Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: our Constitution may not save us! And other sad truths.

Heritage Action executive director pens editorial explaining why we should all vote for Republicans this year. Your jaw will hit the floor when he says electing Democrats will increase partisan bitterness, as if Beltway partisans like him don't already look for any excuse to ratchet up the bitterness; most of the rest of it is better, I suppose, but it'll only move you if you already believe it, and three paragraphs of pablum about health care reform being better at the state level is no answer to the reality that Republicans tried to take away our health insurance. The worst thing about this op-ed, though? How the last paragraph suggests that the "noise" in American politics comes from anywhere other than our President and his votaries. That's some hardcore gaslighting there.

Green Party candidate for state auditor of Missouri writes damning piece about how "liberal" media reporting -- at least as far as his own race is concerned -- only covers "Issues That Don't Matter." Worse than the big media organs' refusal to cover issues brought up by him (and his Constitution and Libertarian cohorts), worse, even, than those organs' fascination with the Democrat and Republican candidates exchanging "jabs" and "harsh words," was the journalist telling him that there just "wasn't room" for discussion of issues in his article, and anyway "we need to write about what interests our readers, and they just want to know what the Democrats and Republicans say." Typical, how journalists think so little of us! They can rest assured that most readers (definitely including myself!) return their contempt in spades. There's a solution in there, somewhere.

Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs warns us to "be careful" about assuming our Constitution will save us from things like our President's efforts to end birthright citizenship for certain brown-skinned babies born on American soil. Long story short: "(c)onstitutions are very important documents," but "(t)heir words do not mean anything, though, if there is nobody in charge who is willing to uphold them," like, you know, the five right-wingers on the Court right now (not to mention the sixth or seventh, if Justices Breyer and Ginsburg pass). Thus even an abjectly stupid argument about what one of the original writers of the 14th Amendment "thought" it meant (an argument Antonin Scalia would have rejected!) could become "precedent" in the hands of unscrupulous folks like Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

How about some good news? a U.S. District Judge rules that Wyoming's ag-gag laws are unconstitutional. This means not only that folks working to expose animal abuse at factory farms can breathe a little more easily now, but folks testing water downstream from factory farms to expose pollution can also breathe a little more easily, since Wyoming's ag-gag law prevented that, too. One day we'll all take for granted that corporations shouldn't have more rights than people, and this ruling helps bring us one step closer to that day.

Finally, how about some more good news? Our FDA has banned the use of lead acetate in hair dyes. Responding to a petition filed by several groups including Consumers Union and the Environmental Defense Fund, our FDA found the 1980 study allowing lead acetate in hair dyes to be scientifically deficient, but note well that scientists have said for years there is no "safe level" of lead in just about anything. Hair dye may not sound like such a big deal, but a lot of people use it, and you probably don't even know how many! So this is a big deal, and kudos to our FDA for doing the right thing.

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.

Action: concerning clean water, social media, and methane emissions.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell Gov. Wolf to do his damnedest to keep lead out of our drinking water. Finding lead in your drinking water isn't something that only happens to "those people" in Flint, Michigan -- Detroit's public schools just shut off their drinking water after they found lead in it, and our Government Accountability Office (or GAO) found over one-third of school districts that had tested for lead found elevated levels of lead in their water. And remember: there is no safe level of lead consumption -- any amount of lead can cause brain damage and can stunt a child's growth and/or brain development. This is one of those things we actually need to be zero-tolerance about, but too many of our leaders act like they can do nothing about it. But that sure in hell ain't the American can-do spirit in action. And it's well past time our leaders get right with the American can-do spirit.

Meanwhile, Facebook's Messenger Kids app isn't just an app that exposes our youngest children to all the problems older kids already have with social media, like depression and bad body image -- it's an app that apparently breaks the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act! Nobody could have predicted! Apparently Messenger Kids lets folks approve children's accounts without actually proving they're the parents and also lets Facebook disclose children's data to members of the "Facebook Family of Companies," both of which would contravene COPPA protections. Of course this is the sort of thing our President talks about as being "in the way of companies making money and trying to serve people," but when you hear such a thing in the context of protecting children's private information, I hope that kind of statement sounds like the lame excuse it absolutely is. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell Facebook to abandon its Messenger Kids app.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to continue to require strong methane leak rules, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Hey, weren't we just talking about those pesky regulations stunting our economy and forcing corporations to follow a lot of rules boo-hoo? Well, those "pesky" regulations forcing gas and oil drilling corporations to emit less methane not only protect us from pollution and climate change, they also keep usable energy from leaking into the atmosphere -- usable energy, I should add, that means royalties for the American people when it occurs on public lands. But our Administration just wants you to think it's thrown up its hands, what with the NHTSA's assessment that global temperatures would go up a staggering seven degrees by the end of the 21st century. But perhaps our Administration also needs to get right with the American can-do spirit.

Action: three alerts about pollution.

Flint isn't the only city in Michigan still suffering with poisoned water: now Detroit has lead and copper in its water at its public schools. And Detroit only began testing its public schools' water for lead this past year! Who knows how long its water has been tainted, or how many good Detroit kids got their brains permanently warped by lead? Hence Color of Change helps you tell Michigan's government to get the lead out of public school plumbing. Knowing Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a notorious right-winger who thinks corporations know everything and government knows nothing, he'll probably force Detroit to contract with Nestlé to get clean water or something, but the only way to really fix the problem is to replace the lead pipes out of public schools and then install filters to keep lead out. Why, that's the kind of infrastructure our President is supposedly all about! And it's about time our governments actually supported it, on their bosses, the people's, behalf.

Meanwhile, our Administration got its rocks off by shrinking the size of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, and now our Bureau of Land Management is opening up what used to be part of Bears Ears to uranium mining corporations, hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep uranium mining away from the Bears Ears area. Uranium mining not only pollutes nearby water tables, but leaves a lot of radioactive sludge everywhere it goes, and for what? So uranium mining CEOs can make even more money? So we can prop up a nuclear power industry that's never made money no matter how much corporate welfare we've thrown at it? So we can build nuclear weapons when we already have enough of those to destroy the world hundreds of times over? So we can stick it to the Obama Administration for letting Native American nations have some control over the Monument? None of this sounds very respectful of the traditions that sustain us as a civilization.

Finally, get your surprised face ready, as our Administration plans to delay implementation of the EPA's 2015 coal ash rule -- the one that would prevent coal ash, the waste from burning coal, from seeping into groundwater and thus putting good Americans at a higher risk of getting cancer -- so Environmental Action helps you tell the EPA to implement the damn rule already and start protecting people from this kind of pollution. Our Administration will be ready to respond that WE'RE PROTECTINGZ TEH COAL MINURZ!!!!!, but of course they're not -- not unless they're giving coal miners magic suits that protect them against carcinogens! No, they care only about other bosses, and not their real bosses, i.e., us. Our Administration has had several of its previous attempts to delay regulations struck down in court, but lawsuits take time to wind through courts, and in the meantime, people get hurt. If we act, we can stop that.

Action: concerning "free" trade, lead poisoning, and campaign finance disclosure.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk that any renegotiated NAFTA must put people before corporations, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. "Putting people before corporations" is a pretty simple principle, really, but right-wingers love to muck it up by suggesting that people can't live without corporations. And some tell you that having corporations around is much better than living in a feudal society, which I suppose it is, but of course the choice we actually face is not between "corporations controlling everything" and "literally being a serf," particularly when the first could bring back the second if we're not careful. These "free" trade deals sure do bring out the worst in Our Glorious Elites, who constantly use misdirection and absurd claims like "you can't fight globalism." But we're not fighting globalism so much as fighting evil -- and yes, evil is the word to describe trade pacts that nullify our laws and outsource our jobs.

