Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: featuring yet another Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate!

As Connecticut-based hedge fund manager David McCormick readies a Pennsylvania Senate run as a Republican, the burning question is: will Trump votaries support a bankster for Senate? I kid, of course -- Trump votaries will "hold their nose" at his profession, particularly since he doesn't have a Jewish-sounding last name, and in any case I'm sure Mr. McCormick will quickly disavow his year-old statement blaming Mr. Trump for the January 6 attempted coup. Still, look out for Jeff Bartos, who instigated Sean Parnell's disgrace; he's currently running around 3 percent in polling but is sitting on a lot of money I'm sure he'll deploy the last two weeks of the race. If he wins, Donald Trump will endorse him as if he'd never endorsed anyone else, and then the votaries will be pacified.

Ho hum, JP Morgan Chase has resumed suing its credit card users for falling behind on their payments. What's that, you say? So what? Well, Chase hadn't been doing that for 10 years, after our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found they were filing "flimsy" suits which not only too often said customers owed more than they actually did, but which also relied on actual robo-signed affidavits (rather than billing records!) as "evidence." And now they're doing lawsuits-with-affidavits again. You might almost call these frivolous lawsuits, though the tort "reform" crowd, strangely, never talks about them. If Republicans take back either chamber of Congress in November, you'll never get that crowd to STFU -- and all they care about is stopping lawsuits that help those good Americans wronged by big corporations.

When I hear that folks from 14 to 49 are generally having less consensual sex now than they did a decade ago, and I see that researchers offer a lot of possible reasons, like increased social media use, "rough sex," lower incomes, more drinking, and (even) more binge-watching, I find myself asking about two other possibilities: increased awareness of sexual abuse and more widely-available pornography. Do people have less sex if they're wary of being caught-out as a harasser or an abuser -- or, conversely, are potential partners more wary of such folks than they used to be? Also, does all the porn one can get today help folks satiate their curiosity about other people's bodies -- a curiosity you might have had to resort to actual sex to satiate not too many years ago?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) slams New York's new Mayor, Eric Adams, for referring to "low-skilled workers" as folks who "don’t have the academic skills to sit in a corner office." "The suggestion that any job is 'low skill' is a myth perpetuated by wealthy interests to justify inhumane working conditions, little/no healthcare, and low wages," she says, and she's absolutely right, and didn't they say Eric Adams would be a "different" kind of Democrat? By putting the guy in the "corner office" above the barista and the waiter, he's revealed he's just like all the others who look down on folks who don't happen to be entrepreneurs. Remember when folks looked down on manufacturing workers? Now that they're gone, we lionize them! And by the time we get to lionize baristas and waiters, there may not be any jobs left.

Chip Gibbons at Jacobin reminds us -- and we shouldn't have needed the reminder! -- that Dick Cheney certainly should not have gotten the warm reception he got from Democrats on January 6. Seriously, you have to do more than just be against attempted coups to be a good guy in America -- and waging war on Iraq, warrantless wiretapping, torture, and unconstitutional detainment (just to cite things he did as Vice President; Mr. Gibbons also tabulates his nefarious works during his decade in Congress) certainly don't make you a good guy. Why, whenever he thinks of how he managed to steal the 2000 election, I bet he looks at those January 6 rioters and says these guys are pikers!

Finally, Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) now apparently doesn't even support his own proposal for restructuring the Build Back Better Act. Not only does he get to explain to those good folks in West Virginia why they can't have paid family leave, lower taxes for working families, and lower prices for drugs and child care, but he has further isolated himself as The Villain of all these proceedings, which could complicate Democrat efforts to throw the 2022 midterms -- voters will less likely blame all Democrats if they can blame one Democrat. If Kyrsten Sinema is the galaxy brain she thinks she is, she'll convince Mr. Manchin to vote for the bill, since he got everything he asked for, but she's not, so she won't.

Action: concerning jobs, pollution, Guantánamo, our Post Office, and un-Foxing your cable box.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk that yes home and community care service spending absolutely belongs in the American Jobs Plan and to pass the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act; tell President Biden to close Guantánamo Bay already; tell your Senators to confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees so they can fire Postmaster General DeJoy; and tell your local cable provider to "un-Fox your cable box." Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to get your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below. And good hunting! It's almost the weekend!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that we should absolutely invest in home care and community care services. The Republicans are all up on the TV telling us that anything other than roads and bridges isn't "real infrastructure" (which they're won't vote to fund either, by the way), but actually, home and community care are real infrastructure -- if you think, you know, that civilization consists of people, rather than things. And if you've ever done home and community care (ahem!), then you know it's absolutely essential work that, frankly, we're going to need more of as the years go by. So don't let Republicans tell you your work isn't essential, or "real." And, ah, why do we let seditionists tell us what's essential or real again?

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. S. 984 would make plastics corporations responsible for single-use plastic waste, by forcing them to contribute financially to the collection and processing of all that waste; that would be quite the welcome change from having everyone else clean up all of their mess. And then we'd see all that trash disappear right quick! Because they'd then make recyclable and reusable plastics, of course. Corporations don't like losing money, as you know. Don't worry that this change will be "too much" for them or that it'll "kill jobs." Corporations always complain about change -- but they can adjust more easily than us, because they have more money.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden to close the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention center. Guantánamo has been a stain on our nation for almost 20 years now, a place supposedly for detaining "the worst of the worst" terrorists, but when they hold you there for five or 10 or 14 years (like Mansoor Adayfi, whose book Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo comes out soon), they're all but announcing you're not a terrorist. Remember the Obama-era formulation "too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release"? No one is "too dangerous" to charge, convict, and sentence. If you think so, go live in a dictatorship already, because you're not tough enough for civilization.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's three USPS Board of Governors nominees -- so they can then fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, whose service-cutting and price-hiking ways make a mockery not just of our Post Office but of America. Where's the can-do spirit, Mr. DeJoy? Saying "we've got to raise prices and cut services" when our Post Office was running a crap-ton better before he got there sure ain't the can-do spirit I grew up with. You've heard that the reconstituted USPS Board of Governors might not fire Mr. DeJoy after all? We'll address that with the Board of Governors shortly. But your Senators should still know that you want him fired.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to "un-Fox your cable box" -- that is, get your cable corporation to dump Fox News -- here's the link. Now, perhaps you're saying to yourself, self, what about all the other far right news channels like OAN and Newsmax? Are we going to boot them off our cable box too? And the answer would be: sure, if we've got to! But this is mainly about Starving the Beast that is Fox News of all the user fees they collect from big cable corporations, which stick those fees in their prices for your basic cable package. OAN and Newsmax will surely become Beasts in due time, but in the meantime, let's teach our cable providers that there'll be a price for carrying noxious news channels full of drama and junk news.

Action: concerning good House bills, sanctions on Iran, and Chad Wolf.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Why do we keep doing this? Because we need to establish our will, as we communicate it to our Senators -- and thus also establish how badly they're doing at adhering to our will, which is their sole job, and a job they're doing much worse than our House is. And the more we do it, the closer we get to fulfilling the promise democracy.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and Secretary of State Pompeo to reject any more sanctions on Iran. We could go on at length about the damage more sanctions would do to good Iranians, who will certainly bear the brunt of sanctions more than their rulers, but all we need say is, well, calling this Administration's policy toward Iran piss-poor would be a grievous insult to piss. The Obama Administration helped craft a successful agreement that kept nuclear weapons out of Iran's hands, but this Administration withdrew from that agreement, apparently as part of a plan to create international chaos that could only be resolved by war with Iran, which is so 1980, you know. You could argue, I suppose, that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy only strengthened Iran in the region, thus tying our current President's hands, but just as two wrongs don't make a right, two stupids don't make a smart. So let's not remain hostage to bad foreign policy, because that would be un-American.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to the permanent Homeland Security Secretary position, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. They'd have plenty of reasons to reject the nomination, including Mr. Wolf's ardent support for family separation and illegal detainment of protestors, as well as his refusal to accept new DACA applications even though our Supreme Court told him to do it. But now that we're less than a month away from Election Day, our Senators would probably just prefer to wait this whole thing out and see how things go, given that voting for Mr. Wolf would be tough to defend to the voters who are about to decide your immediate future. It's funny that none of them have said confirming Mr. Wolf is essential given "the grave threats we face," since you know that's what they would have said in Tha Bush Mobb years. Still, we must remind them that cowardice is evil, and the time to do the right thing is always now.

Action: concerning your right to be free from government spying, corporate spying, and secret police.

Our President has deployed unnamed and unmarked federal officers to certain American cities in order to "contain" "violence" that has been over for weeks and at least partly the work of obvious agents provocateurs -- and the officers sent to "contain" the violence have, of course, restarted the violence. Oh, and they abduct people off the streets and detain them without charge. Pretty un-American, eh? But we are not powerless in these times, though our President would like us to feel that way, hence today we get on the phone with our Reps and Senators and tell them we support three amendments to various appropriations bills. One would make anyone carrying out a "law enforcement action" funded by the Department of Defense to identify themselves and their agency. Another would zero out Commerce/State/Justice funding for any more "responses" to "looting" or "rioting" without a written request from the state or locality, plus it'd also force identification of any officers sent for that purpose. And a third would zero out DHS funding for the above-described "responses." So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone), and good hunting.

