Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: when robots talk, and other horrors.

While even “liberal” media outlets like CNN and the New York Times apparently don’t want to shill for Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro – despite all the “good” he’s done American corporations with his “reforms” – Fox News has proven it’s up to the task. Hilariously they’re using booga-booga about China as a reason to support Mr. Bolsonaro, when Brazil spend four times as much on Chinese goods as Americans do – and that number’s actually gone way, way up since Mr. Bolsonaro took office. Sadly, Glenn Greenwald has slipped further down the rabbit hole at almost as rapid a pace. I know, the guy who literally broke the Sergio Moro corruption story! But obsession with censorship über alles has ruined many a good thinker.

A University of Chicago Institute of Politics Poll informs us that one out of every four Americans feels so “alienated” from our government they think it “may soon be necessary to take up arms against it,” but let me be the one to tell you that this information is not that startling if you’ve long thought, as I have, that about 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane in the first place. It’s just that back in the day they wanted to put Iraq war opponents in jail for treason, and today they think they need to take up arms against their government. It’s not even much of a devolution, frankly, and if you’d asked folks this question in, say, 2004, I think the only reason that number would have been lower was because you had a Republican government then. Strange, isn't it, how liberals talk about changing government while right-wingers talk about burning it all down?

It’s easy to dunk on Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) for voting against protecting gay marriage at around the same time he was toasting his own son at his son’s gay wedding. And Mr. Thompson seems like a good guy – his resume includes decades spent as a physical therapist, a firefighter, and an EMT – so we’re better off saying that he’s the sort of Republican who should be forcing his party to do better. But I don’t have the power, I guess he’d say, and setting aside the fact that he’s in line to be Agricultural Committee Chair if Republicans take the House, the first power you have, as a civilized person, is the power of shame. It’s a great power, if we would but use it.

What do you call it when a long-time advisor to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán breaks with him over his latest speech decrying all the European “people of mixed race”? Same thing you call it whenever right-wingers fight: drama! I mean, I really do like to think the best of people, but right-wingers have spent decades making positive noises about courage without delivering any actual courage, and the evidence does pile high after a while. (Don't object with "but Liz Cheney," for reasons including, but not limited to, the fact that for every Liz Cheney there are a hundred Jeff Flakes who talk a good game but do nothing.) In any case, I’d lay money that Zsuzsa Hegedüs will soon go back to work for the Master Race in some other capacity.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of overtly anti-democratic BS that has crept into mainstream political discussion lately, let me sum up “mysterious” and “complex” concepts like “neoreaction” in three words: you don’t count. Seriously, if you’ve grown up your whole life believing that anyone can make it in America (or that anyone should be able to make it in America), you shouldn’t take up with statements like “all organizations – irrespective of size – are best managed by a single executive” even after Joe Manchin scuttles the 135th attempt at Build Back Better. Here’s another five words about wishing for strongmen: boys do that, not men.

Finally, Ohio Senate candidate/pretend redneck J.D. Vance has caught a lot of well-deserved flak for saying that folks shouldn’t leave violent marriages for the sake of the children will no one think of the children! And I guess some folks easily fooled by robot talk will find his “defense” of marriage convincing. But Mr. Vance presents a false dichotomy: he posits only two possible worlds, one in which you “stay with your abusive spouse no matter what,” and the other in which “people change spouses like they change underwear,” and a great nation needs not submit to these false choices. Besides which, neither choice describe America as it actually is – the divorce rate, for example, is considerably lower now than it has been in decades, maybe because real Americans navigate all these issues better than Mr. Vance wants you to think.

Action: concerning human rights and health care.

Avaaz helps you tell the U.N. Human Rights Council, world governments, and corporations doing business in China to fight that nation's continued oppression of over a million Uyghurs. The U.N. Human Rights Council will meet in Geneva for the next month, so now's an especially good time to get their attention! As you know, China has detained over a million of its ethnic Muslims, and detainment in China also includes torture, rape, and family separation. Of course, earlier this week we were taking Apple to task for failing to provide secure messaging apps on their Apple Store in China, and, well, China's ongoing oppression of the Uyghurs is just one of the things Chinese activists get "disappeared" for talking about with each other. And oppression, in these times, requires a lot of corporate help, particularly in the area of surveillance and DNA databases. But we can wield the Big Stick of Bad PR and get corporations, governments, and the U.N. to respond. Indeed, we already have.

Meanwhile, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell six fairly famous American corporations to stop enabling Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory. If you just read that sentence and immediately thought that telling those corporations to pull out would mean the death of Israel, then consider this: just as "being a friend" and "enabling whatever your friend wants to do no matter how harmful it would be" are two entirely different things, supporting Israel's right to exist and thrive and enabling it to wipe out Palestine are two entirely different things. I suspect most Americans understand that, though Our Glorious Elites pretend not to. But if we get Airbnb, Expedia, Trip Advisor, General Mills, Motorola (which provides a lot of the technological backbone for checkpoints and surveillance in the occupied territories), and Booking Holdings to stop doing business in occupied Palestine, we'll get some change.

