Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning discrimination, government spying, and internet privacy.

Sadly, pro-discrimination bills are advancing in the Tennessee state legislature -- HB 1274/SB 1499 would force the state to help localities defend their bathroom bills, SB 1297 would call the mere presence of a transgender person in a locker room an "indecent exposure" incident, and SB 1304 would let adoption agencies discriminate against particular parents as an act of "religious" "conscience." You'd think state legislators would have something better to do than make it harder for gay and transgender folks to live their lives! But this is now the hill far-right religious bigots will die on. The good news, I guess, is that they've already died on so many other hills, but that's only because we fought them, and kept fighting them after it seemed we lost. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to oppose HB 1274 and oppose SB 1297, SB 1304, and SB 1499. And if you're in Tennessee, you can join protests at the capitol; you can get more information here and here. The legislature will start deliberating on all these bills today, so the quicker you act, the better we'll do. Good hunting!

Meanwhile, H.R. 1942/S. 936, the Ending Mass Collection of Americans' Phone Records Act, would, as its title suggests, stop our National Security Agency from collecting American phone records without a warrant. Proponents of government spying always gloss over those last three words, "without a warrant," in their never-ending efforts to smear those of us who respect our Constitution as "weak on terror," but no one opposes law enforcement carrying out its duties in a lawful manner. And considering how quickly our government can get warrants to investigate terror activities, you have to wonder why our government has needed more power -- and if you concluded that they "need" that power so as to silence its opponents and smear protestors as "terrorists" (or "socialists"!), I wouldn't blame you. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending Mass Collection of Americans' Phone Records Act.

Finally, word on the street is that Congress is trying to draft online privacy legislation -- but that Congressfolk are already giving in to big telecom corporations. Not that this is a tremendous surprise, if you recall that the Republican-dominated Congress nullified FCC internet privacy regulations in 2017 using a "resolution of disapproval." Given our Congressfolk's propensity to wilt before the prospect of campaign contributions (or campaign contributions for potential opponents), we will no doubt have to lend some steel to their spines, hence Fight for the Future helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass internet privacy legislation that puts us, and not big corporations, in charge of our private information. That link has a lot of good information, such as Mr. Snowden's statement that "(a)rguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." Indeed.

Action: concerning clean water, paycheck fairness, renewable energy, and social media monopolies.

The WATER Act is back, this time as H.R. 1417, and it would pay for restoring our water- and sewer-related infrastructure in America by raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 24.5%. I'd raise the corporate tax rate all the way to 55%, which is where it was in the America all those Tea Party folks grew up in, but financing water infrastructure with a smaller hike in the corporate tax rate is certainly worth doing. And what can Republicans say in response? That the corporate tax cut has created craploads of jobs which is to laugh? Seriously, the more folks get their taxes done this year, the more unpopular the 2017 tax "reform" will be -- and the more popular the idea of raising taxes on corporations so that folks can drink unleaded water will be. If we act, that is! Hence a group of good-government organizations helps you tell your Congressfolk to support clean water by passing the WATER Act.

Meanwhile, our House of Representatives plans to vote on H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, today (Thursday), so you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your House Reps' phone numbers and call them to tell them to support the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act, as you know, would protect workers from retaliation if they discuss their pay at their job -- since that is, after all, the only way most folks find out they're victims of discrimination! -- and would also ensure that employers can't make hiring decisions solely on the basis of past salaries, since that'd be like penalizing people for the discrimination they've already suffered. Women's pay still hasn't achieved parity with men's pay, even after you adjust for factors like experience, so we need the Paycheck Fairness Act with a quickness.

In other news, our President's budget proposal (among its many, many other insults) zeroes out our Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (or ARPA-E), which operates within our Department of Energy and happens to be the agency that conducts R&D for clean energy. Because, apparently, the will of coal corporation executives means everything in America, and the will of the people means nothing! And also, apparently, coal simply can't survive unless this Administration strangles all other forms of energy in their crib. But solar and wind farms now cost less to start up than coal plants do, and solar and wind production have almost achieved parity in cost with fossil fuel production, so zeroing out ARPA-E (and trying to zero out virtually all other renewable energy funding in our budget) smacks of desperation. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to preserve our government's investment in renewable energy.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break up Facebook, then Freedom from Big Tech still helps you do that. You know that Facebook has seemed awfully susceptible to actual "fake news" purveyors, and that Facebook had allowed Cambridge Analytica to misuse the data of 87 million users, and you also know that both of these problems are made much, much worse by the fact that you can't just punish Facebook for its mistakes by moving your entire social media life to another network these days. But add yet another scandal to your list: Facebook has apparently stored hundreds of millions of passwords, maybe including your password, as plain text on its servers. Too often it seems we need to rewrite the old saw "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" into "the bigger they are, the more damage they do" -- and we need to force our government to work a lot harder at making sure corporations don't get that big.

UPDATE. The House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act this morning, so Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to pass the bill.

Action: concerning internet privacy, endangered species, and conservation funding.

You've heard all the news stories about social media corporations failing to protect our private information, and yet so many in politics would prefer that these corporations get to "police themselves"! When people screw up on the level that these corporations have screwed up, do we let them "police themselves"? Of course not! Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass strong legislation protecting our private information online. That might seem like an uphill climb, particularly if you remember that our FCC did enact decent internet privacy regulations toward the end of 2016, only to see our Congress repeal those regulations in a "resolution of disapproval." Surely they've learned their lesson, right? We should never assume that our Congressfolk learn any lessons unless we've taught them those lessons again and again. But that's why we're here.

Meanwhile, Avaaz helps you tell our world leaders, in advance of a global wildlife summit, to add giraffes to the list of animal species the multilateral CITES treaty protects. Almost half a dozen African nations have already proposed adding giraffes to the protected species list, almost certainly because the world's giraffe population has gone down close to 40% over the last 30 years, putting them at risk of extinction. And a big reason their numbers are down? Illegal hunting, of course. Because giraffe steaks make good eatins for folks who might otherwise starve to death? Well, no -- because well-off folks like to hunt animals. Frankly I'm gobsmacked that anyone who's ever seen a giraffe would want to kill it for sport, and I'm even more gobsmacked when I hear testimonials from folks who've worked with giraffes and found them intelligent and gentle. I guess some folks are just that empty inside and need something, anything, to fill the void.

Finally, Congress still hasn't reauthorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which expired last September 30, and no all the shutdown drama is no excuse, not just because reauthorizing a popular conservation fund isn't exactly a heavy lift politically or logistically, but because this program actually pays for itself, via oil and gas drilling royalties. And you like the Delaware Water Gap? The Appalachian Trail? The Flight 93 Memorial? Well, the Land and Water Conservation Fund created all of these, and many more of our most popular and significant monuments. Of course, our current President only cares about the present -- certainly not the past, and certainly not the future. But those of us who do care about the past and the future can let Penn Environment helps is tell our Congressfolk to get off their duffs and reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund already.

Action: concerning the minimum wage, internet privacy, and the DREAM Act.

With a new Democratic House taking power, the Economic Policy Institute (among other groups) help you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Raise the Wage Act. (I have no bill numbers for its current iteration at this writing.) Raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would represent a vast change in working families' fortunes -- the current minimum wage of $7.25/hour actually represents a pay cut from the late 1960s, when the $2/hour minimum wage had over $10/hour in contemporary purchasing power -- and no, it wouldn't kill jobs, not just because minimum wage jobs are often the kind you can't kill, but because "the minimum wage vs. jobs" is the wrong focus. A better focus would be "absurd CEO salaries vs. jobs," since those salaries are the real job-killer in America. The Senate won't pass it, etc., but embarrassing them isn't exactly a vain pursuit, particularly if it instructs future Senates about the people's will.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the big telecom corporations have been selling your location data to other corporations -- some of which will sell that data to just anybody, including bounty hunters. Thing is, your contract with your cellphone provider may prohibit data sales to "disreputable" folks or corporations, and even the big telecoms admit that they sell too much data to too many unsavory actors! Well, they said that out of fear that our government would regulate them -- a vain fear, since our government repealed FCC privacy regulations last year! -- but since the abuse is still happening, Free Press helps you tell our FCC to stop corporate abuse of our private data. Please do not be the fool who says well just stop using a cellphone then! Everyone uses a cellphone now, and everyone deserves privacy -- I mean, Chief Justice Roberts understands this, and crafts excellent jurisprudence based on that understanding.

Finally, you no doubt recall that our President tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program last year, and though various federal courts have blocked his efforts, now's as good a time as any to let People for the American Way help you tell Congress to pass a DREAM Act, so that immigrants brought here as children can contribute to America's heritage and one day gain citizenship. Sending immigrants back to nations they don't recognize as home, when they literally had no say in emigrating to America, should strike you as the height of cruelty, but of course our Administration cares about nothing but diddling the rage glands of its votaries, and thus still struts around demanding a brand new border wall before our government starts inspecting food and airplanes again. So when I said "now's as good a time as any" just now, perhaps I was being a bit glib -- now's a damn good time to change the conversation about immigration, even if our President doesn't want to.

Action: concerning the Arctic Refuge, kids' apps, media consolidation, and climate change.

Our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) has released its proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (also known as ANWR) to oil drilling -- and, naturally, because they don't want to hear what you think about it, they announced their proposal in late December when folks are immersed in the holidays and have given us only a month to leave a public comment about it! So let the Sierra Club help you tell our BLM to keep big oil drilling corporations out of ANWR. You know (better than our BLM does, apparently!) the threat oil drilling poses to caribou within the Reserve and the Gwich'in Native Americans who live there, but don't forget to remind our BLM that just about nobody who's studied the matter thinks there's a whole lot of oil in ANWR to begin with! Is this the lesson we want to teach our descendents -- that when some corporation or other wants to make money, it can destroy whatever's in its way? And that our government should help them do that? Not in my America, it's not. But only if we act.

Meanwhile, you might think the children's apps in the Google Play Store wouldn't illegally collect data or manipulate kids into buying stuff or model harmful behavior, but, sadly, they do, as a Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood complaint to our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) documents. Like the app depicting a kid crying after you don't buy something! That's disgusting! Kids take it seriously when other people cry! And when the big corporations providing these apps say hey, we're just collecting information so we can target ads better -- corporate spokeshacks are not as smart as you think, after all! -- contemplate the horror of a corporation that thinks of children as just another moneyjar. You know, the way they already think about their parents! But at least parents can defend themselves better against such manipulation -- children need their parents' protection for a reason. Hence the CCFC helps you tell Google to adopt more vigorous standards that protect kids from privacy invasion and rampant commercialism.

In other news, one Digital First Media plans to buy Gannett newspapers, the nation's biggest newspaper publisher -- no doubt you've read USA Today and a slew of local and regional newspapers that used to be independent. Yeah, might as well get that out of the way early: having a thing such as Gannett isn't a good thing for America, even if their reporting is competent enough, but having it bought by an even bigger corporation owned by a freaking hedge fund is an even worse thing. What do you think Digital First will do once it gets its grubby hands on Gannett? If the experience of previous Digital First-owned outlets (like, say, the Denver Post) has any predictive power, there'll be censorship of journalists, firing reporters who don't toe the bottom line, and sacrificing anything and everything to the altar of mammon. Hence Free Press helps you tell Gannett's board to protect their newsrooms by refusing to sell to Digital First Media. We've got here the Big Stick of Bad PR here, so let's use it.

Finally, our Supreme Court has lately rejected Exxon's latest attempt to stall or stop Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey's investigation into whether it lied to investors and consumers about fossil fuels' role in climate change, so now's as good a time as any to tell your state Attorney General to join the effort against Exxon, as Corporate Accountability helps you do. You probably know the story by now: several media organs reported in 2015 that Exxon's own scientists had warned executives of fossil fuels' role in climate change as early as 1977, but these executives basically pretended that research didn't exist and spent their time stoking doubt in everyone's minds instead. And there you have the real role of money in climate change policy -- scientists don't "make money" from telling everyone climate change is real so much as fossil fuel corporations make money from telling everyone climate change is a hoax. Remember that the next time our President weighs in on the matter.

Action: concerning privacy, clean water, and worker rights.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real reforms defending consumer privacy from big tech corporations. Sadly, the reason we need legislation to accomplish this (and I really wish journalists would mention it a bit more!) is that Congress passed one of its notorious "resolutions of disapproval" repealing FCC privacy rules which would have (among other good works!) forced big corporations to allow consumers to opt in to letting corporations sell their data, rather than forcing consumers to opt out. But big tech corporations like Facebook have been earning themselves a lot of bad PR for their inability/unwillingness to protect their customers' private data (and for employing Nixonian tactics against their critics) -- and corporations like Facebook monopolize their fields, so our government has to step in and curb their power, whether they want to or not. Concentrated power: it's evil everywhere!

Meanwhile, as you may know, the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) proposed banning fracking in the basin of the Delaware River earlier this year, which is good, but also proposed letting corporations dump fracking wastewater in the Basin and draw Basin water out to frack with! Welcome to yet another King-Solomon-actually-splitting-the-baby-in-half "compromise"! I mean, the whole point of banning fracking is to keep pollution out of our water, so if you go ahead and allow fracking-based pollution in water nearly 15 million good Americans drink and wash with, you've kinda missed the point. Still, Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf has one of four votes on the DRBC, so Food and Water Watch helps you tell Gov. Wolf to support a fracking ban with considerably more teeth. Remember, folks: the money you make from polluting water quickly goes away, but clean water lasts forever -- if we maintain it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) not to repeal its "joint-employer standard," then the Economic Policy Institute still helps you do that. Big chain corporations have long claimed that their workers' "real" employer was the particular franchise where they worked; thus workers would have had to redress grievances over pay and scheduling and such with the franchise. Of course any fool can see that's absurd, since franchises obey (or cope with) orders from the top, so the NLRB created a joint-employer standard to help workers redress grievances with their real bosses. Now that Republicans dominate the board, they're trying to scuttle the standard. But don't believe the hype that TEH STANDURDZ HURTZ TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!! Your local McDonald's ain't a "small business." Obviously.

Around the table: Democrats plan another mistake, plus somewhat better news.

Democrats plan a "magnum opus" of legislative provisions for their first bill, one that would address voting rights, campaign finance reform, and ethics. They've got the right idea, but as usual, they've got the wrong size: these all-encompassing pieces of legislation give Republicans too much space for prevarication (remember "death panels"?), and we can get more done with (and get more public support for) smaller bills. I think making H.R. 1 the Voting Rights Advancement Act would be the better idea, not least because we could put Republicans on the spot with it. After all, why do you oppose expanding voting rights? is a much more difficult question to answer than why do you oppose this big bill with all kinds of stuff in it? (Oh, and I'm also pretty sure they can't just overturn Citizens United with a bill.)

60 Minutes runs a lengthy report showing how European nations are actually doing more for their citizens' internet privacy than we are -- but doesn't mention that the FCC actually enacted privacy regulations in 2016, only to see Congress repeal them with a "resolution of disapproval" the next year. It's not like that was beside the point of the report! Anyway, Max Schrems's point about "forced consent" -- that it's wrong for a corporation to sell you a product and then say give us all your data, or you can't use the product -- should be attended by American jurists, maybe? It's not like there's no precedent in American law.

