Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: in which even the good news is bad news (and some of the bad news is, at least, indifferent news).

Federal District Court Judge declares the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional -- but denies the state of Texas's request for an injunction, meaning that his declaration has, essentially, no legal force at present. Why, you might be tempted to call that drama! In the unlikely event our Supreme Court upholds this decision -- four Justices won't, and it's probably occurred to Chief Justice Roberts that a mandate tax that's currently zero could conceivably be raised by Congress tomorrow and thus render the decision nonsensical -- there's still Medicare-for-All, you know, which makes all these legal questions moot. Unless the five hard right-wingers on our Supreme Court now think Medicare is unconstitutional, that is.

On the other hand, this is probably a nothingburger, too: House passes a new Farm Bill with an irrelevant legislative rider preventing the House from taking up a War Powers resolution relating to the war on Yemen -- one day before the Senate, in a 56-41 vote, approves a War Powers resolution aiming to stop our involvement in that war. OK, maybe not a complete nothingburger, since even getting the Senate to express disapproval of our continued involvement in the Saudi/UAE war against Yemen has taken years, but it does anger a man that our "leaders" constantly shit all over everything. And I sure hope anyone running against the Senators who changed their votes for this Senate resolution will note that they only voted for it when it wouldn't make a difference.

Ho hum, Frank Clemente at the Our Future blog reminds us that "The GOP Tax Bill is Creating Jobs -- Just Not in the U.S." The 2017 tax "reform" "charges corporations just half the tax rate on foreign profits that it charges on domestic earnings" and thus "(i)t’s hard to imagine a stronger lure for corporations to pack up their plant and equipment and ship them offshore." I might not have been so understated. As an aside, it's always good to be reminded that our Administration did explicitly promise that every family would get a $4,000 raise from the tax "reform," and that corporations have spent 117 times as much money on stock buybacks as on worker pay raises.

Chalmers University of Technology study suggests that growing organic food will actually exacerbate climate change. How? Because organic farming doesn't pump out the same yields as conventional farming, thus requiring more land, leading to deforestation, which vastly increases carbon emissions. Sounds reasonable, right? But the study's authors seem to imagine a world in which a) any government would mandate that all farming be done organically and b) only large producers will do any farming. I can't imagine that folks who grow their own food organically won't be helping reduce climate change simply by relying less on industrial farming for their food needs. And those who complain that we'll never make that world? Well, that's not the attitude that ended slavery.

From the "No, Somebody Actually Does Gotta Say It" file: Benjamin Barber at Facing South reminds us that the ongoing imbroglio over the election in North Carolina's 9th U.S. House district reveals that the real "election fraud" threat seems to come from the right-wingers who whine about it the most. Unreturned absentee ballots that just so happen to come disproportionately from counties with larger minority populations -- gosh, who woulda thunk it? But please, right-wingers, keep using that Interstate Crosscheck database that unconstitutionally deregisters voters without checking if voters with the same first and last names in different states even have the same middle names.

Finally, after Sen. McConnell (E-KY) finally allows a vote on a criminal justice reform bill, Carl Hulse at the New York Times gazes in apparent open-mouthed wonder at just how many actors had to pressure Mr. McConnell to hold a vote on the bill. Your jaw will hit the floor, too, when you read that Mr. McConnell actually brought up Willie Horton back in 2016 in the process of telling his caucus the bill wouldn't come up then. Let's avoid calling Mr. McConnell a "law-and-order Republican," though -- recall how he moved mountains to get Don Blankenship's coal corporation off the hook after it polluted the drinking water of 27,000 good Kentuckians with a massive slurry spill, and you'll be reminded that, for our leaders, "law and order" is only for us "little people."

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

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

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

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

Around the table: for whom are "free" markets free? And other matters.

Republican-dominated North Carolina state legislature suddenly calls emergency session and strips the incoming Democratic Governor of many powers. Give the good folks of North Carolina credit, though -- they were out protesting in enough force, on very short notice, that they made their will known (and a few got arrested). This is the kind of power grab a political party executes when it can't win arguments anymore. And we'll be seeing a lot of this kind of crap at the federal level fairly soon.

Ho hum, another election setback, another "liberal" media "analysis" suggesting Democrats should move to the right -- this time by giving up on black folks to win white folks back. Instead of, you know, getting white voters to turn their anger away from folks of color and toward their real enemies, the corporatists and their lackeys in politics and media -- which, to be frank, doesn't seem that big a chore to me. Also, too, what was Mr. Trump's "winning" percentage of the popular vote? 46 percent, a smaller percentage than three of the last four Republican Presidential nominees (and he barely outpaced the fourth, John McCain in 2008), which means his "ideas" on appealing to white voters aren't that persuasive.

Dean Baker, in an excerpt from his new book provocatively entitled Rigged, reminds us that "free" markets are really only free for the folks making the most money. He also punctures the repugnant argument advanced by wealthy "free" marketeeers and "free" traders, that folks who want to hold on to their manufacturing jobs "don't care" about alleviating poverty in the rest of the world. As if those are the only two choices! The folks making these arguments could pay themselves less, or corporations could stop meddling in the affairs of the rest of the world and thus allow the world's workers more say in their lives. That's at least two more choices. (Kudos, again, to Mr. Baker for referring to "income redistribution" as it actually happens in the world -- that is, upward, from workers to Our Glorious Elites.)

At long last, a coalition of good Kansans has come together to vigorously oppose the mindless tax-cutting program of Gov. Sam Brownback. But I'd sure go a lot harder than they do! That top income bracket shouldn't start at $40,000 a year, even if that's what it used to be -- it should start at a considerably higher income and be at a considerably higher rate. And sales taxes, frankly, shouldn't even exist -- taxing consumption always hurts the people who have to consume (i.e., the poor) more than the people who don't (i.e., the rich). Still, it's always good to see people coming together to make taxes fairer.

20 state Attorneys General file a lawsuit against six pharmaceutical corporations for price-fixing. The suit centers mainly around two generic drugs, one antibiotic and one anti-diabetic, with prices for the former drug over 90 times higher in April of 2014 than they were just six months earlier. Prices don't go up like that because of "free" markets, despite the "free" marketeers crowd telling us that giving corporations whatever they want keeps prices down, when five seconds of thought would tell you it doesn't. The even better news? This particular lawsuit might only be the first price-fixing lawsuit over generic drugs. I wish them the best.

Finally, Liza Bayless at Yes! magazine describes the efforts of Lankenau Hospital in southeastern Pennsylvania to feed its patients with food grown on an on-campus organic farm. Lankenau sits in Montgomery County, but gets a lot of patients from Philadelphia County, ranked dead last in good health outcomes among 67 Pennsylvania counties in 2011 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, so clearly they saw the need for a more preventive approach. Lankenau has provided food for 400 patients so far, often giving food to patients as they're waiting for appointments and leading in-services on preparing it. Seems to me they're planting a seed, as it were, from which future food-education efforts will sprout forth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: corporate welfare in Oregon, and oil wastewater in organic food.

