Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: concerning government spying, taxes, private prisons, "right to work," and "socialism."

Apparently now our government is tracking journalists and refugee advocates with a secret database run by the Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic), which of course doesn't have the legal authority to do such things. A Customs and Border Protection spokeshack says they're targeting these folks because of alleged violence at the border in November, and how do you know that's bullshit? Because that wasn't what they told NBC7 a mere five days earlier. Tha Bush Mobb would have given us the bullshit explanation right away, which is yet another reason they're worse than this clown car of an Administration.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy offers "Fairness Matters," a chart book showing who pays state and local taxes these days. Long story short: lower-income working families pay a bigger share of their income in state and local taxes than the rich do, and states that call themselves "low-tax" because they don't have an income tax tend to fill revenue shortfalls with the kind of regressive taxes and fees that hit working families a lot harder. Some rich folks think that's the way it should be, because they think they're better than you. But they don't get all the say in America.

Here's some good news: big banking corporation JP Morgan Chase has announced it will no longer underwrite bonds and loans for private prison corporations. If you have agitated for this very thing, go reward yourself a Buffalo chicken cheese steak, or what you will. (Also, too, you think this might have had something to do with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's call for oversight hearings on the relationship between banksters and private prison corporations? Of course it did, and there's another lesson in the importance of pushing to get people in office who'll do good, rather than merely settle for people who won't literally burn down your house.)

Kenawha County (WV) judge rules that West Virginia's "right to work" law actually violates workers' First Amendment rights to free association. It's similar to the Dane County (WI) judge's decision against Wisconsin's "right to work" law in 2016, which the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court reversed because of course they did -- and, lo and behold, the Republican-dominated West Virginia state legislature is at this moment trying to impeach every member of the Democratic-leaning state Supreme Court. It's like they can't win unless they set everything on fire. Why do we, as civilized people, tolerate such insanity?

Finally, when you hear Sen. McConnell (E-KY) suggest that the now-passed-in-the-House For the People Act is a "radical" and "socialist" bill, you are reminded that all they can do now is call what they don't like "radical" and "socialist." And when Mob Boss Mitch has to call it that -- rather than farm out the remarks to some hungry youngster like, say, Tom Cotton -- that means the forces of evil are even more desperate. I'd call that good news, except that we all know what desperate people are like -- they're the kind of people who throw nukes at Venezuela and Iran to keep power.

Action: concerning labor, bailouts, and genocide.

H.R. 6080/S. 3064, the Workers' Freedom to Negotiate Act, would amend the National Labor Relations Act to strengthen worker protections. The bill would (among many other things!) strike down "right-to-work" laws at the state level, keep taxpayer dollars away from corporations that violate worker safety laws, narrow the definition of "independent contractor" so corporations can't just willy-nilly reclassify their employees as such, and prevent corporations from using class action waivers as a condition of employment. That last item is important, since more than half of all employers now subject their non-union employees to these class action waivers, thus depriving them of their right to a day in court when these employers screw them over. ("More than half" should clue folks in that "just go get another job" isn't a good objection.) So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Workers' Freedom to Negotiate Act.

Meanwhile, our Energy Department still thinks bailing out the coal and nuclear industries is a good idea, even though coal is dying out and nuclear has never made money. I can already hear the right-wingers squeal BUTZ WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH COAL MINURZ!!!!! How many times must I tell these pimps! This bailout ain't about coal miners; it's about CEOs, as it always is with this Administration. The Energy Department's plan to subsidize "reliable" industries has met with plenty of resistance already, so now they're claiming that we need to do it for national security reasons. Remember Dr. Johnson saying that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel? Well, squealing "national security" is the modern last refuge of politicians who can't win arguments on the merits. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to push back against our Administration's fossil fuel bailout plan.

Finally, Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to push the U.N. to bring the perpetrators of the massacre of Rohingya Muslims to justice. The Burmese military started ethnic-cleansing the Rohingya a little over a year ago, burning down villages and killing thousands, while spurring almost a million more Rohingya to flee to other countries, where they now live in (as you'd expect) wretched refugee camps. Hence we ask our Congressfolk to pressure our U.N. Ambassador, Nikki Haley, to bring the Burmese military to justice; she did call for a worldwide arms embargo of Burma last year, so she may be sympathetic. I do wonder how reasonable-sounding folks will argue that we should leave Burma's military alone. Because without their military, they'd collapse? That military is the very reason Burma can't succeed as a nation. And that military deserves no lenient treatment after committing genocide.

Around the table: from a dead merger to a still-going special election.

Good news, everyone! The Tribune Media Group withdraws from the proposed Sinclair-Tribune merger -- and also files $1 billion lawsuit against Sinclair, alleging misconduct that precluded government approval of the merger. One is tempted, a la Sen. Truman, to just say let them kill each other. But one is also tempted to wonder if FCC Chair Ajit Pai, in demanding that a judge review Sinclair's ownership arrangements and thus effectively scuttling the merger, has made himself look better if investigators look into his own contacts with Sinclair before approving loosened UHF media ownership rules that benefited Sinclair.

From Sally Hardin at TalkPoverty we learn that our Administration's rollback of fuel efficiency standards will cost the average working family about $500 annually in fuel costs. So when you hear folks regurgitate our Administration's line that new cars will cost $2,100 to $2,700 less, keep in mind that you'll probably have your car longer than the four or five years before you start losing money. Our Administration valuing the short term over the long term; what a surprise! (But after you do that math, don't forget to heap on all the health care costs from all the added pollution we're going to have.)

Speaking of extremely surprising things, our FBI arrests U.S. Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) for insider trading. Mr. Collins could be overheard on the House floor last year declaring his intention to sell off some big pharma stock the day before that corporation announced the failure of a study involving its MS drug, but if you recall that Mr. Collins bought up $2 million worth of big pharma stock shortly before writing a bill speeding up FDA consideration of drugs -- and then bought another $1 million of stock after that bill passed! -- this arrest will seem, well, doubly unsurprising.

Ipsos poll finds 43% of Republicans think our President should be able to "close news outlets engaged in bad behavior." Presumably not with a la carte cable packaging, since that would be an example of the people closing down news outlets engaged in bad behavior. The good news? When you mention specific media nemeses like the Washington Post and the New York Times, the number goes down to 23%, and since about 25% of the American electorate will sign on to any noxious program as long as it diddles their rage glands, that number might actually represent progress.

Missouri voters repeal, by a 2-1 margin, the legislature's recent "right-to-work" law. That's right, 67 percent of voters hated "right-to-work" badly enough that they came out on a primary Tuesday to defeat it. And why were they voting on the repeal on primary day, versus, you know, Election Day? Typically because right-wing voters turn out more heavily for primaries than liberals do. So the "right-to-work" forces couldn't win even when they stacked the deck. Good job, Missouri!

Finally, Democrat Danny O'Connor still trails Republican Troy Balderson by less than a percentage point in the U.S. House special election in Ohio's 12th, but while Our Glorious Elites wonder how a Republican could almost-lose a district the party has normally won by 20 points or more since 1982, I wonder if, one one hand, maybe folks aren't as mad at Republicans as they were when Conor Lamb won the PA-18 special, but on the other hand, anyone who's willing to not-STFU about health care can make a race close just about anywhere. Then again, on the other other hand, maybe a straight-talking socialist could have beaten the Republican outright, conservatism being, these days, less a matter of substance than tone.

Action: internet freedom, corporate welfare, and workplace democracy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your U.S. House Rep to nullify the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, then Stop the FCC still helps you do that. Net neutrality officially ended last Monday, as you know, and though the big telecom corporations haven't started censoring websites or slowing websites down or forcing you to watch junk news videos before your websites load or herding some of your websites into internet "slow lanes," but the only reason they haven't done these things yet is because they're not completely stupid -- they know it's better to take your freedoms away a bit at a time, rather than rush to take them all away at once. And net neutrality is about your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than have a bunch of big corporations tell you where to go. The Senate already passed a "resolution of disapproval" aiming to nullify the FCC's repeal; now the House must do the same. But they won't, unless we demand it.

Meanwhile, our Administration's Department of Energy has concocted a truly moronic scheme to force utilities to buy a set percentage of their electric power from coal and nuclear. Brought to you by the same people who call renewable energy standards "welfare handouts"! Coal corporations are failing, not because of some "war on coal" drama, but because natural gas is considerably cheaper, and solar and wind are price-competitive now. And nuclear power plants have never made any money. How do we know? Because our government keeps giving them "loan guarantees," which only "guarantee" that taxpayers bail them out when they fail! I wish I could believe that this chunk of corporate welfare is all about our coal miners, but it's not -- the only people our President cares about are other bosses, and he sees the rest of us as just tools. So the Sierra Club helps you demand that our Energy Department scuttle its plan to force utilities to buy more from failing fossil fuel corporations.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5728/S. 2810, the Workplace Democracy Act. The Workplace Democracy Act would amend the National Labor Relations Act to curb corporations mislabeling their employees "independent contractors," to keep corporations from forcing employees to attend anti-union presentations, to force more good-faith negotiating efforts between corporations and unions, to allow employees to choose a card-check election instead of a secret ballot election to join a union, and to repeal "right-to-work" laws at the state level -- among other things! The only other thing I would ask for would be to allow farm workers to organize. But this bill is the gold standard of labor legislation in these times -- and when we have strong unions, we have better wages and better working conditions. So don't believe the right-wing hype that unions "make us less free," because all they do is make corporations less free to hurt us.

Around the table: from ballot initiatives to social media dramas.

From Michael Corcoran at TruthOut we learn why Republicans fear ballot initiatives. The good news? You can scare up more righteous anger at, say, a state "right-to-work" law than you can scare up righteous anger in support of it. The bad news? The rage people feel at liberal policy initiatives sure does seem to get more attention. We need to amend our Constitution so we can have national ballot initiatives, by the way. I'd tell the states to do it, too, since less than half of them do it now.

The New York Times publishes a lengthy report on how economic austerity policies in Great Britain are decimating that nation's once-formidable safety net. I'd say it's interesting that the Times writes about austerity like it's a bad thing, but then again, they're probably more comfortable writing about the austerity that's happening far away than the austerity that's happening here.

Surprise, surprise, corporate CEOs are actually starting to come out and say they're not using any of their tax "reform" windfalls to raise worker pay. OK, I suppose it is a little surprising that they'll say it out loud, just as in a few months they'll be saying, out loud, that yeah we're going to cut all these jobs now because we have big balls. Think some of these CEOs can be the stars of Democrat attack ads? I kid, of course -- these are the Democrats we're talking about.

Of course we should investigate whether there's any relationship between the President's daughter getting five trademarks in China mere days before the President decided to bail out the Chinese corporation ZTE, but fact of the matter is our President seems to do something every minute of every day that points to some corrupt act or other. And the lesson? Don't elect people with so many conflicts of interest!

Perhaps the most bizarre moment during Roseanne Barr's sudden crash-and-burn earlier this week was the spectacle of right-wingers taking to social media to insist that Bill Maher should be fired for the same thing! (Which was "comparing someone to an ape," though if you compare a black person to an ape, as Ms. Barr did -- and as Mr. Maher did not -- you're taking part in a long tradition of American racism.) What a surprise it must have been that liberals largely responded by saying, essentially, whatevs, yo. And the lesson? Fight for ideas and policies, not people. By the evidence, liberals seem to be taking this lesson to heart more than right-wingers are.

