Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, unconstitutional war-making, and freedom of the press.

It's Monday morning, and you know what that means: it's time to 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. 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. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. You may be tiring of telling your Senators to pass these bills, but the more they hear from us, the more embarrassed they'll be -- and the more they'll swing our way, as is their damn job. They need to hear from us that we want bills that protect voting rights, working families, public lands, disadvantaged minorities, and internet freedom. And they need to suffer the consequences of standing against these things -- you know, like losing their jobs.

Meanwhile, our President has declared that the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF), which authorized war with Iraq, also authorizes war with Iran! And that's reason enough to let Demand Progress help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 AUMF -- because all this open-ended authority for the Executive branch to wage war isn't a good thing, and certainly isn't how our Founders envisioned our government running. They envisioned Congress declaring war, after all, and the fact that Congress has largely abdicated that duty since the end of World War II doesn't change that fact, and certainly doesn't change what's right or what works. I wish I could say that our current President's claim was the most absurd claim I've heard from a recent President over his authority to bomb wherever he likes, but sadly, it's not -- President Obama's claim that various AUMFs gave him authority to strike in Libya and Syria were, frankly, more strained, and if our current President's votaries weren't so good at letting their pride erase their memory, they'd see that their Personal Lord and Savior is wrong, too. I'm not going to lay money on that happening any time soon, but I'd be happy to be wrong about that.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell the Brazilian government to drop cybercrime charges against journalist Glenn Greenwald. Mr. Greenwald's website, The Intercept, published articles last year exposing the infamous Brazilian "corruption" probe -- one which happened to put a lot of liberal politicians in jail, and just so happened to put the current President's opponent in jail while the campaign was going on! -- as an utter sham, and for that, the Brazilian government has arrested him. I like to believe folks are deeper than they seem, so I wish there were more to it than that, but there's not -- journalists who actually practice journalism, and expose the folly and venality of Our Glorious Elites, are more likely to wind up in jail than banksters who foreclose on grandmothers overdue by 27 cents on their mortgage. Of course, Brazil has laws, too, so they can't just put a journalist in jail for publishing leaked or hacked info; they have to insinuate that Mr. Greenwald somehow aided the hackers. But I'll believe the journalist who exposed government misdeeds over the government embarrassed by those misdeeds any day. It's not like we have a lot of journalists left, after all.

Around the table: more notes about various kinds of corruption.

Independent media outlet unmasks a senior Twitter editor as a British psyops agent -- but our "liberal" media largely ignore the story. You'd think our media would be more interested that a government spy, whose specialty is influencing how people think, was that deeply embedded in a social media corporation that influences how people think, but no, and I doubt it's because some media organ no one ever heard of (which hopefully will change!) broke the story. More likely it's because our "liberal" media do not take their duties seriously, and are just looking to fill space between adverts and move up the corporate ladder. Hey, I like to think the best of people, but some people make it awfully hard.

Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliot at ProPublica describe how Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert managed to get "opportunity zone" tax breaks for his properties in Detroit even though they're not in particularly distressed areas of the city. You'll be depressed to learn that getting these tax breaks is mostly about who you know, and even if Mr. Gilbert or his cronies didn't actually break any laws, the result -- money intended to spur investment in poorer communities gets diverted to already-wealthy developers -- is unmistakably corrupt and evil. And of course the way the 2017 tax "reform" sets up these "opportunity zones" is remarkably free of oversight and disclosure, and therefore accountability. Don't right-wingers say they're all about accountability? Oh, they mean accountability for you, not for them.

U.S. Magistrate Judge holds Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt of court for "show(ing) only minimal efforts to comply" with a court order preventing it from collecting more Corinthian College loans. Which is worse: the DOE spokeshack who plays the but-we-didn't-mean-any-harm card, or the one who said, probably rolling his eyes, that "(w)e acknowledged that servicers made unacceptable mistakes," never mind the unacceptable mistakes committed by DOE? Your law and order Administration, ladies and gentlemen!

You may have heard that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been having dinner with a lot of right-wing blowhards lately, but The Intercept checks around and finds that, despite a stated desire to "meet() new people and hear() from a wide range of viewpoints" that Mr. Zuckerberg says drives his dinners with the likes of Tucker Carlson and L. Brent Bozell III, , he hasn't actually broken bread with any liberals. Dig the it's called learning! BS at the end of his twittergasm! I gotta say, these days, when I read about someone rich or famous, normally my first response is gosh, what a fucking asshole.

Bobby Lewis at The Guardian watches 44 months of the Fox News Channel so you don't have to. And also so that you can fully understand that Fox News "poisons" people, which, like, I've seen happen. I've long said that Fox and Friends is the worst program on Fox News, not just because it's so baldly stupid, but because the hosts all pretend to be regular folks. You can take comfort in knowing that most of the regular folks you know are better informed than this. No, really. Don't judge by the guy eating 10 eggs at the Wisconsin diner, who'll blame his next heart attack on socialism.

Another day, another Bernie-can't-win-Iowa article in which voters act like they're trying to predict the winner, not be the winner. Seriously, when you say you're "unsure" how Medicare-for-All "plays in small-town Iowa" (set aside that it actually plays pretty well!) and you wonder if the things he proposes are "achievable things," you're doing democracy wrong -- gosh, if you're a small town voter and you like Medicare-for-All, you can actually make Medicare-for-All seem less impossible by supporting candidates who might actually pass it! This horserace mentality too many voters still have is going to get us all killed one day.

Finally, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) tells reporters that "(i)f Turkey was planning on coming into northern Syria and trying to ethnically cleanse the Kurds, and U.S. troops were caught in the middle, I am not completely convinced that it was a bad idea to get them out of harm's way." I guess that sounded better in his head, though seriously, America afraid of a big bad Turkish invasion? He acts like we're up against Suleiman the Magnificent instead of some two-bit dictator/Presidential man-crush. As an aside, maybe Beto O'Rourke could run ads about this in a 2020 Senate race.

Around the table: time for another exciting installment of "how much is enough?"

David Brooks is getting far too much credit for saying "the only plausible choice" in a race between our President and Elizabeth Warren "is to support Warren." No one gets to talk about a "wave of insular intolerance coursing through parts of the American left" without noting that there are Nazi wannabes out there right now cracking heads, and I'm long past tired of all his cherry-picking of the data (he says Ms. Warren is "one of the few Democrats who could actually lose" based on one poll showing her losing six points with independent voters after a very narrow set of polling questions). You know what's worse, though? His dreaming about everyone-getting-together-and-getting-things-done when the 2016 election instructed us that voters are beyond tired of that scam. David Brooks: even when he's right, he's wrong.

Steve Wamhoff at ITEP says that "Depreciation Tax Breaks Are a Problem that Deserves More Attention." "Accelerated" depreciation, for example, lets corporations take a larger part of the deduction of a piece of equipment at the beginning, which means less tax revenue to pay for the services you've come to expect from your government. Services like, you know, police, libraries, and firefighters. And a lot of corporate tax breaks are about "reward(ing) companies in return for making investments they would have made anyway," which is, you know, stupid. I mean, they already get to expense these investments; how much is enough?

Gregory Shupak describes how our "liberal" media got "Alarmed" by an "Imaginary U.S. Pullout from Syria." This means that what he did was actually worse than reported: it not only leaves the Kurds to die, but doesn't get us out of the Middle East! Why, this guy's almost as good at getting important stuff completely wrong as Bush the Lesser was! It's clear our President framed his withdrawal the way he did to get some more anti-war votes in 2020, which might work, but at least he won't get them from anyone who's actually paying attention, like us. Sadly, when our "liberal" media gets it wrong, they divert our attention.

I think it's actually a big deal that former Ohio Governor/Presidential aspirant John Kasich thinks our House should impeach our President, regardless of the fact that he's not in office at present, and regardless of the fact that Mr. Mulvaney's press conference was so off the rails. But I feel compelled to note that we would be wrong to describe Mr. Kasich as a "moderate" merely because he demonstrates the presence of a soul with some consistency; we would more accurately describe him as a conservative -- which, of course, means you would better describe the folks who call themselves "conservative" on the TV as "reactionary" (if you value civility above all) or "bat-guano insane" (if you don't).

Finally, Hillary Clinton insinuates that Russia is "grooming" Rep. Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate in 2020 so our President wins re-election. Jesus Mary and Joseph does she really think she lost in 2016 because of Jill Stein? Mrs. Clinton lost that race because she didn't miss an opportunity to tell you she would ignore the people's will in favor of Our Glorious Elites' will -- which didn't stack up well against her opponent's railings against immigration and "free" trade, even -- and if Democratic party poobahs get their way, they'll make the same mistake in 2020 with a Biden or a Buttigieg, and a Tulsi Gabbard 2% showing won't be the reason they lose. Once our current President proved that an unqualified and unhinged asshole could win an election, the palette of the possible widened in America, so in 2020 we certainly don't need to hold ourselves hostage to another center-right can-win let's-work-with-arsonists candidate to win. Besides, you don't win big unless you bet big.

Around the table: just because it's free speech doesn't mean it's not whining! And other lessons.

Our President received a well-covered setback in court last week, concerning his ability to keep Congress from seeing his tax returns, but he also got smacked down in two other rulings. A federal district judge stayed his rule denying green cards to folks who've ever received certain forms of public assistance -- calling the rule "simply a new agency policy of exclusion in search of a justification" -- and another federal district judge declared unlawful the "national emergency" declaration he used to fund a vanity border wall, and said he'd block the plan after getting input from both sides. Victories are hard to come by, but they do sustain us through tough times.

Georgia Southern University students burn books by a Latina author after a "contentious" Q-and-A she held there. Book-burning is as much constitutionally-protected speech as flag-burning, but I won't linger too long on that point, nor will I linger too long on how kids look like Nazis when they burn books, or the university's apparent ignorance of their in loco parentis rights -- rather, I'll linger, as is my habit, on the fact that anyone who burns books because they think they should have all the say about everything is a whining, diaper-loaded brat loudly advertising not their "toughness" but their insecurity. You know, like our President.

FAIR finds most of our big "liberal" media news organs strangely uninterested in studies finding that our military is a major driver of climate change. I'd long supposed that our obsession with building and moving was the main driver behind climate change, but I hadn't actually considered that our obsession with war-making plays a comparable role. And just as more efficient drive trains in automobiles got cancelled out, emissions-wise, by an increase in their construction, our military's honest efforts to combat climate change is likely to be cancelled out by the next 47 wars our politicians want to fight. And our "liberal" media loves war, so you won't hear about it from them.

On the heels of our surprise withdrawal from Syria/leaving of the Kurds to destruction at the hands of Turkey, Stephen Zunes at TruthOut reminds us how often our government has used the Kurds like a wet dishrag. And not just during the Persian Gulf War, either! We've also given Turkey truckloads of help in oppressing their own Kurdish population, all 15 million of them. (Mr. Zunes doesn't address it here, but the Kurds also did fight for the Allies in World War II, despite the impression our President may have given you. They fight the Nazis, they fight ISIS -- what does a brother have to do?)

Finally, in case you were wondering, Thom Hartmann at TruthOut reminds us how our Founders felt about impeachment. Long story short: our Founders obsessed about corruption, and how much damage an "executive" or "magistrate" (they weren't calling him "President" yet) could do. You probably already knew that in a general sense, but it's good to have it spelled out. Elbridge Gerry -- who ultimately didn't sign our Constitution because it didn't (yet) include a Bill of Rights -- spells out the need for "the necessity of impeachments" most plainly: "(a) good magistrate will not fear them. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them."

Around the table: from Kentucky to Syria, and guess where we find more hope?

Hazard (KY) job program helps give recovering drug addicts work, pay, and "a sense of purpose" as they help build affordable housing. "Research is starting to show what advocates have known anecdotally: having a job makes a significant difference in long-term addiction recovery," but try getting a job without skills, or with a criminal record. The program helps half a dozen folks annually gain construction skills and get jobs; maybe a few of our billionaires could break off some of their largesse and fund more programs like these, particularly in rural areas like Hazard? Or do we have to tax them harder to get it done? It's a question worth pondering.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media repeatedly insinuates that Messrs. Sanders, Warren, and Biden for being "too old to be President." Mr. Sanders's heart attack is obviously worth contemplating when deciding whom to vote for in a Democratic primary, but writing off all septuagenarians as physically and mentally unable to do the job is an awfully convenient argument given that the Democratic nominee will almost certainly be one of three septuagenarians. Maybe the one who takes selfies for four hours after a rally? And our "liberal" media never seem to mention the 73-year-old who currently occupies the Oval Office. Maybe that's because he constantly acts like a spoiled brat.

Also ho hum, Republican megadonor/notorious "America Firster" still manages to get H1-B visas for foreign workers even as our President cracks down on said H1-B visas. Of course, our President also uses undocumented immigrants wherever he can, and his votaries excuse that, because BUILDZ TEH WALLZ!!!!!. When Charles Baudelaire said that genius was the ability to hold two disparate ideas in the mind at one time, I don't think he was actually describing hypocrites or their enablers.

Uh oh: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has apparently violated a court order preventing her office from going after some indebted Corinthian College students, and could face jail time. You'll remember Corinthian College as the for-profit college chain that went under in 2015, but not without putting a lot of its students in a big debt hole first; the Obama Administration set up a program to help some of them get loan forgiveness, but this Administration's Education Department has virtually (and unlawfully) shut down the program, resulting in students incorrectly getting billed for loans and even getting their wages or tax refunds garnished. Again: you can't just skimp on your duty under the law just because you don't want to do it, or because you don't believe it's your duty under the law.

Finally, I've been loathe to go after our President for pulling out of Syria, since I'm no fan of our presence in the Middle East, but I find it hard to believe that our only two choices were "stay in Syria indefinitely" or "let the Turks kill all the Kurds," especially with this supposedly uniquely talented "deal-maker" in charge. Naturally our President has opened himself to charges of corruption, given that he has, well, business in Turkey that he doesn't have with the Kurds. One sad part of all of this is that now even more of our descendants will say this is the way the world is and there's no sense in trying to change it. We can help avert that catastrophe by making this President into the poster child for How Not to Be.

Around the table: featuring more of our President's lies, and more of the right's misdirections.

In ten brutal paragraphs, Jeffrey St. Clair lays out the horrible devastation in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria, and (of course) slams our President's absurd claims about how great his Administration handled it. Close to 5,000 dead, not "16," and our President never says who issues those rave reviews of his "performance" Jesus Mary and Joseph why is everything a damn performance anymore? Anyway, it really is well past time for Puerto Rican statehood -- I mean, given the number of times we've all had to tell people Puerto Rico is part of America, you know, maybe we should drive the point home.

Reed Richardson at FAIR reminds us that the whole "anonymous" kerfluffle just so happened to occur right around the time our Administration committed to further military involvement in Syria, which supports the hypothesis that our Administration, which loves drama, perpetrated the "anonymous" op-ed in the New York Times as a false flag operation. How do the libertarian-inflected folk who voted for our President because he promised a new-different-better foreign policy feel now, I wonder? Well, I don't wonder that much, because that was always a slim reed to hold onto.

