Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: in which the right-wing dramasphere remains aflame.

Greg Palast absolutely skewers Dinesh D'Souza's new film, 2000 Mules, which aims to "prove" that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election he lost by seven million votes. Long story short: Mr. D'Souza says he has a crap-ton of evidence of election fraud but, strangely, doesn't present it -- I'm old enough to remember when we all considered that a tell! -- and even the geolocation data "proving" Black men visited vote drop-off boxes 20 times each actually is only "accurate" within 93 feet! The argument gets much, much worse from there, as you would expect if you were even distantly acquainted with Mr. D'Souza's work. But for some Americans, the only "truth" is their own unquenchable rage, and they're clearly Mr. D'Souza's intended audience here.

Another day, another FAIR article reminding us that our "liberal" media talks to far too many right-wing rageheads about transgender issues and not enough to, well, transgender folks themselves. Yikes, pimps, talk to trans kids! They know more about themselves than you do! And certainly more than folks who present themselves as "influencers" but just want to hook you on another rage drug. (As evidenced by the fact that Breitbart "covered" the Texas "child abuse" directive more than most other media outlets. They're probably spinning it as "we got more trans sources than the Washington Post!" They're hoping you don't know how to read a chart.)

New York and California bills would create workers' councils so that workers' viewpoints can be heard a bit better. California's proposed Fast Food Sector Council would also include franchisees, who are also pretty put-upon by their bosses. I don't have nearly as many problems at work as fast-food employees -- they work, after all, in an industry that "literally cannot comply with wage, hour, safety and health law and still make a profit" -- but for the last decade or so, my bosses have all seemed to understand not one part of the work I do, so I heartily applaud such a move. And I bet when you think about it, you do, too.

Uh oh: the Staten Island, NY District Attorney actually used asset forfeiture cash to buy facial recognition software. Why, that's two fists of evil, right there -- it's like selling arms to the Iranians in order to get the money to arm the Contras. Even better, Staten Island has stopped using it, because it, you know, sucks, which you or I could have told them for nothing. Also too, they used asset forfeiture cash so they wouldn't have to use tax money, because politicians have been selling us a no-tax fantasy the last 40 years or so. Ideally, taxes pay for things we all may need at some point or other. Ideally, they do not pay for facial recognition software that can't tell Black folks apart any better than your right-wing uncle can.

Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-OR), justifiably facing a primary challenge from his left, runs ads touting his support for overturning our Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling -- without mentioning that he's directed close to $400,000 of Super PAC money to his own campaign. There's the world I want and the world I live in, I can already hear him intoning, but don't you love how these center-right politicians run left once they get a primary challenge? His vote late last year for the Build Back Better Act -- after he vowed to vote against it! -- I would similarly not attribute not to a Damascus moment on his part.

Finally, right-wing media outlets have reported that Justice Alito has removed himself to an "undisclosed location" after his draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade leaked -- based on a single source who said it on Fox News but now can't remember "whether I saw in on Twitter or somebody told me." And for that the right-wing dramasphere blew up yesterday. Don't cry any tears for poor Ilya Shapiro; I'm sure this all went down exactly the way he wanted it to. It may take him years to figure out how thoroughly Our Glorious Elites have used him.

Around the table: what looks large from a distance, close up ain't never that big.

Mother Jones reminds us that right-wing assholes don't just stumble over each other on Facebook -- Facebook actively aids and abets their meeting. I'm old enough to remember when you had to work to find like-minded folks on social media! Now Facebook's algorithms, here likened to "a speed-reading robot that curates everything you see," are not only "biased in favor of inflammatory content," but also biased in favor of right-wing news sources. Add in their "recommendation" tools like "Groups You Should Join" -- literally responsible for almost two out of every three folks who join some group of Nazi wannabes -- and you have a complete shitshow. I've been contemplating deleting my blog's Facebook page and doing all my promotion over email; this is why. I mean, I won't become an obnoxious right-wing prick, not least because I'm an obnoxious left-wing prick.

Spencer Snyder at FAIR tells us why "MSNBC Can't Look Back" on its origins in celebrating 25 years on the air. I've never thought they were all that liberal, and I rather vividly remember when they tried their damnedest to ape Fox News, but their history is so, so much worse than that -- they gave Laura Ingraham her big cable news break, they provided a soft landing to Tucker Carlson after Jon Stewart shamed Crossfire into oblivion, and even Keith Olbermann, now fondly remembered for being just about the only cable news personality who'd take on George W. Bush during his second term, wouldn't STFU about Monica Lewinsky during the late '90s. Of course, we should remember that they're a freaking cable news channel, which guarantees a certain level of suckitude. They clearly lucked into having Ed Schultz, God rest him, and naturally they fired him for no good reason.

You remember that ProPublica report about how awful asset forfeiture has gotten in Massachusetts? Well, now Massachusetts state legislators are making noises about overhauling the entire asset forfeiture system there, so that maybe fewer DAs can just hang on to your money and/or property for years after they decided not to charge you with anything. So, yeah, good journalism can lead to good works -- maybe folks who only watch cable news don't know that! -- and even if Massachusetts state legislators are only playing their constituents now, the good citizens of that state have something to say about that. Many things, I would think. And now all they need do is say them until they get the justice they deserve.

Ho hum, defense contracting corporation whines that the end of the Afghanistan War is costing it money, but will fund a pro-war think tank nonetheless. You see the inherent contradiction, I trust -- gosh, why not go into, oh, I don't know, renewable energy? There's a lot of call for that now, and nobody with any real work to do remembers the name of big defense contracting corporations anymore. Oh, and yeah, there's a "feedback loop," where big defense contractors fund think tanks which employ "experts" to go on the TV and tell us why we need to go to war all the time. And no "liberal" media outlet that gives them airtime will force them to disclose their potential conflicts of interest. I am, strangely, more than a little annoyed this zombie won't fall. I say "strangely" because I see apparently unkillable zombies all the time in politics.

Patrick Cockburn predicts -- quite accurately, I think -- that the Taliban will "Escape Pariah Status By Posing as the Enemy of ISIS." Isis, you may have heard, has made quite the return in Afghanistan. I've long thought that ISIS gave al-Qaeda a huge opening to claim legitimacy -- you can, I trust, imagine al-Qaeda terrorists saying hey, we did what we had to do, but we're not total barbarians like ISIS! -- but apparently it falls to the Taliban to seize that opportunity, and the better relations with other countries that could come with it. Yes, even with the U.S. -- you think the Taliban might have a few things we want? And you think maybe Joe Biden calculated all of this ahead of withdrawal? I'd be surprised if he didn't, frankly.

Finally, Jonathan Chait says "we have no idea what the rationale is" for "moderate" Democrats slashing President Biden's proposals to hike corporate taxes and tax hikes on the rich. Maybe he's too polite to say it, but I sure as shit ain't: Democrats plan to piss all over yet another slab of extremely popular legislation so that they completely demoralize their base and lose our House and Senate in 2022, thus keeping us in the same absurd and perverse hostage crisis that has yielded the Contract on America and Tha Bush Mobb and the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Maybe the Josh Gottheimers of America should consider they'll never win another election if Congress is full of open fascists, as it will be if they get their way this time. If superior arguments clearly don't move "moderate" Democrats, I won't be above appealing to their self-interest.

Around the table: concerning tax cuts for the rich, asset forfeiture, stupid COVID ideas, and Afghanistan.

ProPublica finds yet another reason to hate the Trump tax "reform": it widened a loophole allowing CEOs who also own their own businesses essentially reclassify salaries as profits so they can pay less in taxes. Thus an effective top tax rate falls from 40.8% to 29.6%, which adds up at a CEO's income level. CEOs would have to justify the decrease in their salaries to our IRS -- if our IRS audits them, which hardly happens to rich folks anymore thanks to over a decade of our Congress defunding our IRS. WeatherTech CEO David MacNeil will probably regret taking ProPublica on a tour of his floor-mat empire, since he comes off like a self-centered jerk, to put it mildly.

