Thieves in the Temple.

Action: ranked-choice voting, food stamps, torture of autistic students, and the Sinclair/Tribune merger.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to create a ranked-choice (or instant runoff) voting system in Pennsylvania. A ranked-choice system allows you to designate first, second, third, and so on choices for elected offices, rather than simply designating one choice (very likely while holding your nose). The top two vote-getters then advance to a runoff election (hence the term "instant runoff"), and if your first choice didn't make it to the runoff, your second choice would get your vote (or your third, if your first and second choices don't make it, and so on). That means you'd never have to worry about "throwing away your vote" on a "spoiler" candidate again. Ranked-choice voting could help us break the wheel of voting for political parties that too often seem to conspire against us. And that's worth fighting for.

Meanwhile, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the upcoming Farm Bill if it winds up cutting benefits for low-income working families. Yeah, Congress is working on a Farm Bill again, and by "Congress," in this case, I mean Republicans. And you know what that means: more regulations that make it harder for good Americans to get the help they need -- because Republicans only like the regulations that actually constitute a burden! -- and more rules kicking more Americans off the food stamp program. They got some nerve, passing trillions of dollars in tax cuts mainly for the rich and then saying that big corporate tax cuts will trickle down to the poor! I rather suspect the poor are used to something else trickling down upon them from the rich. Food stamps: you pay for them, so you should be able to get them when you need them. This is not a very difficult principle to understand, or at least it shouldn't be.

In other news, you may recall that horrid 2002 video of the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts administering electric shock "therapy" to an autistic student 31 times in seven hours for refusing to take off his jacket. The Rotenberg Center is literally the only American program for disabled children using remote electric shocks as punishment, which is nothing to yell WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. Between 2014 and 2016, our FDA debated and then wrote regulations banning these shocks. Then what happened? A man who fervently hates all regulations that actually help good Americans got elected President, and since then, the FDA has done nothing about the matter. Typical. So the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the FDA to implement regulations banning electric shocks, and thus help end the torture of special-needs students in America.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC and the DOJ to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. There's no need to theorize about what could happen when one corporation owns over 200 TV stations nationwide and can reach into every corner of the country, because we've already seen from Sinclair what that means: trading favorable coverage of the President for more access, mandating that their anchors support the "war on terror" after 9.11, and forcing all their newsreaders to recite from the same script about "fake news." It ain't far from there to imagine the Administration itself writing their "news" copy, and then what would separate us from your average developing-world dictatorship? You know, aside from the fact that we have a lot more weapons? Our Glorious Elites' lust for mammon will bring the rest of us hardship and misery -- unless we speak out in numbers our government can't ignore.

Action: oppression of dissidents nay, pro-pollution bills nay, renewable energy yea.

Back in September of 2016, Chad arrested Tadjadine Mahamat Babouri (a.k.a. Mahadine) after he posted Facebook videos accusing the government and its cronies of corruption. Think there might be a relationship between those two events? Naturally the Chadian government has tortured him and refused to tell his wife and children where they were detaining him, and now Mahadine faces a life sentence on spurious charges including "threatening national security." Jesus Mary and Joseph when you turn free speech into "threatening national security" you're only revealing your own insecurity. Oh, and Mahadine has contracted TB in prison, so he's also deathly ill and can't get the proper medical attention. One of the ways we can ensure that something like this doesn't happen here, of course, is by fighting it when it happens elsewhere, so Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Chad to release Mahadine and get him the medical attention he needs.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 1237 would hamstring the executive branch's ability to issue environmental regulations, even though the state legislature generally delegates the responsibility to issue such regulations to the executive branch. The bill would force any regulation it deems to have a "significant economic impact" -- by which they of course mean the "negative impact" to corporate bottom lines, and not, for example, the positive impact people's health care costs that such regulations actually have! -- to be approved by both houses of the legislature within 30 days, and either house can scuttle the regulation simply by refusing to act on it. In other words, legislators want to be able to let corporations pollute your air and water without even having the courage to take an actual vote on the matter! Why do you suppose that would be? Maybe because Pennsylvanians generally oppose pollution? The Sierra Club helps you tell your state Rep to reject the objectively pro-pollution HB 1237.

Finally, H.R. 3314/S. 987, the 100 by '50 Act, would (as the title suggests) help our nation transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050 by (among many other things!) helping poor folks get more access to solar power, getting utility corporations off fossil fuels and onto renewables, and encouraging development of zero-emission cars, buses, and trains -- while also providing extensive benefits (including unemployment and retraining) for workers temporarily displaced by the move to renewables. Of course refitting our grid so that it runs on renewable energy will dramatically reduce pollution and might even help us survive climate change, but the notion that it'll KILL TEH JOBZ!!! is laughably absurd. After all, will robots do all the rebuilding and refitting? Of course not! You need people to effect positive change; technology is merely a tool. Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a renewable, clean energy future by supporting the 100 by '50 Act.

