Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: useful idiots, everywhere!

Lots of good ways to think about our current predicament in Ben Debney's article "Culture Wars Defend the Minority of the Opulent From the Majority." The other day I suggested cultural warriors were "useful idiots" for corporate power, but Mr. Debney reminds us that the culture war is also very much like a protection racket -- "at a price, they offered protection against evils that they themselves would otherwise inflict, or at least allow to be inflicted." We find this to be literally true in the latest child-molestation scandal involving Southern Baptists! And maybe I don't say this enough, but the cultural warriors are all whiny little diaper-loaded brats! Their real problem with America isn't that they have "no voice in the public square," but that theirs isn't the only voice in the public square.

It's a damn shame that there are enough mass school shootings that scholars can study them and detect patterns in them, but from James Densley and Jillian Peterson at The Conversation we can learn a few things about these shootings. Like, either boys or 18-year-old men carry them out, they generally don't intend to live past the shooting, they generally leave warnings about what they're about to do, and most of them have a connection to the school at which they kill people. Also, it's not so much about "fame and notoriety" as it is about anger. I found getting along with other kids pretty tough when I was that age, which certainly wasn't all their fault, and I imagine it's only gotten worse for the teenagers who've come after me.

Our Supreme Court essentially sentences two likely-innocent men to death in ruling that inmates convicted in state courts can't appeal to federal courts if they had bad counsel. Why should a state get to abridge a citizen's Constitutionally-granted (and therefore federal) rights? Beats me. Oh, wait, I know: so that the Court's far-right wing, now numbering six of nine, can claim a broad "state's right" to ignore our Constitution whenever convenient, at which point it'll be bye-bye to a lot of things we've fought and died for. And dig Justice Thomas's whining about having to deal with "serial relitigation of final convictions"! Or, as your right-wing uncle would say, how many trials do we have to give a guy? The civilized person's answer: as many as it takes until justice is done. That is what great nations do, isn't it?

Henry Kissinger says that defeating Russia would have "disastrous" consequences. Like? Oh, you know, "upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome," and remember that Russia's been around for hundreds of years! Citing these as reasons not to hand Russia a decisive defeat sure sounds like an argument against ever doing the right thing if it injures any nation that happens to have endured for centuries. If our country gets taken over by fascists and starts bombing the crap out of Central and South America, I guess he'll argue against our "humiliation" or "defeat" for the same reason. Personally, I think the civilized people should make these decisions.

Finally, Sen. Sinema (D?-AZ) says that "D.C. solutions" to our mass murder epidemic aren't "realistic" (while Arizona's other Senator, whose wife nearly got killed by a mass shooter, has a more humane response). First off, new rule: no one who works in government gets to suggest that government just doesn't work, as the phrase "D.C. solutions" surely does, not just because they might be the reason government doesn't work, but also because they're biting the hand that feeds them and we are that hand, since we're the taxpayers who pay her salary. Second, her vaunted "message discipline" is starting to sound merely like the absence of empathy, which might make her the Sam Alito of the Democratic caucus.

Around the table: chronicling more right-wingers right-winging it up.

How might big corporations fight new SEC climate change disclosure rules, per Daniel E. Walters and William M. Manson at The Conversation?. They'll say it'll cost them more than our SEC says it will; they'll say our SEC can't regulate disclosure of "Scope 3 emissions" (which result mainly from the activities of suppliers and producers); they'll say our SEC can't regulate "major questions" like climate-related disclosures at all, though it seems to me that telling investors what they're in for in re a corporation's dedication to battling climate change fits our SEC's mission fairly snugly.

Sonali Kohatkar says our Postal Service can be a model for other government agencies. For all the hurt inflicted upon our Postal Service by the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act's benefits pre-payment mandate, our Postal Service still "delivers to more addresses with fewer...employees” than big private mail services like UPS or FedEx, both of which don't handle our Postal Service's volume, or deliver to areas where they don't think they can make money. To those who'd say "mail delivery is hardly comparable to such complex needs as health care or banking," Ms. Kolhatkar reminds us that the private corporations that dominate these fields hardly do very well at them -- mainly because they account to their owners and shareholders more than they do to their customers.

Dan Pfeiffer explains "Why the MAGA Movement Loves Putin," a.k.a. "Russia's Pinochet." He lists four reasons -- they're "addicted to strength," they have "an apocalyptic mentality," they love "white power," and they understand "the perverse incentives of the internet attention economy" -- all of which might well be boiled down to "they follow the biggest dick." Of course, right-wingers don't love real strength; they love acting out the drama of strength, a drama that usually involves a lot of yelling at liberals and fantasizing about doing violence to them (or, maybe, just doing violence to them). It's kinda like watching a car wreck, which I'm sure is the idea.

When I hear that a majority of Americans believe "public schools are on the wrong track," I remember that Americans have legitimate fears about what two years of mostly-remote learning has done to their kids, but I still feel like right-wing propaganda has caused this particular poll result. Right-wingers ginned up controversy over something that doesn't even get taught in schools and now we all feel some kind of way about "racism"? That's so beneath us as Americans. And how have we responded to this question (or similar ones) in previous polls? We should know that, so we know more about what these results mean, but sadly, the article doesn't tell us.

Branko Marcetic at Jacobin performs a public service by reminding us that "The Right is Still the Enemy of Freedom." Regardless of Republicans' newfound (and selective, and opportunistic!) opposition to big tech corporations, they're still the ones "criminalizing protest," "banning books, concepts, and even words from schools," and "using executive power in new, repressive ways." 23 states (all run entirely by Republicans) have criminalized protest, 11 laws have made it damn near impossible to talk about racism in many schools, and Republicans have spearheaded anti-BDS laws in 32 states, when you'd think refusing to give money to someone would be a value for which they'd fight to the death. And, of course, they love themselves some Putin and Orbán.

Finally, Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) says that just as our Supreme Court should have left abortion to the states, they should have left laws against interracial marriage to the states! He tried to walk it back, of course, saying he "misunderstood a line of questioning" and discrimination is always wrong yadda yadda yadda, but we need to take the time to explain exactly why he's wrong. If we believe, as a civilization, that you should get to marry whomever you want -- the only way to interpret our Supreme Court's ruling in Oberkfell v. Hodges -- then we cannot accept a state's "right" to keep you from doing that. Mr. Braun, like many right-wingers, loves "states' rights" more than he loves people. This remains a common malady among Congressfolk, but not a tolerable one.

Around the table: the Ukraine *still* could be Russia's Iraq! And other truths.

Patrick Cockburn instructs us again that "Putin is Playing a Strong Hand on Ukraine" "as Long as He Doesn't Invade." British and American officials are creating a lot of drama here, but the former Ukrainian defense minister tells us that the 127,000 soldiers along the Ukraine's borders "is not enough for a full-scale offensive." That sounds right, once you consider that the area of the Ukraine is over 600,000 square miles, whereas the area of Iraq is a little over 437,000 square miles, and you recall Gen. Shinseki telling us in February of 2003 that 150,000 troops in Iraq would be nowhere near enough to occupy that nation -- a matter about which he was entirely correct! Further reports from both the Ukraine and France should obliterate British and American drama about the matter once and for all, though I know they won't.

Alex Pareene may not be entirely serious in titling his latest missive "Abolish States," but he does point out a lot of problems with contemporary "states' rights" conservatism If we can even call it conservatism! "States' rights" was always "a fig leaf for Jim Crow and 'massive resistance,'" true, but states also act like the federal government they profess to hate when they restrict the will of local governments. Mr. Pareene gives many examples of this nefarious phenomenon, and you can no doubt think of more; Pennsylvania residents need only remember the state legislature's efforts to stop municipalities from banning fracking during the Tom Corbett era. Why, if I had a dollar for every time I said "now there's conservatism for you!" back then I might be able to quit my day job. Professing a dedication to "federalism," as right-wingers do, doesn't wipe such hypocrisy away, of course; you either believe the smallest body of government should make the most decisions, or you don't. (I do happen to believe that! I also believe it can't happen without a strong federal government restraining wealthy/corporate power.)

When I hear that some QAnon followers can be brought back to the fold of civilization by Wordle, I find it fairly easy to resist glib statements like "you're just replacing one addiction with another," and not just because an addiction to Wordle is far better for you than an addiction to QAnon. I will admit that I've largely failed to apply the great truism of drug addiction treatment -- i.e., that you have to fill a patient's life with nurturing human connections so they don't turn back to drugs -- to folks addicted to various forms of right-wing rage. I still think we need to shame and shun such people, and I also think one person can't single-handedly re-fill someone's life with healthier obsessions, but clearly I need to develop more supple strategies.

I've long wondered why Donald Trump doesn't grab onto Ohio Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel with both hands, and apparently I'm not the only one. I'd assumed that Mr. Mandel was perhaps too obsequious in his Trump-worship and that it actually put the big man off, but apparently Mr. Trump thinks Mr. Mandel is "a charisma-free weirdo and dork" (not exactly an absurd judgment) and has also talked a lot about Mr. Mandel's sex life (a matter about which Mr. Trump should show more restraint). I'm a little puzzled that Mr. Trump hasn't also called Mr. Mandel a loser -- after all, he ran for Senate in 2012 and lost by six points despite tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions buttressing his run -- but then perhaps he's hedging his bets in case Mr. Mandel emerges as the winner, at which point he'll pretend nothing described in this paragraph happened.

Anthony DiMaggio, writing at Salon, says that his research indicates that Dominion Voting Systems has a "strong case" for defamation against the Fox News Channel. Long story short: Fox News presented evidence-free stories about alleged voter fraud concerning Dominion, refusing to air Dominion's more evidence-based rebuttals, and Fox News viewers believe that voter fraud is rampant to a much larger degree than consumers of any other media outlet, which suggests that Fox's anti-Dominion reporting actually did defame the corporation. That's almost all one would need -- one would still have to prove "actual malice," but even that isn't necessarily about proving intent, but more about proving recklessness in publishing false information. Any Fox News workers write emails protesting that these reports weren't good enough to air? Any Fox News bosses respond that they didn't give a rat's hind quarter? That's the kind of evidence Dominion could win on. (Yes, I know corporate "personhood" is an issue here, but I'm going to go ahead and file that under "goose/gander.")

