Thieves in the Temple.

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: concerning pollution, lead poisoning, and food safety.

Our President tried to ram through Keystone XL pipeline approval early in his term, but a U.S. District Court judge ruled in April that our State Department had to complete a lawful environmental review before issuing any permits. So now our Administration has apparently issued a draft of said environmental review that fails to fully evaluate the environmental impacts, not least of which is a proposed alternate route through Nebraska. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to do a lawful environmental review before committing to build the Keystone XL pipeline. And if doing a lawful review means they can't build the pipeline, well, that's just too bad! Our President doesn't care about climate and clean water; he only cares about swinging his balls in everyone's faces -- which, sadly, resonates strongly among those Americans who blame everyone but themselves for their problems. But they're not a majority, and they don't get all the say about everything.

Meanwhile, as schools are finding lead in their drinking water all the way up and down the state of California -- including half the schools in San Francisco, which really should be collecting enough money in property taxes to fund solutions to this problem -- Cal PIRG helps you tell your local school boards to protect our children from lead in drinking water. The state of California allowed lead in plumbing fixtures until the year 2010, which wasn't that long ago, even if it feels like it. That means a lot of schools there (and plenty of other states!) still have lead in their water pipes, and if you've got lead in your water pipes, you're probably going to have lead in your water sooner or later. And, as you know, any amount of lead in drinking water can cause brain damage in children. And children are literally our future! It wasn't just a Whitney Houston song! So let's tell our school boards to get on the stick with getting the lead out.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big food-producing corporations to get the glyphosate out of their food, then Only Organic still helps you do that. As you may know, the Environmental Working Group found the cancer-linked glyphosate (the main ingredient of Roundup, Monsanto's most famous herbicidal product) in two out of three of the oat-based foods it tested, and at a much higher level than scientists would call safe -- and a lot of our biggest food-producing corporations, like Quaker, Kellogg's, and General Foods, make these foods. And kids eat them in cereal and oatmeal and granola bars! The World Health Organization and the state of California have declared glyphosate a possible carcinogen, and the European Union has banned it from their crops entirely -- and yet our society just chugs along, our leaders in business and government saying their hands are tied. So let's give them some incentive to untie them.

Around the table: what stands in the way of a Democratic wave, and other lessons.

If you're already gushing at the possibility of a Democrat victory in the coming midterms, Ari Berman at Rolling Stone cautions that Republican-held states have devised a lot of nefarious ways of suppressing the vote. Mainly Mr. Berman concentrates on Wisconsin, once the home of great American public servants like Bob LaFollette and William Proxmire, but now a right-wing swamp of extreme gerrymandering, vote suppression, and dark money political contributions. But here's a ray of hope: maybe the Supreme Court heard about 2011 Republican lawmakers saying "ignore the public comments" while mulling the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

Here's another corrective to your enthusiasm: Ryan Grim and Lee Fang at The Intercept describe how actual populists in U.S. House races have to run against the Democratic establishment before they can run against (beatable) Republican incumbents. You'd think Pennsylvania state Democrat poobahs, in particular, would have far less credibility after their lousy showing in 2016 (seriously, who could possibly care about getting Katie McGinty's endorsement?), but they're still around, saying Democrats have to appeal to Republican moderates who will never vote for them rather than the left-leaning and left-behind economic populists who otherwise wouldn't vote for anyone. What's the definition of insanity again?

Bill McKibben at The Nation presents "Three Strategies to Get to a Fossil-Free America," wryly adding that "none of them rely on Washington to do anything useful." Here they are: getting states and localities to move to renewable power; blocking new fossil-fuel projects like gas and oil pipelines and fracking wells; and stop the flow of bank money to fossil-fuel projects. I laughed out loud at the part where folks actually installed fields of solar panels on Keystone XL's path.

In a peripherally-related note, The Straight Dope describes the phenomenon of the "fatberg," or the massive, dense blob of cooking oil and other waste that tends to block off sewer lines. The biggest culprit in the creation of the "fatberg" isn't that turkey grease you dumped down the sink (though it doesn't help!), but the massive amount of used cooking oil restaurants dump into sewers. Sadly, the only idea advanced to stop the fatberg -- converting cooking oil into energy -- is over a decade old already, and some enterprising small-town or big-city mayor should already have made it the great work for which they'll always be remembered.

Finally, Araz Hachadourian at Yes! magazine describes the "time bank," where good Americans who might be short on cash trade hours of services instead. Folks might swap mowing the lawn for a good food dish, for example -- and no money changes hands. Some 500 of these banks exist across America, and I suppose today's "conservatives" would decry them as TEH SOSHULIZM!!!!, even though they consist of people signing and fulfilling contracts with each other without the assistance of some governmental body, which would ordinarly sound like something after a conservative's own heart.

Action: tax "reform," and Keystone XL.

Republicans still aim to pass the nefarious Trump tax "cut" plan despite the fact that just about everyone who's thought about the plan hates it, so today's another good day to call your Senators and tell them to reject it. Some folks are still taking the Trump Administration's cue and calling it a tax "cut" plan, even though the tax "cuts" the plan offers are mainly for corporations and wealthy folks, while any tax "cut" the middle class gets will likely be offset by the middle class tax breaks (for state and local taxes, for property taxes, and for health care costs, to name three) that the plan either eliminates or severely curtails. And though I'm nowhere near as troubled by government deficits as I am by household and corporate debt held by banksters, I don't automatically assume deficits are a good thing. Imagine, if you will, trillion-dollar deficits every year and our government still trying to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That's our future if Congress passes this "reform." So let's make sure it doesn't happen.

Meanwhile, you've likely heard that Nebraska's Public Service Commission approved a critical part of the Keystone XL pipeline that would pass through that state -- but you may not have heard that the Commission approved a route that Keystone's builder, the oil drilling corporation TransCanada, has already called unworkable. Did TransCanada call it "unworkable" as a negotiating ploy, or are they really that skittish about getting all those additional property easements? I don't know, but 13-dimensional chess is not our game: our game right now is to tell one of Keystone's major financial bankers, Wells Fargo, not to renew funding for the Keystone XL pipeline. You may want to remind them that if they do fund it, and TransCanada does build it, it'll still pass through the Ogallala Aquifer that provides clean drinking water to millions of heartland Americans. You may also want to remind them that the Keystone XL pipeline took a 5,000-barrel dump on South Dakota not too long ago, and it wasn't an isolated incident.

Around the table: special "bad news" edition!

If you're wondering why President Trump isn't doing a dance-with-no-pants about how he "made" ISIS abandon its de facto capital in Raqqa, that may be because coalition forces fighting ISIS there allowed about 250 ISIS fighters to leave, along with their families and all the ammo they could carry in a three-mile-long convoy. And this deal gets ISIS out of a stalemate in Raqqa, with no exchange of hostages and no guarantee they won't be back when the Kurds rebuild Raqqa. Our President sure is a deal-maker! But then the "deal" here may be to export terror to other nations, including ours, and so perpetuate the "war on terror" that aims to hold voters hostage to bad leaders. We can put a stop to that, of course.

Ho hum, FCC votes to roll back media consolidation regulations, which just so happens to benefit the notoriously pro-Trump Sinclair Broadcast Group's plan to buy Tribune Media. But I might not focus so much on whether there's an actual quid pro quo between FCC Chair Ajit Pai and Sinclair and more on whether the FCC did its due diligence as required by the law when it rolled back the regulations. That's how Powell the Lesser's FCC failed in a similar effort over a decade ago, after all.

Keystone pipeline shuts down after spilling 200,000 gallons of crude in North Dakota. If only someone had warned us about TransCanada's lousy pipeline safety record! If only a group of stalwart native Americans had risked life and limb to spread the message that pipelines pollute water! (What, you think I should mark this event with something other than snark?)

Well, this news isn't so bad, I guess: President Trump decides to roll back an Obama-era ban on bringing elephant trophies to America, but then says he's put the decision "on hold" after a massive public backlash. Until he can "review all the facts," of course, though that sure is a way of saying your Administration didn't do its job in the first place. And Interior Secretary Zinke should remember that hunting as a great way to bond with your daddy and granddaddy isn't actually the same thing as hunting an endangered species, which is what that Trump offspring was caught on camera doing.

Randall Balmer (whose book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, I highly recommend if you want to understand contemporary rank-and-file evangelicals) instructs us as to why Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore is a "con artist." You'll learn/be reminded of a lot -- that a founding principle of Baptism is the "wall of separation" between church and state (a phrase coined by Roger Williams himself) and the late 19th/early 20th century evangelicals had, shall we say, a stronger devotion to helping the poor than contemporary ones (who traffic in rage and fake martyrdom) seem to do.

Finally, I wouldn't make too much of an NRSC poll showing Doug Jones ahead of Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate special election by 12 points. The scandal over Mr. Moore's alleged mistreatment of teenage and underage girls while in his 30s broke too early -- absent smoking-gun evidence, Mr. Moore will continue his three-step plan of deny-deny-deny, and by the time Election Day gets here, a month will have gone by and folks will justify voting for him by saying no one proved he was guilty and we need another Supreme Court justice. I'd be happy to be wrong, of course, but I fear I'm not.

Action: basic human rights, education, and clean water.

S. 1055, the Philippines Human Rights Accountability & Counternarcotics Act of 2017, would (among other things) stop sales of certain arms to the Philippines as long as that country can't protect basic human rights. You'll likely know why this is happening -- because Philippine President Duterte has openly encouraged the murder of Philippine citizens suspected of dealing or using drugs (due process, how quaint!), to the tune of over 7,000 deaths. So I guess that's why President Trump has such a hard-on for having Mr. Duterte over -- after all, they're both big talkers who don't really care about law and order and who prefer that other, more disposable people do their dirty work for them. But the fact that we Americans are, by nature, a people impatient with bullshit does not mean we are uncivilized, or that we tolerate uncivilized behavior anywhere. Killing people you "just know" to be drug-dealers or drug-abusers is plenty uncivilized, and demands a response from civilized people. Hence the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1055, and thus support the basic human rights of Philippine citizens.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1880/S. 806, the College for All Act -- a production of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), respectively -- would end tuition and fees at community colleges for all students, and end tuition and fees at four-year public universities for those making less than $125,000 annually. It irks me that folks (including Sen. Sanders himself!) call this "free college," because it's not really free if your taxes pay for it. People very often take for granted what their tax dollars get them (what do you call a liberal? A conservative who just bottomed out over a pothole), and that's at least partly because too many weakling Democrats pretend taxes don't really exist at all, and don't fulfill a function in our society. But we need to ask whether funneling more and more of our tax money into CEO bank accounts as corporate welfare is really a better way to go than setting aside money so anyone who wants to go to college can go. The latter, certainly, seems like more of an investment in our future than the former. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the College for All Act.

Finally, as you know, the Trump Administration may have approved the Keystone XL Pipeline, but they don't get all the say about that: Keystone XL would run through the great state of Nebraska, and over the Ogalalla Aquifer that supplies clean drinking water to millions of heartland Americans, so the Nebraska Public Service Commission still has to issue the necessary permits. And, as it happens, Nebraska farmers and ranchers also aren't all that keen on a pipeline going through the land that provides for their livelihoods. You need not be worried about climate change (though you should be!) to oppose Keystone XL -- you need only be aware of TransCanada's not-exactly-sparkling pipeline safety record, and of the decades it might take to fix the damage a pipeline burst can do. And what would people who want to drink clean water do in the meantime? What would farmers and ranchers do? Food and Water Watch helps you tell the Nebraska Public Service Commission to deny permits to TransCanada for building Keystone XL. If it can't go through Nebraska, after all, it can't really go anywhere.

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.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: the newest email scandal! And other tales.

Uh oh: while Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence used his AOL account. to conduct state business, and that account got hacked at least once (to run that old we're-stranded-send-money scam, no less!). And right-wingers are coming down just as hard on him as they did on Mrs. Clinton! I kid, of course -- we're more likely to see squealing that Indiana laws are different, or that previous Indiana governors did the same thing, though neither is a standard you'd use to select a President or Vice President.

The incomparable David Dayen informs us that Trump crony "regulatory advisor" Carl Icahn gets President Trump to draft an executive order that would force gasoline wholesalers, not oil refiners, assure that gasoline meets the 15% renewable energy standard. Why is this important? Because Mr. Icahn just so happens to own an oil refinery that can't blend ethanol, meaning his refinery has to buy renewable fuel credits to the tune of over $200 million last year. In the words of one industry analyst, "this is no deal for anyone but Carl Icahn." Greed and selfishness: they're what the Trump Administration is all about.

Surprise, surprise, the Keystone XL pipeline will not have to build with American steel like other pipelines will per a Trump executive order, because the Keystone XL pipeline isn't a "new" project, having been first proposed over eight years ago. If Mr. Obama put out that excuse, right-wingers would call him an egghead, but Mr. Trump did it, so they'll laud his cleverness in "sticking it to the man." Right-wingers never realize that they're "the man" their heroes stick it to.

Lily Hay Newman at Wired explains how "Medical Devices are the Next Security Nightmare." More and more implantable medical devices can be tweaked over wi-fi, which is a big improvement over needing another surgery, unless a hacker gets ahold of it. The only slightly less awful news is that the outdated computer software hospitals use (a few hospitals still use Windows XP, for which Microsoft no longer even makes security patches) is the more likely target.

Samsung is sending out Dish network techs to fix washing machines. The corporation says it notifies customers they'll get a Dish tech, and assures us that their Dish techs know what they're doing, but, ah, they don't always, plus they occasionally try to sell you a Dish network subscription. What on Earth would be the harm in, you know, hiring washing machine technicians in an economy with a U6 unemployment rate still above 9%? Oh, I forgot -- doing that doesn't get the CEO his 19th vacation home.

Finally, the good people of Kansas achieve a victory, of sorts, when their state legislature votes to rescind all of Sam Brownback's tax-cuts-for-the-rich since 2010. Sadly, Mr. Brownback, who's somehow still Governor, vetoed the bill and only the legislature's lower house overrode the veto. Still, I hope they try again. But I also hope that when Mr. Brownback leaves office his name is synonymous with "failure" -- and that the whole concept of "trickle-down economics" soils the name of anyone who supports it.

Action: clean water, and fair trade.