Meanwhile, S. 3192 is named the CLEARR Act, which is unfortunate, not just because "clearr" isn't really a word, but because there's another CLEARR Act out there, an pro-bankster bill numbered H.R. 2133. S. 3192 isn't about banksters, but about getting lead out of our water -- the bill would help communities replace lead pipes, mandate our EPA to report results of lead tests online, and more stringently punish municipalities that don't get the lead out of their citizens' water. As you know, there is no "safe" level of lead poisoning, and lead poisoning causes irreversible brain damage in children, brain damage you may not be able to spot for yearss. And with lead pipes still being used all over America, all it takes is another unaccountable smartypants to decide to use cleaning chemicals that just so happen to corrode lead pipes to cause another Flint. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight lead poisoning by passing S. 3192.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6239/S. 3150, the DISCLOSE Act, then a consortium of good government groups (including Common Cause, Roots Action, and People for the American Way, among others) still helps you do that. Super PACs and dark money groups spent upwards of $1.4 billion in the 2016 election, and almost none of the groups that spent that money had to reveal their funders. And though we all fancy ourselves the kind of people who don't believe anything we see in campaign ads, we also know that a group with a lot of money can dominate the national conversation on TV, print, and radio. The DISCLOSE Act would actually shine some sunlight on the folks who are so determined to get their cronies elected that they'd spend millions of dollars doing it. As long as folks can spend millions without accountability, we're more likely to be stuck with bad leaders. And we, as Americans, deserve better than bad leaders.

Action: freedom of the press, payday lenders, and safe schools.

Amnesty International helps you demand that the Burmese government release journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. The government has charged them with violating Burma's Official Secrets law, after they met two police officers in a restaurant who handed them rolled-up papers. Sound like a set-up to you? And certainly such a set-up would have absolutely nothing to do with their ongoing investigation of the murder of ten Rohingya Muslims in western Burma! The government detained the two reporters for over three months before their first court hearing, and oh, the police said they presented a warrant to Wa Lone's family in order to search his house the day after the arrest, but the family says they didn't. Whom to believe? The family who has every reason to fall in line behind the government's official story, or the government that has every reason to lie? Their Rohingya massacre sure hasn't gotten them the best PR, after all.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, under former Director Richard Corddray, put together some regulations that do more to prevent payday lenders from trapping people in a downward spiral of debt. So naturally Congress is grateful that the CFPB actually did something to protect consumers, something Congress itself hasn't seen fit to do over the years. I kid, of course -- whether they find intolerable the mere existence of a single regulation that might actually help people or whether they're as mad as their President to undo anything that might have the name Obama on it, Congress has introduced H.J.Res. 122/S.J.Res. 56, another "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify the CFPB's payday loan rules. Why on Earth would you want to be pro-financial predator? Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support consumer protections by rejecting H.J.Res. 122/S.J.Res. 56.

Finally, on the heels of several local reports detailing the various health care risks Philadelphia children still face in their schools -- like asthma and lead poisoning -- Penn Environment helps you tell Philadelphia's Mayor and City Council to get rid of health care hazards in schools. You can still find lead in paint in Philadelphia public schools, and in some rooms lead dust levels were 150 times higher than federal standards allow. You can also find lead in outdated water fountains, asbestos in ceiling tiles, and mold and rat poop in classrooms, and these are not things we should tolerate in the Birthplace of Freedom, because they help cripple our future. Ultimately, as I've long said, Philadelphia property taxes are going to have to go up if we want to make our schools safe again. In the meantime, cleaning up the toxins and hiring more custodial workers sure won't hurt.

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

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

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

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

Action: cellphone privacy, harmful chemicals, and Social Security.

H.R. 1899/S. 823, the Protecting Data at the Border Act, would make law enforcement officials get a warrant when they want to search your cellphone at the border. The bill would also prevent our government from denying entry to you just because you won't let them search your cellphone without a warrant. You'd think all this would be common sense, but, sadly, it's not, not when your government is so anxious to take away your freedoms in the name of fear -- fear of something that's less likely to kill you than a bathtub accident, I feel compelled to mention. The bill has some bipartisan support -- its sponsors include Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX), of all people -- and though that doesn't necessarily bode well for its chances of passage, the way folks value their cellphones in contemporary America does. Even Chief Justice Roberts, no great friend of citizen privacy, wrote the majority opinion in Riley v. Califonia ruling that law enforcement has to get a warrant before looking at a cellphone, and he seemed quite in awe of the power of a cellphone, appropriately so, I think. So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone as we speak, on the bottom of this page) to call your Reps and Senators and urge them to support the Protecting Data at the Border Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you submit a public comment to the FDA as to whether it should allow cosmetic corporations to use lead acetate in their hair dyes. I'm guessing the word "lead" might have led you in a particular direction on that question, and it should have: lead acetate (a color additive in hair dyes) is a "possible carcinogen," per the Centers for Disease Control, and the CDC also strongly recommends that one keep children away from any hair dye that contains lead acetate. Scientists have also linked lead acetate to kidney troubles, reproductive toxicity, and nervous disorders, which last item makes sense, since lead acetate is also a neurotoxin. Also, both the European Union and Canada have banned lead acetate in hair dyes, and (this is important) corporations still sell hair dyes in these areas of the world, which you should remember when their PR hacks complain that YOU CANTZ MAKE TEH HAIR DYEZ WITHOUTZ TEH LEADZ!!!!!! The FDA actually seems inclined to agree with cosmetic corporations on this matter, but c'mon, America is the can-do country -- surely we can figure out a way to dye our hair and look nice without causing ourselves all kinds of health problems.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Reps and Senators to reject the Trump proposal to get rid of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security, then CREDO still helps you do that. (Alternately, you can urge them to do so while you have them on the phone about warrants for cellphone searches.) Mr. Trump has apparently floated getting rid of FICA taxes as a "middle-class tax cut," since FICA taxes only apply to the first $127,200 of one's income, but those taxes fund Social Security, which means they fund the retirement you worked for, paid into, fought for, and deserve -- and, not incidentally, they're currently funding the retirements of good Americans who've already worked for it, paid into it, fought for it, and deserve it. You know what would be a far better idea? Lifting the ceiling on payroll taxes entirely, so that all income gets taxed into the system. The various bills floating around Congress now don't actually do that -- they tax high-end income, to be sure, but they leave a "donut hole" of untaxed income in the low six figures. I'd prefer getting rid of that ceiling entirely, and if you feel the same, you may want to mention that to your Reps and Senators.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: EPA funding, consumer protection, and yet another "bathroom bill."

You've no doubt heard that President Trump's budget proposal would slash funding for just about anything good our government does, and now you can add "EPA funding" to that list, as Mr. Trump apparently plans to cut EPA staffing by a fifth in his first year and cutting overall funding by about a quarter. And his cuts include Energy Efficiency programs, Environmental Education and Environmental Justice grants, and other grants that help states and regions enforce environmental standards. Those poor, poor fossil fuel corporations, constantly under siege by the big, bad old EPA! That's the picture Donald Trump paints, and it's a ludicrous one -- fossil fuel corporations aren't in any danger of going down as long as our government hands out public lands for them to plunder, and Big Gummint EPA helps keep our air and our water clean on our behalf. And they're already understaffed and underfunded, so cutting these further would only put more lead in our water and more cancer-causing chemicals in our air. It'd also make certain CEOs richer, which I'm pretty sure is all Mr. Trump really cares about. So use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Reps and Senators, and tell them you don't want EPA funding cut, but expanded.

