Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: how do the fools survive, part 322.

U.S. Justice Department declares that North Carolina's notorious "bathroom" bill, HB 2, violates Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 as well as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and has given the state until Monday to declare that it won't implement HB 2. Over $2.2 billion in education funding is at stake, but then again maybe that's the way North Carolina Republicans want it -- Republicans have this habit of fomenting (or taking advantage of) chaos in order to ram their bad solutions down the people's throats, and in the wake of losing all that federal money, the state could ram solutions like a completely-privatized school system down the people's throats. History, at least, won't look kindly on the state legislature that destroyed its state's education system so it could force transgendered folk to go to the wrong bathroom.

America's Last Conservative, Paul Craig Roberts, tells us that Greece is a "colony of the private banks. I was about to say how surprised I was that it's taking Greece so long to figure out that they could merely exit the EU and print their own currency, until Mr. Roberts reminded me that Greek government officials got their country into this mess by taking bribes to take on unpayable loans, and surely the bribes are still coming. I must confess I do find it difficult to accept how easily folks can be bought. Mr. Roberts now thinks Greece is too far gone, even, to exit the EU, but he does tend to be pessimistic.

Atrios reminds us of what charter school advocates seem to have forgotten: "closing down schools and reshuffling teachers and moving kids around all the time has an incredibly negative effect on a child's education and mental/ emotional well-being." Going to new schools all the time is traumatic for kids, after all. Of course, these charter school "experts" don't get it because their paycheck depends on them not getting it. You can also look at the buildings charter schools have "repurposed" and easily wonder "how can a kid learn in there?" That's what blind worship of "boldness" and "innovation" gets you.

Jennifer Sabin, writing at Huffington Post, expresses horror that so many Americans are now openly racist in the era of Donald Trump. I feared it would be like this -- that Mr. Trump would make racism OK again, in large part by re-naming anti-racism efforts "political correctness," at which point racism becomes mere "free speech." We can start fighting back by re-naming "political correctness" "not acting like a prick." (Of course we know why Mr. Trump also says things like "we're going to love each other, and cherish each other" -- no one can call Malia Obama all kinds of racist crap, after all, unless they truly believe they're good people, who just happen to be "provoked.")

Finally, in case you needed reminding that the New York Times's Thomas Friedman is the World's Worst Pundit, Dean Baker reminds us by summarizing the worst parts of Mr. Friedman's latest whinefest about the parties failing to work together in a "bipartisan" manner to pass "centrist" legislation that's neither centrist nor popular. One does at least look at what's broadly popular in determining where the "center" is, after all. Right? Not Tom Friedman -- he "make(es) up absurd positions, attribut(es) them to the people he doesn't like, and us(es) this as an excuse to throw them out of the discussion," all to support things like the "Grand Bargain" that would have cut Social Security and Medicare, which are, again, broadly popular programs which will not bankrupt the nation. But what of bankster-held debt, which will bankrupt the nation? That doesn't register with him. "(G)reat source of insight into establishment thinking" or not, let's never speak of him again.

Around the table: the Greek government aims for surrender, and other stories.

And now the Greek government prepares to squander the advantage the people handed to them in last week's referendum, by signing a bailout deal that's no better than the one the people rejected. I'd advise Alexis Tspiras to ask Democrats how well capitulation has worked for them at the polls, but most Democratic politicians aren't self-aware enough to give him a useful answer.

Hillary Clinton lays out her economic plan. Long story short: it's not as good as Bernie Sanders's economic plan (which is still a bit too nonspecific for my taste, I'll tell you what), but it'll do some good -- if she actually plans to act on any of it, that is. Which she can, no matter how many seats Republicans have in the House and Senate after 2016.

Doctor gets 45 years in jail for giving chemo treatments to folks who didn't actually need them. His monstrosity ran the gamut -- he gave chemo treatments to folks who didn't have cancer, overtreated other cancer patients, and gave the wrong treatments to still others -- all of which killed a not-insignificant number of his patients as it fattened his bank account. And yet too many right-wingers will go to their graves obsessing about black kids in hoodies, rather than real monsters like Dr. Fata.

Facebook has finally given its users the ability to prioritize what shows up in their news feed. I've been using custom lists almost exclusively on Facebook for years, and though I expect the news feed still won't show events in chronological order (as my custom lists do), this is a welcome, if very overdue, development.

