Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning arbitration fairness, pollution, and high drug prices.

H.R. 1423/S. 610, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (or FAIR) Act, would (as its title suggests) invalidate any arbitration agreement a corporation forces upon an employee or customer if the dispute concerns employment, product safety, antitrust law, or discrimination. These little "agreements," as you know, force you into an arbitration proceeding generally of your opponent's choosing, which denies you your rightful day in court and also very likely denies you a positive outcome. If this bill passes, we'll never have to hear, again, of folks who get raped in nursing homes but whose families can't sue, or folks whose lenders illegally renew thousand-percent loans but can't sue, or folks whose banks use their names to open fake accounts but can't sue. Really, these are not "frivolous" lawsuits. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our right to a day in court by passing the FAIR Act.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to reject the Pebble Mine project in Alaska's Bristol Bay. You probably know the drill by now: mining for copper in Bristol Bay will not only pollute good Alaskans' water and disrupt the unique and fragile ecosystem, but it'll also be the death knell for the Bristol Bay's sockeye salmon industry, one of the world's most famous salmon fisheries and one that supports 14,000 jobs. You probably also know that not even that most inveterate corporate defender, former EPA head Scott Pruitt, could see his way clear to approving the Pebble Mine project, and you probably also know that a lot of Pebble Mine's potential investors have gotten cold feet. But none of that is any reason to be complacent, since we are currently ruled by a President who thinks it's honest work to buy low, suck the wealth out of the resulting failure, and foist the burdens of that failure on the taxpayer. So let's make sure we do our duty.

Finally, a Change.org petition helps you tell Pennsylvania state legislators to cap insulin prices in that state. In days of old (and, who knows, maybe tomorrow, too), right-wingers would have decried such things as TEH PRICE CONTROLZ!!!!! But arguing against "price controls," here, would be the same as arguing in favor of big pharma corporations setting insulin prices so high that diabetics start rationing their insulin and then die. Is it naive to suggest that right-wingers will perhaps exercise some shame at the prospect of being called objectively pro-diabetic death? I kid, of course -- right-wingers tend to recast any shame they deserve as liberal oppression, at which point I say: c'mon, we're either the people who want to give everyone participation trophies or we're the people who are waiting for you in the parking lot with baseball bats, but we can't be both.

Action: concerning Medicare drug prices, abortion, product safety, and defense spending.

We've spent a lot of time trying to get Mob Boss Mitch to hold Senate votes on good bills passed by the House, but sadly, it's also like pulling teeth to get Democratic House leadership to consider some good bills. Case in point: H.R. 1046, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act of 2019, which would, as its title suggests, finally let Medicare negotiate its drug prices on behalf of our seniors -- and would empower our government to manufacture its own generics if big pharma corporations refuse to negotiate in good faith. Why would Democratic leadership not want a vote on that? Could it be because Democratic leadership is far better at raising money from big corporations -- including big pharma corporations -- than they are at legislating? It's a question worth asking! Or, more precisely, it's a question worth making moot by demanding that Democratic House leaders allow a vote on the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, which Social Security Works helps you do.

CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 29975, the Women's Health Protection Act. The Women's Health Protection Act would prevent states from passing legislation outlawing (or putting onerous restrictions upon) abortion; you may have noticed that states have been doing a lot of these things lately. Would you respond that we should let the smallest government make the most decisions about the most people's health and welfare? I am, after all, neither immune to nor automatically disdainful of such arguments! But you're better off taking that argument up with our Constitution, because our Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision specifically says we cannot leave the legality of abortion up to the states. Given the current composition of our Court, that argument may not hold much longer. But I'll still oppose outlawing a procedure when only half of Americans (i.e., women) could ever serve time for it -- I mean, the only fair thing to do would be imprison men for the ill-considered sex that also contributed to the abortion, and I know no man in America would support that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would ban unsafe baby sleepers, like the Fisher-Price Rock 'n Play, and other unsafe baby products. An April Consumer Reports investigation revealed that sleepers like these have helped kill over three dozen babies, and you can't just pretend you're Brit Hume and say that's not so big a number, because every baby is the apple of someone's eye. And our Consumer Product Safety Commission knew, for several years, that the Rock 'n Play had helped kill babies, but took no action until the aforementioned investigation revealed more deaths than our CPSC had said. Consumer Reports will also help you call for a ban on crib bumper pads that help cause suffocation and strangulation, and tougher safety standards for dressers so they don't tip over on babies, since that also leads to over two dozen deaths annually. Again, if these numbers don't seem so impressive, just imagine it's your baby. That should do it.

In the wake of the news that our government is actually making a defense contractor pay for overcharging our government -- not a big-name defense contractor, nor a huge amount of money ($16 million) in the context of a $700 million-plus annual defense budget, but it's still a good work -- a consortium of good government groups (including Public Citizen, Roots Action, and Win Without War) helps you demand a $200 billion annual cut in defense spending. I often hesitate to put a number out there that looks arbitrary, but you don't even have to know that we already spend more on defense than the next seven countries combined to know that we can afford it -- you only need know that we routinely throw billions of dollars at weapons that clearly don't work. Which is to say they don't actually help defend us -- at "enriching corporate CEOs" and "funneling corporate welfare to big corporations," I guess these weapons do work. Call me old-fashioned, but I think defense spending ought to defend.

Action: concerning discrimination, aircraft safety, and internet freedom.

Last week the House passed H.R. 5, the Equality Act -- with eight Republican votes! Eight! It's a firestorm of moderation! I kid, of course -- I'm old enough to remember when the Republican Moderate Caucus in the Senate had two dozen members; now it doesn't even meet for lunch! Still, that might bode well for passage of the Equality Act in the Senate, since all 47 Democrats will vote for it and a handful of Republicans still style themselves as moderates. Perhaps a handful more will style themselves as independents who worry about more important things than continuing to discriminate against gays and transgender folk -- but only if we get in their grills! Hence you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers so you can call them and tell them to pass the Equality Act. Maybe our President will veto it (at Vice President Pence's urging, no doubt!), but let's at least make him do it.

In the wake of numerous news reports about safety failings of the Boeing 737 Max plane, which caused two of them to crash in six months, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) to mandate the "optional" safety features that could have prevented those crashes, and Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase FAA funding and take decision-making power about safety standards away from airplane manufacturing corporations. When folks started telling us that "the private sector does everything better," and started privatizing government functions, they assured us that government would still hold corporations accountable when they failed -- and then they started privatizing the accountability itself! It's like telling burglars to decide the length of their own jail sentences because, hey, they know best! Truth be known, airline deregulation has been a problem as long as I've been alive; maybe now's the time to stop all that?

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to vote for H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. Americans across the ideological spectrum -- yes, actual conservatives and actual liberals -- support the Save Internet Act, because it would restore net neutrality, the principle that big telecom corporations should treat all network traffic the same, and thus you, and not some corporation, should get to decide where you want to go on the internet. But politicians don't support it, because politicians care more about big telecom money than about people. Harsh? Nah, just truth. How do we know? They can't concoct a good argument against net neutrality -- take their complaining that internet regulation needs a "light touch," when net neutrality is obviously "light touch"! When an internet regulation doesn't mandate content or price, that's light touch.

Action: concerning Muslim bans, birth control, product safety, and taxes.

H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, would reverse our President's various Muslim bans and prevent future Presidents from issuing similar travel bans, mainly by amending the Immigration and Nationality Act so that it explicitly prevents discrimination against foreigners based solely on religion. What's that, you say? Our Supreme Court said the Muslim ban wasn't an attack on religious freedom because it also happened to include a few nations our Administration obviously put there to provoke such a ruling? Well, our Supreme Court was wrong, and not just because they simply refused to consider our President's stated intent (to enact a "Muslim ban, but legally") when they've bent over backwards to amplify supposed "intent" in other rulings. They're wrong because a billion Muslims live on Earth and if Islam was really so "violent," ISIS would be as big as pre-World War II Germany. Hence People for the American Way helps you tell our Congressfolk to truly honor our actual religious beliefs by passing the NO BAN Act.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a pair of bills that would increase our lawful access to birth control. H.R. 2182/S. 1086, the Access to Birth Control Act, would require pharmacies to supply birth control medication to anyone who can lawfully get it, regardless of any pharmacist's "religious" "beliefs," since "conscience" doesn't give you the right to discriminate against others. Folks who profess worry that the bill will force pharmacies to dispense birth control medication to folks who can't pay for it or who don't have a prescription in states where the law requires they get one, etc., can go ahead and read previous versions of the bill at Congress.gov to find out they're wrong. Or they can just admit they're trolls. H.R. 2091/S. 1049, the Access to Contraception for Servicemembers and Dependents Act, would expand access to birth control for our soldiers and their dependents, without the cost-sharing schemes that can limit that access.

Did you know our FDA can't get cosmetics off the shelves that have asbestos in them? Even makeup marketed to children? I wouldn't market makeup to children, personally, but if I were so inclined I certainly wouldn't market makeup to children with a chemical scientists have strongly linked to lethal lung diseases. If your Tea Party uncle tells you that of course the FDA can't get cosmetics off our shelves because it's called the Food and Drug Administration, remind him that the law that expanded the FDA's power in 1938 is called the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and it came about because of (among other things) the mascara "Lash Lure" that purported to give women a permanent eyeliner look but instead blinded them. I'd hate to one day find folks dying of mesothelioma because they used makeup as kids. Anyway, PennPIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to give our FDA the power to remove cosmetics from our store shelves.

S. 1138, the Working Families Tax Relief Act, would expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC), by expanding the size of the benefit taxpayers who qualify for the credit would receive. You should distinguish that from right-wing efforts to "expand" the EITC and the CTC so that higher-income folks can get the credit; the effort described in S. 1138 actually helps working families, while the right-wing "expansions" only pretend to. You should also distinguish the Working Families Tax Relief Act from the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the law that promised tax cuts to the middle class but instead delivered massive tax cuts to rich folks and corporations -- and slammed a lot of middle-class taxpayers with a tax bill this year instead of the tax refund they'd come to expect. The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the struggle of working families by passing the Working Families Tax Relief Act, because it's a bill that actually lives up to its name.

Around the table: the worst word in the English language, and other revelations.

John Mauldin at Forbes announces that "The Average American Can't Save Enough to Retire" -- and that's mainly because the average American doesn't make enough money. Take that, rich boss who looks down on everyone who's not like him! I can't really fault Mr. Mauldin for talking about retirement in terms of "cruises and golf tournaments," or bills only in terms of paying off your house or car, since I imagine that's how his intended audience at Forbes thinks about these things. And perhaps some of them will get the message, however muted, that they're not paying their employees enough to have a decent-sized IRA.

Fran Quigley at TruthOut warns us that big pharma corporations are trying to deflect from their role in pricing life-saving drugs too high by nattering on about middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers." Because what else can they do when you have them dead to rights on jacking up the price of insulin so much that some diabetics skip doses which diabetics cannot ever do? Just remember that big pharma corporations pay their executives tens of millions of dollars and report profits as high as 40%, and that the price of insulin has increased tenfold over the last 20 years, which is, to say the least, a lot faster than inflation. (Also, note that pharmacy benefit managers don't set a drug's list price.)

Buried in this account of how our President hates the idea of self-driving cars, not that he's doing anything about it, is the statement that Administration Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao faces a "challenge" to "manage safety concerns while promoting U.S. innovation." If a car isn't safe, how is it "innovative"? Are we "innovating" on the definition of safety now? To include, you know, stuff that's not safe? "Innovation" is really the worst word in the English language. You can safely decide that anyone who deploys it as an unambiguous positive is a fool.

Janine Jackson at FAIR reminds us, in the wake of the news that the Venezuelan government didn't blow up those aid convoys at all, that "Exposure of Another Pro-War Lie Doesn’t Make Media More Skeptical of Pro-War Claims." You have to wonder why our "liberal" media keep going to the same people who are always wrong about everything -- a phenomenon we've observed repeatedly, such as when folks who swore up and down that the Iraq war would be easy-peasy kept getting cited as "experts" in news reports -- but of course we already know why: because war makes big corporations money, and media outlets don't challenge money.