Nicholas Powers at TruthOut reminds us that "Nike Uses Liberal Multiculturalism to Hide Abuse" -- specifically, abuse of the workers, in low pay and unsafe working conditions, who make Nike shoes. I've been obsessing lately over Hillary Clinton's suggestion during her campaign that we shouldn't break up the big banks because that won't solve racism or sexism or homophobia (gosh, I wonder why she lost!), and Mr. Powers's observations map pretty well onto that. (I do think he's overstating the effect 3D printing has on "making fully automated factories possible." 3D printers make knickknacks now, and get zero scrutiny from product safety regulators.)

Here's little-reported dung nugget from our President's August 30 Indiana rally: he slammed wind power, hitting on every last "problem" wind power supposedly has. In order: no, turbines don't kill that many birds; no, it's not the end of the world when the wind doesn't below because every form of energy has the occasional supply issue, and no "wind turbine syndrome" is not a thing, which anyone who's spent time in an actually noisy place already knows. He's taken all the crap-with-crap-sauce arguments fossil fuel PR hacks put out over the years and dumped them all in one paragraph! Our President really is everything wrong with our civilization in one person.

Finally, from the "I'm Pointing This Out So You'll Ignore It in the Future" file: long-time Republican donor Sean Klarman urges everyone to vote Democrat in the upcoming midterms, because "democracy is at stake," but you no doubt remember how many right-wingers urged you to vote for Mrs. Clinton in 2016 because democracy was at stake, so I hope you can forgive me for thinking this is a) just another attempt at corralling you into their game, instead of making them play our game, or b) ratfuckery from a big right-wing donor.

Around the table: meet the new boss, same as the old boss, part 785.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: ISIS fighters have moved back into Raqqa, Syria, not even a year after coalition forces allowed 250 of their fighters to leave Raqqa with their families and all the weapons they could fit into a three-mile long convoy. It sure is a good thing our new national security braintrust isn't overly preoccupied with truly ridiculous projects like regime change in Iran! Oops, sorry; I forgot which evil alternate universe I was in for a moment.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigns/is fired, citing "unrelenting attacks on me personally" because waaaaaaaaaah! And our President's votaries now see Mr. Pruitt as One of Them, because he gets attacked by Those Librul Elites just like they do! Never mind that they'd never tolerate a Cone of Silence from a Democrat. (Also, a former coal lobbyist now runs the EPA, on an "interim" basis that I expect to last at least until the end of 2020.)

In the face of yet more "liberal" media hand-wringing over Just What Those Red State Voters Are Really Like, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us that the glue that really binds them (and their messy lives) to our President (and his messy life which is now our messy life) is sexism. "The anti-abortion campaign is all about punishing women for sex, not men," right-wingers don't "put a 'higher value' on marriage" so much as they "stigmatize not being married," by which they mean women not being married -- all true, and as long as men are trying to get sex from women (and imagining themselves somehow disenfranchised if they don't), this'll all remain a problem.

Ho hum, privatizing IRS tax collection functions has caused our government to lose money, which Nobody Could Have Predicted! Worse, private tax collectors more typically go after low-income working families than big fish, which Nobody Could Have Predicted, Either! We talk about this kind of stuff all the time, but our elected representatives never seem to listen. That's why we need to keep talking about it. Can't some enterprising Democrat somewhere run campaign ads about this? Or would that be uncivil?

Max Boot becomes another major right-wing figure (a la George Will) to openly root for Democrats to win back the House and Senate this fall. Of course, Hillary Clinton was able to find plenty of Republicans willing to endorse her and even shoot ads for her; how did that work out? And how much pull do folks like Max Boot and George Will really have with regular Americans? Hell, how much pull do they have with other elite right-wingers, most of whom, I imagine, are saying we're getting rid of regulations and getting two Supreme Court Justices out of all of this as we speak?

Finally, leave it to Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall to point out that simultaneously telling Democrats "we have to fight or we can't win" and "if we do fight, it will backfire and we also can't win" is utterly absurd. He also approves of the "Abolish ICE" slogan because at least it's got "clarity and power," like, you know, all right-wing slogans do no matter how stupid they are, plus "(i)f your political language tip toes around what you think or shows you’re not quite sure what you think or shows that you know what you think but may not be willing to act on what you think, that has bad consequences. It signals weakness and irresolution. It shows you may not have the resoluteness to act." Which explains how Scott Walker/Sam Brownback/Paul LePage/Rick Snyder/Rick Scott somehow won all those elections -- they're wrong about everything, but they're resolutely wrong.

Around the table: tabulating bad arguments and their even worse consequences, plus some felons on parole get good news.

Federal prosecutors aim to criminalize many of the J20 protestors still up on felony rioting charges by citing their union membership -- specifically, their membership in International Workers of the World (a.k.a. the "Wobblies"). This is how desperate our government's case against J20 protestors has become -- invoking century-old whipping boys in order to scare up convictions. Hearing liberals constantly smeared as "Communists" seems almost modern by comparison, almost like that's the whole idea.

Adam Johnson at FAIR tabulates 26 "liberal" media editorials on the President's Syria strikes and finds, guess what, zero opposed. There's plenty of reason to oppose the Syria strikes, among them that Congress didn't authorize them as the Constitution mandates, and usually when a baseball player goes 0-for-26 he gets a couple of days off. What a shame that the "liberal" media pundits who constantly demand we waste more blood and treasure on stupid war-making never grab some deep pine.

Jeff Bryant at the Our Future blog tells us "Why Teacher Uprisings May Move to Blue States, Too.". Short answer: because the blue states deserve it, too, being as they've been full of corporate Democrats embracing austerity policies and pushing "school choice" as a way to funnel taxpayer money away from functioning public schools and into the coffers of cronies. The good news? Change only comes from the people, and it sure looks like that change is coming.

Get a load of all the high-level Republicans, including "straight talker" Ron Johnson, saying it's "too early" to talk about supporting the President's re-election effort in 2020! Of course the President filed to run in 2020 literally the day he took office in 2017, but this wishy-washy act from Congressional Republicans sure did work pretty well for them in 2016, so I can see why they're doing it. It might not work as well in the future, though, because The Man Who Couldn't Possibly Beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 has now been President for a year and a quarter, and that trail of slime he's left everywhere he's gone is a little harder to step over now.

Finally, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announces plans to restore voting rights to felons on parole -- by pardoning mass numbers of them. I couldn't care less that he's doing it because he fears he's going to lose his next gubernatorial primary to Cynthia Nixon, because it's the right thing to do -- felons' voting rights should never have been taken away in the first place. Naturally state Republicans call it an "outrageous power grab," as if their refusal to restore voting rights to felons is somehow not an outrageous power grab. All together now: waaaaaaaah!

Action: war in the Middle East, and the "balanced budget amendment."

In re whatever we're planning to do to Syria in the next day or two: Robert Naiman at Just Foreign Policy has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that our President gets Congressional authorization before beginning any military action against Syria. Our Glorious Elites will scream TIME IZ OV TEH ESSENCEZ!!!!! in our ears, in an attempt to get us to back yet another military action in the Middle East that will backfire against us in time, but we should remember two things: one, that our Constitution mandates that Congress, not the President, authorizes war, and two, that we don't know if Syria's government attacked its citizens with chemical weapons. After all, we couldn't prove they did last time Mr. Trump threw a bunch of missiles at them. That's why you don't leave foreign policy-making up to the President.

Meanwhile, earlier this week I argued against the "balanced budget amendment" the House will start considering soon on purely philosophical grounds -- and both Social Security Works and Americans for Tax Fairness still help you tell your Congressfolk to reject it -- but these organizations remind me that I didn't do enough to describe exactly what kind of havoc a balanced budget amendment could wreak. The amendment, if it passes, would force automatic cuts to programs like Medicare and Social Security, programs, I feel compelled to say once again, we earned by paying into all our lives. The amendment would also require a three-fifths vote, rather than a majority vote, to overspend its budget or raise taxes on rich folks and/or corporations. Thus Republicans could cut our earned benefits without actually having to vote on it! It's a win-win! For everyone but the American people, that is.

Around the table: featuring truly bad arguments and governments gone wild!

Laura Gottesdeiner at Mother Jones finds our ongoing war against ISIS to be, well, rather less "precise" than advertised, to the point where many Syrian citizens think the Americans' main aim is to kill as many civilians as possible. You'd hate to think we've outdone Mr. Assad in the area of killing Syrian civilians, let alone ISIS, but in May and June we managed to outdo both in that area. And if you're thinking destroying ISIS is more important than worrying about the "collateral damage," you have to consider what killing civilians always does in the long term -- namely, that it creates more ISISes.

You've heard from right-wingers that consumers win more money through arbitration than class-action lawsuits, but the Economic Policy Institute reminds us that so few consumers ever win in forced arbitration -- a mere 9% do, making that nice-looking $5,000-plus average virtually meaningless, since you get zero dollars if you lose. Also, and we often forget to talk about this when we talk about forced arbitration, that corporations win even more often when they take you to arbitration, and they collect, on average, over $7,000 when they win. Class action lawsuits may not make you rich, but it ain't all about you -- it's also about everyone else who got harmed, and making sure corporations don't harm people again.

The Turkish government has detained half a dozen activists for the heinous crime of discussing and learning about encryption and digital security. Oh, sure, the charges include things like "committing crimes in the name of a terrorist organization without being a member," which sure sounds like a made-up thing, but make no mistake: they're oppressing good activists laying their lives on the line for their fellow citizens. And like so many other governments around the globe (cough Venezuela cough), Turkey's government does these things because it knows it will shrivel and die under ordinary circumstances. (But remember that our own CIA Chief, Mike Pompeo, has all but equated encryption to criminal activity as well.)

Ho hum, would-be Estate Tax killers still trot out family farms, even though the stodgiest Estate Tax opponents have never been able to find even one family farm that succumbed to it. Last month a House Ways and Means Committee hearing brought in a North Dakota farmer to decry the Estate Tax when his farm won't be subject to the Estate Tax, and a 2014 ad campaign against the Estate Tax featured a Kentucky farmer who took over $150,000 in farm subsidies over the previous 20 years! The Estate Tax repeal movement has always been one of America's stupidest -- but how many more bullets do we have to pump into this zombie lie to keep it down for good?

Finally, Janine Jackson at FAIR reminds us of the dangers of believing credulous "liberal" media stories about attacks against America by describing how the Tonkin Gulf "attack" led to the catastrophe in Vietnam. You have to hope that if/when Donald Trump tries something similar, today's "liberal" media will hate him enough to be a bit more skeptical, except that the "liberal" media seemed to love him best earlier this year when he fired a bunch of Tomahawk missiles at a just-deserted Syrian air base. So it's down to us to keep us out of war, as usual.

Around the table: from real journalism to a real "American Caesar."

Issie Lapowsky at Wired profiles the Syrian journalists who are risking death to spread the word (largely via social media) about how ISIS and the Syrian government are destroying their country. You know, in case you were wondering what real journalism looks like -- the kind of journalism that speaks truth to power and puts the lives of its practitioners at risk, rather than the kind we're used to from the "liberal" media, where journalists suck up to the powerful and pretend they're "cultivating sources."

Bad news for the Trump Administration -- from the Trump Administration! The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issues report finding, among other things, that the mix of sick and healthy folks on the Obamacare exchanges was about the same last year as it was the year before. Well, that's one hell of a "death spiral" there! And when they get around to evaluating how well the exchanges did in 2017 versus 2016, they run the risk of blaming themselves for any problems! No wonder they're so hot to get rid of Obamacare.

I wouldn't blame you for being skeptical about research indicating that counties where law enforcement receives military equipment from our government have a higher incidence of police violence, although the authors say they controlled for all the factors you might think of (violent crime and citizen wealth in a county, to name two examples). But the finding that police get attacked more when they've got military equipment should give you pause under any circumstance -- if the whole purpose of military equipment is to "protect police," we have to assume that's not working, don't we?

Eric Anthony at Streaming Observer estimates that ESPN makes some $4.5 billion annually from broadband customers who don't actually want to watch it. Which is, you know, more than half of the people who get it in their basic cable package. You know what'd fix this? A la carte cable packaging, that's what! (And the "a la carte" services don't really serve channels up a la carte: Sling TV, which used to tempt me, now carries four ESPN channels in its basic "Orange" package.)

Finally, 18 state Attorneys General sue the Department of Education over its decision to delay enforcing rules protecting students from predators in the financial and for-profit college industries. The Trump Administration obviously thinks they've found a loophole in the law by "delaying" or "pausing" rules, instead of going through the trouble (and it is trouble!) to repeal or rewrite them. But while executive branches may get to set enforcement priorities, they can't just refuse to enforce a law because they don't like it, or even because they believe it's a bad law. Isn't this the kind of behavior the Founders warned us about?

Around the table: the bigliest pro-Trump network ever, and other lessons.

I've got some good-news-bad-news for you, courtesy Dave Lindorff at Counterpunch. The good news? Seymour Hersh has exposed the convenient lie that Syrian President Assad attacked his own people with sarin nerve gas in April -- the very thing that prompted President Trump to throw a couple dozen Tomahawks at a Syrian air base. The bad news? He couldn't get an American newspaper to publish it -- only the German daily Die Welt carried Mr. Hersh's exposé. Of course Mr. Trump is again claiming very loudly (with zero pushback from our "liberal" media) that Mr. Assad plans to use chemical weapons on his people again, and if any President was ever in need of a war, it's Mr. Trump.

Now Warren Freaking Buffett thinks we should shift to a single-payer health care system. And he's got an argument that might sway corporate leaders -- that health care costs, not corporate taxes, make corporations less competitive with their foreign counterparts. I've long argued that corporate CEOs would welcome paying less for their employees' health care, though of course the worst of them will want "something in exchange" for agreeing to it, as if reducing labor costs substantially isn't "something." If we're very, very lucky, we won't have some Robert Rubin-picked Democrat to conduct those negotiations.

Judd Legum at Think Progress describes "how TMZ quietly became America’s most potent pro-Trump media outlet." Its "apolitical" (and young) viewers "come for Kanye West, Lady Gaga, and Amber Rose" and then get pro-Trump coverage along with it. Of course, the mere fact that TMZ exists, and can broadcast on over-the-air channels, tells us how sick, immoral, and decadent our society has become, and just as it shouldn't be hard to believe that a President like Donald Trump could emerge from that swamp, it shouldn't be hard to believe that TMZ is his biggest cheerleader.

Former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler and former FCC general counsel Jon Sallet think this whole net neutrality imbroglio will end up in court. I'm inclined to agree, merely based on how many fake comments the FCC has already tolerated and could have prevented, but Mr. Sallet concentrates on what consumers can reasonably expect from their broadband connections -- for example, if your ISP says you can "go anywhere," should consumers reasonably expect legal internet sites to be censored or throttled? If the FCC does what we expect and kills net neutrality, maybe we should simply contact our ISP every time a page doesn't load fast enough.