Finally, GM workers in Mexico vote overwhelmingly for an independent union to bargain collectively on their behalf. An "independent" union, you say? Apparently employer-friendly unions dominate the Mexican labor movement, and you could easily imagine how they might not be working in your best interest, I would think. A 2019 labor reform law requires all union workers to vote on their existing contracts by next May, which provides an opening for workers to get real representation at work; at present, only two dozen union shops have thrown out their union, but the GM plant at Silao is the largest shop to do so to date. I wish them the best of luck -- and I wish all Mexican workers the best of luck in overcoming all their obstacles to justice, so that one day American corporations stop looking to Mexico as a way of depriving Americans of their well-paying jobs.

Action: concerning Social Security, war on Yemen, privacy, workers' rights, women's health, and Presidential power.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, block our President's recent arms sale to Saudi Arabia, and pass the Protecting Data at the Border Act; tell your Senators to pass the PRO Act and the Women's Health Protection Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protect Our Democracy Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act. Our "liberal" media love squealing that TEH SOSHUL SECURITIEZ TRUSTZ FUNDZ WILLZ GOEZ TEH BROKEZ!!!!!!, but we've blown past every deadline for the trust fund to go broke, and good Americans are still getting the checks they worked for, paid into, fought for, and deserve to enjoy in their old age. And while our "liberal" media loves talking about the "necessity" to cut benefits, none of them will talk about increasing revenues. The Social Security 2100 Act would not only increase revenues (by taxing income over $400,000 into the system for the first time) but increase benefits (by measuring inflation as it relates to seniors' lives a lot better). As Ross Perot might say, problem solved! If we speak out, that is.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to block the proposed $650 million arms sale to Saudi Arabia, which comes on top of a $500 million arms deal last month, and which the Saudis will almost certainly use in their interminable war on Yemen. And as Rep. Omar (D-MN) reminds us, we're not just selling arms to a country that's forcing Yemen into famine and destitution simply because they don't like their government, but we're also selling arms to a country that "kill(s) and torture(s) dissidents" like the journalist Jamal Khassogi, whom the Saudis killed with -- among other implements, I presume -- a bone saw. No use retorting, as Mr. Trump once did, that "(t)he world is a dangerous place!" (exclamation point in the original). One of the main reasons it's a dangerous place? We give money and weapons to killers and torturers.

Restore the Fourth helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass H.R. 5524/S. 2957, the Protect Data at the Border Act. As you know, our Supreme Court ruled back in 2014 that law enforcement needed to get a warrant to search your cellphone, because cellphones, in Chief Justice Roberts's words, "hold for many Americans 'the privacies of life'." Yet Customs and Border Patrol agents routinely search your cellphone at the border -- as lower courts "struggle" with whether our Supreme Court's ruling applies there, I guess because they think folks at the border are non-citizens, although that's far from a given (and not just because borders include coastlines). What would a conservative do? Give people at the border the protections of the law until you determine for sure that they don't merit them, that's what. And the Protect Data at the Border Act would help with that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would, among other things, clamp down on retaliation by employers against employees who try to unionize and clamp down on employers pulling you away from your work so you can sit for hours and hear their high-priced lawyers propagandize against unions. But all right-wingers bellow about is that it would outlaw state-level right-to-work laws, though there's a reason we call "right-to-work" laws "right-to-work-for-less" laws. Even if you're skeptical of federal influence in "state matters," you can't be in favor of firing workers just for trying to unionize, or pulling them off the floor to make them sit in stupid meetings for hours at a time. Can you?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act, which would essentially legalize abortion everywhere in America, now that our Supreme Court seems anxious to kill Roe v. Wade once and for all. I do not criticize anyone's sadness or pain at the mere thought of an abortion occurring, nor do I assume that the goal of anyone on the pro-choice side is "more abortions." Further, I doubt legalizing abortion would lead to that -- there were plenty of illegal abortions every year before Roe v. Wade. But we can't go back to a world that makes women into little more than breeders, and that's where right-wingers want to take us with their anti-Roe v. Wade activism. And to stop them, we have to speak out.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. The Protecting Our Democracy Act would limit a President's ability to declare national emergencies so they subvert the popular will (i.e., by building vanity border walls the people's representatives in Congress have refused to fund), plus it would prevent Presidents from profiting from their office (as a certain recent occupant of the Oval Office was known to do), and would require Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates to release 10 years of tax returns (ditto). These Trump-era sins would make our Founders spin in their graves, and though they share some of the blame for these sins (having created the Electoral College!), their hatred of untrammeled executive power is one we should all share. And act upon!

Action: concerning water privatization, voting rights, debt drama, law and order, and credit reports.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to block Aqua Pennsylvania's attempts to take over the Chester Water Authority, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, get rid of the stupid debt ceiling forever, pass the Counseling Not Criminalization Act, get rid of qualified immunity for police officers, and ensure good Americans can get credit reports easily and for free. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Aqua Pennsylvania, the private water service corporation, wants to take over the publicly-held Chester Water Authority; if they succeed, they'll likely go after the public water services of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh next, which will give them pretty near complete control of Pennsylvania's water. They're basically a monopoly in every municipality they operate, which means what, class? Higher prices for you, that's what! (No, public water isn't a "monopoly," because it belongs to you and thus you have much more control over it.) Pennsylvania's legislature is mulling HB 1936, which would prevent private corporations from buying public water systems unless those systems are in financial distress; I'd prevent it under those circumstances, too, but HB 1936 will improve matters. Thus Sum of Us helps you tell your PA state legislators to support public water.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act, and H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Ignore right-wing rubbish about "letting states run elections," because too many states have recently revealed they want to "run" elections that only Republicans can win. The Freedom to Vote Act would expand your access to the voting booth, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering where politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around, and end states' efforts to meddle in their own elections. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the Voting Rights Act so our Justice Department can step in and stop states and localities -- and not just Southern ones -- from suppressing the vote. America needs these bills to become law; I'm not sure I can put it any more simply than that.

Democracy for America helps you tell our government to end the absurd debt ceiling threat once and for all. Politicians only ever complain about our national debt when the other party runs things, and so it goes with today's Republicans, who let Donald Trump run up our national debt by nearly $8 trillion (comprising a nearly 40 percent increase) in just four years, but who now imagine we'll buy their gaslighting about how they're the "fiscally responsible" party. They may also imagine they'll be able to extort concessions (privatizing Social Security, cutting Medicare, etc.) in exchange for graciously raising the debt limit, though they haven't actually mentioned any concessions lately. So we need to neutralize the threat, and end the endless hostage-taking. And no, I don't care if President Biden does it on his own. I think most folks would call that leadership, which is a thing we haven't seen from very many Presidents lately.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4011/S. 2125, the Counseling Not Criminalization Act, which would mean fewer police officers and more counselors and nurses in our public schools. Because police officers don't have the skills to stop kids from acting out! And we shouldn't expect that of them! And a couple classes in conflict resolution can't match the abilities of folks who have spent years doing exactly that! Police officers are not Swiss Army knives, after all. If that sounds like "defunding the police" to your right-wing neighbors, then I would have to ask if maybe they care a lot more for "funding the police" than, you know, actually reducing crime. Yesterday's conservatives always said you can't just throw money at a problem; today's "conservatives" yell I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! every time you try to solve a problem. And boy do I hate yellers.

In a related note, Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers, so that good Americans can finally get justice for the wrongs police have done to them. And police have done wrongs to them! No amount of I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! will bring back the Black kids killed for having a toy gun or the Black men killed for pulling out their cellphone. And ending "qualified immunity" won't automatically send police officers to jail, it'll just take away the tool that gives them near-absolute protection from accountability; plaintiffs will still have to prove their case, as they always do. And if your right-wing neighbors tell you "cops can't do their job" without having accountability for the wrong they do, well, ask them how that's conservative. I mean, conservatives always said they were all about accountability.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell Congress to ensure you can get your credit reports easily and for free. Yes, our government already does provide free credit reports at annualcreditreport.com, but doesn't that website name strike you as a nefarious compromise? As if they went out of their way to let corporations trick you with websites with the word "free" in them? It's always seemed that way to me, that's for sure. So, yeah, we should publicized the fact that annualcreditreport.com is where you go for free credit reports, but we shouldn't let corporations charge you hundreds of dollars or siphon away your private info so they can resell it, either. That's not "the free market" in action; that's corruption in action, and for too long our politicians have just shrugged at corruption and called it "freedom." But if it makes folks less free, how is it freedom?

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare expansion, paid family leave, Medicaid expansion, and big telecom cruelty.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, expand Medicare, provide paid family/medical leave, pass a bill that would let individual counties and localities accept the Medicaid expansion where states won't, and pass the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act; and attend a rally in favor of the For the People Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Voting Rights Act used to have a list of states that needed to pre-clear their voting law changes with our Justice Department -- until our Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, ruled that discriminated against Southern states (which comprised most of that list!). The Voting Rights Advancement Act would amend the Voting Rights Act so that any state or locality with a record of suppressing the vote would have to pre-clear their voting law changes. Don't brook any silliness about how "the South has changed" from the likes of Mitch McConnell -- the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would fight vote suppression everywhere, not just the South. So let's get to it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve and expand Medicare, by lowering the eligibility age to 60 and adding hearing, vision, and dental coverage. As they say, seniors have ears, eyes, and teeth just like everyone else, so there's no reason Medicare shouldn't cover them! And though I'd rather lower the eligibility age to zero, lowering it to 60 would be a good first step. I can already hear right-wingers whine how are you going to pay for it? If we pass it as part of the next reconciliation bill, we'd get tax hikes on rich folks and corporations to help pay for it -- plus we could let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, which even the Mercatus Center has said would save Medicare about $84 billion annually. (Toward that end, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3, which would let Medicare negotiate prices for most of the drugs it buys.)

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk you want our government to provide paid family/medical leave to all our workers. That is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of the American Families Plan, so we might as well tell Congress we want it, lest they think the American people care more about whatever manufactured outrage right-wingers want to flood the zone with today. And though asking HOWZ WILLZ WE PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!! does get tiresome, just so happens Sen. Gillibrand's previous family/medical leave bills have already answered that: with a payroll tax that would cost workers making $50,000 annually less than $9/month. Nine dollars! And that's not even how I'd do it! See, this is why I get tired of people who whine about paying for things.

Both Daily Kos and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would let counties and cities sign on to the Medicaid expansion even if state governments won't do it. What would be the opposing point of view there? That "states' rights" are too important? Gosh, that would be a tired argument! States that have refused the Medicaid expansion didn't do so because of some serious policy disagreement, but merely out of cruelty. No, a desire to "stick it to Obama" counts as cruelty; I mean, the result is the same. And if Congress doesn't have a moral obligation to fight cruelty, then why do we have a democracy to begin with?