As you know, President Trump signed Executive Orders moving forward both the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline, despite their massive unpopularity and the danger they present to clean water (these two items, of course, being intimately related). Hence Amnesty International helps you tell Mr. Trump to withdraw his order and guarantee the right to peaceful protest and redress of grievances in re Standing Rock, and the Sierra Club helps you tell Mr. Trump to reverse orders on both Dakota Access and Keystone, and put people, clean water, and renewable energy first. He won't listen, but at least he'll be on record as having ignored the will of the people. Many issues are at stake here -- clean water, pipeline safety, wildlife habitats, religious freedom -- but these pipelines also won't get done in a day: the Keystone Order, for example, restarts the process, giving the State Department 60 days to review the matter. We know what they'll say, but it ain't over.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has formally withdrawn the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" negotiations; I did wonder how he was going to flip-flop on this matter, but I'm glad he didn't. Still, as with the pipeline troubles above, the Executive Order isn't the end of it -- Mr. Trump may well negotiate (or renegotiate) trade deals that are even worse than the multitudinous "free" trade deals that have plagued our nation over the years. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to negotiate trade deals that put people above polluters. The road to hell is paved with the stories of multinational corporations who spew filth into the people's air and water -- and then sue their governments for even having clean air and clean water laws in the first place, expecting a tribute (or a bailout, take your pick) for the trouble they caused! Mr. Trump's inclinations don't give me hope, but then he doesn't get all the say around here.

Around the table: good Americans doing good works -- and the whiners and fools who try to hold us back.

Crowd numbers for Saturday Women's March in multiple cities well eclipse turnout for Mr. Trump's inauguration. You know organizers tend to overestimate turnout and police tend to underestimate it, but the D.C. Metro system reports that more than three times as many folks rode the subway by 11 am on Saturday than on Friday, the day Mr. Trump ascended to the Presidency. As this was happening, new press secretary Sean Spicer said the media manipulated photos to make inaugural turnout look worse than it was, because when the going gets tough, the Trump team whines. Mr. Trump got 46% of the vote, folks, and he struts around like he got 66%, then whines like he got 26%. But we have the power to make this a long four years for him, which is a lot better than vice versa.

Of course, before that, "liberal" media commentators were wringing their hands over Rep. Lewis boycotting the inauguration and questioning the "legitimacy" of the President. Of course, they don't criticizing Mr. Lewis to silence him -- they do it to silence you, so you "accept the results" and keep your mouth shut. Accepting the results does not impel you to keep your mouth shut, of course, even though the "liberal" media seems to think it does. (Read the whole article, of course, lest you miss another imploding Jonah Goldberg argument and speculation about whether Republicans might one day use "guerilla tactics" against a Democratic President, as if that isn't what they just did for eight long years.)

House Speaker Paul Ryan goes on Charlie Rose's show to say that he'd like to replace the Affordable Care Act's "subsidies" with "refundable tax credits," which are the same damn thing. I guess he'll go on to replace "houses" with "dwellings," "money" with "cash," and "food" with "sustenance." You know what's even worse than Democrats who are so smart they're dumb? Republicans who do badly even trying to convince you they're smart. Of course, Mr. Ryan would also make his health insurance subsidies far worse -- he would give almost everyone the same subsidy, regardless of income level, when any deaf, dumb, and blind infant knows that folks who make less money need bigger subsidies.

Behold! Right Wing Watch presents "10 Right-Wing Predictions About Obama that Never Came True." Didn't take your guns, didn't kill his critics, didn't impose Sharia law, didn't scheme to stay in office, and you know what's missing from their list? Didn't bring Godless socialism to America. So, will there be any, you know, shame coming from these right-wing prognosticators? Of course not -- they think shame is for losers, and their new President feels their self-pity.

Finally, Yes! magazine continues to explore "creative ways Americans are stepping up to build strong local economies." You'll meet the Oakland, CA, citizens who organized to ensure that the redevelopment of a long-gone Army base meet created good jobs for locals, the Nebraska ranchers who joined with environmental and tribal groups to stop the Keystone XL pipeline from running through their lands, the Goffstown, NH residents who banded together to buy the mobile home park that was threatening rent hikes and evictions, the Buffalo, NY residents who helped convert run-down buildings into energy-efficient housing, the South Carolina community development corporation that helped residents get good housing, and the good folks of West Virginia who evoked that state's coal-rich past by building museums. Moral: a lot of Americans have a lot of good ideas, and don't need to wait for some politician to "lead" them.

Around the table: the power of structural racism, and other ominous tales.

Terrence Heath at the OurFuture blog explores the influence of "structural racism" in the Freddie Gray murder. Folks who think structural racism doesn't exist, well, first off, have never talked to a real estate agent, and second off, don't know their history -- not just the part where a modern-day police sergeant tells a reluctant subordinate to "make up" a reason to stop a few black men, but the part where our government, all the way back in 1937, literally redlined which neighborhoods would get federal subsidies and which wouldn't, and guess which ones didn't. (Spoiler alert: those would be the neighborhoods with residents like Cab Calloway, Thurgood Marshall, and Billie Holliday.)

Weren't we worrying, not too long ago, that Hillary Clinton's choice of transition team head would be telling-and-not-in-a-good-way? Well, now we're here, with the news that former Senator and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar will head the Clinton transition team. Ken Salazar is not exactly Bernie Sanders, as you know -- he was pretty good at keeping the uranium miners out of the Grand Canyon, but otherwise he's a pro-fracking, pro-Keystone "free" trader, and he'll likely steer a Clinton Administration (if there is one, of course!) toward folks like himself. Now, that doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and go home -- it means we understand the obstacles we must hurdle. This is one of them. And our duty is unchanged.

The incomparable Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches the New York Times extolling "American power" in training Honduran cops to help reduce violence -- without mentioning that you have all this violence in Honduras in the first place because a right-wing regime overthrew a democratically-elected (but inconveniently liberal) President back in 2009 while our State Department got all Hamlet about the precise definition of "coup." When the Honduran government is the biggest murderer in Honduras, it's hard not to achieve a murder reduction at some point -- "ah, listen, fellas, could you maybe stack the bodies in the soccer field two-deep this month instead of three-deep? Bad press, you know? K thanks bye" -- and I can't help but think that the Times has come out with this article to answer the agitation by good Americans against our government's continued funding of Honduran police.

Uh oh: former Indiana Senator/current Senate candidate Evan Bayh now faces questions about his residency in Indiana, after CNN reports that he's usually used his Washington, D.C. address to buy homes, donate to candidates, and get fishing licenses. Residency issues felled Richard Lugar in 2012 after 36 years in the Senate, and though Mr. Lugar's issues were more pronounced, Mr. Lugar was also more popular -- but then Mr. Bayh has been sitting on over $10 million in campaign funds for six years. I still wish an actual populist, rather than a fake "moderate," would prove that a liberal populist is exactly the fellow who can win in a red state like Indiana. You know, like Byron Dorgan did in North Dakota for three terms.

Finally, you might have heard that Michael Moore told Bill Maher a few weeks back that he thought Donald Trump would win the Presidency, but after the last few, ah, difficult weeks Mr. Moore now believes Mr. Trump doesn't really want to be President and may now be actively sabotaging his campaign. He says it was all a negotiating ploy to extract more money from NBC, home of The Apprentice, and sadly that's far from implausible. He even says Mr. Trump would rather drop out than be a "loser," but that ship has pretty much sailed. Of course I still fear that Mr. Trump will win, because candidates who can present themselves as "outsiders" will always have an advantage over candidates who can't.

Action: Honduras, missile "defense," and pipeline safety.

H.R. 5474, the Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, would cut off our government's funding of military and police operations in Honduras, until the Honduran government conducts appropriate human rights investigations. The money ain't big, at least as far as our budget is concerned -- $18 million -- but you can bet Honduras is counting on it, and frankly it's well past time our government did something about a regime that overthrew the so-liberal-he-made-the-corporations-sad President in 2009 while our State Department was mulling over the precise definition of the word "coup." And this regime has apparently committed numerous human rights violations since then, including the murder of the Honduran activist Ms. Caceres in early March. A regime that detains, tortures, rapes, and murders its own people is a sorry regime indeed, but a regine that has the power to induce better behavior from such a regime but does nothing is a shameful one. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5474, and thus support human rights in Honduras.

Meanwhile, our government also plods on with the mindlessness of missile "defense," having built such "defense" sites in Alaska, California, and Romania and eager to build more of them in places like New York and Ohio. Why do I put "defense" in quotation marks? Because missile "defense" depends on notoriously inaccurate missiles suddenly acquiring the capability of shooting down other nation's missiles in mid-air, when those missiles can defend against our missiles easily (and inexpensively) with reflective paint or Mylar ballons as decoys. Furthermore, we know that "successful" missile defense tests are generally rigged so that they're impossible to fail! And what do missile "defense" proponents say when confronted with all of this evidence? Just launch more missiles at the incoming missile -- which, surely, our opponents would never think of! Hence Roots action helps you tell our government to scrap plans to expand our missile "defense" program. What should we do instead, you ask? Gosh, I don't know -- how about doing the hard work of making and maintaining peace?

Finally, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (or PHMSA) has actually proposed fairly strong pipeline safety rules -- which, naturally, the big energy corporations hate, because these rules would hamper their ability to redistribute worker income upward to executives. Good pipe safety regulation actually creates jobs, after all -- jobs for engineers and designers and inspectors and technicians -- and as any modern executive knows, you can't keep all the money yourself if you have to pay other people. But America has endured far too many pipeline bursts over the years, and these bursts aren't very easy to clean up (though they're fairly inexpensive to clean up, for the corporations who put crappy pipelines out there, as long as they can count on the government doing everything for them!). Indeed, you may recall how TransCanada's long record of skimping on pipeline safety helped doom its attempt to build the Keystone XL pipeline. So the Sierra Club helps you tell the PHMSA to implement the most vigorous pipeline safety rules possible.

Action: fracking regulations, "free" trade, and Verizon strikers.

The Pennsylvania state Department of Environmental Protection has worked, for five years, on stronger oil and gas drilling regulations that would force corporations to cut their air and water pollution. But five years is, apparently, not long enough for oil and gas corporations, who have apparently prompted state politicians to attack the DEP's work. As if the whole point of democracy were to give big corporations all the say about everything! The DEP's new standards would, among other things, ban those huge open-air pits that frackers use to store wastewater -- that's right, the same pits that leech into your drinking water and occasionally catch fire and pump toxins into the air. Yeah, what a hardship it would be for these corporations to have to stop doing that. Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to support the DEP's efforts to keep gas and oil waste from negatively impacting our health. We deserve more from our democracy, after all, than the back of some corporation's hand.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership", then the Sierra Club helps you do that. The Sierra Club reminds us that the "investor-state tribunals" found in the TPP and other "free" trade pacts will directly result in your tax money going into the pockets of big corporate CEOs -- like the CEOs of TransCanada. TransCanada, as you recall, wanted to build the Keystone XL pipeline in America, but after the Obama Administration rejected it, TransCanada decided to sue, in a NAFTA-created tribunal, for $15 billion. If they win, that means $100 leaves your pocket (given about 150 million American taxpayers) and magically reappears in their pockets! Income redistribution! Remember, also, that Congress's stated wariness about passing the TPP before Election Day is a bald lie -- they will try to ram it down our throats the very next day. And we need to be ready for that. The best way to get ready for that now is to tell them no repeatedly until they get it.

Finally, Verizon workers are still on strike for better working conditions, so National People's Action helps you tell Verizon's CEO, Lowell McAdam, to agree to a fair contract that secures well-paying jobs for its workers. Certainly some will ask: why are they on strike? it's not like they're fast food workers or anything! Well, for one thing, they've been working a contract since last August, so they've actually demonstrated tremendous restraint in waiting until last week to strike. And Verizon has made roughly $13 billion in profits annually since 2013 -- and, contra what Mr. McAdam said last week, pays around 12% of that in taxes to America annually -- but still flogs the zombie line that it must "cut costs" (i.e., worker pay, benefits, and job security) in order to "keep up with a changing marketplace." Apparently the marketplace changes, like, every minute of every day, which is kinda hard to believe in a country with only four major phone carriers. And here you thought our entrepreneurs were our boldest and brightest.

Action: "free" trade, lymphedema treatment coverage, and corporate land grabs.

Our government still plans to pursue the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," another "free" trade deal that would outsource our jobs and nullify our laws -- despite the outcry from good Americans across the ideological spectrum! -- so Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the TPP. You may recall how Congress repealed country-of-origin meat labeling laws after the WTO stated they violated two prior "free" trade agreements, but recent headlines also provide us with "free" trade horror stories, like the $15 billion lawsuit filed by TransCanada alleging that the Obama Administration's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline violates the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, i.e., NAFTA (or SHAFTYA). And one of those "investor-state tribunals" will hear the suit! Why should the American people pay a $15 billion bailout to a corporation that couldn't overcome well-organized public opposition to their pipeline? Can you say frivolous lawsuit, boys and girls?

Meanwhile, Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1608/S. 2373, the Lymphedema Treatment Act. Lymphedema allows damaged fluid to accumulate in areas of the body where lymph nodes and vessels are damaged, resulting in extreme swelling and a higher susceptibility to infection, and though some folks are born with it, most folks get it after undergoing radiation therapy for cancer. We can't cure lymphedema at present, but we can manage it, usually with compression therapy. So what would the Lymphedema Treatment Act do? It would mandate that Medicare cover lymphedema compression treatment items, and when Medicare covers them, that increases the possibility that private health insurers will one day cover them, too. Two of the bill's four Senate sponsors are Republicans, as are 64 of the House version's 179 sponsors (and the bill's main sponsor, Mr. Reichart of Washington), but since the bill doesn't actually injure someone, the "liberal" media won't call it "bipartisan." All the more reason to support it!

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to fight the transfer of sacred Oak Flat national forest land in Arizona to copper mining corporations, then CREDO still helps you do that. Lately Sen. Sanders (I-VT) has introduced legislation (S. 2248) that would repeal the land grab; if you're tempted to castigate the Vermonter for getting involved in Arizona politics when Arizona's two Senators backed the land grab, you may want to note that copper mining corporation Rio Tinto (which owns the corporation that'll get the land) has contributed buku bucks to Senator McCain -- and that Senator Flake used to lobby for Rio Tinto before he ever got elected to Congress. Clearly nothing to see here! Mining corporations have been trying to get their grubby mitts on this land for decades; I guess folks like Barry Goldwater and Dennis DeConcini and Jon Kyl were somehow holding them back. And, ah, if we're so concerned about "religious conscience" in America now, how come we're not concerned about Apache religious beliefs here? I would hate to think it's because they're not Christians.

Around the table: the decline of the swing voter, and other matters, explained.