ProPublica also tackles assert forfeiture laws in Massachusetts -- specifically, how hard it is to get your property back there even several years after the state decided not to charge you with whatever suspicion prompted them to confiscate your property in the first place. Seriously, the lengths the state goes to just to avoid giving you your property back (waiting years, putting your name in fine print along with a hundred others, demanding that you respond in court when you did nothing wrong) would be comic, if it weren't unconstitutional. If you still think drug charges are a serious enough reason to violate our Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful searches and seizures, note that Massachusetts will seize your property without a drug charge. Also, how well has that strategy worked in reducing drug addiction? By the evidence, not well at all.

Ho hum, Gov. Ron DeSantis (E-FL) pushes Regeneron treatments ahead of vaccinations as a hedge fund CEO invests millions in Regeneron and millions more in Mr. DeSantis's campaign. And when one of the few remaining Democratic state legislators points out that Mr. DeSantis is "not a full-blown anti-vaxxer" but also someone who "doesn't want to upset those who support the vaccine," you start to think he might actually be a pretty good politician. You will not, however, think he's a very good Governor, or a very good leader. The only reason Florida's seven-day moving average of new cases is under 20,000 is that Florida doesn't report every day, which would lead you to think Mr. DeSantis has something to hide.

Heard that the horse-dewormer drug ivermectin might be a "miracule cure" for COVID? Nicole Karlis at Salon explains why you should be, ah, skeptical. And when your Trumphole aunt says "but I read about it in the Wall Street Journal," you can reply that the Journal op-ed piece they read (or, more likely, heard about) was co-written by a drug industry "consultant" who worked for the corporation that created ivermectin. Also, the studies that "prove" ivermectin's effectiveness were almost absurdly small, or took place in test tubes which aren't human bodies, or retracted due to data manipulation. And I'd just leave it at that -- even Trumpholes who used to carry The Pill Book around at their jobs will go la-la-la-la when you tell them about side effects and drugs you should never mix ivermectin with.

Why oh why are we allowing the folks who started the Afghanistan War offer their opinions on its ending? There are plenty of astute observers our "liberal" media could use instead -- why, there are even folks who don't say one thing in public and another thing in private, as Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Lute have done. There is, of course, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), the only House Rep to vote against the Afghanistan War to begin with! Think she might have something interesting to say about all of that? To most of our "liberal" media's preferred voices on Afghanistan I would simply say: thank you for your input, but I think you've done enough.

Finally, Jon Schwarz at The Intercept reminds us who really "won" the Afghanistan War: big American defense contracting corporations. The biggest five defense contracting corporations in America have seen their stock returns go up almost 900 percent since 2001, while stocks generally have gone up by a bit over 500 percent, meaning the big five defense stocks did about 58% better than the stock market as a whole. All that, to put the same right-wing extremist government back in power that we were supposedly trying to dislodge when we went in almost two decades ago. Nice work if you can get it!

Action: concerning corporate divestment from police foundations, social media "fact-checking," and online abuse.

Color of Change helps you tell big corporations such as Amazon, Target, Starbucks, and Comcast to divest from police foundations. Police foundations are a two-pronged menace: they fund our burgeoning police state, and they show up state, local and federal governments for failing to fund police in the first place! If we're going to have police -- and ideally, as I've said before, we will have them doing far fewer jobs -- then we ought to fund them properly, and not use tricks like asset forfeiture, the 1033 program, and police foundations to paper over that lack of funding. Police foundations, being private non-profits, also fund police departments with very little or no public oversight, which means police departments can spy on citizens and fire rubber bullets on protestors without anyone accountable to the people having actually signed off on that! Which also gives our worst public servants an unearned sense of relief, I suppose. Need I mention that corporate influence on police is a) undesirable and b) no substitute for making corporations pay their share of taxes? The only people who should be influencing police are the people police officers serve. So it's time to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR again.

Meanwhile, Facebook somehow seems to outsource its third-party fact-checking function to the worst far right-wing "news" organs, and The Daily Caller (founded by Tucker Carlson because of course it was) is just one of them. Guess what else The Daily Caller does? It tries to raise money for our President's re-election effort! Think Snopes, Factcheck.org, or PolitiFact are raising money for Joe Biden right now? (If you responded OF COURSEZ TEH LIBRUL MEDIAZ DOEZ TEH THINGZ!!!!, please navigate away from this page. And maybe see a therapist about your rage issues.) I take issue with outsourcing your fact-checking function to some big media corporation to begin with -- millions of people are looking for jobs as we speak, and my experience tells me most of them have much better BS detectors than they get credit for having! -- and I also take issue with isolating "fact-checking" as if it's some special function of a news organ rather than that news organ's reason for existence. Nonetheless, I don't want obviously biased news organ telling me what a fact is. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop using The Daily Caller as a "fact-checker."

Finally, YouTube has decided (as of the end of September) to remove the feature that enables users to add features such as closed captioning and translated subtitles to videos; this Community Contributions feature sure is a fresh breath of 2007, when (regardless of whatever else was going on in the world!) it seemed like any of us could use the internet as a force for good, even if that good was merely helping deaf folks and foreign-language speakers enjoy the same videos we're all enjoying. But Google (YouTube's owner, sigh) claims it's removing the feature because it "was rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse," and I figured spam and abuse would be the real reason, but you know how you counter spam and abuse? You be like Wikipedia and you hire enough people to effectively monitor the feature for spam and abuse! Just like, you know, if you want to do fact-checking, you hire enough people to check the facts, not outsource it to some corporation or throw up your hands at how hard it is. Anyway, Change.org helps you tell Google not to remove the Community Contributions feature from YouTube. If you like, you can tell them to manage it better, too.

Penny Rants for Sunday, December 8, 2019: concerning internet policy, tough-on-crime posturing, and impeachment.

Sen. Sanders releases his broadband plan, a plan big telecom executives won't like, according to Karl Bode at Vice. Sen. Sanders would restore net neutrality and break up big telecom monopolies, of course, but he'd also prevent big telecoms from imposing hidden and onerous fees -- which anyone who has ever paid a cable bill will like! -- plus he'd invest $150 billion (over how many years, his proposal doesn't say) in community broadband, which anyone who has ever paid a cable bill will also like. I'm not sure Mr. Sanders's plan is "Comcast's Worst Nightmare," though -- maybe Ben Tarnoff's "Socialist Plan to Fix the Internet" is. (No, I won't recoil from the word "socialist" just because idiots use the word to describe anything they don't like.) Mr. Tarnoff's plan is more a "sketch," containing a range of proposals including turning our internet into a free, publicly-owned utility and regulating corporations differently based on their size and function; you would think Comcast would rather deal with Mr. Sanders than Mr. Tarnoff.

Chris Calton at the Foundation for Economic Education writes about how asset forfeiture laws have mushroomed over the last half century -- with a vital assist from then-Senator/now Democratic Presidential contender Joe Biden. And also, sigh, with a vital assist from then-Assistant Attorney General/now Republican Presidential contender William Weld, which should (again) instruct us about the general uselessness of moderate Republicans. At first, RICO only went after the assets of convicted criminals, but within a decade Congress changed the law so they could go after indicted criminals -- and then Messrs. Biden and Weld stepped in, allowing law enforcement to take "substitute" property (like houses) without even demonstrating probable cause, let alone getting an indictment. Thus we now have a state of affairs that outrages liberals and conservatives alike -- not to mention good Americans who've lost their homes not because they broke the law, but because their local police department got hungry.

Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer reminds us that the Iran-Contra affair might predict what'll happen with the current impeachment effort better than the one against Richard Nixon. Mr. Reagan got away with that one, after all, and most Americans today look at the makeup of the Senate and conclude that our current President will, too. I recall that the Iran-Contra investigation essentially ended when NSA head John Poindexter told Congress that "the buck stops here with me," i.e., that he had decided to go ahead with the whole arms-for-hostages-plus-money-for-Contras deal and had actively kept President Reagan out of the loop. But that doesn't excuse our media's collective amnesia over that time a President committed an impeachable offense and Congress didn't impeach him. And while our current President ought to remember that he's a lot less popular than Mr. Reagan was back then, no matter what he says to screaming crowds at rallies, the rest of us should remember that he's not that unpopular -- at least not yet.

Around the table: our Supreme Court does a good thing, plus a lot of other people do bad things.

Our Supreme Court unanimously rules that states and localities must adhere to our Constitution before they can indulge in asset forfeiture shenanigans. To be sure, their ruling won't end asset forfeiture, but it will give defendants a way to argue that seizing their property without being able to convincingly tie them to an actual drug funding network violates our 8th Amendment protections against excessive fines. Maybe one day we'll be able to get our Supreme Court to recognize that seizing property without convicting someone of a crime is itself an excessive fine, but the arc of history surely bends toward justice even when it looks less like an arc and more like a plank.

I'm not sure saying that our "liberal" media have been busy lately "erasing" the positive effects of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela gives us the whole picture, because it sure seems to me that our "liberal" media have never acknowledged these gains! The Chavismos have definitely reduced poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and even racism; does that make it OK for the late Mr. Chavez to have demanded (and received) "rule-by-decree" power in 2000 and 2007, for example? No, of course not. But painting the works of the Bolivarian revolution the way our "liberal" media do sure doesn't tell us the whole story, and not least because they all forget to mention U.S. sanctions on Venezuela as the main contributor to Venezuela's economic woes.

Another day, another report showing big corporations getting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax rebates despite making hundreds of millions (or billions) in profits. And another day, another "expert" asserting that corporations should never pay more taxes than they owe because they're supposed to please their shareholders, when the issue is actually that we don't make them owe enough in the first place! Seriously, that statement has almost everything I hate about right-wing argument in it -- the gaslighting, the changing of the goalposts, the tacit admission that they can't win on the merits.

Surprise, surprise, our President talks tough about stopping migrant smugglers while undermining actual efforts to do that. Typical. To be sure, this state of affairs results (at least in this Administration) from overzealousness in one area (deportation) resulting in neglecting another (attacking smuggling rings), but when a man spends so much time talking about how super-awesome he is, you do tend to be less forgiving of his faults, and who could blame you? Besides a ragehead, that is.

When you encounter a poll indicating that Sen. Mitch McConnell's poll numbers are seriously underwater just 20 months before he goes before the voters again, you may remember we were at this point in 2013, also, and he went on to paste his opponent -- you remember his opponent, Alison Lundergran Grimes, the one who refused to say whether she voted for Barack Obama for President? Lesson: if Democrats won't put up someone people will want to vote for, then Mob Boss Mitch will cruise to another term, no matter how little Kentuckians seem to like him.

Finally, with his Administration's own climate change assessment and intelligence community having the temerity to tell him things he doesn't want to hear, our President is putting together another climate change panel, to be headed up by an unregenerate climate change denier who has said -- sit down for this one! -- that the "demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler." Just like! Remember how we kicked carbon dioxide out of our schools, segregated it into its own ghettoes, boycotted and vandalized its shops, made it wear yellow Stars of David, and then froze its property and assets when it tried to leave for other lands? When they say a little learning makes a man dangerous, this must be what they mean.

Around the table: more stories of Republicans supporting all the wrong people.

Surprise, surprise, our Administration's CFPB has proposed slashing Obama-era rules regulating payday lenders. After all, who is more popular than a lender who traps you in a cycle of debt with 300% interest rates? Upon hearing that "(t)he industry feared the new regulations would force many of them to close their doors," I wouldn't blame you for reacting, we can only hope! That might also be an appropriate reaction if I were to suggest that the courts are probably going to strike down this new rulemaking process, too. (Nobody give me the "but where else will poor people turn when they need money" spiel. The U.S. Postal Service could do the job, as it did until the late 1960s, if Congress had the political will to allow it.)

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, informs us that "the so-called popular uprising" in Venezuela "is, at its heart, a furious backlash of the whiter (and wealthier) Venezuelans against their replacement by the larger Mestizo (mixed-race) poor." I don't know that the white supremacist in the White House thinks of any Venezuelans as white, but Venezuelans who count Europeans as their ancestors sure do, and they also think of Mestizos as lesser human beings, if they think of them as human beings at all. One hopes the Mestizos rise up and beat back this coup, as they did in 2002.

Our Supreme Court issues another stay of Lousiana's infamous anti-abortion law, while Justice Kavanaugh -- the only Justice to write about the stay, which of course he opposed -- busies himself trying to find the loophole that'll let our Court strike down the Texas law and let the nearly-identical Louisiana law stand. "Louisiana's four doctors getting hospital admitting privileges" ain't it, not when our Court also struck down Texas's law because it required abortion clinics to be "mini-hospitals," but that might not matter if our Court is bent on causing jurisprudential mayhem.

House Republicans have taken to spreading hysteria about violent crimes by undocumented immigrants, though by their logic we could just as easily cherry-pick 16 anecdotes from 16 Congressional districts over a 19-year period describing crime-by-citizens and justify building a wall to keep Americans out of America. Why, Rebecca Solnit provides five examples of white men committing murder and plotting terror in America just from the last two weeks of January, which by House Republican logic means we should build a wall to keep white males out of America. Oh, did I mention 16 crimes over 19 fucking years? It's like Republicans are trying to see how badly they can do science.

Finally, South Carolina police lobbyist and asset forfeiture defender actually comes out and says that, without the ability to forcibly take property from folks before they've been convicted of a crime, "what's the incentive to go out and make a special effort?" I'm old enough to remember when saying such a thing out loud would make you afraid to face your friends and neighbors; not so now in our sick, immoral and decadent society, where folks confuse cynicism with knowledge and think they're better than everyone else because they're more jaded than everyone else.

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: includes follies about healthcare, law and order, transparency, and big telecom service.

Dean Baker describes the "massive shift of resources" that would accompany a move to a Medicare-for-All, single-payer health insurance system. He generally finds less savings from single-payer than you'd hope, but also finds more savings in the area of prescription drug costs than you'd think, and he also thinks it's "a good working assumption" that, under a single-payer system, wages would rise by about the amount employers are paying for health insurance now, and I hope he's right, because I suspect big corporations would try their damnedest to keep that money for themselves and push the cost onto their workers in the form of payroll taxes. (He's also skeptical of raising taxes significantly on the wealthy, figuring they'll try harder to avoid it -- but we largely prevented that in the 1950s, so why can't we do that now?)

The Obamacare repeal deadline is all in the news these days (and the CHIP reauthorization deadline, which is the same day, uh, isn't,) but yet another health care-related funding deadline is coming up, and that's for federal funding for community health centers. 61 Senators, from both parties, have gone on record supporting reauthorization of this funding, so if Congress fails at this, it should be grotesquely easy to run ads against incumbents next year. If Congress kills it with poison pill amendments, of course, they could avoid defeat more easily, since most folks don't like to peer inside the sausage-making factory. But they would deserve defeat. Evil works always deserve defeat.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) demands information about "wasteful and potentially unlawful spending by the U.S. Marshals Service" with assets seized from civil and criminal proceedings. I do like it when Mr. Grassley performs actual oversight the way an actual people's representative would do, though his moments of partisan hackery, unfortunately, seem to get more attention. And if you'd prefer he concentrate his efforts on ending asset forfeiture, keep in mind that a damning indictment of asset forfeiture abuse would help such an effort.