Both Color of Change and Free Press help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which would stop big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners when they talk to their families on the phone. Is it right that we would take advantage of prisoners and their families in this way? Is any cruelty OK if it makes you look "tough on crime"? And don't be the fool who says well, don't commit a crime, then, since we all know that contact with families helps folks in prison stay out once they get out. Also, too, there's a pandemic on, which means less face-to-face contact with families, which means more phone contact. Like I said, it's cruel, and that means we must change it.

Finally, Deadline for Democracy will be holding rallies all over America this week helping you tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act; here's where to find one. You just enter your zip code and find the event nearest you. Some two out of three Americans support the For the People Act, but Republicans Senators just keep on with their propaganda that an end to gerrymandering, campaign finance disclosure for big donors, 15 days of early voting nationwide, same-day and automatic voting registration, and an end to racist caging practices somehow all constitutes a "Democrat power grab." As usual, Republicans doth project too much -- they're the ones doing all the power-grabbing, and the For the People Act would make it harder for them to do it! So let's get out there, in force, and remind them who they're supposed to serve.

Action: from good House bills to bad hunting regulations.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. These are all good bills: the Voting Rights Advancement Act, for example, would put the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act that our Supreme Court knocked out, while the Save the Internet Act would reinstate the FCC's pro-internet freedom net neutrality rules as the law of the land again. So tell your Senators to pass these bills, with no excuses.

Meanwhile, H.R. 7221, the Prohibiting Law Enforcement Use of Chemical Weapons Act, would (as its title suggests!) prevent police from using tear gas as a weapon. If you're of the mind that reforms such as these would "keep cops from doing their jobs," please think about it: how many crooks do police apprehend with tear gas? It is an enormously cumbersome and imprecise weapon, much more so than a handgun or a taser. Of course, crooks don't get apprehended with tear gas -- but peaceful protestors sure do! And that's who the tear gas is really for. You would also want to consider why police would need a weapon soldiers haven't been able to use since 1997; I would discard answers that include the phrase "because the streets are so much more dangerous now," because a) that's not true and b) I just said that tear gas is a bad weapon to fight crime with. No, really, people do pretend to be that stupid. Anyway, the Other 98 helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect peaceful protestors from police violence by passing the Prohibiting Law Enforcement Use of Chemical Weapons Act.

In other news, Amazon has stepped up its feel-good PR campaign -- you saw the ad with the deaf single dad? Yeah, they'll fire his ass, too, if he walks too slowly in the warehouse -- almost like they know they achieved their position as the world's number one online retailer mainly by doing evil! Amazon has also lately imposed a one-year moratorium on police use of its infamous (and pretentiously-titled, don't think any of that Kraftwerk coolness rubs off on you!) Rekognition software. You remember Rekognition, right? The facial recognition software that's almost as bad at telling black folks apart as your right-wing uncle is? A one-year moratorium is exactly the kind of thing that's designed to make people feel good about using Amazon again -- and then quickly forgotten once the PR storm passes over, as it will for a lot of Americans, though not for a lot of black Americans who still have to face random police brutality. Anyway, MPower Change helps you tell Amazon to cut all of its ties with law enforcement. They're still providing cloud computing services to ICE, after all; think that helps out anyone but Amazon?

Finally, our National Park Service finalized rules in several Alaska national parks allowing hunters to kill bears and cubs while they hibernate and shoot wolves and coyotes while they're with their pups; the rules also allow hunters to shoot coyotes from motorboats and lure bears out of their dens with donuts so they can shoot them. Well, that all sounds very sporting, doesn't it? It doesn't sound like "good Americans ritualizing how their forebears used to survive"! It doesn't even sound like "an excuse for a bunch of guys to hang out and get drunk," as one hunter described hunting's purpose to me years ago. No, the word we're looking for here is cruel, though Alaska's Congressional delegation supports the change, claiming that it -- hey, not my words, but Sen. Murkowski's! -- is a "matter of states' rights"! Who knew the "right" to own slaves was at play here? And on federal land, no less! So, in short: it's not just cruel, it's also bad law-making. And since our Administration wants to do this to other Alaska national parks, the Alaska Wilderness League helps you oppose similar cruelty in other federal parks in Alaska.

Action: concerning social media, antibiotic abuse, and pollution.

Twitter has lately declared it won't take money for political advertising, which is interesting, I suppose, but Free Press helps you tell Twitter that they might be better off banning white supremacists from their website. Thanks to our First Amendment, our government can't put you in jail merely for being a racist (though it can if you, you know, beat up black folks), but nothing in our First Amendment says "social media must allow Nazi wannabes to spew filth in public," just as our First Amendment doesn't force publishing houses to accept every single manuscript they receive, or force shopping centers to allow everyone who wants to set up shop there to do so. I would actually be perfectly OK with them using Twitter to get together in private, but Twitter doesn't really differentiate between "public" and "private" very well, and that's Twitter's fault, not theirs, mine, or our First Amendment's. Certainly Nazi wannabes don't need a damn megaphone going off in everyone's ears all the damn time. It's not as if only one person can have First Amendment rights at a time, after all.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Drug Administration (or FDA) to stop factory farms from using antibiotics on feed animals for any purpose other than illness, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. In recent years, our FDA has mandated more veterinary oversight over antibiotic use on factory farms, which is better, but the stakes really are life-or-death for the rest of us here -- when factory farms use antibiotics on nominally healthy feed animals in order to a) fatten them up and b) allow them to endure squalid conditions more easily, then the end result might well be superbugs that resist any antibiotics, and thus a world where the next cut on your finger could kill you. None of that is alarmism, and all of that is simple logic. And if you're that worried that big factory farm corporations will collapse and we won't be able to buy any meat, find a small farmer to fill that need. They still exist, and if you find them, you can help other people find them, too -- and you can help them find more customers.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to stop its efforts to rescind California's stronger car emissions standards, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. This ain't that damn deep: the only benefits anyone will get from rolling back California's standards are a) big auto CEOs won't have to spend more money making their cars run more efficiently and b) you might -- I said might! -- pay less for a car when you buy it. Now let's list the benefits we get from the California standards: more efficient cars, less gas burnt up, fewer emissions befouling our air, and lower gas bills. (Since California is a big market, automakers tend to avoid building separate cars for different states.) Does "paying a little less for a car" outweigh "paying less for gas the entire time you own that car"? I say it does not, and that's before we reconsider the other benefits listed above. And memo to right-wingers: what happened to "states' rights" as a conservative value? Or was that only ever about slavery?

Action: fighting corruption, identity theft, and "balanced budget" amendments.

Early last week it looked like EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt had done a few, ah, questionable things, but it's just gotten worse and worse for him since then, as we've learned that his security detail is three times larger than his predecessor's, that he defied the White House's will in handing out massive pay raises to two of his cronies, and that he reassigned or demoted no less than five EPA officials who questioned his spending. Well, I guess that $43,000 "cone of silence" can't protect him from everything! We even learned that the energy lobbyist couple who rented out that $50-a-night-only-the-nights-you-stay-there condo got sick enough of him that they changed the locks on him. If only we could do that! I guess we'll have to settle for calling for his removal, as EDF Action, Public Citizen, Food and Water Action,, and People for the American Way all help you do.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that the name "Equifax" has, in the public's eyes, become synonymous with "corporation that doesn't care about protecting your data," our Congressfolk still seem desperate to pass legislation that would make it easier for corporations like Equifax to get away with losing your data to identity thieves. Maybe that's how Congress should work in the Bizarro World, but not this one. Hence one of the provisions of the notorious and nefarious S. 2155, passed by the Senate passed almost a month ago, would actually pre-empt stronger laws against identity theft at the state level. Because telling states they have no choice but to put up with weak federal anti-fraud laws is what being a conservative is all about! Seriously, the hypocrisy is strong with this bill. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your House Reps to support stronger pro-consumer, anti-fraud legislation by rejecting S. 2155.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk you oppose a "balanced budget amendment" to our Constutition. Often you hear from people who ought to know better I have to balance my budget, so why can't Congress? But no one who lives and works in America goes an entire lifetime without taking on some debt at some time in order to secure a better future. If we demanded a "balanced budget" of ourselves like we demand it of our government, we could never get a mortgage on a house, we could never buy a car with anything but cash, we could never make necessary home repairs on a credit card, and we could never pay for higher education with a loan. And heaven forbid you get cancer! Republicans have some nerve squealing about TEH BALANCEDZ BUDGETZ!!!! so soon after exploding our annual deficits with their tax-cuts-for-the-rich bill. So let's readjust their priorities.

Around the table: including a *completely unsurprising finding* about tax "reform"!

Ho hum, Tax Policy Center analysis finds that folks making more than $732,000 are getting over $32,000 from the Republican tax "reform," while folks making less than $25,000 are getting a mere $40. If your first inclination is to say BUT TEH RICHEZ MAKES MORE OF TEH MONEYZ HA HA HA HA!!!!!, you might try grabbing a calculator and figuring out that folks making less than $25,000 are getting a mere one-sixth of one percent of their income back from the "tax cut," while wealthy folks are getting a far more robust 4.3 percent of their income back. And if your response then is to say THEY DESERVEZ ITZ MOREZ BECAUZ THEY CREATEZ THE JOBZ!!!!!, maybe you ought to just slap yourself. I can only repeat "CEOs would never hire anyone if they didn't have to" and "people who buy stuff create jobs" so many times, after all.

Campaigns in seven states and the District of Columbia have begun to close the "carried interest loophole" enjoyed by hedge fund managers at the state level. And all of conservatism rose up at once to marvel at the wondrous works "states' rights" can do! I kid, of course -- the "conservatives" you always see on TV care about nothing other than rich people having more money. Still, they might do well to attend what actual conservatives might be thinking -- that restraining the rich, particularly those rich who don't really do anything of value but move money around in a giant shell game, might help the little guy pull himself up by his proverbial bootstraps a bit better.

So you've heard about that $50-a-day-only-the-days-he-stayed-there condo EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt rented from an energy lobbyist's wife? Well, turns out the EPA approved a Canadian corporation's application for a pipeline extension, and that lobbyist worked for that very same corporation! "Any attempt to draw that link is patently false," an EPA spokeshack said, "because, gosh, if it pollutes and makes some CEO richer, we're going to approve it, regardless of whatever perks the Administrator might be getting!" OK, I made up that last part -- or, at least, I made up the part where the spokeshack said it out loud. Anyone else think maybe "knowing the industry you're regulating" is a farcical explanation for corruption?