Finally, security researchers find wind farms shockingly easy to hack. I'm tempted to say this news proves you ought to hire people to watch over things rather than leave every damn thing to computers -- or tumbler locks! But wind farms typically don't secure their computers very well, either -- even though most don't even connect to the internet, they can still be picked from afar. Of course, this is no reason to throw up your hands and accept the pollution of fossil fuels -- it's a reason to demand better security from wind farms.

Around the table: Turkey's President is *even worse* than ours, and other lessons.

Turkey blocks access to Wikipedia, citing it as a "security threat." What a big baby this President Erdogan is. Waaaaaah! Wikipedia article on me has picture of cockroach instead of a picture of me! Waaaaaaaah! I sure hope Mr. Trump doesn't get any ideas -- though if he does, I expect a holy righteous fury to rise up spontaneously from the American people, at which point we'll know if this whole democratic experiment of ours works.

Reed Richardson at FAIR describes "100 Days of Media Hoping for a New, Improved Trump." Remember when the "liberal" media said he "became" President the night he addressed Congress without shouting at them, or the day he fired nearly five dozen missiles at a Syrian airbase the Syrians had already mostly cleared out? Good times! Of course, the media's job, like the citizen's job, isn't to "hope" for a better President, but to make Donald Trump be a better President.

Ho hum, Chinese workers making Ivanka Trump's very expensive clothes get paid around $1 an hour. No use complaining that Chinese workers don't make very much money generally, because Ms. Trump is sure making a big profit using cheaper workers, instead of American workers she'd have to pay at least seven times as much. In short, we're much better off making hay of this than we are of Melania Trump's immigration status, because this really tells us who the Trumps are.

Even the New York Times tells us that "Trump Tax Plan Would Shift Trillions From U.S. Coffers to the Richest." Doesn't matter that he didn't release details, because we all know who always benefits from slashing corporate taxes and estate taxes and Obamacare taxes and capital gains taxes and alternative minimum taxes, and we all remember that Tha Bush Mobb's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts didn't exactly goose up job creation or economic growth.

Finally, speaking of economic growth, guess what else Mr. Trump can take credit for? A 2017 first-quarter GDP growth rate of a mere 0.7%. Not that Mr. Obama's GDP growth rates were the cat's pajamas, but Mr. Obama didn't walk around like he had the biggest balls on Earth, either. I presume Mr. Trump will do what any ball-swinger does, and blame his predecessor (as his Commerce Secretary has already done), even though Mr. Obama was only in office for the first 20 days of the quarter.

Action: budgetary hostage-taking, and "liberal" media war worship.

Congress is back to work, such as they do, and they have a mere two days to pass a spending bill and authorize raising the debt ceiling -- so of course they're considering all the ways they can hold the people hostage to their will, like refusing to fund Affordable Care Act subsidies, clean air and clean water enforcement, or funding that stupid border wall of Mr. Trump's. So I think a phone call to your Congressfolk about that is in order, and as always you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone). Feel free to complain directly to your Congressfolk that you're sick and tired of them using all these artificial deadlines as excuses to create hostage situations so they can shove evil policy initiative down our throats. I bet they don't hear that from their constituents enough, and they should be hearing it a lot more, since what they're doing is so blindingly obvious. They also argue through hostage crisis, of course ("don't make me keep coal plants from polluting, or people will lose their jobs!"), but today we'll concentrate on Congress's more direct threats to our well-being.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell traditional "liberal" media outlets to stop glorifying violence and war. One doesn't need to slam Brian Williams (who might have been signaling disapproval of Mr. Trump's missile strike in Syria with his use of an obviously ironic Leonard Cohen lyric) to find the "liberal" media's warmongering plenty obvious -- not just in their effusive praise of Mr. Trump for "becoming President" the day he threw almost five dozen Tomahawks at an air base the Syrians had already pretty much cleared out, not just for covering that event almost solely in the context of whether it constitutes a "win" for President Trump (the American people never win on "liberal" media programs!), but in their wall-to-wall coverage of war-making in general, which reminds one of nothing so much as a hormone-addled teenage boy at his video game console. War is essentially a way of admitting the complete failure of your statecraft, so our "liberal" media shouldn't get all giddy when Presidents drop bombs -- they should treat the occasion with considerably more sobriety. Maybe that doesn't "get ratings," but it does inform the people more effectively, and the latter is, after all, their real job.

Around the table: more lessons about how the other side feeds off failure.

Tyler Rogoway at The Drive tells you, in excruciating detail, why the Trump missile strike on the Syrian airbase was "a sham." Of course you can't discount the possibility the Trump Administration knew their attack would restrict their military options in the region -- after all, that would increase the possibility of a future military reversal, meaning more opportunities to rally the American people to a President they don't otherwise like. I mean, you know Republicans feed off failure the way dung beetles feed off, well, you know.

Senior editors at Breitbart News have asked writers to lay off Mr. Trump's advisor/son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Because that's what you do when you work for a big-league news outfit: kowtow to the President. And that's what you do when you work for a big-league White House advisor: complain about news coverage. And remember that one of Breitbart's biggest problems with Mr. Kushner is his Membership in the Tribe. Seriously, this is all a big pile of suck.

No less an authority than Goldman Sachs estimates that the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. "Obamacare") has created 500,000 health care jobs over four years. More people having more health insurance means more people getting more health care means more jobs to meet the increased demand, as you know if you studied economics employed common sense. Anyway, think of how many jobs we could create if we could get everyone covered under a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program!

President Trump apparently will not visit Pope Francis I during next month's G7 Summit in Italy. Because TEH POPEZ SAIDZ THE MEAN THINGZ ABOUTZ MEZ!!!!! So, there's probably on truth to the rumor that he won't visit because he fears getting deported from Vatican City, or the rumor that he fears he would the Pope's presence would cause him to spontaneously combust.

Finally, we might do better assuming that Mr. Spicer intended his "Hitler didn't use chemical weapons" flatugasm on Tuesday, because it sure sounds like dog-whistle politics to me. I mean, I'm not going to check, but I would not be surprised to find more than a few right-wing message boards aflame with TEH SPICER IZ TEH ONE OF UZ!!! declarations, since "Hitler didn't use chemical weapons" is kind of a way of denying the Holocaust. I wouldn't blame you if you applied Occam's Razor and chalked Mr. Spicer's flatugasm up to mere stupidity, either, but I would then feel compelled to remind you: stupid is evil.

Around the table: a coup in the Wyoming Democratic party, and other strange developments.

The Wyoming Democratic Party holds committee elections, and the Berniecrats trounce the Clintonoids. I would be highly amused to discover that the Clintonoid faction warned repeatedly about the "risk" people would be taking if they elected Berniecrats -- I mean, when your party has 12 out of 90 seats in the state legislature, there's very little hostage-taking the establishment can do ("don't vote for those crazy people, or you'll lose!").

Congress is in recess for two weeks, but very few swing-district Republicans will hold live town halls over the next two weeks. Tele-town halls are no substitute (you're not really "facing your constituents" if you get to pick all the questions and do it over computer) and if Republicans are really concerned about live townhalls devolving into "shouting matches," as one Republican spokeshack says, then they may want to consider how they could prevent that. Maybe by managing conflict better -- I mean, they teach courses in that! -- or by, oh, I don't know, withdrawing support for unpopular policies that hurt people.

Jeff Sessions's Department of Justice announces it will curtail efforts to review scientific standards in forensic practices. Not as part of the Trump Administration's "War on Science," perhaps, but certainly because they'd rather leave "guilty" people in jail even if the forensic evidence used to convict them (like bite-mark and firearm tracing) wouldn't pass scientific muster today. Always the Accountability Crowd takes the easy way out! Better crime-fighting isn't just good for our civilization, it builds character.

Ted Rall regales us with "Confessions of a Frequent Guest on Fox News." You'll recognize the things Fox does to its house liberals -- put them in smaller chairs, tamp down their microphones, tell them the show's about one thing only to switch it on them when they showed up to the set -- as the hallmarks of people who can't win arguments on the merits. And without a la carte cable packaging -- under which consumers wouldn't pay for channels they didn't want -- they'll keep getting away with it.

Finally, Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News wonders if "liberal" media applause over Mr. Trump's missile strike will mark "a dangerous turning point" in our history. Maybe! But Americans, by and large, don't like Mr. Trump, and by and large they don't like the "liberal" media, either, so I think it'll take a lot of Democrat enabling to make large numbers of people think he's "Presidential." It did not occur to me before, though, that Mr. Trump has surpassed Mr. Bush in at least one thing: don't wait until a particularly bad day to drop bombs. Of course, since every day is a bad day when you're tripping over your own dick, "waiting until a slightly less bad day" is just about his only option.

Around the table: more about Syria, body cameras, regulations, and Trump votaries.

Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept reminds us, in re Mr. Trump's recent missile strike on a Syrian airbase, that "in every type of government, nothing unites people behind the leader more quickly, reflexively or reliably than war." Today he became President, our "liberal" media tell us, though, gosh, what a low bar they set for this guy -- he stops shouting at everyone for an hour and he "becomes President"; he blows up an airbase the Syrian government was able to clear out beforehand and he "becomes President."

Sen. McConnell (E-KY) says President Obama never targeted Syrian use of chemical weapons like President Trump supposedly did -- but Mr. McConnell actually opposed Mr. Obama's efforts to throw missiles at Syria for the same reason! Will our "liberal" media challenge him on this obvious lie? They will not -- although, to be fair, some journalists may be failing to question Mr. McConnell not out of cowardice, but out of disgust. Hey, I don't talk to evil people, either, if I can avoid it.

The Rights and Dissent blog finds the New York Police Department's new body camera policy wanting. Folks who reflexively dismiss body cameras have had years to persuade me and haven't done so yet, but the New York Civil Liberties Union makes two good points: the NYPD's policy won't capture all police encounters, though encounters that seem calm at first can always escalate, and the policy also doesn't give the public a whole lot of access to videos, even though, you know, the police serve the public.

While the headline "How Merrick Garland Could Torment Trump" is a bit of clickbait, the former Obama Supreme Court nominee did author a 1985 Harvard Law Review article that describes how to fight deregulatory efforts like the one Mr. Trump is undertaking. And a 1983 Supreme Court decision (on a case Mr. Garland argued successfully as a corporate lawyer) declared that our government "could change their minds about the value of a particular regulation" but "could not ignore evidence they considered when putting the rule on the books in the first place." This maps well onto our notion that regulations meet specific, legally-mandated ends, and you can't just throw out the regulations unless you're going to achieve those same ends in some other way.

Finally, though I really shouldn't be spending any more time on horse-race coverage like this, Steve Bannon's allies are supposedly trying to convince Mr. Trump not to fire him, by saying it'd alienate his "base," which consists of "the people who didn't vote for 20 years." Ah, no -- his base consists of the same people who were energized by the "war on terror," then the budget deficit, then the Tea Party, then "Regulation Nation," then "Blue Lives Matter." The right-wing establishment leads them around from outrage to outrage, and Mr. Trump is in no danger of losing them, no matter what he does with Mr. Bannon. (And yeah, when the "Bannon ally" spoke of "the Cohns of the world," I'm pretty sure he just meant "Jews.")

Action: war with Syria, and forced labor.

President Trump ordered the firing of nearly 60 Tomahawk missiles at Syria's Shayrat airbase late last week -- after letting Russia know first, of course, at which point Russia likely told Syria what was coming, which would explain how the Syrian government could get personnel and equipment out of the way before the strike. Our Congressfolk, naturally, have squeaked about Mr. Trump needing Congressional approval should he try to escalate matters, though he already acted without Congressional authorization, and thus without Constitutional authority, on Thursday night. I think Greg Grandin (first link) and Richard Clarke (second) are right to conclude that Mr. Trump's real target was his domestic opposition and that the strike was politically "symbolic," respectively -- though I might not have said "symbolic," but rather called the whole thing a drama, the kind Mr. Trump lives to create. And since it's a drama designed to neutralize Mr. Trump's real opponents (i.e., the American people), I think we should call our Reps and Senators and tell them that we oppose further Syrian attacks.

Meanwhile, at Legion of Doom Headquarters, the Turkmenistan government has imprisoned activist Gaspar Matalaev for six months now, and has apparently tortured him to get him to confess to various charges -- charges not including "filming forced labor in the nation's cotton fields," though he has done that, and there you may find the reason he's in jail, forced labor being unpopular among virtually everyone on Earth. And yes, Turkmenistan is yet another Eastern European nation that forces its citizens (including its children) to work the cotton harvest every year or face jail time; Turkmenistan also compels businesses to provide labor or its in-kind equivalent or face closure. And that, right-wingers, is what real government oppression of the business sector looks like -- please, no more silliness about how regulations are so oppressive, is that so much to ask? In any case, the fact that Turkmenistan does these things means they're a failing system, so the International Forum for Labor Rights helps you tell the government of Turkmenistan to release Mr. Matalaev. Because the Big Stick of Bad PR still works, even in these decadent times.

Action: health care, war in Syria, public water, and fracking.

The House plans to vote on Obamacare repeal today, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're viewing this page on a smartphone) to call your Reps and tell them to reject the legislation. We have plenty of reasons to oppose it, chief among them that it repeals the Medicare-funding tax imposed by the Affordable Care Act on high incomes -- which means that, yes, Republicans are trying to steal money from Medicare in order to give handouts to their wealthy donors. It would not be "uncivil" to put it like that, since it is, in fact, true. Obamacare repeal would also deprive over 20 million Americans of their health insurance and replace the individual mandate with a 30 percent premium hike for people who've had gaps in their health insurance -- which means that instead of paying your government a fine for not having had health insurance, you'll be paying health insurance corporations that fine. All praise the "free" market!

Meanwhile, H.R. 1473, the Prohibit Expansion of U.S. Combat Troops into Syria Act, would, as its title suggests, prevent our President from "establishing or maintaining any presence of members of the United States Armed Forces or private security contractors on the ground of Syria, unless the purpose of such presence is limited solely to rescuing or protecting members of the United States Armed Forces from imminent danger," except in case of the need "to protect, rescue, or remove United States personnel." That's right, it's another succinct anti-war bill from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA)! And H.R. 1473 doesn't actually prevent the President from, you know, going old school and actually requesting a declaration of war from Congress like the Constitution demands. It does, however, prevent the President from using the 2001 AUMF as an excuse to send soldiers off to die wherever he likes, which is also a pressing matter. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help put a stop to endless warmongering by supporting H.R. 1473.

