Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, discrimination, and pollution.

Our President, as you know, has declared yet another of his "national emergencies" so he can sell weapons to the Saudi/UAE coalition that's currently raining down bombs on impoverished Yemenis. What's the "emergency"? Saudi Arabia needs weapons to defend itself from Iran, or something. Iran is now the excuse for everything, apparently. "Where's my tax cut? Iran took it!" (Maybe I shouldn't give our President any ideas.) Since our President has declared an "emergency," Congress can't stop him from selling arms using the Arms Control Act -- but we can tell Congress to simply ban arms sales to the Saudi/UAE war effort with new legislation, which Win Without War helps you do. I've said it before and I'll say it again: a President who needs to declare "emergencies" so he can accomplish unpopular legislative aims isn't a guy who "gets things done;" he's a weak man and a bad leader.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1756, the Preventing Credit Score Discrimination in Auto Insurance Act, would, as its title implies, would prevent car insurance corporations from setting insurance rates based on your credit score, and would prevent credit reporting agencies from furnishing car insurance corporations with that information. And here you thought your auto insurance corporation might raise or lower your rates based on your driving history! But now car insurance corporations charge folks more if they have low credit scores, which sure does seem like a recipe for car insurance corporations not getting paid, but it does trap lower-income folks in a cycle of debt. Too much of our economy seems predicated on punching people in the face when they're down; if you hate that as much as I do, then let CREDO help you tell your Congressfolk to fight financial predators by passing the Preventing Credit Score Discrimination in Auto Insurance Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to ban glyphosate, Just Label It still helps you do that -- but do it quickly, as the EPA's public commenting period on the matter ends tomorrow. Glyphosate was in the news after several juries found Monsanto liable for billions of dollars in damages when folks who routinely used RoundUp (Monsanto's brand-name version of glyphosate) got cancer, and we dump around 250 million gallons of the stuff on our crops annually in America. Note well, also, that Monsanto's genetic engineering projects tend to center around making their crops more resistant to RoundUp, rather than, say, increasing crop yields so farmers can produce more food. Upon hearing that many farmers are already moving away from spraying glyphosate on their crops before harvest, you have to wonder what the EPA's hesitance to ban it would be. And by "you have to wonder," I mean "because corporate welfare."

Around the table: why local food is better, and other lessons.

Helena Norberg-Hodge reminds us that "Unlike a Globalized Food System, Local Food Won’t Destroy the Environment." Think of all the things we wouldn't be doing if we grew all our food locally -- things like seed extinction, monoculture farming, antibiotic abuse, factory farm pollution, high-fructose corn syrup subsidies, and crops genetically modified to better withstand resist proprietary pesticides, to name just a few. It's enough to make you think that the only thing Big Food does "efficiently" is delivery money into executive bank accounts.

"N.J. Attorney General to Cops: Stop Working With ICE" is a misleading headline, because ICE can, you know, get a warrant and thus earn the cooperation from police that such warrants mandate. Of course that subtlety seems lost on the ICE deputy director who squeals about "public safety" and issues ominous warnings that ICE will just have to arrest more people, which will "inevitably" result in "collateral arrests." What's preventing ICE from just getting warrants again? I sure hope it's not the Bush Mobb-era notion that warrants are "quaint."

When you hear that our government takes upwards of 10 years to process workers' claims for nuclear contamination compensation largely because nuclear labs don't necessarily document problems the way they're supposed to, you may feel compelled to ask: is this what folks mean when they demand small government? Because this is what we get when we demand small government, and no use telling me you just know some of these claims are BS -- if you had a comp claim that you knew other people were telling their friends "must be" BS, how would you feel? (Note well, also, that Tha Bush Mobb dragged its feet on giving these workers justice wherever they could.)

While our government's Office of Special Counsel tells federal workers they'd best not talk about resisting or impeaching our President while they're on the clock -- and the worst I'll say about that is that maybe the OSC takes their interpretation a bit too far -- that very same OSC found that half a dozen Administration officials, including our deputy press secretary, violated the Hatch Act, but let them all off with warnings. Who thinks OSC will be similarly-restrained with rank-and-file federal workers talking about impeaching our President? Not me -- this Administration, like so many others, thinks law and order is for "little people" like us.

Goldman Sachs analysts ask, in re gene therapy treatments, "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" That's very unfortunate wording right there, but if a treatment obliterates a sector of the health care economy, that doesn't mean it's evil; surely no one would wish to have leprosy or smallpox back as part of a perverse "job-creation program" because they once kept doctors and caregivers busy. (Oh, and Gilead's sales of their miracle Hep C drug could also be falling because now more people know how expensive it is and how noxious a corporation Gilead is.)

Finally, House Democrats forge ahead with their Leviathan of a voting rights/campaign finance reform/anti-corruption bill. And now that they've apparently purged attempts to simply repeal Supreme Court decisions without actually amending our Constitution, now I'm wondering if H.R. 1's pack-everything-in-one-bill might actually be the right approach. Any Republican who votes against it can be portrayed in campaign ads as "anti-voting rights" or "anti-campaign finance reform" or "pro-corruption." I mean, we're still relying on Democrats to run those ads, but at least they'll put Republicans on the spot. (Of course, when Republicans whine that we're trying to do too much at once, we can respond, paraphrasing William Lloyd Garrison, that you don't pull a baby out of a fire gradually.)

UPDATE. I really should have checked the date on that Goldman-Sachs article referenced in the fifth paragraph above -- not only is it from April, but I wrote about it then (and rather less generously than I did above, I think). I still think the insight contained therein is worth keeping.

Action: concerning trade, clean water, and healthy food.

The governments of the United States, Canada, and Mexico plan to sign the new USMCA trade agreement -- the one that would replace NAFTA -- on November 30; after that, the pact will go to Congress for ratification, so now's a good time to tell our Congressfolk to ensure that we get the strongest USMCA possible, as Public Citizen helps us do. The USMCA would eliminate the "investor-state dispute settlement" system with Canada in three years, and drastically curtail ISDS use with Mexico; these are tremendously good things, because we deserve to know that investors won't be able to nullify our laws and exact tribute from us simply because they can convince some tribunal that our clean air and clean water laws "cost them money." But that doesn't mean we shouldn't demand more, such as the elimination of corporate welfare for big pharma and better enforcement of labor and clean air/clean water standards. So let's get cracking.

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed expanding offshore drilling in almost all of our coastal waters -- except around Florida, of course, because they need Rick Scott in the Senate that badly. I would naturally have said hey, remember how well the Deepwater Horizon spill went?, but it turns out that the Taylor Energy oil spill of 2004 is about to overtake the Deepwater Horizon spill as the worst oil spill in American history. If you're wondering how a 14-year-old oil spill is still spewing hundreds of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day, well, Taylor didn't even tell anyone about the oil leaking for six years and still claims there's "no evidence" the spill is even happening. And this is the kind of thing our Administration apparently wants more of in our great nation! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to scuttle its plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your state Governor to follow the lead of Arkansas and ban dicamba usage on your state's farms. Arkansas banned dicamba usage during that state's main growing season after finding that dicamba doesn't stay put once it's sprayed on crops -- it drifts away for up to three full days, leaving a trail of destruction in its path, and if it drifts onto neighboring farms -- which, hello, happens all the time -- then it also damages other folks' crops, and therefore their livelihoods, and also therefore our food. Arkansas also found workers getting sick after working with dicamba, which couldn't possibly happen to consumers, could it? Naturally, Monsanto has a version of dicamba it uses with its proprietary soybean crop which it modified genetically to better withstand its dicamba. But our choice is simple here: we can either stand with farmers or stand with big corporations.

Action: fighting unconstitutional war-making and bad GMO labeling standards.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject S.J.Res. 59, an Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) which would greatly expand our President's unconstitutional war-making power, then Win Without War still helps you do that. It doesn't matter which gang of war-mongering weaklings now control our foreign policy, and it doesn't matter what the President's name is -- all of our Presidents since 9.11 have abused the original 2001 AUMF, and by giving present and future Presidents the authority to declare certain forces as being "associated" with the Taliban/al-Qaeda/ISIS and wage war upon them, S.J.Res. 59 would further damage Congress's Constitutional right to declare war. And don't believe the hype that S.J.Res. 59 would provide for "adequate Congressional review," not if you've attended how Congressfolk actually vote when confronted with the "threat" of being called "weak on terror" by rage-addicted fools.

Meanwhile, in a related note, Saudi Arabia has begun its attack on the Yemeni port of Hodeidah -- an attack that threatens to exacerbate Yemen's near-famine conditions, since some 80% of Yemen's food imports go through Hodeidah, and an attack that we are enabling, with intelligence on air strike targeting. If you think you missed the part where Congress declared war on Yemen, well, you didn't: we have assisted Saudi attacks on Yemen, in violation of our Constitution and our laws, since the beginning of the Obama Administration. And for what? To extend Saudi power in the region? To destroy of some of the best ISIS-fighters out there in the Houthi rebels the Saudis are trying to crush? These are questions worth asking! Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell your Congressfolk to invoke the War Powers Act against our enabling of the Saudi attacks on Yemen.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to dramatically improve its proposed GMO labeling standard, then Just Label It helps you do that. They actually to put a sunflower with a smiley face to signify that a food has genetically-modified ingredients! And they'd use the term "BE" (for "bio-engineered), a term nobody knows, rather than the term "GMO," a term everyone knows. And they're also allowing labels to point you to a we address or use a QR code instead of just writing "this food has GMOs in it." Gosh, it's like they have something to hide! And there is nothing conservative about the USDA proposal. A real conservative would call all that smiley-face QR code crap "bureaucratic red tape." A real conservative would say we should clearly label GMOs so consumers can make their own decisions. And a real conservative would wonder if GMOs will cause more problems than they solve.

Action: unconstitutional war-making, drug policy, and GMO labeling.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is still mulling S.J.Res. 59, the authorization to use military force that would replace the 2001 AUMF (good), but actually expand the President's unconstitutional authority to wage war wherever he likes (so bad it's not worth the good). And this bill has a bipartisan sheen, with three Democratic co-sponsors out of six total. So why is the Senate taking so long to consider it? Because they know it's a pile of dung -- and, more to the point, they know we know it's a pile of dung. I suppose they'll wait until right before the election to jam it through, and squeal about TEH NASHUNUL SECURITEEZ!!!!! when we oppose them, though they're taking so long with it we could easily retort that it must not really be that important. Now would be a good time to call your Reps and Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to reject S.J.Res. 59.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6043/S. 3032, the STATES Act, would allow states that have legalized marijuana to enforce their own marijuana laws without interference from our federal government. Oddly, our President has endorsed this bill, setting up yet another quarrel with his Attorney General, Mr. Sessions, who acts like pot is the root of all evil. Less oddly, though, the STATES Act has almost as many Republican sponsors (in both House and Senate versions) as Democratic sponsors. Why, it almost looks like actual bipartisanship, in that both parties seem to like it and the American people seem to like it! Why do I suspect we're being set up for a massive disappointment -- say, when the House version passes, but the Senate weighs it down with poison pill amendments? None of that will matter if we speak up loudly enough, so the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane drug policy by passing the STATES Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to enact a real genetically-modified food-labeling standard, and not the BS one they're trying to enact, then MoveOn still helps you do that. Some things haven't changed with the change in Administrations, and one of them is the USDA's determination to pretend they're enacting a "clear" GMO labeling standard when they're obviously trying their damnedest not to. You don't exempt sugars and oils from your standard, since just about everything has one or other in it. You don't exempt gene-editing from your standard as if "gene editing" somehow isn't "genetic modification." And you certainly don't let corporations put hifalutin scanning codes or website addresses on their labels in lieu of a simple statement like this product has GMOs in it. The USDA also literally put a happy face on some of their sample GMO logos! You have to ask: what are they so afraid of?

Action: internet freedom, "free" trade, and GMO labeling.

As you know, S.J.Res. 52, the "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, passed the Senate, but the House doesn't seem to have any desire to take it up (or its companion bill, H.J.Res. 129). We know how to fix that! Using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone), you can get your House Rep's phone number, and then you can call them and tell them to approve of S.J.Res. 52/H.J.Res. 129. You may also suggest that they author a "discharge petition" that would force House consideration of S.J.Res. 52/H.J.Res. 129 if more than half the House signs it. (At this writing, I've received no word of any "discharge petitions" on this matter.) Why support S.J.Res. 52/H.J.Res. 129? Because it would restore real internet freedom -- for people, that is, not for corporations, and that's worth fighting for.

Meanwhile, NAFTA renegotiation is apparently going well enough that the resulting pact might actually scuttle the notorious "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) mechanism that not only threatens to nullify our laws, but extract bailouts from the taxpayer for the "crime" of passing clean air or clean water or labor laws that "deprive" some foreign investor of obviously unearned money. But the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) is trying to flex its muscle, and has tried to scare up state legislator signatures for a pro-ISDS letter. Word on the street is they only got 12 of them, whereas Replace NAFTA's anti-ISDS (and therefore pro-freedom) letter has garnered almost four times that many signatories among our state legislators. Hence Replace NAFTA helps you tell your state legislators to help end the anti-freedom, anti-job, anti-law-and-order ISDS mechanism in NAFTA. Yes, all those "anti"s are entirely appropriate -- you don't want some corporation telling you what laws to pass, do you?

Finally, our USDA has proposed a national GMO labeling standard -- but it's not very good. Would it have been better had Hillary Clinton won the Presidency? I doubt it, because this GMO standard contains a lot of the same loopholes -- like substituting web addresses and QR codes for plain writing on a label -- the USDA mulled under President Obama. Plus this GMO labeling standard might well exclude sugars and oils, which would, like, just about defeat the purpose of a GMO label. Big food corporations have been fighting GMO labeling standards tooth and nail for years now, because they know people will be very, very angry once they find out how much of their food contains GMOs -- in other words, they want to win the battle without fighting fair. Force them to fight fair by letting the Sierra Club help you demand that our USDA enact a clear GMO labeling standard.

Action: fighting genocide, a bad civil rights nominee, and genetically-engineered food.

Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to condemn Burma's ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. Rohingya are Muslim, in a Buddhist-majority nation, so I can already hear American right-wingers squealing TEH MUD PEEPULZ STARTEDZ ITZ!!!!, and though the Burmese military started its genocide against the Rohingya after a Rohingya attack at a weapons station, gosh, haven't they heard of law and order? Haven't they heard of bringing individuals to trial for their crimes? Genocide is never a response to a perceived wrong, and people who think it is are evil, no matter what rationalizations they've fed themselves. You'd be hard-pressed, also, to point out what code of civilized law authorizes "forcing half a million people to flee to Bangladesh" and "burning down villages and then shooting people trying to escape the fire" as a just sentence for any kind of crime. Still, they're as vulnerable to the Big Stick of Bad PR as anyone else, so let's wield that stick.