Finally, Louisiana-based televangelist starts soliciting donations for a brand new $54 million private jet, saying that, if Jesus were here on Earth today, "he wouldn't be riding a donkey" but would be "in an airplane flying all over the world." But would Jesus insist on his fourth private jet in 40 years because there are too many "demons" to pray away in coach? That sure doesn't sound like the Jesus I've known since I was a little kid.

Action: "free" trade, the Grand Canyon, and health care policy.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any renegotiated NAFTA that includes the hated "investor-state dispute settlement" system. These systems (which our very own Supreme Court Chief Justice, no great friend of the working family, also opposes) allow foreign corporations to sue our government on the grounds that we've prevented them from making money -- and if they win, they get to collect tribute from the taxpayer. And since corporations generally claim that any labor, environmental, or financial law "costs them money," those are the kinds of things that'll be on the chopping block -- though Canada has also voiced the wish that we would outlaw "right-to-work" laws at the federal level as part of a trade deal, so right-wingers have just as much to be alarmed about as we liberals. Of course, I get the feeling that Trump votaries would loudly support any trade deal their man negotiated, even if it contained the continuing offense to law and order that the ISDS represents. But we'll cross that bridge later; right now, we express our will.

Meanwhile, it's hard to believe we keep having to tell our government that the Grand Canyon is a national treasure and we shouldn't go mining and digging in it or around it, but we're here again, so CREDO helps you tell the Trump Administration not to open up the Grand Canyon area to new leases for uranium mining. If President Obama's first Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, is remembered fondly for anything, it'll be for imposing a 20-year moratorium on any new uranium mining within the Grand Canyon or its immediate surroundings -- but since Mr. Obama did that, Mr. Trump has to poop all over it! Don't believe him when he tells you we can have our magnificent national monuments and uranium mining, because uranium mining pollutes the water of the Colorado River, which provides water to five U.S. states and two Mexican states, and in this climate change era, that river is stretched enough as it is. Did I mention that the Havasupai nation lives right around that area? And we're going to pollute the water they put on their crops? Haven't we done enough to native Americans?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senator to oppose Alex Azar, Mr. Trump's nominee to replaced the disgraced Tom Price as HHS Secretary, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Mr. Trump told America that Mr. Azar was just the kind of guy who could keep drug prices down, but while heading up U.S. operations at big pharmaceutical corporation Eli Lilly, Mr. Azar jacked up the price of insulin over 300%. Insulin, as you know, is not exactly an elective drug, but a drug a diabetic needs to survive, and with our junk food-laden culture promising to create more and more diabetics in the coming years, it's going to become a life-saving drug for a lot more people. Was Mr. Trump trying to say that Mr. Azar is so good at raising drug prices that he'll tell our government all the tricks of the trade so our government can stop it? Nah, politicians don't even put that much effort into their lies anymore, not in the fuck-you-I'm-President era. So let's make this the no-fuck-you-we're-the-American-people era, and stop the Azar nomination.

Action: "free" trade, and corporate welfare.

Replace NAFTA helps you tell your House Reps to reject any trade agreement, including the currently-being-renegotiated NAFTA, that includes the nefarious "investor-state tribunal" as a mechanism for resolving trade disputes. "Investor-state tribunals" (a.k.a. investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS) allow foreign corporations to sue our government if our government passes laws that "hurt" those corporations' investors -- and if they win, they can exact tribute from the American taxpayer. If you're on the left, you may worry about foreign corporations suing over clean air and clean water laws, and if you're on the right, you may worry about foreign corporations suing to end "right-to-work" laws at the state level, but either way, you worry about submitting to international tribunals that can nullify our laws. "Free" trade deals tend to have an ISDS mechanism, and it gets abused -- witness the corporations rushing into Spain to "develop solar power" right before that country started scaling down its solar subsidies, merely so they could sue Spain and win money! It can happen here -- unless we fight.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reject Energy Secretary Perry's proposal to force taxpayers to subsidize aging coal and nuclear power plants. Specifically, the proposal would require utilities to fund any coal and nuclear plants, even those that should be retired, as long as they keep 90 days' worth of fuel on-site. Presumably, the Trump Administration would sell this plan as a) something that improves the reliability of the electric grid and b) something that would keep coal miners employed. Of course, if you've been sentient over the last half-century or so, then you know that the electric grid is already quite reliable, and doesn't need the help -- indeed, Mr. Perry's own Department of Energy recently came to this very same conclusion in spite of him! -- and employing coal miners in decaying and noxious coal plants isn't nearly as good an idea as retraining them to build and maintain solar and wind plants, though these items are the real enemy as far as the Trump Administration is concerned. But they don't get all the say in America -- we do.

Action: human rights in Honduras, "right-to-work" laws, and police militarization.

As you probably know, Honduras doesn't have the most sparkling human rights record at least since the military coup that ousted the democratically-elected-but-inconveniently-liberal President Zelaya in 2009, and in addition to the mysterious assassination of activists there, big corporate interests (mainly in mining and hydroelectricity) have subjected the Lenca people to death threats and physical assault. Nobody should have to endure such abuse on their own land merely because some corporation wants to exploit it, and if you somehow find that sentiment a bit squishy, consider that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has already mandated that the government of Honduras protect the Lenca from abuse, and being a signatory to both of the treaties that give the Inter-American Commission its power, Honduras has little wiggle room here, law-and-order-wise. Still, if we must remind them to do their job, we will, so Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Honduras to protect the Lenca people from corporate abuse.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3827/S. 1838, the Protecting Workers and Improving Labor Standards Act, would achieve its title's stated aims by repealing the part of the National Labor Relations Act that allows states to pass "right-to-work" laws, a.k.a. "right-to-work-for-less" laws. "Right-to-work" laws allow workers to enjoy the benefits of being in a union without paying union dues, and a lot of right-wingers love to ask, "why should we compel workers to pay for something they don't want?" Short answer: you gonna reimburse me for all that spending on the Iraq war I did? Long answer: if you have no problem with the whole concept of federal budgeting by representative government -- in which each and every one of us is guaranteed to pay for something we don't want! -- then you really have no business demanding that union members get union benefits without having to pay union dues, which will ultimately result in union members getting fewer benefits because they belong to ever-weakening unions. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help the American worker by passing the Protecting Workers and Improving Labor Standards Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1856, the Stop Police Militarization Act, then Defending Rights and Dissent still helps you do that. Most folks I know have lived their entire lives in fear of violent crime, so that actual dropping crime rates don't leave much of an impression upon them -- certainly not more of an impression than the constant violent imagery they see on TV, both from news programs and police dramas. Police dramas pretend that officers face horrific life-and-death crises a lot more often than they do in real life, but news programs certainly suffer from the if-it-bleeds-it-leads dictum; thus one can get quite a distorted picture that might lead one to believe that police officers actually need bazookas just to get through the day. Of course, I also suspect politicians have long played up the threat of violent crime in order to get actual conservatives to lash themselves to a police state they'd have otherwise opposed, but I suppose that's more a matter for historians.

Around the table: in which we are reminded that "free" trade deals are (at least!) a two-way street.

Margaret Flowers at TruthOut finds the upcoming Sanders "Medicare-for-All" bill to be noticeably weaker than Rep. Conyers's H.R. 676, long the "gold standard" of single-payer health insurance bills. Well, that would explain why Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-TX), the latter Sen. Ted Cruz's likely challenger in 2018, have embraced the cause! Mr. Sanders appears to have learned the wrong lesson from Mr. Reagan's similarly close loss in the 1976 primaries -- whereas many people then asked "wouldn't it be nice if Ronald Reagan could manage facts and figures?", no one is now asking "wouldn't it be nice if Bernie Sanders could 'play the game'?" When you've already changed the game, you don't play the old one.

Canada demands that the U.S. drop its state-level "right to work" laws and institute a generous paid family leave program, as part of NAFTA renegotiations. So that's what Barack Obama was talking about when he said "free" trade deals would force other nations to protect their workers better! But did he fail to consider it'd be used on us? I oppose any attempt to bargain away our laws in trade deals, even laws I don't like. But this sure is what's-good-for-the-goose territory for "free" traders. If we're very lucky, it might be the kind of thing that induces President Trump to throw up his hands and withdraw from NAFTA entirely.

"JPMorgan Software Does in Seconds What Took Lawyers 360,000 Hours," reads this breathless headline which, at any site other than Bloomberg, might be followed by an explanation point. I would advise my fellow liberals to avoid celebrating at the misfortune to be suffered by password-resetting techs and lawyers who used to read commercial loan agreements -- I mean, are any bosses suffering in this scenario? -- and attend to the very real possibility, unaddressed by this apparently slightly-rewritten PR release, that software is a way to avoid accountability for human mistakes and human wrongdoing. Also, JP Morgan Chase fucking cloud computes? Doesn't anyone care about security anymore?

Hillary Clinton alleges, in her upcoming election loss post-mortem, that Bernie Sanders caused "lasting damage" to her campaign, that he "made it harder to 'unify progressives'," and even paved the way for Mr. Trump's "Crooked Hillary" line of attack. These charges may be true in the strictest sense, but surely she remembers (for example) that George W. Bush's "flip-flopping" charges against John Kerry originated with Howard Dean (who used actual flip-flops!), and surely she knows that these things always happen in primaries. So I submit that as more evidence that she thought she had some kind of right to the nomination, if not also to the election, and we all know what that kind of hubris brings.

Finally, in a truly stunning display, the Trump Administration EPA goes to considerable lengths to attack one AP reporter over his work finding seven out of seven Superfund sites in Houston "inundated" by water. Tha Bush Mobb would simply have split hairs over whether "inundated" means "flooded," and I'm almost nostalgic for that kind of silliness, though the EPA's claim of having examined sites through "aerial imaging" does recall Bush Mobb reports that Mr. Bush had seen Katrina damage from on high. But the kicker, of course, is the personal attacks on the reporter for an unrelated story -- because when you can't win the case on the merits, personal attacks are all you have left.

Around the table: meet the new boss, same as the old boss, part 873.

Jesus Mary and Joseph House Speaker wannabe Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) not only peddles the "corporations can't compete because of the tax rate" lie, but also says Democrats "can’t just be the party of redistribution of wealth." This gives right-wingers an opening to say LOOK EVEN TEH DEMOCRATZ!!!!, but American corporations are doing quite well, thank you very much, despite the 35% rate most of them can bribe their way out of paying. But doesn't Mr. Ryan know that Republicans are also "the party of redistribution of wealth"? Republicans just prefer to redistribute wealth upward.

President Trump plans to end President Obama's DACA program, which helps children of undocumented immigrants stay in America and contribute to society -- but will do so six months from now, ostensibly to give Congress time to "fix the problem." Or, perhaps, to give his CEO friends six months to get used to not having these folks around. Still, it's like King Solomon decided to just split the baby in half for real. And deporting folks who had absolutely no say in emigrating to the United States and wouldn't recognize their "home" countries at all remains cruel, but then "cruel" describes Donald Trump's main constituency.

In case you were wondering, no Donald Trump can't simply designate antifa a "terrorist" group. That'd be tough, in theory, because there's no actual hierarchy to the mulititudinous groups who call themselves antifa, but it's also impossible because the State Department can declare foreign organizations as "terrorist" groups, not domestic ones, and our government has no formal mechanism to designate a domestic group as a "terrorist" organization. And that's for the best! It'd too easy to dismiss the other side's arguments merely by brandishing scare words like "terrorist." It'd also be fair to ask exactly whom is "terrorized" by antifa -- from here, it sure looks like folks "terrorized" by antifa might really be terrorized by the quite reasonable fear that they can't actually win arguments on the merits.

