Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning "free" trade, worker rights, corporate spying, and criminal investigations.

You've heard me say "free" trade deals are bad for people? Well, dig this: big fossil fuel corporations have been using something called the Energy Charter Treaty -- signed in 1994, and now law in over 50 nations -- to sue governments for shutting down oil rigs and coal plants, using, you guessed it, the notorious "Investor-State Dispute Settlement" (or ISDS) system, as nefarious a corporate welfare system as has ever been devised. Big corporations have deprived world taxpayers of over $50 billion so far using the Energy Charter Treaty, but it's not all bad news: Italy has withdrawn from the pact, and several other European nations (including France) are mulling doing the same. Hence Avaaz helps you tell world governments to pull out of the Energy Charter Treaty and do their level best to stop the Treaty's spread to other nations. And why should we compensate big corporations for their fossil fuel investments as we transition to more sustainable energy? I mean, they all knew that churning the ground for oil and coal isn't sustainable, and yet they kept doing it. Doesn't the word "consequences" mean anything to anyone anymore?

Meanwhile, H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, is back; the bill would, as the title suggests, protect workers' right to organize and bargain collectively for better pay and working conditions. A mere 40 years ago, one in three American workers belonged to a union; now, thanks to a succession of alternating hostile and weak governments, that number's more like one in eight, even though unionized workers generally get better pay and a bigger voice at work, and even though polling has told us for many, many years that more than half of American workers would like to join a union. The PRO Act would give workers a lot of tools to fight for a better worklife, by stiffening penalties for employers who try to bust unions, closing loopholes in our labor laws, and allowing workers to file civil lawsuits against employers, so there's be no more reclassifying workers as "independent contractors" or "supervisors," to name two nefarious tools bosses use. So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to support workers by passing the PRO Act.

In other news, fast food corporation McDonald's has apparently been spying on its workers in an attempt to get "strategic intelligence" on those workers who advocate for a $15/hour minimum wage. You have to wonder what they think they're going to learn! That people hate being paid in dung pellets and they're willing to organize to change that state of affairs? That folks working three jobs just to meet the bills will advocate for a position that's popular even among Republican voters? That's a whole suitcase full of no shit, Sherlock! right there -- I mean, if you need "strategic intelligence" about that, you shouldn't run a franchise, let alone a multinational corporation. Nonetheless, their efforts (which include social media surveillance, so for the 400th time don't make your posts "public," OK?) may well be breaking the law, since our laws do actually frown upon harassing workers, and if McDonald's would just pay a living wage, they wouldn't have to play Amateur Pinkerton. Hence Fight for the Future helps you wield the Big Stick of Bad PR and tell McDonald's to stop spying on its workers.

Finally, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee helps you tell incoming Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate former President Trump and his cronies. For what, your Trump votary uncle asks? Well, for perjury, bribery, obstruction of justice, violating the Hatch Act, violating campaign finance laws, and violating the emoluments clause of our Constitution, for starters -- and that's before we get to the little matter of the attempted coup he incited on January 6. Now, your more liberal uncle might well express fatigue at all of this (which no doubt comes, in part, from his sincere relief that Mr. Trump isn't President anymore) and might be willing to, as Mr. Obama used to say, look forward, not backward. But then anyone can leave a trail of slime anywhere they like and get away with it! And we need only remember how much evil crap George W. Bush got away with (like, you know, torture) while he was President to know that if we don't hold the lawless accountable, we'll have a hundred more Donald Trumps in our future. Is that the future America deserves?

Action: concerning immigration, public health, and another Presidential veto threat.

First things first. Our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) plans to deport Steven Tendo, an ordained minister and asylum-seeker who will very likely be killed if he's sent back to Uganda. I say "very likely be killed" because the government of Uganda tortured him -- amputating two fingers -- and killed several family members. Sounds like the kind of fellow you'd like to help, right? Not to our government! Our government promptly put him in a concentration camp, where he's been for two years, not getting appropriate care for his diabetes, of course, which means he's now blind in one eye and going blind in the other. Plus, you know, COVID-19 is running rampant in these camps! I don't expect our President's votaries to evince any sympathy about any of that, but all that means is we have to be louder than them. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell our Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (yeah, that's ICE) to stop deportation proceedings on Mr. Tendo and help him seek asylum.

Meanwhile, Social Security Works helps you tell your local and state governments to require that folks wear masks on their faces. Our federal government ain't gonna do that -- our President can't even be bothered to model good behavior every once in a while! -- but maybe local officials, who will more likely see disgruntled citizens every once in a while, will be more responsive. Absolutely positively brook no silliness about how not wearing a mask is a fundamental freedom guaranteed by God and our Founders, because it isn't, actually (no, it was not the 20 1/2th Amendment), and virtually everyone who's thought about the matter knows that wearing a mask will reduce the possibility that other folks will get COVID-19 from you. Hopefully we're not so addled as a civilization that we don't care about making other people sick -- or that we more easily digest lies about TEH MASKZ MAKINGZ TEH PEEPULZ CHOKEZ!!!!!! since masks are inconvenient. They irritate my ears, too, but when I became a man I put away childish things.

Finally, from the "Things We Shouldn't Even Have to Bother With" file: our President has said he'll actually veto the next defense authorization bill if it includes an amendment requiring that our government rename military facilities currently named after Confederate figures. After all, what says "patriotism" more than memorializing traitors? It's odd that this is the hill our President wants to die on; it's almost like he's only chasing the Nazi wannabe vote. I mean, at least 25% of the electorate will vote for him no matter what because they're nuts, but the Venn diagram of "bat-guano insane voters" and "Nazi wannabe voters" already has a lot of overlap. No use saying he's just "fighting political correctness," either, not when right-wingers now define "political correctness" as "any time you don't act like a complete prick." Really, the term is just about meaningless now. Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to hold its ground in the face of this absurd veto threat.

Action: concerning paid sick leave, coronavirus policy, and worker rights.

Congress passed legislation responding to the novel coronavirus threat last night, and it included two weeks of paid sick leave for workers who have either contracted the coronavirus or been told by a doctor to stay home because of their symptoms, and we may well have our foot in the door to get paid sick leave legislation for all workers -- but not if we sit on our hands! Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid sick leave legislation for everyone. Everyone's not going to get the coronavirus, after all, but everyone is going to get sick from something sooner or later, or will need to take care of a sick family member sooner or later, and we all deserve to be able to take a day or two off to take care of ourselves and our families without having to worry about whether we'll lose our jobs or whether we'll be able to pay all the bills. Furthermore, Americans deserve better than having to worry about whether a sick worker will make them sick. See? Paid sick leave protects us all, and protecting us all is our government's job.

Meanwhile, Color of Change (among many other groups) helps you tell our local, state, and federal governments to release as many folks as possible from prisons and detention centers so that they don't all die in a coronavirus outbreak. Don't be the one who squeals YOU CAN'TZ LETZ TEH PRIZONURZ OUTZ INTO TEH STREETZ TEH MURDURZ!!!!!, because you know as well as I do that a) hard criminals comprise a small number of folks in jail, b) "as many folks as possible" would exclude them, and c) most folks being held in jails and detention centers -- without being convicted of a crime, I feel compelled to add -- are there for nuisance crimes. Also consider that prisons are probably the most densely-populated places on Earth; think maybe the virus can spread like lightning under those conditions? Consider, finally, that helping people to live, no matter what they've done, is humane policy. I've seen my fellow Americans have very little trouble being good to each other lately, and it's heartening, though not surprising. But it's well past time our politicians followed suit.