If you're wondering why this session's Medicare-for-All bill has fewer House Democratic supporters than last session's Medicare-for-All bill did, despite there being, you know, more Democrats in the House this session, you can take comfort in the fact that quite a few of last session's Democrats supported it because it had no chance of passing, and its chances of passing grow with the passage of time. You can take less comfort in recalling that Democrats sure do have a habit of sabotaging good ideas when they have the power to do so -- but you can take more comfort in knowing that our job isn't to elect more Democrats, but to make the politicians in power do our will.

Finally, in a related note, David Dayen reminds us that California Senator/Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris loves to celebrate her role in getting that $25 billion settlement from banksters over foreclosures, but that the settlement itself is nothing to celebrate. That goes beyond the fact that banksters were able to write that $25 billion off their taxes, and none of them went to jail, even though they obviously broke the law -- a lot of that settlement money didn't actually help anyone keep their home, though that was, ostensibly, its whole purpose. Think of that the next time someone tells you that you have to support Kamala Harris because she's "electable" or "sensible" or whatever -- in these times, these words mean "part of the problem."

Action: concerning nuclear weapons, climate change, and self-driving cars.

Our President has declared he'll withdraw our nation from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (or INF) Treaty, which was one of the signal foreign policy achievements of President Reagan's second term. Observers disagree as to whether our President can actually pull us out; the Senate did ratify the treaty, which makes it American law. But here's one thing we can more easily agree on: whining about other nations getting to "do" weapons is no reason to abandon international treaties that actually help keep us safe. And here's another thing we can more easily agree on: either House of Congress can simply refuse to fund the "doing" of intermediate nukes. Don't get too hopeful now that one of those Houses will be in Democratic hands in January; you know how Democrats like to prove they can be just as "tough" in foreign policy as right-wingers. So Roots Action helps you tell your Reps and Senators to refuse to fund intermediate nukes.

Finally, in the wake of our Administration's National Climate Assessment concluding that, basically, climate change will wipe us out unless we act, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to take serious action on climate change. Their actions could include, but would not be limited to, the OFF Fossil Fuels Act (current bill number: H.R. 3671) or the 100 By 50 Act (S. 987), both of which would begin the work of weaning us off fossil fuels, while helping fossil fuel workers retrain to work on the new power grid. Don't believe our President's various dismissals of his Administration's NCA -- for example, retorting that our water and air are cleaner than ever a) underscores how unsuccessful his efforts to gut clean air and clean water regulations have been and b) actually has nothing to do with climate change! And certainly don't embrace cynicism and fatalism, because these are not the attitudes that ended slavery.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject S. 1885, the AV START Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. S. 1885 would let corporations sell self-driving cars without meeting federal safety standards and would prevent states from passing their own laws regulating self-driving cars; given that self-driving cars have killed two people and injured another this year, do either of these things sound like good ideas to you? I'll tell you what they do sound like: they sound like corporate welfare given to self-driving car manufacturers that haven't done the work to ensure their products are safe for people. Why, it's like our government is picking winners and losers with the AV START Act. And the losers? Folks who don't want to get run over by self-driving cars. Seems like our government always wants to make us the losers. And that's why we fight.

Around the table: more lessons about drama and duty.

Surprise, surprise, while the Senate Judiciary Committee created all that drama on Friday, the House passed yet more tax-cuts-for-the-rich. Not that they planned it precisely that way, of course -- but creating drama all the time does give folks cover to do nefarious evil, and I'm sure the folks who create the drama are quite aware of that. (The House did not pass the bill in question, H.R. 6760, as part of a budget reconciliation process, meaning our Senators can filibuster it, and of course we'll get on our Senators to do that presently.)

Natalie Shure at In These Times instructs us, in examining the collapse of alleged innovative corporation Theranos, that we're not going to "innovate" our way out of our health care problems. "Ingenuity isn’t what our healthcare sector needs," she writes. "We have plenty of it already, and it hasn’t managed to stop poor people from dying over 10 years earlier, on average, than their wealthy peers." I was going to add that "looking to private corporations to fix health care is more than a little like looking to banksters to fix the foreclosure crisis," but then I realized it wasn't much of a joke, because the Obama Administration did all of that. Didn't we used to think scientists, not entrepreneurs, were the big innovators?

Rebecca Solnit at The New Republic does a public service by reviewing three books about female anger. Male anger -- the kind that ends up in school shootings, wife beatings, and whole movements of men who never stop whining about woman constantly rejecting them I wonder why -- gets most of the ink in America, but it's well past time we acknowledged that women have a right to be angry, and that we need to stop telling them they don't. (I mean, I don't put up with oooooh why are you so angry? from the haters, and it never occurs to me that I should -- but we make women feel like they should.)

Jake Laperruque and David Janovsky at the Project on Government Oversight inform us that aerial drones may have reached a point where they're good enough and cheap enough to tempt local police departments to radically increase spying on the citizenry. And the more automated they become, the fewer people will be involved in their use and maintenance -- which means, yes, that aerial drones kill jobs. How many times must I tell these pimps! Ensuring that government spying doesn't violate our rights is the work of a democracy, and only people can do the work of a democracy -- and if that last part puts the fear in you, then your task as a citizen is to help create people worthy of that work, not throw up your hands and let machines do it.

You can get too hypnotized by the inside politics in this excerpt from Michael Lewis's upcoming book (The Fifth Risk) about how our Administration is destroying our government from within, but you'll probably agree that, regardless of the specific context in which he said it, "fuck the law...I want my fucking money" is pretty much the motto of our President and of the corporate executives he regards as his real constituency. Remember that motto every time our Administration tries to slash clean air, clean water, and product safety regulations.

Finally, we learn the amazing story of how Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) went from declaring his support for the Kavanaugh nomination to demanding an FBI investigation into the allegations against Mr. Kavanaugh after activists confronted him in a Senate elevator with their stories of sexual assault. That video is hard to watch, but "(l)ook at me when I'm talking to you!" is exactly how we must confront the powerful in America, and when we do, we have the opportunity to learn a simple lesson: that shame works. Never let the cynics and the haters tell you any differently.

Action: concerning Puerto Rico, self-driving cars, and endangered species.

Given the fact that Puerto Rico -- which ought to be a state, so Americans are less likely to think it's full of brown-skinned foreigners -- is still suffering from the ravages of Hurricane Maria over a year later, Amnesty International helps you tell local and federal authorities to investigate our government's response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The immediate news hook: a CBS News report (based on photos taken by a Puerto Rico police officer) that millions of bottles of water sat on a runway in Puerto Rico for more than a year. I guess our Administration will blame REGULASHUNZ!!!!! for that, though is that sort of excuse really worthy of a can-do country? Also, both the Union of Concerned Scientists and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to enact some real relief for the good citizens of Puerto Rico. And if that means building out a renewable power grid and/or ending the forced austerity policies so beloved by the banksters who hold Puerto Rican debt, well, those are sacrifices we should be willing to make.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to oppose S. 1885, the AV START Act, which would let corporations put self-driving cars on the road without ensuring their safety, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You heard about the two people self-driving cars have killed this year, but you may not have heard that road tests commonly find self-driving cars absolutely flummoxed by a little snow or a solitary seagull. One corporation wants to put sensors under cars so they'll "see" the road better. I have a few better ideas: properly fund public transportation, mandate that corporations with known safety problems start disclosing them, and shame people who only buy cars because they're flashy. We'll start getting safer driving after that! Why do we assume machines will do things better than people when machines can't check out my groceries better than a 16-year-old? Because bosses don't want to have to pay workers, that's why. Let's not enable that behavior.

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Administration not to pursue a bunch of regulatory changes that would seriously injure our ability to protect endangered species. Get to stepping, though, because the deadline for your comments is Monday. What does our Administration plan to do? Among other things, they plan to allow agencies to tabulate "economic costs" when deciding how to protect endangered and threatened species and also to ignore scientific data before giving out oil and gas drilling leases. They'd further mandate that every single threatened species in America get its own rule, even though one rule currently covers all of them; is that what right-wingers mean when they say REGULASHUNZ IZ TEH BURDENZ!!!!!? Apparently the right finds cumbersome regulations just fine when it makes the real work of civilization much harder. They'll answer to God for their nefarious works -- but let's maybe help them walk a more rewarding path by speaking out now.

Action: concerning banksters, free speech, and product safety.

With the 10-year anniversary of the 2008 financial services armageddon having lately passed, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to break up the big banks via a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, which would make banks smaller by preventing them from indulging in the hifalutin investments that crashed our economy and will crash it again. As the first sentence suggests, we've already seen what happens when we don't break up the big banks -- and we're continuing to see what happens when we let banksters determine what our economy is going to look like, and it includes a lot of income redistribution upward from people who work to people who don't. But limiting the size of any institution that threatens to run roughshod over our freedoms is not some "radical" proposal, but one with a long history and precedent in America. You might even say a fundamental opposition to concentrated power created America.

Meanwhile, our Education Department would like to adopt a definition of "anti-Semitism" that would equate criticism of Israel or support of Palestine with anti-Semitism! All so folks can win civil rights cases against folks who do either one in an academic setting! Hey, that could be any of us, if we work in a school! Of course, Israel is not Judaism even if their far-right-wing government acts like they are, and when even the progenitor of the legal theory equating anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel says it can't be used in academic settings due to free speech issues, you have to wonder what our Education Department is really afraid of. Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell our Education Department's Office of Civil Rights not to equate pro-Palestinian activism or criticism of Israel with "anti-Semitism." Yikes, this from the Administration whose President said some Nazi wannabes are "very fine people."

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to ban poisonous paint strippers. A lot of paint strippers contain N-Methylpyrrolidone (or NMP) and methylene chloride, which cause respiratory problems and could lead to death; our EPA did propose a rule banning these paint strippers during the second Obama term, but you know what happened after that: a President openly hostile to regulations that protect good Americans happened. Walmart, Lowe's, and Home Depot have all lately banned these toxic products, but that ain't the boon it seems to be, as our EPA might use that as an excuse to declare that "the market has taken care of the problem," even though these three big corporations could all reverse their decisions tomorrow. And, ah, don't be the fool who retorts WHAT YOU THINK PAINT STRIPPERS SHOULD ONLY HAVE NICE CHEMICALS HA HA HA SNORT. Nobody should worry about dying because they use a paint stripper.

Action: concerning taxes, unconstitutional war-making, and product safety.

As long expected, Congressional Republicans have introduced H.R. 6760, known as the "Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act of 2018," but perhaps better known as "Tax Scam 2.0," the bill that would make permanent certain tax cuts Republicans passed late last year, and though Republicans spend a lot of time telling you these are really for, well, "families and small businesses," that's utter rubbish -- sure, the cut in the 25 percent bracket to 22 percent will stay, but that's not a whole lot of real money, whereas the 2.6 percentage point cut in the former 39.6 percent bracket is real money, and so is the Estate tax cut (which working folks like us never pay), and so is the pass-through business tax cut which mostly rich folks get. We might as well get the jump on this, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your House Rep to reject the work-hating, deficit-busting, working families-hurting "Tax Scam 2.0."

Meanwhile, several Congressfolk from both parties are still pushing for a War Powers Resolution vote on our participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you demand that your Congressfolk vote on the war on Yemen, as our Constitution and the War Powers Act mandate they do. Earlier this week, our Administration "certified," in testimony to Congress, that Saudi Arabia and the UAE "are undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure." Like bombing school buses? Like leaving Yemen teetering on the brink of famine? Defense Secretary Mattis has also said that American influence on Saudi Arabia and the UAE has saved civilian lives, which sure sounds like a rhetorical hostage crisis to me. You know what would save more civilian lives? If our government didn't feel like it had to go along with whatever Saudi Arabia wants, that's what. It's hard to say you have leverage over someone if you never actually use it.