Surprise, surprise, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt imposed a 20-month delay on implementation of EPA regulations concerning chemical plant safety not even three months before a plant damaged by Hurricane Harvey started blowing up. And these were the regulations the EPA put together after that big chemical plant explosion in West, TX that was all over the news in 2013! And you likely filed a public comment about those regulations! Why does it seem that the regulations President Trump hates the most are the ones that protect ordinary people the most?

Actual "fake news," er, satirical website runs story claiming a mosque also closed its doors to non-Muslim Hurricane Harvey victims, and gets gobs of attention, despite describing a mosque that doesn't exist and picturing an imam who was nowhere near Texas at the time. Too many fake news outlets are hiding behind "satire," and one day one of them is going to lose a lawsuit because a judge is going to point out that none of this "satire" is actually funny. And then they'll close up shop, and then they'll cast themselves as "free speech martyrs" or something, because self-pity does seem to be an endlessly renewable resource on the right.

Finally, Shaun Richman at In These Times presents "A New Bill of Rights for Workers: 10 Demands the Labor Movement Can Fight for and Win." I'll admit this list is a little mind-blowing -- I hadn't thought of "right-to-work" laws as a violation of the 5th Amendment's takings clause (i.e., its proscription against being "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"), nor had I thought of "scope of bargaining" restrictions as free speech restrictions. I also hadn't contemplated a national campaign against at-will firing, which would (as Mr. Richman says) actually make unions a lot more popular (just as the SEIU's assistance to fast food workers has done very well for their rep, though not increasing their membership).

Around the table: in which we contemplate tried-and-true methods of getting politicians to do our will.

John O'Day at FAIR finds that the "liberal" media have reduced net neutrality to a shallow "mogul vs. mogul" kind of coverage, but of course there are reasons for that. Google vs. Comcast, or Facebook vs. Verizon, maps pretty easily onto the kind of horserace/sports match coverage the "liberal" media prefers anyway, and it also just so happens to map on to right-wing complaints about net neutrality, i.e., that they protect Google and Facebook at the expense of Comcast and Verizon. Of course, I really don't care if they do or not -- I only care that net neutrality protects people from corporate abuse. (Great article, though -- read down to the part where he reminds us that the internet didn't "flourish" under "less regulation" because the phone lines over which consumers originally surfed the internet were, by law, very heavily regulated.)

From Fran Quigley at TruthOut we learn how Nevada unions were "the driving force" behind that state's new insulin price transparency law. They didn't listen to "data-driven consultants," but did it the old-fashioned way: by going door-to-door, making thousands of phone calls to their legislators, and finding folks with unique stories to tell about how the insulin-pricing bill would help them or their loved ones (or, ah, would have helped them or their loved ones). They also supported (and helped elect) actual liberal politicians, rather than the faux-liberals to which national Democrats constantly hold us hostage. (Seriously, can you see Jon Frickin' Ossoff sponsoring a drug price transparency bill in the House? No, you cannot.)

Matt Gertz at Media Matters reminds us that "There Will Be No Pivot" into sanity from President Trump, no matter how much the "liberal" media might want it. With extraordinary generosity and restraint, Mr. Gertz suggests that reporters are susceptible to the "pivot" or "reset" narrative because they're just as stressed out about living in Trumpland as the rest of us, and also because reporters are intuitively "bias(ed)" toward finding "new" stories, and Donald Trump acting like a sane person sure would be a new story. But there's some horserace here, too -- if the "liberal" media merely tabulated Mr. Trump's insanity non-stop, how could they then build him up so there's a race in 2020? (In reality, of course, if Democrats nominate yet another I'm-sane-he's-an-ogre candidate, there'll be a race, all right, and Democrats will lose it.)

Unions turn in over 300,000 signatures (three times the required amount!) in an effort to get Missouri's new "right-to-work" law overturned by a public referendum in 2018. But ho hum, "(w)hile unions are bankrolling the anti-right-to-work campaign, it’s unclear who is paying for the other side" -- apparently the "right-to-work" law's supporters don't want to be known, for some reason. I'm also a bit unclear about why the vote has to wait until 2018; are they afraid folks won't turn out in an "off-year"? They'd be wrong about that: Ohio voters rejected their legislature's anti-public unions law by a 3-2 margin in 2011.

You've no doubt heard that President Trump has had to dissolve two business advisory councils because of all the business leaders who left them after his awful Charlottesville remarks, but that his evangelical advisory council somehow remained intact in its wake. Well, President Trump's evangelical advisory council finally has its first defection -- in a former Clinton/Obama voter who apparently decided to leave well before Charlottesville. And dig Eric Metataxas's rubbish about not abandoning people (like the President, apparently) when they're down! Mr. Metataxas has the relationship exactly wrong: the President doesn't abandon us when we're down, but we have no such responsibility to him, as he's supposed to serve us.

Finally, President Trump draws the internet's ire for saying that our great nation needs to "heel" our divisions. Gosh, Freudian slip much? He wishes he could bring the American people to heel. As long as we draw breath, he never will.

Action: tuition-free public college yea, whistleblower protections yea, "right to work" nay.

S. 806 -- authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and known colloquially as the "College for All Act" -- would make four-year public universities and colleges tuition-free. (I don't have a House bill number yet, but Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, sponsors that bill.) If your right-wing friends get all ZOMG HOW WILL YOU PAYZ FOR TEH COLLEGEZ!!!!, tell them that the College for All Act would fund its aims with a financial transaction tax (or "Robin Hood tax," or "Wall Street sales tax"), one that would levy a 0.5 percent tax (not "five percent," and not "50 percent"!) on stock trades, a 0.1 percent tax on bond sales, and a 0.005 percent tax on derivative transactions. I think the bill should tax derivatives a lot harder than that, and I'm not a big fan of dedicated revenue streams either, but I approve of making public college-level education tuition-free for all Americans. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to support the College for All Act.

Meanwhile, S. 762, the IRS Whistleblower Improvements Act of 2017 -- an actually bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Grassley (R-IA) and Wyden (D-OR) -- would better protect whistleblowers who drop a dime on tax fraud at their workplaces. The IRS whistleblower program has recovered $3 billion in tax fraud since 2006, which doesn't sound like a lot in the context of trillions of dollars in revenues annually, but which also represents a dramatic improvement in recovered taxes since then, and really, we ought to protect the good folks who risk their lives and careers (and I'm not exaggerating when I say that!) to expose the people who are cheating us out of all the services our taxes buy. With all the hysteria from the right about the IRS over the years, it's awfully nice to see at least one Republican tune it out occasionally, and that's true even if you knew the one Republican who'd tune it out would be Charles Grassley. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support courageous whistleblowers by supporting S. 762.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject "right-to-work" legislation -- such as H.R. 785/S. 545, the National Right to Work Act -- then Sign for Good still helps you do that. Listen to folks who support such legislation and you'll be whisked off to an alternate universe where the National Labor Relations Act somehow deprives workers of their right to negotiate terms of employment (rather than enhance their ability to exercise that right!), and where a union bargaining on your behalf is somehow a "monopoly." Seriously, if you're already very, very wealthy and successful, you can negotiate terms of employment more or less to your liking, but absent unions and strong legislation, employers could dictate terms to the rest of us, or else we wouldn't have a job. And, ah, the union as a "monopoly within the workplace"? What a profound insult to all the people hurt by real monopolies -- including the monopolies that treat their workers the worst precisely because no one can compete with them. Sometimes right-wingers are clever with words. But not so much this time.

Action: Presidential tax transparency, and "right to work."

H.R. 305/S. 26, the Presidential Tax Transparency Act, would force Presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns, like virtually everyone else who goes to work in our government. Right-wingers who read the bill may tell you that the "Special Rule for Sitting Presidents" described in Sec. 2(a)(1) -- which would compel the person who's actually President right now (his initials are "Donald Trump") to submit his tax returns within 30 days of the bill's enactment -- is an unconstitutional bill of attainder. And you know what? They'd be right about that: the Constitution does specifically proscribe arresting and convicting folks for crimes (here, the refusal to disclose tax returns while a Presidential candidate) that weren't crimes when they committed them. But you know what else? Mr. Trump has already declared his candidacy for 2020, which makes him a Presidential candidate, which would put him under the scope of the bill, if it becomes law. You can see where a clever negotiator might have put that "Special Rule" in there only because giving it away would be worthless to the other side. Anyway, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Presidential Tax Transparency Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk and your President to reject "right-to-work" legislation, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. "Right to work" is a clever phrase, I'll give right-wingers that -- they're very good at coming up with clever phrases while their counterparts in the Democratic party are tripping over their five-syllable words and using words like "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" as if they were amulets. But so-called "right to work" laws don't actually confer upon you the right to work, or even the right to work the way you'd like -- they merely deprive unions of the ability to automatically collect dues from their members, who presumably had a say in whether or not they wanted a union and who certainly enjoy the benefits of being in one, which is why liberals often call it "right to work for less." Still we hear right-wingers say "why should anyone be compelled to pay for something they don't want," as if, you know, civilized people don't routinely pay for things they don't want, as the price of living in a civilized society. I mean, I opposed the war in Iraq, but I'm not asking for a refund of all that tax money I contributed toward it.

Action: internet privacy, runaway executive pay, and "right-to-work."

You know the FCC -- which, like most other federal government agencies, now resembles a sort of evil alternate universe version of itself -- hates those privacy protections the last FCC, but you may not know that Congress would like to kill them dead, too, and some Congressfolk have begun to make noise about creating yet another "resolution of disapproval" under the Congressional Review Act that would kill them dead. Anyone else think it wasn't such a hot idea for the Obama Administration to wait until the last six months (the only timeframe within which the Congressional Review Act can operate) to issue all these regulations? Anyone else wonder if maybe that was the point? Anyway, don't be like Sen. Toomey (R-PA), who fretted all those years ago that if we enacted strong consumer privacy protections we'd "break the internet." Why can't we have both consumer privacy and a great internet? Aren't we the can-do country? So you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to lay off the FCC's internet privacy rules.

Meanwhile, the SEC, under Acting Chair Michael Piwowar, has apparently begun the process of rolling back the executive pay-ratio rule, mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act of 2010. It took the SEC five frickin' years to write the rule and now they've started a 45-day "review," with a special invitation to banksters and CEOs to report to them on how the SEC's executive pay-ratio rule burdened them. Hear that sound? That's the World's Tiniest Violin playing. Complying with the rule isn't exactly ditch-digging; CEOs just don't want to reveal that they're engaging in a massive income-redistribution-upward scheme, where they take home millions and pay their workers in dung pellets. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the SEC to leave the executive pay-ratio rule alone. Recall the Harvard Business Review report that good Americans think the average ratio of executive to unskilled factory worker is around 31:1, and would actually prefer it at a little less than 7:1. The actual ratio, of course, is 354:1. Anger at runaway CEO pay cuts across the political spectrum -- but not in Washington.

Finally, if you've missed opportunities to tell state and federal legislators that "right-to-work" laws are bad for workers and bad for America, then both CREDO and Sign for Good help you do that. Right-wingers incongruously claim that "right-to-work" -- which makes paying union dues optional if you belong to a union, thus depriving that union of some of its ability to fight on your behalf, which is kinda the whole point of being in a union -- actually liberates workers, but ain't no liberation comes with pay cuts and worse working conditions, which is what workers in "right-to-work" states more typically face. And folks who whine WHY SHOULDZ TEH ANYONEZ BE MADEZ TO PAYZ FOR TEH ANYTHINGZ!!!! know that I could, using that logic, ask for a refund for all my tax dollars that went to fight Tha Bush Mobb's Little Iraq Adventure, right? I mean, I could, but I don't -- not just because I understand that I'm not the center of the damn universe, but also because I understand that the price of living in a democracy is paying taxes, just as the "price" of a better union job is paying monthly dues.