Meanwhile, closer to home, CREDO helps you tell your Senators to block the nomination of Eric Dreiband to direct the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. You may be surprised to learn that the Senate hasn't actually confirmed someone for this position for five years -- all Directors of the Civil Rights Division since Thomas Perez (who served from 2009-2013) have been "acting" directors, and so is our current Director, John Gore, himself notorious for (among other things!) defending Florida's 2012 racist voter purge and North Carolina's notorious "bathroom" bill. So you think President Trump has learned his lesson? Not a chance -- Mr. Dreiband just so happens to have made his life's work defending corporations and people from charges of discrimination. Maybe Mr. Trump think that makes Mr. Dreiband uniquely qualified to help good Americans suffering from discrimination! But, being sentient life forms, we know better, and being Americans, we deserve better, and should demand better.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell big poultry corporations to stop genetically engineering chickens to grow so quickly it cripples them. If you're tempted to say what does it matter, they're just going to wind up in my chicken nuggets anyway, please do two things: a) slap yourself, and b) contemplate more closely how happy you'd be if you couldn't walk, let alone see the sun or breathe clean air, which a lot of factory farm chickens also never get to do. And contemplate, also, whether an animal genetically engineered to get bigger than necessary is really a good thing for you. A lot of folks I respect would tell you I'm no better than a climate change denier for slamming genetic engineering the way I do, but look at what uses we put it to: growing animals so fast it yields more meat but cripples them, and making crops so resistant to proprietary pesticides that they invade other farms and ruin their crops. That's some future we've made there.

Action: poisonous pesticides, and national parks.

Knowing that Arkansas is dominated by Republicans only makes it more heartening that their state government has fought Monsanto's dicamba, a herbicide scientists link to shortness of breath, muscle weakness, and vomiting -- but it's only banned dicamba use during the warmest parts of the year, since dicamba aerosolizes (and makes people sick) far more efficiently in warmer air. Hence Penn PIRG helps you thank the government of Arkansas for its partial ban of dicamba and encourage them to make their ban year-round. Should I bother mentioning that Monsanto manufactured dicamba for use on its own genetically-engineered crops? Yes, I should bother mentioning it again -- especially since Monsanto will no doubt tell you they do what they do to increase yields or end hunger, two goals that seem much too big for them to comprehend. I mean, making money off crops, they get, but doing so in a way that doesn't hurt people they're not anywhere near as good with. It sure is a good thing we're here to help them with that.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration's drill-everywhere-fuck-the-consequences plan continues unabated, as they now plan to sell fossil fuel drilling leases near Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. You may remember stopping fracking in Chaco Canyon back at the end of the Obama years, but, as they say, that was then and this is now, and "now" means nothing so much as big fossil fuel executives making as much money as humanly possible right away. That's Donald Trump for you, though -- he doesn't care about anyone but big boss-men like himself. Naturally, the Chaco park holds thousand-year-old artifacts from the Ancient Pueblo civilization, and good folks belonging to today's Pueblo nation find the area sacred, but again, "religious freedom" only means something to Trumpholes when you're a boss trying to deny women birth control. So CREDO helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to reject proposed fossil fuel leases near the Chaco park. After all, oil and gas are temporary, but history is forever.

Action: EPA budgeting, medical marijuana, and GMO labeling.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Reps and Senators to oppose any appropriations bill that would cut EPA funding, then Environmental Defense Action still helps you do that. Don't listen to current EPA Administrator Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt tell you that he can streamline his department and save the taxpayer money, because the EPA doesn't have enough money now to catch polluters. And the EPA's job is catching polluters, not coddling them -- catching them ensures we have clean air and clean water, after all, while coddling them just allows more dirty energy CEOs to redistribute more worker income upward to themselves. But the Trump Administration's "Hard Power" budget wouldn't just cut funding on climate change research and state and local air quality monitoring -- it'd also cut funding for things like stopping runoff pollution and protecting our water and our soil from underground storage tank leaks. Really, they're going all out to destroy our government's ability to protect our air and water. So we must go all out to stop them.

Meanwhile, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2920/S. 1374, the CARERS Act, which would ensure that more good Americans get access to medical marijuana. Among other things, the CARERS Act would repeal our federal government's prohibition of medical marijuana, ensure VA doctors can give advice about medical marijuana to our veterans, ease some of the federal restrictions on marijuana research, and protect medical marijuana where it's legal from overzealous federal officials like our Attorney General, who has a thing for stamping out all pot everywhere, for some reason. The Drug Policy Alliance also reminds us that giving folks medical marijuana (despite its reputation, you're not likely to get physiologically addicted to pot) might keep them from going on opioids, which has a considerably higher probability of addicting folks, and an astronomically higher probability of killing them. So, if you don't have medical marijuana, one big reason is big pharma CEOs who get rich off opioids. But they don't get all the say around here.

Finally, you may recall that the "compromise" on GMO labeling Congress passed last year mandated that our Department of Agriculture gets to create a national GMO labeling standard -- which I don't imagine would be any better under a Democratic President than a Republican one, given the corporatists Democratic Presidents have typically installed at agriculture, though they'd probably go to more effort to string us along. Anyway, we've got the President we've got, and we've got the Agriculture Secretary (former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue) we've got, but we've also got the duty we've got as American citizens to make our will plain and unmistakeable, and so Just Label It helps you tell our Department of Agriculture to mandate strong GMO labeling standards. And we want none of this QR code stupidity, where you'd need a smartphone and a special app and an internet connection to establish whether the food right fricking in front of you has any genetically-modified ingredients in it -- we want clear labels, on all of our food. It really isn't too much to ask.

Action: concerning health care, birth control, and food monopolies.

High drug prices are very unpopular, right? Of course they are! So, naturally, President Trump, visionary that he is, wants to replace the disgraced former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price with big pharma CEO Alex Azar -- whom, among other things, oversaw the doubling of insulin prices at Eli Lilly USA over a five-year period. But he's the bigliest person for the job of running Medicaid and Medicare and setting executive branch health care policy! Mr. Azar also served in Tha Bush Mobb's HHS back in the day, but surely that isn't a selling point, not just because you don't want "worked for Tha Bush Mobb" on your résumé, but because the revolving door between our government and big corporations is almost as popular as high drug prices. You know what else is unpopular? Weakened drug safety standards, but guess what Mr. Azar also supports. Hence both Public Citizen and Social Security Works help you tell your Senators to reject Mr. Azar as the next Health and Human Services Secretary.

Meanwhile, in a related note, the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the Trump Administration to rescind its order allowing certain corporations to evade the federal birth control coverage mandate for "religious" (or "moral"!) reasons. As I've been saying for a long time, a boss's "religious beliefs" aren't better than yours or mine, and certainly not more so than their employees, and I also won't abide unctuous pronouncements that they pay the money, they get their say -- I could just as easily argue that the boss's employees pay for their own health care in lost wages, or that the boss's customers pay for employee's health care, either of which would put decision-making power in better hands. And how many times must I tell these pimps! Birth control not only saves all of us money, it prevents abortions. Not too many years ago, a few Republicans remained who would remind us that birth control prevents abortions. And even if they've all lost their elections to rageheads since then, it's no less true.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to reject the proposed Bayer-Monsanto merger, then ActionAid USA still helps you do that. Where to begin with this monstrosity? With the fact that letting Bayer buy it lets Monsanto bury its notorious name? With the merger giving the resulting behemoth a quarter of the world seed market, which could help create a world where a mere three megacorporations control more than three-fifths of that market? With the fact that control of the seed market in fewer corporate hands gives small farmers (whom Monsanto prevents from replanting saved seed year over year, I kid you not) fewer choices? With the fact that seed concentration almost guarantees that multitudinous species of seed will go extinct because they "don't make money"? With the fact that it would make more of these farmers dependent on genetically-modified seed, seed manufactured not to increase yields but to withstand proprietary pesticides? Seriously, I have no idea where to start with this. I guess you can just pick a spot.

Action: Afghanistan, and GMO food.

President Trump's votaries won't regard his plan to increase American forces in Afghanistan as Dear Leader transforming into Just Another Politician, but the rest of us should remember how "nation-building" began in the first place -- war is unpopular enough that Congress hasn't formally declared one since FDR, and Tha Bush Mobb correctly sussed out that A War to Hunt Terrorists wouldn't be enough to keep America voting Republican, even after 9.11. Tha Bush Mobb also correctly sussed out that deadlines for withdrawal blunted some of the criticism they deserved, a luxury Mr. Trump now won't have with his declaration that his new plan is "results-based," whatever those results would be. We should also remember how impressed Mr. Trump has been lately with all the rare earth metals one can find in Afghanistan. Anyway, Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that three Presidents have now abused to start or ramp up wars all over the planet without getting proper, Constitutional authorization from Congress.

Meanwhile, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, has issued a 120-day ban on a Monsanto pesticide called Dicamba, due to the hundreds of complaints from state farmers about Dicamba drifting into neighboring fields and harming crops. Dicamba is yet another Monsanto pesticide designed to kill weeds on its own crops they've genetically-engineered to withstand it, which of course will ultimately have the effect of killing all the crops in the field but Monsanto's -- and forcing farmers to switch to Monsanto's GMO seed or go out of business! Can anyone say antitrust violation? I mean, seriously, this is out of a dystopian sci-fi novel. And I almost forgot to mention that Dicamba stays in the soil for a year, can find its way to nearby water sources, and thus harm fish as well. Gov. Hutchinson has done the honorable thing and listened to his constituents in this matter, but now he must ban the stuff forever and for always, so Avaaz helps you tell Gov. Hutchinson to keep Dicamba out of Arkansas's fields, and thus help ensure food safety for good Arkansans and their descendents.

Action: health care, banksters, and GMO labeling.

Ho hum, the CBO projects that the Senate health care bill will cause 22 million people to lose their health insurance over the next decade, and 15 million to lose it by next year. That's a million fewer health insurance losses than under the House bill, but is that what you'd take to the pearly gates? "Yeah, I voted for a health care bill that only deprived 22 million of health insurance, not 23 million, so that we could give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to the undeserving rich." Sure doesn't sound like something you'd say to St. Peter, does it? And neither does "I voted for a health care bill that slashed Medicaid for working families and increased the possibility that folks would get tossed off their insurance for their pre-existing conditions." Tools for calling your Senator and telling them to deep-six this bill are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

But wait, there's more! H.R. 10, the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, would (among many other things!) weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- the same bureau that has returned $29 billion to good Americans defrauded by financial predators -- and would eliminate the Obama Administration's "fiduciary rule," which requires pension advisors to put their customers' interests first rather than their own. And here's something I didn't know: H.R. 10 would also raise the threshold at which shareholders can file resolutions, so that only the very richest shareholders would be able to file them! Why would anyone support a bill that gives all these corporate welfare handouts to financial predators? Because they worship mammon, that's why -- and good luck taking that to the pearly gates! So PennPIRG helps you tell your Senators to reject the Financial CHOICE Act. Alternately, you could tell your Senators to oppose the bill while you have them on the phone about the Trumpcare bill.

Finally, the Department of Agriculture is mulling a new GMO labeling standard, as required by Congress last year; I always warned that some far-right Republican could get to write that standard -- but I also said that when the time comes, our duty is the same no matter who occupies the Oval office: to make our will unmistakably known to our government. Hence Just Label It helps you tell the USDA to enact the most vigorous GMO labeling system possible. What is our will in this matter? That all GMOs in food get labeled, that labels tell you which ingredients come from GMOs, and that labels be clear and easy to read. We'll have none of these "QR codes" that you'd need a smartphone app to read! Not everyone worships at the altar of the smartphone, after all -- in fact, a great many people still read, and a great many more than that don't want their food labels to mislead them. None of this is too damn much to ask. And remember, this is about disclosure of GMOs, not banning them.

Action: the Trump budget, Keystone XL, and GMO labeling.

Today's as good a day as any to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're viewing on your cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject the Trump budget or anything close to it. You know the drill: the Trump budget slashes spending that actually helps people, while jacking up spending that helps corporations. We should really call it the corporate welfare budget, since that's what it is. Seriously, a $54 billion hike in military spending, when we already spend more money on the military than all the countries ranked second through eighth in military spending combined? When we could eliminate considerably more than that in waste and unnecessary weapons? I mean, the only reason anyone's spent 25 years trying to build the F-35 fighter jet is corporate welfare, and that's a far greater moral hazard than spending on food stamps, public broadcasting, rural arts funding, and scientific research, to name just four necessary things that would suffer under the Trump budget.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard by now that the State Department has approved the Keystone XL pipeline. And you may have responded to that news by saying that sure was fast! You would not be alone in that -- though the Obama Administration sure did seem to drag its feet on the whole process, the sheer speed with which the Trump Administration got this done makes it more likely that they didn't go through all the legal procedures in approving it. Of course, for Donald Trump, law and order is for losers. Despite the rapid approval, the Keystone XL pipeline still faces many hurdles -- the Nebraska Public Service Commission has yet to approve that part of the pipeline that runs through Nebraska, for example, and this has long been a sticking point with good Nebraskans, as they scramble to protect the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides clean water to nearly two million good Americans in eight midwestern states. Hence the Sierra Club helps you urge the Nebraska PSC to reject permits for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Finally, Just Label It helps you tell the Nestlé corporation to label its genetically-modified foods for-real for-real -- by which I mean "not with QR codes" that only a smartphone can read, because that's not a good way of telling people whether your foods contain genetically-modified organisms or not. Nestlé doesn't just make iced tea, Crunch bars, and bottled water from public water sources, you know -- they also own a bunch of popular brands, including Buitoni pasta, DiGiorno pizza, Gerber baby foods, and Lean Cuisine meals. (They make a lot of dog and cat foods, too.) Would it kill Nestlé to commit to labeling its GMO foods, as many other major corporations have done? No, it would not -- certainly monks with quill pens don't write all their food labels, and certainly not everyone would reject GMOs in their foods even if they knew their foods even had them. If good Americans want to buy GMO foods, they should be able to -- and if good Americans don't want to buy GMO foods, they should be able to know which foods have GMOs in them.

Action: civil rights, ANWR drilling, and food labeling.