Finally, some time ago we discussed the plight of the Thai seafood workers, who face numerous abuses, ranging from torture, beatings, and executions to forced 20-hour work days and forced ingestion of methamphetamines in order to keep working; sadly, they still face these abuses, so the International Forum for Labor Rights helps you tell the Thai government to do something about the plight of seafood workers. Migrant workers testify that the laws generally favor employers and boat owners, which is not a tremendous surprise, but we should resist the urge to go numb at yet another report of that. And certainly the Thai government should resist the urge to pass a bunch of laws with bite that they don't enforce! This is often the way of things in the developing world -- legislatures will pass good laws, but governments either refuse to enforce them or let utterly corrupt people enforce them. Don't let such observations make you cynical, because your duty remains the same: to confront injustice and, ultimately, to defeat it.

Action: concerning human rights and health care.

Avaaz helps you tell the U.N. Human Rights Council, world governments, and corporations doing business in China to fight that nation's continued oppression of over a million Uyghurs. The U.N. Human Rights Council will meet in Geneva for the next month, so now's an especially good time to get their attention! As you know, China has detained over a million of its ethnic Muslims, and detainment in China also includes torture, rape, and family separation. Of course, earlier this week we were taking Apple to task for failing to provide secure messaging apps on their Apple Store in China, and, well, China's ongoing oppression of the Uyghurs is just one of the things Chinese activists get "disappeared" for talking about with each other. And oppression, in these times, requires a lot of corporate help, particularly in the area of surveillance and DNA databases. But we can wield the Big Stick of Bad PR and get corporations, governments, and the U.N. to respond. Indeed, we already have.

Meanwhile, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell six fairly famous American corporations to stop enabling Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory. If you just read that sentence and immediately thought that telling those corporations to pull out would mean the death of Israel, then consider this: just as "being a friend" and "enabling whatever your friend wants to do no matter how harmful it would be" are two entirely different things, supporting Israel's right to exist and thrive and enabling it to wipe out Palestine are two entirely different things. I suspect most Americans understand that, though Our Glorious Elites pretend not to. But if we get Airbnb, Expedia, Trip Advisor, General Mills, Motorola (which provides a lot of the technological backbone for checkpoints and surveillance in the occupied territories), and Booking Holdings to stop doing business in occupied Palestine, we'll get some change.

Finally, both Moms Rising and Public Citizen help you tell our government not to give out exclusive licensing rights for a coronavirus vaccine to big pharma corporations. Sadly, our Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar, has already announced that he can't even guarantee a coronavirus vaccine would be affordable -- dig the can-do American spirit he evokes there! -- since "we need the private sector to invest" and (sigh) "price controls won't get us there." Both of those statements are absolute horsedoodle -- insisting that price controls can't control prices is, of course, a special kind of stupidity long fashionable on the right, but the fact is that we the taxpayers will do most of the investing in any coronavirus vaccine, as we have done since 2002. So, no, we don't actually need private investment -- in fact, we could redirect a very small portion of federal budgetary misspending (cough vanity border wall cough!) to get it done.

Action: concerning good policy, the war on Yemen, and torture.

The list is back! It's time once again to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People 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. 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; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And this week we're proud to add H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed the full House on Friday afternoon. Why have all these good bills piled up? Because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY) won't bring them up for a vote; didn't know we elected Mitch McConnell Dictator-for-Life, did you? So let's tell our Senators to fight for voting rights, equal rights, public lands, internet freedom, and so much more -- and let's stay in their grills until they bend to our will.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that Democrats will abandon efforts to pass a defense spending bill amendment that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Sigh. And I bet Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, runs on proposing the amendment, even as he prevents its passage so it can actually do some damn good! And it would do a considerable amount of good -- it would get us out of yet another undeclared war, it would bring more good Yemeni back from the brink of starvation, and it would save more Houthi rebels for the fight against al-Qaeda that they're good at. Sometimes you think we get involved in these messes just so we can make everything worse. Ah, who am I kidding -- of course we're in Yemen to create chaos, just like Iraq! Rep. Smith's office number is 202.225.8901; his Armed Service Committee office number is 202.225.4151. These numbers are courtesy Just Foreign Policy; good luck finding phone numbers at his own House website, because they seem pretty well-hidden.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to release the full 7,000-page torture report to the American people, then Win Without War still helps you do that. There's no "looking forward, not backward" (in Mr. Obama's infamous phrase) when our CIA tortured at least 100 men in "black site" operations, and though Congress has released a 500-page summary of the report, they haven't released the whole enchilada, which hamstrings our effort to ensure this never happens again. The cynical will ask whom among our good Americans will read the full 7,000-page report -- and sadly, too many of our "liberal" media will ask the very same question, though the answer should be that they will read it, and report on its contents and its meaning. That is journalism, after all, and if too many contemporary "journalists" call it a day after they've trolled through Twitter for cruel and obnoxious crap uttered by fools who deserve their anonymity, that doesn't change their obligations to our Republic and our civilization.

Action: concerning shareholder power, torture, and government spying.

Our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) -- which, like our President, cares only about bosses -- would like to make it harder for shareholders to propose resolutions aiming to restrain corporate misbehavior. Our SEC would make you own more stock before introducing a resolution about anything that goes on at the corporation in which you invest, and they would also make shareholder resolutions meet higher support levels before ever being considered again; these changes seem like transparent attempts to stop shareholders from telling executives what they think they ought to do. Gosh, if resolutions concerning climate change and racial diversity and sexual harassment are so bad, why not just advance winning arguments against them? I kid, of course -- the answer is they can't. Because they're losers. CREDO helps you tell our SEC to work for us, not banksters, and reject its proposed changes to SEC Rule 14a-8.

Meanwhile, Open the Government helps you tell your Congressfolk to release the full Torture Report. Our Senate investigated CIA torture of terror suspects starting in 2009, approved a final report in 2012, and released an executive summary in 2014, but has never released the full, 6,000-page report. If you're thinking we might as well leave enough alone and everyone pretty much knows the story (which is, per the report and per common sense, that CIA torture never produced any significant intel on terror attacks), consider that a woman who oversaw torture at detention sites now runs the CIA, and that another State Department nominee advocated using torture on terror suspects while serving with Tha Bush Mobb. And we now have a President who has embraced torture as a terror-fighting tool, again, though this position opposes both science and common sense. Not to mention morality! But he doesn't get all the say around here.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell big tech corporation Microsoft to divest from AnyVision's facial recognition technology, which several foreign governments use to track down and oppress citizens who protest these governments' actions. Israel, in particular, has used AnyVision to track down Palestinians who've said something bad about Israel on Facebook and then refused them passage across the Israel/Palestine border; you see the slippery slope there, I trust. Microsoft has actually developed standards for supporting facial recognition software that include "non-discrimination, fairness, and consent," but governments use AnyVision to spy on their citizens in a discriminatory manner and without their consent; you have to wonder if Microsoft came up with their standards simply as an intellectual exercise. Still, Microsoft said all of these words out loud, for anyone to hear, so why not make Microsoft live up to them?

Action: concerning voting rights, torture, pollution, and social media.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. After all, if you've been watching this space, you've very likely already advocated for most of the things this bill would do, like redistricting reform, automatic voter registration, campaign finance disclosure for large donors, and public campaign financing. You've also very likely fought efforts to remove voters from voting rolls for no good reason other than that they might vote against the kind of politician who'd like less people to vote, and the For the People Act does something about that, too. Plus it'd make Election Day a national holiday and keeps House Reps from serving on for-profit boards. Who could oppose such things? The Republicans who parade their hatred of all that's good, that's who. And that's why we need the For the People Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2407's title, the Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, will set off some rageheads right off the bat -- you'll hear them say how dare you call it an occupation! as if that's the worst thing a human being could possibly do. Or as if it's anti-Semitic! But criticizing Israel's actions in Palestine is not in-and-of-itself "anti-Semitic," and nor are attempts to induce better behavior from Israel. And even if you think people criticize Israel too much, you should be put off by reports of Israeli soldiers separating Palestinian children from their families and torturing them while in detention. These things may not create terrorists, but they do create broken people, and we can't keep creating broken people and calling ourselves civilized. Hence Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose cruel treatment of Palestinian children by passing H.R. 2407.

