Thieves in the Temple.

Action: fighting discrimination against gays and the Social Security Administration's idea of "progress."

Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 300/HB 300 (now that's a statistical oddity!) would amend Pennsylvania's 1955 law outlawing discrimination on basis of race, religion, ancestry, or age so that gays and lesbians can enjoy its protections as well. The 1955 law mainly treats matters of employment, loans, and real estate, but, as you know, more than half of America's states still don't prevent employers from discriminating against gays and lesbians -- and with several national organizations' (short-sighted, I believe) withdrawal of support for ENDA in the wake of the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision, this is our way of getting gays and lesbians the protections they deserve in Pennsylvania. And why should gays be shut out of renting or buying a house in a particular area? Wouldn't it be nice to turn the conversation for once away from people's supposed "right" to discriminate against whoever they don't like based on their "sincere religious beliefs"? So Keystone Progress helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to support SB 300/HB 300. Because, last I looked, everyone had rights in America.

Meanwhile, if you missed previous opportunities to tell the Senate to pass S. 2742, which would mandate future Social Security Administration office closures go before the public, then the Campaign for America's Future still helps you do that. The Social Security Administration has nearly blank-check power to do this now, and they're planning on closing a dozen field offices in the near future, saying it's not such a big deal because seniors can just use laptops and smartphones to contact the SSA. That'll greatly comfort the seniors who have arthritis and vision problems preventing them from using laptops and computers well enough to accomodate the SSA's "progressive" vision! And while we should be careful not to think of seniors as folks who can't adapt to new technology, many of them would rather have people help them through problems. And what's wrong with that? It is how most people relate, after all, not just seniors. And keeping offices open keeps people employed, which means what? Saving good jobs, that's what. Getting rid of government employees really isn't a very good "job creation" program.

Around the table: from government spying to Shaggy's diet.

11th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that law enforcement can't track cell phone movements without a warrant -- and thus may have taken a bat to the kneecaps of the NSA's legal justification for vacuuming up all your metadata. Long story short: the NSA's legal justification relies on the notion that you have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" when you give data to the phone company (or to any business), but the 11th Circuit maintains that you do, because, really, do you even think about revealing your location every time you use a cell phone? What on Earth is wrong with getting warrants, anyway?

President Obama signs an executive order forbidding federal contractors from discriminating against gay, lesbian, and transgender workers. Mr. Obama would have preferred that Congress pass ENDA (and so would I!), but this will do for the meantime, even if a President Walker or a President Sandoval overturns it. Author Gabriel Arana also points out that even if the Supreme Court decides that corporations have religious beliefs God forbid, no law compels a corporation to seek out federal contracts -- though with a few more Robertses on the Court, perhaps corporations will one day win a "right" to discriminate against people they think Jesus told them not to like and feed at the government trough.

David Corn helpfully provides "7 Talking Points You Need for Discussing the Iraq Crisis. I do wonder if reasoning with Iraq war hawks will do any good -- maybe the best response to any testosterone-addled fool yelling for Mr. Obama to send someone else's kids back to Iraq might be, "you had your shot, but you fouled it up out of abject stupidity and arrogance, so now let the adults give it a go."

David Frum asks "When Will Republican Leaders Fight Back" -- against "Republican radicals," that is, like the ones who toppled Eric Cantor last week. But I doubt Republican leaders want to "fight back," when they can just let teabaggers redefine the center further rightward, allowing leaders to work far less hard to appear "principled." And who in Virginia's 7th District would run through a wall for Eric Cantor anyway?

Finally, Think Progress reminds us how Casey Kasem (who passed on Father's Day) leveraged his power for causes dear to his heart, such as when he quit voicing Shaggy on Scooby-Doo in the mid-'90s after producers wanted him to cut an ad for Burger King, and would only return if they made Shaggy a vegetarian. I'm not necessarily with Mr. Kasem on vegetarianism, but I'm certainly with him on factory farms, and how many folks in his position would risk their cashflow on principle as he did?

