Thieves in the Temple.

Congress is off for most of the month, praise the Lord, so we get a chance to catch up on our progress on several fronts.

It probably won't surprise you to learn that the State Department's Inspector General will investigate possible ethics violations concerning the most recent draft of State's environmental impact report on the Keystone XL pipeline, but the Inspector General has also frowned upon the last report, so this could all be theatre. I'd prefer to believe the best of people, even politicians, but still, the Sierra Club still helps you tell Secretary Kerry to make State's environmental impact report reflect sound science, not oil industry biases.

H.R. 1010/S. 460, the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, has 143 House sponsors and 31 Senate sponsors, but remains stuck in committee in both houses -- in the House, actually, it's stuck in subcommittee. You'd think Congress would recognize a good idea supported by over two-thirds of the American public as a sure winner, but this is Congress we're talking about. Never mind calling the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections -- John Boehner's number is 202.225.6205. You can find Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee members here, or you can take more action at Ralph Nader's new website here.

Tier 3 tailpipe emissions, as you know, enjoy support from both environmentalists and automobile manufacturing corporations -- but not big oil, no, sir. Think big oil gets all us-against-the-world like pro sports teams do? If so, they're just another group of millionaires who waste their time cultivating a false sense of oppression. Gina McCarthy has been EPA Administrator for about seven minutes now, so the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Ms. McCarthy to set the strongest tailpipe standards available, so we get less asthma and less cancer and suchlike. I do not believe you'd be double-commenting if you use this tool and if you've already submitted a public comment.

On the fracking front, the Bureau of Land Management still thinks allowing gas drillers to frack all over public lands while telling us little about the chemicals they're pumping into our water is a swell idea. After all, some corporation's "trade secrets" are so, so much more important than the possibility that you're ingesting poisonous crap. (End sarcasm.) The public comment period ends on August 23rd, so if you've missed previous opportunities to give the BLM what-for about their dumb rules, Breast Cancer Action still helps you do that.

Finally, hard to believe, but the USDA is still mulling whether to let chicken processing corporations do most of their own inspecting, and leave a mere one federal inspector per plant to look at almost 200 birds a minute and hope they spot the feces and blood and pus that would make a contaminated chicken a bad meal at the dinner table. Privatization -- it always works, except when it doesn't work, which is always. It gets better: one way the USDA plan would "make up for" the lack of chicken inspectors is to allow corporations to spray their chickens with more dangerous chemicals. It sounds like a Bush Mobb plan, except Tha Bush Mobb's USDA actually functioned better than this. One is tempted to ask why USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack couldn't be burned out by Cabinet work like Hillary Clinton was at State, and one is tempted to answer that winding down two wars slowly enough for all the corporate mercenaries to get their cut is harder work than just rubber-stamping whatever big agricultural corporations tell you. Anyway, the fact that they're still taking comments on this plan tells me they're still not getting enough comments from people who are perfectly happy to get salmonella if it means some CEO gets to gild his plumbing, so Food and Water Watch helps you tell the USDA to drop this dumb chicken inspection privatization plan already.

Once again, we catch up on some of the initiatives we've been working on (and, not insignificantly, I get to show off another fresh new graphic for the first time).

As you know, the House rejected the "Back to Work" budget and passed the nefarious Ryan budget, while the Senate rejected the Ryan budget and narrowly passed a budget sponsored by Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA). Ms. Murray made the appropriate noises about reconciling the Ryan budget and the Murray budget, which, if I may be so bold, doesn't seem particularly likely -- especially with a lot of Congressfolk "waiting" to see what "happens" on the "Grand Bargain." Mr. Obama, the President of Super Happy Bipartisan Fun Time Land, has said he'll give up Medicare benefit cuts and Social Security benefit cuts in exchange for new tax revenues in a "Grand Bargain" over the deficit -- but a non-binding resolution from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) got the Senate on record (in a voice vote, without objection) as opposing Social Security benefit cuts using the "chained CPI" formula. (The "chained CPI" formula purports to measure inflation by predicting what products folks will switch to when prices on their preferred products go up. Trouble is that seniors, often on fixed diets and having fixed medical needs, don't have nearly as many of those choices as the rest of us.) The Campaign for America's Future still helps you tell Congress to reject Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts, and Daily Kos helps you tell Congress and the President to reject "chained CPI"-based Social Security benefit cuts.