We could make too much of a U.S. District Court judge blocking further construction on the Keystone XL pipeline until our Administration does the proper reviews (and not just environmentally-related ones) as required by law, since our Administration could just show its work and OK I couldn't get through that sentence without spitting tea all over my keyboard. Also, too, if, per our Supreme Court, an Administration agency "cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past," well, that doesn't bode well for the FCC's net neutrality repeal, does it?

In other good news, our Administration announces that it will stop refueling Saudi planes bombing the bejeesus out of Yemen, though it will still aid the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen with weapons sales and logistical support. This is a good thing, though we'll need to pressure our Administration to do more, and I bet Mr. Khashoggi, now sitting comfortably in the beyond, finds his role in this matter rather amusing. Rep. Royce (R-CA) could use some education, however, lumping the Houthis in with al-Qaeda when the Houthis are some of the world's best fighters against al-Qaeda.

Finally, Axios/SurveyMonkey poll finds that 61% of Democrats think Republicans are "racist/bigoted/sexist," while some 31% of Republicans think the same of Democrats. For the record, I don't believe Republicans are bigots merely due to party affiliation -- in fact, I believe all of us are susceptible to bigotry (calling racism a "virus" that could be "activated" really was the smartest thing Nate Silver ever said), and better public policy, public policy that doesn't merely redistribute worker income upward to executives, would better ensure that fewer folks drink from the cup of bigotry.

Action: internet freedom, email privacy, and robocallers.

Roots Action helps you tell your state government to contract only with internet service providing corporations that respect net neutrality. Net neutrality, as you know, is the principle that demands that ISPs treat all network traffic the same, and that's the same principle that allows you, and not some corporation, to determine where you want to go on the internet. It's also the same principle that the FCC repealed late last year, because for them, corporate "freedom" to bilk us and herd us into junk news ghettoes is more important than our actual freedom to associate freely on the internet. But the state of Montana has already declared it won't contract with corporations that don't respect net neutrality; if enough states follow suit, those corporations are more likely to throw up their hands and keep things more or less the way they are. The FCC will hate it, but they're walnuts in the batter of eternity, and we're not.

Meanwhile, here's a welcome development: the Email Privacy Act, once unanimously passed by the House only to fall to some truly disgusting Senatorial machinations, is now a part of the House's version of the defense authorization bill. Now, the Senate will pass its own version, which might or might not include it, or the two bodies might conference it out -- but that's where we come in, by using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to tell our Senators to include the Email Privacy Act as part of the defense authorization bill. Unlike the poison pills they usually try to attach to defense authorization bills, the Email Privacy Act actually relates to national security, since it would require our government to get a warrant whenever it wants to look at personal emails left on a corporate server. So give your Senators a call; they won't see it coming.

Finally, if you have a cellphone, you're almost certainly getting phone calls from numbers that look like real people but are actually robocallers trying to separate you from your money; I can't tell you how many of these phone numbers I've put through a reverse lookup at Whitepages.com only to find they're "suspected spam" and/or "flagged as scam or fraud." Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell our FCC to enact the most vigorous possible regulations restricting the power of robocallers to disrupt our lives. Yeah, the FCC is in charge of that, and they don't give one rat's hind quarter about you or I; they only care about their corporate cronies. But said corporate cronies have no particular interest in protecting robocallers, since they're a) extremely unpopular and b) generally small-time crooks at best. And if robocallers induce folks to use their cellphones less frequently, corporations will care about that. So let's get cracking.

Action: violence against protestors, internet privacy, and forced arbitration.

The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand accountability for the Israeli slaughter of over 50 protestors in Gaza earlier this week. No use telling me that these protestors were "no angels," because civilized people don't shoot protestors or treat protestors as soldiers, period. And calling for "accountability" shouldn't send shivers through anyone's spine -- if these protestors truly provoked Israel, then Israel has nothing to worry about! But the government of Israel has, for too long, acted as if accountability is for other people, and our government has, for too long, enabled them. Folks who counter that we must "support Israel" at all costs clearly do not understand the true definition of "support" -- if you truly support Israel, you also stand up to Israel when it does wrong, just as you would to any of your family and friends. (And folks who counter with a sentence beginning with "well, what about" should be adults and learn how to concede points.)

Meanwhile, our Congress repealed FCC internet privacy protections last year with a "resolution of disapproval" -- and then Facebook got in a heapload of trouble for exposing its users' personal data to corporations such as Cambridge Analytica. Nobody could have predicted! So along comes S. 2639, the Customer Online Notification for Stopping Edge-Provider Network Transgressions Act (or CONSENT Act), which would require "edge-provider" corporations like Google and Facebook to get permission from customers to use, sell, or share their personal info. The FCC privacy rules covered internet service providing corporations rather than "edge providers," true, but it should be a no-brainer, at least, to do something about something that was just in the news. Which means what, class? That if Congress doesn't pass it, they have fewer than zero brains. Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Americans' online privacy by passing S. 2639.

Finally, contractors have sued Amazon for sexual harassment, but guess what? Same as Gretchen Carlson did at Fox News, these contractors have forced arbitration clauses in their contracts. Ms. Carlson was savvy enough to tape her boss's harassment, but she would have had no recourse in court, because Fox also put a forced arbitration clause in her contract, which would have greatly impeded her chance of getting justice. (Ms. Carlson has since become a fierce opponent of forced arbitration; no use complaining that's only because it happened to her, like we're only supposed to learn from thought experiment and never from experience.) Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Amazon's Board of Directors to dump forced arbitration clauses from its employment contracts. You can remind Amazon that it prides itself on being a "progressive" workplace, so it shouldn't keep its workers from getting the justice they deserve in a court of law.

Around the table: the President is not America for the 443rd time, and other musings.

Louisiana and Minnesota legislators introduce anti-protest bills in the wake of protests over pipeline expansions in those states. And the Louisiana bill actually goes further than model ALEC "critical infrastructure" legislation in that you don't actually have to set foot on a pipeline site to go to jail. Again: if you have to pass laws to stifle protests, you've lost the argument. Adults admit when they lose arguments. I guess that means these legislators aren't adults. You know, just like our President.

Jessica Rich at Wired reminds us that -- in the wake of the news that 87 million Americans, not 50 million, may have had their personal info on Facebook compromised by Cambridge Analytica -- that we need basic internet privacy laws in America. Recall that Congress repealed FCC broadband privacy regulations in 2017 and a campaign ad may present itself: the Facebook scandal proves we need stronger privacy laws -- but your Republican Congressperson voted to gut federal privacy laws! Think Democrats will run that? Nah; running ads like that might make people think you'll actually work for them.

Alvin Chang at Vox draws a straight line from tax-cuts-for-the-rich in Oklahoma to the Oklahoma teachers' strike, now almost two weeks old. Over the last 14 years, the state legislature has cut the top bracket from 6.65% to 5%, which wound up depriving Oklahoma of some $350 million in annual education spending, such that Oklahoma kids now only go to school four days a week. You recall, no doubt, that tax-cuts-for-the-rich has put Kansas's public schools in peril, too, though at least Kansas didn't respond to hard economic times by sponsoring an "Oilfield Prayer Day," as Oklahoma did.

Ed Henry at Fox News may have won numerous plaudits for his unexpectedly scorching interview with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, but the network's other programs either a) ignored the interview or b) gave it as much pro-Administration spin as possible. And this is exactly how one would do evil propaganda -- put up the occasional negative report to say "see, we're not so bad," and then bury that negative report as deeply as possible on programming that gets the most eyeballs. It's rather similar to how they've been using Shepard Smith for years. Hell, it's how they've been using their internet reporting for years.

Finally, hot on the heels of two FBI raids of the office of our President's personal lawyer, our President calls the FBI raid "an attack on our country in the truest sense." If he has a serious point to make about, say, the way the FBI got its warrants for the raid, you'll never hear it underneath all his TEH UNFAIRNEZZ!!!! and TEH WITCH HUNTZ!!!! And one more time: the President is not America. I locate the greatness of America in our people and our traditions, not our President. Perhaps Dr. Johnson should have said that conflating yourself with your country is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Action: government spying, clean water, and war in Yemen.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 4943/S. 2383, the CLOUD Act. Why? Because the CLOUD Act would let American police grab your private data -- your emails, your videos, your online photos, your chat logs -- no matter where it's stored on the planet (and it could be anywhere!), and it'd also let foreign police get your private data from American corporations. Never mind a little thing called a warrant. And it'd allow our President to enter into "executive agreements" with other nations that would let them ignore our privacy laws while presumably following their own, weaker ones, never mind a little thing called foreign entanglements. This is the kind of thing that has historically gotten conservatives very upset, but with today's "conservatives" little more than shells of their ancestors, you might be tempted to hope right-wing suspicion of foreigners helps defeat this bill. But we're better off hoping our own activism kills it.

Meanwhile, closer to home, we learn from a USA Today investigation Pennsylvania has more schools and learning facilities with lead in their drinking water than every other American state, and since any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, that's nothing to crow WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. But HB 2025 would mandate that every state public school test its water for lead every two years, make the results of those tests public, and cut off any drinking water sources with more than 5 ppb of lead. This'd seem like a no-brainer, but too often our leaders seem like they're the ones who've spent their whole life drinking lead-contaminated water, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to support clean water and healthy child development by passing HB 2025. It's well past time we were able to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about something good our politicians have done, but we won't be able to, unless we speak out.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to support S.J.Res. 54, the resolution that would end American war-making in Yemen without Congressional authorization, then Defending Rights and Dissent still helps you do that. Word on the street is that the Senate will vote on S.J.Res. 54 this week, so you want to get a word in before that vote. To sum: Saudi Arabia has been waging war, with our help, on the Houthi rebels in Yemen for years, and though you may debate the wisdom of that -- personally, I think waging war on the Houthi rebels who are some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth is a bad idea, and that overplaying alleged Houthi ties to Iran is mere fearmongering -- you can't challenge the fact that Congress never declared war on Yemen, nor did Congress grant power to the President to act via the War Powers Act. Nor should you object that S.J.Res. 55 "hamstrings the President from acting," because, well, that's the idea.

Around the table: describing another frontier in fearmongering, and other tales.

If Sinclair gets to gobble up Tribune Media, what sort of things can we expect on our local news programs? Why, ginned up anti-Muslim terror reports, of course! Or, as they call them, "Terrorism Alert Desk" segments, which, you won't be surprised to learn, are not exactly substantive. Sinclair ran run about 200 of them last year, and I guess if you see one more than every other calendar day, you might start to think TEH MUZLIMZ ARE TEH KILLINGZ TEH PEEPULZ!!!! everywhere. You have to remind yourself that 1.5 billion Muslims inhabit the Earth, and "Imam Reads to Blind Grandmother" isn't likely to hit the "Terrorism Alert Desk." Or even the "news desk."

Jim Naureckas at FAIR finds a Pew Research Center study anxious to point out that the youngs are liberal and the olds aren't, but strangely not anxious to point out that just about every age group has become more liberal over the last seven years. He also points out, toward the end, that social media outlets have enabled more Americans to get past the "media gatekeepers" -- and that those gatekeepers love telling us we're all in our own "bubbles," rather than the bubble they would prefer to keep us in.

Every once in a while you need to hear a former Republican remind us that Republicans only have "one idea" anymore, and that idea is tax cuts. It's good to hear someone count "the administration's dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its rules against consumer fraud" as an offense against law and order. And it's also good to hear someone remind everyone that Sen. Flake sure talks a good game about the President's various offenses against civilization, but "votes with machine-like consistency in favor of the president’s destructive agenda and unqualified nominees." Mr. Flake gave us the "resolution of disapproval" that repealed internet privacy protections, you recall.

Ho hum, the President announces stiff new tariffs against imported aluminum and steel, and then we learn that one of his advisors, the notorious Carl Icahn, just so happened to have sold over $30 million of stock in the heavily steel-dependent Manitowoc Company during a ten-day period starting on February 12. I have no opinion on whether these tariffs are actually a good idea, but here's the trouble: Mr. Icahn hadn't traded any stocks in Manitowoc for almost three years before February 12, and of course steel stocks (including Manitowoc's) went down bigly after the President's announcement. Could that be illegal insider trading? And could the "insider" who supplied Mr. Icahn with his info be the President? These are questions worth asking.

Finally, Office of Management and Budget releases report stating that "major" federal regulations enacted between 2006 and 2016 had financial benefits that far, far outweighed their costs. You would think this Administration, in particular, would have tried to cook the books, but apparently they just settled for hoping that we'd never notice, what with all the drama that surrounds our President. Also, too, OMB found that regulations tend not to be "a significant factor in employment," meaning regulations don't kill jobs. That won't stop Republicans from repeating a bunch of crap, nor will it prevent the "liberal" media from failing to question them on it. Which is why we trust ourselves.

Around the table: tabulating continuing bad behavior from the "liberal" media, corporate front groups, and, of course, our President.

Wondering how the Republican tax "reform" plan started getting positive numbers? It may have been because the "liberal" media kept parroting right-wing talking points about thousand-dollar bonuses, which were a) not given to all workers by all corporations and b) pale next to the windfall those corporations are going to get. The bad news? When you refuse to pay workers what they're worth for so long, a thousand-dollar bonus will feel like manna from heaven, rather than a small pile of money that'll be gone in two weeks. The good news? Only around 25% of Americans seem to be noticing a tax cut in their paychecks, and that number maps too easily onto my old saw that 25% of the electorate is insane. Remember when President Obama got a tax cut designed not to be noticed into your paycheck? Remember how the 2010 midterms went for him?

On the other hand, Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic suggests that Democrats will fumble away their chance to take back Congress by "fail(ing) to effectively challenge the GOP claim that its tax-cut plan is benefiting average families." We're seeing a little evidence Democrats understand this -- ads supporting Sens. McCaskill and Donnelly mention the probability that tax-cuts-for-the-rich will lead to Medicare cuts for seniors -- but, gosh, the reality we've described above (people not seeing bigger paychecks, small bonuses spent and forgotten) should be fairly compelling, too. I'd shoot an ad with a bunch of bloodhounds looking for tax cuts. Hey, it worked for Mitch McConnell against Dee Huddleston in 1984.

Democrats formally introduce the resolution of disapproval aiming to overturn the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, and the corporate lobbyists have already begun their whining. Dig the "Broadband for America" group's asinine assertion that "such a significant policy issue should (not) be decided by an obscure legislative device that bypasses congressional debate and important input from the public." They sure didn't complain when Republicans used that very same "obscure legislative device" to repeal FCC consumer internet privacy protections, and they didn't defend "important input from the public" when the FCC came out and said it ignored most of the public comments it got, so Broadband for America, whoever they are, can drink a big glass of STFU.

The U.S. Geological Survey plans to eliminate its Biological Survey Unit, which costs a mere $1.6 million annually (out of a $4 trillion-plus budget!) and keeps over a million plant and animal specimens. Civilizations do not do this; sick, immoral, and decadent societies do this, and the more they say they're doing it for the coal miner in West Virginia or the single mother in Detroit -- who do both benefit from research on plants and animals in America -- the sicker, more immoral, and more decadent they become. And only truly sick individuals like Newt Gingrich say some billionaire could do it if it's that important, like only billionaires can do important things. We do it, as Americans, because we do important things.

In case you were wondering, no, we shouldn't deprive gun owners of due process rights just because the President gets frustrated with having to think hard about things that require hard thinking. We have preserved due process rights over the centuries precisely to prevent governments like this one from becoming too powerful, but sadly I bet a lot of the President's votaries agreed with him, even the biggest gun-lovers among them (who, after all, always think it's those other people who deserves to have their rights violated). Being civilized is hard work. It's supposed to be hard work. And folks who don't like doing the hard work should go live in a police state. It's that simple.