Rep. Walden (R-OR) has introduced a bill concerning Oregon's Klamath River Basin, but you should not confuse it with the Klamath Basin Water Recovery and Economic Restoration Act of 2015, introduced by Sen. Wyden (D-OR). The Klamath Basin contains both the Klamath National Forest and the Fremont-Winema National Forest, and though the Basin has been the subject of disputes among farmers, Native Americans, conservationists, and local officials, they've all come together to negotiate three agreements governing use of the area. Sen. Wyden's bill would codify all three of these agreements in federal law, but Rep. Walden's bill would codify only two of them, excepting the agreement mandating the removal of four local dams -- and the Walden bill would also push those national forests onto two Oregon counties, which very likely won't be able to afford their maintenance and thus will likely sell them off to loggers. And if you liked that bit of corporate welfare, Rep. Walden's bill has another one -- it specifically exempts the corporation that owns the dams from any liability if the dams' removal winds up harming the environment. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Walden bill.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to prohibit the use of oil wastewater to irrigate organic crops, then the League of Conservation Voters still helps you do that. We all know that California, which supplies a great deal of America's fruits and vegetables, is suffering from a terrible drought, which has prompted California agricultural concerns to irrigate their crops with something, but you buy organic fruits and vegetables to get away from wastewater irrigation, not to tolerate it because conditions aren't what we'd like them to be. And if federal standards mandate that organic food can't have any oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, then they damn sure should mandate that organic food can't be awash in oil wastewater, either. A lot of good folks are going to look the other way about this, if they can be convinced that organic farms will die out if they can't get a get-out-of-jail-free card on this matter, at least until the drought lessens. But again: I don't do hostage situations. And we should patronize small, local organic farmers, who can survive droughts better than big ag corporations can. Big corporations deal in volume, after all, and thus get hurt by big events like droughts worse than the small farmers who don't deal in volume.

Action: tax relief for working families, and getting fracking wastewater out of organic food.

Moms Rising helps you "welcome" Paul Ryan to the House Speakership by telling him to prioritize keeping the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) strong. That means keeping them both at the levels set by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 (i.e., "the stimulus"). Rep. Ryan is on the record as a supporter of the EITC and CTC -- why, he has even used the word "ownership" in expressing his support for these tax credits! -- so a "change of heart" in this matter would make him seem (more!) like just another politician who talks a good game but plays his paymasters' game. And as Speaker of the House, he now has a lot more power to decide what legislation gets a vote and what legislation languishes in committee purgatory. Since over 60 million families depend on the EITC and the CTC -- including one of every four current or former military families -- he may want to give this matter the appropriate amount of urgency. Hopefully he will not follow the lead of some Republicans who want to extend the EITC and the CTC to wealthier families who don't really need it.

Meanwhile, some agricultural concerns are still using wastewater from fracking operations to irrigate their crops, including food you might eat. Someone thought this was their only option to get through a drought, and I can't entirely blame them. But someone else thought this was a terrific way to make money off of wastewater, and I can blame them. The USDA has not, apparently, ruled on whether organic farmers can still call their food organic if they're using this crap on their crops, so the Sierra Club helps you tell the USDA to revise organic food standards to exclude oil-based wastewater. Organic food already must be devoid of conventional pesticides and fertilizers based on oil and sewage sludge, so your organic food shouldn't be treated with oil-based wastewater, either. Even well-meaning folks will no doubt tell me that we have to let organic farmers do this or they'll die out. Unfortunately, that's a hostage situation, and I don't do hostage situations, particularly where your food is concerned. Moreover, we have other policy choices available to us -- like not letting big agricultural corporations get "too big to fail."

Around the table: from a Presidential candidate determined to do it wrong to a police department determined to do it right.

Surprise, surprise, Jeb Bush opposes encrypting data. "If you create encryption, it makes it harder for the American government to do its job -- while protecting civil liberties -- to make sure that evildoers aren’t in our midst." He almost forgot to say "while protecting civil liberties," didn't he? Every advance in communications technology brings these challenges with it; how does Jeb Bush think we got this far without terrorists tearing us apart?

"Joe Biden Said to Be Considering One-Term Presidency," Politico tells us. Who said this? Famed journalist Carl Bernstein, who added that Mr. Biden would use his one term to "unite Washington" because he's "dealt with the Republicans in Congress all (his) public life," though you'd think Mr. Biden's six-plus years as Vice President would have helped "unite Washington" by now. Mr. Bernstein's reporting on the Watergate break-in helped take down an American President when he was just 30, as you know, so he doesn't care what I think. But his analysis sounds like typical Beltway wankage.

Now that an Avian flu outbreak has caused Iowa farmers to euthanize over 30 million birds, organic farmers say we should avoid looking at vaccines as the solution to the problem and look instead toward "organic, regenerative" farming. Farmers don't have to be organic, really, but they do have to be small-scale operators that care more about the land and the animals than about profits (since without the land and the animals, you don't even have profits). Certainly we should stop worshiping at the altar of "efficient" factory farms, which produce a lot of sick, miserable animals and only do one thing "efficiently" (that is, deliver wealth upward to CEOs).

Scott Walker, speaking at a New Hampshire VFW, suggests that only a "handful" of Muslims are "reasonable" or "moderate." Gosh, what if a Presidential candidate said only a "handful" of Christians are "reasonable" or "moderate"? Our Glorious Elites would throw a collective tantrum, that's what. His spokeshack does the best she can with it, I suppose, basically by pretending Scott Walker doesn't really believe what he says. So how will he appear more "moderate" for the general election? I don't know, but he sure won't be troubled by the task, because such a task would only trouble a man with a soul.

Finally, Gloucester, MA police chief decides that "the war on drugs is over, and we lost," and starts helping drug addicts get clean. Gloucester is a small town, but one out of every six folks the Gloucester police help come from out of state. I eagerly await the studies suggesting that (just as providing homes for the homeless is actually cheaper than providing them expensive services on an emergency basis all the time) concentrating on helping addicts rather than just punishing them actually saves the taxpayer money. In the meantime, I wish Chief Campanello and his department the best of luck.

Action: the "war on drugs," truth in organic food labeling, and worker safety.

As you know, President Obama commuted the sentences of 22 folks in jail for non-violent drug offenses a week ago, and now Drug Policy Alliance helps you ask Mr. Obama to release more. 22 down, several hundred thousand to go could be the headline, and while I expect Mr. Obama to utilize his power to pardon good folks or reduce their sentences sparingly, I don't expect him to use it that sparingly. And being "tough on crime," especially tough on drug users, hasn't exactly curbed drug use in America -- which you'd expect if you thought about it, since drugs tend to be addictive, and addictions tend to overrule your exercise of your free will -- and plenty of folks are in jail for crimes that now get considerably shorter sentences; some of them have been in long enough that they would have already served a sentence had they received it several years later. If we want to curb drug abuse in America, and we do, we should concentrate on helping people deal master their addictions rather than just throwing them in jail. Just throwing them in jail doesn't help anyone but the private prison industry.

Meanwhile, large organic chicken and egg producers have been giving a synthetic hormone called methionine to their chickens while still calling their products "organic." They've convinced our government that their chickens need the supplement in order to stay healthy -- but their chickens would get enough of it if they were actually raised outside in pastures, and eating a more natural diet of grass, worms, and insects. So why aren't they outside? Probably because the larger producers realized they couldn't get bigger, and deliver profits upward to executives more efficiently, unless they caged up their chickens indoors and shot them with synthetic methionine. But why preserve the "right" of corporations to get as big as they want -- versus preserving organic standards and consumer safety? The National Organic Standards Board will review the five-year exemption for synthetic methionine at the end of this month, and the Organic Consumers Association helps you tell the NOSB to let the synthetic methionine exemption lapse. Deadline for comments, unfortunately, is today.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell the Department of Labor to investigate working conditions in fast-food corporations. A recent Hart Research Associates study tells us that nearly 80% of fast food workers have suffered burns on the job, with a majority of them suffering multiple burns, and a third of these workers said their managers told them to soothe their injuries with some sort of condiment -- you know, like mustard, ketchup, or mayonnaise. You may be tempted to say that working around a grill puts you at risk of getting burned, but if that many people get burned, then employers obviously aren't doing enough about it. Probably having a first-aid kit around (which, surprise, a lot of fast-food joints don't even have on hand) would help matters; probably ending slavish devotion to the Culture of Efficiency, which makes everyone rush around like headless chickens, would help matters, too. McDonald's, for its part, makes the noises you'd expect, plus the ZOMG AN ACTIVIST GROUP IZ BEHIND TEH COMPLAINTZ!!!!, which assertion, as you know from being able to employ fundamental logic, does not by itself disprove the complaints.