In a completely related note, Stop the Patriot Act helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious USA PATRIOT Act that has dramatically expanded surveillance on American citizens. Yeah, our President's deployment of federal officers who act like they're in a dictatorship and not America does remind us that concentrated spying power is noxious anywhere, especially in our government. As it happens, today marks the four-month anniversary of the expiration of the bill's surveillance powers -- after our President threatened to veto it, no less, possibly because of his belief that our government used it to spy on him and/or his compadres -- and our NSA has maintained for years that it doesn't actually need all the spying powers the PATRIOT Act gives it. Which would make sense, since the more information you have, the more you have to sift through. You'd still like to see our government indulge in less adventurism abroad, but let's prevent our government from indulging in adventurism at home.

Finally, if you've used services like Ancestry and 23 and Me to discover more about your family heritage -- and, hey, I've been tempted myself! -- you may not know that these services can buy, sell, and trade the DNA info you give them without your knowing or your consent. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell our government to enact the most vigorous DNA privacy standards possible. These would include: requiring corporations to get explicit permission from customers before sharing any DNA info with other corporations; securing DNA data from unauthorized access (i.e., hackers); prohibiting the use of DNA data for insurance underwriting purposes; and preventing corporations from charging customers for any of these things, since that, you know, prevents some folks from guarding their personal info, and everyone should be able to do that. Personal to those who would say well just don't use the service then: why must a useful service come with unacceptable risks? Because the "free market" says so? It ain't a "free" market unless we're all free.

Action: concerning our pandemic, and the various evils our government does under its cover.

We're almost two months after our first coronavirus diagnosis and somehow we still don't have enough tests! And we need them; after all, we can't all just cough on a rich person or shake hands with our President! Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell tell Brent Giroir, our Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services and the man who runs coronavirus testing in America, to ensure everyone who needs a coronavirus test can get one. And, like, now -- I'm sick of hearing all the supposed can-do types who run our country shrug and say we can't do this. We can give away hundreds of billions in bailouts under cover of a pandemic, but we can't test our own citizens? Who wants to take that achievement to the pearly gates? They used to say a government that can do anything for you can do anything to you, but they helped create a government that can do anything to you but can't do anything for you. And we deserve better.

Meanwhile, speaking of dastardly things done under cover of a pandemic: you may have heard that our Department of Justice (sic) has asked Congress for the ability to detain Americans indefinitely -- you know, because courts will be closed, or open irregularity, and thus they "can't" grant us our constitutional rights of due process and habeus corpus. Awfully suspicious, eh? Another thing our all-powerful government just "can't" do, and if you don't think this government (or the next one) won't abuse that power, I know a dead Nigerian prince who left you a lot of money. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt by our Administration to grab the right to detain Americans indefinitely. If you're thinking well, this is just until the pandemic is over, I direct your attention to our NSA's warrantless surveillance of good Americans, which has gone on for almost 20 years after 9.11; when our government abuses its power, it doesn't want to stop.

Remaining on the topic of "dastardly things they do under cover of a pandemic": our EPA has declared that it won't enforce clean air or clean water regulations very vigorously during the pandemic, citing physical distancing. I'm old enough to remember when conservatives routinely said stop complaining about how hard it is to do the right thing and just do it! But today's right-wingers spend an awful lot of time whining about why they can't do the right thing. You think clean air and clean water enforcers couldn't be designated essential personnel? You have to wonder why this Administration hasn't done that! And please understand that when I say that, I mean "because this Administration hates regulations that actually help people, and only likes regulations that let someone push their allegedly religious bigotry on someone else." Too harsh? The truth always is. So the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to stop making excuses and protect good Americans from polluters.

Finally, Whole Foods's CEO, John Mackey, has actually said that if some of his workers need paid time off during this pandemic, then their co-workers should be gracious enough to "donate" their paid time off! Gosh, is that all it takes to be a CEO -- to refuse to help your own workers in their time of need? And they say getting rich is hard! Seriously, those of us who aren't rich might actually have a lot to be proud of. And Whole Foods, as you know, is owned by Amazon, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, is worth over $100 billion, that's "billion" with a "b," and he's echoed Mr. Mackey's suggestion that workers "donate" their paid time off, proving, again, that you don't get to be the boss by being generous or humane. I swear, if I've done one good work before I die, it'll be to make the word "boss" into a cuss word, a matter our President has helped a lot with, amirite? In the meantime, MoveOn helps you tell Messrs. Bezos and Mackey to ensure their workers have the paid time off they need.

Around the table: concerning matters of law and order, taxation, and drama.

Our government continues to justify its "right" to detain folks -- even American citizens! -- indefinitely without charge. Our Supreme Court has lately refused to hear an appeal from one Moath al-Alwi, one of the first 20 men Tha Bush Mobb brought to Guantánamo Bay, meaning he's been there for 17 years, without being charged with a damn thing. Open-ended detainment is bad enough when it's folks who can't pay bail for public drunkenness, but 17 years! Without a charge! That disgraces us, and injures our democracy. If we're the greatest nation on Earth, we shouldn't pull the kind of tricks dictators pull.

Speaking of things that disgrace us and injure our democracy, our Administration tells our Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that our laws don't actually require them to provide detained immigrant children with such things as soap or toothbrushes, even though our laws actually do require them to keep detainees in "safe and sanitary" conditions. It may be true that our laws do not always spell out how you must act like a human being, but that's often because we should all know how to do that by now. May God have mercy on the immortal souls of those who serve, such as they do, in our government.

I'm glad to see others saying, as Steve Wamhoff from the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy does, that "Calling Progressive Tax Proposals 'Extreme' Are Taunts Meant to Distract." And what do they distract you from? Why, their popularity among good Americans, of course! Whenever folks like Mob Boss Mitch call Sen. Warren's wealth tax proposal "extreme," they're actually calling over 60 percent of Americans "extreme"! How are majorities "extreme" again?

Ho hum, a hedge fund manager and his wife have contributed more than $3 million to the anti-vaccine movement over the last few years. In particular, they enable yet another snake-oil salesman to tell reporters that kids "should be allowed to have the measles if they want the measles." After all, who doesn't want the measles? Hedge fund managers! They're so useful!

Upon hearing that our President's new pro-coal climate change plan could "hurt the same workers he claims to be helping" -- mainly by depriving them of the renewable energy jobs that will get them out of a dying industry -- you may be reminded that people like our President only need you for your pain, and they need it so badly they'll create more and more of it. And then they'll tell you your pain is all black people's fault! I'd call it clever, if I didn't insist that cleverness, you know, not be evil.

I'm pleased to see that more than half of Americans say our President has "changed the tone and nature of political discussion for the worse," but I'm annoyed that 54% of Americans find themselves "at least sometimes entertained" by his antics, which are considerably less entertaining than a boy belching loudly over and over again. If we can persuade those people to feel ashamed at being "entertained" by an obnoxious jerk who lives only to create drama, we'll have a chance at building a sane, moral, and reasonable society again.

Finally, speaking of drama, Fox and Friends created quite the drama for our President after he didn't bomb Iran last week, with one talking head repeatedly intoning that he-must-have-a-secret-plan and another saying the Middle East will look at his "non-action" as "weakness." And then Steve Doocy, the man who gives effeminacy a bad name, got to act like the adult in the room! The sad thing is that goading this President works -- recall that he'd all but conceded defeat over vanity border wall funding late last December, and then shut down part of our government for over a month after Ann Coulter gave him an earful -- which means, as usual, that drama only foments more drama. We should want more from our government, and from our civilization, than drama.

Action: tackling foreign policy, intelligence, and immigration.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject S.J.Res. 59, the military force authorization that would actually expand the President's war-making powers, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Giving the President even more unconstitutional power is a bad idea, particularly when this particular President has loaded up his cabinet with folks who want to make war on Iran. But S.J.Res. 59 gives the President the power to add particular groups to his bad-guy list and then go ahead and bomb them, even if it results in what Ron Paul used to call "blowback," and it give Congress a power to veto these bad-guy list additions within 30 days that they'll never use, because they're Congress. Oh, and S.J.Res. 59 also expands the President's power to unconstitutionally detain people, and people might include you or I or those we love, particularly if any of us protest the next war and the one after that. So let's get to it, good peoples.

Meanwhile, Mike Pompeo's unfortunate ascension to State has left an opening for CIA Director, one the President wants to fill with CIA lifer Gina Haspel, who has (like Mr. Pompeo!) shown a lust for torturing suspects that should offend our citizenry, our heritage, and our civilization. We can't say for sure that Ms. Haspel tortured suspects herself (or, more likely, ordered other folks to do so), but we can say for sure that she oversaw torture in Thailand and that she oversaw the destruction of videotapes of CIA torture, and why gamble that she "wasn't that involved" when you can find someone better? Some folks will say she was just doing her job -- or they'll cynically invoke the CIA's long history of torture, as if that's a reason not to fight evil now! -- but we get only one life, and we really ought to make it a life the Lord would be proud of. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to block Ms. Haspel's ascension to the top of the CIA.