Finally, notorious right-wing gasbag Erick Erickson says Parkland high school student David Hogg is a "bully." Our Glorious Elites, feeling "bullied" by high school students! And dig how they suggest that anyone who proposes a boycott is a "bully" -- where's their love for the "free" market? And dig how Mr. Erickson says "(h)igh school kids are not people we should take seriously on any subject," as if that's not profoundly elitist, and thus also anti-American! Our Glorious Elites do nothing, ever, but bully the people, and then pretend they're the victims when the people finally push back. May God have mercy on their immortal souls.

Action: tax "reform," and internet freedom.

Sen. Corker (R-TN), who once said he wouldn't vote for any tax "reform" bill that added to the deficit, now says he'll vote for this tax "reform" bill that will add between $1 trillion and $1.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade (possibly because of this development!), and Sen. Rubio (R-FL) apparently got enough of his demands met to declare he'll vote yes on the bill -- but, dismal though things seem, you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to tell your Senators and your House Reps to reject this absurd tax "reform." Don't be swayed that the bill doesn't cut renewable tax credits after all, or that it doesn't repeal the Johnson Amendment after all, because guess what else would protect these good works? Voting against the damn bill, that's what. Just remember that the bill gives massive, unearned handouts to corporations and rich folks -- who got almost three percentage points lopped off their top bracket after all, how utterly surprising! -- and takes tax breaks away from working families such that they won't feel the half-percentage point dip in some of the middle brackets at all. Don't just take my word for it, though: read the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's report.

Meanwhile, as you know, the FCC ignored the popular will last week (as expressed in over 20 million public comments to the agency) and repealed the 2015 Open Internet order that protected the internet freedom of consumers from corporations. But it turns out that the "resolution of disapproval" process we (rightly) despise so much after it killed internet privacy and forced arbitration rules earlier this year (and damn near killed methane emissions rules) can surely be turned on those who use it the most, and Sen. Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Doyle (D-PA) will soon introduce a resolution of disapproval that would nullify the recent FCC repeal right quick. With 48-and-soon-to-be-49 Democrats in the Senate almost certainly favoring such a resolution (one that can't be filibustered, you recall) and Sen. Collins (R-ME) probably willing to join them, the resolution would need just one more Republican defection to pass the Senate. Passing the House would be rather more work, but it wouldn't be impossible. The hard part would be getting the President to sign it; you know he won't want to, but how well do you think he'll defend a veto, and how much more wrath does he want to face from the voters? Let's find out! Consumer Reports, Free Press, and CREDO all help you tell your Congressfolk to roll back the FCC's anti-internet freedom vote.

Action: net neutrality, and consumer privacy.

The FCC plans to destroy the internet as we know it with their vote on repealing the 2015 Open Internet order that enacted strong network neutrality regulations, so it's time to clog up the phone lines of the three anti-internet freedom FCC Commissioners. These would be FCC Chair Ajit Pai at 202.418.1000, Michael O'Rielly at 202.418.2300, and Brendan Carr at 202.418.2200. I know, I know, we all participated in the official public commenting process already, but the FCC didn't listen to them unless they "introduced new facts into the record or made serious legal arguments." Thus the FCC gives a massive middle finger to the popular will, and I can't imagine that going over well in whichever court or courts this net neutrality repeal effort will wind up. And using this logic, couldn't an arsonist justify burning down a house by saying all the people telling him not to burn down the house weren't telling him anything "new," or weren't speaking his preferred dialect of hifalutin? Really, what more do you need to say other than burning down houses is bad? And why do you need to learn legalese to do that? Isn't that, you know, elitist? If not un-American?

Meanwhile, Uber has apparently outdone Equifax in the "exposing good folks' personal data to unscrupulous actors" department -- and that's no small feat! -- not just by exposing the personal data of some 57 million drivers and riders, but by not telling anyone about it, and then paying the hackers who stole the data $100,000 to give it back, which I guess they decided meant it was all no-harm-no-foul. All praise the new economy! Oh, and our Federal Trade Commission was investigating Uber for (wait for it) failing to secure customer data at the time. You think maybe they should have come clean with the FTC, since the FTC does, at least nominally, work for the American people? But I know who else, at least nominally, works for the American people: our Representatives in Congress, who failed to put forth strong data security legislation even in the wake of Equifax's massive data breach earlier this year. Hence Consumers Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Uber breach and enact strong legislation protecting consumers' personal data. And don't tolerate any "nothing's private on the internet" backtalk, because that's not the attitude that ended slavery or passed the Voting Rights Act.

Around the table: from internet privacy to the healthful effects of small, independent news outlets.

Having already gotten Congress to nullify the FCC's internet privacy regulations from 2016, Verizon has now asked our FCC to prevent states from passing their own laws restoring those privacy rights. My first thought was, "that would be as Constitutionally dicey as that FCC attempt to nullify state laws outlawing community broadband would have been," and lo and behold! FCC Chair Ajit Pai made that very same argument against that very same effort! But I bet he thinks differently now, and will justify such an anti-privacy with rhetorical gymnastics that would put his TEH DEAD CATZ WITH TEH BURNERZ PHONEZ STUFFEDZ INSIDEZ!!!! to shame.

The Supreme Court may well curb public sector unions' ability to collect "agency fees" -- which perform the same function as the union dues that fund those union functions that defend their workers -- and Lois Weiner at In These Times identifies "business unionism" as a major culprit in this effort. "In defining their purpose primarily as protecting members’ narrowly conceived economic interests and shaping the organization to function like a business," she writes, "unions construct a very limited role for the workers they represent." So if unions had, for example, been listening more to their members or arguing for the best interests of all workers instead of "just our own," then they might not have to wonder why folks wouldn't bother to pay dues or fees if they didn't have to, because those folks would want to.

New Jersey Governor-elect Phil Murphy has promised to start a public bank there, so Ellen Brown at the Web of Debt blog discusses the multitudinous benefits of public banking. The most famous public bank, the Bank of North Dakota, "has seen record profits for almost 15 years," even despite the state oil bust, and that's likely due to its business model, as it "is risk-averse, lends conservatively, (and) does not gamble in derivatives or put deposits at risk," plus "(i)t does not pay bonuses, fees, or commissions; has no high paid executives...and does not have private shareholders seeking short-term profits." But there's also an oblique warning about Mr. Murphy's public bank in the tale of the now-defunct Los Angeles Community Development Bank, which was "not a bank" and was "designed to fail."

Michael Corcoran writes a devastating piece for FAIR about the "liberal" media's utter failure to inform the public about Canadian single-payer health insurance. Long story short: the "liberal" media cherrypicks the data when it can and ignores or distorts the data when it can't -- why tell folks that Canada spends 55% what we do on health care when you can talk about long wait times for specialists and elective surgeries, which is literally the only thing American health care does better than Canada? Also, too, the "liberal" media can find a whole lot of people willing to tell stories about the deadbeat neighbor down the street, but not the people who've lost family members because they couldn't get health insurance, and it's not like the latter are hard to find.

Kathy Wilkes at In These Times reminds us why NFL owners can't just fire their players for kneeling during the national anthem. If you've been saying, as I have, that the First Amendment doesn't protect you from your employer, well, turns out that's not the issue when you have an employment contract negotiated by a union (as NFL players do), and not only doesn't the NFLPA contract call "kneeling during the national anthem" a fireable offense, NFL owners failed to follow contractual procedures that might have made it one. Also, when you do get fired, you can file a grievance. If your Tea Party uncle is still full of rage, remind him that the owners signed the contract.

Finally, a study published in Science finds that publishing stories in "small, independent news outlets" has a broader effect on the political conversation on social media than you'd think -- particularly when three (or more) of them publish articles on the same topic in the same week. It's also nice to hear someone else say, out loud, "we have faith in the American people." A lot of good government organizations have that faith, but often forget to say it. And the professional cynics can laugh all they want, but all they'll bring to the Pearly Gates is their money.

Around the table: limning new frontiers in corruption and political manipulation.

Red Cross confirms it lost some $6 million in Africa between 2014 and 2016 in fighting the ebola epidemic. Over $2 million of that went missing due to "likely collusion" between a few Red Cross employees and a few Sierra Leonian bank employees, when they "improperly fixed the exchange rate." That sounds pretty bankster to me, though I suppose real banksters would call someone stealing $2 million a piker.

A record number of folks signed up on the Obamacare exchanges on November 1 -- 200,000, or more than twice as many as last year. Those folks are generally re-uppers, not new customers, but it's still impressive. Donald Trump is no doubt trying to take credit for it as we speak -- and I guess he deserves some, for trying so hard to screw it up that it put the fear into people. It'll have a much shorter sign-up period, of course, so if fewer people sign up overall, I guess he'll talk about how it's "imploding."

ProPublica discusses "doxxing," or the practice of folks dropping your private information on the internet as a way of harassing you into silence. It happens to a lot of people who speak out (and, in the case of at least one white power rally non-attendee, some people who don't), and ProPublica provides a good primer on how to reduce the possibility it'll happen to you. You'll want to attend your Facebook privacy settings, of course, though the good news is you seem to have more power over them than you used to.

Twitter is doubling the character limit on its twitterings, from 140 to 280 characters, and I'll confess I'm a little sad. I found that the 140-character limit sharpened my writing (you missed my two-year run on Twitter? Don't worry, so did everyone else!), and I don't think Twitter's problems have very much to do with the character limit. Problem with Twitter is that it's hard to get noticed unless you act really, really obnoxiously, and I'm not sure that has to be a problem in a system with relatively little gatekeeping.

Finally, don't make too much of Mr. Trump's telling Japanese auto CEOs they ought to make their cars in the U.S., mere seconds after acknowledging that they already do. Republicans act stupidly in order to make you think they're more stupid than evil, and Mr. Trump's only the latest practitioner of that art. His votaries will cleave to him harder, not just because they love ball-swinging displays, but because they love bashing the press after the press bashes their hero. As a civilization, we have to do better -- particularly since I could have written the previous sentence about George W. Bush 13 years ago without changing a word.

Around the table: featuring truly bad arguments and governments gone wild!

Laura Gottesdeiner at Mother Jones finds our ongoing war against ISIS to be, well, rather less "precise" than advertised, to the point where many Syrian citizens think the Americans' main aim is to kill as many civilians as possible. You'd hate to think we've outdone Mr. Assad in the area of killing Syrian civilians, let alone ISIS, but in May and June we managed to outdo both in that area. And if you're thinking destroying ISIS is more important than worrying about the "collateral damage," you have to consider what killing civilians always does in the long term -- namely, that it creates more ISISes.

You've heard from right-wingers that consumers win more money through arbitration than class-action lawsuits, but the Economic Policy Institute reminds us that so few consumers ever win in forced arbitration -- a mere 9% do, making that nice-looking $5,000-plus average virtually meaningless, since you get zero dollars if you lose. Also, and we often forget to talk about this when we talk about forced arbitration, that corporations win even more often when they take you to arbitration, and they collect, on average, over $7,000 when they win. Class action lawsuits may not make you rich, but it ain't all about you -- it's also about everyone else who got harmed, and making sure corporations don't harm people again.

The Turkish government has detained half a dozen activists for the heinous crime of discussing and learning about encryption and digital security. Oh, sure, the charges include things like "committing crimes in the name of a terrorist organization without being a member," which sure sounds like a made-up thing, but make no mistake: they're oppressing good activists laying their lives on the line for their fellow citizens. And like so many other governments around the globe (cough Venezuela cough), Turkey's government does these things because it knows it will shrivel and die under ordinary circumstances. (But remember that our own CIA Chief, Mike Pompeo, has all but equated encryption to criminal activity as well.)

Ho hum, would-be Estate Tax killers still trot out family farms, even though the stodgiest Estate Tax opponents have never been able to find even one family farm that succumbed to it. Last month a House Ways and Means Committee hearing brought in a North Dakota farmer to decry the Estate Tax when his farm won't be subject to the Estate Tax, and a 2014 ad campaign against the Estate Tax featured a Kentucky farmer who took over $150,000 in farm subsidies over the previous 20 years! The Estate Tax repeal movement has always been one of America's stupidest -- but how many more bullets do we have to pump into this zombie lie to keep it down for good?

Finally, Janine Jackson at FAIR reminds us of the dangers of believing credulous "liberal" media stories about attacks against America by describing how the Tonkin Gulf "attack" led to the catastrophe in Vietnam. You have to hope that if/when Donald Trump tries something similar, today's "liberal" media will hate him enough to be a bit more skeptical, except that the "liberal" media seemed to love him best earlier this year when he fired a bunch of Tomahawk missiles at a just-deserted Syrian air base. So it's down to us to keep us out of war, as usual.

Around the table: in which we contemplate White House drama, Russian oppression, and bankster corruption.

In case you were thinking the former Marine General who's now President Trump's Chief of Staff will stop all the drama in the White House, the incomparable Heather Digby Parton at Salon warns us that President Trump hasn't gotten on quite well with perceived military strongmen as time has gone on. Gen. McMaster, in particular, was "the new sheriff in town" not long ago, and now they're pushing him out of the way like he's Mayor Farnum on Deadwood. But here's a question: if Mr. Trump does turn on yet another man he sees as "a 'tough' leader, like himself," will Trump votaries start thinking maybe Mr. Trump isn't actually tough? Or will they continue to equate acting like a prick with "being tough"?

Speaking of the President acting like a prick, now the White House tells us his statement to Long Island police suggesting they should not be "too nice" when apprehending certain suspects was a "joke." If you find police brutality funny, or if you think all suspects are guilty merely because the police arrest them, then I guess the "joke" worked for you, even if it apparently didn't work for dozens of police departments, who don't routinely get criticized by the right for being so "sensitive" like the rest of us do.

Russian government passes law banning Virtual Private Networks (or VPNs), as well as other means of surfing the internet anonymously. Like our own CIA chief, the Russian government seems to think that the mere act of trying to protect your identity (or your data) online means you're a criminal trying to cover your tracks. You could just be a patriot, trying to protect yourself from the state! Why do I suspect that Trump supporters -- who call themselves patriots an awful lot, after all -- would cheer this on? Because their "patriotism" mainly means sticking it to liberals, that's why.

Wells Fargo admits to charging "several hundred thousand borrowers for car insurance they did not want or need," which of course enabled them to collect unearned missed-payment fees and repossess some 20,000 cars. Is this why we should let our bravest and boldest entrepreneurs do whatever they please, with no fear of government regulation? Not only do these bravest-and-boldest contribute nothing of value to our civilization except perhaps their bad example, they don't do any real work, either. Concocting a fraud scheme isn't work.

Finally, Brian Klaas at USA Today reminds us that President Trump "Embodies Every One of the Seven Deadly Sins." "He made the Boy Scouts speech about himself rather than about serving others" is the perfect sentence I spent a whole paragraph trying to write last week. But despite the cascade of irrefutable charges I'm sure Trump votaries won't be swayed, for how much of themselves will they see in this portrait of Dear Leader? There's nothing wrong with giving all your enemies what-for, they'll say, though I'm sure all of them, at some point, accepted the notion that some enemies are best ignored.

Around the table: the defense community vs. methane emissions, and other tales.