Mr. Trump's nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions as Attorney General is bad enough, and his widely-reported zeal for slashing the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division is even worse, but his nomination of John Gore to head up the Civil Rights Decision also demands our opposition. Why so? Because Mr. Gore has had his name on some of the most horrible right-wing anti-civil rights initiatives of the past few years -- he's defended Republican redistricting from New York to Florida, defended Florida Gov. Scott's racist voter purge of 2012, and even defended North Carolina's notorious "bathroom bill" in court. My guess is that the Trump team will say this guy really understands civil rights!, but understanding how to subvert civil rights laws is nothing to brag about. The next few years are going to be very, very hard, but we don't have to take that lying down. Hence People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to oppose the Gore nomination

Meanwhile, with the ascension of Mr. Trump to the Presidency, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) has become a thing again, and though Sen. Stevens is no longer with us to wear his Incredible Hulk tie to ANWR votes, Alaska's current Senatorial delegation (Sens. Murkowski and Sullivan) are still anxious to open up the area to oil drilling, though estimates of oil reserves in ANWR have never been all that impressive, and though drilling there would injure the wildlife (it is a wildlife refuge, after all!) and the native Americans who live there. But why should Mr. Trump care, when there's unearned money to be squeezed from somewhere? Make no mistake, ANWR drilling is only a thing because some CEO will make money from it. And that's before we get to the problem of where the polar bears are going to live, now that climate change has decimated their more northerly habitats. The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your Senators to vote against any bill that would open up ANWR to drilling.

Finally, the FDA currently focuses on salt and fat when evaluating "healthy" labels on food, but while salt and fat are important, we also know that other factors figure into whether or not we can call a food "healthy" -- like added sugar content, use of chemical pesticides, antibiotic abuse, and using "whole" ingredients more than highly-processed ones. Using genetically-modified organisms shouldn't earn a food a "healthy" label, either, if for no other reason than that GMOs usually indicate the overuse of pesticides. I can already hear folks say that if you believe a "healthy" label on a food product, you're a fool. But why should it be that way? Cynicism sure does make you feel better for a moment or two, but it's no way to change the world. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell the FDA to make sure "healthy" food labels tell you a lot more about that food than they currently do.

Action: fighting drug and seed monopolies, and investigating brutalities.

Word on the street is, with our government only funded through December 9, big pharmaceutical corporations want to get an additional six months of monopoly power over drugs before other corporations can sell them as generics. Naturally, it'll be another hostage situation -- give me a right to more unearned money, or the government gets it! But I'm sure some folks wonder why we make big pharmaceutical corporations relinquish control over their drugs at all, since it's "their property." Of course our legal system has long recognized that property can be regulated for the common good, and it has also long mandated that no one -- not authors, not musicians, not scientists, and certainly not corporations -- should have exclusive rights to their intellectual property forever; we recognize these things because we recognize that too much control of private property by too few actors causes harm to all of us. Thus we can easily establish that too much big pharma control over the drugs it makes (usually with help from our government, and therefore with our help, I feel compelled to point out) causes harm to our society, in the form of higher drug prices impregnable to correction by the free market. Plus, you know, you don't need a book or an album to live, but you might need a drug to live. Hence Social Security Works helps you tell Congress to prevent big pharmaceutical corporations from extending their power over us.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell American and European regulators to stop the proposed Bayer/Monsanto merger, then Sum of Us still helps you do that. Why both? Because Monsanto is an American corporation and Bayer is a German corporation, and thus both our Justice Department and the European Union can essentially veto the proposed merger. Of course you already know that mergers are a bad idea, because they kill jobs, reduce competition, and jack up prices, but you may not know that a Bayer/Monsanto merger would give the resulting behemoth control over 70 percent of the world's cotton seed, as well as a quarter of the total seed market and almost a quarter of the crop-chemical market. Does that sound like a good deal for farmers -- to be forced to deal with so few seed-providers (many of whom will likely mandate, as Monsanto already does, that farmers not save seeds for replanting the following year)? No, it does not. And it also means, not incidentally, that all of Monsanto's genetically-modified seed -- seed modified not to give us healthier food, but to better withstand Monsanto's pesticides -- would continue under a new name that's not nearly as hated as Monsanto's name. So let's not let Monsanto get away with disappearing their nefarious works under a more respected corporate banner.

Finally, Columbus, OH police shot Tyre King, 13, back in mid-September; police apparently wanted to question the boy about an armed robbery involving some $10, but then, according to police testimony. he pulled out a BB gun with a laser sight that looked an awful lot like a real weapon, and thus an officer shot him to death. Yet a week later, an independent medical examiner hired by Mr. King's family said that he was "more likely than not" running away from officers at the time of his shooting. So which is it? If it's the former, we wouldn't even be talking about this, but running from a police officer is not and has never been a death-penalty offense. Sadly, local prosecutor Ron O'Brien has been unwilling to look very deeply into police shootings of local young black men, and this phenomenon, unfortunately, occurs all over America wherever prosecutors have to investigate the police officers who are vital witnesses in other cases. But if we say we must leave police officers completely alone to do their work because we're afraid they won't be able to do their work if we don't, we're being cowards -- civilized people that ensuring that police officers do the right thing by the people they're sworn to serve is hard work, but work that must be done. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell Prosecutor O'Brien to call for an independent investigation of Mr. King's death.

Action: depleted uranium, GMO labeling, and oppressing protestors.

Last year, our government said it had not used, and did not use, depleted uranium weaponry in Iraq and/or Syria. The Department of Defense has since walked that back, which isn't that impressive, since everyone knows our government did in fact fire depleted uranium weapons into populated areas during the Iraq war, and while doing so will apparently never have consequences for George W. Bush or his Mobb, it does have very real consequences for Iraqis and Syrians right now, since scientists have linked depleted uranium aerosols with increased birth defects in children. If you're tempted to say who cares, it's just people that have been killing each other for centuries, please do four things: 1) slap yourself, 2) contemplate the role Western nations' zeal to steal Middle Eastern natural resources in our troubles, 3) slap yourself again, and 4) ask yourself why the greatest military in the world must use weapons that harm innocents. And then, perhaps let Just Foreign Policy and MoveOn help you tell our government to look a little harder at what it's done and come clean about its use of depleted uranium weapons overseas.

Meanwhile, as you know, our government enacted a GMO-labeling bill that pre-empted state-level GMO-labeling laws but which might, in a few years, result in a national mandatory GMO-labeling standard that doesn't suck, but in the meantime, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is mulling whether to allow big ag corporations to exempt oils and sugars that use GMOs, which would pretty much take a bat to the kneecaps of any national GMO standard that might emerge. The USDA is, perhaps, the worst of the Obama Administration's alphabet agencies, having only one positive accomplishment for the American people to its credit (higher school lunch nutrition standards, which, naturally, Congress tries to gut every chance it gets), that accomplishment hidden like a nugget of gold in the river of hog manure that is the overall record of the USDA's otherwise slavish adherence to big ag desires. Still, it's not like we're powerless, as the USDA is taking public comments on this matter as we speak, and Just Label It helps you tell the USDA not to exempt certain foods from GMO labeling mandates.

Finally, staff and players on the Beaumont (TX) Bulls youth football team decided to take a knee during the national anthem during their September 10 game, as 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has famously done, and at the time, they did so with the support of their youth league and their team's executive board. Then the board got cold feet and told them not to take a knee during the anthem before their next week's game -- but the team did so anyway. Then the board suspended the head coach -- not for sticking with his players, of course, but for "removing a player and coach from the team and an improperly distributed text message," which, like, yeah sure -- and then the board threatened to arrest parents who tried to attend games or other team events, and when the players kept resisting, they ultimately cancelled the season. If the board is trying to teach these kids that actions have consequences, well, they should be learning it themselves. Toward that end, Color of Change helps you demand that the board stop acting like a bunch of whiny bullies and give these courageous kids back their season.

Action: defense spending, and GMO labeling.

S. 2943, the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2017, is currently in conference -- and apparently the Senate version would limit the amount of information the Pentagon would be required to provide about using private contractors. You recall, perhaps, Gen. Shinseki's statement before the Iraq war that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed to occupy Iraq, which was rather more than Bush the Lesser planned to provide -- and you may also recall Blackwater mercenaries getting a thousand dollars per day to work during the occupation of Iraq. I mention these two items, of course, because they are intimately related, and because their knowledge reflects very badly on the Bush Mobb's judgment. Think maybe our government might be trying to cover a President Trump's ass when he decides to invade a much larger country and outsources even more of our military functions to "the best" private mercenaries? I've said it before and I'll say it again, at the risk of being called a Communist or whatever: we waste a damn lot of money selling public functions to private corporations, and this problem might be at its worst in the defense industry. So Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell Congress to reject provisions that would hide information about public spending on private defense contractors from the people.

Meanwhile, quite a few big food corporations, including Campbell's, Mars, and Dannon, have decided to use clear GMO labels on their packages -- you know, the kind that say things like THIS FOOD IS MADE WITH GENETICALLY-MODIFIED INGREDIENTS, things that anyone who knows how to read can read. Well, Hershey Co. has apparently decided to go in the other direction, and though it's committed to removing GMOs from some of their chocolates, a commitment isn't a result, and if it's not going to label GMOs in the foods that continue to have GMO ingredients, then the whole thing starts to look like a scam. I mean, I hate to think the worst of our corporate titans, but I don't want to be a schmuck, either. So Just Label It helps you tell the Hershey Corporation to label its GMO ingredients clearly on its products. And not with no fancy-pants "QR codes" that you need a smartphone to read, either -- not everyone has a smartphone, and not everyone who has a smartphone is an amateur programmer. And, really, what the hell is wrong with just saying THIS FOOD IS MADE WITH GENETICALLY-MODIFIED INGREDIENTS? Besides, the fact that "this food contains genetically-modified ingredients" would be snappier, I mean? (Look, the folks who write copy for food labels aren't exactly Raymond Carver acolytes.)

Action: battling ANWR/Arctic drilling and the proposed Bayer/Monsanto merger.

The Senate is contemplating S. 3203, the so-called Alaska Economic Development and Access to Resources Act, which would allow new drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) and the Arctic Ocean. What are the problems with these plans again? Roll call! Drilling for oil in ANWR won't yield very much oil! Drilling for oil in the Arctic is even harder than drilling in the Gulf! ANWR provides clean drinking water to good Alaskans! ANWR is sacred ground to the Gwich'in people! ANWR provides an environment for polar bears and caribou! OK, so it's not as snappy as the Mousketeer roll call, but it is all true -- more economic development in ANWR and the Arctic Ocean will do nothing for good Alaskans, but will make a few oil corporation CEOs a bit richer. Remember the days when Sen. Stevens would wear his Hulk tie to the Senate whenever an ANWR drilling bill came up? Sen. Stevens is gone, God rest him, but his dream of tearing up land all good Alaskans need so that a few CEOs can make a bit more money is, sadly, still with us. So the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your Senators to reject ANWR and Arctic Ocean drilling.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Department of Justice to stop the proposed Bayer-Monsanto merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. Allowing Bayer to buy Monsanto will allow Bayer to completely disappear the hated name of Monsanto while still carrying on all the nefarious works that have given Monsanto its bad name -- which include, but are certainly not limited to, crushing farmers who don't adhere to Monsanto's absurdly strict seed contracts and making more and more farmers dependent on toxic pesticides and genetically-modified food. It gets worse: if Bayer gets to buy Monsanto, the resulting behemoth would control 70 percent of the world's cotton seed, and if the equally nefarious Dow-DuPont merger also goes through, the result would be four corporations controlling 90 percent of the world's seeds and crop chemicals, and no power should be that concentrated. The world's food supply depends on diversity and availability, after all -- and corporate power squashes diversity and availability. Civilized people don't put power before food.

Action: fighting slavery, banksters, and monopolies.

As you may know, the government of Uzbekistan forces its good citizens to pick cotton during their annual harvest. Doesn't matter what you do for a living -- you could be a nurse, a teacher, a college student, or a business owner -- you're out there picking cotton 10 hours a day. And while Uzbekistan has improved some work conditions and started to phase out child labor on the cotton fields, they've also cracked down hard on the good Uzbeks who continue to press for an end to the practice. But the President who has enforced this policy for the last 25 years, Islam Karimov, has lately died, which (sad as it may be for the Karimov family) does provide us an opportunity to agitate for the abolition of forced labor. I would invite right-wingers who claim that taxation is slavery and regulations are oppression to look at what's happening in Uzbekistan to see what slavery and oppression are really like. (Or they could work on a Hawaiian fishing boat, but I digress.) Hence the International Labor Rights Foundation helps you tell the Uzbekistan government to end forced labor in that nation.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5983, the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, would give the banksters even more power. Didn't Wells Fargo just get fined nearly $200 million for opening up accounts people didn't want and even charging fees on those unwanted accounts? But Congress's only impulse, it seems, is to keep your government from protecting you from banksters. Hence H.R. 5983 would (among other things!) prevent our government from breaking up too-big-to-fail banks, let retirement investors put their own greed ahead of their clients' needs, gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, repeal the Durbin Amendment limiting the fees businesses pay to banks for debit card use, force all financial regulations to be approved all over again by Congress, and repeal the CEO-to-employee pay rule Dodd-Frank mandates. In other words, H.R. 5983 is an absolute fecal storm, and no amount of lying about "protecting small businesses" (by making them pay higher fees to banks? Really?) can cover that. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Financial CHOICE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell American and European governments to reject the proposed Monsanto-Bayer merger, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Bayer is a German corporation (a real one, unlike so many of today's "foreign" corporations like Burger King, which "moved" merely to avoid paying their fair share of American taxes), so European regulators might have as much to say about it as ours do. Or more; our government just greenlighted Charter/Time-Warner, after all. Who would benefit from one corporation having so much so much say over chemicals and agriculture? Nobody but Bayer's executives. And Monsanto's endless line of GMO seeds that don't deliver healthier food in higher yields but merely withstand its own proprietary pesticides better would continue, to the greater detriment of us all. And let's not even get started on what farmers would have to do to survive under an even bigger big ag conglomerate. I mean, giving farmers, not big corporations, more power over the food supply would be the conservative thing to do.

Around the table: why the white working class votes right, and other puzzles.

Theo Anderson at In These Times describes sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild's work answering the question "Why the White Working Class Votes Conservative." Long story short: these voters aren't deluded about the harm untrammeled corporate power can cause, but they consider government an even greater evil, since they perceive that government handouts go to "the people who get ahead without putting in the hard work." And then "(t)he result is a vicious cycle of dysfunction. Anti-government anger leads to deregulation of industry, which is then free to inflict more havoc, which intensifies the sense of loss and anger, which is then directed primarily at the government." (As an aside, I don't agree that Thomas Frank doesn't delve into "the lived experience of conservatives"; actually, I came away with more respect for right-wingers after I read it.)

