Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning our Estate Tax, patent trolls, and compassion for hurricane victims.

S. 309, the For the 99.8% Act, would hike our Estate Tax on larger-income estates, i.e., those over $750,000, and create more progressive brackets for Estate Taxes, such that folks who leave billion-dollar estates would pay 77 percent on that part of the estate over a billion dollars, and estates over $10 million dollars would get taxed overall at rates much closer to 50% than they are now. (The high end of the Estate Tax rate is currently 40 percent.) Right-wingers have been having all the say about this matter for a long time now, what with their calling it the "death tax" even though (as the bill's title suggests!) much fewer than 1% of Americans will ever have to pay it! And if we don't tax large estates, then we won't be able to restrain the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to make Estate Taxes fairer and more vigorous by passing the For the 99.8 Percent Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3666/S. 2082, the so-called STRONGER Patents Act, would let patent trolls have their way in America by gutting the inter partes review process, which allows folks to challenge the validity of patents. And a lot of patents, quite frankly, need to be challenged, or else the Patent Office wouldn't have thrown out over 1,500 patents over the last seven years (more than one every other day!) via the IPR process. Patent trolls go around patenting every widely-used thing they can, like crowdfunding and messaging and picture menus, so they can sue craploads of people and win craploads of money, and of course Congress wants to make patents "stronger" so they can withstand scrutiny, rather than making them better so that real innovators can benefit from their work. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect real innovation in America by rejecting the STRONGER Patents Act.

Finally, Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas hard, depriving tens of thousands of good Bahamians of access to food, water, and shelter, but our President, peach of a man that he is, doesn't want to allow any victims of the hurricane to seek refuge in America, because some of them are bad people, or something. He really wants you to think this country has just never had a system to vet people who want to come here! Of course the Temporary Protected Status (or TPS) system has long existed to help out folks who flee their country because of natural disasters, hence H.R. 4272, the TPS for Victims of Hurricane Dorian Act, would allow Bahamians to live and work here for the next 18 months. 18 months! Some folks enjoy TPS status for decades, so bad off are their home countries. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to show some compassion by passing the TPS for Victims of Hurricane Dorian Act.

Action: concerning patents and pollution.

Remember a few years ago, when our Supreme Court ruled that you couldn't patent human genes because, well, you didn't make them? Congress may undo that good work with legislation that would nullify the ruling and allow big corporations to patent human genes again, so Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep big corporations from patenting our genes. Some Congressfolk will claim that this legislation doesn't do that, but all you need do to refute them is attend the discussion in paragraphs 8 through 11 of this article. Trigger warning: a lawyer claims the ruling has caused "a dead stop in research in the United States on isolated natural products." You'll recognize that as a hostage crisis -- give me monopoly power over human genes, or the science gets it! You'll also recognize it as absurd, since we're more likely to do good work about "isolated natural products" if many entities can research them, rather than one corporation valuing money more than science.

Meanwhile, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned our EPA's 2015 coal ash rule last year, ruling that it did not adequately protect good Americans from the water pollution caused by coal ash leaking into groundwater -- as mandated to do by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which grants our EPA rule-making power in this matter. Yes, I totally put that last clause in there to forestall complaints about BIG GUMMINT!!!! But even though the coal ash rule dates from the Obama Administration, now this Administration must fix it -- again, as mandated by our laws and our courts -- and you can probably guess their enthusiasm for that task. Still: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want -- if we speak out loudly enough. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to comply with our courts and write a strong coal ash rule. That would be the law and order thing to do, after all.

Finally, H.R. 2156, the RECLAIM Act, would help states clean up air and water polluted by abandoned coal mines Reclaiming abandoned coal mines -- which put a lot of filth into our air and water, particularly in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, from which (perhaps not coincidentally!) many of H.R. 2156's sponsors hail -- would not only make our air and water cleaner, but would create jobs for workers abandoned by a dying coal industry. And H.R. 2156 actually has almost a dozen Republican co-sponsors and just passed out of the House National Resources Committee by a 26-10 vote; with Senate Majority Leader Mitch "I decide what we vote on" McConnell also hailing from Kentucky, maybe H.R. 2156 can pass both houses of Congress! But we've still got to stay on our Congressfolk, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to cut pollution and help out depressed areas of our country by passing the RECLAIM Act.

Action: concerning taxes, domestic violence, and patent trolls.

