Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning taxes, law and order, energy security, protecting our democracy, immigration, and copyrights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, oversee FBI investigations more closely, pass the Energy Security and Independence Act and the Protecting Our Democracy Act, support ending Title 42, and reject the SMART Copyright Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to revive the Child Tax Credit expansion that put $250 and $300 checks in the bank accounts of working families. Because that will help people struggling with inflation! Don't believe the Manchinean hype that "expanding the Child Tax Credit caused the inflation in the first place." For one thing, if that were true, inflation would have gone down by now, since the CTC expansion expired almost four months ago. For another, corporate greed causes most of the inflation we're experiencing! Corporate pre-tax profits went up 25% in 2021; recall that inflation was about 7% for the entire year. It's cruel to "get tough" on folks who need help making ends meet, and not to get tough on the powerful people who cause all the problems.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to conduct more stringent oversight of FBI "sensitive investigative matters" -- i.e., investigations of political organizations, religious organizations, public officials, or the media. We learned last month that our FBI allowed more than two errors per investigation on average in 2019, errors that contravened our FBI's own rules about these investigations and included such basic failures as failing to get proper authorization to even start an investigation. Law enforcement officers must answer to the law, and if not to the law, then certainly to internal procedures; we can't let them cut corners, because good Americans get hurt when they do. Sure, it's a "political organization" today, but tomorrow it could be you or I.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7439/S. 4013, the Energy Security and Independence Act, which would amend the Defense Production Act of 1950 so that it would cover energy production in America. Donald Trump will tell you that'd be "black helicopter territory" if our government stepped in and made big corporations produce renewable energy so we wouldn't have to rely on foreign countries so much, but no, it's not "black helicopter territory" for our government to actually insure that we rely on ourselves for our energy needs. And if big corporate CEOs think losing a few million dollars off their annual salaries constitutes "government oppression," I'd like to introduce them to some Russian anti-war protestors who could explain to them what oppression is really like.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which our House passed late last year. That also means contacting Senate Majority Leader Schumer (here's his contact info) and telling him to schedule that vote in the first place! No excuses about this one or that one maybe not voting for it! Hold their feet to the fire! The Protecting Our Democracy Act would prevent Presidential abuses of power like those perpetrated by Mr. Trump during his four notorious years in office, specifically targeting a President's ability to profit from his office and abuse his pardoning power, both of which Mr. Trump surely did. I guess this bill's opponents will yammer on about all that being in the past, ignoring the fact that the past teaches a great deal about what to avoid in the future. Hmm, that sounds almost conservative.

NETWORK, the National Catholic Social Justice Lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to support ending the Title 42 "health care-related" immigrant expulsion policy. President Biden (finally!) announced that he's ending this cruel policy, one former President Trump supposedly enacted to keep COVID out even though Mr. Trump's most devoted supporters then proved they can keep a pandemic going all by their damn selves. But quite a few Democrats have spoken out against this announcement in recent days -- they smell blood, might it be their own? -- but don't believe the hype that Joe Biden's not giving us tools to deal with the influx of immigrants. Those tools are laws and courts; they take a long time to work their will because they serve justice, not the need for second-rate politicians to "look tough."

Finally, No Censorship Filter helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3880, the so-called SMART Copyright Act. The SMART Copyright Act would basically force every internet entity that handles content to install automated filters aiming to catch copyright infringement, but if there's something worse than an overzealous human censor, it's an algorithmic censor that can't be reasoned with, let alone tell the difference between actual infringement and fair use! Seriously, too many politicians think machines can just do anything, when the tech bros feeding them that nonsense just don't want to hire people and pay them and give them health insurance and vacation time and paid family/sick leave and the like. And these tech bros laugh at the politicians they con! We won't be laughing if this bill passes, though.

Action: concerning shareholder power, adoptee citizenship, copyright trolling, and paid family leave.

Apparently because no regulation that serves the public interest can be allowed to survive under this abomination of an Administration, our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) is mulling whether to roll back rules that would inform shareholders of big business decisions involving pollution, campaign contributions, and offshore tax evasion. I guess their reasoning (such as it is) is that shareholders don't care about anything but money, which is certainly true of our President, but as I keep saying, our President is not America, and I bet you won't even find very many Republican-appointed judges who don't understand that shareholders make decisions on where to invest for a variety of reasons -- a thesis proven by the very existence of shareholder resolutions aiming to get corporations to pay their executives less, or address climate change. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our SEC to scuttle its own efforts to make corporations less accountable to their shareholders. Protecting shareholders from corporate abuse is, after all, our SEC's very reason for existence. That's not my opinion; that's the law.