Frank Stricker at Counterpunch asks whether we can really bring back all the factory jobs we've outsourced. Short answer: no. Somewhat longer answer: we won't bring back 31,000,000 factory jobs, but creating 10,000,000 more jobs would get us closer to full employment. How do you do that? You spend taxpayer money on physical infrastructure work and on public education. "Neither candidate has made a major commitment in these areas," he concludes, and you can see why neither would make a move to invest in public education -- they'd fear losing big donor money from the charter school crowd.

Sarah Anderson at OtherWords notes that even though Presidential candidates from both parties bash fat-cat banksters, they present very few effective solutions to the problem. Why, it's almost like that's the idea! Even the Obama Administration's CEO pay reporting requirement doesn't have "real teeth" in it, she writes, because it doesn't (for example) link CEO pay practices to government contracting. That could be something the next President tries to do (if that President's name is Clinton, of course -- you think Donald Trump would even think of something like this?), though we'll hear nothing but nanny state and violates our rights from the pro-bankster waaambulance. Even though the Obama Administration hasn't done enough to curb their power, you'd still think they'd have shame by now.

Physicist Vandana Shiva reminds us that we don't need genetically-engineered "golden rice" to deliver Vitamin A. You may well take issue with Dr. Shiva's list of foods that can give you your RDA of Vitamin A, a list that includes "one carrot" and "one mango," by saying, well, you can't grow carrots and mangos wherever you like. But the truth is only that you can't grow these things en masse wherever you like, and growing food the corporate way is not the only way to grow food. Big ag corporations hate crop diversity, because it's harder than just growing the same thing for acres on end, and because it doesn't redistribute income upward to executives like growing the same thing for acres on end does.

Ho hum, big dirty energy corporations paid for meetings between their representatives and Republican Attorneys General in August of 2015, and there they collaborated on a plan to sue the Obama Administration to stop the EPA's Clean Power Plan. It's not the collaboration that upsets me, of course -- it's the massive six-figure donations the Republican Attorneys General Association, and though it may not upset John Roberts that these corporations weren't stupid enough (as far as we know!) to spell out what they wanted in exchange for what they were giving, we'd be schmucks to pretend it's just coincidence. Didn't Donald Trump tell us that politicians who take big donations "do whatever the hell you want them to"?

Finally, James Hohmann at the Washington Post asks if President Obama "squandered an opportunity" by nominating Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. The matter is actually far more interesting to contemplate than I expected -- NOW's President, for example, says that if Mr. Obama had appointed, say, a black woman instead, not only would the liberal wing of the Democratic party have been more galvanized in support, but right-wingers would have attacked her "viciously," thus exposing the real aim of the Republican Party. I'm not sure Republican aims can be any more exposed than they are, and I'm certainly not opposed to a Justice Garland -- moderates tend to drift leftward once they're on the Supreme Court. But Mr. Hohmann collects the most evidence yet that the Garland nomination is just another example of Barack Obama playing 13-dimensional chess with himself.

Action: religious freedom, and GMO labeling.

You've no doubt had your fill by now of folks like Donald Trump saying they'll prevent Muslims from coming to America. Well, H.R. 5207, the Freedom of Religion Act, would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act so that "an alien may not be denied admission to the United States because of the alien’s religion or lack of religious beliefs." The good news? This bill already has 112 House sponsors! The bad news? Only one, soon-to-be-retired Richard Hanna of New York, is a Republican. Wasn't it David Frum who said, many years ago, that Democrats hate their base while Republicans live in fear of theirs? Maybe they're not afraid of their base so much as they use their base. Whatever the case, clearly we're not shaming Republicans enough -- 9.11 happened on their President's watch, and now they do nothing but stoke fear and rage against anyone with brown skin who doesn't wear a cross around their neck. So Americans United for the Separation of Church and State helps you tell your Reps to support H.R. 5207, and thus support real religious freedom in America.

Meanwhile, you know that President Obama signed Congress's GMO-labeling "compromise" -- the one which might result in a strong federal GMO-labeling standard down the road, but which kills Vermont's GMO-labeling standard, and any others states might implement, right now. But you also know that most Americans would prefer knowing whether or not their food contains genetically-modified organisms, and that some corporations (including Kellogg's, General Mills, and Pepsi) have started to voluntarily label their GMO foods. So Consumers Union helps you tell corporations to support real labeling of GMO foods. People don't want to see toll-free phone numbers, website URLs, or QR codes when they want to know if their food has GMOs in it -- they want a simple label in plain English, like, you know, "this food contains genetically-modified organisms." A lot of corporations (the same ones who donated all that campaign cash so they could get their "compromise" bill passed in the first place!) would like to get away with labels that aren't really labels. But that's, you know, cheating, and why should we tolerate that?

Action: GMO labeling, and banning atrazine.

Well, the House followed the Senate's lead in passing the GMO "labeling" bill that will allow big food corporations to "label" their genetically-modified food in a way that looks suspiciously like not labeling genetically-modified food, and will also pre-empt Vermont's actual GMO labeling law to boot -- and then President Obama did what I expected him to do, which was declare victory and retreat by signing the bill. What else are Democrats good at, after all? But the fight isn't over -- the bill does compel the FDA to issue a national GMO labeling standard one day, and when they do, we'll be on that like white on rice. In the meantime, quite a few food processing corporations have actually bowed to popular pressure and started voluntarily putting GMO labels on their products, so Just Label It helps you tell seven big food processing corporations to put clear GMO labels on their food. Not all of them have decided to use GMO labels, nor have they committed to using clear ones, versus the QR codes or website addresses you'd need to jump through hoops to read. So let them know we're watching them.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell the EPA to ban the weed-killer atrazine from use on American crops. Why? Because the EPA's own scientific assessment has found high enough levels of atrazine, the second most-used herbicide in America, in rivers and streams that it negatively impacts fish and mammals -- this after UCal-Berkeley biologist Tyrone Hayes found that atrazine disrupted the sexual development of some amphibians. If that doesn't impress you, then consider that you are also a mammal -- not all that different from other mammals, really, except perhaps in self-importance -- and consider, also, that studies from earlier this millenium linked atrazine with delayed menopause, gestational diabetes, and birth defects in humans. It's no use arguing that banning atrazine would raise food prices, as if all attempts to improve our world must be held hostage to food prices, or as if a CEO couldn't break off some executive salary to keep food prices low, nor is it any use arguing that we'll just never come up with something to replace atrazine, when this is America, home of the can-do spirit.

Around the table: a sad truth of the Sanders revolution, and other stories.

Eli Clifton and Joshua Holland at Slate suggest that Bernie Sanders squandered a huge chunk of his $200 million-plus mostly-small-donor campaign haul on "ads, consultants, and a dispiritingly conventional campaign." "Every dollar that went into broadcast ads, digital strategizing, or Democratic consultants’ pockets was one less for local campaign staff or get-out-the-vote efforts," they write, and I bet that sure sounds familiar to you. The rest is a cautionary tale about mainstreaming your revolution -- getting folks with "establishment" connections also means, in the words of one commenter, "redistribut(ing) income up, from working and middle class Americans to upper middle class consultants and ad makers."

From Chris Morran at The Consumerist we learn that the GMO "labeling" bill Congress rammed through last week is even worse than we thought. For example: "(t)he bill also says that an item is only to be labeled as genetically modified if the modification could not have occurred through 'conventional breeding,'" which suggests that big ag corporations won't label genetically-modified foods they could have raised conventionally but didn't. And the Rev. Jackson also reminds us that if you do have a smartphone, but live where internet connections aren't reliable, you still won't be able to read that damn QR code.

Corporations are starting to push back against the Treasury Department's anti-corporate tax inversion rules. I'll summarize for you: whine whine whine affects our business whine whine whine unintended consequences whine whine whine substantial disruption whine whine whine huge impact whine whine whine time-consuming. Our Best and Boldest Entrepreneurs, Ladies and Gentlemen! (Seriously, though -- if "decades of settled law" have resulted in corporations avoiding their tax obligations on this scale, then some "disruption" is absolutely necessary.)

Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post's WonkBlog covers the recent finding that states that have legalized medicinal marijuana are seeing drops in Medicare spending on drugs. Dig this flatugasm from a corporation manufacturing synthetic THC, insisting that moving marijuana (which, as you know, contains natural THC) from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3 (where it'd still be illegal, but more available for research) would increase "the abuse potential in terms of the need to grow and cultivate substantial crops of marijuana in the United States." Setting aside this corporation's naked self-interest: seriously? More research would increase the potential for abuse? Why, you'd never know that knowledge came from research!

Benjamin Balthaser at In These Times interviews an organizer from a labor union comprising both Israeli and Palestinian citizens. Organizing in the settlements, of course, is extremely difficult, when employers can "fire" you simply by canceling your permit to get into the West Bank, or get rid of "troublemakers" just by calling them terrorists. Still, the rule of law can be of great help even when law enforcement isn't -- a 2008 court decision gave Palestinian workers access to better pay and benefits if they work for an Israeli corporation, which opened the way to organizing the Zarafty Garage.

Finally, Hanna Rosin at NPR describes how the town of Aarhus, in Denmark, "Helped Turn Young Muslims Away from ISIS." Instead of shutting down mosques or revoking passports, Aarhus told the Danish citizens who had gone to Syria to join ISIS that "they were welcome to come home, and that when they did, they would receive help" in re-integrating into Danish society. But I guess right-wingers would call this sort of thing "weakling work," as if the Aarhus principles hadn't already been used successfully by King and Gandhi -- and, more to the point, as if dancing around telling everyone how tough you are all the time, the way right-wingers do, isn't weak.

Action: government spying, and GMO labeling.

As you know, the Senate failed to pass a John McCain-authored amendment giving the FBI power to use National Security Letters to spy on your browsing, emailing, chatting, and texting histories -- but they only failed to advance the amendment by two votes, and they could bring it up again literally any minute, so the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell your Senators to protect our Fourth Amendment rights and reject the McCain amendment. As usual, supporters of the amendment hide behind technicalities -- the FBI would still need a warrant to access your content, but don't delude yourselves into thinking the FBI wouldn't find out virtually everything about you from your internet metadata. And don't believe the hype that National Security Letters are "precise" tools; they allow law enforcement to gather data without a court order, and without establishing that they're getting the data to investigate an actual terrorist suspect. Certainly don't believe the hype that getting a warrant from a judge is a pain in the ass. Law and order in America is supposed to protect the innocent, even at the expense of the guilty. Free people understand that -- and they also understand that the roots of terrorism lie in an economy that exploits other nations and redistributes worker income to bosses.

Meanwhile, despite our best efforts, the Senate passed that GMO "labeling" bill by a filibuster-proof margin -- but not a veto-proof margin. (The Senate vote was 63-30, but they'd need 67 votes to override a veto.) Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell President Obama to veto the GMO "labeling" bill. I'm putting "labeling" in ironic quotation marks for good reason: the bill doesn't actually mandate proper GMO labeling, but allows food-producing corporations to put "labels" like QR codes (which you may not have the smartphone app to read) or website addresses (because you routinely remember website addresses from supermarket labels, right?) or 800 phone numbers (because you're never in a hurry at the market, are you?), instead of the simple "this product contains genetically-modified organisms," which you don't need a smartphone or a laptop to read. Mr. Obama long ago said he wanted real GMO labeling on food, but I don't believe he ever meant it -- given his USDA Secretary's overt support for things like QR codes, Mr. Obama is more likely to declare the Senate's bill "the real GMO labeling bill we've all waited for," never mind the actual GMO labeling Vermont is now doing (and which the Senate bill would pre-empt). Still, duty is duty, and our duty is to tell him to keep his word and veto the bill.

Action: concerning GMO labeling, discrimination, and privacy.

The Senate will vote on S. 2609, the alleged "bipartisan" "compromise" on "voluntary" GMO labeling, today, so both Consumers Union and Food and Water Watch still help you tell your Senator to allow real GMO labeling to continue (in Vermont, at least) by rejecting S. 2609. It is also possible that the Senate will attach S. 2609 as an amendment to S. 764 -- which you may recall as the bill that defunded Planned Parenthood. That's a bit of a head-scratcher, frankly, but no matter: we want real GMO labeling, not another "voluntary" system no food-producing corporation will use, and certainly not a "voluntary" system that allows corporations to put a QR code or a web address on a package, rather than the words "this product contains genetically-modified organisms." And no complaining from your Senators about how "patchwork" approaches (like the one that allows Vermont to label GMO foods) "confuse" people. You know what confuses people? QR codes, web addresses, and "voluntary" labeling. And it's funny how right-wingers want our federal government out of our lives -- until we want to know what's in our food.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state legislature advanced a bill that would actually protect gays and transgendered folks from discrimination for the first time -- but one Senator, Lisa Baker (R-20), has apparently asked for more time to "study the impact" of the bill. This reminds me of that time in 2004 that Steelers coach Bill Cowher challenged the spot on a Patriots completion, aiming to put the ball on the Steelers' 6 instead of the Steelers' 4; I scratched my head wondering why two yards could possibly have meant that much to him, especially so close to the end zone, until I realized that the Patriots were marching up the field pretty much at will and this challenge gave him the chance to take the wind from their sails (which he did). Well, Sen. Baker is trying to do the same thing here -- trying to stop the momentum of a bill that has substantial bipartisan support. But what we tolerate in football, we shouldn't tolerate in politics -- Sen. Baker doesn't need to "study the impact" of this bill, because the impact will be that gays and transgendered folks will be able to fight discrimination against them a lot better than they can now. So Freedom for All Americans helps you tell Sen. Baker to stop trying to derail the state's anti-discrimination bill.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Department of Justice to thwart FBI efforts to exempt its biometric database from the privacy protections all citizens enjoy, then both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Demand Progress help you do that. The FBI's biometric database, as you may know, consists mainly of fingerprints and photographs of faces and tattoos -- but this is an era where facial recognition software just isn't very good, and quite a few folks in the database haven't been charged with a crime, or, indeed, even suspected of a crime. And if you're in that database, why shouldn't you know about it? The FBI says you shouldn't know about it because it'd hamper their investigations. You know what else hampers investigations? The U.S. Constitution, whose Fourth and Fifth Amendments help craft a legal system where you're innocent until proven guilty. Does the FBI think we should get rid of the Constitution, too? (Perhaps I have loosed a demon by asking that.) And your presence in that database could keep you from getting a job. Again, why shouldn't you know about that?

Action: government spying, GMO labeling, and discrimination.