The AP reports on state government bodies actually suing folks who request public records. Can you say "frivolous lawsuit," boys and girls? If you're even entertaining the notion that state government agencies might have a point, look at their argument -- "it’s best to have courts determine whether records should be released when legal obligations are unclear" (as the AP summarizes it) cries out for a punch in the nose. It's so obviously an attempt to intimidate watchdogs and muckrakers that the reactionary Michigan state House unanimously banned the practice earlier this year. It's so awful maybe even Neil Gorsuch would rule against it.

Finally, Verizon disconnects over 8,000 rural customers, thus threatening the ability of these residents to deal with emergencies (among other things). By the time you figure out the labyrinthine reason Verizon is dropping these folks, you'll be thinking maybe the real problem is that Verizon wanted to look like it was serving rural customers without actually doing the hard work that comes with serving them. Either that, or that they're just not very good at anything but making money. You know what would solve this problem? Community broadband! You know what big telecom corporations like Verizon spend inordinate amounts of time and effort fighting? Community broadband!

Around the table: racism as a virus, cowardice as a Democrat virus, and other high concepts.

U.S. House passes an actually-bipartisan amendment that would essentially roll back the Department of Justice's efforts to expand asset forfeiture. Allowing police to seize property from the accused, not the convicted, is obviously unconstitutional -- except to the politicians who prefer posturing about being "tough on crime" to actually solving problems. The Senate could still shoot it down -- as they just shot down a Rand Paul amendment that would have repealed the 2001 AUMF that three Presidents have now abused -- but it's still a step forward.

The incomparable Heather Digby Parton writes a long and thoughtful article (including excellent analysis of recent polls) wondering whether making a deal with President Trump on the debt limit was a "trap." Call me old-fashioned, but I think you can walk through a lot of traps if you stop playing 13-dimensional chess and just work for your constituents, though that seems to be a lot to ask of contemporary Democrats. Certainly one should cast a wary eye at Democrat efforts to "win back" Trump voters, the vast majority of whom were Romney voters, McCain voters, Bush voters, et cetera. The worst thing about the debt limit deal, as I've said, was that it cleared the board for Republicans this month, so they can exert more effort on odious tax "reform" and health care "reform" efforts.

Credit reporting corporation Equifax removes forced arbitration clause from the free credit monitoring service it set up in the wake of its now-notorious data breach, but not from its general Terms of Service. That means that Equifax could try to force you into an arbitration court if you have a dispute with them over this whole imbroglio (which means that even if you threw their own statement saying they wouldn't force arbitration on you back at them, you might be doing so before an arbitrator). So I'd be conservative and monitor your credit using an actually-free credit report via annualcreditreport.com. (Yes, that is a totally valid way of using the word "conservative," though I guess I can't blame you for doing a double-take.)

Adam Johnson at FAIR informs us that the six top US newspapers actually spent a little more time condemning anti-fascists than they did condemning fascists after Charlottesville. Even if I were generous, and assumed that the "liberal" media condemn anti-fascists because it doesn't actually take a lot of moral courage to condemn fascists, I still don't think the isolated incidents of violence from folks resisting fascists is more than half of this story. I think Nazi wannabes committing considerably more acts of violence against people they think should be wiped from the Earth is more than half the story, actually.

Ho hum, Martha Pskowski at TruthOut describes how Coca-Cola has been sucking the water out of the ground in an area of rural Southern Mexico. Conservatves ought to find a lot of these themes familiar -- like the city overtaking the farm and the extermination of local traditions -- but too many of today's "conservatives" simply repeat the words free market over and over again, possibly in an effort to position themselves for their next job as a corporate PR hack. Trouble is, Coca-Cola's water-draining arrangement probably violates Mexico's Constitution, which literally guarantees clean water to its citizens.

Finally, we've been hearing a lot lately about the "intra-Democratic divide," which is a vast improvement from our "liberal" media treating Barack Obama like he was Thee Most Liberal Liberal Imaginable, but too many folks treat "reaching out to working-class whites" or "keeping black and Latino voters" is an either-or. Mr. Marshall is right to suggest that racism is a "virus" that lies "dormant" but can be "activated" by the right set of conditions, but one of the conditions that helps activate that racism is a corporatist Democratic candidate who has nothing to offer other than not being a Republican. Give people the economic populism they crave and deserve, and racism won't be anywhere near as important.

Action: "free" trade, asset forfeiture, and the Saudi war in Yemen.

As you know, President Trump made opposition to "free" trade a central part of his platform -- but given his appointment of "free" trade-loving banksters to his cabinet, his own refusal to scuttle the "investor-state tribunal" in NAFTA, and his Commerce Secretary's odd compulsion with remaking NAFTA into something more like the hated Trans-Pacific "Partnership," you have every reason to believe Mr. Trump is playing us. I mean, if you get us out of the TPP but make all your trade deals like the TPP, what have you accomplished? Besides the appeasement of Our Glorious Elites, I mean? Of course, what he wants matters far less than what we want, so the Sierra Club helps you tell Congress to make any future trade deals work for people, not for polluters and corporatists. And you can take heart that even a conservative's sense of balance between government regulation and pollution isn't the same as yours, that a conservative would still hate having our rule of law upended in courts not created by our Constitution.

Meanwhile, actual conservative Radley Balko at the Washington Post thoroughly demolishes Attorney General Sessions's decision to ramp up asset forfeiture. Long story short: some state laws forbid asset forfeiture except in case of conviction, but our federal government helps local law enforcement entities turn local cases into federal ones, and thus evade those state laws -- while still getting the lion's share of any assets seized by the feds! This effort, in other words, exists solely to let localities unconstitutionally seize money and property of folks accused, not convicted of a crime -- and the Obama Administration was winding it down in states with laws against asset forfeiture, but naturally the "states' rights" "law-and-order" Trump Administration has scrapped that. But you can do something about it, by letting the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell Congress to pass H.R. 1555/S. 642, the FAIR Act, which would reform asset forfeiture at the federal level.

Finally, as you know, the House has passed three amendments to its defense authorization bill that would restrict our government's ability to help the Saudis fight their war against Yemen, so Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell the Senate to vote the same way the House did. As you know, the Senate gets to write its own defense authorization bill, and they'll no doubt puff up their chests and talk about how they're the Greatest Deliberative Body in the History of the Universe and they'll castigate the House for being so irresponsible as to hamstring the President's ability to "protect the country." But, frankly, helping the Saudis (oh, and al-Qaeda, by the way -- yes, they're also on the Saudis' side here) fight a war against Yemen that has caused a cholera outbreak and nearly caused a famine is itself irresponsible. And can you figure out how helping the Saudi war against Yemen "protects America"? I can figure out one way it doesn't -- the Houthi rebels, a Saudi target, have proven to be pretty good ISIS killers.

Around the table: one-third good news this one day only!

Here's a surprise: the House Appropriations Committee has adopted an amendment to the defense authorization bill that would kill the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF), which Presidents of both parties have abused in expanding the "war on terror." Kudos to Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) for fighting nonstop for the AUMF's death for over 15 years. The amendment could get sifted out in the inevitable conference between competing House and Senate bills, but this is still a big step forward.

Illinois state legislature reforms some of its asset forfeiture procedures. The two big changes are ending the use of probable cause to seize property and repealing the requirement that accused persons put up 10% of the asset seizure's value just to challenge the seizure (after all, should redressing grievances be a pay-to-play game?). Best news? Exactly one legislator voted against the bill, meaning the legislature can override a gubernatorial veto with ease. It's not total repeal, but it is progress.

Eoin Higgins at FAIR provides yet another necessary reminder that obsessing over Russian meddling in the 2016 election is much less important than covering all those other things Mr. Trump is doing or wants to do. Why, it's almost like Mr. Trump wants you to look at Russia instead of all his other dramas! I'll admit I'm a little surprised to find a near-supermajority in one poll saying the "liberal" media's obsession with Russia is "hurting the country," and I wouldn't go quite that far. But would we even be talking about Russian meddling had Bernie Sanders been the Democratic nominee?