Both Moms Rising and Americans for Tax Reform help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2017 "tax scam." The Moms Rising tool also helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC), since these are tax credits that actually help working families make ends meet, or even get ahead. Unlike all those corporate tax loopholes Congress loves waiting until the end of the year to extend because they know they're too unpopular to extend at any other time! But the 2017 tax "reform" -- which more and more Americans, however accurately, now regard as a "tax scam" because they're not getting as much back at tax time as they did in previous years -- not only gave us near-trillion-dollar deficits, but handed out welfare to corporations and rich folks. They say the wealth will trickle down to us "little folks"; I say something's trickling down, but it sure ain't wealth.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act already. Yup, they let it expire again, just like they did in 2012, but at least then they got hung up over stupid crap; this time, they let it expire because, you know, why bother governing when you could be posturing? The Violence Against Women Act has done America a great deal of good -- before Congress passed it in 1994, domestic violence survivors generally thought they were at fault for what happened to them, and most Americans agreed; now, at least, most folks will keep their victim-blaming to themselves, and blame the attackers for taking out their insecurities on their partners. This is no small thing, helped by the many programs (including the National Domestic Violence Hotline) VAWA has created. But we've got more work to do, and the Violence Against Women Act helps us do that work, so let's get to it.

Finally, you've heard of "patent trolls," who patent relatively common pieces of software and then sue anyone who uses that relatively common piece of software as part of a considerably more innovative product, thus cowing such actual innovators into giving them money for not actually doing any work. Naturally, the U.S. Patent Office -- in the Administration of the President who has, more than any other American, excelled at conning folks into giving him money for not doing any work -- wants to make it even easier for patent trolls to operate. Such is our Administration's blind hatred for regulations, particularly regulations that actually help good Americans. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell our Patent Office to apply, not narrow, our Supreme Court's decision in Alice v. CLS Bank, which held that you can't just patent any old thing because you can now do it on a computer.

Action: real tax breaks for real working families, and patent reform for real innovators.

By now, you know the drill -- politicians blame taxes for your struggle to make ends meet, and then, once you put them in power, they go and cut taxes for their big donors and not so much for you. In fact, they're likely to raise the taxes that hurt you the most, like sales taxes, once their big donor tax cuts reduce government revenues and thus cripple the government services upon which we all rely. But "liberal" media cynicism aside, it doesn't have to be that way, and short of the campaign finance reform that would cut off the lifeflow of big donor money to policymakers, we still have a voice, and we still have representatives that are supposed to, you know, represent. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk why tax breaks that really support working families work for you. You know that things like the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit do help you make ends meet. And you know that the benefit a corporation gets from stashing billions of dollars offshore or depreciating an executive jet over a period of years doesn't ever trickle down to you -- but, sadly, you also know that too many Congressfolk try to convince you that their pet corporate welfare handouts are really "tax breaks for working families." Always remember: you're the job creators in this economy.

Meanwhile, Congress has, at times, seemed enthusiastic about enacting patent reform that would actually enable innovation in America, but then they seem to lose that enthusiasm. I doubt it's because we haven't been consistent enough in our advocacy -- I'll bet Congressfolks' big donors make them afraid of what would happen to them if they tried to keep "patent trolls" from patenting everything they can think of willy-nilly. These patent trolls aren't even trying to win lawsuits -- they're just trying to discourage you from marketing some innovative new product or process, because the lawsuits would be too expensive to fight. Would it be uncivil to call opponents of patent reform objectively pro-frivolous lawsuit? The tort "reform" crowd always cries about class-action lawsuits, after all, but they're quite mute about patent trolls. Still, S. 2733, the VENUE Act, would force plaintiffs to file patent lawsuits in the judicial districts where the defendants work and/or committed the alleged infringement, instead of shopping around for a favorable district that will give them whatever they want -- but Judiciary Chair Charles Grassley (R-IA) seems unwilling to move the bill forward. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you urge Sen. Grassley, via Twitter, to move the VENUE Act for a vote. (If you don't use Twitter, you can also find his contact info using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page.)

Action: patent trolls, money bail, and cage-free eggs.