In other news, the Nestlé corporation is doing its damndest to execute "water grabs" all over America -- where they pay a municipality a piddling sum to siphon off its citizens' public water so they can bottle it and make a shamefully huge profit -- but we are fighting back against these water grabs wherever we can. Even in Michigan, where Republicans have a stranglehold on state government, we've managed to stall their efforts to steal water from the town of Evart. But the Premier of British Columbia, has backed away from promises to review that province's water rate schedule "for industrial users" (i.e., corporations like Nestlé) -- promises she made only last year, after heavy action from the citizenry, of course. She faces the good voters of British Columbia again in less than six months, so help her do the right thing, but letting Sum of Us help you tell Premier Clark to keep Nestlé from stealing British Columbia's water. Especially given all the drought that's afflicted that province over the last few years!

Finally, Philadelphia residents take note: SEPTA still plans to build a fracked natural gas plant in the northern part of the city; perhaps not coincidentally, North Philly is the area of the city most neglected by the municipal government over the years. So perhaps they don't care if "those people" have dirtier air, since they already have the dirtiest air in the city. Why does no one think of building a renewable energy plant in economically-distressed areas? I mean, the gas'll be gone one day -- and will do plenty of damage in the meantime! -- but the sun and the win will always return. Now, the SEPTA board voted to pass this proposal months ago, but got caught not giving the public the legally-required amount of notice (I wonder why not!) and thus have to redo the vote. And Philadelphia's Mayor, Jim Kenney, can still veto the plan. You can call him at 855.969.5216 to tell him to veto the SEPTA fracked gas plan, and thus protect good North Philly residents from (even more) air pollution.

Action: pollution, unconstitutional war-making, and automatic voter registration.

By now you know that the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency has put the the Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) in clear peril, what with Mr. Trump himself having declared his hostility to all regulations and having vowed to abolish the EPA, with a "senior advisor" who calls people who care about clean air and clean water "greentards," and with a transition head who decides to make a big drama of tearing up the Paris climate accord, as if that's how a grown-up acts. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Senators to ensure that the EPA continues to protect good Americans from pollution. Because, after all, your elected officials are still supposed to answer to you, not their big donors, and that's true regardless of what they think. And nobody in America wants environmental "policy" that gives polluters everything and people nothing and that drives up health care costs far beyond the "costs" (mainly to CEO pocketbooks) of keeping our air and water clean. And if, like me, you were outside this past Christmas Day in 74-degree weather in the Northeast, you know climate change isn't some "hoax" perpetrated on the American people, and most Americans would seem to agree with you about that.

Meanwhile, the Oval Office's current occupant, President Obama, has lately (as in right after the election) asked Congress for another $11.6 billion to fight all those undeclared and unconstitutional wars we're currently waging in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Wait, you thought those last two were over? As if! Mr. Obama, if anything, has damaged our Constitutional war-making capability even more than Mr. Bush did, by failing, even, to make a show of coming to Congress to authorize adventures in Libya and Syria. (His Administration says the 2001 AUMF gives him all the authority he needs. Nobody could have predicted that power would get abused!) So Roots Action helps you tell our government to abandon plans to spend yet more billions of dollars on yet more undeclared wars. It's not enough to note that the U.N. instructs us that $11.6 billion could remove barriers to clean water for everyone on the planet, or that $11.6 billion represents all by itself more money than all but 15 nations (including the U.S.) spend on their military -- asking for more money for more undeclared wars in regions that don't pose an existential threat (seriously, now, are we ever surrendering to ISIS?) is not just unconstitutional, but immoral.

Finally, given reports about voters disenfranchised by the Interstate Crosscheck database and by organizations like the Voter "Integrity" Project, it's good news that six states (and the District of Columbia) have legalized automatic voter registration, where you get registered every time you get or renew your driver's license or get or renew other state ID. And despite what you may have heard, none of these states actually force people to register to vote; in each of them you can opt out of registration if you so desire. These six states include blue states like Oregon and California and red states like West Virginia and Alaska, so you'd probably figure that automatic voter registration has actual bipartisan support, versus all the stupid corporate crap that politicians and their "liberal" media enablers call "bipartisan." Hence Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to pass laws enabling automatic voter registration. As always, don't pay any regard to the arguments of haters, who say it's "already easy enough" to register. In states where right-wingers can challenge black folks' voting rights merely by alleging they've moved, and have their local governments simply toss the registration, it ain't all that easy.

Action: depleted uranium, GMO labeling, and oppressing protestors.

Last year, our government said it had not used, and did not use, depleted uranium weaponry in Iraq and/or Syria. The Department of Defense has since walked that back, which isn't that impressive, since everyone knows our government did in fact fire depleted uranium weapons into populated areas during the Iraq war, and while doing so will apparently never have consequences for George W. Bush or his Mobb, it does have very real consequences for Iraqis and Syrians right now, since scientists have linked depleted uranium aerosols with increased birth defects in children. If you're tempted to say who cares, it's just people that have been killing each other for centuries, please do four things: 1) slap yourself, 2) contemplate the role Western nations' zeal to steal Middle Eastern natural resources in our troubles, 3) slap yourself again, and 4) ask yourself why the greatest military in the world must use weapons that harm innocents. And then, perhaps let Just Foreign Policy and MoveOn help you tell our government to look a little harder at what it's done and come clean about its use of depleted uranium weapons overseas.

Meanwhile, as you know, our government enacted a GMO-labeling bill that pre-empted state-level GMO-labeling laws but which might, in a few years, result in a national mandatory GMO-labeling standard that doesn't suck, but in the meantime, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is mulling whether to allow big ag corporations to exempt oils and sugars that use GMOs, which would pretty much take a bat to the kneecaps of any national GMO standard that might emerge. The USDA is, perhaps, the worst of the Obama Administration's alphabet agencies, having only one positive accomplishment for the American people to its credit (higher school lunch nutrition standards, which, naturally, Congress tries to gut every chance it gets), that accomplishment hidden like a nugget of gold in the river of hog manure that is the overall record of the USDA's otherwise slavish adherence to big ag desires. Still, it's not like we're powerless, as the USDA is taking public comments on this matter as we speak, and Just Label It helps you tell the USDA not to exempt certain foods from GMO labeling mandates.

Finally, staff and players on the Beaumont (TX) Bulls youth football team decided to take a knee during the national anthem during their September 10 game, as 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has famously done, and at the time, they did so with the support of their youth league and their team's executive board. Then the board got cold feet and told them not to take a knee during the anthem before their next week's game -- but the team did so anyway. Then the board suspended the head coach -- not for sticking with his players, of course, but for "removing a player and coach from the team and an improperly distributed text message," which, like, yeah sure -- and then the board threatened to arrest parents who tried to attend games or other team events, and when the players kept resisting, they ultimately cancelled the season. If the board is trying to teach these kids that actions have consequences, well, they should be learning it themselves. Toward that end, Color of Change helps you demand that the board stop acting like a bunch of whiny bullies and give these courageous kids back their season.

Around the table: revealing more secrets of Donald Trump's "success."

Adam Haslett at The Nation says Donald Trump has "trashed our political culture by weaponizing shame." For those of us who still think shame is an important tool to ensure more people don't turn out like Donald Trump, it's an unexpectedly good article: first he diagnoses the emotion "driving our present politics" not as anger, but shame, and then describes how Mr. Trump first "induces" shame in his votaries, then essentially excuses them from confronting it by "publicly shaming others instead." The rest of it draws that necessary line from the rise of tabloid journalism and "reality TV" in the West to the "domestic variation of what Naomi Klein described in The Shock Doctrine" that Republicans today practice as "politics." This article is so good it might actually get me to read a National Review writer again (the one whose name is J.D. Vance, of course).

Speaking of Teh Donald, a Newsweek investigation finds that Mr. Trump has used Chinese steel in two of his last three big construction projects, despite the availability of perfectly good American steel. This, also, could represent a week of campaign ads for Hillary Clinton -- but the problem (and I mean this literally, that it's a problem) is that Mr. Trump's hypocrisies are so YUGE that ad campaigns can barely contain them. Inveterate "free" trader refusing to use American steel in his buildings; "self-made man" taking nearly a billion dollars in city tax breaks over 40 years, and also taking a six-figure 9.11-related federal grants away from small businesses that actually needed it -- there are so many that I honestly can't think of any more right now. Of course, the internet is a big place, so someone's probably done a more comprehensive list. The future is good for some things.

Speaking to one of Mr. Haslett's objections in the article to which today's first paragraph links, Stephen Wolf at Daily Kos explains why Hillary Clinton hasn't been branding Donald Trump as the logical extension of Republican extremism he appears to be. Long story short: voters apparently aren't all that convinced that Mr. Trump is that logical extension, and they start to resist campaigns when they link Mr. Trump to national Republicans too assiduously. And why should they be? Most folks just aren't as obsessed with politics as we are, and the "liberal" media upon which they rely for their information have not only treated Mr. Trump as sui generis, but have consistently helped move the center further right in accordance with Republican wishes. Kudos to Mr. Wolf for making clear that Donald Trump isn't the ideological godson of Barry Goldwater, but rather of Richard Nixon's racist Southern Strategy.

In case you missed that Vice Presidential debate from Monday night (how can I sleep if I'm screaming at the TV), Adam Johnson at FAIR tells you what you didn't miss. As it turns out, you didn't miss a series of hard-hitting questions about "climate change, poverty, abortion, healthcare, student debt, privacy, LGBTQ rights or drug policy," though you did miss more hand-wringing about Social Security's "insolvency" and more prompting about how much we ought to bomb the crap out of Syria. So, yes, I'm now even more pleased with my decision to practice good sleep hygiene. Why, I think I only got up to go to the bathroom once.

Finally, because it can't be all bad news all the time, Spencer McAvoy at In These Times describes how some public unions are pushing back against their pension investments getting managed by hedge fund banksters. Hedge funds, as you know, don't do significantly better than other investments, but they sure do ding their investors for hefty fees and commissions. But working families across our great nation are fighting to reestablish the central tenet of pension fund investment: you want your investment to be there, not "outperform" someone else's investment, as if life is nothing more than a sporting event.

Around the table: key findings about the Middle East, the working class, "Broken Windows" policing, methane emissions, and Olivia de Havilland.

Patrick Cockburn finds us not learning from our Middle Eastern adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria very well. Key point: "in most of these countries, where Islam is the dominant religion, extreme Salafi-Jihadi movements, including the Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda, and the Taliban are essentially the only available vehicles for protest and rebellion. By now, they have completely replaced the socialist and nationalist movements that predominated in the twentieth century." Which you'll find resonant, not just if you read about the growing gap between rich and poor in Syria, but if you remember that our troubles with Iran started with a CIA-aided overthrow of the popularly-elected nationalizer-of-BP-oil Prime Minister Mossadeq, which paved the way for the Shah, which paved the way for the Ayatollahs.

Beverly Silver at Roar finds declarations of the death of the working class and/or the labor movement to be premature. They declared the labor movement dead in the early 20th century, of course, before its heyday starting with the New Deal, and though it's easy to look at the data and call what's been happening over the last 20 years a "race to the bottom," Ms. Silver notes that whenever corporations look for cheaper labor, they wind up creating new working classes wherever they land, who will soon have new grievances that corporations ignore at their own peril. Will there, one day, really be "nowhere left for capital to run?" We can only hope!

Josmar Trujillo at FAIR reminds us that "The Busted Theory of Broken Windows Still Has Media Defenders." So when even the NYPD Inspector General reports that cracking down on low-level lawlessness actually doesn't reduce felony-level lawlessness, what does the "liberal" media do? Act like it's the "bombshell" revelation it's clearly not, regurgitate the Broken Windows gospel with their fingers in their ears, or launch truly hysterical attacks against the report (with one "liberal" media outlet claiming the NYPD IG report was flawed because the NYPD IG's office is "filled with prosecutors and cops," which phrase I had not previously encountered from the "liberal" media as a criticism).

Over 100 community/environmental groups ask the EPA to investigate whether the EPA's Science Advisory Board Chair, Dr. David Allen, produced fraudulent research on methane leakage. When the inventor of the Bacharach Hi-Flow methane sampler goes on the record saying his machine has a fault that causes it to tend to low-ball methane emissions from gas drilling, I'd think you'd at least have to look into that -- but Dr. Allen, of course, doubled down on his research rather than be a grown-up and admit he might be wrong. The punchline: Dr. Allen gets some of his research money from oil and gas corporations.

Finally, two-time Oscar-winning actress Olivia de Havilland turned 100 on July 1, so Thomas J. Stipanowich at the Los Angeles Times recalls the time Ms. de Havilland "Took on the Studio System and Won." Finding herself unexpectedly not at the end of her seven-year contract in 1943 -- for years she'd been "arm candy" in films with male stars, and had even willfully taken on suspensions-without-pay so she could avoid such roles -- Ms. de Havilland sued her employer, Warner Brothers, and a California appeals court agreed with her that Warner couldn't lawfully "tack on" all that suspension time to her contract. Then she won her two Oscars, and actors began to find contractual terms considerably more favorable to them. She took on big money and not only lived to tell about it, but she thrived. That makes her a hero.

Action: payday loan regulation, arms control, and fair redistricting.

As you know, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) has issued its long-awaited payday loan rules, and now the public gets the chance to comment upon them, so Stop Payday Predators helps you tell the CFPB to implement the most vigorous payday lending regulations possible. The REGULASHUNZ IZ TEH EVULZ!!!! crowd won't approve, but haters gonna hate, and the CFPB's proposal would curb the worst excesses of payday loans, car title loans, and the like, mainly by mandating more stringent credit checks and restricting rollovers. I guess the right-wing answer would be people should pay their debts! Such a statement should earn no praise, since no one has ever said people shouldn't pay their debts, but right-wingers would do better to say creditors shouldn't trap people in debt. Then again, blaming the victims, not the perps, is the right-wing way. And when fewer than one in six payday loan borrowers can pay the loan back before their next paycheck, you know something's wrong with the system, not the people.

Meanwhile, the defense authorization process has, as you know, been weighed down by a series of right-wing legislative proposals that would never pass as stand-alone bills and have little or nothing to do with national defense. But one amendment, courtesy Senators Murphy and Paul, would prevent our government from shipping bombs to Saudi Arabia until they do more to protect civilians in their war with Yemen, and another (courtesy Sens. Udall and Lee) would stop our government from shipping arms to Syrian fighters unless the Secretary of Defense can certify that those arms aren't finding their way to al-Qaeda or ISIS. It's not too much to ask for better behavior from our nominal allies before we send them killing machines -- I mean, being an ally doesn't mean signing on to every stupid thing your allies do, just as being a friend doesn't mean signing on to every stupid thing your friends do. If Our Glorious Elites have forgotten such lessons, we must remind them. Hence Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Senators to support the Murphy-Paul and Udall-Lee defense authorization amendments.

