Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad methane regulations, and bad corporate acquisitions.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Do I "keep saying the same thing"? Yes, I do, if what I keep saying is the right thing. Let our Senators listen to anyone but their big donors for once, and then I'll count the colors in my garden. Until then, it's hammertime.

Meanwhile, our Administration has formally weakened methane emission regulations, by repealing requirements that oil and gas corporations install the technology that would detect and repair methane leaks. Ugh, one more time: methane packs a much bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions, leaked methane is a waste of usable energy, and leaked methane also deprives the taxpayer of royalties if said leaking occurs on public lands. But what's all that pollution and waste and lost revenue next to gas drilling corporation executives being able to gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes? Seriously, that's all our Administration's new rule does: hand out welfare to corporations and rich people. Like everything else they do! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to block this Administration's new methane emissions rule. Congress would have to accomplish this by passing a "resolution of disapproval," and you may be tempted to wait until a new President and a new Senate come into office, but I wouldn't count on that, and anyway, our duty is always to do the right thing right now.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to block the proposed sale of DNA-collecting corporation Ancestry to big private equity corporation Blackstone, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Hopefully I've identified the problem with the proposed sale by identifying what each of these corporations does -- it's bad enough that big corporations get their grubby hands so deep in your investments, so you certainly would not want their grubby hands in your private information, and your DNA is as private as it gets. And I do not accept the notion that "you give your DNA to someone to help figure out where you came from and you take your chances." Why must it be like that? Because the internet's a big place? Because the "free" market is sacred? I'm so old-fashioned I only think doing what's right is sacred, and letting big corporations buy your DNA info is wrong. And I've never believed the internet is "too big to civilize," no matter how much Our Glorious Elites want you to believe it. And I always choose civilization over chaos.

Action: concerning financial predators, your private data, and pot legalization.

As states move to cap payday loan rates, yet another "acting" head of an Administration bureau has come up with a scheme to circumvent such caps: it would turn a blind eye to payday lenders as they launder loans through big banks. Such cleverness! Unless you think, as I do, that it's only clever if it does our civilization good. Releasing payday lenders from regulatory "burdens" so they can continue to gouge working Americans with 300% loans ain't good, particularly as tens of millions of Americans still can't regain the jobs they lost due to the pandemic. It's not like payday lenders can't make money at levels like 36% annually -- and frankly I'd set such caps a lot lower than that! -- but our Administration seriously believes that any regulation that actually helps Americans is a profound evil, because only money-making bosses matter. Too harsh? The truth is always harsh, but never too harsh, if you're a grown-up. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to reject its proposal to let payday lenders circumvent strong protections.

Meanwhile, big private equity corporation Blackstone wants to buy Ancestry, one of the corporations that'll read your DNA to determine your genealogical heritage. And you already see the problem with that, right? It's bad enough that one corporation has all that data and our government can't or won't make laws protecting it from abuse or theft, but having a bankster buy up all that data is like another whole suitcase full of bad. And what would prevent a hedge fund from selling your data to the highest bidder? Certainly not their ethics or morals! I mean, the individuals who run Blackstone will pretend to be shocked, shocked! that anyone would ever think such a thing of them, but they're not stupid. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk and federal regulators to block the proposed Blackstone acquisition of Ancestry. Maybe someone should tell our President that Blackstone's CEO said he was stupid! Of course I don't know if he did -- Blackstone's executives and I don't exactly move in the same circles -- but it's not exactly unlikely, is it? And it seems to get results.

Finally, House Democratic leadership may hold a vote on H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, later on this month, so Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to legalize pot and start to repair the damage caused by prohibition by passing the MORE Act. Yeah, I used to think legalizing marijuana was a bridge too far -- though I've always felt putting it on Schedule I of the Drug Enforcement Act was ridiculous, since it's nowhere near as dangerous as drugs like heroin -- but then a few states did it on their own, and they didn't exactly fall apart, did they? No, they did not. The MORE Act would remove pot from Drug Enforcement Act scheduling entirely, and would invest more money into rebuilding the communities that have been ravaged by "war on drugs" policing. "Ravaged" isn't too strong a word, not when you have it from Richard Nixon's own counsel, John Ehrlichman, that the "war on drugs" was never really about drugs, but about oppressing anti-war and black protestors without appearing to violate their rights. And that's a legacy we ought to let go.

Action: concerning your right to be free from government spying, corporate spying, and secret police.

Our President has deployed unnamed and unmarked federal officers to certain American cities in order to "contain" "violence" that has been over for weeks and at least partly the work of obvious agents provocateurs -- and the officers sent to "contain" the violence have, of course, restarted the violence. Oh, and they abduct people off the streets and detain them without charge. Pretty un-American, eh? But we are not powerless in these times, though our President would like us to feel that way, hence today we get on the phone with our Reps and Senators and tell them we support three amendments to various appropriations bills. One would make anyone carrying out a "law enforcement action" funded by the Department of Defense to identify themselves and their agency. Another would zero out Commerce/State/Justice funding for any more "responses" to "looting" or "rioting" without a written request from the state or locality, plus it'd also force identification of any officers sent for that purpose. And a third would zero out DHS funding for the above-described "responses." So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone), and good hunting.

In a completely related note, Stop the Patriot Act helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious USA PATRIOT Act that has dramatically expanded surveillance on American citizens. Yeah, our President's deployment of federal officers who act like they're in a dictatorship and not America does remind us that concentrated spying power is noxious anywhere, especially in our government. As it happens, today marks the four-month anniversary of the expiration of the bill's surveillance powers -- after our President threatened to veto it, no less, possibly because of his belief that our government used it to spy on him and/or his compadres -- and our NSA has maintained for years that it doesn't actually need all the spying powers the PATRIOT Act gives it. Which would make sense, since the more information you have, the more you have to sift through. You'd still like to see our government indulge in less adventurism abroad, but let's prevent our government from indulging in adventurism at home.

Finally, if you've used services like Ancestry and 23 and Me to discover more about your family heritage -- and, hey, I've been tempted myself! -- you may not know that these services can buy, sell, and trade the DNA info you give them without your knowing or your consent. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell our government to enact the most vigorous DNA privacy standards possible. These would include: requiring corporations to get explicit permission from customers before sharing any DNA info with other corporations; securing DNA data from unauthorized access (i.e., hackers); prohibiting the use of DNA data for insurance underwriting purposes; and preventing corporations from charging customers for any of these things, since that, you know, prevents some folks from guarding their personal info, and everyone should be able to do that. Personal to those who would say well just don't use the service then: why must a useful service come with unacceptable risks? Because the "free market" says so? It ain't a "free" market unless we're all free.

Action: concerning good House bills, war with Iran, and internet privacy.

Happy Monday, good citizens! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). Our House of Representatives has assembled a good record of passing legislation that protects voting rights, health care, worker wages, consumer protection, and real internet freedom, and our Senate has done bupkus about all of that. And they won't do anything until they hear from us, in numbers, again and again and again.

Meanwhile, last month our Senate passed S.J.Res. 68, which would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional approval, and now the House must pass the bill, so we can send it to our President. He'll veto it, but let's make him veto some legislation, particularly legislation that would make him adhere to our Constitution. I said that the House might pass this bill with a quickness, but clearly I forgot that our Congressfolk hate taking up foreign policy-related legislation that might "hamstring" the President in foreign policy, but how many times must I tell these pimps!. Delegating war-making powers to Congress, not our President, is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug! Our Constitution only gives the President the authority to figure out how to win wars Congress has already declared, not the authority to go off all half-cocked. Hence Peace Action West helps you tell your House Reps to restrain our rogue President from unilaterally starting a war with Iran by passing S.J.Res. 68.

Finally, Clearview AI aims to scrape your photos off your Facebook page so it can create the world's biggest facial recognition database -- which should trouble you, since facial recognition a) generally oppresses activists more than it catches actual criminals and b) can't hardly tell black folks apart and it's almost like that's the idea. Besides, they're your photos! You put them on the internet, but that doesn't mean you give permission for big corporations to make your life hell! Besides, Facebook does have privacy settings, the existence of which signal your own intent as to how you want folks to use your photos, and also signal Facebook's duty in protecting them from folks you don't want to see them. Commonsensical, right? You'll be gratified to learn that Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn have all threatened legal action against Clearview for scraping photos from their sites -- but not Facebook, apparently. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop Clearview AI from harvesting your private photos for their nefarious ends.

Around the table: more little victories for good Americans, and more shaking my damn head at the bad ones.

11th Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down Florida law preventing felons from voting until they had paid their court-related fines. If you're tempted to say but they should complete their sentence before they get to vote, and the fine is part of their sentence, just know that I'm going to respond that they never should have lost their right to vote in the first place. Rights are rights; they're not privileges, and they don't only belong to people we like. (And yes, the "wealth" of ex-felons is, in fact, pertinent to the case and "exogenous" to their punishment, even when a fine is not precisely exogenous to their punishment.)

The New York Times looks over our President's recent pardons, and sees a pattern -- they all have "connections" to him. As in, "all 11 recipients had an inside connection or were promoted on Fox News," which almost does sound like they're repeating themselves a bit. Of course they're playing right into his hands by suggesting that "his own scalding encounters with investigations since taking office" (like they weren't deserved or something!) plays a role in his "mercy." Also, I wanted the First STEP Act passed, too, but that was a watered-down version of a watered-down version of what I really wanted, and I suspect a lot of folks that bill has left behind -- who are not lucky enough to get on Fox News or have connections within professional conservative circles -- feel the same.

From the "Wow, They're Actually Trying This?" file: surveillance corporation Clearview AI's CEO claims that his attempts to spy on people are protected by the First Amendment. Apparently, scraping someone's private data from the internet and then selling it to someone else is a speech act. But plenty of law already exists (see the fourth- and third-to-last paragraphs at the link above) to suggest that just because you "say" something, you don't automatically get our First Amendment's protections. You know, if common sense didn't already tell you that.

When I read that "(i)f you're having a hard time falling asleep, that sleep tracker on your wrist might be to blame," the first thing I think is I can totally relate! Having all that data was cool at first -- I never assumed there was an absolute one-to-one relationship between the data and the truth, but the worst thing you can do is try to measure up to previous days, wonder what on Earth you did wrong since you didn't have any caffeine after noon, and let that all build up. I accidentally wore my fitness tracker into the shower once, took it off before it suffered any damage, and then said (suddenly, or so it seemed to me at the time) why put it back on? I haven't looked back -- and I have never again wondered whether the amount of deep sleep I got last night fit snugly into the 12-18% range.