Congress didn't pass comprehensive patent reform legislation last year, but S. 2733, the VENUE Act, would only allow plaintiffs to bring patent infringement suits in judicial districts where defendants actually work and/or where they have allegedly committed the infringement. The VENUE Act would also mandate that both parties have "a regular and established physical facility" "not primarily for the purpose of creating venue," which would close the loophole patent trolls exploit, where they go fishing for a judicial district that seems more sympathetic to patent infringement claims than others -- like, say, the Eastern District of Texas, which hears almost half of all patent-infringement suits in America. We need further reforms to stop patent trolls from filing these frivolous lawsuits that don't protect property but merely extract tribute from folks who actually make stuff, but the VENUE Act would do some good. The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell the Senate to begin reforming our patent system by passing the VENUE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4611, the No Money Bail Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The No Money Bail Act would do pretty much what it sounds like it'd do -- it would prevent our federal government from extracting money for bail in federal criminal cases, and would also cut off certain federal grants to states that continue to use money bail. But if we can't demand money for bail, I can already hear right-wingers saying, how are we going to protect the public? Oh, gosh, I don't know -- maybe by doing police work? If the state suspects you of a crime, but doesn't have enough evidence to detain you and can't prove you're a flight risk, why should you have to pay to go free? Particularly when money bail hits the poor a lot harder than everyone else? I look forward to the day we stop punishing drug addicts and start treating them, because then a lot of the problems with our criminal justice system will fall away. Until then, we argue for the right thing, and we demand the right thing.

Finally, a lot of supermarket chains (including Kroger, Food Lion, and Target) have moved toward cage-free eggs -- meaning that the hens who lay the eggs don't live in tiny cages -- but Publix hasn't, and they have more than 1,100 stores in six Southeastern states. Egg-laying hens typically live in "battery cages," so named because of the arrangement of cages more or less like battery cells, but you could be excused for thinking a different kind of battery goes on, because these hens live absolutely miserable lives: often crammed eight or 10 to a cage the size of a filing cabinet drawer, these hens suffer from many of the same problems other factory-farm chickens do (dirty conditions, increased illness, no space even to stretch their wings), plus others -- they live in the dark and have their beaks trimmed, so they don't peck at or cannibalize other birds, though, of course, they wouldn't do these things if they weren't living in those damn cages! So Change.org helps you tell Publix to get with the times and move toward cage-free eggs.

Around the table: Chelsea Clinton goes Karl Rove on Bernie Sanders, and other follies.

Look out: Chelsea Clinton says Bernie Sanders, if President, will "dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance." And neglects, apparently, to mention that Mr. Sanders has proposed a single-payer plan covering all Americans that would merely replace those plans. I fault Mr. Sanders for not simply saying he wants to expand Medicare to everyone, but that's a mere messaging matter, whereas the above-quoted passage is some Karl Rove-level BS.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation finds that the huge jump in patent suits might well be explained by the sharp rise in "patent trolling" in the Eastern District of Texas. That news may well prompt you to say, Texas, stop your grandstanding and secede from America already, but the news isn't all bad: even this Republican Congress has shown some interest in dealing with the problem, and lower court rulings have also chipped away at those trolls who patent every damn thing so they can win frivolous lawsuits against honest, hard-working Americans.

Virginia state legislator actually proposed legislation mandating that schools ban transgendered students from any bathroom other than the bathroom of the sex they got at birth. Now that's some small government there! And though the bill would "leave it up to schools" to figure out how to enforce the ban, we might as well call it the "Touch Kids' Junk" bill.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin informs our federal government that he plans to scuttle the state's legendarily successful health care exchange, Kynect. He's clearly learned from Scott Walker to do all your asshole stuff at the beginning of your term, so voters have four years to get used to it. Problem here is that Gov. Bevin would force half a million Kentuckians onto ZOMG OBAMACAREZ!!!!!, which means he might actually have trouble from his right in 2019. I know it's hard right now to imagine anyone to Mr. Bevin's right, but I assure you the forces of evil are building that beast as we speak.

Finally, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is getting a lot of good press for her Republican rebuttal to President Obama's State of the Union address the other night, but really, our "liberal" media should attend these things to the end, rather than just reach for the first quotation that might be about Donald Trump and run with it. It's sad we credit her for suggesting we need to "turn down the volume" of our disagreements, but we don't discredit her for presuming taxes aren't low for working families at the federal level, or for saying we "demonize" "innovators" when we criticize banksters, or for taking yet another Republican pass on what precise health care reforms would "lower costs," or for suggesting we can somehow let bigots discriminate against gays and still "respect differences in modern families."