Action: net neutrality, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

The FCC will formally unveil their new net neutrality rules on May 15, and with FCC Chair Tom Wheeler so far unwilling to listen to the public on his proposal, so Sum of Us helps you urge the relevant House and Senate subcommittees to intervene, and keep big corporations from controlling our internet experience with their "fast lanes" and "tiered service." I've said it before and I'll say it again: just about everyone, from left to right on the political spectrum, prefers an internet where service providers have to treat all information equally, without them getting to "pick winners." When corporations get to pick winners (who have not really "won" anything so much as they've just shoveled bucketfuls of money toward Comcast and Verizon and the like), then wonderful things like blogs and Facebook and YouTube don't happen, because a corporation could never have come up with that stuff. Only people could. The FCC would essentially turn the internet into cable TV, when cable TV is a wasteland of "reality" TV stars who make money hand over fist acting in ways that would shame their parents, and cable news pundits who make money hand over fist acting in ways that would shame their parents. America doesn't need any more of that.

Meanwhile, the Senate passed the Employee Non-Discrimination Act back in November, but the House still hasn't taken it up nearly six months later. At the time of the Senate bill's passage, House Speaker John Boehner said he wouldn't take it up because he feared it would cause "frivolous lawsuits." In a land where corporations, not people, file four out of five lawsuits, I wonder where he finds "frivolity" in the lawsuits gay folks might file after being terminated due to their boss's irrational fear of Getting Teh Gay Cooties. But Mr. Boehner is always pretty ready with the excuses -- this is, after all, the guy who wouldn't pass an unemployment extension first because it wasn't "paid for," then because it was too hard, then because he wanted some goodies. To be fair, I guess there is a remote possibility I could be selling the man short -- perhaps he didn't mean "frivolous lawsuits" so much as he meant fabulous lawsuits. In any case, People for the American Way helps you tell the House to pass ENDA already. It might take even longer than it already has, but the House folded over the Violence Against Women reauthorization last year, so they can certainly fold over this -- with enough pressure.

Around the table: the usual catalogue of contemporary hypocrisy and venality, plus bonus *Star Trek* reference.

American officials say that the NSA is actually only vacuuming up about 30% of all American telephone metadata, at least in part because of the explosive proliferation of cell phones over the last decade. Whenever I hear stuff like this, I think of the Star Trek episode "Charlie X," in which the Enterprise crew foil a godlike adolescent by overwhelming him with stuff to control. I also remind myself that these American officials could be fibbing.

New York police department tests the notorious Google Glass as a surveillance tool. I'd say it's fine, as long as you get a warrant, which law enforcement doesn't like doing anymore now that Messrs. Bush and Obama made that OK. But there's hope: Google will start selling the glasses to the public later this year, which means we'll be able to spy on the spies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says the FCC can't save net neutrality. Why? Their argument essentially boils down to "the FCC stinks at its job" and "government overreach is also bad," but our duty as citizens is to make our government do its job correctly, not throw up our hands at the difficulty of that task and hope for a series of solutions that won't even happen without our government doing our will.

Speaking of bad government, John Boehner says he can't push immigration reform because of the "widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws." You mean the administration that's deporting more immigrants more quickly than any other in history? And where does he get off complaining about this administration's "untrustworthiness" when the last one acted as if enforcing the law wasn't even part of its job?

Wellesley College students protest the placement, outside, of a statue of a man sleepwalking in his underwear -- part of an art exhibit, but not a part installed inside the museum. I don't think the whole inside-outside art-life thing is bunkum, nor do I think consumers of art should only get the art they want or expect, but I get tired of being told "it was meant to evoke response," because any idiot can provoke a "response" these days, and too many idiots do just that. I just hope this thing doesn't cause an accident.

Finally, former Navy chaplain and anti-gay activist says that folks who are "not going to get eternal benefits in Heaven" don't deserve any "government rewards here on this Earth." What provoked that? Oh, he's mad about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, because he thinks it'll let men use women's bathrooms, though he doesn't cite any language from the bill that would support that claim, possibly because doing so would require reading and reflecting. I'd never heard of Gordon Klingenschmitt before, though given the circumstances of his Naval discharge perhaps I should have; still, let's never speak of him again.