Democrats declare they won't work with President Trump on tax reform until he releases his own tax returns, presumably so we can see how his tax reform plans would benefit him. But we already know how his tax "reform" plans would benefit him (i.e., bigly), and we really shouldn't make everything about Mr. Trump, since he feeds on drama like a dung beetle feeds on dung. Instead, Democrats should be advancing ideas that would actually reform our tax code, like bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and closing corporate tax loopholes, but of course they won't do that, because they fear losing their big corporate donors, when they should fear losing American voters.

Have you been wondering why the Senate hasn't yet acted on the House's "resolution of disapproval" aiming to overturn the Bureau of Land Management's rules limiting methane emissions on our public lands? Well, apparently a significant slice of the defense community, including thousands of veterans and four Generals, support the methane emissions rule, arguing that (among other things!) venting methane as wastefully as we do hurts our efforts to produce our own energy, and thus also our efforts to stay out of wars over energy. Could we run ads saying those who want to get rid of the methane emissions rule are objectively anti-security? Hey, they'd just be getting some of their own.

Adrianne Jeffries at The Outline reminds us that stories about people who walk 12 miles to work every day are not "heartwarming" -- that they're "really indictments of a country that has the world’s largest economy but can’t promise a living wage," or at least not enough of a living wage to buy a car. Also, too, why can't we have nice things like public transportation, particularly in rural areas? Because we won't tax the rich hard enough to get them, that's why.

Alana Semuels at The Atlantic describes how four years of complete Republican rule have allowed coal ash pollution to hurt residential clean water in North Carolina. It's a big story, and note well that in Amy Brown -- the Belmont, NC resident and former Republican who now lines her walls with bottled water for cooking, drinking, and tooth-brushing and who agitates against coal ash pollution -- North Carolina has summoned a thundercloud, for hell hath no fury like a Republican utterly abandoned by her party.

Finally, Trump Administration spokeshack Sean Spicer suggests that public disclosure about such issues as Mr. Trump's tax returns and the identity of White House visitors is (as the Times puts it) "unnecessary, intrusive, or even harmful." People who talk about the importance of "privacy" not as it relates to your internet information but as it relates to "the President's ability to get the best advice" don't seem to understand that they work for America, and they also don't understand that Americans give the President all the advice he needs. It's a shame Mr. Spicer's position isn't an elected one, or we could pelt him with "public disclosure is harmful" ads until he has to get a real job.

Around the table: various follies concerning protests and town halls, plus that thing your Tea Party uncle told you that wasn't-true-either.

Natasha Lennard at Esquire reminds us that over 200 Inauguration Day protestors are still facing "felony riot" charges, the penalty for which could be a $25,000 fine, ten years in the clink, or both. Also, too, when a right-winger beats up a left-winger at a protest, he tends not to get charged with anything. How will the police prove probable cause (i.e., that each and every person they arrested actually actively incited other people to commit vandalism and the like)? Sadly, a lot of defendants might plead out before then.

Uh oh: Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN) faces hostile questioning about health care and President Trump at a breakfast with local chambers of commerce. And even admonishes the crowd to "be civil" at one point! Republicans get a little breathing room when they claim that "paid protestors" swarm their town halls, but chambers of commerce are supposed to be their people! Hmm, maybe things really are coming apart for Republicans this time.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) tells a crowd of constituents angry that he voted to repeal FCC internet privacy rules that "nobody's got to use the internet." He goes on to say that "I don't think it's my job to tell you that you cannot get advertising for your information being sold," when, actually, the FCC rules allowed you to opt out of privacy protections if you chose. That first quotation should be an easy campaign ad, though.

Mr. Sensenbrenner's fellow Wisconsin House Rep, Speaker Paul Ryan, didn't hold any town halls at all during the February recess -- but he did raise over $650,000 at upwards of six non-Wisconsin locations. Meeting with his real constituents, I suppose! And you may recall that in 2011 he was charging his constituents money to go to his town halls, like the people work for him and not the other way around. These two items are also campaign ads just waiting to write themselves.

Is your Tea Party uncle telling you that President Trump "increased your Social Security"? That's abject rubbish -- our government announced the latest Social Security cost-of-living adjustment (or COLA) back in December; Mr. Trump had nothing to do with it. You know, just like Mr. Obama had nothing to do with the "quadrupling of the deficit" in early 2009, since he didn't write that budget or demand the bankster bailout that inflated it.

Finally, while discussing the latest Trump flatugasm against protestors yesterday, I neglected to mention that he ended one of his twitterings with "The election is over!" By which he means, of course, that democracy is over, at least until the next election (though I'm sure he's working on that!), and that elections are the only days Americans are to be permitted to express their will. Well, them's fighting words.

Action: internet freedom, and Keystone XL.

Congress is home again this week, and are thus more vulnerable to their constituents than they are when safely sequestered in D.C., as the author of the bill that stole our internet privacy away, Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake, found out last Thursday when his constituents yelled at him at a town hall for 2 1/2 hours. I mention internet privacy not merely because the Republicans' repeal of FCC regulations protecting our internet privacy should result in Republicans losing dozens of seats in 2018, but also because it's a big part of the Republicans' big plan to kill FCC net neutrality rules, which require internet service corporations to treat all pieces of network traffic equally, and thus allow you, not some corporation, to control your internet experience. Republicans say they want the FTC, not the FCC, to manage internet service provider privacy, but it just so happens that the same law that allows the FCC to regulate net neutrality prevents the FTC from regulating internet privacy as practiced by internet service providers! So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to tell your Reps and Senators that you know their game and you want your internet exactly the way it is -- that is, you want it to remain yours, not theirs.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Nebraska Public Service Commission to reject TransCanada's application for the Keystone XL pipeline, then CREDO still helps you do that. Yes, the Trump Administration State Department has approved Keystone XL, but, as you know, our federal government isn't the only game in town -- state governments also get their say, and if Nebraska doesn't want Keystone XL running through it, then Nebraska gets to stop it. A lot of right-wingers will very quickly become big fans of Big Government when that happens, though of course honorable and principled conservatives won't. But good Nebraskans have been voicing their concerns over Keystone XL dragging its 800,000 or so barrels of filthy tar sands oil through their state every day, not just because of Nebraska's vast swaths of farmland, but because Nebraska sits on the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground water table that provides clean drinking and bathing water to some two million heartland Americans in eight states. Our federal government didn't do its job, and may pay the price for that in court, but we need to apply pressure everywhere, particularly in places where it might work.

Around the table: a reprieve for Arkansas death row inmates and an obvious conflict of interest at the *Washington Post*, plus more Trumpslam.

Pulaski County (AK) circuit judge stays execution of six Arkansas men who were part of an "execution blitz" planned by the Arkansas Governor. (Other court decisions had stayed the execution of two other men.) Judge Griffen's decision deferred to the manufacturer of vecuronium bromide (the drug Gov. Hutchinson says would expire on April 30, thus "necessitating" the execution of eight men over 10 days), which said it did not sell the drug for execution purposes, and also said the state had said it would return the drug, but didn't. This tale sure got strange awful quick. The U.S. Supreme Court could intervene in the matter as early as today.

President Trump says "(s)omeone should look into who paid for" all those Tax Day rallies on Saturday calling for him to release his tax returns. That's typical right-wing hypocrisy -- accuse other people of doing the nasty things you're doing. Besides which, why can't the President of the nation that spies on everyone and doesn't want anyone to have any internet privacy figure this out on his own? Maybe because protestors are actually in it for love of country, and not money? I wonder why that wouldn't occur to him.

Ho hum, the Washington Post utterly fails to disclose that a pro-Syrian strike writer works as a lobbyist for the corporation that made the missiles used in the strike. Worse, they've done this before with this very same writer, only revealing his work on behalf of fossil fuel corporations after he'd peddled climate change denialism in those pages. Wait, let me guess: the "liberal" media needs corporate PR flags because of their expertise! But why should we respect "expertise" in shilling for one's paymaster?

Florida health inspectors have cited the President's Mar-a-Lago resort -- you know, where he conducts official government business, as it were, on the weekends? -- no less than 78 times since April 2014, including 15 times in late January of this year alone. Violations included poorly-refrigerated meat, dirty cutting boards, and a "black/green mold-like substance" in ice machines. And so we learn why he hates regulations -- because they're always showing him up.

Timothy Noah at Politico reminds us that cutting more federal jobs, as the President is so hot to do, would most likely result in outsourcing federal work to more (and more expensive) contract employees. You know, since that's what always happens -- I mean, it'd have to when a nation has roughly the same number of federal workers over half a century while its budget increases more than sixfold. Maybe OMB Director/"wealth transfer" expert Mick Mulvaney will demand 24-7 bodyguards soon, as Mr. Pruitt has done.

Finally, Naomi Klein tells us how to resist President Trump by thinking of him as a brand. You'll see a video (total running time: seven minutes, 31 seconds) that describes the "vulnerabilities" of being "a brand first, and a politician a distant second" -- that brand being "the boss who is so rich he can do whatever he wants." I don't think making Mr. Trump look like someone else's puppet is a good idea -- it makes him seem less threatening! -- but I'm all for boycotting his products, using the Big Stick of Bad PR to get buildings all over the world to dump his name, and generally "being a nuisance" in such a way that he has a much harder time making money. And I'll feel this way even after he bombs his next country! Hey, I'm not doing the bombing, and he's got choices.

UPDATE. The Arkansas Supreme Court has taken Judge Griffen off of that state's death penalty cases, and Gov. Hutchinson still plans to execute two of the eight aforementioned convicts tonight. Also, I erred in saying the vecuronium bromide was the expiring drug; another drug in their execution cocktail, midazolam, is the one that's expiring at the end of the month.

Action: internet privacy, and "bathroom bills."

So let's call President Trump today, between 9am and 4pm EST, at 1.202.456.1111, to tell him to veto S.J.Res. 34, the nefarious anti-internet privacy, pro-hacking bill. Mr. Trump doesn't give one rat's hind-quarter what you think, but duty is duty. You should also know that the whole get-regulatory-parity-with-the-FTC argument is utter rubbish: the FTC has literally no power to regulate the private data management policies of ISPs, and the FCC has literally no power to regulate the private data management policies of internet corporations that aren't ISPs! So the next step, for Republicans, is to remove the classification ISPs as common carriers, supposedly so the FTC can regulate privacy, but which act would just so happen to destroy the FCC's ability to regulate net neutrality! After which the internet will become a corporate junk news-ridden place just like cable news, which will help Republicans steal elections in perpetuity! So you see the stakes here, and you know your duty.

Meanwhile, North Carolina "repealed" its notorious HB 2 "bathroom bill" last week, in concert with that state's new Democratic Governor. I put "repealed" in ironic quotation marks because the new bill, HB 148 (or, as Equality NC has called it, "HB 2.0") reserves the right to regulate multi-occupancy bathrooms to the state government and prevents municipalities from passing (until late 2020) ordinances similar to the Charlotte ordinance to which HB 2 objected -- which means the reactionary state legislature could simply wait out the Democratic Governor and then start this BS all over again with the next guy, who'll undoubtedly make Pat McCrory look like a saint. Hence the ACLU helps you tell the NCAA to keep boycotting North Carolina. The NCAA, as you know, pulled championship game siting out of North Carolina because of HB 2, and said it wouldn't reconsider unless the legislature "fixed" the law by March 30; the NCAA is apparently mulling whether North Carolina's actions really "fix" the law as we speak, and nothing prevents us from giving them our counsel on the matter. Who's gonna stop us? Especially now that we know what gets reactionary legislatures to move? (Since justice for transgendered folks sure doesn't get them to move, amirite?)

Around the table: the *incomprehensible mysteries* of the Earth's orbit, and other follies.

We don't hear enough about this anymore, but around 320 Fortune 500 corporations still hold some $2.6 trillion in offshore profits, thus avoiding some $750 billion in taxes. They earn this money here, but they stuff it over there, to avoid paying for roads and bridges and police officers and firefighters here. And this 10% tax amnesty I keep hearing about is no way to get better behavior out of them.

WIRED talks to three Republican House Reps (out of 15) who voted against S.J.Res. 34, the anti-online privacy bill. They all make strong cases, though Mr. McClintock says "government...restricts competition," when actually government allows big corporations to restrict competition; there's a big difference. In any case, one must conclude that the Republicans who voted to trash the privacy rules are not conservatives -- they're reactionaries, or right-wingers, or morons, or what you will.

So what else is wrong with Congress's repeal of FCC internet privacy rules? according to Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm, it "could result in the greatest legislative expansion of the FBI’s surveillance power since 2001’s Patriot Act." S.J.Res. 34 doesn't grant the FBI any new powers, but it enables the FBI to ask for much, much more information associated with an IP address -- since ISPs will be collecting so much more of it now. All to enable corporate Republican sugar-daddies.

The incomparable David Dayen describes "how pharmacy benefit managers morphed from processors to predators." Pharmacy benefit managing corporations act as go-between between drug manufacturers and pharmacists -- and have amassed so much power (at least partly through consolidation into near-monopolies everywhere but North Dakota) that they have no interest in getting a good deal for customers, but only for themselves, and that means higher drug prices for all of us. The good news? Actual bipartisan groups in Congress want to rein them in. The bad news? Our Glorious Elites only care about the "bipartisanship" that nobody actually wants and does nobody any good.

Finally, Pennsylvania state Senator/gubernatorial hopeful, in discussing climate change, says "the Earth moves closer to the sun every year" and wonders if the increase in population causes an increase in body heat that accounts for climate change. Anything to get fossil fuel corporations off the hook! If you're thinking Mr. Wagner just misunderstood the whole concept of an elliptical orbit, remember: it's not "stupid or evil," because stupid is evil.

Penny Rants for Sunday, April 2, 2017: false flags, "free" trade, and internet privacy.

Emphatic non-truther Paul Street says "the time has never been riper for a false flag terror attack." Approvals in the 30s not even three months in, his first attempt at repealing Obamacare falling flat on its face, his first two anti-Muslim executive orders dying in court, his utter inability to put the Russian hacking story to rest -- yeah, the new President has sure made an entrance, and don't forget that 54% of the electorate voted for someone else. And don't forget, also, that George W. Bush didn't win the popular vote either, and sure looked headed for a one-term Presidency before 9.11 became his "opportunity" (Condi Rice's word, not mine). At least Mr. Bush actually put together a government; Mr. Trump hasn't even done that much, meaning there'll be fewer people in the conspiracy if there is one (and of course the bigger the supposed conspiracy, the more likely it doesn't exist). Remember that, incidentally, when the attack comes -- along with his refusal to attend intelligence briefings, his purge of the State Department, his golfing weekends in Florida, and his general strutting around like he's got the biggest cock in the universe. But, really, Mr. Trump may not need a conspiracy -- as one of my co-workers says, Mr. Trump's election is ISIS's endgame.

Mr. Trump says he won't scrap NAFTA, formerly "the worst trade deal," but will keep many planks in place when he goes to renegotiate it. And I bet you just can't guess one of them. That's right, the investor-state tribunal -- which the Times doesn't even mention until paragraph 20, though I'd say the mere existence of such tribunals, which threaten to destroy law and order in America and any other country in which they exist, was the main reason folks across the political spectrum hated the Trans-Pacific "Partnership." Were you wondering how Trump was going to fail us on "free" trade? This sure looks like how. But Paul Ryan's smoke-blowing aside, Mr. Trump hasn't exactly convinced everyone he's a "closer," and it looks like our neighbor to the north -- you remember that Canada was also a party to SHAFTYA, right? -- might have more urgent concerns about Mr. Trump's aims than Mexico does. Let's not allow the existence of Mexico's national sales tax lure us into accepting Mr. Trump's proposed American national sales tax "border tax," either. I'd be happy to accept our withdrawal from NAFTA. I'd even be happy to give Mr. Trump credit for it, as I do for our withdrawal from the TPP. (Not too much credit, though. We really deserve most of that.)