Finally, hot on the heels of the news that some Playskool crayons you find in dollar stores or at online sellers like Amazon or eBay might have asbestos in them, Penn PIRG (which conducted the study) helps you tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to recall these and other products that might injure our children off our shelves. (As an aside, I sure do find the misspelling of "playschool" less funny as I get older.) Penn PIRG's findings also included markers with benzene and three-ring binders with phthalates, and while a Johns Hopkins toxicologist said the amount of asbestos found in the Playskool crayons isn't dangerous to "most" people, you have to wonder if "most" people includes children, and one of the Penn PIRG study's authors points out that if you get trace amounts of asbestos from several products (and you might!), you're still at risk for getting sick. So, yes, it seems like recalling the crayons would help save lives.

Action: concerning conservation, marijuana, and self-driving cars.

Congress still hasn't reauthorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, though it'll expire at the end of this month, and though it has worked to reclaim American lands for decades now. And why not? Because they abhor hard work? Because dedicating oil and gas drilling fees toward buying up and reclaiming lands like the Appalachian Trail is TEH EXTREMIZTZ ENVIRONMENTALISTZ!!!!!? Because it's about conserving the past so the future can enjoy it and today's politicians only care about the present? Because a program that doesn't actually cost taxpayers anything must be a program that runs well and therefore must be destroyed? Whatever the reason, the Wilderness Society helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund with a quickness. And if they start talking about the LWCF needing "reform," you can remind them that when they say "reform" they usually mean "deform." There's no reason they shouldn't know we're on to them.

Meanwhile, our Administration has convened a Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee, with the apparent purpose of bamboozling the public not to support better marijuana policy, as most of us do. You'd think they'd have better things to do with their time, but let's one-up this "policy coordination committee" and let Drug Policy Alliance help us tell our Congressfolk to pass pending legislation which would improve our federal policy toward marijuana. The bills you'd support are the Marijuana Justice Act (H.R.4815/S.1689), which would remove marijuana from Schedule I and help communities ravaged by the "war on drugs," and the STATES Act (H.R.6043/S.3032), which would let states that have legalized the drug operate without federal interference. Why, even our President endorsed the STATES Act earlier this year! Of course, that was then, and for our President, tomorrow is always another country.

Finally, Congress is still itching to pass legislation that would actually allow corporations to put self-driving cars on the road without first determining if they're safe. This is, as you know, a matter of some debate, since self-driving cars have killed people on two occasions this year, and you and I still can't get one! But S. 1885, the AV START Act, would not only let self-driving car-manufacturing corporations glide past federal safety standards, it would prevent states from banning self-driving cars. I remember asking why folks are so excited about self-driving cars, but of course I know the real reason: putting these monstrosities out on the road will make someone a lot of unearned money. Indeed, it often seems like that's the only reason corporations do anything in America. Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from unsafe products by rejecting S. 1885.

Action: government oppression, food safety, and marijuana prohibition.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Venezuela to release its political prisoners. Venezuela just had an election, as you know, and it wasn't quite the resounding victory for which incumbent President Nicolas Maduro might have hoped -- in fact, given the increased number of protestors out in the streets after the election, it may well have been a loss. Mr. Maduro has taken a page from Mr. Assad's playbook by shooting those protestors, a few short years after following in the footsteps of his predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, by wresting rule-by-decree power, this time while the opposing party controlled the nation's assembly. But it doesn't matter whether I might agree with any part of Mr. Maduro's political philosophy, because governments are always wrong to fire on their protestors, and governments are always wrong to detain their political opponents. And if governments do either one, then they are failed governments, and deserve to be out of power.

Meanwhile, Food and Water Watch helps you tell the U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to keep unsafe Chinese chicken out of American stores. Specifically, you'll ask the USDA to deny "granting equivalency status for the poultry inspection system in the People's Republic of China," which the USDA would like to do though China's lackluster poultry inspection system is notorious the world over, allowing things you might expect (sick birds and antibiotic abuse) and things you might not (using recycled cooking oil from street gutters, yum!). This is the kind of thing we supposedly put Mr. Trump in office to stop, but the Trumpoids have an answer: it's a great deal, a YUGE deal, really, because we're opening up their markets to our beef! So we're selling safe, high-quality beef to China, and we're getting crappy, disease-ridden chicken in return. Yeah, that's a great deal like getting Jason Grimsley for Curt Schilling was a great deal for the Astros.

Finally, Sen. Booker (D-NJ) has introduced the Marijuana Justice Act, an ambitious bill worthy of the man Mr. Booker pushed out of the Senate, the late Frank Lautenberg. Among other things, the bill would end federal scheduling/prohibition of marijuana, withhold funding from states that continue to criminalize it (which they'd have the right to do) if they disproportionately arrest and convict non-whites on pot charges, and establish a Community Reinvestment Fund to help those communities most harmed by the "war on drugs" (which, as John Ehrlichmann himself said, was always about demonizing blacks and anti-war activists). Fact is, pot is no worse than alcohol or tobacco, and if it's a "gateway drug" to anything, it's most likely a gateway drug to "getting hemp grown the way we've historically grown cotton," which may explain Attorney General Sessions's opposition to it even more than any racist feelings he might have. Anyway, Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Marijuana Justice Act.

Action: "free" trade, free speech, and EPA funding.

CREDO helps you tell our U.S. Trade Representative to put people first, not corporations, when he renegotiates the North American Free Trade Agreement. CREDO presents an impressively detailed list of demands: an "open and transparent" negotiation, the elimination of the "investor-state tribunals" that allow corporations to nullify our laws and exact tribute from taxpayers, strong environmental and labor standards, strong product safety standards for imports, and strong protections for citizens against higher drug prices. Who could possibly oppose these things? Why, no one, of course -- which is why "free" trade votaries try to distract you with irrelevancies like "booga booga China" and "polls say everyone likes trade" and "OK, we hear your complaints, just let us have this trade deal and we'll listen next time." That's mostly stuff corporate Democrats say, but don't be lulled into complacency by the presence of President Trump, because he appointed a lot of "free" traders to his cabinet, and because, you know, duty is duty.

Meanwhile, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 1697/S. 620, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act. I've held that past attempts at the state level to zero out government funding for groups associated with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (or BDS) movement are odious, but not unconstitutional -- you have a right to free speech, but you don't have a "right" to collect money from your fellow taxpayers. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act goes further than that, though -- it prohibits any American citizen "engaged in interstate or foreign commerce" from "requesting the imposition of any boycott by a foreign country against a country which is friendly to the United States" or "supporting any boycott fostered or imposed by an international organization, or requesting imposition of any such boycott, against Israel." That sounds an awful lot like our government telling us what to do and what to think, so let's not put up with that.

Finally, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose proposed Trump budget cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, and also to expand EPA funding so it can do the job the people have commanded it to do. Our government's failure to properly fund the EPA's mandate to keep our air, water, and land clean has been a problem almost since its inception under President Nixon, and you may be surprised to learn that even a few far-right Republicans aren't necessarily that anxious to cut EPA funding further: "There's not that much in the EPA, for crying out loud," says Rep. Simpson of Idaho. Now, if we get EPA funding up to the point where it actually can inspect fracking wells, for example, I bet Rep. Simpson reverts right back to complaining about how the EPA "oppresses small businesses" and "kills jobs," though nobody wants the EPA to be 20 percent of our federal budget. More than 0.22% (that's 22 one-hundredths of one percent, not "22 percent," "liberal" media) of our federal budget would be nice, though.

Action: "free" trade, and endangered species.

President Trump may have withdrawn the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and notified Congress of his intention to renegotiate NAFTA, but don't congratulate him too much for these things -- Mr. Trump, after all, decided not to try to get rid of the most odious part of NAFTA and other "free" trade deals, the "investor-state tribunal" that allows corporations to nullify our laws and extract tribute from the taxpayer. Also, Mr. Trump's own Commerce Secretary told a corporatist crowd that he'd start renegotiating NAFTA by adding in some of the only-slightly-less-odious parts of the TPP, like its extension of drug monopolies. You'd think any renegotiation of NAFTA would begin by putting workers' interests at its center, since that's pretty much what Mr. Trump said he'd do, so Sign for Good helps you tell the U.S. Trade Rep to make sure any NAFTA renegotiation puts workers in all three countries first. These interests include getting rid of "investor-state tribunals," requiring imports to meet strong American safety standards, protecting Buy American and Buy Local rules, and restricting monopolies on drug patents. Think they want to do any of that? Of course not. But let's make them known as opponents of the popular will, if it comes to that.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the Department of the Interior to reverse its planned delisting of the Yellowstone grizzly bear as an endangered species. Interior plans to protect grizzlies inside the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and near Glacier National Park, but would rescind protections for hundreds of grizzlies in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Some of these will now fall prey to trophy hunters, whom I'm pretty sure wouldn't face a grizzly bear without a big gun. Didn't know trophy hunters got so much say about everything, did you? Particularly after more than 600,000 public comments to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prevented delisting last year? We do have many more grizzlies than we did 40-plus years ago, but not nearly as many as we used to, and grizzlies have lost nearly 10% of their numbers since 2014, so they still face challenges. And folks who complain about having to work to protect the grizzly for yet more years are clearly out of touch with the whole idea that anything worth doing is hard, takes time, and should be done right. You might think these are conservative values. And then you might wonder why so few of today's "conservatives" seem to hold them.

Action: product safety, and campaign finance disclosure.

Lithium button batteries have come a long way over the last few years -- but not necessarily at Duracell, which still makes lithium button batteries for toys, remotes, and the like that can burn through a child's throat in a mere fifteen minutes, if a child happens to swallow one. But they just tell parents to watch their kids and make sure they don't swallow them. Even though toddlers can get into a whole lot of things with a quickness, most folks (even most parents!) want to tell parents that at some time or other -- after all, it's been pretty obvious for a while that no one watched Donald Trump enough when he was a kid. But what we need to train ourselves to do more, frankly, is tell corporations: if you can make something so that it's safe, why not just do it already? Maybe Duracell will tell you making their button batteries safer would drive up the price, but so what? No one who loses their child to a swallowed battery will console themselves with the notion that at least they didn't pay as much for it. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Duracell to help keep children safer by making their batteries safer.

Meanwhile, H.R. 430/S. 229, the DISCLOSE Act, would require corporations, unions, and other entities to disclose any campaign spending of more than $10,000 they undertake -- and would also require those entities to disclose the names of any donors who contributed more than $1,000 to that effort. Why? Because money is not speech, and disclosing the names of the big donors who seem to get whatever they like after they donate their money is not "bullying," as Super Great and Awesome Real American President Mitch McConnell has called it. The DISCLOSE Act would also expand the definition of "independent expenditure" so that corporations et al can't hide their donors as easily behind an "issue ad," which may slam a particular candidate while avoiding literally expressing a preference for one. I disagree with the part that would let folks 17 and under donate money to campaigns, not just because children aren't supposed to have all the same rights as adults, but also because "contributions from children" sure looks like a way to launder money. Still, Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the DISCLOSE Act.

Action: "free" trade, corporate welfare, and cosmetic safety.

As you know, the text of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" is finally out, and early analyses suggest the deal is even worse than we knew it was going to be from leaks. So both the People's Email Network and Roots Action help you tell your Congressfolk to reject this noxious "free" trade deal. The TPP would, as you know, would ship our jobs overseas and bring more unsafe products here, would make it harder to get the drugs you need to get better, would make it harder to speak freely on the internet, and (perhaps most noxious of all) would allow "investor-state tribunals" to nullify our laws if they cost some investor some money somewhere -- even if those laws protect the people against pollution, workplace injuries, or bankster schemes. The deal is so bad that its supporters (including President Obama and his former economic BFF, Lawrence Summers) can't defend it coherently -- Mr. Summers's last defense relied on booga-booga about China and a vague promise to stop passing bad "free" trade deals and get future "free" trade deals right if we'll only give up and let this one pass. He must think the American people are profoundly stupid. We're not.