In case you were wondering how "Fair and Balanced" Fox News was covering the shooting of Stephon Clark in Sacramento by police officers, Dina Radtke at MediaMatters informs us that Fox News has rather de-empasized the shooting and rather overemphasized the protests. Interesting, isn't it, that the on-air personalities say "violence" and then describe protestors standing on tables and being demanding and blocking other folks from going places and breaking one window? Gosh, I'm old enough to remember when violence was violent! But if you're getting all your news from Fox, chances are you're not doing this kind of tabulation anyway -- you're just waiting, breathlessly, to have your rage gland diddled.

Kentucky state legislature actually passes law preventing radiologists from diagnosing black lung disease from X-rays, and would leave the matter solely to pulmonologists. Turns out Kentucky has only six federally-certified pulmonologists, and four of them work for coal corporations, which might well have an interest in reducing the number of black lung diagnoses! Also, radiologists are doctors, too, plus they're better at reading X-rays, as you might guess from the word "radiologist," and of course they tend to find more black lung sufferers than the aforementioned pulmonologists do! But I'm sure our President, that champion of the forgotten, will sweep in and fix everything! I kid, of course.

Finally, Mike Elgan at Computer World says email is "the best social network." With email you can connect with "a lot of users," "filter spam and harassment," "interact with people on all the social networks," avoid advertising, and enjoy better search capabilities, among other things. Meanwhile, social media "are designed...to turn you into an addict," "so that you spend hours every day descending into a rabbit hole of unproductive distraction." But you can do a lot better getting your news by subscribing to email lists (ahem!) than by compulsively checking your social media feeds. Hell, email's a better way to get your news than cable news channels, too.

Action: net neutrality, and human rights.

Worried that the courts won't stop the FCC's net neutrality repeal? Bummed that Democrats have had trouble finding a 51st vote in the Senate to help stop it? Well, Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to mandate that state and local governments get internet services only from corporations that respect net neutrality principles. You've heard, no doubt, that the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal would prevent states from creating their own net neutrality laws (because right-wingers so love states' rights!), but Montana Gov. Steve Bullock has mandated that any corporation doing internet business with the state must respect basic net neutrality provisions, and that's plainly not the legislature making a law. Folks who would cry AMURKIAN CAESAR!!!!! at Mr. Bullock's order should consider whether Montana state law specifically empowers -- oh, why bother? These are the same people who excoriated Mr. Obama's orders but applaud Mr. Trump's.

Meanwhile, given the ongoing imbroglio in Honduras -- whose government has been beating the snot out of protestors for two months after quite possibly ascending to power via massive election fraud -- Witness for Peace helps you tell your Senators to withhold security-related aid from Honduras as long as it oppresses its citizens and tell your Representatives to support H.R. 1929, the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act. Both these actions would help ensure that American taxpayer money doesn't help Honduras beat down its citizens in the streets, but can we take a minute to applaud these good citizens? They're still out there, even as their government has killed some 30 folks and injured hundreds more; as with the good Iranians taking to the streets after the very suspicious re-election of Mr. Ahmedinejad in 2009, we should remember that, in some parts of the world, you literally risk your life to do the right thing.

Action: drug pricing, pot prohibition, and automatic voter registration.

Sign for Good helps you tell the Senate to investigate HHS Secretary nominee Alex Azar's role in insulin price gouging while CEO of big pharma corporation Eli Lilly. We know that Eli Lilly jacked up the price of insulin over 300% while Mr. Azar was there, and when your right-wing uncle says BUT OVER FORTY CORPORATIONS MAKE INSULIN YOU LOSE HA HA SNORT, you can remind him that Eli Lilly is one of the three biggest corporations that control, between them, over 90% of the market. You may also remind him that diabetics need insulin to survive, and that the world is becoming more diabetic all the time, thanks to all the sugar and other carbohydrates we ingest (a problem our government doesn't exactly help by subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup). So, in sum: greed is bad, monopolies are bad, corporate welfare for monopolies is bad, and you can't natter on about a "free market" for life-saving drugs. And if you do natter on about it, you may have a heart of stone.

Meanwhile, as you know, Attorney General Sessions recently rescinded the Cole memo, promulgated under the Obama Administration, which limited federal interference in states that had loosened laws against marijuana. And this proves, among other things, that "states' rights" mainly means "whatever best oppresses black folks" -- I mean, a real conservative would say the facts don't justify pot being on Schedule I, so the states are a good place to see if loosening pot prohibition really works, but then Jeff Sessions isn't a real conservative. Anyway, he doesn't get all the say around here -- the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell Congress to defund all efforts by the Justice Department to meddle in states that have legalized marijuana. Congress has defunded DOJ efforts to meddle in medical marijuana states, so this wouldn't be a long walk.

Finally, H.R. 5779/S. 3252, the Automatic Voter Registration Act, would mandate state election boards to ensure that everyone who's eligible to vote in that state is also registered to vote, except for folks who decline registration. The bill also mandates that a citizen's information can be transferred directly from a state agency to the election board without any further action from said citizens, which, of course, is not the same as your government spying on your emails without a warrant, or your local police department disguising a spying device as a cell phone tower -- automatic voter registration would ensure that information citizens have already volunteered gets to the election board. After all, the only reason someone would think voting should be hard (and some folks say this out loud!) is that they can't win a vote, or an argument, on the merits. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support voting rights by supporting the Automatic Voter Registration Act.

Action: tax "reform," and internet freedom.

Remember when Mitch McConnell said he'd have a vote on the Senate tax "reform" plan after Thanksgiving? Well, it's now after Thanksgiving, so it's time to call your Senators and tell them to reject it. After all the PR hits the Trump tax plan has been getting lately, that shouldn't be a heavy lift, but Republican Senators sure sound like they're more concerned about their big donors abandoning them than they are of doing evil, which sure is a damn shame. But you don't need to feel stumped about what to say to your Senators, because you have no shortage of criticisms -- corporations won't create jobs with their tax cut but will just shovel it to their executives and shareholders; the meager income tax cuts for working families won't offset the loss of tax credits (deductions for state, local, and property taxes) the plan would repeal; those meager income tax cuts will expire in 10 years but the corporate tax cut will be permanent; the House version, at least, would make corporate "offshoring" of profits a million times worse; and, seriously, why do rich folks and corporations deserve more tax cuts?

Meanwhile, the net neutrality repeal plan FCC Chair Ajit Pai has advanced is, somehow, even worse than we imagined -- it would not only end net neutrality protections so that corporations, and not you, could dictate to you where you go on the internet, it would expressly permit ISPs to discriminate against websites by blocking them or slowing their delivery to your computer, and it would foment the nefarious practice of paid prioritization, whereby some sites pay to get delivered more quickly to your computing device. Plus, it would prevent states from enacting their own net neutrality laws! Your Trump Administration "conservatives," ladies and gentlemen! So, long story short, Mr. Pai's net neutrality proposal is an even more disgusting piece of un-American filth than the Trump tax "reform" plan. Maybe good folks will clog up their ISP's phone lines when they can't go where they want on the internet anymore, but until then, both Save the Net from Trump and Battle for the Net help you tell your Congressfolk to stand up to Mr. Pai's plan to ruin the internet.

Around the table: special "somewhat better news" edition!

In opening arguments against the first of the J20 defendants -- you know, the ones who face decades in prison on absurd felony rioting charges -- prosecutors somewhat inauspiciously concede that they have precisely zero evidence tying the defendants to any actual property damage. Ordinarily that wouldn't bode well for an attempt to convict people for, you know, damaging property, but the prosecution has plodded on, demanding that the defendants "intended" to destroy property (a claim which would surely raise the ire of Zombie Justice Scalia) and repeating random phrases as if mere repetition would rally folks to their side. In short, the prosecution is a textbook right-wing prosecution, and sadly it might succeed in Trump's America.

Bess Levin at Vanity Fair reports on all the rich-people tax loopholes that somehow made it into the House-passed tax "reform" bill. They largely describe hedge-fund managers, who as you know are very popular, and folks hiding money in large estates, who are similarly popular. Is it too much to ask that anyone who voted for this monstrosity be turned out of office in 2018? No, I do not believe it is too much to ask, even in an era where legislatures can gerrymander individual homes out of districts.

A second U.S. District Court judge blocks the Trump Administration's attempted ban on transgender soldiers in the military. Somewhere James Mattis is breathing a sigh of relief! And which gay-humping, flag-burning, income-redistributing Democrat President appointed this judge to the federal bunch? Why, Bush the Better, of course. I wish that made me feel better about the reactionary jerks Mr. Trump is putting on the federal bench at an accelerated rate.

Sammi-Jo Lee at Yes! magazine describes how the "internet co-op," of which there are now currently hundreds across the land, could be a bulwark against the FCC's attempts to destroy free speech on the internet. And of course these internet co-ops succeed in areas filled with Trump votaries, which matter they may want to attend, particularly after their hero helps make their corporate internet experience miserable. But let's not expect any consistency about "states' rights" from the man who would prevent the FCC from nullifying state-level anti-community broadband laws, but would also prevent states from enacting their own net neutrality laws.

If you've any benefit-of-the-doubt left for Roy Moore because he married his wife when she was an actual adult, note well that Mr. Moore himself says he first laid eyes on her when she was around 15 or 16, and that she made a strong impression upon him then. So either he really believes it's better to pick a mate who's not old enough to consent to sex yet so he can mold her more easily into a "good wife," or he sublimated an urge society can't tolerate by picking a girl when she was young and then keeping his hands off her until she was an adult capable of consent. I'm sad that believing the best about him requires accepting the latter choice.

Finally, Michael Arria at In These Times writes about the "Affordable Housing Movement" "Rising from the Wreckage of the Foreclosure Crisis." You'll read about successful efforts to protect renters in San Jose, Seattle, New York, and Minneapolis, and you'll be reminded that right-wingers sold Proposition 13 in California in the 1970s by arguing that capping property taxes would be a way of capping home prices and rents. Forty years on, exactly the opposite has happened, almost like that was the whole idea!

Action: "free" trade, asset forfeiture, and the Saudi war in Yemen.

