Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: further describing our struggle with an incompetent President and a cowardly opposition.

It's about time someone put it like this: "Trump's Policies Won't Bring Back Coal Jobs -- They Will Kill More Miners." President Trump has not only vastly overestimated how many new coal mining jobs the economy has created over the last year (50,000? More like 1,000!), but if he succeeds in rolling back clean air and clean water regulations -- including regulations that specifically protect coal miners from black lung! -- then a lot more coal miners will die. The "happy ending," here, is that bosses will be richer, and bosses are the only people who matter to Mr. Trump anyway.

Ted Rall at Counterpunch reminds us that, yes, Virginia, "Democrats Could Lose Again This Fall." It's good to hear other folks saying that Democrats' complete lack of an agenda and the fact that Clintonistas still run everything (even as Sandernistas have all the energy!) may cripple them, but I doubt that Americans will vote Republican if they "vote their pocketbooks" -- hey, if the economic "recovery" of the Obama era didn't save Hillary Clinton, I don't see it saving Republicans, either -- and when more and more folks find out that the tax "cut" bill didn't cut their taxes very much, I see tax "reform"'s numbers going back down.

Joe Emersberger at FAIR catches the "liberal" media slobbering all over Ecuador's President, who ran as a liberal populist and has, of course, revealed himself to be a right-winger upon taking office. Odd how the "liberal" media calls a man who does whatever his big corporate cronies tell him to do "his own man." Also odd how they call the actual populist a "strongman" but leave that word in its sheath when the right-winger actually bullies judges. The good news? Actual liberal policies are actually so popular all over the planet that you have to at least pretend to be one to get anywhere. Why, if Mr. Trump had bashed banksters more consistently during the campaign, he might actually have won a popular vote majority.

Surprise, surprise, the Trump Administration is letting a corn syrup lobbyist help the USDA set dietary guidelines. And perhaps, like other sugar-addicted corporations like Coca-Cola, she'll use her "expertise" to downplay sugar's nefarious effects on our health! And what a surprise to learn, in addition to learning that our government gets "advice" from precisely the wrong people, that waivers to Mr. Trump's already-weakened ethics rules are so, so easy to get.

Finally, President Trump tells Ohio ralliers that Democrats who failed to applaud at his State of the Union should be considered traitors. Almost as bad, he equates their failure to applaud with a failure to love one's country, as if America is Donald Trump and Donald Trump is America, a feat of ego-stroking (among many other kinds of stroking!) the Founders would have found appalling. And I guess it's no use citing Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution to our President, though it sets the bar for treason considerably higher than he does. Memo to Trump votaries: if you support calling your enemies "traitors," particularly for the crime of not clapping at Dear Leader, then you are damaged beyond my ability or willingness to engage with you.

Action: drug pricing, pot prohibition, and automatic voter registration.

Sign for Good helps you tell the Senate to investigate HHS Secretary nominee Alex Azar's role in insulin price gouging while CEO of big pharma corporation Eli Lilly. We know that Eli Lilly jacked up the price of insulin over 300% while Mr. Azar was there, and when your right-wing uncle says BUT OVER FORTY CORPORATIONS MAKE INSULIN YOU LOSE HA HA SNORT, you can remind him that Eli Lilly is one of the three biggest corporations that control, between them, over 90% of the market. You may also remind him that diabetics need insulin to survive, and that the world is becoming more diabetic all the time, thanks to all the sugar and other carbohydrates we ingest (a problem our government doesn't exactly help by subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup). So, in sum: greed is bad, monopolies are bad, corporate welfare for monopolies is bad, and you can't natter on about a "free market" for life-saving drugs. And if you do natter on about it, you may have a heart of stone.

Meanwhile, as you know, Attorney General Sessions recently rescinded the Cole memo, promulgated under the Obama Administration, which limited federal interference in states that had loosened laws against marijuana. And this proves, among other things, that "states' rights" mainly means "whatever best oppresses black folks" -- I mean, a real conservative would say the facts don't justify pot being on Schedule I, so the states are a good place to see if loosening pot prohibition really works, but then Jeff Sessions isn't a real conservative. Anyway, he doesn't get all the say around here -- the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell Congress to defund all efforts by the Justice Department to meddle in states that have legalized marijuana. Congress has defunded DOJ efforts to meddle in medical marijuana states, so this wouldn't be a long walk.