Finally, Scott Walker formally joins the Presidential race. "Government that is closest to the people is best," "Americans deserve a President who will fight and win for them" -- that's some cojones from the man who fights and wins for the wealthy, whose government stands further from the people's will than any other. Yeah, he's won three elections in four years, but a real populist Democrat could have beaten him easily.

Penny rants for July 8, 2015: on Greece, Confederate flag-loving black folk, and how to beat Scott Walker.

Paul Krugman compares the "self-styled technocrats" pushing Greece to vote "yes" on the EU bailout deal to "medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding." Everybody but our elites knows you have to, in Eric Cantor's words, take a risk to get sluggish economies moving again -- but that means you have to spend money, which means you can't hoard it if you happen to have most of it when the economy goes south. Mr. Krugman also reminds us that "Greece’s debt problem reflected irresponsible lending as well as irresponsible borrowing," which makes a total of one member of the "liberal" media who has mentioned the irresponsible behavior of German and French lenders. Mr. Krugman also says he doesn't know for sure that abandoning the Euro would work out well for Greece, though debt relief surely would, especially when one of Greece's creditors has come out and said that Greece can't pay back what it owes, which scenario would, I suppose, be the dream scenario for banksters.

Thanks to the Washington Post, we meet some black defenders of the Confederate flag, most of whom live in the South. ZOMG THE TABLES HAVE TURNED!!!!! TEH WHITEZ WHO OPPOSEZ TEH FLAGZ ARE TEH REAL RACISTZ!!!!!!! Well, not exactly -- America is a big place, with some 330 million people, big enough that you'll encounter pro-Confederate flag black folks sooner or later. I don't presume all of them want extra credit for opposing slavery and only being friends with folks who feel the same, nor do I presume all of them can't explain coherently why they think slavery is a "choice" or how preventing state houses from flying the flag actually oppresses a person's own right to fly the flag or think about the flag however they like. I also presume that not all Confederate-flag loving black folks think you are "not entitled to commentary on which flag waves in our humid Southern breeze," though such "commentary" would also be First Amendment-protected speech. But, for better or worse, that's who we meet here -- another bunch of folks who can't distinguish between being oppressed and being shamed in public.

Finally, I've talked a lot about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's political survival skills, but I think I've finally figured out how to beat him. As always with formidable politicians, it involves turning his strength into weakness. What is his strength? His absolute unflappability through whatever chaos and disorder he's fomented; the kids would call him "cool," I suppose, or "chill." And what would we better call him, in order to defeat him? Cold. The man is unflappable, we would say, because he has no feelings about anything at all. And how do we know his hollowness? Because he has shown us he will say anything, at any time, to gain an advantage -- he tells the Tea Party he's against Big Gummint welfare while telling Iowans he's for ethanol subsidies, and he said he wouldn't try to kill public unions or pass right-to-work laws when he was trying to win elections, but he did both those things after he got elected. You can't trust anything the man says, because for him, you are not people; you are mere instruments of his victory, and men like that can never be trusted with power. I'll likely have to refine or expand upon this thesis in time, but that'll do for an opening.

Around the table: thoughts about Greece, Scott Walker, and gay marriage.

Dave Lindorff exults that "The Greek People Have Voted No to Austerity and Economic Blackmail." "Blackmail" does adequately describe what the EU is trying to do, after all, and so does "hostage-taking" -- kill those pensions and sell off those public utilities, or the country gets it! Paragraph 8 allows us to dream of an America that had national referenda, and the final paragraph suggests that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras could well meet with an "accident."

French economist Thomas Piketty reminds us that Germany has "no standing" to lecture Greece about repaying its debt, noting that plenty of other nations, including Germany, have had considerably worse debt at various times over the last few centuries, plus Germany never paid debts incurred from two World Wars. By the time he calls their putative "moral uprightness" "infantile," I'm reminded that we do hear very little from the "liberal" media about irresponsible lenders.