Wondering how to navigate the post-internet privacy world, as delivered by Congress this past week? Quincy Larson at Quartz advises us to set up a Virtual Private Network (or VPN) and certainly to enable HTTPS on our browsers, while Emily Dreyfuss at WIRED advises us to check out the Internet Noise website, which opens five tabs on your browser to websites chosen at random, and then visits five more websites every 10 seconds until you tell it to stop. I will admit to being quite attracted to the latter item -- as we learned in the Star Trek episode "Charlie X," one good way to deal with someone who's got too much power is to give them too much to handle -- but I also imagine that the better ISPs (and the better data-buyers) will ultimately figure out which traffic is trash. You should also worry (especially since Internet Noise's creator hasn't even evaluated all the search terms he uses) that an unscrupulous actor will concoct a terrorist plot from these searches -- Cardinal Richelieu once said "give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him." There's more than one way to give evil too much to handle, though -- one of my random searches led me here, and that sure brought back some happy memories.

Around the table: describing matters about law and media.

Nearly two dozen young folk file suit against President Trump, alleging that his refusal to deal head-on with climate change's effects would "deny() young people and future generations their constitutional right to a healthy and stable atmosphere and environment." They also sued President Obama over this matter, and I'm not sure they'll win -- what the law commands our government to do about climate change may not be as clear-cut as they'd like. But I am sure that I'm-the-President-so-you-can't-sue-me won't kill the suit.

House votes to approve S.J.Res. 34, which would repeal FCC rules preventing internet service providers from selling your private information at will. It would be grotesquely easy for Democrats to run ads painting (most of) their Republican opponents as anti-privacy or even pro-hacking -- so easy, I suspect, that none of them will do it, since they're all a bunch of smartypants weaklings.

A California state legislator introduces, then thankfully withdraws, a bill that would ban "fake news." Naturally the bill's dragnet would have punished satire like The Onion or The Borowitz Report, which you should be able to tell are satire without anyone's help. How do you fight "fake news"? Same way you always have -- with good works. You just may need to do more good works than you think.

In a peripherally-related development, New York Times holds up past spreader of lies about Saddam/al-Qaeda links as a bastion of "basing...arguments on facts, logic and reason." Lessons: we can't let our horror at how bad media has become make us look upon past practitioners of bad media more generously -- and we really need to stop looking for right-wingers who "seem sane," since this year's "sane" right-winger is usually last year's insane one.

Bill Blum at TruthDig tells us how "Bill Clinton Laid the Groundwork for Trump's Ugly Immigration Policies." Almost tripling immigrant detentions, punishing "sanctuary cities," speeding up deportation hearings, expanding the list of crimes for which you can be deported, even building a big wall on the Southern border -- yep, that was all Bill Clinton, too. Strange how little credit he gets from the right for all of that. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

Finally, Chris Hayes at The Nation, in writing about "Policing the Colony from the American Revolution to Ferguson," gives us a couple of responses to "why didn't those protestors who got beat up just do what the cops said?" One: how do you know those protestors didn't? Two: how do you know the police didn't make an unreasonable or unconstitutional request? Three: don't you know the Founders were scofflaws? Seriously, though, this is a sprawling, enlightening article (adapted from a book, no less -- A Colony in a Nation, which I'll have to check out).

Action: Medicare-for-all, law and order, and consumer protection.

Congressional Republicans pulled the American Health Care Act from a vote last week, after it became obvious that it wouldn't get enough votes to pass. So how about we play offense, and use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing on a cellphone) to call our Reps and Senators and demand a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health care system? Rep. Conyers (D-MI) has introduced H.R. 676 again, and Sen. Sanders (I-VT) has pledged to introduce his own version of a Medicare-for-all bill in the Senate. If you think your Reps and Senators are just too far gone, you could remind them that Medicare runs extremely well, and you could also remind them that America spends twice the money per capita on health care that single-payer country Canada does -- and nearly three times the money that socialized-medicine country England does. My guess is that today's CEOs (whom too many of our Congressfolk imagine are their real constituency!) are not so devoted to "free" market economics that they'll pass up an opportunity to spend less money on health care than they do now.

Meanwhile, after Florida state Attorney Aramis Ayala declared that she would no longer seek the death penalty in any capital cases, Florida's ultra-right-wing Governor, Rick Scott, is trying to remove her from a high-profile murder case. You may well be wondering where state and federal law stands here, and happily Jordan Smith at The Intercept tells us -- the Florida law allowing a Governor to replace a prosecutor is rather broad and vague, while prosecutors typically have the discretion to seek sentences they deem appropriate (they'll have to defend their choices in court, after all). Also, the U.S. Supreme Court has not only found Florida's death penalty scheme unconstitutional, but has also ruled that state governments can't mandate the death penalty in laws. Yet Mr. Scott is, surprise, surprise, all hot to mandate the death penalty for someone, like he's afraid everyone will find out he's never gotten 50% in an election or something. So Color of Change helps you tell Mr. Scott to drop his crusade to replace Ms. Ayala.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell Congress and the President to stop their incessant attempts to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB has helped nearly 30 million Americans get their money back from scammers, and you'd think that would be popular, right? I mean, no one likes getting their pocket picked! But you'd be wrong -- American banksters, those utter parasites who do nothing for our country and who spend all their time figuring out how to redistribute your wealth upward to themselves, are hot to get rid of the CFPB, all the while yelling REGULASHUNZ BAD!!!! Of course, without the CFPB, we might never have known that Wells Fargo was opening up customer accounts (and charging the fees that come with those accounts) without their customers' knowledge, and I remember everyone, regardless of political ideology, being against that. It's enough to make you wonder if most politicians don't care about doing wrong, but only about getting caught doing wrong.

Oh, and the House plans to vote today on S.J.Res. 34, the anti-internet privacy bill; if you didn't call your Reps yesterday, you'll want to call them today.

Action: internet privacy, affordable prescription drugs, and paid sick leave.

You may know that S.J.Res. 34, which would nullify the FCC's recent internet privacy rules, passed the Senate last week. But that bill still has to clear the House, so now would be a very good time to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or at the bottom of your page, if you're viewing this on a smartphone) to call your Reps and tell them to reject S.J.Res. 34. After all, why should Congress make it harder for you to protect your privacy on the internet? Because that's what S.J.Res. 34 does -- it makes it easier for corporations to sell your private info to third-party data corporations, or to hijack your web searches and send you to some crony's page rather than the page you said you wanted to see, or insert ads into your web surfing based on that information. What part of that sounds like anything the American people would want? And personal to those corporate hacks claiming they want "parity" between FCC and FTC regulations: why not go after FTC rules, then?

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1249/S. 469, the the Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Importation Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. (Alternately, you could mention it to your Reps while you have them on the phone about H.J.Res. 34, and then call your Senators about it.) The Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Act would, as you may recall, let good Americans get cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. The reason they're cheaper, of course, is that Canadians get to bargain for cheaper drug prices as a unit, which we can't do. We have long been beset by bad news about skyrocketing drug prices -- even President Trump criticized Martin Shkreli for jacking up the price of life-saving medication Daraprim. Of course, Mr. Trump's since declared that Medicare, which literally can't negotiate drug prices, is the real "price-fixer"! But our job as citizens is to make the President irrelevant by expressing our will, so let's do that.

Finally, H.R. 1516/S. 636, the Healthy Families Act, would require employers to provide 56 hours of paid sick time to their employees (except for businesses with fewer than 15 employees, which would have to provide that amount of unpaid sick time). Of course, despite the parenthetical I just employed, right-wingers will use small businesses as a human shield when they attack the Healthy Families Act, and they'll wring their hands that some $20 million-a-year CEO at a corporation sitting on trillions of dollars in "trapped capital" will simply never be able to afford all that paid sick leave! Of course, more and more CEOs are coming around to the notion that giving out paid sick leave actually saves them money in the long run -- not just in reduced dependence on public assistance programs, but also in less turnover, less "presenteeism" (where you're at work but not really at work), and fewer workplace injuries. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Healthy Families Act.

Action: racial profiling, "natural marriage," lead bullets, and internet privacy.

H.R. 1498/S. 411, the End Racial and Religious Profiling Act of 2017, would do pretty much what its title suggests. I wouldn't blame you for flinching at Sec. 102(c), which says proof of law enforcement activities having "a disparate impact on individuals with a particular characteristic" is enough to "constitute prima facie evidence of a violation of this title." We do, for example, demand that prosecutors produce more than the fact of an unnatural death to convict a defendant of murder -- we also demand they prove the defendant intended to commit murder. But racism isn't murder -- you can commit racist acts without conscious hatred, and many folks hide their racism even from themselves. And racist practices can continue long after anyone feels strongly about them, and other institutional pressures can help perpetuate them. Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1498/S. 411.

Meanwhile, because the Tennessee state legislature never seems to let up, their House Civil Justice Subcommittee will consider HB 892, the so-called Tennessee Natural Marriage Defense Act, which would, guess what, aim to outlaw same-sex marriage there. Now you may well be saying to yourself, self, didn't the Supreme Court make gay marriage legal all over America? Well, yes, they did. But HB 892 would try to do it anyway, even though a state can't just nullify a Supreme Court decision in this manner, and would sound like a state full of whiners in trying to do so. And check out their big cojones in calling gay marriage "unnatural"! What, exactly, about love between two consenting adults is unnatural? Have they not considered that gay folks wanting to get married is a sign of gay folks wanting to strengthen the institutions that sustain us? The Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell the Tennessee state legislature to reject their so-called "Natural Marriage Defense Act.".

In other news, the very first thing new Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke did when he literally rode into office (because right-wingers aren't about drama at all!) was to roll back Obama-era rules phasing out the use of lead bullets on public lands. And thus Mr. Zinke did exactly the sort of thing that gives gun-rights advocates a bad name -- this whole "debate" is just more right-wing swordfighting, where one right-winger tells another he's "insufficiently conservative" because he never defended the "freedom" of gun manufacturing corporations to put as much lead into their bullets as they want! Trouble is that lead persists in public lands and waters, meaning more dead animals and more brain-damaged people, thus meaning less freedom for us. And hunters and fishers are fairly resourceful people, who can hunt and fish without enabling so much pollution. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell Secretary Zinke to restore this lead ban.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to protect your privacy by rejecting the "resolution of disapproval" that would overturn strong FCC privacy rules enacted late last year, then both the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you do that. Again I feel compelled to ask: who could possibly be against good Americans having the right to tell their internet service provider not to sell their private data if that's what they want? And again I feel compelled to answer: evil people, who only want what fills their campaign coffers, and for what? So that one day they might have enough seniority to finally do something good? That never happens: the time to do your duty to your constituents is always now, and not once you're "entrenched" or whatever. I'm aware that I'm being generous in assuming that Congressfolk do so much evil because they're trying to do good later. But it doesn't really matter -- all that matters is that they're doing evil, and we must stop them.

Action: internet privacy, clean water, and pension fund advice.

Yet another Congressional "resolution of disapproval," H.J.Res. 86/S.J.Res. 34, would overturn the FCC's recently-enacted rules protecting your online privacy. because, apparently, that is exactly the sort of thing that really, really resonates with Americans. Please, Congress, they say with one voice, let our internet service providing corporations sell our online data to whomever they like, since their right to make money is more important than our right to privacy! Or, perhaps, that's what the good Americans in Congressional heads say. I haven't emphasized this enough, but all of these "resolutions of disapproval" don't just repeal regulations that actually serve the American people, but they forbid the agencies issuing the regulations from ever addressing the matter again. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject the anti-privacy H.J.Res. 86/S.J.Res. 34.

Meanwhile, a Public Herald investigation has turned up evidence of Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) misconduct in investigating at least 170 water safety complaints over the past decade-plus -- most of which seem to concentrate in areas where gas drilling corporations use fracking to get their natural gas out. The DEP kept these complaints secret for many years, supposedly because they didn't want to "cause alarm," though if your water smells like gas or lights on fire or makes you ill you're already pretty alarmed, amirite? Seriously, if you're a law-and-order type, you wouldn't want to think that your government, which you've charged with keeping polluters from befouling the water you drink, wash, and bathe with, is deliberately failing to protect you. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell PA state Attorney General Josh Shapiro to investigate this possible misconduct.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Department of Labor to keep the "fiduciary responsibility" rule that forces pension advisors to put retirees' well-being ahead of their own lust for mammon, then PennPIRG still helps you do that. Do it with a quickness, though, because the Department is only accepting comments until tomorrow; possibly they hope the short commenting period will yield a plethora of comments like yes, I would very much like my retirement money to be shoehorned into investments that don't necessarily work for me, but that make my advisors even richer, because they're so much better than I am! Seriously, the "need" to "evaluate" further the subject of whether pension advisors should, given the choice, do what's best for you or what's best for themselves is so absurd that you must conclude the Trump Administration cares more about its rich friends than it does about you. Still, give 'em hell, because hell is what they deserve.

Action: internet privacy, runaway executive pay, and "right-to-work."

You know the FCC -- which, like most other federal government agencies, now resembles a sort of evil alternate universe version of itself -- hates those privacy protections the last FCC, but you may not know that Congress would like to kill them dead, too, and some Congressfolk have begun to make noise about creating yet another "resolution of disapproval" under the Congressional Review Act that would kill them dead. Anyone else think it wasn't such a hot idea for the Obama Administration to wait until the last six months (the only timeframe within which the Congressional Review Act can operate) to issue all these regulations? Anyone else wonder if maybe that was the point? Anyway, don't be like Sen. Toomey (R-PA), who fretted all those years ago that if we enacted strong consumer privacy protections we'd "break the internet." Why can't we have both consumer privacy and a great internet? Aren't we the can-do country? So you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to lay off the FCC's internet privacy rules.

Meanwhile, the SEC, under Acting Chair Michael Piwowar, has apparently begun the process of rolling back the executive pay-ratio rule, mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act of 2010. It took the SEC five frickin' years to write the rule and now they've started a 45-day "review," with a special invitation to banksters and CEOs to report to them on how the SEC's executive pay-ratio rule burdened them. Hear that sound? That's the World's Tiniest Violin playing. Complying with the rule isn't exactly ditch-digging; CEOs just don't want to reveal that they're engaging in a massive income-redistribution-upward scheme, where they take home millions and pay their workers in dung pellets. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the SEC to leave the executive pay-ratio rule alone. Recall the Harvard Business Review report that good Americans think the average ratio of executive to unskilled factory worker is around 31:1, and would actually prefer it at a little less than 7:1. The actual ratio, of course, is 354:1. Anger at runaway CEO pay cuts across the political spectrum -- but not in Washington.