Finally: Pennsylvania residents, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to support fairer redistricting in the Commonwealth, then Fair Districts PA still helps you do that. HB 1835 and SB 484 would change the state constitution so that, instead of party-controlled legislatures drawing Rorschach-blot legislative districts that deliver their party unearned victories, an independent state commission consisting of the four party leaders in the state legislature and a fifth member (chosen by the other four or, if things get dire, the state Supreme Court) who is not "a local, State or Federal official" and who would chair the commission. Putting redistricting to such a commission, rather than a legislature controlled by one party or the other, would go much further toward giving us, as they say, a state where voters choose their legislators, rather than one in which legislators choose their voters. You need only look to Iowa, where the Congressional districts are fairly-evenly matched and competitive every two years, to know that fair redistricting is no pipe dream.

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.

Around the table: containing good news for law-and-order types.

Maryland Court of Special Appeals issues opinion stating not only that police must get a warrant before using a "stingray" -- a device that acts like a cell phone tower for the purpose of gathering cell phone user information -- but must "fully explain to the court what exactly the device does and how it is used." People who don't think that's an onerous duty for police probably opposed the Miranda ruling, too. Also, police can't apply for a pen registers (which only authorize collection of phone numbers) and then try to collect other info using the stingray, because that's dishonest -- almost as dishonest as cooking up nonexistent "informants" to "provide" the info a stingray gathered. And police can no longer hide behind nondisclosure agreements with stingray manufacturers to avoid doing the right thing. It's a shame that the "war on terror" and the "war on drugs" have complicated what really are very simple matters, but good for Maryland.

Economist Robert Pollin says "Bernie Sanders Will Make the Economy Great Again." How? Single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care would dramatically reduce our country's spending on health care; a $15/hour minimum wage would vastly increase worker spending power with minimal rise in business costs; a financial transaction (or "Robin Hood") tax would raise a lot of money and reduce financial speculation; and gross domestic product would go up in a way that would actually favor workers, rather than banksters, for once. You probably knew all that already, but it's good to have it all in one place.

Kate Gould, writing at TruthOut, proposes a "non-military" solution to the ISIS problem. More bombs and more ground troops might get right-wingers hard, but it also creates more ISIS militants, who look at the carnage all around them and decide ISIS must be right. Ending the wars in Syria and Iraq, stemming the flow of arms to these and nearby regions, stopping Iraq's oppression of Sunni-majority areas, and fighting poverty in the Middle East will (to use a simpler metaphor than the "artichoke" metaphor Ms. Gould employs) starve ISIS of the oxygen it needs to make fire.

The New York Times observes a considerable amount of infighting among nominal conservatives -- mainly about whether conservatism has become too intolerant and too prone to believing the wildest lies. Many of the folks who say conservatism is just fine, thank you, don't deserve to be called "conservative," and Jonah Goldberg weighs in by saying TEH LIBRULZ ARE WORSEZ!!!!!! And if you came across the phrase "epistemic closure" and decided it meant political correctness, well, I wouldn't blame you.

Finally, Trump supporters grope and pepper-spray a 15-year-old girl at a rally in Janesville, WI. Yeah, she was a protestor, but does that make it OK to grope underage girls and then spray pepper in their faces? Let's see Teh Donald talk his way out of this one. Is it too much to hope that praising his supporters' "energy" or saying the girl was "asking for it" just won't do this time?

Action: the "war on terror," wage theft, and corporate tax avoidance.

Did you know our Department of Defense has been supporting Syrian Kurds fighting ISIS -- but our CIA has been supporting groups that have attacked those Kurds? It'd be funny, if it weren't murderously incompetent. (No, whether it's malicious or not, it's still incompetent.) Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell Congress to stop funding groups that attack Syrian Kurds. Even with a Republican-held Congress determined to do nothing until after the election, this is not as tall an order as it sounds -- CIA spending on jihadist attacks on Kurds is, as it happens, not a tremendously popular idea in Congress, and even the establishment "paper of record," the New York Times, now sounds open to the idea of Kurdish self-rule within Syria. It's hard to underestimate the significance of that pronouncement, even if the Times is pretty sure nothing will come of it -- when have they ever complained, for example, about how European powers drew African borders during the colonial era? So let's make this tall order into the people's order.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4763/S. 2697, the Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act, then Fight for 15 helps you do that. Most employees experience wage theft in dribs and drabs -- tips not distributed, overtime hours counted as straight time, straight time hours disappearing from paychecks. But these dribs and drabs add up to real money for the corporate CEOs who put pressure on managers to get the work done "any way they can," rather than putting managers in position to do the best job they can, as is a CEO's duty. And they also add up to real money for workers weighing how much they can get away with not paying on their electric bill so they can pay their water bill. Sadly, our laws currently let corporations reimbursing workers they've stolen from at minimum wage, no matter what workers actually make -- and that's virtually an incentive to cheat. As any good conservative would tell you, we don't need our government giving corporations an incentive to bad behavior.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama's Treasury Department to close the loophole that allows corporations to become "foreign" corporations and evade their fair share of taxes, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. How did the Treasury Department get this power, you ask? Shouldn't Congress fix this loophole? Of course Congress should fix this loophole, but they have little enthusiasm for such tasks even when Democrats are running things. And Treasury got this power to make corporate inversion rules the same way the Executive branch always gets power from Congress: because Congress delegated it to the Executive branch through legislation. So if President Obama actually uses that power, that doesn't make him an AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!!! like Republicans always say he is. And where were they when George W. Bush was warrantlessly wiretapping American citizens? Cheering him on and calling his critics traitors, like always. Apparently Presidents are only "dictators" when they do something for the American people.

Action: soldiers' benefits, drug sentencing, and paid sick leave.

H.R. 3016, passed by the House last month, would cut the monthly Basic Allowance for Housing (or BAH) for children who've inherited their parents' Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits -- by hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month! -- and now S. 425 would not only make that same cut, but would lengthen our soldiers' minimum term of service before they can pass on benefits to their children in the first place (which, yes, is also a benefit cut), and then cut the cost-of-living increase to veterans' housing benefits by one percent every year over the next five years. Remember when our politicians told us that when we opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria, we were "against the troops"? Nickel-and-diming our soldiers after they've served their country is appalling enough, but there should be a special level of Hell for politicians who would do that to the soldiers who did their best for the criminally insane morons who sent them to the Middle East in the first place. IAVA helps you tell Congress to stop playing budget-hawk with our soldiers.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Malone, of Huntsville, AL, has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Obama Administration to pardon his son, Edwin Walter Rubis, who has served 18 years of a 40-year sentence for pot possession. Even if this wasn't Mr. Rubis's first offense, forty freaking years for drug possession? I would call that criminally insane. The story of Mr. Rubis's conviction is extraordinarily sad -- his lawyer told him to rat out other drug users, but Mr. Rubis apparently couldn't do that, because not every drug user knows every other drug user, and was thus punished for his "reticence" with a draconian sentence -- but the story of how he's used his time in jail, at least, is rather less so. Still, you do have to wonder about a society that would rather punish drug addiction than try to change it. I think most Americans are tired of being "tough on crime," but it's not enough to presume the existence of an arc of history bending toward justice -- we still have to bend it.

Finally, the Obama Administration's Department of Labor has decided to continue to take public comments on the Department's plan mandating paid sick leave days for employees of federal contractors -- up to seven annually, for some 800,000 workers -- and Moms Rising helps you leave a comment supporting paid sick leave, if you haven't already. We already know the reasons why paid sick leave is a good thing: workers won't go to work sick and then make their co-workers sick as often; workers will be able to better care for sick children; and workers trying to escape domestic abuse situations will be able to take time off from work to take care of that. It isn't just workers who think paid sick leave is a good idea -- a lot of corporate executives see it, too. But if Republicans want to continue ignoring not only the will of the people but the will of corporate executives, then I would like to encourage you to call their anti-paid sick leave stance objectively pro-domestic abuse. Or objectively pro-sick child. I'm well past done fighting intransigence with sweet reason.

Action: helping Madaya, Syria and Flint, Michigan, and protecting religious freedom.

In Syria, the Assad regime has laid siege to the town of Madaya (some 40 miles from Damascus) since July, encircling the town with landmines so no one escapes, and keeping aid out of the town, such that its 40,000 citizens are perpetually in danger of starving to death. The regime finally allowed food aid from the U.N. into the town earlier this week, but that'll last perhaps a month, and this occurred after Syria's U.N. Ambassador -- whom we will not name, lest he thinks his works have earned him anything but scorn -- not only declared that no one in Madaya was starving, but that media reports about that suffering were "fabricated." You won't be surprised to learn that Madaya residents took part in the massive peaceful protests preceding the Syrian civil war, and that now the Assad regime accuses Madaya of "harboring terrorists," by which I presume they mean anyone who doesn't like the regime. Hence Avaaz helps you tell U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to intervene to lift the siege.

Meanwhile, food processing corporation Cargill has lately fired nearly 200 Muslim workers for the offense of praying at their jobs. And not for, you know, interrupting their work to pray, but for praying on their 15-minute breaks or their lunch breaks, in designated rooms, no less, all of which Cargill had allowed since 2009. What changed their mind? Gosh, I don't know -- maybe they thought their plant workers were sitting in designated rooms not actually praying but beaming murderous energy to the Paris attackers; I mean, you just don't know what goes through the minds of CEOs these days. But our laws don't permit corporations to fire workers for praying if it doesn't cause "undue hardship" to the day's business, and being on your assigned break is pretty much the definition of not causing undue hardship. And not that I should have to say this, but replacing the word "Muslim" with the word "Christian" in the first two sentences above would result in the same injustice. So Sum of Us helps you tell Cargill to stop oppressing the religious freedom of its workers.

Finally, if you've been following the water emergency in Flint, MI -- in which Flint's "Emergency Manager" forced Flint to draw its drinking water from the polluted Flint River rather than Detroit's water supply in an effort to "cut costs" -- you know that Gov. Snyder has issued a state of emergency there, but this comes after the Governor knew Flint's water had high lead levels and still told them it was safe to drink and after our federal Department of Justice began investigating. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell the Obama Administration to declare a federal state of emergency in Flint and give Flint's citizens what they need to recover. Once kids take in lead (and the chemicals used to "clean" the river water corroded Flint's lead pipes so badly that those pipes now also pollute the cleaner Detroit water Flint gets again), the brain damage they suffer is pretty much permanent, meaning future health care costs will go up. And of course Flint will need new water pipes. So how does that "cost-cutting" move look now?

Action: Syrian peace talks, and saner pork production.

Syrian Kurds can't get into Saudi Arabia-led peace talks regarding the future of their country, even though they fight ISIS harder than almost anyone. Why? Apparently because the Turkish government doesn't want them there, apparently. If you know the autocrat who runs Turkey, you must ask: why does he get veto power over anything? And the whole point of peace talks is to talk to people you don't want to talk to, so you can all live together. Hence Just Foreign Policy helps you tell our government to demand a place for Syrian Kurds at any peace negotiation. Some folks -- folks who don't just want to come out and say they don't want to talk to any Middle Easterners, I suspect -- will complain that if we insist on Syrian Kurds' participation in the peace process, it'll gum up the process. Well, peace is hard. And maintaining peace is hard. But making war all the time, with other people's children, and then calling other people "traitors" when they criticize your stupidity? That's too easy. Civilized people need to stop doing that.

Meanwhile, the group Compassion Over Killing has started a petition on Change.org helping you tell the USDA and Hormel to end their participation in a "pilot" program aiming to allow pork-producing corporations to speed up their pig slaughter lines and do so with less oversight by our government. Less oversight by our government means less oversight by us, and I put "pilot" in quotation marks for a reason -- obviously, both big agriculture corporations and our government are hot to declare this program a success whether it actually is a success or not. Which, by the way, it won't be -- as you know either from watching the video or, ah, doing any kind of real work, the faster the slaughter line, the more abuse workers will heap upon the slaughtered, simply because the pressure to produce is too great. And the less we-the-people can inspect what they're doing, the less we'll know about the food we eat -- which, in this case, will have more pus and feces in it than safe food would have. And who will deny we have a right to know?

Around the table: mass shootings, union-bashing, working families, political correctness, and Donald Trump.

Have there really been more mass shootings than days this year? No, there have been more like four mass shootings this year, according to Mark Follman at Mother Jones. Just as right-wingers need to stop whining about Syrian refugees coming to eat their children, civilized people must also resist the urge to get hysterical about the problem, because getting hysterical just makes the problem worse.

Dean Baker catches a Washington Post hack desperate to prove that unions are anti-worker. How? Because union efforts to raise worker wages "force" corporations to outsource jobs to cheaper foreign locales -- even though corporations pretty much use any excuse to pay people less, as even the Washington Post hack acknowledges. Can you say "hostage crisis," boys and girls? Don't demand better treatment from your employers, or the jobs get it!

Bernie Sanders defends his persistence in talking about working families instead of terrorism. But why does it have to be one or the other? We meddle in Middle Eastern affairs at the behest of the same elite class that redistributes worker income upward to themselves and then tries to tell you that some dark-skinned person (foreign or not, it makes no difference to them) is really stealing your American dream. And you'd have a damn sight less terrorism (not to mention mass shootings) if more good jobs were available.

Seth Meyers rips the Republicans a new one because they're constantly whining about Mr. Obama refusing to utter the words "radical Muslim terrorist," in that precise order. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- this is political correctness, far worse than your college-age granddaughter insisting you say "woman" instead of "girl." (Mr. Meyers does get in a bunch of other good digs, I must admit -- and I never cared that much for his stewardship of Weekend Update.)

Finally, John Nichols, writing at The Nation, says it's time for "responsible Republicans" to declare they won't back Donald Trump if he wins the Republican Presidential nomination. That'd be nice, but by and large they won't -- not just because there aren't very many "responsible Republicans" left, but because too many Republicans do what they do because they're mortally afraid of Democrats winning, as if Democratic victories somehow forestall capitulation to Republicans in the name of "bipartisanship."

Around the table: murderers have blood on their hands, and other truths.

Liz Stinson at Wired describes Abou Naddara, the anonymous Syrian film collective that has released one- to five-minute videos offering slices of Syrian life roughly every Friday since 2011. And though I suspect they're anonymous because they have to be, their films eschew depictions of violence and spend more time with workers and families than mainstream or state-sponsored media would otherwise be inclined to do.

Paul Buchheit reviews "The Secret Five-Step Plan to Privatize Everything." Here you will find much that needs to be repeated: nobody "does it on their own," "free marketeers" pose a false dichotomy between government and freedom, and governmental incompetence is just another tool with which to further destroy government. Key quotation, courtesy George Lakoff: "Individualism begins after the roads are built, after individualists have had an education, after medical research has cured their diseases."

I know I'm going to be swimming against the tide with this, but Ed Krayewski at Reason argues forcefully that we shouldn't blame Black Lives Matter for police officer deaths or the pro-life movement for the Planned Parenthood shootings. Saying Carly Fiorina has "blood on her hands" is inaccurate -- no matter her own sins in her comments afterward, Robert Dear and no one else has blood on his hands for that -- and we absolutely can't blur the line between murderer and enabler if we're going to restore this sick, immoral, and decadent society to health.