Terrance Heath recounts some of the victories we earned on Election Day. Maine's Clean Elections law expansion you probably already know about, but Seattle voters passed the famous "Democracy Voucher" program, Elizabeth, NJ voters passed a paid sick leave law, Tacoma, WA voters hiked their minimum wage, and Jefferson County, CO voters recalled three school board members who had thrown a right-wing hissy fit about AP history exams. I'm not sure whether to count Ohio's redistricting reforms as a win, though -- the end result could be hyperpartisan maps that have to be redone every four years, versus every 10.

The Obama Administration rejects the notorious Keystone XL pipeline. This move fits in with his modus operandi of taking tough decisions only when he's in no danger of suffering politically from them, but we should still celebrate, because it couldn't have happened without us. Note to pro-Keystone PR flaks: rejecting the Keystone pipeline is not "thumbing your nose" at folks who want to reduce our dependence on foreign oil if there are other ways to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, which there are. And question for Sen. Barrasso (R-WY): if people who want to reduce pollution are a "special interest," then what are banksters?

Comcast plans to institute data caps for cities in several Southern states in December. These will be extraordinarily unpopular, but as long as Comcast has monopoly status in these cities, they'll be hard for ordinary people like ourselves to dislodge, unless we go to the FCC. Kudos to Consumerist writer Kate Cox for referring to David Cohen as a Comcast "mouthpiece." "Lobbyist" is too good for the man who slammed the entire anti-consolidation movement.

In a surprising development by non-Louisiana standards, Republican Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, the fourth-place finisher in Louisiana's gubernatorial runoff last month, has endorsed the Democratic candidate still standing, John Bel Edwards, for Governor, rather than endorse Republican U.S. Senator David Vitter. That doesn't mean Dardenne's voters will automatically flock to Edwards, though; though polling thus far suggests they are flocking to Mr. Edwards, the runoff election is still two weeks away, and those voters are still more likely to vote for Mr. Vitter in the end.

The Washington Post chronicles "The Astonishing Decline of the American Swing Voter." But voters perceiving "sharp differences" between the two parties isn't evidence of actual sharp differences between two parties lurching further right. And I'd volunteer a different cause for the swing voter's decline: the ongoing Republican witch-hunt, first against President Clinton, then against liberal "traitors" under Mr. Bush, then against President Obama, has hardened everyone against each other, almost like that was the idea or something. My thesis might be more difficult to test scientifically.

Finally, noted non-liberal Jesse Ventura, in a lucid analysis that won't surprise anyone who's paid attention to him over the last 20 years, says Donald Trump "is using words he doesn't understand" when he refers to Bernie Sanders as a "Communist." And I'd say Mr. Trump isn't the only one! Virtually no one who brandishes "Communist" as a scare word these days can conceive of one-party elections, the abolition of capital ownership, complete central planning of the economy, citizens living in one-bedroom apartments assigned by the state, or the fear of being literally followed around by police at any moment. But that's what Communism is, and calling Bernie Sanders a Communist insults all the billions of good people who suffered under real Communist oppression.

Action: Keystone XL, sustainable food, and endangered species.

TransCanada, the corporation aiming to build the Keystone XL pipeline, has asked the Obama Administration to suspend its process for evaluating TransCanada's application for permits. So TransCanada can bone up on pipe safety? Sadly, no: TransCanada cites Nebraska's latest route review process as the reason -- and I'm all for Nebraska taking its time approving the pipeline's route, since that's a big chunk of heartland drinking water that's going to go down if the pipeline bursts there -- but more likely TransCanada is afraid the Obama Administration will deny their application, and if he suspends the process, they'll take their chances that a new President not named Sanders will be more likely to approve it. (Secretary Clinton has said she opposes the pipeline, but that's now -- we'll see what she does if she wins.) You have to wonder if the bottoming out of crude oil prices all over the planet might have something to do with it, too. In any case, now is the time to put more pressure on President Obama to reject the pipeline, which bothFriends of the Earth and the Sierra Club both help you do.

Meanwhile, the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell Darden Restaurants to do more to support the well-being of civilized people by better promoting local agriculture, sustainable food production, and higher wages for its workers. Why Darden Restaurants? Because it's the biggest-grossing casual dining corporation in America -- as it should be, if it owns Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, and the Capital Grille, among many others! -- and if you can get the biggest operation to change its ways, other operations will follow suit. And Darden should be hungry for some good PR, given the bath they took not too long ago about their CEO making over 1,900 times what his lowest-paid tipped employee makes. Asking Darden to do a lot of different things (all things, I reiterate, that will bring them good publicity) increases the possibility they'll do any one of them. If I had to pick one, I'd say pay their workers better, but if they depended less on factory farms, or upped their veggie portions, or bought more food from local and regional producers, well, those are all victories, too.

Finally, our Congressfolk still aim to kill the Endangered Species Act, because protecting endangered species interferes with Congressfolk's goal of selling off public land to their mining and drilling cronies. To think that some of these folks are so "pure" that they don't even get any kind of kickback for that -- they really believe that selling off public lands to make their donors richer is moral and just and requires no additional compensation! And I normally admire purism! I guess I prefer my purism uncorrupted by mammon. In any case, having explained why politicians try to kill the Endangered Species Act, I should explain why we defend it. Yes, killing off an entire population of a species, forever, is immoral, but it's also bad for us -- when a species's numbers starts to dwindle, that's an alarm that something's wrong with the ecosystem upon which they depend, and we depend on those ecosystems, too, no matter how remote they are. So Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect endangered species, and in so doing also protect us.

Action: fighting for regulations that fight for us.

Like a zombie that just won't go down no matter how many bullets or arrows you put in it, H.R. 427, the REINS Act, is back, and the House will vote on it this week, because the most important thing Republicans can do for the economy is to make sure our government can't protect workers, can't protect the air, can't protect the water, and can't protect all of us from another bankster-caused financial crisis. The REINS Act would force Congress to approve all regulations coming from the executive branch -- and if Congress doesn't hold a vote on a particular regulation, the REINS Act would treat that as a "no" vote, and strike the regulation down. Congress has already delegated extensive regulatory powers to the Executive branch, and has a "resolution of disapproval" process for trying to stop regulations it deems excessive; why does it need even more power? Because the corporate paymasters of Congressfolk don't want any regulations telling them what to do. It's like they're all 12 years old or something. Public Citizen helps you tell your House Reps to reject the REINS Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to ensure that Enbridge's Alberta Clipper pipeline expansion gets the appropriate and lawful regulatory scrutiny before it proceeds, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. What business does our government have telling Enbridge it can't expand its pipeline? Our business, that's what -- we the people have an interest in ensuring that shoving more oil through a pipeline, or building an entirely new branch of the pipeline, doesn't pollute our air and water, since, you know, we all breathe air and drink water. This is the part that regulation-haters pretend not to get -- that this government is ours, and that we must make it act in our interest, and kneecapping its ability to act in our interest is not in our interest. Sadly, the State Department seems to be kneecapping itself here, by failing to complete the reviews the law mandates. But we don't have to sit back and take that from them, any more than we have to sit back and take it from corporatists in Congress.

Finally, four executives in the public relations firm Edelman (the world's largest PR firm, I'm told) have resigned in protest of the firm's work for the fossil fuel industry, and just because they're relatively wealthy executives doesn't mean we shouldn't value their courage -- these folks may not work as executives, anywhere, ever again, and any other field of employment would regard them with some suspicion. You may well be saying to yourself, self, who am I to tell Edelman whom to represent? You are an American, with a voice, that's who, and it's not like Edelman isn't selective -- the corporation now does not work with tobacco corporations or gun makers (and, in the second case, that's further than I'd go!). And among Edelman's clients over the last year are TransCanada, currently trying to build the Keystone XL pipeline despite its lousy pipe safety record, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC), still pushing lousy pro-pollution bills at the state level in America. So CREDO helps you tell Edelman's remaining executives to lay down the gauntlet about doing PR for polluters.

Action: country-of-origin labeling, war in the Middle East, sexual assault in the military, and Keystone XL, Jr.

First things first. The House of Representatives plans to repeal country-of-origin labeling (or COOL) laws for meat, fruit, and vegetables -- laws we've only had for a few years -- today, ostensibly because the World Trade Organization ruled last month that our COOL laws violated the TBT and GATT, but I suspect they're using the WTO's ruling as an excuse to gut laws they wanted gutted anyway. And isn't this the kind of thing we've been complaining about with "free" trade? And wasn't that President Obama telling us a few weeks back that when "critics warn that parts of this deal would undermine American regulation -- food safety, worker safety, even financial regulations," that "(t)hey're making this stuff up" and that "no trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws"? Well, that sure came back to bite him. Just remember, though: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want. So Consumers Union helps you tell your House Reps to keep our country-of-origin labeling laws, even if it means we have to bow out of "free" trade agreements.

Meanwhile, Reps. McGovern (D-MA), Lee (D-CA), and Jones (R-NC) have introduced H.Con.Res. 55, which would direct President Obama to "remove United States Armed Forces deployed to Iraq or Syria on or after August 7, 2014, other than Armed Forces required to protect United States diplomatic facilities and personnel, from Iraq and Syria," no later than the end of 2015. Once the House takes up this bill -- and they will, since it invokes the War Powers Act -- they'll finally be compelled to debate the unilateral war President Obama began in Iraq and Syria against ISIS 10 months ago. But we shouldn't let Congress mouth off that they'd have given Mr. Obama more power if he only had an inkling of how to fight ISIS, because that evades the point: that they shirked their Constitutional duty to authorize the President to fight the war, as well as their responsibility to tell him how to fight it. Change the subject, lose the argument, that's what I say. I think H.Con.Res. 55 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming.

In other news, the Senate filibustered the Military Justice Improvement Act last year, but it's back this year, as an amendment to the defense authorization bill (specifically, it's S.A. 1578 to S.A. 1463 to H.R. 1735, H.R. 1735 being the House-passed defense auth bill and S.A. 1463 being the Senate's amended version of the House bill). S.A. 1578 would help reform the military's ability to handle sexual assault cases (and other cases) by taking the decision to prosecute sexual assault out of the chain of the command and giving it to military prosecutors. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that most of the 45 filibustering Senators' views of the Military Justice Improvement Act were of the "who cares it's women" and "let's not give Obama a victory on anything" variety, but I suppose some Senators are truly concerned about taking power from commanding officers. But do we expect the President to micromanage affairs in the legislative branch, because he's "above" them? So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to vote for S.A. 1578 and help sexual assault victims in the military.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Obama Administration to exercise its authority on the people's behalf to conduct an environmental review of Enbridge's proposed expansion of its Alberta Clipper tar sands pipeline, then the Sierra Club helps you do that. President Obama has made much of the State Department's process in evaluating the Keystone XL pipeline -- he made so much of it, in fact, that he vetoed Congressional legislation designed to make him approve the bill, while leaving open the possibility that he'd approve it once the State Department's evaluation was done. But the State Department approved an Enbridge scheme to move nearly twice as much oil through its pipeline, and then build a bypass of that pipeline, without the required environmental impact review or public notice -- required because the Alberta Clipper passes through northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Did I mention that the pipeline that burst into the Kalamazoo River in 2010 belonged to Enbridge? Let's see if we can put a stop to this madness.

Action: the "other" Keystone XL, offshore drilling, and smarter sentencing.

If President Obama hasn't killed Keystone XL dead because our government has a process for evaluating it that must be respected, as he says, then why has his Administration fast-tracked approval of an expansion of Enbridge's Alberta Clipper tar sands pipeline? This pipeline runs through the northernmost regions of Minnesota and Wisconsin, so we the people ought to have a say about the deleterious effects an expansion might have on public safety and climate change. But earlier this week we learned from State Department emails that State approved that expansion with no public notice, no public comment period, and no environmental impact evaluation, and hoo boy do those emails sound inappropriately deferential -- the State Department seems to think it should be heeding Enbridge's schedule, rather than, you know, ours. Luckily, construction of the expansion is nowhere near complete, so CREDO helps you tell President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry to stop the Alberta Clipper expansion.

Meanwhile, speaking of oil, Public Citizen helps you tell President Obama to halt any further expansion of offshore drilling. Sadly, we know from catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon Spillageddon in 2010 that it's not so much a question of whether they'll be another one, but when. And we also know that the big corporations don't like having clean-up crews on hand for big spills, because that costs money. But surely our government has learned from its mistakes, right? Well, no: Congress has passed no legislation on the matter, and federal regulators are just now proposing new rules addressing what happened five years ago, which oil corporations will have another 10 years before they get around to complying with them -- by which time we could be neck-deep in some Arctic catastrophe that will be even harder to clean up than that mess in the relatively temperate Gulf was. If we can't make offshore drilling safe, we shouldn't do it. I know, I know: that sounds conservative. It's a risk I'll take for love of country.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 920/S. 502, the Smarter Sentencing Act, then Families Against Mandatory Minimums still helps you do that. The Smarter Sentencing Act, as you know, would help give judges more of the flexibility they should have when sentencing non-violent federal drug offenders; currently they're far too hamstrung by mandatory minimum laws to dispense justice properly. However, you may not know that a passel of religious groups stand with us on this matter -- not just the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and the Union for Reform Judaism, but Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition and Tony Perkins's Family Research Council also not only support more merciful (and practical) sentencing laws, and are actually in Washington lobbying for that as we speak. And I'm just as happy to stand with right-wing evangelicals on this matter as I am to stand with them on a la carte cable packaging.

Around the table: R.I.P. Leonard Nimoy, and other stories.

The Intercept credits an "unprecedented guerilla activism campaign" for the FCC's approval of vigorous net neutrality rules on Thursday, and it's true that we need folks who will get in decision-makers' faces to get things done as much as we need folks who contact our government day after day, year after year. Author Lee Fang also suggests that the complete lack of an "insider-grand bargaining political style" to the net neutrality fight greatly helped our success, which is a terrific way of saying government needs to stop talking only to its own various factions and start talking to the American people. We can encourage them to do that, of course.

Also from the good news file, President obama vetoed Congressional legislation that would have forced Executive branch approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Of course, the Executive branch's own process, including a State Department environmental review, might still recommend approval, but we'll keep encouraging them to do the right thing. And I hope Mr. Obama is fully cognizant by now that right-wingers will never approve of anything he does. He has, after all, given himself plenty of opportunities to learn that lesson.