Meanwhile, our Administration has been deporting immigrants who were adopted by American citizens but never got citizenship when they were adopted. What, you thought adoption automatically led to citizenship? So did I! Our Administration never tires of looking for these little loopholes in the law, do they? All so they can look "tough" when the truth is they are not tough, they are weak -- only weak people care so much about looking tough, and only strong people possess the quality of mercy, particularly when it concerns folks who have spent almost their entire life in America. Hence H.R. 2731/S. 1554, the Adoptee Citizenship Act, would expand citizenship to immigrants adopted by Americans under certain conditions (i.e., the immigrant got adopted before turning 18, and was present in America at the time of adoption). You'll noted that, at this writing, the House version of this bill actually has more Republican sponsors than Democratic ones, which makes it what? An actual bipartisan bill! 18 Million Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Adoptee Citizenship Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to reject H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act. The CASE Act would push "small claims" into an "alternative" court which of course isn't a real court of law, but a "Copyright Claims Board," not staffed with judges but still empowered to levy up to $30,000 in fines if you (for example) share something copyrighted in a meme on Facebook. And dig Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) claiming that the $30,000 cap limits the scope of this bill to "truly small claims"! You think $30,000 is "small"? I suspect not. I suppose we can't expect much better from the political party whose current standard-bearer once claimed to have gotten his start in real estate with a "very small loan" -- of a million bucks! So now is the time to stand up -- not just for the rule of law, which guarantees us our day in court, but also for the notion that $30,000 isn't a "small claim." It's like our leaders don't understand a thing about regular folks, which is why we teach them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Most working Americans can't take time off to take care of themselves or a sick loved one, or a newborn baby, without taking a risk they'll lose their jobs or fall into a debt hole, but the FAMILY Act would create a national paid family medical leave program, and if you make $50,000 annually, you would pay a mere $8.33 monthly to enjoy its benefits. We could debate whether that tax rate (two-tenths of one percent paid by worker, the same amount paid by employer) should be progressive -- that your rate should be higher the more money you make -- but that alone wouldn't be a good reason to withhold support, particularly in one of the few rich nations that doesn't have any paid family leave for workers, unless employers are generous enough to give them or unions are canny enough to negotiate them. So let's get it done.

Action: concerning copyrights and monopolies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from copyright trolls by rejecting H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act. Yeah, this bill would provide an "alternative" to fighting copyright issues out in court, and whenever someone proposes an "alternative" to the day in court that is your right, you should be suspicious. The CASE Act, as it happens, would create a "Copyright Claims Board" -- not even composed of judges, but of "claims officers" -- that could enforce penalties of up to $30,000 against you. $30,000! Nearly half of Americans don't have even $400 lying around! And what might you do to get a judgment against you? Share a meme or a video online! Seriously, that's all you might have to do! And it's something you probably do all the time! Of course, a copyright troll knows where all the loopholes in the law are, but why should they get more say than we do?

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FDIC to block the proposed BB&T/SunTrust merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. Haven't heard of BB&T or SunTrust? Southerners have -- and if we allow them to merge, then we'll all hear about the resulting behemoth they're planning to call Truist. Truist? I guess they think if people hear the name enough, they'll think it's a real word, and I can't entirely blame them for that, I suppose, since these are the days Our Glorious Elites repeat almost anything enough that large segments of the population will believe it. But I'm so old-fashioned I only want to keep corporations from getting so big that they run roughshod over our rights, and this would be the biggest merger allowed to go through since the 2008 bankster meltdown that almost destroyed our economy. Unless we stand in the way, of course -- and we should stand in the way. Why do we let money make all our decisions for us? And what kind of world will we leave for our children and our children's children?

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, robocalls, copyrights, and immigration.

It's Monday again, so let's call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. And this week we add to that list H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, which would (among other good works) mandate paper ballots for federal elections. The House has passed all these bills, but Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell still refuses to hold a vote on any of them. Still, we have a voice, and we believe that secure elections, voting rights, civil rights for gay and transgender folk, paycheck fairness for women, higher wages for working families, and internet freedom for all Americans are all good things that our Senators should support, particularly if they want to remain Senators. You can find tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Meanwhile, both House and Senate have passed anti-robocall bills, but they didn't pass the same bill, so now House and Senate must conference out a bill that can go to our President, and you know how that can go -- for example, a lot of the worst parts in that 2017 tax "reform" bill somehow found their way into that bill during the House/Senate conference! -- so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Reps and Senators to agree upon the most vigorous anti-robocall bill possible. A conference bill should, for example, ensure that big telecom corporations give you free tools to end all those "spoofed" calls that pretend to be from your bank or our IRS or even your own damn number, and it should also crack down on international scam call rings. Remember: our Reps and Senators would be nothing without us, so they had better do our will here, not some big donor's will. I mean, nobody likes robocalls except scam artists and other people nobody wants to talk to on the phone. Surely Congress can hit a bank-shot layup?

In other news, H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the CASE Act, purports to streamline the process by which folks can redress copyright violations, but that ain't as good as it sounds -- by taking copyright-related claims out of our courts and creating a separate office within the U.S. Copyright Office to evaluate them, the CASE Act will open the floodgates for copyright trolls to slap copyrights on everything they can find so they can harvest settlements from the unsuspecting. If you think you won't be affected because you don't violate copyrights, ask yourself: have you ever shared a meme on Facebook or Twitter? If the answer is "yes," then it will affect you, once folks slap copyrights on everything in sight, knowing they'll get a quick hearing from the U.S. Copyright Office rather than letting the wheels of justice in our courts grind slow. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from copyright trolls by rejecting the SAFE Act.