Action: "right to work," the Endangered Species Act, and FBI harassment of protestors.

Bad news, folks: H.R. 785, the National Right to Work (sic) Act, would amend the National Labor Relations Act and the Railway Labor Act to permit workers to refrain from paying dues to their union -- while still receiving the benefits of being in a union. H.R. 785 would thus hamper unions' ability to actually bargain for better pay and working conditions and redress grievances with employers. Folks love to say why should I be compelled to pay for something, apparently unaware that they pay for a lot of things with their taxes for which they'd otherwise choose not to pay -- like the Iraq War, for instance. And I have never argued for a check-off box with which I can simply "choose not to pay" for things I don't like, because I understand that I have representatives for that. But President Trump's spokeshack, Sean Spicer, has indicted that he'd like to see a "right-to-work" bill passed because it would be in "the best interest of job creators." Sadly, when he said "job creators," he didn't mean you, though you, with your buying power, are the greatest job creators in the history of the planet -- he meant the executives who bend over backwards to destroy jobs so they can redistribute worker income upward to themselves. I think H.R. 785 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators.

Meanwhile, the Senate has begun to hold hearings on how best to destroy the Endangered Species Act. Of course, they don't call it that, because if they said "we want to destroy the Endangered Species Act," they'd be very unpopular and might risk losing re-election even in heavily-gerrymandered districts, so they say they're "modernizing" the Act. But tell them you'd like to "modernize" the Constitution and see how they react! Too often we hear from ESA opponents that it just costs too much money to save species from oblivion; where do we begin describing what's wrong with that? By reminding folks that a whole lot of good works in America cost money? By comparing ESA enforcement with, oh, just to pull an example out of the air, the cost of the B-35 fighter jet that Lockheed has tried to get combat-ready for literally a quarter of a century? By asking "costs whom," and invariably coming up with the answer "corporate executives"? By reminding folks that America is the can-do country and whining about the cost of being civilized isn't very American? Really, there are so, so many places to begin. I think the Endangered Species Act also deserves a phone call to your Reps and Senators.

Finally, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force has apparently been questioning Standing Rock protestors, which of course was not at all intended to intimidate the Water Protectors, not at all! Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell your Senators to question FBI Somehow-Still-Director James Comey about the questioning of peaceful protestors. You'd think the JTTF would have more to do than find folks protesting our government and pretend like they're terrorists, but apparently they don't, for they've also apparently harassed Keystone pipeline protestors, Black Lives Matter protestors, School of the Americas Watch protestors, Occupy Wall Street protestors, and Tea Party protestors. OK, I made up that last one -- seriously, Tea Partiers? They're certainly no threat to the status quo! -- but they've messed around with the others. It's enough to make you think our government wants terrorists to strike, so they can use that as a pretext to harass all those good Americans who risk their lives and livelihoods in order to make us a more perfect union.

Around the table: documenting various absurdities and hypocrisies -- and offering hope for worker rights in hard times.

National Security Advisor Michael Flynn resigns over the revelation that he discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia with a Russian ambassador before being confirmed to his Cabinet job. These discussions may have violated the Logan Act, which prevents private citizens from conducting foreign policy on behalf of our nation, and I guess we should be glad that Mr. Flynn's "apology" to the Trump Administration didn't end like this. But, gosh, it sure is a good thing we've got a law and order Administration now!

We learn from the Bill of Rights Defense Committee that FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force members have been trying to question Standing Rock protestors. They've been using the notorious "knock and talk" method, whereby agents try to strike up a "voluntary" conversation, without a warrant (warrants: they're so quaint!) and without your lawyer present. The good news? Local citizen groups have been able to pressure local police (including San Francisco's!) into withdrawing from participation in the JTTF. But you're about as likely to find a "terrorist" at Standing Rock as you are to find a short quarterback in the NFL.

Surprise, surprise, civil rights groups that get a lot of money from big telecoms are against internet freedom as the FCC protects it. Groups who rightfully oppose discrimination also opposing the FCC net neutrality order which prevents big telecoms from...discriminating? You have no need to think about it -- just follow the money -- and you have no need to parse through their absurd arguments, not least because we've already smacked them down a hundred times, but also because their folly demands nothing from us but shame and shunning. They should really know better.

Also from the "surprise, surprise" file: Donald Trump seemed warm to banning lobbyists from his Administration when he was running for President, but now he's hiring them, because of course he is. Sadly, I think the worse hypocrisies are coming: his draft budgets cut Social Security and Medicare though he promised not to do that as a candidate. And while Mr. Trump hasn't been a hypocrite on "free" trade, and I'm quite pleased with that, I feel compelled to add the qualifier: yet.

Finally, given the very strong possibility that anti-labor "right-to-work" laws will be the standard nationwide within a few years, Leah Freed at Labor Notes describes how unions can "survive and even thrive" under such adversity. The first lesson, of course, is to fight the boss and win for your workers -- meaning not just winning grievances but winning better wages and working conditions at contract time. The final lesson (not that the ones inbetween aren't vital, too!) is to "involve members in bigger movements." Sounds like good advice for weak Democrats, too -- but I bet we have more success getting unions to take that advice.

Around the table: the failure of welfare "reform," and other lessons.

Gordon Long interviews America's Greatest Economist, Michael Hudson, about how "Wall Street Has Taken Over the Economy and is Draining It." Not incidentally, he resolves the are-our-elites-stupid-or-are-they-evil question thusly: "The successful error of monetarism is to force countries to have such self-defeating policies that they end up having to privatize their natural resources, their public domain, their public enterprises, their communications and transportation, like you’re seeing in Greece’s selloffs. So when you find an error that is repeated, it’s deliberate. It’s not insane. It’s part of the program, not a bug." Also, there'll be a new Michael Hudson book in three months' time, with the promising title of J is for Junk Economics.

George Will sounds the alarum against a Donald Trump nomination. But he never fully explains why he thinks Mr. Trump is "the most anti-conservative presidential aspirant" in Republican history -- all we really learn is that "conservative essentials" "includ(e) the manners and grace that should lubricate the nation’s civic life," but those aren't conservative values, they're civilized values. In other words, Mr. Will would have been more accurate to describe Mr. Trump as the most "anti-civilization presidential aspirant" in history.

Retro Report wonders how well the Clinton Administration welfare "reform" of 1996 has gone. Long story short: ending "welfare as we know it" worked OK during the years of the internet bubble, but when jobs (and then, in 2008, nearly the entire economy) disappeared during Tha Bush Mobb years, not so much. And then states used the welfare money they got from our federal government to plug other, unrelated holes in their budgets. And it got worse from there, until now 46 million Americans are in poverty, with about half of these making less than $10,000 annually, which doesn't cut it anywhere in America. Total time of video: 13 minutes, 24 seconds.

Shaun Richman, writing at In These Times, describes "The Legal Argument That Could Overturn Right-to-Work Laws Around the Country." As one legal scholar says, right-to-work laws "compel() one private party to provide benefits to another private party with no compensation" -- which is to say, the union has to provide services to workers who don't have to pay dues to the union under right-to-work. Stick around for the part where Mr. Richman describes a time when unions actually competed for the same workers in the same workplaces -- and agency fees didn't exist.

Finally, the Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan -- poet, priest, and lifelong activist against war and economic injustice -- has died at the age of 94, his advanced age perhaps testifying to the utility of doing good works regardless of how Our Glorious Elites receive them. He's most famous for participating in the burning of hundreds of draft cards in Maryland during the Vietnam War; I suspect Our Glorious Elites are glad he's better known for that than for declaring that poverty, racism, greed, and militarism were all outward expressions of the same injustice. Also n.b. that he was a Gerard Manley Hopkins fan, which always recommends a person. R.I.P.

Action: promoting fair redistricting, equal rights, and consumer protection.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled earlier this week that apportioning districts by population, rather than by eligible voters, did not violate the U.S. Constitution. But you know that won't be the end of it -- the folks who failed (by 8-0, I feel compelled to point out using the Italics Hammer) at the Supreme Court will take their battle to the states next, and quite a few of these state legislatures, which have spent the last few years passing Voter ID laws and "right-to-work" laws and "religious liberty" laws and "bathroom" bills and ag-gag laws and other obnoxiousness, will happily pounce upon the opportunity to pretend that folks who can't vote (whether because of their immigration status or their status as a felon) don't deserve a voice in our democracy. The forces of evil love it when our vote means less. Sadly, you don't have to wonder why. Common Cause helps you tell your state Governor to ensure that state and federal legislative districts continue to represent all the people therein.

Meanwhile, back in Tennessee, HB 1840 -- a.k.a., the Counseling Discrimination bill, or "Hate Bill 1840" -- states that "(n)o counselor or therapist providing counseling or therapy services shall be required to counsel or serve a client as to goals, outcomes, or behaviors that conflict with a sincerely held religious belief of the counselor or therapist." Want to be sexually active again after being raped? No can do, say counselors with "sincere religious beliefs" about how sex outside marriage "led" to your rape. Want to work through being bullied by other kids because you're gay? Forget it, because this bill would let counselors bully you, too! Want to get counseling about getting a sex change? Oh, you know how that'll go. I'm so tired of coddling folks who think religious people's "rights" supersede everyone's rights. So the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam to veto HB 1840 if it reaches his desk.

Finally, the FTC ruled back in 2014 that advertising for the Your Baby Can Read products could no longer claim the product, consisting of videos, "lift-a-flap" books, and flash cards, could help babies learn to read before they learn to walk, or that using Your Baby Can Read would help babies who used it do so much better in life than other babies. Turns out the evidence for such claims is lacking if not non-existent -- but like all true believers, Your Baby Can Read's creator, Robert Titzer, is persistent like a bad debt. So he's back with Your Baby Can Learn, and though you might think he's on more solid ground by replacing "read" with "learn," it turns out scientists tell us that having babies sit down and watch videos actually hinders their learning process, via disturbed sleep and delayed language skills. Hence Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell the FTC to address these new claims from the Your Baby Can Read folks.

Around the table: the *Friedrichs* non-decision decision, and other stories.

As expected, the Supreme Court hands down a split 4-4 decision in Friedrichs v. CTA, upholding the Ninth Circuit's original ruling and slowing the right's push for a "right-to-work-for-less" nation a bit. You may be surprised to learn that the "controversy" wasn't over union dues, which everyone agrees workers don't have to pay if they don't want to join the union that will then represent them when they need it to, but over "agency fees," which sure does seem to me to represent a workable compromise. And I sure hope people who complain that people should never be compelled to pay for things they don't want are ready to reimburse me for the Iraq war.

Coalition of 17 state-level Attorneys General will pursue a lawsuit against Exxon for fraud -- specifically, for knowing about the adverse effects of climate change and then for lying to America about it so they could keep making money. I do wish they hadn't spoken at length about the need "to defend the next president’s climate change agenda," and not necessarily because the next President's name might be Donald Trump -- I wish they'd stuck to the case at hand. I also hope this doesn't end in a massive "settlement" that Exxon will then write off on its taxes.

Michigan state Senate panel approves measure effectively banning courses at state colleges that "promote or discourage" unionization. Now who thinks the state government will actually apply the same scrutiny to obviously anti-union curricula as to pro-union curricula, since corporations flood the system with far more money than unions? And who thinks this bill couldn't possibly end in labor issues getting covered nowhere in the curricula -- not even in history or business, let alone labor studies?