A South Carolina bill would put pro-gun, NRA-sponsored curricula in public schools. And as someone generally sanguine toward gun ownership, and one who wouldn't even object to firearms training in public schools under the right circumstances, I say this bill is bat-guano insane like the rest of the professional gun-rights movement. Having the NRA do the curriculum (versus, oh, I don't know, teachers) is corporate welfare simple and plain. And yes they chose December 15 as their little Second Amendment Day because they're pricks. And saying gun manufacturer PTR relocated from Connecticut to South Carolina because it "didn't feel supported" after the Sandy Hook shootings makes gun manufacturers sound like whiners, which is, I would think, not the image they'd want to project. It's getting harder and harder to be pro-gun in America.

Under some pressure, the New York state Department of Education issues new restrictions on restraining and suspending students. We have retained some semblance of civilized behavior, to be telling teachers they need to resort to de-escalation of conflicts before calling 911 on out-of-control students. It would also help if we'd show fewer celebrity tantrums on TV. A lot of these folks just aren't good role models.

Speaking of which, actor/director/poet/musician Leonard Nimoy, most famous as Mr. Spock from Star Trek, has died at the age of 83. It would be hard to overestimate the positive effect Mr. Nimoy's Spock has had on popular culture: the calm, logical, and loyal First Officer taught us that diversity need not be feared, that passion need not be loud, and, perhaps most importantly, that intelligence not only makes you powerful but integral to your community. The man will be missed, but his work will, if you'll forgive me, live long and prosper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: net neutrality, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Keystone XL.

As you know, FCC Chair Tom Wheeler, after an almost unprecedented amount of public comment, has proposed reclassifying broadband internet (including wireless broadband) as a public utility under Title II of the Communications Act, which is exactly the step the FCC must take in order to enact vigorous network neutrality regulations, which protect your ability to decide what you want to see on the internet, free of any corporate interference in the form of "tiered service" or slowing down of website loading or outright censorship. But the FCC still has to enact vigorous net neutrality regulations, so CREDO, Demand Progress, and Consumers Union all help you tell them to do that. With that out of the way, take a look at the latest pieces of excrement the anti-net neutrality folks have spewed forth, including a Michael "the Lesser" Powell "argument" in the Wall Street Journal -- wasn't he running the FCC when it reclassified broadband so that it couldn't regulate net neutrality? Why, yes, he was! -- and a broadband corporation-produced video spreading more stupidity and fear-mongering. With enemies like these, we should have won ages ago. The only reason we didn't? Our enemies are flush with mammon.

Meanwhile, Republicans should explain their hatred of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Do they really want to stop our government from protecting its owners, the American people, from financial scams? Do they really want for-profit colleges to entrap more students in a downward spiral of debt? Do they really want more folks to get kicked out of their houses because of unscrupulous lenders? Do they really want Wall Street to redistribute even more American worker wealth upward to themselves? Or are they just mad that President Obama went and created a new bureau presumably peopled with bureaucrats? Sen. Shelby, not even two years after the 2008 financial services meltdown, infamously claimed that Street didn't need a "nanny state." while we were still crawling from the wreckage of the 2008 financial services meltdown no less. Setting aside the obvious difference between law enforcement and a "nanny state": if anyone needs a nanny state, it's the banksters, who make more and more money and do less and less good. National People's Action joins with several other worthy organizations to help you tell Congress to reject any dismantling or crippling of the CFPB.

Finally, President Obama has a Keystone XL pipeline bill to veto; he's said he's going to veto the bill, but he still hasn't done so yet, so the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the President to veto the Keystone XL bill, and also to reject the pipeline's approval for good. He could very well veto the bill and approve the pipeline later, as you know -- his original reason for vetoing the bill, as you may recall, was that it would step on the toes of the Nebraska Supreme Court, an excuse that dissipated within days. But he has plenty of reasons to reject the pipeline -- tar sands crude is notoriously climate-unfriendly, TransCanada has built notoriously unsafe pipelines, and the pipeline moves Canadian oil over heartland drinking water so it can be sold to foreign markets, thus doing not thing one for American energy independence. Remember Sen. Grassley's famous wind production tax credit? That does more for American energy independence than Keystone XL ever will, but naturally Congress let that lapse, even though Mr. Grassley's party now controls both houses of Congress. And we could certainly do more for real energy independence, but Keystone XL ain't it.

Around the table: from a "divisive" veto threat to actually divisive punditry.

The Hill's headline about President Obama's expected veto of the Keystone XL pipeline calls the putative veto "divisive", and even has the nerve to speculate that Republicans could successfully paint Mr. Obama as "obstructionist" if he vetoes too many bills. Strange how the "liberal" media didn't call Republicans "obstructionist" when they won all those Senate votes 41-59, or when individual Senators put holds on countless bills and judicial nominees that actually had broad bipartisan support. Republicans essentially nullified the 2008 election, but apparently, for the "liberal" media, the 2014 election is the only one that really counts.

David Dayen chronicles the failure of the Obama Administration's infamous Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP. HAMP gave banksters "financial inducements to modify loans for at-risk borrowers," but let the banksters determine how to disburse aid and to whom. And this is a program Mr. Obama didn't even need Congressional approval to do right! Naturally Obamanoids would counter that reducing principals for underwater homeowners would have put trillions in derivatives at risk. You recognize that, right, from your Debt Ceiling Studies class? That's right, it's a hostage situation -- it's as if they're saying, don't help homeowners, or I'll blow this economy's brains out!

"Don't Listen to Anyone Who Says the Unemployment Rate is a Big Lie," advises Matt O'Brien in the Washington Post. I wouldn't go that far -- like Mr. O'Brien, I've been cataloguing the U6 unemployment rate (still nearly twice the official U3 rate, in case you were wondering) with the appropriate regularity. Here's what I would say instead: "Don"t listen to anyone who says the unemployment rate is a 'big lie' if that person was completely silent about the matter during the Clinton and Bush years."

In a related note, Democrats still aren't prepared to handle our ongoing problem with the income gap between the very rich and the very poor. The very notion that Democrats would still listen to Larry Summers about anything tells me the Democrats don't listen to the American people -- or would like to convince the American people they're listening without actually listening. And that is why Scott Walker will be America's next President.

Nick Hanauer tells us we should prevent corporate executives from spending so much money on stock buybacks. Stock buybacks do little for the economy except drive up stock prices -- they don't, you know, result in higher wages for workers or more money lent out to enterprising businesses with good ideas -- and it turns out stock buybacks (which account for nearly $7 trillion in GDP since 2004) were almost nonexistent until 1982, so it's not like this is some radical idea. You know, the way that building a massive, leak-prone pipeline over heartland drinking water is a radical idea, or claiming a corporate "right to privacy" justifies not telling consumers about your products' dangers is a radical idea.

Finally, Fox News (sic) blowhard Eric Bolling instructs us that only Muslims have ever killed in the name of religion. Setting aside the half-dozen examples the author, David Perry (whose blog is a great read) lists at the bottom of the post: one couldn't even win that argument by saying BUT TEH CHRIZTIANZ NEVER SED THEY KILLED INFIDELZ IN TEH NAMEZ OF TEH JESUS HAHAHAHAHA!!!! But Eric Bolling may be the biggest asshole on television, and that's saying something. I can't remember if we've decided to never speak of him again, but let's resolve to do that now.

Action: stopping torture, expanding mental health care for veterans, reforming asset forfeiture, and stopping Keystone XL.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Philippines' government to stop torturing people. The Philippines has come part of the way in this area since the Marcos years, but that's not a high bar to clear, and despite enacting the Anti-Torture Act in 2009, the Philippines Commission on Human Rights lately found that Laguna detention center officers actually used a "Wheel of Torture," which could select a particular mode of torture with a spin of an actual giant wheel -- the "20 seconds Manny Pacman," referencing the country's popular boxer Manny Pacquiáo, got you 20 seconds of punches to the gut. Real life should not read like a dystopian science-fiction novel. A big part of the problem in the Philippines is that they actually don't have enough police, and when you have to meet various quotas and mandates without the personnel to do so, you will cut corners. It's not an excuse, but it is an explanation. Perhaps the big stick of bad PR will make the Philippine government a bit more of a job-creating government.

Meanwhile, the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for America's Veterans Act (now H.R. 203/S. 167) is an actual bipartisan bill (19 of its 48 current Senate sponsors are Republicans, including the lead sponsor, Arizona's John McCain) that would expand veterans' access to mental health care, and would have passed the last Congress -- except that one Senator, the incorrigible Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, put one of his infamous holds on it, supposedly because it duplicated "almost everything" in other already-passed bills and, get your surprised face ready, wasn't paid for with other budget offsets. If more than 20 of our soldiers were killing themselves every day because we sent them off to foolish wars that people like Tom Coburn supported, I wouldn't be stopping all progress because of slight uncertainty about exactly where the money was coming from. Of course, I'd be taxing millionaire income at 91% anyway, so I'd know where the money would be coming from. Anyway, the Senate may be voting on this bill today, so change.org helps you tell your Senators to support the Clay Hunt SAV Act.

In other news, we finally have a bill at the federal level that would, at least, tamp down the incentives our government gives to police departments to take your money and property in the name of the "War on Drugs": H.R. 540/S. 255, the FAIR Act. It even has Rand Paul's name on it! The FAIR Act would eliminate the federal Equitable Sharing Program -- which induces state and local police departments to seize more assets than they otherwise might, since they know they're going to receive a big chunk of the proceeds -- and also raises the burden of proof our government must meet when it moves to seize assets. If the whole "asset forfeiture" game seems unconstitutional to you, you're not alone -- police departments do it out of financial desperation, with politicians unwilling to raise taxes to properly fund the police departments that serve taxpayers. Again: it's not an excuse, but it is an explanation. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the FAIR Act, and mitigate police power to take your possessions without due process.

Finally, the Senate passed its bill forcing the Executive branch to approve construction on the Keystone XL pipeline; it did not meet a veto-proof majority in the Senate, either, but after the expected veto from President Obama, House and Senate leaders will no doubt go to work on some of their recalcitrant members when they go to override the veto. And, as I've said, Mr. Obama hasn't played this as smartly as he could have. Hence the People's Email Network helps you remind President Obama to veto the Keystone XL legislation, while Public Citizen -- thinking ahead a bit to the point where Mr. Obama might actually approve the pipeline, which he'll still have the power to do even if he vetoes the bill -- helps you tell the Executive branch to reject the Keystone XL pipeline for good. You need not even refer to the deleterious effects on heartland drinking water or climate change that excessive development and exportation of tar sands oil will have -- you need only remember that this is a pipeline we're allowing a Canadian corporation to build so it can sell its oil to other countries, and that has nothing to do with American energy independence.

Around the table: tales of right-wing scare numbers, plus game-changing observations about debt and drugs.

The Center for Effective Government notes how the Jan. 17 50,000-gallon oil leak near Glendive, Montana contaminated the town's drinking water, and reminds us that a Keystone XL pipeline would bring a lot more of the same. I pity the fool who says why do you talk about individual pipeline spills, when the vast majority of pipelines don't break? Because pipeline spills cause a lot more damage than their relative infrequency would suggest, that's why. It would be like someone causing a car accident that killed people and then huffily pointing all those other days this year he didn't cause an accident.

The Washington Post finally evaluates Rand Paul's claim that half of those on Social Security disability programs aren't really earning their benefits, and gives his claim "Three Pinocchios," which I find rather generous, given their analysis, which is well worth reading in full. But note that Mr. Paul's spokeshack tries to defend his boss by claiming he was answering a "spontaneous" question in public and speaking "without prepared remarks," as if it's too much for citizens to expect Senators to answer questions upon which they haven't been specifically briefed that day, or to speak extemporaneously without distorting issues.

As a public service, Yes! magazine distills five tips for getting and staying out of debt from the Occupy movement's Debt Resisters' Operations Manual. They are: avoid payday lending and other "fringe" loan services, make an offer to pay part of your debt (since selling your debt to a debt collector actually makes creditors very little money), know and defend your rights, think of other ways to get what you need without a credit check (like references and portfolios), and try alternatives, like bartering networks and local time banks. It's good to have options, especially in These Interesting Times.

CBO estimates that the Affordable Care Act will cost 20% less than previously forecasted over the next decade. Some of that's due to low inflation and some of that's due to states refusing Medicaid expansions, but the right wing is already squealing ZOMG TEH OBUMMERCARE SPENDZ $56,000 PER PERSON!!!! (They're dividing the $1.35 trillion price tag by 24 million expected insured.) This is, of course, a scare number -- they never tell you that's $56,000 per person over ten years, which means $5,600 per person annually, which is very likely a little over half what your employer pays to insure you.

Finally, Johann Hari argues that the main cause of drug addiction isn't necessarily the drugs themselves, but a life unconnected to people and things you love. Inspiration: a scientist follows up on a famous rat experiment -- the one where a rat in a cage drinks from a heroin-laced water bottle all day rather than a just-water bottle -- by putting a rat in a cage with all sorts of toys and food and tunnels and other rats in it, and finding that the rat never drank from the heroin-laced water bottle though it was always available. Could this be the paradigm shift we need in ending the War on Drugs? Perhaps, but we'll also need serious change in economic policy, too, so people have more opportunities to have the good life that'd keep them off drugs. At the very least that means talking taxing the rich, hard, so we can pay to provide those opportunities, and also because they're the ones standing in progress's way most of the time.

Around the table: notes about working families, media folly, and venal politicians.

North Carolina's two Senators push to amend Keystone XL bill to allow exploratory oil and gas drilling along the Atlantic coast. States would get some income back for allowing said drilling, but not as much as the oil and gas corporations stand to gain from actually finding oil and gas, and not as much as states will lose in tourism and other shore-based industries when the next Spillageddon comes.

How else does Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback plan to balance his state's budget without taking back any of the tax-cuts-for-the-rich that helped cause his state's budget woes? By cutting education spending and deferring pension plan payments, of course! And why not? After all, he'll be Scott Walker's Secretary of Commerce or something by the time it all blows up. Silver lining: the courts may stop him, though that might provoke cries from the ZOMG WHY TEH COURTZ DEFYZ TEH WILLZ OF TEH PEEPULZ!!!!! crowd.

Wonkette notices the kid-glove treatment a certain pair of young white criminals have been getting from the "liberal" media lately, and wonders if the media would be calling them "star-crossed lovers" or "Bonnie and Clyde" if they were black. The article also notices what too few media pundits notice anymore -- that the issue of consent plays a role in analyzing what an 18-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl do together.

Bureau of Labor Statistics finds union membership down 0.2 percentage points over the last year, to a mere 11.1 percent. That's about one in nine; even in 1983, well after President Reagan won his showdown with the air traffic controllers' union, it was still one in five. Also, public-sector unions have about the same number of total members as private-sector unions, so the next time your right-wing uncle says he can "understand" why the private sector needs unions but not the public sector, remember that he's essentially arguing for cutting union membership in half in America.