Action: carbon emissions, corporate welfare handouts, and ENDA.

The EPA has announced its intention to cut carbon emissions from new and existing power plants -- and Rep. Whitfield (R-KY) and Sen. Manchin (D-WV) plan a legislative effort to block the EPA's efforts. Their bill (which they haven't formally introduced as of this writing) would also require additional authorization from Congress before the EPA could roll back carbon emissions from existing power plants, though the Clean Air Act already gives the EPA the authorization it needs. What do these guys have against clean air and a non-boiling planet? Wait, let me guess: EPA KILLZ THA JOBZ AND THA SMALL BIZNIZZIZZ!!!!! WITH COMMUNISM SOCIALISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!!!!!! Am I not giving my opponents enough credit? Then they should try earning that credit -- preferably by not asserting that small businesses could possibly be responsible for so much pollution. The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Reps and Senators to let the EPA do its damn job already.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government not to give J.P. Morgan Chase a $4.5 billion welfare handout, then PennPIRG still helps you do that. What manner of "welfare handout" is this, you ask? Well, J.P. Morgan Chase has agreed to pay a $13 billion fine to settle various mortgage lending abuse cases prosecuted by the Justice Department -- and, since a fine for wrongdoing is essentially a "loss," they could conceivably deduct the fine from their income and pay $4.5 billion less in taxes. That's money they owe us, I feel compelled to add using the Italics Hammer. The Justice Department can forbid them from deducting the fine for tax purposes, but may benefit from pressure from our elected representatives in Congress. Five U.S. Senators have already joined the call to keep J.P. Morgan Chase from manipulating the system; PennPIRG tool helps you pressure more Senators to get on board.

Finally, it must be three days now since we've told the House of Representatives to pass ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act -- which the Senate passed last week, no thanks to 32 objectively pro-discrimination Senate Republicans -- so CREDO helps us pressure the House to pass ENDA, again. CREDO reminds us that House Speaker John Boehner is not exactly impervious to pressure -- when confronted with massive pressure to pass the better version of the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization, he did ultimately relent. And what did John Boehner do when he shut down our government and then suddenly found himself facing a President who wouldn't negotiate over the debt limit? Fold like a house of cards, that's what. These guys all think they're big shots. They're not. And one day, they will pay, with their jobs and with their dignity, for all the harm they've done to the country we love.

Action: the USA FREEDOM Act and ENDA.

Surely by now you've heard of the USA FREEDOM Act, which would shutter the NSA's data-vacuuming program, among other necessary reforms. But another Senate bill, the so-called FISA Improvements Act, has moved through the Senate much more quickly -- the Judiciary Committee passed it in a 13-2 vote on Tuesday -- and that bill would not only expand the NSA's data-vacuuming program, it would also punish folks who access information about matters like the NSA data-vacuuming program with ten-year prison sentences. They still don't get that the problem we have with them is that they're trying to record everything we do without getting a warrant? They still think the real problem is the folks like Mr. Snowden who tell the world what our government is doing, and not what our government is doing? Both Daily Kos and Roots Action help you tell the Senate to reject the FISA Improvements Act and support the USA FREEDOM Act, because we're not so stupid we can't tell which is which.

Meanwhile, the Senate has passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act by a 64-32 margin. Even Utah's Orrin Hatch voted "yea." Orrin Hatch! I'm old enough to remember when you couldn't go further right in the Senate than Orrin Hatch. But our esteemed House Speaker has said he won't even bring it up because it'll encourage "frivolous lawsuits." He really thinks all discrimination cases filed by gays are "frivolous"? Or maybe he meant fabulous. But it's damn wrong to fire someone because they're gay, so Daily Kos and People for the American Way help you tell your House Rep to support ENDA. Your House Reps have no excuse -- the bill, as I've said before, exempts religious organizations in the manner the Civil Rights Act does, doesn't create affirmative action programs for gays (let alone "special rights"), and explicitly affirms that an employer's right to enforce standards in the workplace won't change. And the House version of ENDA has, at this moment, 194 sponsors, so let's get cracking.