In other news, S. 1187, the Safe School Meals for Kids Act, would phase out food tainted by the ubiquitous pesticide chlorpyrifos from our school lunch programs. Scientists have linked chlorpyrifos to numerous neurological and developmental disorders, and indeed our EPA banned chlorpyrifos from home use almost 20 years ago. Yet our Administration drags its feet on imposing a broader ban, even though our courts have mandated it, and even though kids who eat fruits and vegetables sprayed with chlorpyrifos -- which they likely are, since big ag corporations spray about 10 million pounds of it on crops every year -- may well be getting 140 times what our EPA has considered safe exposure. After all, cutting pollution doesn't make executives richer! Where our Administration won't act, perhaps our Congressfolk will -- but not unless we act. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep kids safe from pollution by passing the Safe School Meals for Kids Act.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell Facebook to stop with its bogus attempts at "fact-checking." You'd think we'd be happy that Facebook is actually checking facts, since so much BS gets spread around there, but they've partnered with decidedly-non-objective outlets like CheckYourFact.com -- a Koch brothers-funded project of the Tucker Carlson-created The Daily Caller -- and the right-wing Weekly Standard. That can't be an accident, could it? Nor could it be an accident that Facebook actually purged pages (including ZeroHedge) because the previously unknown website PropOrNot smeared them as pro-Russian propaganda hounds right after the 2016 election? It never occurred to them to seek out the decidedly non-liberal FactCheck.org? But all we need from Facebook, really, is an end to speech that our First Amendment doesn't protect, like terroristic threats. We certainly don't need "fact-checking" that's worse than the Wild West.

Around the table: concerning workers, taxes, defense, drama, campaigns, and yet another novel moral argument from Pat Robertson.

Mike Konczal at The Nation suggests that bank workers could do a lot of good if they organized into unions and bargained collectively for better pay and working conditions. And by demanding, say, an end to the kind of insane sales quotas that helped the Wells Fargo scandal along, they could even "regulate from below," which would be a help, since regulation sure ain't coming from above. You'd think conservatives would love unions more, since they represent a way for businesses and workers to solve their problems without a whole lot of big government involvement. You'd also think, of course, that the labor movement would have organized workers like these a long time ago.

It's time for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's "Who Pays" report, and surprise! Lower-income folks get hit a lot harder by state and local tax systems than higher-income folks do. When you hear that lower-income people pay six times as much of their income in taxes as higher-income people do, don't be the one who says well that figures, because higher income people make more money ha ha ha ha snort. Setting aside the math-illiteracy of such a statement ("paying a higher percentage of your income in taxes" is a lot different than "paying more money in taxes"): don't we all deserve a shot at moving up in the world? Isn't that what America is all about? Well, sales taxes, flat income tax rates, and corporate welfare keep good Americans down.

Jeffrey St. Clair at Counterpunch describes how the Lockheed-Martin corporation has achieved a near-monopoly over defense contracts in America. Long story short: our government has enabled them to do it over the last few decades. And that means Lockheed-Martin gets an outsized say in defense policy, such that they continue to rake in the taxpayer dough for planes they can't seem to make work. That might be a worse outcome than the outcomes we rightly fight against when big media corporations get their monopolies.

In times past we would have been aghast if we heard that our President's Chief of Staff and our National Security Advisor got into a lengthy shouting match outside the Oval Office, but now we either excuse it by imagining Richard Nixon's explosive temper or we shake our head and say this proves they can't run a country. But this is the way our President wants it -- he wants us to get more emotionally involved in the dramas his Administration creates so we'll be less emotionally involved in the reaper's scythe he's cutting through regulations protecting our clean air, our clean water, our internet freedom, and of course our freedom from financial predators. Also, too, we should be running our country, not them.

Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA) abruptly tells a recovering drug addict "(y)ou think you're having a hard time? I've got $5 million of negative ads going against me. How do you think I'm feeling?" Between this and his apparent inability to stop saying Nancy Pelosi's name -- a habit which finally prompted his opponent to tell him "Abigail Spanberger is my name!" during a debate -- I'd be very disappointed if he got re-elected. But at least he rid us of Eric Cantor, whom I still assert is worse, since he's far more able to mask his madness than Mr. Brat.

Finally, Pat Robertson informs us that we shouldn't be "screaming blood for the Saudis" over their apparent torture and murder of a journalist, because "these people are key allies" and "we’ve got an arms deal that everybody wanted a piece of," meaning "a lot of jobs, a lot of money come to our coffers." And you recognize that argument, right? It's a rhetorical hostage situation -- as in, don't demand justice for the state-sanctioned torture and murder of a journalist, or the jobs get it! What does he imagine Jesus would do here?

Around the table: the moral of every story learned, at last!

Another day, another reminder that making a "blue wave" the be-all-end-all of your life is very shortsighted, to say the least: Matt Stoller at the Washington Post says "Democrats Can't Win Until They Recognize How Bad Obama's Financial Policies Were." No, really, as in Mr. Obama's response to the foreclosure crisis was nothing more and nothing less than "a wholesale attack on the American home (the main store of middle-class wealth) in favor of concentrated financial power." It goes on from there; by the time you get to the point where the Obama FTC goes after "such villains as music teachers and ice-skating instructors" rather than, you know, any of the dozen job-crushing monopolies you or I could name, you'll hopefully be reminded that you are the Great Person you've been waiting for, not some Democrat politician who'll sell you out in the name of "bipartisanship."

I don't know that Brett Kavanaugh committed perjury per se during all of his various confirmation hearings over the last decade-plus -- some of the arguments made at the link are stronger than others, and the strongest argument anyone will really care about (what, you think the average voter could give one rat's hind-quarter how much input he really had into William Pryor's nomination?) concerns his testimony about torture. But politicians never seem to be as offended by torture as the people are, so I doubt Democrats will make much of an effort there -- though it'd be easy for Democrats to paint Mr. Kavanaugh as a "coward" for trying to distance himself from unpopular policies when convenient.

And now, from Sam Levin at The Guardian, here's "The Dark Side of California's Ending Cash Bail." What is the downside to ending the unconstitutional practice of detaining folks in jail indefinitely before convicting them of a crime? Well, the law's writers decided they had to come up with some system to keep suspects in jail, purportedly out of concern for public safety, but they came up with "risk assessment" algorithms to predict who's a threat, and guess whom they're most likely to "predict" are a threat? Poor, black, and brown folks, that's whom, since they're the folks law enforcement will most likely arrest in the first place! Maybe in time we can polish this turd, but right now we've just given rageheads another tool to impose their biases on the rest of us.

Uh oh: Louisiana state police were apparently circulating a list of antifa members they got from a Nazi wannabe website. Oh, and it's not even a list of real antifa -- probably just folks Nazi wannabes don't like, which means you or I could be on it! That'd be a little ominous, of course, but it would also make me a little proud. Naturally the Louisiana police tried to block the list's release, saying that doing so could "compromise" an investigation and out a "Confidential Informant" (caps in original), because, as we know, there's just no way civilized people could protect actual confidential informants and pursue justice at the same time.