Meanwhile, the Senate also passed another non-binding resolution (with 62 votes in favor) offered by Sen. Hoeven (R-ND) expressing its opinion that Mr. Obama should allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline through America's heartland. The State Department still needs to finish its review (a review at least partly written by one of the corporations that would help build the pipeline!), but the Senate vote, though non-binding, puts pressure on Mr. Obama. I always suspected his delay of his decision until this year was an election-year ploy; his nomination of fossil-fuel supporter Ernest Moniz to Steven Chu's old job as Energy Secretary doesn't inspire a lot of hope, either. Of course, good Canadian citizens have begun to organize against tar-sands oil -- the extraction of which requires even more energy to convert to usable oil than traditional oil rigs do -- and that might give Mr. Obama an out. No use just hoping, though, so Greenpeace helps you tell Mr. Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, if you haven't done so already.

Finally, the nefarious "farmers assurance provision" -- which, as we know, doesn't assure very many farmers of very much of anything, but does "assure" big ag that they can continue planting their Frankenseed while the USDA is reviewing it, even if a judge has ordered them to stop planting it -- made it into the most recent continuing appropriations act, which funds our government for the next six months. Mr. Obama signed the bill, and I doubt he lost any sleep over that provision, as he's been carrying water for big ag since becoming President. But in a related development, Washington state residents will vote on a ballot initiative (I-522) this November to force GMO labeling, if supporters can submit enough petition signatures; a similar ballot initiative failed in California in 2012, after the big ag corporations poured millions of dollars into misleading media ads. But Washington state might actually have a better chance of passing one in an off-year, when generally the most passionate voters dominate votes, and those who'd complain that this means the vote will ignore the will of the voters might want to consider that about 9 out of 10 Americans support GMO labeling, making this an actual bipartisan cause, versus the "bipartisanship" our elites normally peddle. More details as they arrive.

The show so far for Friday, February 22, 2013.

Congress doesn't come back to work (such as they do) until Monday, which gives us a moment to catch up on some of the issues we've been following.

35,000 good folks demonstrated against the Keystone XL pipeline (and the impact of climate change generally) in Washington, D.C. over the weekend, and -- what's that, you say? You didn't see that on the news? Well, anyway, this is the year Mr. Obama decides whether to allow a Canadian corporation with a bad pipe safety record to import the dirtiest possible crude oil through a pipeline running over some of America's most important heartland water tables so it can be refined in Texas. The People's Email Network helps you tell Mr. Obama to reject the pipeline.

H.R. 12/S. 123, the Voter Empowerment Act -- a wish list of voting reforms that Mr. Obama touted during his recent State of the Union address -- currently sits in the House Subcommittee on Health, of all places, and in the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which I guess is a little better. CREDO helps you tell your Senators to pass the bill. You can find out who's on the House Subcommittee on Health here, and then look up their phone numbers on the house.gov directory. You can contact Senators on the Rules and Administration Committee from here.

As you know, the U.S. Postal Service will cease Saturday deliveries in August, which will put a lot of postal workers out of work, all because of, no, not the internet, but Congress's 2006 mandate that the USPS pre-pay billions of dollars each year into future pensions, which the law has never required of any other public or private entity. Color of Change helps you tell Congress to end the prepayment boondoggle. Neither of the bills the Truth-out.org link above mentions -- the 2011 Rep. Lynch (D-MA) bill, which would have fixed the problem with minimal damage, and the 2012 Rep. Issa (R-CA) bill, the so-called Postal Reform Act, which would have made everything a lot worse -- show up on thomas.loc.gov at this moment, so I presume neither has been reintroduced in this Congress; if/when I get alerts about them, I'll pass them along. (You'd think Rep. Lynch, in particular, would want to be vocal about this issue, since he's trying to win John Kerry's Senate seat and isn't exactly the favorite.)

Some moderately good news: the FDA has extended the comment period for another 60 days on genetically-modified salmon, after receiving so many comments against the Frankensalmon. I presume they've extended the comment period so that corporate GMO advocates can get their act together and drown us out, but the next time that works will be the first. The FDA choosing to ignore the vast majority of their comments would be, sadly, rather less unprecedented. So let's not give them wiggle room! Both Food and Water Watch and the Organic Consumers Association help you tell the FDA to stop the Frankenfish from wreaking havoc on our health and our waters.

Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), I heard rumors of an imminent CISPA vote as early as last week, but as of this moment CISPA (which would allow corporations to pass your private information along to our government without a warrant) sits in the House Committee on Intelligence. They'll probably fast-track it, and the full House will probably pass it -- and then the fun begins. The Senate would like to pass it, but they also wanted to pass SOPA and PIPA, before a popular uproar made that impossible. Mr. Obama said he'd veto it last year, but he's been re-elected since then, and could go either way now. We could, of course, make it harder for him to go either way: Free Press helps you tell Congress to reject CISPA. (I love that graphic of the zombie CISPA bill.)

The show so far for Tuesday, July 17, 2012.