Finally, both Moms Rising and Public Citizen help you tell our government not to give out exclusive licensing rights for a coronavirus vaccine to big pharma corporations. Sadly, our Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar, has already announced that he can't even guarantee a coronavirus vaccine would be affordable -- dig the can-do American spirit he evokes there! -- since "we need the private sector to invest" and (sigh) "price controls won't get us there." Both of those statements are absolute horsedoodle -- insisting that price controls can't control prices is, of course, a special kind of stupidity long fashionable on the right, but the fact is that we the taxpayers will do most of the investing in any coronavirus vaccine, as we have done since 2002. So, no, we don't actually need private investment -- in fact, we could redirect a very small portion of federal budgetary misspending (cough vanity border wall cough!) to get it done.

Around the table: from the high cost of home ownership to corruption and censorship.

Sam Pizzigati at the Our Future blog foresees "A Nation Where Only The Rich Have Homes." Dystopia has landed in the Bay Area, where millionaires rant about homeless folks parked in RVs along the waterfront and GoFundMe campaigns have actually emerged to fund lawsuits fighting affordable housing. Why, it's like these folks have never heard of irony! If we taxed the rich a lot harder than we do, we wouldn't have any of these problems -- not homelessness, which is almost entirely a post-Kemp/Roth phenomenon in America, and not whining about homeless people getting a "better view" of the beach.

Barbara G. Ellis at TruthOut reports that well over half of rural voters also want Medicare-for-All health insurance -- and reminds us that rural folk "have horrifying mishaps the urban/suburban public are unlikely ever to experience," plus "the problem of long-distance travel to reach a medical facility." She also gives some good advice about how to talk to rural voters about Medicare-for-All -- or, to be more precise, how to listen to rural voters' health care stories. Strange that a "liberal" media that seems to love horror stories about health care doesn't typically run stories about folks getting mangled by tractors or crushed by jacks. Maybe they can't hear such stories because they have all that money in their ears.

Ho hum, YouTube doesn't abide by its own rules regarding harassment, mainly because of money from advertising. Using algorithms instead of human beings to "demonetize" websites that deserve it is undoubtedly part of the problem, though that doesn't fully explain why the history teacher making instructional videos about the fall of the Third Reich always seems to get shafted while the guy actually spouting racist rubbish gets off -- but who, exactly, would want to advertise with right-wing trolls who do little other than call their opponents foul names? It can't be all about the eyeballs, since anyone can get attention by merely being an asshole. Thus a Drop Fox-style campaign against YouTube seems long overdue.

Annoyed by all the drama our President has been fomenting about whatever agreement he has or doesn't have with Mexico over tariffs and immigration? Dean Baker comes to the rescue, as usual, by explaining how tariffs work. Long story short: consumers don't necessarily bear all the burden of tariffs, and tariffs can be an effective negotiating ploy, but in the hands of this President, tariffs will almost certainly become just another tool with which he enriches himself and his cronies. Also, too, assessing tariffs against Mexico makes no economic sense when you've been negotiating a trade deal with Mexico! Sadly, as I've said, it does make political sense.

I'm not sure this report about Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao greasing the skids for projects in the home state of her husband, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell will have the negative effect against Mr. McConnell's 2020 re-election effort that I'd like it to have. I mean, yes, it is textbook corruption, but will Kentucky voters feel that way about it, particularly after Mr. McConnell shows ads touting his role in "the revitalization of Owensboro"? Statistics showing Kentucky ranking only 25th in Department of Transportation money since the beginning of 2017 aren't convincing, of course, once you see that email from February of 2017 regarding "Ky-specific issue(s)." And by "Ky," they didn't mean the jelly.

Finally, China's "Great Firewall" of internet censorship now blocks both the Washington Post and The Guardian in addition to most other major English-language papers of record. Most news reports speculate that China is doing all this censoring because it doesn't want its citizens to read about the 30th anniversary of the Tianenmen Square massacre, in which the Chinese government literally ran over protestors with tanks; I guess that could explain the timing, but with tyrants you still have to wonder. It couldn't also be that the Post and the Guardian have been highly-critical of our President, could it? I mean, tyrants do seem to attract each other.