I know our President didn't really mean all protests should be illegal, just the ones that take place during hearings on his Supreme Court nominees hearings at our Capitol, but he said what he said, and anyway he's dead wrong: our government belongs to us, so we've got as much right to be at our Capitol as our Representatives do, and if they get all angry-dad on us, we have every right to say "are you effing kidding me?" and act like the bosses we are. Seriously, if protestors dog your every move, don't you wonder what you might have done wrong?

Finally, Michaela Haas at Yes! magazine shares with us "Seven Strategies to Turn Trauma Into Strength." You're always better off trying to turn the bad shit that happens to you into some sort of positive, and I can tell you from experience that meditation, self-compassion, gratitude, and you-need-a-mess-of-help-to-stand-alone (to name four of the seven strategies) are big helps in doing that. And yet I also feel compelled to caution you against using positivity against folks who seem to have more trouble overcoming their suffering than you'd expect. You know, the way right-wingers do to poor, black, and brown folks? It seems like "don't be like right-wingers" is the moral of every damn story I tell.

Around the table: no, our President is not a traitor! And other lessons.

FCC Chair Ajit Pai suspends the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, saying he's afraid Sinclair will sell some of its stations (in order to get under an FCC ownership cap) in "sidecar arrangements" allowing them to keep a stake in programming and revenues -- thus retaining control over stations they don't own, which is against the law. Next will be a hearing before an administrative judge; Comcast and Time-Warner abandoned their efforts to merge rather than face an administrative judge in 2015. I still wouldn't be surprised to see this deal come back from the dead, though. And why do we allow any person or corporation to own more than one station again?

Look, I want to believe just as badly as anyone else that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) could vote against the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. After all, Mr. Kavanaugh believes a President should be exempt from criminal prosecution because he's-so-busy, and he has also stated that our government's metadata-vacuuming program is "entirely consistent" with our Constitution's 4th Amendment (and also spoke of the program's alleged "critical national security need," as if he hadn't convinced himself of the previous statement). But Mr. Paul could be the deciding vote here -- Republicans have 51 of 100 Senators, but John McCain is gravely ill and hasn't voted on anything in months -- and my guess is he waits for Sens. Manchin, Heidtkamp, and Donnelly to vote yea before he votes nay. Because the best time to vote on principle is when it makes no difference!

Just as we should take the term "fake news" with about a pound of salt, Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that we might actually credit social media with the leftward shift in voters' beliefs over the last few years. And just as we figure our President calls things "fake news" because he doesn't like being criticized, we should also figure that the "liberal" media doesn't like social media first and foremost because it's upended their authority -- social media has allowed good Americans to filter the news they get more to their liking, and maybe traditional "liberal" media sources, corporatist and cowardly as they are, aren't really to anyone's liking. Also, too, social media certainly isn't worse than the "right-wing noise machine" that drove voters rightward during the '90s.

Uh oh: looks like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker also met with Marila Butila, the Siberian woman recently charged with trying to collaborate with certain Americans to influence American elections. They met during Mr. Walker's Presidential campaign launch in 2015, which reminds me, mainly, that we really dodged a fucking bullet when Mr. Walker's campaign went kaplooey later that year, because Mr. Walker would be doing all the things Mr. Trump is doing and doing them in a way that would probably seem civilized to most Americans. But I'd be perfectly happy if this revelation helped finish his try for a third term later on this year.

Our President sure did put on a show two days ago in Helsinki (no, this won't be the straw that breaks the camel's back for Republicans, either), but no no no a thousand times no our President did not commit treason by throwing our intelligence agencies under the bus and sucking up to Vladimir Putin. He committed a thousand other sins, certainly, but not that one, because Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution still says what it's always said, and Congress has not declared war on Russia. And just as we remain wary of our "liberal" media regardless of how much our President constantly whines about them, we should remain wary of our intelligence agencies, as we have always done, out of our duty as citizens.

Finally, I was profoundly disgusted with our President fist-bumping that notorious Turkish dictator wannabe, Mr. Erdogan. "Do(ing) things the right way," according to our President, doesn't just explicitly mean steamrolling over our Constitution's mandate that spending bills originate in Congress -- it also explicitly means firing tens of thousands of civil servants, sending hundreds of judges to jail, torturing and raping detainees, and arresting 60 children for treason. Think of all that the next time you think of President Big Balls fist-bumping Mr. Erdogan.

Action: forced arbitration nay, arms sales to nations that abuse human rights nay, and treating prisoners like human beings yea.

As you likely know, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday (in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis) that corporations comply with current law and precedent when they force their workers into arbitration, thus denying them their day in court. But whatever we may think of the merits of the Court's ruling, the majority opinion pointedly did not preclude Congressional action on the matter, so the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban forced arbitration clauses (and class/collective action waivers) from employment contracts. A quarter-century ago, a mere eight percent of workers had forced arbitration clauses in their contracts; now well over half of all workers do, which means when those workers have grievances against their employers, their employers get to force them into an arbitration hearing that those workers frankly have very little chance of winning. And justice delayed is justice denied, so let's get to stepping.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to sell $1 billion in weapons to Bahrain -- after reversing restrictions on such sales to Bahrain imposed by President Obama -- at a time when Bahrain is detaining and torturing civilians, banning travel for citizens who criticize the government, stripping their critics of their citizenship, and amending its constitution to expand military "national security" powers in peacetime. But Congress, at least, gets 30 days to reject the weapons sale, and though it's true that arming bad actors sure does seem a bipartisan obsession, that doesn't change our duty. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support human rights across the globe by rejecting the proposed arms sale to Bahrain. It's one thing to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses, but it's another thing entirely to enable the abusers by selling them weapons. Maybe we'd be less hated around the world if we stopped doing that.

Finally, the Miami Correctional Facility of Bunker Hill, Indiana, eliminated in-person visits at the start of May, giving their prisoners just one week's notice before terminating just about their only contact with their families and loved ones. Because of drug trafficking, of course, even though it sure does seem like we could stop that with (at the very least) a few more honest eyeballs around the place -- or by punishing the prison guards who bring most of the drugs in! Really, if you can't keep drugs out of a prison, you have no business managing prisons. I'll brook no backtalk about how difficult that is, because anything worth doing is difficult. The reason we defend in-person visits, of course, is that prisoners who get these visits go back to jail far less often, so Roots Action helps you tell the Miami Correctional Facility to promote the rehabilitation of its prisoners by rescinding its ban on in-person visits.

Around the table: a modest proposal for hedge fund managers who lose taxpayer money, and other items.

In re the slaughter of Palestinian activists by Israeli soldiers this past Monday, Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that "Media Can Tell Readers Who's Killing Whom -- When They Want To. The good news, this time, is that some "liberal" media outlets seem to want to, including the Washington Post, but you've still got a lot of the same tortured headlines (the ones that seem to say protests kill people, not "people kill people") that you get for police shootings.

Radley Balko at the Washington Post tells us why the so-called Protect and Serve Act (H.R. 5698/S. 2794, in case you were wondering) "is a response to a problem that doesn't exist," i.e., the "war on cops." Calling crimes against police "hate crimes" ignores the simple fact that "they are about as far removed from a vulnerable group as one can imagine," since they, you know, "carry guns and other weapons," "have the power to detain, arrest, and kill," and "literally have the entire government at their backs." Seriously, if you think black folks "whine" about the fear of being executed by a police officer without even a charge, let alone a trial, you should reacquaint yourself with the definition of whining, because demanding to make police officers a "protected class" is pretty much it. (Hate to pile on -- OK, I don't -- but Mr. Balko also reminds us that crime against police officers actually isn't skyrocketing, even though we as citizens are a lot more skeptical about police officers than we were even five years ago.)