Finally, you all knew William Barr wasn't really going to quit over our President's twitterfarting making it "impossible" to do his job, right? Remember what I said at the beginning of this Administration: when Republicans fight each other in public, they're playing us, trying to lull us into a false sense of security about their unity. It's drama, and it's not even good drama. I suppose we can't discount the possibility that Mr. Barr was actually saying that his job is to protect the President from the consequences of his own actions.

Action: concerning surprise medical bills, data privacy, and paid family leave.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing surprise medical bills. Plenty of folks get them, and they don't get them because "they don't take care of themselves" or because "they don't read the fine print" or because they've screwed up in some other way; they get them because our privatized health insurance system loves exploiting holes in provider networks to deprive you of money. Do folks "deserve" to get billed in the thousands of dollars because their surgeon was in-network but his anesthesiologist wasn't? Or because their hospitals subcontract to out-of-network air ambulance providers? Or because they get life-or-death service (please attend closely the words "life-or-death") at an out-of-network hospital? No, they do not. That is not the "free" market at work, nor is it the work of "makers" as opposed to "takers" and "looters" -- I'm fairly confident, in fact, that were Zombie Ayn Rand to visit us today, she would tell us that the corporations that issue these surprise medical bills are the "looters." If not the "takers"!

Meanwhile, you won't be surprised to learn that our government doesn't regulate location tracking very well, to the point where Google still tracks the location of people who've turned off all the location tracking functions on their phones and computers, so Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to protect our digital private data a whole lot better than they've been doing. Remember: Congressfolk have done little about this issue not because it's a "hard issue to understand." "Protect my privacy" ain't that damn deep -- it only becomes "deep" when Congressfolk take campaign money from corporations that want to sell your private data, and it only becomes "deep" when law enforcement wants to get location data without going through the trouble of getting a warrant for the information. Certainly don't believe that corporations know this issue better than politicians, because that's a little like saying we should let the fox, not the farmer, run the henhouse.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass meaningful paid family leave legislation, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. By "meaningful legislation" we most certainly do not mean "legislation that would steal from your future Social Security benefits to pay for family medical leave now," like right-wingers would have us do. No, meaningful paid family leave legislation would more closely resemble H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act. The FAMILY Act would create a national paid family leave program, and when your Tea Party uncle asks HOW WILLZ YOU PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ HA HA HA SNORT STUPIDZ LIBRULZ!!!!!, you can respond that the FAMILY Act would pay for itself with an 0.4% payroll tax -- that's four-tenths of one percent, not "four percent" or "40 percent," "liberal" media! -- and the employer would pay half, meaning someone making $50,000 annually would pay $8.33 monthly. That's not even five cups of coffee at Wawa monthly, and for peace of mind? What an easy choice.

Action: concerning banksters, pollution, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may well be saying to yourself, self, I'd very much like to stop Wall Street looting, too, but would this bill really do that? The answer is yes, S. 2155 would basically take all the joy banksters feel when they suck all the assets out of a corporation -- it would impose a 100 percent tax on all the fees private equity firms impose on a corporation for two years after they buy it, it would make those firms actually take on more of the debt they've assumed rather than simply transfer it back to the corporation they've bought, it would give workers more of a chance to recover what they've lost after their employer goes bankrupt, and it would make private equity firms' doings more transparent. These firms don't just kill big chain stores like Sears and Payless -- they kill local newspapers all over America, too (the Denver Post being the most famous example). And S. 2155 will help us stop them.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 707, 708, and 709 would give the state Attorney General "concurrent jurisdiction" over certain clean air and clean water laws in the state, and thus give our AG the power to initiate investigations into these matters. Given that our Attorney General is supposed to, you know, enforce the law on behalf of the people of the Commonwealth, you would think our AG would be able to do that on his own, but no -- current law mandates that our AG must first get a referral from the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) or a local district attorney. I have to admit I'm at a loss to explain why the state of Pennsylvania does it that way -- it sounds a lot like a decades-old turf battle won in favor of someone who may not even be alive now, frankly. But we don't need to put up with inter-bureaucratic turf battles, because our Attorney General answers to us. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to help our state government protect us from pollution by passing SB 707, 708, and 709.

Finally, in the wake of yet another data breach exposing the private data of over 100 million good Americans, Fight for Privacy helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass strong legislation that protects the privacy of good Americans' online information. There's no use saying if you still want privacy, don't put your information online, because putting your information online is basically necessary now, unless you pay for everything with cash and never take out a loan. I will say I continue to be disappointed with our Congressfolk's apparent inability to process the fact that we should be able to opt in to corporate attempts to sell our data to third parties. It wouldn't "break the internet" (as Sen. Toomey infamously put it in 2011), and it wouldn't even be very hard to do -- and it would protect a lot more people from a big bank that somehow decides to put all of its sensitive information on a freaking Amazon cloud server. When will folks realize that "cloud computing" doesn't actually make our lives better? It only makes it easier for big corporations to make big money.

Action: concerning banksters, immigration, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would impose a small financial transaction tax on big Wall Street banksters, then Americans for Tax Fairness would still help you do that. The bills in question are H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, which would impose a 0.1% tax on financial transactions including stock and derivative trades, and H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which would impose a range of taxes (from 0.005% to 0.5%) on same; the highest tax imposed here would be $5 per $1,000 in trades. Folks on the right are calling this a "tax on my 401(k)," as if all financial speculation winds up in pension funds, and as if $5 per $1,000 is onerous -- and as if reducing the number of trades banksters make, which these bills would do, wouldn't actually stabilize markets. Most people understand all of this intuitively -- unless, of course, their salary depends on them not understanding it. But if we get it, we must act.

Meanwhile, I have two private prison-related action alerts for you: in one, Color of Change (among others) helps you tell your Congressfolk to close a loophole that allows private prison corporations to avoid taxes, and in the other, Moms Rising helps you tell two big banking corporations to pull their investments from private prison corporations. Both of these are also concentration camp-related, of course, since this Administration thinks detaining immigrants in inhumane conditions and funneling taxpayer money to corporate cronies is a two-fer. Even the Obama Administration had started getting private prisons out of the immigrant detainment business; the least we can do is hold the folks who work for us (i.e., our government) accountable to us. And certainly private prison corporations deserve no special treatment from our tax code; at least S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would stop private prison corporations from calling themselves "Real Estate Investment Trusts."

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell three big airline corporations (JetBlue, Delta, and American) to stop using facial scanning technology on their customers. Why? Well, we'll begin with the airlines' explanation: it makes things faster! After all, presenting your boarding pass or your passport (which biometric screening would replace) takes several seconds, and Delta claims that using biometric screening saves a whole nine minutes per flight. Would you want to take "I saved nine minutes per flight" to the Pearly Gates? I didn't think so -- it would display a distinct lack of imagination. The downside, meanwhile, is that we don't have a whole lot of law covering facial scanning, so who knows how long the airlines hold on to the information or which government agency they give it to without a warrant? Yeah, I know the airlines say they don't store the info, but you don't trust corporations more than you trust your government, do you? Of course you don't. So let's not trade liberty for convenience.

Action: concerning the minimum wage, internet privacy, and the DREAM Act.

With a new Democratic House taking power, the Economic Policy Institute (among other groups) help you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Raise the Wage Act. (I have no bill numbers for its current iteration at this writing.) Raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would represent a vast change in working families' fortunes -- the current minimum wage of $7.25/hour actually represents a pay cut from the late 1960s, when the $2/hour minimum wage had over $10/hour in contemporary purchasing power -- and no, it wouldn't kill jobs, not just because minimum wage jobs are often the kind you can't kill, but because "the minimum wage vs. jobs" is the wrong focus. A better focus would be "absurd CEO salaries vs. jobs," since those salaries are the real job-killer in America. The Senate won't pass it, etc., but embarrassing them isn't exactly a vain pursuit, particularly if it instructs future Senates about the people's will.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the big telecom corporations have been selling your location data to other corporations -- some of which will sell that data to just anybody, including bounty hunters. Thing is, your contract with your cellphone provider may prohibit data sales to "disreputable" folks or corporations, and even the big telecoms admit that they sell too much data to too many unsavory actors! Well, they said that out of fear that our government would regulate them -- a vain fear, since our government repealed FCC privacy regulations last year! -- but since the abuse is still happening, Free Press helps you tell our FCC to stop corporate abuse of our private data. Please do not be the fool who says well just stop using a cellphone then! Everyone uses a cellphone now, and everyone deserves privacy -- I mean, Chief Justice Roberts understands this, and crafts excellent jurisprudence based on that understanding.

Finally, you no doubt recall that our President tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program last year, and though various federal courts have blocked his efforts, now's as good a time as any to let People for the American Way help you tell Congress to pass a DREAM Act, so that immigrants brought here as children can contribute to America's heritage and one day gain citizenship. Sending immigrants back to nations they don't recognize as home, when they literally had no say in emigrating to America, should strike you as the height of cruelty, but of course our Administration cares about nothing but diddling the rage glands of its votaries, and thus still struts around demanding a brand new border wall before our government starts inspecting food and airplanes again. So when I said "now's as good a time as any" just now, perhaps I was being a bit glib -- now's a damn good time to change the conversation about immigration, even if our President doesn't want to.

Action: concerning health care, redistricting, and surveillance.

Sen. Warren (D-MA) has introduced a bill called the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act (Congress.gov has no bill number as of this writing), which would allow our government to manufacture generic versions of any patented drug. If you call that "socialism," please consider that actual socialism would more likely entail our government manufacturing all the drugs, but Ms. Warren's bill would only allow federal manufacture of generics under certain circumstances, such as absurdly high prices, lack of competition, or shortages, and none of these circumstances are shining examples of free market efficiency, are they? People want our government to protect us from the things that hurt and kill us, and the best our opponents can do is squeal SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! whenever we propose making our government do just that? Thus we should call our Reps and Senators and tell them to support better drug policy by passing the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA helps you tell your state Assemblyfolk to reform the rules by which they consider legislation. We know these rules need reform, because House state Government Committee Chair Daryl Metcalfe (E-12) seemed to spend the entire spring gutting actually-bipartisan redistricting reform bills in 2018 once they got to his committee -- why, one of those bills had the support of more than half of the House, meaning that, well, if it'd come to a vote, it would have passed! I know right-wingers think (and might even say, since these are interesting times!) that Committee heads should have the power to gut bills at will, because what do us little people know about governing? But if, like me, you think "little people" is a disgusting epithet, and if, like me, you think us "little people" actually do know a lot, you'll find arguments for reform more convincing.