As you know, President Trump made opposition to "free" trade a central part of his platform -- but given his appointment of "free" trade-loving banksters to his cabinet, his own refusal to scuttle the "investor-state tribunal" in NAFTA, and his Commerce Secretary's odd compulsion with remaking NAFTA into something more like the hated Trans-Pacific "Partnership," you have every reason to believe Mr. Trump is playing us. I mean, if you get us out of the TPP but make all your trade deals like the TPP, what have you accomplished? Besides the appeasement of Our Glorious Elites, I mean? Of course, what he wants matters far less than what we want, so the Sierra Club helps you tell Congress to make any future trade deals work for people, not for polluters and corporatists. And you can take heart that even a conservative's sense of balance between government regulation and pollution isn't the same as yours, that a conservative would still hate having our rule of law upended in courts not created by our Constitution.

Meanwhile, actual conservative Radley Balko at the Washington Post thoroughly demolishes Attorney General Sessions's decision to ramp up asset forfeiture. Long story short: some state laws forbid asset forfeiture except in case of conviction, but our federal government helps local law enforcement entities turn local cases into federal ones, and thus evade those state laws -- while still getting the lion's share of any assets seized by the feds! This effort, in other words, exists solely to let localities unconstitutionally seize money and property of folks accused, not convicted of a crime -- and the Obama Administration was winding it down in states with laws against asset forfeiture, but naturally the "states' rights" "law-and-order" Trump Administration has scrapped that. But you can do something about it, by letting the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell Congress to pass H.R. 1555/S. 642, the FAIR Act, which would reform asset forfeiture at the federal level.

Finally, as you know, the House has passed three amendments to its defense authorization bill that would restrict our government's ability to help the Saudis fight their war against Yemen, so Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell the Senate to vote the same way the House did. As you know, the Senate gets to write its own defense authorization bill, and they'll no doubt puff up their chests and talk about how they're the Greatest Deliberative Body in the History of the Universe and they'll castigate the House for being so irresponsible as to hamstring the President's ability to "protect the country." But, frankly, helping the Saudis (oh, and al-Qaeda, by the way -- yes, they're also on the Saudis' side here) fight a war against Yemen that has caused a cholera outbreak and nearly caused a famine is itself irresponsible. And can you figure out how helping the Saudi war against Yemen "protects America"? I can figure out one way it doesn't -- the Houthi rebels, a Saudi target, have proven to be pretty good ISIS killers.

Around the table: a potential public option in Nevada, responsible government in Kansas, and other items.

Don't look now, but Nevada's state legislature just passed a bill that could make Medicaid a public option there. The bill allows folks who qualify for Obamacare subsidies to use them to buy into Medicaid instead, an option that might be attractive to both Nevada and Nevadans simply because Medicaid generally pays doctors less than Medicare does. But if Gov. Sandoval doesn't veto the bill (and he may not), I suppose those "conservative," "states'rights" people in the Trump Administration could always come in to try to squash it. You can't judge by "positive" interactions with Tom Price's CMMS, after all.

Is Kansas finally ready to bounce back? The state legislature finally rolls back a big chunk of Gov. Brownback's "signature" tax-cuts-for-the-rich by overriding his veto of a sizable legislature-passed tax hike. To the Republican Rep who voted against the override by saying it was "(t)oo much, too fast," I might remind him of William Lloyd Garrison's axiom that you don't pull a baby out of a fire gradually. I might also be interested in his opinion of those actually too-much-too-fast tax cuts in the first place.

Michael Shermer at Scientific American reminds us of the key reason "Why Climate Skeptics Are Wrong": they don't point to a better theory that explains the data better. Also, they often "point to the occasional anomaly in a particular data set, as if one incongruity gainsays all the other lines of evidence." Of course, when you worship at the altar of mammon, you don't have to do science very well.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is following up on earlier ProPublica reports that Wells Fargo has been charging mortgage fees to customers inappropriately, often blaming bank-caused paperwork delays on the customer. And given that these were, you know, mortgages, the fees could be $1,000 or more. Nice work if you can get it! The CFPB is, of course, the agency Congress and President Trump are so hot to cripple, because worshiping at the altar of mammon also means you don't have to do morality very well.

The Town Hall project provides a list of the 193 members of Congress (out of 535 Reps and Senators) who have not held townhalls since the inauguration. Some "liberal" media flak no doubt stands ready to call the problem "bipartisan," but only 34 of the 193 are Democrats, meaning this is a problem is over 82 percent Republican. You'll see New Jersey House Rep. Frelinghuysen on that list -- the one who told activists to pipe down and let him do his work, the one who outed another activist to her employer, the one who should lose re-election to a shrub in 2018.

Finally, the Columbia Law School's Knight First Amendment Institute thinks President Trump is violating the First Amendment by blocking critics from his Twitter feed. But I think that depends entirely on whether Mr. Trump's Twitter account really is a "designated public forum," and not just the absurd rantings of a guy who happens to be President; under the latter, I think he would have First Amendment free association rights like anyone else, whatever we may think of him blocking his critics. But making the President use an official account that is a "designated public forum" would be well within Congress's rights.

Around the table: border taxes, private prisons, "states' rights," immigration, playing defense, and hearts and minds.

Citizens for Tax Justice also thinks the "border tax" is a bad idea. Claims that ZOMG TEH BORDER TAX WOULD RAISE TEH 1.2 TRILLYUNZ DOLLARZ!!!! (over 10 years) tend to ignore the fact that the Republican proposal would actually lose $4 trillion over 10 years (largely because it repeals the corporate tax). Of course we should never tolerate when corporations pass on their taxes to consumers, but we shouldn't be dumb enough to think that wouldn't happen, either, particularly given the Republicans' utter lack of a law-and-order bent when it comes to corporate behavior.

Ho hum, Attorney General Jeff Sessions continues his hot streak by withdrawing an Obama Administration memo aiming to reduce private prison involvement in detaining undocumented immigrants. Because how can our government do the job all by itself? Private prisons do a worse job just like private everything does a worse job of fulfilling government functions, and we shouldn't leave it to Bernie Sanders to remind us that private prisons gave a lot of money to the Trump campaign, though I'm still glad he did.

Zaid Jafani at The Intercept notes the irony, as it were, that the Trump Administration wants to leave transgendered-folks-in-bathrooms policy "up to the states" but won't leave marijuana enforcement up to the states that have legalized the drug. "States' rights" is one of the most intellectually-bankrupt concepts in American history, having long been little more than a synonym for a state's "right" to own black slaves. Everyone wants the smallest possible governmental unit to have the most direct power over people's welfare, but people have rights, and "states' rights" can't be an excuse to run roughshod over those rights. Plus, pot ain't an opioid, so using opioid problems to justify cracking down on pot doesn't make sense.

Issie Lapowsky at WIRED says President Trump's immigrant deportation plan isn't just cruel, but suffers from "bad math." Long story short: your plan has a smaller chance of success the bigger its ambitions -- and deciding that deporting every undocumented immigrant is a bad way to use finite resources. Plus that Skittles analogy is really, really stupid -- "three in a handful" itself vastly overstates how many refugees commit violent crimes.

Another day, another quite correct diagnosis that playing defense isn't enough and Democrats need to start taking a few more chances if they're ever going to come back. "We must fight to either disengage the Democratic Party from its corporate masters, or to develop a viable third party," Leonard C. Goodman writes -- though the latter might be the only way to achieve the former.

Finally, Colin Beavan tells us "What It Takes to Change Hearts and Minds." Basically, we shouldn't pound numbers and facts so much, but we should "align() communication about (our) cause with the most deeply-held values and aspirations of (our) friends, relatives, neighbors, and fellow citizens." I'll admit it takes a lot of practice to discern between doing that effectively and just telling other folks what you think they want to hear. Keep in mind, though, that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano crazy and can only be contained in their damage, and that's just as true now as it was under Tha Bush Mobb. So we work on the 75% who aren't crazy. And that's why I'm an optimist.

Action: arming Syrians, and drilling in national forests.

Another day, another report (this time from Amnesty International) that U.S.-backed (and Saudi-backed) Syrian opposition groups have perpetrated war crimes upon Kurds. Perhaps they decided that American and Saudi support was all they needed to finally put down those uppity Kurds. But several House members have lately offered National Defense Authorization Act amendments that would end or limit arms transfers to Syria (since that would surely make this situation much worse), so Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to support efforts to keep American weapons away from folks who would use them merely to cause mayhem. Really, of course, we should have a formal declaration of war from Congress to operate against whoever our enemies are in Syria, rather than a 15-year-old Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that the Obama Administration has interpreted far beyond the call of linguistic ambiguity. I wonder why they don't do that. (Spoiler alert: because they might accidentally reveal that they don't want to solve international problems, but that they'd rather enable American rage indefinitely so they can get re-elected and make more and more money for their paymasters.)

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the U.S. Forest Service to keep oil and gas corporations from drilling in the Wyoming Range in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. You probably know the drill by now: the Wyoming Range isn't just home to the biggest moose population in the state, but is also prime recreational ground for humans who love to camp, fish, and ride horses. And the Forest Service has actually proposed a ban on drilling leases in a 40,000-acre area of the Range, but the oil and gas drillers will be yapping in their ears non-stop, so we have to yap in their ears, too. And we shouldn't feel guilty about yapping in their ears, because we're the American people; a gas or oil drilling corporation is just a vehicle for some executive to redistribute worker income upward to himself. I pity the fool who reads this paragraph and squeals BUT TEH WYOMINGZ SHOULD HAVE TEH CHOICEZ!!!! The word "national" is present in the title of the Bridger-Teton National Forest, right? Let's check again: yes, it is right there. Some folks don't understand the difference between "state" and "national" anymore, or they pretend not to. We are not their enablers.

Action: "free" trade, the Grand Canyon, and whistleblowers.

What happened when Colombia made a big chunk of the Amazon rainforest into a national park? An American mining corporation slapped a $16.5 billion lawsuit against the Colombian government, that's what. They wanted to mine for gold there, and because our nation has a "free" trade agreement with Colombia, the Tobie Mining and Energy corporation is suing for "lost investments" totalling over one-fifth of Colombia's entire national budget! One more time: governments have a right to take, and protect, land on behalf of the people they represent and for the purposes the people demand -- and that right (which, again, is really the right of the people of Colombia) supersedes the "right" of any corporation to make money. This is the very thing we've been talking about in the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" that our government plans to ram through after the election -- the mockery its "investor-state tribunals" would make of law and order, via their subjugation of people to mammon. So Sum of Us helps you tell Tobie to drop its lawsuit against Colombia.