Ho hum, our EPA has (so far) squashed an HHS study of water contamination from toxic chemicals, with at least one White House aide saying, in an email, that they couldn't get the HHS agency to "realize the potential public relations nightmare this is going to be." That's almost like saying it out loud! Of course, when your President says all kinds of things out loud that civilized people wouldn't say out loud, I guess you can't expect the underlings to do better. And no, saying it's "important for the government to speak with a single voice on such a serious issue" to head off the release of a study that'll give you bad PR is intolerable bullshit.

Also ho hum, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has basically dissolved the team in her department that investigated for-profit college abuses. And then hired some of the officials at for-profit colleges being investigated! How many times must I tell these pimps! For-profit colleges take taxpayer money! Punishing them when they're corrupt is a no-brainer! Thus more evidence that the only value of contemporary "conservatism" is executive profit, and also more evidence that when our President promised to "drain the swamp," he meant "get rid of all the liberals," which is, I'm pretty sure, exactly how his votaries understand it.

And even more ho hum, CIA Deputy Chief Gina Haspel, up for the big job there despite her well-documented past support and enabling of torture by CIA agents, now says torture was actually a bad idea -- thus giving Senators cover to vote for her, and (more importantly) allowing her to get away with the torture she's already supervised. You'll recall that Scott Pruitt also saved his nomination when he intoned that people cause climate change, a belief he sure hasn't acted on as EPA Administrator. When people talk about the moral breakdown of society, they should be locating it in occurences like these, not in gay marriage or birth control or "everyone making the cheerleading squad" or whatever diddles folks' rage glands these days.

Finally, Dean Baker suggests that, instead of harrumphing about whether Medicaid recipients "work enough," we should "focus() on whether the people at the top are working for their money." Meaning, of course, that if a rich hedge fund actually underperforms index funds while taking craploads of taxpayer money, maybe they should "work to pay off the fees the state paid them." They'd balk, of course, not just at making very little money and thus spending craploads of hours working them off, and they'd say things, out loud, like "we can't work under this kind of pressure." Hey, I have to do a good job everyday; why not a rich hedge fund manager?

Around the table: containing two of the President's best stratagems for winning the midterms.

With both parties of Congress anxious to give our President even more unconstitutional war-making powers, it's left to Pat Buchanan to remind us not only that Israel struck Iranian forces in Syria first last week, but that the neocons who supposedly hated our President so much now control his foreign policy. Mr. Buchanan rightly reminds us that the notion that "Iran is on 'a quest for nuclear weapons'" is a "Bush-like assertion," and that "the foreign policy that America Firsters voted for" is "being replaced by the Middle East agenda of Bibi and the neoconservatives," but I bet these "America Firsters" were never that committed to ending foreign wars, especially now that their Personal Lord and Savior seems to favor one. Who wants to bet that this Administration will start banging the drums for war right around a month before the midterms?

Administration spokeshack says opposing torture-approving Gina Haspel for CIA chief would be somehow anti-feminist, and our "liberal" media seems to agree. I presume that a real feminist would know that women are, being human, as capable of evil as men are, and a real feminist certainly wouldn't let someone else's bean-counting get in the way of the truth. And, seriously, the CIA doesn't employ a single woman who can lead and who opposes torture? That seems unlikely, not just because the CIA is now almost half female, but because the world is a big place, much bigger than torture apologists tend to imagine.

Our President rolls back transgender protections for prisoners, meaning transgender prisoners will have to use the bathroom of their birth gender and get the crap kicked out of them by other prisoners as a result. Also, too, federal prisons will have to use "biological sex at birth" to determine housing assignments, which will also result in a lot of beaten-up transgender prisoners. I guess our President really doesn't care who gets hurt, as long as religious bigots get to diddle their rage glands.

There's so much to say about Vice President Pence's statement that "in the interests of the country, I think it's time to" end the Mueller investigation into his Administration, but I'll just say this: Mr. Pence should not act like the Administration "fully cooperat(ing)" with the Mueller investigation is some great gift to the American people -- "full cooperation" with a criminal investigation is, frankly, the minimum we, as Americans, have a right to expect from our government. (Is this what moved George Will to declare that Mr. Pence is even worse than our President? I don't know, but that statement certainly merits further evaluation.)

New NRA President Oliver North claims his organization is a poor, poor victim of "civil terrorism" by the multitudinous political activists who now oppose it. And, he adds, the NRA faces even worse opposition than even the civil rights movement did back in the day, though I suspect marchers who got the crap kicked out of them by police will beg to differ. All together now: waaaaaaaah! Remember: folks who present themselves as tough guys are more likely the real snowflakes.

Finally, we learn that our President would like the upcoming midterms to be "a referendum on his Presidency" and that he's far more likely to talk about himself at rallies than the candidates he's nominally supporting. Of course our President loves talking about himself, but this instinct may also be the Republicans' best path to victory in 2018 -- talking only about him erases the hopes and dreams of good Americans from the conversation, after all, and surely we remember how he rope-a-doped the Clinton campaign into talking only about him as Election Day approached in 2016, until TV became an onslaught of two-sided negative advertising that kept a lot of Americans home. If Democrats make this midterm all about our President's bad behavior, rather than what good Americans deserve from their government, then they deserve defeat.

Action: tackling foreign policy, intelligence, and immigration.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject S.J.Res. 59, the military force authorization that would actually expand the President's war-making powers, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Giving the President even more unconstitutional power is a bad idea, particularly when this particular President has loaded up his cabinet with folks who want to make war on Iran. But S.J.Res. 59 gives the President the power to add particular groups to his bad-guy list and then go ahead and bomb them, even if it results in what Ron Paul used to call "blowback," and it give Congress a power to veto these bad-guy list additions within 30 days that they'll never use, because they're Congress. Oh, and S.J.Res. 59 also expands the President's power to unconstitutionally detain people, and people might include you or I or those we love, particularly if any of us protest the next war and the one after that. So let's get to it, good peoples.

Meanwhile, Mike Pompeo's unfortunate ascension to State has left an opening for CIA Director, one the President wants to fill with CIA lifer Gina Haspel, who has (like Mr. Pompeo!) shown a lust for torturing suspects that should offend our citizenry, our heritage, and our civilization. We can't say for sure that Ms. Haspel tortured suspects herself (or, more likely, ordered other folks to do so), but we can say for sure that she oversaw torture in Thailand and that she oversaw the destruction of videotapes of CIA torture, and why gamble that she "wasn't that involved" when you can find someone better? Some folks will say she was just doing her job -- or they'll cynically invoke the CIA's long history of torture, as if that's a reason not to fight evil now! -- but we get only one life, and we really ought to make it a life the Lord would be proud of. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to block Ms. Haspel's ascension to the top of the CIA.

In other news, Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your U.S. House Reps to hold a vote on our involvement in the Saudi war against Yemen. Our involvement in the Saudi war against Yemen, of course, also includes our involvement in creating near-famine conditions, our involvement in the worst cholera epidemic in history, and our involvement in the collapse of Yemeni water, food, and health care infrastructure -- not to mention our involvement in the continuing destruction of Houthi rebels who have actually proven to be pretty good al-Qaeda fighters, which means we're essentially on the same side as al-Qaeda with regards to Yemen, and regardless of how thoroughly ISIS has surpassed al-Qaeda in evil, this is not the side you want to be on. The Senate has voted on our unconstitutional involvement refueling Saudi planes and furnishing weapons and helping them with targeting, but the House hasn't; it's well past time for our House Reps to do so.