Finally, H.R. 5779/S. 3252, the Automatic Voter Registration Act, would mandate state election boards to ensure that everyone who's eligible to vote in that state is also registered to vote, except for folks who decline registration. The bill also mandates that a citizen's information can be transferred directly from a state agency to the election board without any further action from said citizens, which, of course, is not the same as your government spying on your emails without a warrant, or your local police department disguising a spying device as a cell phone tower -- automatic voter registration would ensure that information citizens have already volunteered gets to the election board. After all, the only reason someone would think voting should be hard (and some folks say this out loud!) is that they can't win a vote, or an argument, on the merits. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support voting rights by supporting the Automatic Voter Registration Act.

Action: internet freedom, energy efficiency, and food labeling.

Word on the street is that the FCC could vote to kill net neutrality -- and thus give corporations more power to steer you where they want to steer you on the internet -- just before Thanksgiving, when they think no one will be watching. Too late! Battle for the Net helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them you want strong net neutrality rules that protect our right to determine for ourselves where we want to go on the internet. You know, kinda like the rules we have now, the rules FCC Chair Ajit Pai is so determined to destroy so he can please his corporate cronies. You hear whispers that some Congressfolk would like to put a stop to Mr. Pai's plan, but that they're just not hearing enough from their constituents about it. Frankly, I don't know what part of "millions of comments in favor of strong net neutrality rules" they missed the first couple of times around, but if they're going to announce exactly what it is that will make them move, then I think it's perfectly all right to oblige them. This time.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania state legislators are actually trying to exempt big corporations from paying into the state's energy efficiency program. SB 805 would also prevent any such corporations from receiving any funding from state energy conservation plans, but that's symmetry, not fairness. Fairness would be compelling every corporation to participate, with the larger corporations having to accept that they'll never get as much back in grant money as they put in, because with great power comes great responsibility. Right-wingers love saying "rights have responsibilities," a phrase with which no one actually disagrees, but I rarely hear them say power has responsibilities -- in fact, it often seems their entire program aims to relieve the powerful of any responsibility to civilization. So Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject SB 805 and preserve the state's energy efficiency program.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell the FDA to stop delaying implementation of their new nutrition labels already. Brook no silliness from the Trump Administration about how they're going to gut the rules anyway, so there's no sense in making big food producing corporations follow them now -- and be aware that such statements can and will be used against them in the inevitable lawsuit accusing them of regulating in bad faith, which is actually against the law. Changing food labels is not prohibitively difficult, since the big food corporations don't use monks with quill pens to write each and every food label, and the new food labels would improve the old ones, by ending confusion over serving size and listing added sugars. If big corporations are really going to throw a hissy fit over this, you have to wonder why. Do they aim to hide, say, the outsized power of the corn lobby, which takes so much taxpayer money to produce high-fructose corn syrup that the price of soda virtually hasn't changed in over 35 years?

Action: concerning discrimination, campaign finance, and sugar intake.

In all the noise about the "religious freedom" to discriminate against gays, the ACLU reminds us that a Bush Mobb legal memo concluded that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 essentially authorizes taxpayer-funded organizations to discriminate against certain folks on "religious" grounds, and thus helps us tell President Obama to review this Office of Legal Counsel memo that bigots use to justify their "right" to discriminate. We presume that if the former Constitutional law professor orders a review, then the rickety legal standing of "religious freedom to discriminate" will collapse faster than that house on stilts from Lethal Weapon II, and while that may not happen -- after all, this former Constitutional law professor has actually expanded unconstitutional terrorism-related surveillance since ascending to the office -- putting pressure on the President is never a bad thing. And while it's bad enough that our laws would permit bigots to claim "conscience" in depriving others of their freedoms, it's even worse that our government would fund such bigotry.

Meanwhile, Rep. Yarmuth (D-KY), who lives out in coal country, has introduced H.R. 2125, the Keeping Our Campaigns Honest Act of 2015, and guess what acronym that bill's title spells out? KOCH, of course! The KOCH Act would compel the FCC to require SuperPACs and other political organizations to disclose their big donors in their radio and TV ads. You may recall that the majority in the Citizens United v. FEC decision wondered why disclosure of donors' identities wasn't enough to keep big money at bay. Perhaps we could test that theory, if we could get adequate campaign finance disclosure in the first place! But Republicans filibustered the DISCLOSE Act every time it was offered between 2009 and 2014, and Great American Super-Real and Awesome President Mitch McConnell, once an advocate of campaign finance disclosure, now likens disclosure to bullying. It's enough to make a man think that the real weaklings in America are the people with the most money. Anyway, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support campaign finance disclosure in the KOCH Act.