As you may remember, Sens. McCain (R-AZ), Burr (R-NC), and Cornyn (R-TX) sponsored an amendment to a peripherally-related appropriations bill that would have expanded the FBI's power to collect information including browser histories without a warrant; the amendment failed by a mere two votes, but Senate Majority Leader/One True Real and Awesome Super-American President Mitch McConnell has said he'll bring it up for a vote again, and he might do that very, very soon. Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell your Senators to reject this literally unwarranted expansion of government spying power. It does seem awfully likely that Mr. McConnell will be able to fearmonger two more Democrats into voting for this measure -- I mean, these are Democrats we're talking about, who spent the better part of two weeks filibustering and sitting in for gun-control measures dependent on expanded government spying power. But again: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want.

Meanwhile, less than a week before Vermont's GMO labeling law goes into effect, the Senate plans a vote on S. 2609, yet another bill that would nullify state efforts to label GMOs and create yet another "voluntary" labeling system for genetically-modified organisms in food that no Big Ag or food processing corporation will ever use. (We know this because the four-digit PLU codes for produce can be five-digit codes headed up by a "9" -- for organic produce, I'm sure you've seen them -- or an "8," for GMO produce. Ever seen one with an "8"? Me neither.) S. 2609 would further let corporations make you jump through entirely non-voluntary hoops to find out if your food has GMOs in it -- instead of simply writing "this food has genetically-modified organisms" on the package like a civilized person would do, you'd get a website URL, a QR code, or even a damn phone number. They're calling this a "bipartisan" "compromise," but who cares? Regular folks like you and I don't care about "bipartisan" government; we only care about good government. Use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Senators and demand they reject S. 2607.

Finally, not all the news is bad -- the Pennsylvania Senate's Urban Affairs and Housing Committee has advanced SB 974, which would prevent discriminating in employment, housing, and public accommodations against good Pennsylvanians just because they're gay or transgendered. The full Senate may take a crack at it this week, hence Freedom for All Americans helps you tell your PA state legislators to support SB 974 and thus support freedom from discrimination for all good citizens of the Commonwealth. (The state House companion bill is HB 1510.) Naturally, right-wingers have noticed that "public accommodations" would include public restrooms, and are thus whipping their miserable-but-redeemable lot into a ZOMG TEH GAYZ IN TEH BATHROOMZ WITH TEH CHILDRENZ!!!! rage-orgy. (Rorgy? Nah, too hard to say.) Remember that the vast majority of child molestation in America is committed a) by men and b) against girls. Thus, you'd think the far right would more strenuously object to the presence of men in any public place where girls might reasonably congregate. They haven't, of course, so I presume they think it's just not that effective a way to propagate hate.

Action: GMO labeling, and payday lenders.

Vermont's GMO labeling law goes into effect on July 1, so, naturally, Congress wants to stop it. And they know most Americans support labeling genetically-modified organisms in food, so your Congressfolk won't say they'd just prefer to ignore the people's will and do the bidding of their Big Ag and big food donors instead. Hence my state's allegedly-conservative junior Senator wrote back to me last month, "I do not believe that a customer should be prohibited from knowing whether or not their food was bioengineered. I am, however, concerned about a 'patchwork' approach where food labeling requirements and definitions vary by state. A patchwork approach could lead to scenarios where a food is considered bioengineered in one state but not in another. Moreover, this could confuse customers and could hurt smaller food businesses that lack regulatory expertise but want to sell their products in multiple states." That answer's got it all -- it takes small businesses hostage, it says labeling will "confuse" you, it lays the ten-dollar word "bioengineering" on you, and it derides local control as a "patchwork" approach. And here you thought "local control" was an actual conservative value or something! So Consumers Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to overrule state efforts to label GMOs.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to rein in the notorious abuses of payday lenders, then both CREDO and Stop Payday Lenders still help you do that. You know the drill by now: payday lenders target Americans in financial trouble with high-interest loans that can easily roll over into the next paycheck, and the next paycheck, and so on and so on ad nauseam, until you're trapped in a triple-digit loan you can't get out of. I have no use for people who respond then don't get in financial trouble, as if banksters and their ilk don't destroy jobs as often as they can, as if we should always blame victims and never blame predators. But we should also attend very closely one simple matter that the payday loan industry and their hacks would prefer we ignore: that more debt makes people less free -- less free to raise families, less free to improve oneself, less free to pursue leisure activities, and less free to make a difference in the world, which last item is our true birthright as Americans. So when we pursue "free" markets über alles -- when we let banksters and their like block our government's regulation of their activities on our behalf, so they can put more people and corporations in deeper debt to them -- then we make America less free, because "free" markets über alles only means freedom for that market's biggest actors.

Around the table: what *can't* Donald Trump make worse? And other burning questions.

Ain't nothing so bad that Donald Trump can't make it worse: hot on the heels of alleging people had "congratulated" him on "being right" mere hours after the Orlando shootings, Donald Trump suggests that maybe President Obama was somehow in on it. Without having the guts to just come out and say so, of course! Two things: one, constantly complaining about people who do not string together the words "radical Islamic terrorism" is the very soul of political correctness. Two, just as George W. Bush did not plan, execute, or allow 9.11 to happen, Barack Obama did not plan, execute, or allow the Orlando attack to happen; "people can't believe" these theories because they're too stupid to believe.

The "liberal" media seems obsessed with the notion that the Orlando shooter was able to buy guns even though the FBI had questioned him three times in connection with two separate cases.. Note well, however, that Mr. Mateen was not actually convicted of anything before Sunday morning. And just as we should not shut down websites accused of copyright theft, we should not deny gun purchases to folks merely because they've been accused of something (and the FBI didn't even go that far with Mr. Mateen), not least because anyone can accuse anyone of anything at any time for any reason. (I'm no great fan of taking away people's rights after they've been convicted of crimes, either, as I've repeatedly noted when discussing laws taking the vote away from felons.)

Alex Press, writing at The Nation, reminds us that the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" won't help farmers, but will help seed-making big ag corporations. I mean, of course you know corporations will benefit and people won't, but you may have forgotten that corporations patent their GMO seeds, and then contractually bar farmers from ever replanting seeds they could harvest from the plants the original seeds produced -- exactly the thing that has helped drive so many Indian farmers to suicide. Now, they couldn't force that on other TPP signatories, but they got the next best thing -- patents for "inventions derived from plants," and you could drive a Mack truck through that loophole.

The lead story on the excellent Daily Kos Elections blog yesterday morning was how unexpectedly close Survey USA found the race in Utah's 4th Congressional district -- they actually have the Democrat leading, and by six points! -- but the bigger story may be that Survey USA also finds the Presidential contest tied in Utah, with Libertarian Gary Johnson in third place at 13%. Utah hasn't gone Democrat in a Presidential election since LBJ in 1964, so maybe they'll come back to Mr. Trump once the Hillary-hate ads start running, but if Utah Republicans really want to assert themselves, they could do worse than supporting Mr. Johnson.

Finally, Bloomberg visits "The 100-Year-Old Man Who Lives in the Future," the future being situated "in the middle of nowhere in Florida." Read and you'll be amazed how Mr. Fresco's utopian vision hasn't evolved over the years -- he thinks a computer can distribute resources more equitably than people because they're not "susceptible to corruption," though their programmers might be -- and I figure the relative absence of money has profoundly slowed the building even of yesterday's dreams. Still, I give him credit for sticking to his vision, much of which is pretty useful (roundish buildings) or worth the striving whether you reach it or not (getting past the need for money).

Action: GMO labeling, and lead poisoning.

Vermont's GMO-labeling bill goes into effect in a mere seven weeks, and word on the street is that the nefarious anti-GMO labeling bill, S. 2609, may come back to the Senate floor before then. It's proponents perhaps believe that once one state starts mandating GMO labeling, corporations will simply put the label on everything they have, lest a can of corn intended for sale in New Hampshire accidentally falls off the truck in Vermont. They may believe this because big ag corporations tell it to them -- though, of course, food labels are not made by monks with quill pens. These are our biggest, brightest, boldest entrepreneurs -- who never seem to lack lame excuses for why people can't have nice things. So Food and Water Watch still helps you tell your Senators to reject S. 2609, which would make GMO labeling voluntary like that's ever worked before, and instead support S. 2621, which would make GMO labeling mandatory. This bill could come back on its own, or as an amendment to another bill; however it happens, we need to be ready.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to help keep kids safe from lead by passing S. 2631, the Lead-Safe Housing for Kids Act, then Color of Change still helps you do that. Four million children currently live in housing that gets some level of federal assistance, and any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, so this is pull-the-baby-out-of-the-fire-now time. And S. 2631 would, as you may recall, set lead limits much lower than they're currently set for federal housing, and would also mandate the Department of Housing and Urban Development (or HUD) to do far more thorough inspections of federal properties before letting families with children move in. The bill would also end the exemption for "zero bedroom" housing -- folks live in plenty of places that don't have proper bedrooms, after all. I struggle to understand what objection one would have to protecting children from lead poisoning in federal housing. Well, OK, understanding their reasoning, such as it is, isn't the problem -- understanding how they sleep at night is.

Action: cluster bombs, GMO mushrooms, and methane emissions.

Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your House Rep to help end cluster bomb production and use abroad. Typically soldiers drop cluster bombs from planes, and then these bombs shoot munitions off in multiple directions (now there's a precise instrument!), but they also frequently don't shoot off, and sit there for years on end, essentially a landmine dropped from the sky. Now, if you're of the mind that we should hold onto any weapon we can make, note a couple of things: one, that cluster bombs are notoriously unreliable weapons as described above, and two, that federal law already prohibits their export (unless they're unusually reliable), as well as their use in civilian areas. I guess the question for cluster bomb supporters then becomes: how flagrantly do you want to violate the law, and how many civilians must die in order to soothe your bottomless rage? And while the United States has not signed the international cluster bomb ban, the Convention on Cluster Munitions (or CCM), over 100 nations have -- which means we're behind the curve. Is that what America is like?

Meanwhile, the FDA is mulling the approval of yet another genetically-modified food, this one a mushroom genetically modified to -- produce higher yields? Withstand its natural enemies? Hell, even withstand some proprietary pesticide? No, not even: these mushrooms are whiter. I guess someone decided that folks would be more amenable to eating mushrooms if they weren't so dark. Haven't they tasted mushrooms? It's either your thing or it's not, and no artificial brightening is going to change that. Apples that don't brown, mushrooms that are brighter -- what's next? Redder strawberries? Greener cucumbers? I mean, the follies are endless -- and not conducive to our health, frankly, since (for example) we might actually want to know if we've left our apples out too long before we feed them to our children. Hence USPIRG joins with MoveOn to help you tell the FDA to "perform substantial and meaningful safety tests" on these mushrooms before approving them. Of course, I'd prefer that the FDA reject them -- the folks behind GMO foods aren't even trying to convince us they're better than what we've got.

Finally, the EPA proposed new methane standards for gas and oil drilling back in August, and may finalize them any day now, but there's still time to tell the EPA to strengthen these standards, as the Environmental Defense Fund helps you do. The EPA's standards, as they look now, will do more to protect us from methane emissions than our government has ever done before -- and you no doubt know that methane emissions drive climate change far more "efficiently" than coal emissions do -- but the standards could force gas and oil drilling corporations to monitor for methane leaks more frequently, and by removing more exemptions to the monitoring requirements. Why force corporations to monitor their own activities more? The cynical might respond that's because the EPA is always so underfunded that it can't possibly conduct enough of its own inspections, and while EPA underfunding remains a persistent issue, it's more important to remember that a fossil fuel corporation should be the first to know if it's got a problem, and should be the first to fix the problem. After all, that's what we expect from ourselves.

Around the table: the "real Donald Trump," and other absurdities.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted It Except a Sentient Life Form" file: Donald Trump's handlers are now telling the Republican establishment that the billionaire has been "projecting an image" which they should not confuse with The Real Donald Trump, who is exactly like them. And then Mr. Trump tells a Connecticut that no way no how is he going to "tone it down," which I presume is also part of the scam. Seriously, though, at the point they try to persuade people that they should ignore bad behavior in public precisely because it's calculated to be drama, they argue for a politics in which we shouldn't make any decisions using evidence, but rather look for some "ironic" "calculation" lurking behind the evidence. And that's not happening, not in my America.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe issues executive order re-enfranchising some 200,000 convicted felons. His order only applies to those who have completed their sentences, and certainly the timing is a bit suspicious, but then again the drive to disenfranchise felons in the first place was also largely a matter of partisanship. And I can't abide the critics who say his order is too broad, because these felons should never have lost the right to vote at all. If society assigns you a debt to repay, society doesn't get to punish you again just because one party wants to win, or some folks want to ventilate their rage a little more.

Surprise, surprise, Philadelphia's Mayor wants to fund universal preschool with a soda tax -- and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have the reactions you'd expect. Though my right-wing readers will likely find this surprising again, I don't like the soda tax either -- as Mr. Sanders says, it hits the poor harder than it hits the wealthy, which is exactly the opposite of how taxes ought to be. And not only are there better ways to fund universal preschool, there's a better way to fight childhood obesity -- like ending the massive welfare handouts for big ag corporations that allow cheap high-fructose corn syrup to exist, and allow soda to remain at literally the same price since 1981. I know Mrs. Clinton would never advocate for such a thing, and I'm afraid Mr. Sanders wouldn't, either, which is why we went with the corporate tax angle.

Adam Johnson, who's proving quite a find for FAIR, tells us to "Forget 'Bernie Bros' -- The Worst Trolls Work in Corporate Media." I don't know about "worst" trolls -- there are some pretty bad trolls out there! -- but the "liberal" media columnist justifying a ridiculous headline by saying "provocative headlines provoke" is, as Mr. Johnson says, the "the living, breathing definition of trolling," because it seeks to manipulate rather than inform. I tend to avert my eyes from headlines saying someone "called out" so-and-so, or headlines ending in "and it was glorious," for pretty much the same reason -- I'd rather have authentic emotional reactions to what I read.

Finally, Erin Sagen, writing at Yes!, discusses some of the challenges farmers face as they try to save seeds in a sustainable manner. This is a big deal not just because of big corporate "suicide seeds," or seeds designed not to yield more or better crops but simply to withstand proprietary pesticides, or big ag lawsuits against farmers whose seeds have been contaminated by GMO seeds and are thus "guilty" of "intellectual property theft" -- it's also a big deal because big corporate farming, in its quest to redistribute farmer wealth upward to its executives, frowns on things like crop rotation and crop diversity as "costs." I long for the day when "cost-benefit analyses" accurately represent the real cost of what corporations do to our economy, our civilization, and our lives.

Action: GMO crop regulation, FBI whistleblower protection, and food menu labeling.