Finally, H.R. 3923, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, would (as the title suggests!) strengthen standards for detaining aliens at detention centers, including ending mandatory detention and barring use of private prisons for detention. I can already hear the President's votaries demanding to know why we should be so nice to immigrants when we have other problems, but that is of course a false choice, one that implies that our government can only ever do one thing at a time (and, er, one that also implies that our government should be spending all of its efforts catering to other people's prejudices). A great nation can treat immigrants humanely and (to name just one thing we also spend a lot of time talking about at this blog) revive moribund Appalachian economies, too -- among other good works we could enumerate. In the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act.

Action: war-making powers, torture-supporting nominees, the quality of mercy, and the "balanced budget amendment."

Another day, another "bipartisan" attempt to find that elusive "balance" between following our Constitution's war-making procedure and letting the President bomb whomever he likes. S.J.Res. 59 would authorize our President to use military force against "the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and designated associated forces," but not just them, not really -- also against anyone else the President designates as "associated forces." Congress would get to reject such designations, but they'd have to do so within 60 days -- can you say "run out the clock," boys and girls? -- and they'd functionally have to reject new inclusions by two-thirds, so they can override the expected Presidential veto. No, terrorists are not "existential threats" -- they don't hurt us anywhere near as much as we hurt ourselves fearing them. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject this attempt to give the President more unconstitutional war-making powers.

Meanwhile, you didn't think I'd forgotten about the nominations of Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State and Gina Haspel to be CIA Director, did you? Word on the street (as of this writing) is that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will not report Mr. Pompeo out favorably -- the Committee has an 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats, with all Democrats and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) reportedly opposed -- but the full Senate might well vote on, and confirm, him anyway. And if Mr. Pompeo ascends to State, Ms. Haspel will be up for CIA Director; both individuals, as has been well-reported, support torture and generally frown upon privacy and human rights issues, and like other recent Administration hires including Zombie John Bolton, Mr. Pompeo seems anxious to start a war somewhere -- in Iran, he hopes, where he's in line with Administration dogma against the Iran nuclear deal, even though it's working. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to reject the Pompeo and Haspel nominations.

In other news, the family of one David Diaz has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell California Gov. Jerry Brown to free Mr. Diaz, given the increasing uncertainty surrounding his conviction in a 1997 shooting. The victim of that shooting says Mr. Diaz didn't do it, and no less than three witnesses now say police pressured them into identifying Mr. Diaz as the shooter. Sounds like reasonable doubt to me! If you still think Mr. Diaz should serve out his sentence because "he was 19 and Hispanic so he must've been guilty of something," please do two things: 1) slap yourself and 2) slap yourself again. Maybe a third time, if that's what it takes. Our Founders quite correctly oriented our laws so that the burden of proof rests with the accuser, not the accused, and folks who squeal about law and order all the time when confronted with this fact may want to stop bragging about how much they love our Constitution.

Finally, the House passed its nefarious "balanced budget amendment" last week -- though not by a two-thirds margin, which is what you need to amend our Constitution. So why is the Senate taking it up this week? To be jerks, of course, because if our Senators can do one thing well, it's be jerks. No, our government does not need to "balance its budget like we do," because a) we don't and b) the rest of the world actually has a lot of faith in the credit of the most powerful country on the planet. And a "balanced budget amendment" will result in what, class? Cuts to Medicare and Social Security, that's what. And do we deserve that, after having worked for them and fought for them and paid into them all our lives? No, we do not. Maybe Congress could balance the federal budget better if they stopped giving welfare handouts to the rich and to corporations! Anyway, CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the "balanced budget amendment."

Action: torturers, and overtime pay.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nominations of Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State and Gina Haspel as CIA Director, then Defending Rights and Dissent still helps you do that. It really shouldn't be too much to ask that folks in our government who support torture shouldn't get promoted, just as it shouldn't be too much to ask that "liberal" media figures who cheered on the Iraq war shouldn't still be "trusted sources of news and analysis." But please don't get cynical and assume that failing upward is just the way the world is now, because it's not the way the world should be, and helping to make the world we've got into the world-that-should-be is an American citizen's solemn duty, one that does not discharge with difficulty or failure. And stopping the Pompeo and Haspel nominations is as good a place to start the day's work as any.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4505/S. 2177, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, would restore the Obama Administration's overtime pay standard struck down by a federal District court judge -- thus mandating overtime pay for folks making up to about $48,000 annually, rather than $24,000. As you may know, Judge Mazzant ruled that the Department of Labor could not lawfully raise the overtime pay threshold without considering whether workers' job duties (i.e., whether they work in an executive or administrative capacity) exempt them from the threshold, but Sec. 3 (a) of the bill essentially makes the salary threshold an exemption-within-the-exemption, rendering that distinction moot (as I've always said it should be!) for workers below a certain income. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand overtime pay for working families by passing the Restoring Overtime Pay Act.

Action: against two Presidential nominations.

Just Foreign Policy has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of former House Rep/current CIA chief Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State. I keep harping on Mr. Pompeo's apparent belief that merely using encryption for your online communications constitutes evidence of wrongdoing, but we should also oppose his nomination because he embraces torture and he has a hard-on for war with Iran -- a war that would go considerably worse than the Iraq adventure, and that adventure gave us ISIS. A strong nation doesn't need to bomb the crap out of every weaker nation that offends it, because a nation's strength depends on the goodness of its people and the responsiveness of its institutions. And when right-wingers want to bomb the crap out of everyone who offends them, you have every right to wonder: are they bereft of faith in the strength of our nation, or are they merely evil?

But wait, there's more! If Mr. Pompeo ascends to Secretary of State, that'll leave his current position of CIA director open -- and the President has appointed CIA deputy director Gina Haspel to replace him! Ms. Haspel, unfortunately, has shown a similar taste for torture, having run a CIA "black site" in Thailand and directed the destruction of torture videos made there. The Senate also just so happened to find in 2009 that none of Ms. Haspel's torture resulted in actionable intelligence, but of course you already suspected that. And again, a strong nation doesn't need to torture people. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to block the nomination of Gina Haspel to CIA director. No use saying that Ms. Haspel couldn't torture someone if she wanted to, because she could still send prisoners to black sites like the one Ms. Haspel used to run -- where, again, one can torture prisoners until they tell you what they think you want to hear, instead of the truth. No real security comes from that.

Action: torture, immigration, and factory farm pollution.

Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to reject the President's nominations of CIA chief Mike Pompeo to become Secretary of State and current CIA deputy chief Gina Haspel to take over Mr. Pompeo's current job. One doesn't want to get into the habit of starting sentences with "well at least Rex Tillerson didn't," but Mr. Tillerson's general lack of enthusiasm for scuttling the Iran nuclear deal and bombing the crap out of North Korea are two positive attributes Mr. Pompeo doesn't share. Plus, Mr. Pompeo thinks you might be a criminal if you use encryption! Ms. Haspel's apparent rise to the top is no less offensive, as she oversaw a notorious CIA torture farm during Tha Bush Mobb years. As Dexter Filkins at The New Yorker reminded us early last year, if not for Mr. Obama's let's-look-forward attitude to prosecuting CIA torturers, "people like Haspel, quite plausibly, could have gone to prison." Can we at least keep her from becoming CIA Director?

Meanwhile, some Pennsylvania Republican state reps want to pass HB 28, a bill that would let any municipal employee contact our federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) department, at any time, while forcing municipalities to jail folks whenever ICE asks (with none of those pesky judges to get in the way!) or risk losing state funding. I guess if you can't win the argument, you start taking hostages -- give ICE whatever it wants, or the money gets it! You don't let just any state employee contact ICE because state employees all have superiors who should be handling such contacts, and you don't let ICE force towns to jail folks because you want feds to get warrants before getting cooperation from localities. You'd think nominally conservative politicians would be sensitive to all of that. So the ACLU helps you tell your PA state rep to preserve local rights and reject HB 28.