Meanwhile, some four dozen big corporate tax breaks have expired, as they do every year, and Congress is anxious to renew them, as they do every year. Have any of them considered that the difficulty they have renewing such corporate welfare handouts as the "bonus depreciation" handout might well be due to the American people's hatred of corporate welfare handouts? I kid, of course: Congressfolk know full well what they do, and care more about their big donors than their real bosses, i.e., the American people. Naturally, at the same time our glorious representatives are figuring out how they're going to extend these handouts, they're waffling on extending expansions of actual tax relief for actual working families, namely the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC). Congress may well play the we're-broke game they never play with corporate welfare handouts -- unless we tell them not to. Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell Congress to prioritize tax relief for working families over corporate welfare handouts.

Finally, this week the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (or HELP) Committee will mull S. 1014, the Personal Care Products Safety Act, and Breast Cancer Action helps you demand more vigorous action against carcinogens in personal care products than the current bill would take. More and more scientists are linking cosmetics to cancer, but S. 1014 doesn't go far enough in protecting good Americans from carcinogens: it would make the FDA evaluate a mere five chemicals annually, and though cosmetic manufacturing corporations would have to provide a list of chemicals they use to the FDA, they wouldn't have to put those ingredients on their product labels -- you know, where good Americans might actually get to read them. Perhaps most importantly, the FDA would, under S. 1014, assume all chemicals are safe until they're discovered to be harmful, rather than force corporations to prove their chemicals are safe to begin with. There is, also, the matter of funding the FDA's new mandates, which S. 1014 doesn't address. You're supposed to spend money to prevent wrongdoing, after all.

Around the table: of constructive economic policy and disruptive technology.

Boo hoo, the super-rich need therapy, too, because of the unique problems of having wealth. As if the rich aren't "isolated" because building a society that worships wealth above all isolates all of us, or this isolation isn't so often a conscious aim of the super-rich. If the "liberal" media were actually making the people who crapped all over our economy feel "ashamed," my response would be bravo! But when one "wealth psychologist" says "I am not necessarily comparing it to what people of color have to go through" before going ahead and comparing it to what people of color have to go through, I'm reminded that there are still far too many "liberal" media folks who'd tell a struggling black man to "start with the man in the mirror" but would never say that to John Paulson.

The New York Times runs a story claiming that increasing taxes on the rich would actually do quite a lot, but it doesn't go all the way. The return of the 91% tax bracket still apparently has the name of Voldemort to the "liberal" media, and no it is not true that we should not bring back the 91% tax bracket because "at some point, higher tax rates would discourage extra investment and work" -- it would make CEOs pay themselves less with corporate revenues, and then shield those revenues from taxation by hiring people to make stuff, which would go a long way toward bringing back a thriving middle class.

Robert Reich argues that Hillary Clinton's Wall Street policy prescriptions won't be enough. Mr. Reich approves of the thrust of her plan, which would impose fees on banks that depend less on deposits and more on short-term funding, and would regulate mutual funds and hedge funds more stringently, but Mr. Reich argues it won't be enough, simply because the banksters are too politically powerful now, so we ought to break them up. I concur -- not just because I've long said the biggest enemy of the small bank is the big bank, but because banksters resist any change, this after they took a massive crap all over the economy. You'd think they'd feel shame or something.

Cade Metz at Wired tells us why the internet porn business isn't as "ridiculously lucrative" as it was, say, 10 years ago. Long story perhaps a bit too short: it's now ridiculously easy to see porn for free on your home computer -- to the point where it's become a "low-margin" business, in the testimony of one porn app entrepreneur -- while at the same time it's actually quite difficult to get porn on the smartphones most folks use to surf the internet these days. There's a bit more to the story than that, but that's the jist of it.

Finally, Ana Swanson at the Washington Post covers actual disruptive technologies, and concludes that the most disruptive technology of the last 100 years is the refrigerator. And, if you think about it, it's true: as another writer says, "(a) whole arsenal of home preservation techniques, from cheese-making to meat-smoking to egg-pickling to ketchup-making, receded from daily use within a single generation." This and other technologies (including the dishwasher, the clothes-washer, and the vacuum cleaner) resulted in a big drop in the time working families spent on meal-prep, laundry, and house-cleaning: from 58 hours weekly in 1900 to just 18 in 1970. (Remind your libertarian friends, though, that without clean water regulations and product safety laws, there'd be much fewer of us around to celebrate these labor-saving devices.)

Around the table: from the non-ISIS ISIS plot to the worker-owned co-op rising from the ashes of a failed corporation.

FAIR catches the "liberal" media howling about an ISIS nuke plot that doesn't demonstrate ISIS involvement in said plot. Details! They're so hard! But this is how they'll create another generation of rage-filled citizens the next Republican President will harvest. And like the last generation, they'll forget all about terrorism the moment their Personal Lord and Savior takes a giant dump all over the economy, and then rebrand themselves as teabaggers for the next center-right Democratic President.

California enacts the strongest digital privacy law in America -- by virtue of requiring that law enforcement get a warrant before compelling any business to turn over any electronic data. Alberto Gonzales would find that concept "quaint," and Barack Obama would oppose it because of "the grave threats we face," but this is America, so their kind don't get all the say around here.

Ho hum, North Carolina's reactionary state legislature imposes auto and appliance repair taxes in order to pay for another round of tax cuts for the rich. How hard would it be for Democrats to run TV ads showing some state legislator helping some guy in a monocle literally take money out of working people's pockets? I mean, that took me ten seconds to work out. But Democrats are either too "polite" to do it or too "smart" to think of it. Please understand that by "polite" and "smart," I mean weak.

Double ho hum, Notre Dame study finds a strong correlation between corporations that pay their executives in stock options and corporations with a lot of product safety issues. But don't they say stock options make an executive more invested in his corporation's success? Not when "success" no longer includes making good products -- or safe ones. Naturally, CEOs who've run their corporation for a while have fewer product safety issues. Why, it's almost like sticking around and building something lasting is, like, good for the world or something.

Right Wing Watch catches Mike Huckabee endorsing a boycott of Frito Lay over its gay-friendliness -- and remembers that Mr. Huckabee called a similar boycott of Chick-Fil-A over its gay-unfriendliness "economic terrorism." Don't people know they're not talking into the void? But even worse is the guy who suggested the boycott, who thinks we're now all supposed to "participate" in gay weddings (I bet Mr. Lane doesn't even get invited to them!) and also says that in the year 2000 we'll all be put in jail if we don't "cheer" gay weddings. Evidence of these assertions? I kid, of course. Let's never speak of this David Lane dodo again.

Finally, we check in with worker-owned co-op New Era Windows, and find them doing quite well. You remember when Republic Windows and Doors closed down in 2008 and the workers occupied the factory to keep it open and keep their jobs? (Even some Libertarians approved!) Well, Republic sold the factory to a California corporation Serious Materials, which then tried to shut the factory down again -- so the workers occupied it, again. And then Serious Materials buckled under popular pressure (which you may have helped apply, if you were reading this blog in 2011) and sold the factory to the workers, and now they're back on their feet and thinking they might be a model for other corporations. Times could get tough, and greed could see an opening to creep back in, but they're showing it can be done, so good for them.

Action: government spying in France, forced labor in Uzbekistan, and chemical safety in the U.S.

France is considering a bill that would give its secret service (the DGSE) the same sort of government spying capabilities our NSA has -- spying on phone calls and vacuuming up data without warrants, with very limited independent oversight on how it's using its powers. Because all that's worked out so well, and has been popular with so many people! Keep in mind, when considering the madness the French Parliament contemplates here, that we're still the only nation with a First Amendment guarantee that the government can't put you in jail merely because you spoke out against it. As a result, citizens of other nations are more likely than we are to consider free speech as something that ought to have "sensible" limits (besides the obvious limits on libel, slander, and terroristic threats), and that opens the door a bit wider for government spying initiatives like this one. But if our great gift to the world is our democracy, then we have a duty to weigh in on what the French government plans to do. Hence Access Now helps you tell the French Senate to reject the surveillance bill passed by the French National Assembly.

Meanwhile, Uzbekistan continues to force many of its citizens into labor every October in that nation's cotton fields, for little or not pay and for the monetary reward of that government's corporate cronies. (Personal to right-wingers constantly squealing about our "socialist" President: this is what a state-run economy looks like.) Worse, the World Bank invests hundreds of millions of dollars into agricultural projects in Uzbekistan, which helps prop up the slave labor regime. And Uzbekistan is the world's fifth-leading cotton exporter, so Uzbek cotton could wind up in your clothes. The World Bank has said it'll withdraw from Uzbekistan if it discovers evidence of slave labor there, but it might not be all that motivated to look hard for it. Hence the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell the World Bank to investigate the matter vigorously. Let's at least put them in the position of falling back on the old but if we leave, we won't be able to effect change there argument -- which you no doubt recognize by now is a hostage situation.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban flame-retardants in household furniture, then Friends of the Earth still helps you do that. I expect you know the long-story-short by now -- flame retardants don't particularly retard fires even as well as their name would suggest, and they typically contain toxic chemicals scientists have found cause brain-development issues in children, as well as cancer and reproductive issues in everyone. And when furniture with flame retardants does catch fire, it releases toxic fumes and smoke, which makes them harder to contain and thus puts firefighters at more risk. (Yes, firefighting is not a risk-free job, but there's no point in making it riskier if we can avoid doing so.) Deadline for comments to the CPSC is October 19, and we shouldn't expect positive action from Congress (which is still poised to pass a bad chemical safety "reform" bill they had the cojones to name after Frank Lautenberg), so now is the time to get cracking.

Action: net neutrality, voting rights, and chemical safety.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to stop its cowardly backdoor attacks on the FCC's net neutrality rules, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may recall the story: a financial services/general government spending bill contained a section effectively preventing the FCC from enforcing net neutrality regulations until three lawsuits against net neutrality had been settled -- a process that, with appeals and all, could take years. We called over a dozen House Reps on the Appropriations Committee to see if we could get that section struck, but the Committee passed the bill with the offending provision; now it gets a full House vote (probably this week), and then a full Senate vote, and then it goes to the President, whom we may have to convince that net neutrality is a legacy-calibre issue. By then, of course, the appropriations process may be so gummed up that he'll give it up in order to get something done. Though I'd let the government shut down over that odious net neutrality provision, I'd prefer that we communicated our will to our Reps in force, so that doesn't become necessary.

Meanwhile, CREDO also helps you tell your Reps and Senators to pass H.R. 2867/S. 1659, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, so we can fix the hole in the Voting Rights Act the Supreme Court blew wide open in Shelby County v. Holder, if you haven't done that already. Or if you have -- sometimes you gotta tell someone until they're sick of hearing about it, especially if that "someone" is a Senator who'd prefer to listen to his or her big donors over martinis rather than listen to their actual bosses, their constituents, over the phone or at their offices. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would require states or municipalities to pre-clear any changes in their voting rights laws for 10 years if 15 or more voting rights violations occurred there over the past 25 years -- and that number would go from 15 to 10 if the state itself committed the violation. That pre-clearance formula would presumably satisfy the Supreme Court's objection to the Voting Rights Act's original formula, even if a fairly-applied VRAA just so happened to list the same states for pre-clearance.

Finally, Jennifer Beals has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell four prominent dollar stores to stop stocking items containing toxic chemicals. With Congress about to pass a crappy chemical regulation reform bill, we're stuck, for the moment, with telling the corporations to get the toxic chemicals off our shelves, but they're all susceptible to the Big Stick of Bad PR. And dollar stores often wind up being a frequent stop for folks in impoverished communities, even more so than WalMart -- I know plenty of folks who buy groceries at dollar stores. But the Campaign for Healthier Solutions has found that four out of every five items in dollar stores contained toxic chemicals, the kind scientists have linked to learning disabilities and cancer, among other things. So let's help them do the right thing, and don't be swayed by folks saying making dollar stores sell safer stuff will hurt impoverished communities that depend on them, when making folks sicker hurts them more.

