or, at the very least, one fewer PR headache. Hence Avaaz helps you tell Yahoo! to disassociate itself from elephant poaching by forbidding ivory sales on its sites.

Action: "defending" marriage, refugee and visa politics, and battery cages.

Tomorrow the Tennessee House Civil Justice Committee plans to consider HB 1412/SB 1437, the so-called Tennessee Natural Marriage Defense Act, and by the name, I bet you can guess what it does -- it declares that the state will "defend natural marriage" and claims to nullify the Supreme Court's recent decision legalizing gay marriage across the nation. The bill's fiscal note instructs us that the bill's passage would cost the state money not just in marriage license fees, not just in lost tourism dollars, but also in federal funding (including welfare funding) that Tennessee simply won't get if it's not in compliance with the law. Under these circumstances, I'm tempted to let Tennessee do what it wants and suffer the not-inconsiderable consequences (certainly including "being ostracized by the rest of America"). But right is right and wrong is wrong and duty is duty, hence Change.org helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to reject the so-called Natural Marriage Defense Act. Don't be afraid to let them know you're from out of state -- they need to know we're all watching them.

In the wake of yet another fairly well-received Presidential State of the Union address, this one declaring (among other things) that we should "reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion," Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to offer two petitions: one helping you tell the Senate to reject any bills that would block Iraqi and/or Syrian refugees from entering America, the other helping you tell your Congressfolk to support a bill that would repeal a visa waiver ban on Europeans who hold dual citizenship with Iran, Iraq, Syria, or the Sudan. I've taken some flack for saying things like this, but I'll say it anyway: banning folks from certain countries just because of their nationality is racist. And banning dual-citizenship folks because of their heritage is also stupid -- a lot of Europeans with dual-nationality have never even set foot in Iran, Iraq, Syria, or the Sudan. I know, I know -- facts mean nothing to the rage-filled. But the rage-filled don't get all the say around here. I mean, this isn't 2005.

Finally, Katie Ernesto, of Meridian, ID, helps you tell the Idaho state Senate to ban battery cages for egg-producing chickens. Battery cages, as you probably remember, are so small that they hardly let chickens stand or spread their wings, plus the wire bottoms mangle their feet, plus these chickens tend to get "de-beaked" at birth so they don't peck the other chickens in the cage to death (because, surprise, surprise, if you stick a couple of chickens in a single cramped cage for their whole lives with nothing to do they'll take it out on each other). And several fast-food corporations (most recently Wendy's) have started to expel battery cage-produced eggs from their food production chains, but as California has instituted bans on battery cages, Idaho has, ah, pointed out its lack of battery-cage laws to chicken-producing corporations. A lot of Idaho legislators may well try to say, as state Sen. Corder did, that "industry should decide." Well, there's an inspiring bumper sticker: let the industry decide! And it's much less impressive if, like me, you think the people should decide.

Action: fighting privatization and animal cruelty.

Ho hum, Congress wants to privatize the air traffic control system. Why? Privatization votaries will say it's because everything government does sucks and everything private corporations do is awesome -- never mind that when your government fouls up, you can do more about it, because your government belongs to you. Never mind, also, that when our government sells off its services to private corporations, services don't necessarily get better -- in England and Canada, privatizing traffic control led to massive job losses and huge hikes in ticket fees. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that such privatization efforts also resulted in certain folks with a significant investment in these efforts becoming quite wealthy. No use justifying it by saying WE'RE BROKE!!!! either, because we're seeing how it works in Spain and Greece -- no amount of privatization is ever enough, and no amount ever seems to shrink government debts or kickstart economies. So Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to abandon efforts to privatize air traffic control systems.

Meanwhile, Mercy for Animals has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Wendy's to ban eggs from animals raised in battery cages like those used in factory farms. You know the drill with these cages: animals can barely stand or spread their wings in them, and birds often get trampled or mangled in cage wires, and then left to rot when they die, often right next to bird that are still laying eggs. Say it with me: no "cheap" food is worth torturing animals like this, and yes, I insist, as a civilized person, that you treat your feed animals with respect and dignity, not in the least because doing so tends to give you better meat, even if it doesn't make poultry CEOs as rich. If you're the kind of person who wonders why we should bother doing things like this because no one ever changes, etc., note well that many of Wendy's competitors in the fast-food business -- including McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King, and Panera -- have already begun transitioning to cage-free eggs. No one ever succeeded by throwing their arms in the air and walking away, after all.

UPDATE. Well, that was quick -- Wendy's has agreed to make its eggs cage-free by 2020. Good work, folks!

Action: feed animal abuse, and climate change denial.