Finally, you may recall that the FDA planned to revamp the nutrition labels that tell you how many calories, carbohydrates, etc., are in your food, and that we wanted them to include the amount of "added sugar" on every label. The good news is: not only does the FDA plan to do that, they also plan to mandate that food labels include an estimated recommended daily allowance for added sugar. Folks are probably going to find that number uncomfortably low (I'm sure I will, too!), but the corporations who try to defend all the sugar they pack into their foods can do little in opposition but mutter about regulations and Big Gummint and say the science on sugar is "inconclusive." But while fine details about sugar intake may not be concluded as of yet, no one can reasonably say sugar is good for you -- and no one can reasonably say that the big agricultural corporate corn subsidies that keep the price of junk food artificially low is a good thing, either. So the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell the FDA to include both added sugar and percent of daily value figures on food labels.

Around the table: "free" trade, drought in California, website commenters, Uber drivers, Brownback tax hikes, and Scott Walker tries to recover from his worst gaffe to date.

Didn't I say they'd wait until we weren't looking? The House passes another "free" trade "fast-track" bill on Thursday, not even 48 hours after extending their deadline to get "fast-track" done in its entirety to the end of July. I'd give them credit for cleverness, but I never credit evil for anything. The good news? This bill (also different from the Senate bill) would go to the Senate without the "trade adjustment assistance" that induced Democrats to vote for the Senate version in the first place. The bad news? Senate Democrats (and the President!) sure sound like they're more likely to settle for "assurances" instead of action, which is even worse than the selling-out-for-so-little they were preparing to do. It's like they haven't served in the Senate with these Republicans for years on end and thus learned what "assurances" mean.

FAIR finds the New York Times hoping you'll blame the California drought on the foods you eat that grow in California, rather than, for example, climate change, or massive government subsidies for big-ag corn corporations, which keeps almost everything else off heartland farms. And the list of stupid crap the Times foists on the reader here is hilariously long -- from the Times's casual confusion of drought (caused by high temperatures and low rainfall) with water shortages (caused by our mismanagement of resources) to the Times's apparent belief that "thin slices" and "tiny wedges" are real units of measure to the Times's refusal to compare equal units of actual measure when they have the chance (0.33 oz. and 1.75 oz. are not, as you can see, the same thing). It's enough to make you think nobody at the Times does their own grocery shopping.

European Human Rights court rules that governments should hold websites liable for certain comments by anonymous users. That shouldn't make any damn sense to you -- nobody who thinks about the matter (or doesn't have an axe to grind against a particular website) imagines that comments on a website's post somehow "represent" the website. And under this regime, it'd be pretty easy for some big-money actor to force a website to play an endless game of whack-a-mole by anonymously posting hundreds of evil comments. Best to take a deep breath, remember that they don't have a First Amendment over in Europe, and take this as a lesson that stamping out "hateful speech" isn't best done by censorship, but by confrontation.

California Labor Commission rules that Uber should treat its drivers as employees, not contractors. Uber is one of the many so-called "sharing" economy corporations that has tried to make fast money off fudging the difference; it's nice to see some government body, somewhere, not putting up with that noise. And if you're thinking of driving for Uber, you should know that, as a non-employee, you get nothing from them other than pay (and sometimes not even that, as the claim sparking the ruling demonstrates) -- you crash your car, you get sick, you're on your own. That's the price of "virtually nonexistent operating costs."

Ho hum, Gov. Brownback raises taxes dramatically on the poor, then says doing so isn't really a tax cut, because when you look at "the totality of the picture," he cut a massive amount of taxes before (all for his rich friends, but never mind) and didn't raise as much money in tax hikes this time, so the net result is TAX CUTS! And when poor folks get steadily bled by the sales tax increases in the new Brownback budget, I bet they'll keep that in mind. Seriously, I hope "Brownback" one day becomes a synonym for "stupid, arrogant prick." I'd hoped "Bush" would be that, too, back in the day, but I never got to see that happen. A man can dream.