Finally, Amazon aims to get a contract from our Pentagon to build a "weapon of unprecedented surveillance and power," called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. (Yes, the acronym of that weapon's name is JEDI, which suggests that its namers have literally no idea what Jedis stood for in the Star Wars films.) JEDI would vastly increase our military's ability to share and sift through surveillance information, using "artificial intelligence," which doesn't impress you if you've found, as I have, that autocorrect incorrectly anticipates what you're about to type nearly 100% of the time. And if you're tempted to say if Amazon doesn't build it, someone else will, recall that Amazon has already collected so, so much data on Americans that it could quite easily correlate with DoD surveillance information. Luckily for us, Amazon employees seem to have some sway within their corporation, so Roots Action helps you tell Amazon employees to pressure their management to bow out of the JEDI bidding.

(Posting has been light for a while, and will remain light until the new year. The main reason for that? I'm putting together another Penny Rants volume for release in mid- to late February. I know what you're saying to yourself: self, didn't he just put out a second Penny Rants volume last month? Why, yes, yes I did -- and soon I'll put out a third one, covering the last two very, very interesting years. So be on the lookout for that, and in the meantime, continue to enjoy the holidays and have a safe and happy new year.)

Action: concerning privacy, clean water, and worker rights.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real reforms defending consumer privacy from big tech corporations. Sadly, the reason we need legislation to accomplish this (and I really wish journalists would mention it a bit more!) is that Congress passed one of its notorious "resolutions of disapproval" repealing FCC privacy rules which would have (among other good works!) forced big corporations to allow consumers to opt in to letting corporations sell their data, rather than forcing consumers to opt out. But big tech corporations like Facebook have been earning themselves a lot of bad PR for their inability/unwillingness to protect their customers' private data (and for employing Nixonian tactics against their critics) -- and corporations like Facebook monopolize their fields, so our government has to step in and curb their power, whether they want to or not. Concentrated power: it's evil everywhere!

Meanwhile, as you may know, the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) proposed banning fracking in the basin of the Delaware River earlier this year, which is good, but also proposed letting corporations dump fracking wastewater in the Basin and draw Basin water out to frack with! Welcome to yet another King-Solomon-actually-splitting-the-baby-in-half "compromise"! I mean, the whole point of banning fracking is to keep pollution out of our water, so if you go ahead and allow fracking-based pollution in water nearly 15 million good Americans drink and wash with, you've kinda missed the point. Still, Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf has one of four votes on the DRBC, so Food and Water Watch helps you tell Gov. Wolf to support a fracking ban with considerably more teeth. Remember, folks: the money you make from polluting water quickly goes away, but clean water lasts forever -- if we maintain it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) not to repeal its "joint-employer standard," then the Economic Policy Institute still helps you do that. Big chain corporations have long claimed that their workers' "real" employer was the particular franchise where they worked; thus workers would have had to redress grievances over pay and scheduling and such with the franchise. Of course any fool can see that's absurd, since franchises obey (or cope with) orders from the top, so the NLRB created a joint-employer standard to help workers redress grievances with their real bosses. Now that Republicans dominate the board, they're trying to scuttle the standard. But don't believe the hype that TEH STANDURDZ HURTZ TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!! Your local McDonald's ain't a "small business." Obviously.

Action: concerning data protection, corruption, and mergers.

Remember a year ago, when Equifax announced they'd been hacked, leaving the personal information of almost 150 Americans exposed? What do you suppose Congress has done about the matter since then? Go find an empty sheet of paper and hold it up, and you'll have your answer. Why, they even tried to cap class-action lawsuit awards to protect corporations like Equifax when they expose your data! But S. 2289, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would help protect good Americans from these little Equifax moments, by regulating credit corporations' cybersecurity, mandating annual inspections thereof, and instituting fines for non-compliance. I'd prefer jail time for these clowns instead of fines, but S. 2289 represents a better impulse after data breaches than "let's ensure no corporations get hurt!" Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans' data by supporting S. 2289.

Meanwhile, S. 3357, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, would engineer a wide swatch of reforms to our political system; some of these include keeping politicians from going into lobbying after they leave office, keeping lobbyists out of our government, getting more transparency out of Congress and federal contractors, and ensuring that regulations prioritize benefits to the people over benefits to corporations. S. 3357 would also make administrative law judges competitive civil service jobs, just like they used to be before our President reclassified them so he could pack immigration courts with his cronies. These and other reforms in S. 3357 will go some way toward ensuring that our elected officials don't spend all day ignoring the popular will and collecting perks from their big corporate donors. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support public integrity by passing S. 3357.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FCC to reject the proposed Sprint/T-Mobile merger, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Sprint and T-Mobile would like you to believe that they need to merge in order to better compete with AT&T and Verizon, but Jesus Mary and Joseph get bigger is not the solution to every problem. And that's not even to say these corporations haven't tried other things! But we know for certain that a bigger Sprint/T-Mobile corporation will not bequeath upon our civilization lower prices, more jobs, or better service. Why, gosh, I'm old enough to remember when economists said more competition resulted in lower prices, more jobs, and better service! I'm sure our corporate kingpins find all that "quaint," but they the only thing they're really good at is (everybody now) redistributing income upward from working people to themselves. And we deserve better than that.

Action: concerning government spying and carcinogens in food.

Google still gathers location data from users even after they disable location tracking on their phones. And worse, Google says they do it so they can better target advertisements to you! It's like they think buying stuff is the only thing anyone should ever be doing. Of course, we know it's more than ad targeting, because location tracking has become a sort of crutch for law enforcement over the last few years, and law enforcement doesn't need to get your permission to get that info, only Google's. No use saying if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear, either, because our government may decide that some benign doing of yours today (checking out some non-mainstream news website, for example) is a terroristic threat tomorrow. And, really, does any government or corporation deserve to know where we all are at all times? Demand Progress helps you tell Google to stop spying on its users.

Meanwhile, it's been a bad month for Monsanto and their notorious glyphosate herbicide RoundUp -- a jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million to a school groundskeeper who developed cancer after using RoundUp, the California Supreme Court wouldn't hear a challenge to glyphosate's inclusion on that state's famous list of carcinogens, and the Environmental Working Group reported finding dangerously high levels of glyphosate in two-thirds of the oat-based children's food products it tested. Gosh, they might be having a tougher time of it than our President, and they don't have a big chunk of the population that'll run through a wall for them like our President does. So Just Label It helps you tell big food-processing corporations General Mills, Kellogg's, and Quaker to make their food products free of glyphosate. Because, really, no one (and certainly not our children) should worry about getting cancer from oatmeal or granola bars.

Action: violence against protestors, internet privacy, and forced arbitration.

The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand accountability for the Israeli slaughter of over 50 protestors in Gaza earlier this week. No use telling me that these protestors were "no angels," because civilized people don't shoot protestors or treat protestors as soldiers, period. And calling for "accountability" shouldn't send shivers through anyone's spine -- if these protestors truly provoked Israel, then Israel has nothing to worry about! But the government of Israel has, for too long, acted as if accountability is for other people, and our government has, for too long, enabled them. Folks who counter that we must "support Israel" at all costs clearly do not understand the true definition of "support" -- if you truly support Israel, you also stand up to Israel when it does wrong, just as you would to any of your family and friends. (And folks who counter with a sentence beginning with "well, what about" should be adults and learn how to concede points.)

Meanwhile, our Congress repealed FCC internet privacy protections last year with a "resolution of disapproval" -- and then Facebook got in a heapload of trouble for exposing its users' personal data to corporations such as Cambridge Analytica. Nobody could have predicted! So along comes S. 2639, the Customer Online Notification for Stopping Edge-Provider Network Transgressions Act (or CONSENT Act), which would require "edge-provider" corporations like Google and Facebook to get permission from customers to use, sell, or share their personal info. The FCC privacy rules covered internet service providing corporations rather than "edge providers," true, but it should be a no-brainer, at least, to do something about something that was just in the news. Which means what, class? That if Congress doesn't pass it, they have fewer than zero brains. Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Americans' online privacy by passing S. 2639.

Finally, contractors have sued Amazon for sexual harassment, but guess what? Same as Gretchen Carlson did at Fox News, these contractors have forced arbitration clauses in their contracts. Ms. Carlson was savvy enough to tape her boss's harassment, but she would have had no recourse in court, because Fox also put a forced arbitration clause in her contract, which would have greatly impeded her chance of getting justice. (Ms. Carlson has since become a fierce opponent of forced arbitration; no use complaining that's only because it happened to her, like we're only supposed to learn from thought experiment and never from experience.) Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Amazon's Board of Directors to dump forced arbitration clauses from its employment contracts. You can remind Amazon that it prides itself on being a "progressive" workplace, so it shouldn't keep its workers from getting the justice they deserve in a court of law.

Action: concerning monopolies, credit, clean water, and fair redistricting.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to reject the proposed AT&T/Time Warner merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. AT&T wouldn't be buying Time Warner's cable TV apparatus -- Charter bought that last year, after Comcast bid for it and then withdrew their bid under massive popular pressure. AT&T would be buying Time Warner's entertainment and news holdings, including CNN, HBO, and Warner Brothers, and while a pedant would tell us that AT&T's business is in delivering content and Time Warner's business is in producing content and therefore there's no monopoly possible, we of course know better, particularly if we recall that blocking such mergers if their "effect...may be substantially to lessen competition" has legal precedent in American law. We also know better, I'd hope, to think that an AT&T/Time Warner merger would "create jobs." Our opponents rarely say it anymore, which is an indication that most Americans do know better.