Action: death for "blasphemy," organic labeling standards, and the Comcast/Time-Warner merger.

First things first. A Pakistan high court recently upheld a death sentence for Aasiya Noreen, a.k.a. Asia Bibi, for blasphemy. For what? For allegedly insulting Mohammed, a charge made by a group of women with whom Ms. Bibi had been harvesting berries, a group of women apparently upset that she was drinking the same water as them, and also, one suspects, that she was a Christian. Two Pakistani politicians have actually died after advocating for her and opposing the state's blasphemy laws -- and the Taliban took credit for shooting one of them. A state that needs to outlaw blasphemy, let alone put people to death for blasphemy, is not only a state that's very insecure about its power, but a state that's also very insecure about religion. And, needless to say, it's a state that doesn't derive its power from its people. Change.org helps you tell our government to oppose Ms. Bibi's impending execution. The Big Stick of Bad PR has lately saved Meriam Ibrahim from a similar fate, but let's not get complacent: we must act to make it happen again.

Meanwhile, the National Organic Standards Board (or NOSB) -- that branch of the USDA that, as you might expect, determines organic food labeling standards -- meets at the end of the month, and will supposedly review the list of non-organic ingredients that they've allowed in organic food in the past. But, as you may remember, the NOSB's Director also made that task considerably more difficult by changing the voting process -- previously an approved non-organic material automatically needed a two-thirds majority of the NOSB to keep it on the approved list, but now such a material needs a two-thirds majority to remove it, which means a mere six of 15 board members, rather than 10, can keep non-organic materials in organic food. And you know how much easier a big ag corporation can get to six board members than it can get to 10. But this is par for the course for the Obama USDA; all we can rely on is ourselves. So the Organic Consumers Association helps you tell the NOSB to do whatever it can to keep non-organic materials out of USDA-certified organic food.

Finally, the FCC still hasn't decided what to do about the proposed Comcast/Time-Warner merger, a merger that would leave Comcast in complete control of more media markets than ever before -- in a majority of American media markets, Comcast would have no competitors, and you know what no competitors means: it means, no, not "creating jobs" but cutting jobs, and not "lower prices" but higher prices, and if it means "better service," that's only because Time-Warner's customer service is even more notorious than Comcast's, and that's a hell of a thing to trumpet from the rooftops. Huzzah! We are marginally less crappy than the other guy! And though Comcast says it will protect vigorous net neutrality provisions, that "promise" only lasts until 2018; after that, absent more vigorous federal action from the FCC headed up by the former corporate lobbyist, Comcast is just as likely to force you to watch Miley Cyrus videos on the internet as anyone else. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell the FCC to stop the Comcast/Time-Warner merger.

Action: an end to GMO field tests, mercy for a Good Samaritan in Illinois, and stricter pollution controls for oil refineries.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell the USDA to stop field trials of genetically-modified seed. What's that, you say? Our government actually allows corporations to test their GMO seed outside? Yes, they do. And you probably already know what happens when they do: the Frankenseeds get blown about by the wind or washed away by the rain and find themselves growing on fields where they don't belong, including on organic farms, where their presence renders what's grown there inorganic. Last year a farmer in Oregon found GMO wheat on his own farm, and the USDA, after an undoubtedly very thorough investigation, couldn't determine where the GMO seed came from. I said this years ago when it happened under Tha Bush Mobb, and I'll say it again today: if you can't keep track of where the Frankenseed is, don't let it grow outside. Especially since Monsanto has gotten into the habit of suing the farmers who find their own crop contaminated by Monsanto seed. That's certainly bad behavior we want to discourage.

Meanwhile, Change.org helps you tell the LaSalle County (IL) state's attorney to drop charges against one Steve Patterson, who rescued two bald eaglets that had fallen from their nest after a storm, and got in trouble with the law for it. It's hard to imagine what Mr. Patterson could have done to avoid this mess, which has dragged on for a year and a half now -- he made multiple calls to local authorities, all of which went unanswered, and even after taking the eaglets from the ground he didn't try to rehabilitate them himself, but found a licensed professional to do it. The birds both recovered, but Mr. Patterson got two counts of "illegal taking of a bird of prey" and two counts of "taking a protected species," and federal Good Samaritan law apparently doesn't operate in Illinois. I don't advocate ignoring the law whenever it's convenient, but that's not what Mr. Patterson did -- can we really fault him for not knowing precisely whom to call to get the birds rescued? -- and mercy is just as admirable quality in a state's attorney as it is in the rest of us.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell the EPA to stop oil refineries from polluting the air with the most vigorous anti-pollution rules possible. Naturally the oil corporations are fighting the EPA's efforts, but I don't have to mention the benzine, xylene, and toluene that oil refining routinely puts into the air, or mention that Port Arthur, TX has 27 oil refineries and also feature astronomically higher rates of heart and respiratory conditions and a mortality rate from cancer 40 percent higher than suffered by the average Texan -- I only need ask: have you ever driven the New Jersey turnpike around Elizabeth, New Jersey? Have you ever visited the neighborhood of Paulsboro, in the southern part of the state? If you've ever been near an oil refinery, you know how it smells. You know it doesn't smell good. And you don't need oil corporations telling you it's not so bad. Need I add that that poor and minority folks are far more likely to live near oil refineries? Or that a child's respiratory system is more sensitive to oil refinery pollutants than an adult's?

Action: depleted uranium in Iraq, GMO vaccines in organic food, and the EPA's climate change plan.

What's yet another outstanding legacy of our little adventure in Iraq? Increased incidences of cancer and birth defects due to depleted uranium shells, that's what! Scientists have found uranium in the urine and semen of 1991 Gulf War veterans, and since the half-life of depleted uranium is 4.1 billion years, Iraqi citizens stand a very good chance of experiencing the ill effects of depleted uranium for, basically, ever. The U.N. has tried to pass resolutions since 2007 aiming to discover where depleted uranium weapons have been used and find out more about what their long-term harmful effects will be -- but the U.S. belongs to the U.N. Security Council, composed of the five most powerful nations on Earth, and so the U.S. essentially has veto power over any such resolution, and hasn't been afraid to use it, whether its President was Mr. Accountability None or the Nobel Peace Prize winner who has actually outdone his predecessor in launching unconstitutional wars. Hence Roots Action helps you tell our government to stop opposing such resolutions and face up to at least some of the harm it's caused in its Iraq adventures.