Around the table: from a dumb "anti-terrorist" questionnaire to a deceptively smart-sounding potential Clinton campaign slogan.

National Counterterrorism Center develops smartypants questionnaire, to be used by law enforcement and community and religious leaders, to rate someone's ability to succumb to violent extremism and become a terrorist. Well, there's no way unscrupulous government officials could abuse that! Note to NCC: people who "talk of harming self or others" might be in severe pain or have legitimate mental health issues. Know what a better plan would be? Let's stop treating the world's citizens like they're mere obstacles to infinite wealth. We'll enable the creation of fewer terrorists as a result.

The Center for Effective Government highlights the presence of toxic chemicals in dollar stores. Why does this matter? Because big-box retailers have pledged to phase toxins like formaldehyde, phthalates, and heavy metals out of their products, but a lot of working families use dollar stores, and one study found over 80% of tested dollar store products violating either mandatory or voluntary health standards. Sadly, our forty-years-outdated chemical safety system is also to blame -- and you know Republicans aren't going to fix that, right?

Robert Creamer at the Huffington Post says new Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner is an awful hybrid of Mitt Romney and Scott Walker. I guess the Scott Walker in him is his drive to get rid of Illinois's public unions, which I expect he'll have a tougher time with than Mr. Walker did, but Mr. Creamer does a good job illuminating his Inner Romney, nowhere better than in this paragraph: "Rauner brazenly claims that state employees' average wage of $64,000 per year is simply too high. This from a man who makes $64,000 in two and a half hours."

On Wednesday, cell phone service provider corporations began allowing their customers to unlock their phones so they can use those phones with another provider, and the Consumerist describes some of the ins and outs of that process. Generally you need to be all paid up on your phone to move it (which, hopefully, you'd expect); T-Mobile adds some small requirements and AT&T adds a few more. Sprint customers, however, are pretty much trapped unless they've just bought their phone, and by "just bought" I mean today, yesterday or the day before. (Verizon 4G customers all have unlocked phones to begin with, and only a few 3G customers will need customer-service intervention to switch providers.)

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback reverses the executive order issued by his predecessor that extended anti-discrimination protections for state workers to gays. Mr. Brownback then said approximately the stupidest thing I've heard all week, that "(a)ny such expansion of 'protected classes' should be done by the legislature and not through unilateral action," as if the legislature never granted the Executive branch the authority to do just that in hiring and maintaining Executive branch workers. He only wants you to think he's dumb, though.

Conservative economist provides potential Hillary Clinton campaign slogan: "The Republicans gave us a crappy economy twice, and we fixed it twice. Why would you ever trust them again?" While folks probably don't remember the Reagan revolution as well as they did 20 years ago, they probably do remember, quite vividly I think, that this particular "recovery" hasn't done very much for them. Hell, we shouldn't even credit the Clinton miracle to the Clintonoids -- the internet bubble had more to do with that than anything, and no similar bubble has emerged during the Obama years.

Around the table: renewable energy, ebola, "liberal" media folly, celebrity endorsements, and net neutrality.

Remember Solyndra, which went belly-up after taking a loan of over half a billion dollars? Well, the federal loan program that gave that loan is now turning a profit -- as in, the interest payments on these loans now exceed defaults. But don't worry, Scott Walker will get rid of this program as soon as he's President, and inhabitants of distant planets will hear SOLYNDRA!!!!! echoing on their media devices hundreds of years from now.

The World Health Organization reports that ebola has killed 5,000 folks, almost entirely in Western Africa nations like Liberia and Sierra Leone. Kudos to the AP not just for actually staying on top of this story, but for resisting the temptation to report it as if Americans (total deaths from ebola in America: one) matter more than anyone else in the world. (Don't read the comments, though; too many of them are depressingly moronic.)

Surprise, surprise, the "liberal" media can hardly find anyone who opposes President Obama's new war in Syria and Iraq, as a mere three percent of its guests on roundtable/interview TV programs during the middle of September opposed the war. Reminds me of that time Tim Russert told Bill Moyers that he wished he "had access" to sources who might have been more skeptical of Tha Bush Mobb's rush to war in Iraq! After all, it wasn't like Tim Russert was a journalist or anything.

Ashlee Kieler at The Consumerist tells you why celebrity endorsements of products shouldn't matter that much to you. Really, we should be able to separate the Fonz from Henry Winkler when seeing reverse-mortgage ads, but Ms. Kieler also wonders why celebrities don't take more trouble to learn about their products -- witness Larry King's utterly moronic suggestion that "When you’re a spokesman, you have to have some faith." Don't you have to have some brains?

Finally, numerous actual conservatives take to Sen. Ted Cruz's facebook page after Mr. Cruz's brain-dead comments about network neutrality. Cynics will no doubt claim that all the variations of the phrase "bought and paid for by the big telecom corporations" signal a fake grassroots campaign, but what of the possibility that conservatives like net neutrality, too? They make a pretty good case for it, after all -- mainly, that net neutrality doesn't "stifle" competition but promotes competition.

Action: getting carcinogens out of products, and keeping our air clean.

CREDO helps you tell Procter & Gamble to remove carcinogens from all of its products. Why Procter & Gamble? Partly because you have to start somewhere, and partly because P&G have been promoting breast cancer awareness all month without labeling any P&G product ingredients that might be helping to cause that cancer, like ingredients that release formaldehyde in many of their hair and makeup products. But mainly we ask Procter & Gamble because Procter & Gamble, a name I've heard since I've been watching TV, has such an outsized share of the market -- Tide, CoverGirl, and Pantene are just three of their brands. Of course we also ask because our government has done very little about the matter -- getting chemical safety legislation has proven to be a Herculean task, and though Rep. Schakowsky (D-IL) has thrice introduced legislation allowing the FDA to regulate cosmetic products, Congress hasn't moved on it. (No, not even when Democrats controlled both houses.) We'll have to demand action from Congress in time -- but no power can stop us from demanding action from corporations until then.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to tighten the rules that cover air pollution when energy plants start up, shut down, or experience a malfunction. Essentially, the EPA wants to stop giving plants a free pass when their startups and shutdowns (but not malfunctions, though surely energy corporations can find people who can design plants that malfunction less) put them over emissions limits. Let me guess: big energy corporations claim their plants won't be able to start if the EPA gets its way. Well, that's not very big-boy of them, is it? Surely, as the best and brightest people in America, they can figure out how to start up and shut down plants so that the good folks downwind don't get asthma and cancer as much? Or are they only good at stealing money from people who work? What about the folks who have to breathe that air, anyway? Are their needs worth nothing? Because big energy corporations, whenever they dismiss regulations that clean our air, sure do act like other folks' needs are worth nothing. If they wonder why we get that impression, they may need to look in the mirror more often.

Action: corporate taxes, nuclear power, and corporate accountability.

You may have heard that Burger King plans to "move" to Canada -- in the sense that they'll merge with Canadian donut/coffee chain Tim Hortons and reincorporate in Canada -- so they can evade American taxes. Hence The Other 98% joins with MoveOn to help you tell Burger King not to go through with, in the petition's words, "This Whopper of a Tax Dodge." Why are Burger King's majority owners at 3G Capital contemplating this move, when both President Obama and Treasury Secretary Lew have both not only spoken out against such corporate inversions but have openly contemplated action against them? And when just about zero American citizens really, really appreciate it when an American corporation moves somewhere else to avoid paying taxes -- taxes that pay for things, after all, things like police and firefighters and libraries and roads and bridges? Perhaps 3G Capital's decision-makers think Mr. Obama will really do something soon (which is a bet I'd never take!), and so they're trying to get it done before he does; possibly they also think most folks don't really understand what a "corporate inversion" is. But I suspect most folks understand it perfectly well.

Meanwhile, Friends of the Earth helps you tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to shutter the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California until it can prove the reactor can operate safety. Sitting as it does on not-one-not-two-but-three faults in a fairly earthquake-prone state, you might see where the Diablo Canyon plant might be in some danger of causing some serious harm to nearby citizens on the central coast of California. And the NRC's own inspector at Diablo Canyon testified to the NRC a year ago that he thought the plant should have been shuttered, an action that by law should have prompted a response from the NRC within 120 days, which (get your surprised face ready) never arrived. Those who argue that we should encourage nuclear power so as to wean ourselves from foreign oil should contemplate two matters: one, whether our need to wean ourselves from foreign oil demands that we break our own laws in order to do it, and two, how it will feel if we're a little freer of foreign oil but several thousand good citizens die in a Fukushima-style accident. I imagine it'll feel rather Pyrrhic, to say the least.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to support S. 2615, the Hide No Harm Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Currently corporations hide behind confidentiality agreements in lawsuits, which is why GM didn't have to say anything about the faulty ignition switches in their cars that may have already claimed a dozen lives, though a lot of GM owners might have wanted to know about that. But S. 2615 would mandate disclosure of such "serious dangers" to federal agencies, and would also mandate jail time for CEOs if they fail to comply. Some folks would argue that breaching such confidentiality agreements would put us on a "slippery slope" that would ultimately threaten all privacy everywhere. But it's not enough to retort that you'd feel differently if it were your kid. Fact is, a civilization constantly weighs the balance between privacy and disclosure, between the individual good and the greater good, and folks who resort to such slippery slope arguments (arguments that conveniently benefit corporations at the expense of actual people, I feel compelled to add) essentially announce their abdication of that duty. And I don't want folks like that in my foxhole.

Action: divestment in Israel, holding corporate officials accountable, and justice for home health-care workers.

Avaaz helps you tell the CEOs of half a dozen well-heeled banks and funds to divest from Israel. No one believes Palestinians should choose violence in fighting their occupiers, but no one ought to believe Israel is blameless, either -- they're fighting Palestine because they're occupying Palestine. But Israel's government will respond to international economic pressure, and will respond asymmetrically, in the sense that a little economic pressure will provoke a more sizable response than we'd be inclined to think. Desperate governments don't just overreact by sending missiles after single terrorists in nations they control almost absolutely -- they also overreact by dreading how much worse the bad PR could get if they don't choose another path. I support Israel's right not merely to exist but to set a good example for other civilizations -- and they do in many other respects -- so I certainly hope Israel's government sees the light, as so many of its citizens (who are, after all, their government's bosses) already have.

Meanwhile, S. 2615, the Hide No Harm Act, would hold corporate officials accountable when they "forget" to inform the public of the harm their products or practices cause. Such a bill should be close to the heart of anyone who's lost a family member to a heart attack caused by Vioxx -- about which danger Vioxx's manufacturer, Merck, kept an unwise silence for over five years. Anyone who lost a family member to a General Motors car with a bad ignition switch might feel the same way, as would anyone who lost a baby in a Simplicity crib. Product safety is not something only squares care about -- product safety is something that affects us all, and (as Mr. Surowiecki suggested in his New Yorker article about bankster settlements) we'll get better safety info if corporate officials know that they will suffer for their negligence. Hence the Center for Effective Government helps you tell your Senators to embrace some real law-and-order thinking in this great land of ours, and support the Hide No Harm Act.

Finally, the Department of Labor has finalized its rule extending minimum wage and overtime protections to home health care workers, but is actually mulling giving home health care corporations another year to make more money off its workers ahem adjust to the new rules. I'm sorry, I actually have very little sympathy for bosses who get all diaper-loaded over having to pay their workers like they're human beings or something. America has well over two million home health care workers, folks who feed and dress and bathe and clean up after folks too ill to take care of themselves anymore, and news flash! That sector of the economy is only going to get bigger as the years and decades go on. Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the Department of Labor to extend protections for home health-care workers right away. People who need justice generally need it right now, after all -- not when "the Senate works its will," not when "bosses buy in," not when scaredy-cats stop whining, but now.