Finally, Scott Walker recovers as best he can, I suppose, from his gaffe in re attributing beliefs to British Prime Minister David Cameron that Mr. Cameron's office denied he had: "(w)hat I learned best from that is I should leave discussions like that that aren't done in front of the media to be treated privately, whether it was there or anywhere else," he says, adding that he won't comment any more on private meetings he's had with world leaders. Why he didn't know that to start with is a mystery -- has he never thought this rule could apply to, say, other Governors? -- but I don't know if his vaunted cool will overcome this gaffe, especially if Jeb Bush and/or Hillary Clinton throw tons of money at it. Normally Scott Walker turns weakness into strength; here I think he's just turning lemons into lemonade.

Around the table: possible solutions for homelessness, hunger, and diabetes! Plus the usual tales of corruption.

The city of Los Angeles opens a 102-unit apartment complex for the homeless in Skid Row. Other cities and states have figured out that just housing the homeless is actually cheaper than providing emergency services all the time -- but not every city has put a gym, a library, and an art studio in an apartment complex for the homeless. All of these are fine things, but I wonder if L.A. could have put more homeless folk up if they'd skipped on those things.

Uh oh: a Raleigh County (WV) lab official pleads guilty to faking water quality tests for coal corporations. His tactics (though I don't imagine he invented them!) included diluting water samples, failing to refrigerate water samples, and drawing samples from a known compliant area (also called, no lie, a "honeyhole") to substitute for a sample you knew wouldn't pass. Nobody could have predicted that voluntary testing and compliance could go so wrong!

It's not just our military handing out weapons to local police forces: private donors, including corporations, have been buying goodies for our police as well. Again, taxing the rich strikes me as a better solution than compromising our police departments' ability to serve constituents -- as opposed to serving private donors, which will surely become the case in time, especially when private corporations donate surveillance tools without any public oversight.

U.N. official says that small scale, more "traditional" farming methods would do more to solve our planet's food issues than large-scale corporate agriculture. All we have to do now is grow more food in our backyards -- or, for you hydroponic enthusiasts, in our basements. Even in an urban area, you can grow more of your own food than you currently do. And the more you attend to it -- that is, the less some corporation caring only about its own bottom line attends to it -- they better off you'll be.

Factcheck.org catches a pair of "whoppers" from a single ad attacking Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King. I'd prefer attacking Mr. King with actual facts, since there are plenty to choose from, but the ad coming from his Democratic opponent, Jim Mowrer, sounds like it tried to shoehorn the facts into an idea ("these Congressfolks and their constant pay raises for doing nothing!").

Finally, Harvard scientists have produced insulin-producing cells from stem cells, which could (if successfully tested in people) lead to a cure for Type 1 diabetes. About one in 10 diabetes sufferers have Type 1, but most juvenile diabetes sufferers have Type 1. Now if we can end the massive corn-syrup subsidies that keep junk food cheap, we might be able to take down Type 2, as well.

Around the table: what Americans *really* think about the ratio between CEO and worker pay, and other items of interest.

Three big soda corporations pledge to slash calories in their soft drinks 20 percent by 2025. I think their methods (as outlined in paragraphs four and five) stand a good chance of actually accomplishing that goal, and I'm no fan of soda taxes or serving-size limits either, but 20-percent-by-2025 is still a better slogan than a program, and when are we going after the real problem, which is the massive corn industry subsidy program that keeps high-fructose corn syrup (and soda) cheap?

The Harvard Business Review tells us what folks all over the world think of the CEO-unskilled worker pay gap. Incredibly, Americans think the ratio is around 31:1 (which is around what it was back in the late 1970s), and would prefer that the ratio be more like 7:1 -- and that ratio is apparently the same across the ideological spectrum. The real ratio in America, of course? 354:1. I'd have loved to see the respondents' reactions to that bit of news.

ProPublica checks claims that the long-expired assault weapons ban cut down on gun crime and/or deaths from gun crime -- and finds them wanting. The author suggests that future assault weapons bans might work better, but from here, banning assault weapons looks like another policy prescription that sounds like it should work, but doesn't. (For the record, I still think the return of the 91% tax bracket, and all the infrastructure building/refitting and actual job creation that would accompany it, would do more to decrease gun violence than any gun ban.)

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) says Congress should actually debate the Obama Administration's attacks on ISIS, and that failing to do so would "create() a horrible precedent, or maybe further a horrible precedent." I'd have dropped the word "maybe." Anyway, I sure hope that he doesn't really mean that Congress better authorize these air strikes before ISIS comes and kills us all in our beds. I'd rather he means we should actually debate whether more violence will fix all the violence that came before.