Finally, we've been trying to get Greyhound to stop letting Border Patrol agents on their buses willy-nilly, but they don't care what you think, so the ACLU helps you tell Greyhound's owner, FirstGroup plc, to stop Greyhound from letting Border Patrol agents on their buses unless they have a warrant or are at an actual CBP checkpoint. Of course if CBP or ICE agents have a warrant, or the bus is passing through a CBP checkpoint, agents can get on board and search, but the CBP has been searching buses without warrants and declaring that pretty much anywhere is now a "checkpoint," and they've also taken plenty of folks of color off buses without having any real suspicion that they're undocumented immigrants. Again, Greyhound has demonstrated that it doesn't care about any of that, so we have to alert their owners to what they're doing. In a sane, decent, and moral society I wouldn't ever have to say this, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society I often have to, so I will: law and order don't exist just to give us whatever results we want.

Action: concerning copyright trolls and corporate tax loopholes.

H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act, should set off your alarm bells first with the tortured acronym of its title and then with the word "alternative," because guess what "alternative" they're talking about? That's right, an "alternative" to settling small copyright-related claims in a court of law! Why our courts and our laws never seem to be good enough for our politicians I'll never know, but the CASE Act would let "claims officers" in our Copyright Office to hear copyright complaints and assess fines -- which would essentially enable copyright trolls to stamp copyrights on everything that ain't nailed down and then get an expedited hearing about the matter which will almost certainly go in their favor. There's a reason they might not try that in an actual court of law, you know. Thus the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect law and order by rejecting the CASE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to close corporate tax loopholes that benefit for-profit private prison corporations, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would prevent corporations that operate prisons from being able to call themselves a real estate investment trust (or REIT) subsidiary, which sure sounds like a loophole even if you've never heard of a REIT before. A REIT is, per section 856 of our Internal Revenue Code, "any corporation, trust or association that acts as an investment agent specializing in real estate and real estate mortgages"; mainly that means office complexes, shopping centers, and apartment buildings, but private prison corporations? That sure does seem to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the law, and we could put "following the spirit of the law" another way: doing the right thing.

Action: concerning the right to protest, copyright law, and food safety.

So liberals get out in the streets to protest our government, and now our National Park Service wants to make it harder for good Americans to protest on public lands. Like our heritage as a people isn't based on protest! Like public lands don't, you know, belong to the public! The NPS would make protestors pay for the cost of barricades and "monitoring," would close off large areas around our White House to protests, and would give our government the right to shut down a protest for most piddling of reasons (rather than using the current "clear and present danger" standard). You know that famous photo of '60 civil rights protestors on the National Mall? Yeah, that won't happen under the new rules, and it's almost like that's the idea. You can pimp-slap the NPS by leaving a public comment opposing their new anti-free speech regulations, which Defending Rights and Dissent helps you do. But get to stepping, because deadline for comments is Monday.

Meanwhile, they call H.R. 1695 the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act; if you note the incongruous presence of the word "accountability" in the title, you already know something's up, and if you note the massive support this bill has from big entertainment corporations and big entertainment trade associations, you know something else is up, too. Currently our Library of Congress appoints a Register of Copyrights, but H.R. 1695 would make that position a Presidential appointee to be confirmed by the Senate. Meaning what? The position would become a political position, and, at present, would be filled by a President who thinks getting all kinds of unearned tax breaks for yourself is just "smart," but who also thinks that whatever big corporations think should be copyright infringement should maybe get your hands cut off. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Senators to reject H.R. 1695.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations to get the glyphosate out of our food, then Just Label It still helps you do that. As you may recall, an Environmental Working Group study found glyphosate in oat-based foods at considerably higher levels than what most scientists would call safe, and scientists have long linked glyphosate to cancer, childbirth issues, and cell function. It's bad enough that four European nations have suspended Monsanto's license to use the most popularly-known glyphosate, Roundup, on their farms -- but here in America, we douse our crops with glyphosate in the hope it'll kill all the nearby weeds, though those weeds have long been developing a resistance to glyphosate, which means we'll heap more of it on, which means they'll get more resistant and we'll get sicker, ad nauseam. This could be yet another one of those disasters "no one sees coming." So, as usual, it's up to those of us who do see it coming.

Around the table: the death of Democratic populism, explained! And other things, also explained.

Matt Stoller at The Atlantic takes us back to the time "Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul" -- specifically, the time the "Watergate babies" that came into Congress in 1975 overthrew a populist anti-bank committee chair who had been in Congress for nearly half a century. Mr. Patman, a Texas House Rep, pretty much exemplifies all the contradictions about populism during the New Deal era -- he, like many populists and progressives of the era, was, at various times, a segregationist and a Vietnam War supporter, but his fierceness against bankster capitalism and corporate monopoly power remains unmatched by any member of Congress today, including Sen. Warren. Of course the whippersnappers who helped overthrow him also helped turn the Democratic party into the party of social liberalism, which essentially meant that economic populists were abandoned by both parties. Read the whole thing, though -- it's a marvelous history lesson, one that (as all great history lessons do) suggests what we can do about it if we only do it en masse.

Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals panel rules unanimously that torture is so unlawful that it's "beyond the power of even the president to declare such conduct lawful." You'd think a lot of right-wingers would applaud this decision, given that it declares the primacy of law and order over any faux-serious debate about military tactics, and restricts Presidential power just as the Founders intended, but instead they'll probably just yammer on about activist judges and that speech Jack Bauer gave on 24.

Dean Baker at TruthOut talks about the need to "retake the English language" when talking about "free" trade. He's made these points before, but he hasn't made them quite so clearly -- that it's literally impossible to call a trade pact a "free" trade deal if it codifies all sorts of policies, like expanding patent and copyright protections, that actually restrict trade, and a trade pact can hardly be a "free" trade when tariffs are already historically low. Also, too, "(t)he real story here is that the TPP is a deal about redistributing more income upward. It's imposing more competition on those at the middle and the bottom while maintaining and increasing forms of protectionism that benefits those at the top."

One more note for those whippersnappers supposedly thinking of voting for Gary Johnson: Gary Johnson doesn't like net neutrality. He can't really tell you why, either: his answer (from a 2011 interview) essentially boils down to government does it, so it's bad. Refuse to do anything because of "unintended consequences" and guess what? You will never do anything, because everything has unintended consequences. I know what the fully-intended consequences of opposing net neutrality are, though: that corporations, not you, will control your internet experience. It's bad enough they control your cable TV experience, though if we passed a strong a la carte cable packaging bill, we could change that.

A former porn star accuses Donald Trump of inappropriately kissing her, with Mr. Trump retorting, "I'm sure she's never been grabbed before." Why he recast her accusation as "grabbing" rather than "kissing" is unclear, unless he thought it made a better zinger, but no porn star deserves to be grabbed or kissed without their permission merely because they've done the deed in a movie -- using what happens under a contract to describe consent is moronic. (As an aside, why is he saying he'll sue all these women if he becomes President? Why not now?)

Finally, notorious cartoonist Jack Chick, purveyor of short, primitively-drawn religious tracts that have inspired mirth and scorn from young folks for decades, has died at the age of 92. Mr. Chick's little pamphlets, which religious folks have often distributed for free, rail against the occult, Catholicism, Communism, Islam, drugs, and homosexuality, among so, so many other things, and though of course I disagree profoundly with his notion that your only choice is either to believe in Jesus or go to hell, I must admit that he had a fierceness about him I can't help but admire -- a fierceness he could turn on himself occasionally, it seems. I'd be glib to say I'd feel differently about him if he'd taken over the world, because that was never going to happen -- he wasn't good enough at disguising his aims, possibly because he never tried. R.I.P.

Action: lead exposure, and copyright.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed updating the Lead Safe Housing Rule (for the first time in 17 years), and is now taking public comments on Sierra Club helps you tell the Department of Housing and Urban Development to issue the most vigorous new Lead Safe Housing Rule possible. HUD's proposal would reduce the allowable level of lead in publicly-assisted homes and apartments to the level recommended by the Centers for Disease Control (or CDC), and would automatically reduce that level further if the CDC recommended doing so. All this is important, since there is no safe level of lead, and since lead causes (among other things) behavior and learning problems in children. Our government banned lead paint in 1978, of course, but that doesn't mean lead paint still doesn't lurk in a lot of old houses -- think of areas like basements, generally the last to be repainted. (Remember: if you've already left a public comment about the Lead Safe Housing Rule -- at regulations.gov, for example -- don't sign this petition as well. Doing that muddies the data.)

Meanwhile, Section 1201 of the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 criminalizes the breaking or circumventing of digital locks, so as to prevent people from pirating VHS tapes and DVDs. Trouble with that is that these digital locks have expanded well beyond these media -- they now show up in appliances that use software, such as cellphones and refrigerators, and these locks make it a lot harder to tinker with them, repair them, or improve them. They also make it harder for security researchers to test whether or not hackers can break into them, which is something you'd want to know about before it happened. But now the U.S. Copyright Office is taking public comments on whether it should recommend to Congress that it create permanent exemptions to DMCA Section 1201 -- exemptions that could include smartphones, computer software, and technologies that assist disabled folks. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell the Copyright Office that copyright law shouldn't "punish research and repair," as EFF puts it (and it's a good way of putting it).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: terror watchlists start receiving the scrutiny they deserve, and other stories.

Kim Zetter at Wired tackles the following questions: "How Does the FBI Watch List Work? And Could It Have Prevented Orlando?" Short answers: badly and no. Our government adds folks to terror watchlists based mainly on "rumor and innuendo," according to at least one ex-federal prosecutor -- hey, that sounds like how they found Guantánamo detainees! -- and our government actually dropped Mr. Mateen from the list, after an informant tried to entice him into buying weapons and/or bomb-making materials, which I'm sure has never made a would-be terrorist suspicious! Want to fight terrorism? How about pursuing real job-creation policies, instead of "free market" ones?

Christopher Alvear, writing at Inequality.org, reminds us that the recent $15/hour minimum wage hike in Washington, D.C. left out tipped workers. D.C. tipped workers make $2.77/hour, and you can't rely on good tips, since you can't work five Friday or Saturday nights a week. I suspect that a good number of folks (even those who've worked for tips) don't care much for tipped workers, because of that one time the soup was cold or the burger was late or you had to ask twice for a glass of wine. But I also suspect that such folks need to work on their empathy glands a bit.