Meanwhile, CREDO also helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1816, the Freedom from Equifax Exploitation Act, which would give consumers more tools to fight data breaches. The FREE Act (hey, at least it's not a completely tortured acronym) would require credit reporting corporations to provide credit freezes for free, would block corporations from selling your personal information when you have a freeze on your account, and would mandate an additional free credit check for those folks who used their annual free credit check before the Equifax breach. The bill would also refund folks who wound up paying for a credit freeze after the Equifax breach became known; a lot of people, I suspect, panicked and paid for credit freezes, which smells of the kind of corporate exploitation that too many folks call "the free market in action." But conservatives who extolled the virtues of the "free market" in the Reagan years didn't approve of such exploitation, and neither should we.

In other news, the Bureau of Land Management, scarcely two years after enacting regulations that protect clean water from hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. "fracking") on public lands, now wants to repeal those rules, which, like, sigh. Fracking didn't suddenly become safe over the last two years; so what do you suppose happened? Oh, right -- we elected a President who literally doesn't care about anything but money. Oh, and we also elected a President who seeks to completely erase President Obama from American history by undoing all of his works, even those (like the BLM's fracking rules) that didn't go nearly as far as we wanted, but went further toward protecting us than before. But there's no reason for good Americans to be held hostage to President Trump's insatiable thirst for drama; hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect us from pollution by abandoning its effort to repeal the fracking regulations it passed in 2015.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislator to pass HB 722/SB 22, which would create an independent commission that would redraw legislative districts more fairly then self-interested legislators tend to do, then Fair Districts PA still helps you do that. HB 722/SB 22, as you recall, has actual bipartisan support in the state legislature, but the relevant committee heads are sitting on the bill and refusing to hold hearings on it, despite their popularity (and despite the feedback they're getting from their constituents). This is America, though, so they can be so ignorant of the popular will for only so long, and now wouldn't be a bad time to start pressuring our legislators again, if for no other reason than that the relevant committee heads can get pressured by their colleagues as well as their constituents. It's a shame it's come to that, but I'm not too proud to use the whatever levers of power are available to me as a citizen.

Around the table: featuring health care scare numbers and tax code silliness.

The quite estimable Harold Meyerson likes Sen. Sanders's Medicare-for-All bill because it doesn't try to do everything at once. He makes a compelling argument for extending Medicare to children and workers 49 and over first -- for example, will right-wingers be very successful calling health care for kids "socialism"? Still, as you know, I prefer opening with what I want and then negotiating -- though of course this bill is way less of a pre-emptive compromise than the Affordable Care Act was.

Republicans respond to the release of the Medicare-for-All bill by pretending it would require $32 trillion in new spending. Over 10 years, of course, though nobody ever says that. Problem with that is that we spent $3.4 trillion on health care spending just last year, which projects to $34 trillion over 10 years -- or, if you account for premiums going up, $49 trillion. So the answer to the question WHERE DOEZ HE COMEZ UP WITH TEH MONEYZ!!!!! is "out of the much larger pile of money we're already going to spend."

The incomparable Bruce Schneier informs us that the only solution to big data breaches like the recent Equifax breach is (drumroll, please) government regulation. The "free market," after all, won't fix it: "The companies that collect and sell our data don't need to keep it secure in order to maintain their market share. They don't have to answer to us, their products. They know it's more profitable to save money on security and weather the occasional bout of bad press after a data loss. Yes, we are the ones who suffer when criminals get our data, or when our private information is exposed to the public, but ultimately why should Equifax care?" Particularly when Target, Yahoo!, et al, haven't suffered in the long term. Regulate and punish them and they'll learn through their suffering.

Another day, another analysis (this one from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy) showing us that the Trump tax cut plan would benefit the rich more than working folks. And no it doesn't deliver them bigger cuts because "they make more money"! Just look at the frickin' charts! And it certainly doesn't matter that President Trump himself says his plan won't deliver huge tax cuts to the rich -- it only matters to him that his votaries believe that, and that they scream it in your face when you try to argue with them. (You're not trying to argue with Trump votaries, though, are you? Don't argue with them; just outvote them.)

Finally, former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore -- who may soon be the Republican nominee for the Senate seat until recently held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions -- said back in February that the 9.11 terrorist attack was "divine punishment." For failing to restrain financial predators with tough laws and regulations, no doubt! I kid, of course. But can Mr. Moore be the next Senator from Alabama? Of course he can! He's a Trumphole even if Mr. Trump is officially pulling for his opponent. It'd be nice if the Democratic candidate, former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, runs on his successful prosecution of the last two perps of the 1963 Birmingham bombing that killed four black girls. The national party is no doubt giving him the exact opposite advice as we speak.

Action: health care, private data collection, and food labeling.

Today's a good day to call your Senators and tell them not to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. But you can also let Moms Rising help you write a letter-to-the-editor of your local newspaper opposing the Senate's health care "reform" bill, a.k.a. "wealth care," a.k.a. Trumpcare. And you may want to pay attention to what your local Trumpcare-bill supporting Senator is saying. Sen. Pat Toomey, for example, served up a bunch of word salad on Sunday's Face the Nation, trying to put lipstick on the pig of cutting our federal government's share of Medicaid expansion funding from 90% to 57% over seven years, pretending that states won't have to make hard choices affecting good Americans when that happens, saying the "tax credits" are better than those in the House bill like that even merits a participation trophy, and of course claiming that the "free marketplace" creates "wonderful innovation" all over America without giving even one clear example. I'm guessing your right-wing Senator is doing similarly desperate verbal gymnastics.

Meanwhile, AT&T -- the corporation that most happily handed over your call records to Tha Bush Mobb without a warrant -- now does the same for law enforcement organs all over America. And even if you're not an AT&T customer, you probably talk to AT&T customers, which means you're caught up in the dragnet, too. Of course AT&T is more famous these days for saying they won't "sell your personal information to anyone, for any purpose," but they're not selling it to law enforcement! I know getting warrants is quaint and all -- no, I will never let Alberto Gonzales live that down -- but the whole notion of convincing a judge you have a better-than-even chance of securing a conviction before you can investigate someone further protects us from abuse by the state. The Founders were quite keen on not getting abused by the state, you know. Hence Access Now helps you tell AT&T to stop selling our your privacy.

Finally, you won't be surprised to learn that the FDA has decided to delay rules that would revamp food labeling so that restaurants would have to give more nutritional information on the meals they serve, and food processing corporations would have to note such items as added sugar. Why? Oh, you know, BIG GUBMINT BAD!!!!! Or, as the FDA puts it, "(n)umerous stakeholders have informed us that they have significant concerns about their ability to update all their labels by the compliance date due to issues regarding (among other things) the need for upgrades to labeling software, getting nutrition information from suppliers, the number of products that would need new labels and a limited time for the reformulation of products." Gosh, where's their American can-do spirit? And what about the most important "stakeholder" of all, the American citizen, who generally wants more information about what they're eating? Moms Rising helps you tell the FDA to give us the food labeling we deserve.

Around the table: in which Republicans blink, for now.

Senate puts off health care "reform" bill vote until after the July 4 holiday. But don't get complacent: keep calling your Senators and communicating your will. And what's with President Trump's spokeshack saying that Mr. Trump hopes "Republicans would live up to their promise" of passing an Obamacare repeal? Like Mr. Trump never made that promise himself? Way to throw your party under the bus, Dear Leader!

So how was Mitch McConnell putting lipstick on that pig of a bill until yesterday? Why, by completely ignoring that part of the CBO report that says 22 million good Americans will lose their health insurance under the Senate bill, of course! He also pretended tax cuts going mainly to the rich were "middle-class" tax cuts, and he also "confused" rising premium prices and the rising growth rate of premium prices, so he could "accidentally" say the bill will do something about the former when it actually does something about the latter. Punchline? Obamacare has already reduced the growth rate in premiums -- and that's nothing to write home about.

Just to remind you that states aren't the only organs keeping massive amounts of data on good citizens, Cora Currier at The Intercept describes World-Check, a database owned by Thomson Reuters and used by world banks, which lists some two million folks whose alleged ties to crime or terrorism may be quite exaggerated. You might be able to get World-Check to change its data on you, eventually -- if you even know you're on it. And of course Thomson Reuters says it's a "risk assessment" tool, which is just doublespeak for blacklist.

Jeff Bryant at the OurFuture blog explains why "Charter Schools Do Bad Stuff." Long story short: "Because They Can." Long story somewhat longer: private agencies, not public ones, generally "monitor" charter school activities and "hold them accountable." It's bad enough we throw away the taxpayer money on private schools that we should be spending on public schools, but then our local governments don't even hold them accountable, instead outsourcing the job to a private entity. But really, what do charter schools have to fear from the people?

Finally, in a heroic effort, Tasneem Nashrulla at Buzzfeed tabulates recent softball questions Fox News has asked President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Ivanka Trump in the last 24 days. The list is either disheartening or hilarious depending on your level of spiritual advancement, but I'm only going to highlight one example: one talking head asks Mr. Trump if "Republican Senators are doing enough to have your back" on the health care bill, rather than the more pertinent question of whether they, or their President, have got the people's back. You see, for Fox News and for Donald Trump, democracy ain't about you, it's about them. May God have mercy on their immortal souls.

Action: internet privacy, and "bathroom bills."

So let's call President Trump today, between 9am and 4pm EST, at 1.202.456.1111, to tell him to veto S.J.Res. 34, the nefarious anti-internet privacy, pro-hacking bill. Mr. Trump doesn't give one rat's hind-quarter what you think, but duty is duty. You should also know that the whole get-regulatory-parity-with-the-FTC argument is utter rubbish: the FTC has literally no power to regulate the private data management policies of ISPs, and the FCC has literally no power to regulate the private data management policies of internet corporations that aren't ISPs! So the next step, for Republicans, is to remove the classification ISPs as common carriers, supposedly so the FTC can regulate privacy, but which act would just so happen to destroy the FCC's ability to regulate net neutrality! After which the internet will become a corporate junk news-ridden place just like cable news, which will help Republicans steal elections in perpetuity! So you see the stakes here, and you know your duty.