Max Berger at The Nation argues that we're seeing a lot of "white male terrorism" now because social justice movements are winning. The argument is quite attractive, but I have to hope he's right, because it sure does seem like all the enemies of progress has been in their "death throes" for more than a decade. Generally, I suspect we should avoid confusing violence with tipping points merely just because progress is hard-won and slow.

Finally, I think we have a winner in the "America's Biggest Asshole" sweepstakes, in the tale of a Mississippi man who shot a Waffle House waitress to death after she told him to stop smoking inside the restaurant. To reiterate: Johnny Mount shot Julie Brightwell because she told him to stop putting himself and those around him in danger of getting lung cancer, as he had already agreed to do merely by patronizing that establishment. Right-wingers constantly criticize college kids for being too "sensitive," but this guy personifies such "sensitivity," and no right-wingers will say so, because guns. Next: Donald Trump praises Mr. Mount's energy.

Action: the "war on terror," climate change, and energy efficiency.

After the ISIS attacks in Beirut and Paris, a lot of American politicians have been responding by pretending they're going to bomb the daylights out of everyone they don't like, or by declaring they won't take any refugees from Syria. To some Americans, that sounds like strength, but it's weakness -- anyone can bang on loud objects when they're angry, but it takes a grown-up to realize that, while banging on loud objects may be pleasurable for a short while, we're civilized people, with obligations not just to our past and to our present but also to our future, and a civilization that forgets that violence begets violence and mercy strengthens bonds will not last long. Hence CREDO helps you remind our government that civilized nations do not lash out in hatred when terrorists attack. Our government is currently bombing putative ISIS targets in Syria as we speak -- and they're conducting this bombing without the authority of Congress, I should add -- so regardless of what sympathetic noises President Obama has made in recent days, they need the reminder as much as any right-wing blowhard currently running for President.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans may vote on S.J.Res. 24, a "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify the EPA's carbon emissions plan, as early as today, so both the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Environmental Defense Fund help you tell your Senator to reject the bill. The EPA's Clean Power Plan would force energy corporations to cut their carbon emissions and convert more of their operations to renewable energy sources, but of course big energy corporations hate it, because being told to do anything differently than how they're doing it would prevent them from redistributing everyone else's wealth upward to themselves. No the EPA's plan isn't a "job-killer" but a job-creator, since the people who refit and redesign power plants presumably need jobs to do that, and it's not evidence of Big Gummint overreach, since it lets states develop their own plan that meets EPA targets, and it's certainly not a burden upon small businesses, since large corporations, not small businesses, do most of the polluting. So, really, right-wingers have no excuses to kill the EPA's Clean Power Plan. They could still be completely unreasonable, but let's expose that.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 805, which would allow Pennsylvania's biggest energy producing corporations to opt out of paying state energy efficiency program fees, still awaits a Senate vote. Could it be they're having trouble explaining why big corporations shouldn't have to pay into the state's energy efficiency program while you still have to? That means now is the time to strike! So the Sierra Club helps you tell your state Senators to oppose SB 805 via email, but also points you to the Secretary of the Senate's phone number, 1.717.787.5920, so that you may call your state Senator. Perhaps SB 805 flaks will claim that the big corporations will pass the savings on to their consumers. Ever see a big corporation pass its savings onto consumers? You may be the first! And if everyone else still has to pay into a system that actually saves all of us money in the first place, then we'll all wind up paying more anyway when the program falters due to shortfalls in funding. More and more it seems corporatists don't understand how things actually work.

Action: freedom for Bassel Khartabil and a stay of execution for Ernest Johnson, plus "free" trade and the Alabama DMV scandal.

First things first. Earlier this week, we discussed the Syrian government's imprisonment of Bassel Khartabil, the man who made 3-D computer models of famous Syrian historical sites since destroyed by ISIS. Well, now we have a Change.org petition demanding Mr. Khartabil's release. In the wake of the Arab Spring protests that rocked oppressive governments all over the Middle East, the Syrian government arrested Mr. Khartabil in 2012, not long after that government started beating and killing good Syrian protestors. Mr. Khartabil has a long history fighting for open internet access in Syria -- which the Syrian government has, naturally, translated as "harming state security." Mr. Khartabil did some time at the Syrian network of detainment centers that Human Rights Watch calls "the torture archipelago," but when several publicly-known organizations wielded The Big Stick of Bad PR, they got the government to move him, at least, to a prison where his wife could see him -- but now they've moved him again without telling anyone where. So clearly the Syrian government is in desperate need of more embarrassment.

Also, the state of Missouri plans to execute Ernest Johnson on November 3, though Mr. Johnson is intellectually-disabled, and the U.S. Supreme Court has held, in Atkins v. Virginia, that executing intellectually-disabled folks violated the U.S. Constitution's 8th Amendment. (Which was not an Anthony Kennedy majority opinion, believe it or not -- though Justice Kennedy did join the majority opinion written by Justice Stevens.) But the state of Missouri has, apparently, ignored his I.Q. test of 67, ignoring his fetal alcohol syndrome, ignoring two brain injuries he suffered as a youth -- and honed in solely on his ability on the basketball court in arguing he's not disabled. Remember that time Ernest Johnson dropped 11 treys on the Lakers in 1984? No, you don't, because it never happened. Seriously, people are far more complex than Our Glorious Elites would have you believe; everyone has an ability you wouldn't expect, but no sane person would use that as an excuse to ignore the law. The execution's in November, but we have only a few days to tell the Governor to grant a stay and convene a Board of Inquiry, so the ACLU helps you do that.

In other news, Roots Action helps you tell the Congressional leadership of both parties to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," that nefarious "free" trade deal that would allow extralegal judicial bodies to nullify our laws if it costs some corporation money and would continue the death march of American jobs overseas. Of course, even though the centrist Democrat Hillary Clinton has come out against the TPP, supporting the TPP remains a "bipartisan" cause; still, our duty is the same no matter what our Congressfolk think. And their arguments favoring the TPP are becoming ever more desperate: President Obama essentially told the world that folks opposing the TPP are liars, Larry Summers slathered us with booga-booga about China before making promises he obviously never intended to keep about listening to the people more next time. Lately, Sen. Hatch, no great friend of labor or the environment, raised his hackles about inadequate protections for big pharmaceutical corporations, and Sen. Tillis expressed displeasure with proposals cutting off big tobacco access to the TPP's tribunals. Still, this is no time for complacency.

Finally, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch still hasn't moved to investigate Alabama's suspicious closings of over 30 DMV centers all over the state -- closings supposedly forced by the state's budget troubles, but we're not idiots. Strict Voter ID laws plus closed DMVs equals a crapload of good Alabamans who won't be able to vote in elections because they can't get the photo ID they need. Gov. Robert Bentley has since announced that the DMVs will be open one day a month. Gosh, that's twelve days between now and Election Day 2016! Who wants to bet they'll all be weekdays? When folks have, you know, jobs they can't just blow off to truck down to what will obviously be a very overcrowded DMV? The generosity of our politicians, it just kills me. Voter ID laws put unfair burdens on the same poor, senior, and minority folks who haven't needed photo ID and who generally don't vote Republican because Republicans only show them the back of their hand. But, presumably, we still have a federal government that cares about these things, so CREDO helps you tell our Attorney General to investigate Alabama's DMV shenanigans.

Around the table: why the word "bipartisan" should make you afraid, and other life lessons.

U.S. Senate passes the nefarious CISA bill by a 74-21 margin. Yay bipartisanship! Democrats and Republicans coming together to screw their constituents! The good news? We managed to get it put off this long, and the Senate and the House still have to conference out a bill that can avoid the President's veto pen. One hopes they just say fuggedaboutit since there's an election on, but we're better off counting on our action than on their laziness.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches a factoid from a satire website making its way not just onto Sean Hannity's TV program, but Donald Trump's stump speeches and mainstream TV news. Real News Right Now is yet another "satire" site that just isn't good enough at satire to avoid this kind of confusion and you have to wonder if that's the point. Will Sean Hannity ever offer a correction to his viewers? Will his viewers ever wonder why Mr. Hannity might have been a little less-than-stringent about his fact-checking in that particular instance? I kid, of course.

The EPA will propose a rule that would compel plants processing natural gas to report their release of toxic chemicals. Gas drilling corporations get to keep the chemicals they use a secret from the public, thanks to that energy bill from 2005, but I presume that the plants processing the gas don't enjoy the same protection from the law. At best, it's a lateral move against gas drilling pollution; it may work, but I prefer to hit these things head-on.

Hey, were you just wondering how Gravity Payments, the corporation whose CEO decided to raise his employees' minimum wage to $70,000 annually over the next few years, was doing? Well, their revenues and profits have doubled since the announcement, while customer retention also went up and new customer inquiries went sky-high. Don't shed a tear for the two employees who quit, though, since (as you may recall) in July the New York Times was perfectly happy to air their grievances like they were the only grievances that mattered.

Finally, Ben Carson instructs us that not only wouldn't he sign a budget that raises the debt ceiling as President (though his wording leaves open the possibility that he'd sign a debt ceiling hike in separate legislation), but also that "I think the time to address that is at the beginning of the fiscal period, not at the end, because then you have other options." That's yet another statement that, back in the day, would have finished a Presidential campaign -- tell us, again, Dr. Carson, how it's more prudent to get things done early! -- but it also ignores the fact that Republicans wanted a government shutdown crisis and a debt ceiling crisis intertwined, because they thought it would make President Obama fold.

UPDATE. Mr. Hannity claims he got the "250,000 new refugees" figure cited above not from the Real News Right Now site, but from a September AP report quoting Secretary of State Kerry. I'll happily concede it's possible he got the number there, and maybe even that he or someone on his staff did the addition, but of course his defense opens him to new charges. For one, he did not previously say the 250,000 refugees represented three calendar years' worth of refugees, nor did he mention that the average number of refugees accepted by the United States annually since 1980 is about 83,000, which (surprise!) is almost 250,000 when multiplied by three years -- and both of these are, sadly, standard stratagems for folks both left and right who employ scare numbers. He is also incorrect to suggest that he had always said the refugees weren't just coming from Syria and Iraq; on both October 19 and 20, he offered the figure in the context of discussing Syrian and Iraqi refugees. One cannot read these statements differently without willfully misinterpreting them. So, as long as Sean Hannity commits larger crimes with numbers and context, he can take his little addition lesson and cram it.

Action: war in the Middle East, big money in political campaigns, and the "sun tax."

With the situation in Syria deteriorating "in spite of" President Obama's unilateral air strikes, Just Foreign Policy helps you tell our government to give more help to Syrian refugees and negotiate with all parties, including Russia and Iran, to end the bloodshed. Right-wingers who think negotiation is for weaklings might want to check themselves to make sure they're not projecting, and when they point to the Iran negotiations as an example of how negotiating with your enemies is always wrong because you can't "trust" them, they should note the stringent inspection regime that agreement produced, and thus should not expect that just because Iran would be involved with these negotiations that we would simply "trust" Iran about anything in particular. They should also know that bombing everyone into the stone age is not a mark of strength, but a mark of weakness. Accomplishing peace, real peace where everyone's a stakeholder and everyone's accountable, is strength. Is it too much to ask that reasonable adults get more of the say about things in America than rage-filled right-wingers?

Meanwhile, Common Cause helps you tell the IRS to vigorously regulate the so-called "social welfare" non-profits that have been spending millions of dollars on political campaigning. 501(c)4 groups can keep their donors secret because they have, historically, been civic organizations doing things like publishing community newspapers and organizing community sports leagues, but groups like Crossroads GPS, the nefarious creation of Karl Rove, are somehow 501(c)(4) "social welfare" non-profits despite pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into political campaigns. Do they seriously want to argue that trying to elect knuckle-dragging Republicans who will clamp down on any government program that actually helps people promotes "social welfare"? I'd be glad to have that argument. The IRS's actual proposal suggests they're not the model of courage right now, their investigations into right-wing groups some years back being totally overblown by both the right and the "liberal" media, but the right thing to do is still the right thing to do, whether right-wingers whine about it or not.

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your state legislators to fight back against big fossil fuel corporations' attempts to cripple the solar power industry. So far, the "sun tax" initiatives pushed by groups like the Koch brothers -- you know, the ones that try to cripple home solar power creators' ability to sell their power to utility corporations, under the absurd reasoning that folks who spent tens of thousands of dollars to create their own power are "free riders" -- have occurred at the state level, and in the aftermath of the 2016 elections, however they turn out, that could well change, but we should fight for solar power at the state level before the battle goes nationwide. And that means going directly to the same state legislators far too prone to regurgitate whatever ALEC tells them to. We really do live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society when so-called "conservatives" try to stop people from making their own power, and try to destroy an industry adding jobs at twenty times the national average. But this is a democracy, so we can fix that.

Around the table: the thing that could kill Ben Carson's campaign, and other stories.

From Taegan Goddard's Political Wire, we learn that back in May, Ben Carson proposed replacing all health insurance with "health savings accounts" -- and that includes Medicare. So Ben-Carson-the-Medicare-killer might be the Ben-Carson-campaign-killer. But if the "liberal" media couldn't be bothered to report it the first time, I bet they're even less inclined to report it now. (We also learn that Mr. Carson thinks the Iraq war was a bad idea. What tremendous courage, to oppose a war more than twelve years after it's begun.)

Colorado citizens will mull a single-payer-style health care reform in a 2016 ballot initiative. But Colorado's plan doesn't actually get rid of the private insurers; it merely streamlines the way they collect money by assessing taxes instead of charging premiums, and it also puts the responsibility for running the system into an elected board of trustees, rather than the state legislature. It's not really single-payer, but it would probably be an improvement upon the Affordable Care Act.

Andy Greenberg at Wired writes about the Syrian citizen Bassel Khartabil, whose 3-D models of the ruins at Palmyra have become, in the wake of ISIS attacks upon Syrian historical treasures, a critical historical artifact. The Assad regime has imprisoned Mr. Khartabil for over three years -- and a la Kafka's Joseph K., probably hasn't charged Mr. Khartabil with anything -- but further efforts by scientists and historians to preserve Syrian history in 3-D models may yet wield the Big Stick of Bad PR and get Mr. Khartabil out. (As an aside, ISIS must be quite insecure to insist that respect for one's own history is itself blasphemous. Why do insecure people get all the say about everything? Because they are the best tools against democracy Our Glorious Elites could ever hope for.)

Jeb Bush, obviously flabbergasted that he's nowhere near being the front-runner in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination, has "remov(ed) senior staff from the payroll" and cut payroll by 40 percent, in an apparent effort to stay afloat. You're tempted to respond, "because nothing improves morale like cutting jobs and pay," until you remember that the Right to Rise SuperPAC, which is of course dedicated to Mr. Bush's election though not formally affiliated with Mr. Bush, still has a lot of money.