In other news, Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your U.S. House Reps to hold a vote on our involvement in the Saudi war against Yemen. Our involvement in the Saudi war against Yemen, of course, also includes our involvement in creating near-famine conditions, our involvement in the worst cholera epidemic in history, and our involvement in the collapse of Yemeni water, food, and health care infrastructure -- not to mention our involvement in the continuing destruction of Houthi rebels who have actually proven to be pretty good al-Qaeda fighters, which means we're essentially on the same side as al-Qaeda with regards to Yemen, and regardless of how thoroughly ISIS has surpassed al-Qaeda in evil, this is not the side you want to be on. The Senate has voted on our unconstitutional involvement refueling Saudi planes and furnishing weapons and helping them with targeting, but the House hasn't; it's well past time for our House Reps to do so.

Finally, H.R. 3923, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, would (as the title suggests!) strengthen standards for detaining aliens at detention centers, including ending mandatory detention and barring use of private prisons for detention. I can already hear the President's votaries demanding to know why we should be so nice to immigrants when we have other problems, but that is of course a false choice, one that implies that our government can only ever do one thing at a time (and, er, one that also implies that our government should be spending all of its efforts catering to other people's prejudices). A great nation can treat immigrants humanely and (to name just one thing we also spend a lot of time talking about at this blog) revive moribund Appalachian economies, too -- among other good works we could enumerate. In the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act.

Around the table: drone deaths, "free" trade, stock buybacks, forensic foolishness, pot as "gateway" drug, and Rick Santorum's latest pile of dung.

With the killing of two humanitarian aid workers/al-Qaeda hostages on Thursday, the drone strike death count stands at well over 4,000, including nearly 500 folks now described as "innocent" and eight American citizens. And, as you might expect when you're fighting an undeclared war from far away, the CIA can't tell if it's killed innocents and/or Americans until weeks after it's done the deed, at which point I'm sure "we tried our best" is a tremendous comfort to the mothers of the dead, as well as to those of us who still do not consider due process "quaint." Hate to get all Star Trek, but this is why war should be hard.

President Obama suggests that our complaints about the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deals are rather like the whole "death panels" dust-up during the Affordable Care Act debate. Well, no: right-wingers took an obscure end-of-life-planning component of the ACA and blew it up into "death panels," whereas "free" trade opponents have made very specific complaints based on very specific leaks of TPP text, and these complaints are nowhere near as outlandish as "death panels" were. And it's evil for Mr. Obama to tell us that certain members of Congress have access to the text, but "forget" to mention that these members are sworn to silence about what they see in the text. I mean, sure, it looks like typical Democrat weakness, but it's evil.

Rex Nutting describes "How the Stock Market Destroyed the Middle Class." A more accurate title would be "How Stock Buybacks Have Destroyed the Middle Class," since I do not assume (though I'm often tempted to assume) that buying stock itself is evil. Still, the story will sound familiar -- our government once presumed it evil for big corporate titans using corporate profits to buy back stock, because that left less corporate money to invest in workers and infrastructures, but in the early 1980s our government started believing that getting executives to "think like owners" by making them owners would make them more invested in their corporation's success, when actually it just makes it easier for executives to drain the wealth of corporations. Why, it's almost like that was the idea.

In the wake of news that FBI forensic hair analysts have, over the decades, given "flawed testimony" in criminal cases virtually all of the time, ProPublica reminds us that a lot of the CSI-style forensic techniques actually don't have much of a basis in scientific research. A National Academy of Sciences study from 2009 found only nuclear DNA testing backed by a significant amount of "peer-reviewed, published studies." Ask some Republican Presidential candidate about this and I guess he'll answer, "well, I'm not a scientist," like that would excuse his responsibility as a leader to make decisions based on the best science.

Speaking of science, Factcheck.org reminds us that regardless of what Gov. Christie says, we cannot say with certainty that pot is a "gateway drug" to the harder stuff. The moment I read that plenty of folks who use pot also use harder stuff I thought correlation isn't causation, and then there it was in paragraph four. One would more reasonably conclude that people who use pot are people who are already more likely to use drugs generally. Research suggesting that pot "primes" the brain for other drugs isn't conclusive, and I'd like to see the study that (in the manner of the famous "Rat Park" experiment) gives rats pot and then offers them heroin, but has them in a cage where they have other stuff to occupy their minds.

Finally, Rick Santorum now argues that the "wall of separation" between church and state, as described in the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, means the government can't legalize same-sex marriage. I get profoundly tired of giving basic civics lessons to people who should know better, but I'll do it again: our government could very easily legalize same-sex marriage as performed by the state, while leaving it up to churches whether they want to perform them as well. Not that such arguments could possibly penetrate Mr. Santorum's mind -- he'll just do like all right-wingers do, and ignore it, and then spout his argument again like no one had ever refuted it. The best way to silence Rick Santorum is to shame his stupid ideas and then wait for him to die. After all, it's not like his works will outlive him.

Action: PATRIOT Act expirations, energy efficiency, and consumer financial protection.

Roots Action helps you tell Congress to let crucial freedom-killing parts of the USA PATRIOT Act to expire. These include business record searches, roving wiretaps, and the nefarious Section 215, which the NSA uses to justify its data-vacuuming program. The good news? They're all going to expire on June 1. The bad news? Congress and the "liberal" media would never admit an actual debate on whether these sections of the PATRIOT Act protect us or hurt us -- they'll just wave the bloody shirt of terrorism and say you don't love your country if you're unwilling to let our government spy on your neighbors with less restraint than ever before, and certainly with less restraint than the Fourth Amendment demands. But now Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI) -- who did not author the PATRIOT Act, as is commonly supposed, but authored the anti-terrorism bill Tha Bush Mobb replaced with the PATRIOT Act -- has been circulating a letter to colleagues trying to get them to support an end to the enabling of wanton government spying; good for him, and good for anyone who supports this effort.

Meanwhile, you may recall a bipartisan energy efficiency bill from Sens. Portman (R-OH) and Shaheen (D-NH) in 2014 that should have been a bank shot for Congress, but wound up getting weighed down irrelevant and nefarious amendments, perhaps because it was an easy bill to pass, or maybe just because OBAMA!!!!! Anyway, the aforementioned Senators have reintroduced the bill, numbered S. 535, and though congress.gov doesn't have a text of the bill or a summary thereof as of this writing (which happens more frequently these days, for some reason), but the last bill would have provided the means for updated building codes and more efficient building construction, both of which would have helped businesses save money and create jobs. Brook no nonsense from any of your Congressfolk about how we're too broke to do such things, since these things would help our economy, not hurt it, like all of Congress's favorite corporate tax handouts do. The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell Congress to support efforts to make our buildings more energy-efficient.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to stop trying to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Seriously, the CFPB exists to protect us, consumers and citizens, from the predatory practices of Wall Street banksters, who are approximately the least popular people in America right now, so let Congressfolk eager to take the reaper's scythe to this nascent agency explain why they need to do that. No explanation that begins and ends with it's just another Big Gummint alphabet agency that we don't need will do -- everyone remembers the 2008 financial services meltdown, and everyone outside of Fox News audiences remembers exactly who did it to us: big banks and their ever-more exotic financial "instruments" designed to redistribute income from the folks who earn it to the folks who gamble with it. It would not be uncivilized to call banksters nihilists. But it would be uncivilized to let them do exactly as they please.

Around the table: today with almost *half* good news!

Uh oh: the Guardian catches the Chicago police operating, essentially, a "black site" detainment center for suspected criminals in an abandoned warehouse. During their stay, suspects get shackled, beaten, and kept away from their lawyers. Oh, and "suspects" include protestors. And, needless to say, the police don't keep very accurate records of their doings in the Homan Square warehouse. So quite a few police in Chicago seem pretty anxious about their small packages being discovered.

Clive Thompson at Mother Jones touts the homemade "mesh" network as a data-snooping alternative to mainstream internet service. Mesh networks can be safer, more democratic, and cheaper than big telecom services, plus they'll go into rural and impoverished areas where the big telecoms won't. But when Scott Walker becomes President, I bet the big telecoms tell him to declare all mesh networks "terrorist networks" and to arrest anyone who uses one. After all, the people who run big corporations literally live in terror of not being obscenely rich.

Daily Kos diarist Alex Forgue explains why a flat tax, despite its apparent simplicity, is a bad idea. Long story short: if you tax someone making $25,000 and someone making $1,000,000 annually at a flat 10% rate, "it is hard to survive on $22,500 compared to $900,000." And "(e)ven with a progressive tax structure, the wealthy can still survive and have money left over to invest." I'd add that the problem with the flat tax isn't unequal incomes so much as equal living expenses -- a wealthy person making 20 times what I make doesn't need to consume 20 times the calories, use 20 times the electricity, or put 20 times the gas in his car.

JetBlue, once famous for not charging baggage fees, now plans to do so -- at the advice of investors, no less! Wonder if they ever ask their customers anything? Apparently not, because at least one JetBlue exec apparently feels folks will just get used to it, a reason which could pretty much justify any of the thousand cuts customers feel at the airline counter. Maybe, one day, they'll also get "used to" being tossed out of the plane mid-air because the plane's overbooked.

Michael Shermer at Reason notes the 1980s finding that "Real IQ" scores have gone up three points a decade over the last century and supposes we're becoming "morally smarter," since most of the IQ point gains have occurred in abstract reasoning categories. I don't know that the raft of research Mr. Shermer describes convinces me, but I am already inclined to accept that "the moral arc of the universe may be bending in the right direction," even if individual humiliations along that arc are legion. Believing in that arc isn't a call to complacency, and I don't think that arc bends in a Libertarian direction, as Mr. Shermer does ("economic liberalism" isn't the same as liberalism, after all), but I remain an optimist in these matters -- as long as we act.