Meanwhile, we've spoken a bit about organic food labeling lately -- specifically about the possibility that loopholes in organic food standards could allow genetically-modified vitamins into organic food -- but the organic food standards do have one pretty outsized loophole: they allow genetically-modified vaccines in livestock. And while the standards require the NOSB to review any proposed use of GMO vaccines and only approve such vaccines where non-GMO alternatives don't exist, and while the NOSB hasn't approved a single such vaccine for that use, no one has even submitted such a vaccine for review -- and yet the NOSB admits that GMO vaccines find their way into organic food! How could such a thing happen? If you answer "because the NOSB hasn't been doing its job," you win first prize. But you know what a better prize would be? A better prize would be to outlaw GMO vaccines in organic food entirely, and then get all up in the NOSB's grill to actually enforce the standard this time, and so the Organic Consumers Association helps you do that. It's a tough job, but so's anything worth doing.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA's to propose the most vigorous carbon emissions standards possible, then Public Citizen helps you do that. But I warn you: if you use Public Citizen's tool, you'll be asking for more vigorous standards than the EPA has actually proposed. In what areas could the EPA's Clean Power Plan be improved? The Clean Power Plan could demand more renewable energy from states, it could stop pushing natural gas as an alternative to coal (especially since gas drilling leaks methane, which traps 80 times the heat that carbon dioxide does), and it could eliminate nuclear power, which does pollute less than coal or gas but which has never been economically viable without massive government handouts. And don't believe the hype that wind and solar "cost" more than coal. First, any new technology costs less as it's deployed more, and second, they only "cost" more to the corporations that would make them -- when you add in the health care savings and the climate change savings, they cost less to our civilization.

Action: covering the Israeli occupation, real organic standards, and the FAMILY Act.

Do I really want to wade into a battle over words? NPR's Morning Edition purported to have such a battle over the words folks use to describe the Israeli occupation of Palestine -- but the battle was between "settlement" and "neighborhood." I must have missed the part where "settlement" was a bad word, but since Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wants to use the word "neighborhood," now they can question the friendship of anyone who uses the word "settlement." Needless to say, NPR didn't have anyone on who would call the "neighborhoods" or "settlements" by a more realistic name, like "colonies." Israel is actually breaking international law by colonizing Gaza and the West Bank, because they captured these territories in war -- and if they annexed the land, they'd be breaking international law, too. It really looks as though the "liberal" media plans to forget how unnerved they were earlier this year at Israel's behavior in Palestine. Hence FAIR helps you tell NPR's Morning Edition to include some critics of the Israeli occupation in their little semantic discussions.

Meanwhile, the USDA will soon mull the meaning of another word: "organic." Actually, the specific words they'll mull over are "excluded methods," as in food production methods you can't use and still call your food products "organic." For over two decades the USDA has excluded "(m)ethods used to genetically modify organisms or influents their growth and development by means that are not possible under natural conditions or processes." Sounds fairly all-inclusive, doesn't it? But what if you've grown a product organically from a genetically-modified seed? Then your "organic" food really isn't. And these days food technologies have multiplied, such that you might well find genetically-modified vitamins in otherwise "organic" foods. But it just so happens that the National Organics Standards Board will meet at the end of October to debate this very topic; hence the Organic Consumers Association helps you tell the NOSB to preserve the meaning of the word "organic" by excluding both methods and products of non-organic food production from its definition.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act, or FAMILY Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. America is approximately the last developed nation on Earth that doesn't mandate that employers offer paid sick leave to their workers, and that's not the way I want to celebrate how special and unique America is. The way I want to celebrate it? That when we see something's wrong, we fix it. The paid sick leave movement has made some strides in America these past few years, but aside from the state of California (which passed a paid sick leave law a few weeks ago) these strides have come mostly at the municipal level -- and some states have hurried to pass laws actually restricting localities from passing paid sick leave laws. Which is very conservative of them, isn't it, utterly failing to trust the smallest unit of government to govern best? And those right-wingers who squeal BUT WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!! might want to listen to small businesses a little more about paid sick leave.

Action: more Frankencrops in the ground, and fracking underneath the Ohio River.

The Obama USDA continues to cut its reaper's scythe through American agriculture, as it stands poised to approve Monsanto's GMO cotton and soybeans. Monsanto has created these new Frankenfoods to be more resistant to two herbicides, dicamba and glufosinate, the latter of which was banned by the European Parliament in 2009 after scientists found that it tended to interfere with human reproduction. Scientists have linked both herbicides to various reproductive, kidney, and cancer-related disorders, and we all know that more genetically-modified crops means more bombardment with harmful herbicides and pesticides -- and sadly, it might also mean the demise of organic agriculture as an alternative to corporate agriculture, as the wind spreads the new Frankenseeds (or even the pesticides and herbicides) around the land until organic farms become contaminated beyond rescue. Hence Friends of the Earth helps you tell the USDA to reject Monsanto's GMO cotton and soybeans. Regrettably, I must ask you to act quickly, because the deadline for comments to the USDA on this matter is today. That doesn't preclude the possibility that they'll extend the deadline so that they can get more pro-GMO comments, though.

Meanwhile, West Virginia activists have started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell West Virginia's Governor and Secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection to reject plans to frack under the Ohio River. The Ohio River runs a long way, you see -- not just through Ohio, but also through Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky -- and gives three million good folks their drinking water, so if West Virginia allows gas drillers to frack underneath the Ohio, there's a good chance all those carcinogenic chemicals used in fracking will wind up in someone's tap. Perhaps it looks like West Virginia's politicians are trying to wean their state off coal, but no one ever seems to try to wean off coal with wind and solar, though states can certainly do these things, and surely West Virginia's politicians know that gas drilling puts methane into the atmosphere, and methane traps heat far more efficiently than any pollutant coal puts out. I can't help but think they're just trying to add gas drilling corporations to the list of cronies they can tap for campaign funds. You'd think they'd know better than to play such games, considering the Elk River chemical leak was only nine months ago. Best we remind them, then.

Around the table: the people are to blame! And other follies.

Matt Bai says small money donors are the real problem with politics. Does he prove this is the case? Of course not -- that would require more than anecdotes about breathless fundraising emails and "most shared" lists. It would require, for example, Mr. Bai to demonstrate that small money outraises big money (which he can't, because it doesn't). And never does Mr. Bai consider the more obvious explanation: that establishment politicians use extremists to get things done they could never get done on their own. If he did that, he'd have a much harder time telling us it's all our fault.

The Intercept reveals that some 40% of Americans on our government's "Terrorist Screening Database" have "no recognized terrorist group association." We also learn that our government's no-fly list has expanded greatly under President Obama, that the city with the "second-highest concentration" of folks in the database just so happens to have the largest Arab-American population in the country, and that folks often find their way to the database through a sort of gateway database, if you will, that fingers folks for suspicion based on even less evidence than the TSD does. It should go without saying that a putative terrorist-watching database with so much fat would have problems catching real terrorists.

Citizens for Tax Justice explains the problem with using the principle of "dynamic scoring" to argue that tax cuts raise revenues. If the words "dynamic scoring" don't already pin your BS detector to the red, you will learn that the right's argument for "dynamic scoring" is based on the premise that tax cuts will lead to better behavior, which will in turn lead to more revenue. But does "better behavior" explain the lower revenue and massive cuts to public services good Kansans are experiencing right now at the hands of Gov. Brownback's tax cut "experiment"?

Another day, another dilemma with horns sharp enough to impale Rand Paul and his Presidential ambitions: Republicans can't go all Libertarian on gay marriage, he says, because look at all the Republicans who signed up for the party based on social issues, and you can't just ignore them. The GOP can't just "completely flip," he says, but you're either for gay marriage or against it; he seems to want the Party to be both and neither.

Finally, some bad news: Missouri's "right to farm befoul your water and let Frankenfood seeds blow over onto organic farms and spray carcinogens on your food" has, apparently, passed, albeit narrowly. And who puts a state constitutional amendment to a vote during a primary, versus a general election? Someone who wants to stack the vote, that's who. Take heart in the fact that they stacked the vote and still damn near lost.