Ho hum, the FCC stands ready to smash the last two policies that might preserve what little local media we've got left, namely the "main studio rule," in which media corporations must locate their main offices within the communities they serve, and the repeal of the "UHF discount," so big corporations can, again, own more local media stations. Why? Don't believe the hype about "changing technologies," because literally all FCC Chair Ajit Pai cares about is money. And if Democrats had smarts or guts, they'd be citing these FCC policies as proof that Republicans think rural areas don't deserve local media that serves them and not some corporate media conglomerate.

President Trump's ridiculous "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity" has demanded complete voter registration records from all 50 states and plans to make that information public. This is not a case of "what do voters have to hide," because they do actually have something rather valuable to hide -- their personal information -- from unscrupulous people who might steal their identities or attack them at their homes. Again, if Democrats had smarts or guts, they'd call this request "voter intimidation," and then tell the "Commission" what physically impossible thing they might do with their requests.

Finally, we learn from Mark Joseph Stern at Slate that new Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's first dissent -- in a case where the Court held that both female partners in a lesbian couple should be named as parents on a birth certificate -- "Has a Huge Factual Error and Terrible, Dishonest Logic." But he was so nice during his confirmation hearings! It's bad when a Supreme Court Justice not only can't agree that Arkansas refused to put both names on the birth certificate, but tells the couple they should have challenged a different law than the one that actually hurt them. Neil Gorsuch should remind you of no one so much as that right-wing kid in your polisci class who wouldn't ever shut his yap.

Action: free speech, clean air, whistleblower protections, and endangered species.

Hoo boy: the Arizona state Senate passes SB 1142, which would, get this, allow the state to seize the assets of anyone who plans or participates in a protest that could turn violent. Asset forfeiture is an unconstitutional blot on our nation's soul already, and it shouldn't be difficult to imagine how an agent provocateur, or a group of them, could make a peaceful protest go south right quick. But if you aren't being violent at a protest, why should we allow the state punish you? SB 1142's supporters want you to think that anyone who protests Mr. Trump is a paid provocateur -- a profound insult to our patriotism, and you're free to remind them of that! But folks who whine that we've-gotta-do-something-anything also expose themselves as weaklings. And if they don't like protests, maybe they should stop giving the people the back of their hand. SB 1142 goes to the state House now; state House Speaker J.D. Mesnard's phone number is 1.602.926-4481, and Majority Leader John M. Allen's number is 1.602.926.4916. You want more phone numbers? Here they are. Give 'em hell.

H.J.Res. 36, the "resolution of disapproval" that would roll back the Obama Administration's rules curbing methane emissions on public lands, passed the House, but still awaits Senate approval. If you're scratching your head wondering why anyone would think more methane emissions on public lands would be a goodthing, well, you're not alone. Methane emissions, as you know, pack a bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions do, and "flaring" them on public lands not only pollutes those lands, but it represents energy that could be captured and used, and it represents royalties from capturing that energy and using it that the public could be earning. Since it is, you know, our land. But that's our Republican party -- objectively pro-pollution, objectively pro-wasting natural resources, objectively pro-wasting taxpayer money, as long as these things distribute more of your money upward to their big donors. So, yeah, H.J.Res. 36 warrants a phone call to your Senators today.

Meanwhile, Republicans aren't content with just unleashing more pollution -- they're also aiming to gut the Securities and Exchange Commission's whistleblower program, which has, over the last few years, recovered billions of dollars -- taxpayer dollars, I might add -- from fraud artists. If you're scratching your head wondering why anyone would want to make it harder to catch corporate criminals -- well, actually, you've already figured out that it explains itself. Any big campaign donor -- especially in an age that not only doesn't reward work but seems to hold contempt for work -- might be a corporate criminal, and we can't have any sunlight shining on that, or else some of these Congressfolk might actually lose their jobs. Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell Congress and the President that to reject any attempt to gut SEC whistleblower protections. After all, Congress may pretend it didn't happen, but we all remember that banksters crashed our economy in 2008, and though they feel no shame over that, we're not about to let it happen again.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to gut the Endangered Species Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Now that we have a bill (H.R. 717, the so-called Listing Reform Act, always they burn down your house and call it "reform"!), we can guess at the specific aims of Endangered Species Act destruction: H.R. 717 would mandate that government agencies count the financial costs of protecting endangered species, and would even let more unscrupulous government agencies (uh, like the ones we have now!) put "lost" oil and gas profits or "lost" local tax revenue ahead of any other consideration! Because that's the civilization they want -- one that makes every decision not just based on money, but based on short-term gains. That all doesn't sound very conservative, does it? I mean, wouldn't an actual conservative would insist on taking the long view? Of course, our President and our Congress aren't conservatives -- they're reactionaries. But reactionaries don't get all the say. Not in my America.

Around the table: a victory against government spying, another victory against "conversion therapy" -- and other far less affirming events.

U.S. District Judge orders the CIA and the NSA to reveal whether they were conducting surveillance on Occupy Philly. They'll also have to justify keeping those records from the public, and since Occupy Philly were not terrorists, I'm having a hard time seeing how they'll justify that. (Clever, clever little CIA, refusing to answer at first because their mission is monitoring foreign subjects! A mission I'm sure they never expand!)

In a possibly related note, Capitol police arrest 17 (out of 40) protestors who staged a sit-in at the office of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Until Tuesday evening, Mr. Schumer was picking out drapes for the Senate Majority leader's office; now he's hoping his reputation as the senior Senator from Wall Street won't kill his chances at becoming Minority Leader. I'd prefer Sen. Sanders or Sen. Warren, too, but these are Democrats we're talking about, who are as we speak planning to find the weakest possible centrist to run against Mr. Trump in 2020, the lessons of 2004 and 2016 remaining unlearned.

Radley Balko at the Washington Post writes at length about "The Terrifying Prospect of an Attorney General Giuliani." The sheer amount of pettiness, vindictiveness, and power-madness described therein is exhaustive and exhausting, but let's highlight two things: one, his actual incitement of New York police officers to riot in 1993, and two, his hard work expanding asset forfeiture, where you get your property taken before you're even found guilty of a damn thing. It's not too outlandish to imagine Mr. Trump sending in the Army to massacre to the Standing Rock protestors with nary a nod from Mr. Giuliani.

William D. Cohan at Politico wonders "Why Wall Street is Suddenly in Love with Donald Trump." Suddenly? The banksters have been getting, and will continue to get, "flagellation" from "mainstream America" (of course, we might also call them the people), but any flagellation they got from the Obama Administration was only for the cameras. The idea that Donald Trump knows how to "build things" is, of course, laugh-out-loud funny, and exactly the kind of "analysis" you'd expect from a bankster who doesn't build anything but fake wealth. Kudos to the author, at least, for mentioning that Steve "I'm 'Alt-Right,' Not Racist" Bannon was a Goldman-Sachs bankster not too long ago.

Finally, the Seattle City Council votes unanimously to ban "conversion therapy" purportedly aiming to turn gay youth into straight youth. "Conversion therapy" uses "practices" like forcible re-enactment of past sexual abuses and certain "exercises" involving intimate touching and nudity. That's some "tough love" right there! Of course, your freedom to practice bad "science" doesn't extend to pushing that "science" onto children.

Action: police brutality, and clean water.