Finally, U. Mass-Amherst economists say the fast food industry could quite easily survive a gradual increase to a $15/hour minimum wage. Which you already knew, but it's nice to have some research behind it. Key finding: a higher minimum wage would reduce the costs of finding and training new workers, because (surprise, surprise!) a higher income is less of an inducement to quit.

Around the table: net neutrality, fair housing, bond ratings, body cameras, the Keystone pipeline, and religious folly.

The Consumerist helpfully runs down recent bad arguments against net neutrality. But you probably already know that ZOMG FEES GETZ PASSED ON TO TEH CONSUMERZ!!!! was a line of poop, since broadband prices always go up faster than inflation simply because big broadband corporations feel like raising them. That's what corporations do when they have no competition in their markets -- which makes Senators' claims that the Communications Act is "antiquated" even more ridiculous.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could gut the Fair Housing Act. Four decades of jurisprudence uniformly established that the Fair Housing Act could apply remedies wherever the result was segregation, regardless of intent, but I bet the Supremes decide you have to flaunt your racism to commit actual acts of racism, which notion would offend most intelligent folks (though perhaps not those with something to hide). And right-wingers say liberal judges are activists!

Uh oh: the Securities and Exchange Commission has suspended Standard & Poor's authority to rate a big chunk of the bonds market. Oddly, the SEC didn't evaluate data from the 2008 financial meltdown, but from S&P's rating of commercial mortgage bonds from 2011 -- the Department of Justice is investigating S&P's actions during the meltdown, with observers suggesting a settlement (sigh) is coming -- but if ratings agencies haven't learned anything about banksters, that's not good news.

Activists in Los Angeles oppose body cameras for police -- but not for the reasons you might think. I find only one of Stop LAPD Spying's four objections (suggesting that cameras are just a band-aid solution) even remotely convincing -- if police officers sabotage cameras or use them to spy on people, you find out and you punish them for it. I mean, if we refused to do anything good because we fear unintended consequences, we'd be right-wingers.

Katherine McFate explores some not very well-covered aspects of the Keystone XL battle. Like, that Keystone has little or nothing to do with "American energy independence" -- it would be an American pipeline enabling a Canadian corporation to sell oil overseas. Also, the pipeline sits over drinking water for two million Americans and several thousand acres of farmland, and TransCanada has a terrible pipe safety record -- its Keystone I line, running from Alberta to Illinois, sprung 14 leaks in its first year running, one of which spewed out 21,000 gallons of crude tar sands oil. But, on the other hand, OBAMA TEH DICTATUR!!!!!

Finally, Colorado resident files a discrimination complaint with the state after a bakery refuses to bake him a cake with an anti-gay message. Some people really need to take a deep breath and ask themselves: is "hating gay folks" really the only thing I want people to remember about my religious beliefs?

Action: anti-Social Security demagoguery, racism, and Keystone XL.

CREDO helps you tell Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to cut out the attacks on Social Security disability recipients. "Over half of the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts," he said. "Join the club. Who doesn’t get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts? Everybody over 40 has a little back pain." See what he did there? He moved from "anxious" to "a little anxious" and from "their back hurts" to "a little back pain" -- all that backtracking, as if he knows he's full of it. And being "anxious" or "having back pain" won't get you SSI benefits -- you get SSI for things like post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition involving rather more than "anxiety," and one frequently brought about by our "war on terror" against which Mr. Paul, despite his Libertarian reputation, offers the meekest criticisms. Ask an Iraq or Afghanistan vet with PTSD if they're "a little anxious." Ask someone who lost a leg in a car accident, or slipped and fell on their back or their head at their job, if they have "a little pain." Really, it's like Rand Paul hasn't lived in the real world.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard about Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), now the number-three man in the Republican House leadership, and his 2002 address to the David Duke-affiliated group European-American Unity and Rights Organization (or EURO) -- not to mention his own self-description as "David Duke without the baggage," by which he presumably did not mean to remind you of Mr. Duke's multitudinous trips to the plastic surgeon. The House leadership has not moved to unseat him, and I've avoided helping you suggest that they do, because, well, why bang your head against a wall? But here's something that would do some good: Presente! helps you tell the many corporate donors associated with Mr. Scalise to disassociate from him. Mr. Scalise's "leadership" PAC has garnered millions of dollars in support from corporations such as UPS, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, and none of them would want the PR black eye of being associated with a man who's made no more than a pro forma effort to disavow the racist beliefs that, sadly, helped him get where he is today.

Finally, the House, as you know, passed H.R. 3, which would force Executive branch approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, though without a veto-proof majority. But the Senate, for some reason, hasn't acted on H.R. 3 with similar haste -- I don't imagine they won't eventually pass it, but their relative inaction on the matter is a bit puzzling, especially considering they couldn't possibly have been moved by recent demonstrations in Washington against the pipeline, since Senators tend to think of demonstrators not as good, concerned citizens, but as dirty effing hippies. Anyway, the Sierra Club helps you tell President Obama to veto the bill. Folks write a lot about Keystone's effect on climate change -- it will facilitate the production and sale of tar sands oil, the extraction of which emits a lot of carbon -- but we also need to remember that situating the pipeline over heartland water tables where oil spills will cause serious damage to the drinking water of good citizens is at least as important. Without clean water, we don't have good health, after all.

Action: the Keystone XL pipeline, the right to protest peacefully, and "free" trade.

As you know, the House passed a bill authorizing construction of the Keystone XL pipeline on Friday, while the Senate plans at least a test vote on that same bill today. But the House didn't get two-thirds of its members to vote in favor -- even if the 11 House members who voted "present" on Friday all vote "yea" a second time, Keystone supporters still wouldn't have a two-thirds majority -- and we have every reason to suspect the Senate doesn't have 67 votes, either. Of course, we're only talking about a two-thirds majority because President Obama said last week he'd veto the bill. Trouble is, he gave an impending Nebraska Supreme Court decision on the pipeline as his reason, and said Court has since ruled in favor of letting the pipeline proceed, so Mr. Obama will look a little foolish now if he vetoes the bill. Still, the fact that he should have played it better doesn't affect our mission, which is to stop construction of a pipeline over heartland water tables by a corporation with a bad pipe safety record which will exacerbate climate change. Hence the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and CREDO all help you tell Mr. Obama to veto the Keystone XL bill.

Meanwhile, a Bloomington, MN prosecutor has put a recent #BlackLivesMatter protest at the Mall of America in her crosshairs, not because the protestors did anything untoward, like damage property, but because the protest cost the Mall "lost revenue" and the taxpayer police overtime. You see the problem with that, right? An overzealous prosecutor can silence any protest, anywhere, by raising the threat that the protestors will have to pay for "lost revenue" (how do we know the Mall lost revenue that day again?) or "police overtime" (again, any taxpayer can protest about anything at any time, so paying for police to oversee a rally isn't a "burden" to the taxpayer). Those who find they sympathize with the prosecutor might want to imagine a different prosecutor deciding that police overtime for, say, an anti-immigration rally is too much of a burden to taxpayers and local businesses. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell the Mall of America to help stop state interference with peaceful protests. For maybe the prosecutor's actions have been enough of a PR headache that the Mall might want to distance itself from her.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and any "fast-tracking" thereof, Public Citizen still helps you do that. The deleterious effects of the TPP -- that it would nullify our nation's laws, let copyright "protection" run roughshod over the principle of fair use, and make outsourcing American jobs even easier than it is now, among many other things -- are well-known, despite the negotiators' attempts to keep them secret. But the effect of "fast-tracking" trade proposals -- which would force Congress to vote on the pact with an hour of debate and without the ability to amend it -- is perhaps not as well-known. It's bad enough that "fast-tracking" forces Congress to vote on something without being able to debate it properly on behalf of the people Congressfolk nominally serve, but it's even worse that anyone would consider a trade pact of such immediate importance that it has to be passed now-now-now. If anti-terrorism or environmental bills don't get fast-tracked in this manner, why should trade bills?

Around the table: featuring a Republican anti-jobs bill and a litany of Republican squealing about President Obama.

Juan Cole instructs us that the attack on Charlie Hebdo was "an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture." Whether al-Qaeda itself was behind it I couldn't say with certainty, but the results of the attack would certainly benefit their efforts. Note well that when "liberal" media personalities like Chuck Todd won't ask the rich and powerful tough questions on TV out of fear that they won't come on his show again, the end result is that folks who actually have something to say, like Juan Cole, still can't get on TV.

Another day, another hostage situation forced upon the American people by Republicans, as they attach yet another pro-bankster amendment to a must-pass terrorism insurance bill. Sooner or later, simply as a matter of their own survival, Democrats will have to stand up to these hostage situations, and force the "liberal" media to listen to them. I shudder to think that they'd actually prefer Republicans to screw up the country in this manner, under the not-a-sure-shot assumption that they'll benefit on Election Day 2016. They do remember which party the current President belongs to, don't they?

Michael Hiltzik describes why the McConnell/Boehner effort to raise the Affordable Care Act's definition of "full-time" from 30 hours weekly to 40 will actually hurt American workers. Long story short: corporations that were already cutting their workers' hours to 29 just so they wouldn't have to provide health insurance to those workers would now have a much larger pool of workers (including me, and maybe you, too) whose hours they could cut to 39, who would then also no longer have health insurance. Also, the alleged spike in part-time jobs supposedly caused by the ACA simply isn't happening.

As the battle over the Keystone XL comes to a possible end, the battle over a 550-mile natural gas pipeline running through three mid-Atlantic coast states is just beginning. On one side, some familiar players -- Duke Energy, Dominion Resources of Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio frackers -- while on the other, we have all-too-unfamiliar players in the persons of the homeowners presently refusing to let pipeline developers even survey their land, on whose behalf one pro bono lawyer says, "(i)f this were for a hospital or some truly public purpose, we could turn the other cheek, but this is a Fortune 500 company trying to make a profit." Best of luck to the landowners, who would, in a sane and moral society, have plenty of conservative defenders.

Ford Motor Co. sues a third-party auto repair diagnostics corporation, alleging that it violated Ford's copyright on a list of car parts and specifications. I'm stunned that anyone thinks they can copyright a list, which in theory anyone can compile, with minimal creativity. Ford says it included some totally made-up parts and specs in its list, to which I can only say: how post-modern our corporations have become.

Finally, Daily Kos diarist SemDem lists some of the outrageous lies people seem to believe about President Obama -- like that he's "disbanded the Marine Corps," "banned donuts," and "personally funded a Muslim Museum." This, when a lot of the things Mr. Obama has done (invading Libya, Iraq, and Syria without Congressional authorization, continuing warrantless wiretapping, ramping up drone strikes, vacuuming up cell phone data, and that's just what comes to the mind immediately) are bad enough. Democrats pretending to be like Republicans may work for Democrats in the short term, but it doesn't work for us -- if they actually were the liberals Republicans always say they are anyway, the American people wouldn't be served these ever-higher plates of bullshit.

Around the table: pensions, net neutrality, asset forfeiture, corporate taxes, and the Keystone XL pipeline.

The incomparable Michael Hudson warns us about "The Coming War on Pensions." After all, as Paul Craig Roberts said years ago, pensions are all that's left for Our Glorious Elites to steal from us. Mr. Hudson points to Wall Street management of pensions as the major problem, banksters being in it for themselves and "fiduciary responsibility" being rarely enforced by our government. He also shows us that lawmakers seem to have designed supposedly beneficiary pension laws to fail, which I'll admit is dispiriting, but once you can diagnose problems, you can overcome them.

The FCC announces it will finally release a new net neutrality proposal shortly and vote on it by the end of next month. Let me guess: it will release this proposal on a Friday, or maybe even a Sunday. If they release a bad proposal, the backlash from the people will be swift and furious, and though President Obama will be able to do little about it (though his stated support for strong net neutrality provisions did, and does, mean something), Congress won't be able to give the FCC any cover, either, even though Republicans control both houses. But the end result of all that is more FCC dithering, note that the FCC won't be able to enforce any net neutrality regulations in the meantime -- meaning the big telecoms will be on an honor system, which is a hell of a thing to count on.

Philadelphia D.A. drops civil forfeiture proceedings against two families who stood to lose their homes over alleged drug sales at the properties. Fun fact number one: the city tried to seize one home over a $40 drug deal by the homeowner's son. Fun fact number two: Philadelphia seizes more money this way than Brooklyn and Los Angeles County combined, despite having about 60% of Brooklyn's population and a mere 15% of Los Angeles County's. The good news? No reasonable folks in Philadelphia are shouting WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!!! about this achievement.

Paul Buchheit reminds us that corporations don't pay their state taxes, either, which means, as you know, that small businesses have to pick up the slack, and also that you have to pick up the slack. And we feel the pinch at the state level perhaps more acutely than we do at the federal level, because state taxes fund public schools, which, according to Apple, no longer produces people "with the skills we need." Well, as far as the "skills" Apple "needs," I sure hope public schools never start teaching the "skill" of exchanging millions in campaign donations for billions in unearned tax breaks.

Finally, Emily Atkin at Think Progress reminds us to have a little perspective when Keystone XL supporters say ZOMG TEH PIPELINEZ WILL CREATEZ 42,000 JOBZ!!!!! It doesn't matter so much that they're temporary jobs as that 42,000 jobs is about what our economy creates in one week these days. And we don't have to choose between 42,000 pipeline jobs on one hand and the extreme likelihood that TransCanada will pollute heartland drinking water and accelerate climate change on the other -- we can create more jobs, and longer-lasting jobs at that, by investing in renewable energy. But CEOs don't want to do that, since (as Ralph Nader said long ago) they can't own the sun.

Action: the Keystone XL pipeline, net neutrality, and children's health insurance.

The House passed a Keystone XL pipeline approval bill late last week, and the Senate plans to take up that same bill today; hence Friends of the Earth helps you tell your Senators to reject approval for the Keystone XL pipeline. For reasons with which we're already quite familiar: its builders have a bad pipe safety record, the pipeline will run over heartland aquifers providing drinking water to millions of Americans, and creating markets for tar sands oil will exacerbate climate change. Saving Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu from defeat in her runoff election a few weeks from now is not an adequate reason to approve the pipeline. If Democrats were so anxious to keep her in the Senate, perhaps the DCCC shouldn't have pulled out of Louisiana a few weeks ago. Hell, if they were so anxious, they could have, you know, stood for things when they ran for election. Hell, they could have done things they could actually have run on while they controlled all the levers of power just a few short years ago. But another filthy oil pipeline when Americans clamor for less pollution and more renewable energy? Only politicians and their paymasters like that.