This U.S. Department of Agriculture may be as slavish a servant of big agricultural corporations as we have ever seen, but it still has lawfully-mandated duties, and luckily these include taking public comments on their proposed changes to the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service's new genetically-modified crop approval process. And their proposal -- surprise, surprise! -- stinks pretty awful, in that it seems to have been formulated by folks who don't understand that corporations don't create GMO crops to increase yields or promote healthier food, but to withstand ever-higher doses of their own proprietary pesticides. The APHIS proposal doesn't consider a lot of the ill effects of GMO crops, including increased weed resistance to ever-expanding use of pesticides, and GMO seed propensity to drift into fields that don't grow GMO crops. Food and Water Watch helps you tell the USDA to put health-related issues front and center when considering whether to approve GMO crops.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced S. 2390, the FBI Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, and the full Senate will soon consider it. S. 2390 would prevent the FBI from retaliating against whistleblowers, and would give whistleblowers the right to have their case reviewed by an Inspector General, the Attorney General, or a federal court. If you're aware of the Obama Administration's "war on whistleblowers" -- a war that has not only claimed good Americans blowing the whistle on medical device problems, CIA torture, and warrantless wiretapping, but also many good FBI officers -- then you probably see that FBI whistleblowers need more protection. And the Senate, at least, also seems to see this need -- S. 2390 has 11 sponsors, including lead sponsor Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and 10 other Senators evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Senator to help government workers who want to expose corruption and wrongdoing by supporting S. 2390.

Finally, the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) have been working on restaurant menu labeling guidelines since 2010 -- which would, among other things, include information about calories, fat, sodium, and sugar -- but they still haven't finished the job, so Moms Rising helps you tell the FDA and HHS to enact the most vigorous restaurant menu food labeling guidelines possible. This isn't some outrageous Big Gummint mandate, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of big food corporations (including Starbucks and Panera) have voluntarily started such labeling, and that some states and municipalities have enacted their own mandates. I suppose the more resourceful troublemakers among us will complain that people aren't literate enough about these things generally so-what's-the-point, but naturally the more scientific studies tell us that folks actually do make better choices with better information. Giving folks stuff to read promotes literacy, who'da thunk it? And, of course, we don't abide folks trying to convince us to let the perfect murder the good.

Action: auditing the Pentagon, and labeling GMO foods.

H.R. 942/S. 327, the Audit the Pentagon Act, would compel the Department of Defense to account for how it spends taxpayer money, also known as our money. Tales of Pentagon waste and fraud are legion, yet the Defense Department doesn't properly account for the money it spends (or wastes, as the case may be), though we actually do have laws that tell them to do that. As it happens, the House and Senate versions would approach their stated aim differently -- the House version would simply cut discretionary defense spending by half a percentage point if the Defense Department doesn't produce a clean audit, while also preventing the Secretary of Defense from trying to achieve that cut out of soldiers' pay or health care, but the Senate version is rather more convoluted, imposing consequences for failing to produce an audit that include more supervision of defense spending and the Defense Department being unable to move funds around after 2019. Maybe it'll work, but why be an engineer when a hammer will do the job? So CREDO helps you support the House version of the Audit the Pentagon Act.

Meanwhile, with the various House and Senate versions of the so-called Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act dead for the moment, S. 2621, the Biotechnology Food Labeling Uniformity Act, would require the FDA to mandate that all genetically-modified organisms in food to be labeled as such. Labeling could occur in four different ways under Section 2 of the bill, and none of these ways, you'll note, are the QR codes you can't read without a smartphone -- all four ways are, in fact, easily decipherable by anyone who can read. The bill does contain a few exemptions (for food in which genetically-engineered organisms comprise less than 0.9% of the food's weight, or for food produced using genetically-engineered vaccines or enzymes), but while these exemptions may wind up exempting the entire cheese industry, for example, the bill is still tighter with regard to exemptions than Vermont's law -- which would be nullified, if S. 2621 passes. Hence Just Label It helps you tell your Senators to pass stronger GMO labeling legislation than they've thus far considered.

Action: GMO labeling, email privacy, and the "liberal" media.

Word on the street is that the Senate will vote this morning on S. 2609, the Senate bill that would establish yet another voluntary-labeling regimen for food containing genetically-modified organisms and would prevent states from enforcing their own mandatory labeling regimens. Plus, this "voluntary" labeling system wouldn't use, you know, words, like you'd expect a label to do, but QR codes, which you may or may not have the technology to read when you're in the store. Democrat weaklings probably think QR codes are a clever way to trick more big ag corporations voluntarily label their GMOs. This bill made the Senate Legislative Calendar a little over two weeks ago without so much as a committee vote, and I couldn't even find this bill on Congress.gov until lately; why, it's almost as if they've got something to hide. Well, their secret is out, and Consumers Union helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject "voluntary" GMO-labeling regimens that will continue to keep consumers in the dark.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte to allow a vote on H.R. 699, the Email Privacy Act, then Save the Fourth still helps you do that. H.R. 699 now has an astounding 312 sponsors, including lead sponsor Kevin Yoder, Republican of Kansas's Third District and 194 other Republicans; that not only fulfills Dennis Hastert's stupid "majority of the majority" rule for bill consideration, but represents a veto-proof majority of the House, were President Obama to be so stupid to veto the bill. Moreover, the bill would actually do good things -- it would require our government to get a warrant to read any of our emails, even the ones left on ISP servers; currently our government can take possession of any email left on a server for over 180 days, under the notion that it's been "abandoned," a notion that made sense 30 years ago but makes none now. Naturally, a popular, bipartisan bill that does good works on behalf of government's owners, the American people, can't even get a vote. So let's remind them whom they serve.

Finally, Presente helps you tell CBS to fire its CEO, Les Moonves, after he said that Donald Trump's clown show "may not be good for America," but is very good for CBS's coffers. I do not understand why the "liberal" media seems only to care about money. Do they not care about protestors getting the crap kicked out of them by Trump blueshirts while Mr. Trump eggs them on? Do they not care about all the insults and bullying and whining coming from someone who aims to lead and represent the greatest country on Earth? Do they not understand that the Trump campaign would be long over by now if they, the so-called "liberal" media, didn't cover everything his immature antics like they were Very Serious Events to Be Discussed in a Very Serious Manner? I worry, of course, that the answers to these three questions, respectively, are "no," "no," and "yes, and they don't care," but I guess I really would prefer to believe that our "liberal" media elites are so drunk on post-modern irony that they really do not see their own decadence. So let's help them see.

UPDATE. S. 2609 failed on a cloture vote this morning; 49 Senators voted against cloture, including seven Republicans -- though one of them was Mitch McConnell, and his vote against cloture allows him (as Majority Leader) to bring the bill up again. So the anti-GMO labeling bill is dead -- for now. But those of you who mobilized on very short notice made a difference today.

Action: free speech, ANWR drilling, and GMO labeling.

Should you be investigated by your government merely for exercising your First Amendment right to redress grievances and assemble peaceably? I kid, of course: y'all know the short answer to that is "no" and the long answer is "hell no!" And yet the FBI and the DHS have tracked, infiltrated, and spied upon Occupy and Black Lives Matter (among others) under the pretense of conducting "counterterrorism." Of course, anyone "terrorized" by Occupy or Black Lives Matter needs a therapist, not an enabler. So the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to investigate government surveillance of activists exercising their First Amendment rights. It's a conundrum for the Republicans who control both committees: they won't want to investigate, because dirty hippies, but then again they might want to investigate, because Obama. It's hard out there for a pimp. But if you do the right thing by your country and your constituents, you don't need to be a pimp.

Meanwhile, S. 2341 would designate nearly 1.6 million coastal acres of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness under the Wilderness Act, thus protecting those acres from oil drilling, since the Wilderness Act prohibits the road-building and mechanized-transport activity oil drilling requires. Drilling for oil in ANWR has been an obsession of the right for many years now, but frankly there's much less oil in ANWR than they typically claim, so drilling in ANWR would have done little but make make certain oil producing corporations (even) richer. I can't even say the good citizens of Alaska (who get dividends out of the Alaska Permanent Fund, funded by Alaskan oil revenues) would be see more than marginally bigger payouts, and preferring that over keeping the land, the air, and the water clean (not to mention preserving the area's biological diversity) would be short-term thinking. The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from the nefarious effects of oil drilling.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell the U.S. Department of Agriculture that the citizens deserve mandatory GMO labeling, not the hifalutin buffoonery of QR "smart codes." Why can Democrats never sustain electoral victory, even when Republicans dump it in their lap? One major reason is that they think they're so damn smart, and the USDA's apparent preference for QR codes over a label that simply says "made with genetically-modified organisms" exemplifies that arrogance -- no, arrogance is what it is, even if the person being arrogant wears glasses and speaks softly. But you can't read a QR label unless you have a particular app on your smartphone. You know what's easier than figuring out how to get this app on your smartphone and then figuring out how to use it? Reading the words "made with genetically-modified organisms," that's what. And who are mostly likely not to have smartphones in the first place? Poor folks, disabled folks, and seniors -- basically, three longtime traditional Democratic constituencies. Democratic politicians: so smart, they're stupid.

Action: in which we demand justice for a murdered activist, public service from the "liberal" media, and GMO labeling from Congress.

Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to prod the Honduran government into investigating the murder of indigenous/ environmental rights leader Berta Cáceres, and condition future aid to Honduras on the results of that investigation. Ms. Cáceres, one of the co-founders of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPINH), is one of at least a hundred activists who have been killed in Honduras since 2010, and Sen. Leahy is right that "no one...is safe in Honduras if they speak out against corruption or abuse of authority." I wouldn't blame you for arguing that Sen. Leahy's outrage is a bit late, given that our government fiddled while the current Honduran government overthrew the democratically-elected but inconveniently-liberal President Zelaya in 2009. Still, conditioning aid on better behavior is a thing worth doing. And if it brings the Big Stick of Bad PR to bear upon then-Secretary of State (and now Presidential candidate) Hillary Clinton, then tough toodles. Doing bad things should bring you bad PR.

Meanwhile, you may have heard about CBS CEO Les Moonves's stream of how-did-he-think-that-would-sound-to-normal-people comments about how much money the Donald Trump Circus makes for CBS. Hence CREDO helps you tell CBS to stop jacking up Trump coverage merely for profit. Those of you who still answer arguments about this with WELL DON'T CORPORATIONS HAVE THE RIGHT TO MAKE AS MUCH MONEY AS THEY WANT HA HA HA COMMUNIST! should attend the word "merely" in the previous sentence -- as the current frontrunner for the Republican Presidential nomination, I expect Donald Trump will get coverage, annoying as that prospect might be. But CBS currently holds over 100 TV and radio broadcasting licenses, all of which mandate that CBS stations "render such broadcasting service as will serve the public interest, convenience, or necessity to the full extent of the privileges herein conferred." See anything in there about making truckfuls of money? Me neither. But they're not supposed to get rich before they serve the public.

Finally, word on the street is that Great and Awesome Real American President Mitch McConnell plans to put S. 2609, a bill that -- like H.R. 1599, the absurdly-titled Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015 -- would create yet another "voluntary" labeling standard for genetically-modified organisms in food (because those have already worked so well!) and would pre-empt any state's effort to mandate GMO labeling within its borders (because that's so conservative!). Hence Just Label It! helps you call Sen. McConnell and tell him to stand up for Americans' actual right to know what's in their food and reject S. 2609 and any of its evil brethren. Mr. McConnell doesn't care what you think, but if we all tell him what we think anyway and he decides to go ahead and do the bidding of big ag donors, he looks bad before the people. I don't blame people for thinking politicians do whatever they want regardless of what we want. But in a democracy it's up to us to punish representatives who won't do their job.

UPDATE. Next-to-last sentence in third paragraph revised so that it makes sense.

Action: government spying, and GMO labeling.

You no doubt know by now that the FBI has obtained a court order mandating that computer corporation Apple hack into an iPhone 5c belonging to one of the suspects in the San Bernardino shootings. You no doubt also know that Apple has publicly announced that it will fight the court order. You may be saying to yourself, self, what's the big deal? We all want to put that guy in jail! But the FBI hasn't merely asked Apple for its cooperation in the investigation, which Apple has by and large given -- the FBI has asked Apple to develop a method to hack into any iPhone, at any time, belonging to anybody, perhaps even you. And ultimately that'll mean not just any iPhone, either, or even any phone, but any device that can connect to the internet, and there'll be a lot more of those devices in the coming years. So the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell your Congressfolk to reject legislative efforts to force corporations to build "backdoors" into their devices.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that Sen. Roberts (R-KS) has introduced the Senate version of H.R. 1599, the so-called Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015, and though Congress.gov doesn't yet list the bill, Sen. Roberts's Agriculture Committee will hold a hearing on the bill later on this week. If this bill is significantly like H.R. 1599, it'll prevent states from passing laws requiring food corporations to label genetically-modified organisms (or GMOs) in their food, and will set up yet another voluntary reporting regime for GMOs, just like the one that's been in place for over a decade that hasn't induced anyone to label any GMOs. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the real GMO labeling regimes that good Americans want, not the corporate "labeling" regimes they hope Americans will be fooled by. I wouldn't wait for a Democratic filibuster on such a bill, or a Presidential veto, either. I would, however, be happy to see a large public outcry induce a filibuster or a veto.

Action: Gynnya McMillen's death, WalMart's spying on its workers, and the latest "compromise" in GMO labeling.

First things first. Lincoln Village Detention Center staff found 16-year-old Gynnya McMillen, of Shelbyville, KY, dead on the morning of January 11 -- and didn't administer CPR upon finding her lifeless body for 11 minutes. State workers put Ms. McMillen in the center after a "domestic dispute" at her mother's house (where she was not living at the time -- she was living in a group home for abused and neglected children in Louisville), this although she had no criminal record nor a history of violent behavior, and once at the center, where she stayed for 14 hours, staff performed a restraint move on her after she wouldn't take off her sweatshirt and then left her in solitary confinement without checking on her every 15 minutes, as was their jobs. After her death, Kentucky officials hastened to state that Ms. McMillen died of "natural causes." If 16-year-olds dying of natural causes after being restrained and then not being checked on all night sounds a little odd to you, you're not alone, and Color of Change helps you tell Kentucky state officials to release all relevant video and information to Ms. McMillen's family.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate whether the FBI has been helping WalMart spy on its employees. Hard to believe, Harry, but Bloomberg has reported that WalMart hired Lockheed Martin to monitor WalMart employee social media accounts and (on upwards of one occasion) worked with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces in re countering worker protests. You know, like the ones where WalMart workers go on one-day walkouts to call attention to their low wages and inconsistent scheduling? Yup, sure sounds like "terrorism" to me. If WalMart feels "terrorized" by its workers agitating for better pay and working conditions, I suppose it can always see a therapist. But this is, sadly, not so much the wave of the future as the wave of the present: you are now a "terrorist" if you want more from your employer than the back of his hand, and in time you will be a "terrorist" if you want more from your economy than the prospect of endless debt servitude to the bankster class. It is happening now, and it is getting worse. But we live in a democracy, so we can still reverse that nefarious trend.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to support actual GMO food labeling, and not the various "voluntary" regimes Congress keeps pretending will satisfy our right to know what's in our food just fine, then Food and Water Watch still helps you do that. H.R. 1599, the so-called Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015, passed the House of Representatives in July, but the Senate never took it up, and didn't even follow up on a threat to include some version of it in December's omnibus spending bill. Still, big ag corporations never sleep, and neither should we -- word on the street is that a "GMO labeling" bill will be introduced in the Senate very shortly that will rely on QR codes (they look like this) to "tell" folks whether their food has genetically-modified organisms in it or not. But you can't scan a QR code without a smartphone, and the corporation would post the QR code on its website, not on a food label! Already so many steps, when all anyone needs to do is put the words "contains genetically-modified ingredients" on a label.