Moms Rising helps you tell the Obama Administration to take immediate steps to curb police brutality. They present a long list of reforms we've fought for here at various times, including reforms that directly address the Sterling and Castile killings (like more robust data collection on police brutality) and reforms that go deeper into structural issues with police departments (like limits on asset seizure and transfer of military equipment to police). If you're thinking that presenting this list of demands ensures that some of the demands will get lost, just remember that every time you utter a demand, you get closer to realizing it. And if you're wondering how police are ever going to defend themselves if we don't give them a wide berth to shoot black and brown people dead, do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) remember that our legal system presumes everyone innocent until proven guilty -- which is why I don't pass along action alerts demanding convictions or charges for the officers involved, though I will pass along action alerts demanding investigations. If a guy dies after being pulled over for a broken taillight, I can think of no good reason to oppose investigating further -- though I can think of plenty of bad ones.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5313, the WATER Act, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. Our federal government has reduced spending on water infrastructure by some 75% over the last 40 years, which has shifted a lot of responsibility for such spending on the states -- which may please those who have a certain philosophical bent, but which does not, presumably, please the good citizens of Flint, MI, whose children now have permanent brain damage thanks to corroded lead pipes resulting from the bold thinking of an unelected "emergency manager." Also, for those of a certain philosophical bent, abdicating responsibility at the federal level doesn't just "leave matters to the states" -- it also leaves matters to corporations, who are hastening to privatize water systems across America as we speak. If it's hard enough to get state and federal officials to redress grievances; how hard will it be to get a corporation, which only owes its shareholders, to redress grievances? The WATER Act -- by funding water infrastructure spending with revenue collected by closing corporate tax loopholes, which I call a win-win -- will begin to break down this dystopia, so let's get to it.

Action: asset forfeiture, GMO labeling, and retirement advisors.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Reps and Senators to repeal the asset forfeiture laws that make it much easier for state and local law enforcement agencies to take money from folks who haven't been proven guilty of a crime. This is yet another remnant of the I'm-tough-on-crime-because-I-have-very-small-testicles era -- law enforcement wanted to stop suspected drug dealers from moving money around, so they concocted a way to seize it, and who could have predicted that they would one day become so financially dependent on the practice that they'd abuse it? Besides anyone who thought about it for a minute, I mean. Asset forfeiture not only constitutes an abuse of government power against innocent-until-proven-guilty citizens, it's also an act of profound cowardice -- if state and local governments have trouble funding police forces, they should have the guts to raise taxes, or, at the very least, stop giving out welfare handouts to corporations in the form of tax breaks. I mean, if you don't have at least that amount of courage, you really should be in another line of work.

Meanwhile, Congress is back in session, and the House passed H.R. 1599, the absurdly-named Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, before the break -- a bill that actually prevents accurate labeling of genetically-modified organisms (or GMOs) in our food by preventing states and localities from mandating such labeling, and which "compensates" for that by permitting a "voluntary" labeling regime for GMOs, just like the "voluntary" regime we have had for over two decades that no one uses to label GMOs. (Those four-digit PLU codes you see in the produce section? If anyone wanted to label their GMO-laden produce, they'd start the code with an "8." Ever see one? Of course you haven't.) It's only safe for the big agricultural corporations that seem to get all the say about everything, even with supposed GMO-labeling proponent Barack Obama, who will surely add this to his list of broken promises, probably in the name of "bipartisanship" (when, like, hello? support for GMO labeling is actually bipartisan!). Just Label It helps you tell your Senators to support honest food labeling by rejecting H.R. 1599.

Finally, the Department of Labor is finishing up rules that would require retirement investment advisors to adhere to a "fiduciary duty" to put their customers' needs ahead of their own. Sound commonsensical to you? Of course it does! And you know what that means: Wall Street banksters hate it and are trying to scuttle it. They're not completely stupid, of course, so they say that of course they look out for their customers' best interests, so why do they need regulations forcing them to do that? (Though if you are, in fact, looking out for your customers' best interests, regulations mandating that you do that shouldn't really bother you.) They also say the rule will close off investment advice to large portions of Americans -- as if there will ever be a shortage of customers looking for retirement investment advice, or a shortage of professionals looking to earn money giving it! OK, I take it back: they are completely stupid. Americans for Financial Reform helps you support the Department of Labor's retirement advice rules.

Action: asset forfeiture, and fuel-efficiency standards for trucks.

H.R. 540/S. 255, the FAIR Act, would end the Department of Justice's Equitable Sharing Program, which has, for over 30 years, shared asset forfeiture proceeds between state and federal police forces -- which fact has been known to prompt local law enforcement officers to bring in federal ones just to get their hands on a motherlode. The FAIR Act would also require that seized assets go into the Treasury's general fund, rather than into the Justice Department's fund, since that state of affairs also induces corruption. New Mexico enacted similar reforms last week, and though the FAIR Act doesn't go as far -- New Mexico can now only seize assets from folks convicted of a crime, not merely accused of one -- it does increase the burden of proof the government must meet to seize property. And remember: we'd be dealing with less corruption in these matters if we just raised taxes on millionaire income back to what they used to be. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight for the Constitutional rights of property owners, and support asset forfeiture reform.

Meanwhile, while automobile fuel-efficiency standards got a big shot in the arm from the EPA during President Obama's first term, truck fuel-efficiency standards haven't -- they get about six miles to the gallon, just like they did during the Convoy days -- and that may not seem like a big deal, since most folks don't drive big rigs, until you consider that just about everything you buy gets to the store how? On a truck, that's how. We've told our government to get moving (so to speak) on truck fuel standards, but they haven't proposed any yet. Of course, we don't have to talk exclusively to our government to get things done: we can talk to the corporations that use trucks to ship or get the goods they sell. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell five big corporations including Pepsi and WalMart to support vigorous fuel efficiency standards for big trucks. These corporations would make buku bucks from more fuel-efficient trucks, because the trucks wouldn't cost as much to use if they're not using as much gas. Let's have "divide and conquer" work for us for once.

Around the table: tales of various Presidential candidates, plus actual asset forfeiture reform in New Mexico.

Jonathan Chait thinks "Hillary Clinton is Probably Going to Win" the 2016 Presidential race. Mr. Chait has a solid list of reasons why -- capped, of course, by the fact that she'd be "the candidate of the only major American political party not run by lunatics" -- but I think it's more important that fewer people would run through a wall for Democrats than for Republicans. Really, abortion and racism and homophobia motivate people more than Not Being Republican does, and if Democrats had used their mandate to do actual good works back in 2009 -- instead of trying to make peace with the party that just spent eight years burning our country down -- they wouldn't have this problem.

Amanda Marcotte wonders if Rand Paul is playing a sort of long game with his tantrums against the press. Long story short: Mr. Paul may have calculated that getting snotty with the press whenever they ask him tough questions will put an end to the tough questions -- but if he's actually made that calculation, he's forgotten that every time a Presidential candidate acts out, it gets the press more attention, too. I think he's operating pretty much on instinct myself.

Gracy Olmstead, writing at The American Conservative, ponders the ironies of the social media era, where we find (in one rabbi's words) that "in the virtual village, we are too close, and long for the space that we had just two decades ago." I had imagined objecting that social media can help people come together in real space-time, but clearly she anticipated that objection: "the internet can complement community," she writes, "but it cannot replace it." And, to be perfectly honest, social media doesn't help us come together unless we actually try to come together, and too often we let social media do that trying for us.

"DARPA Wants to Make a Computer Program that Evolves for a Hundred Years," Vice announces -- "evolve," that is, to adapt to ever-changing hardware and software. This notion stokes fears of artificial-intelligence-taking-over-and-getting-rid-of-people, but before we worry too much, perhaps we should first wait for operating systems that don't repeatedly crash or freeze. We might also recall what we learned from healthcare.gov's rocky rollout -- that the organizations that get government funding are often only good at getting government funding, and not actually making things that work.

Finally, New Mexico's government has reformed its civil asset forfeiture laws, Now only convicted criminals can have their property taken from them by the state of New Mexico, which is as it should be, and the state also now prevents police departments from getting first crack at such forfeitures. Gov. Martinez, who very nearly didn't sign the law, still aired sour grapes about it -- she said the term "policing for profit" "disrespects our law enforcement officers." No, it doesn't -- it disrespects a system that runs roughshod over the rights of the citizenry, a system I suspect our police like as little as the rest of us.