Finally, Congress is mulling a pair of bills -- H.R. 848, the so-called Farm Regulatory Certainty Act, and S. 2421, the so-called Fair Agricultural Reporting Method Act -- that would (as you no doubt gathered from the words "regulatory certainty") hamstring our ability to counteract factory farm pollution. H.R. 848 would prevent us from suing factory farms under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act when factory farms pollute our water, and S. 2421 would let factory farms keep more of their toxic gas emissions secret from nearby communities. If Democrats had any guts, they'd be hammering Republicans with ads calling them objectively pro-pollution and objectively pro-dirty water and objectively pro-dirty air, but you know the chances of that happening. Which means, as usual, it's up to us. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from factory farm pollution by rejecting H.R. 848 and S. 2421.

Around the table: with horrible truths about the Pennsylvania 18th district special election.

The President's nominee for CIA director, current CIA deputy director Gina Haspel, allegedly ran a CIA "black site" in Thailand where prisoners got waterboarded, and may even have ordered the destruction of video evidence of that torture. Right-wingers, of course, are squealing that ProPublica got the identity of one tortured suspect wrong, which of course automatically means she never ever tortured anyone ever ha ha ha suck it liberals! Seriously, though, this is what we get for looking forward, not backward. Right, Mr. Obama?

Study finds that of the 150 counties that get the most food stamps, 136 are rural. A majority of counties isn't the same as a majority of recipients, but surely this finding means our "liberal" media and our politicians underplay the prevalence of food stamp usage in rural counties. That's because of racism, of course -- keep telling rural food stamp recipients that any cuts in the program are really for TEH BLACKZ!!!! and they'll keep voting Republican. Unless, of course, Democrats start running campaign ads about Republican cutting your food stamps. I kid, of course -- these are Democrats we're talking about.

Turns out at least two stories about Executive branch corruption are worse than we thought: EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's little "cone of silence" wound up costing $43,000, not $25,000, and the Carsons did-too pick out their $31,000 dining set on the taxpayer dime. I wouldn't blame you for thinking this doesn't look a whole lot like "draining the swamp," but you must remember that when they say "drain the swamp," they really mean "stick it to liberals."

Senate votes by a nearly 2-1 margin to pass the nefarious S. 2155, which would loosen financial regulations on big banksters. Any good news? The House thinks the Senate bill isn't evil enough, and wants even more easing of regulatory "burdens," so when House and Senate go to conference out differing versions of the same bill, Democrats can filibuster the resulting conference bill. Yes, even the ones who voted for it the first time who feel "betrayed" by the changed conference bill. I mean, Jon Tester's not a fool -- if the President's going to remain this unpopular, why throw him a lifeline?

Now that Democrat Conor Lamb has upset Republican Rick Saccone in the Pennsylvania 18th special election -- in a district the President won by almost 20 points in 2016 -- some Republicans, including the President himself, are scrambling to claim Mr. Lamb as a conservative. Because he's personally pro-life but believes abortion should be legal, an opinion that has impressed exactly zero pro-lifers since Geraldine Ferraro? Because he "doesn't like" Nancy Pelosi, another opinion that will have zero consequences in the real world? They're even resorting to lies like saying he "love(s) the tax cuts," which is the precise opposite of the truth, without breathing a word about Mr. Lamb's many attacks on repealing Obamacare and slashing Medicare and Social Security. Well, when you've got nothing but you still feel the need to flap your yap, what can you do but lie?

Finally, and perhaps even worse, Republicans were calling Mr. Lamb's opponent, Rick Saccone, an "F candidate" even before the election. Mr. Saccone is an ignorant, blustering fool, certainly, but you don't even have to look at our President to see that he's not exactly an anomaly -- that in fact he represents the natural progression of the mainstream Republican candidate. When Republicans spend decades defending indefensible Presidents and policies and provoking their most rage-addled adherents with bad arguments and lies, then Rick Saccone is precisely the kind of person winds up carrying their banner. Seriously, they're all "F candidates" now.

Around the table: about the folly of obsessing over civility, and other lessons.

You could find a hundred articles describing how stupid the Republican tax cut plan is, but here's just one, from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. In order: no the U.S. is not "the most-taxed country" but actually one of the least-taxed, no corporations are not "overtaxed" since they can buy loopholes from their Congressfolk seemingly at will, and yes the rich will accrue most of the benefits from the Republicans' tax cut plan. Oh, and no repealing the Estate tax won't "benefit truckers." I guess in a roomful of zombies he'd have said it'd "benefit zombies."

Let's not give George W. Bush too much credit for obliquely criticizing the Trump Administration for fomenting nativism and isolationism, not merely because opposition to "free" trade isn't automatically racist, but because his toadies spent years telling us we were traitors and terrorist-sympathizers and haters of America and he had not word one to say about any of that. And when they crossed that line, they made it easier for their successors to cross more lines. (Of course, Mr. Obama's own commitment to civility is mainly a way of letting a lot of wrongdoers off the hook -- mainly banksters and torturers.)

Wisconsin Governor/King of Corporate Welfare Scott Walker starts gearing up to run for a third term. And though the Foxconn imbroglio will blow up in Wisconsin's face sooner or later, he will benefit from both a very low unemployment rate and his own considerable political skills. And the Democrats will no doubt run a get-beyond-partisanship, let's-all-get-along center-right loser, and no wave can bring that boat to shore.

After exposing Mr. Trump's questionable methods of "consoling" a dead soldier's family, Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL)'s office has to send constituent calls to voicemail after getting thousands of calls, a striking number of them threats against their person. I am not looking forward to hearing the twisted reasoning of right-wingers who still insist that TEH LIBRULZ ARE TEH REAL VIOLENTZ!!!!! And if Ms. Wilson holds even one town hall after this, she'll have outclassed virtually every one of her colleagues across the aisle. (By the way, if you're about to leave a rage-filled comment about this matter, please read this first.)

Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore took $1,000 from something called the Foundation to Defend the First Amendment, which turns out to be one of the many slush funds of a now-deceased Nazi wannabe named Willis Carto. This should inspire a Goofus and Gallant-style ad from his opponent: Doug Jones fights Nazis! Roy Moore takes their money! But if Mr. Jones has thought of it, I'm sure the national party is already working to convince him not to run it, because civility.

Trump Administration spokeshack Sarah Huckabee Sanders, responding to a reporter who actually asked tough follow-up questions, says it's "highly inappropriate" to "get into a debate with a four-star Marine general." I suppose she was trying to be funny, but she failed, instead coming off as someone who thinks reporters shouldn't "question" generals. Epistemologically speaking, it's assholes all the way down with this Administration.

Action: "free" trade, torture, and immigration.

Sum of Us helps you tell our government that any renegotiated NAFTA absolutely can not have an "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanism. Why? Because the ISDS (a.k.a. the "investor-state tribunal") allows corporations to sue governments if the laws they pass cost those corporations money -- and then extract tribute from the taxpayer if it wins! That is exactly the sort of thing that should unify law-and-order conservatives and law-and-order liberals -- I can't think of anyone who would want a multinational trade agreement to interfere with how we legislate in America. This is true even though the laws corporations would most likely sue over are laws protecting our workers, our financial system, and our clean air and clean water -- real conservatives are no less concerned about these things than liberals are, though they may insist on achieving positive results differently. But the "conservative" or "liberal" who'd applaud a system that nullifies our laws, is no kind of conservative or liberal at all.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Bahrain to release human rights activist Ebtisam al-Saegh. Bahrain, as you know, detains and tortures activists, bans them from traveling, and even occasionally strips them of their citizenship -- plus they won't let independent human rights observers in, almost like they have something to hide! Bahrain has detained Ms. al-Saegh many times over the years, but most recently in early July, after she spoke out on Twitter about the horrible conditions (including torture and rape) faced by female detainees at the Isa Town detention center. And now they've apparently been inflicting these conditions upon her, though she's officially "under investigation" for, you guessed it, "terrorism," and will be detained until the "investigation" "concludes." Of course, any government so "terrorized" by free speech deserves to die a humiliating death, so let's fight for Ms. al-Saegh.