Action: "free" trade, and food safety.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell NAFTA renegotiators to get rid of the pact's "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanism (a.k.a. the "investor-state tribunal"), then Sign for Good Still helps you do that. In all their obfuscations -- "people generally support trade," "we know we've done a bad job on previous 'free' trade deals but just give us this one and we swear we'll listen to you next time," "booga-booga China booga-booga" -- "free" trade supporters have ignored the real reason most folks across the political spectrum oppose "free" trade deals: because of the possibility that foreign corporations will sue our country in these "tribunals," claim that some law protecting the citizenry "cost their investors money," and then collect tribute from the taxpayer if they win. We may hate it because of the laws corporations typically have in their crosshairs, or we may hate it because we think Americans should make laws affecting Americans, but hate it we do, and why not? It makes us less free. So let's do something about it.

Meanwhile, chicken processing corporations want the USDA to obliterate the cap on how fast they can move chickens through inspection. You'd think getting higher speed caps out of the nearly useless Obama USDA would be enough, but no. And the amount of pus and bile and poop you might find in your chicken tenders will never be anywhere near as important to chicken corporation CEOs as the ability to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. Of course, food poisoning always makes the news, and the food recalls resulting from food poisoning always make the news, but chicken processing corporations are counting on a few days of bad PR and then going back to business as usual. All that means is we'll fight them when it happens, but wouldn't it be nice to fight them before it happens and win, so it doesn't happen? Food and Water Watch helps you tell the USDA to reject petitions asking them to lift chicken inspection speed caps. The life you save could be your own. I wish I were being glib about that.

Around the table: time for another exciting campaign from Danny Tarkanian! And other stories.

Martin Longman at Washington Monthly says Democrats might fight their way back to power in rural/poor white districts by fighting monopolies again. I'd quarrel with some of his points, but if you're looking for something that unites rank-and-file Americans, fighting monopolies might be it, particularly since monopolies lay waste to communities that never vote Democrat anymore. Fighting monopolies might even be the idea that unifies all the other things that unite rank-and-file Americans across the ideological spectrum (like opposition to media consolidation, corporate crime, "free" trade, and bankster power).

Apple removes some of its Virtual Private Network (or VPN) apps from its Chinese app store, which just so happens to jibe with China's ongoing internet crackdown. Apple is notorious for strong-arming app developers into making their products to conform to its rigid hardware and software requirements, but it would have been a vain hope to think they'd play hardball with the Chinese government. So remind your friends and family to avoid thinking we should let corporations do whatever they like, so that corporate power can be a bulwark against totalitarians.

If you've fallen prey to the notion that we shouldn't expect to see life-saving vaccines if there's no money in it (cough ebola cough), Dean Baker reminds us that our government can play a role in developing such vaccines, such as the Zika vaccine. Of course, corporate whining about government involvement in vaccine development is doubly offensive when you consider how much taxpayer money goes into developing big pharma drugs -- and sigh, our government will grant the corporation it paid to develop the Zika vaccine a seven-year monopoly on it.

Political gadfly Danny Tarkanian says he'll take on Sen. Dean Heller in the 2018 Republican primary, because Mr. Heller isn't pro-Trump enough. Can he win the nomination? Sure he can, even against a formidable campaigner like Mr. Heller. Can he win the general? Of course he can, even though he's now lost five attempts for high-profile office since 2004 -- 2018 isn't going to be a year for non-ideological problem-solvers to win office, but a year for populists and fake populists to win office. Still, we can't discount the possibility that the end result (or even the intent!) will be that Mr. Heller looks more palatable to the good folks of Nevada -- he really blew it with that last health care vote, after all.

I've long believed that websites like Napster existed because people really, really wanted to download music and the record corporations should have moved a lot more quickly to fulfill their desires, but my generosity most certainly does not extend to the hackers who are trying to blackmail HBO into giving them a cut of their largesse. We may reasonably debate whether HBO has too much money, but that doesn't make everyone who wants to take it from them into Robin Hood, even if it means some folks will get to see the next Game of Thrones episode a few days early. So yeah, this "Mr. Smith" is just an asshole, or a group of assholes.

Finally, since we're on the subject, I'm with Charles Blow's characterization of Donald Trump as "America's Whiniest 'Victim'" -- until he suggests that Mr. Trump's votaries are just as whiny as he is. A lot of votaries have legitimate grievances (corporations have utterly ravaged their neighborhoods and livelihoods, after all), though TEH BLACKZ GETZ ALL TEH GOODIEZ!!!! is, frankly, not a legitimate grievance, and if we addressed their legitimate grievances, a lot of their illegitimate ones would magically disappear. Still, it is a shame that none of them will never add the sum of Mr. Trump's whining and deduce that he is, in fact, a whiner.

Around the table: good news about government funding and net neutrality, but bad news about who's still President.

Congress apparently averts government shutdown by striking relatively non-obnoxious deal to fund our government through September. The deal (if it passes!) will preserve almost all EPA funding, increase renewable energy funding and National Institutes of Health funding, and cover a Medicaid shortfall in Puerto Rico and permanently extend retired coal miners' health benefits. How did we get this out of a unified Republican government? Because we spoke out and wouldn't quit. Make no mistake, Congress didn't "get this done" -- the American people did.