Action: stopping torture, expanding mental health care for veterans, reforming asset forfeiture, and stopping Keystone XL.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Philippines' government to stop torturing people. The Philippines has come part of the way in this area since the Marcos years, but that's not a high bar to clear, and despite enacting the Anti-Torture Act in 2009, the Philippines Commission on Human Rights lately found that Laguna detention center officers actually used a "Wheel of Torture," which could select a particular mode of torture with a spin of an actual giant wheel -- the "20 seconds Manny Pacman," referencing the country's popular boxer Manny Pacquiáo, got you 20 seconds of punches to the gut. Real life should not read like a dystopian science-fiction novel. A big part of the problem in the Philippines is that they actually don't have enough police, and when you have to meet various quotas and mandates without the personnel to do so, you will cut corners. It's not an excuse, but it is an explanation. Perhaps the big stick of bad PR will make the Philippine government a bit more of a job-creating government.

Meanwhile, the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for America's Veterans Act (now H.R. 203/S. 167) is an actual bipartisan bill (19 of its 48 current Senate sponsors are Republicans, including the lead sponsor, Arizona's John McCain) that would expand veterans' access to mental health care, and would have passed the last Congress -- except that one Senator, the incorrigible Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, put one of his infamous holds on it, supposedly because it duplicated "almost everything" in other already-passed bills and, get your surprised face ready, wasn't paid for with other budget offsets. If more than 20 of our soldiers were killing themselves every day because we sent them off to foolish wars that people like Tom Coburn supported, I wouldn't be stopping all progress because of slight uncertainty about exactly where the money was coming from. Of course, I'd be taxing millionaire income at 91% anyway, so I'd know where the money would be coming from. Anyway, the Senate may be voting on this bill today, so change.org helps you tell your Senators to support the Clay Hunt SAV Act.

In other news, we finally have a bill at the federal level that would, at least, tamp down the incentives our government gives to police departments to take your money and property in the name of the "War on Drugs": H.R. 540/S. 255, the FAIR Act. It even has Rand Paul's name on it! The FAIR Act would eliminate the federal Equitable Sharing Program -- which induces state and local police departments to seize more assets than they otherwise might, since they know they're going to receive a big chunk of the proceeds -- and also raises the burden of proof our government must meet when it moves to seize assets. If the whole "asset forfeiture" game seems unconstitutional to you, you're not alone -- police departments do it out of financial desperation, with politicians unwilling to raise taxes to properly fund the police departments that serve taxpayers. Again: it's not an excuse, but it is an explanation. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the FAIR Act, and mitigate police power to take your possessions without due process.

Finally, the Senate passed its bill forcing the Executive branch to approve construction on the Keystone XL pipeline; it did not meet a veto-proof majority in the Senate, either, but after the expected veto from President Obama, House and Senate leaders will no doubt go to work on some of their recalcitrant members when they go to override the veto. And, as I've said, Mr. Obama hasn't played this as smartly as he could have. Hence the People's Email Network helps you remind President Obama to veto the Keystone XL legislation, while Public Citizen -- thinking ahead a bit to the point where Mr. Obama might actually approve the pipeline, which he'll still have the power to do even if he vetoes the bill -- helps you tell the Executive branch to reject the Keystone XL pipeline for good. You need not even refer to the deleterious effects on heartland drinking water or climate change that excessive development and exportation of tar sands oil will have -- you need only remember that this is a pipeline we're allowing a Canadian corporation to build so it can sell its oil to other countries, and that has nothing to do with American energy independence.

Action: Social Security, asset forfeiture, and smog standards.

CREDO helps you tell Congressional Republicans to expand, and not to cut, Social Security benefits. As you know, Republicans have already taken a shot at Social Security, by essentially passing a rule preventing them from reallocating funds from the Social Security trust fund to the Social Security disability fund, which may run out of funds next year -- which means that they'll be able to take the disability fund hostage and extract some kind of nasty concession, like benefit cuts for seniors, in exchange for keeping the disability program solvent. They'll tell you they're doing it out of concern for the program, but they had the opportunity to do things that would actually signal that concern, like pass the Harkin/Begich bills from the last Congress that would have raised revenue and benefits, and of course they did nothing. It's well past time for Republicans to learn that nobody elected them to take Social Security hostage so they can do the helicopter dance of victory before their corporate paymasters. But we the people can teach them better -- if we stand up, repeatedly, and be counted.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania ACLU helps you tell your state legislators to reform state asset forfeiture laws. Asset forfeiture has received a lot of press lately, because, frankly, it's gone out of control, especially here in Philadelphia, where it has morphed from a way to keep drug dealers from continuing to break the law after they've been arrested into a way to simply beef up police department budgets. Philadelphia, as we mentioned here last week, seizes more assets than Brooklyn and Los Angeles County combined, despite having many fewer residents than either area. But the whole idea has never been constitutional -- the state should only punish folks convicted of crimes, not accused of them; no matter how "tough" on drugs politicians want to seem, rights are rights, and seizing assets pre-emptively has always had the potential to oppress the mass of good citizens. The leader of this reform effort in the legislature is Sen. Mike Folmer, R-48, who defeated the sitting Senate majority leader in the 2006 primary in the wake of the legislative pay hike scandal. I think that bodes well.

Finally, the EPA's had a good week, issuing decent methane emissions standards, and now it's issued a proposal for smog standards, one that could prevent over a million asthma attacks in kids over the next decade -- but the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to enact stronger smog standards. Why? Because clean air, along with clean water, is one of our most precious resources, and because smog puts one out of three Americans at a greater risk for heart disease and asthma, and that's one out of three too many. We should also support stronger standards because cleaner air, just like cleaner water, reduces health care costs (I mean, if folks get sick less from what they breathe, they don't go to the doctor as often, amirite?) and saves businesses money in lost work time due to illness. If you use the above-linked tool, you'll advocate for the same standard (60 ppb of ground-level ozone, rather than the 65-70 ppb level the EPA has proposed) supported by the American Lung Association. I suppose this means right-wingers will accuse the American Lung Association of "liberal bias."

Around the table: pensions, net neutrality, asset forfeiture, corporate taxes, and the Keystone XL pipeline.

The incomparable Michael Hudson warns us about "The Coming War on Pensions." After all, as Paul Craig Roberts said years ago, pensions are all that's left for Our Glorious Elites to steal from us. Mr. Hudson points to Wall Street management of pensions as the major problem, banksters being in it for themselves and "fiduciary responsibility" being rarely enforced by our government. He also shows us that lawmakers seem to have designed supposedly beneficiary pension laws to fail, which I'll admit is dispiriting, but once you can diagnose problems, you can overcome them.

The FCC announces it will finally release a new net neutrality proposal shortly and vote on it by the end of next month. Let me guess: it will release this proposal on a Friday, or maybe even a Sunday. If they release a bad proposal, the backlash from the people will be swift and furious, and though President Obama will be able to do little about it (though his stated support for strong net neutrality provisions did, and does, mean something), Congress won't be able to give the FCC any cover, either, even though Republicans control both houses. But the end result of all that is more FCC dithering, note that the FCC won't be able to enforce any net neutrality regulations in the meantime -- meaning the big telecoms will be on an honor system, which is a hell of a thing to count on.

Philadelphia D.A. drops civil forfeiture proceedings against two families who stood to lose their homes over alleged drug sales at the properties. Fun fact number one: the city tried to seize one home over a $40 drug deal by the homeowner's son. Fun fact number two: Philadelphia seizes more money this way than Brooklyn and Los Angeles County combined, despite having about 60% of Brooklyn's population and a mere 15% of Los Angeles County's. The good news? No reasonable folks in Philadelphia are shouting WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!!! about this achievement.