Wisconsin's legislature sought to gut its vaunted Open Records law last week, before a public backlash forced them to backtrack, and now some folks wonder if Gov. Walker was really behind the effort to gut the law in the first place, since he's personally under investigations relating to Open Records requests. Really? This is a question? Sure, if we tried Mr. Walker in court, we'd need more evidence, but elections only require that we reject candidates who do horrible things that just-so-happen to benefit them personally.

In other Scott Walker news, right-wing economist Stephen Moore claims Mr. Walker assured him over the phone that he hasn't gone "nativist" on immigration -- and then Mr. Moore "clarified" that he hadn't actually talked to Mr. Walker over the phone, but someone in his organization had. So I suppose the Walker and Moore camps hashed out a story making Mr. Walker look like he might be less extremist on immigration while not utterly discrediting Mr. Moore. That's the sort of thing people do when they possess a lot of cleverness and no soul.

Mike Huckabee, clearly backed into a corner by recent events, says the problem with marriage today is that we see it as a "selfish means of pleasing self, rather than a committed relationship in which the focus is upon meeting the needs of the partner," and adds that the "redefinition of love as something that is purely sentimental and emotional has been destructive." I find the sentiment behind the first quoted part agreeable to a point, but, ah, the "redefinition of love"? Is he acquainted with any works of classic Western literature?

Finally, clerks in five Kentucky counties have stopped issuing any marriage licenses so that they don't have to issue them to gay couples. One says, "I respect their position — the gay community's — that that is how they want to live...but I would ask for for the same respect for my decision." Ah, no: "how they want to live" is the law now, and your "decisions" don't deserve the "same respect" because you're a public servant, not an only-the-public-I-approve-of servant. And not issuing marriage licenses but sending a heterosexual couple to another county to get one? That's cheating, and God sees when you cheat.

Around the table: a "three strikes" law for banksters, and other ideas.

Katherine McFate at the Center for Effective Government wonders why we can't have a "three strikes" law for banksters who repeatedly abuse the public trust. Working that out would be a challenge (you'd have to relocate a lot of customer deposits, for example), but yes, bankster crimes are worse than most of those that land individuals in jail for life these days, and yet for some reason they attract so little rage from law-and-order types.

Department of Labor proposal would expand overtime protections to salaried workers making not more than $50,400 annually, meaning all those workers would be paid time-and-a-half for time worked over 40 hours in a week (or eight hours in a day). We agitated for raising that threshold to $69,000 earlier this year, but that's why you demand what you want, instead of settling for what you think they'll go for: so you get more than they'd otherwise give you.

The incomparable Dean Baker catches the New York Times confusing "lending" and "spending," as in, "(t)hat gargantuan sum of money is what central banks around the world have spent in recent years as they have tried to stimulate their economies and fight financial crises." Banks generally expect to get their money back in due time. That the Times would make such a mistake signals that they know making Greece endure more austerity at the hands of the EU is indefensible -- just as the "liberal" media signals its knowledge that arguments supporting "free" trade are indefensible by ventilating hysterical booga-booga about China.

Fast food CEO claims that the social safety net "can lock people into poverty." And here I was thinking that paying your workers in dung pellets locked them into poverty, but must be incapable of the kind of bold thinking that makes folks rich these days! I wonder if Mr. Pudzer knows that he pays people so little that they have to get food stamps oh never mind of course he knows and he's just a jerk.

Finally, Jack Jenkins at Think Progress tells us about all the mainstream religious leaders who are actually celebrating the Supreme Court's recent ruling legalizing gay marriage across America. But since these leaders don't act like brats and don't surround themselves with drama, I expect the "liberal" media will continue to ignore them. After all, good people doing good things in America is so squaresville.

UPDATE. I originally treated the overtime proposal as a done deal, and should have known better. Error corrected above.

Action: the Greek elections, the Robin Hood Tax, and fracking in the Chaco Canyon area.

Voters in Greece gave the leftist party SYRIZA a near-majority of Parliament seats on Sunday, and then SYRIZA then promptly formed a coalition government with the far-right, anti-bailout party Independent Greeks; some of the Independents' platform is unpalatable, but it would be nice to see populists on left and right come together to do some good for once. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell our government to encourage foreign governments to negotiate fairly with Greece. What's there to negotiate? Greece has had three-count-'em-three bailouts, but with austerity policies forced down its people's collective throat as a condition thereof, hence Greece still has a 25% unemployment rate. Syriza won the elections after promising more public investment, less cutting of public services and jobs, and a better debt repayment deal -- in short, Syriza promised a path that might actually result in economic recovery. We can help them on this path by encouraging European nations to negotiate a deal that better ensures Greece's self-sufficiency, versus the continued enrichment of EU cronies.