Trump Administration Chief of Staff Reince Priebus says the Administration has considered amending the Constitution, apparently to protect him from criticism. It's really not a good sign when our President thinks of criticism as a personal attack, let alone that he would change the Constitution, possibly, as Mr. Priebus all but says, by effectively abolishing the First Amendment. They say they're against "false" stories about Mr. Trump, but gosh, doesn't the President have the biggest megaphone in the country? If Mr. Trump uses his megaphone to whine incessantly, that isn't the media's fault, and good Americans sure don't need to coddle him.

Dean Baker at TruthOut reminds us that Mr. Trump didn't strike a deal on currency manipulation with China while he met with its President last month -- but he sure did get some Chinese trademarks for his daughter's clothing brand. This, again, is the kind of sickness, immorality, and decadence we ought to attack (versus, say, whatever Melania Trump's immigration status was all those years ago), because it sure looks like he sold out his votaries in order to get something for his daughter.

Speaking of the Great Man, Mr. Trump "seems unaware" that his health care plan essentially makes the pre-existing conditions ban meaningless by allowing states to "opt out" of them. No use playing the stupid-or-evil game, because of course he knows what's in his plan and what's not -- the biggest mistake we make is in assuming these assholes are just dumb, when they're actually malicious. Seriously, I've long thought this 1986 Saturday Night Live skit to be much closer to the truth about Our Glorious Leaders. (Kudos, at least, to Face the Nation for not covering the bill like it's a horserace. You know, the way Chuck Todd would.)

Finally, we have some evidence that Mr. Trump's votaries on Reddit may be breaking with the Great Man on net neutrality. Net neutrality has Actual Bipartisan Support, as you know, but I remember Tea Partiers being a lot more unified in their opposition to net neutrality -- a few said they didn't want big corporations to run the internet, but they hated their government more, particularly when run by Teh Furriner, so of course they opposed net neutrality. The good news? Most Trump votaries used to be Tea Partiers (who in turn used to be Bush Derangement Syndrome voters), so this skepticism is an improvement.

Around the table: peaceful protest as "economic terrorism," and other absurdities.

Spencer Woodman at The Intercept runs down five-count-'em-five bills proposed by Republican state legislators that aim to criminalize peaceful protest. The one from Washington state that would equate certain protests with "economic terrorism" is my personal favorite, and please understand that by "favorite" I mean "the bill I'd most like to see humiliate its author to the point where he never shows his face in public again." Don't figure that cooler heads will prevail and none of these laws will pass, because your representatives are nothing without you communicating your will to them.

In case you've been hearing that TEH DONALD IZ CREATINGZ TEH JOBZ ALREADYZ!!!!, please note that most of the corporations that have announced big job-creation plans in recent days are mostly announcing job-creation plans that have been in the works for some time. I mean, I'm as big a fan of public shaming as anyone, and if Mr. Trump were really shaming corporations into creating jobs, I'd be all for it. But when Sprint re-announces big job creation plans that they already announced long ago, or WalMart announces their regular amount of job creation not too long after cutting jobs, or Bayer announces job creation if their merger with Monsanto goes through (and that's some hostage-taking right there!), you have every reason to believe this is all snake oil salesmanship.

Oh, and if you're hurrying to protest the above paragraph by saying TEH AMAZON IZ ADDINGZ TEH 100,000 JOBZ!!!!, please note, as Greg LeRoy at Good Jobs First does, that if Amazon adds 100,000 jobs to its warehouses, that still won't make up for the loss of 200,000 jobs at brick-and-mortar retail stores over just the past four years. Yes, we can draw a direct line from one to the other, particularly when we remember that Amazon has been around since 1994, and we all remember the obliteration of medium-sized bookstore chains like B. Dalton Booksellers, Waldenbooks, and Encore Books (not to mention Borders!). (Also, too, Amazon sure gets a lot of corporate welfare handouts from states. How libertarian is that, Mr. Bezos?)

Outgoing FCC Chair Tom Wheeler explains why we should keep net neutrality rules. He wasn't that much in favor of them until millions of Americans spoke out, but Mr. Wheeler makes a case that should persuade folks who don't know much about net neutrality, and that's no small thing. Seriously, it doesn't have to be all freedom-from-corporate-interference all the time -- sometimes you need to hear someone say that net neutrality hasn't slowed capital investment or injured corporate profits, and sometimes you also need to hear someone cite "the desires of a few ISPs to be free of meaningful oversight," since that's what net neutrality opposition is really all about. And why should a few big telecoms get all the say about everything?