Meanwhile, North Carolina "repealed" its notorious HB 2 "bathroom bill" last week, in concert with that state's new Democratic Governor. I put "repealed" in ironic quotation marks because the new bill, HB 148 (or, as Equality NC has called it, "HB 2.0") reserves the right to regulate multi-occupancy bathrooms to the state government and prevents municipalities from passing (until late 2020) ordinances similar to the Charlotte ordinance to which HB 2 objected -- which means the reactionary state legislature could simply wait out the Democratic Governor and then start this BS all over again with the next guy, who'll undoubtedly make Pat McCrory look like a saint. Hence the ACLU helps you tell the NCAA to keep boycotting North Carolina. The NCAA, as you know, pulled championship game siting out of North Carolina because of HB 2, and said it wouldn't reconsider unless the legislature "fixed" the law by March 30; the NCAA is apparently mulling whether North Carolina's actions really "fix" the law as we speak, and nothing prevents us from giving them our counsel on the matter. Who's gonna stop us? Especially now that we know what gets reactionary legislatures to move? (Since justice for transgendered folks sure doesn't get them to move, amirite?)

Action: internet privacy, affordable prescription drugs, and paid sick leave.

You may know that S.J.Res. 34, which would nullify the FCC's recent internet privacy rules, passed the Senate last week. But that bill still has to clear the House, so now would be a very good time to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or at the bottom of your page, if you're viewing this on a smartphone) to call your Reps and tell them to reject S.J.Res. 34. After all, why should Congress make it harder for you to protect your privacy on the internet? Because that's what S.J.Res. 34 does -- it makes it easier for corporations to sell your private info to third-party data corporations, or to hijack your web searches and send you to some crony's page rather than the page you said you wanted to see, or insert ads into your web surfing based on that information. What part of that sounds like anything the American people would want? And personal to those corporate hacks claiming they want "parity" between FCC and FTC regulations: why not go after FTC rules, then?

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1249/S. 469, the the Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Importation Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. (Alternately, you could mention it to your Reps while you have them on the phone about H.J.Res. 34, and then call your Senators about it.) The Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Act would, as you may recall, let good Americans get cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. The reason they're cheaper, of course, is that Canadians get to bargain for cheaper drug prices as a unit, which we can't do. We have long been beset by bad news about skyrocketing drug prices -- even President Trump criticized Martin Shkreli for jacking up the price of life-saving medication Daraprim. Of course, Mr. Trump's since declared that Medicare, which literally can't negotiate drug prices, is the real "price-fixer"! But our job as citizens is to make the President irrelevant by expressing our will, so let's do that.

Finally, H.R. 1516/S. 636, the Healthy Families Act, would require employers to provide 56 hours of paid sick time to their employees (except for businesses with fewer than 15 employees, which would have to provide that amount of unpaid sick time). Of course, despite the parenthetical I just employed, right-wingers will use small businesses as a human shield when they attack the Healthy Families Act, and they'll wring their hands that some $20 million-a-year CEO at a corporation sitting on trillions of dollars in "trapped capital" will simply never be able to afford all that paid sick leave! Of course, more and more CEOs are coming around to the notion that giving out paid sick leave actually saves them money in the long run -- not just in reduced dependence on public assistance programs, but also in less turnover, less "presenteeism" (where you're at work but not really at work), and fewer workplace injuries. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Healthy Families Act.

Action: fighting the oppression of journalists, the sale of private data, and the abuse of animals.

First things first. You may have seen the work of Egyptian photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, better known as Shawkan, in such outlets as Time and BBC.com, but the Egyptian government has held him in detention for over three years now, torturing him the whole time. Holding a prisoner that long without charges is itself illegal in Egypt, but no matter -- the government finally filed half a dozen charges against him, including possession of a weapon, illegal assembly, murder, and attempted murder, but you could be excused for thinking his real "crime" was documenting the Rabaa massacre, where Egyptian government forces killed at least 800 protestors. Of course, protesting doesn't merit the death penalty, anywhere, at any time -- I wonder how many good Americans will remember that in the coming months and years -- and documenting government oppression doesn't merit criminal charges of any kind, particularly the trumped-up kind. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the Egyptian government to free Shawkan. Not incidentally, Shawkan has contracted Hepatitis C -- for which he's had a hard time getting medical treatment! -- but the Egyptian government has freed other political prisoners suffering from Hep C. Egypt can't even be consistent in how it oppresses its people! It's hard out there for a pimp.

Meanwhile, closer to home, big telecom corporation AT&T has been selling its analyses of your private call data to law enforcement agencies via its Hemisphere project -- and this is true whether you're an AT&T customer or not! (The chances are pretty good that you call AT&T customers or make calls on AT&T-built infrastructure on occasion.) Naturally AT&T hid what it was doing from, because this is immoral coming and going -- a corporation selling your private data and taxpayer money going to buy it! AT&T adds close to four billion records to its database every day, and no use hoping that law enforcement is taking on much more data than it can handle, because searching for data isn't anywhere near as hard as people might think, and desperate states will go a long way to hurt people (just like Egypt has, above). Hence Access Now helps you tell AT&T to stop selling your private information to law enforcement. No use trying to tell me that we need these kinds of tools to foil terrorists now-more-than-ever. You know what kind of tools foil terrorists? The kind of tools that promote real independence for Americans -- higher-paying jobs, good homes with less debt -- which are exactly the kinds of tools corporations are constantly trying to destroy, because then you'll be less dependent on them.

Finally, Dan McKernan of Chelsea, MI has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Michigan state Sen. Joe Hune (R-22) and state Rep. Gretchen Driskell (D-52) to fight the continuing abuse of animals at factory farms by opposing HB 5987. HB 5987 would extend the phase-out of battery cages in Michigan by five years, but this phase-out is already a 10-year process, passed by the state legislature seven years ago, and Michigan is the first state in the nation to mandate that factory farms phase out the kinds of cages that force animals into confined spaces for their entire lives -- not so food prices can be lower, mind you, but so factory farm executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Of course HB 5987 has a lot of industry support, and as long as big ag corporations can hold the threat of "less food" or "higher prices" over our heads, bills like HB 5987 will have a good chance of passing. The only things we have going for us, I guess, are our voices, and our tradition as civilized people who hate being needlessly cruel to animals for profit. But I'll take that -- big ag corporations are prisoners of their hunger for money, but we're free people.

Action: clean water, and internet privacy.

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

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

Action: protecting Social Security, and promoting freedom online.

Even the farthest-right Republicans know they can't privatize Social Security -- Mr. Bush tried it, with huge majorities in House and Senate, and couldn't even get a bill considered. But the far right has other ways to hurt the Social Security system we've fought for and paid for, and one of them is to cut the Social Security Administration's budget. Their proposed cuts would furlough employees, close offices, and prevent them from processing claims and fixing problems -- all so they can point to how badly Social Security is working and declare that the markets can do better. Anyone who can remember as far back as 2009, when the stock market crashed to about half its value the previous year, knows that's utter bunk. Hell, anyone who's watched any private corporation take over a government's function and line their pockets at the expense of the taxpayer knows that. But it's never enough to win -- we also must defend our victories, day in and day out, from the forces of evil. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to cripple the Social Security Administration.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to prevent cable corporations from selling your private info willy-nilly and end the cable corporations' monopoly on set-top boxes, then Free Press still helps you do that. What could possibly be the right's objection to good Americans getting to buy their own set-top boxes, instead of being chained to Comcast's or Charter's set-top box? And what could possibly be the right's objection to preventing cable corporations from misusing your personal information? We may sum up their objection to both thusly: cable corporations are big donors, and they're paying for our re-election. Sure, they tell you that the FCC proposals amount to Big Gummint Run Amok, but sometimes government has to step in to allow freedom to flourish. And these right-wingers have nothing to say about warrantless wiretapping or NSA data-vacuuming -- because it doesn't cost their biggest donors any money. The bad news: word on the street is that the right's empty and desperate arguments are working on at least two FCC Commissioners. But we can be the steel in their spine -- again.

Action: torture, internet privacy, and gay rights.

The CIA has apparently "accidentally" destroyed its copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report from the last Congress. No, it wasn't the only copy in the whole world, but understand that the torture report actually had little chance of seeing the light of day to begin with -- so far our government has only released the report's 700-page executive summary, and a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel has lately ruled that the Freedom of Information Act can't compel disclosure of the other 6,200-plus pages, since the FOIA doesn't apply to "Congressional documents." Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell President Obama to declassify the Senate torture report and ensure that the National Archives and Record Administration preserve it. Let's not pretend that other countries learning that we torture "compromises national security," nor let us suppose the National Archives should only record the good we do -- if we can't accept, and learn from, the evil we do, we have no business aspiring to be the greatest country on Earth.

Meanwhile, the FCC has proposed rules that would give consumers more control over how information internet service providers use, share, or sell their private information. I've heard a lot of reasonable folks say things like you should get used to not having any privacy on the internet, and while they mean to remind you not to be a blithering idiot in public or to avoid scams that sound too good to be true -- both worthwhile reminders no matter how often we get them! -- we should be able to have some privacy on the internet, and we should certainly be able to make big telecom corporations get our permission before doing anything with our private information, and we should get notifications from those corporations whenever that information gets stolen. Of course, big telecoms don't want to do any of this, supposedly because it would "confuse" consumers -- which certainly betrays their very, very low opinion of the people whose money makes their businesses possible. Don't we tend toward believing in folks' capabilities in a free country? Demand Progress helps you tell the FCC to mandate the most vigorous privacy protections possible for consumers on the internet.

Finally, in case you were wondering if the struggle for gay rights is over now that the Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage across the land, recall that many state legislatures have made foster care systems a battleground in their attempts to enshrine a "right" to discriminate against people who offend your "religious" "conscience." Some politicians think that if you don't want LGBTQ parents to foster kids because cooties, you should be allowed to prevent them from doing that -- and if foster parents don't want to foster LGBTQ kids, they should be allowed to do that. Just to make things clear: you have a right to be a bigot -- but you don't have a right to abridge other people's rights with your bigotry, or because of your bigotry. How strange, that folks pass up all the character-building opportunities meeting people unlike them can provide. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell HHS Secretary Burwell to forbid foster care services receiving federal funding from discriminating against LGBTQ kids or parents. I know, the right will call that Big Gummint, just like they never called the PATRIOT Act or warrantless wiretapping Big Gummint, but haters gonna hate, and we don't pander to hate, even if it carries a cross.

Around the table: what "free" trade is really all about, and other horrible truths.