President Obama will submit a budget proposal to Congress soon, and Public Citizen helps you tell the President to include a financial transaction tax, also known as a "Robin Hood tax," in that proposal. Republicans will declare it DOA, but let's at least make them oppose what's actually in it -- let's make them argue that an 0.03 or 0.5 percent tax (that's respectively three one-hundredths of one percent and half of one percent, "liberal" media) is a job-killer or an economy-killer. Fact is, the vast majority of all Wall Street stock transactions are now done by computer software, and they don't build or re-build economies -- these transactions don't loan money to businesses so they can develop innovative products or processes, but merely allow banksters to make money without doing any of the work that helps great nations rise. And even the tiniest Robin Hood tax will raise billions of dollars annually in revenues, without hitting working families with higher taxes or Medicare and Social Security cuts. Why are these such bad things again?

Meanwhile, Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to protect the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico from fracking. Chaco Canyon, in the Four Corners region where four Western U.S. states meet, sits on a motherlode of shale gas, but gas drilling corporations have already demonstrated that they can't perform hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking") anywhere without polluting the air and water. They also can't do it without exacerbating the ill effects of climate change, because fracking releases a lot of methane into the air, and methane is much, much better at trapping heat than even carbon dioxide. There's a law and order element to this, too -- by its own account, the BLM has never properly researched the effects of fracking in the Chaco Canyon area, and its own resource plan forbids fracking in that area, but they've still approved nearly 120 fracking wells and have also leased some 20,000 acres in the Santa Fe national forest for gas drilling. If you can't ensure drilling in our national treasures is safe, maybe government is not the right place for you.

Around the table: a new government in Greece, a state-run media organ in Indiana, some bitter medicine in Alabama, and other stories.

Dave Lindorff tells us how the left-wing party SYRIZA's victory in Sunday's Greek elections will make life very difficult for the more center-right governments across Europe. Long story short: if Europe "thumbs its nose" at Greece, Greece could simply leave the Euro, which will strengthen Greece and weaken the Euro, but if they renegotiate bailout terms with Greece, other nations like Italy, Spain, and Portugal will want a redo, too. Come to think of it, Greece has really held the cards all along. It's about time we embraced the face that we do, too.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence apparently aims to create a state-run news service in Indiana. It will be called, no, not Pravda, but "Just IN," and state documents promise not only that it will "publish() information ahead of any other news outlet," but that it will also be the "voice of the state of Indiana's executive branch," because if there's one thing wrong with the "liberal" media, it's that Executive branches just dont have enough of a "voice" in them. Again, this is a strange thing for a nominal conservative Governor to do.

Koch brothers announce at annual retreat that their political network will spend nearly $900 million in the 2016 elections. Note well that four possible Republican Presidential candidates attended, and while Sens. Cruz, Rubio, and Paul made fools of themselves in a "candidate forum on economic issues," Gov. Scott Walker did not, which means he's the Golden Boy. Best laugh: an ad campaign called "We Are Koch," presumably not with this song as background music.

Gay Alabama state Rep tells her colleagues to stop using "family values rhetoric" in bashing gay marriage, lest she expose their apparently multitudinous marital infidelities. Well, it worked back when Barney Frank threatened to expose his famous "list" of gay Congressfolk, and it worked a few weeks ago when David Duke threatened to tell the world just how many Congressfolk-not-just-Steve-Scalise kowtow to racists like him, so I suspect it'll work here, too. And no it won't be like Bill Clinton, because people liked Bill Clinton.

Finally, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) suggests raising the minimum wage would hurt "teenagers," "minorities," and "people looking for their first job," thus demonstrating his ignorance of both anti-discrimination laws and the vast number of non-teenagers, non-minorities, and non-rookies in the workforce still making minimum wage because corporations don't feel like paying more. I'm old enough to remember when Tom McClintock was a gadfly, but now he could be California's next U.S. Senator! How far the Republican Party has come!