Mercy for Animals has started a petition on Change.org that helps you tell poultry-processing corporation Perdue to stop abusing its chickens. I'm no fan of manipulatively spooky incidental music in hidden-camera videos, but watching workers not just stomp on live chicken heads but grind them under their boots and hearing other workers describe the health problems chickens get from Perdue's breeding methods is convincing enough. So much for all the good PR Perdue got from reducing antibiotic use! Perdue fired one worker after this video got publicity, but that just makes him the Lt. Calley of animal abusers, and workers don't abuse animals because they all wear Snidely Whiplash mustaches -- they abuse animals because they're under a lot of pressure to produce. So, even though the petition calls for a number of good works that Perdue could undertake -- including slower breeding, more space, and more humane killing methods -- I wish it had also called for hiring more workers and training them better. But you can hijack the "I'm signing because" box to add that.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether ExxonMobil unlawfully misled the public on climate change, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. As you may recall, we have evidence that ExxonMobil knew about the disastrous effects of climate change in the late 1980s, yet still embarked on an expensive and decades-long campaign of climate change disinformation. You'd think, knowing what was coming, they'd have spent all that money weaning themselves off oil and onto renewables, but of course doing so would have made it much harder to redistribute wealth upward to executives. I bet ExxonMobil executives would say they obfuscated on climate change out of their "duty to shareholders," but usually by "shareholders" they mean "executives like me," and one wonders if they ever put the matter honestly to their shareholders, because shareholders are pretty good people -- certainly better than the executives who use them as a human shield. Perhaps we can answer questions like these in court.

Action: Syrian peace talks, and saner pork production.

Syrian Kurds can't get into Saudi Arabia-led peace talks regarding the future of their country, even though they fight ISIS harder than almost anyone. Why? Apparently because the Turkish government doesn't want them there, apparently. If you know the autocrat who runs Turkey, you must ask: why does he get veto power over anything? And the whole point of peace talks is to talk to people you don't want to talk to, so you can all live together. Hence Just Foreign Policy helps you tell our government to demand a place for Syrian Kurds at any peace negotiation. Some folks -- folks who don't just want to come out and say they don't want to talk to any Middle Easterners, I suspect -- will complain that if we insist on Syrian Kurds' participation in the peace process, it'll gum up the process. Well, peace is hard. And maintaining peace is hard. But making war all the time, with other people's children, and then calling other people "traitors" when they criticize your stupidity? That's too easy. Civilized people need to stop doing that.

Meanwhile, the group Compassion Over Killing has started a petition on Change.org helping you tell the USDA and Hormel to end their participation in a "pilot" program aiming to allow pork-producing corporations to speed up their pig slaughter lines and do so with less oversight by our government. Less oversight by our government means less oversight by us, and I put "pilot" in quotation marks for a reason -- obviously, both big agriculture corporations and our government are hot to declare this program a success whether it actually is a success or not. Which, by the way, it won't be -- as you know either from watching the video or, ah, doing any kind of real work, the faster the slaughter line, the more abuse workers will heap upon the slaughtered, simply because the pressure to produce is too great. And the less we-the-people can inspect what they're doing, the less we'll know about the food we eat -- which, in this case, will have more pus and feces in it than safe food would have. And who will deny we have a right to know?

Around the table: torture, free speech, body cameras, small businesses, and the gang that couldn't shoot or think straight.

Steve Benen informs us that no less than four Republican Presidential candidates have embraced torture as a viable option when dealing with terror suspects, not that they use the word "torture" or anything. Jeb Bush, naturally, parrots his brother's it's-not-torture-if-I-say-so line of dung, but Mr. Benen is right to point out that if President Obama had prosecuted torturers during his Administration, Republicans wouldn't be as quick to embrace torture as they are.

Scott Klinger at the Center for Effective Government reminds us that ag-gag laws violate the First Amendment. You don't need to be a vegan to think so, either -- especially not if you already know that laws against libel, slander, and destruction of property already exist. What could the big ag corporations be so afraid of?

The title of this article, "The Dystopian Danger of Police Body Cameras," turns out to be a bit of a bait-and-switch: the "dystopian danger" turns out to be from using body cameras in other, obviously less appropriate ways, like to spy on students, but these are boundaries civilized people have to draw, every day. From there we move on to surveillance methods that are not body cameras; I was really hoping to at least be challenged on my support of body cameras, but I wasn't.

FCC rules that satellite TV corporation Dish can't apply some $3.3 billion in small business credits toward its purchase of government airwaves. You should be hitching on the notion that Dish could have received small business credits; apparently its subsidiaries have received the credits. Just as it occurs to me that a small business shouldn't have more than 50 employees (let alone the 500 employees the Small Business Administration uses as its cutoff), it also occurs to me that a small business shouldn't be owned by a big corporation.

Finally, we learn that one of the fellows guarding a "Muslim-free" gun shop in Oklahoma accidentally shot himself in the arm after dropping his gun on Tuesday. It's nice to know that some people who can't think straight also can't shoot straight, I guess, but it's still not a thing to count on.