Paul Buchheit at Nation of Change provides yet another well-linked argument, this time favoring massive tax hikes on the rich. The sentiment expressed by "(t)he richest Americans are takers of social benefits" ought to be a bumper sticker. He doesn't just tackle corporate taxes and federal investment in internet and pharmaceuticals, but also Congressional underfunding of the IRS and how saddling middle-class twenty- and thirty-somethings with debt discourages them from taking the risks that actually improve our civilization. Take that, PR hacks who constantly whine about government regulations keeping your paymasters from "innovating"!

Dean Baker at TruthOut says that "The Secret to the Incredible Wealth of Bill Gates" is basically copyright and patent protection. I'll concede that it plays a role -- history will not remember Sen. Hatch well in this regard -- and I'm always pleased to see economists use the phrase "redistribute income upward," but I think lower tax rates on millionaire income (and even lower tax rates on investment and capital gains) play a larger role. Should we lower copyright and patent protections? Of course we should -- and it'll be much harder to do so than to hike tax rates on millionaire income, which will itself be pretty hard.

Finally, Adam Johnson at FAIR explodes the "liberal" media myth that Bernie Sanders's Secret Service detail "costs taxpayers $38,000 a day." Long story short: our government isn't just going to fire the agents on Mr. Sanders's detail once he quits the race; they'll just go to work somewhere else in our government. The arguments against Bernie Sanders are getting even more desperate than they've always been; if I were more (or less?) spiritually advanced, I'd find that profoundly amusing.

Around the table: what "free" trade is really all about, and other horrible truths.

Dean Baker reminds us that the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade pact "has little to do with trade" and more to do with "putting in place a pro-business regulatory structure." You see, tariffs aren't so much a "free trade barrier" anymore, but those pesky clean air and clean water and antitrust and fair use laws are, to the corporatists who drafted the pact -- not that they'll come out and say so, of course, since you'll want to punch them in the nose if they do. Rather, they'll use more scare numbers -- 18,000 OF TEH TARIFFZ DESTROYED!!!!, including the infamous Brunei ski boot tariff, a stain on civilization's honor since time immemorial.

Vulture capitalists -- those extraordinary folks who buy up a nation's defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar in order to extort vast sums governments can't pay without selling off public services -- have reached a "deal" with the new Argentine government. The shame of it is that Argentina actually did pretty well after its 2002 default, mainly by refusing to cave to outlandish creditor demands, but then 2009 hit, you remember that, and then another bad spell helped put a right-wing government in, one more willing to cave to folks like Paul Singer, until recently a Marco Rubio man and now standing to make nearly four times what he "invested." A certain American judge and a certain Obama Administration cabinet agency were also no help to good Argentinians.

In an unexpected development, the Department of Justice has apparently backed down in its fight to get Apple to create a key the FBI can use to unlock any encrypted cell phone. Sadly, not because they realized they were wrong, but because they think they can unlock the phone of the San Bernardino shooter another way -- hopefully a way that protects the privacy of the masses, though I'm not holding my breath. This "other way" might also fail, which means we'll be back to square one. We'll likely know in about two weeks' time.

Annalee Newitz, writing at ArsTechnica, describes Facebook's attempt to "establish an ethnic affinity," though not of course an actual ethnicity, to its users. Not to racially profile, but to make money, and praise the Lord it's only about making money! Also, like so many things in this Brave New World, this sort of marketing isn't opt-in: "(e)ven when a Facebook user says they like #BlackLivesMatter, they don't feel like asking to opt in to an ethnic identity," Ms. Newitz says, "it's just one of many interests that define that person." I wonder what "ethnic affinity" Facebook projects onto my newsfeed's endless stream of death notices and music videos.

Finally, Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall takes us in his wayback machine to the antics of southern California's Wally George, a right-wing TV host who presaged so many right-wing talk radio and cable news blowhards -- and Donald Trump. Helmet hair, limp liberals, wrestling-style bombast, security throwing guests out -- sound familiar? Of course I remember Morton Downey, Jr. gaining a similar following in the late 1980s with a similar act. Happily, "digging right-wing blowhards who yell and scream and throw things, ironically or maybe not" is one of the many childish things I've put away.

Around the table: President Reagan vs. his votaries, and other tales.

On the eve of the latest Republican Presidential debate at the Reagan Library, Think Progress reminds us that the putative heirs of Ronald Reagan would profess to find much of his program revolting. You know, raising taxes every year but one, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, occasional compromise with Democrats. This reminds me of the time someone called into the Rush Limbaugh show to tell him that President Reagan did-so raise taxes, and Mr. Limbaugh demanded to know the source of that info, and then said he thought the caller's source might be Media Matters, because, you know, MEDIA MATTURZ BAD!!!! That's all right-wingers have left anymore: personal attacks.