Around the table: how a right-wing anti-labor effort might backfire on them, and other tales.

Shaun Richman, writing at In These Times, explains how the right-wing, "right to work" effort behind the Friedrichs v. CTA case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court could actually have positive consequences for unions everywhere if the Court sides with the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs argue that "every interaction that a union has with its government employer is inherently political" (italics in original), making a union's collection of dues "inherently" "compelled" political speech -- but "every interaction" would include strikes and attempts to bargain for better working conditions that states just so happen to prohibit, and if they're all "inherently political" interactions, then they're also protected free speech under the First Amendment. Then again, I suppose the Roberts Court could just call collecting dues "compelled political speech" but not any of the other things, if the plaintiffs' suit doesn't formally raise them.

NSA's "hacker-in-chief" tells security conference attendees how they might keep folks like him out of their computer systems. I guess you should take that with a grain of salt, but it seems that the more you ask your system to do, and the more people who have password access to that system, the more possible entry points the NSA has. And then a lot of times the NSA will exploit holes good sysadmins can fill by installing patches to their systems promptly and paying attention to the anomalous activity on their networks (via the "out-of-band network tap").

Dave Johnson, writing at the Campaign for America's Future blog, describes how the Johnson-Tyco merger will take even more of the tax burden off corporations and put it on the rest of us. Incredibly, even though Johnson is headquartered in Milwaukee and Tyco in Princeton, the resulting corporation will be Irish, since Tyco "moved" to Ireland in 2013 (after being Swiss from 2008 and a "citizen" of Bermuda from 1997). By the way, Sen. Sanders's way of putting it -- "You can’t be an American company only when you want corporate welfare from American taxpayers or you want lucrative contracts from the federal government. If you want the advantages of being an American company then you can’t run away from America to avoid paying taxes" -- is the right way of putting it.

Surprise, surprise, the Federal Trade Commission has accused DeVry University of deceiving potential students about their job prospects after they graduate. Typical lies-damn-lies-and-statistics, too: DeVry not only allegedly brags about their 90% placement rate without spelling out that that's a rate over 30 years, but also, apparently, by counting graduates as "employed in their majors" when they weren't, counting graduates as "employed in their majors" when they were already employed in their majors, and counting graduates as "not actively seeking work" when "desperately seeking work" would have been more accurate. I wonder if Marco Rubio will ride to their rescue!

Finally, we learn from Argentine journalist Darío Aranda (via translator Nancy Piñiero) how a small and rural Argentine town has thus far kept Monsanto from building a GMO seed plant there. I suppose a hater, after reading this article, will say that the protestors who blockaded the 30-hectare site owned by Monsanto were law-breakers simple and plain, and when confronted with all the ways Monsanto and the Argentine government themselves broke the law during the permitting process, that hater would probably just mumble about bureaucracy and "job terrorism." It is true that if you break the law, you suffer the consequences, and with upwards of 20 protestors injured at the hands of police, I bet they understand that more acutely than we do. So does Rosa Parks.

Action: human rights in Saudi Arabia, and GMO experiments on people in Iowa.

Human rights lawyer Waleed Abu al-Khair has consecrated his life to defending activists such as Raif Badawi, as well as basic human rights such as the right not to be detained by the state without charge, and these works have already earned him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination at the relatively young age of 36 -- so, naturally, the Saudi Arabian government has put him in jail, where it apparently plans to keep him for the next 10 or 15 years. And, of course, they've beaten the crap out of him and moved him from one jail to another, ensuring his sleep deprivation in the meantime. And what were the "crimes" of which he was convicted? Oh, the usual -- "undermining the regime and officials," "inciting public opinion," "insulting the judiciary," which you'll recognize as exactly the sort of legalistic whining all insecure states indulge in. So Amnesty International helps you pressure the Saudi Arabian government to release him, while Just Foreign Policy helps you pressure our government to push for his release.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell Iowa State University and the Bill and Melenda Gates Foundation to stop their plans to test food with genetically-modified organisms (or GMOs) on people. If you remain of the mind that opposing GMOs is exactly the same as denying climate change, consider that vast scientific research not funded by self-interested parties (i.e., the fossil fuel corporations) supports the conclusion that the planet is warming unsustainably and that we're contributing mightily to that -- while the science claiming GMOs are A-OK mainly comes from self-interested parties which maintain an iron grip over their patented seeds such that more skeptical scientists can't get access to them. And this experiment they're working on? It would make bananas richer in Vitamin A for folks in Uganda. Why not improve access to foods already rich in Vitamin A, as USAID has done by introducing a sweet potato into Uganda with darker orange flesh and more beta-carotene (which your body turns into Vitamin A)? Probably because that doesn't make big ag corporations a lot of money.

Action: sane budgeting, and *a la carte* cable packaging.

Congress passed a five-day extension late last week to fund the government until this coming Wednesday, with Speaker Ryan suggesting more short extensions are in the offing, since he wants to do a spending bill "right" and not be held captive to an "arbitrary deadline." Running out of money is "arbitrary"? Try telling the clerk at your local grocery store about "arbitrary deadlines" when you can't pay for you food! And why would Mr. Ryan and his comrades have to pass endless piecemeal extensions? Because everything Republicans want is noxious to the American people, and he knows it. The politicians and their "liberal" media enablers can spin it however they like, but that's the damn truth. The American people do not want dirtier water or a crippled EPA; hence Friends of the Earth helps you remind your Congressfolk of this fact. The American people do not want our federal government to cripple state efforts to label GMO foods; hence Food and Water Watch helps you remind your Congressfolk of that fact. And Common Cause, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Peace Action West also help you tell your Congressfolk you want a clean budget bill, shorn of "poison pill" policy riders including those mentioned above -- and also including those that would infuse even more corporate money into political campaigns, and kill net neutrality so corporations can take control of your internet experience from you.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to force cable corporations to offer their TV channels a la carte, then the Parents Television Council still helps you do that. If you're like me, you have a somewhat different set of concerns than the PTC does, but that doesn't mean they have the wrong solution -- allowing good Americans to pay for their cable channels a la carte would let us vote with our pocketbooks, so to speak, and starve undeserving cable channels of unearned subscription fees and advertising revenue. You can make the cable company come out and block channels you don't like (and it's probably worth it to make them do that!), but you'd still be paying for them. And why pay to watch "journalists" rummage through mass shooters' apartments and play Amateur English Professor about their baby toys? Why pay to watch sensationalist fearmongers on cable news channels fellate Donald Trump all day? Ban all Muslims bomb everyone I'm YUGE you're a LOSER -- people who watch this garbage all day must be bitter and miserable people. Let's enable less of that, shall we?

Around the table: "terrorizing the public for the terrorists," and other absurdities.

Umair Haque argues that Donald Trump has already peaked, because (and this summary won't do his argument justice) he's a troll and the only strategy available to a troll, after a time, is to say ever more outrageous things, which means he will inevitably alienate even his most loyal supporters. I hope Mr. Haque is right, but the real problem is bigger -- the folks who give attention to trolls like Mr. Trump simply move from one object of rage to the next, from terrorism to the deficit to Obamacare to regulations to immigration to Black Lives Matter to refugees, and Our Glorious Elites seem to have no problem finding new people for haters to hate and "populist" vehicles for their hate.

Adam Johnson, writing at Fair.org, finds the "liberal" media far too willing to "terrorize the public for the terrorists." I wouldn't call terrorism a "post-modern" crime, because the phrase "post-modern" sure sounds a lot like "post-now," but it is true that "blowing up a market 1,000 years ago, for example, before mass communication, would have been entirely pointless. To properly terrorize a population, the population must be aware of the threat, and to be aware of the threat relatively quickly, mass communication is required for economy of scale to be achieved." You'd hope the "liberal" media would be more aware of that, lest they go The Way of the Troll.

"People are Demanding Non-PC Comments on Terrorism," writes Danielle Egnew, "So Here's the Mother of Them All." Maybe not quite "the mother of" -- the demiurge of, I'll say -- and of course I wish her rant were shorter, but yes it's annoying to hear people constantly whining about "political correctness" merely because they just want to be able to use slurs and still have people like them, and yes they need to "grow up emotionally." And I think saying "the terrorists have won" every time some right-winger fearmongers about refugees or "impending terrorist attacks" is a good idea.

Fox News morons try to land a punch on John Oliver after his lengthy rant debunking refugee-related hysteria from the right. And what do they pick on? His Englishness, of course -- which shows their desperation, as resorting to the personal attack first and foremost always shows desperation. Welcome to "then they fight you," Mr. Oliver!

I'm a little late to this party, obviously, but the Economic Policy Institute provides a handy primer for arguing politics with your Tea Party uncle. OK, sure, Thanksgiving was yesterday, but there are more holidays coming, so you can get plenty of practice dealing with inanities like what did unions ever do for us? or why can't the (sic) government tighten its belt like the rest of us? Of course, you won't need to cite all of these facts all at once -- quick answers to what did unions ever do for us? include "weekends" and "eight-hour days." It could turn into a Life of Brian routine right quick.

Finally, both Costco and Red Lobster say they won't sell genetically-modified salmon. Congratulate yourself if you were one of the many who helped pressure Costco to repudiate GMO salmon (a variety of which the FDA approved last week, as you probably know). A Friends of the Earth spokesperson cleverly says "the market is rejecting GMO salmon," which of course we already know from big food corporations' efforts to fight mandatory GMO labeling and their utter refusal to voluntarily label GMO foods.

Action: GMO food labeling, and sentencing reform.

You may have heard that the FDA has approved Aquabounty's GMO salmon -- but not as food, but as an animal drug, though the FDA also claims that the salmon is safe to eat. And supermarkets won't be selling Aquabounty's salmon as a "drug," but as food -- and they won't label that food as GMO food. That's as good an occasion as any to tell your Senators that you want genetically-modified organisms in food labeled as such, as Consumers Union helps you do. The fact that the FDA put Aquabounty's GMO salmon through a less rigorous process (for "animal drug" testing, versus food testing) for determining its safety doesn't bode well, nor does the FDA's reliance on Aquabounty's own studies which -- hard to believe, Harry! -- found the GMO salmon completely safe. Many grocery stores (including a few big chains like Kroger's, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods) won't sell any GMO salmon, but you may not be near any of these stores, and if you remain concerned that self-interested corporations have too much control over the GMO science, you ought to tell your Senators how you feel about it.

Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee advanced H.R. 3713, the Sentencing Reform Act, to the House floor, around a month after the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced its version, S. 2123 (called the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act); if these bills pass, House and Senate will need to go to conference to hammer out the differences. Both bills would reduce (but not eliminate) the burden of mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent federal drug offenders, both bills would expand the "safety valve" for judges to waive mandatory minimums, and both bills would allow judges to reduce crack cocaine sentences for prisoners sentenced before mid-2010, but each bill also creates a few new mandatory minimums (the House for heroin-related offenses, the Senate for domestic violence- and terrorism-related offenses) and the House bill also leaves off the Senate's reforms for federal prisoner treatment. Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell your House Rep and Senator, respectively, to support and improve their chambers' sentencing reform bills.

Action: "free" trade, and GMO food labeling.

The text of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" finally came out last week, and America's Greatest Citizen, Ralph Nader, calls it "the most brazen corporate power grab in history," one that will, as we already knew, give corporations the power to nullify our laws and run roughshod over our democracy by suing to overturn our laws in "investor-state tribunals," and these tribunals certainly won't be evaluating lawsuits by the people against the corporations. And it not only violates the rule of law in this nation and in other nations, not only attacks the worker and clean air and water protections we've fought for and won, not only reduces our access to drugs and a free, open internet, but it could even allow corporations to nullify our financial regulations, putting us all at risk to have banksters crap all over our economy again. I wonder if Mr. Obama will say these things are "just not true" now that the text is out and anyone can read it. I kid, of course -- he'll keep saying these things are "just not true" because he's counting on you not having read it, since you have a job and a family and such. Don't let him cow you: both Public Citizen and Food and Water Watch help you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership."

Meanwhile, the Senate still hasn't considered H.R. 1599, the so-called Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, but word on the street is that Sen. Stabenow (D-MI) is trying to put together a GMO food-labeling bill that can attract bipartisan support. Whenever Congress tries to do something "bipartisan," you should be suspicious, since experience tells us that our government thinks "bipartisanship" means Democrats and Republicans coming together to give corporations whatever they want. But they don't get all the say around here; we do. Hence Consumers Union helps you tell your Senator what you want from a GMO food-labeling bill: a strong mandatory GMO label on all food that's easy to read and comprehend. In other words, not a UPC-style barcode, because not everyone has a smartphone. You'll also demand that Congress stop trying to keep states from passing strong GMO labeling laws, as a few states have done. The Consumers Union tool says, fairly succinctly, "I should have the right to make my own decisions about the food I buy and eat, and not have those choices taken away by Congress." Congress should never take away your rights in order to appease their big corporate donors.

Action: better wages for WalMart workers, and GMO food labeling.