Action: the Iran nuke deal, and "ag-gag" laws.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Senator to support the Iran nuke deal. My state's junior Senator opposes it, of course. "At the heart of the issue is whether Iran has truly given up in its 30-year quest for nuclear weapons," he writes. Ah, no: at the heart of the issue is whether we can keep them from getting nukes whether they want them or not; their intentions are moot, and thus invoking the hostages and "wiping Israel off the map" and suchlike is also moot. Sen. Toomey also repeats the zombie lie that we're "left...to trust Iran." Is that why we got the power to conduct inspections of their nuclear facilities 24/7, or the power to inspect new areas based on new intelligence? That's "trust"? But worst of all is his assertion that President Obama won't actually enforce the agreement, because "enforcement leads to termination" of the agreement. But termination would reinstitute sanctions -- which Sen. Toomey already said were effective in bringing Iran to the negotiating table. Anyway, right-wingers used to negotiate with their enemies. I wonder what changed.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to stem the tide of "ag-gag" bills at the state level and protect whistleblowers exposing animal abuse. Remember that Bob Barker-introduced video you saw here a few weeks back, the one depicting the inhumane slaughter of chickens (and the abuse of their chicks) at factory farms? Shooting that video would be against the law in many states now, and too many state (and federal) legislators consider videos exposing the ill treatment of feed animals tantamount to terrorism. You always hoped that governments wouldn't call anyone who might make the redistribution of wealth upward to CEOs a bit harder a "terrorist," but your hopes were dashed, because once a government claims power, it doesn't give it up easily. But there are already laws against libel and slander; why do corporations also need laws that treat their accusers as if they're terrorists? Could it be that these corporations have something to hide? Things like stressed-out, overworked factory workers punching and kicking pigs and slamming chickens' heads into the ground?

Action: banksters, "trophy" hunting, and the minimum wage for New York City fast-food workers.

The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill passed five years ago -- but federal agencies (including the SEC) still haven't written many of the rules that Dodd-Frank mandated. You'd think after the banksters took a massive dump all over our economy and put millions of people out of work, our government would pursue the matter with more urgency, but they listen too much to the anti-regulatory blather of America's coddled-and-enabled financial class. News flash: the banksters still aren't popular, even if the fury the American people have toward banksters has subsided, and with laws come responsibilities -- responsibilities like writing regulations and enforcing them. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell the SEC to finish the job Dodd-Frank gave them already. SEC Chair Mary Jo White, another one of Barack Obama's post-partisan appointees, may have done the worst job of anyone in his Administration, and that's saying something when this Administration that's had Tom Vilsack and Timothy Geithner in it. But, like all of them, she responds to public pressure -- if we do our jobs.

In the wake of the trophy killing of Cecil the Lion -- who had been coaxed off national park land in Zimbabwe (where he could not be legally killed), and then left to suffer for more than a day and a half by the Minnesota dentist who ultimately killed him -- Sum of Us helps you tell airline corporations to ban the transportation of "trophy" animals from their planes. Dead animal "trophies" wouldn't get very far if airplanes didn't transport them, after all, and that means there'd be less of a market for them. As of yesterday, 10 airlines have answered the call, including British Airways and Delta, but most American airlines haven't done so yet. Perhaps they're afraid of Republican swordfighters who extoll the "free market" above all other things. But trophy killing doesn't fulfill any of the functions of a civilized society -- it doesn't feed people, it doesn't prevent invasive animals from upsetting ecosystems, it doesn't even preserve traditional hunting practices, but just serves to delude cowards into thinking they're courageous, and no "free market" should be obliged to coddle cowards.

Meanwhile, you know that the wage board convened by Gov. Cuomo in New York state recommended a $15/hour minimum wage for New York City's fast-food workers -- but the state Labor Commissioner still needs to approve the recommendation. We've figured that was a done deal, but really, nothing is a done deal until we do it. So Fight for $15 helps you tell the New York state Labor Commissioner why fast-food workers should make at least $15/hour. You can bet the anti-worker forces will be bending the Labor Commissioner's ear, with loser BS about "killing jobs." I call it "loser BS," not just "BS," because the entrepreneur who worries about bottom lines whenever thinking about a minimum wage hike -- instead of all that extra money going into potential customers' pockets because they just got a raise -- is a loser, frankly. And we just witnessed how Gravity Payments' $70,000 minimum wage "forced" them to hire 12 more workers to process the resulting new business and respond to all the emails and social media postings following the announcement. Is it too much to ask that these zombie "job-killing" lies stop getting up after we've put them down?

Around the table: terrorism, cowardice, dishonesty, handouts, abortion, and renewable energy.

Glenn Greenwald reminds us that we don't commonly consider the racist murderer Dylann Roof a "terrorist," but our laws do commonly consider animal rights activists "terrorists." Only a sick, immoral, and decadent society prioritizes like this -- and it'll get worse under a President Scott Walker, who'll be such a stooge to big agricultural corporations he'll make that big corn subsidy champion and breaker of GMO-labeling promises, Barack Obama, seem like a granola-eater. Why, it's almost like that's the idea.