Continuing along this theme, PennPIRG helps you tell your Senators to reject any attempt to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It's appalling that you tell right-wingers about the $12 billion the CFPB has won back for consumers from banksters so far, or their rules restricting payday lenders' ability to trap folks in a cycle of debt forever, or their work exposing the Wells Fargo fake account scandal that Congressfolk from both parties condemned, and the only answer you get is TEH REGULASHUNZ ARE KILLINGZ TEH JOBZ!!!!! Why "job creation" should ever depend on a financial predator's ability to rip off as many consumers is possible is something the right should try to explain. But, as PennPIRG's email missive reminds us, "(b)eing able to save, invest and manage your money without fear of being ripped off isn't some wildly controversial idea -- it's a hallmark of a civilized society." Which must by why eminently uncivilized Republicans -- including their standard-bearer, Donald Trump -- are so hot to destroy it. But they don't get all the say around here.

Finally, today a Tennessee state House subcommittee plans to consider HB 888, yet another "bathroom bill" that would force transgendered students to use the restroom of their birth gender rather than the gender they're actually living. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee legislators to reject HB 888, and thus protect the rights of transgendered students. Why bother with these "bathroom bills"? It can't really be out of a sense that transgendered students will molest children, because no right-winger has ever backed up such an argument with anything other than fear and emotional manipulation. So if "protecting children" isn't the point of "bathroom bills," what is? Ginning up rage from right-wingers so they'll vote against their interests, that's what. And I bet most right-wingers don't even hate transgendered folks, but they support these bills because they hate liberals and would do almost anything to piss liberals off. But that's not really better, because their hate won't make liberals suffer, but it sure will make transgendered kids suffer.

Action: drug sentencing, water pollution, and the Grand Canyon.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell President Obama to release thousands of low-risk prisoners who committed non-violence offenses in time for the holidays. Hopefully, folks released would include folks still serving crack cocaine sentences under the sentencing regime before it was reformed in the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. The Fair Sentencing Act reduced the disparity between crack and powder cocaine minimum sentences from a ratio of 500 to 1 to a ratio of 17 to 1, but quite a few folks are still serving time under the old ratio, and why do that? The newly emboldened racist right will squeal about TEH THOUSANDZ OF PREDATURZ ON TEH STREETZ!!!! -- and they may not even hide behind coded language anymore! -- but good Americans don't gin up drama like that, only bad ones do. Speaking of which, we sure ain't getting any clemency under a President Trump, who declares his Presidency will be a "law and order" Presidency. Of course, Mr. Trump only thinks of black people when he thinks of "law and order," not the corporate criminals he's putting on his cabinet. But we'll still be around to remind everyone of what mercy really means.

Meanwhile, investigators have found lead and copper in the water at the Eastham Unit Prison in Lovelady, Texas, and prisoners there have testified to the water's "sulfur-like smell," "offensive taste," and "gritty residue." The prison administration apparently knows about the problem, as it has provided its guards with clean water, but not their prisoners. I can already hear the Trump votaries rolling their eyes and saying so what? They're prisoners! But as civilized people, we keep the water clean for prisoners as much we do as for everyone else -- I mean, how can you rehabilitate prisoners if you're poisoning them at the same time? And why do we heap punishment after punishment upon prisoners when their sentences and prison rules (which surely do not say "poison the prisoners' water") already detail their punishment? Also, too, consider the quality of mercy, a matter Jesus said more about than he ever said about gay marriage. Roots Action helps you tell the U.S. Justice Department and the Centers for Disease Control to investigate the water pollution at the Eastham Unit Prison.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to declare a national monument around the Grand Canyon National Park and thus protect it for future generations, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. You know why this is particularly urgent: partly because corporations want to get their grubby mitts on the uranium in the area, and they don't care if it pollutes the Colorado River or not, though the river provides drinking water to seven states -- but mainly because the Grand Canyon is a national treasure, part of that great American heritage we ought to be passing on to future generations, rather than digging into so we can get a little energy today for nuclear power plants that can hardly sustain themselves without massive welfare handouts from our government in the first place! No, really, they can't -- and we can't compare their reliance on government handouts to wind power tax credits, since a) wind power is a lot younger and b) fossil fuel corporations spend all their time trying to crush wind power, instead of embrace it.

Action: battling lead poisoning, undeclared wars, and racism.

Flint, MI isn't the only city suffering from lead in its drinking water -- Philadelphia suffers from it, too, at twice the national average according to recent reporting from our two local newspapers. Thus the Philadelphia City Council is this week contemplating legislation that would reduce the lead in our water, and PennEnvironment helps you tell the City Council to support these bills and thus protect our clean drinking water. These bills would, if passed, improve testing and (of course!) remediation of lead problems at Philadelphia's public schools, and would require that day care centers get lead-free certification before licensing; they would dramatically improve matters for Philadelphia's children, who stand to lose the most from lead poisoning, because their brains are still developing. Our federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has, of course, been finalizing regulations that would help fight lead poisoning nationally, but the incoming President has an avowed hostility to federal regulations, particularly the ones that protect our air and water, it seems. The good news? Donald Trump ain't the boss of us, particularly at the local level, and we can still do a lot to make things better.

Speaking of The Donald, he and his foreign policy advisors have said they want to avoid wars that don't actually advance the fight against ISIS and al-Qaeda, and though I'd respond that no war advances that fight -- that, in fact, the wars initiated by George W. Bush that empowered al-Qaeda and created ISIS -- I'm not averse to seizing an opportunity to stop another war. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn to oppose our continued involvement in Saudi Arabia's bombing of Yemen. Bombing Yemen has stoked the growth of al-Qaeda and ISIS there, mainly by bombing the crap out of the Houthi rebels who despise al-Qaeda and ISIS. And, of course, our involvement in assisting Saudi Arabia's little Yemen adventure (which includes our drone fighters, naturally) has not been approved by Congress, unless you read the 2001 AUMF a lot more liberally than it's intended to be read -- and, of course, if you regard the AUMF as a legal document granting the President actual authority to make war, which I don't. No, I'm such a stickler I want Congress to declare war, per our Constitution, and the Founders wanted it that way precisely so we'd fight fewer wars and get less entangled in foreign affairs.

Finally, both CREDO and People for the American Way help you tell Senate Democrats (there are still 48 of them!) to block Sen. Jeff Sessions's confirmation as Attorney General. If Donald Trump was trying to convince you he deserved a "chance" to prove he wasn't the virulent racist he was when he ran for President, tapping Mr. Sessions to be our next Attorney General was the wrong move. We could tabulate the many, many issues that came up back in the mid-1980s when President Reagan nominated him to a federal judgeship -- issues including his "joke" about thinking the KKK were OKK until he learned they smoked pot or his statement that the NAACP were "Communist" and "un-American," statements with which he "meant no harm" -- but he's also established a record, as both U.S. Attorney and Senator, of anti-immigrant extremism, harassment of black activists, and (lest we forget!) selling out to big banksters and corporate power (with the exception of his opposition to the 2008 bailout). All of these are, frankly, more pertinent to his nomination as Attorney General, really. To think we were all fretting that Chris Christie or Rudy Giuliani would get the job! Not that either man is a peach, but Jeff Sessions would put civil rights law enforcement in for a world of hurt. Unless we stand up, that is.