Action: "free" trade, the Farm Bill, and ENDA.

If you've missed previous opportunities to speak out against fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade agreement, the People's Email Network provides one more. Remember how the President used to have fast-track authority to submit trade agreements to Congress for a simple up-or-down vote, without debate or amendments? Congress let that authority lapse in 2007, but now they're talking about reviving it. But consider that, despite the wall of secrecy surrounding TPP negotiations, we have learned through leaks that the TPP would gut labor laws, gut environmental laws, gut privacy laws, and halt the free flow of information on the internet, and it would accomplish all of this mainly by putting all disputes before "investor-state tribunals" instead of, you know, the judges who know and interpret the laws of a given nation. So the TPP would befoul the earth, doom its people to low-wage McJobs, subvert our laws, and otherwise make our lives miserable so big corporations can steal more money from us -- and Congress wants to fast-track such a train wreck? Tell them a thousand times no.

Meanwhile, the Farm Bill still needs to be renewed! Thought we forgot about that, didn't you? You may recall that the Senate passed a mediocre-to-poor farm bill, but then the House passed a mass of hot-and-steaming which actually jacked up corporate agricultural subsidies (because who needs our government's help more than the big corporations?) and didn't even include food stamp funding! Now House and Senate conferees will meet to reconcile the two bills. Think anything good will come from that? And so we might as well view that as an opportunity to demand what we've deserved all along: a farm bill that slashes the undeserved welfare handouts big corporate farmers get, while still ensuring the working poor get the assistance they need to get by; a farm bill that promotes healthy foods and organic farms over high-fructose corn syrup and factory farms; and a farm bill that actually protects small farmers from their real enemies, the big corporations. Food and Water Watch helps you demand a just and kind American farm policy.

Meanwhile, the Senate cleared a procedural hurdle on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act this past Monday (I thought they were voting on the bill itself, and I apologize for saying so); the full Senate vote on ENDA could come any day now, so People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators and House Reps to support ENDA. ENDA has the votes to pass the Senate, but may get some poison pill amendments attached, so we'll be on the lookout for that. Of course, House Speaker Boehner has already said the House won't take up ENDA, because the bill would "increase frivolous litigation." Some folks call it progress that Mr. Boehner didn't resort to a bunch of anti-gay booga-booga, but now I have to remind folks that the occasional "frivolous lawsuit" is the price we pay for living in a society where we can redress grievances through the courts. When faced with such lawsuits, you don't curtail everyone's ability to sue; you appoint good judges who can slap stupidity down, while ensuring the legal system still helps everyone. That sounds like work, which must be why Republicans don't want to do it.

Action: ENDA and corporate pay disclosure.

Word on the street is that the Senate will take up ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, today. Word on the street, also, is that the bill currently has 59 votes in favor; in today's dysfunctional Senate, every bill needs 60 out of 100 to pass. That's why we have tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page -- so we can all call our Senators and tell them to pass ENDA. I've run down more than a few "criticisms" of ENDA, but Equality Matters provided a pretty fantastic summary of them all right here back in July, and you can refer to it when you call your Senator. You know, so you can say "ENDA doesn't do this, either." We already know ENDA doesn't create "special rights" for gays in the workplace and doesn't hamstring bosses from enforcing dress codes and the like (and should we even have to mention that here in the twenty-first century?), but the bill doesn't "hurt religious freedom," either, because one in America has the "religious freedom" to treat their gay workers worse than their straight ones.

Meanwhile, if you haven't already told the SEC to force corporations to disclose the ratio between their CEO's pay and their median worker pay, Sum of Us still helps you do that. The SEC has apparently written a pretty strong rule that doesn't allow corporations to (for example) exclude its foreign or part-time workers from pay calculations, because excluding such workers would make a corporation's median salary seem higher than it really is. Naturally the big corporations hate it the way vampires hate sunlight. Are they afraid that investors won't want to invest in corporations that pay their CEOs too much? Perhaps they should be -- just as they should be afraid of investors finding out that some corporations out there do very, very well, without allowing their CEOs to gild their plumbing while paying their workers in dung pellets. And hello! The law doesn't mandate salaries; it mandates disclosure of salaries. I'm old enough to remember when disclosure was the conservative position.