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals insists that corporations can't compel video services to take down videos that allegedly violate copyright without first making a good faith effort to determine whether the video constitutes "fair use." You'd think this would be common sense, but to big corporations trying to extract unearned money wherever they can, it's apparently not. And Universal Music really stepped in it, first saying they did-too determine fair use, then saying that having to determine fair use could slow down their anti-piracy efforts boo-freaking-hoo. I don't think it's that hard to tell the difference between piracy and fair use -- unless, again, you're trying to leverage your copyrights to redistribute income from other folks to yourself.

Michelle Chen, writing at The Nation, describes how bad the "sharing economy" can be for workers -- and lists some actions workers can take, including using the Big Stick of Bad PR whenever Uber or Lyft has you working 15 "flexible" hours in a row. Oddly enough, I just received an offer from one of my credit card providers promising a "rewards upgrade" -- and one of those upgrades just so happens to be a 20% statement credit on Uber rides through April. Needless to say, I won't be taking them up on that offer, because that's is how the big corporations get you to act against your interests, and the interests of other working families.

Study suggests that "Racial Diversity in Alternative Press May Be Declining." They're doing better with women and LGBTQ populations than folks of color, which, sadly, doesn't surprise me. You'll also be sadly un-surprised to learn that a lot of folks who do the hiring at alternative presses say they "reach out to everyone" or "look to the best candidates regardless of race," which is much too similar to what people say when they don't care to make the effort.

Finally, Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall calls Scott Walker a "Dead Man Walkering," given his Trump-aided plunge in recent polling. The truth is there's nothing wrong with Scott Walker's campaign that $900 million in Koch Brothers money can't fix. Still, a man can hope that a happy side effect of the Trump ego trip is that Mr. Walker can't find the spotlight again, so he has to go back to Wisconsin and face the consequences of the corporate welfare state he's created there.

Around the table: in which we contemplate the nexus between adultery and copyright law, among other things.

Chauncey DeVega suggests that "Christianity hinders racial justice." We could quarrel about that, I suppose, though I suspect that quarrel also hinders racial justice, but I agree that the automatic forgiveness white folks seem to expect from black folks after yet another murder certainly hinders racial justice. And who expects forgiveness from white people whenever a white person gets murdered? I have to say I've never heard that come up.

Ho hum, the "liberal" media keep flogging discredited anti-Iran nuke deal propaganda days after they're properly discredited. How did "inspections of military sites will respect Iran's military security needs" turn into ZOMG IRANZ WILL INSPECT ITSELFZ!!!!!!? Because haters gonna hate, that's why. And if a lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes, the "liberal" media spreads lies around the world before the truth gets out of bed.

Kate Cox at the Consumerist instructs us that Ashley Madison (the dating site for adulterers) may not be able to legally prevent people from looking over all the client info that got hacked last month, despite their best efforts. Ashley Madison seems to think it has copyrighted all of that client info, but generally, as Ms. Cox says, "you can copyright original works, but not lists of facts." Will Ashley Madison claim that these lists are unique enough that they represent narratives, and thus are "original works," in a sense? I guess that would be interesting.

Bryce Covert reminds us that the Monday morning stock market plunge would have wreaked absolute havoc on Social Security if our government had privatized Social Security -- as Mr. Bush wanted to do in 2005 and as several Republican Presidential candidates still want to do now. But they're so criminally insane they'll probably use the Monday morning stock plunge as proof of privatization's necessity. (Ms. Covert also points out that most smart investment is actually counterintuitive -- folks want to sell when things start to go bad and buy when things start to go good, but these are pretty much the wrong things to do at those times, if you think about it.)

Finally, an SEI report finds that some two-thirds of a particular kind of carbon-trading (Joint Implementation, where one country finances a carbon-reducing project in another country, instead of just trading credits) "are unlikely to represent additional emissions reductions." In some cases, JI projects simply created more carbon emissions so they get carbon credits for "reducing" them, and in others, the carbon-reducing projects simply didn't exist, though people still made money off them. Hence yet another reason I prefer good old-fashioned regulation to carbon-trading schemes.

Around the table: from the end of the "real Republican primary" to the end of Comcast's dreams of acquiring Time-Warner.

Doyle McManus describes the Republican "billionaires' primary," where a series of right-wing billionaires each seem to have a "pet candidate" they can "make or break." Philadelphia Eagles fans will remember (though not fondly) former owner Norman Braman, who's now a Marco Rubio man. The Nation's John Nichols, writing on the same topic, reminds us that the plutocrats in this "primary" don't speak for very many Republican voters: almost half of rank-and-file Republicans think the rich don't pay enough in taxes, and a similar number think we should have fewer foreign policy adventures. Also, though Mr. Nichols doesn't note it, two-thirds of Republicans think the Supreme Court botched the Citizens United v. FEC decision that birthed this "billionaires' primary" to begin with.

Ho hum, the 15 biggest medical device corporations pushing Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act's 2.3% excise tax just so happen to be pushing a lot of their profits "offshore" to avoid taxation. I wonder if anyone besides a corporatist would run through a wall for medical device tax repeal. I also wonder if anyone who supports such repeal can explain how the tax is supposed to work in the first place -- the ACA would, after all, deliver more work to medical device corporations through its exchanges than they'd otherwise get, and a 2.3% excise tax in return hardly seems like extortion.