Finally, Sarah Jaffe at The Nation tells the story of how a group of 250-plus cable technicians in Brooklyn finally got their employer, Cablevision, to recognize them as a collective bargaining unit. Key lessons: winning the first vote to unionize is often a beginning, not an end, of struggle; a vigorous NLRB can be of tremendous help to a fight for a better life; and "one day longer, one day stronger" is a hell of a slogan to deploy to potentially dispirited workers. I wish them the best in their future together. I also wish I had half their strength and courage.

Around the table: "when did our team stop being America?" and other observations.

"Liberal" media, again "asks" if "economic populism" of the kind espoused by the likes of Sen. Warren and Rep. Grayson is an electoral "dead end." Gosh, is that why they call it "populism"? Because it's unpopular? If so, you'd have to ask "with whom?" You could be excused for answering "with Our Glorious Elites who have very few arguments with which to befuddle the masses anymore." And, last I looked, we outnumber them.

Texas judge sentences rapist to light jail time and, oddly, 250 hours of community service at a rape crisis center. Equally oddly, the judge clearly used circumstantial evidence to justify the lighter sentence, like that the victim had other sex partners, had a baby, and had contacted the defendant first, none of which actually helps answer the question "was this person raped at this point in time by this other person?" As for the community service, the road to hell is paved with the skulls of people who think they're geniuses because they've looked at everyone else's bad idea and somehow seen a good idea.

Senate strips provision from intelligence bill requiring the President to disclose how many people (including civilians) drone strikes kill. But that could work in our favor, since, as you know, Reps. Schiff (D-CA) and Jones (R-NC) have offered H.R. 4372, which would do the same thing as the stripped-out provision, and surely it's better to have these debates out in the open, right?

Citizens for Tax Justice reports on a corporation, Pfizer, that actually wants to "renounce its citizenship" and reincorporate in the U.K. so it can merge more easily with a British corporation, and thus evade taxes further here in the U.S. Sadly, "evade taxes further" doesn't quite describe the depths to which Pfizer has sunk in order to evade its responsibilities to the American taxpayer -- not just shifting its profits abroad, not just spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbying, but being the biggest "winner" in the 2004 tax amnesty and gobbling up over $4 billion in Big Gummint contracts just since 2010. It's actually an even longer trail of slime than that to which we've sadly become accustomed.

U.S. Supreme Court upholds Kansas Supreme Court's 2013 disbarment of former state AG Phill Kline, after the Kansas court found Mr. Kline had repeatedly misled (or permitted his subordinates to mislead) judges and grand juries (among others) in order to further his anti-abortion crusade. The U.S. Supreme Court is not known for being pro-choice, but no doubt they could not justify Mr. Kline's repeated violations of professional ethics codes -- and certainly they could justify staying out of a state's affairs with some ease.

Finally, David Sirota uses one Politico article, peripherally concerned with fracking in Colorado, to indict our entire horse race-obsessed political culture. Choice cut: Colorado Democratic Gov. Hickenlooper's spokeshack says a ballot initiative giving municipalities the ability to ban fracking is "like setting off a grenade in a closet -- you never know if someone's going to get killed," and by "someone" he means some politicians' careers, not the someones who have to drink or wash with the brackish, gelatinous, flammable water that fracking chemicals leave behind. Why should any readers care about any politician's chances for election anywhere? Because we've been trained to "root" for them if they're on our "team"? When did our team stop being America?

Action: net neutrality, drone strike transparency, and junk food ads in schools.

Word on the street is that the FCC will deal the death-blow to net neutrality today, by announcing a plan that would allow broadband services to create a "fast lane" where big corporations can pay to have their websites load more quickly. The FCC's plan would prevent corporations from slowing down loading times, or censoring sites entirely, and the plan would also reserve the option of "reclassifying broadband as a public utility," under which conditions the FCC could, legally, enforce strong net neutrality regulations. What's more interesting is that the FCC plans to evaluate every contract for preferential treatment to see whether it's "commercially reasonable." That could mean it could take for-freaking-ever for, say, the FCC to approve Google getting goodies from Comcast -- or it could mean the big corporations overwhelm the FCC with so many contracts the FCC rubber-stamps them all. But this, too, is no time to count on Barack Obama to win a game of 13-dimensional chess -- after all, 13-dimensional chess does sound like a hard game to play, let alone win, does it not? So Free Press helps you tell the FCC, one more time, not to kill off net neutrality. After all, we should control our internet experience, not the big corporations.

Meanwhile, we learned last week that a U.S. Air Force squadron in Nevada, not the CIA, has been flying drone strikes in Pakistan. Last year the Obama Administration claimed it wanted to transfer authority for drone strikes from the CIA to the military, but apparently the military has been working with the CIA for some time. And who's been in charge? Certainly not us! As one drone strike operator testified, "(a) CIA label is just an excuse to not have to give up any information. That is all it has ever been." In that spirit, let us recall that H.R. 4372, an Adam Schiff/Walter Jones production, would mandate that the Executive branch disclose whom our drone strikes are killing; they would also disclose how many civilians our drone strikes are killing, a matter of some contention -- our government, of course, says very few, while more independent sources, ah, contest that assessment. Still, better to make our government peel back the veil of secrecy. You can call your House Rep at 202.225.3121, or use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page -- your Reps are on vacation recess right now, so call their local offices -- and, if you like, you may report the results of your call to Just Foreign Policy here.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell USDA Secretary Vilsack to get junk food advertising out of public schools. We've participated in many actions (via Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood) to get advertising out of public schools at the state level, but we can also target junk food ads at the federal level. And this is one area Mr. Vilsack might actually consider himself accountable to the American people -- certainly he hasn't done anything for the public that might affect big ag's corporate profits, but the USDA's standards for the foods in snack machines and a la carte lunch lines at public schools have certainly improved on his watch. Maybe he thinks that's all the work he has to do -- that ads for junk food don't mean anything if he's gotten so much of the junk food out of the schools -- but he'd be wrong about that. If you know how susceptible adults are to good advertising, then you know kids are a lot more susceptible, and if they're out after school eating chips and cupcakes, the USDA's efforts to get public school kids to be healthier might be for naught. Personal to the trolls who contemplate spewing MICHELLEZ OBAMAZ WANTZ TO TELL YOU WHATZ TO EAT: you tell your kids what to eat, right? Well, do you want your government making that task harder, or easier? (And if you reply "I want big gummint to stay out of it," you've just voted for "harder.")

Action: drones and due process, wind power tax credits, and GMO labeling.

So far, President Obama has killed four Americans with drones; apparently he's considering killing a fifth, claiming that the target has aided in terrorist attacks on American troops in Afghanistan. Because that's tough, I suppose, never mind that America's rage-filled right-wingers don't respect Mr. Obama when he gets "tough." You know what's tough? Capturing a man who's helping attack our troops, putting him on trial, convicting him of his crimes, and parading his shame around America so we can all be reminded that this is how not to be. Killing people with machines from far away like the world is your first-person shooter game? Not tough. Never mind that our Constitution makes it pretty hard to send people to jail, just as the Founders intended and just as it ought to be -- our elites, helpless before mammon and enabled by a "liberal" media that treats life and death like a reality show, no longer have what it takes to be tough. Luckily, we do -- we have to be tough in all the ways that count every day. Roots Action helps you tell Mr. Obama that he doesn't have the right to violate Americans' right to due process just-because.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell Congress to restore the Production Tax Credit for wind power. Should you be suspicious of tax credits for businesses? Of course you should -- a lot of them are just corporate welfare handouts. But has the Production Tax Credit helped America? You bet it has -- over one-third of all new power capacity over the last five years has come from wind power plants, and Iowa (whose senior Senator, Republican Charles Grassley, first dreamed up the credit) now creates almost one-fifth of its electricity from wind. Naturally, the fossil fuel industry hates the Production Tax Credit, and has actually convinced Congress to let it lapse. What are fossil fuel corporations afraid of? Who has put a gun to their heads and said you must continue producing energy by churning up the land and belching filth into our air and water from now until the end of time? Perhaps we should end the billions of dollars in annual subsidies (which don't lapse!) the fossil fuel industry gets instead. After all, as we've suggested, some handouts just make corporations and the people who run them indolent.

Finally, the FDA remains quite wishy-washy over labeling of genetically-modified foods: despite two decades of studies linking GMOs (and, not incidentally, the herbicides and pesticides that accompany them) to maladies ranging from allergies to cancer, the FDA says it has "not found evidence of safety risks." Could that be, in part, because GMO foods aren't labeled, making them harder to track? And if the foods are safe, then why are they fighting labeling tooth and nail, in a land where over 9 out of 10 Americans want them labeled? The FDA apparently plans to issue "voluntary" labeling guidelines, but voluntary guidelines already exist, courtesy the International Federation of Produce Standards, which created the four-digit PLU code accompanying your produce. According to the IFPS system, a "9" would precede the four-digit number for organic foods and an "8" would precede GMO foods; you've seen the 9, I'll bet, but you haven't seen the 8, because food producers won't use it. So the science is pretty clear: "voluntary" guidelines don't make food producers label their Frankenfood. Take that to the FDA when you tell them to get serious about GMO food-labeling.

