Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: Donald Trump snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, and other stories.

Because we're all about solutions here, Micah Lee at The Intercept shows you how to create an iPhone passcode that could "defeat the FBI's backdoor strategy." Long story short: set up a random, 11-digit passcode (versus the four-digit passcode you likely use now), and because the FBI would have to input passcodes directly into your iPhone, and because doing that takes time, and because adding extra digits to your passcode vastly increases the number of possible passcodes, it could take the FBI, literally, over 100 years to crack your iPhone. Just don't use, like, your birthdate in your passcode, because then it won't take a hundred years.

It gets worse for Democratic House Rep./U.S. Senate candidate Alan Grayson: not only did Mr. Grayson operate a hedge fund, which would seem largely at odds with his populist image, but until recently his children had holdings in an Eritrean gold mining corporation using essentially slave labor -- thus casting doubt upon his fervent denunciations of "free" trade deals with repressive countries on the House floor. Mr. Grayson's declarations that he simply didn't know seem, well, unlikely -- as always, the question isn't how many details a man can be expected to know, but whether he should know if his business arrangements depend on evil, particularly if they take place in a country that hasn't held elections in almost a quarter-century.

Ho hum, Ted Cruz's tax "reform" plan would shift yet more of the tax burden off rich folks and onto working families. Mr. Cruz's plan would get rid of payroll taxes (and thus not pay for Social Security and Medicare, I would think) and corporate taxes, and would institute a flat 10 percent income tax and a confusing 16 percent "business flat tax," all of which would, in another non-surprise, add at least $800 billion to the national debt every year. But I suppose Mr. Cruz will keep going on about "reduc(ing) record-keeping and reporting requirements," like that's the thing we're all going to talk about when we're all sitting around the fire with nothing to eat.

Georgia passes one of them there anti-gay "religious freedom" bills, and a Decatur-based telecom corporation announces it'll leave the state as a result. I wish 373K the best of luck in their move, particularly when religious bigots start calling them "job-killers" -- or worse, I suppose, given that 373K's co-founder and CFO are gay.

A right-wing group that used to demand that George W. Bush's judicial appointees get an up-or-down vote, now wants the Senate to block any Obama Supreme Court nominee, saying that "(t)he Supreme Court has a vacancy and your vote in November is your only voice." Again: that's utter rubbish -- any American citizen has a voice, anytime, about anything; any American can communicate their will to their Reps and Senators anytime, about anything. I'm getting tired of having to repeat this, but I'll keep doing it as long as I have to, because duty is duty.

Finally, Donald Trump complains about the treatment he gets at Republican Presidential debates. He's probably right that the GOP "stacks" the audience to applaud at the dumb things the other candidates say (versus the dumb things he says!), but complaining about that when you've just won big in two primaries makes you sound like a whiner, not a winner. It sure is a good thing his eventual Democratic opponent will make that a central message in the general election! I kid, of course -- calling out the other side's whining is too uncivil for them.

Action: slave labor, campaign finance disclosure, and reining in bankster power.

First things first. Sum of Us helps you tell Canadian mining corporation Nevsun to stop supporting slave labor in Eritrea. Slave labor at Nevsun mines in Eritrea, that is -- though the Eritrean government calls it "national service," which will make me think less benignly on the term the next time John McCain calls for it. "National service" in Eritrea doesn't just mean forced labor, it also means rape, torture, and execution. But Nevsun pays over a billion dollars a year in royalties to the Eritrean government, meaning they're likely making a lot more, so when they tell us that the U.N. report exposing their role in Eritrean slave labor didn't rely enough on Nevsun's own assessment, you could be forgiven for thinking they might have some self-interest in saying so. Also, they claim it's out of their hands, because the workers are "subcontracted." That's some cojones right there: slavery as "subcontracting." And again: "national service" by working as a slave for foreign corporations! There may be something less popular in the world, but I'm having trouble thinking of it right now.

Meanwhile, Common Cause helps you tell the IRS to close loopholes allowing superhuge political groups to hide their donors, which action will help us find out who's paying out the wazoo to influence our elections. How do groups like Crossroads GPS keep their donors' identities a secret? By calling themselves non-profits, which, by law, must spend most of their money on "social welfare," not political advocacy. But the IRS may well define "political activity" more precisely, so that (hopefully!) the unscrupulous are less able to argue that such activity is really "social welfare" activity. Republicans, naturally, think all of this infringes on "free speech." How many times must I tell these pimps! Money is not speech -- money is property, and laws can regulate property. And, again, this is disclosure we're talking about, which Great and Awesome Real American Super-President Mitch McConnell used to support, until disclosure looked like it might happen, when he started calling it "bullying." Disclosure is really not too much to ask.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to support S. 1709, the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, which would force banksters to either provide traditional banking services or engage in casino-economy speculation but not both, then Americans for Financial Reform still helps you do that. Why? Because banks hold your money, and if we allow them to indulge in hifalutin "securities" with your money, they will be far less careful with your money, which exemplifies a conflict of interest. So what do you say when some pedant says "the repeal of Glass-Steagall didn't really cause the financial meltdown, because the Treasury Department had already broken down that wall"? You say, banks hold your money, and if we allow them to indulge in hifalutin "securities" with your money, they will be far less careful with your money, which exemplifies a conflict of interest. Yes, I copied-and-pasted that, because you don't need to go through a lot of trouble to smack a pedantic argument down.