Paul Buchheit reminds us that corporations don't pay their state taxes, either, which means, as you know, that small businesses have to pick up the slack, and also that you have to pick up the slack. And we feel the pinch at the state level perhaps more acutely than we do at the federal level, because state taxes fund public schools, which, according to Apple, no longer produces people "with the skills we need." Well, as far as the "skills" Apple "needs," I sure hope public schools never start teaching the "skill" of exchanging millions in campaign donations for billions in unearned tax breaks.

Finally, Emily Atkin at Think Progress reminds us to have a little perspective when Keystone XL supporters say ZOMG TEH PIPELINEZ WILL CREATEZ 42,000 JOBZ!!!!! It doesn't matter so much that they're temporary jobs as that 42,000 jobs is about what our economy creates in one week these days. And we don't have to choose between 42,000 pipeline jobs on one hand and the extreme likelihood that TransCanada will pollute heartland drinking water and accelerate climate change on the other -- we can create more jobs, and longer-lasting jobs at that, by investing in renewable energy. But CEOs don't want to do that, since (as Ralph Nader said long ago) they can't own the sun.

Around the table: Arctic drilling, CEO pay, "jump-outs," wage theft, pension theft, and bad cartoons.

Good news: President Obama has indefinitely banned oil and gas drilling in Bristol Bay, Alaska, a cause for which we've agitated here. Only an incoming President can reverse the ban, which a Republican President almost certainly will, because Obama. Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) doesn't oppose the ban, but finds it "frustrating" that the Obama Administration sees "conservation" as Alaska's "most pressing need." Then again, Republicans see "more money for their corporate paymasters" as all of America's most pressing need.

Fifteen Senators sign a letter to the SEC demanding that they implement a CEO-to-worker pay disclosure rule as mandated by the Dodd-Frank law. Financial corporations -- being, as they are, run by people without any sense of shame -- have pressured the SEC to delay or water down the rule, and they seem to be getting their way so far. SEC Chair Mary Jo White may prove to be an even worse Obama appointment than FCC Chair Tom Wheeler.

Nicole Flatow at Think Progress tells us all about "jump-outs," which is when a handful of police officers drive up and jump out of their cars all armed and armored-up -- and these police usually "jump out," observers tell us, at congregations of young black men on the street. Warrants? We don't need no stinkin' warrants! Funny how the drug problem never seems to get better in America, no matter how many unconstitutional acts we throw at it. It's almost like that's the idea. And the "war on terror" is exactly the same.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, upholding a seven-year old lower court ruling, ordered WalMart to pay $188 million in a class-action wage theft lawsuit. But WalMart will keep appealing, all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary, out of its CEOs' obviously very-deeply held conviction that all those people who sued them shouldn't have been allowed to sue as a class. That looks more to me like a "frivolous lawsuit" than any of the stupid stories tort "reformers" belch out.

And here's yet another odious result from that omnibus spending law Congress passed over the weekend: it allows pension plan trustees to cut benefits for current pensioners. Everybody understands that the future is the hardest thing to predict, but everybody also understands that pension funds should be investing safely, rather than giving themselves over to hedge funds, and everybody also understands that, you know, you should keep your damn promises.

Finally, fossil fuel corporation front group creates a cartoon calling the alleged effects of EPA environmental regulation "torture." But fossil fuel corporate CEOs will have a tough time convincing very many Americans that making a little less money -- the only actual negative effect of clean air and clean water regulations -- is anything like being beaten up, being forced to stand on broken feet, or being waterboarded. More likely they'll convince Americans that they're the biggest whiners in American history.

Around the table: a dying letter, a completely non-frivolous lawsuit, and other stories.

Anti-war Iraq vet Tomas Young, who died at the age of 34 on Monday, writes a last letter to Messrs. Bush and Cheney. Much of it should remind you of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War," but he actually finds it in his heart to hope Messrs. Bush and Cheney one day ask forgiveness for what they've done. Clearly Mr. Young was a better man than I.

Richard Kirsch finds that Democrats with more populist economic narratives won on Election Day. I had just been thinking what an easy time Al Franken had getting re-elected, and I figured that his strong stands on net neutrality and forced arbitration, coupled with two major pieces of legislation (one forbidding sexual assault-related forced arbitration clauses in defense contracts, the other forcing health insurers to pay at least 80% of their premiums on health care), had a lot to do with that, just as Byron Dorgan's stands on "free" trade, media consolidation, and corporate crime always ensured landslide victories for him in a far redder state, North Dakota.

A group of over 200 former veterans of the Iraq War sues five big banks for financing militant groups in Iraq. The suit alleges that the five banks "conspired with Iranian banks to mask wire transactions in order to evade U.S. sanctions," and those wire transactions financed militant groups operating against our troops in Iraq. The good news? The U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act specifically allows such lawsuits. I wish these soldiers the best in their efforts.

Surprise surprise, police departments have "wish lists" when they seize assets of suspected criminals. Nobody could have predicted that a tool designed to fight the "war on drugs" could ever lead to law enforcement corruption. Nobody but anyone who thought about it, that is.

Texas state Senator wants to amend her state's constitution so that business owners can discriminate against gay folks merely because of "sincerely-held religious beliefs." Telling, that they propose amending the constitution to get their way -- it's like they know that someone's "sincerely-held religious belief" can't trump another person's actual rights. Anyone ever heard of Donna Campbell before? Me neither. You know that that means.

Finally, in a flatugasm of truly amazing stupidity, MIT professor/Affordable Care Act architect gets caught on tape (from 2013) calling American voters stupid and saying the bill's "lack of transparency" helped it pass. "The stupidity of the American voter, or whatever" absolutely obliterates Mr. Gruber's criticisms of how the sausage factory works. And why does he think it's so difficult to message "healthy people paying for sick people"? Hello! We can all get sick at any time! I think it's "hard" for folks like him to "message" such things because folks like him are such innate cowards.

Around the table: includes not-terribly-surprising items about the IRS and male worms.

Shaila Dewan at the New York Times finds (get your surprised face ready) that the IRS is also in on the asset forfeiture business, in this article seizing folks' checking accounts before even accusing them of a crime because they had made too many deposits smaller than $10,000 -- which isn't in and of itself actually a crime, but resembles one. The IRS says it'll curtail such practices, but I bet they already thought they were practicing restraint. I eagerly await the judge who rules that asset forfeiture violates the Constitution.

Chris Morran at The Consumerist asks: "Why Doesn't Tesla Just Use Dealerships to Sell Its Cars?" Of course Mr. Morran comes down on the side of common sense: why should dealerships be able to buy laws protecting them from the electric car manufacturer and any other car dealer that would prefer to sell directly to the consumer? Surely "free" market types would prefer that a sector of the economy that needs a big government handout be allowed to die. Unless they get buku campaign donations from car dealers, I suppose.

The Coalition of Immokalee Farm Workers debuts its "fair food" label, the first of its kind in America. If you've followed the Coalition's work getting better wages for tomato pickers in Florida, you won't be surprised to learn that the label describes tomatoes picked by workers who earned a decent wage and enjoy basic working people's rights. The National Labor Relations Act doesn't cover farm workers, as you may know, so this is an uphill fight.

Perhaps seeing polls forecasting a loss to incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan, South Carolina House Speaker (and Republican U.S. Senate candidate) Thom Tillis now says that yes, he can see a path to expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Which, as a U.S. Senator, he wouldn't have much to do with, since states (not the Senate) get to choose whether to accept the money or not -- but Mr. Tillis, as House Speaker, did have a lot to do with rejecting the money in the first place, ramming a bill doing just that through the state House. He even ran an ad touting this alleged accomplishment! Between this and "the system worked, it just took too long," it's something, actually, that he's as close in polls as he is.

Finally, a study finds that male worms, when given a clear choice between sex and food, will go out of their way to get sex. I wonder how many readers will find that news surprising.