Dean Baker reminds us that the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade pact "has little to do with trade" and more to do with "putting in place a pro-business regulatory structure." You see, tariffs aren't so much a "free trade barrier" anymore, but those pesky clean air and clean water and antitrust and fair use laws are, to the corporatists who drafted the pact -- not that they'll come out and say so, of course, since you'll want to punch them in the nose if they do. Rather, they'll use more scare numbers -- 18,000 OF TEH TARIFFZ DESTROYED!!!!, including the infamous Brunei ski boot tariff, a stain on civilization's honor since time immemorial.

Vulture capitalists -- those extraordinary folks who buy up a nation's defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar in order to extort vast sums governments can't pay without selling off public services -- have reached a "deal" with the new Argentine government. The shame of it is that Argentina actually did pretty well after its 2002 default, mainly by refusing to cave to outlandish creditor demands, but then 2009 hit, you remember that, and then another bad spell helped put a right-wing government in, one more willing to cave to folks like Paul Singer, until recently a Marco Rubio man and now standing to make nearly four times what he "invested." A certain American judge and a certain Obama Administration cabinet agency were also no help to good Argentinians.

In an unexpected development, the Department of Justice has apparently backed down in its fight to get Apple to create a key the FBI can use to unlock any encrypted cell phone. Sadly, not because they realized they were wrong, but because they think they can unlock the phone of the San Bernardino shooter another way -- hopefully a way that protects the privacy of the masses, though I'm not holding my breath. This "other way" might also fail, which means we'll be back to square one. We'll likely know in about two weeks' time.

Annalee Newitz, writing at ArsTechnica, describes Facebook's attempt to "establish an ethnic affinity," though not of course an actual ethnicity, to its users. Not to racially profile, but to make money, and praise the Lord it's only about making money! Also, like so many things in this Brave New World, this sort of marketing isn't opt-in: "(e)ven when a Facebook user says they like #BlackLivesMatter, they don't feel like asking to opt in to an ethnic identity," Ms. Newitz says, "it's just one of many interests that define that person." I wonder what "ethnic affinity" Facebook projects onto my newsfeed's endless stream of death notices and music videos.

Finally, Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall takes us in his wayback machine to the antics of southern California's Wally George, a right-wing TV host who presaged so many right-wing talk radio and cable news blowhards -- and Donald Trump. Helmet hair, limp liberals, wrestling-style bombast, security throwing guests out -- sound familiar? Of course I remember Morton Downey, Jr. gaining a similar following in the late 1980s with a similar act. Happily, "digging right-wing blowhards who yell and scream and throw things, ironically or maybe not" is one of the many childish things I've put away.

Around the table: ranging from insurance-corporate dystopian to a more agrarian utopianism, even in the heart of the city.

Donald Trump wins Republican Presidential primary in South Carolina. Jeb Bush finishes fourth, and then suspends his campaign, suggesting that you can count a bastard out if he gets outshined by an even bigger bastard. One quibble: the suggestion, in the above link and elsewhere, that it's somehow surprising that Mr. Trump's fight with the Pope didn't hurt him with religious voters in South Carolina. I mean, to a lot of these voters, Catholics aren't even Christians, and they get into (or long to get into!) swordfights over Who's More Christian just like Donald Trump did all the time.

Ho hum, President Obama's budget would let corporations "bring back" overseas profits and pay taxes on those profits at far lower rates than they otherwise would. I'd say, "well, it's a good thing Republicans won't even consider Mr. Obama's budget," but it'd be just like Congress to lift out all the bad parts of that budget proposal and pass them. Indeed, Congress has tried to pass this particular dung nugget already. Remember when they called this sort of thing a tax "amnesty," before the nativists made amnesty a bad word. Then it was a tax "holiday," and now it's a "transition tax." Next year they'll call it something even more absurd, like "stimulus" or "job creation."

Abby Jackson, writing in Business Insider, discusses a study provocatively entitled "Are Charter Schools the New Subprime Loans?" Turns out it's only a metaphor -- financial bubbles result from the multiple stakeholders (and their conflicting interests) loans now have, whereas charter school failures often result from the multiple authorizers (and their conflicting interests) they have -- but it's an apt metaphor nonetheless, and suggests solutions in both realms are possible, if our politicians only have the will to do the people's will.

Robert Naiman reminds us that Hillary Clinton, as President Obama's first Secretary of State, "enabled" (his word! My efforts are working!) the coup that ousted President Zelaya from office in 2009. How? By suggesting that, well, maybe a coup didn't really take place (because that's so hard to figure out!) and that the State Department needed to study the matter -- when her own emails reveal that she already knew a coup had taken place. It's hard out there for a pimp. And it's even harder out there for good Hondurans, thanks to Mrs. Clinton.

If you're in the mood for some serious dystopianism, Morgane Remy's got it, as she posits a world where insurance corporations can use all the data the internet collects on you as leverage to "control your lifestyle." No sense arguing that inductive reasoning doesn't have absolute predictive power, because that's not how insurance corporations think -- and I presume if you opt out of the "Internet of Things," insurance corporations will just charge you a lot more for not giving them enough data to work with. Maybe we need single-payer for all kinds of insurance -- it won't make the Big Brother problem go away, but it'll make it more controllable by the people.

Finally, if you're not in a dystopian mood, Jasleena Grewal, writing at Yes! magazine, writes about how a community vegetable garden in the "Banglatown" section of East London can "create a space where people could re-form social networks." A real social network, we are reminded, occurs among folks who live close to each other and run into each other regularly without planning to, and needs a place where folks feel comfortable enough to get to know each other, and the garden not only provides a place for folks of differing backgrounds to speak the "universal language" of growing vegetables, but also allows them to eventually take their plots away from the space and create a new space where they can teach the lessons they've learned to others. I wish the Nomadic Community Garden, and all its offspring, the best of luck.

Around the table: Muslims react to the Paris attacks, and other stories.

Muslims worldwide condemn terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday. Remember this when right-wingers say ZOMG WHY DO TEH MUZLIMZ NEVER CONDEMNZ TEH TERRORIZMZ!!!!!

Hackers reveal that Securus Technologies, which provides phone service to many of our nation's prisons, has been recording phone calls between prisoners and attorneys, meaning they very likely violated attorney-client confidentiality and thus broke the law. Some fools will laugh when they hear this and say, so what, they're just prisoners. I sure hope such folks don't have to revise their opinions by going to jail themselves.

Maine Attorney General sues a Planned Parenthood protestor for protesting too loudly. Both state and federal law guarantee a citizen's right to get legal health services without "disruption," and while Mr. Ingalls's protests can apparently be heard "in the second-floor counseling and examination rooms of the facility," I don't think that alone would meet the bar. But I presume he could be prosecuted if he's violating noise ordinances, since the First Amendment only guarantees a right to speak, not a right to speak at a volume that actually physically interferes with others' speech.

Ain't nothing so bad that Rand Paul can't make it worse: Sen. Paul, in saying that "only certain opinions are acceptable on college campuses," adds that "(i)t’s almost like they’ll put you in prison for challenging the religious dogma on climate change." Mr. Paul would have to prove there's anything particularly "religious" or "dogmatic" about climate change, but more to the point, it is not "almost" like "prison" until colleges start actually detaining students for expressing contrary views. You'd think a "libertarian" would be more sensitive to all of that.

Finally, the notorious House Freedom Caucus apparently plans to draft a Contract On With America II. They think of themselves as "anti-establishment," but make no mistake: their wish list, which includes "overhauling" Social Security and Medicare, repealing the Estate Tax, cutting regulations, cutting corporate taxes, and expanding offshore drilling, is an establishment wet dream. Democrats could run against that by defending Social Security and Medicare, by defending clean air and clean water regulations, and by defending making everyone, including the wealthy and corporations, pay their fair share so we can all have bridges and roads and libraries and firefighters and police officers. I kid, of course -- Democrats don't have the guts to do any of that.

Around the table: starring Ben Carson and Alan Simpson as "Goofus and Gallant."

Boy, I really thought we were done with this "War on Christmas" crap, but apparently we're not: right-wing evangelicals say that coffee corporation Starbucks has, in handing out red coffeecups with no snowflakes, reindeer, or Santas on them, "REMOVED CHRISTMAS from their cups because they hate Jesus" (caps in original). My memory of the stations of the cross isn't airtight, but I don't remember seeing snowflakes, reindeer, or Santa Claus at any of them. 'Tis the season, apparently, for folks to throw tantrums so they can get attention.

Robert Reich reveals "What I Learned on My Red State Book Tour." Spoiler alert: "many of the conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers I met agreed with much of what I had to say, and I agreed with them," which will only surprise folks who believe in "liberal" media stereotypes. Yes, "crony capitalism," "factory farms," "'free' trade," and "too big to fail banks" all meet with broad bipartisan opposition, and this is the precise opposite of what the "liberal" media tells you when they talk about "bipartisanship."

Elias Isquith at Salon interviews New York Times journalist Charlie Savage about how President Obama seemed to change his mind about the "security (sic) state." Mr. Savage points to two main factors: one, Mr. Obama objected to Mr. Bush's warrantless wiretapping because he felt they were lawless, but when Congress rewrote the laws to conform to what Mr. Bush was doing, that objection disappeared. Two, the "underwear bomber" seemed to have put a scare into Mr. Obama. A potential third factor, the "deep state" described by Michael Glennon among others, gets some mention at the end.

Julia Angwin at ProPublica tells us that Vizio "Smart TVs" can "track your viewing habits and share (them) with advertisers," who can then target you on your smartphone. You can opt out, but why should you have to opt out? Really, they should give you the option of opting in, like Samsung and LG smart TVs. Apparently a loophole in the law (specifically, the Video Privacy Protection Act) allows smart TV makers to do this. Don't worry, though -- Congress is always looking out for the consumer and will offer a fix post-haste. I kid, of course.

Ben Carson actually blames "political correctness" for drug addiction. No, that really is the way to read his answer to an admittedly vague John Dickerson question on Face the Nation: people get addicted to drugs because they "lack something," and what do they lack? Contact with other people, as very bright folks have lately said? Well, no -- they lack "the values and principles" that make America great, and since people have apparently replaced that with "political correctness," then political correctness causes drug addiction. Political correctness is an evil, but right-wingers indulge in it all the time (see first paragraph above), and folks who treat it as the worst evil in America are themselves "lacking something."