Alan Pyke at Think Progress instructs us that Walter Palmer's trophy killing of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe makes hunters look much worse than they are. Luring a lion out of a national park to kill it isn't what hunters do, it's what cowards do; so is killing a lion who has a pride (whose cubs will be killed by the next male that takes over the pride), and so is failing to mercy-kill the lion for a day and a half. The good news? Walter Palmer is about the most unpopular man in America right now.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) not only invested in a fund that would have yielded massive returns if the U.S. had gone into default in 2011 during the debt ceiling crisis, but failed to disclose this holding in financial disclosure forms. In other words, he stood to benefit from a default, and didn't want you to know about it, lest you think he was in bed with the banksters -- or that his efforts to hold the debt ceiling hostage to harmful and unpopular budgetary demands might have been, you know, selfish. It's enough to make a man wish we forbade Congressfolk from investing in anything at all.

The incomparable David Sirota, after noting that opposing corporate subsidies happens to be an actual bipartisan cause, reminds us that corporate subsidies is "a central part" of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's economic agenda. So yes, perhaps we should skip over "cronyism" when talking about the WEDC and instead just go right for the jugular: corporate welfare, as in "Scott Walker's economic plan begins and ends with corporate welfare." Maybe an ad with guys in monocles holding their hands out and crying would do the trick, though no Democrat has the cojones to do it.

Mike Huckabee suggests that he might send in federal troops to stop abortions. He cites President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as support, and an actual legal scholar reminds us that President Eisenhower, though not a great fan of desegregation, did send in federal troops to integrate schoolkids in Arkansas -- so it sure seems like a lot of right-wingers want to be black without doing any of the hard work that comes with being black.

Finally, Germany produced an astounding 78 percent of its energy needs on July 25 from renewable energy sources. That was a spike, obviously, as Germany produced a little over 25 percent of its energy from renewables in 2014 overall, but again, the big American polluting corporations will be more than happy to tell you that renewable energy doesn't work, when all that's really missing is commitment.

Action: seeds and elephants *also* want to be free.

Sum of Us helps you tell the Monsanto corporation to abandon its scheme that traps Indian farmers in a cycle of debt, to the point where over 200,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves. Farmers in India used to save seeds and plant them the following year -- a practice pretty much every farmer in human history has embraced -- but Monsanto patents its seeds, and our government allows these patents to go through, which means if you, as a farmer, save seeds either by harvesting them out of the resulting fruit or simply not planting the extras, you're "violating" Monsanto's "rights" -- this, even though you can't really patent something you can just as easily find in nature, and "exercising its rights," for Monsanto, means trampling all over the rights of farmers everywhere else on Earth. Making farmers buy new seeds every year, just so you can keep the cash rolling in? Not as important as farmers being free to practice the conservative value of thrift. Versus, you know, the "conservative" value of letting big corporations do whatever they want.

Meanwhile, the African elephant is in trouble -- the Wildlife Conservation Society estimates that an African elephant gets killed about every 15 minutes, so it could be extinct, except in captivity, within the next 10 years -- and though laws all over the planet either ban or restrict the trade, the black market in elephant ivory still thrives, and in the most unlikely places, like Craigslist. That's right, the place where you bought that bicycle, sold that laser printer, or made that horrific date! Craigslist has formally banned ivory sales on its pages, but hasn't moved to enforce that ban, by, say, going after and taking down ivory sales posts or reporting the posts to law enforcement. Some folks will say, gosh, how can they do that when they have over 50 billion pages and over 80 million new posts daily? Well, a big website brings big responsibility, and if Wikipedia can keep nonsense off its entries, then maybe it's not so impossible a job. Avaaz helps you tell Craigslist to do more to stop illegal ivory trading on its site, and thus help fight the illegal killing of African elephants.

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: cruelty in the Dominican Republic, and inhumanity in factory farms.

The Dominican Republic, as you may or may not know, has been stripping good Dominican citizens of Haitian descent of their citizenship and expelling them to Haiti. Imagine if our government started deporting American citizens of Mexican ancestry to Mexico! Well, actually, some Americans do have wet dreams about that possibility, but it would be illegal and immoral to do so, since citizenry does imply certain rights, like the right not to be kicked out of your own country. Lately the Dominican government has announced a new round of expulsions, so Amnesty International helps you tell the Dominican President to work to reverse this cruel policy and let Dominicans of Haitian descent resettle in the Republic. Will he heed our call? Not at first, I'd expect, but justice can take a long time. And don't let yourself think that maybe we should let them do it because these are poor countries and they need to do what they can to get by -- cruelty is never an option for anyone, and, as Amnesty instructs us in copious detail, the DR violates both international law and its own law with what it's doing.

Meanwhile, Mercy for Animals has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the American Humane Association to stop certifying factory farms as "humane." The accompanying video (narrated by Bob Barker, with a total time of 3:16) shows scenes at one Foster Farms, a factory-farm poultry producer; it'll break your heart, but when you consider how much chicken is on your grocery shelves, and then how many groceries there are in America, what you see won't really surprise you. And if you've worked enough repetitive, volume-heavy jobs (ahem!), you also won't be surprised to find workers who occasionally take our their frustrations on their work (in this case, the ones who punch chickens in the head needlessly or defeather them cruelly). As I always say, moving work at this volume may make CEOs rich, but it makes us a cruel people. And you don't absolutely need to stop eating meat to fight animal cruelty -- you can buy your meat from local producers who don't need to resort to slaughterhouse methods, or even raise animals yourself.