Meanwhile, in the wake of President Obama's surprisingly vigorous defense of network neutrality from last week, both the ACLU and the Sierra Club help you tell the FCC to defend net neutrality and stop trying to give away the internet to big corporations. Despite the fact that allegedly conservative politicians and political organizations have all abandoned it, net neutrality -- the principle that internet service providers should treat all traffic equally, which allows you, and not some big corporation, to decide where you want to go and what you want to see on the internet -- still retains strong bipartisan support. You'd think our politicians would appreciate that, since they're always talking about "bipartisanship" all the time, but their brand of "bipartisanship" simply means giving in to corporations all the time. And right-wing big-money organizations really need to quit with the ZOMG BIG GUMMINT WILL STRANGLEZ TEH INTERNETZ AND TEH INNOVASHUNZ!!!! rubbish already. This will blow the mind of anyone who automatically equates government action with oppression, but sometimes our government needs to act to preserve our freedoms. This is one of those times.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Children's Health Insurance Program, of CHIP, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. CHIP was a bipartisan creation of the Republican Congresses under President Clinton; its main Senate sponsors were Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican Orrin Hatch (I'm old enough to remember when you couldn't go any further right in the Senate than Mr. Hatch), and CHIP adheres to conservative principles by letting the states manage the programs, though they use federal funding to do it. Will any of that matter to the nihilist nutjobs who just got themselves elected to the House and Senate in greater numbers than ever before? Somehow, I doubt it -- they routinely demonstrate that they care more about money than people. Perhaps, in the "spirit of compromise," they'll demand some poison pill attached to any CHIP reauthorization. But just because that's the way they are, that doesn't mean we have to take it. All we need do is tell them what we want, repeatedly and in huge enough numbers that they can't ignore us.

Around the table: the "liberal" media moving the center ever rightward, and other stories.

Ho hum, another day, another New York Times columnist asserting that the right is actually the center. Opposing a minimum wage hike can't be a "centrist" policy because the vast majority of Americans support a minimum wage hike, but then for the "liberal" media the "center" occupies a spot on some imaginary continuum with ever-shifting goal posts, and has nothing to do with, you know, where Americans actually are.

North Carolina's new fracking law not only doesn't protect North Carolina's drinking water, but gives massive handouts to gas drillers. This, after one state legislator called the state's renewable energy standard a handout! The law also prevents municipalities from assessing impact fees, because Republicans are the party of small government.

Fox News contributor spews a bunch of hateful crap on TV about Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson and the "white liberal nerds" who comprise a part of his fan base. Said prick, whom we will not name, adds that Mr. Tyson used to get "profiled" a lot as a youngster because of his "huge afro" and "cutoff shirt." Does he provide evidence that huge afros and cutoff shirts were ever actual indicators of criminal behavior (and not just police harassment)? Of course not -- for Fox News, it's not about racists having facts, it's about racists having feelings.

The Consumerist details "one of the scammiest payday loans we've ever seen," in which a $300 payday loan somehow turns into nearly $1000 in payments over just 10 weeks. Also, the corporation giving out the loans has explicitly told its trainers to teach sales reps to lie to customers, and has tried to escape FTC oversight by claiming Native American affiliation. We should frog-march these people to prison in a public ceremony.

Finally, Navy SEAL who oversaw bin Laden raid says the Keystone XL pipeline would be "a target to terrorists," partly because it's been all over the news, and partly because Keystone's builders have provided almost no security on construction sites. Also, too, it's a giant above-ground pipeline moving filthy crude oil over heartland drinking water. Next up on Fox News: indisputable documentary evidence that all of Dave Cooper's fellow SEALs hated him!

Action: unemployment insurance, coal ash regulations, and the Keystone XL pipeline one more time.

Word on the street is that the Senate might vote on that somehow-elusive long-term unemployment extension for the first time in over a month; they could vote this week or next. I mean, what's the rush, amirite? Only two million families have gone without any sort of lifeline since long-term unemployment expired at the end of last year, and this is only an economy still creating jobs as a snail's pace. Yes, clearly, we wouldn't want to move too fast on this. (Did I need sarcasm tags for all that?) Seriously, we still have three unemployed folk for every job opening in America, so I brook no guff about how all the unemployed are "lazy" and prefer their $350 or so weekly to a job that would almost inevitably pay more. The AFSCME provides a toll-free number, 1.888.853.7037, with which you may call your Senators and tell them to get a move-on, and the Coalition on Human Needs provides an email tool with which you may do same. Remind your Senators not to try to "pay for" the unemployment extension by trying to force poison pills down the people's throats -- poison pills like, say, cuts to the Child Tax Credit or the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of a coal ash spill into the Dan River in North Carolina measuring over 30,000 tons so far -- that's a lot of coal ash! You yourself may not drink one-sixth that much water in your lifetime! -- the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the EPA to issue vigorous protections against coal ash contamination. What is coal ash? Coal ash is a residue from coal production, as you might guess; it usually contains arsenic, lead, and mercury, among other goodies. Used to be coal corporations just released coal ash into the air, but now they have to capture it and store it -- and, well, if they're not storing it properly, then accidents will happen. (Not incidentally, a little less than half of all coal ash gets recycled, usually into concrete -- which ain't much better, really, since all those health-hampering goodies get used again.) Guess who doesn't want the EPA to regulate coal ash and its storage? That's right, the coal corporations -- the same ones who don't want any decent clean air regulations. Well, they're not the boss of us. That's true even when our government acts like they're the boss of us.

Finally, today is the last day to submit comments to the State Department about the Keystone XL pipeline, and if you haven't submitted one yet, well, I know a few good organizations who'd like to help you do that -- like Public Citizen, the Environmental Defense Fund, CREDO, Friends of the Earth, Avaaz, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Center for Media and Democracy. Like I said, a few. You know the case against the pipeline well by now -- the pipeline will make climate change worse, by making it easier for dirty tar sands oil to move around; the pipeline's builder, TransCanada, has a not-terribly-good pipe safety record; the pipeline will deliver the vast majority of its oil to foreign customers, not American ones; the pipeline still runs over the Ogalalla Aquifer, a major source of heartland drinking water; the pipeline will actually create very, very few jobs in the long run and not terribly many in the short run; the pipeline won't create much corporate tax revenue because of tax loopholes; and the pipeline won't pay for the leaks it causes, thanks to even more egregious legal loopholes. You know the case, so make the case. Your counsel is more important than that of any corporate hack anyway.

Action: Holocaust reparations, corporate intrusiveness, and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Holocaust survivor Leo Bretholz, now 93, has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell French railroad corporation SNCF to pay reparations to Holocaust victims. As you may recall, France was the country that prepared to bet on two possible winners during World War II, and SNCF transported over 75,000 good folks to Nazi death camps (with all but 2,000 dying there); the Nazis apparently paid per person and per kilometer -- instructing us, if anything does, that evil wears reading glasses -- and SNCF even kept sending invoices to the French government well after the Allies liberated Paris in 1944, which I bet President de Gaulle, who fought the Nazis from the first day to the last, found quite interesting. And unlike some 6,000 German corporations, SNCF has never paid a cent in reparations for any of that. For Mr. Bretholz, who jumped from one of SNCF's trains when he was 21, the cause has become even more personal, as SNCF is bidding to build a light-rail line in his home state of Maryland. While we should not forget the 1,700 SNCF railway workers whom the Nazis deported or killed because they fought occupation, we also should not let SNCF forget the time when their business was extermination.

Meanwhile, Capitol One recently changed the terms of its standard contract with its credit card customers; the contract stated that they could contact customers in "any manner we choose," and "any manner" explicitly includes the possibility of showing up at your house. Remember in Kafka's Metamorphosis, when Gregor Samsa's office manager actually showed up at his house to harangue him about not coming to work? Hopefully, you won't have mysteriously turned into a giant insect when Capitol One comes knocking! Capitol One might also call, email, fax, or text you -- oh, you have to pay your cell phone provider for texts other people send you? Well, too bad for you! -- and Capitol One also claims the right to "modify or suppress caller ID and similar services and identify ourselves on these services in any manner we choose," which promise their PR department had to walk back in subsequent days, for reasons you might easily imagine. But Capitol One hasn't revised their contract, and the contract's the thing that matters in a court of law, so Consumers Union helps you tell Capitol One to keep Big Brother tactics out of their contracts with customers.

Finally, the clock's running out on the Keystone XL pipeline (a matter about which many good folks got arrested yesterday). President Obama has the power to reject the pipeline, as he said he would if it significantly impacted our worsening climate-change problem. The oil corporation flacks who helped write the State Department's report have argued that the pipeline won't make climate change worse, because the tar sands are going somewhere anyway and it doesn't matter if it's that pipeline or some other pipeline or some railroad -- as if making transportation of tar sands oil easier couldn't possibly mean there'll be more of it! In any case, the Center for Media and Democracy put together a short but powerful film demolishing the case for Keystone XL. One thing I forgot: the Ogalalla Aquifer doesn't just supply drinking water to the heartland, it also supplies agricultural water to the heartland. One thing I didn't know: taxpayers will have to pay for any pipe leaks, because TransCanada, the corporation building the pipeline, won't have to pay into an insurance fund that pays for such cleanups. See, it's not just about the environment -- it's about right and wrong. Sum of Us helps you do the right thing.

Action: Texas vs. Mr. Munoz, fracking on public lands, and the Keystone XL pipeline.

First things first: you no doubt know that the state of Texas forced Marlise Munoz's family to keep her on life support for nearly two months because she was pregnant when she suffered the apparent pulmonary embolism that left her brain dead. Texas law doesn't allow health care providers to apply advanced directives (like the one Ms. Munoz had one, expressing her wish to be taken off life support if brain dead) to pregnant patients, because SANKTITIEZ OF LIFEZ!!!!!! But Texas law apparently also regards brain death as legal death, which is why Judge Wallace was, ultimately, able to enforce Ms. Munoz's stated wish. And yet Ms. Munoz's husband, who fought to have her wishes enforced in court, now faces crushing medical bills. The state forces you to ignore your own wishes and then makes you pay out the nose for that? I do not believe Barry Goldwater would call any of that conservative. Thus Daily Kos helps you tell the state of Texas and the John Peter Smith hospital to absorb Mr. Munoz's medical bills. Yes, of course I would have loved to save the child's life. No, I do not believe in running roughshod over other people's rights to do that.

Meanwhile, President Obama's State of the Union address did instruct us that "climate change is a fact" -- and what a shame we regard that as progress, after years of George W. Bush almost single-handedly making climate change denialism mainstream -- but Mr. Obama also committed to continuing to develop natural gas. Of course Mr. Obama was careful to tell us he would be mindful of our safety when developing new sources of gas, and even told us natural gas would result in fewer carbon emissions (which, hello, is far from a sure thing!), but fracking continues to pollute our sources of clean water for drinking, bathing, and washing, so how do we intend to accomplish that? Gas drilling corporations already get more than enough assistance from our government, so the Sierra Club helps you tell Mr. Obama to end oil and gas fracking on public lands. Yes, Mr. Obama's support for higher renewable energy funding and for EPA carbon emission regulations comprise a good start, but we have the duty to ensure he doesn't just start the job of saving this planet from pollution.

Finally, the State Department finally put its Keystone XL report out on Friday, and while it does concede that the Keystone XL pipeline will "contribute to cumulative global GHG emissions" -- to the tune of adding the carbon emission equivalent of 5.7 million new cars on the road -- it also says "(a)pproval or denial...remains unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands," which is a way of throwing up one's hands and walking away from one's responsibilities. But the State Department's Inspector General still hasn't released a report examining potential conflicts-of-interest concerning the report's writing -- which had heavy involvement from a corporation that used to do business with TransCanada, the pipeline's builder. And we still should consider TransCanada's horrible pipe-safety record, all the oil-train derailments that have plagued our continent lately, and the report's stunning finding that the Keystone XL pipeline will create exactly 50 jobs. So both the Sierra Club and CREDO help you tell your government to reject the Keystone XL pipeline and protect good Americans from its ill effects.

Action: animal cruelty, media consolidation, and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Taylor Radig went undercover at a cattle company, where she filmed workers throwing and kicking calves around, and dragging them by their legs, their tails, even their ears. Police arrested three Quanah Cattle Company workers as a result -- and then arrested her, because she didn't notify police immediately. (It's not like she was undercover or anything. It's not like you need more than one incident to establish a pattern or anything.) Lest you think Ms. Radig violated some ag-gag law that requires folks who film animal abuse to turn their film over immediately or face draconian consequences, know that Colorado ain't one of those states. Actually, legislators have tried to pass ag-gag laws in six states this year, and went 0-for-6 -- and Tennessee's Republican Governor vetoed an ag-gag bill after massive public pressure. So why is Colorado prosecuting Ms. Radig? Maybe because of pressure from big agricultural corporations? Abby Spiwak provides a petition via change.org, which helps you tell Weld County D.A. Ken Buck to drop charges against Ms. Radig.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell FCC Chair Tom Wheeler to stop rampant media consolidation, Free Press still helps you do that. Mr. Wheeler is a former telecom lobbyist, so I have little confidence in his commitment to keeping local media in local hands, but duty remains duty -- the FCC would otherwise be split on the matter. The last few FCCs have tried to loosen media consolidation rules, but the courts have stopped their efforts; still, one sympathetic judge is all you need to set a bad precedent. And the big telecoms have gotten a little cleverer, I suppose -- they're not buying all those TV stations (over 200 changed hands last year, the most in a decade) themselves, but setting up shell corporations to buy them. I must admit I find it hard to believe that the FCC just didn't notice that. I find it much easier to believe they know the loopholes are there and don't care, since more than a few of them will follow the last FCC Chair, Julius Genachowski, into the big telecoms themselves. Still, the whole thing is embarrassing, and I wouldn't underestimate any politician's malleability while he's being embarrassed.

Finally, our government still hasn't decided whether to approve the notorious Keystone XL pipeline, so CREDO helps you tell President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry, one more once, to reject the pipeline. Why? Because the corporation building the pipeline, TransCanada, has a terrible pipe safety record -- pipe safety being fairly important when you're talking about a pipeline running over heartland water tables. Because the State Department corrupted its own environmental impact evaluation process by outsourcing the report to a corporation that had done business with TransCanada in the past -- a report which concluded that since large-scale tar sands extraction is inevitable, building the pipeline wouldn't make any impact on the environment! See, most of us had assumed that the pipeline would make such extraction inevitable. Did I miss anything? Oh, right -- because scientists tell us that dredging up tar sands will pound us with greenhouse gases, making climate change a lot worse. But, sure, go ahead and believe the big corporations when they tell you rejecting it would kill jobs -- like there's just no other way on Earth to create jobs.