Copyright law has become ever murkier in recent years, and now tractor manufacturer John Deere asserts that, though you actually paid cash money for that tractor, you don't really "own" it, because the tractor has a computer chip with some code on it. Well, so much for my lifelong dream of popping wheelies with a tractor! Seriously, they're trying to muscle in on the good thing computer-makers have with their digital books and mp3s you can't resell, but no one really thinks of either one of those things as, well, things.

Max Ehrenfreund writes about how "Kansas Lawmakers Want the Poor to Pay for Tax Cuts for the Rich." Good Kansan working families pay nearly one out of every nine dollars they make just in state and local taxes -- that's before we get to federal taxes -- and they're about to pay a bit more than that. Yet they re-elected Gov. Brownback, not because he's so clever at using social-issue misdirection, I maintain, but because Democrats offered little better in Paul Davis, who never ran on repealing the Brownback tax cuts, but on maybe slowing some of them down. Typical Democrat weakness.

In a peripherally related note, Wichita State statistician sues top Kansas election officials in order to obtain electronic voting machines' paper tapes. Why? Because she's noticed the same thing other folks have noticed: that in many precincts across America, "the percentage of Republican votes increase the larger the size of the precinct." Furthermore, the pattern seems to favor Republican establishment candidates over Tea Party challengers. Remember when Diebold's CEO declared in 2004 that his corporation was dedicated to delivering Ohio for Mr. Bush? There's motive, at least.

Finally, some good news: Comcast has abandoned its effort to assimilate merge with Time-Warner cable, after much public outcry (including yours, I bet!) over how a merger would further entrench Comcast as a monopoly. A Comcast PR statement lamented that "we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities," which must have made Comcast subscribers all over America spit out their coffee. But we helped do a good thing here, even if Comcast is having a sad about it.

Action: reining in banksters, jailbreaking your phone, and requiring CEO pay disclosure.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the Federal Reserve to limit the risk the big banks take by making banks have more capital on hand when they borrow money. Banks borrow money, mainly to take on ever-larger (and riskier) investments, putatively on behalf of their shareholders, and though I'd prefer that banks do more lending money to businesses creating innovative technologies, products, and processes, I'd certainly prefer that they more real money lying around when they invest with borrowed money, because when such investments blow up in their face, we have to bail them out, and I think I speak for just about all taxpayers when I say I do not want to bail out any more banks in my lifetime. The Fed announced in December it would make the riskiest big American banks hold about $1 dollar in deposits for every $9 in assets-on-paper, versus what some of the riskiest banksters held in the run-up to the 2008 meltdown, which was about $1 in deposits for every $30 in assets-on-paper. That rule would be a start, but the banksters are already whining about it, so we need to push back.

Meanwhile, when you modify your phone or tablet's operating system so you can (among other things) run lawfully-acquired software that the phone or tablet's manufacturer doesn't want you to run, they call that "jailbreaking," as if you're breaking your device or phone out of jail, which, sadly, you kind of are. And unless the Library of Congress specifically exempts such "jailbreaking" from copyright laws, corporations will continue to assert that you've violated their copyright by modifying the OS. But unless you're taking that modified OS and selling it to other people as if it were your own creation, then what's the problem? Here's the problem: big telecom corporations only want you to run the apps their cronies make. Even free marketeers should be aghast that corporations would use the law to restrict not only consumer freedom, but the freedom of software apps to compete fairly. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell the Library of Congress to exempt jailbreaking from copyright laws. (You can read the EFF's own quite edifying petition to the Library here.)

Meanwhile, if you've missed opportunities to tell the Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to implement a vigorous CEO pay disclosure rule -- which would reveal the ratio between a corporation's CEO pay and its average employee pay -- then CREDO still helps you do that. The SEC has been very corporate-friendly (versus shareholder-friendly, which is closer to its legal mandate) during the reign of Mary Jo White, but all that means is we need to be even louder. Recall that the Harvard Business Review found most Americans thinking the CEO-to-unskilled-labor-employee ratio (which, admittedly, we'd expect to be worse than a CEO-to-average pay ratio) was around 30:1, when it's actually around 350:1 -- and more to the point, Americans across the political spectrum would prefer that ratio be more like seven to one. And remember, a CEO-to-average-worker ratio would be better than that -- perhaps more like five or six to one? Five-to-one still isn't one-to-one, ye teabag-toting warriors against the Obamanoid Communist Socialist Nazi Kenyan Anti-colonialist Revolution.

Action: the Keystone XL pipeline, the right to protest peacefully, and "free" trade.

As you know, the House passed a bill authorizing construction of the Keystone XL pipeline on Friday, while the Senate plans at least a test vote on that same bill today. But the House didn't get two-thirds of its members to vote in favor -- even if the 11 House members who voted "present" on Friday all vote "yea" a second time, Keystone supporters still wouldn't have a two-thirds majority -- and we have every reason to suspect the Senate doesn't have 67 votes, either. Of course, we're only talking about a two-thirds majority because President Obama said last week he'd veto the bill. Trouble is, he gave an impending Nebraska Supreme Court decision on the pipeline as his reason, and said Court has since ruled in favor of letting the pipeline proceed, so Mr. Obama will look a little foolish now if he vetoes the bill. Still, the fact that he should have played it better doesn't affect our mission, which is to stop construction of a pipeline over heartland water tables by a corporation with a bad pipe safety record which will exacerbate climate change. Hence the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and CREDO all help you tell Mr. Obama to veto the Keystone XL bill.