Action: overarching law enforcement, protecting chicken consumers and small farmers, and antibiotic abuse on factory farms.

You may have heard that an overnight SWAT raid in Georgia -- one with the express mission of finding drugs -- left a 20-month-old baby with a collapsed lung, a blown-off nose, and a hole in his chest after one of the SWAT raiders threw a flashbang grenade in his crib. Also, the SWAT team found no drugs in the house and made no arrests. (The baby in question, now universally known as "Baby Bou Bou," has made a remarkable recovery to date.) Police departments now conduct over 45,000 SWAT raids in America annually, which averages out to about five raids per hour -- though, of course, they're more likely to happen at night. Should America resemble a war zone? And should our SWAT officers expend their skill and energy on drug raids, rather than confronting the complex life-threatening situations for which they're trained? I mean, drug addiction is evil, but the mere presence of drugs in a house (or, in the case of this raid, in some house other than the house where the raid took place) doesn't constitute an immediate threat to anyone's life. So the ACLU can help you tell the Georgia state legislature to convene an emergency legislative session to discuss limiting SWAT use to situations where someone's life is actually in danger.

Meanwhile, Rep. DeLauro (D-CT) has offered an agriculture appropriations bill amendment that would do considerable good: it would defund USDA efforts to speed up poultry inspections and drastically reduce government inspectors at private poultry corporations -- both of which, if funded, would allow poultry corporations to do much more of their own inspections. Fewer inspectors and faster inspections would (as you can well imagine!) result in more blood, more feces, and more pus getting to your dinner table, and it's nice that someone in Congress cares about that. Also, Rep. Pingree (D-ME) has offered another amendment that would preserve USDA rules protecting contract farmers who raise feed animals for big ag corporations. Big corporations have a habit, it seems, of retaliating against contract farmers when contract farmers complain to Congress about the abuse they suffer at the hands of said big corporations -- abuse like canceling contracts and cutting payments. It's sad that we have to amend bills to prevent harm, but apparently Republicans are only the "party of small business" when it's time to cut taxes for rich people, and not when it's actually time to protect small businesses from the overarching power of big corporations. Hence the Organic Consumers Association helps you tell your Congressfolk to support healthy chicken consumption and justice for small farmers.

Finally, while we're on the subject of healthy feed animals, PennPIRG has put together a neat infographic called "What if Antibiotics Stopped Working?" And you don't have play and pause buttons to mess with -- to advance the presentation, you scroll downward on your browser, and if you're not ready to move on, you just stop scrolling. Maybe it's just me, but I think that feature's tremendous. If you've been visiting this site for any length of time, you won't be surprised at any of the information it provides, but the title, alarmist as it sounds, remains entirely apt -- our overuse of antibiotics on factory farms has only made stronger and stronger bacteria that we won't be able to kill with antibiotics one day, and if that statement doesn't chill you, look at your own hands. No, seriously. Just last week, I almost pulled a fingernail out at work lifting something heavier than I expected. A few days before that I sliced into my thumb cutting onions at home. I also cut my forearm last week, and I don't even remember how I did that. No big deal, right? But in the coming post-antibiotic world, that's three ways I could have died. Once you've finished the infographic in the above link, PennPIRG will help you tell the FDA to crack down on antibiotic abuse on factory farms much harder than they've done thus far. Then, maybe, antibiotics will reign supreme over bacteria again, like they should.

Action: minimum wage protections, veterans' benefits, and sunshine in litigation.

The Department of Labor finally extended federal minimum wage protections to home health care workers -- the people who help our elderly and disabled citizens eat, drink, and bathe, but who have trouble making ends meet and staying off public assistance because they're just not paid enough. And yet word on the street is that the Department of Labor might delay that action for another 18 months past the current January 1, 2015 deadline. Why? Surprisingly, the objections come from state Medicaid directors, who may wind up paying for the change, but who don't have anything new to say about it -- "the potential impact on the continuity and quality of care for certain Medicaid enrollees, as well as state capacity to sustain the current scope and reach" blah blah blah. If I don't tolerate hostage situations from corporations, why would I tolerate it from our government? So the AFSCME helps you tell the Department of Labor to implement federal minimum wage protections for home health care workers on schedule, because justice has eluded them for 40 years already, and another year and a half will no doubt land more than a few of them in the poorhouse.

Meanwhile, Sen. Sanders (I-VT) has introduced S. 2422, the Restoring Veterans' Trust Act of 2014, which would do some of the same things his last veterans' benefits bill did. You remember, the one the Republicans filibustered because they couldn't get an anti-Iran amendment attached, or because it cost too much, or something? You don't remember? Well, as we discussed the other day, the "liberal" media didn't do a very thorough job covering it back in February. But S. 2422 would let the VA hire more doctors and nurses, lease 27 new health care facilities, and give scholarships and student debt forgiveness as an incentive to health care professionals who might want to work for the VA. One thing I haven't said enough about this whole thing: Republicans whining about the cost of taking care of veterans now may want to revisit the wisdom of invading Afganistan and Iraq and occupying those nations for years on end. They may also want to revisit the wisdom of trying to win wars (and occupations!) with too-small armies who get absolutely strung out from repeated tours of duty. Anyway, the Campaign for America's Future helps you tell Congress to support better health care for veterans.

Finally, Sens. Blumenthal (D-CT) and Graham (R-SC) have introduced S. 2364, the companion bill to H.R. 4361, the Sunshine in Litigation Act. Remember those bad ignition switches in GM cars that may have killed a dozen folks in the last decade? Well, we might never have found out about those, because GM put confidentiality agreements in all their settlements over the switches. And when any GM auto owner could have an ignition switch that winds up snuffing them out, and when "any GM owner" might include you or someone you love, then I think we would be compelled to agree that such knowledge is in the public interest. And it's not just ignition switches subject to these settlement agreements -- how about that hip implant, or side effect-laden drug, or defective toy? All covered by confidentiality agreements, and all things we need to know about. It's nice to see Lindsey Graham agrees -- no doubt the all-lawsuits-are-bad lobby is pressuring him to drop his co-sponsorship as we speak, but he's doing a good thing here, and we ought to encourage that. So Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to support the Sunshine in Litigation Act.

Action: the right to protest, safer laundry detergent, and ending the AUMF.

Word on the street is that the Minerals Council of Australia has actually been mulling whether to outlaw campaigns aimed at persuading folks from divesting in coal corporations! And that could happen here, you know: Stanford's student union has persuaded the University to divest from coal corporations, and Our Glorious Elites can't have that, now, can they? So the moment where Our Glorious Elites start telling us that divestment equals terrorism (or, at least, "dangerous and unlawful civil disobedience") seems, finally, to be here. But you have to wonder how alleged free marketeers can support putting people in jail for trying to get banks and other corporations to divest from fossil fuel producers. These campaigns might fail, or they might succeed, but isn't that "the genius of civilization," as Paul O'Neill might say? Or is freedom only for the people with the most money and to hell the rest of us? The Sierra Club helps you tell Australian Prime Minister Abbott (and other Cabinet minsters) to reject this effort to restrict the right of protest. No reasonable person advocates blowing up coal power plants -- but no reasonable person should equate a divestment campaign with "terrorism," either.

Meanwhile, apparently over 10,000 kids under five last year got sick eating those little pods of laundry detergent you get at laundromat dispensers. (If you're thinking, for some reason, that 10,000 isn't a very big number, here's some statistical perspective: we also suffered approximately 10,000 gun-related homicides in 2011.) The pods look almost exactly like candy -- whose brilliant idea was that? -- and they're sold largely in see-through packages so that kids can see the pods look almost exactly like candy. But they'll do worse to a kid than any candy can do -- outcomes include lethargy, vomiting, internal chemical burns, and loss of breathing to the point where kids need to be put on a respirator. Is that the price kids should pay for mistaking something poisonous for a piece of candy? Need I add that the folks most likely to use laundry pods are poorer folk who can't afford a house with its own washer and dryer? Hence Consumers Union helps you tell detergent-manufacturing corporations to stop making laundry detergent pods look appetizing, put a bittering agent in them so kids spit them out, and to package them more securely. None of that is too much to ask, except of someone with an accountant's mind. But no society would be so foolish as to let accountants run everything, right?

Finally, CREDO helps you tell Congress to pass H.R. 4608 and repeal the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). Let the record show that Congress passed the original AUMF on September 14, 2001, or a mere three days after 9.11 and well before we knew very much of what had happened on that day; the bill authorizes "the President...to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." "(H)e determines" -- well, that was a big weapon to hand the Executive, wasn't it? And Presidents have used the AUMF to do all manner of evil, including Guantánamo Bay military tribunals (which the U.S. Supreme Court stopped in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld) and the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, both unforgivable offenses against our nation, our citizenry, and our heritage. And here we are, thirteen years later, with our government still threatening our freedoms in the name of the "war on terror" even though Mr. bin Laden is dead and we've pulled most of our troops out of Iraq and will do so soon in Afghanistan. But fear must not rule us, or fear will tear us apart. Indeed, it already has torn many of our countryfolk apart.

Around the table: because they're evil, that's why!

The Oklahoma legislature had a really great week after its state House passed a bill levying a fee on those lazy good-for-nothing "free riders" who spend tens of thousands of dollars putting solar panels on their homes and thus deprive utility corporation CEOs of their God-given right to gild the plumbing on their seventh vacation home, and Gov. Fallin signed a bill forbidding OK municipalities from raising the minimum wage or mandating paid sick leave. And right-wingers have the nerve to celebrate these as small government moves! The state just attacked good citizens providing their own power hamstrung municipalities' ability to make their own laws. For right-wingers, "conservatism" is whatever you want it to be, I guess. But it sure looks like "whatever hurts people and makes our corporate paymasters happy."

Scientists find a few Appalachian gas wells bleed methane into the atmosphere before gas drillers have even begun fracking, with some of these pumping over 100 times as much methane into the air as an actively-fracked well does. The article seems hopeful that this means only a few wells commit most of the methane pollution caused by gas drilling, which also means we can find out why this is happening and stop it. But that would, of course, require spending money on safety, which gas drilling corporations are loathe to do unless someone (like, you know, municipal, state, or federal governments) were to make them. And it still doesn't solve fracking's little setting-our-drinking-water-on-fire problem.

Victory! The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that a corporation can't file a lawsuit anonymously just to protect its reputation. Some corporation filed a lawsuit against the Consumer Product Safety Commission a few years back, claiming that a complaint filed at the CPSC's SaferProducts.gov database was inaccurate -- but didn't want its identity known, claiming that public knowledge of their identity would damage their reputation. Trouble is, you don't have a First Amendment right to a good reputation, even one you've earned -- and if you want to clear your name, why would you hide your name?

Surprise, surprise, SuperPACs spent more than half of the over $140 million they raised last year, with over two-thirds of SuperPACs and hybrid PACs spending more money in 2013 than they took in. On all those earth-shaking 2013 elections, right? No -- on expensive restaurant meals, expensive consultant payments, and expensive "payments to firms employing (SuperPAC and hybrid PAC) leaders." PAC hacks no doubt call all that the cost of networking, but good citizens, left and right, who just want to make a difference would see that differently -- or, more precisely, accurately.

Finally, the Washington Post's Chris Cilizza has no business looking down on John Boehner's primary challenger because of the ad he made. I'd never support J.D. Winteregg for any office, and I'd also have buried half of that ad in the deep grave, but what's left would be pretty damn good -- I laughed out loud at "if you have a Boehner lasting more than 23 years, seek immediate medical attention," and I like the two mugs coming together to spell out "Winteregg." Even with his pittance of a campaign fund, this guy could take down the Speaker of the House in his primary -- and if the "liberal" media is so dismissive of his chances while simultaneously giving him free publicity, I'd call that a good omen.

Action: GMO labeling, absurd drug sentencing, and product safety.