Action: electronic privacy, and "burdensome" regulations.

The NSA claims it doesn't need a warrant to dig through your emails, because terrorism, but you may not know that the law already allows other law-enforcement agencies to dig through your emails without a warrant. How? Well, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act passed in 1986, and it considered any email left on a server for more than six months to be "abandoned," and if the user's "abandoned" it, the state doesn't need a warrant to look at it. Remember how much email you were using in 1986? Exactly. And how many of your emails are still out there on your server now, even after you've downloaded them to your computer? Quite possibly all of them -- and that's before we got to whatever, say, Amazon or iTunes has stored for you in "the cloud." But H.R. 1852, the Email Privacy Act, would mandate that government agencies get a warrant before looking at emails (and other documents) stored in the cloud. H.R. 1852 has over 180 co-sponsors, some of them Republicans; if it gets to 218, John Boehner will have little excuse not to hold a vote on it, spout though he will that it's a "job-killing" bill, or that it's Communism, or Benghazi, or something. Both Demand Progress and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1852.

Speaking of things the House would like to do, here comes a yet-to-be-numbered bill, the SCRUB Act, which stands for "Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily Burdensome Act." But the bill would establish a burdensome nine-member commission to review and override regulations solely because of their "cost" to the "economy." Will such a commission count, say, the cost of treating illnesses, and the cost of the resulting lost work days, that laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act save our economy? Of course not -- they're mainly concerned about the "cost" to some coal CEO's bank account, since to them CEOs are The Economy. And if Americans don't like the idea of some trade-pact "investor-state tribunal" overriding our nation's laws every time some big corporation wants to dump some Frankenslurry into our water, why would we like giving a similar power to some commission? We've already got "commissions" for that; they're called the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Executive branch agencies the House and Senate establish through law. I think this bill warrants a phone call in opposition to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming.

Around the table: a minefield for myths!

Netflix will pay millions of dollars annually to stream its content via Comcast. The article doesn't tell us whether Netflix will pay Comcast more or less money than it currently pays the intermediary corporations who deliver Netflix content to Comcast; the agreement essentially gets rid of those intermediaries. But this is how the internet begins to end -- soon, only the biggest content providers being able to pay for their own "on-ramps," which do not differ from "paid prioritization," no matter what the Times says.

Exxon CEO joins lawsuit against construction of a water tower for fracking near his Texas home, citing the potential loss of property values. Naturally, the rest of the time, Mr. Tillotson heavily promotes fracking, pooh-poohing folks worried about dirty water and dirty air and increased risk of cancer; his interest in the lawsuit mentions none of these, so I suppose he's not a hypocrite per se. But that's a damn small thing to bring to the pearly gates.

Kevin Drum finds the case of Julie Boonstra -- featured in an anti-Affordable Care Act ad funded by Americans for Prosperity -- so wanting that he wonders if anyone is "truly being harmed by Obamacare." Ms. Boonstra will actually pay a little less under her plan, will keep her doctor, will even get better treatment -- yet still went along with a right-wing plan to destroy a right-wing health care reform law. I know stories are more powerful than carefully-reasoned arguments, but that doesn't explain why the "liberal" media eats up these horror-stories-that-aren't, while caring little for success stories.

Wired's David Kravets finds AT&T's release of government surveillance requests wanting, as the report apparently omits requests for metadata. The Obama Administration released guidelines in late January for corporations to release records of government requests for information -- and, it seems, left bulk metadata collection out of the guidelines, hence (perhaps!) AT&T's failure to release them. I guess they're hoping that we get fed up with all the confusion, but if it looks like dung and smells like dung, we ought to just call it dung.

Finally, Yes! magazine explodes "the myth behind public school failure." Spoiler alert: we face "not an education crisis but a manufactured catastrophe," only exacerbated by 30-plus years of privatization. Chris Hedges explains it pretty well, too -- there's all this money governments spend on education, "and the corporations want it." Note well that corporatist solutions to the education "crisis" don't actually save the public any money.

Action: state drone murders, better judges, and bad mergers.

Incredibly, the Obama Administration is mulling whether to kill an American al-Qaeda member with a drone strike. Let's stop the mulling: the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution tells us that "no person shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Thus the President doesn't get to kill an American, even one working for al-Qaeda, just on his say-so. We value our rights here in America, even if doing so results in bad things happening -- even if it gets us killed, or gets someone we love killed. I've said this before, but it bears repeating: your values aren't worth horsedoodle unless there's a good chance they'll inconvenience you. I mean, anyone can come up with a system of values that just so happens to benefit them in each and every situation they go through in life, but it takes wisdom to adhere to a value system that challenges you, that outlasts your short-sighted desires, and that fulfills you when you stare into the void. So Roots Action helps you tell President Obama that he doesn't get to kill anyone he likes because terrorism.

Meanwhile, we've blasted Senate Republicans plenty for blocking Mr. Obama's judicial nominations -- even nominations with wide bipartisan support -- but we haven't addressed the fact that a lot of these judges get wide bipartisan support because they're corporatists. Thus Daily Kos helps you tell Mr. Obama to appoint more public interest lawyers than corporatists lawyers to federal judgeships. Does that sound presumptuous? Does that sound like pie-in-the-sky thinking? Let the haters say so, for every great change that comes in America also comes with haters telling everyone how stupid it is. More than 7 out of 10 of Mr. Obama's judicial nominees have been corporate lawyers, and of course they're not all Snidely Whiplash, but corporations train their lawyers to think like corporate interests are the most important thing in the world. Meanwhile, fewer than one in 25 of Mr. Obama's judicial nominees have been public interest lawyers, and these folks who are more likely to stick up for working families than corporate lawyers. Not all public interest lawyers are peaches, either, but if I wanted to bet on justice getting done, I know which way I'd go.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop the Comcast-Time Warner merger, then both Common Cause and Free Press help you do that. We've spent enough time combatting the most nefarious myths of mergers -- that they "create jobs" (they kill jobs, as the resulting megacorporation cuts "fat" from the job rolls of the two former corporations) and that they lower prices (because they'll be competing with whom, exactly?). But we should also remember that we have no net neutrality regulations in America right now, and thus Comcast would have even more power in stopping us from, say, watching TV shows that aren't NBC shows (since Comcast owns NBC) or movies that don't come from Universal Studios (which, guess what? Comcast also owns). Comcast would also have more power to exact tribute from certain websites, meaning you might not see your favorite websites, but only the websites of their partners. No corporation -- no one -- should have so much power. But we can put a stop to that, if we have the will.

Action: government spying, charter schools, and voting (because it's Election Day).

Both the ACLU and Free Press help you support H.R. 3361/S. 1599, the USA FREEDOM Act. I'm sorry to report that, as with the USA PATRIOT Act, the USA FREEDOM Act is a tortured acronym, but that's about all the latter has in common with the former -- the USA FREEDOM Act would curb our government from indulging in many of the abuses it thinks the USA PATRIOT Act blesses, including the data-vacuuming the NSA does with just about every electronic communication of just about every American. And I'm pleased to report that, as of this writing, three of S. 1599's 18 co-sponsors are Republicans (Dean Heller of Nevada, Mike Lee of Utah, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska -- though not, conspicuously, Rand Paul of Kentucky), which bodes well for the USA FREEDOM Act's passage in the upper House, at least. The lower House will make its multitudinous excuses, but the longer they delay justice, the closer many of them will come to getting tossed out of office.

Meanwhile, closer to home, we successfully shamed Pennsylvania Gov. Corbett into releasing $45 million in state aid to the Philadelphia public schools -- but Philadelphia's superintendent, Walter Hite, plans to reserve $10 million of that money for charter schools. The "charter" school is a complete scam, designed by its creators to siphon money from public schools into schools that can reject students at will (and, not incidentally, prevent its teachers from organizing into unions) -- all of which makes public schools worse, which makes charter schools more "necessary," which makes charter schools "eligible" for more public money, which then makes public schools even worse, ad nauseum. But we're either a civilized society or we're not: when we fail to educate our children, we fix what we're doing wrong; we don't rely on the "free market," which acts only in the interest of its biggest players, to bail us out. MoveOn helps you tell Mr. Hite to spend all that money on public schools.

Finally, today is Election Day, and though we may not live in New York City (who will elect a Mayor today), or Virginia or New Jersey (who will be electing Governors and state legislators today), or in any of the six Congressional districts holding special elections or any of the several dozen cities who will also elect Mayors today, it's still our duty to vote. So, if you experience or witness any problems voting today -- said problems including, but not limited to, finding the polling place, voter intimidation, accessibility issues, voting machine problems, or provisional ballot issues -- the number to call is still 1.866.OUR.VOTE (that's 1.866.687.8683, if you have as bad a time converting letters to numbers as I do). And remember: this is our government, no matter how little it may resemble a good government, and voting represents only the beginning of our duty to make our government a good government. It's a duty we'll carry out every day after we vote, whether we call our representatives, march in the streets, or talk to our friends and neighbors.