Finally, Daniel Larison at The American Conservative writes that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is "the worst of both worlds" when it comes to foreign policy "in that he wants to intervene in the affairs of other countries while remaining oblivious and indifferent to their political realities." Of course Mr. Larison would have been just as dead-on if he'd substituted the word "Bush" for "Cruz," which he's probably done in his heart if not on paper, but when he talks of a "middle ground" between "McCain and Paul," I hope he means Ron Paul, who is the real deal, and not Rand Paul, who is a fraud of elephantine proportions.

Around the table: the horrible truth about superior military strength! And other stories.

Good news, everyone -- Congress passes, and the President signs, a law permitting good folks to "unlock" their cell phones, that is, use their cell phone with a different service provider than the one who sold them the phone. The bill reverses the U.S. Copyright Office's ruling that cell phone unlocking violates the Digital Millenium Copyright Act -- but it doesn't reverse that ruling permanently, meaning that the Copyright Office will determine whether to extend the repeal in three years. Still, it's more freedom for the consumer in the meantime, and if you told the President and Congress to get it done, good job.

Patrick Cockburn notes that Israel's offensive against Palestine actually weakens Israel and strengthens Hamas. He is not the first to note the irony that greater military superiority, and the will to deploy it, is too often antithetical to real political superiority, but having invaded Iraq and spilled so much blood and treasure there over the last decade-plus, Americans should be particularly attuned to this message. And despite the "liberal" media remembering its pro-Israel bias, the shock of Israeli teenagers murdering Palestinian ones may be hard to shake.

Meanwhile, Toledo, Ohio residents can't drink the tap water, and Emily Atkins at Think Progress explains why. Long story short: a massive algae bloom in Lake Erie, where Toledo residents get most of their drinking water, has infested the water with a bacterium called microcystis, which can cause serious liver and digestive tract problems. Toledo residents couldn't drink the water until yesterday, and residents with liver issues couldn't wash in it. We're making it even worse, of course -- the main culprit, phosphorus runoff, is a major by-product of the massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides in corporate farming.

ProPublica provides a timeline of the Senate's efforts to investigate CIA torture. It will remind you that the wheels of justice grind slowly, but they do grind on, as the charges that CIA Director Brennan called "spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts" turned out to be a) not terribly spurious and b) rather well-supported by the facts. Of course, being CIA Director means never having to say you're sorry, even (or especially?) under a Democratic President.

Finally, Tracie McMillian at National Geographic explains how it could be that so many Americans with so many middle-class trappings could still go hungry. Those who poke fun at obese folks needing food stamps may find their minds opened a bit by the reporting herein, where average Americans' declining wages force them to "pit one bill against another" even as easy credit allows them to get cell phones and flat-panel TVs, while our government's corn subsidies make eating fast food an all-too-easy choice for overworked and underpaid Americans.

Action: soda-free happy meals, a big bad merger, and the minimum wage.

Moms Rising helps you tell Wendy's and Burger King to take soda out of kids' meals. You know, so we can help keep kids from becoming obese and getting Type 2 diabetes, since sugary beverages pump more added sugar into kids than all other sources of added sugar combined. I bet I'll hear some libertarian-types saying what are you, anti-choice? Those would be some damn inattentive libertarians, of course: we're not saying stop selling soda, we're saying stop selling soda as part of a combination meal. Go to almost any fast-food joint and the default drink in kids' meals is soda. Why does it have to be like that? Because soda is so cheap, which in turn is because our government hands out billions of dollars in subsidies to the corn syrup producers? There's no damn good reason for it. And though we've tried and failed (for the moment!) to get our government to stop doing that, certainly there's no harm in asking of our fast-food titans to make it harder for kids to get their hands on soda. The kids will have to talk their parents' ears off to get it -- just like we did in the old days, and we turned out fine.