Around the table: new frontiers in corruption!

New Jersey state legislature passes bill allowing municipalities to privatize their water utilities without putting the matter to a public vote. You'd think there'd be a benefit to having huge Democratic majorities in the legislature to counter a vigorous Republican Governor, but in this case you'd be wrong. Folks who support privatization because WE NEEDZ TEH MONEYZ NOW!!!! would do well to imagine where else you might get the money -- like, from repealing tax cuts for millionaires, or repealing corporate tax breaks, the "stimulating" value of each being, for some reason, quite overrated.

Speaking of New Jersey, the state just bailed out two about-to-default tobacco bonds, resulting in $92 million for the state right away, but also resulting in the loss of $400 million in money coming in after 2017, and also resulting in a $100 million payout to a hedge fund involved in the bonds. Nice work if you can get it! And when state Treasurers claim (as New Jersey's did) they have to bail out banksters to "protect() the state's reputation with lenders," you might suspect that the "reputation" they're "protecting" is the state's reputation as a mark.

Starting now, eggs consumed in California will have to come from chickens getting more free space than they've previously had. The increase from 67 to 116 square inches of room isn't a lot, but it does represent progress in our effort to get away from factory-farm methods, though of course egg producers have sued multiple times to keep the law from going into effect. They claim treating chickens more humanely will cost their corporations money, though what it actually does is cost the CEOs money.

With nefarious lenders finding state and federal regulators cracking down on payday loans, lenders have found a new frontier in usury: car title loans. And banksters are packaging these loans into securities for pension funds to invest in! Again, nice work if you can get it! The way our financial class acts today would make even Henry Potter blush.

Republican House Whip Steve Scalise says that, now that he thinks about it, he does remember addressing white supremacists as a state legislator back in 2002. And look how far he's come since then! Seriously, if John Boehner doesn't make him resign, it'll be a bigger black eye than Trent Lott's unfortunate comments at Strom Thurmond's 500th birthday party, which they also did their damndest to ignore. And what is with these folks who bleat that "(t)here’s a different standard for whites than there are for other groups"? They've become the whiners they always accused liberals of being.

Finally, the Shawnee County District Court rules that Kansas isn't funding its school budget adequately. I guess Gov. Brownback could take a page from President Reagan's playbook, and raise taxes on working people to make up the difference. That'll be harder than it was in Mr. Reagan's day, but not impossible, especially with a vigorous Republican party and a weak Democratic one that couldn't even beat the most unpopular Governor in the nation. But if Mr. Brownback decides to follow Tha Bush Mobb's example and not raise anyone's taxes, well, you remember how that ended.

Around the table: how the rich get richer, and other horrible truths.

Aida Manduley writes a lengthy primer describing how to argue about the racial politics surrounding the Darren Wilson non-indictment. I disagree about the efficacy of riots (it's tough to shame your oppressor once you riot), but I certainly see that Black Friday riots (for example) just don't provoke the same reaction from pundits that Ferguson seems to do. And I'd add that folks who leap from "you criticized the actions of one officer" to "you hate all cops" are perhaps not cut out for the hard work of maintaining a civilization, and would perhaps be happier in an actual police state, where one need never question whether the police have done the right thing in any instance.

Danielle Kurtzleben explains an apparent paradox: how the ultra-rich are getting richer as their wages have fallen. Long story short: the 400 highest-income tax returns happen to garner an outsized share of capital gains, dividends, and interest income, and tax rates on those types of income have fallen rather dramatically since, oh, about 2003. Remember when President Reagan said wages should never be taxed more than capital gains and dividends? Well, Mr. Bush said to hell with that. Shocking bit: when UPenn/UBonn economists say the optimal top tax rate should be 90 percent, which I rarely hear from economists.

ProPublica reviews federal crude oil train transport data and finds most localities still unaware of the potential problems coming with crude oil trains. And now that crude trains go through more densely populated areas (like Philadelphia), well, you can see the difficulty of evacuating tens of thousands of folks, rather than thousands, or hundreds. I still don't see why releasing route information to state management officials is a "security issue" for railroads -- unless they think state management agencies are rife with terrorists, which (at the risk of being too understated) is quite unlikely.

Surprise, surprise, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie vetoes bill banning certain inhumane gestation crates for pigs -- thus, in the words of one state Senator, currying favor with Iowa Republican primary voters and "Big Pork interests." Perhaps those voters should ask themselves if factory farms really represent their interests. I mean, cheap food can't be all people care about, right? Especially when such food mainly enriches big ag CEOs at the expense of small farmers?

The National Journal wonders if new FDA calorie-labeling requirements for restaurants will "shame" consumers into eating better. To which I answer: we can only hope! Even asking the question is a way of saying information doesn't really matter. And really, citing a study "in McDonald's stores" finding "no significant change in consumption behavior"? Why do they think people go to McDonald's? And suggesting that "if you want people to eat better, don't make them do math" is insulting -- like the requirements ask anyone to do multivariable calculus!