Rep. Pompeo (R-KS) has introduced H.R. 4432, the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act. Which it's not: H.R. 4432 would prohibit states, counties, or municipalities from enacting mandatory labeling laws -- now there is some small-government, states' rights conservatism for you! -- and would allow big food corporations to slap "natural" labels on their GMO food products, since the definition of the word "natural" is a matter of such intense debate. The bill would "permit" corporations to label their Frankenfoods voluntarily, but as we know, standards for voluntary labeling of GMO foods already exist, and no food producers are using them. And, as Steve Benen instructs us, Mr. Pompeo has also tried to scuttle a household product safety database and an EPA greenhouse-gas polluter database, all apparently at the behest of Koch Industries, which just so happens to be headquartered in his district. There's serving your constituents, and then there's serving your constituents up to your big donors. The Organic Consumers Association helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 4432.

Meanwhile, Robert Shipp is serving a life sentence for selling cocaine. No one argues that Mr. Shipp shouldn't pay for his crime (which should go without saying, but seriously, some people can't read), but even the judge forced by law to hand down the sentence objected, after noting that Mr. Shipp's suppliers got comparatively light sentences. Mr. Shipp was, according to his sister, an honors student walking the straight-and-narrow until his brother's murder, which sent Mr. Shipp into a tailspin as it might do you or I; his brother's murderer, incredibly, got a mere 20 year sentence, then got out in 10. Drug addiction keeps you from exercising your rights and reaching your potential as an American, so I don't support legalization generally (though marijuana shouldn't be a Schedule I drug), but certainly we should punish murderers more than we punish nonviolent drug offenders. So change.org helps you petition President Obama and Attorney General Holder for clemency. Mr. Obama has shown some capacity for mercy in this regard, and, lately, so has society.

Finally, H.R. 4361, the Sunshine in Litigation Act, would make it a lot harder for corporations to hide damaging information in legal cases if that information is in the public interest. This bill comes attached to a news hook, as we're only just now finding out (thanks to confidentiality agreements in settlements) that General Motors's bad ignition switches may have killed as many as 13 good folks since 2005; if you've contemplated buying a GM car since then, you might have wanted to know that -- and if you've lost a family member to a bad GM ignition switch, you might have wanted to exact justice. H.R. 4361 would restrict confidentiality agreements in court cases if said agreements obscure "facts relevant to the protection of public health or safety." And before right-wingers squeal about TEH END UV TEH PRIVACYZ!!!!, note that judges can still enforce orders that preserve privacy if public safety isn't at risk, or even if a judge can justify letting "a specific and substantial interest in maintaining...confidentiality" prevail. So Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4361.

Around the table: six items that remind us why we're here and why we care.

Tennessee state legislature passes monstrosity called the "Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act," which would (among other things!) actually protect students from being punished if they indulge in anti-gay bullying. After all, didn't Jesus specifically instruct his Apostles to bully gays whenever they could? I kid, of course. But seriously, don't right-wingers understand that when they try to declare that they need "protection" from the natural consequences of their bigotry, they sound exactly like the whining diaper-loaded brats they constantly accuse liberals of being?

Daily Kos diarist finds some hope in the early Hobby Lobby arguments before the Supreme Court. Hobby Lobby, you recall, is the corporation claiming it (that's right, it) has the "religious freedom" to refuse to comply with the Obama Administration's mandate to cover birth control medication for its employees. I'll admit Justice Kennedy's very specific question as to the rights of employees rather than employers is the right one, even the crucial one, but Justice Kennedy often thinks with his heart rather than his head, and though that's worked toward justice in the past (cf. several pro-gay rights and anti-"tough on crime" decisions), it's also worked the other way (cf. several abortion-related decisions).

Sarah Vogel instructs us that corporations are replacing BPA in plastics with chemicals that are, or might be, even worse. Our right-wing friends may tell us that this proves that ALL YER ACTIVIZMZ FAIL!!!!!, but what it actually tells us is that activism is hard, and requires even more of us than the immense effort to which we've already committed. It also tells us we need better chemical regulations, since a lot of what's replacing BPA in plastics hasn't even been tested before it hits the market.

Fallen prey to the argument that exporting fracked natural gas will help keep our European friends from depending on Russian natural gas? Dean Baker reminds us that Europe has already committed to renewable energy sources in such a way that its demand for Russian natural gas simply isn't as high as some of our punditoids would like it to be. Better to let the demand for Russian natural gas die on its own, at the hands of solar and wind, which now account for a full quarter of Germany's energy demand.

Harold Meyerson details recent government efforts to crack down on employee "misclassification," which term describes the practice of calling full-time employees "temps" or "independent contractors" so corporations can pay them less and deny them benefits. Those efforts to crack down have an interesting side effect -- they make it far easier for the no-longer-"misclassified" employees to organize and bargain collectively. You can almost see the wheels turning in Barack Obama's head in 2010: "Blanche Lincoln stands in the way of the Employee Free Choice Act? No problem; we'll just crack down on employee misclassification, after everyone's stopped looking, of course." I'm no fan of 13-dimensional chess, as you know, but if it works here, I'm happy to be a grown-up and admit it.

Finally, Sen. Portman (R-OH) introduces the Federal Permitting Improvement Act of 2013, which would "improve" the federal permits process by limiting public comments on federal infrastructure projects. And it would create another group of bureaucrats to stop our government from considering a project's environmental impact, even though right-wingers never stop whining about all the bureaucrats we already have. Some "improvement." And yet I can't escape the feeling that it'll impress a President Obama "hungry" for "bipartisanship" and "streamlining government," which casts a worse light on that aforementioned game of 13-dimensional chess he seems to be playing.

Action: the minimum wage, women's health, and safe toys.

The People's Email Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1010/S. 460, the Fair Minimum Wage Act. The Fair Minimum Wage Act would increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $10.10/hour -- or a mere 67 cents an hour less than the inflation-adjusted 1968 minimum wage would be. Yes, that means our minimum wage workers have (like most workers!) lost ground since 1968, and we don't measure the success of a society by how many vacation homes our top earners can buy -- we measure the success of a society by how many opportunities we can create for everyone in society to be the best they can be, and giving folks a minimum wage they can live on, raise a family on, and provide opportunities for their family on, is a good start. And the Fair Minimum Wage Act would stimulate the economy without increasing government debt -- give folks just scraping by more money, and they'll put most of it right back into the economy, whether they buy better food, get more schooling for themselves or their children, or even just buy more flat-screen TVs. After all, CEOs don't create jobs; people who buy stuff create jobs.

Meanwhile, the National Women's Law Center helps you support H.R. 3471/S. 1676, the Women's Health Protection Act, which would restrict states' ability to hold abortion clinics to higher standards than those states require of other health care providers. State laws that hold abortion clinics to stricter standards than hospitals and doctor's offices must meet do nothing more and nothing less than cheat -- you might turn away a lot of women seeking abortions in the short term, as state legislators in Texas and Mississippi and Virginia have done, but how many women will you have honestly convinced of the righteousness of your cause? And make no mistake: supporting the Women's Health Protection Act will not magically make you into someone who "doesn't care about the children" or "doesn't care about women's health." No one thinks abortion providers should be held to a lower standard than other health care providers, but I bet even pro-lifers will ultimately find it hypocritical to hold them to a higher one. We're not a society that'll do just anything to achieve a goal, are we? It's about time we fought to reduce abortions without all the grandstanding.

Finally, USPIRG provides its 28th annual "Trouble in Toyland" report, describing the kinds of toys you should avoid buying for children this holiday season. (You can also open their tips page on your cell phone; it might be best to open it from here.) Long story short: though the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 made our consumer product safety laws better, kids still get too many toys with lead in them, too many toys with toxic chemicals in them, too many toys that are really too loud for them, and too many toys that remain choking hazards. And by the way, in each of the above-named instances as well as many others, too many is still "one." No this isn't a whole lot of bellyaching about how everything's a mortal danger and we have to protect our kids from stubbed toes or whatever. Keeping your kids off a busy street during rush hour, for example, you can do, because you've identified at least two dangerous things about that scenario just by reading it. But keeping your kids away from the long-term developmental impairments some toys present is a bit harder, since things like lead and cadmium don't exactly wear a bell.

Action: protecting Social Security and Medicare, and keeping toxic chemicals out of household products.

There he goes again: Richard Durbin of Illinois, the number two Democrat in the U.S. Senate, told Fox News Sunday that he'd support Social Security and Medicare cuts in a "grand bargain" with Republicans. Anybody remember any point in recent years when Republicans have proven they can be bargained with? Anyone? CREDO helps you tell Sen. Durbin not to use Social Security and Medicare as a bargaining chip in "negotiations" with Republicans. I hate to sound like a broken record -- no, wait, I don't hate to sound like a broken record, as long as nominally Democratic politicians sound like a broken record when they say ZOMG SOSHUL SECURITEEZ MEDICAREZ BANKRUPT AMERIKAZ!!!! -- but the Harkin/Begich bills in the Senate would increase Social Security benefits and revenues, and that allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices would reduce Medicare costs without reducing benefits. If enough of us speak out, they'll have to listen -- or they'll at least have to make bigger fools of themselves explaining why they can't do our will, which also works to our advantage in the long run.

Meanwhile, Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Senators to keep toxic, carcinogenic chemicals out of household products. Specifically, you'll advocate for a robust overhaul to the Toxic Substance Control Act of 1976, and you'll also advocate for making corporations ensure their products are safe before they hit the market, which sounds an awful lot like common sense, doesn't it? And 1976 was (gulp!) 37 years ago, and as you no doubt know, a lot has happened since then -- now some 80,000 chemical products find their way into our bottles and our packages and our cleaners and our toys and our furniture, and how many of them have been properly tested? Around 200. That ain't good. All the right-wing has to offer in defense of doing nothing are nostrums like REGULASHUNZ KILLZ THA JOBS!!!! Just remember -- aside from the fact that regulations don't kill jobs, and that no right-winger ever explains exactly how regulations kill jobs -- that if too many people get cancer, there'll be no one to do all the work our corporate chieftains want us to do. After all, the free market comes at a cost!

Food and Water Watch helps you tell the EPA to reopen three water-contamination investigations possibly involving fracking, and to ensure that citizens in the affected areas get clean drinking water. What's that, you say? The EPA actually abandoned water-contamination investigations? Yes, they did -- and what's worse, their preliminary report on Dimock, PA water pollution concluded that the entire gas drilling process released more methane into the drinking water, and that fracking may have caused methane pollution as well. (Sheathe those knives, right-wingers: you know as well as I do that there's more to gas drilling than just fracking.) Why did the Dimock, PA investigation, and similar investigations in Wyoming and Texas, get shut down? At least in Dimock's case, I'd hate to think it was because it was an election year. Well, Barack Obama ain't running for re-election, so he ain't got no excuses now.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that the Senate might change the law so nuclear power plants can ship casks of waste on American roads and railways to "consolidated interim storage" sites. And this idea's proponents are probably saying: well, at least we're shipping casks around instead of pools of spent fuel rods! You know what would be even better, though? Nuclear power plants storing their own waste in steel and concrete casks on their own property and those casks never going anywhere. Why would we move the casks, anyway? Because the nuclear power industry would rather store the waste on someone else's property. It's almost as if they somehow know it's bad stuff! Nuclear power plants can't make money despite decades of massive federal subsidies and now they want more from us? And any cask brigade would be a slow-moving target for terrorists, even worse than the "mobile Chernobyl" activists call it. CREDO helps you tell the Senate Energy Committee to scrap the "mobile Chernobyl" plan.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Senate to enact vigorous chemical safety reform, Moms Rising still helps you do that. Out of 80,000 chemicals registered for use in American products, how many have been safety-tested? 200. That's one-fourth of one percent (not one-fourth, "liberal" media!), which ain't enough, not when scientists link chemicals like flame "retardants," phthalates, and BPA to learning disabilities and cancers, and you can find these things in your furniture, your household cleaners, your packaging, and even your fruits and vegetables. Moms Rising will help you advocate for more rigorous protections for families in heavily-polluted "hot spot" communities, for making corporations (and not the public) prove the chemicals they make are safe, for letting states set stricter standards than our federal government if they so choose, and for giving the EPA vigorous law-enforcement power. And to your Senators who might harrumph about "the possible harm to businesses": businesses aren't more important than families.