Finally, former Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson offers an extraordinarily lucid description of some of the real moral crises plaguing this nation. He likes college kids, but says they're being conditioned to be "consumers" rather than citizens, and he uses "class warfare" the way it should be used, against the forces that would make everyone work for less money. I'll admit I never liked Mr. Simpson as a youth -- I thought he was as out there as Newt Gingrich, and maybe he sounds better now because Out There 2015 is hardly visible from Out There 1987. But maybe, just maybe, I wasn't listening to him as well as I should have back then.

Around the table: internet privacy, worker rights, food safety, voting rights, and one audacious hombré from Maine.

New U.N. privacy chief says we need a "Geneva convention" for internet privacy. He's right, though of course we need protection from corporations (which buy and sell our info) as well as governments (which gobble it up to use against you later). Key quotation: "at least Winston (Smith, of George Orwell’s novel 1984) was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined."

National Labor Relations Board rules that its previous definition of "joint employer" wasn't broad enough, raising the possibility that temporary employees and employees of subcontractors and franchises can redress grievances with the parent corporations, rather than the "middle men." Naturally Congressional Republicans have already announced they'll attack this decision through the appropriations process -- because they somehow find it unconscionable to give working families more tools to fight an unnecessarily obscure employer-employee relationship that redistributes worker wealth upward to corporate CEOs.

Consumer Reports finds bacteria resistant to at least two antibiotics in nearly one out of every five samples of ground beef. Sustainably-raised beef fares substantially better as far as antibiotic-resistant bacteria are concerned (though not necessarily other bacteria), but you'll still find it there, likely because you found it somewhere else first. Could we, maybe, you know, stop pumping healthy animals full of antibiotics now? Factory farms aren't so old, after all, that we need to get all Russell Kirk about protecting traditions and such.

You remember the Wichita State scientist who has found that the Republican share of votes seems to increase as precincts get larger in Kansas (and elsewhere)? Well, she's sued the state of Kansas for the hard copies of votes in order to check her data, and Kansas's Secretary of State has asked a judge to block that request. Mr. Kobach is, you might have guessed, a Republican, one who won re-election in 2014 though polls had him on the skids for a moment. But until the data convinces me otherwise, I'll continue to assume Mr. Kobach won mainly because his Democratic opponent didn't offer enough of an alternative.

Finally, Maine Governor Paul LePage says he might challenge Independent Senator Angus King in 2018. Gov. LePage is perhaps hoping (and perhaps in vain) for another three-way election, since those are the only kinds of elections he can win. But while Mr. LePage's gubernatorial term ends in 2018, circumstances might well free him to campaign extensively before then.

Action: the Iran nuke deal, and student privacy.

The Senate will take up the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran when they get back from their month of fundraising their working vacations with their constituents, and the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell them to support the framework of the Iran nuke deal. It's going to be an ugly, ugly battle, full of misinformation and irrelevant information, the latter including ZOMG THEY STILL CHANTZ TEH DEATHZ TO TEH AMERICAZ IN TEH STREETZ!!!!! It doesn't matter how Iran feels about this deal. Hell, it doesn't matter how anyone feels about this deal. It only matters whether this deal will keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and this deal will do that, with its rigorous inspection schedule and the threat of reinstituting economic sanctions against Iran if they violate the agreement. And people who think that only war with Iran will keep us safe are the same people who said Iran should unilaterally give us everything we want as a precondition to negotiations, and people like that don't understand what negotiation is.

Meanwhile, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood joins with the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy to help you tell Congress to enact vigorous legislation to protect kids' privacy in our schools. The vast majority of schools now use cloud services for things like classroom instruction, bus route planning, and testing, which means that a lot of personal student data -- names and addresses, Social Security numbers, test scores, et cetera -- sits out there where hackers and corporations can exploit it. The solutions the CCFC and the PCSP propose? Notifying parents before disclosing (or re-disclosing) any personal student info to third parties outside the school district; complete bans on selling student information and advertising within instructional materials; stronger encryption standards for student info; and vigorous enforcement, including specified punishments for violations. That all sounds common-sensical to me, but Congressional efforts to protect student privacy have been weaker, likely to "protect" big corporate donors. But they ain't the boss of us.

Around the table: in which banksters attack pension funds and property rights.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept investigates how banksters have gotten their grubby mitts on our state pension funds. You remember from living in the real world that the most important thing about a pension fund is not that it makes buku bucks, but that it's there when you need it to be, which is why their managers used to invest conservatively. But investing pensions in things like hedge funds don't even make the pension funds more money -- they only make banksters money, through exorbitant fees. At least the provincial government of Quebec instructs us how to do it right.

A Rasmussen poll finds more Americans thinking that private corporations spy on them more than their government does. But that's not an illuminating comparison -- corporations can spy on you to make you see ads and induce you to buy stuff, and in rare instances fire you, but your government can spy on you and put you in jail. And Americans who profess to worry little about government spying often forget that what's lawful today might become "terrorism" tomorrow. In any case, Rasmussen also found that nearly three in four Americans think our government's violated their privacy, which is the result I would have led with.

Noam Scheiber warns us that startups like Uber and TaskRabbit, which connect folks who need tasks done with folks who do them, could wind up turning us all essentially into temp workers. Yes, it is easy to imagine a Dystopian future in which we all get up in the morning worrying about whether some Amazon warehouse will need us to pull orders, or whether some wealthy bankster will need furniture moved. For a more historical perspective, I point you to Echidne of the Snakes, who also reminds us how organizations like Uber transfer risk "downstream" -- i.e., to workers.

Senka Huskic profiles the Southern Essex County (MA) Register of Deeds, John O'Brien, who continues to pursue the fraudulent foreclosure documentation foisted upon us by banksters, long after the Obama Administration settled with the big banks. Mr. O'Brien audited his county's mortgage assignments in 2010, and declared it "a crime scene," and not just because of robosigning. I'm glad he's fighting on, but it is unfortunate that right-wingers, constantly squealing about property rights in other contexts, have been largely quiet about how badly banks have screwed with property rights in America.

Finally, Europe's Parliament calls for breaking up Google. The vote was lopsided but non-binding, as the European Parliament has no jurisdiction over anti-trust matters -- but the European Commission does, and the vote could wave the stick of bad PR against the Commission enough that they act. What would action look like? "(C)hanges in its business practices and even possibly a big fine," the Times says -- so it would look like America's action, plus the changes in business practices and the size of the fine, of course.

Action: corporate cell phone spying, and carbon emissions.

Facebook has introduced a new feature to its phone app, which allows them to listen to your phone conversations through your phone's microphone. Do they even know how that sounds? They say it's just a feature to use when you don't know what song is playing in the background, as if no other app on the planet can do that (and, ah, I can do it better, if the song was recorded between approximately 1968 and 1992). The feature is "opt-in," which I suppose is appropriate, but does Facebook have a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause? Is Facebook comprised of law enforcement personnel entrusted by the community to find and apprehend law-breakers? If the answer to these questions is "no," then they shouldn't have the ability to listen in on our phone conversations in the first place. No doubt Facebook's brain trust would think themselves foolish not to try and get all the information (and therefore money) they can out of a website used by virtually everyone on the planet who uses the internet, but actually the opposite is true: having awesome power, frankly, requires more restraint. It's really like Our Elites have forgotten that. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop invading its users' privacy.

Meanwhile, the EPA announced a proposal for carbon emissions standards from existing power plants (not just new power plants), and if you missed earlier action alerts about it, then both CREDO and Public Citizen help you tell the EPA to issue the strongest standards possible. The EPA's proposal aims to reduce carbon emissions in 2020 by 25% from the year 2005's emissions, but the year 2014's emissions are actually rather lower than 2005's, such that America has already achieved two-thirds of that 25% reduction, and frankly we're going to need to lower our carbon emissions more than that if we're going to beat climate change. But the coal corporations and their enablers have been throwing a tantrum about the EPA's plan all week. Aren't these folks supposed to be our "best and brightest," our Glorious Job Creators to whom we are supposed to bow in awe? And yet at the same time they are our "best and brightest," our "indispensible" people, our Kings and Queens of talent and innovation, they are also somehow severely threatened by a Big Gummint regulatory plan that basically gives current emissions-lowering efforts a bit of a push. Why, it's enough to make you think that our "best and brightest" are actually neither. At the very least, they sure do whine a lot.

Around the table: corporate data sharing, big bad college students, the ongoing matter with Kansas, and other topics.

Wondering which of the many corporations you deal with, if any, "have your back" regarding government requests for information about you? The Electronic Frontier Foundation can tell you. Of the 26 listed corporations, the worst seem to be Snapchat and AT&T, which latter corporation we already knew handed over your private info to Tha Bush Mobb faster than Pierre Laval handed over Jews to the Nazis. Comcast ain't too great, either, though their record for defending their users' privacy (from the IRS, anyway) is slightly better than the others'.

There have been plenty of bad op-eds concerning the "chilling effect" of student protests prompting controversial commencement speakers to withdraw voluntarily from their speaking engagements, and FAIR finds one of the worst, in the New York Times, no less. Read the block-quoted paragraph: see how the writer implied that the only choices you might have for your commencement speakers are a) someone who's done very bad things or b) someone who's a "benign mediocrity," like, say, a sitting Supreme Court justice? So you must have a war criminal/other species of jerk at your graduation ceremony, or your graduation ceremony will be dull, and what could possibly be worse than that?

From the "'pro-business' policies kill economies" file: after $1.1 billion in Kansas state tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy and for corporations, the state lags behind national economic growth. And the state Supreme Court has stepped in to halt school budget cuts, but can't fix rising poverty rates by its lonesome. It's enough to make you think that tax-cuts-for-the-rich is just a way of redistributing taxpayer money upward to the rich. Luckily, Gov. Brownback proves he's serious about poverty by ensuring that everyone who wants to get married gets an 8-hour class on how to be married. Unless Paul Davis runs an utterly incompetent campaign, Mr. Brownback will be back in the private sector (finally!) by early next year.

House Republicans have actually proposed allowing public schools to solve their budget crunches by opting out of federally-mandated healthy lunch programs. Because there is no other solution to a budget shortfall than to take good ideas hostage! The House's newest idea will no doubt please the right-wing warriors who think making kids eat healthy food while they're on school grounds is GUMMINT TELLING US WHAT TO DO!!!!! I guess these folks never tell their kids what to do, or maybe they shadow them at school while taking government assistance because they don't work. I mean, those would be the only options that wouldn't make them utter hypocrites. Also, too, we are the government.