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

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

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

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

Though President Obama told us we're "at war" with "al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces," the Pentagon has classified the identity of those "associated forces" -- though the Pentagon has apparently told Sen. Levin (D-MI) who they are after he asked, but gagged him from speaking further. You know who we're at war with? No one, because Congress hasn't declared it. This "classified" rubbish, as you might already have guessed, only gives the Obama Administration some "plausible deniability" when their drones accidentally kill someone they didn't actually want dead.

As you know, the Amash/Conyers amendment curtailing PATRIOT Act surveillance powers failed by a mere 12 votes on Friday, and since both "ayes" and "nays" were fairly bipartisan, Daily Kos helps you break down the vote. Long story short: the closer your House Rep is to a leadership position, and (to a somewhat lesser extent) the closer to the ideological center your House Rep stands, the more likely he or she voted against the Amash/Conyers amendment. It's enough to make you think the real clash in American politics isn't left-right, but people-establishment.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) calls Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R) "dangerous" for his stands against "war on terror" policies that curtail American freedoms. Sadly, most folks will forget what the fight's about, and remember only that Chris Christie attacked Rand Paul, and thus made himself look like a "moderate," again, which of course he's not -- it's not like he attacked Rand Paul for doing whatever the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants, after all.

A few Democrats (Mr. Obama and Sen. Feinstein included) think Guantanamo is "too expensive." Of course it is, and we're not just talking about money when we say that -- but who among these "critics" will house any detainees in their state's prisons? I remember that being a big problem with them back in 2009. They could solve that problem by releasing them all, since if they were guilty of something, they'd have been charged by now. But what do I know? I'm not a Nietzschean Superman like our Reps and Senators obviously are.

Finally, scientists at MIT say they've implanted false memories into mice. They say the research could help treat schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder, but I can't help but see the massive potential for abuse -- even though I've found the human mind, for good and for ill, remains fairly resistant to attempts to change it.

The Atlantic tells us about two cases the Supreme Court will hear that could deal serious blows to organized labor. In one, the Justices will decide whether the Senate was really in "recess" when Mr. Obama made certain recess appointments to the NLRB; in the other, the Justices will decide whether unions can make "organizing agreements" with corporations about how union elections would be conducted (among other matters). I could see the Supremes going either way on the first one and probably against labor on the second -- but whatever happens, we'll just pick up, dust off, and go again.

Don't look now, but a new meme may have penetrated the "liberal" media: that "privacy vs. security" is a false choice when discussing the NSA leaks! On NBC News, no less! With the ever-estimable Bruce Schneier as the column's first expert, no less! Am I wrong to experience the joy of hoping for better days? Or should I note that it's been weeks already, and that David Gregory still gets a lot more eyeballs than Bob Sullivan and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future?

30,000 California inmates begin refusing meals in an apparent hunger strike. Prisoners have called for a five-year cap on isolation, monthly phone calls, and increased access to educational programs, which some folks apparently think are "luxuries." I should note that California imposes harsher terms on prisoners if they're suspected of having prison gang ties, which should offend anyone with a get-warrants-prove-stuff ethic.

EPI's Ross Eisenbrey suggests that government spending, and not lightly-taxed corporate titans, drive innovation. He cites the iPhone, whose nine "core technologies" all received massive military/government help. Is that what Republicans mean when they say defense spending creates jobs? Seriously, Mariana Mazzucato's book The Entrepreneurial State looks like quite the read.

Finally, Nation of Change's Paul Buchheit offers four extremely well-sourced examples of corporate tax avoidance. And dig Whole Foods CEO John Mackey defending Apple just one paragraph in, saying "(t)hey're just following the rules that were created by governments," as if no corporate lobbyist ever paid off any Congressfolk ever to rewrite those rules ever. And then he says "(i)f the government doesn't like the rules, they can change them," as if "they" ain't us. I wonder why he'd want us to think that.

The ACLU helps you demand due process for NSA data-vacuuming whistleblower Edward Snowden, if and when our government catches him. You will not, in signing on to this effort, demand that Mr. Snowden be found innocent of a crime (our government has charged him with at least two offenses covered by the 1917 Espionage Act); you will simply demand that he get everything an accused person in America should get, like access to a lawyer and decent treatment while awaiting trial. In other words, you'll be demanding that our government do better with Mr. Snowden that it did with Mr. Manning, who was forced to sleep naked on a sheetless bed in solitary confinement. Folks who follow politics like it's football admire Mr. Obama for keeping his internal affairs drama-free and leak-free. But those of us who follow events because we value freedom suspect Mr. Obama's relentless pursuit of whistleblowers (whether they expose NSA surveillance or FDA incompetence) has become a mania.

But wait! There's more! Eight U.S. Reps, including Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Todd Rokita (R-IN), have introduced H.R. 2475, which would force the FISA Court to reveal its legal reasoning behind NSA surveillance programs. The bill doesn't have any text entered for it at thomas.loc.gov just yet, but you would not be out of order to phone your Reps and Senators and express your belief that, as Justice Brandeis used to say, "sunlight is the best disinfectant." Meanwhile, H.R. 2399, a production of Reps. Polis (D-CO), Conyers (D-MI) and Amash (R-MI), would also force the FISA Court to reveal its secret opinions to Congress and (in summary form) to the public, while also restraining our government's surveillance power under the PATRIOT Act. And H.R. 2399's 34 co-sponsors include 14 Republicans, Walter Jones naturally among them, but Paul Broun and Tom McClintock also among them. You want to call your Congressfolk about H.R. 2399? Who will dare stop you?

Remember ag-gag laws? The ones that would hamstring activists trying to expose abusive practices at factory farms? Well, they've proven unpopular enough that even though four states passed ag-gag laws in 2012, 12 states haven't been able to replicate that success this year -- even Tennessee's Republican Governor, Bill Haslam, vetoed one after massive public pressure. Which pressure we'll keep up, by telling our Congressfolk to prohibit ag-gag laws at the federal level. I suppose you have to give the pro-ag-gag folks credit, not just for designing their laws so that you actually must report any abuse you witness before you can determine if it's a pattern even worth reporting, but for deploying phrases like "farm protection legislation" when the laws really only "protect" big factory farms. They even insinuate that just because a practice is "standard," it's OK. But we can think of lots of things that once were "standard" but we'd never accept now.

Meanwhile, you know that big pharmaceutical corporations make money hand over fist, but did you know that they occasionally pay off the generic drug manufacturers to wait a few years before coming out with cheaper generic drugs? The FTC calls this practice "pay for delay," and they estimate that "pay for delay" costs American consumers an extra $3.5 billion annually. That's a nice chunk of change! I suppose since big pharma pays it out to generic drug corporations, they can cry poor and thus convince Congress to turn a blind eye to anything else they might be doing, but no doubt they've calculated that they can pay generic drug makers a relatively small amount now so they can make a lot more later. What a boon the "free" market is! Of course high-cost drugs actually make people less free -- or, you know, dead, which is hardly the kind of freedom our Constitution ensures. So PennPIRG helps you tell Congress to stop this awful practice.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to speak out against our government's data-collecting mania, I've got two more. Access Now helps you pressure the major internet corporations to push Congress to stop the Obama Administration's data vacuuming endeavors, and a slew of organizations (including OpenMedia and Demand Progress) help you tell Congress to investigate the NSA data-vacuuming program. Folks have told me that since they're not doing anything wrong, we shouldn't worry. But while our Constitution prevents our government from prosecuting you for things you did before Congress made those things illegal, nothing prevents our government from deciding to fight "new" terrorist "threats" whose "profile" your photos and tweets and blog posts and shopping habits magically fit. So even if you're not flying planes into federal tax buildings, you need to fight this.

Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian reports that the Obama Administration requested, and received, FISA permission to collect phone log data of all Verizon customers. Now Senators from both sides of the aisle have been quick to respond that data-vacuuming program isn't a new one, that they've been briefed on its existence for seven long years now, that it's authorized by Sec. 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and that, in Mr. Chambliss's words, "we have collected significant information on bad guys." I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on that, and not just because Mr. Chambliss didn't name any "bad guys" or even because "collecting significant information" on bad guys isn't the same as stopping bad guys -- plenty of government officials have testified that all this data-vacuuming we're doing has overwhelmed them with bad intel. When we demand warrants and probable cause, we're not merely protecting the innocent from government oppression -- we're setting a bar that sifts the malcontents from the real terrorists. Demand Progress, the ACLU, and Free Press have the action alerts.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to halt all field trials of unapproved genetically-modified crops, Organic Consumers still helps you do that. You could get away with planting unapproved GE crops in the field if and only if you could be absolutely sure that none of the Frankenseed will escape the field and find its way onto someone else's field. Given the fact that wind blows seed just about everywhere, and animals carry seed just about everywhere, how likely does that seem? The Frankenwheat found in an Oregon wheat field got field-tested in 15 other states. And Monsanto is now doing open-air field tests of a slightly-different glyphosate-resistant Frankenwheat in North Dakota and Hawaii. The USDA has responded with its best Alfred E. Neumann impression, telling us that the FDA found the Frankenwheat safe in 2004. The FDA in 2004? My God, that was Mr. Bush's FDA! An FDA even worse than Mr. Obama's! Why should I take their word for a damn thing?

The Supreme Court rules, in Maryland v. King, that it's A-OK to take DNA from suspects without a warrant because DNA is like, you know, fingerprints and stuff, and John W. Whitehead eviscerates their logic. Warning: you'll find Antonin Scalia on the right side of an argument, as happens more often than the Stopped Clock Rule would explain. What the hell is the matter with getting a damn warrant? Life ain't 24.