Meanwhile, a Bloomington, MN prosecutor has put a recent #BlackLivesMatter protest at the Mall of America in her crosshairs, not because the protestors did anything untoward, like damage property, but because the protest cost the Mall "lost revenue" and the taxpayer police overtime. You see the problem with that, right? An overzealous prosecutor can silence any protest, anywhere, by raising the threat that the protestors will have to pay for "lost revenue" (how do we know the Mall lost revenue that day again?) or "police overtime" (again, any taxpayer can protest about anything at any time, so paying for police to oversee a rally isn't a "burden" to the taxpayer). Those who find they sympathize with the prosecutor might want to imagine a different prosecutor deciding that police overtime for, say, an anti-immigration rally is too much of a burden to taxpayers and local businesses. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell the Mall of America to help stop state interference with peaceful protests. For maybe the prosecutor's actions have been enough of a PR headache that the Mall might want to distance itself from her.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and any "fast-tracking" thereof, Public Citizen still helps you do that. The deleterious effects of the TPP -- that it would nullify our nation's laws, let copyright "protection" run roughshod over the principle of fair use, and make outsourcing American jobs even easier than it is now, among many other things -- are well-known, despite the negotiators' attempts to keep them secret. But the effect of "fast-tracking" trade proposals -- which would force Congress to vote on the pact with an hour of debate and without the ability to amend it -- is perhaps not as well-known. It's bad enough that "fast-tracking" forces Congress to vote on something without being able to debate it properly on behalf of the people Congressfolk nominally serve, but it's even worse that anyone would consider a trade pact of such immediate importance that it has to be passed now-now-now. If anti-terrorism or environmental bills don't get fast-tracked in this manner, why should trade bills?

Around the table: featuring a Republican anti-jobs bill and a litany of Republican squealing about President Obama.

Juan Cole instructs us that the attack on Charlie Hebdo was "an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture." Whether al-Qaeda itself was behind it I couldn't say with certainty, but the results of the attack would certainly benefit their efforts. Note well that when "liberal" media personalities like Chuck Todd won't ask the rich and powerful tough questions on TV out of fear that they won't come on his show again, the end result is that folks who actually have something to say, like Juan Cole, still can't get on TV.

Another day, another hostage situation forced upon the American people by Republicans, as they attach yet another pro-bankster amendment to a must-pass terrorism insurance bill. Sooner or later, simply as a matter of their own survival, Democrats will have to stand up to these hostage situations, and force the "liberal" media to listen to them. I shudder to think that they'd actually prefer Republicans to screw up the country in this manner, under the not-a-sure-shot assumption that they'll benefit on Election Day 2016. They do remember which party the current President belongs to, don't they?

Michael Hiltzik describes why the McConnell/Boehner effort to raise the Affordable Care Act's definition of "full-time" from 30 hours weekly to 40 will actually hurt American workers. Long story short: corporations that were already cutting their workers' hours to 29 just so they wouldn't have to provide health insurance to those workers would now have a much larger pool of workers (including me, and maybe you, too) whose hours they could cut to 39, who would then also no longer have health insurance. Also, the alleged spike in part-time jobs supposedly caused by the ACA simply isn't happening.

As the battle over the Keystone XL comes to a possible end, the battle over a 550-mile natural gas pipeline running through three mid-Atlantic coast states is just beginning. On one side, some familiar players -- Duke Energy, Dominion Resources of Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio frackers -- while on the other, we have all-too-unfamiliar players in the persons of the homeowners presently refusing to let pipeline developers even survey their land, on whose behalf one pro bono lawyer says, "(i)f this were for a hospital or some truly public purpose, we could turn the other cheek, but this is a Fortune 500 company trying to make a profit." Best of luck to the landowners, who would, in a sane and moral society, have plenty of conservative defenders.

Ford Motor Co. sues a third-party auto repair diagnostics corporation, alleging that it violated Ford's copyright on a list of car parts and specifications. I'm stunned that anyone thinks they can copyright a list, which in theory anyone can compile, with minimal creativity. Ford says it included some totally made-up parts and specs in its list, to which I can only say: how post-modern our corporations have become.

Finally, Daily Kos diarist SemDem lists some of the outrageous lies people seem to believe about President Obama -- like that he's "disbanded the Marine Corps," "banned donuts," and "personally funded a Muslim Museum." This, when a lot of the things Mr. Obama has done (invading Libya, Iraq, and Syria without Congressional authorization, continuing warrantless wiretapping, ramping up drone strikes, vacuuming up cell phone data, and that's just what comes to the mind immediately) are bad enough. Democrats pretending to be like Republicans may work for Democrats in the short term, but it doesn't work for us -- if they actually were the liberals Republicans always say they are anyway, the American people wouldn't be served these ever-higher plates of bullshit.