Congress is hardly doing anything -- which would be, in saner times, the preferred state of affairs -- so today's "Show So Far" won't be long.

The DISCLOSE Act failed yesterday by 51-44 -- that's right, 51 votes in favor, 44 against, and still it fails. Among the nays, of course, you may find the three Last Northeastern Moderate Republicans and ex-campaign finance hawk/putative Citizens United v. FEC opponent John McCain (R-AZ). Sen. McConnell (E-KY) also called the DISCLOSE Act "un-American," which I guess means supporting campaign finance disclosure, as he has done, isn't "un-American," but actually doing something about it is. Calling something most Americans support "un-American" is usually the kiss of death, and thus I feel compelled to remind folks that Mr. McConnell got a mere 53% of the vote in his 2008 re-election effort, and has cleared 60% just once in five elections.

In far better news (don't we deserve it?), the Chicago Tribune has suspended its relationship with Journatic, which you may remember is the corporation that provides "local" news from overseas, and Journatic's editorial head resigned. In addition to the complete absurdity of trying to write local news from thousands of miles away, Journatic has, it turns out, serious ethics problems -- fake bylines, plagiarized quotations, even completely made-up quotations. I'm sure local journalists occasionally commit the same sins, but the temptation has to be even harder to resist when, as I may have already mentioned, you're writing "local" news from several thousand miles away. Journatic still has clients in many big American cities such as Houston and San Francisco; more news on that development as it arrives.

The show so far for Friday, November 11, 2011.

We've been following a bunch of legislative assaults from the Congress of Screw You this week, and, well, so far, so good: the Senate voted against proceeding on S.J.Res. 27, Paul the Lesser's bill preventing the EPA from enforcing cross-state pollution rules, by 56-41 -- which means, yes, some Republicans voted against proceeding. And yet Sens. Manchin (D-WV) and Coats (R-IN) have introduced S. 1833, which would delay cross-state pollution rules for three years and mercury rules for two more. "To provide additional time for compliance," the bill says, which I'm sure will warm the heart of anyone with asthma. I don't have a handy email tool for S. 1833 yet, but you can go ahead and call your Reps and Senators about it, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner; they'll never see it coming.

Also, the Senate also voted against proceeding on S.J.Res. 6, which would have nullified the FCC's net neutrality rules, on a strict party line vote, which tempts me to say there is a benefit to having a Democratic Senate! Admittedly it'd be more of a benefit if the Democratic FCC's net neutrality rules weren't so weak in the first place. The party-line vote also disturbs me. Sure, it's nice to see that Joe Manchin and Ben Nelson aren't going to vote like Republicans on everything, but the votes against media consolidation in 2003 had substantial Republican support, and from unlikely Republicans like Trent Lott, too. Now the right seems to have abandoned net neutrality, as it's somehow become an "Obama thing." When some big corporation blocks their traffic because they haven't ponied up extra money, they may remember where the right side is. I'd much rather it didn't come to that, of course.

In other news, the Obama Administration delayed approval of the Keystone XL pipeline until it can complete a new environmental review, which likely won't be done until after Election Day. (You may recall that the old environmental review had, er, issues -- mainly that the corporation contracted to undertake the review had strong ties to the corporation building the pipeline.) I'm not the first person to wonder about Mr. Obama's timing -- I mean, who wouldn't rather make that decision without having to face the voters again? -- but the delay will save the heartland from tar sands oil spills for another year and a half. In any case CREDO helps you tell Mr. Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all.

Finally, today is Veterans' Day, so thank a veteran. They deserve it.

The show so far for Tuesday, August 2, 2011.

Perhaps incongruously, I've decided to share nothing but good news today, some of it pertaining to things we've worked on in this space.

First up: President Obama proposed an increased automobile fuel efficiency standard covering the years 2016 through 2025. The standard, 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, falls a bit short of the standard we were fighting for (60 mpg), but considering that CAFE standards aim to get us only to 35.5 mpg by 2016, 54.5 is a pretty good number. Of course, this standard isn't final yet, nor is it perfect -- environmentalists point to a 2018 "review," ostensibly to assess whether the 54.5 mpg standard can still be met, which could quickly turn into an out, and I have some reservations about whether the standard can stop automakers from making outrageously fuel-efficient cars they don't actually intend to sell, but intend only to boost the "fleet" average. So, toward that end, the Sierra Club helps you tell our President to keep loopholes out of the standard.