Around the table: "free" trade, propaganda videos, privatized care, lost jobs, and foolish gun owners.

If your heart has swelled that Republicans are now saying that the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" probably won't pass Congress in 2016, Dave Johnson at the Campaign for America's Future warns you that Republicans are really mad that the TPP doesn't cause even more chaos and destruction. The main sticking point for Republicans these days? That the TPP doesn't allow tobacco corporations to use "investor-state tribunals" to nullify anti-smoking laws. When some Republican goes on about how much he hates the TPP but won't tell you exactly why he hates it, remember that the reason he hates it is most likely because it's not evil enough.

FAIR asserts that "Credulous Reporting of Deceptive Propaganda Made Planned Parenthood Attack Inevitable." I won't go that far -- assholes like Robert Dear are always one pathetic excuse away from going off -- but this is the place to draw a line from the ACORN video to the Shirley Sherrod video to the NPR fundraiser video to the Planned Parenthood videos, and it's also the place to wonder how so many "elite" "journalists," all at least as trained in semiotics as I am, somehow didn't understand that editing a video creates an entirely new video.

Heather Vogell at ProPublica describes how private corporations caring for the disabled bend politicians to their will, particularly when someone's died under their care. She tells a sad tale -- children dying of neglect and abuse, facilities using restraint techniques outlawed in other countries over a century ago, campaign money coincidentally popping up when states attempt reforms. Remember when someone tells you that the rich need more money to create jobs that the rich are just as likely, if not more likely, to use their unearned largesse as hush money when they foul up.

You knew WalMart's forays into China displaced good American jobs, but here comes the Economic Policy Institute to try and determine how many: over 400,000 jobs between 2001 and 2013, and that's a "conservative" estimate. EPI says over three-quarters of those were manufacturing jobs, which of course they were, since Chinese wage slaves get paid in dung pellets to do what Americans used to do for a wage they could live on, support a family on, and send kids to college on. Keep in mind, also, that WalMart's just one corporation -- overall, "(t)he growing goods trade deficit with China displaced 3.2 million U.S. jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013." That's a drag of 20,000 lost jobs every month. Is this a good time to remind you that China's only one country?

Finally, Charlie Renville, of Fargo, ND, wants his son's principal fired because his high school, enforcing school policy, wouldn't print a photo of his son with his favorite rifle in its yearbook. Even better, the dad says "so begins the fight for freedom." "Begins"? Such drama -- too many Americans want to be mentioned in the same breath as Frederick Douglass without actually doing any of the hard work of being Frederick Douglass. And "(t)he rifle is a rifle he built and it is his favorite rifle"? Should I get Zombie Gilbert and Sullivan to put that to music? Let's never mention this fool again.

Action: funding anti-pollution efforts, and giving special needs students in North Carolina more tools to fight abuse.

H.R. 2822, the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2016, is yet another appropriations bill that the corporatists in Congress have used to take the will of the American people hostage. I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say the electorate did not return both Houses of Congress to Republicans out of a deeply-held desire to defund new climate change standards, cut money for protecting endangered species, or keep EPA staffing levels so low they can't do the work the people have charged them with doing, yet H.R. 2822 would accomplish all of that nonetheless. Please, Lord, let one of these morons utter the phrase "we're doing this for our constituents," so that the world will know that a great number of our House Reps think that the big polluting corporations that threw nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars around in 2014 are their "constituents," versus whom you or I would say their constituents are, i.e., the residents of their districts. Friends of the Earth helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 2822 and to protect our air, water, and climate.

Meanwhile, Becky Bass of Monroe, NC, has begun a petition on Change.org that helps you tell the state of North Carolina to mandate that special education classrooms, therapy rooms, and resource rooms all equip themselves with cameras that can record audio as well as video. Why? Because children who are non-verbal (like her daughter, who has apparently come home with bruises) aren't able to tell their parents what happened to them at school. As with the police-wearing-body-cameras debate, we will hear, from both left and right, that putting cameras in schoolrooms is a lot like Big Brother. Well, not exactly -- the state putting cameras in your bedroom would be rather like Big Brother, as would the state putting cameras in private corporate offices. Putting cameras in the rooms where public servants serve us is rather more like our right as taxpayers. And if allowing the reactionary legislature of North Carolina to look less reactionary is the price we must pay to do justice here, I'm willing to pay it.