Around the table: includes part 434 of "why the Trump infrastructure plan sucks."

North Dakota law enforcement personnel attack Standing Rock protestors with rubber bullets, water hoses, percussion grenades, and tear gas, injuring over 160 people and sending seven of these to the hospital. Protestors were attempting to remove two burned-out trucks police had put up as a barricade, forcing good North Dakotans to take a 20-mile detour; police, of course, justified the use of water hoses by saying the protestors were setting fires, though the proper term might be building fires, as in "to keep warm" or "make warm drinks," temperatures being well below freezing that night. (That means, yes, they used water hoses against protestors on a freezing night. Sad!)

The Institute for Southern Studies provides a Harper's Index-style list of voting rights problems during the 2016 election. The Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder, of course, opened the floodgates for all kinds of crap, not least of which is the more than 860 polling places closed this year in states that used to have to pre-clear their voting law changes with the DOJ. What we have left, at this moment, is shame -- not for the folks who voted for Mr. Trump, necessarily, but certainly for the politicians who went to great lengths to silence the "wrong" kind of people at the ballot box and did more to enable this monster than even the "liberal" media did.

Michigan state officials ask federal court to block a federal court order to keep delivering bottled water to the beleaguered residents of Flint. Apparently Michigan feels that setting up emergency water distribution centers that not everyone can get to (particularly the elderly) is enough, and that actually delivering clean water to residents is too hard. It sure was easy enough to put lead in their water. And what happened to you-break-it-you-fix-it?

Paul Krugman at the New York Times also finds the Trump infrastructure plan wanting. "If you want to build infrastructure, build infrastructure," he says. "It’s hard to see any reason for a roundabout, indirect method that would offer a few people extremely sweet deals, and would therefore provide both the means and the motive for large-scale corruption. Or maybe I should say, it’s hard to see any reason for this scheme unless the inevitable corruption is a feature, not a bug." Surely, he reminds us, our government can borrow as easily as any private investor can, interest rates being (still) so incredibly low -- but of course Mr. Trump's fellow Republicans, who would squeal SOCIALISM!!!! at such a thing, will eat up the Trump plan, regardless of what they might tell you now.

Finally, from the "Party like it's 1999!" file: Sen. John McCain, famously tortured by the Viet Cong during his time as a POW, says Mr. Trump won't be able to torture people as President because "it’s specifically, in law, now prohibited" and ""a whole bunch of us that would have them in court in a New York minute" if they tried and "no judge in America" would side with them. Those are some big words there; now let's see action.

Around the table: which Presidential candidate has more "secret voters"? And other questions.

This time last week I said I found arguments about "secret Donald Trump voters" more persuasive than other observers have, but the incomparable Digby lets us know that Hillary Clinton may actually be more likely to have "secret voters" -- namely, women who live in fairly right-leaning households whose husbands are all voting for Mr. Trump and who have to "maintain their standing in their conservative communities." That's at least as persuasive as any Trump "secret voter" argument, I'll admit, but I still don't agree that the "secret voter" argument stands at odd with "the swashbuckling, politically incorrect, in-your-face ethos of the Trump movement" -- as I said, a lot of folks are with Trump precisely because he says the things they can't, and presumably don't, and I'll bet some of them are not only married to liberals, but live in liberal communities.

Julia Lurie at Wired tells the story of "How One Company Contaminated Pittsburgh’s Drinking Water" -- with lead, that is. Long story short: Pittsburgh's public water utility was doing a bad job, so the city turned to a private corporation to help fix their water infrastructure -- and wound up having safety and water quality managers laid off and replaced one corrosion control chemical with another, cheaper one that, well, didn't work. The Paris-based corporation "consulting" with the city perpetrated other shenanigans as well; the lesson seems to be that we have to watch our public agencies a lot more closely or we'll wind up with public-private partnerships (or totally privatized agencies!) that are even worse.

And now, from the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: the Obama Administration is telling federal agencies involved in counterterrorism to get involved in anti-bullying initiatives at local and state levels. Because they'd be so good at that! They're likely to tell us (though they seem unwilling to answer questions from journalists about it at present) that they can find future terrorists in today's bullies, which is, as usual, totally the wrong way to go about pre-empting terrorism. The best way to pre-empt terrorism? Stop trying to steal things that belong to other people, like oil.

The Trans-Pacific "Partnership" is wildly unpopular, thanks to popular pressure, but that doesn't prevent the "liberal" media from offering up things like this fluff interview with Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, in which she summarizes all the lame arguments favoring the TPP. America will lose face with the rest of the world if we don't follow through, the TPP will help fight violent extremism, China booga-booga, and by the way Ms. Pritzker doesn't really understand why people are so "anxious." Neither does the article's writer, who never asks about, you know, the investor-state tribunals that would nullify our laws.

Jean Trounstine at TruthOut introduces us to some family members of crime victims who work toward rehabilitation of criminals rather than punishment. I'm not anti-punishment, actually, but most politicians take it way too far, and not, I suspect, out of a sincere interest in justice, but out of a base desire to stoke rage in their supporters. And if the vast majority of crime victims say treatment and crime prevention are more important than punishment, can't the rest of us conjure up some mercy, too? Of course we can. (As an aside, I always like to see Mural Arts Philadelphia get press for its good works.)

Finally, Trump voter Terri Rote faces felony charges of voter fraud in Iowa after trying to vote twice, fearing her first vote for Mr. Trump would be changed because "(t)he polls are rigged." I wonder where she might have heard that? Of course, if we asked Ms. Rote if she was a good, law-abiding person, she'd say yes, and recent events notwithstanding we probably wouldn't doubt it. But this is what right-wingers have been doing to good Americans since time immemorial: convince them to do bad things because they "have to." Come to think of it, the only way to get a good person to do a bad thing is to make them think they have to.

Around the table: Trump supporters "fear" revolt, and other follies.

Various Trump supporters say they fear people will revolt if Mr. Trump loses the Presidential election. Other people, of course. It's not just the hostage-taking -- vote for the candidate I want, or the country gets it! -- or even the absurd fear that yet another center-right Democratic Presidency will bring about "socialism," it's the damn whining. When George W. Bush got re-elected, I didn't go into a "depression." I went to work.

EPA plans to overhaul regulations concerning lead in drinking water, which could lead to "proactive replacement of lead water pipes" and "beefing up mandates for corrosion control technology," among other things. And though you'll have less lead in your water, and thus less brain damage in your children, right-wing whiners will still call all of this "job terrorism," as if good health care is even possible without clean water.

A three-week strike of dining hall workers at Harvard University ends with workers winning increased salary and a five-year reprieve from health care copay hikes. Well-done, Harvard workers -- and well-timed, as classes didn't start that long ago. And if you think $35,000 a year is a lot to pay someone who washes dishes and tends the salad bar, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) consider that Harvard currently holds assets of over $35 billion.

