Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: talking only to banksters about financial regulation, and other follies.

Dean Baker catches Bloomberg analyzing a proposed Wall Street tax by talking only to Wall Street banksters. Naturally, Wall Street banksters take "mom and pop" hostage, as if Mom and Pop are the ones indulging in the high-speed trading that does nothing for our economy except redistribute wealth upward. But it is stunning, that nominally intelligent people (I don't think it's an act of charity to assume reporters are nominally intelligent people) seem so blind to other people's self-interest. Can it be because they're paid to be blind to it?

Ho hum, Union of Concerned Scientists report due out tomorrow will tell us that "missile defense" programs the Pentagon has been laboring on all these years don't protect us from a damn thing. And, naturally, you'll discover that Barack Obama has been throwing good money after bad on "missile defense" just as much as George W. Bush did, without garnering any of the hero-worship the right bestowed on Mr. Bush back in the day. I wonder why "missile defense," despite its obvious problems and its rigged tests that still fail, still persists as a serious project. Cough corruption cough!

OpenSecretsBlog informs us that the Trump campaign will have serious trouble raising money from Wall Street this year, because Mr. Trump's running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has the power to select firm (or firms) to run Indiana state or local pension funds, and the SEC has, since 2010, forbidden campaign contributions from any firm that could be selected to run those funds! Hey, it's called the "pay to play" rule for a reason. I expect Donald Trump will decry the "pay to play" rule as Big Gummint Run Amok, and would, as President, appoint some stooge to the SEC to kill it -- until, of course, he needs it to defeat his 2020 challenger.

Government investigators say that HUD Secretary Julian Castro violated the Hatch Act by praising Hillary Clinton to Yahoo! News -- in his own office, with the HUD seal in the background. The Hatch Act forbids public employees from conducting partisan political business at public offices, and while not many folks know what the Hatch Act does, this could still dash Mr. Castro's Vice Presidential hopes -- if there's anything Hillary Clinton hates, it's an amateur crook. I'll be mildly interested to hear Donald Trump's howls of anger, since I expect he'll be violating the Hatch Act every hour of every day as President (and probably telling us it's different when he does it, too).

Finally, buried in this mountain of pre-Republican convention coverage from Politico is the spectacle of George W. Bush openly fretting that he will be "the last Republican President." All together now: we can only hope! Now Mr. Bush shouldn't worry so much about that, because Republicans will always have bajillions of dollars in corporate campaign contributions and thus will always have a shot -- but he should have a little more shame. Donald Trump isn't the reason to worry that Republicans will never win the Presidency again -- George W. Bush's eight-year reign of incompetence and arrogance is that reason, even if today's Republicans pretend he never existed. Republicans sure don't deserve any more Presidents after George W. Bush.

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.

Around the table: debunking myths about ISIS, missile defense, CEO pay, and Hobby Lobby's "Christianity."

Juan Cole offers "Seven Myths About the Radical Sunni Advance in Iraq." Chief among them: ISIS isn't terribly popular with Iraqis, a meme you'd ordinarily think the right would be pushing a bit harder, except that admitting that most Sunnis in Iraq are not knuckle-dragging fanatics doesn't help you beat the war drum. Read the whole thing, but also attend point #6 closely, in which we are reminded that air strikes won't work any better against guerillas than conventional ground warfare does.

The Los Angeles Times reports at considerable length about the multitudinous failures of our attempts to build a "missile defense" system. Launching four or five or 10 missiles and hoping one of them will take out an incoming missile from an enemy nation is a lousy way to defend a country, no matter how many jobs it supposedly creates in Alabama. And fooling the "missile defense" system would be a much cheaper proposition than building Even More Missiles. Why do it, then? As DJ Shadow would say, "it's the money."

The incomparable Dave Zirin pens a dispatch from the front lines of a protest at the World Cup in Brazil, where police fired tear gas and live ammunition at protestors (though, thanks in part to an unfavorable wind, they wound up accidentally tear-gassing tourists). A majority of Brazilians now think Brazil getting the 2014 World Cup was a bad idea -- after all, building or refurbishing 12 soccer stadia that may never get used again does seem a little short-sighted when your country has other problems. I bet a majority of Russians think similarly about Sochi, though given their leadership they may never say so in large numbers.

Surprise, surprise: researchers find that corporations that have CEOs who make more than $20 million annually are more likely to lose money than CEOs who don't. That's for all the folks who believe that if a CEO makes enough money to gild the plumbing in his seventh vacation home, it must be because he's "earned" it. Researchers also find that "incentives" (like stock options) to improve CEO performance tend to lose their effectiveness as they're due to be paid out. But who needs an "incentive" to run a corporation well, anyway? Are we really that decadent that we accept, however implicitly, that corporate leaders are so crooked and incompetent that they need "incentives"?

Finally, Jonathan Merritt reminds us that Hobby Lobby -- the corporation trying to get the Obama Administration's birth control mandate overturned because it supposedly offends the corporation's "religious beliefs," gets a lot of its products from China -- where factories pay workers (including far too many children) in dung pellets to work 20-hour days, and where state-mandated abortions number 13 million annually (which is twice as many abortions per capita as in the United States). It's one data point, but one that exposes they hypocrisy of Hobby Lobby's executives.