Action: clean water, whistleblowers, and ENDA.

The EPA has determined that over half our river and stream water is in bad biological condition -- yet still it drags its feet on updating polluted runoff standards that would mandate capturing and filtering runoff water before it gets to our rivers and streams. Rain doesn't just glide off the roads and rooftops it hits -- it carries with it the bacteria present on those roads and rooftops, as well as some of heavy metals and chemicals that go into those roads and rooftops, and all that crap ultimately winds up in our rivers and streams. And the EPA has dragged its feet so long on runoff standards that it's missed a deadline (negotiated in a settlement with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation) to issue those rules for the seventh time. It's almost like the EPA doesn't know that the greatest advance in health care over the last century-plus has been clean water -- without clean water, as our 19th century ancestors could probably tell us, getting and staying healthy is an uphill battle. So American Rivers helps you tell the EPA to update its runoff standards already, and protect our drinking and bathing water.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee has approved S. 42, the Criminal Antitrust Anti-Retaliation Act, a Patrick Leahy (D-VT)/Charles Grassley (R-IA) production, which would, rather surprisingly, protect those who report antitrust law violations from retaliation, permit whistleblowers to get a jury trial in federal courts if they need it, and allow whistleblowers to recover their jobs, damages, back pay, and attorney costs. I say "rather surprisingly" because recent legislation mooted in Congress (which didn't pass, praise the Lord) treated whistleblowers like liars; this bill would give whistleblowers a chance to face those monsters who try to destroy their lives after having their own corruption exposed for all to see. What will the right wing response be, I wonder? Will some Tea Party knuckle-dragger primary Mr. Grassley in 2016 for his "apostasy"? Don't laugh; the right wing threw Richard Lugar under a bus because he supported a bank fee. The National Whistleblowers Project helps you tell your Senators to support S. 42, and thus support whistleblowers who alert us to antitrust violations.

Finally, word on the street is that the forces of good are a mere one vote short in the Senate to pass S. 815, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Thomas.loc.gov currently lists 56 Senate sponsors, and while their numbers include two Senators no longer serving, they don't include the Senate's newest member, Cory Booker of New Jersey, who will likely sign on as a co-sponsor with a quickness, or Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who said he'll vote for the bill this week. They also don't include Rob Portman of Ohio, who announced his support for gay marriage earlier this year. So CREDO helps you tell Senate Republicans to get on board the ENDA train, because (as we've said repeatedly!) ENDA doesn't give gays "special rights" regardless of anything they've heard or wished was true. (As an aside, I really would prefer if CREDO didn't use the words "moderate" and "Pat Toomey" in the same sentence. While Mr. Toomey's co-sponsorship of a gun background check bill may yet earn him a challenger in his 2016 primary, he is in no way a "moderate," or even one of the "more moderate" members of the Senate.)

Action: featuring, for once, three bills we can support.

Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Sen. Leahy (D-VT) have introduced the USA FREEDOM Act (no bill numbers or entries on thomas.loc.gov as of yet), and yes it features an unwieldy title shoehorned into an unlikely acronym, but it shares little else with the USA PATRIOT Act. The bill would not only curb our government's (claimed) powers to vaccum up all the phone records it can, but would also amend the nefarious FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to prevent our government from searching through all that data whenever it likes. And the USA FREEDOM Act would create a privacy advocate within the FISA Court, who would have standing to argue privacy concerns on the public's behalf before the court. Yes, we'd like the bill to do more, but this is a good start. Both Free Press and the ACLU help you support the USA FREEDOM Act. I'm interested to see what all the ZOMG TERRORISM!!!! types have to say about it. Wait, no, I'm not.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1975/S. 942, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, would keep employers from discriminating against their pregnant workers. Specifically, the bill would force employers to make "reasonable accommodations" for their pregnant workers on the job, prevent employers from denying jobs to pregnant women out of a desire not to make such accommodations, ensure that employers don't force workers to accept unreasonable workplace accommodations, and keep employers from forcing pregnant workers to go out on leave in a misguided quest to avoid making reasonable accommodations. And by "reasonable accommodations" I'm talking letting pregnant women lift less or sit down while cashiering. Do these take food out of anyone's damn mouth? Of course not. Both the ACLU and the National Women's Law Center help you support the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Finally, Senate Majority Leader Reid plans to bring up ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, this fall. He made that promise in 2010, too, so I'm a little wary of hearing it, but lo and behold thomas.loc.gov informs us that ENDA (H.R. 1755/S. 815) has made it to the Senate legislative calendar. ENDA even has 55 co-sponsors at the moment, including two Republicans. The bill still prohibits employers from discriminating against gays just because they're gay -- which protections we need at the federal level because employers can still fire someone just for being gay in 29 states -- and the bill still specifically addresses pretty much all of the histrionic objections a right-winger could invent, because it still includes appropriate exemptions for religious organization, still won't prevent employers from enforcing dress codes, and still doesn't create affirmative action programs for gays. Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to support ENDA.