UPDATE. I should have made clear, originally, that low taxes for working families is something that really only exists as far as federal taxation goes -- working families still get disproportionately hit by sales taxes and flat state income taxes. Error rectified above.

Action: patenting genes, rewriting textbooks, and associating with ALEC.

The Federal Court of Australia -- which sits just under that nation's High Court -- ruled last month that corporations can patent breast cancer genes, on the grounds that isolating genetic material from the human body essentially created something new. Our own Supreme Court ruled quite differently, you may recall -- that corporations can't patent genes, since genes occur in nature, but could patent artificially-manufactured genes. What's the trouble with giving corporations patents over human genes, besides its utter absurdity? Those corporations could monopolize cancer treatments and dictate the terms upon which people live or die, much like the fabled "death panels" the Affordable Care Act did not create. The decision's supporters tout the new business the Court's decision will supposedly bring to Australia, which sure will make all those people affected by cancer feel a lot better. Well, my mom died in horrible pain and suffering, but at least the economy got a little boost! You know what comes next: the big stick of bad PR, which has prompted other Australian corporations to drop their patent applications. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Myriad Genetics to drop its application for a patent on the BRC1 gene.

Meanwhile, the Texas state Board of Education is, again, considering rewriting all their textbooks so that whiny, cowardly, diaper-loaded right-wingers never suffer an emotional boo-boo from anyone's hard truths ever again. This time they're considering a social studies text that would describe Moses's "direct influence" on the Constitution -- you know, 10 Commandments, 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights? For when have we ever had ten of anything else? The text would also "inform" us that "states' rights," not slavery, caused the Civil War, and would claim that scientists disagree a lot on climate change, which they don't. We might just ignore Texas in these matters and let them go their own disastrous way, except that Texas, as you might expect, buys a lot of textbooks, and thus has far more influence on how textbooks get written than, say, Wyoming -- I mean, why else would the far right make Texas an educational battleground, as they have for more than three decades? Hence People for the American Way help you tell the Texas Board of Education to stop injecting religious ideology into their books. Note well that I said "religious ideology" and not "God" -- God is not nearly as weak as some of His most annoying votaries would have you believe.

Finally, you've surely heard by now that Google has announced it will quit ALEC; you may not have heard that Facebook has announced same, and these corporations would follow in Microsoft's footsteps. But some internet titans still associate with the American Legislative Exchange Council, which has lately abandoned promoting Voter ID and "Stand Your Ground" laws (after getting those laws passed in as many legislatures as they could, naturally) and now traffics in corporate welfare handouts and climate change denialism, which latter item (I'm still sore it's not the former, but I guess I shouldn't expect too much from a big corporation) has prompted much of the recent exodus. So Common Cause helps you tell AOL to cut its ties with ALEC. (Common Cause originally aimed their action tool at both AOL and Yahoo!, but Yahoo! has since cut ties with ALEC as well.) And Public Citizen helps you tell Google to quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as well as ALEC. State and local Chambers of Commerce still fulfill important functions in America, but the national organization suffers from some serious Obama Derangement Syndrome, and is now no better than a national ALEC. Climate change denialism is but one of their symptoms.

Around the table: mine safety, climate change, privatization, gay marriage, net neutrality, and turning light into matter.

A May 12 mining accident at a notoriously unsafe West Virginia mine "highlights the need for Congressional action," says the Center for Effective Government. They're right, of course, but n.b. that the Robert C. Byrd Mine Safety Protection Act couldn't even get through the House when the Democrats controlled it, which speaks to the difficulty (though not impossibility!) of our task. Getting proper funding the for the Mine Safety and Health Administration (a casualty of sequestration, of course!) should, in theory, be considerably easier -- I mean, what Congressperson would really want to be known as pro-dead miner?

This should be interesting: Farmers Insurance Co. has filed nine class-action lawsuits against over 200 local governments in Chicago and its environs, alleging they know about climate change but are doing nothing about it, thus causing the kind of catastrophes Farmers Insurance has to spend money covering. I'm not sure any of them are going to win -- I presume you can demonstrate that climate change is causing certain events to happen more frequently, but not necessarily that it caused all the specific claims you're trying to redress. Still, the fossil fuel corporations could one day find themselves surrounded on climate change by every other sector of the corporate economy, and that wouldn't be a bad thing.