A New York Times writer wonders if Republicans, with their likely reduced majorities in Congress, will try to get things done in an effort to "get past" Trump or if they'll double down on their obstruction of any Clinton agenda. Gosh, what about past Republican behavior would lead us to contemplate that they'll "dig in" against Democrats? You know, besides all of their past behavior?

In a related note, Sen. Ted Cruz suggests that the Republican blockade of that last Supreme Court seat could go on for a long, long while -- after all, we had fewer than 9 Supreme Court justices just 70 years ago! So, like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, first it was "the people need to have a voice" in the next Supreme Court nomination by electing a new President, and now it's nobody getting a voice but Republicans. Who'da thunk it?

Finally, filmmaker Michael Moore says that Trump voters are "legal terrorists." His subsequent explanation of a Trump voter's motivation for "blowing up the system" is apt, but I didn't like being called a "terrorist" for opposing the Iraq war, so why would I like it when someone calls Trump voters terrorists? And I can't shake the feeling he put it like that just to get heard above the din. But that's the post-modern way to get heard, and we must resist that.

Action: clean water, and internet privacy.

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

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

Around the table: mostly cataloguing fraud, betrayal, and stupidity.

Uh oh: an EPA inspector general says the agency could have intervened in the Flint water emergency seven months before they did. I'd hate the think the EPA delayed action out of a belief that the state of Michigan should be given time to fix the problem in their own way -- or even out of a belief that Michigan broke it, so they should fix it. Sometimes, our federal government has to jump in and take control -- you know, like when kids have lead in their drinking water.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism describes how Hillary Clinton might gut Social Security. Long story short: Mrs. Clinton's plan would force employee contributions into "mandatory retirement accounts," run largely by hedge fund managers and other banksters, with workers getting little or no say over how their funds are "managed." Spoiler alert: they'd be "managed" into bankster coffers. Donald Trump could do worse than rant and rave about such a plan in the time left to him. And we would do worse if we didn't fight such a plan as hard as we fought Mr. Bush's privatization plan.

I tend to avoid articles with titles like "October 2016: The Month Political Journalism Died," and not merely out of a sense that entropy increases, but this article is a pretty damning indictment of our "liberal" media's Presidential debate coverage. That they prefer the "fatuous" over the substantive you already knew, but you may not know that it was not always thus: the late October 1980 Carter/Reagan debate, relatively substantive and conducted largely by print journalists, was the highest-rated Presidential debate ever, until the three most recent "pie fights."

A ProPublica analysis finds that some two-thirds of New York City landlords who have received tax breaks under a city rent stabilization program haven't even formally applied for the program and haven't registered specific apartments for stabilized rent -- meaning they can collect tax breaks while raising rent at will, which is kind of the opposite of how the program's supposed to work. So when right-wingers refuse to hire more workers to process the landlords' applications, we can accuse them of being objectively pro-fraud, right? (As an aside, I'd be a schmuck to think this results from mere "bureaucratic incompetence" -- what did we learn from George W. Bush, if not that incompetence always happens for a reason?)

Now here's a surprise: former Fox News punditoid Gretchen Carlson will testify before Congress against forced arbitration clauses in employment contracts. Seems Fox News tried to force her sexual harassment claim against Roger Ailes into arbitration, where she'd have had much less of a chance of success. Right-wingers will call her traitor, no doubt, but good liberals shouldn't demean her efforts against forced arbitration (or sexual harassment, for that matter) out of a sense that she only cares because they happened to her. We don't learn everything through thought experiment, after all; we learn a lot because things happen to us, and that's how it should be.

Finally, a Western Pennsylvania city council Vice President circulates a fake meme on Facebook suggesting that only Democrats will be able to vote online on Election Day, when in fact no one in America can vote online as of yet. Naturally he takes none of the blame for what happened afterward, saying it was "clearly a joke." You know what would have made it "clearly a joke"? If it was clearly funny, which it clearly wasn't.

Action: lead exposure, and copyright.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed updating the Lead Safe Housing Rule (for the first time in 17 years), and is now taking public comments on Sierra Club helps you tell the Department of Housing and Urban Development to issue the most vigorous new Lead Safe Housing Rule possible. HUD's proposal would reduce the allowable level of lead in publicly-assisted homes and apartments to the level recommended by the Centers for Disease Control (or CDC), and would automatically reduce that level further if the CDC recommended doing so. All this is important, since there is no safe level of lead, and since lead causes (among other things) behavior and learning problems in children. Our government banned lead paint in 1978, of course, but that doesn't mean lead paint still doesn't lurk in a lot of old houses -- think of areas like basements, generally the last to be repainted. (Remember: if you've already left a public comment about the Lead Safe Housing Rule -- at regulations.gov, for example -- don't sign this petition as well. Doing that muddies the data.)

Meanwhile, Section 1201 of the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 criminalizes the breaking or circumventing of digital locks, so as to prevent people from pirating VHS tapes and DVDs. Trouble with that is that these digital locks have expanded well beyond these media -- they now show up in appliances that use software, such as cellphones and refrigerators, and these locks make it a lot harder to tinker with them, repair them, or improve them. They also make it harder for security researchers to test whether or not hackers can break into them, which is something you'd want to know about before it happened. But now the U.S. Copyright Office is taking public comments on whether it should recommend to Congress that it create permanent exemptions to DMCA Section 1201 -- exemptions that could include smartphones, computer software, and technologies that assist disabled folks. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell the Copyright Office that copyright law shouldn't "punish research and repair," as EFF puts it (and it's a good way of putting it).

Around the table: taxes, "entitlements," "discrimination," evil, greed, and cowardice.

Sam Pizzigati at Inequality.org argues that we ought to put a 30 percent minimum tax rate for the wealthy in place -- but also urges us "not" to "stop there," since our wealthiest Americans used to pay much higher rates. You know those teabaggers who are always going around saying I just wish this could be the country I grew up in? Remind them that they grew up in an America that taxed millionaire income at 91% and didn't hand out corporate welfare like it was candy -- and that's how we grew the greatest middle class in history.

Dean Baker at TruthOut reminds us that "debt and entitlements" was one of the topics at last night's third and thankfully final Presidential debate, and that this terminology herds people into agreeing to cut Social Security and Medicare when they otherwise wouldn't. Why not shore up Social Security and Medicare by taxing the rich a lot harder? The rich don't want you to ask that question, hence their talk of "entitlements," as if you haven't paid into Social Security and Medicare all your life, or as if you don't deserve it. And also, why not "debt and military spending," or "debt and pharmaceutical patents"?

Trump advisor compares the Department of Labor's new "fiduciary standard" -- which mandates that a pension fund's financial advisors must put their clients' interests ahead of their own -- is "about like the Dred Scott decision." Lest you think he was merely saying that the DOL's standard is dumb like the Dred Scott decision was dumb, he went out of his way to say the DOL's standard was discriminatory like the Dred Scott decision was discriminatory -- discriminatory against bad financial advisors, I guess. And they say liberals are frail and weak?

Wisconsin Gov./Satan Incarnate Scott Walker solicited $750,000 in campaign contributions from a now-deceased businessman who used to manufacture lead-based paint -- right before lawmakers put a four-word change into a budget bill nullifying lawsuits against the businessman's corporation and other lead-paint makers. And Mr. Walker's winged monkeys, naturally, wonder why this is a big deal, since lead paint has been illegal since 1978. As thinking people know, however, the fact that no one has made lead paint for nearly 40 years doesn't mean all the lead paint is gone, nor does it mean lead paint manufacturers never harmed anyone before it was outlawed (and it certainly doesn't mean they didn't know what they were doing, since they knew by the 1920s that lead was toxic). The only good news? Federal and state courts declared the legislative rider nullifying the lawsuits to be unconstitutional. I do not presume that these courts also ruled it to be evil, but I will.