Penny rants: concerning gay rights and health care.

Holy crap does Michigan Governor Rick Snyder ever sidestep a question about whether firing someone because they're gay is discrimination -- three times, and I'm not counting "that's not a hypothetical" and "you're not going to lead" as two more only because they don't actually end with a question mark. Worse than that, though, is the House Speaker's hack telling us that "(n)o one has yet come up with a good answer on how to balance personal liberty with religious freedom." "No one"? I sure hope he means "no one" in the Michigan state legislature, because the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act has been a "good answer" for over a decade now (of course, Congress still needs to pass it). More likely, though, I think he means that the only answer he'll accept as a "good answer" is the one that allows religious bigots to enforce their bigotry on everyone else. I'm pretty sure that's their definition of a "balance" between "personal liberty" and "religious freedom," anyway.

Meanwhile, Mike Konczal asks if the disastrous-so-far rollout of healthcare.gov presents "a problem for liberalism" -- does it "discredit the core goals of a liberal project"? Short answer: no. And not merely because this is a right-wing health care plan put forth by a Democrat: just because a government does something incompetently doesn't mean a government should never do anything, and anyone who thinks so has blocked out the entire Bush Administration, which usually went out of its way to do nothing and usually did worse than nothing. Philosophically, we should always demand that our government do things right, whether we're liberals or conservatives, and certainly no liberal should feel compelled to defend incompetence because it comes from a Democrat. We might well conclude (as Mr. Konczal does) that the ACA is rolling out so badly because it's not liberal enough -- Medicare-for-all wouldn't have these problems, after all.

Action: the shutdown drama and ENDA.

The shutdown of our government continues apace, unlikely to end until we run up against the debt limit in a little over a week, so CREDO helps you tell Speaker Boehner to call for a vote on a clean continuing resolution so that our government can operate again. The fun part? CREDO also plans to give Mr. Boehner one pacifier for every person who signs on to their petition. I've been calling right-wingers crybabies for years, but this is some imaginative activism. Remember when right-wingers always called liberals crybabies just for caring about stuff? Now we can give them some of their own. I wouldn't worry about whether sending a hundred thousand pacifiers to John Boehner will "only alienate him more" -- there must be a point where such alienation sickens even him. At least, I have faith that such a point exists. And if getting there requires that he suffer more spiritual hardship in the near term, who am I to question?

Meanwhile, People for the American Way provides an outstanding toolkit with which you may tell your Congressfolk to support ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. (If you need contact info for your Congressfolk, use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page.) I've addressed, on several occasions, the many non-reality-based objections one might have to ENDA -- that it confers "special rights" upon gays (it doesn't even confer affirmative action!), or that it would allow gays to dress flamboyantly at work without reprisals (it pointedly does not abridge a boss's right to determine a dress code for workers) -- but PFAW's toolkit summarizes five "religious" objections to ENDA, and you should brace yourself for how repugnant they are. It destroys our religious freedom! It's Jim Crow revisited! It'll put child molesters in charge of our kids! Well, as the gospel song says, sooner or later God'll cut 'em down.