Incredibly, the Senate will actually hold hearings about updating our chemical safety laws this week. Congress last updated chemical safety legislation in 1976. Anything happen since 1976? Why, yes! Over 80,000 chemicals used in manufacturing weren't around in 1976, and thus have never been safety-tested. But word on the street is that the Senate will settle for a weak bill, so both Breast Cancer Action and Consumers Union help you demand a strong chemical safety bill. What would such a bill look like? Such a bill would make chemical corporations prove their chemicals are safe before they put those chemicals in household products, provide extra protection for "hot spot" areas drowning in unsafe chemical exposure, and allow states or localities to pass stronger safety standards, among other things. After all, cancer-causing chemicals are in our homes and our bodies now, so the Senate really needs to get cracking. (If the House would deign to get cracking afterward, that would be awfully nice.)

Meanwhile, if you missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to increase Social Security benefits, both Bold Progressives and CREDO still help you do that. Apparently the House Ways and Means Committee wants your input on reforming Medicare and Social Security, and what's their very first suggestion? Cutting Social Security benefits by linking cost-of-living increases to the dread "chained CPI." This zombie just keeps on coming, but we keep on firing: "chained CPI" tends to undercalculate inflation by assuming that people will automatically switch to cheaper products once certain products get too expensive. And guess who almost never has that option? Seniors, who already live on fixed and very small incomes and who don't exactly have a cornucopia of "options" if medical issues crop up (and they will crop up). But the Harkin and Begich bills in the Senate (S. 567 and S. 308, respectively) would link cost-of-living increases to a Consumer Price Index for Elderly Consumers (or CPIEC) -- an index the Department of Labor would still have to create, but we'll fight that battle when it's time.

H.R. 1385, the Safe Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Act, would give the FDA more authority to keep carcinogens and other dangerous chemicals out of our soaps, shampoos, lotions, deodorants, and perfumes. Currently, the FDA can't compel cosmetics corporations to conduct safety testing of their products, or force a recall of products found to be dangerous, but H.R. 1385 would change all that, and it would force corporations to phase out all their cancer-causing and reproductive-system-disrupting chemicals. H.R. 1385 would also compel corporations to label all of their ingredients in their products, rather than hiding them behind vague terms like "fragrance." A lot of these things are fragrant, all right. What will our right-wing intelligentsia have to say about H.R. 1385? That REGULASHUNZ KILLZ THA JOBZ AND THA INNOVASHUNZ!!!!!!, perhaps? If so, you have to wonder if they really want to "innovate" on the definition of "safety." Green America helps you tell your Congressfolk to support safer personal care products.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell Secretary of State Kerry to get some better intel about how the Keystone XL pipeline would affect climate change. We've gone into some detail about how a pipeline spill (from a pipeline builder with a rotten safety record) would pollute heartland drinking water, but the July 2013 Scientific American reminds us that refining oil from tar sands bitumen requires more energy and creates more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil refining. (Next up on the Glenn Beck show: the liberal bias of Scientific American!) Now, it seems Mr. Kerry didn't get very much of that counsel from the folks who wrote the Keystone XL environmental impact report; that may be because many of the folks who wrote that report came from the oil industry (and some of them worked with the would-be builders of the Keystone XL pipeline). Jesus Mary and Joseph what the hell is wrong with investing more money in renewable energy? That would actually create jobs and wean us off foreign oil. Oh, wait, I think I just answered my own question.

Last Thursday, Mr. Obama pledged to wind down the "War on Terror" because it damages democracy, and the "liberal" media applauded it. How pleasing that they've all finally seen what so many of us saw over ten years ago! The New York Times's praise is especially repugnant -- they actually had the cojones to say that "much of what Mr. Obama said should have been said years ago." Like when they said it, in 2002? Oh, wait: they were doing PR for the Iraq war then. So Mr. Obama has pledged to "ultimately" repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force, but Roots Action helps you demand its repeal now. And Mr. Obama still wants to close Guantánamo, four years after telling us he'd close it within a year, but the Center for Constitutional Rights helps you demand that Mr. Obama take immediate steps to close Guantánamo, while Amnesty International helps you tell Mr. Obama to release Shaker Aamer, who has been cleared to leave Guantánamo twice. Also, the ACLU helps you tell Mr. Obama to end the targeting killing of Americans, which program he defended, rather weakly, last week.

Meanwhile, Chevron holds its annual shareholder's meeting in California this week, and Public Citizen helps you tell Chevron to keep its money out of American elections. Chevron donated $2.5 million to the right-wing SuperPAC called the Congressional Leadership Fund, and that $2.5 million represented over one-fifth of that SuperPAC's total fundraising haul for the 2012 elections. But Chevron's donations might have been illegal (even under the post-Citizens United regime), since Chevron receives federal contracts, and American law bans federal contractors from making political donations. Chevron, for its part, claims that Chevron subsidiaries (such as Chevron U.S.A.) actually hold the federal contracts, not the parent corporation, Chevron Corporation, that made the donations. Got that? Another reason to fight against corporations owning other corporations. When Zombie James Madison comes around, he can't get his head around how the anti-slavery amendments not only made corporations into people but somehow don't prevent them from owning other corporations.

In other news, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been investigating the Jeep Grand Cherokee -- particularly the model made from 1993 to 2004 -- for its role in fiery crash deaths. During those years, the Jeep Grand Cherokee's gas tank was positioned behind the rear axle, which left it quite exposed in the event of a rear-end crash. (In 2005, Chrysler moved the tank in front of the axle, ostensibly to clear room for storage.) The end result: perhaps hundreds of otherwise survivable rear-end collisions killed drivers simply because the gas tank exploded. You might well be saying (as Chrysler has been saying) that a few hundred fatalities over the last two decades isn't that many, but if that number ever became 100% of you, you might feel differently about it. If you're lucky! Hence Jenelle Embrey of Linden, VA has started a petition on change.org, helping you tell the NHTSA and the Department of Transportation to recall the offending Jeep Grand Cherokee models. And Ralph Nader supports the petition; need we say more?

Even the Washington Post says a Koch brothers-owned Tribune Company "doesn't bode well for the kind of fact-based journalism that most American newspapers strive to practice." The Post surely overestimates its own commitment to any "kind of fact-based journalism," but they're right anyway -- if the Koch brothers had the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and the Hartford Courant and the Tribune Company's five other newspapers, we'd have another right-wing media mogul getting more "favorable" coverage of corporate corruption and pollution, and they don't need more apologists than they already have. We'll also continue to have less local news, as we have whenever one entity owns more than one newspaper or media outlet. Worse, the bankrupt Tribune Company seems eager to sell to the Kochs. We've already told the FCC to put a stop to this madness, but we can head this off at the pass, too, by telling the Tribune Company not to sell to the Koch brothers.

Closer to home, La Belle, PA, once had a coal mine, but now has a coal ash disposal site, where three corporations dump coal ash without the folks operating the site doing so much as covering it with tarp. That means coal ash dust blows everywhere -- and coal ash, you may recall, contains arsenic, mercury, and lead, among other heavy metals. Thus La Belle's population of around 200 is falling due to a higher-than-normal concentration of eye, mouth, and brain cancers. (Seriously, read that article -- it's bad when people take showers and see all that soot in the bottom of the tub.) The Sierra Club helps you tell PA Gov. Corbett and his Department of Environmental Protection to deny any permits to dump coal ash in La Belle. Nobody should suffer from cancer and respiratory problems anywhere, ever, even if they live in a town no one's heard of. Or, as one La Belle resident puts it, "I am pro-business. I believe in working for a living. But who the hell has the right to make a living making me sick?"

Speaking of nasty stuff getting inside you, Moms Rising still helps you tell major retailers to stop selling products with hazardous chemicals. We still figure that most of these retailers don't really know what's in the products on their shelves, and would be as appalled as we are if they found out -- and might even take corrective action. Of course, some folks tell us that, by demanding that retailers take hazardous products off their shelves, we're interfering with their ability to survive in this economy. But is that really the kind of world we want -- a world where we make money poisoning people, a world where we can change nothing because someone, somewhere, would lose money? (And please understand by "someone, somewhere" I mean "the corporation's CEO.") Flame "retardants" in couches, BPA in plastics and food can linings, formaldehyde in shirts, phthalates in flooring -- if we can dream better, why don't we do better? And why don't we deserve better?

Last but certainly not least, Reps. Scott (D-VA) and Massie (R-KY) have introduced H.R. 1695, the Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013, in the House of Representatives. Of course, Sens. Leahy (D-VT) and Paul (R-KY) introduced its companion bill, S. 619, not long ago. Both bills would allow judges to give sentences shorter than the mandatory minimums for federal crimes. Imagine that! Letting judges judge! That's better than letting testosterone-addled politicians hamstring judges from judging -- and as the American people are wearying of that sort of posturing, so, too, are politicians from both political parties. Of course, nobody thinks "people shouldn't pay for their crimes"; we think people should get the right sentence for their crimes. No one should spend decades behind bars for nonviolent drug crimes so some politician can beat his chest in public, and not everyone needs to be clobbered over the head to change their ways, either. Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell your House Reps to support H.R. 1695.

Monsanto has been patenting (literally) garden varieties of fruits and vegetables like cucumber, melons, and broccoli in Europe. True, they're not patenting them in the U.S. (yet!), but anyone who wants to grow these things -- be they other big corporations and small farmers trying to make a living, or you and I trying to grow a few things in our backyards -- will have to deal with the European patents. How does a corporation become so presumptuous as to patent everyday food seeds? Actually, I could have asked that question without the last six words. Avaaz helps you tell European nations to close loopholes in their patent laws that allow big corporations to patent conventional fruit and vegetable seeds. Almost two million people have answered this call so far; if world public opinion is, as Mr. Chomsky says, the world's other superpower, should we not prevail?

Meanwhile, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the ten largest retailers in America to keep products with toxic chemicals away from their stores and their consumers. Big task? Hey, we're Americans; we dream big. And your shampoo could well have carcinogens in it, your T-shirt could have formaldehyde in it keeping it wrinkle-free, and don't even get me started on what ineffective flame-retardants might be in your couch. We ask a lot not merely because asking a lot gets you more; we ask a lot because some of these big retailers might not be aware of all the crap that's in their products. Hey, we don't go to the store with a thousand-page list, and the big retailers are made up of people, so they may not know, either. If they do, of course, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. But if they don't, we might as well let them know.

In other news, you may have heard about that Denver-to-Baltimore United flight from February that suddenly diverted to Chicago for "security concerns" -- namely, a pair of parents who didn't want their four- and eight-year-olds to have to watch the movie Alex Cross, which, like a lot of PG-13 films, has a generous helping of violence, bad language, and nudity in it. We wouldn't be talking about this if a) we weren't able to subtract 4 and 8 from 13 and b) it wasn't shown on overhead movie screens. I've taken a dozen flights over the years where I not only had my own video screen, but the choice of half a dozen different movies; United has to ask if their one-size-fits-all approach really works. And I insist that parents have the right to protect their kids from entertainment too adult for them, and if you feel the same, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has an action alert for you.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Securities and Exchange Commission to require disclosure of publicly-traded corporate campaign spending, then People for the American Way provides another one. The SEC, as you know, regulates stock and securities trading. When a corporation decides to spend money on a politician's campaign, it's not spending its own money so much as it's spending its investors' money -- its shareholders' money, in other words. So why shouldn't shareholders know how the corporations are spending their money? Maybe the shareholders are fine with it, but maybe not, and they ought to have a say in that. The SEC listens to a lot of big corporate CEOs who think they have the right to spend anyone's money however they feel like, so they won't listen to us unless a lot of us speak up. And even if we don't own stock, we ought to speak up.