Finally, if you've missed opportunities to tell state and federal legislators that "right-to-work" laws are bad for workers and bad for America, then both CREDO and Sign for Good help you do that. Right-wingers incongruously claim that "right-to-work" -- which makes paying union dues optional if you belong to a union, thus depriving that union of some of its ability to fight on your behalf, which is kinda the whole point of being in a union -- actually liberates workers, but ain't no liberation comes with pay cuts and worse working conditions, which is what workers in "right-to-work" states more typically face. And folks who whine WHY SHOULDZ TEH ANYONEZ BE MADEZ TO PAYZ FOR TEH ANYTHINGZ!!!! know that I could, using that logic, ask for a refund for all my tax dollars that went to fight Tha Bush Mobb's Little Iraq Adventure, right? I mean, I could, but I don't -- not just because I understand that I'm not the center of the damn universe, but also because I understand that the price of living in a democracy is paying taxes, just as the "price" of a better union job is paying monthly dues.

Action: church and state, transgendered students, and internet privacy.

You may have heard that President Trump told attendees at the National Prayer Breakfast that he wanted to "get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment." No truth to the rumor that he also said he wanted to annihilate it, rip it to shreds, and go back in time and kill Lyndon Johnson's grandfather so that it'd never even be born. The Johnson Amendment, as you know, prevents churches and similarly tax-exempt organizations from advocating on behalf of candidates, or to donate money to those candidates' campaigns. So Mr. Trump would prefer that churches be tax-exempt without doing the duty that tax-exempt organizations must do, but that may not be the worst part -- the worst part would be the prospect of large corporations using churches as money-laundering schemes, because they can never have too many ways of obscuring the source of their money. I mean, we don't just separate church and state for the state's benefit -- we also do it for the church's benefit. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk not to gut the Johnson Amendment.

Also, as you know, the Trump Justice Department (and I put those words together at considerable risk of opening up a hole in space-time!) has revoked the Obama Administration's Title IX guidance which mandated that schools ensure that transgender students can use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity, rather than the birth certificate listed on their gender. So the ACLU helps you tell Attorney General Sessions to reinstate the guidance, and thus protect transgendered students from bullying and discrimination. The DOJ no doubt thinks adding a statement saying it really, really hates bullying and discrimination does the job, but it doesn't -- all the caring words in the world don't do as much as one caring act. Hopefully no trolls are coming along to say that transgendered folk are all child molestors, because they're transgendered. I mean, usually they're a little cleverer than that, but that's how their argument boils down. Since men still commit the vast majority of pederasty (and mostly against girls), we might do better to ban men from public restrooms. Of course, that would be a terrible idea, but that only tells you how terrible the other idea is.

Meanwhile, the FCC, now headed by Ajit Pai, plans to do whatever it can to gut your net neutrality laws, but might also move against new privacy protections put into place by the previous FCC. The FCC would, like most good Americans, prefer that internet service corporations get permission from you before they go selling and mining your personal data, but big corporations, of course, don't want to do that -- they'd rather propagate the myths that privacy protection on the internet is just too hard, or you're a greedy fool for wanting privacy on the internet, or but you'll lose our on all our great deals! The truth is that they'll lose out on that golden opportunity to make money by doing even less work that the internet provides. And I guess I should point out that I don't begrudge them the ability to make money by directing their ads at the right eyeballs more easily -- I begrudge them the "right" to demand that we participate in that, whether we want to or not. So Consumers Union helps you tell the FCC to protect internet customers' privacy.

Action: email privacy, Muslim bans, and methane emissions.

The U.S. House of Representatives has again passed H.R. 387, the Email Privacy Act -- and has, again, passed the bill unanimously. H.R. 387 would, as you no doubt recall, require our government to get a warrant before searching any emails you've left on your email provider's server. Current communication law -- and "current," in this case, means "30 years old" -- regards emails left on your server as "abandoned," and thus doesn't require our government to get a warrant before Hoovering them up, but this is the cloud computing era, where documents you clearly use all the time get left on servers. Last time the Email Privacy Act sailed through the House, a few Senators tried to attach poison pills to it (like the amendment offered by Jeff Sessions that would have allowed our government to shout emergency! as a way around getting a warrant, a power that could never, ever be abused!). So you may want to call your Senators about passing the Email Privacy Act as is, without poison pills. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, both CREDO and Amnesty International help you tell your Congressfolk to support legislation that would end President Trump's Muslim ban. A federal judge (not a "so-called" federal judge, Mr. Trump) issued a stay against the Trump order last week, but this may wind up at the U.S. Supreme Court, and you never know which hat John Roberts will have on (either the "obsessive literalist" hat or the "right-wing judicial activist" hat; the first is, obviously, more palatable) when the Court hears a case. So Congress can, in the meantime, act against a stupid and racist ban that clearly targets immigrants of a certain religion (hey, Rudy Giuliani said so! In public!) and clearly targets refugees, i.e., the class of people least likely to inflict terrorism on others precisely because they've had terrorism inflicted upon them. (No, terrorists more frequently come from classes of people who don't suffer from terrorism, but who witness others folks' suffering.) Congress may well be afraid of Trumpeteers throwing bricks through their windows if they oppose him, but no one said the work of civilization was easy.

Finally, Congress has lately moved to block the Obama Administration's methane emissions standards -- because what's more freedom-loving than natural gas corporations wasting methane gas into the atmosphere, so that it can not only make climate change worse, but be completely unavailable to consumers as an energy source? -- and thus some in Pennsylvania's state legislature have introduced SB 175, which would prevent the state Department of Environmental Protection from enacting any methane emissions standards that are stronger than the federal one! Which, as we've just described, is about to become nonexistent! What clever folks these Pennsylvania state legislators are! And again, it's not just the pollution that bothers me about this, it's the waste -- Pennsylvania gas drillers waste enough methane to heat over 100,000 homes for an entire year. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your state legislators to reject SB 175, and take matters like clean air and climate change a bit more seriously than they take their big donors' pocketbooks.

Action: bad Trump nominees, bad Muslim bans, and bad attempts to kill good privacy and equal pay initiatives.

Senate Democrats have taken to skipping Committee meetings in an effort to stall President Trump's Cabinet nominees, which has led to some truly hysterical hand-wringing from the right -- Sen. Toomey (R-PA) called it "an unprecedented level of obstruction," which is to laugh! Surely you recall Senate Republicans refusing to confirm several of President Obama's nominees in 2013, which (unfortunately) led Democrats to get rid of the filibuster for Presidential nominees; Republicans seem anxious to point out that they didn't put up much of a fight on Mr. Obama's 2009 nominees, but his 2009 nominees were largely center-right nominees of whom even Pat Robertson seemed to approve, whereas Donald Trump's 2017 nominees are far right-wing extremists who do not speak for anyone but their biggest campaign donors. I was planning to urge you to use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Senators and tell them to oppose the nominations of Tom Price to Secretary of Health and Human Services and Mick Mulvaney to the Office of Budget Management -- Mr. Price for his obvious hostility to Medicare and Mr. Mulvaney for his stated desire to slash Social Security -- but hell, any of them is fair game right now.

Meanwhile, as you might expect, I've got action alerts concerning Mr. Trump's nefarious Executive Order which shut down refugee admissions for at least the next four months and banned legal immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations (though not the ones he's got business interests in or the ones who actually sent terrorists to kill us, amirite?). Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to denounce the Trump ban from the Senate floor, while the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Demand Progress, and MoveOn help you direct your will at all of Congress, and Sum of Us helps you contact Mr. Trump's CEO buddies, who (unlike some CEOs) have held their tongue about the Order. People who cheer on Mr. Trump's un-American ban should look into their own past and see if they were very well-received when they got here. Chances are they weren't! But did it kill this country to let such folks in? Of course it didn't. But the blind fear some folks have toward anyone who isn't like themselves is sure going to kill this country if we let it. And Donald Trump won't care, as long as he's making money. Let's try to make him irrelevant, as he most definitely deserves.

In other news, the FCC lately mandated that your internet service provider get your permission (which you can withhold!) before selling your data to third-parties -- and, of course, now that Mr. Trump is in office, his nominee for FCC Chair really, really wants to get rid of that mandate, because it's a good thing that helps people, rather than a bad thing that helps corporate CEOs make even more unearned money. Let me know if I'm not making my feeling absolutely clear, OK? Consumers Union helps you tell the FCC not to reverse the FCC's new privacy protections. Folks who would give you guff about this need to answer why on Earth we should expect privacy for our offline private information but not our online private information. The ease with which corporations can find and collect information is no excuse -- as your mama taught you, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. You wish our current ball-swinging man-child President's mama had learned this.

Finally, because like Ferdinand Foch I fight everywhere, Congress is mulling a backdoor attack on equal pay by rolling back pay reporting requirements that could reveal pay discrimination based on gender or ethnicity. What do our best and brightest corporate leaders have to hide? Some Congressfolk (no doubt egged on by these "best and brightest") act like any reporting requirement is onerous, like we're asking them to lift 16-ton weights with their pinkies or something. We only managed to get these reporting requirements last year, which means Congress might deep-six them before anyone has actually had to report any information! And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions (or EEOC) and the Labor Department (in theory, amirite?) need this information in order to investigate bad actors and enforce the many laws that would prevent corporations from discriminating against their employees. Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to gut equal pay reporting rules.

Around the table: student loans, hiring freezes, Executive Orders, legislative agendas, Holocaust statements, and online privacy.

The Center for Media and Democracy finds that Betsy DeVos does have some education experience after all -- she's invested in a student loan debt-collection agency that, of course, has lately failed to secure a government contract, possibly because of numerous consumer complaints against it. So, yeah, we'd want someone invested in that in charge of regulating that! It's also good to be reminded, though, that "a largely bipartisan consensus around 'education reform'" has enabled Betsy DeVos's ascension to begin with, and that our "liberal" media still enable this "bipartisan consensus," one built on the three-decade-plus-old lie that public schools are failing us.

Richard Eskow asks "Who'll Get Shafted" by President Trump's federal worker hiring freeze, and finds, unsurprisingly, that mostly regular folks will get the shaft. Social Security recipients will get shafted by not having enough workers to help them through their issues, workers will get hurt by having fewer OSHA inspectors, and veterans will get hurt by hiring freezes at the Veterans Administration (strangely not part of Mr. Trump's big military exemption) -- but small businesses will also be hurt by the stagnating demand the hiring freeze will bring about, and when the EPA doesn't have the people to keep air and water clean, everyone will be hurt. (Yes, there's also a "public safety" exemption to the freeze, but I doubt a Trump EPA Administrator would ever pressure Mr. Big about it.)

Speaking of Mr. Big, a lot of Mr. Trump's notorious Executive Orders may "run aground," simply because he didn't consult any of the agencies that would be affected by them. That raises the possibility that these Orders would conflict with existing, settled law. But, hey, nobody but George W. Bush is better at profiting off failure than Donald Trump! If his immigration-related Executive Orders, for example, wind up dying a quick death at the hands of some federal appeals court, and then terrorists launch a 9.11-sized attack on American soil, Donald Trump can blame all those "liberal" federal judges (most of whom were appointed by Republicans, but never mind). C'mon, if I could figure that out, I'm sure Mr. Trump's braintrust has already mooted it.

But in case you thought Donald Trump wasn't the only Republicans planning to wreak havoc wherever he can, Paul Ryan's House also has an, er, ambitious agenda, to unfold over 200 days, apparently, because Donald Trump really likes it when you try to go one bigger on him. He'd approve of most-if-not-all of this agenda -- Obamacare repeal, tax cuts for the rich and corporations, strangling good regulations in their cribs, a corporate welfare infrastructure program -- even if most of the American people wouldn't, which is the more pertinent question, really. Why does Paul Ryan want more methane in our air, anyway?

If George W. Bush had simply forgotten to mention Jews during his Holocaust Remembrance Day statement, as Mr. Trump did on Friday, you might have chalked it up to stupidity, though Mr. Bush wasn't stupid, and anyway Mr. Bush was far too attentive to folks' feelings to have ever have made that mistake. Not too many folks think of Donald Trump as stupid, of course -- they're more likely to think of him as mean, which isn't a good look for a President, and they're also more likely to think of him as a racist, given his multitudinous you-call-it-politically-incorrect-I-call-it-being-an-asshole statements about various minorities. Also, too, Steve Bannon probably wrote that statement, and Steve Bannon's not exactly Nobel Peace Prize-winning material.

Finally, Julia Angwin at ProPublica discusses "How to Protect Your Digital Privacy in the Era of Public Shaming." I'm a bit put off by the title, merely because I don't think shaming people who injure our communities is a bad thing, but what is a bad thing is people throwing bricks through your window because you criticized the President. That isn't shaming; that's vandalism. Anyway, make your passwords longer, update your software, use encryption, opt out of data brokers, get rid of ancient data, and other things. (Also, Ms. Angwin provides a link to this site advising you on surviving online harassment, which might be in your future if you're planning to speak out against this evil Administration; there's plenty of good advice there, too.)

Around the table: in which federal employees take hits -- and get back up.

President-elect Trump orders all politically-appointed ambassadors to leave their posts before Inauguration Day. Typically Presidents grant extensions to these ambassadors to transition more easily to private life, but I'm also pretty sure these ambassadors are of some use to their successors; now they're not, and they may not get replaced for a few months, all so that Mr. Trump can continue the Republicans' obsession with Mr. Obama. Remember this the next time terrorists attack.

House revives "Holman rule," which could allow individual lawmakers to lower a particular federal employee's salary down to $1. Which will not be abused for political reasons at all! After all, didn't Mr. Trump's transition team just get caught trying to make up a blacklist of Energy Department scientists working on climate change? And woe betide you if you actually pursue a voter caging allegation under an Attorney General like Jeff Sessions, or a report of water poisoning near a fracking well under an EPA Administrator like Scott Pruitt, or a lead on some well-connected doctor defrauding Medicare under an HHS Secretary like Tom Price.

Telecom corporation files suit against the FCC's recently-finalized privacy rules -- hoping to be able to gut net neutrality rules in the process. Their angle is clever, I suppose -- that "edge providers" (like Facebook and Netflix) get regulated by the FTC while the FCC regulates internet service providers as a "common carrier," but it sounds like they're arguing that symmetry always equals fairness, which anyone who thinks about it knows isn't true. The good news? The big telecoms' efforts will take time, and if the newly Trumped-up FCC acts in haste -- which they will! -- they'll almost certainly run afoul of the courts, just as Tha Bush Mobb's FCC did. Oh, almost forgot: why are corporations so anti-privacy again? Not because they care about how easy it is for you to buy stuff -- because they care about how easy it could be for them to make money off you buying stuff!

Drew Altman at the New York Times describes "The Health Care Plan Trump Voters Really Want." I don't know why they would get all the say about everything, comprising only 46% of the electorate, but their concerns are, guess what, pretty much like everyone else's -- they hate high premiums and surprise bills, they find health insurance way too complex, and they often admire Medicaid from afar (though they also resent the people who get it). They also generally dislike the ideas Republicans come up with to "replace" the Affordable Care Act (it warmed my heart to hear them call HSAs and the like "not insurance"!), but here's the bad news: they all have faith in Donald Trump to fix it. They'd be much better off having faith in themselves and calling their representatives to tell them what they think, which I'd be happy to help them do.

Finally, the U.S. Postal Service has decided to stop permitting Staples stores to provide USPS services, The article plays up the role of unions in this battle, but the result actually shows what good Americans can accomplish if they stop waiting for politicians to fix stuff. It also suggests, yet again, that privatizing essential government services (and by "essential," in this case, I also mean "constitutionally-mandated") doesn't improve those services, as a May 2016 Inspector General Audit found. So good job, Americans -- and, ah, get ready for when Republicans try to destroy the USPS again.