Action: fracking vs. family farms, and trucks vs. fuel costs.

Penn Environment helps you tell the New Sewickley, PA Board of Supervisors to reject a Dallas-based gas drilling corporation's plans to build a compressor station right near an organic farm. New Sewickley is a town far out in western Pennsylvania, almost 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh (neighboring towns include Knob, Sunflower, Zelienople, and, of course, North Sewickley Township), which means, I suppose, that frackers think they can develop there without anyone noticing, except New Sewickley is also home to family farms, including the Kretschmann family organic farm. Think that farm will grow anything organic when the frackers are done with it? The compressor station would bring air and noise pollution, not to mention truck traffic, which is actually a matter of no small concern in New Sewickey. So let's keep frackers as far away from family farms as possible -- especially in those parts of Pennsylvania the frackers think we don't care about.

Speaking of truck traffic, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell the EPA to set more stringent fuel efficiency standards for commercial trucks. Do not brook any nonsense from right-wingers about REGULASHUNZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!!, because here's how this would actually work: trucks would have to go farther on less fuel, which would make the total cost of delivering goods around the country lower, since gas is a big part of that cost. And the corporations now spending less on fuel would either pass that savings on to consumers in the form of lower prices, or they'd use those savings on other necessary expenses. Hell, they might even create jobs with it. The Consumer Federation of America tells us that commercial truck fuel indirectly costs households a little over $1,000 annually. Presumably you, also, can think of things you could do with a thousand bucks. Also, less fuel means less pollution. Really, no one loses except a few already-overpaid CEOs.

Around the table: old bastards and new bastards.

Pennsylvania state lawmakers introduce SB 1095, which aims to prevent "SLAPP" lawsuits, or lawsuits some people file largely to silence other people and saddle them with huge legal bills. Some of the law's skeptics say they want to be careful not to thwart suits that actually have merit, but given that they don't point out how SB 1095 does that, and that no one actually says they support thwarting lawsuits of merit, I'm going to go ahead and file such objections under "deliberate obfuscation."

PR Watch describes the ongoing battle to strengthen organic food standards. I suppose it's some small comfort to know that the USDA has never been much of a friend of good organic food standards -- in the early '90s, they did their damndest to sabotage the original rule-making process, albeit unsuccessfully. But the nominal Democrat running the USDA these days, Tom Vilsack, has proven a greater enemy of organic food than any of Mr. Bush's three USDA Secretaries. "As only Nixon could go to China..."

Surprise, surprise: Central Florida Commission on Homelessness finds that it costs about three times as much money to provide services to the homeless than it would to simply give them housing. You know the real trouble with people who bash the homeless? That they don't even have the guts to back up their tough words -- hence taxpayers pay out absurd amounts of money toward ever-more Rube Goldbergian service schemes. Why, it's almost like that's the idea.

The Wall Street Journal speculates that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker might cut a deal with the state's special prosecutor to end the present John Doe investigation of possible illegal campaign coordination between Mr. Walker and several right-wing groups. And now other right-wingers in Wisconsin -- perhaps mindful that the last John Doe investigation into Mr. Walker's doings resulted in six convictions -- worry that they'll be tossed under the bus, too. But don't be fooled into thinking the Walker juggernaut will fall apart one day because he'll run out of friends. People like Scott Walker can always buy find new friends.

Dick "Tha Dicksta" Cheney says President Obama is the "weakest President of my lifetime," and maybe even anyone's lifetime -- and he knows this because he's, you know, talked to the same elites he's been talking to for twenty years and they tell him how "alarm(ed)" they are. Gosh, Mr. Obama has already put Mr. bin Laden's head on one pike and Mr. Gadhafi's on another; how many more heads will reassure Mr. Cheney's friends? And why can't the "liberal" media treat Mr. Cheney like he deserves to be treated after all the evil he's done?

Action: another "sun tax," a bad chemical safety bill, and toughening up organic standards

They couldn't get the "sun tax" through the Arizona state legislature, so they're trying to get it from the state Executive branch: Arizona's Department of Revenue has apparently decided that folks who lease solar panels on their home should pay more property taxes -- around $150 more annually, which just so happens to wipe out most folks' annual savings on their electric bills, thus conveniently making solar a far less attractive option in a state where the sun seems to shine 678 hours a day. All so coal energy corporations, which are already quite wealthy, can continue to be quite wealthy and continue to pump poisons into our air and water. Great job, Arizona government! But the Sierra Club helps you tell Gov. Brewer to stop the "sun tax" in Arizona. Gov. Brewer has a mixed record on matters she can directly affect -- she didn't stop the "show your papers" bill, but she did stop the "turn away the gay" bill -- but I think if you put the words "sun tax" in your letter enough times without being too obvious, she might be swayed.

Meanwhile, Frank Lautenberg's chemical regulation reform bill from 2012, which would have reformed the Toxic Substances Control Act, sadly seems to have died with him, and the House now pushes something called the Chemicals in Commerce Act, which actually hamstrings the EPA from regulating or requiring testing for new chemicals -- which are being developed all the time, you know, hence the need to update the Toxic Substances Control Act. The bill also limits the amount of information you can get about toxic chemicals, and (in a real "states' rights" move!) even overrides tougher state laws about toxic chemicals. Nice to see the "conservatives" in the House bend over backwards for corporate power, again. Don't conservatives hate concentrated power anywhere? Contemporary "conservatives" only seem to hate power not concentrated in the hands of their paymasters. But Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Chemicals in Commerce Act, and demand something a lot stronger. Now that I think about it, calling this bill's supporters "objectively pro-breast cancer" might be a good tactic.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to reverse the National Organic Standards Board (or NOSB) rule that actually weakens organic standards in America, then the Organic Consumers Association still helps you do that. What does this rule do? Organic standards do include inorganic ingredients (necessary for storage, transport, and the like), but it used to be that the approval of those ingredients would only last five years and would have to be reinstated; now the approval of those ingredients lasts forever and we would have to challenge their continued inclusion -- which we'll do, but why make corporations happy at the expense of people? I must admit I am surprised to learn that 71% of Americans think organic food should have as few artificial ingredients as humanly possible. What are the other 29 percent thinking? Apparently, they're thinking that expanding folks' access to organic food requires sacrifices, like making it a lot less organic, which strikes me as an awful lot like not thinking. Still, we can turn them around, just as we can turn the NOSB around.

Action: net neutrality, organic standards, and nuclear non-proliferation.

As the Consumerist reminds us why we need the no-crippling-nor-prioritization-of-service network neutrality rules the FCC plans to gut, I have even more action alerts with which you may demand that you, not some ISP, determines what your internet experience will be like: one from Roots Action, another from CREDO, and a third from Free Press. That last one, from Free Press, is a phone-calling tool, so even if you've used any of the others, you can still use that one; FCC Chair Tom Wheeler needs to know he has nowhere to run. The Consumerist reminds us that if we let corporations run the internet, they will crush innovation, because it's really very easy right now to start an innovative website or application on the internet, but when we all have to pay out the ass to do that, it won't be easy to innovate anymore. And big corporations don't innovate -- small businesses innovate, and then big corporations gobble them up. And Roots Action reminds us, also, that on the very same day the FCC announced its plan to gut net neutrality, Brazil codified net neutrality provisions into national law. I'd hate to think our government was so addled by big corporate money that it couldn't do the right thing -- the thing that promotes innovation, the thing that promotes freedom, the thing that enjoys actual bipartisan support from left and right.