VoteVets puts out ad scorching Pat Toomey for serving on the board of a now-unaccredited for-profit school, and "try(ing) to turn our military benefits into his financial gain." In a close race like the one Mr. Toomey's in, an ad like this could be the difference -- a lot of good Pennsylvanians know someone who served our country and then got caught in the downward spiral of the for-profit college debt trap. (As an aside, Mr. Toomey's ad claiming that he's "independent" and would stand up to the bad ideas of "any" President should get a fairly easy response listing all the bad ideas Mr. Toomey didn't stand up to when he was in the House and George W. Bush was President. But I fear Katie McGinty's focus-grouped her way out of that one.)

Finally, a North Dakota District Judge dismisses rioting charges against Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman -- but "No Thanks to Corporate Media," notes Jim Naureckas at FAIR. A few "liberal" media journalists did cover it, but they're names you'll recognize -- Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News, Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times, and, of course, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone -- and we didn't hear very much about it from our papers of record in New York and Washington. As an aside, I'd love to have seen the look on Judge Grinsteiner's face when he dismissed the charge.

Action: "free" trade, immigrant veterans, and lead poisoning.

A few dozen organizations have coordinated to make today "TPP Call-In Day" -- as in, call your Reps and Senators to tell them you don't want them to pass the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," a "free" trade deal the Obama Administration is still pushing. Americans across the ideological spectrum abhor the "free" trade deal that will outsource more American jobs and allow corporations unprecedented power to nullify American laws, via the "investor-state tribunal," through which corporations could allege that laws protecting air and water and workers cost them money, and thus exact a bailout from the American people. Most of our Congressfolk are actually talking a good game about this -- I was floored to hear from our state's junior Senator that he actually opposed it, because I'm old enough to remember when there wasn't a "free" trade deal Pat Toomey didn't like. But fact is, they're only talking a good game, and there's still plenty of time for them to pull a gotcha on the American people. So use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page -- or use this toll-free phone number, 888-659-7351 -- and call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject the TPP.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5695, the Veterans Visa and Protection Act, would establish a visa program for non-citizen military veterans, so that those veterans will ultimately be able to naturalize as American citizens -- and so our government can stop deporting them. It's one thing to come to America to make a better life for yourself, but it's another thing entirely to come to America and risk your life to defend our country. A lot of these veterans, unfortunately, think that military service automatically confers citizenship, but it doesn't -- and our government hasn't always been clear about what a non-citizen veteran needs to do to become a citizen (and, in less sunny moments, I suspect our government deports non-citizen veterans because they won't be able to get health benefits once they're deported). Now I bet some folks would hear about H.R. 5695 and worry that a terrorist will use a veteran visa program to infiltrate our country and cause mayhem, but becoming a soldier to accomplish that? That sure is a long game. The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Veterans Visa and Protection Act.

Finally, the lead crisis in Flint, MI may have passed from the nightly news, but it's still a crisis for the good people of Flint -- the state of Michigan, as far as I can tell, has handed out water-testing kits and water bottles, and that's what they're bragging about, and Congress has done even less than that, although they have plenty of options, including funding relief, funding childhood lead prevention programs, establishing water testing programs at schools and child care centers, and reauthorizing the Drinking Water Safe Revolving Fund. Some Congressfolk will attempt to exact spending cuts elsewhere (and not in oil corporation subsidies, for example!) in exchange for these necessary programs. But when half a million children have lead in their blood, and any amount of lead causes brain damage, then treating emergencies like the Flint water crisis as opportunities to make pet spending cuts elsewhere is unconscionably cruel, and unworthy of civilized people. The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to do right by the folks in Flint, and stop lead poisoning in their drinking water.

Around the table: how vote suppression and "free" trade are *even worse* than you thought, and other hard lessons.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, describes "The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters." Yes, it's the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a.k.a. Crosscheck -- the database that pretends to identify "voters who've voted in multiple races across state lines" by matching fairly common names that just so happen to belong to predominantly black folk and folks of color. Plus, the database matches voters without checking their full Social Security numbers -- or, apparently, their middle names. Still not convinced? Out of over 7 million suspects flagged by the database, how many folks have actually faced voter fraud charges? Four. So, yes, Crosscheck is partisan and racist.

Chris Hamby at Buzzfeed reveals "The Court That Rules the World" -- and, spoiler alert, it's the "investor-state tribunal" created by "free" trade agreements. You won't just learn about the less-noxious origins of ISDS, and about corruption in Egypt and lead-laced water in El Salvador -- you'll also learn about "the system’s usefulness as a shield for the criminal and the corrupt," which "has remained virtually unknown." The ISDS virtually ended any attempts by good Egyptians and Salvadorians to clean up their countries; think that won't happen here if the TPP passes? (Of course, it already has -- Congress rushed to repeal country-of-origin labeling laws for meat late last year when the WTO ruled that such laws violated "free" trade deals.)

Louisiana 1st Circuit Court of Appeals panel rules that a Terrebone Parish sheriff violated the Constitutional rights of a blogger when he raided his house. The blogger, of course, had accused the sheriff and several other local officials of corruption. Turns out the alleged "defamation" perpetrated by the blogger wasn't a criminal offense -- because public officials can't be "defamed" in that manner -- and thus any search warrant procured by the sheriff lacked probable cause. The sheriff, at one point over the last month, referred to the accusations against him as "unsatisfactory." That's a pretty terrible way of saying people are wrongly accusing you. It's like he got lost in a thesaurus.

Washington Post writer Kent Babb chronicles the below-poverty-level life of minor league baseball players. If you're tempted to think that's an OK price to pay so you can one day get to The Show -- which plenty of poor minor league ballplayers also think! -- remember how few of them ever make it to the majors. And n.b. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred using the exact same excuse all corporate leaders use whenever they want to argue against the minimum wage: that "additional regulation could ultimately lead to smaller minor league rosters or fewer teams." You'll recognize this, of course, as a hostage situation: don't make me do the right thing, Mr. Manfred's really saying, or these jobs'll get it! But I think he's wrong -- I don't see major league ball clubs taking kindly to the suggestion that they can do without their rookie league or high A farm clubs.

Finally, Harry Boyte at Moyers and Company reminds us that "Consumer Culture is Killing Citizenship." Long story short: we care less about each other and more (or perhaps only) about ourselves. Long story somewhat longer: our commercialized culture, where city folks can see some 5,000 ads daily and children see 40,000 ads every year, stops us from being "makers of democratic society" and makes us instead into people who "brand() and sell() ourselves" and constantly ask "what's in it for me?" Will the Trump campaign, which "embod(ies) the logic of a culture where differences between salesmanship and leadership disappear," be America's wake-up call? Maybe, maybe not -- but we'll be out there banging our saucepan.

Action: lead poisoning, elephant endangerment, and poultry processing workers.