Meanwhile, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Obama to protect the Grand Canyon from uranium mining corporations (and other actors who would pollute that national treasure) by creating a Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument. Don't believe the hype that such a declaration would make Obama into Hitler -- if creating a national monument against the wishes of greedy corporations were all that made a President into Hitler, well, wouldn't we have elected, and therefore survived, a lot of Hitlers already? And certainly don't believe the hype promulgated by certain members of Arizona's Congressional delegation that the states should make these decisions, when what they really want is for their cronies to make those decisions. Indeed, Sen. McCain is up for re-election in 2016, and has even drawn a formidable Democratic opponent, who could rather easily attack Sen. McCain for being against the Grand Canyon. (Well, unless she's no better than he is, which is always a possibility.)

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4619/S. 2591, the Whistleblower Augmented Reward and Nonretaliation Act (or WARN Act), which would strengthen protections for whistleblowers who expose bankster criminality, then the National Whistleblowers Center still helps you do that. We'll need all hands on deck just not only to get this bill considered -- you think a Republican-held Congress would do anything to help people if it might also deprive their bankster friends of unearned money? -- but also to get it signed by a Democratic President whose has made his utter contempt for whistleblowers all too obvious over the years. Hey, maybe we can convince Republicans to vote for it by telling them it's anti-Obama! Seriously, financial sector whistleblowers have fewer protections than whistleblowers in other fields, but they deserve protection no less than anyone else for the critical and dare I say patriotic duty they perform in exposing wrongdoing.

Around the table: nuclear winter, voter ID, dark money, Confederate "heritage," and a victory against coal pollution.

The most recent RetroReport video covers the theory of nuclear winter and how it affected nuclear arms issues, particularly during the Reagan Administration. Scientists are more likely to think the effect would be more like "nuclear fall" now than nuclear winter, but when even a drop of a few degrees across the planet could wreak havoc on food production (and, ah, indirectly lead to more war), that's not exactly a comfort. Time of video: 11 minutes, 58 seconds.

Ari Berman and Michael Waldman discuss, at length, how voting law changes (including Voter ID laws and the Supreme Court's invalidation of a critical part of the Voting Rights Act) could affect the 2016 elections. I'd say "good to know someone else has noticed," but I always hope I'm wrong about the worst. Among the things you may not know: Texas's Voter ID law considers a concealed-carry permit "valid ID" but not a college student's ID, wonder why that is. Mr. Waldman's book, The Fight to Vote, looks like a good one.

In a peripherally-related note, Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut reviews Jane Mayer's book, Dark Money, which describes the decades-long plan by America's überwealthy to deform democracy along corporatist lines. Among the many items of note: the extent to which the Koch brothers literally funded the Tea Party movement, a fact missed by most of the "liberal" media at the time, though not missed by you or I. If Occupy had had that kind of money, the Democrats would have retaken the House in 2012.

Gov. Bryant of Mississippi has declared April "Confederate Heritage Month," which sadly is not in and of itself unusual in the South, but his declaration omits any mention of slavery, which actually is unusual. Hip revisionists are wrong -- the South seceded not over "states' rights" but over the "right" to own black folks, and President Lincoln fought the Civil War not just to reunify America but to end slavery. Naturally, Gov. Bryant's spokeshack says the Governor "believes Mississippi’s history deserves study and reflection, no matter how unpleasant or complicated parts of it may be," without mentioning that the Governor left the most "unpleasant" part of that history out.

Finally, Nick Engelfried, writing at Waging Nonviolence, describes "How Montanans Stopped the Largest New Coal Mine in North America." You'll recognize much of the story -- big government agencies plotting "coal sacrifice zones," coal-hauling railroads running through lower-income areas -- plus lots of direct action, including protestors chaining themselves to desks, sit-ins at the Montana state capitol building, protests and blockades on the rail lines themselves, and the 100,000 public comments activists were able to gather opposing the Otter Creek Mine. External factors also helped (China's declining coal demand, Arch Coal's bankruptcy), but what's the shame in that? Good Montanans did a good job helping to protect their air and water from pollution.

Action: climate change, country-of-origin labeling, and fairness for pregnant workers.

Some 49 Senators (including two coal-state Democrats who are probably toast in 2018 no matter what) have co-sponsored S.J.Res. 24, a "resolution of disapproval" aiming to gut the EPA's carbon emissions plan. Why? Because they're doing what their big donors tell them to do. No, really, that is the reason. They'll say it's other things, like "states' rights," even though the EPA's Clean Power Plan already empowers states to come up with their own plans for meeting the EPA's goals. And they'll use "small businesses" as a human shield, like always, citing the higher utility prices small businesses will have to pay if we have to produce more of our power from solar and wind and suchlike, never mind the higher prices we're all going to pay for everything if we don't, or that big utilities use any excuse to jack prices up anyway. No, they're protecting their big donors' ability to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. But they don't get all the say around here! The Sierra Club helps you tell your Senators to support the Clean Power Plan and reject legislation that would weaken or destroy it.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2393 is called the Country of Origin Labeling Amendments Act, but it doesn't "amend" country-of-origin labeling laws for meat so much as it repeals them. The House passed H.R. 2393 in June, but the Senate hasn't taken it up yet. Perhaps they know how unpopular repealing country-of-origin labeling laws are! They'll say their hands are tied, of course, since the World Trade Organization ruled that our country-of-origin labeling laws violated at least two "free" trade agreements and put other nations at an "unfair" competitive disadvantage. If it's not entirely clear to you how merely mentioning where meat comes from constitutes a "disadvantage," you're not alone. And of course, this is the same Congress that wants to ram another "free" trade deal, the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," down the throats of the people. I know it ain't just me who sees the essential relationship between two of the most unpopular legislatives in America. CREDO helps you tell your Senator to reject H.R. 2393 and save our country-of-origin meat labeling laws from the nullifying force of trade agreements.

Finally, H.R. 2654/S. 1512, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, may have a shot at getting passed, since the Senate version, at least, demonstrates some collaboration between Democrat Bob Casey, Jr., of Pennsylvania and Republicans Dean Heller of Nevada and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would mandate that employers make reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers on the job -- which may mean something as small as letting an employee sit down to do her job or carry around a water bottle or have more access to the rest room -- and would forbid rejecting a job applicant just because she's pregnant, or requiring pregnant employees to take unpaid leave if reasonable accommodations can be made, or otherwise retaliating against an employee for getting pregnant. That anyone would do that may seem incomprehensible -- until you remember that corporations are actually quite anti-family, since families distract workers from the important business of making the CEO as much money as possible. But Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Around the table: includes tales of Republicans, "governing"!

You know that highway infrastructure reauthorization bill that Mitch McConnell is supposedly working so hard to get done, so he can prove Republicans can run Congress without everything falling apart? Well, among its problems is that it shields certain kinds of public safety information from disclosure via Freedom of Information Act requests. "Risk to public safety is exactly the type of information that FOIA is intended to prevent being shielded from the public," writes Sue Udry, but you know, it's only accountability to the people, so you can see why Mr. McConnell doesn't care.

Speaking of that highway bill, Scott Klinger says we should fund the Highway Trust Fund in ways other than what the Senate has proposed in its legislation, like closing the corporate offshore profits loophole. As an aside, the Senate is actually proposing outsourcing tax collection to private tax collectors as a money-saving idea again. It didn't work last time, as anyone who thought about it for a nanosecond could have predicted. But hey, look at the Republicans, governing!

Jim Tankersley at the Washington Post reminds us that Jeb Bush owed his "success" at "rejuvenating" the Florida economy to a massive housing bubble. Which, when it burst (after Mr. Bush left office, of course), left Florida way worse off than most other states. Next time he says "I know how to do this," remember that anyone can "rejuvenate" an economy with unsustainable speculation.

Leon Neyfakh suggests we can live without air conditioning -- which at least one scientist estimates adds the equivalent of 10,000 car-driving miles per household of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Ignore the notion that "civilization was humming along just fine" before air conditioning arrived -- I'd want to see stats concerning heat-related hospitalizations and deaths before and after A/C before buying that -- but attend the notion that it's silly to cool down offices so folks can wear uncomfortable business suits, or the notion that modern architecture has forgotten a lot of very useful information.

Elizabeth Hasselbeck uses her valuable time on Earth playing devil's advocate about cops beating up Sandra Bland (who later died in police custody) during a traffic stop. "But, what if, I mean, there are times, I'm sure, someone has, in the history of this land, used a cigarette against a police officer, maybe chucked it at him, pushed it at him." Number one, speak English! Number two, the officer had at least two far more powerful weapons than a lit cigarette. Let's do ourselves a favor and never speak of Elizabeth Hasselbeck again.

Finally, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker stopped in at both legendary Philadelphia cheesesteak stops on Tuesday. Chiding Mr. Walker for ordering American cheese and no onions is so stupid I shouldn't even have to waste space calling it stupid, but chiding him for cutting in line and leaving trash behind is entirely appropriate. And those protestors held up such asinine signs I can't dismiss the possibility that the Walker campaign planted them.

Action: Iran's nuclear capabilities, GMO food labeling, and real chemical safety.

Nine nations reached a deal that would reduce Iran's nuclear capability in exchange for a relaxation of economic sanctions against it, and naturally the American right is pooping its pants over it -- when a putatively "moderate" Republican Senator accuses the President of wanting Iran to get nuclear weapons, you know it's bad. But the real problem right-wingers have with the deal is that it doesn't give them an opportunity to parade their testicles in front of everyone like the "war on terror" does -- international inspection regimes, after all, don't get them hard. (I see no need to gender-equivocate here.) Five of eight non-Iranian nations would have to agree to reinstate sanctions if Iran fails to comply, which (as Igor Volsky explains) removes the veto power China or Russia would have preferred. Hell, it even sounds like democracy, and you know how right-wing warmongers feel about democracy -- at least, about democracy that doesn't give them everything they want. So the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell Congress not to sabotage the Iran nuclear deal.

Meanwhile, the House Agriculture Committee passed H.R. 1599, the so-called Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, out of committee this week. H.R. 1599 would, as you know, keep states from enacting GMO labeling laws, since the "states' rights" doctrine apparently only extends to keeping black folks down, and would also make GMO labeling voluntary, as if it's not already voluntary -- and worse, as if a voluntary GMO labeling system doesn't already exist. You know the four-digit numbers on stickers on your produce? Ever see a five-digit number on a label beginning with "9"? No, you haven't, because that's the label indicating the produce has been grown with genetically-modified organisms, and no one's using it. Because they wouldn't sell anything if they did. Why don't the big food corporations try convincing people GMO food is fine, rather than trying to buy laws from Congress or fearmonger about food prices and "frivolous lawsuits"? The Organic Consumers Association helps you tell your House Rep to oppose the anti-GMO labeling bill, H.R. 1599.