Finally, Michael T. Klare at TomDispatch describes the "four flash points" that could develop into an international crisis Mr. Trump will have to deal with as President. None of them will surprise you -- "North Korea, the South China Sea, the Baltic Sea region, and the Middle East," and it's good to be reminded that Gen. Mattis (Mr. Trump's Defense Secretary nominee) wanted to attack Iran back in 2011. But don't worry; somehow, for Republicans and their "liberal" media enablers, whatever happens will all be Mr. Obama's fault. And the same people who would blame Mr. Obama will call you a traitor if you blame Mr. Trump.

Around the table: which Presidential candidate has more "secret voters"? And other questions.

This time last week I said I found arguments about "secret Donald Trump voters" more persuasive than other observers have, but the incomparable Digby lets us know that Hillary Clinton may actually be more likely to have "secret voters" -- namely, women who live in fairly right-leaning households whose husbands are all voting for Mr. Trump and who have to "maintain their standing in their conservative communities." That's at least as persuasive as any Trump "secret voter" argument, I'll admit, but I still don't agree that the "secret voter" argument stands at odd with "the swashbuckling, politically incorrect, in-your-face ethos of the Trump movement" -- as I said, a lot of folks are with Trump precisely because he says the things they can't, and presumably don't, and I'll bet some of them are not only married to liberals, but live in liberal communities.

Julia Lurie at Wired tells the story of "How One Company Contaminated Pittsburgh’s Drinking Water" -- with lead, that is. Long story short: Pittsburgh's public water utility was doing a bad job, so the city turned to a private corporation to help fix their water infrastructure -- and wound up having safety and water quality managers laid off and replaced one corrosion control chemical with another, cheaper one that, well, didn't work. The Paris-based corporation "consulting" with the city perpetrated other shenanigans as well; the lesson seems to be that we have to watch our public agencies a lot more closely or we'll wind up with public-private partnerships (or totally privatized agencies!) that are even worse.

And now, from the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: the Obama Administration is telling federal agencies involved in counterterrorism to get involved in anti-bullying initiatives at local and state levels. Because they'd be so good at that! They're likely to tell us (though they seem unwilling to answer questions from journalists about it at present) that they can find future terrorists in today's bullies, which is, as usual, totally the wrong way to go about pre-empting terrorism. The best way to pre-empt terrorism? Stop trying to steal things that belong to other people, like oil.

The Trans-Pacific "Partnership" is wildly unpopular, thanks to popular pressure, but that doesn't prevent the "liberal" media from offering up things like this fluff interview with Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, in which she summarizes all the lame arguments favoring the TPP. America will lose face with the rest of the world if we don't follow through, the TPP will help fight violent extremism, China booga-booga, and by the way Ms. Pritzker doesn't really understand why people are so "anxious." Neither does the article's writer, who never asks about, you know, the investor-state tribunals that would nullify our laws.

Jean Trounstine at TruthOut introduces us to some family members of crime victims who work toward rehabilitation of criminals rather than punishment. I'm not anti-punishment, actually, but most politicians take it way too far, and not, I suspect, out of a sincere interest in justice, but out of a base desire to stoke rage in their supporters. And if the vast majority of crime victims say treatment and crime prevention are more important than punishment, can't the rest of us conjure up some mercy, too? Of course we can. (As an aside, I always like to see Mural Arts Philadelphia get press for its good works.)

Finally, Trump voter Terri Rote faces felony charges of voter fraud in Iowa after trying to vote twice, fearing her first vote for Mr. Trump would be changed because "(t)he polls are rigged." I wonder where she might have heard that? Of course, if we asked Ms. Rote if she was a good, law-abiding person, she'd say yes, and recent events notwithstanding we probably wouldn't doubt it. But this is what right-wingers have been doing to good Americans since time immemorial: convince them to do bad things because they "have to." Come to think of it, the only way to get a good person to do a bad thing is to make them think they have to.

Around the table: bad arguments about "free" trade, and other lessons.

Another day, another push to pass the unpopular Trans-Pacific "Partnership" by stirring up booga-booga about China. A former World Bank President says "(i)f the U.S. abandons TPP, our Asian allies and partners will perceive America as yielding to China," by which I guess he means that if all those other nations can't pay their workers in dung pellets like China does, then we're really in the soup. They also say we should have a "presence" in Asia, as if any presence will do, or that rejecting the TPP would be a blow to "American leadership," as if bad leadership is just as good as good leadership. They can't even tell you the TPP will force other nations to treat their workers better, but that the TPP will "set the stage" for it. This is what you get from Our Glorious Elites when they can't win arguments -- fearmongering and rhetorical sleight-of-hand.