H.R. 4879/S. 2776, the TEST for Lead Act, would require public schools to test their water -- water used for drinking, washing, or food prep -- for lead contamination; schools built before 1996 would have to test for lead at least twice a year, while schools built after that would have to test for lead once. You will not be surprised to learn that the home base for both House and Senate sponsors of the TEST for Lead Act (Rep. Payne and Sen. Booker, both Democrats of New Jersey) is the city of Newark, where some 30 K-12 schools have been cited by both city and state officials as contaminated sites, most if not all of them containing high levels of lead. This, when any level of lead causes brain damage which kids aren't just going to be able to shake off. Hence Jamani Montague has created a petition at DIY Roots Action which helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the TEST for Lead Act, and thus protect children's health. Lead contamination in water has been in the news for months on end, thanks to the ongoing (and entirely avoidable!) ordeal in Flint, MI, but our leaders have done nothing about it; passing the TEST for Lead Act would, at least, improve upon that sorry record.

Meanwhile, the European Union has lately signaled its opposition to a global ban on ivory trading, despite the fact that elephants are in danger of disappearing from Africa within a quarter-century, at the rate they're being killed for their tusks. That rate, by the way, is "about every 15 minutes," or almost 100 per day -- so no wonder Tanzania and Mozambique, for example, have lost more than half of their elephants just since 2009. World leaders will go to the Convention on International Trade in International Species (or CITES) conference in Johannesburg this fall to discuss what, exactly, should be done. A better question might be: what, exactly, does ivory do? Does it power the world's electric grid? Does it feed the world's hungry? And even if it did those things, we would still, as a civilization, be obligated to manage such resources in a way that doesn't lead to an animal's extinction, certainly out of self-interest if nothing else. But killing all the world's elephants for trinkets, whether trinkets of religious significance or not, is unconscionable. Hence Avaaz helps you tell world leaders to help the plight of elephants worldwide by giving them the most vigorous legal protections available to them, including a ban on the global trade of ivory.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big ag corporations to treat their poultry processing workers with significantly more respect and dignity, then Add Up still helps you do that. Previous action alerts have helped you tell the Department of Labor to enforce fair labor standards for workers at these corporations, but it's time to go to the corporations themselves, and let them know that the Big Stick of Bad PR can be inflicted upon them. These corporations deny workers breaks to the point that workers have told Oxfam that they drink less water (never a good idea when you're doing hard work!) and even worn diapers to work so they don't lose their jobs. Should anyone be wearing adult diapers to work, if they don't actually need them? And if we don't stamp this meanness out right quick, any of us could very well find ourselves denied bathroom breaks at our jobs. It's not like working in a poultry processing plant is easy, you know -- workers denied breaks will sooner or later become very frustrated workers, and they may even take out their frustrations on the animals they're working on, which is another thing we don't tolerate as a civilized society.

Action: police brutality, and clean water.

Moms Rising helps you tell the Obama Administration to take immediate steps to curb police brutality. They present a long list of reforms we've fought for here at various times, including reforms that directly address the Sterling and Castile killings (like more robust data collection on police brutality) and reforms that go deeper into structural issues with police departments (like limits on asset seizure and transfer of military equipment to police). If you're thinking that presenting this list of demands ensures that some of the demands will get lost, just remember that every time you utter a demand, you get closer to realizing it. And if you're wondering how police are ever going to defend themselves if we don't give them a wide berth to shoot black and brown people dead, do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) remember that our legal system presumes everyone innocent until proven guilty -- which is why I don't pass along action alerts demanding convictions or charges for the officers involved, though I will pass along action alerts demanding investigations. If a guy dies after being pulled over for a broken taillight, I can think of no good reason to oppose investigating further -- though I can think of plenty of bad ones.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5313, the WATER Act, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. Our federal government has reduced spending on water infrastructure by some 75% over the last 40 years, which has shifted a lot of responsibility for such spending on the states -- which may please those who have a certain philosophical bent, but which does not, presumably, please the good citizens of Flint, MI, whose children now have permanent brain damage thanks to corroded lead pipes resulting from the bold thinking of an unelected "emergency manager." Also, for those of a certain philosophical bent, abdicating responsibility at the federal level doesn't just "leave matters to the states" -- it also leaves matters to corporations, who are hastening to privatize water systems across America as we speak. If it's hard enough to get state and federal officials to redress grievances; how hard will it be to get a corporation, which only owes its shareholders, to redress grievances? The WATER Act -- by funding water infrastructure spending with revenue collected by closing corporate tax loopholes, which I call a win-win -- will begin to break down this dystopia, so let's get to it.

Action: Puerto Rico, clean water, and public parks.

H.R. 5278, the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act -- yes, it spells PROMESA -- would essentially replace their democratically-elected government with a "control board" making the island's fiscal decisions. That's right, an unelected, antidemocratic "board" would decide matters of taxing and spending on the island, and this board would put the "needs" of creditors ahead of the needs of good Puerto Ricans by hiking taxes on working people, slashing government spending, and privatizing the island's public assets. We know these things will happen because the bill clearly states that the nation's crushing debt should be restructured only "in the best interests of creditors." H.R. 5278 would also let Puerto Rico's Governor unilaterally slash the island's minimum wage, and exempt the island from the Department of Labor's new overtime rules. It's as if Congress saw what Our Glorious Elites have been doing to Greece for years and got jealous, and demanded that they have someone to oppress so they, too, could insulate banksters from the consequences of all the bad loans they've made over the years. We'd better stop this insanity, or it'll become the norm all over the planet in the coming years, so Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell Congress to reject the PROMESA Act.

Meanwhile, Rep. Conyers (D-MI) has introduced H.R. 5313, the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity, and Reliability Act, or WATER Act. The WATER Act would establish a trust fund, spending up to $34.8 billion annually, on clean water and safe drinking water projects, most of them related to rebuilding pipes and plants. We saw what happened in Flint -- when an unelected "emergency manager" forced Flint to draw its drinking water from the polluted Flint River, and put chemicals in the river to clean the water that wound up corroding Flint's lead pipes -- and, brain damage from lead exposure being irreversible, we don't want that to happen again. And if we spend actual tax dollars upgrading our pipes, we can ensure it doesn't happen again. I suppose the right wing's response to all of that is to let the market decide! -- which would, I suppose, tacitly admit that Michigan's government caused this mess through their greed and incompetence. But the "market" should not decide whether kids suffer brain damage through lead exposure in their drinking water -- that is not a matter for markets, but for morals, and morality demands that we protect citizens of any age from the kinds of harm that curtail their freedoms. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the WATER Act.

Finally, in a spasm of technocratic autoerotica, the National Parks Service has proposed drastically expanding corporate sponsorship of national parks. Because, you know, the money just isn't there like it used to be! And why isn't it there like it used to be? Because used to be we taxed millionaire income at 91%, not 39.6%, and we didn't let corporations write all kinds of bogus "research and development" tax breaks into our laws. In some ways, you know, the old days really were better. But this is what happens when we fail in our duty to make sure the rich don't run roughshod over the rest of us -- not just corporate logos on tour buses, not just public employees finding their advancement tied to their corporate fundraising, not just (God forbid!) corporations getting to attach their name to the Grand Canyon like the parasites they are, but ultimately the complete subversion of public interests (preserving unique natural spaces) to private ones (making money), until corporations one day successfully expand the definition of "conservation" to include all kinds of things that plainly aren't conservation, like gas drilling. But you can throw a wrench into all these horrible works by telling the National Parks Service to keep our national parks unspoiled by corporate greed, as Sum of Us helps you do.

Action: GMO labeling, and lead poisoning.

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

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

Action: lead standards, payday lenders, and sentencing reform.