Finally, former Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) forms an exploratory committee for a Presidential run, and Markos Moulitsas is clearly pretty sour about it. I wouldn't have spoken about the need for bipartisanship either, and I could describe my own differences with Mr. Webb at some length, but Mr. Moulitsas insults him by comparing him to Herman Cain, especially after he (obviously very grudgingly) concedes that Mr. Webb's economic populism is "pretty good." I say that even trying to get poor whites to stop voting for people who keep on crushing them is a worthwhile effort, one Mr. Webb may be uniquely well-suited to lead. I just hope a President Webb doesn't magically transform into another deficit peacock.

Action: ending the Gaza blockade, and stopping a cruel experiment on monkeys.

Reps. Keith Ellison (D-MN), Barbara Lee (D-CA), and Danny Davis (D-IL) have called for an end to the blockade of Gaza, and Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you ask your House Reps to do the same. Israel took justly-earned hits for its behavior in Palestine just a few months ago, but you know how the news cycle is in America. Nonetheless, Israeli and Palestinian officials plan to resume talks concerning Gaza by the end of this month, and Hamas (which has ruled Gaza since 2007) has conceded control of Gaza crossings to the Palestinian National Authority, and several European nations have expressed a desire to monitor those crossings -- but before they do that, they want the blockade lifted. Lifting the blockade would allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, and would allow its citizens to move around somewhat -- because people clamped down as the Palestinians are will always fight and will always rebel -- and threaten the safety of good Israelis, who know even better than I do that 50 years of war-making-for-peace is well past the definition of insanity.

Meanwhile, University of Wisconsin scientists are apparently planning some cruel and unusual punishment for baby rhesus monkeys -- for science! They plan to take the newborn monkeys away from their mothers and put them in a form of solitary confinement, then make the monkeys even more anxious by (among other things) putting snakes in there with them. Then they're going to kill the monkeys before they turn two and dissect their brains. Gosh, I wonder what they'll find? That when you torture helpless creatures, their brains don't develop right? It sure is a good thing we have people like that around to tell us what's plainly in front of our face. Perhaps these folks think they'll develop some sort of drug that can counteract the effects of torture, but I think a better prescription would be to not torture. Hence Change.org helps you tell the University of Wisconsin to abandon its cruel "experiment" on rhesus monkeys. I won't defend just any attempt at "science" because right-wingers hate science. Haters gonna hate, and haters don't dictate the agenda around here.

Action: fighting in the Middle East, animal experiments, and paid familiy leave.

Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk and your President to broker a ceasefire in the latest Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Why? Because we know one's coming anyway, and we might as well save some lives. I mean, look how much good all their fighting has done so far -- one side drops bombs from planes, the other side shoots rockets, people get hurt, people die. But Israel's 45-plus-year occupation of Palestinian lands hasn't looked like self-defense for a very long time -- in fact, it looks rather like self-destruction, and many good Israeli citizens have come to that conclusion as well. And I brook no folly from those who would have you instruct you that anyone who doesn't march in lockstep with the Likud isn't a "friend of Israel." I don't believe in enabling my friends as they continue to hurt themselves by pursuing bad ideas to their dogged end, and neither do you.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the big tobacco corporations to stop telling their cigarettes on animals. I'm not particularly anti-animal testing, or even particularly pro-rat, but come on -- blowing cigarette smoke and diesel fumes straight into the noses of rats? News flash: cigarette smoke causes cancer. Everyone knows it. Lung cancer is the biggest killer among types of cancer in America, and the biggest contributor to lung cancer is smoking cigarettes. I know, I absolutely pounded that passage with the italics hammer, but seriously, do the big tobacco corporations think they're going to prove the rest of us wrong with studies like this? Maybe Philip Morris (the conductor of the diesel fumes study) thinks it'll be able to prove cigarette smoking is safer than other things. In other news, getting your arm chopped off is not as fatal as getting your head chopped off, but it's still something you'll want to avoid.

Finally, S. 1810, the FAMILY Act, is still awaiting a Senate committee vote; the FAMILY Act would allow employees to take up to 12 weeks a year in paid family leave (at about two-thirds your normal wages), versus the 12 weeks of unpaid leave American workers can take now thanks to the Family Medical Leave Act. For those squealing HOWZ WILLZ YOU PAY FOR TEH BILL YOU LAZY LIBRULZ!!!!: the FAMILY Act would cost approximately four cents per $10 of wages. I'd prefer to bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaires to pay for that (and other things!), but I'm not about to let the perfect murder the good. Speaking of which: if some folks abuse the Family Medical Leave Act, you don't get rid of family leave, you find and punish those committing the fraud, not least because the existence of fraud allows fools to cloud our moral judgment. Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to support the FAMILY Act.

Action: bad tax plans, good Orca bans, and net neutrality.

Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) has been busy, first lending his name to a "fast-track" "free" trade bill so corporations can run roughshod over our lives even more than they already do, and then introducing a tax "reform" bill that would gut the Earned Income Tax Credit, cut taxes for top income earners again, continue to tax dividends and capital gains at a lower rate than other forms of income, and let corporations continue to shove profits overseas so they can avoid paying their taxes on it. You see a theme here? I bet you do -- screw working folks and all praise Our Glorious Captains of Industry, though these Captains do little these days other than redistribute their workers' wealth upward to themselves -- and, you know, crash the economy every few years. And Mr. Camp puts forth this plan not even eighteen months after the President wouldn't shut up about taxing the rich a little more and still won a second term. It's really like they don't listen to anyone at all. So we make them listen: Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Camp tax "reform."

Meanwhile, California legislator Richard Bloom has introduced the Orca Welfare and Safety Act, which would ban keeping Orcas in captivity in California. Don't laugh, and don't say "only in California," either -- Scientific American's Board of Editors argued in their March 2014 issue that orcas and elephants, being intelligent and social creatures, shouldn't be held or raised captive in zoos or water parks at all. And n.b. that the Sea World orca named Tilikum has now killed two trainers, whereas wild orcas (despite being called "killer whales") don't attack people at all. An Orca can be 32 feet long and weigh 22,000 pounds, so keeping an Orca in a 40-foot-by-60-foot tank would be like you or I spending our entire lives in a closet. Sound like a good idea? Possibly Mr. Bloom's bill actually trails the popular will, as killer whale shows at water parks draw smaller crowds, and Sea World has received a lot of bad PR due to the documentary Blackfish and a recent Animal Welfare Act bust. So Sum of Us helps you tell the California state legislature to ban the practice of keeping orcas in captivity.

Finally, Free Press reminds us that the only corporations that really benefit from the absence of strong net neutrality rules are service providers like AT&T and Comcast and Verizon -- other internet-based corporations, like Google, Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo, and Facebook, stand to lose from the absence of net neutrality rules. Now perhaps you're saying all those corporations are too big to worry about being shut out of a regime where the big telecoms tell everybody where they can go on the internet. But just because they can pay the AT&Ts and Verizons and Comcasts of the world bajillions of dollars to keep their content flowing on the internet doesn't mean they want to. And I'll bet at least one of those corporations has an executive who remembers what it was like to build something out of nothing, which will be a much less frequent occurrence in a post-net neutrality world. And the FCC's new Chair, Tom Wheeler, is a former telecom lobbyist himself -- meaning he's only likely to listen to pro-net neutrality arguments if they come from other big corporations. So Free Press helps you tell Google et cetera to fight for strong net neutrality regulations.

Action: animal cruelty, media consolidation, and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Taylor Radig went undercover at a cattle company, where she filmed workers throwing and kicking calves around, and dragging them by their legs, their tails, even their ears. Police arrested three Quanah Cattle Company workers as a result -- and then arrested her, because she didn't notify police immediately. (It's not like she was undercover or anything. It's not like you need more than one incident to establish a pattern or anything.) Lest you think Ms. Radig violated some ag-gag law that requires folks who film animal abuse to turn their film over immediately or face draconian consequences, know that Colorado ain't one of those states. Actually, legislators have tried to pass ag-gag laws in six states this year, and went 0-for-6 -- and Tennessee's Republican Governor vetoed an ag-gag bill after massive public pressure. So why is Colorado prosecuting Ms. Radig? Maybe because of pressure from big agricultural corporations? Abby Spiwak provides a petition via change.org, which helps you tell Weld County D.A. Ken Buck to drop charges against Ms. Radig.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell FCC Chair Tom Wheeler to stop rampant media consolidation, Free Press still helps you do that. Mr. Wheeler is a former telecom lobbyist, so I have little confidence in his commitment to keeping local media in local hands, but duty remains duty -- the FCC would otherwise be split on the matter. The last few FCCs have tried to loosen media consolidation rules, but the courts have stopped their efforts; still, one sympathetic judge is all you need to set a bad precedent. And the big telecoms have gotten a little cleverer, I suppose -- they're not buying all those TV stations (over 200 changed hands last year, the most in a decade) themselves, but setting up shell corporations to buy them. I must admit I find it hard to believe that the FCC just didn't notice that. I find it much easier to believe they know the loopholes are there and don't care, since more than a few of them will follow the last FCC Chair, Julius Genachowski, into the big telecoms themselves. Still, the whole thing is embarrassing, and I wouldn't underestimate any politician's malleability while he's being embarrassed.

Finally, our government still hasn't decided whether to approve the notorious Keystone XL pipeline, so CREDO helps you tell President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry, one more once, to reject the pipeline. Why? Because the corporation building the pipeline, TransCanada, has a terrible pipe safety record -- pipe safety being fairly important when you're talking about a pipeline running over heartland water tables. Because the State Department corrupted its own environmental impact evaluation process by outsourcing the report to a corporation that had done business with TransCanada in the past -- a report which concluded that since large-scale tar sands extraction is inevitable, building the pipeline wouldn't make any impact on the environment! See, most of us had assumed that the pipeline would make such extraction inevitable. Did I miss anything? Oh, right -- because scientists tell us that dredging up tar sands will pound us with greenhouse gases, making climate change a lot worse. But, sure, go ahead and believe the big corporations when they tell you rejecting it would kill jobs -- like there's just no other way on Earth to create jobs.