Around the table: how do the fools survive?

Patrick Cockburn sees, in ISIS, "the Birth of a Terrifying New State" and a "counter-revolutionary caliphate," one that could take over all of Iraq and Syria. Not because "we didn't do enough to stop it," but because, frankly, we did too much -- when foreign nations interfere in your affairs for decades on end (and that includes helping install the hated Saddam Hussein), the locals remember forever, and so would we, if it were us. Bush's Folly could wind up allying us with Iran against ISIS -- which irony wouldn't be unprecedented in human history, I suppose.

International Franchise Association sues Seattle over its phased-in $15/hour minimum wage, claiming unfair treatment because the law classifies franchises as big businesses and thus requires them to phase in the money faster. Maybe Mr. Clement's assertion that the law violates the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause could work in the IFA's favor, but folks who think we should treat big businesses exactly as we'd treat small businesses confuse symmetry with fairness, and no reasonable person should think the nearest McDonald's is a "small business" just because its owners have driven a Mack truck through a loophole in the law.

The great-granchildren of Anna Short Harrington, who played Aunt Jemima in Quaker Oats promotional materials for decades, have filed a class-action lawsuit against Quaker Oats and three affiliated corporations, saying they exploited Ms. Harrington and thus cheated her descendents of royalties for over 60 years. Good luck to them -- you know Quaker's going to lose (though maybe not pay $2 billion plus punitives) because all their PR hacks can think of to say is "(p)eople associate The Aunt Jemima Brand with warmth, hospitality and comfort, and we stand by this heritage as well as the ways in which we do business." Warmth, hospitality, and comfort -- all things we associate with wage theft.

Federal investigators find a "a systematic breakdown" in how two Virginia schools "employed restraints and seclusions" -- as in, one of them used "last-resort" disciplinary tactics on nearly 40 percent of its students. Those ready to squeal that TODAYZ KIDZ ARE OUTZ UV TEH CONTROLZ!!!!! would need to explain how using "last-resort" tactics nearly half the time isn't an indication that the school has no idea how to keep its students focused and in line.

Finally, Standard and Poor's becomes the second national ratings agency to downgrade the Kansas's credit (from AA+ to AA). They follow Moody's, which downgraded Kansas in April. Both agencies cite the Kansas government's unwillingness to cut spending as well as its mania for cutting taxes, noting that Kansas's tax cuts will actually become steeper after 2015. While it's tempting to dump on Sam Brownback some more -- after all, these tax cuts are all part of his big "experiment" -- I doubt future Kansas Republicans will abandon their tax-cutting mania; they'll just argue that Mr. Brownback somehow did it wrong, because of his Brownbacky Brownbackness, I guess, and then try it again once they get the chance. I'd be happy to be wrong about that. But I doubt I am.

Action: banning electric shock "therapy" for special-needs kids, and promoting community broadband in rural America.

Remember back in May of 2012, when we discussed how the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts, a school for special needs students, punished Andre McCollins, an autistic student, for not taking off his jacket? And do you remember how they punished him with hours of electric shocks, leaving him permanently brain-damaged, not to mention burned? Well, the FDA is now mulling whether to ban using electric shock devices in this manner, and former JRC worker Gregory Miller has started a petition on change.org to help you tell the FDA to ban such torture devices used on special needs kids. "Torture devices" is not hyperbole -- when schools' mania for discipline becomes such that they give kids electric shocks for (in Mr. Miller's words) "closing their eyes or tearing a paper cup," they're engaging in torture simple and plain, and maybe we ought to keep their toys from them when they do that. Obviously, no one opposes actual discipline, but abusing children like this is not discipline, nor is it "tough love," nor is it the fruit of "zero tolerance" policies. It's just evil.

Meanwhile, AT&T has been pushing state legislators to make community broadband networks illegal -- even in rural areas in which AT&T has no intention of building out. And toward this end they've apparently enlisted the aid of the dastardly ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, since ALEC has so much experience writing "model legislation" which somehow closely resembles state legislation designed to serve big corporate paymasters at the expense of good citizens just trying to make a better life for themselves. Again, I do not exaggerate: the ALEC agenda is anti-freedom, because when the law serves only big corporations, the rest of us have no freedom. And the push against local, government-owned broadband is a push against the people's broadband, because the people own their government. Thankfully, the people who actually own AT&T, their shareholders, are about as fed up with AT&T spending their money to keep rural areas broadband-free as the rest of us, so Sum of Us helps you tell AT&T to tell their shareholders about their war against rural broadband.