Brendan I. Koerner, writing at Wired, explains "Why ISIS is Winning the Social Media War." It's an incredibly well-researched and incisive report in more ways than I can count, but the title is quite overstated, and, as always, the open media upon which ISIS thrives cuts both ways, which means it also makes the task of folks who'd fight ISIS easier. The long-term solution would, of course, be to end the corporate stranglehold on American politics, which enables the creation of a lot more ISIS soldiers than we'd otherwise have, but what messages should we deploy in the short term? Here's one, off the top of my head: ISIS "soldiers" are small men desperate to prove they've got big balls by making life into a shoot-em-up video game. It could use some refining, admittedly.

Finally, the incomparable David Dayen, writing at The Intercept, finds some desperation in President Obama's endorsement of Florida House Rep./DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Would Mr. Obama had waded in if Ms. Wasserman Schultz's primary opponent, Tim Canova, weren't getting traction, and close to five months before the primary, no less? In the long term, of course, Democrats should consider whether Ms. Wasserman Schultz's support for bankster bailouts, "free" trade, and payday lenders (let alone her obvious shilling for Hillary Clinton at the expense of Bernie Sanders!) might be endangering her more than any perceived liberal "disloyalty" might be.

Around the table: how a right-wing anti-labor effort might backfire on them, and other tales.

Shaun Richman, writing at In These Times, explains how the right-wing, "right to work" effort behind the Friedrichs v. CTA case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court could actually have positive consequences for unions everywhere if the Court sides with the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs argue that "every interaction that a union has with its government employer is inherently political" (italics in original), making a union's collection of dues "inherently" "compelled" political speech -- but "every interaction" would include strikes and attempts to bargain for better working conditions that states just so happen to prohibit, and if they're all "inherently political" interactions, then they're also protected free speech under the First Amendment. Then again, I suppose the Roberts Court could just call collecting dues "compelled political speech" but not any of the other things, if the plaintiffs' suit doesn't formally raise them.

NSA's "hacker-in-chief" tells security conference attendees how they might keep folks like him out of their computer systems. I guess you should take that with a grain of salt, but it seems that the more you ask your system to do, and the more people who have password access to that system, the more possible entry points the NSA has. And then a lot of times the NSA will exploit holes good sysadmins can fill by installing patches to their systems promptly and paying attention to the anomalous activity on their networks (via the "out-of-band network tap").

Dave Johnson, writing at the Campaign for America's Future blog, describes how the Johnson-Tyco merger will take even more of the tax burden off corporations and put it on the rest of us. Incredibly, even though Johnson is headquartered in Milwaukee and Tyco in Princeton, the resulting corporation will be Irish, since Tyco "moved" to Ireland in 2013 (after being Swiss from 2008 and a "citizen" of Bermuda from 1997). By the way, Sen. Sanders's way of putting it -- "You can’t be an American company only when you want corporate welfare from American taxpayers or you want lucrative contracts from the federal government. If you want the advantages of being an American company then you can’t run away from America to avoid paying taxes" -- is the right way of putting it.

Surprise, surprise, the Federal Trade Commission has accused DeVry University of deceiving potential students about their job prospects after they graduate. Typical lies-damn-lies-and-statistics, too: DeVry not only allegedly brags about their 90% placement rate without spelling out that that's a rate over 30 years, but also, apparently, by counting graduates as "employed in their majors" when they weren't, counting graduates as "employed in their majors" when they were already employed in their majors, and counting graduates as "not actively seeking work" when "desperately seeking work" would have been more accurate. I wonder if Marco Rubio will ride to their rescue!

Finally, we learn from Argentine journalist Darío Aranda (via translator Nancy Piñiero) how a small and rural Argentine town has thus far kept Monsanto from building a GMO seed plant there. I suppose a hater, after reading this article, will say that the protestors who blockaded the 30-hectare site owned by Monsanto were law-breakers simple and plain, and when confronted with all the ways Monsanto and the Argentine government themselves broke the law during the permitting process, that hater would probably just mumble about bureaucracy and "job terrorism." It is true that if you break the law, you suffer the consequences, and with upwards of 20 protestors injured at the hands of police, I bet they understand that more acutely than we do. So does Rosa Parks.

Around the table: banksters, unions, socialists, values, and refugees.

Richard Eskow explains why reinstating the Glass-Steagall "wall" between banking and securities is essential. Long story short: "too big to fail" banks actually possessed around 4% of their stated assets before the financial armageddon of 2008, and now they have -- wait for it -- 5%. That means 95% of their financing is debt. And these are the heroes of the "fiscally-responsible" right! So banks would actually have less debt if they weren't involved in so many casino-economy games and were more involved in holding savings and lending to small businesses, which is what they always say they're going to do if we would just stop watching them.

Shaun Richman, writing at In These Times, suggest some ways unions could fight back against "right to work" laws. Unions could offer membership outside their contracted obligations, work to change the "at-will" employment standard at state levels (where an employer can fire you pretty much "at will") to a "just cause" standard (where an employer would have to have a good reason to fire you) -- and, basically, reach out to workers they don't necessarily represent, which unions have already started to do by fighting for the $15/hour minimum wage at municipal levels.

Sen. Bernie Sanders said at last week's debate that he would not raise the top tax bracket to where it was under President Eisenhower, at 91%. He then added, slyly, that he was "not that much of a socialist compared to Eisenhower," but even though I'd also prefer to end all those Bush Mobb tax cuts on dividend and capital gains income, we have a moral reason for a 91% tax bracket -- it prevents the wealthiest from running roughshod over the rest of us, as they've been doing for what seems like forever.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, supposedly the nicest Republican Presidential contender, says he would establish a "government agency" to promote "Judeo-Christian values" abroad. So I guess he thinks the problem with ISIS isn't that they're bastards, but that they're Muslim? Also, he wants "stringent background checks" on Syrian refugees, as if they're currently nonexistent. I suspect Mr. Kasich overestimates the size of both his heart and his brain.

Finally, Fox News's token non-insane television personality, Shepard Smith, condemns those who would close our borders to all refugees, saying "we cannot allow ourselves to become like those who want to destroy us" and "(w)e cannot resort to the tactics of the barbarians." All of that is true, and it may even give American rageheads some pause -- but only for a moment, before Ted Cruz or somebody reminds them how much short-term pleasure rage affords.

Christmas in September.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has lately polled consistently in the low single digits, has suspended his Presidential campaign -- and in dropping out said he's "called to lead by helping to clear the field in this race so that a positive, conservative message can rise to the top of the field," and urged other Republican candidates to drop out as well, so that the party could coalesce behind a nominee who is not a certain very loud billionaire who embarrasses them by saying the things out loud that they only say at country clubs. This is, of course, par for the course for a political animal who combines the inarticulate cunning of George W. Bush with the messaging skills of Karl Rove -- if he can call corporate welfare "job creation" and getting goodies for his cronies "winning for the people," why not call quitting "leadership"?

But in a world where repeatedly spewing forth racist and sexist garbage is apparently no longer a serious impediment to political success, it can be hard to see exactly what Scott Walker did (or failed to do) to lose the nomination. Of course he's not as scintillating as Mr. Trump, but neither are the other 154 remaining candidates, and Mr. Walker didn't win three statewide elections in four years because he's scintillating -- rather, he cuts the figure of a man who knows his stuff and doesn't get rattled when he's challenged, and voters respond to that as surely as they respond to a billionaire with a bad attitude. As far as I can tell, Mr. Walker only made two mistakes that Democrats would have mentioned in campaign ads: he out-Romneyed Mitt Romney by taking three-count-'em-three positions on birthright citizenship within a week, and he suggested that the British government didn't like President Obama's "leading from behind" in foreign policy, which earned that famously terse retort from the Cameron camp: "(t)he Prime Minster did not say that and does not think that."

You might find that assessment a surprise, if you've attended the steady drumbeat of stories about Walker missteps (like the Philly cheesesteak "gaffe," ugh) and sound bites from other Republicans (who knew Tom Coburn attended the party's pulse so well?) describing Mr. Walker as "not ready for prime time." You may be tempted to respond that folks who think Mr. Walker wasn't "ready for prime time" haven't watched Marco Rubio try to explain anything, but you'd be better off attributing Mr. Walker's demise not just to Mr. Trump, who sucks the oxygen from any room he's in, but also to that infamous right-wing chimera, the "liberal" media. Not that the "liberal" media had very much to say about Mr. Walker's destruction of public unions or his embrace of "right-to-work" laws, or his patent refusal to do either of these things while he was campaigning. But Mr. Walker too often showed contempt for reporters, especially when they asked tough questions. Aside from one frank assessment of a New York Times reporter on a mic he didn't know was hot, how much contempt for the "liberal" media did George W. Bush show in 2000? And who was the "liberal" media's favorite in 2008? The "liberal" media may not remember much, but they remember when they've been disrespected.

So now what? Mr. Walker, in "suspending" his campaign, could always come back, I suppose, but I doubt he will, since we don't live in that universe where Gary Hart won two terms as President. My heart swells at the prospect that Mr. Walker will have to go back to Wisconsin and face the mess he's made, and ultimately leave office in 2018 as disgraced as Mr. Bush did a decade earlier, but there is another, horrifying prospect: Mr. Walker could wind up as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, not on a ticket with Mr. Trump, of course, but maybe with John Kasich or Chris Christie. Having Mr. Walker as your running mate would be like getting a good campaign manager for free, and once he's largely relieved of the responsibility to talk about himself or his own record, his considerable political skills could help propel the Republican nominee to victory.

I'm not going to lie to you, though. Scott Walker dropping out of this race is Christmas in September. He'd have been that horrible a President. And now we're very likely spared that catastrophe for at least eight more years.

Around the table: the trouble with Not Being Trump, and other stories.

Scott Walker proposes a giant dung sandwich for working families -- making the entire country "right-to-work," eliminating the National Labor Relations Board, repealing the Davis-Bacon Act, and replacing overtime with comp time, all of which he calls "reform" and "modernization." I thought he'd at least pretend he wasn't such a bastard, but apparently the pressure that comes with Not Being Donald Trump is too much to bear. If he gets the nomination, and tries to pull an Etch-a-Sketch on the electorate, he'll need a lot more "liberal" media help than Mitt Romney got.

Buried in this fluff piece about Great and Awesome American Real Super-President Mitch McConnell is his rather absurd claim that "(b)usiness leaders" have told him they have "a hard time finding people to do the work because they’re doing too good with food stamps, Social Security and all the rest." You're tempted to respond that science is more than just collecting anecdotes, but you might also contemplate the possibility that these "business leaders" can't find people to fill positions because they're trying to pay them in dung pellets. (Hate to pile on -- OK, I don't -- but why does he think "the most successful people" are the people who make the most money?)

Casey Quinlan at Think Progress asks "Why Graduates Of For-Profit Colleges Are Struggling To Pay Back Student Loans." Long story short: for-profit schools promise rather more in the way of career prospects than they deliver and commit a good bit of fraud, and of course the financial services meltdown made everything a lot worse. But it sure is a good thing Marco "Corinthian is my constituent" Rubio would get rid of the "elitist" college accreditation system so that even more Americans can enjoy endless debt.

It's not just the for-profit college students who have trouble: ProPublica reports on the large amount of debt low-income NYU and UCal students pick up. Their job prospects are better than if they went to some Corinthian college, but still. We also learn that low-income Vassar College students leave with very little debt, thanks in part to its "need-blind" admissions policy and its reliance on grants instead of loans. (NYU's response has its slimy arguments, like the one ProPublica takes apart in paragraph 18. But at least NYU didn't step in it the way the Harvard official does at the end.)