Dave Johnson promises "Five Government Outsourcing Horror Stories," but actually delivers many more, and not just because number 5 is "Any Government 'Outsourcing' Anything." Read through the Chicago Parking Meters story, the Indiana Toll Road story, the private prisons story, and the "Cost Overruns" story, but attend these four sentences most closely: "But just how do they save money? There are two ways a company can save money over what government spends. The first is to reduce what it pays employees and suppliers. The second is to cut back on the amount or quality of the service the company is taking over."

Far-right radio host/contender for Georgia's 10th Congressional District says having same-sex parents is rather like "los(ing) a mom or dad in a car accident." Plus gay people have the right to marry, just not each other har har har. I guess he's trying to out-Paul Broun Paul Broun, who currently "serves" the 10th District and who just lost the Senate runoff. Mr. Hice, unfortunately, just made the House election runoff, and the winner there will almost certainly win the general election, meaning we could be hearing from Mr. Hice for many, many years. But not here, where we'll never speak of him again.

Yes! Magazine gives us "four signs net neutrality isn't dead yet." You likely already know them -- that the FCC changed its proposal somewhat after popular pressure, that pressuring elected representatives helped that, that public utility reclassification isn't dead and buried, and that some big corporations are now more visibly on our side -- but it's good to be reminded. Why, AT&T has just promised three years of net neutrality if we approve their deal to buy DirecTV, which shouldn't induce us to take the deal, but should alert us that corporations know net neutrality is popular and thus induce us to fight harder for net neutrality.

Finally, scientists at Imperial College London have worked out how to turn light into matter. Note that nobody's actually done that yet, but the physicists think it can be done with "existing technology." Hopefully we won't have to deal with junk patents on light in the meantime.

Action: patent trolls, GMO labeling, and getting better behavior from BP.

The House passed the Innovation Act back in December, but the Senate plans to bring its own patent-reform bill to the floor -- S. 1720, the Patent Transparency and Improvements Act. It has a wordier title than the House bill, and it's also not as good as than House bill -- as the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports, the Senate bill would do a few things the Innovation Act does, but wouldn't reform the patent-issuing process, wouldn't force patent trolls to pay your attorney fees when they lose a frivolous lawsuit against you, wouldn't make patent trolls specify exactly what part of their vague patent they claim you've violated, and wouldn't prevent patent trolls from bankrupting you by forcing you to present reams of unnecessary and irrelevant documents. Thankfully, the EFF also helps you tell the Senate to pass a better patent transparency bill, so that our laws do not permit no-work-doing leeches to destroy real innovators. Hopefully our champions of tort "reform" will embrace legislation that would actually stop frivolous lawsuits.

Meanwhile, Creswell, OR activist James Dubick joins with CREDO to help you tell Safeway's CEO to label food products that contain genetically-modified organisms. Why? Because Safeway is the second-biggest supermarket chain in America, and could induce other supermarkets to do the right thing. If your friends complain to you that telling Safeway's CEO to label GMO foods is somehow fear-mongering, remind them that if GMO foods are safe, then GMO manufacturers have nothing to fear from their labeling. They're constantly telling us they're safe, right? While scientists do not all necessarily agree that GMO foods cause health problems, GMO foods spur big ag to use more dangerous pesticides and herbicides, which makes GMO foods de facto more dangerous. And, er, doesn't Newt Gingrich say that when 70 percent of Americans want something, they should get it? Polls consistently show over 90 percent of Americans want GMO food-labeling. So what's the problem?

Finally, the EPA has lately lifted British Petroleum's suspension from receiving federal contracts, but you might wonder whether BP has really done anything to deserve such lenient treatment from our government. You do not need to contemplate the 2010 Spillageddon in the Gulf any further to wonder -- you need only consider that BP's Whiting, IN refinery spilled over 1,600 gallons of crude into Lake Michigan late last month, or that the same refinery has been polluting Chicago's South Side neighborhood for years, or that BP violated Oregon state law by slapping fees on customers who paid for gas with their debit cards without telling them. Does that sound like a good corporate citizen to you? Public Citizen helps you tell the EPA to keep BP from feeding at the federal trough until it conducts itself better. Don't believe the hype that keeping BP from getting federal contracts kills jobs. Is there really no other oil corporation deserving of federal contracts?

Action: private prisons, and patent trolls.