Around the table: how governments oppress the press and prisoners -- and how they help overcome drug addiction and protect law and order.

Reporters Without Borders ranks the United States 49th out of 180 nations in press freedom, citing our government's oppression of whistleblowers and Ferguson police's actions against reporters during protests. More complacent folks will note that RWB still rates our press freedom as "satisfactory" (though barely so), but we were 17th in RWB's first ranking in 2002, and, as Lindsey Graham might say, the whole point of being an American isn't to have a press that's a little freer than Haiti's, or one that isn't completely ground down like Eritrea's.

South Carolina prisons have put almost 400 inmates into solitary confinement for -- wait for it -- using Facebook and other social media. South Carolina has made social networking a Level 1 offense, like, you know, stealing, murdering, or rioting. Given that people actually like to be on social media a lot, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is a deliberate policy designed to drive prisoners into solitary. Naturally, South Carolina is running out of solitary cells, though that might just mean some state government crony will get to build more.

Johann Hari notes that Portugal has cut drug addiction rates in half by taking a less punitive, more rehabilitative approach. I doubt I'll ever see my way clear to legalizing most drugs -- drug addiction takes away your freedoms, and I think meth rings, for example, cause a lot more damage than trying to break up meth rings does -- but certainly putting drug addicts in jail hasn't been a very effective deterrent, and they'll do better if we connect them not just to rehab but to thriving communities. Of course, the private prison industry won't like that, because drug addicts are their best customers. But they don't get all the say around here!

Katherine Cross at Feministing instructs us that constantly calling out utterings as "offensive" limits our ability to talk about the "material harm" some actions do. Choice quotation: "But in the real world actual racism is not about hurt feelings. It’s about being incarcerated, harassed, strip-searched, stalked, murdered, denied career advancement or an education, or being at risk of the foregoing and then having someone rub in one’s face the slurs and stereotypes that animate it all. Against all this, the psychic paper cut of 'cracker' surely pales."

Finally, a Holt County (NE) district judge blocks TransCanada's ability to invoke eminent domain on privately-owned property. If you're saying, but I thought the Nebraska Supreme Court already let Keystone XL go through, note that Judge Kozisek has ruled on eminent domain-related lawsuits filed since that Supreme Court decision. Daily Kos diarist Meteor Blades also explains the other ways in which that decision didn't actually stop Keystone dead.

Action: war with Syria, human rights in Eritrea, and poultry inspection.

Congress has come back to work; please feel free to boo, and when you're done, you may want to tell them how you feel about Mr. Obama's wish to attack Syria, using action tools from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Avaaz, and the People's Email Network. Now I was just looking around on the internet, as I do occasionally, and I saw that Secretary Kerry announced the release of videos from the August 21 chemical weapons attack in Syria. Then I clicked through to the Senate Intelligence Committee website hosting the videos, and saw this note: "Each of these 13 videos explicitly claim to show victims of a chemical or poison gas attack." So the videos "claim" to show victims of a chemical attack, and don't even assert, apparently, that you'll be able to blame the Syrian government for this attack -- wow, how Bush-league. (I also don't know why they said "explicitly," but maybe I'm just piling on.)

Meanwhile, Eritrea has been an independent nation for 20 years now, but it has a long way to go on its journey to self-sufficiency and freedom -- it has, apparently, built a vast underground network of torture centers and has "disappeared" over 10,000 good citizens, including journalists and members of religious organizations. Eritrea does, as a point of law, imprison those who don't practice one of the nation's four "registered" religions -- which exclude non-Sunni Muslim denominations and, since 2002, most Christian denominations as well -- while Reporters Without Borders has ranked Eritrea dead last among world nations in media freedom, right behind North Korea. But most people don't know much about Eritrea, and surely Eritrea wouldn't want the first thing everyone learns about it to be that it treats its dissenters so horribly, right? So Amnesty International helps you tell the Eritrean President to end the torture and detention in Eritrea.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA not to outsource its chicken inspection functions to the very poultry processing corporations who are making the chicken, then Food and Watch Watch helps you do that. In other news, federal prisons plan to turn over all the cell keys to the prisoners, and banking regulators are going to let banks ensure their derivatives don't crash the economy. OK, that second one's real, but no less absurd than the others. Seriously, who lets food-processing corporations police themselves? The most corporation-friendly Department of Agriculture we've ever had, of course. No, Mr. Obama's USDA is worse than Mr. Bush's -- why, even Tha Bush Mobb couldn't stomach continuing a similar self-inspection program for chicken makers, and for good reason: no inspectors will find the pus and feces and blood and bile on birds if they have to look at three birds per second.