CREDO helps you tell WalMart to pay its workers $15/hour. Folks tempted to say LEAVE WALMART ALOOOOOOONE!!!!!! should recall that while, yes, WalMart did raise its minimum wage for its hourly workers earlier this year, it only did so after years of protests, strikes, and bad publicity, and WalMart has followed this pay hike by cutting jobs and hours for many of its employees, while its executives continue to plow corporate profits into stock buybacks, a strategy our government used to frown upon back in the day, out of a fear that it would influence free markets unduly. So we're not only looking at one-step-forward-three-steps-back behavior from WalMart, we're also looking at a corporation that needs intense public pressure to take that one step forward to begin with, and at a world where no corporation changes its behavior without pressure. Contemporary "free" marketeers should remember that concentrated power anywhere, not just in government, must be checked by the people -- and corporations have now concentrated more power than they've had at any time over the last 80 years.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to support legislation requiring food product labels to tell you whether or not those products contain genetically-modified organisms (or GMOs), then Consumers Union still helps you do that. You may point out in your missive that "legislation supporting food labeling" most emphatically does not include H.R. 1599, the so-called Safe And Accurate Food Labeling Act, which pre-empts state efforts to force GMO food labeling and which also creates yet another voluntary labeling system like the one we already have where no one labels their GMO foods. "Legislation supporting food labeling" would more precisely include H.R. 913, the Genetically-Engineered Food Right-to-Know Act, which would actually prohibit the sale of GMO food unless it's labeled as such. H.R. 913 even contains sensible exceptions, i.e., for farmers who try to grow organically but find their seed contaminated by genetically-modified seed that blew in from a nearby "experiment." Really, what do big ag corporations have to hide?

Action: asset forfeiture, GMO labeling, and retirement advisors.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Reps and Senators to repeal the asset forfeiture laws that make it much easier for state and local law enforcement agencies to take money from folks who haven't been proven guilty of a crime. This is yet another remnant of the I'm-tough-on-crime-because-I-have-very-small-testicles era -- law enforcement wanted to stop suspected drug dealers from moving money around, so they concocted a way to seize it, and who could have predicted that they would one day become so financially dependent on the practice that they'd abuse it? Besides anyone who thought about it for a minute, I mean. Asset forfeiture not only constitutes an abuse of government power against innocent-until-proven-guilty citizens, it's also an act of profound cowardice -- if state and local governments have trouble funding police forces, they should have the guts to raise taxes, or, at the very least, stop giving out welfare handouts to corporations in the form of tax breaks. I mean, if you don't have at least that amount of courage, you really should be in another line of work.

Meanwhile, Congress is back in session, and the House passed H.R. 1599, the absurdly-named Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, before the break -- a bill that actually prevents accurate labeling of genetically-modified organisms (or GMOs) in our food by preventing states and localities from mandating such labeling, and which "compensates" for that by permitting a "voluntary" labeling regime for GMOs, just like the "voluntary" regime we have had for over two decades that no one uses to label GMOs. (Those four-digit PLU codes you see in the produce section? If anyone wanted to label their GMO-laden produce, they'd start the code with an "8." Ever see one? Of course you haven't.) It's only safe for the big agricultural corporations that seem to get all the say about everything, even with supposed GMO-labeling proponent Barack Obama, who will surely add this to his list of broken promises, probably in the name of "bipartisanship" (when, like, hello? support for GMO labeling is actually bipartisan!). Just Label It helps you tell your Senators to support honest food labeling by rejecting H.R. 1599.

Finally, the Department of Labor is finishing up rules that would require retirement investment advisors to adhere to a "fiduciary duty" to put their customers' needs ahead of their own. Sound commonsensical to you? Of course it does! And you know what that means: Wall Street banksters hate it and are trying to scuttle it. They're not completely stupid, of course, so they say that of course they look out for their customers' best interests, so why do they need regulations forcing them to do that? (Though if you are, in fact, looking out for your customers' best interests, regulations mandating that you do that shouldn't really bother you.) They also say the rule will close off investment advice to large portions of Americans -- as if there will ever be a shortage of customers looking for retirement investment advice, or a shortage of professionals looking to earn money giving it! OK, I take it back: they are completely stupid. Americans for Financial Reform helps you support the Department of Labor's retirement advice rules.

Action: GMO labeling, cybersecurity, and treating children as adults in the criminal justice system.

H.R. 1599, the so-called Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, passed out of the House late last week by a 270-150 margin -- short of the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto, but should we count on a veto from President Obama, whose USDA has been an even greater friend to GMOs than Mr. Bush's was? H.R. 1599 would prevent states from labeling GMOs in food, would make FDA efforts to label GMO food more difficult, and would even allow corporations to slap the word "natural" on products with GMOs in them, and no I'm not going all semiotic on the meaning of the word "natural." Now the bill goes to the Senate, which may be anxious to pass it, to "help small farmers" or some rubbish. If small farmers rely on GMO seeds, that's because the big corporations make them, and any Senator who really cares about small farmers would do something about that state of affairs. In the meantime, both USPIRG and Food and Water Watch help you tell your Senators to reject efforts to curtail GMO labeling.

Meanwhile, S. 754, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (or CISA), would help corporations share huge slabs of customer data with our government. Warrant, no warrant, who cares? Warrants are so 18th century already! Of course, if our government really wanted to stop cyberattacks, it would make corporations embrace encryption, stronger passwords, and multifactor authentication, and the notion that "corporations will embrace these reforms in time" won't comfort you if a hacker steals your credit card number before then. But our government cries wolf about jihad and ISIS and demands new powers, when vacuuming up all that data won't help protect us from terrorists -- and CISA would also allow the FBI and NSA to use the data for purposes other than counterterrorism and grant immunity against lawsuits to the corporations that hand over the data. So the Bill of Rights Defense Committee helps you tell your Senators to preserve privacy, reject government spying, and vote against CISA.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Justice Department to investigate the widespread practice of trying children as adults and putting them into adult prisons, then CREDO still helps you do that. It is tempting, I suppose, to throw up your hands and say the kids just get crazier every year, until you realize that folks have always been saying that for, like, forever, and until you remember that we are, all of us, defenders of civilization, and we have a solemn duty to pass that civilization on to our descendants. I would hate to think our descendants will think it's just normal to put kids on trial as adults at a time in their lives when they're simply unable to think like adults, or put them in adult jails where they'll be abused by bigger, stronger prisoners -- all of which will make their rehabilitation a lot more difficult. Of course, future generations might also think it's normal to leave kids in front of some computer screen all day while the parents go work one of their three jobs. But preventing that is also our job as defenders of civilization.

Action: Iran's nuclear capabilities, GMO food labeling, and real chemical safety.

Nine nations reached a deal that would reduce Iran's nuclear capability in exchange for a relaxation of economic sanctions against it, and naturally the American right is pooping its pants over it -- when a putatively "moderate" Republican Senator accuses the President of wanting Iran to get nuclear weapons, you know it's bad. But the real problem right-wingers have with the deal is that it doesn't give them an opportunity to parade their testicles in front of everyone like the "war on terror" does -- international inspection regimes, after all, don't get them hard. (I see no need to gender-equivocate here.) Five of eight non-Iranian nations would have to agree to reinstate sanctions if Iran fails to comply, which (as Igor Volsky explains) removes the veto power China or Russia would have preferred. Hell, it even sounds like democracy, and you know how right-wing warmongers feel about democracy -- at least, about democracy that doesn't give them everything they want. So the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell Congress not to sabotage the Iran nuclear deal.

Meanwhile, the House Agriculture Committee passed H.R. 1599, the so-called Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, out of committee this week. H.R. 1599 would, as you know, keep states from enacting GMO labeling laws, since the "states' rights" doctrine apparently only extends to keeping black folks down, and would also make GMO labeling voluntary, as if it's not already voluntary -- and worse, as if a voluntary GMO labeling system doesn't already exist. You know the four-digit numbers on stickers on your produce? Ever see a five-digit number on a label beginning with "9"? No, you haven't, because that's the label indicating the produce has been grown with genetically-modified organisms, and no one's using it. Because they wouldn't sell anything if they did. Why don't the big food corporations try convincing people GMO food is fine, rather than trying to buy laws from Congress or fearmonger about food prices and "frivolous lawsuits"? The Organic Consumers Association helps you tell your House Rep to oppose the anti-GMO labeling bill, H.R. 1599.

Finally, Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Senator to vote against S. 697, the so-called Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act. Why? Because the bill that bears the late Senator's name insults his memory -- he authored far better chemical safety reform legislation before his passing. And though Congress last tackled chemical safety regulation nearly 40 years ago, this bill wouldn't force our government to evaluate chemical safety on any realistic schedule, wouldn't allow states to pass stronger chemical safety laws, wouldn't adequately fund chemical safety regulation efforts, wouldn't target "hot spot" communities that suffer from more chemical exposure, and wouldn't allow our government to take swifter action against more dangerous chemicals -- let alone force chemical corporations to prove their chemicals are safe before they reach the market. Do we not deserve these things, as good Americans? And do we not deserve leaders who will accomplish these things in our name, instead of leaders who let chemical corporations have all the say about everything?

Action: Social Security benefits, summer meals for kids, and GMO food labeling.

Not too long ago, the liberal blogger Eschaton called for an expansion of Social Security benefits, and this flew in the face of "conventional" "wisdom," which held that Social Security is totally unsustainable and future seniors (ahem!) will have to accept benefit cuts. As with so much "conventional" "wisdom," it's rubbish -- Social Security doesn't have any problems that can't be ameliorated by a growing economy and an end to the $119,000 cap on taxable income -- but it's good to see folks widening the palette of the possible. Just last Congress, two Senators (Messrs. Begich of Alaska and Harkin of Iowa) introduced legislation that would have increased Social Security benefits; there's no chance of such a bill passing in this Congress, but it's the right thing to do and we should push for it anyway -- especially now that corporations are doing their level best to ruin the pensions they're supposedly running on our behalf, so Social Security may be all we have left. So People for the American Way helps you tell the White House Conference on Aging that you support expanding Social Security benefits.

Meanwhile, US Action helps you tell Congress to support H.R. 1728/S. 613, the Summer Meals Act, and H.R. 2715/S. 1539, the Stop Child Summer Hunger Act. What would these bills do? The Summer Meals Act would operate summer food service programs (which you may generally find at summer school programs, public parks, and some private centers like the Y) in districts where more than 40% of children are eligible for free or discounted school lunch meals, while the Stop Child Summer Hunger Act would allow children who'd be eligible for free or discounted school lunch meals to continue to get that benefit (via a USDA-issued "summer EBT card" worth about $150 per child) during the summer months. The two programs sort of work hand-in-hand, which is nice when you see it. And who would oppose these bills? Some Scrooge McSmallgovernment who can't speak a sentence of fewer than a hundred words, that's who. I suppose they regard childhood hunger as a character-builder, though reasonable people regard hunger as a way of causing children pain and stunting their growth and reducing their ability to fight off illness.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Quaker (and Quaker's owner, PepsiCo) to support mandatory GMO labeling (and, ah, also to stop funding campaigns opposing GMO labeling), then Just Label It still helps you do that. Only this time, you'll be doing that over the phone, because their action tool will patch you through to Quaker HQ. Quaker prides itself on being health-friendly and family-friendly, but it's spent buku bucks to defeat state-level GMO-labeling initiatives (which have come close to passing in Oregon and Colorado, and somewhat less close to passing in Washington and California). And I remain unimpressed with assertions that opposing GMO crops is like denying climate change. Climate change denialism and GMO-positive science both come from where? Corporations. And there's no denying that genetically-manipulating crops in order to withstand proprietary pesticides and herbicides is short-sighted, dangerous, and nowhere near as conducive to feeding the hungry as it is to increasing corporate profits. The CEOs with their gilded plumbing in their 19 vacation homes? They're in food corporations, too.

Action: net neutrality, political prisoners, genetically-modified food, and Arctic drilling.

Another day, another emergency: some fool in the House of Representatives has attached, to a must-pass House financial services appropriations bill, language that would prevent the FCC from using any budgeted funds to enforce the net neutrality rules it proposed earlier this year. Because millions of people from across the political spectrum speaking with one voice against corporate control of the internet means, apparently, nothing to Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-FL) (whose phone number is 202.225.2501, by the way), and because any must-pass appropriations bill can and must be taken hostage on behalf of anyone's corporate paymasters! But remember: the fight for justice isn't over until you draw your last breath, because any time you can get your government to do something good for America, you still have to keep fighting the corrupt corporate lackeys who want to take it from you. And take it they will, unless we speak out. So Free Press helps you tell your House Reps to reject any attempt to hold our government's funding hostage to corporate extremists who want to destroy net neutrality.

In other urgent matters, earlier this month the Saudi Arabian Supreme Court upheld the sentence of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi of 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes, putatively for "insulting Islam" and for violating Saudi Arabian information technology laws, but actually for bringing together good Saudi citizens online to speak freely about political and religious matters. Yes, this still happens in the world, and don't think a lot of your fellow Americans wouldn't like it to happen here, too -- though, of course, they wouldn't like it to happen to them. I tell the Saudi Arabian authorities the same thing I tell right-wingers in this country afraid of being told "happy holidays!" when they're out shopping: if your faith is strong, you don't need government intervention to prevent it from being insulted. Mr. Badawi, meanwhile, isn't in very good health, but the Saudis could start lashing him again as early as tomorrow. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the Saudi Arabian government to free Mr. Badawi immediately and stop oppressing political prisoners.

Meanwhile, the USDA is, no doubt because they're being compelled, beginning to overhaul their system for regulating genetically-modified crops, and Friends of the Earth helps you tell the USDA to enact vigorous reforms that protect the environment and protect good Americans from harm. We know where it gets us when we don't keep a vigorous watch over GMOs: we get GMOs invading organic farms (and then GMO manufacturing corporations suing said forms for "intellectual property theft" I kid you not), and we get carcinogenic pesticides sprayed on crops like they were water. I do not, incidentally, accept arguments that "we've always messed with crop genetics," for two reasons: one, we've never messed with crop genetics in a way such that we can't anticipate the outcome, and two, we've never messed with crop genetics for the sole purpose of making crops more resistant to proprietary pesticides. And the pro-GMO "science" comes mostly from the corporations making the GMOs (since they tend to throw lawyers at researchers who purchase seed and experiment on their own). Think maybe they might be a little biased?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Obama Administration to keep corporations like Shell from drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. We know drilling in the Arctic is a bad idea because cleaning up the inevitable spill is even harder than it is in more temperate areas of the world, and also because we don't know enough about the wildlife in the region to know what awful effects drilling will have. We do know enough about the endangered bowhead whale, however, to know that the noise of drilling, ice-breaking, and seismic testing is deafening, as in literally deafening. You might well be saying, well, that's a shame, but we need to get ourselves free of Middle Eastern oil, but setting aside the many other ways we could be getting off foreign oil, you may not be considering that whales won't just use sign language if they're deaf -- they're going to lose their ability to communicate with other whales, which is life-or-death to the bowhead whale. Which makes Arctic drilling cruel as well as foolish.