Presente helps you tell the Gates Foundation to withdraw financial support from the GEO Group, a private prison corporation. You need not have a strong opinion of the Gates Foundation's (or, for that matter, the GEO Group's) good-evil orientation to support this effort, nor need you have an opinion on how badly prisons generally treat non-whites and immigrants. I support it for one simple reason: keeping folks in prison is our government's job, not a job our government should outsource to private corporations. When it's our government's job, that means it's our job, and even if our government monitors how well private corporations house and care for our prisoners -- which is no safe bet! -- that still puts a wedge between us and our government. It also makes prison corporations richer without rehabilitating prisoners or making communities safer. And to those who wail WHERE WILLZ TEH MONEYZ COME FROM TO RUNZ TEH PRIZUNZ!!!!: stop letting our governments give away our tax money to big corporations for "job creation," since corporations generally give that money to their CEOs and shareholders instead. One can find a lot of money there.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Senate to pass the Innovation Act, which would keep "patent trolls" from suing actual innovators into the poorhouse, then the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you do that -- using their Fix Patents call tool. What do patent trolls do? Patent trolls go around patenting the littlest and most common things they can find, so that when other folks make actually-useful things out of them, the patent trolls can sue them. Nice work if you can get it! Seriously, we've become a society that doesn't reward hard work anymore, and so it goes with patent trolls, who bank on you not wanting to go through the pain and hardship (and, ah, risk of bankruptcy) of a lawsuit so they can extort a settlement to go away. The Innovation Act would shift the financial burden of these frivolous lawsuits to the bad actors filing them, and would also make these bad actors cite exactly which parts of their patents they think are being violated. The whole patent-granting process in America still needs a considerable amount of reform, but the Innovation Act would do a lot of good.

Action: patent trolls, antibiotic abuse, and "free" trade.

Don't look now, but the House actually passed a decent bill at the end of last year -- H.R. 3309, the Innovation Act, a Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) production which received an unusually robust 325-91 vote in favor. The Innovation Act addresses that scourge of this new century, the patent troll. What's that, you ask? A patent troll goes around taking out patents on everything they can think of, not so they can create interesting and innovative things, but so they can sue people who create interesting and innovative things. Nice work if you can get it! But H.R. 3309 would stop these Actual Frivolous Lawsuits by requiring the plaintiff to specify exactly what part of the patent the defendant is violating, and would force losing plaintiffs to pay the legal fees of their defendants. That last part's important: the patent troll basically banks on you, the Actual Innovator, to give up and stop doing what you're doing because you can't pay to fight them in court. Now, the Senate must take up the bill, so the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell the Senate to pass the Innovation Act.

Meanwhile, the FDA has, as you know, issued guidelines for antibiotic use on factory farms, among them the requirement that veterinarians write prescriptions for those antibiotics. Previously, factory farms could get them without a prescription, but now they can't, and while some vets might fall for the factory farm line that they need these drugs to produce meatier animals, I suspect most vets won't, and in any case the FDA requirement that vets actually see the animals or visit the farms where they're kept would, I imagine, deflect corruption further. Still, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell the FDA to improve and maintain these requirements. In your letter, you'll call for (among other things) better public data collection on antibiotic use and ending antibiotic use that doesn't address a specific illness. Since some four out of five antibiotics still go to nominally healthy feed animals, and that makes diseases stronger as a result, you would not be histrionic to say our health is at stake.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to hold the line against the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and legislation to fast-track "free" trade agreements, Public Citizen still helps you do that. The Camp-Baucus fast-track bill failed to gain any traction in the House or Senate, but we've all been around the block enough times to know that legislative bodies like to pass unpopular bills when no one's looking, which means we must be ever-vigilant, especially against a "free" trade agreement that would limit our internet freedoms and give corporations more "rights" to overturn our environmental and labor laws. President Obama's own trade representative has said that if the American people knew what was in the TPP, they'd oppose it, hence "fast-track" bills, which limit debate and forbid amendments. You'd think, in America, a bill the people oppose would be DOA, but our venal and stupid elites will keep any zombie animated. So we'll kill that zombie, over and over again.

Action: in which we provide for the *real* common defense -- against corruption and greed.