Verizon workers reach agreements with their employer, ending their nearly seven week-long strike. Workers received adequate pay hikes, fought off pension cuts, and got Verizon to withdraw their hated send-workers-a-few-states-away-for-two-months proposal. But Verizon got to change a call center rule mandating that all calls go to workers in the state from which the call originates, and also now gets to try to buy out employees once a year without going to the union first -- which will make getting rid of now-"redundant" call center operators easier. Note well that Verizon demanded more than it got; you have already noted well that Democrat weaklings in Washington never demand more than they get, while Republican hysterics always demand more than they get. It's like there's a lesson in there, somewhere.

Michael Hiltzik, writing at the Los Angeles Times, reminds us that mergers in health care don't lower prices there, either. The myth that mergers lower prices, which directly conflicts the saw that competition lowers prices, should have an even harder time surviving in a land where health care prices always seem to be going up faster than inflation, yet big corporations are game to feed us a line of slop. Luckily Mr. Hiltzik, as usual, has science, history, and superior argument on his side.

Dean Baker suggests we avoid "condemn(ing)" Trump supporters as "hopeless Neanderthals" and actually see their real grievances. No, their putative hatred of immigrants and women and "political correctness" are not their "real grievances" -- their real grievances have to do with the disappearance of well-paying factory jobs with good benefits from the American landscape. The last paragraph is worth quoting in its entirety: "There is no excuse for supporting a racist, sexist, xenophobic buffoon like Donald Trump. But we should be clear: the workers who turn to him do have real grievances. The system has been rigged against them. And it is a bit hypocritical of those who have benefited from this rigging to be mocking the poor judgment of its victims."

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Stephen Hawking says he doesn't understand Donald Trump's popularity. I'd just tell him to read the preceding paragraph, and then the Dean Baker article to which it links; he might also try reading Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal. Mr. Hawking also wants Britain to stay in the EU, though Britain (like every other EU country, especially Greece, amirite?) has plenty of good reasons to leave the EU that have nothing to do with racism and xenophobia.

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

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

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

Around the table: dutifully tabulating the folly of banksters, politicians, and right-wing state governments.

Armand V. Cucciniello III, writing in USA Today, says Ted Cruz may be even worse than Donald Trump as a nominee, because Mr. Trump at least can cut a deal, while all Mr. Cruz has done in the Senate is "say 'no.'" I've said it before and I'll say it again -- the fact that Mr. Cruz is now the "establishment" candidate, whose success provokes "relief" from Republicans, now makes me think Donald Trump isn't a trick Democrats pulled on Republicans, but a trick Republicans pulled on us. (If Mr. Trump gets the nod and Gen. Matiss runs as a far-right "independent," I'll think the same thing.)

Ho hum, Yves Smith, writing at Naked Capitalism, catches J.P. Morgan-Chase CEO Jamie Dimon telling a bunch of falsehoods in order to argue that our government should stay off his back. Aside from being untrue, the statement that big banks can perform "mission-critical services...that regional and community banks simply cannot do" is rhetorical hostage-taking -- don't make my bank smaller, he's saying, or these mission-critical services get it! Also, there's booga-booga about China. Seriously, though, read the whole thing, if for no other reason than to put another nail in the idea that the right has all the economic thinkers.

Just about everyone uses words like "ludicrous" and "technically illiterate" to describe the draft encryption bill emanating from Sens. Burr and Feinstein late last week. Speaking to "illiteracy," I really should have been more clear the other day about a matter of diction. "Encrypt" doesn't literally mean "protect" or "keep safe," even though it has the word "crypt" in it, and even though "encryption" should lead to safety and security -- "encrypt" literally means to convert a message into cipher or code. So demanding that folks make their encrypted data "intelligible" literally means "make your encrypted data unencrypted." But they're not stupid; they just want us to think so.

Louisiana judge orders the release of seven indigent men -- all facing felony charges including murder, rape, assault, and armed robbery -- because the state has failed to fund their defense, and further says that this failure violates the men's Sixth Amendment rights. A brief perusal of said Sixth Amendment reveals that Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Arthur Hunter is absolutely right, and also suggests that maybe the government of Louisiana should stop pretending that tax cuts magically increase state revenues. I mean, does Duck Dynasty really need tax breaks?

Finally, Kansas Secretary of State gets caught putting out voter guides in Spanish with incorrect information. The Spanish-language edition said voters could register up to 15 days before an election, when the law actually says 21, and naturally the English-language edition had the correct info. After eight years of watching malice-disguised-as-incompetence from Tha Bush Mobb, I'd be a real schmuck to believe that this was all due to "administrative error." Someone needs to lose their job over this, too. Color me skeptical that anyone will.

Around the table: the demographic hurdle Donald Trump may not be able to clear, and other curiosities.