Action: clean water, and internet privacy.

So here we are, a mere two and a half weeks from Election Day, and Congress still hasn't funded a response to the water crisis in Flint, MI. What's the rush? After all, good Flint residents have only had lead in their water for 2 1/2 years now! President Obama and Michigan Gov. Snyder have only declared a state of emergency for ten months now! And lead poisoning is only irreversible and poisonous at any amount! Last we heard, Congress didn't fund Flint water infrastructure funding in the bill keeping our government open through December 9, but Congressional leaders promised another vote on that matter during the lame-duck session. Of course, you know Congressional promises aren't worth the toilet paper they're written on -- unless we make them keep their promises, which is why Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass water infrastructure help for Flint and other cities post-haste. Clean water may be the most important health care innovation of the last century, and our leaders have absolutely no business pretending to be leaders if they won't fix what happened in Flint -- and won't prevent it from happening in other cities and towns across America. Really, investing in people is not too much to ask.

Meanwhile, the FCC may vote this week to put the brakes on big corporate ISPs selling our personal and private data without our consent -- but word on the street is that one FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is on the fence about that. That can't be because big corporate telecoms have been lobbying Congress relentlessly over the last few months, can it? Or because the Senate has refused to consider her renomination to the FCC for a second term, even though President Obama submitted it well over a year ago? Here's the thing: if any of us cave to big corporate money, we teach future generations that greed is OK, and if a nominee bows before Republican pressure in order to get her renomination considered, we teach future generations that it's OK to play stupid playground games in order to get what we want. Why don't corporatists and Republicans ever try to win these arguments on the merits? Could it be because they can't reasonably oppose good Americans having more control over how their ISPs use their personal data? Don't let the haters have all the say about everything: let Free Press help you tell the FCC to do the people's will and allow us to have more control over our internet privacy.

Around the table: a victory and a defeat for law and order, plus various cowardices from Our Glorious Elites.

U.S. District Judge throws out evidence gathered by DEA officers using a stingray without a warrant, ruling that "(a)bsent a search warrant, the government may not turn a citizen's cell phone into a tracking device." Judge Pauley is the first federal judge to rule against law enforcement in this manner, by the way, and good for him. I'll brook no silliness from the you-can't-expect-privacy-on-the-internet crowd, as if the Fourth Amendment is just something we'll have to give up so we can have nice toys.

North Carolina government enacts law making police body camera footage unavailable to the public without police consent. And the "public," in this case, includes folks who want the footage to prove the police officers broke the law, which is a violation of their rights, particularly since they'd have to pay court costs to overrule the police department. And I wouldn't call this a Fifth Amendment issue, either, since a video isn't testimony per se -- we'd more accurately call interpretation of the video "testimony." On balance, though, thanks to easily-obtainable smartphones with built-in HD cameras -- over which this bill would exert no control -- I'd say the horses are out of the barn.

Ho hum, "centrist Dems" seem to be iffy about ever passing a public option for health insurance in America. Because it doesn't have "bipartisan support," you see, as if anything worthwhile will ever win Republican support again. By that logic, they must also not support Medicare, since Republicans wish to destroy that as well, but of course they would never say that out loud. The good news? At least two of these Senators have zero chance of getting re-elected in 2018, and a third is in serious trouble -- and maybe, just maybe, since this is starting to happen all the time, Democrats will stop letting their right wing dictate what they fight for. (Personal to Mark Warner, talking about the "29 to 30 hour cliff" supposedly created by the 30-hour-work-week mandate in the Affordable Care Act: so you'd rather have the 39-to-40-hour cliff back, as Republicans do?)

Charles Koch, in an interview with Fortune magazine, says choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is like deciding between "cancer or heart attack." Don't you believe it! Just like everyone else, he's got almost four months to rationalize himself into voting for Mr. Trump. You know how else I know he's going to vote for Mr. Trump? Because he did not raise the possibility of supporting Libertarian Gary Johnson even one time during his Fortune interview.

Finally, Politico talks to a few U.S. Senators who forecast that the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" doesn't have the votes in the Senate to pass. Don't you believe this, either! Rob Portman's "concerns" about "currency manipulation" will disappear; Thom Tillis and Richard Burr will throw their tobacco interests overboard, and Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee don't really care about "biologics." All they care about is money, and they won't protect relatively narrow interests at the expense of protecting money. And Politico, like the rest of them, thinks it's perfectly OK to report that the TPP's best chance for passage is in the lame-duck session, like that isn't abject cowardice or dereliction of duty.

Around the table: crushing debt, bankster propaganda, self-serving folly, app security, and the Republican 2016 platform.

Two Congressfolk propose the Wage and Garnishment Equity (or WAGE) Act, which would set limits on what creditors could do to low-income borrowers. The critical reform, here, would be new limits on creditors garnishing your bank accounts -- creditors can presently take 25% of your after-tax paycheck, but they can take 100% of it if you put it in the bank. I eagerly await the whining from the just-shut-up-and-pay-your-debts crowd, who will pretend that there are absolutely positively no predators among banksters and creditors, and who also pretend that "free markets" only means freedom for the market's biggest actors, and not everyone.

Speaking of which, Jim Naureckas at FAIR finds the New York Times publishing an op-ed by JP Morgan Chase CEO/whiny bankster Jamie Dimon about how he's going to raise his corporation's minimum wage for 18,000 employees to "between $12 and $16.50 an hour...depending on geographic and market factors." Kudos to you if you also recognized "I don't wanna" as a potential "market" factor. But Chase doesn't have 18,000 employees; it has more than 240,000, and not all of them are CEOs who make $27 million annually, as Mr. Dimon did in 2015, so BFD. Also, Mr. Naureckas reminds us that New York City's minimum wage will be $15/hour by 2019, and California's will be $12/hour by then, so, like, double-BFD.

Rep. Corrine Brown (D-FL), lately indicted by the Department of Justice on fraud charges, says the DOJ should have been investigating the Orlando shooter instead of her. You'll recognize that as self-serving right off, of course, but it's also extraordinarily poor reasoning, as it implies that the DOJ can only carry out one investigation at a time. It also implies that the crime alleged by the indictment -- using a charity supposedly established to help poor students go to school as a slush fund for Ms. Brown and her cronies -- is small potatoes, which it's not. It's profoundly morally, ethically, and spiritually corrupt, in fact.

Any of y'all playing Pokemon Go? No? Well, you're probably better off, since iPhone users (and some Android users), in order to use the app, must give it permission to access their Google account in its entirety, including your email, browsing history, location data, and any other data Google stores and/or can access. If you go on a Google hunt, you can find a workaround, but there's no excuse for an app compromising your private data that much -- certainly "using an outdated sign-on process" isn't an excuse. The good news? The app may be updated shortly, though probably only because everyone's using it.

Finally, remember when we heard that Republicans might be scrapping their implacable opposition to gay marriage in its platform? Well, scratch that: the platform's most recent draft, among other things, bars women from military combat, smiles on state "bathroom" bills, supports "conversion" "therapy" for gays though it doesn't have the guts to come out and say so, and refers to coal as "clean" energy. Oh, and the platform also calls for building an actual wall along the U.S./Mexico border, not a "digital" wall, as former Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested earlier this week. Mr. Trump sure is going to be in big trouble at the debates if he hasn't read this platform by then.

Action: government spying, and GMO labeling.

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

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

Around the table: a real threat to gun owners, and other stories.

Sen. McCain (R-AZ) introduces legislation allowing the FBI to access your browsing history and email data without a warrant. Because National Security Letters aren't enough, I guess. If you're tempted to rationalize this by saying "Republicans aren't coming after my browsing history," then remember that Democrats also win elections on occasion. Of course, if President Obama really, really wanted to take everyone's guns away, he would've done that back when he had a 70-seat House majority and a filibuster-proof Senate majority.

Speaking of guns, Andy Greenberg at Wired says the "homemade AR-15 industry" is "surging" after the Orlando shootings. That's a bit of an overstatement, though -- Cody Wilson's corporation sells around four of their $1500 AR-15 gun millers daily, and that spiked to 11 a few days after Orlando, but that's still eleven, in a country of 300 million people; I could just as easily tell you my blog traffic doubled during the 2008 bailout, without telling you what embarrassingly small number it doubled from or to. Anyway, I can easily imagine gun-making corporations deciding that there are some forms of gun control they like after all, and I can also imagine 3-D printers one day showing Mr. Wilson's gun millers the door to obsolescence.

Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall wonders if British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's "unreserved" opposition to Great Britain leaving the EU will "doom" Labour, mainly because it puts another wedge between the Labour establishment and its "traditional working-class base." Read the whole thing; it's a tremendous analysis. And, you know, you can support Great Britain leaving the EU without being a racist -- if I were Greece, I'd leave the EU just to be able to use my own currency again! -- but Mr. Corbyn has whiffed on that opportunity, which makes me think that, if he ever becomes Prime Minister, he'll be as co-opted as the rest of them.

Ho hum, Marco Rubio is running for re-election to the Senate after all. I don't care that he "went back on his word" (though he did so pretty spectacularly!), since I never took him at his word, but I bet he finds re-election rather tougher than his 2010 election, when he ran against Charlie Crist and a guy named Meek. Not that Patrick Murphy and Alan Grayson don't have their problems, but Mr. Rubio will only face one of them, and their problems don't include "is obviously an empty suit" or "went to bat for the notorious for-profit college industry." (Oh, and Mr. Rubio could also lose the primary to a wealthy Trump-hugger -- which could make either Mr. Murphy or Mr. Grayson the second-luckiest man in America, after Florida's other Senator, Bill Nelson.)

FEC filings show that Donald Trump has, in recent months, diverted about 20% of his campaign's funds back into businesses he owns. That's rather worse than all the useless horse-race analysis about his campaign not having very much money to begin with, and would be weapons-grade PR for Mrs. Clinton -- unless her State Department emails reveal her peddling her influence within our government to Clinton Foundation donors, as some have suggested they might.

Finally, a Tennessee House candidate puts up a billboard saying "Make America White Again" (and there's some disagreement about who, exactly, took it down). So Donald Trump, with a vital assist from the "liberal" media, has made it OK to fly your white supremacist freak flag again. And if Democrats somehow manage to win back both Houses of Congress and the Presidency in 2016, you'll see a lot more of these assholes running for Congress in 2018 -- and, since Democrats never do anything good with their majorities, a lot of these assholes will win. How do we prevent that? Mainly by demanding that whoever's in power, regardless of party, do right by us -- until they do right by us. It may not work right away, but duty is duty.

Action: protection against discrimination, and internet privacy.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 1510/SB 974, the Pennsylvania Fairness Act, would amend the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act of 1955 to outlaw certain forms of discrimination on the basis of "sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression"; these protections would prevent discrimination in "employment, housing and public accommodation." The election of Democrat Tom Wolf as Governor has apparently turned the Republican-held Pennsylvania state legislature into one of the most reactionary in the nation, but, as usual, it doesn't matter what they want, it matters what we want -- polling shows widespread support for the bill, after all. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to ensure fair treatment under the law for gay and transgendered folks. Don't believe the morons who mockingly ask who's next to get special protections from the government? and then make absurd lists of nonexistent groups. It's lazy, at best, to accuse people of defending protections they haven't actually defended, and it's far worse than lazy to call equal rights for us "special protections" for others.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to protect your private information from being sold online without your consent, then Free Press still helps you do that. Dig some of the anti-privacy talk coming from the corporatist right about this -- no, not the "fear" that strong privacy protections will "break the internet," nor all that tiresome ALL BIG GUBMINT REGULASHUNZ BAD!!!! talk from people who aren't imaginative enough to make money and protect privacy at the same time, but the notion that people will lose out if we demand that internet corporations protect our privacy! I've heard this from a few corporate flacks, and I guess they really think being shown ads based on where you've been on the internet is really an opportunity for you to buy new stuff, versus an opportunity for them to make money off you buying new stuff. Worse than that, of course, is that their argument is illogical -- people who really want ads pushed on them like that would, under the FCC proposal, have the freedom to give consent to participate in that activity. It's enough to make you think corporations just hate our freedoms.

Action: payday lenders, internet privacy, and hedge fund taxation.

CREDO helps you tell the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to make their proposed payday lending regulations even more vigorous. (Remember: if you've already commented with the CFPB on their proposal, don't do it again. It muddies the data.) CREDO finds the CFPB's proposal pretty good, but it could be better, and why shouldn't we ask for the moon? The corporations that try to stop every good thing we try to do always ask for the moon, and too often they get it. Even here, they've managed to persuade the CFPB to let them forgo establishing a customer's ability to repay if the customer has repaid a loan once before -- never mind whether that customer's circumstances have changed since then! -- and also to persuade the CFPB to scrap an attempt to limit loan installments to less than five percent of a customer's paycheck. The CFPB also decided that 30 days between loans was enough; they originally proposed 60. The good news? If enough of us tell the CFPB to strengthen their proposals, what are payday lenders going to do? Claim they're more important than us?

Meanwhile, the FCC has, as you probably know, proposed the first-ever internet privacy protections for consumers -- and, as you surely know, the big telecom corporations are throwing a hissy fit about it. You remember when Sen. Toomey (R-PA) expressed hesitation at supporting a pro-internet privacy bill in the Senate because he didn't want to "break the internet"? The big telecom's arguments are no better -- if consumers get the right to tell broadband corporations not to share the private information that comes through their filters, they tell us, how are they going to make any money? Our boldest, best-and-brightest entrepreneurs sure do shrink before the prospect of government regulation on the people's behalf, don't they? It's like they don't really believe in a free market at all. So the ACLU helps you tell the FCC to implement the most vigorous internet privacy protections possible, so consumers don't have to worry about what their service providers are doing with their information. After all, you don't have to worry about your phone provider taking notes on all your phone calls; what's so different with this?

Finally, H.R. 2889/S. 1686, the Carried Interest Fairness Act, would close the loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay taxes at the capital gains rate (nearly 24%) rather than at the normal income tax rate, which in their rarefied air would be closer to 40%. While the Treasury Department's proposed rule concerning hedge funds would reclassify them from investor partners to "service providers," and thus turn capital gains into income (since you don't get capital gains by providing a service per se), the Carried Interest Fairness Act would simply reclassify hedge fund capital gains as straight-up income, since that's what it is anyway, really. Hedge funds claim that such a change would interfere with their ability to both outperform the market and "police" corporations that aren't doing well enough. Of course, hedge funds don't actually do either of these things -- they just extract wealth from corporations like the vultures they are. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2889, and thus force hedge fund managers to contribute more of their fair share of tax revenues. Because, as you know, if they don't pay their share, you'll have to pay more -- particularly if you're a small business owner.

Around the table: the Senate drops the ball on email privacy, and other stories.

Senate Judiciary Committee tables consideration of a Senate version of the Email Privacy Act after other Senators try to weigh it down with loopholes for law enforcement. Just like we told them not to do earlier this week! And, naturally, the bill got scuttled for BS reasons -- Sen. Cornyn wanted to attach an amendment expanding warrantless use of National Security Letters, because any old amendment to any old thing is OK these days, and a few government agencies protested that they'd be hamstrung since they don't have the authority to issue warrants in the first place, though these agencies do have the authority to issue subpoenas, which -- guess what! -- they hardly ever use. Don't worry, though; we'll be back.