H.R. 3639, the confidently-titled Provide for the Common Defense Act, would restore sequestration defense cuts by cutting Social Security and Medicare. Because what could be more popular than taking from popular programs and giving to unpopular, waste- and corruption-filled programs? Specifically, the bill would increase deductibles for new Medicare enrollees after 2017 -- I hope young folks do remember that they will, one day, all be new Medicare enrollees -- and would attach cost-of-living increases to the dread "chained CPI," an index which, as we know, does not reflect the sheer number of fixed costs seniors face. To be fair, the bill also caps crop insurance payments, though it leaves other agricultural subsidies untouched. But on balance, this is a terrible way to "provide for the common defense." Remember when the 91% tax bracket helped provide for the common defense? I guess Congress doesn't. USAction helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 3639.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3309, the Innovation Act, could get a House vote as early as today, and this particular Innovation Act (authored by Bob Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, and co-sponsored by nine House Republicans and seven House Democrats) actually would help unleash innovation -- not to mention actually stop frivolous lawsuits -- by making it harder for patent trolls to buy up patents and then sue people willy-nilly for "violating" them. If H.R. 3309 becomes law, would-be patent trolls would have to specify exactly what part or parts of the patent they think the target of their lawsuit is violating, plus they would have to pay the defendant's court costs if they lose -- and that's a substantial deterrent to filing frivolous lawsuits, since most patent trolls bet on their ability to collect quick settlements rather than have their opponents go broke defending themselves. The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you email or call your House Reps and urge them to support the Innovation Act.

In other news, the Pennsylvania state Senate, though nominally dominated by law-and-order Republicans, plans to push through a bill (SB 411) that would virtually immunize gas drilling corporations from polluting nearby water tables. Because you learned from your parents that when you make a mess, you should lobby your state legislators to pass a law mandating that someone else clean up your mess, right? SB 411 allegedly builds on Pennsylvania's "Good Samaritan Law," which immunizes mining corporations that voluntarily treat acid mine pollution, but handing out a get-out-of-jail-free card to gas drilling corporations who know they're polluting the water we drink and bathe in and wash clothes and dishes with would be more accurately described as a loophole. And all the gas drillers would have to do to drive through this loophole would be to take the water from abandoned mine sites and use it to frack -- not, you know, treat it so that people might use it. Both PennEnvironment and the Sierra Club help you tell your PA state legislators to oppose SB 411.

Finally, in a slap in the face to all good Americans fighting the corruption of our democracy by mammon, the SEC has apparently decided not to issue a rule requiring that corporations disclose their election spending to their shareholders. The SEC has dragged its feet on this rule for years now, finally putting the issuing of said rule on its official agenda for 2013, then not issuing the rule and "disappearing" the rule from its 2014 agenda. Jesus Mary and Joseph did they think no one would notice? Do they think shareholders in America care about nothing besides money? Do they think shareholders don't care if their corporate boards waste their money trying to elect utter wastes of flesh like Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, who came within five percentage points of unseating Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2012 with the help of $40 million in big corporate bucks? Public Citizen helps you tell the SEC to do its damn job already.

Supreme Court strikes down Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional, arguing that making several states and counties pre-clear electoral law changes with the federal government made sense in 1965, but that the specific discriminatory conditions 4(b) addresses have improved in those areas such that 4(b) places a burden on those areas today. The best I can say for the majority opinion is that it reads 4(b) very, very narrowly; the worst I can say for the dissent is that it takes eight pages to start winning the argument. The decision does open the door for Congress to pass a revamped 4(b), though I won't hold my breath.

Senate Agriculture Committee narrowly passes Begich/Murkowski GMO salmon labeling amendment to agricultural appropriations bill. Since the ag-approp bill is a must-pass, and the amendment passed with more than one Republican's support (Ms. Collins and Mr. Kirk also voted yea), GMO salmon labeling will likely pass the entire Senate -- though if the House passes a different bill, the amendment could be conferenced out. Still, good news.

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit again rules in favor of an obscure firm named Ultramercial which claims to have patented the idea of running web ads instead of charging website visitors for content. Now Ultramercial gets to file frivolous lawsuits against anyone else who might have this absurdly common idea, just as our Founders intended. Next up: I patent breathing, and sue everyone!

ProPublica's Nikole Hanna-Jones explains why class-based affirmative action may not be the sword that slices the Gourdian knot of American ambivalence over race-based affirmative action. Long story short: poor white kids generally don't get sequestered in bad neighborhoods and bad schools, and white/Asian kids account for more than four out of five poor kids who do well in school, suggesting that class-based affirmative action won't be de facto race-based as often as I'd have presumed.