Meanwhile, you may recall that the National Organic Standards Board (or NOSB) banned the use of the antibiotic tetracycline in certified organic apples and pears after October of this year -- after your activism, no doubt -- but the NOSB hasn't banned the use of another antibiotic, streptomycin, in certified organic apples and pears, so the Organic Consumers Association helps you tell the NOSB to end streptomycin use on organic apple orchards the same day it ends tetracycline use. Why? Well, the more we overuse antibiotics, the more resistant the bacteria they target will become, until we're one day inundated by super-bugs everywhere that we can't kill. Orchards have used antibiotics to combat fire blight, a disease apple and pear trees get that makes the trees look like they've been burned and which ultimately kills the tree. But the best way to fight fire blight is to prune the blighted areas of the tree before they spread to the roots (which, I know, requires more workers, but hey, our U6 unemployment rate is still nearly 13%). And some scientists have also had success using bacteria and yeasts to take down the fire blight bug. So it's not exactly antibiotics-or-die for the organic apple and pear industry.

Finally, President Obama has, in the past, been a staunch advocate of securing "loose nukes," but his 2015 budget makes big cuts to programs that find and secure loose nuclear weapons and material. For the third year in a row, I should add. And the 2015 budget actually increases funding for nuclear weapons! That's getting it precisely backward -- does this mean we're going to just fire more nukes at terrorists and rogue states that get their hands on nuclear weapons? Seems to me we're much better off getting hold of those nukes before anyone else can. Seriously, I'm boggled at the priorities Mr. Obama has put on display here. Mere pretend deficit-hawkishness doesn't explain it -- you have to wonder if nuclear non-proliferation programs are "unpopular" now merely because Mr. Obama embraced them. Of course, if that's the case, then appeasing these fair-weather opponents isn't the right thing to do. You also have to wonder if Mr. Obama simply means to embrace good ideas in public and kill them in private. Hell, that's how it seems to have worked on network neutrality and the financial transaction tax! But if that's the case, then he needs to hear from us, so the Council for a Livable World helps you tell Mr. Obama to restore cuts to nuclear nonproliferation programs.

Action: corporate tax evasion, and organic food.

As you know, Tuesday was tax day, and in that spirit corporations have been lobbying Congress to renew two corporate tax loopholes -- the "active financing exception" and the "CFC look-through rule" -- that expired on January 1. Citizens for Tax Justice explains how they work here. Long story short: they make it easier for corporations to move money overseas, so we can't tax them -- to the tune of around $8 billion annually. The backers of these loopholes claim that our corporations need them to compete with nations that don't tax their corporations as hard, but that's bunkum for at least two reasons: one, our corporate tax code is already so riddled with holes that other countries aren't much competition, and two, squealing about competition in this manner essentially allows the nation that taxes everyone the lightest to hold the rest of the world hostage. Taxes pay for things, after all -- and if corporations won't pay for roads and bridges and schools and unemployment insurance, then small businesses and actual people will have to pay more. PennPIRG helps you tell Congress not to bring back the corporate loopholes that make it easier for corporations to shift income overseas.

Meanwhile, the USDA does not allow genetically-modified ingredients or irradiated ingredients in organic food -- but it does allow ingredients altered by mutagenesis in food earning the USDA organic label. No use arguing that all evolutionary change occurs through mutagenesis -- if you make food by shooting X-rays at a plant and seeing what mutations occur, as with mutagenesis, then your food is not organic. And no use arguing that we can't feed the world without finding new foods with mutagenesis. We don't have problems feeding the world because we can't create thirty-foot carrots, but because our society doesn't grow food to be eaten -- it grows food to be sold. And that thirty-foot carrot still wouldn't be organic. And don't folks who choose to eat organic food have the right to know their food actually is organic? The Organic Consumers Association helps you tell the USDA to reject mutagenesis as an acceptable practice in growing organic food. I'd lay money that few (if any) small organic farmers are experimenting with their products like this -- but that's all the more reason to close a loophole that helps big ag corporations put small farmers out of business.

Action: organic standards, renewable energy, and carbon emissions.

Six months ago, without seeking public comment (I wonder why!), the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) changed its rules for determining what synthetic products to allow in organic foods. The NOSB used to automatically sunset synthetic products after five years, and mandate a two-thirds vote of the NOSB to reinstate them, but now they've turned that on its head: once it allows a synthetic product in organic food, it allows it indefinitely unless a two-thirds majority votes it out. That'll let corporations get lazy about making their organic processes more organic (which sunsets nominally give them time to do), and will likely make the list of synthetic products allowed in organic food longer and longer until the word "organic" doesn't mean a damn thing anymore. Hence the Organic Consumers Association helps you tell Agriculture Secretary Vilsack to reverse the NOSB rule changes. I bet Mr. Vilsack, being an utter corporatist, doesn't care what we think. But he'll jump if he thinks he has to. And a lot of Americans, across the political spectrum, love organic food.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Pennsylvania state Sen. Daylin Leach (D-17) has introduced SB 1171, which would mandate that Pennsylvania utilities increase the amount of electricity they produce from renewable resources (particularly solar) to 15% by 2023. That doesn't seem like a whole lot to ask, does it? Especially in a state where wind power is actually doing reasonably well? Wait, let me think of some objections to SB 1171: coal is "more reliable" than solar or wind, people who use renewable energy are "free riders," renewable energy "kills jobs," all government mandates "kill jobs," climate change is a "hoax" perpetrated by environmentalists, coal and oil CEOs know better than everyone else. Nope, no reasonable objections in that list! Pennsylvania actually enacted a renewable energy standard fairly early, back in 2005, but other states have since surpassed Pennsylvania's efforts, and now we're looking at a bill that would only mandate that Pennsylvania produce 4.5% of its electricity from renewable energy sources this year. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senator to vote for more renewable energy.

Finally, the EPA is still accepting public comments on its new rule aiming to reduce carbon emissions from new power plants, and Public Citizen helps you leave said comment. President Obama might actually have played this particular 13-dimensional chess game pretty well -- the House passed an awful climate change bill in 2009, one that actually gave away most of the carbon credits that were supposed to raise revenue; the Senate didn't take up the House bill, and then couldn't get a bill of its own together in 2010, at least partly because the Republican point man was, somehow, Lindsey Graham, who took his ball and went home early. But all that left a more desirable option -- EPA regulation of carbon emissions -- on the table, an option already sanctified by a Supreme Court majority that included Antonin Scalia; several Republican-led attempts to rescind the EPA's authority went nowhere, thanks largely to Democratic majorities in the Senate. So having the EPA mandate lower carbon emissions is where we want to be. And if you want the EPA to regulate existing power plants as well, you can add that to your comment.

Around the table: the corporate surveillance state vs. a better world.

Sad news: America's prisoners currently outnumber America's high school teachers. America's prisoners also outnumber America's engineers, physicians, surgeons, lawyers, and social workers. That's what three decades-plus of screw-everyone-but-me economic theory and draconian criminal sentencing laws can do to a land. The good news? States seem to be waking up to the "draconian criminal sentencing" part, and our prison population has actually declined since 2009. Our work fighting screw-everyone-but-me economic theory is ongoing.

Here's an interesting thesis from Michael Lind: the right has a unified economic vision, but the left's vision is fragmented among three impulses -- protecting small producers, protecting unions, and promoting change through direct legislation -- and would be better served by concentrating on the last item, instead of protecting ever-diminishing numbers of small producers and union workers. I'd call protecting small producers a conservative economic vision myself, but the thing is, I don't think these three impulses comprise a fragmented vision -- in fact, I think one word describes them all: "freedom."