Meanwhile, Comcast has announced plans to buy Time Warner Cable. See any problems with that? Here's one big one: Comcast is the nation's #1 cable provider, one that already owns NBC and Universal Studios, among other things. Who's #2? Time Warner Cable, of course. Combine the top two cable providers into one company and you'll have a monopolistic behemoth just about no one will be able to stop from jacking up prices and compromising our privacy and trampling over network neutrality. One of the biggest problems with the media today is that too few corporations own too much -- no sense telling me there are 500 channels when only four corporations own them -- and we can't get our cable channels to serve its customers better because, in most media markets, you'll have only one big cable company, with no competition to keep everyone honest. Hence Free Press helps you tell the Department of Justice and the FCC to block a Comcast/Time Warner merger. They might do it -- Justice blocked the AT&T/T-Mobile merger a while back, as you may remember -- but they have to hear from us first.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to hike the minimum wage to $10.10/hour, here are three more, from the Campaign for America's Future, Moms Rising, and NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby. Folks making minimum wage make a shade over $15,000 annually, and most folks who make minimum wage are women, and over a quarter of those women have children. And to all the haters: no one budgets absolutely perfectly or enjoys a life untouched by unforeseen circumstances. It's always better to give these folks a hand up rather than ridicule them. And no, hiking the minimum wage won't cause prices to go up or force small businesses to cut jobs (like small businesses have the luxury!) -- but, as our President said the other day, it will put more money in the pockets of working folks, which means they'll have more money to spend, which means businesses will have more customers and will hire more workers to keep up with the demand. We used to know how all that worked. I wonder what happened. Oh, right -- the rich got all the say about everything.

Action: the Farm Bill, campaign finance disclosure, and Frankenapples.

First things first. Congressional negotiators have finally put together a Farm Bill, and, as expected, it's not good enough: it cuts food stamps by $8 billion over 10 years, and though it ends farm subsidies, it moves a big chunk of that subsidy money into crop insurance, which essentially makes the crop insurance program another subsidy program. (The Times reports that the Farm Bill will cap subsidies, though it doesn't say what those caps will be like -- if they're not like Sen. Toomey's caps from 2012, they're probably not good enough.) Thus we make our will known, again: PennPIRG still helps you tell your Reps and Senators to end the gravy train of taxpayer money to big agricultural corporations, while Daily Kos helps you tell Congress not to cut food stamps while playing a shell game with subsidies. Noting that this Farm Bill supposedly saves $23 billion in spending over 10 years, one might wonder why $8 billion in food stamp cuts is even necessary. Of course we know why: so Republicans can claim a "win." But they're not supposed to win. The people are supposed to win.

I didn't mark the occasion, but the fourth anniversary of Citizens United v. FEC passed last week, and though President Obama once seemed kindly disposed toward having the Securities and Exchange Commission mandate disclosure of corporate campaign spending, the SEC has not only failed to issue regulations on the matter despite getting more than half a million comments demanding them to do just that, but has "disappeared" the matter from its 2014 agenda. After hearing what, exactly, from big corporate bosses? That disclosure isn't necessary to protect shareholders, or that shareholders don't care that corporations piss away their money trying to elect knuckle-draggers to Congress? I do not believe that shareholders care only about money, because that is cynicism, and I do not abide cynicism. Perhaps they've been telling the SEC that disclosure amounts to "bullying" -- this, coming from financial tough guys who've spent the last few decades doing the helicopter dance in front of us! -- to which I reply: go see a therapist already. So the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell the SEC to mandate disclosure of campaign spending by publicly-traded corporations.

Meanwhile, the USDA rather surprisingly extended its deadline for public comments on the "Arctic Apple." You remember the Arctic Apple? The apple genetically engineered, no, not to increase yields at orchards or even to resist corporate pesticides, but to not turn brown after it's been sliced? I'm tempted to say "who the hell thinks that's clever?" But I know that people who cherish "cleverness" in precisely that shallow manner don't actually have a whole lot of say in how corporations make decisions, even if corporations would like us (or them!) to think so. No, someone probably created this monster so that kids would eat more apples -- as if parents have absolutely zero say about that, as if an apple browning represents some elephantine injury to culinary aesthetics, as if our government doesn't make healthy food choice significantly harder by handing out all that taxpayer money to corn-syrup producers. Seriously, technology doesn't solve every problem. The USDA's new comment period ends tomorrow, so the Organic Consumers Association helps you tell the USDA to reject the potentially unsafe and certainly unnecessary Arctic Apple.