The Senate takes up the Farm Bill again this week, and we've already had a win and a loss: a Durbin-Coburn amendment began the hard work of limiting crop insurance subsidies for big corporations, but a Gillibrand amendment that would have restored over $4 billion in food stamps got shot down, with 28 Democrats helping the Republicans do the shooting. And they call that fiscal sanity! But Food and Water Watch helps you email your Senators about amendments to the Farm Bill. Their list is pretty comprehensive; it includes, among others, two Barbara Boxer (D-CA) amendments that would force labeling of genetically-modified food, a Begich (D-AK) amendment that would ban genetically-engineered salmon, a Gillibrand (D-NY) amendment that would tackle antibiotic abuse in factory farm animals, a slew of factory farm-spanking amendments authored by Democrats Tester and Rockefeller as well as Republicans Grassley and Enzi, and a Shaheen (D-NH) amendment limiting crop insurance payouts to $50,000. The big agricultural concerns will try to drown us out, but they're nothing compared to us. After all, we're people.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Pennsylvania state Senate is actually mulling legislation (SB 975) that would legalize payday loans extracting 300% annual interest. Sigh. They're calling SB 975 a "micro-loan" bill, but if it looks like dung and smells like dung you don't need to eat it because Pennsylvania politicians call it meatloaf. And back in 2002, the state legislature actually passed a tough payday lending law -- one that limited the size of loans to $500, limited fees to $75, and limited interest to 20% for the first $300 and a mere 7.5% for any money over $300. Pennsylvania law also doesn't allow borrowers to take out a second payday loan until they've paid off the first, which keeps them out of an endless cycle of debt brought on by a temporary cash crisis. So why break something that's been working well for over a decade? I'd hate to think it's because the big banksters want to get into the payday loan business, but we can't discount the possibility. Keystone Progress helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject SB 975, and keep our payday loan laws strong.

President Obama again said that the Guantánamo Bay detention camp "needs to be closed." Well, that only took a massive hunger strike among detainees. No, really: Mr. Obama said "I don't want these people to die," which would have been rather more poignant if some detainees hadn't already died well after they were supposed to be released. You remember how his last attempt to close Gitmo went down: Mr. Obama declared, in the early days of his term, that he would close Guantánamo within a year, and then Congress -- dominated by Democrats at the time, you may recall -- stamped their feet about housing "terrorists" (though, of course, they were only detainees) in their "backyards," despite the fact that several protesting Senators represented states already housing convicted terrorists in maximum security prisons. Still, when a judge says a detainee can go home, and our government doesn't get him home, whose fault is that? Amnesty International helps you tell our government to end the Gitmo ignominy.

Meanwhile, you no doubt heard about the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh last week, which killed over 360 garment workers. And you no doubt remember the November fire at the Tazreen garment factory, also in Bangladesh, which killed 112 workers. And, of course, you know that both these factories manufacture clothing that shows up in big American stores like WalMart, JC Penney, and Sears. You may even recall that a WalMart safety officer told a meeting of global retailers and government officials that making safety improvements in foreign sweatshops would not be "financial feasible." Not "financially feasible" to have (for example) fire extinguishers that actually work! And they wonder why we hate them! But Tarzeen factory survivor Sumi Abedin helps you tell the big retailers to improve safety everywhere along their supply chain. Nobody who buys clothes wants other folks' blood on them -- and no corporation wants bad PR, either.

Hate to go on about recent tragedies, but 15 folks are now dead (and 200 are injured) thanks to the explosion two weeks ago at West Fertilizers of West, TX. You may remember that West Fertilizers failed to disclose to the Department of Homeland Security (sic) that it housed over 1,300 times the amount of ammonium nitrate the law required them to disclose, but you may not know that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) had last inspected West Fertilizers in 1985. 1985! We still had a 50% tax bracket that year! Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our President and our Congress to ensure OSHA has the tools it needs to do its job. Like more inspectors, you know, and steeper fines for corporations that kill people through their own negligence. But especially more inspectors. Seems like the answer to most of our problems today is to create more jobs. But not "job terrorists," no matter what the punditoids at Fox News tells you.

Finally, the Governor of Tennessee seems poised to sign SB 1248/HB 1191, another "Ag-Gag" bill aiming to prevent activists, journalists, and whistleblowers from taking photos or videos of animal abuse at factory farms. SB 1248/HB 1191 would criminalize anyone who waits more than two full days to turn over photos and videos of animal abuse. Does that sound fairly positive? Not so fast: it's tough to establish a pattern of abuse over months or years when the state forces you to turn over your evidence within 48 hours of discovering it. And if you've witnessed animal abuse in the past, now you wouldn't be able to come forward, lest the state regard you as a criminal for not telling them within 48 hours. And, you know, you don't trust your government to do the right thing -- you make your government do the right thing, by producing the argument your government can't ignore. SB 1248/HB 1191 would prevent good Tennesseans from doing that. So the ACLU helps you tell Governor Haslam to reject the "Ag-Gag" bill.