Finally, Citizens for Tax Justice studies Jeb Bush's tax "reform" plan, and surprise, surprise, the top 1% get over half the relief from Mr. Bush's tax cuts. Oh, and it would eliminate the Estate Tax and the now-patched Alternative Minimum Tax. You just keep partying like it's 1999, Jeb!

Around the table: from a reconsideration of *The Wire* to an unexpected proposal from Scott Walker.

Dave Zirin says his experience of the Baltimore unrest has taken some of the luster off his love for the HBO drama The Wire. Why? "I am now seeing what the The Wire was missing, despite its much lauded, painstaking verisimilitude: the voices of people organizing together for change," which absence renders the show's pessimism "childish." I love The Wire myself, and while every work of art has its flaws, and you love works of art largely because of what you see of yourself in them anyway, Mr. Zirin is dead-on. Read the whole thing, and maybe one day HBO will give us a series about the struggles of community organizers.

Dean Baker catches USA Today distorting the facts in an unabashed pro-"free" trade piece. Long story short: USA Today talks "manufacturing output" as if our government doesn't count parts made overseas as part of "output" here, plus they don't adjust for inflation, just like the oldheads who whinge on about how they made $2/hour in 1969 and it never hurt them none. Also, "manufacturing output" sure isn't the same as "manufacturing jobs."

FAIR catches Chuck Todd utterly failing to mention Bernie Sanders on Meet the Press the same day he mentioned a dozen other Presidential candidates, and Mr. Todd responds -- by saying that he had him on eight months ago (or approximately eight months before he declared his candidacy), and that he's mentioned him on the show's website, when we all know that websites are where big news corporations push coverage they don't want on the TV. I'm so glad I didn't take that bet that he'd show any humility at all in his response to criticism. Working in the "liberal" media means never having to admit you're wrong, after all.

ProPublica reports that the more traditional colleges and universities have joined the fight against Obama Administration proposals that would make for-profit colleges adhere to stricter rules or lose federal funding. Yes, it's hard to believe, since, as the author says, "the higher education establishment has viewed the for-profit education business" like "the cousin with the rap sheet who seeks a cut of the family inheritance." I wouldn't count out the possibility that these "traditional" venues of learning might want to become more like "the cousin with the rap sheet" themselves. Still, it's quite anti-intellectual to come down on the side of less accountability for how our government spends our money.

Finally, in a burst of honesty I hadn't expected, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says he'd like to institute "right-to-work" laws at the federal level. And he pretends there's some irony in being a small-government guy but wanting big government intervention here, as if anything a government does is automatically anti-freedom. Of course, the "opportunity" he's talking about unleashing here is the "opportunity" to make less money at your job, and for your non-union workers to enjoy union benefits without paying for them. The best thing that could happen now is for him to say he was taken out of context when questioned about it, which, given the eventuality that he'll have to please moderate voters, is not outside the realm of possibility.

Around the table: the Rahm Emanuel lifetime, the income gap, prevailing wage laws, the Rand Paul lifetime, Indiana whiners, and walkable communities.

Ho hum, incumbent Rahm Emanuel wins Chicago mayoral runoff over Jesus "Chuy" Garcia by a 56-44 margin. The story of Mr. Emanuel's re-election will be the money, though plenty of underfunded candidates used to win elections all the time, and can do so again, with superior messaging. And frankly, it looks to me like Mr. Emanuel's mea culpas before the camera worked (just as they did for Charles Percy in 1978!), and it also looks to me like Mr. Garcia let Mr. Emanuel define him before he defined himself, and I'm tired enough of that tale that I won't declare victory just because Mr. Garcia forced a runoff against a corporatist Democrat.

Nicholas Fitz at Scientific American reminds us that we, as Americans, don't quite understand how bad the income gap between rich and poor has become. Long story short: studies find that Americans think the rich have a much smaller share of American wealth than they actually do, that the income gap between CEOs and workers is much smaller than it actually is, and that upward mobility in America is much more common than it really is. The good news? Americans are good people, and would like a much less unequal society.

Wisconsin Republicans prepare their next attack on workers: a bill that would repeal the state's "prevailing wage" law for construction workers on state and local projects. That law ensures that governments would actually have to pay workers as well as similar local businesses do -- and would have to pay workers brought in from another locality as well as they'd be paid in their own locality. Instead, Republicans want government to use its power to drive wages downward. They really do love big government -- if they can use it to redistribute your income to their big donors.

Sen. Rand Paul is running for President, and John Nichols at The Nation reminds us that his populist/libertarian talk is just talk. We've gone over all the things he hasn't done -- like, that his supposed iconoclasm on drugs and war-making has yielded exactly bupkus as far as results -- but I did not know that he just about single-handedly derailed a bill that would have given Washington, D.C. residents more autonomy over their tax dollars (a small government sort of thing, amirite?) by attaching all sorts of amendments relating to guns, abortion, and "right to work." Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The Washington Post informs us that "Many Indiana Residents Feel Embarrassed and Misunderstood" over all the controversies (not just the "religious freedom" law) concerning their state over the past few weeks. Well, stop whining, Indiana, and then stop electing knuckle-draggers to office, and if you do these things, the medicine might taste a little better.

Finally, Jay Walljasper at Yes! magazine describes how walkable Arlington County, VA, has become, and suggests it might be a good model for other suburban areas looking to reduce auto traffic and attract more commerce. Improved transit helped, but only around train stops at first; the real boons came when the county committed to an "urban village" planning model, with wider sidewalks, bike lanes, median islands, and walking tours (among other things) helping folks slow down -- because, as one local lawyer says, "(y)ou notice lots more things, like kids playing, when you’re living at 5 miles per hour." Good for them.

Around the table: research apps, apparent "niceness," "liberal" media hypocrisy, "right to work," and homelessness.

The Consumerist notes that collecting users' medical data to help researchers, as Apple's new app suite ResearchKit would do, has some issues. And it ain't all about the privacy, though you may not have as much of that as you think, either -- issues mostly derive from users and researchers not "interacting in person in some way," which opens the door to made-up data, data skewed by class (since wealthier people tend to own smartphones, though I suspect that's changing as time goes on), and data that just isn't that useful, since every user's medical problems may not be that much of a help to anyone else.

If you were looking for one post summarizing all the reasons Scott Walker would make a terrible President, thank Right Wing Watch, because they wrote a great one -- replete with 32 links, including seven in one glorious paragraph. It occurs to me that when folks like Ted Cruz run for President, they make folks like Scott Walker look somehow "moderate," and that's mainly, I still think, because Sen. Cruz projects a "passionate" demeanor while Gov. Walker projects a "level" one. Confusing a man's outward "niceness" and his radical, reactionary works is a dangerous mistake, and I hope the American people understand that sooner rather than later.

I don't mean to assert that Hillary Clinton's email imbroglio is much ado about nothing, because it's not, but Joe Conason is right to remind us that the "liberal" media has been ignoring those times Republican Presidential candidates -- and Presidents! -- did similar things. Jeb Bush has released perhaps one in 10 emails he wrote as Florida's Governor, Scott Walker concocted a complete shadow email system while he was Milwaukee County executive -- and the Administration of Mr. Accountability One himself, George W. Bush, lost millions of emails and never archived millions more.

Since it's apparently Scott Walker day around here, let us at least celebrate the fact that Wisconsin unions have sued to keep that state's notorious "right to work" law from taking effect, asserting that the law allows the state to take a union's property (i.e. union dues, used to provide services to workers) without "just compensation." That might succeed and it might not, but let's get to business: people who join a union without knowing they're going to pay dues are ignorant, and people who think they're paying more in dues than they're gaining in income are dumb.

Finally, Carl Gibson writes about the research suggesting that it's cheaper to put the homeless in homes than it is to leave them out on the street. Right-wingers imagine that leaving the homeless to their own devices is "fiscally responsible," but the Big Gummint "socialist" solution of putting them in existing homes (or build tiny homes for them, as Occupy Madison did in Wisconsin's capital city) would actually cost the taxpayer less -- because the taxpayer pays to put homeless folks in the ER, or put them in jail, or put them in shelters, or (even) to put them on planes and ship them out of town, a spectacularly useless and cruel stunt.

Action: smarter sentencing, climate change, and food stamps.

H.R. 920/S. 502, the Smarter Sentencing Act, is one of those rare instances of a bill that's actually bipartisan in the way the people's will is actually bipartisan -- you know, versus thinks like "free" trade deals, where the elites on both sides come together in a "bipartisan" manner to screw the people over. The Smarter Sentencing Act goes further than much other sentencing-related legislation we've supported here: it would cut mandatory minimum drug sentences in half, give judges more flexibility in sentencing drug offenders, and allow folks sentenced to crack-related crimes before 2010 to get their sentences reduced. And did I mention bipartisan! Senate sponsors range from Sheldon Whitehouse on the left to Ted Cruz on the right; House sponsors range from Barbara Lee to Raul Labrador. I wish this bipartisan smart-on-crime trend yielded more results -- politicians have been making these noises for a decade now -- but that just means we have to keep pushing. Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Smarter Sentencing Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer to end its association with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Since folks started organizing to sever corporate ties with ALEC in 2012, over 100 corporations (lately including Google, Facebook, and eBay) have stopped associating with the group responsible for writing the Voter ID bills and right-to-work bills (among so many other backward, pro-corporate bills!) so many states have passed over the years. Why Pfizer? Because ALEC has lately declared its "skepticism" in re climate change, and Pfizer has declared the opposite; you'd think Pfizer wouldn't want to associate with folks who think climate change is a hoax perpetrated by an environmental lobby they want you to think is far more powerful than it actually is (so that you don't think the fossil-fuel lobby is as powerful as it is, naturally). And, once we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR, perhaps Pfizer will do the right thing and help starve the ALEC beast of the money it needs to continue working on behalf of its corporate paymasters.

Finally, Republicans are still strutting around like they own America -- an impression they got, perhaps, from the national Democrats' second Election Day lie-down in four years -- and as a result they're actually talking about cutting our food stamp program further. Congress successfully cut food stamps by almost $9 billion over 10 years in the nefarious 2014 Farm Bill reauth, but still Republicans yammer on about fraud and inefficiency, though they haven't been able to actually prove any claims about fraud and inefficiency. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk that you won't tolerate any more cuts to food stamp programs that working families need. Why do they need it? Because too many American corporations still act in an utterly immoral manner -- sitting on trillions of dollars in "earnings," extracting handouts and bailouts from weakling Congressfolk, spending money on stock buybacks instead of investing in America. And when corporations act like that, people suffer. It's well past time politicians started acting like people are more important than corporations.

Around the table: Republicans demonstrate How Not to Be, part 447.

"Cookie-Cutter ALEC Right-to-Work Bills Pop in Multiple States," announces PR Watch. You'll see the uncanny similarities between ALEC's model "right-to-work" bill and the "right-to-work" bill in New Hampshire, and you'll get to track "right-to-work" bills Missouri, New Mexico, West Virginia, and other states. ALEC is even trying to get those bills passed at the local level, which usually requires enabling legislation ("enabling," what a perfect word!) at the state level. But we'll fight at every level.

The Consumerist describes an unlikely ally we have in our battle against payday lenders: faith-based groups. It's always heart-warming to hear a religious figure say things like "(t)his is not a liberal versus conservative issue, this is simply a right or wrong issue," and more so to see churches educating their communities or establishing their own alternative loan programs to serve them. But it's a shame we have to be even a little surprised when faith-based groups join a battle against evil.