Jim Tankersley at the Washington Post tells us that Republican support for "most favored nation" status with China has done more damage to American manufacturing than NAFTA did -- and helped bring about Donald Trump. It sure is a good thing Larry Summers took to this very same newspaper all those months ago to tell us we better support the TPP because China is too powerful. The last paragraph, which describes "free" trade advocates pointing to "a recent Gallup survey that shows near-record enthusiasm for trade," should have pointed out more explicitly that one can very easily be "pro-trade" without being "pro-'free' trade," or "pro-bad trade deals."

Ho hum, Dean Baker catches the New York Times flogging a Citigroup study suggesting that public pensions will constitute an untenable burden on world nations. And surprise, surprise, it has scare numbers: ZOMG 78 TRILLYUNS OF TEH DOLLURZ ALMOSTZ TWICEZ TEH NASHUNUL DEBTZ!!!! But that number represents 20 nations' public pension obligations over the rest of the 21st century, which will go on for another 84 years. And it also represents some four percent of those nations' estimated GDP over the next 80 or so years, meaning that GDP number is $2 quadrillion. Every time some bankster squeals about "underfunded pensions," you should pretty much count on scare numbers coming. And have I mentioned that emotional manipulation is evil?

Steve Vladeck, writing at the Just Security blog, finds Judge Merrick Garland's record on detainee treatment a bit wanting. Judge Garland has "never ruled for a detainee on the merits in a Guantánamo habeas case" (emphasis in original), and that covers more than a dozen Guantánamo-related cases. Why, even one of Mr. Bush's favorite judges, J. Michael Luttig, ruled against our government's detainment of Jorge Padilla at a critical point in 2005, and that probably scuttled his chance to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court! Mr. Vladeck tells us, essentially, that it's worse that Judge Garland defers to the government in detainment cases than that he rules consistently against detainees -- though he also says "the Court is too far gone" on a lot of national security cases for him to make that much of a difference if he were less deferential.

Even George Will finds Senate Republicans' blocking of Judge Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court "indefensible." His column is a morally-forceful laugh-line fest pretty much from start to finish, so much so that I'm willing to overlook that he praises Judge Garland for pretty much the same things for which Mr. Vladeck criticizes him. But consider how many of today's "conservatives" consider Mr. Will a dinosaur -- and how many of them would actually call him a dinosaur without realizing the irony of doing so. I used to find such things amusing; now I don't, and I don't know whether that's because I've matured, or merely because I've gotten old.

Finally, we learn one actually fairly compelling reason why Donald Trump might not be President: that he would have to, in Greg Sargent's words, "improve on Mitt Romney’s advantage over Barack Obama among blue collar whites by double digit margins, which is an astronomically high bar" in Rust Belt states that he could make competitive. I'm inclined to accept the force of that analysis -- but I also feel compelled to remind everyone that Election Day is over seven months away and a lot can happen in the interim, and that the "liberal" media, those expert buriers of memory, may well remain Mr. Trump's biggest asset.

Action: "free" trade, corporate welfare, and cosmetic safety.

As you know, the text of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" is finally out, and early analyses suggest the deal is even worse than we knew it was going to be from leaks. So both the People's Email Network and Roots Action help you tell your Congressfolk to reject this noxious "free" trade deal. The TPP would, as you know, would ship our jobs overseas and bring more unsafe products here, would make it harder to get the drugs you need to get better, would make it harder to speak freely on the internet, and (perhaps most noxious of all) would allow "investor-state tribunals" to nullify our laws if they cost some investor some money somewhere -- even if those laws protect the people against pollution, workplace injuries, or bankster schemes. The deal is so bad that its supporters (including President Obama and his former economic BFF, Lawrence Summers) can't defend it coherently -- Mr. Summers's last defense relied on booga-booga about China and a vague promise to stop passing bad "free" trade deals and get future "free" trade deals right if we'll only give up and let this one pass. He must think the American people are profoundly stupid. We're not.

Meanwhile, some four dozen big corporate tax breaks have expired, as they do every year, and Congress is anxious to renew them, as they do every year. Have any of them considered that the difficulty they have renewing such corporate welfare handouts as the "bonus depreciation" handout might well be due to the American people's hatred of corporate welfare handouts? I kid, of course: Congressfolk know full well what they do, and care more about their big donors than their real bosses, i.e., the American people. Naturally, at the same time our glorious representatives are figuring out how they're going to extend these handouts, they're waffling on extending expansions of actual tax relief for actual working families, namely the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC). Congress may well play the we're-broke game they never play with corporate welfare handouts -- unless we tell them not to. Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell Congress to prioritize tax relief for working families over corporate welfare handouts.