Finally, in Louisiana's all-in gubernatorial primary, Democrat state Rep. John Bel Edwards (no relation!) and Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter advance to the November runoff. Mr. Edwards garnered nearly 40% of the vote, to Mr. Vitter's 23%; but the two other Republican candidates running, public safety commissioner Scott Angelle and Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, garnered 19% and 15%, respectively, and though Mr. Dardenne certainly isn't Mr. Vitter's biggest fan, one would expect most of those votes to go to Mr. Vitter in the runoff. And I'm not sure Mr. Edwards is, well, different enough from Mr. Vitter to take advantage of all the bad press Mr. Vitter's been getting lately (most, but not all, of said bad press relating to Mr. Vitter's "very serious sin" first reported in 2007).

Around the table: R.I.P. *National Geographic*, and other stories.

The National Geographic Society essentially turns over its "media assets," including its flagship magazine, to 21st Century Fox. And the National Geographic Society's Chief Executive called the deal "bold"! Doesn't he know that "bold" is the word Our Glorious Elites use to mean "something unconscionably stupid that will befuddle the inattentive while making us even richer"? I'd rather not watch Rupert Murdoch turn National Geographic into a mountain of dung, which he'll do -- I mean, Fox helped give us the National Geographic cable channel, and is that worth your time? At least I've got their first 127 years on disc and on my bookshelf, so I can remember when they did great work.

Warren Buffett, everyone's favorite rich man, praises Bernie Sanders for the campaign he's running. But remember when Mr. Buffett said Elizabeth Warren was too "angry" and "violent" when she criticized Wall Street banksters? Now that he seems more sanguine about a male politician who stands to Ms. Warren's left and whose tone toward the banks is about the same as hers, I'm more inclined to think Mr. Buffett was being sexist back then.

Speaking of Bernie Sanders, a Manhattan College history professor reminds us that the "liberal" media calls his positions "left" when they're actually supported by a majority of Americans. If you remember how the "liberal" media called opposing the Iraq war a "far-left" position after it had become the majority position, then you know that's how they do it -- they take the things most people want and they call them "left," or "liberal," or "extreme." Or "un-American." If they can just convince you that the things you want are things those people people want, they can win. But don't let them win. They don't deserve to win.

PR hack runs campaign purporting to show small businesses affected adversely by minimum wage hikes -- but the Center for Media and Democracy finds that several of the small businesses depicted in the campaign actually favor minimum wage hikes, and are none too happy about being misrepresented. When America's small businesses finally get tired of being taken hostage by right-wingers ("don't raise taxes on rich people, or this small business gets it!), then we will truly have progress in America. In the meantime, I'll do my part to remind small businesses that they're tired of it.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the FCC's rule helping consumers block robocalls. They act like "consent" from a consumer is so hard to get (it's only hard when you're trying to trick people into giving it!), and that's not very can-do of them. Seriously, though is there any cause so unpopular that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce won't support it? Next, I guess they'll tell you that you should always let your neighbor's dog poop on your lawn, because TEH GUBMINT OVERREACHEZ!!!!!

Finally, this really did have to be said, and I'm glad James O'Malley at The Independent said it: Syrian refugees are not somehow "unworthy of our help" if they happen to possess smartphones. Mr. O'Malley makes at least a dozen good points (like, hey, they're not fleeing Syria because they're poor so much as because their government is shooting them). But do people who point out refugees with smartphones (or poor Americans with debit cards) really not understand how easy it is to get a smartphone with very little money down (particularly, as Mr. O'Malley, reminds us, an older model)? Or are they just jerks who need to prove how smart they are, or who like to hit people when they're down? This probably won't surprise you, but I think they're just jerks.

Around the table: various sillinesses concerning the deficit, Syria, federal contracting, and the "war on terror," plus a short summary of the Donald Trump Problem.

C. Robert Gibson at Occupy.com reminds us that, with Fed interest rates still near zero percent, we could be spending more money rebuilding our infrastructure. I maintain that the perfect tonic to right-wing squealing about Teh Deficit is to pay for infrastructure with a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, just like in the old days, and though right-wingers will continue to squeal, they'll only be defending the super-rich when they do.

FAIR reminds us that when we hear "liberal" media pleas to DO SOMETHING!!!!! about Syrian refugees, they tend to forget (or, more precisely, "forget") that America is already "doing something" in Syria -- like funding Syrian rebels to the tune of $1 billion annually. And, of course, noting that we're already "doing something" in Syria opens us up to charges of doing the wrong or ineffective thing in Syria, which is a much more difficult thing to cover than the myth that we're doing nothing. Still, doing the difficult thing builds character.

PR Watch finds one of the world's largest temp agencies (Manpower, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and you can bet they heart Scott Walker and he hearts them back) agitating against President Obama's recent executive order requiring our government to take labor violations into account when awarding federal contracts. Specifically, PR Watch finds that a Manpower executive just so happens to sit on the board of a trade association advocating against the Obama order -- and Manpower has accumulated over $13 million in fines and settlements so far this millenium, while vacuuming up over $10 million in federal contracts just since 2013. Nope, nothing to see here.

And now, from the "actual frivolous lawsuits" file: two Montana state Senators sue to stop two Native American nations from taking over the Kerr Dam, because it could lead to terrorist attacks. No, really: because "the Turkish government and Turkish-American organizations have looked to establish business and cultural exchanges with Native Americans," and Turks are Muslim, there could be terrorists in there, and THE DAMN GOES BOOM! But please, right-wingers, tell me again how class-action lawsuits are inherently "frivolous."

Finally, I said I wasn't going to talk about Donald Trump anymore, but he's demonstrated enough staying power at the top of Republican Presidential polls even after saying all that racist and sexist crap that I feel compelled to weigh in. Mr. Trump's populism is certainly ironic (coming, as it does, from a billionaire), but it also appears unmediated -- that is, he sounds like he's talking off the top of his head. What consultant would have advised him to say, for example, that hedge-fund managers "get away with murder"? But this is a man who would never have gotten so rich back in the day when we taxed the rich hard and regulated markets for the common good, and his populism is all attitude. And I think his act is just the latest establishment Republican ploy to regain the Presidency -- sure, establishment Republicans sound like they hate him, but when have they ever told you the truth?

Action: war in the Middle East, coal mine cleanup insurance, and drilling royalties on public lands.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to finally debate, and then end, the war in Iraq and Syria, then Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you do that. Reps. McGovern (D-MA), Jones (R-NC), and Lee (D-CA) have introduced invoked the 1973 War Powers Act to bring forth a privileged resolution, H.Con.Res. 55, which aims to end the war President Obama started in Iraq and Syria late in 2014. President Obama says the 2001 AUMF gives him the authority to conduct air strikes (and, now, deploy ground troops) against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but it doesn't -- the Constitution says only Congress can give him that authority, which they declined to do last year, mainly out of cynicism. And I do not believe that since we broke Iraq and created ISIS, we should fix it with more bombing and more fighting that will, one day, help create a group of monsters that even ISIS would find uncivilized. Negotiating with regional powers to fight ISIS is the only way to go. If that means we have to talk to Iran (which 47 of our Senators thought was a great idea a few months ago), so be it.

Meanwhile, closer to home, did you know that our laws let large coal corporations avoid fully insuring themselves against mine-related cleanup costs if they have, in theory, enough cash to pay for their cleanups themselves? Well, coal corporations are making less money than they used to -- not so much because of ZOMG TEH REGULASHUNZ!!!! as because of the rise of natural gas and (to a much lesser extent) the rise of renewable energies -- and now Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal corporation out of St. Louis, still lobbies our government to give it a break on cleanup insurance despite claiming losses of over $750 million last year. And I suppose if the government sticks to its guns here, Republicans will squeal WAR ON COAL!!!!! They should answer this: is breaking the law OK when your big coal donors do it? We should fix the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act so that coal corporations buy private cleanup insurance entirely, to ensure they'll clean up their mess without a taxpayer bailout, but in the meantime, we need to enforce the law as it is. So CREDO helps you tell our government to force Peabody to clean up its toxic mess.

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to charge private gas and oil corporations more for the privilege of drilling on our public lands. If we must permit allow gas and oil drillers to pollute our public lands, we damn sure better get a fair price for that, but currently we're not even getting that -- we're getting a few dollars per acre for the right to drill on public lands. Which are, as I've said, our lands -- we are the owners of this land, and our government should be managing our lands in our interest. And if unfortunate realities mean they won't manage it in a way that protects our air and water, they should at least manage it in a way that gets us the largest financial return, and doesn't merely prop up unearned corporate profits. Personal to right-wing pimps: do not retort that doing so would hike energy prices, when CEOs have the power to pay themselves fewer millions of dollars every year and keep prices where they are, and certainly do not retort that charging more would "kill jobs," as if gas and oil drillers will suddenly replace all their workers with robots out of spite.

Around the table: the British election, "free" trade, Congressional "prerogatives," Rand Paul's posturing, and Carly Fiorina's unfitness for command.

Neil Clark at Russia Today analyzes the Conservative Party's resounding victory in British elections last Thursday. His reasoning is mostly sound (Labour party weakness, a dominant right-wing media, big corporate money flowing into Tory coffers, even a "born to rule" attitude among Tory leaders), but complaints about the "first-past-the-post" system sound like sour grapes to me, not just because I advocate the notion that public action should be vigorous enough to render the political party of the representative a meaningless matter -- the British also don't redraw their Parliamentary districts with any regularity, as American states do. I can easily think of reasons why they don't, but that doesn't justify not doing it.

President Obama inexplicably went to Nike headquarters on Saturday to make what USA Today inexplicably calls a "progressive case for trade." You know the script -- "the right kind of agreements," "the past versus the present," the strawman arguing of "trade works" when we criticize "free" trade, not trade. At least the article (paragraph 11) almost wonders out loud why the agreement needs to be fast-tracked. Not to be incorrigible or anything, but I don't even buy the argument that the TPP will improve other countries' labor standards -- the problem in those nations isn't the law, but enforcing the law, and the "investor-state tribunals" will let corporations overwrite those laws anyway.

The Intercept reports that Congressional lawyers argued in court last summer that the SEC shouldn't have been allowed to conduct an insider trading probe, because "lawmakers and their staff are constitutionally-protected from such inquiries given the nature of their work." Now, I'm no lawyer, but I suspect that the moment lawmakers and staff break the law -- and insider trading not only breaks the law, but breaks a law Congress high-fived itself for passing not even three years ago -- you don't automatically get to hide behind the Constitution.

Sen. Rand Paul says Democratic Presidential candidate (and former Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton made Libya a "jihadist wonderland." But though he can talk the talk, he's never walked the walk -- remember how quickly this foreign policy "skeptic" wilted when it was time to support Mr. Obama's bombing raids in Iraq and Syria? Or how quickly he's abandoned even his meek criticisms of aid to Israel? How are we supposed to imagine he's going to be better as President?

Finally, David Corn reminds us, in excruciating detail, why Carly Fiorina's tenure as Hewlett-Packard CEO would make her a bad President. You know the long-story-short -- cut jobs, lost the company money, got pushed out with a $21 million parachute -- but you may not have remembered that she once justified outsourcing by saying "(t)here is no job that is America's God-given right anymore" or that HP's stock price jumped 7% the day they let her go.

Action: war in the Middle East, "too big to fail" banks, and "free" trade.

Roots Action (along with 10 other organizations) helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose any new Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) for President Obama, and to repeal the AUMFs Congress passed in 2001 and 2002. Maybe we should, you know, debate whether to formally declare war, as the Constitution would have us do? After all, endless war-making against whomever we're fighting has made no one any safer, though it has been good to weapons-manufacturing corporations. And those who claim that a 22-minute video of ISIS burning a Syrian pilot alive tells them all they need to know should answer this: does ISIS have a government? Do they have a political presence in any world legislature? If the answer to either of these questions is "no," then we don't have any business making war upon them. We have business, certainly, getting together the Middle Eastern countries ISIS is terrorizing, and negotiating a better outcome -- hopefully before the next gang of terrorists rises from the ashes of our air strikes in Iraq and Syria, a gang I'm sure will do things that make ISIS blanch.

Meanwhile, National People's Action helps you tell Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to reject the proposed merger of two mediocre banks, CIT Group and OneWest Bank. Why? Because the resulting behemoth would be large enough to be considered a "systematically-important financial institution" under the law, one which we the taxpayers might have to bail out if it ran aground. Also, the banks have to prove their merger will be good for the public, at least partly by demonstrating a past record of investing in the communities they serve -- but these two banks generally haven't done well at that. Note, also, that OneWest emerged from the ashes of California lender IndyMac, and has needed FDIC assistance to resolve foreclosures IndyMac foisted on unfortunate families. And who has been one of the ringleaders of OneWest's emergence? None other than former hedge fund manager John Paulson, the poster child of banksters, who made $4 billion during the meltdown telling folks to invest in crappy mortgage securities while he bet against them. I would not want the stink of that man on anything I did.

Finally, if you've missed previous "free" trade-related action alerts, then Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk you don't buy the bogus claim that the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" would help small businesses, and Democracy for America helps you tell Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) that supporting any form of "fast-tracking" for the TPP would be disastrous. Yes, big corporations are claiming that the TPP would be a boon for small businesses, like they always do whenever they want some undeserved goodies for themselves, but it doesn't matter if the majority of exporters are small/medium businesses if a mere three percent of small/medium businesses do any exporting at all. Would it be piling on to note that counting how many businesses are small businesses is much less relevant than counting how much of the economy small businesses have a piece of? No, it would not be piling on. As for Sen. Wyden, he should know that PPP found almost two-thirds of his state's voters opposing the TPP and nearly three-quarters opposing fast track. Maybe he doesn't have to worry about re-election in 2016, but we deserve a world where he has to earn it.

Around the table: featuring a Republican anti-jobs bill and a litany of Republican squealing about President Obama.

Juan Cole instructs us that the attack on Charlie Hebdo was "an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture." Whether al-Qaeda itself was behind it I couldn't say with certainty, but the results of the attack would certainly benefit their efforts. Note well that when "liberal" media personalities like Chuck Todd won't ask the rich and powerful tough questions on TV out of fear that they won't come on his show again, the end result is that folks who actually have something to say, like Juan Cole, still can't get on TV.

Another day, another hostage situation forced upon the American people by Republicans, as they attach yet another pro-bankster amendment to a must-pass terrorism insurance bill. Sooner or later, simply as a matter of their own survival, Democrats will have to stand up to these hostage situations, and force the "liberal" media to listen to them. I shudder to think that they'd actually prefer Republicans to screw up the country in this manner, under the not-a-sure-shot assumption that they'll benefit on Election Day 2016. They do remember which party the current President belongs to, don't they?

Michael Hiltzik describes why the McConnell/Boehner effort to raise the Affordable Care Act's definition of "full-time" from 30 hours weekly to 40 will actually hurt American workers. Long story short: corporations that were already cutting their workers' hours to 29 just so they wouldn't have to provide health insurance to those workers would now have a much larger pool of workers (including me, and maybe you, too) whose hours they could cut to 39, who would then also no longer have health insurance. Also, the alleged spike in part-time jobs supposedly caused by the ACA simply isn't happening.