Action: Keystone XL, email privacy, and paid family medical leave.

Not too long ago, Public Citizen released a report documenting no less than 125 spots in Oklahoma and Texas where TransCanada had to dig their pipelines back up because they needed repairs. TransCanada calls these dings and dents and bad welds "anomalies," but they're occurring about every two miles, and we already know (from Greg Palast's reporting) that TransCanada finds proper pipe inspection to be a drag on profits, and therefore verboten. Set aside that there are 125 spots just in a section of pipe that comprises a little over one-tenth of the total proposed Keystone XL pipeline: how many pipe breaks does it take to cause a big damn spill that pollutes everyone's air and water? Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Congress to do its job and conduct proper oversight of the Keystone XL pipeline in Oklahoma and Texas. Yes, I'm figuring if Congress does its job, the pipeline won't get built.

Meanwhile, Techdirt helps you tell President Obama that he shouldn't be able to access anyone's emails without a warrant. Why tell Mr. Obama? Because Executive branch agencies have been trying to get even more power to access your communications -- which the NSA, as you know, already vacuums in -- and because at least one House bill (H.R. 1852, the Email Privacy Act) would revise the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to require that the Executive branch get a warrant before it can read your emails. Our government and our "liberal" media pretend everything is so complicated, but it's not: get a warrant from a judge, and no one's going to complain about it. Incidentally, H.R. 1852, a Kevin Yoder (R-KS) production, would also prevent our government from treating emails left on servers after 180 days as "abandoned," and therefore ripe for unwarranted scrutiny. How often do you purge all your emails from, say, your google inbox? Answer: more often after today.

Finally, Sen. Gilibrand (D-NY) and Rep. DeLauro (D-CT) will soon introduce the FAMILY Act (it's not a bad acronym!), which would let folks using family medical leave under the Family Medical Leave Act to be paid up to two-thirds of their regular salary while they're on family medical leave. Less than one in eight Americans get paid family medical leave via their jobs (the Family Medical Leave Act grants 12 weeks annually of unpaid leave), and the United States is the only industrialized nation which does not guarantee its citizens paid leave. Of course, the corporate talking heads will tell you that the FAMILY Act would hurt small businesses, but that's an opinion that just so happens not to be shared by very many small businesses. The FAMILY Act would hike payroll taxes by about $1.50 per week to pay for the program, and though I'd rather we break off a piece of a re-enacted 91% tax bracket to pay for it, it's not a terrible burden. Moms Rising helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support the FAMILY Act.

Action: the shutdown drama, Chiquita's obligations in Colombia, and paycheck fairness.

CREDO helps you call House Republican leadership and tell them to stop holding our government hostage to their ridiculous demands. You remember their little ransom note from last week, right? I mean, they've foregrounded their demand to delay the Affordable Care Act for another year (which I'm sure they'll demand, again, when some other must-pass bill must pass), but recall that they also want to roll back coal ash and climate change regulations, ratchet up oil and gas drilling on federal lands, hamstring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and ram through the Keystone XL pipeline. Oh, almost forgot: they also wanted "fast-track" authority to "reform" the tax code, because that's just another thing they don't want to bother the American people about, I guess. If you can maintain a civil tone, then it'll be all the more effective when you tell them they look like a bunch of diaper-loaded brats. I don't know that for sure, because I rarely maintain a civil tone with these clowns. But maybe.

Meanwhile, the Chiquita banana company (not to be confused with this) paid out a $25 million fine in 2007 for its role in funding death squads in Colombia -- no, really, and they also helped overthrow the Guatemalan government in 1954 -- but now they're trying to evade a lawsuit filed by the victims of said death squads and their families, so Sum of Us helps you tell Chiquita to give those victims their due. You may well be saying, hey, they already paid a $25 million fine to the Justice Department; what more do you want from them? But the Justice Department fined them for associating with terrorists, whereas the lawsuit would make Chiquita pay for the damages it caused to the victims and their families -- all stemming from the same incidents, but different allegations, nonetheless. Incidentally, Chiquita paid the death squads $1.7 million, but have already paid over ten times that much in fines. Think maybe the next corporation will think twice about "the cost of doing business" with evil bastards? Or am I too hopeful?

Finally, the U.S. Census Bureau told us last week that women, on average, still earn only 77 cents for every dollar men earn. So Moms Rising helps you tell the Department of Labor to speed up development and deployment of its compensation data survey. What would that do? It would collect information about the wages and salaries that employees of federal contractors and subcontractors earn, which would give said employees ammunition to redress pay discrimination grievances, which would help narrow the gap between what men make and what women make. I know, I know, it sounds a bit esoteric, but sometimes -- I said sometimes, Third Way types! -- an esoteric-sounding tool can do a lot of good. Of course, S. 84/H.R. 377, the Paycheck Fairness Act, is still out there waiting for a vote; the Paycheck Fairness Act would give workers more tools with which they may fight pay discrimination, and Moms Rising helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support that, too. After all, what's wrong with giving people tools so they can get justice for themselves?

Congress is off for most of the month, praise the Lord, so we get a chance to catch up on our progress on several fronts.

It probably won't surprise you to learn that the State Department's Inspector General will investigate possible ethics violations concerning the most recent draft of State's environmental impact report on the Keystone XL pipeline, but the Inspector General has also frowned upon the last report, so this could all be theatre. I'd prefer to believe the best of people, even politicians, but still, the Sierra Club still helps you tell Secretary Kerry to make State's environmental impact report reflect sound science, not oil industry biases.

H.R. 1010/S. 460, the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, has 143 House sponsors and 31 Senate sponsors, but remains stuck in committee in both houses -- in the House, actually, it's stuck in subcommittee. You'd think Congress would recognize a good idea supported by over two-thirds of the American public as a sure winner, but this is Congress we're talking about. Never mind calling the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections -- John Boehner's number is 202.225.6205. You can find Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee members here, or you can take more action at Ralph Nader's new website here.

Tier 3 tailpipe emissions, as you know, enjoy support from both environmentalists and automobile manufacturing corporations -- but not big oil, no, sir. Think big oil gets all us-against-the-world like pro sports teams do? If so, they're just another group of millionaires who waste their time cultivating a false sense of oppression. Gina McCarthy has been EPA Administrator for about seven minutes now, so the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Ms. McCarthy to set the strongest tailpipe standards available, so we get less asthma and less cancer and suchlike. I do not believe you'd be double-commenting if you use this tool and if you've already submitted a public comment.

On the fracking front, the Bureau of Land Management still thinks allowing gas drillers to frack all over public lands while telling us little about the chemicals they're pumping into our water is a swell idea. After all, some corporation's "trade secrets" are so, so much more important than the possibility that you're ingesting poisonous crap. (End sarcasm.) The public comment period ends on August 23rd, so if you've missed previous opportunities to give the BLM what-for about their dumb rules, Breast Cancer Action still helps you do that.

Finally, hard to believe, but the USDA is still mulling whether to let chicken processing corporations do most of their own inspecting, and leave a mere one federal inspector per plant to look at almost 200 birds a minute and hope they spot the feces and blood and pus that would make a contaminated chicken a bad meal at the dinner table. Privatization -- it always works, except when it doesn't work, which is always. It gets better: one way the USDA plan would "make up for" the lack of chicken inspectors is to allow corporations to spray their chickens with more dangerous chemicals. It sounds like a Bush Mobb plan, except Tha Bush Mobb's USDA actually functioned better than this. One is tempted to ask why USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack couldn't be burned out by Cabinet work like Hillary Clinton was at State, and one is tempted to answer that winding down two wars slowly enough for all the corporate mercenaries to get their cut is harder work than just rubber-stamping whatever big agricultural corporations tell you. Anyway, the fact that they're still taking comments on this plan tells me they're still not getting enough comments from people who are perfectly happy to get salmonella if it means some CEO gets to gild his plumbing, so Food and Water Watch helps you tell the USDA to drop this dumb chicken inspection privatization plan already.

Certain Congressfolk seem to think the matter of arming Syrian rebels is "classified" -- and that even includes their own deliberations on the subject! It's like they've all forgotten they answer to us! When even Sen. Wyden doesn't give a straight answer about a decidedly non-classified matter of federal law, you know Congress is getting away with far more than we should ever allow.

Bloomberg sees the economy getting better, largely due to a renewed willingness on the part of Americans to borrow money. I'm not going to discount that notion entirely -- not many folks build a bigger life with money they already have -- but I'm skeptical of the slew of context-free statistics the article offers, and it doesn't tell us exactly how much of that record-setting household net worth comes from the rich households getting richer.

A Washington, D.C. NBC station rejects an anti-Keystone XL ad submitted for airing during a President Obama appearance on the Tonight Show, despite airing many pro-Keystone XL ads earlier. Climate change activists smell the Hand of Big Oil behind the rejection -- but nobody seems to consider that Mr. Obama might have pressured NBC himself, given that the ad would have run while he was on TV. I'd like to be wrong about that, of course.

Ken Buck, the Colorado Republican U.S. Senate nominee in 2010, files papers to run for the Senate again in 2014. They must be doing cartwheels in Mark Udall's office! Seriously, Ken Buck is the guy who a) couldn't ride a huge Republican wave to victory in 2010 b) against Michael Bennet. Michael Bennet! And Ken Buck routinely did Christine O'Donnell one better -- he not only said crazystupid crap, but he blamed other people for the cardinal sin of understanding perfectly well how crazystupid it was. (I'm glad he beat lymphoma, though.)

Popular Science looks at efforts to make body parts with 3-D printers -- body parts as in vital organs like the liver. We're nowhere near there yet, of course -- 3-D printers can make cells, but the cells still have to learn how to talk to other cells -- but it's been a fascinating journey so far, and more uplifting than using 3-D printers to make guns. (I don't particularly oppose 3-D printing guns, though I certainly oppose some of the ninnies doing it.)

Finally, Occupy.com looks at the Green Tea Coalition, in which, as one lobbyist laments, "the Tea Party has formed an unholy alliance with the left." And not just to pass that well-covered solar power mandate, either -- they've also come together to kill a sales-tax hike that would've done a bad job rehabbing public transportation, and a bill that would have stiffened penalties for protesting outside someone's house. I always hoped the Tea Party would figure out the difference between freedom for people and freedom for corporations; now it seems at least some of them are.

Daily Kos and the National Resources Defense Council help you tell President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. You recall he said he'd reject it if it helped worsen climate change, as almost everyone in the world not making money from ignoring climate change thinks it will -- almost everyone, that is, except the U.S. State Department, upon whom Mr. Obama will rely for advice and/or cover. Can you imagine the day when Mr. Obama announces that "it was a hard decision" but he gave the go-ahead for the pipeline, because jobs and cheaper fuel? You may want to mention to Mr. Obama that supporting growing energy sectors, like the renewable energy sector, actually creates jobs, whereas supporting established energy sectors, like the fossil fuel sector, just lets CEOs slash jobs and steal money. You may also want to mention that Consumer Watchdog tells us that Keystone XL approval will actually raise gas prices, simply because the current lack of markets for Alberta tar sands oil keeps tar sands oil prices relatively low. Still, make the climate change argument, too, since he promised us.

Meanwhile, Kentucky's Division of Water recently proposed a Clean Water Act adjustment, which would permit more selenium to flow through the Appalachian River. Why? Because selenium just so happens to be a by-product of mountaintop removal mining, still an influential industry in Kentucky. Scientists have found that selenium does serious damage to the river's fish -- including deformities, reproductive issues, and death -- and thus also to the wildlife that feed on fish; we're not talking high enough levels of selenium to do damage to people, but given how much other toxic-to-people crap mountaintop removal mining puts in the water, do we really want to give them a handout? And so the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA Administrator to overrule Kentucky's wish to put more pollutants in their water. The EPA requires comments by two weeks from now; with any luck, we'll have an actual EPA Administrator by then (since Senate Republicans were holding up Gina McCarthy's appointment, but aren't now, because Harry Reid threatened to take their filibuster away for Presidential appointments).

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Mr. Obama to keep big oil corporations from drilling in the Arctic Ocean, Alaska Wild still helps you do that. You may remember that Shell had an oil rig crash near an island earlier this year, but, ever the optimists, Shell plans to try again next year, hoping, or hoping you hope, that they'll avoid screwing up again. They won't, and we already know why: we don't know enough about the Arctic ecosystem to know what effects our oil drilling will have, and we also can't clean up a spill in the Arctic Ocean anywhere near as well as we could in the much more temperate Gulf of Mexico (at least in theory, amirite, BP?). But we've got a bigger problem with drilling in the Arctic -- namely, that climate change seems to be proceeding faster there than anywhere else, and, ah, do you want to drill there if that's happening? Seems to me everything I've said in this paragraph is fairly conservative -- we shouldn't mess with things we don't understand, and we shouldn't make our solutions worse than our problems. Yet our nominal "conservatives" seem to want to drill everywhere. Could worship of mammon have something to do with that?

H.R. 1385, the Safe Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Act, would give the FDA more authority to keep carcinogens and other dangerous chemicals out of our soaps, shampoos, lotions, deodorants, and perfumes. Currently, the FDA can't compel cosmetics corporations to conduct safety testing of their products, or force a recall of products found to be dangerous, but H.R. 1385 would change all that, and it would force corporations to phase out all their cancer-causing and reproductive-system-disrupting chemicals. H.R. 1385 would also compel corporations to label all of their ingredients in their products, rather than hiding them behind vague terms like "fragrance." A lot of these things are fragrant, all right. What will our right-wing intelligentsia have to say about H.R. 1385? That REGULASHUNZ KILLZ THA JOBZ AND THA INNOVASHUNZ!!!!!!, perhaps? If so, you have to wonder if they really want to "innovate" on the definition of "safety." Green America helps you tell your Congressfolk to support safer personal care products.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell Secretary of State Kerry to get some better intel about how the Keystone XL pipeline would affect climate change. We've gone into some detail about how a pipeline spill (from a pipeline builder with a rotten safety record) would pollute heartland drinking water, but the July 2013 Scientific American reminds us that refining oil from tar sands bitumen requires more energy and creates more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil refining. (Next up on the Glenn Beck show: the liberal bias of Scientific American!) Now, it seems Mr. Kerry didn't get very much of that counsel from the folks who wrote the Keystone XL environmental impact report; that may be because many of the folks who wrote that report came from the oil industry (and some of them worked with the would-be builders of the Keystone XL pipeline). Jesus Mary and Joseph what the hell is wrong with investing more money in renewable energy? That would actually create jobs and wean us off foreign oil. Oh, wait, I think I just answered my own question.