Essay from Roosevelt Institute scholar Thomas Ferguson and two others analyzes campaign contributions during the 2012 election. Perhaps the most devastating finding: that those sectors most involved in the "surveillance state," including telecoms and high tech, went big for Mr. Obama, who has not coincidentally expanded the surveillance state well beyond its size under Mr. Bush. A not-so-distant second: banksters were more likely to support teabaggers for Congress than any other sectors of the economy.

Speaking of American police states, David Rosen at Counterpunch reports on the private security state growing alongside the public one. He also discusses private sector surveillance of non-profits. You won't be pleased to learn how well our government integrates with corporations, and you may not be comforted to know how long this has been going on.

Alan Pyke at ThinkProgress tells us that if the minimum wage had increased over the years the way the earnings of the top 1% have increased, the minimum wage would be over $22/hour today. No doubt some right-wing smartypants stands ready to tell us that if minwage workers' earnings increased that much, then their bosses's earnings wouldn't have increased that much ha ha snort. To which I'd respond: we can only hope!

Finally, activists in 17 states across India are creating an organic seed bank called Navdanya. They hope it will help them fight the big corporate GMO takeover of Indian small farms and stem the rash of Indian small farmers committing suicide. You'll read about other "seed libraries," too. I hope I never see the day when our government kills organic seed preservers as "terrorists," but I can imagine it happening all too easily.

DC Circuit Court of Appeals tosses organic farmers' lawsuit against Monsanto -- but also makes Monsanto promise not to sue farmers whose seed has been inadvertently contaminated with Monsanto Frankenseed for "intellectual property theft." That's not a great victory for us -- how a corporation escapes punishment for "inadvertently" contaminating the world with its Frankenseed and then suing small farmers for "benefiting" from having that seed blow onto their crops is beyond me. Also left unsolved: organic farmers still won't be able to earn a USDA organic certification if Monsanto Frankenseed contaminates their crop -- and Monsanto could still battle each-and-every farmer whose seed they've contaminated in an attempt to "discover" if the contamination was "inadvertent," which litigation would still wreck small farmers while hurting Monsanto's bottom line rather little. Republicans who hate "frivolous lawsuits" might want to turn their attention to what's happening here, maybe? Soon Monsanto takes on the rest of the world, which opposes genetically-modified food and is starting to turn back American wheat at the border. I hope we don't have to learn a painful lesson about who's more powerful then.

Meanwhile, Citizens for Tax Justice reminds us why we need a corporate income tax. Apparently some folks have been saying that, since corporate profits eventually go to shareholders, we should just abolish the corporate income tax and adjust personal income tax rates accordingly. Sounds appetizing, doesn't it? But behold: corporations don't eventually pass on all their profits to individuals -- most of their profits go into tax-exempt entities like pensions and university endowments -- and corporations can also hold onto their profits for years before disbursing them. So, yeah, when you've argued from a completely inaccurate premise, the whole thing pretty much falls apart. Furthermore, most dividends go to high-income individuals anyway, so the corporate tax winds up doing at least some of the work a progressive income tax code should be doing. Of course, dividend taxes shouldn't be lower than income taxes in the first place; even Ronald Reagan said so. But hopefully we've nipped this whole argument in the bud -- though you can't underestimate the "liberal" media's ability to ignore good arguments, since they were still peddling rubbish about the Bush tax cuts and small businesses as late as last December.

The Senate takes up the Farm Bill again this week, and we've already had a win and a loss: a Durbin-Coburn amendment began the hard work of limiting crop insurance subsidies for big corporations, but a Gillibrand amendment that would have restored over $4 billion in food stamps got shot down, with 28 Democrats helping the Republicans do the shooting. And they call that fiscal sanity! But Food and Water Watch helps you email your Senators about amendments to the Farm Bill. Their list is pretty comprehensive; it includes, among others, two Barbara Boxer (D-CA) amendments that would force labeling of genetically-modified food, a Begich (D-AK) amendment that would ban genetically-engineered salmon, a Gillibrand (D-NY) amendment that would tackle antibiotic abuse in factory farm animals, a slew of factory farm-spanking amendments authored by Democrats Tester and Rockefeller as well as Republicans Grassley and Enzi, and a Shaheen (D-NH) amendment limiting crop insurance payouts to $50,000. The big agricultural concerns will try to drown us out, but they're nothing compared to us. After all, we're people.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Pennsylvania state Senate is actually mulling legislation (SB 975) that would legalize payday loans extracting 300% annual interest. Sigh. They're calling SB 975 a "micro-loan" bill, but if it looks like dung and smells like dung you don't need to eat it because Pennsylvania politicians call it meatloaf. And back in 2002, the state legislature actually passed a tough payday lending law -- one that limited the size of loans to $500, limited fees to $75, and limited interest to 20% for the first $300 and a mere 7.5% for any money over $300. Pennsylvania law also doesn't allow borrowers to take out a second payday loan until they've paid off the first, which keeps them out of an endless cycle of debt brought on by a temporary cash crisis. So why break something that's been working well for over a decade? I'd hate to think it's because the big banksters want to get into the payday loan business, but we can't discount the possibility. Keystone Progress helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject SB 975, and keep our payday loan laws strong.

FAIR finds the "liberal" media once again rushing to judgment in re whether Syria has used chemical weapons. Long story short: there's much less proof than the "liberal" media would want you to believe. Absolutely priceless moments: New York Times hack Bill Keller saying "getting Syria right starts with getting over Iraq" and ABC news hack Cokie Roberts suggesting that public unwillingness to get embroiled in another quagmire is "a huge problem."

Wisconsin legislature mulls a bill, AB 110, that would attempt to curtail alleged food-stamp spending on junk food -- but would also would curtail food-stamp spending on organic milk, organic eggs, and gluten-free bread, among other actually healthy foods. You're tempted to say the legislature really doesn't understand what they're doing, but they carved out exemptions for beef and pork, just not for the dairy products for which Wisconsin is famous. They really have taken George W. Bush's lessons to heart in Wisconsin.

Dave Johnson describes "Seven Ways the Sequester Is Actually Increasing Government Spending." This isn't one of those counterintuitive cut-the-top-tax-rate-and-you'll-raise-revenue arguments -- we all know in our bones that the essential spending you cut now often costs you later. Highlights, such as they are: cutting IRS appropriations cuts revenue and thus increases the deficit; cutting Meals-on-Wheels puts more seniors in nursing homes and thus increases Medicare spending; even arbitrary defense cuts results in future lawsuits, thus settlements, thus increased spending.

Don't look now, but Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post thinks that "employers lack confidence, not skilled labor." Mr. Samuelson is one of the Post's biggest corporatists, a long-time apologist for Medicare and Social Security "reform," but if he tells you that the number of unemployed folk "dwarf(s)" the number of job vacancies, and that long-term unemployed get shafted worse than anyone else regardless of their skills, then the we-can't-find-the-right-people shtick must be one of the worst shticks ever.

Finally, NPR's David Carr finds that media executives tend to outmake even financial sector executives, at least at the high end. Did you need even more proof that the media can't speak truth to power because they are power? Well, there it is.