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

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

H.R. 12/S. 123, the Voter Empowerment Act of 2013, makes online voter registration easier, makes intimidating voters harder, helps more disabled folks vote, and lets felons vote again once they get out of jail. And the bill directly addresses, and prohibits, voter "caging." You remember "caging," right, from Greg Palast's 2004 BBC Newsnight report? Where the state (in this case, Florida) sends fundraising solicitations or address verification letters to certain (i.e. black) voters, and then puts the voters who don't respond on a special list alleging that they might not be eligible to vote? Clever, huh? Why do people in power waste valuable time and attention on such matters, when they could just, you know, do something valuable for the folks they serve? The Brennan Center for Justice provides more information, and you can use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to urge your Reps and Senators to support the Voter Empowerment Act. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, Congress still works on the Farm Bill, and shows little or no interest in reforming one of the greatest injustices built into the Farm Bill for decades -- that giant multinational corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Archer-Daniels-Midland somehow collect the vast majority of agricultural subsidies. Indeed, between 1995 and 2011, less than four percent of America's farmers collected 75 percent of all of these subsidies. I pity the fool who raises his hand to say, but that makes sense, because those corporations are bigger! But if a pimp needs a slap I'm game to give it: big corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and ADM shouldn't be getting more government help than the small farmers who need it more -- and certainly not to keep the price of corn syrup (and therefore soda and other junk foods) artificially low, which also keeps our children artificially fat. So USPIRG helps you tell your Senators to fight big subsidies for big agricultural corporations.

In other sad food news, an Oregon farmer has discovered genetically-engineered wheat growing on his farm. He didn't plant it, and even better, this particular strain of GE wheat never even received government approval for planting. And this wheat is one of them-there glycophate-resistant strains! Hey, we were going after glycophates in pesticides not too long ago! Now, nobody necessarily broke the law in planting this strain of wheat -- most likely, the strain was part of a field test. But maybe there should be a law against that, since we can't contain the ill effects any more than we can contain the wind or the animals that carry the GE seed from field to field. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell the USDA to halt all field testing of genetically-modified crops. Note well that many trade partners have outlawed GE crops, and that organic crops won't be organic once tainted with GE seed. These alone should be incentive enough for the USDA to act -- even if, you know, they don't take public service seriously or something.

Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), you may have heard the litany of flatugasms coming from (male) Fox News contributors lately, concerning Pew Research's finding that a record number of families with minor children (40%) now feature the mother as the breadwinner. No use slamming these fools any more than their own words (and their own co-workers) have slammed them -- best to remember, as Moms Rising reminds us, that women still earn 77 cents on their male counterparts' dollar, breadwinners or not, and mothers and women of color fare rather worse than that. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to pass H.R. 377/S. 84, the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act would give us better tools with which to enforce the Equal Pay Act -- such as prohibiting employers from disciplining workers who discuss their salaries with their co-workers, and putting gender-based discrimination on equal legal footing with other forms of wage discrimination. I'd be hard-pressed to imagine legitimate objections to either of those items.

Tea Party caller suggests the best way to get Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) to "listen" on immigration reform is to "shoot her." I eagerly await rebuke from Sarah Palin and other self-anointed members of the Civility Police. How long before Susan Collins decides, like Olympia Snowe, that she's had enough of all this shit?

2010 Alaska Republican Senate nominee Joe Miller files papers to run for the 2014 Alaska Senate election. Mark Begich must be seriously hoping he wins, and not just because he's a clown -- he's also a man whose stated political philosophy stands at odds with Alaska citizens' desire to have their Senators bring home the bacon.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) announces that this term will be her last term in the House. Adds that it has nothing to do with all those pesky ethics charges or to her close election in 2012 or to the fool she's generally made of herself. Democrats aren't too happy, as her retirement takes away their putative candidate's main campaign issue, but the rest of us are happy, because we're always happy when embarrassing people leave our government. Though she could take on Al Franken in 2014, I suppose.

Finally, a study finds that a soda drinking habit can be as bad or worse on your teeth as a meth or coke habit. (The American Beverage Association, perhaps not surprisingly, disputes the study.) But cocaine and meth have other problems! you might be tempted to say. Soda does, too -- diabetes, obesity, the taxpayer money spent keeping high-fructose corn syrup cheap not going to address our lousy economy and our failing infrastructure, to name three.

"Imagine if Facebook, Google and Twitter built a privacy-killing surveillance machine to help the federal government spy on us," the latest missive from Free Press begins. I don't think I've explained CISPA better than that. Free Press goes on to remind us that the law currently forbids Facebook, Google, and Twitter from sharing your personal information with our government unless our government gets a warrant, and that the law currently allows you to sue Facebook, Google, and Twitter if they violate your online privacy. Guess what two things will no longer be true if CISPA passes? That's right -- Google could send your emails and search history, Twitter could send your physical location, Facebook could send your photos and status updates, all to our government, all without a warrant. And CISPA would give the big telecom corporations immunity from prosecution if they assert they made an honest mistake in sending your government all your personal data. So Free Press helps you tell your House Reps to reject CISPA.