The Economic Policy Institute finds that more education doesn't guarantee you'll be safe from declining wages -- that folks with "some college" are finding their wages declining the fastest, and even folks with advanced degrees aren't getting ahead. So when your right-wing uncle (or next Republican President) says the solution to getting ahead is just getting more schooling -- preferably in "something useful"! -- you have yet another arrow in the quiver. If you want to pile on, you might mention how awful student debt has become.

Richard Eskow wonders if strong populist support for Social Security and Medicare will help determine who advances in the Democratic primary to succeed retiring Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski. Rep. Donna Edwards has outflanked Rep. Chris Van Hollen in her zeal to protect these compacts so far -- and I don't see Mr. Van Hollen, a figure in House Democratic leadership for some time, retorting that he was "willing to consider" cuts to Social Security and Medicare because he's a leader and leaders have to work with the other side. Jesus Mary and Joseph you don't work with the other side when they're trying to burn everything down, you work around them.

Finally, just as several Republican Senators are admitting that maybe that letter to Iran wasn't such a hot idea, at least two Capitol Hill aides have advanced a novel interpretation of Republican intentions: that the letter was "a 'cheeky' reminder of the congressional branch’s prerogatives," and that the Obama Administration "has no sense of humor." Depends on which cheek they mean, I suppose. Seriously, though: grown-ups don't hide behind "jokes."

Around the table: starving the beast in the Appalachians, and other stories.

Andrew Cockburn suggests that the "mystique of high-value targeting" won't defeat ISIS. Why? If you saw Munich, you already know the answer: take out one target, and another one jumps right in its place, and so it goes with ISIS, which steps up its attacks when a leader dies, to a large degree because they're "invariably and immediately replaced, and almost always by someone (often a relative ready for revenge) younger, more aggressive, and eager to prove himself." We might do better by, oh, I don't know, trying not to control other countries so we can take their resources from them, and then making war on them when we don't get our way. I know it's not as sexy, but it just might work better.

The European Union seems headed in the wrong direction on its net neutrality proposal -- this, after the EU Parliament declared its support for strong net neutrality principles. You'll recognize the demons the EU would set loose -- paid prioritization, actual censorship -- and you'll also recognize the pushback (the "Keep the Internet Open" manifesto signed by youth from 24 different EU countries). I hope they look at what's happened in America so far and realize that they can win.

The battle over solar power in Florida remains interesting, as a group called Conservatives for Energy Freedom is blasting Americans for Prosperity (who else?) for opposing a ballot initiative that would make rooftop solar easier to do in the Sunshine State. When you see the Christian Coalition and the Sierra Club on the same side of something, you might conclude it's actual bipartisanship, not the fake corporate "bipartisanship" the two political parties continually foist upon us.

So Gov. Walker (E-WI) signs the "right-to-work" bill he was so "reluctant" to push, and President Obama slams it. But where was the President when the Employee Free Choice Act was one vote short of breaking a filibuster? Not working the phones, like he was when he was trying to get Ben Bernanke another term at the Fed (or, to his credit, when he was trying to get don't-ask-don't-tell repealed). Meanwhile, Mr. Walker thinks Mr. Obama should look to Wisconsin if he wants to get things done -- a state lagging behind most of the rest of the country in job creation!

Finally, we learn that telling big banks to stop funding mountaintop removal coal-mining is having an impact, as PNC Bank -- only the nation's 7th largest bank, but one of the banks most invested in mountaintop removal -- announces it will no longer fund two coal corporations still practicing mountaintop removal, which effectively ends their involvement in funding the practice. You may remember telling PNC to do that last year. PNC joins otherwise unsavory bankster corporations such as Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo in this refusal. Now that's what I call "starving the beast."

Around the table: "right to work," "free" trade -- does anything happen in America without ironic quotation marks anymore?

Wisconsin is about ready to enact a "right to work" bill, despite Gov. Walker's stated reticence to do so -- but now Gov. Walker says his pledge not to push for right-to-work only applied to his first term. He's normally a much better liar than that -- Jesus Mary and Joseph he's on record as touting his "partnership" with private-sector unions -- but since there's no penis or Botox in this story, the "liberal" media won't make much of it, so you have to hope his Republican primary opponents hammer the "you can't trust him" line to death out of mere self-interest, and then his eventual Democratic opponent does the same.

New York state Labor Department orders minimum wage hike for tipped workers to $7.50. And if the state legislature adopts Gov. Cuomo's proposal to allow New York City to hike its own minimum wage by another dollar per hour, tipped workers would see that hike, too. Of course, New York City Mayor DeBlasio is shooting for $15/hour, but he may not get that out of the legislature. Meanwhile, the restaurant trade groups advance not only the ZOMG TEH WAGEZ KILLS TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!!! line, but the "extreme, unprecedented 50 percent increase" scare number, though surely not all restaurants pay their employees that little.

Ho hum, the Obama Administration is selling the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal "with literally the same promises" as President Clinton used to sell SHAFTYA, er, NAFTA. More jobs, more markets for our exports, blah blah blah. What actually happened? A "$181 billion U.S. trade deficit with NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada and the related loss of 1 million net U.S. jobs under NAFTA, growing income inequality, displacement of more than one million Mexican campesino farmers and a doubling of desperate immigration from Mexico, and more than $360 million paid to corporations after 'investor-state' tribunal attacks on, and rollbacks of, domestic public interest policies." Conservatives should note that last one -- it means "free" trade agreements can nullify American laws.

Michelle M. Francl at Slate describes some of the more ridiculous claims of the Food Babe (real name: Vani Hari). I hadn't spent any time on her before, believe it or not, and though she seems to have done some good, you don't have to be Bruce Willis's character in Fast Food Nation to be annoyed with her obsession with the nether-regions of animals winding up in your food (which happens with much less regularity than she says). She may just not know that coal tar hasn't come from coal for some time, but she should, and anyway maybe she does and is just like all the others.

Finally, some good news: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel not only didn't escape a runoff in Tuesday's primary election, but did considerably worse than polls supposed, while the second-place finisher, Cook County Board of Commissioners member Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, did considerably better than those polls supposed. Maybe Chicagoans are profoundly tired of Mr. Emanuel's relentless shoveling of city resources into his cronies' pockets, some of which, apparently, doesn't even happen under the guise of "privatizing city services," though that's how a more cautious crook would do it. I wonder if his BFF, President Obama, comes out to help him in the April runoff. My hope: Mr. Obama would regard that, at least officially, as unbecoming of the office.

Around the table: from bipartisan rumblings against "free" trade to a CEO who actually gets it.

"Left and Right Align in Fighting Obama's Trade Agenda," announces the New York Times, and we can only hope! Seriously, though, I doubt very many teabagger Congressfolk will be with us in the end. I'm not even sure rank-and-file Tea Party members are with us on this, because they are, to put it gently, a profoundly confused lot. The Times doesn't help with its reporting, which gives plenty of air to charges that President Obama's exceeded his authority (from people who must have been asleep during Tha Bush Mobb years!) and no air to, for example, "free" trade agreements' ability to nullify American laws.

David Cay Johnston at al Jazeera discusses the "faux tax reform" being offered by both President Obama and Congressional Republicans. Mr. Johnston largely concentrates on the now-abandoned Obama proposal to start taxing 529 college-savings plans, which mostly quite well-off folks use, and the Obama proposal to assess a tax amnesty rate of 19% on offshore corporate profits. Still, we could use some more aggressive reformers in Congress who would tax corporate profits and millionaire income hard -- and not just get rid of all the handouts for rich folks.

Michael Paarlberg at the Guardian writes a pretty thorough takedown of "right-to-work" laws in America, demonstrating that such laws don't create jobs or increase individual freedom, since all they do is deprive unions of union dues. Best passage: "Right-to-work laws illustrate the fundamental inconsistency at the heart of anti-union libertarianism. The outrage that small-government types voice in response to any infringement on individual liberties suddenly vanishes when those infringements happen in a workplace. And, as the saying goes, you get more orders from your boss in a day than you get from the government in a year."

Speaking of the ongoing war on unions, three Republican Senators introduce a "resolution of disapproval" which seeks to overturn a recent NLRB rule mandating speedier union elections. The notion that workers will resent their dues going to political campaigning is rubbish, since forcing members to contribute to such campaigns is against the law in the first place, but the notion that corporations just won't have time to prepare for union elections, when so many of them pay folks whose only job is fighting unionization, is almost as absurd.

Finally, Jim Hightower describes how one CEO -- Mark Bertolini of Aetna -- has rejected the it's-all-about-me behavior of contemporary corporate CEOs, by paying his workers no less than $16/hour and lowering health insurance costs for his lowest-paid workers. And he tells his executives to read Thomas Piketty's book! Aetna rakes in $62 billion annually, and expects Mr. Bertolini's reforms to cost some $26 million annually; you and I might note that $26 million is less than one-twentieth of one percent of $62 billion, but most other CEOs will look at that $26 million and say, that $26 million should be mine!

Around the table: the overrated "Brownback effect," and other stories.

Martha Burk explains why the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" would be a bad deal for women. Long story short: this "free" trade deal would, in addition to all the other harm it would cause, cut off access to generic HIV drugs (which more women need these days) and outsource majority-female professions (like human resources departments, now there's irony for you). I notice that the protestor in the graphic holds up a sign saying the TPP would affect 40% of the world's Gross Domestic Product. You'd think Republicans would be up in arms about that figure -- after all, they got so hysterical about the Affordable Care Act affecting a mere 17% of America's economy.

University of Cambridge study finds that when police wear body cameras, they use less force on citizens. It's one study, so let's see it replicated, but it's hardly an unexpected result. And no it's not an example of TEH BIG BROTHERZ WATCHINGZ UZ!!!!!!, like warrantless wiretapping and NSA data-vacuuming -- it's an example of the people watching their public servants so they do less harm. People also complain too much about police turning the cameras off, as if there's just no way to subject such "mistakes" to discipline.

Israeli high court orders the West Bank settlement of Amona demolished, and its 300 residents relocated, within two years. The Israeli government didn't even authorize the settlement in 1995, and has for years admitted that it's illegal -- but keeps asking for extensions on relocation and keeps claiming it's bought some of the land in question. But why do the article's last two paragraphs (out of 10) concern a completely unrelated firebomb attack? Hysterically insisting that everything is intimately related to everything else is a right-wing trick that the "liberal" media certainly shouldn't enable.

ProPublica finds that banksters routinely "bragged" about how easily they could influence agencies like S&P's and Moody's to rate their tobacco-settlement bonds more highly than they deserved. And surprise, surprise, those same tobacco bonds (which, as you know, some states have used to fill budget holes, never mind the exorbitant fees or the consequences when the bonds come due) "have proved much riskier than advertised." If you thought conservatism was all about fiscal responsibility, recall that "conservatives" pushed for 49 states to adopt balanced-budget constitutional amendments, so that states become desperate for budget fixes like these (and others, like raiding their own pension funds). You could say balanced-budget amendments present yet another example of how "zero tolerance" policies hurt a lot more than they help.

Finally, Politico suggests that Republican governors won't cut state taxes much further, given how badly the Sam Brownback tax-cuts-for-the-rich "experiment" is going in Kansas. The article is larded with quotations from Republican operatives about how moving slow is the best way to go, etc., but I bet Republican "unwillingness" to cut taxes lasts only until the next self-created catastrophe they inflict on their states. And nothing prevents a Scott Walker from inflicting some other catastrophe -- like making Wisconsin a "right-to-work" state because WE'RE BROKE!!!!, for instance.

Around the table: "right to work," coming to a city or county near you! And other tales.