The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can't patent human genes -- a decision so obvious they let Clarence Thomas write the opinion. Myriad still gets to patent artificial genes, of course -- but nobody's challenged their right to patents on artificial genes, so it's hardly, as USA Today writes, a "lifeline."

Moxie Marlinspike at Wired explains, much better than I've done thus far, why "I didn't do anything wrong" won't protect you from pervasive government surveillance. Long story short: you don't know you're not breaking a law because there are 27,000 pages just of federal law, technology collects so much more information than it used to do and can store it for so much longer, and very often we grow as a society when we break bad laws. Ask Rosa Parks about that one.

Waaaaah, a bunch of damn diaper-loaded brats in the House of Representatives refuse to help their own constituents navigate the Affordable Care Act. Memo to Tim Huelskamp: your job is to help your constituents navigate the law, whether you agree with it or not. And memo to Jason Chaffetz: the President doesn't make the laws. And it's a damn right-wing law to begin with -- blessed by both the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney, until Mr. Obama embraced it!

At the risk of opening a hole in space-time, let's note that Rick Santorum said something indisputably true last week -- that Republicans should have reached out to the workers who also "built that" in 2012. He may be a bit optimistic about the working class's willingness to listen to Republicans about anything -- though even that could change if Democrats keep doing next-to-nothing about the economy.

Congratulations are in order for the people of Iran, who elected moderate rightist cleric Hassan Mohani to succeed far-right ideologue Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as President over the weekend. But an earlier draft of that Reuters article claimed a Mohani victory would be a "surprise." Certainly no one who's actually lived under a hard-line regime, one that likely cheated its way to victory four years ago, would call it a "surprise."

Hard to believe, Harry, but Bill O'Reilly's really worried now about the surveillance state -- in a way he wasn't when it was Mr. Bush conducting the surveillance. You'd think something changed in the meantime. Well, he was always against government spying on him.

Finally, the Obama Administration has apparently raised the "social cost" of carbon emissions in its regulatory calculations, which could (among other things) make cost-benefit analyses reflect something other than lost corporate profits, for once. It's enough to make you think all these Clinton/Obama Third Way Democrats are actually smart -- until Jim Inhofe calls it a "carbon tax" and Glenn Beck claims the government is trying to tax your breathing. And when you realize Mr. Obama's bigger number is itself a compromise, you remember you're always better off fighting.

Another case study in the banality of evil: we learn, from Mother Jones, 11 "mystifying" things the Tsarnaev brothers did on their way to eternal ignominy. Highlights: they apparently tried to get money out of three different ATMs after hitting the withdrawal limit, and then let a carjacking hostage escape because they had the munchies. Their classmates said they were typical, and they were right!

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Fox News that trying the younger Tsarnaev in civilian court is the right thing to do. He could've delivered the line about the Constitution being "strong enough" more smoothly, but he did good. I'd been hearing rumblings from other liberals that Mr. Paul had been holding his tongue too long about this matter. And like the Prodigal Son's father, I couldn't care less.

The EPA apparently left its own public comment with the State Department about Keystone XL, and found the State Department's report wanting. You won't be surprised to learn (if you didn't know already) that the Keystone XL pipeline doesn't adequately avoid the Ogalalla Aquifer even after the Nebraska state legislature called a special session about it -- and that other pipelines in that area do avoid it. It's like our elites want bad things to happen.

Answering a question about whether America's ready for another Bush (namely Jeb) as President, George W. Bush begins his response with "That's for Jeb to figure out." Actually, no: it's for the American people to figure out. Strange, how they never see that.

Bill Clinton, campaigning for behind-in-the-polls L.A. Mayoral candidate, slams low turnout in the March Mayoral primary. What could be depressing voter turnout in L.A.? Let's see: odd-numbered election year, largely Democrat-controlled city -- and, oh yeah, politicians failing to earn votes with their good works. Strange, how they never see that.

Finally, six-term Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) announces he won't seek re-election in 2014. He'd actually drifted a little leftward under Mr. Obama, which is quite unusual among Senators. And, in an actually rather unexpected development, former Gov. Brian Schweitzer -- who recently declared himself "not senile enough" for the Senate -- now won't rule out a run for the open seat.

H.R. 1010, the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, would gradually (hear that, right-wingers "worried" about the effect on small businesses?) raise our minimum wage to $10.10/hr (get it?) over a period of two years, and would index the minimum wage to inflation every year after that. H.R. 1010 would also raise the tipped-employee minimum wage to $3/hr for the first year after the passage of the bill, and then to 70% of the minimum wage for everyone else. Why do this? Well, remember a few months back, when Rep. Blackburn (R-TN) complained that we shouldn't raise the minimum wage because, hell, when she got her first job, she made only $2.15/hr and it taught her a lot about life? She most likely got that job in the late '60s, when the minimum wage was $1.60/hr; $1.60/hr back then works out to about $9.60/hr now, with the nearly 500% inflation rate over the last forty-plus years -- and that would be well above the current federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr. SignOn helps you tell your House Reps to support H.R. 1010.

Meanwhile, we have four more days to leave a comment with the State Department about the Keystone XL pipeline. (The State Department must review the application because the proposed pipeline crosses national borders.) The State Department seems fairly sanguine about it, as evidenced by the draft environmental impact statement they released last month, but they don't have reason to be -- not when some of the experts State hired to write the report turned out to have ties to TransCanada, the corporation building the pipeline, and (more importantly) the State Department went to some length to cover that fact up. Those experts may not have current ties to TransCanada, whose pipe safety record is quite shoddy, but one of them, Mr. Bielakowski, has consulted for TransCanada at least three times over the last seven years; think he won't go back to work for them? The Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch) helps you leave a public comment about the Keystone XL pipeline.

According to the March 28 Wall Street Journal, President Obama's new budget, to be released this week, will contain Social Security benefit cuts. Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Obama can cut Social Security. With whom is that popular, other than our obnoxiously greedy elites? And with the way they've crapped all over our world, why do they still get all the say about everything? These people live on a totally different planet than the rest of us -- which is why we have to remind them we're here. The Campaign for America's Future helps you tell Mr. Obama not to cut Social Security benefits. If he's not going to protect the programs we've fought for and paid into all our lives, what is the purpose of him? (The Senate went on record as opposing the "chained CPI" benefit cuts last week -- but what if that vote's just cover so nobody has to take responsibility for doing the deed? How absurd would it be for them to run on their non-binding vote instead of the vote that actually did the damage?)

Meanwhile, an Exxon pipeline ruptured in Mayflower, Arkansas last Friday night, dumping thousands of gallons of heavy crude oil and prompting the evacuation of 22 residents. And guess what? That pipeline runs through Lake Maumelle, an artificial lake which provides drinking water to hundreds of thousands of good folks in central Arkansas -- the spill didn't occur there, of course, but why wouldn't it? And though the heavy crude that traversed the Pegasus wasn't tar sands oil (though they are quite similar), you can see why so many good Americans immediately thought of Mr. Obama's impending decision on building the Keystone XL pipeline, which also would run through aquifers and thus potentially befoul the heartland's drinking water. You might see why so many Americans would be a little conservative about such matters. Thus the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the Obama Administration to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

In other news, the North Carolina state legislature mulls HB 217, which would allow the state to try 13-year-olds as adults and send them to jail with adults. Golly, which mode of attack should we use on this legislative mound of dung? Should we point out that studies tell us that putting kids in jail with adults makes those kids more likely to commit more crime when they get out? Or should we merely say hello, these are kids we're talking about? Who, we have long accepted, need our guidance to make the right decisions, and whose behavior reflects on us? No use complaining that kids today are out of control, or pointing to times kids act out and people die -- kids do that today because we have abandoned them, both as parents working too many jobs to make ends meet and as a culture that thinks every-man-for-himself is not only deep philosophy but good economic policy. If you're a North Carolina resident, Color of Change helps you tell your NC state legislator to reject HB 217, and restore some sanity to our justice system.

Finally, the Philadelphia City Council passed a bill in mid-March giving all Philadelphia workers at least four days of paid sick leave, and SignOn helps you tell Mayor Michael Nutter to sign the bill. Yup, even though the Mayor's a Democrat, we have to tell him to sign a paid sick leave bill, because he's already vetoed one in the past. And the noises emanating from the Mayor's office sound suspiciously Republican -- it'll hurt small businesses (like sick workers bringing in their walking pneumonia don't!), the economy's too bad (like you should only do good works when it's convenient for you!). Actually, the bill requires that workers get four paid sick days if they work for small businesses; Philly's other employees would get seven. Yikes, that sounds almost like the kind of compromise we used to see when Democrats and Republicans talked to each other, before our elites redefined "compromise" as abject capitulation to their will. It wouldn't be too conservative of me to yearn for actual compromise again, would it?

Once again, we catch up on some of the initiatives we've been working on (and, not insignificantly, I get to show off another fresh new graphic for the first time).

As you know, the House rejected the "Back to Work" budget and passed the nefarious Ryan budget, while the Senate rejected the Ryan budget and narrowly passed a budget sponsored by Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA). Ms. Murray made the appropriate noises about reconciling the Ryan budget and the Murray budget, which, if I may be so bold, doesn't seem particularly likely -- especially with a lot of Congressfolk "waiting" to see what "happens" on the "Grand Bargain." Mr. Obama, the President of Super Happy Bipartisan Fun Time Land, has said he'll give up Medicare benefit cuts and Social Security benefit cuts in exchange for new tax revenues in a "Grand Bargain" over the deficit -- but a non-binding resolution from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) got the Senate on record (in a voice vote, without objection) as opposing Social Security benefit cuts using the "chained CPI" formula. (The "chained CPI" formula purports to measure inflation by predicting what products folks will switch to when prices on their preferred products go up. Trouble is that seniors, often on fixed diets and having fixed medical needs, don't have nearly as many of those choices as the rest of us.) The Campaign for America's Future still helps you tell Congress to reject Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts, and Daily Kos helps you tell Congress and the President to reject "chained CPI"-based Social Security benefit cuts.

Meanwhile, the Senate also passed another non-binding resolution (with 62 votes in favor) offered by Sen. Hoeven (R-ND) expressing its opinion that Mr. Obama should allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline through America's heartland. The State Department still needs to finish its review (a review at least partly written by one of the corporations that would help build the pipeline!), but the Senate vote, though non-binding, puts pressure on Mr. Obama. I always suspected his delay of his decision until this year was an election-year ploy; his nomination of fossil-fuel supporter Ernest Moniz to Steven Chu's old job as Energy Secretary doesn't inspire a lot of hope, either. Of course, good Canadian citizens have begun to organize against tar-sands oil -- the extraction of which requires even more energy to convert to usable oil than traditional oil rigs do -- and that might give Mr. Obama an out. No use just hoping, though, so Greenpeace helps you tell Mr. Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, if you haven't done so already.

Finally, the nefarious "farmers assurance provision" -- which, as we know, doesn't assure very many farmers of very much of anything, but does "assure" big ag that they can continue planting their Frankenseed while the USDA is reviewing it, even if a judge has ordered them to stop planting it -- made it into the most recent continuing appropriations act, which funds our government for the next six months. Mr. Obama signed the bill, and I doubt he lost any sleep over that provision, as he's been carrying water for big ag since becoming President. But in a related development, Washington state residents will vote on a ballot initiative (I-522) this November to force GMO labeling, if supporters can submit enough petition signatures; a similar ballot initiative failed in California in 2012, after the big ag corporations poured millions of dollars into misleading media ads. But Washington state might actually have a better chance of passing one in an off-year, when generally the most passionate voters dominate votes, and those who'd complain that this means the vote will ignore the will of the voters might want to consider that about 9 out of 10 Americans support GMO labeling, making this an actual bipartisan cause, versus the "bipartisanship" our elites normally peddle. More details as they arrive.

Sens. Cruz (R-TX) and Paul (R-KY) have introduced S. 505, which would prevent drones from killing American citizens on American soil, with exceptions to that rule both few and obvious. Moreover, they're planning to attach the bill as an amendment to the continuing resolution that'll fund our government for another six months. Attaching an amendment to a must-pass bill? They must have done the extra reading for Sausage Making 101! (One of Mr. Paul's first mentors in the Senate was Sen. Franken, so that makes sense.) Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Senators to support S. 505. In a related item, the Virginia legislature has passed a bill declaring a two-year moratorium on drone use; the bill now awaits Gov. McDonnell's signature, and that's not a done deal, given that drone-manufacturing corporations have struck back pretty strongly in the press this week. So the ACLU helps you tell Gov. McDonnell to sign the bill. It may not please people with money, but it's the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, the State Department has released its report on the Keystone XL pipeline -- you remember, the one that's going to transport the dirtiest crude oil imaginable, through a pipeline built by a corporation with a terrible pipe-safety record, over one of the biggest underground water tables in America. Strangely, State seems rather sanguine about that prospec -- could tthat be because a contractor employed by the corporation that would build the pipeline actually helped write the report? You could argue, I suppose, that State should listen to people who know what they're doing -- and I'd respond that they shouldn't listen to people who don't know anything about anything besides delivering profits to their CEOs. Thus the Sierra Club -- whose President, you may recall, was willing to go to jail to make his point -- helps you tell President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, and CREDO helps you leave a public comment with the State Department opposing the pipeline.

As we suggested in the first paragraph, the Senate has released its plan to keep our government funded, and it's got some poison pills in it, so to speak. The dreaded "farmer assurance provision," which would allow big corporations (see what they did there? They replaced "Monsanto" with "farmers"!) to keep planting Frankenseed while the courts are still reviewing applications for planting the Frankenseed. What could possibly go wrong with that? Thankfully, Sen. Tester (D-MT) has finally begun to justify my investment in his 2006 campaign by authoring an amendment striking that very provision, and Organic Consumers helps you support not just the Tester Amendment, not just healthy food production, but law and order. I do not exaggerate -- the judicial system has a job, and the legislature's job isn't to make the judicial system's job meaningless so big donors can make more money. Meanwhile, Food and Water Watch not only helps you support the Tester Amendment, but also helps you help fund food inspectors and enforce contract fairness for poultry growers.