Sen. Lautenberg's untimely death has already led right-wingers to warn New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) that selecting some moderate to replace him in the interim will finish him in 2016. More likely, Mr. Christie tells far right-wingers to go to hell, sooner rather than later, and those right-wingers vote for him in large numbers anyway in 2016, given how much of a rage they've let themselves get whipped up into over SOSHALIZM!!!!!! -- and if Mr. Christie does win in 2016, which is far from unlikely, he's going to do a lot of their bidding anyway.

Conor Freidsdorf at The Atlantic notes that Bill O'Reilly planned to repeat his 2008 radio rant against right-wing "Kool-Aid-drinking idiots" on his more-widely-viewed TV program that night, but backed down in the face of pressure from then-Fox head Roger Ailes. What Mr. Freidsdorf forgets is that Bill O'Reilly criticized right-wing talk radio for opposing the Bush bailout -- the one time right-wing talk radio was on the side of the angels! -- and while Mr. O'Reilly only alluded to Rush Limbaugh in that rant, he called out Barney Frank and Chris Dodd by name.

Finally, former Rep. Allen West (R-FL) has converted his House campaign account into a federal Political Action Committee, called the Deep Strike PAC. It sounds like a damn porn film!

Last Thursday, Mr. Obama pledged to wind down the "War on Terror" because it damages democracy, and the "liberal" media applauded it. How pleasing that they've all finally seen what so many of us saw over ten years ago! The New York Times's praise is especially repugnant -- they actually had the cojones to say that "much of what Mr. Obama said should have been said years ago." Like when they said it, in 2002? Oh, wait: they were doing PR for the Iraq war then. So Mr. Obama has pledged to "ultimately" repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force, but Roots Action helps you demand its repeal now. And Mr. Obama still wants to close Guantánamo, four years after telling us he'd close it within a year, but the Center for Constitutional Rights helps you demand that Mr. Obama take immediate steps to close Guantánamo, while Amnesty International helps you tell Mr. Obama to release Shaker Aamer, who has been cleared to leave Guantánamo twice. Also, the ACLU helps you tell Mr. Obama to end the targeting killing of Americans, which program he defended, rather weakly, last week.

Meanwhile, Chevron holds its annual shareholder's meeting in California this week, and Public Citizen helps you tell Chevron to keep its money out of American elections. Chevron donated $2.5 million to the right-wing SuperPAC called the Congressional Leadership Fund, and that $2.5 million represented over one-fifth of that SuperPAC's total fundraising haul for the 2012 elections. But Chevron's donations might have been illegal (even under the post-Citizens United regime), since Chevron receives federal contracts, and American law bans federal contractors from making political donations. Chevron, for its part, claims that Chevron subsidiaries (such as Chevron U.S.A.) actually hold the federal contracts, not the parent corporation, Chevron Corporation, that made the donations. Got that? Another reason to fight against corporations owning other corporations. When Zombie James Madison comes around, he can't get his head around how the anti-slavery amendments not only made corporations into people but somehow don't prevent them from owning other corporations.

In other news, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been investigating the Jeep Grand Cherokee -- particularly the model made from 1993 to 2004 -- for its role in fiery crash deaths. During those years, the Jeep Grand Cherokee's gas tank was positioned behind the rear axle, which left it quite exposed in the event of a rear-end crash. (In 2005, Chrysler moved the tank in front of the axle, ostensibly to clear room for storage.) The end result: perhaps hundreds of otherwise survivable rear-end collisions killed drivers simply because the gas tank exploded. You might well be saying (as Chrysler has been saying) that a few hundred fatalities over the last two decades isn't that many, but if that number ever became 100% of you, you might feel differently about it. If you're lucky! Hence Jenelle Embrey of Linden, VA has started a petition on change.org, helping you tell the NHTSA and the Department of Transportation to recall the offending Jeep Grand Cherokee models. And Ralph Nader supports the petition; need we say more?

By now you've heard that our Department of Justice seized two months of phone records from over 20 AP phone lines -- including cell and home phone lines -- used by over 100 reporters. Wonder why they'd do that? Justice claims they're trying to find the source of a leak; the AP speculates the leak relates to a plot to carry a bomb on a plane, a plot our government allegedly foiled in early May. Maybe the Department of Justice really wanted that story to go out -- but intimidating reporters with overbroad, illegal investigations is a bad, bad way to do that. The "liberal" media seems shocked, SHOCKED! that this could happen in America; if you recall their relative silence over warrantless wiretapping, you might think they'll actually hurt like we do, now that it's being done to them! Perhaps that's too much to hope for, but still, duty is duty: both Free Press and CREDO help you tell our Attorney General to stop intimidating the press.

Meanwhile, Trader Joe's still refuses to deal with public pressure about selling antibiotic-raised meat, and worse, cranks out this jewel of spokeshackdom: "We understand the importance of our customers' decisions when it comes to their grocery shopping and do not presume to make choices for them." But they already choose what to sell in their stores! Aside from the absurd implication that some significant sliver of Trader Joe's customer base would only eat meat from miserable factory farm animals pumped full of antibiotics, they're not making Freedom Ponies by keeping this meat in their stores, they're doing the opposite -- selling antibiotic-raised meat insures that superbugs get stronger, and thus antibiotics become less effective, and thus people get sicker -- and thus less free. So Consumer Reports helps you call Trader Joe's and ask them to stop selling antibiotic-raised meat.

You may have heard of Carla Hale, the Catholic school teacher fired after her mother's obituary outed her. (Incidentally, want to pressure her school into rehiring her? Change.org has a petition for that.) And she's not the only one, as the folks mentioned here can tell you. But the timing couldn't be worse for the forces of oppression, as Sen. Merkley (D-OR) and Rep. Polis (D-CO) have re-introduced the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (S.815/H.R. 1755), or ENDA. If this ENDA is like past ENDAs, the bill would prevent employers from discriminating against employees because they're gay -- which discrimination would, in fact, include firing them for being gay. I'm eagerly awaiting the crowd of right-wing whiners who claim that people have sincere moral beliefs that being gay is wrong! Well, I have a sincere moral belief that it's not wrong, so whiners can go find the diaper-changing line and leave the rest of us alone. CREDO helps you tell your Senators to support ENDA.

Meanwhile, Sen. Menendez (D-NJ) and Rep. Capuano (D-MA) have reintroduced the Shareholder Protection Act (S. 824/H.R. 1734) in this Congress. As you may remember from previous alerts, the Shareholder Protection Act would give shareholders the right to vote on any campaign spending a corporate board wants to undertake. Even if you sincerely believe that money is speech, and that corporations have the rights of personhood, you have no business opposing this bill, because the money being spent isn't the "corporation"'s money, it's the shareholder's money, and why shouldn't they decide how it's spent? Corporatists will never tell you the real reason why they think shareholders shouldn't get to make those decisions: because it'll take the power away from executives. Haven't we had enough of runaway executive power yet? Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Shareholder Protection Act. Quick, before they spend your pension fund trying to elect people like Josh Mandel.

Finally, as you know, the House of Representatives passed CISPA, the bill that would let corporations and government collude in invading your privacy -- in the interest of "security," of course. And without a warrant, of course, warrants being, as one famous philosopher might say, "quaint" to our elites. Word on the street is that the Senate has no particular stomach to take up CISPA, but that doesn't mean we should declare victory and go home. What if the Senate writes up a similar bill, calling it, I don't know, KISPA? "See, it's a completely different bill, because it has a totally different letter in its title! Now go home, there's nothing to see here." When Senators eagerly place holds on bipartisan bills and uncontroversial nominations for no reason other than that they've lost the debate about said bills and nominations, there's no gutter-level to which they won't stoop. So the Electronic Frontiers Foundation helps you tell the Senate to reject CISPA, in whatever form they may bring it back to life.

U.S. Justice Department grants immunity to big telecoms who snoop for data they'd otherwise be breaking the law to collect. What, the FISA Amendments Act wasn't giveaway enough? No Executive branch, even that belonging to "the most transparent government in history," ever gave up power willingly, and no corporation ever gave up power willingly, either. And by the way, if CISPA becomes law, all of this will be legal.

If the whole "chained CPI" debate about Social Security benefits still seems a little esoteric to you (it's almost like they want it that way!), then Robert Reich explains why it's a bad idea in a two-minute video. Meanwhile, Talking Points Memo explains why a benefit cut based on "chained CPI" would cut benefits even more than it seems, by discussing the CPI-E inflation-measuring tool, which weighs health care costs more heavily than other tools.

One good thing coming out of coverage of the bogus double-tweet that sent markets reeling the other day: the speed of computerized trading has come under fire. What hasn't come under fire, unfortunately, is that our sick, immoral, and decadent culture still treats instant-traders as regular businessfolk, instead of what they are: speculators. There is, believe it or not, more to investing than making-the-most-money-right-now -- like investing in good corporations, or using your power as a shareholder to make corporations better.

Ho hum, New York Mayor says our "interpretation" of the Constitution, and our laws, will have to change in order to keep us safe. If that's true, then the American experiment in democracy is over -- and it's not over.