Moshe Z. Marvit spots the organizations behind "right-to-work" laws plotting to get those laws passed at the municipal and county levels. "Right-to-work" laws essentially allow workers to enjoy union representation without paying dues, which does little except starve unions -- it doesn't lower wages, or right-wingers would have said so, and if it doesn't lower wages, as Mr. Marvit notes, it's hard to argue that it "lures businesses." Trouble for right-to-work proponents is that Taft-Hartley's allowance of right-to-work laws in a "State or Territory," and "territory" means "territory," not "city" or "state." But it only takes one judge to say differently.

Community broadband fans, take note: the government of Chanute, KS, population 9,119, has decided to offer its gigabit fiber-optic service to homes and businesses, and AT&T is throwing a tantrum about it. AT&T is trying to block Chanute's service at the state level, and when you note that Chanute's service costs a mere $5 more monthly than AT&T's DSL service that is not even one one-hundredth as fast, you can sorta see why. Chanute's utilities director seems fairly more optimistic that he'll get the OK from the state to raise bonds. I'm not -- unless Sam Brownback decides to let his foot up off the throat of Kansas now that he's got his second term.

Citizens for Tax Justice finds the House one-year corporate welfare extension bill only a little less nauseating than their planned 10-year extension. Note well: "Often a lawmaker or a special interest group will argue that the tax extender legislation should be enacted because it includes some provision that seems well-intentioned but makes up only a tiny fraction of the cost of the overall package of tax breaks." Is a $40 tax break for teachers who buy school supplies (or even the wind power tax credit or mortgage debt forgiveness exception) really worth tens of billions of dollars in corporate handouts? Given that no law of physics prevents Congress from passing worthwhile tax credits on their own, I call that a hostage situation.

Know that Red Cross claim that they spend 91 cents out of every donated dollar actually helping people? Well, not exactly -- over the last few years they've spent as much as a quarter of their donations on administrative overhead including fundraising, which meets the recommendation issued by the Better Business Bureau. But that might also be bunkum, since some 70% of Red Cross spending relates to its blood business -- where the Red Cross takes donated blood and sells it to hospitals and health care facilities. And you thought you were donating it!

Finally, we have yet another casualty of the rush to get the government funded: House leadership strips the Massie-Sensenbrenner-Lofgren defense appropriations bill amendment -- which would have curtailed NSA "backdoor" searches on American data, and which passed the House by an almost 3-1 margin back in June -- out of the end-of-year omnibus spending bill. The House leadership, selling out actual bipartisan, popular, and needed legislation in the name of "getting something done"? Why, that is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD!

Around the table: an actual victory for justice and civilization! And more right-wing attempts to destroy both.

Good news: the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals halted the execution of Scott Panetti (scheduled to take place yesterday), until it can consider "late-arriving and complex legal questions at issue in this matter." The 5th Circuit may ultimately allow Texas to carry out the sentence, against a man who tried to call Jesus Christ, John F. Kennedy, and the Pope as witnesses in his murder trial, but every reprieve is a victory for justice and civilization.

Despite Gov. Scott Walker's public pronouncements that he has no interest in turning Wisconsin into a "right-to-work" state, some of his allies have announced plans to do just that. And then Scott Walker can say it was the people who wanted it! But citing declining union membership in public sector unions since Act 10 would be rather like citing declining automobile travel on highways after installing steel spikes on every exit ramp. And if Mary Burke had pledged to veto any budget that didn't repeal Act 10, she'd probably be Governor right now.

Judd Legum at Think Progress reminds us that Missouri could still prosecute Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown if "the court having criminal jurisdiction" over the case can find a lawyer willing to prosecute it. Let me guess how the right wing would react to such a development: ZOMG ACTIVIZT JUDGEZ!!!!! (Mr. Legum refers to Missouri state law; I have no idea if New York state has a similar law, now that a grand jury has declined to prosecute Eric Garner's strangler, which decision is, if anything, even more befuddling.)

Matt Wood at FreePress explains why net neutrality won't result in new fees for everyone. One simple answer would be, "well, because we've had net neutrality all these years, and where are these billyuns and billyuns of dollars in fees?" Another simple answer would be, "net neutrality opponents only come up with this kind of ooga-booga now, when they've had eight years?" But Mr. Wood negotiates the actual legal issues patiently and thoroughly.

I shouldn't be spending any time debunking utter rubbish like this, but no, the average "welfare family" does not get $61,000 in annual welfare benefits. How did David Barton come up with this number? Among other things, he counts Medicaid and CHIP spending as if it's actual income going to actual people, and he counts spending on folks above the poverty line as spending on folks below the poverty line. As the Center for Budget Priorities put it, "(p)roviding a frail senior with nursing home care does not mean that the typical low-income family with children is receiving huge amounts of benefits that give it a high standard of living."

Finally, those blessed individuals at Fox and Friends think it would be "great" if you had to pass a civics test before you can vote, apparently blissfully unaware that, well, that was a feature of Jim Crow laws. And I bet their ideal test would require you to say that when Moses handed the Constitution down from Mt. Sinai, he said that it doesn't authorize the government to help anyone, but does demand that government give massive handouts to corporations. A lot of alleged small government types seem to want to give governments new powers to keep people from voting. I wonder why that is.

Around the table: Scott Walker the radical, Rand Paul the squish, and points in between.

"Surprise! 'Pro-Business' Policies Hurt States' Economic Growth," says the headline of this Michael Hiltzik article at the Los Angeles Times. Long story short: states more likely to have low top tax rates, low/no estate taxes, fewer public employees, and "right-to-work" laws actually lag behind other states in job growth. Nice to see a major newspaper refer to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as a "radical," too, since that's what he actually is, no matter how soft-spoken he might be on the TV.

Good news, then bad news: Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin signs legislature's genetically-modified food labeling bill into law, and big food corporations promptly threaten lawsuits. The Grocery Manufacturers Association says that "government has no compelling interest in warning consumers about GMO foods." Why not? Apparently, because they think they're completely safe -- and why wouldn't you trust what food corporations say about the foods that make them their money?

A report from Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy tells us that charter schools have wasted at least $136 million over the last two decades in just 15 states, largely thanks to lax state oversight. And when I say "wasted," I mostly mean "stolen" -- the charter school isn't just a way to bust teachers' unions and make public schools poorer, it's also a way for certain charter school officials to buy goodies for themselves. The report echoes concerns expressed by the federal Department of Education's Inspector General in 2010. Is Congress listening? Not unless we put the word "Benghazi" in the report, I suspect.

ABC reports on a Massachusetts couple who claim not only that a wind turbine operating a quarter-mile from their house made them sicker, but that it caused them to take a loss when they sold their home. But not only did Mrs. Hobart later admit that she'd had the ringing in her ears before the turbine went in, ABC also missed the Falmouth Zoning Board's determination that the loss the Hobarts took on their home was also due to mold and radon found on the property, which -- as anyone who's ever bought or sold a house will tell you -- is a big deal. And personal to people who think wind turbines are too loud: try living in New Jersey. Then you'll know what noise is.

Finally, Rand Paul says the Republican party should "lay off" voter ID laws because they're "offending people." Which stance should please none of his die-hard supporters ("you're going to stop supporting something just because it offends people?") nor earn him new ones in minority communities (since he still hasn't come out against photo IDs, nor has he come around to the idea that voter fraud really doesn't happen in noticeable numbers). As a Gourdian-knot slicer, Rand Paul is no Alexander the Great. And it's nice that he wants to restore voting rights to felons, but let's see action.

Around the table: in which we are reminded that there are many kinds of prisons.

"The Military is Leaving the Missing Behind," says this ProPublica article. Tracing the story of one veteran's decades-long quest to get the remains of his cousin, we learn that 45,000 MIAs (going all the way back to World War II) that could be found haven't been found; reasons include some bureaucratic overlap, a culture of extraordinary caution, and the military's general refusal to use DNA to identify remains until the very end of a long identification process.

Don't look now, but the New York Times's alleged conservative columnist, David Brooks, was right about something last week -- that solitary confinement can be as brutal and inhumane as torture or physical violence. "(W)e need to obliterate the assumption that inflicting any amount of social pain is O.K. because it’s not real pain," he writes. Both he and George Will have become a bit more libertarian on crime and punishment since Mr. Obama's re-election, and though I think they're both trailing the popular will somewhat, I welcome it.

FBI will investigate the Corrections Corporation of America's operation of Idaho's State Penitentiary. Idaho just launched its own investigation a month ago, but the FBI will take that over; allegations of short staffing and violence (fitting, I suppose, for a State Pen popularly known as "Gladiator School") have been circulating for years, and last year a U.S. District Court judge fined CCA for falsifying staffing records. CCA is America's biggest private prison corporation, by the way. Nice work if you can get it!

I'm sure I could generate a week's worth of penny rants out of the flatugasms emanating from CPAC's annual conference, but this report stuck out: a CPAC panelist said that the "biggest impediment" to passing so-called right-to-work laws in Ohio is that state's Republican Governor, John Kasich. Really? The same Governor Kasich who signed a public union-busting law in 2011? The law that got overturned by a 20-point margin at the polls later that year? Maybe the biggest impediment to right-to-work-for-less laws in Ohio is the people of Ohio. Of course, a CPAC hack wouldn't say that -- people might get the idea they can do something about the world around them.

Finally, the Wisconsin state Senate passed Gov. Walker's tax cut plan. Mr. Walker's two-year, $537 million tax cut plan would, according to one watchdog, put Wisconsin's budget over $650 million in the red before the next state budget; recall that Mr. Walker did not inherit a deficit from his predecessor, but quickly created one right before crying WE'RE BROKE!!!! and gutting public employee unions as a "response." What will he do in "response" to the looming budget crisis he's just created? I shudder to think -- the man's like a George W. Bush who can speak in complete sentences.

Penny rants: "right-to-work" laws and another anti-tax fool.

Lake County (IN) Judge John Sedia finds Indiana's so-called "right-to-work" law unconstitutional -- but not for reasons you might think. Indiana's law mandates that no employer, labor organization, or other group can compel anyone to be a part of a union or pay dues or fees as a condition for employment -- but that allows workers to get services from a union representing them and/or their coworkers (services like legal assistance and a collectively-bargained grievance procedure -- to say nothing of heightened wages and/or benefits as a "service") without paying for them, and Article I, Section 21 of the Indiana state constitution mandates that everyone who provides a service (i.e., the union) must receive "just compensation." Judge Sedia didn't rule the law unconstitutional on, say, First Amendment right to free association grounds (which I'd find far more convincing than any argument favoring corporate "personhood"), and the Indiana Supreme Court will rule on an appeal in less than a month's time. Still, it's a foot in the door.

Forks Twp., PA man pays $7,000-plus of his property tax bill in one-dollar bills. To make a point about taxes, of course. Why should he have to pay for public schools when his wife homeschools their three children? Partly because the public school benefits him, whether his kids go there or not, but mainly because he belongs to a community of citizens, a community which governs itself for the good of all the people therein. I mean, I don't tell folks I should get reimbursed by our government for my share of the money we spent in Iraq because it violated my moral convictions, and that's because I understand that that's the risk of being part of a civilized society. Why doesn't Mr. Fernandes get that? I wouldn't necessarily oppose giving him a small tax break for homeschooling his kids, but I sure hope he never gets it in his head that he doesn't have to pay taxes on roads he doesn't drive or libraries he doesn't use or cops and firemen he doesn't call. And the McDonald's analogy is utter crap -- no matter how much big gummint money McDonald's gets to make its food unnaturally cheap, McDonald's is neither a state-owned restaurant nor a public service.