Former Missouri defensive end Michael Sam kissed his boyfriend on live TV after the St. Louis Rams drafted him in the 7th round of the NFL draft, but not everyone was happy about that, like this Dallas, TX TV host, who said, more than once, "I don't want to see that." Also THINK UV THA CHILDRENZ!!!!, who presumably will have questions about the kiss you, as a parent, might be able to answer without having a tantrum yourself. Folks who claim that the sight of gay men kissing is somehow "forced" on them might want to ask whether they've ever felt the same about the sight of a man and woman kissing. I mean, you do see a lot more of that, and by God why does no one ever think of the children when they kiss in public?

Finally, the National Labor Relations Board rules that workplace policies mandating "positive and professional behavior" actually violate the National Labor Relations Act. I'm not sure I agree, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter: telling people to BE POZITIVE!!!!!! is nowhere near as effective as creating a work environment where people will choose to be positive more often than not, and if managers don't often create that environment, that's no reason to throw up your hands and embrace cynicism. (Full disclosure: there is actually no good reason to embrace cynicism.)

Around the table: more Scott Walker warnings, CPAC silliness, big data broken promises, and Mitch McConnell bluster.

"George Bush Lost an Entire Generation for the Republican Party," says Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. Admittedly going from 50% to 66% of the 18-29 vote in Presidential elections just from 2000 to 2008 is impressive (though that number dropped to 60% in 2012), but if Democrats continue to offer voters next to nothing, what's to keep Scott Walker from getting all those voters back in 2016?

Michael Medved tells a CPAC audience that it is a "liberal lie" that any state has "banned gay marriage." All those state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage last decade? All "liberal lies." Which would make all the judicial decisions striking them down...conservative truths? People, it's bad when right-wingers are just denying they did the things they did not even ten years ago.

Surprise, surprise: the National Consumer Law Center finds that credit reports generated by online data brokers are rife with inaccuracies -- and really, really basic ones, ranging from wrong email addresses to wrong family members to wrong income, that last item halved or doubled in some cases. Of course the big data brokers wanted us to think their credit reports would serve the poor who can't get a bank account because they don't have credit. You know what would help solve that problem? Letting the U.S. Post Office offer basic banking services.

Finally, the inimitable Mitch McConnell (E-KY) thinks "mainstream" Republican Senate candidates will "crush" Tea Party candidates "everywhere." At which point the "mainstream" candidates will do whatever the Tea Party candidates would have done, only with smiles on their faces. Really, this establishment/Tea Party split is all theatre, and not even good theatre.

Around the table: GMO hype, repo surveillance, minimum wage myths refuted, bankster dramas explained, and right-wing lies exposed.

Jonathan Latham at FAIR provides a devastating report on the hype surrounding various genetically-modified foods. And it's not just golden rice (which even Scientific American has lately flogged) -- Mr. Latham also delves into "fakethroughs" like disease-resistant Xa21 rice, virus-resistant sweet potatoes, and edible vaccines, and concludes, in a model of understatement, that "(t)hese misreports of biotechnology are endlessly useful to the industry." You want to believe in miracle foods that end hunger, but it sure seems like they just suck money into corporate CEO bank accounts instead.

Shawn Musgrave at BetaBoston writes about the "vast hidden surveillance network" propagated by repo corporations. That's right, repo corporations, in their effort to find cars in need of repossessing, take billions of license plate scans, which essentially amount to geolocation data for almost everyone in America at some point in time -- and that data can be sold to other corporations looking to make a buck. See, it's not just our government we have to worry about when we worry about privacy!

Bloomberg informs us that Washington state, which enacted the highest minimum wage in America back in 1998, has added jobs and lowered poverty faster than America as a whole has done for the past 15 years. You don't need to believe these two things are related to refute right-wing horsedoodle, since right-wing horsedoodle insists that all these things simply cannot happen together at all. In a related story, the Center for American Progress finds that raising the minimum wage to $10.10/hour would cut food stamp spending by $4 billion a year -- since, you know, all those people would be making more money and thus would be better able to pay their grocery bills. Why, that almost sounds like a conservative case for hiking the minimum wage!

Jesse Eisenger at ProPublica describes some of the recent bankster-dramas over federal regulation. Main theme: when banksters really want to fight a rule overseeing, say, collateralized loan obligations, they proclaim it'll hurt smaller banks, even if only three banks own over two-thirds of all collateralized loan obligations. You wonder how they can sleep at night, until you realize that they probably sleep in great comfort -- or they stay up at night worrying about the wrong things.

Finally, Media Matters has created the "Mythopedia" (you can find the site here, with a video how-to here) so that you might refute right-wing garbage with only a few touches on your computer or cellphone. Of course, right-wingers will make fun of you for not knowing every single thing in the world off the top of your head, but you're not necessarily trying to reach them; you're trying to reach those who might listen to them. (It's not available as a cellphone app as of yet -- you'll have to enter the website address into your cell's browser.)

Around the table: climate vs. weather, justice vs. contractors, you vs. data brokers, Shell vs. the Arctic Ocean, and paid sick leave vs. corporate greed.

"If Global Warming is Real, Then Why Is It So Cold?" asks Pierce Nahigyan. Short answer: because weather and climate aren't the same thing. Only slightly longer answer: average temperatures are going up (just as extreme weather events are increasing in frequency), but that doesn't mean it's supposed to be 72 degrees in New England in January, any more than accepting evolution requires us to accept that somewhere a monkey is turning into a human as we speak. Another way of putting it: what's in front of your face is not the whole world.

Justice Department files civil lawsuit against ex-Halliburton subsidiary and two other corporations for some of the, ah, work they did for our Army in Iraq. Said "work" included using a refrigerated trailer as a morgue freezer and as a potable ice freezer without cleaning in between. Enjoy that cola, brave soldiers! One question: why not have the Army freeze its own ice, rather than use a private contractor?

Julia Angwin helps you stop at least some data brokers from collecting all your personal information and selling it to other corporations. You know, so grieving parents don't get emails the week after their child dies, because that kind of stuff happens -- or just so that private corporations (not to mention identity thieves!) don't know every damn thing about you. It's not paranoia, it's privacy.

Good news, everyone! Shell Oil Co. is abandoning plans to drill in the Arctic for 2014. About this time last year, they were abandoning plans to drill in 2013, at least in part because they had some, er, troubles drilling in the cold; this year they're facing some financial reversals and, of course, the Ninth Circuit's ruling that our government had improperly sold drilling leases in the Arctic (during Tha Bush Mobb's rule, what a big surprise). But I'm sure the adverse PR coming from good folks like us had something to do with it, too.

Finally, more good news: Newark, NJ passes a paid sick leave law, mandating that businesses with more than 10 employees grant five paid days off a year. Newark becomes the second New Jersey municipality (after Jersey City), and seventh nationwide, to pass a paid sick leave law. But am I the only one wondering if a Mayor Cory Booker would've vetoed it? (He praised the law after it passed, but he's a Senator now, in a Congress that's won't get that bill done.)

Around the table: financial service reform leaps ahead of health care reform, and other stories.

The federal health care exchanges may not be doing so well (though the state exchanges seem to be doing rather better), but Mike Konczal informs us that the derivative exchanges mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law of 2010 are actually going quite swimmingly, bringing transparency to the kinds of derivatives that crashed the economy in 2008 because regulators weren't watching them very closely. They're even regulating foreign derivatives transactions, a policy for which we've advocated here. It's a shame Mr. Obama will never be able to sell the phrase "swap execution facility" as well as his opponents have sold "Obamacare."

Weren't we just saying that maybe healthcare.gov shouldn't have outsourced its building to private corporations? Well, here comes Nation of Change's Paul Buchheit, giving us "Six Reasons Why" "Public Beats Private." For-real for-real, he's got more than six -- this is a pretty comprehensive list, if also a bit scattershot. Still, I bet you didn't know the USPS's 2-day price is actually $14 cheaper than FedEx's, did you? And pay attention to reason #5, "The Private Sector Has Incentive to Fail, or No Incentive at All," which won't surprise anyone who remembers all those banksters getting bonuses for no good reason.

CNN poll finds that more than half of Americans think it's a "bad thing" that Republicans control the House, and almost two-thirds want to replace John Boehner as Speaker. But before we break open the champagne bottles, we should remember that midterms are still over a year away, and a lot can happen between now and then, as Charlie Cook's analysis reminds us. Long story short: a lot has to happen before Democrats can retake the House in 2014 -- although now just about all of it is possible.

Kelly Phillips Erb at Forbes reminds us that giving away your Social Security number is a) a bad idea and b) frequently unnecessary anyway. Read the whole thing, and remember that a little assertiveness will help you on your way to keeping identity thieves away from your personal information.

Finally, George Washington University reveals that, despite its oft-stated commitment to "need-blind" admissions, it's actually favored wealthier students in the admissions process. And THAT! IS THE MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! HAVE EVER! HEARD!

Around the table: Larry Summers, data brokers, big carbon emitters, hypocrites, and weaklings.

Good news, everyone: Larry Summers has withdrawn his name for consideration as the Federal Reserve Chair. Good job, good peoples -- for, as Alex Pareene reminds us, Larry Summers is wrong about everything, and we can't let people wrong about everything have every position of power in this great country.

Meanwhile, for your edification, ProPublica offers an update on its March article "Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You." Not the NSA, of course -- these are private data collectors who generally use your information for marketing purposes, though they also give it out to folks looking to do a credit or employment check on you. Long story short: there are a lot of data brokers, they have a lot of your info, and you can review and/or amend not nearly enough of it.

Bloomberg tells us that the top 50 carbon emitters in the world are responsible for around 75 percent of the world's global emissions. So next time your Rep or Senator claims that carbon emissions regulations will hurt small businesses, throw this fact in their face.

The Heritage Foundation puts up an anti-Affordable Care Act ad in Times Square. It's like they've forgotten that the Affordable Care Act was mostly Heritage's idea in the first place.

Finally, some don't-tread-on-me tantrum thrower in Idaho plans to construct a pretentiously-named walled city so that some 7,000 like-minded nutjobs from all over America can live far away from rules and laws and suchlike. But has anyone told these "survivalists" that it's generally not a good idea to gather all the people who think like you in one spot?