Finally, Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Senator to vote against S. 697, the so-called Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act. Why? Because the bill that bears the late Senator's name insults his memory -- he authored far better chemical safety reform legislation before his passing. And though Congress last tackled chemical safety regulation nearly 40 years ago, this bill wouldn't force our government to evaluate chemical safety on any realistic schedule, wouldn't allow states to pass stronger chemical safety laws, wouldn't adequately fund chemical safety regulation efforts, wouldn't target "hot spot" communities that suffer from more chemical exposure, and wouldn't allow our government to take swifter action against more dangerous chemicals -- let alone force chemical corporations to prove their chemicals are safe before they reach the market. Do we not deserve these things, as good Americans? And do we not deserve leaders who will accomplish these things in our name, instead of leaders who let chemical corporations have all the say about everything?

Around the table: why we shouldn't blame white evangelicals for Democrat losses, and other lessons.

The Center for Economic Policy Research asks whether happier workers bring a corporation higher profits. They find the case ambiguous, at least scientifically, but for decades now "cost-benefit analyses" have only measured the "cost" to corporations when we make them do the right thing, and corporations these days seem dedicated only to maximizing short-term economic gain, which they can now get without actually doing (or even investing in) any worthwhile work at all. The social scientists may develop the research tools to prove that happiness-is-profitable-too, but I find the moral case for happier workers quite sufficient.

The Center for Effective Government finds that seven of America's 30 largest corporations actually paid their CEOs more than they paid our government in taxes. In other words, you have every right to suspect that when CEOs say they need to pay less in taxes so they can invest in jobs, what they really mean is that they need to pay less in taxes so they can pay themselves more. The return of the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income sure would come in handy right about now.

Major polluters join out-of-state Attorneys General and legislators to sue the EPA for its Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan. From the sound of it, a sane society would call this a "frivolous lawsuit" -- far from handing a mandate down from Mt. Sinai, the EPA worked with states to craft a cleanup plan, and it's an open question whether the folks filing the suit even have standing to sue (only one state involved in the cleanup plan, West Virginia, has joined the suit). And when you hear politicians talking about "states' rights" in this context, you have every right to wonder whether they're really talking about corporations' "rights."

Pope Francis I tells a multifaith traditional-marriage conference that "children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother." No use parsing his words to ask if he really meant "a family should be able to teach how masculinity and femininity can work together" -- you can hardly expect the Pope to abandon millenia of tradition (rank-and-file Catholics can do that more easily, which is as it should be). Still, gay marriage doesn't evoke "the culture of the temporary," or else it wouldn't be about, you know, marriage.

Finally, exit polls indicate that white evangelical Christians actually made up the same proportion of the electorate in 2014 as they did in 2012 and 2010. And voted more or less the same way, too, though you expected that. Further, white evangelicals made up roughly the same proportion of voters in 2008 and 2006, too, but broke harder for Democrats in those years, especially in 2006. In other words, perhaps we should look elsewhere to figure out how Democrats did so badly -- starting with weakness when in office, I should think.

Around the table: the Supreme Court rules for privacy and for the rule of law, community gardeners struggle valiantly in Camden, and other stories.

The Supreme Court released a bunch of decisions yesterday, not all of them good, but this one's a gem: the Court ruled, by a 9-0 margin, that law enforcement can't search a smartphone without a warrant. The concept of getting a warrant from a judge turns out to be not so quaint after all. Chief Justice Roberts seems to get cell phones -- "They could just as easily be called cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps or newspapers," all holding "the privacies of life," he says. The Court even sounds like it thinks Americans have a right to privacy.

Josh Barro explains how government pensions have come to rely more and more on risky investments. Long story short: pension funds used to invest mainly in bonds, but bond interest rates started falling, after which governments turned more and more to stocks and to managed investment funds -- but, since fund manager fees tend to outrun the extra money a pension fund makes, the pension fund doesn't really make out in the long run. I wish Mr. Barro had explained why bond interest rates fell in the first place, though, especially since it seems to have started right around the first Reagan inaugural.

ProPublica finds that right-wingers who oppose limiting physical restraints on schoolkids often invoke a "states' rights' argument. Which is hardly surprising, since I've been saying for a while now that folks don't invoke "states' rights" until they need to justify actually hurting other people. Personal to folks afraid of laws proscribing physical restraints because they dislike Big Gummint involvement in public schools: what's the problem if such involvement defends civilized values on the people's behalf and at the people's behest?

If you haven't acted on the FDA's proposed tobacco regulations yet, you may want to consider this item: the FDA's proposal counts "lost pleasure" extremely heavily in its cost-benefit analysis. Never mind the gained pleasure of not dying from lung cancer and from better breathing; the FDA's analysis would cut any figure measuring such benefits by 70 percent, due to the "lost pleasure" of smoking. But how do you even measure the "pleasure" of a freaking addiction? Next up: the lost pleasure poor coal executives suffer because carbon emissions regulations prevent them from gilding the plumbing in their ninth vacation home.

Finally, the Christian Science Monitor provides a difficult but uplifting account of folks starting community gardens in Camden, NJ, widely regarded as the poorest and most dangerous city in America. By article's end, you will root for all of these folks as they wonder whether Camden is really salvageable -- as I believe it is, even as I know the violence and the hardship would beat me down if I were struggling against it.

Action: war in Iraq, the "liberal" media, and food labeling.

Are they still talking about going back into Iraq? Are the Bush Mobb-types finally ashamed enough to shut their yaps about it? Just kidding; I know Bush Mobb-types are utterly incapable of shame. Yet President Obama has announced he'll send 300 "advisors" to Iraq, and other Obama Administration figures have said these "advisors" will mainly collect intelligence, possibly for further military strikes; I guess if he were in politics the first time around -- oh, wait, he was in politics the first time around, and made his name in 2004 largely from his opposition to the Iraq war. Also, Rep. Schiff (D-CA) apparently got cold feet about offering an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill that would have repealed the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). But once more: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want, and most of us would rather not risk more of our soldiers' lives in Iraq, or risk more Iraqi civilians' lives just to send, well, someone, anyway a message. So both the Friends Committee for National Legislation and the Center for Constitutional Rights help you tell our government to reject further military action in Iraq. You may want to mention, wherever you can, that "no military action" includes drones.

Speaking of the war in Iraq, and the folks who caused it, and might get their jollies from trying to start another one: CNN's Situation Room featured 30 guests talking about Iraq from June 12 to June 19, and of those 30, we can count eight former U.S. military officers, five former Bush Mobb officials and/or pro-war politicians, five 2003-era pro-war punditoids, one State Department spokeshack, and one ex-CIA analyst. CNN also brought in nine journalists (eight of its own) and Iraq's Ambassador to the U.S., which, not incidentally, makes one Iraqi out of 30 for a sparkling .033 batting average. Anyone else missing? Well, there are no journalists from McClatchy, which news organization did pretty outstanding reporting on Iraq in 2002; no Senator Bob Graham, who called Tha Bush Mobb's case for war the worst he'd ever seen; no Patrick Cockburn, no Robert Scheer, no Glenn Greenwald, no Juan Cole. And I know Scott Ritter's in jail, but if Lindsey Graham were in jail, the networks would be setting up cameras in his cell as we speak. So FAIR helps you tell CNN to be a bit more balanced in its Iraq war coverage. After all, can't the "liberal" media talk to people who get things right?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to oppose H.R. 4432, the so-called Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2014, then Just Label It provides another one. Why do we oppose something calling itself "safe" and "accurate"? Clearly it's neither -- the bill would "allow" corporations to voluntarily disclose whether or not its foods have genetically-modified organisms in them. But we've been using a voluntary reporting system for almost a decade, and who tells us whether their foods are Frankenfoods? No one, that's who. Why, it's almost like they know no one will buy their foods if they tell us they've tinkered with it so -- which must be why big grocers pumped $100 million opposing mandatory-labeling ballot initiatives in California and Washington state, and why Monsanto has sued the state of Vermont for passing its own GMO-labeling bill. H.R. 4432 would, incidentally, pre-empt such laws passed by states and localities, presumably because its authors only find "states' rights" a valid doctrine when someone gets hurt. At the risk of piling on, H.R. 4432 also exempts what feed animals eat, meaning you could be eating meat from an animal that ate GMO food and not know it.

Around the table: hope for Parkinson's sufferers, but otherwise mostly bad people acting badly.

FAIR notes that the "liberal" media seems to be giving President Obama a lot of credit for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan -- without noting that he's sent a lot more troops to Afghanistan than Mr. Bush ever did. In fact, we have as many troops there now (roughly 32,000) as we did when Mr. Bush left office -- and we had a staggering 100,000 troops there in between mid-2010 and mid-2011. The fact that Mr. Bush tried to win that war on the cheap even more than he tried to win the Iraq war on the cheap doesn't mean the "liberal" media should forget how to do math.

Dean Baker reminds us that when right-wingers trot out the ZOMG $1 TRILLYUN FUNDING GAP IN TEH PENSIONZ!!!!!, it's just a scare number. How is it a scare number? Well, the part right-wingers never tell you is that pensions have this funding gap over thirty years, which makes the number much smaller, doesn't it? They also don't tell you that we have over 200 state pension plans and well over 3,000 local ones. How big and scary is that number again? Mr. Baker goes on to ask why the pension alarmists never ask about the fees pensions pay to the folks who manage them, since, you know, some of those folks might be ripping pensions off.

Also from the "necessary reminder" file: Wil Wheaton's Daily Kos blog tells the story of a cancer patient who needed emergency chemo and had that procedure deemed "not medically necessary" by a bureaucrat at Anthem Blue Cross. And Anthem Blue Cross put a gynecologist in charge of the review, too, as opposed to, oh, I don't know, an oncologist, maybe? Since the "liberal" media has a strange aversion to health care horror stories like these, please remind your right-wing friends that the "death panels" you have to worry about these days serve in private health care corporations.

Iowa U.S. Senate candidate Joni Ernst (R) says the states should determine whether gay marriage is legal, but also that she'd support a federal ban on gay marriage. How do you get to be for states' rights and for federal pre-emption at the same time? As long as the end result is that someone gets hurt, I guess Ms. Ernst just shrugs and says "who cares?" But this error could haunt her in a general election -- not with the far right, who no longer accept even the logical certainty of a tautology, but certainly with the more independently-minded Iowan.