Big news out of the Senate: the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted 15-7 in favor of S. 815, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. 12 Democrats and Republicans Murkowski (AK), Kirk (IL), and Hatch (UT) all voted in favor. That's right, Orrin Hatch, who struggled to survive a primary challenge from his right in 2012. I'm old enough to remember when nobody stood to the right of Orrin Hatch. The rather sizable vote bodes well for a full Senate vote on S. 815 -- but let's not get complacent. A phone call to your Senators would build momentum. I wonder what manner of foolishness any recalcitrant Senator might employ to justify voting against ENDA. Perhaps they'll say TEH LAWZ PROTECTZ THA GAYZ ENUFFZZZ!!!!! when, actually, most states can still fire someone just for being gay. Or they'll yell SPESHUL RIGHTZZZ!!!! when ENDA very carefully avoids creating new affirmative action programs and preserves an employer's right to fire someone for cause. Really, our opponents ain't got no case. That never stopped them before, but it sure doesn't have to stop us.

Meanwhile, our last Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, actually outperformed expectations in protecting the Grand Canyon from uranium mining corporations -- but let's not get complacent about that, either. The Sierra Club helps you tell President Obama to make the Grand Canyon a national monument. What's that, you say? The Grand Canyon isn't already a national monument? No, it is not. And what would Mr. Obama's opponents say if he designated the Grand Canyon a national monument? That he's caving to evil environmentalists? That he values ancient trees and Native American historical sites more than he values our energy independence? Oh, dear, all of that does actually sound like something they'd do, with absolutely no sense of how they'd be coming off to sane and reasonable people. But you can't control the behavior of pricks; you can only outvote them, and outshout them if necessary. And point out, of course, that letting uranium mining corporations run amok in the Grand Canyon will not only despoil a national treasure but pollute the drinking water of at least seven states.

So Think Progress asked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) what he thought of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (or ENDA) last week -- wow, already I feel like I'm starting a joke. But it's no joke: Mr. Rubio did not directly answer whether he'd support ENDA, which he says he hasn't read, but says "I’m not for any special protections based on orientation." If he'd read the bill, of course, he'd know that ENDA does not mandate any "special" protections based on orientation -- unless he thinks "the right not be fired just because you're gay" or "the right to be protected from retaliation by your employer" are "special" protections. I said it before and I'll say it again: what's rights for us ain't "special" for them. Why, ENDA (H.R. 1755/S. 815) doesn't even establish any affirmative action programs and still exempts religious organizations! The right will have to make up objections to this bill -- and I'm sure they will. In the meantime, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass ENDA.

Meanwhile, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the Tribune Company not to sell their newspapers to the Koch brothers. But anyone (even good government groups that have been fighting the Koch brothers' pro-pollution agenda for decades) would have an interest in making sure the Koch brothers don't have the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and the Hartford Courant and five other newspapers. After all, one Koch brothers front group (Americans for Prosperity) gave us the Tea Party and another (Patients United) helped gut health care reform, and that's before we get to the Cato Institute (founded by Charles Koch), the Heritage Foundation (funded by the brothers), or the so-called Competitive Enterprise Institute (also funded by the brothers). With all these mouthpieces, why do they need eight more newspapers? I guess when you have too much, you're jealous of folks who have more -- or you're paranoid and you don't feel safe until you have more. That's what mammon-worship gets you.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," a "free" trade agreement known to many folks as "NAFTA on steroids." You remember the "giant sucking sound" of jobs out of America that followed NAFTA, right? The Trans-Pacific "Partnership," which now includes the United States and ten other nations, will be all that and more, for what we know of the treaty (since no one actually negotiating it will let anyone read it!) is truly awful: the TPP would make affordable generic drugs a lot harder to come by, would subject all environmental, labor, and financial reform laws to extra-legal "investor tribunals," and would allow corporations to censor the internet even when it suspects someone's violating someone else's intellectual property rights. Any of that sound like a good idea to you? That must be why they don't want anyone to know about it! Thanks to the few leaks we've gotten, they're too late on that. But we still have to speak out.