USA Today investigation finds hundreds of folks who allege that Donald Trump never paid them for work performed. I suppose it's remotely possible that, as Mr. Trump says, these hundreds of contractors and mechanics and service providers just did a bad job -- we don't learn how many similar folks he has paid on time (though we don't have to take his daughter's word on that, either), nor do we know how much other moguls stiff their contractors. But some of the details -- wage theft settlements, going nuclear in lawsuits, failing to pay his own lawyers, criticizing contractors and then trying to hire them again -- are hard to ignore. And even Hillary Clinton should be able to boil all of this down into a devastating laugh line -- and if she manages to work "small businesses" into her routine, I'll be quite impressed.

MergerWatch issues report finding that states perform very little oversight over hospital mergers. I'm sure there are times when mergers do actually serve the public, but I'm also sure it's not true nearly as often as big hospital chains assimilate small local hospitals. When you find that services like neonatal intensive care get downsized pretty much because they're expensive, you won't be happy. And -- surprise, surprise! -- when religious hospital chains become the only game in town, you can't get some services at all, because they put the "conscience" of some executive over the conscience of patients.

Sam Pizzigati, writing in U.S. News and World Report, says we should stop waiting for shareholders to restrain executive pay and act on our own. I wasn't "waiting" for that per se -- I've always held that shareholder power is but one tool with which we might restrain runaway CEO pay -- but I, too, have been disappointed in shareholder power over the years. It'd be hard to underestimate citizens' disgust at runaway CEO pay, once they learn how bad it is -- recall that the Harvard Business Review reported last year that Americans think the CEO-to-worker ratio should be around 7:1, and think it's around 30:1 -- when it's actually well over 300:1.

Finally, Matt Taibbi also thinks the Democrats will "learn all the wrong lessons" from the Sanders campaign. Why? Because Democrats, like the rest of Washington, live in "a kind of incestuous myopia" where they only talk to each other, and (importantly) they, like the rest of Washington, abhor the people. When phones start ringing, we learn, staffers tune in to Fox News to figure out why. Clearly they need to be hearing more from us and less from rageheads. We'll keep working on that.

Action: "free" trade, law and order, and email privacy.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject that nefarious "free" trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific "Partnership." Virtually no one outside of Congress and corporate boardrooms wants this thing to pass, but apparently that's all the "bipartisan" "consensus" you need to get things done in America, although actual bipartisan sentiment opposes "free" trade "deals" because they outsource our jobs and nullify our laws. CREDO's latest action alert concerns the effect the TPP will have on our environment, and that's no less persuasive than any of the other arguments -- the TPP will give unprecedented power to corporations to sue governments in "investor-state tribunals" for the money they "lost" when those governments made them curb their pollution on their citizens' behalf, and then extract a bailout from taxpayers when they win (as they likely will). Still-unpersuaded right-wingers might want to consider how free anyone can be without clean air and clean water. Of course, they also want to consider whether 35-plus years of "free" marketeering has really made anyone rich but the already very-rich, but that's an ongoing project.

Meanwhile, the family of Louise Talley, who was raped and murdered in Philadelphia in 1991, has started a petition on Change.org helping you tell Philadelphia's District Attorney to work to release Anthony Wright, who was convicted of her rape and murder. If that sounds odd to you, consider that DNA evidence exonerated Mr. Wright nearly two years ago (the DNA from the rape kit belonged to a different man who's now dead), and Mr. Wright now awaits retrial in a county prison, when he really ought to be a free man. And, naturally, more than 20 years prior to his exoneration, police forcibly removed Mr. Wright from his home and coerced him into confessing to Ms. Talley's rape and murder, perhaps figuring he had a few priors anyway and they could close a relatively high-profile case quickly. But taking shortcuts to justice only creates more injustice. (Kudos, by the way, to Ms. Talley's family for pursuing the truth; I don't know that many folks would bother helping the man convicted of killing someone in their family. Hell, I don't know if I would.)

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Senate to pass H.R. 699, the Email Privacy Act, without all kinds of exceptions for various law enforcement entities, then the Electronic Frontier Foundation still helps you do that. Really, what more persuasion does your Senator need than that the Email Privacy Act got passed unanimously by the House? And this House rarely moves legislation that actually helps Americans, let alone move it unanimously! But word on the street is that every law enforcement agency wants some exemption or other from the Email Privacy Act, which would make for a very weak bill indeed. Did I not just get done saying that taking shortcuts to justice only creates more injustice? And before you join the if-you've-done-nothing-wrong-you've-got-nothing-to-fear crowd, please consider that any law enforcement agency that gets to snoop in your email without a warrant will be under enormous pressure to produce results that justify their exemption, which means innocent people are going to jail. And "innocent people" could include you.

Around the table: the FBI whines about privacy, and other absurdities.

The FBI wants to exempt its massive database of biometric data (mostly fingerprints and facial photos) from public scrutiny under the Privacy Act. This would prevent citizens from challenging both their presence in this database (which comprises information from convicts and suspects), as well as challenging the accuracy of that information. Why the exemptions? The FBI says it doesn't want investigations "compromised" by people learning they're being investigated, which has to be one of the whiniest excuses I've ever heard. Among the many major troubles with the database: it doesn't always distinguish between convict and suspect, and when a suspect is looking for a job, that might be a big deal.

Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that a law enforcement request for cell phone location information does not require a warrant. While their reasoning has ample precedent -- the "third-party doctrine" holding that folks who "knowingly and willingly" surrender information to a third party have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" regarding that information -- I think you could argue that folks don't surrender cell phone location info "willingly" if they have to do so just to use a cell phone and get service; that, in fact, they're being compelled to surrender that info. And if we're not yet at the point where we could no longer consider a cell phone a luxury, we're getting there.

Kate Cox, writing at the Consumerist, plunges down the rabbit hole of your average Verizon Wireless bill. How does your bill inflate by 50% or more? Certainly because of the monthly charge on the phone itself, which most folks know by now is not really "free," but also via such innovations as the "smartphone line access" fee (amounting to $20 per phone per month on some Verizon bills!) as well as various "service" and "administrative" charges. The "regulatory" charge, I suppose, is there to make you hate the FCC. Just in case you thought we were just picking on Verizon here, Ms. Cox will be going through other big telecom cell phone bills in future installments, and they promise to be as bad or worse.

Jill Richardson, writing at Otherwords, explores the myth that poor people are all lazy cheaters. Versus, you know, held down by a system where the most powerful people run roughshod over the rest of us. Though many Americans think of themselves, in Will Rogers's words, as "temporarily-embarrassed millionaires," you'd think this myth's power would get weaker as more and more of us face the year-in-year-out reality that we're just treading water at best. Sadly, most folks split that particular knot by assuming that those other poor people are the lazy cheaters.

Finally, we learn that Donald Trump has a profound conflict of interest as a Presidential candidate -- that he owes upwards of $100 million to a foreign bank that has had skirmishes with out government's regulators. In a sane and healthy society, this would be a crippling revelation -- a man that far in debt to foreign banks will have his strings pulled by those banks sooner or later, particularly when they want absolution from his Administration for some wrong they've done to Americans. But don't hold your breath waiting for the "liberal" media to say this revelation "disqualifies" Donald Trump, since this isn't, strictly-speaking, a horse-race issue. I guess I won't be too sad if the eventual Democratic nominee runs a bunch of campaign ads about "Donald Trump, the debtor-in-chief."

Around the table: government spying, "vetting" Bernie Sanders, sugar in soda, vertical farming, and profiting from hardship.

Lo and behold, the Senate Intelligence Committee approves an appropriations bill that would permit the FBI to read your emails without a warrant. This is a giant middle finger to the American people, given that a Republican-held House just unanimously-as-in-everybody approved an email privacy bill that would require warrants for emails. Sadly, President Obama would probably prefer the Senate Intelligence Committee's approach, so we'll go to work on him; when I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, takes issue with the notion that Bernie Sanders would wilt as a general election candidate because he hasn't been properly "vetted." Mr. Johnson does a exhaustive job cataloguing the multitudinous criticisms Mr. Sanders has received, but I think it's also true that Republican attack ads will bring those criticisms far more attention than they've received so far. Of course, the notion that Republicans wouldn't run a scorched-earth campaign against any other Democrat is absurd -- if Jesus ran as a Democrat, Republicans would run a million ads calling him a dirty hippie.

Jennifer Chaussee, writing at Wired, tells us how "Sugar’s Not Just Bad for You -- It’s Bad for Coca-Cola’s Business." You may have thought that corporate welfare handouts like the subsidies that make high-fructose corn syrup so cheap would be good for Coke's business, but Coke actually relies heavily on cheaply-produced foreign sugar that isn't always so well-backed by foreign governments. Hence their move to alternative sweeteners -- which may also benefit sugar workers, who may be the worst-treated workers in the history of the world.

Jodi Helmer, writing at TakePart, analyzes the evolution of indoor "vertical" farming by profiling a New Jersey operation operating in what used to be a laser-tag center. Strange, isn't it, that farming sometimes has to go indoors to avoid pesticide use? And with climate change progressing and urban populations growing, we're going to need solutions that aren't chained to arable land -- solutions that make land arable. It's still more promise than realization, as evidenced by the fact that the AeroFarms operation in Newark grows only 10 kinds of crops (it started out trying to grow 200!), but this is also the kind of thing that individuals can do. Which means those of us who do it in ten years or so will be singled out as terrorists by big ag.

Finally, Hillary Clinton has hit Donald Trump hard for saying he "sort of" hoped the housing market would collapse shortly before it did, because then cash-flush guys like him could make a killing, so to speak. Mr. Trump's counterpunch isn't bad, I suppose, but a statement like "I feel badly for everybody" really relies on you being very, very tuned in to his stream-of-consciousness style, and saying "(w)hat am I going to do? I'm a businessman" invites you to fantasize that someone even more powerful has a gun to his head, just making him benefit financially from good Americans losing their homes. And in re benefiting from crises: George W. Bush spent eight years as President creating crises so Republicans could benefit politically from them, and banksters still create crises all over the planet so they can get rich off them. And I think Americans understand this a lot better than they did a decade ago.

Action: torture, internet privacy, and gay rights.

The CIA has apparently "accidentally" destroyed its copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report from the last Congress. No, it wasn't the only copy in the whole world, but understand that the torture report actually had little chance of seeing the light of day to begin with -- so far our government has only released the report's 700-page executive summary, and a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel has lately ruled that the Freedom of Information Act can't compel disclosure of the other 6,200-plus pages, since the FOIA doesn't apply to "Congressional documents." Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell President Obama to declassify the Senate torture report and ensure that the National Archives and Record Administration preserve it. Let's not pretend that other countries learning that we torture "compromises national security," nor let us suppose the National Archives should only record the good we do -- if we can't accept, and learn from, the evil we do, we have no business aspiring to be the greatest country on Earth.

Meanwhile, the FCC has proposed rules that would give consumers more control over how information internet service providers use, share, or sell their private information. I've heard a lot of reasonable folks say things like you should get used to not having any privacy on the internet, and while they mean to remind you not to be a blithering idiot in public or to avoid scams that sound too good to be true -- both worthwhile reminders no matter how often we get them! -- we should be able to have some privacy on the internet, and we should certainly be able to make big telecom corporations get our permission before doing anything with our private information, and we should get notifications from those corporations whenever that information gets stolen. Of course, big telecoms don't want to do any of this, supposedly because it would "confuse" consumers -- which certainly betrays their very, very low opinion of the people whose money makes their businesses possible. Don't we tend toward believing in folks' capabilities in a free country? Demand Progress helps you tell the FCC to mandate the most vigorous privacy protections possible for consumers on the internet.

Finally, in case you were wondering if the struggle for gay rights is over now that the Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage across the land, recall that many state legislatures have made foster care systems a battleground in their attempts to enshrine a "right" to discriminate against people who offend your "religious" "conscience." Some politicians think that if you don't want LGBTQ parents to foster kids because cooties, you should be allowed to prevent them from doing that -- and if foster parents don't want to foster LGBTQ kids, they should be allowed to do that. Just to make things clear: you have a right to be a bigot -- but you don't have a right to abridge other people's rights with your bigotry, or because of your bigotry. How strange, that folks pass up all the character-building opportunities meeting people unlike them can provide. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell HHS Secretary Burwell to forbid foster care services receiving federal funding from discriminating against LGBTQ kids or parents. I know, the right will call that Big Gummint, just like they never called the PATRIOT Act or warrantless wiretapping Big Gummint, but haters gonna hate, and we don't pander to hate, even if it carries a cross.

Action: email privacy, net neutrality, and public waters.

H.R. 699, the Email Privacy Act, passed the House by an astounding 419-0 vote, which is rare, especially for a good bill that actually protects the email privacy of Americans. And Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Grassley (R-IA) plans to bring the bill up for consideration by his committee this week. You see what's coming, right? Government agencies wanting exceptions to the bill so they can snoop on your emails "in case of an emergency," like "emergencies" don't somehow become more "common" as time goes on, or like making government agencies get warrants to look at emails is somehow onerous. Hence Save the Fourth helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 699 without get-out-of-jail cards for certain government agencies. And let's be clear: if the Securities and Exchange Commission wants to investigate bankster wrongdoing and wants to look at bankster emails, or Internal Revenue wants to catch tax cheats by looking at their emails, then they should have to get a damn warrant. If we work and fight to protect freedom and privacy, then we work for all of us, not just the people of whom we approve. If freedom and privacy aren't for everyone, then they're for no one, and I'm not having that, not in my America.

Meanwhile, over a month after the House passed H.R. 2666, the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, the bill's still sitting there in the Senate, awaiting action, even though it's been on the Senate Legislative Calendar for almost as long as it's been out of the House. What could they be afraid of? And don't say "a promised Obama veto," because I don't think the Senate is afraid of that per se, though the President did, in fact, promise to veto H.R. 2666 if it got to his desk. There may just be one thing they're afraid of -- getting their phone lines jammed by angry constituents who actually use broadband and pay for broadband who not only recognize H.R. 2666 as a lateral attack on net neutrality, but who wonder why on Earth anyone in their right mind would think "rate regulation" is an unqualified evil. After all, people who use broadband, and pay for broadband, are sick of their cable company jacking up their rates whenever they feel like it, and all of the solutions to that problem (breaking up monopolies, actually regulating rates) actually involve their government working on their behalf. So let Free Press help you tell your Senator to protect internet freedom by rejecting H.R. 2666.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject S. 2807, the so-called Preserving Public Access to Public Waters Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. How could we oppose a bill called the Preserving Public Access to Public Waters Act? Long story short: the bill doesn't do what it says it'll do. Long story somewhat longer: what the bill does instead is allow states to open federal waters to "residential and commercial fishing," as if the Secretary of the Interior might not have good reasons to close off National Park waters to fishing, as if states should have jurisdiction over federal anything. Seriously, if the states want the waters that badly, they should petition to their reps in Congress to formally turn them over to the state, not change the law so that "federal" and "state" are meaningless terms. And note well the phrase "residential and commercial fishing" -- like how they put "commercial" second like that's not what they care about most? In addition to letting states usurp federal power without due process, the bill also constitutes an attempt to hand over our waters (and the fish in them, fragile ecosystems be damned) to fishing corporations in a corporate welfare scheme -- all under the guise of letting grandpa do more fishing.