Microsoft billionaire Steve Ballmer bids an eye-popping $2 billion for the Los Angeles Clippers, which owner Donald Sterling must sell now that the NBA has banned him for life after his recent spate of racist comments taped by his girlfriend/"archivist." That's nearly four times larger than the previous record NBA team sale, set just a few weeks ago when the Milwaukee Bucks sold for $550 million -- and it's enough to make you wonder if Mr. Sterling, who paid $12.5 million for the team back in 1982, planned the whole damn thing.

Finally, engineer Anupam Pathak designs a spoon that counteracts the tremors associated with Parkinson's Disease -- such that folks with Parkinson's can actually eat and the aides who now have to help them eat might be free to get other things done, though I bet a lot of bosses will look at the spoon as something that will give them an excuse to fire people. It costs $300, but I bet a lot of folks with Parkinson's buy it anyway, and anyway the price will come down in time. Good show, Mr. Pathak.

Action: Social Security benefits and gay marriage, updating nutrition labels, and preventing the "post-antibiotic age."

Social Security Works joins with CREDO Mobilize to help you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4664/S. 2305, the Social Security and Marriage Equality Act (or SAME Act). What would the SAME Act do? The SAME Act would ensure that legally-married gay folks would be able to pass on their Social Security benefits to their partners, just like partners in straight marriages can do, regardless of where they got married or whether their state of residence recognizes their marriage. I can't wait for the usual suspects to scream ZOMG SPESHUL BENEFITZ FOR TEH GAYZ!!!!!! They're not "special benefits" any more than the right not to get fired for being gay is a "special right." And personal to the "states' rights" crowd: Social Security benefits are a federal benefit, and states should not have the right to interfere with federal law. I swear, some folks only care about "states' rights" when it would give them the power to hurt other people. And, seriously, if states want to secede over things like this, let 'em! Let 'em find out how hard it is to run a country, especially when they don't have all that Big Gummint money flowing in from the Beltway.

Meanwhile, the FDA has proposed the first major updates to its nutrition label regulations in 20 years, and the American Heart Association helps you tell the FDA to give us the most accurate and informative food labels possible. The FDA has proposed foregrounding calorie counts, basing nutrition information on more accurate serving sizes, and noting added sugars, vitamin D, and potassium; I find the "added sugars" part particularly valuable -- some foods (like fruit, milk, and tomato gravy) have sugar in them before anyone adds it in, and most of us aren't going to know how much has been added unless we're told. The FDA does not propose lowering the sodium RDA all that much, but you can ask them to do better at that. Woe betide the fool who claims that making food labels better KILLZ THA JOBZ!!!! -- as if we should allow corporations to kill jobs using any excuse. And woe betide the fool who squeals OBAMA TELLZ THA PEEPULZ WHAT TO EATZ!!!!! Nobody's putting a gun to anyone's head and making them eat more broccoli -- better food labeling just gives you, the consumer, better information as to how to feed yourself and your family.

Finally, you've likely heard that the World Health Organization (or WHO) says we may be entering a "post-antibiotic era" in which the simplest cut could result in a fatal infection. Just like in the good old days! How could this happen? Overprescription of antibiotics just-in-case is one reason, but it's not the most compelling reason -- not when four out of five antibiotics in America go to healthy feed animals, so that these animals can produce more meat and weather lousy living conditions a little better. Jesus Mary and Joseph what on Earth is wrong with just growing feed animals the old-fashioned way? The answer is not "because it's inefficient" or even "because worldwide demand for meat is rising" -- the answer is "because it doesn't redistribute wealth upward to CEOs." The price of giving folks the "freedom" to make astronomical amounts of money is too high for the rest of us to pay -- I don't think too many folks will tell their grandchildren that we killed off most of the human race because we abused antibiotics, but praise the Lord we still have a free market! Hence USPIRG helps you tell the FDA to rein in antibiotic abuse in America.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: thieves! Thieves and liars!

You know how corporations should be hiring people to make stuff instead of sitting on trillions of dollars in profits? Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) writes a more fully-developed version of that argument here. He reminds us, also, that the Government Accountability Office found that corporations were paying an effective tax rate of 12.6% -- "low enough to make Mitt Romney jealous"! -- versus the nominal 35% rate that right-wingers constantly talk about lowering so we can "compete" with other corporations in other countries. Now you know what to say when right-wingers screech WHAT ABOUT TEH JOB CREATURZ!!!!!

Dean Baker reminds us that Heritage Foundation President (and former U.S. Senator) Jim DeMint makes $1 million annually -- but also reminds us that Heritage is a tax-exempt organization, meaning that we-the-people subsidize Mr. DeMint's salary. He now makes about six times what he made as a U.S. Senator, by the way. Mr. Baker deftly demolishes right-wing strawmen -- of course "they have the right to pay their president whatever they feel like," but why should taxpayers subsidize it? And all you need to do to refute complaints "that they can’t get good help for such low pay" is look at your paycheck and think about how hard you work for it.

Confused by the many NSA data-vacuuming reform proposals (which is probably the idea, anyway)? ProPublica helps you sort them out. All claim to end the NSA's bulk data-collecting, but the Obama and Rogers/Ruppersberger proposals would still allow our government to access corporate data-collecting rather easily (though the Obama proposal, unlike Rogers/Ruppersberger, would require a court order) and none of them would touch, say, the FISA Amendments Act, which "incidentally" sweeps up the communications of American citizens without a warrant. The Leahy/Sensenbrenner bill would do the most good; we've urged our Congressfolk to support it here before -- and John Boehner, of course, prefers the worst of the three bills.

Mitch McConnell's primary challenger in the 2014 Kentucky U.S. Senate race, Matt Bevin, gets caught attending a cockfighting rally. Because TEH SOUTH!!!!! Mr. Bevin quickly denied, via spokeshack, that it was a cockfighting rally, claiming that it was actually a "states' rights" rally. Oh, well, that clears everything up -- it's not like the phrase "states' rights" has ever been code for "oppressing blacks" or anything. Also, did you know something called the American Gamefowl Defense Network exists? Imagine that, "defense" of a chicken's "right" to be forced to fight another chicken to the death! Like they have trading cards or something! Let's never speak of this organization again.

Comcast lobbyist/asshole says he's heard no "rational, knowledgable voices" opposing the Comcast/Time-Warner merger. Well, if you only talk to other stupid, venal elites (the kind who, for example, posit Hulu as a "competitor" to Comcast when Comcast owns Hulu), I guess you don't hear the voices of reason and knowledge very often. Also, n.b. that he suggests that the real "competition" is between broadband cable and wireless. There's no competition there -- wireless cuts out and takes forever to load all the damn time. I don't use wireless for important work.

Finally, Bill O'Reilly says he wants to "beat up" New York's mayor for wanting to raise taxes on the rich. He said this at a fundraiser for a K-12 Catholic school in New York City. I'm old enough to remember when issuing threats, even "tongue-in-cheek" ones, at a Catholic school fundraiser was a career-ending move; of course, back then, our government taxed millionaire income at 70%. Hmm, high taxes on the rich, better behavior from media stars -- coincidence? And don't miss the part where Bill O'Reilly's "proof" of "liberal bias" in the media is non-coverage of his latest book, proving only that he still thinks everything is all about him.

Action: "free" trade, clean water, public gas, and GMO apples.

Missed any opportunities to express your opposition to the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade agreement? Well, Public Citizen provides another one. In his latest email missive, Public Citizen President Robert Weismann tells us that big corporations long ago embraced the "free" trade agreement, negotiated with little or no public oversight and (until 2007) fast-tracked through Congress, "to get what they could not achieve openly and democratically: weaker food and medicine safety standards, corporate-friendly energy and environmental policies, limits on Internet free speech, new privileges to raise medicine prices and offshore jobs, and more." The TPP will give the big corporations all of that -- which we know only from leaks, since the negotiators have never released so much as a draft of the pact -- largely by subjugating our laws, for which good Americans have fought and died, to "investor-state tribunals" who may overrule the laws of a nation so some corporation can be more gluttonous. They always come up with new ways to hurt us. That's why we fight.

Meanwhile, the nefarious H.R. 2728, the so-called Protecting States' Rights to Promote American Energy Security Act, passed the House last week, and now moves on to the Senate, which might vote on the bill (or its Orrin Hatch-sponsored doppelganger) shortly. The bill would prevent our government from enforcing fracking regulations on federal lands if states have issued different regulations covering the same land. Problem is, we're talking federal land here -- if we say it's a state "right" to regulate federal lands, then words like "federal," "state" and "right" have no meaning. Why would the House pass such a bill? Because states have issued fairly weak regulations on fracking, and weaker regulations mean gas drilling corporations spend less money making sure they don't set our drinking water on fire -- which means more money for gas drilling corporation CEOs. The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Senators to oppose a bill that would hamstring our government from enforcing clean water regulations on public lands.

Speaking of fracking, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter (D?) wants to privatize the publicly-owned Philadelphia Gas Works, which means (among other things) that the good people of Philadelphia will have less say (via their City Council) over whether gas drilling corporations can pollute their air and water, or make Philadelphia a hub for transporting fracked gas, replete with pipelines, refineries, and suchlike. Maybe making Philly the gas hub sounds like a good idea to a lot of people -- but at what cost? At the cost of polluted air and water elsewhere? At the cost of increased cancer and asthma elsewhere? And while I'm sure nearly every Philly resident has their own PGW-sucks story, that doesn't mean some private corporation will be better to you -- actually, they'll have less incentive to be better to you, since they're only accountable (in theory!) to their shareholders. Do we own democracy, or must we buy into it? I know the choice I'd make. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell Philadelphia City Council to reject the Mayor's PGW privatization plan.

Finally, and I really do wish this kind of stuff would just go away, the USDA plans to approve a genetically-modified apple called the GMO Arctic Apple. Genetically-modified to do what, you ask? Genetically-modified to not turn brown when it's cut and left out in contact with the open air. Really? Are we so weak a nation now that we can't eat apples that have gone a little brown? Apples that won't actually look spoiled when they are spoiled, I should add? And is this now the benchmark for proving what a great scientist you are, that you can make an apple that doesn't turn brown? I thought science was supposed to make our lives better, not make certain food-processing corporations a tiny bit richer -- richer from selling apples to people who will not know they're buying GMO apples, because they won't be labeled! And at the risk of piling on, the USDA hasn't actually vetted GMO apple claims through independent scientific inquiry, like, you know, any sane person would. So Friends of the Earth helps you tell the USDA to reject genetically-modified apples.