H.R. 4694/S. 2631, the Lead-Safe Housing for Kids Act, would strengthen federal standards for lead-contaminated dust or soil. This is a big deal, because a lot of federal housing still has lead paint in it, even though we've known for decades that any amount of lead a child takes in causes brain damage, and our regulations haven't kept up with the science. The Lead-Safe Housing for Kids Act would add an "elevated blood lead level" standard to the Residential Lead-Based Paint Hazard Reduction Act of 1992, and would update the Lead-Based Paint Poisoning Prevention Act to require HUD to conduct a proper lead paint risk assessment before letting a family with a child under 6 into federally-supported housing -- and a "visual inspection" of a property won't be assessment enough. And the bill would also end the exemption that "zero-bedroom housing" currently gets from lead paint standards. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Lead-Safe Housing for Kids Act, and thus also support tougher lead-paint standards and healthier children.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is, as we speak, putting the finishing touches on rules that would limit the damage payday lenders could do to debtors -- which, as we know, generally involves gigantic fees and automatic loan roll-overs that keep working families in debt. Naturally, the payday lending industry is doing its damndest to fight new rules concerning payday and car title loans, among others, but really, this should be easy -- it's not often that our government helps good Americans defend themselves from unscrupulous lenders who aim to put them in a cycle of debt they can only escape with extreme difficulty. And any Congressdope who defends payday lenders (cough Debbie Wasserman-Schultz cough) should crumble before negative attack ads excoriating them as, oh, I don't know, objectively pro-greed. Or objectively pro-debt. Or objectively pro-financial predator. Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the CFPB to enact the most vigorous possible curbs to payday lending abuses.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, then the Friends Committee on National Legislation still helps you do that. (Note: you'll be telling your House Rep to support two bills that, taken together, do basically all the same things that the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act would do.) Why do I keep tugging your elbow about a bill that flatly doesn't do everything we'd like a sentencing reform bill to do? Because the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act does represent progress -- it does provide relief from the mandatory minimums that make our judges less effective, that treat low-level drug offenders as if they're, oh, I don't know, banksters or something. And what did we learn from Nixon Administration official John Ehrlichmann? That the "war on drugs" has always been a lie, that our government knew it was a lie, and that our government invented it to discredit anti-war and civil rights protestors. So of course we should encourage our government to move in a more positive direction.

Action: in which we fight at least two kinds of poisoning.

Moms Rising helps you tell our Presidential candidates to stop all the insults, shouting, and bullying already. Moms Rising's latest email missive reads: "my son would be sent to the principal's office if he shouted, insulted, bullied and interrupted his classmates the way we've seen in some of the Presidential debates. Yes, that's right, the behavior of some candidates for the highest office in our land is setting a bad example for an eight year old." And we lose sight of this -- that we're not just creating a culture for ourselves, but for our posterity as well, and civility is an essential tool to help us carry our past with us into our future. You may well say a sick, immoral, and decadent culture that celebrates gluttonous sensationalism created Trumpcruzrubioetal, but we have no hope of changing that if we don't speak out about it. And I'll certainly brook no fashionably post-modern pish-posh about how we're "naive" to expect our Presidential candidates to be role models. If you're an American, you're a role model -- whether you want to be or not.

Meanwhile, Color of Change helps you tell the Department of Housing and Urban Development to regulate lead in public housing. You might think this was settled already -- we've moved away from lead paint and leaded gasoline, and even the Flint affair seems a matter of a specific state government's incompetence and venality. But if you read the actual petition to HUD which you'd be supporting if you sign Color of Change's contact tool, well, you'll find it a bit eye-opening. The CDC now finds the only safe amount of lead poisoning is no lead poisoning, but HUD regulations don't reflect that. HUD also currently exempts "zero-bedroom dwelling units" from scrutiny, but these could include studios, efficiencies, dorms, and sublets, so that's a pretty big exemption. And HUD currently conducts only visual inspections of homes built before 1978, when a regimen of sample testing would do better. And remember to remind your Tea Party uncle that these are the kind of regulations that keep people safe and healthy.

Action: cleaner water for Flint, and a better life for chocolate workers.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Congress to help Flint, MI through its water crisis. Flint's unelected "Emergency Manager," you recall, decided to save a few bucks by forcing Flint to stop drawing its drinking water from the relatively well-managed Detroit water supply and draw it from the thoroughly-polluted Flint River instead, without realizing, apparently, that the water-treatment chemicals used to clean up the Flint River water would corrode Flint's ancient lead pipes. The Obama Administration has declared a federal state of emergency in Flint, but Congress has dragged its feet funding any halfway-decent solution to an urgent problem. Over 8,500 children under age six in Flint have now been exposed to toxic levels of lead, and will almost certainly experience the developmental problems scientists commonly associate with lead poisoning, the kinds of problems that did, after all, lead us to ban lead in gasoline and paint all those years ago. Now it's in people's water, and those people can't wait.

Meanwhile, the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell chocolate-manufacturing corporation Godiva to get rid of the child labor and low wages from its supply chain. Chocolatiers get about 60% of their cocoa from two places -- Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire -- and farmers there have to feed their families on $2/day. While Godiva has talked a better sustainability game lately, it remains too much like most big corporations these days: valuing scale over quality, caring about delivering money to executives and shareholders rather than improving products and processes, let alone improving lives. And fair trade chocolatiers are proving you can do these things, by committing long-term to cocoa farmers, paying them fairly for what they grow, and getting children out of a life of burning fields and spraying dangerous chemicals and into school, where they can get a shot a better future. Everyone deserves a shot at a better future, after all -- even if that throws a wrench into the income-redistribution-upward schemes of the super-rich.

Action: lead poisoning remediation, and net neutrality.

In the wake of the massive lead poisoning crisis in Flint, MI, where twice as many kids now have dangerous amounts of lead in their blood, Color of Change helps you tell our government to restore full funding for the Center for Disease Control's Healthy Homes and Lead Poisoning Program. Our Congress has, naturally, cut such funding over the last three years; in 2012, Congress allocated $29 million to the program, but in the most recent omnibus bill allocated only $17 million, which was a $1.5 million increase over the previous fiscal year's number, but still not enough. While I'd hate to think it would take a disaster on the scale of Michigan's mismanagement of the Flint situation to get our Congress to act, I'm certainly not above using guilt and shame when appropriate. And no it is not "politically correct" to note that these crises seem to happen an awful lot in predominantly Black neighborhoods, neighborhoods redlined by active conspiracy among politicians, bankers, and real estate corporations. Just like in a lot of bad action films, Black folks too often get it first.

Meanwhile, the FCC's net neutrality rules may have survived the appropriations process in Congress, but the big telecom corporations are still trying to, ah, be creative in subverting the rules. T-Mobile, for example, now offers a "Binge On" service which lets you stream content from a select few big content providers like Hulu or Netflix without counting it against your data cap. Trouble is, if you want to stream content from, say, Youtube, you'll find not only that it counts against your data cap, but that the Youtube content gets to you a bit slower than the Hulu or Netflix content. And that's paid prioritization, the very thing net neutrality rules outlaw -- a corporation can't make it harder for you to access content if that content doesn't come from one of their "partners." You should get to go where you want to on the internet without worrying if it's going to cost you more or suddenly work more slowly. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell the FCC to stop T-Mobile's pro-corporate, anti-freedom "Binge On" plan.