It's only been two days and I have a boatload of repeal-the-sequester action alerts. Both the Coalition on Human Needs and the National Women's Law Center help you tell Congress to repeal the whole thing, not just the part that impacts them as they try to get out of town on a weekend. Of course we all understand problems a lot better when they impact us personally, but it shouldn't take that much empathy to get rid of the spending cuts that take food directly out of seniors' mouths, or slash unemployment assistance to folks who need it, which also takes food out of their mouths. Oh, but we're not just about stopping the bleeding, we're also about starting the healing: Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI) has introduced S. 278, the Job Preservation and Sequester Replacement Act, which would replace the sequester's cuts with new revenues generated from ending certain corporate tax breaks and instituting the Buffett Rule. S. 278 is already up on thomas.loc.gov; you may want to call your Reps and Senators about it. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, Europe has banned a class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids (that's right, related to nicotine), because of their tendency to kill off honeybees. But we haven't, and indeed the EPA is mulling approving Dow Chemical's sulfoxaflor for wider insecticide use (the EPA approved it for use on cotton last year, on an "emergency" basis, no less). And the EPA says sulfoxaflor is "very highly-toxic" to bees, but also says its effects on bees are "relatively short-lived." Relative to how long they'll be dead, maybe? Organic Consumers helps you tell the EPA to reject sulfoxaflor for any use. It's get-off-the-pot-time for the EPA, and all this jockeying over whether sulfoxaflor is precisely a neonicotinoid or just something else that kills off a lot of bees sounds like what the big corporations want us to do while they make money hand over fist from desperate farmers. This ain't no joke -- we have fewer than half the bees we had in 1960, and if they all die, they'll very likely take almonds, apples, peaches, cherries, blueberries, avocados, and watermelon with them, and you won't find apples at the market anytime you want, either.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to support H.R. 1755/S. 815, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (or ENDA), People for the American Way offers one more. Corporations can fire folks just for being gay in 29 states (and transgender in 34), and I know a lot of honest conservatives would prefer that we just hire the best people for the job and not worry about who they sleep with at night. Of course, who can hear America's honest conservatives over the gaggle of ragehead punditoids who create all the drama and get all the attention? But the tide seems to be turning against anti-gay bigotry; a majority of U.S. Senators now support gay marriage, the first active male athlete from one of the four major sports just came out of the closet, and even S. 815's five co-sponsors include two Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Mark Kirk of Illinois. H.R. 1755's 161 co-sponsors include (only) two Republicans (Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania and Richard Hanna of New York), but the House ain't the boss of us. Now, right wingers: no lies about gays being allowed to break all the rules (see Sec. 8 of S. 815) or the bill creating gay affirmative action (Sec. 4) or forcing churches to hire all-gay choirs (Sec. 6), OK?

Idaho becomes second state to restrict drone use by law enforcement, as at least one state Senator voices concerns about "high-tech window peeping." It shouldn't be a surprise that arguably the most conservative state in the union just restricted drone use, as conservatives have long had plenty of privacy concerns about drones, even if the "conservatives" you see on cable news don't share them.

Just in case we've been getting too misty-eyed about Rand Paul lately, he just told Howard University students that he never opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yikes, doesn't everybody know that's bunk? And he spent twenty minutes on Rachel Maddow's show avoiding answering the same damn question, and Ms. Maddow wasn't even being mean to him. If he's going to pander, he's got to work on his skills. He sure won't learn them from his Dad.

The Obama Administration has argued that it should not have to disclose a court ruling that it's spied on Americans illegally. Or the consequences could be "exceptionally grave and serious" yadda yadda yadda. I would think the consequences of not disclosing the ruling would be rather grave -- must we always be compelled to allow our government to go on blundering?

Arkansas TV stations pull unusually blunt anti-Exxon ad after Exxon threatens legal action. (As you surely recall, an Exxon pipeline did recently take a dump all over Arkansas.) If Exxon really thinks the makers of this ad think that each-and-every Exxon employee hates children because Exxon makes money off technologies that make them sick, they're more thin-skinned than I previously thought possible. And thanks to the miracle of modern technology, you can see the ad in its entirety at the above link.

California may be segregating its prisoners based on race at at least five of its state prisons. Using a color-coding system, no less! As a response to gang-related rioting at its prisons, they say -- and certainly not because California's prisons are at about 150% of capacity!

The incomparable Alex Pareene writes about Reshma Saujani, the former hedge fund attorney now running for New York City public advocate, but who in 2010 ran against U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney in the Democratic primary with the improbable message that we should be nice to Wall Street. And who has since apparently scrubbed every reference to her pro-Wall Street stance (and career!) she can find. It ain't just Republicans who think we're completely stupid, folks. Wanted to "invite Wall Street to create jobs" -- like that's what they know how to do!

Finally, some good news: the National Organics Standards Board has barred the use of the antibiotic oxytetracycline in organic apples and pears, a battle we earlier described here. Some apple and pear growers contend that there just aren't any better ways of fighting fire blight, though hiring more workers to prune trees more carefully and planting more resistant varieties are, actually, two good ways. Eagerly awaiting the first idiot to tell me that you'll be happy when apple prices go up, hippie -- since, as we know, all prices always depend on one single factor!

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

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

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

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

Food and Water Watch helps you tell the National Organics Standards Board to prohibit apple and pear growers from labeling their produce "organic" if they use the antibiotic tetracycline. That's what organic standards are for, right? Keeping artificial stuff out of food? Yet apple and pear growers have enjoyed an exemption from organic standards for years, and want to extend that exemption for another three years. Tetracycline helps combat fire blight (so named for its burnt appearance, though the pathogen Erwinia amylovora causes it), but the whole point of organic labeling is to prevent the consumer from ingesting harmful chemicals, and tetracycline (which studies have linked to lupus, breathing problems, and fetal bone growth issues) is one of those. Also, using antibiotics on fire-blighted trees has helped create even stronger strains of Erwinia, and there are other ways to fight it (like planting more resistant varieties and more vigilant pruning). Of course, they're more labor-intensive, but I hear a lot of people are looking for jobs these days. And "organic" is a label you really ought to earn.

Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Congress to enact stronger standards for storing radioactive nuclear waste. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Currently more than 70 sites store nuclear waste (tens of thousands of tons of it!) in "spent-fuel pools," which aren't particularly safe from terrorist attacks and need lots of energy to maintain, instead of dry casks, which are made of steel and concrete and which have no need for electrical maintenance (thus making them safer during a power outage!). And the pools were only supposed to be short-term storage to begin with! It's a wonder we don't have more problems -- which, I imagine, would be the right-wing response to any effort to move spent nuclear waste to dry casks. But it has happened elsewhere -- a spent-fuel pool ruptured and leaked radioactive material into the air during the Fukushima disaster -- and if we can imagine it happening here pretty easily, we should deal with it promptly. And this seems to me the more conservative viewpoint -- after all, we do have life and property to conserve, don't we?

Finally, Public Citizen helps you support an end to the arbitration forced upon consumers by corporations. As you may recall, Sens. Franken (D-MN) and Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced the Arbitration Fairness Act in the Senate in 2011, and Rep. Johnson (D-GA) introduced a version in the House. They've yet to re-introduce the Act in this Congress (thomas.loc.gov has nothing for "arbitration fairness" as of this writing), but that doesn't mean it's not important right now, or that we can't talk about it with our Congressfolk. More and more corporations -- like banks, cell-phone providers, and cable corporations -- slip forced arbitration agreements into their contracts, and as you may recall, the Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that corporations could force consumers into agreements that actually prevent them from banding into classes and filing class-action lawsuits. And the arbitrators don't rule in your favor very often, because they get their checks from the corporations -- though, really, since we buy the corporations' products and services, we're paying for it. But no one should have to give up their rights just to get a product or service -- or a job.