Also, in an illustration of the maxim that there is-so such a thing as bad PR, Scholastic has cut back its InSchool Marketing division by 40%, and mostly by cutting corporate-sponsored materials. You may recall that Scholastic had soiled its good name by passing off corporate-written claptrap in public schools as "educational materials" -- stuff written by coal companies extolling the greatness of coal without mentioning little things like pollution, or stuff written by SunnyD that gets kids to drink more of their not-terribly-fruity-but-awfully-sugary product. Well, Scholastic has cut that back, and though we'd like them to cut it out, it's a start, and we'll keep an eye on it. Admittedly I've become a bit rigid about public schools -- they belong to us, hence the word "public," and since they belong to us, they ought to be strong, too, so that they don't get tempted to take corporate money to pay for band uniforms and the like. Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you thank Scholastic for their deeds.

Finally, Health and Human Services has announced that it will require all new health insurance plans to cover birth control without co-pays. Personally I wouldn't be terribly upset if birth control were subject to fair co-pays (though $50 a month is a lot, frankly), but it's been like pulling teeth to get health insurance corporations to cover birth control pills when they jump at the chance to cover Viagra, so I'll take it. I'll admit I'm not looking forward to hearing right-wingers whine about how birth control pills cause abortions (they don't) or how pregnancy isn't a "condition" (it is) or how the rule interferes with folks practicing their religion (nope, doesn't do that, either). But such is the price we pay for progress. Planned Parenthood helps you tell HHS that you support their decision.

The show so far for Saturday, June 25, 2011.

Well, the wars are still going on. A House resolution authorizing the Libya war for one year failed yesterday, but another House resolution actually defunding the Libya war also failed. Bob Novak, God bless his soul, might say that this is like Solomon solving the whose-baby-is-this problem by slicing the baby in half. It's possible that Mr. Obama has gamed Republicans into this corner, but that's nothing to celebrate. Those of us who live closer to the ground than our Beltway cloud-minders value human life on a pretty personal level, and we don't want Democrats playing with our lives, either. That's true even if the games they play actually hurt Republicans. Which, in the case of the Libya war, I can't even say for sure is true.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Pennsylvania Senate apparently didn't vote on SB 1, the school-vouchers-we-can't-afford bill, yesterday. (The PA legislature website states that the last action on SB 1 took place on April 27, and also lists no Senate roll call votes for Friday, June 24.) The PA Senate comes back tomorrow in late afternoon, so maybe they're planning to pass it with no one watching. However, the Washington Independent reports that SB 1 "has been slow to win support from conservative senators who view the legislation as too costly." Which I'm extremely glad to hear! I admit I think so little of Republicans these days that I don't expect actual conservatism from them. Then again, the Pennsylvania House did pass HB 934, Daryl Metcalfe's nefarious voter ID bill, on Friday, despite its striking non-resemblance to anything a conservative might actually do. To think the man actually had the gall to say the bill addresses "significant voter fraud plaguing Pennsylvania's elections"! I guess he figures everyone watches Fox News, so he didn't have to prove that said "voter fraud" was happening, let alone "significant." The bill goes to the state Senate now; I'm sure I'll have new alerts fairly shortly.

After considerable input from good citizens like yourself, Interior Secretary Salazar says he now supports a 20-year ban on uranium mining claims in land surrounding the Grand Canyon. Of course, Mr. Salazar could change his mind, given that he hasn't actually imposed said 20-year ban, but merely extended a moratorium on new mining claims in the Grand Canyon area for six more months. Presumably we'll be back before those six months are up to give Mr. Salazar further advice as he requires it. Hopefully he won't heed the counsel of Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ): according to Mr. Franks, protecting the Grand Canyon is all about giving in to "rabid environmentalists." Never mind that too many of Mr. Franks's past pronouncements were all about giving in to rabid birthers. Mr. Franks wants you to believe that if you want uranium-free drinking water, you're some kind of extremist. Funny how often extremists call everyone else an extremist.

The Chinese government has released Ai Weiwei -- you may have called on China to release him some time ago -- but we also learn that (per the Xinhua news agency) he has pleaded guilty to tax evasion, the crime they always try to get you on when they can't get you on anything else. The BBC dryly notes that the release coincides with the Chinese Premier's visit to Germany and the U.K., where Mr. Ai has fairly strong professional ties. Still, I get the feeling that the man has been, for all intents and purposes, silenced, so I'm not celebrating a whole lot.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot: Congress ain't raised the debt ceiling yet. I haven't attended all the 13-dimensional chess being played over this, but I suspect that when Mr. Obama does swoop in at the last minute and solve everything, his approvals will go up again, just as they did after the Bush tax cut "compromise," just as they did after Mr. bin Laden's death. Every time Mr. Obama cleans up a Republican mess (and it doesn't even matter how well he cleans it up!), the American people seem to like him better. I hope, for our sakes, that Republicans finally catch on to this, and stop trying to set everything on fire.