Meanwhile, Congress is working on another Farm Bill, but why wait to do good works? H.R. 1414, the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act, wouldn't end the nefarious corn subsidies that keep junk food cheap in this country, but it would direct more of our government's efforts toward sustainably- and locally-produced healthy foods like fruits and vegetables, and it would help folks use their food stamps at farmers' markets and other places where you stand a chance of getting good food. Railing at people for spending their food stamps on Pepsi and chips doesn't do us or them any good -- people don't do that because they're stupid or lazy; they do that because our government has completely distorted the market with corn subsidies. If the price of apples had stayed exactly the same for three decades, as the price of a two-liter bottle of Coke and Pepsi has done, folks would eat a lot more apples. So the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to support healthier food.

Finally, with yesterday's tax deadline an irresistible news hook, I've a slew of tax-related action alerts for you. CREDO helps you tell your House Rep to co-sponsor the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which Rep. Ellison (D-MN) plans to introduce this week; the bill would tax stock deals at 0.5% (not "five percent," and not "fifty percent," "liberal" media) and other financial instruments somewhat less. I'd flip that script and tax derivatives more than simple stock trades, but any such tax would discourage the lightning-fast computerized Wall Street trading that doesn't really do any work, and the bill would also exempt households with income under $75,000. (I'd even be happy to raise that exemption somewhat, to be honest.) Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell Congress and Mr. Obama to close the corporate tax loopholes that allow corporations to stow some $32 trillion offshore. $32 trillion in hidden money won't create any jobs here, but putting that money under threat of confiscation might, finally, induce some CEOs to use it to create some jobs. Hell, they might even build some factories.

As you know, CISPA is back, and it still lets corporations share your private information with our government without our government having to get a warrant, and still defines "cybersecurity" and "national security" far too broadly. If you think Big Brother watching you is bad, then Big Brother colluding with private corporations to watch you must be another boatload of bad. And though CISPA lets you sue a corporation that shares your information unlawfully, how will you know that? The Supreme Court just ruled in Clapper v. Amnesty International that the plaintiffs couldn't sue over warrantless wiretapping because they couldn't establish they had been harmed, when everyone knows our government doesn't have to say whom they're tapping! Both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to oppose CISPA.

Meanwhile, you may have heard of "patent trolls," who buy patents from down-on-their-luck corporations or apply for overly-broad patents, all so they can spend their workday suing other people and extracting fees from them. Nice work if you can get it! One suspects the Patent Office ought to review patent applications rather more vigorously. At least H.R. 845, the SHIELD Act -- co-sponsored by Reps. Chaffetz (R-UT) and DeFazio (D-OR) -- would force patent trolls to pay the other side's legal costs if they sue and lose, which would give the patent trolls pause, since their "business model" counts on suing people who would rather pass on expensive court battles. EFF helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the SHIELD Act. And we can fight actual frivolous lawsuits for once!

In other news, the dairy lobby wants the FDA to let them put artificial sweeteners, like aspartame, in milk. But milk is a naturally-sweet drink! Checking the label on my 2% from the supermarket, I see 12 grams of sugar per eight-ounce serving, and no sugar added. I'm guessing the dairy industry sees high-fructose corn syrup drinks as their main competition for the kiddie market, and wants to say at least with milk, the kids get some calcium. And it's not like putting Ovaltine in your milk, either, because parents can stop kids from using Ovaltine, or make it a once-in-a-while treat. Bottom line: we shouldn't let milk makers put more sugar in milk; instead, we should stop shoveling all that taxpayer money toward corn syrup makers, so we can get a handle on all this sugar madness. In the meantime, Sum of Us helps you tell the FDA to nix sweeteners for milk.

Finally, Shell Oil has declared it won't drill in the Arctic for oil this year. That's after a number of high-profile PR reversals (losing control of oil rigs, failing safety tests, like that) in which Shell demonstrated how difficult it is to drill in an area you don't know very much about and can't clean up as easily as you can in warmer climes. So the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the Department of the Interior to keep Shell out of the Arctic, and the Sierra Club helps you tell Messrs. Obama and Salazar to protect the Polar Bear Seas and the coast of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Shell may pull out this year, but it'll be back next year, having learned not a damn thing, I imagine, but still wanting to screw up the Arctic. Why should we permit that?