Finally, this week the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (or HELP) Committee will mull S. 1014, the Personal Care Products Safety Act, and Breast Cancer Action helps you demand more vigorous action against carcinogens in personal care products than the current bill would take. More and more scientists are linking cosmetics to cancer, but S. 1014 doesn't go far enough in protecting good Americans from carcinogens: it would make the FDA evaluate a mere five chemicals annually, and though cosmetic manufacturing corporations would have to provide a list of chemicals they use to the FDA, they wouldn't have to put those ingredients on their product labels -- you know, where good Americans might actually get to read them. Perhaps most importantly, the FDA would, under S. 1014, assume all chemicals are safe until they're discovered to be harmful, rather than force corporations to prove their chemicals are safe to begin with. There is, also, the matter of funding the FDA's new mandates, which S. 1014 doesn't address. You're supposed to spend money to prevent wrongdoing, after all.

Around the table: more tales about political correctness and Democrat weakness.

Barack Obama writes a pretty generic editorial supporting the Trans-Pacific "Partnership." Two problems: one, nobody and I mean nobody ever opposed exports, so arguing that corporations that export do better than corporations that don't is simply a red herring. Two, if you're looking for some assurance that the "investor-state tribunals" won't nullify our laws and force us to bail out big corporations whenever they dump crap into our air and water, you won't find it here. There's no China-bashing, at least, though he probably figures he can leave that to Larry Summers.

Bristol Palin says the whole Starbucks red cup controversy is "an attempt by the left to make Christians look stupid." And she might be on to something! Starbucks may well have rid their cups of all those snowflakes and reindeer because they knew someone would have a tantrum about it and they knew that would bring them more publicity, and I would of course disapprove of such cynical calculation, since I prefer enabling fewer tantrums. But naturally Ms. Palin can't take that theory all the way -- that is, to instruct Christians to ignore what Starbucks is doing -- because if she did, she couldn't drink from the cup of self-pity.

Hillary Clinton describes the problems with charter schools fairly lucidly and succinctly. She's saying the right things, again, which means it will be quite disappointing when she doesn't act on them so she can prize "bipartisanship" above all. You have to wonder, too, how charter schools had this very specific purpose (i.e., to be a sort of laboratory for public schools) and yet so quickly morphed into something else entirely.

U.S. Supreme Court decides not to take up a challenge to California's non-profit donor review law, one that allows the state to determine whether a particular non-profit group is actually doing charitable work. The plaintiffs allege freedom of speech infringement yadda yadda yadda, but the state doesn't even reveal donor names publicly. In any case, this Court has always looked more kindly on campaign finance disclosure than on campaign spending limits. Perhaps the next right-wing court, the one that makes the Roberts Court look as liberal as the Rehnquist Court looks now, attacks all campaign finance disclosure as Communist and un-American.

Finally, Sen. Ted Cruz says atheists should never be President, adding that "(a)ny president who doesn't begin every day on his knees isn't fit to be commander in chief of this nation." Again: how is this not "political correctness"? How is this not an attempt to scare people into adhering to a particular, rigid ideology, and condemning those fellow-travelers who would deviate, however slightly, from that ideology? This seems the very soul of "political correctness" to me.

Action: killing the car "kill switch," and justice for Liu Ping.

Hard as it may be to believe, some two million cars now come equipped, as it were, with GPS-based kill switches. Why? So that lenders can literally shut off cars remotely if borrowers aren't current on their payments. Kill switch operators claim they can't shut off cars while they're actually running, but some folks have testified to the New York Times that's not exactly true, and note well that loans with kill-switches attached generally go to very poor people. People who respond ZOMG WHEN WILLZ THOSE PEOPLEZ BE RESPONZIBULZ!!!!! need to remember first that they're also bill-juggling debtors (who but a rich person buys a house with cash, after all?), and second that putting people at risk of stranding or even death is never an acceptable punishment for being late with a car payment. Only Wisconsin bans these kill switches (I bet Scott Walker would love to change that!), but New York, where a state Senator has introduced a bill (S. 7946) that would outlaw auto kill switches, might follow suit. So Watchdog.net helps you tell the New York state legislature to ban automobile kill switches.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International helps you tell the Chinese government to release Liu Ping. Liu Ping worked at an iron and steel plant until her mid-40s, when the plant forced her to retire; that was five years ago, and she began agitating for better pensions for forced retirees. Social Security defenders, you know what I'm talking about. Naturally, the Chinese government responded by detaining her for 10 days in 2010; the next year, she tried to run as a local delegate to the National People's Congress, but despite legally qualifying for the ballot, the local election director's office threw her name off anyway, because of "foreign influences" or something. In 2013, she participated in (and organized) demonstrations aiming to force Chinese government officials to disclose their wealth -- after all, in Communist China, no one's supposed to be super-wealthy, right? Now, perhaps not coincidentally, she's in jail serving 6 1/2 years for rubbish charges including "using a cult organization to undermine the law." You like the idea of good folks going to jail because they try to expose corruption? Of course not. So let's shame the totalitarians in the eyes of the world.