As the battle over the Keystone XL comes to a possible end, the battle over a 550-mile natural gas pipeline running through three mid-Atlantic coast states is just beginning. On one side, some familiar players -- Duke Energy, Dominion Resources of Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio frackers -- while on the other, we have all-too-unfamiliar players in the persons of the homeowners presently refusing to let pipeline developers even survey their land, on whose behalf one pro bono lawyer says, "(i)f this were for a hospital or some truly public purpose, we could turn the other cheek, but this is a Fortune 500 company trying to make a profit." Best of luck to the landowners, who would, in a sane and moral society, have plenty of conservative defenders.

Ford Motor Co. sues a third-party auto repair diagnostics corporation, alleging that it violated Ford's copyright on a list of car parts and specifications. I'm stunned that anyone thinks they can copyright a list, which in theory anyone can compile, with minimal creativity. Ford says it included some totally made-up parts and specs in its list, to which I can only say: how post-modern our corporations have become.

Finally, Daily Kos diarist SemDem lists some of the outrageous lies people seem to believe about President Obama -- like that he's "disbanded the Marine Corps," "banned donuts," and "personally funded a Muslim Museum." This, when a lot of the things Mr. Obama has done (invading Libya, Iraq, and Syria without Congressional authorization, continuing warrantless wiretapping, ramping up drone strikes, vacuuming up cell phone data, and that's just what comes to the mind immediately) are bad enough. Democrats pretending to be like Republicans may work for Democrats in the short term, but it doesn't work for us -- if they actually were the liberals Republicans always say they are anyway, the American people wouldn't be served these ever-higher plates of bullshit.

Action: restraining the NSA, war in the Middle East, and executive pay.

Incredibly, the Senate actually plans a vote soon on S. 2685, the USA FREEDOM Act. S. 2685 would amend Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act so the NSA can't just collect all your phone records willy-nilly. S. 2685 would also require law enforcement to produce an actual search term when they're trying to collect massive amounts of records, would create a special advocate to argue on behalf of civil liberties before the FISA court, and would mandate that the NSA report how many folks they're watching without a warrant. That's certainly not everything we would want -- where's the bill outlawing warrantless wiretapping, for example? -- but it's been decades since our government passed a law actually taking away some power of the National Security Agency, so S. 2685's passage would represent progress. Of course, no law of physics prevents you from demanding more progress, so the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Senators to enact the most vigorous government spying reforms possible.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has asked for another $5 billion for its air-strike war in Iraq and Syria, but Congress has not voted, or even debated, on an authorization for the air strikes the Administration has already conducted. And why does the Defense Department need another $5 billion? Perhaps, instead, it can track down some of the $8.5 trillion it can't account for since 1996, or cut spending on weapons systems that either don't work or don't respond to the changing face of war. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you demand that Congress cut off Iraq/Syria war funding until it has voted on a new Authorization to Use Military Force and until the Pentagon can justify its sudden need for more money. Spoiler alert: once Congress starts debating, we'll press them to vote against any new AUMF for Iraq and Syria and stop the bombing. But I'm appalled when Congressfolk yammer on about their love for the Constitution and then neglect their Constitutionally-mandated duty.

Finally, though the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill became law in 2010, the relevant federal agencies have been a little slow writing vigorous rules to implement its reforms. Such is the case with Section 956 of the bill, which requires financial service corporations to disclose executive pay to shareholders so those shareholders can decide if that pay is excessive -- and also prohibits executive compensation arrangements that reward reckless behavior like that we witnessed in 2008. This is the shareholders' money that pays these executives, so what could be the problem with that? That big corporate executives want to keep redistributing wealth upward to themselves, that's what. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government to finalize vigorous rules enforcing Section 956 of Dodd-Frank. Of course, the best incentive for banksters to pay themselves less is the return of the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, which would keep banksters from paying themselves like no one else on Earth matters a damn. But short that, we'll take Dodd-Frank's mandates, vigorously enforced.

UPDATE. My apologies -- S. 2685 fell to a filibuster last night, at around 7.30 pm; the cloture vote failed 58-42, meaning, of course, that "only" 58 Senators voted in favor of ending debate and proceeding to a vote on the bill. That fraud, Sen. Rand Paul, joined the filibuster, which also means that Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) outclassed him by voting to actually do something about runaway NSA spying. Anyway, I should have been on top of that development, and I have no excuse for that; I'll do better in the future. I suppose there's no harm in calling your Senators anyway and telling them you still support S. 2685 -- just because they want to be done with government spying doesn't mean we're done with government spying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: ending the "war on terror," and starving climate change deniers of funding.

So we're over 13 years into the "war on terror." Now raise your hand if you feel safer because of it. Go ahead, don't be shy. Anyone? Didn't think so. This year the Obama Administration -- headed up by a Nobel Peace Prize winner, no less -- hit a new low by conducting air strikes in Syria and Iraq without any Congressional authorization whatsoever. Hard to believe he's been outclassed by Tha Bush Mobb, and as an added bonus, precisely none of the folks who loved Tha Bush Mobb now also love Barack Obama! It's like he took our hopes on his back so he could dash them. Fortunately, I never placed my hopes in him: I placed them in America, and I still do. So even though various Congressfolk have introduced more than half a dozen let's-kill-brown-skinned-folks-over-there bills, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk end the "war on terror" instead. You know what will work a whole lot better than just bombing everything? Treating the nations of the Middle East like they're comprised of human beings, and collaborating with them to end the threat from ISIS, since none of them are too fond of ISIS, either.

Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Shell to stop funding ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Why? Well, because Royal Dutch Shell's CEO has made some very interesting comments about climate change lately. "Let me be very, very clear," he began (that's two "verys," for those of you keeping score at home), "for us climate change is real and it's a threat we want to act on," and also "we're not aligning with skeptics." What a breath of fresh air -- we're used to big oil corporations not just pooh-poohing the threat posed by carbon-based pollution and the higher average temperatures and the spike in extreme weather events it causes, but then hiring their own scientists to tell us that it's not happening, or isn't a threat, or isn't caused by fossil fuel corporations belching filth into the air. However, Shell still funds ALEC, which has bravely taken up the flag of climate change denialism. You'd like Shell to put its money where its mouth is, and if they need some steel in their spine to do that, surely we can lend some of ours, because we've got plenty.

Action: ending war in the Middle East, curbing methane emissions, and investigating the New York Fed.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to get back to work and vote to end President Obama's war in Iraq and Syria. Your Congressfolk are all on vacation running for re-election working in their home districts right now, and usually that's where I'd want them to stay, but Congress has abdicated its Constitutional duty to declare war on Iraq and Syria -- which action must proceed any action Mr. Obama undertakes against ISIS terrorists in those nations -- and quite frankly, if Congress simply allows Mr. Obama to do whatever he likes to whichever nation he likes, then the terrorists have won. The next time President Walker or President other-Bush decides he's going to find a whole bunch of "terrorists" somewhere and mow them down for the greater benefit of his crony corporate pals, Congress will have rendered itself powerless to do anything about it. And involving the nations of the region in negotiations will neutralize ISIS far more effectively than the blunt force of air strikes.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell Mr. Obama and his EPA to regulate the methane emissions from oil and gas drilling operations. Methane, as you probably know, is a far-too-common by-product of such drilling (particularly gas drilling), and methane actually traps heat in the atmosphere 80 times better than simple carbon dioxide does. Mr. Obama has promised that the EPA will act on methane emissions, but as with so many other things, the time to act isn't tomorrow, but now. Oil and gas drillers will fight it, of course -- they'll trot out the zombie lie that TEH REGULASHUNZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!!! when there's actually an entire industry now with the sole purpose of restricting methane emissions from existing gas drilling operations. Think the methane mitigation sector might be hiring some folks when new methane regulations go into effect? I think they just might! Or, God forbid, gas drilling corporations might decide to stop cutting corners when they build their gas wells in the first place -- which will also create jobs.

Finally, USPIRG helps you tell Congress to investigate the "culture" at the New York Federal Reserve. As you know, former Fed examiner Carmen Segarra taped 46 hours of her conversations with co-workers at the New York Fed, and the tapes (as described by NPR's This American Life and ProPublica) suggest that the New York Fed had too "deferential" a relationship with banksters like Goldman Sachs, which does not bode well for our hopes that our government can stop the banksters from taking a dump all over our economy again. And if the New York Fed can't adhere to its mission, then we have an especially big problem, because the New York Fed regulates all the Wall Street banks, and that's where the 2008 economic meltdown started (regardless of any rubbish you've heard that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both almost completely divested of subprime mortgages by 2005, started it). Given how angry people still are at the banksters and for damn good reason, Congress might actually hold hearings. Still, we should make as much noise about this as we can.

Action: help from Turkey for Syrian Kurds, and help for Georgia voters.

ISIS is, as we speak, attacking the Kurds who live in the Syrian town of Kobane, near Syria's border with Turkey; some 12,000 civilians may be massacred. And the U.N.'s envoy to Syria has urged the Turkish government to permit Kurdish fighters inside Turkey to cross into Syria to help out their brethren in Kobane. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell our government to pressure Turkey to help the Kurds of Kobane. In doing so, you wouldn't call for more air strikes, or more American soldiers on the ground in Syria, or putting our troops under the supervision of the U.N.; you would call for one Middle Eastern nation to act to help another, which is really what we ought to be doing, rather than blowing up as much crap as possible. And I wouldn't worry about whether we'll accidentally strengthen the position of Turkish President Erdogan, because, truth be known, he has pretty much all the power in that nation anyway, and the only thing that would bring him down (or make him adhere to the people's will more directly) is concerted, sustained action by the Turkish people, which we've supported before.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, some 40,000 voter registration applications submitted by the October 6 deadline remain unprocessed, and early voting in that state begins today. And Georgia's Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, said that he had received six separate complaints, from six separate counties, about the massive voter registration drive conducted by the New Georgia Project; turns out the number he received about the New Georgia Project was rather closer to one than six, which apparently justified a massive investigation, which found 25 allegedly fraudulent applications out of 85,000. And that justifies sitting on at least 40,000 voter registration applications? Ultimately, Mr. Kemp's job is to process these applications, and if he's sitting on them, one has every reason to suspect that he knows he's not going to find too many real problems with them. I mean, what else could he be afraid of? Hence both Color of Change and People for the American Way help you tell Mr. Kemp to do his job and process the remaining voter registration applications received in due time. It's a shame you have to tell anyone to do their job, but these are, as they say, interesting times.

Action: stopping war in the Middle East, regulating payday lenders, and prompting corporations to cut ties with ALEC.

I've received notices asking for support for the Congressional Progressive Caucus's plan to "limit" President Obama's current war in the Middle East, but I haven't passed any of them along, because I'd rather stop war in the Middle East. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote on approving Mr. Obama's war, and also vote "no" on approving his war. Just as the 2001 AUMF is no excuse for claiming the authority to bomb anyone you like anywhere you like, the upcoming election is no excuse for inaction on Congress's part. It's like they've all completely forgotten that doing the right thing actually very closely resembles doing the politically-smart thing. And it certainly would not be untoward of us to turn out any Congressfolk who blithely tells us that the reason they're not carrying out their Constitutionally-mandated duty is the election. Our political class has become so sick, immoral, and decadent that they no longer hesitate to say such things out loud. But we can do something about that.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is mulling new rules that would crack down on the havoc wrought by payday lenders -- including limiting the number of roll-overs for a single loan and curtailing lenders' ability to reach into your bank account -- and Americans for Payday Lending Reform (a project of National People's Action) helps you tell the CFPB to keep as many good Americans as possible out of the payday loan cycle of debt. "Cycle of debt" is an accurate term for a process where eight in 10 payday loans don't get paid off in two weeks and more than half of payday loans get rolled over ten times. That's not "a way for folks who can't get credit to get credit," as payday loan industry defenders claim -- it's a way for another group of non-workers to redistribute worker wealth upward to themselves. I suppose it's a small comfort that no matter how rich a payday loan CEO gets, the real banksters will never see him as One of the Boys -- but only a small comfort.

Finally, internet giants like Google, Yelp, Yahoo!, and Facebook executives have all announced their intention to cut ties with ALEC, but eBay stands out as a a major internet corporation that hasn't done so yet, hence the Sierra Club helps you tell eBay to end its association with the American Legislative Exchange Council. Why the Sierra Club, you ask? While the Sierra Club has expanded its portfolio a bit lately, but ALEC's stance on climate change (they say it's a fraud) and renewable energy (they're big-time sun-taxers) relate directly to the Sierra Club's familiar mission -- as does ALEC's past stances on "ag-gag" bills (they just hate investigations of animal abuse on factory farms) and disclosure of fracking chemicals (spoiler alert: they're against that, too). If eBay looks a little Republican to you (their founder, Meg Whitman, was the unsuccessful Republican nominee for Governor of California in 2010), remember that they're just as susceptible to bad PR as the next corporation.

Action: war in the Middle East, and protecting bees.

With the first air strikes visiting Iraq and Syria earlier this week -- one of them finding a city of 200,000 people, which, just off the top of my head, must have killed civilians, since ISIS has but 30,000 soldiers presently -- both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Peace Action West help you tell your Congressfolk to stop this war. Congress has been extraordinarily cowardly in heading off an impeachable offense by this President, but nothing stops them from coming back from campaigning vacationing working in their districts and holding a special session, since the Founders had good reasons for trying to stop Presidents from going off to war all the time. And to head off another line of reasoning: we can't take a TARDIS back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and dissuade all the Western powers from meddling in Middle Eastern affairs, but there must be a point where "someone else broke it and we have to fix it" is no longer an excuse to keep breaking it -- and I, of course, say that moment is always now. Treating the nations of the Middle East with a little more respect in diplomacy might be a good start.

Meanwhile, Swiss corporation Syngenta has petitioned the EPA to dramatically increase allowable thresholds of neonicotinoid pesticides on corn, wheat, alfalfa, and barley -- in the case of wheat hay, to 400 times the current limit. As you know, scientists have told us that neonicotinoids (or "neonics") depress bees' immune systems, contributing mightily to the collapse of half of America's honeybee colonies over the last decade. Syngenta made $14 billion last year, so clearly they have the money to do things the right way. They would tell us they are doing things the right way -- that they're using the neonics in a leaf spray, so the neonics don't penetrate the entire plant, and that alfalfa (for example) gets cut before it blooms, when bees are, as you'd imagine, most interested in them. But having witnessed, in the last few years, incidents of wind carrying GMO seeds over to farms where they ruin organic seeds, you can also easily imagine the bad neonics getting spread around to other blooms the bees might use -- and then it's still game over for many of our food crops. So the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to reject Syngenta's petition, and thus reject more poison in our crops.