Around the table: populism vs. "populism."

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes perhaps the single most offensive op-ed I've read this year, in which he actually argues that we should borrow the workings of more totalitarian states like China in order to "make democracy dynamic again." The notion of an "unapologetically elitist" "Simpson/Bowles-type commission to push populist reforms" would be merely hilarious if his "populist reforms" weren't the kind of Beltway autofellatio that's actually unpopular with Americans. The best part will be when he complains that we folks just aren't sophisticated enough to understand that when he said we should have less democracy, he wasn't really saying we should have less democracy.

Dick "Tha Dicksta" Cheney suggests that President Obama scrapped missile defense systems just because Vladimir Putin told him so. No word on whether Mr. Putin was shirtless when he gave Mr. Obama the order, but could it be possible that Mr. Obama scrapped missile defense because missile defense doesn't work, and only benefits defense contractors who'd rather not build something useful? And why on Earth is Mr. Cheney walking around in public without a paper bag over his head after everything he's done?

Navy reservist suspended for two weeks after refusing to hide wait times for appointments at the Veterans Administration. You'd think the King of Everyone Getting Along would welcome the testimony of government workers who want government to work better, but Mr. Obama generally treats whistleblowers like they've just leaked wartime troop movements, regardless of what they've actually said. And no, this isn't a mark of George W. Bush's tenure, Bush-league though it may seem.

Three North Carolina Republican state Senators introduce bill making it a felony to disclose fracking chemicals. Because some corporation's "right" to "trade secrets" trumps everyone else's right to drinking water that doesn't catch fire and doesn't turn gelatinous if left out too long! No fracking currently goes on in North Carolina, but that'll change soon -- and we'll see if the Moral Monday folks can counter the will of a reactionary legislature that cares about nothing except money.

Philly.com blogger tells us how "Tom Corbett Just Won Re-election." Sympathetic as I am to how-Democrats-will-screw-it-up-this-time narratives, and noting that Democratic nominee Tom Wolf pounds an I'm-an-outsider-can't-we-all-get-along message that has stranded better candidates at 48 percent, I still think listing Mr. Corbett's leftward moves (or non-moves -- refusing to appeal reversals on Voter ID and gay marriage hardly required him to lift a finger) doesn't prove he's been playing us; it merely proves that he's not completely brain-dead. Plus, dude always looks mad even when he's got nothing to be mad about. People get tired of that.

Jim Hightower delivers the messaging goods when discussing the Koch Brothers' obsession with making solar power users pay a Sun Tax: "Koch Brothers Demand More Government Intervention and Taxes," runs the headline, "they want states to tax homeowners as punishment for becoming innovative energy producers" runs the last line of paragraph five, and here's how the final paragraph begins: "Now we know what the Koch-ALEC complex means by 'free markets' and 'liberty.' They mean that corporate energy interests should be free to stifle our individual liberty." You'd almost wonder why the Crusty Centrists of the Beltway don't find Mr. Hightower's words to be "pitch-perfect populism." OK, not really -- we all know the answer is "money."

As you may know, FCC Chair Julius Genachowski has resigned. In my brief remarks Monday, I neglected to mention that he also approved the Comcast-NBC merger and pushed more media consolidation. He said he'd defend policy initiatives supported by Americans across the ideological spectrum, but caved to the corporations instead. So Mr. Obama gets to pick a new FCC Chair now, and Free Press helps you tell Mr. Obama to pick an FCC Chair who'll actually fight for the public, and not just the big telecoms. Someone needs to protect net neutrality, promote real competition among broadband providers, unlock our cell phones, expose dirty political advertising, help local news providers grow, and foster real diversity in the media. Sound difficult? Of course it is! Anything worth doing is difficult! But Mr. Genachowski didn't appear to even try. I won't stand four more years of that from another corporate lackey, and neither should you.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel plans to expand missile defense tests in Alaska and California, ostensibly because North Korea has been especially noisy lately. Sigh. Have the 30 missile interceptors in these states passed even one flight intercept test? No, they have not. That couldn't be because missile interceptors can be foiled relatively inexpensively, could it? Yes, it could. Mr. Hagel says he won't move forward with the program unless the missiles prove effective, but he was in the Senate during the late Clinton years and Tha Bush Mobb years; he should already know the missiles don't work. Anyway, the Council for a Livable World helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand accountability from missile testing. It'd be nice if some Senator -- how about you, Rand Paul? You've been on a hot streak lately -- made as big a stink about it as we do. I suppose it's not as outlandish a possibility as it was even last year.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Obama Administration that you support their birth control mandate, CREDO provides another one. Workers have just as much right to exercise religious freedoms as their bosses do, and when their bosses decide birth control or AIDS treatment runs counter to their "religious convictions," they curtail their workers' ability to exercise their religious freedoms. And "but the bosses pay for it" is no excuse -- for one thing, you almost certainly contribute weekly toward your own health insurance, and for another, with power comes responsibility! If you don't like it, don't be a boss! And, as Bryce Covert points out in this Forbes article, when women can avoid unexpected pregnancies, they can participate more fully in the economy, and the economy benefits as a result -- to the tune of a 25% increase in GDP. If Forbes printed it, they must think that bosses will respond to it, and in that, there's hope.