The American Legislative Exchange Council's Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force Director ("task force"?) bemoans how "somber" Earth Day has become. Think maybe the "somberness" has something to do with corporations being bigger and able to pollute more than ever before? Or corporations pushing climate-change denialism, just as ALEC has done? Or right-wingers screaming JOB KILLURZ!!!! at every attempt to keep our air and water clean? Or EPA regulators being called "job terrorists" on cable news shows?

Economic Policy Institute study suggests we don't actually have a "shortage" of science-technology-engineering-math graduates, but a shortage of jobs for those graduates. Corporations are absurdly powerful, care only about profits, and cut jobs so they can increase profits, so it's easy to see why they'd want us to think we just don't have enough science/math-related folks to fill jobs. And n.b. that corporations used to say they needed H1-B visas because they couldn't find enough Americans to do the job, but now they say they need them so they can "hire the best and brightest." (Really, they just want to pay workers less, and people who come from nations where the U.S. dollar has more buying power will work for less. I don't blame them, but I do blame the CEOs who've gamed the system this way.)

Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), British ex-drug czar said the 2008 financial services Armageddon was caused by too many bankers doing coke. Doesn't greed explain enough?

CISPA -- the "cybersecurity" bill that would let corporations share your private information with the government without a warrant, and would prevent you from suing said corporations for the harm they did you as long as they did it in good faith -- passed the House last week. President Obama, in a rare show of support for civil liberties, has said he'll veto it if it reaches his desk, but why wait? The Senate hasn't taken the bill up yet, and Demand Progress helps you tell your Senator to reject CISPA. The Senate is where that bill went to die last year, and that isn't a good thing quite often enough, but who knows what Senators will do this year, especially with big telecoms like Verizon and AT&T spending millions of dollars backing the bill? All we can do is speak in such numbers that they can't ignore us anymore.

Meanwhile, the Orlando Sentinel reports that Disney World wants the Florida state legislature to pass a bill preventing city and county efforts to pass paid sick leave bills. Very "small government" of them! But the Magic Kingdom has an Achilles' heel: you. For you can take your family somewhere else than Disney World if they don't want to give their workers a little breathing space when they get ill, so those workers don't infect your family, or worry about losing their jobs. And now the state Senator behind the paid-sick-leave-ban bill actually wants to broaden the bill to include local wage-hike bans! Apparently he thinks when you're caught doing something unpopular, you should double down. I wonder where he learned that. Moms Rising helps you tell Disney World to lay off local efforts to help workers when they're ill.

House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and ranking member John Conyers (D-MI) say they'll subpoena the Obama Administration for the "targeted killing" memos -- which putatively describe how our government decides which terrorists to kill overseas, or here at home. Originally the Obama Administration had until Thursday to produce the memos voluntarily, which they didn't, being, of course, the most transparent Administration in history. (I guess they figured you'd only compare them with the last Administration, and not with some idea of what a transparent Administration would actually do.) So Firedoglake helps you call House Judiciary Committee members and ensure they issue the subpoena. A subpoena threat from Sen. Leahy did, after all, get some Senate members to look at some of the memos. But that's not enough, and perhaps the House can outclass the Senate, though admittedly that's not a high bar to clear.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to establish binding clean water standards for the Appalachian mountain areas. Why? Because mountaintop removal coal mining corporations dump their toxic waste in valleys, and those toxins wind up in drinking water. And why binding? Because the EPA has, in the past, established voluntary "guidance" standards, but the affected states (primarily Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee) don't seem to be taking very much guidance. Studies find higher incidence of cancer, birth defects, and chronic heart and lung disease near mountaintop removal sites; studies also find vastly decreased biodiversity, as species that depend on the mountaintop before its "removal" die out. I guess the right-wing objection would be that you'll be sorry when energy prices go up! As if money is the only thing anyone cares about -- or blowing up mountains is the only way to power a nation! And even coal corporations have begun to abandon mountaintop removal.

In other news, the House blocked a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act last week -- but Rep. DeLauro (D-CT) has issued a "discharge petition," which, if signed by a majority of House members, would force a vote on the bill. You'd have to imagine at least a few Republicans, even in this ever-more extreme iteration of the GOP, would want to make it a little easier for women to find out when they're facing pay discrimination and then do something about it. You'd also have to imagine that, in this cut-throat era, more than a few House Reps who have no intention of passing the bill would still go on the record as favoring a vote on the bill, and hope none of their constituents notice the difference. So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your House Rep to vote in favor of the discharge petition. If this process seems a bit Sisyphean, remember that women make only 77 cents on the dollar that men make, on average, and that can add up over a lifetime -- like, to $400,000 on average. Think you can use an extra $400,000?

We've been bashing the Zombie Ryan budget a lot lately. And for damn good reason, I might add! But I should also mention that Mr. Obama, the Wizard of Super Happy Bipartisan Fun-Time Land, has repeatedly offered up Medicare benefit cuts and Social Security benefit cuts as part of a "grand bargain" with Republicans. Is this how "bipartisanship" works? One side wants to burn down the house, the other side doesn't, so we let half the house burn? And when is the other side going to demand some damn improvements to this house? The Center for Media and Democracy helps you tell your Reps and Senators not to cut Social Security and/or Medicare benefits. Their action tool also contains a list of better ideas, so they can't say well, you come up with a better idea! Just about anyone can come up with a better idea for our house than burning it down.

Meanwhile, CISPA hasn't advanced out of the Permanent Select House Committee on Intelligence since its reintroduction over a month ago, but Congress likes to move unpopular bills pretty quickly, and when they think no one's watching, so Daily Kos and Demand Progress help you tell President Obama to threaten to veto the bill. Wait a minute -- why get Mr. Obama involved? Because he did threaten a veto last time around, and unlike his veto "threat" of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011, which he threatened to veto because it didn't give him enough power to detain citizens, he actually threatened a veto for the right reasons, including the false choice the bill presents between security and privacy. If we stay on him, he'll do better, and if he stays on Congress, they'll do better. But it doesn't begin with him -- it begins with us.

U.S. District Court judge bans National Security Letters (NSLs), which come with a gag order on the NSL recipient, ruling that they violate First Amendment protections on free speech. But Judge Illston also stays her ban on NSLs for 90 days, so the Obama Administration can appeal to the Ninth Circuit. Note well the helpful chart showing that the FBI has issued much fewer NSLs since 2007 -- right around the time an Inspector General found the FBI was abusing its power to issue them (a power expanded, not granted, by the PATRIOT Act).

The New York Times finds that corporations have as many job openings now as they did at the height of the financial crisis -- but that they're waiting longer to hire. The Times gives many possible reasons, but when corporations wait, on average, eight days longer to fill a vacancy than they did just four years ago, you might be tempted to think the reason begins with "m" and ends with "oney."

Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) renounces opposition to gay marriage, mainly because his son came out to him two years ago. He comes closer to making the conservative case for gay marriage (cf. paragraphs four, seven, and eight) than Mr. Huntsman did in The American Conservative last month -- though he also thinks, like Mr. Obama, that the states (and certainly not the Supreme Court, per paragraph 11!) should decide the matter. Still, I won't criticize him for changing his mind because it affected him personally, as if people should only come to their convictions via thought experiment.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (E-WI) doesn't rule out a 2016 Presidential bid. Wanna know a secret? Scott Walker is a hell of a campaigner -- he never gets rattled, and he's always ready with a counterpunch. When he says "results" are all that matter, never mind that he doesn't have any results he can reasonably run on -- Democrats planning to oppose him may want to consider getting some results of their own, or actually convincing folks they can get results, rather than just running center-right so they don't offend anyone and hoping for the best.

U.S. Attorney General says the Obama Administration could, technically, kill an American on American soil "in an extraordinary circumstance," but has "no intention of doing so." Well, that's a relief!

Bank of Amerikkka probably hasn't set enough in reserves aside to settle its many pending lawsuits. Why not? Because they're betting on the lawsuits to go more or less their way, and also because the Federal Reserve, which needs to OK bank reserves, has pretty much rubber-stamped banks' reserves lately. What foresight Mr. Obama had in strong-arming all those Senators into confirming Mr. Bernanke for another term as Fed chief -- instead of doing something useful, like strong-arming Senators to pass mortgage cramdown legislation, allegedly one of his priorities.

Texas legislators propose tough mobile-device privacy laws, which would (among other things) require law enforcement to get a warrant before it can get GPS information from your cell phone. Bills at the national level (Mr. Franken's 2011 Senate bill, the just-introduced Lofgren-Poe bill) wouldn't be as tough as Texas's proposed bills. Gov. Perry, who ran a 2012 Presidential campaign we might charitably characterize as "disastrous," doesn't have enough left to lose to veto them -- though I suppose he could wilt under big telecom pressure anyway.

But, as one hand giveth, etc: Peruvian legislators introduce a surveillance bill that tramples on the rights of Peruvian citizens. I don't necessarily mean the rights Peruvians ought to have because they're human beings -- I mean the rights they already have under law. The bill pretty obviously contravenes Peru's own constitution, too.

It's not all bad news, though: a genetically-modified food labeling bill has just passed out of a Vermont House committee, and another one has passed Hawaii's House and moves on its Senate. The Vermont bill does more (Hawaii's only covers imported GMO food), but both states have made progress in doing something 9 out of 10 Americans want done, and something that doesn't actually trample on anyone's rights.