Finally, President Trump will decide by early next week whether to end DACA, the Obama-era program lessening the possibility of deportation of children who were brought to America by undocumented immigrant parents -- 10 state Attorneys General have threatened to sue him if he doesn't end it, though, you know, maybe he likes being held hostage as little as the rest of America does! Or maybe he'll be mindful of how much his CEO friends would hate it if he terminated DACA. Nah -- as I've said before, hoping Mr. Trump will do the right thing is fool's gold, and worse, it hampers us from telling Mr. Trump to do the right thing, which is our job as citizens. So the Friends Committee for National Legislation helps you tell Mr. Trump to keep deferring deportation for innocent young folks who contribute to American society. After all, punishing good people who had no say in whether or not they came to America is cruel, and we should never be cruel. And please understand that when I say "never," I mean never.

Around the table: why the FDA is a hostage to medical device corporations, and other lessons.

AP finds nearly 20 secret prisons in southern Yemen, where UAE forces torture alleged terrorists and American forces question them. The difference between the two isn't so vast, since international law looks upon the questioning of tortured detainees as complicity in that torture, and also since one Yemeni soldier has testified that at times American forces were mere "yards away" from that torture. Oh, if you're smelling that faint Trump odor, it sure looks like this has all been going on since the Obama years.

FDA strikes "deal" with medical device manufacturers which just so happens to require that the FDA exercise considerably less oversight over these same manufacturers. The FDA has to renegotiate this particular point every five years in order to continue getting funding from the medical device industry to finance a big chunk of its operations. Why not just fund it entirely with tax money, particularly since every time a medical device goes bad it hits the news big-time? At least then the FDA would be more accountable to us, instead of being industry's hostage.

Franklin Foer writes a long and generally incisive piece on how Democrats can get white working class voters back (without, you know, becoming racists again). Key points we learn from the famous Macomb County, MI focus groups: Trump votaries generally hate blacks a lot less than they used to but seem to have displaced that anger onto immigrants, and they don't care that Mr. Trump seems unhinged -- but they also don't know he's sold out to Wall Street banksters, and are very angry to learn that he has. Courageous Democrats might do something with the second item, but I think I just told you why that won't happen.

Ron Fein at TruthOut reminds us that President Trump has said bupkus about Turkish Presidential bodyguards attacking American protestors on the street last month. We can think of a few reasons, of course -- that Mr. Trump has encouraged his own supporters to act pretty much the same way, or that assholes tend to hang around with other assholes -- but you may not know that the Turkish President threatened to take Mr. Trump's name off a pair of Trump Towers in Istanbul last year. Oh, well, just another Trumpian conflict of interest that limits our freedoms.

Finally, the Carrier plant in Indiana where President Trump supposedly saved all those jobs in late 2016 will still outsource some 600 manufacturing jobs by the end of this year. Turns out most of the jobs Mr. Trump "saved" were not union-organized manufacturing jobs, but were technical and engineering positions that were never in danger of being lost in the first place! Also, the cash Carrier got as an incentive to keep the jobs? They're putting that into automation instead of actual job creation. Who "doesn't care about jobs" now, Trump votaries?

Action: selling arms to Saudi Arabia nay, crippling the Endangered Species Act nay, and drilling in ANWR nay.

If you've missed previous action alerts helping you tell Congress to stop President Trump's weapons "deal" with Saudi Arabia, then the Action Network still helps you do that. Also, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you write a letter-to-the-editor to your local media outlets condemning the President's Saudi arms deal. Letters-to-the-editor may sound quaint, but Congressfolk do pay attention to them, and one should communicate one's will to one's representatives in as many ways as possible. Our opposition to the $100 billion-plus arms deal goes well beyond Saudi Arabia's ongoing war on Yemen, a war which has left millions of Yemenis on the brink of starvation, though that war has injured the very same Yemeni rebels (the Houthis) who have been among the most effective fighters against ISIS in the region. Saudi Arabia tortures its political protestors and outlaws protest and beats up protestors. And if we're so strapped for allies in the region that we have to turn to this government, why do we still call ourselves America?

Meanwhile, H.R. 2134/S. 935, the so-called Endangered Species Management Self-Determination Act, would (among other things!) end protections for endangered species a mere five years after their listing. The bald eagle, you may know, needed 40 years of ESA protection to get off the list; one could merely ask one's Congressperson do you really want to mess with the bald eagle? I suppose the bill's supporters will claim they're merely forcing our government to "do the job more efficiently," but saving an endangered species is not necessarily something you put on a stopwatch -- you either do it right, however long it takes, or you fail, and then that species is gone forever. You would be quite right, of course, to suspect that this bill's authors merely intend to open up as much land to oil and gas drillers as possible, so as to keep that sweet campaign cash coming. Hence Environmental Action helps you write a letter-to-the-editor of your local publication demanding that Congress reject the Endangered Species Management Self-Determination Act.

Finally, we have so, so many reasons to oppose the Trump "Hard Power" budget, and we're going to get into more of those reasons tomorrow, but the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling out of the budget. The love of money, as the Bible teaches us, is the root of all evil, and Donald Trump has let the love of money write his entire budget -- any spending that might actually help someone make ends meet is out, while any spending that might make some crony or other richer is in. And make no mistake, drilling in the ANWR refuge will do nothing except make some oil drilling CEO richer -- no, it will not "reduce our dependence on foreign oil," since most scientists think there's not very much oil there to begin with. And it doesn't represent a blow against Big Gummint -- after all, keeping that region relatively free from pollution is a good thing. Government can do good things, when it listens to its owners, the people. And when it doesn't, you don't just destroy it -- you just speak out more.

Action: three alerts about basic human rights.

At the beginning of March, the Nevada state legislature passed the Equal Rights Amendment, becoming the 36th state to do so. Of course, the deadline for passing the Equal Rights Amendment lapsed back in 1982, but given the, ah, stated proclivities of our Commander-in-Chief, it is entirely possible our activism could get two more states to pass the ERA, which would give us 38 states, or more than the three-quarters standard set by our Constitution. All we'd have to do then is get Congress to pass legislation removing the expiration date from the original ERA -- which H.J.Res. 53 and S.J.Res. 5 would do. The Constitution doesn't mandate expiration dates on proposed amendments; that started last century with the Prohibition amendment, and our most recent Constitutional amendment actually took over 200 years to get in. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to tell your Reps and Senators to get rid of the ERA expiration date so we can one day pass it, and give women the equal rights they deserve.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell Congress to prevent the Trump Administration from selling weapons to countries that systematically and egregiously abuse fundamental human rights. The news hook here is the Trump Administration's lifting of human rights restrictions on sales of military equipment to Bahrain, restrictions the Obama Administration had put in place. Is this what Donald Trump means by "the mess he inherited"? Now, if you're prepared to say well, gosh, every country seems to abuse human rights, you'd be a bit glib: every government tries to get over on its citizens, but some countries are really into detaining and torturing people, or banning travel for citizens who criticize the government, or stripping their critics of their citizenship -- and, guess what? Bahrain does all of these things, plus they don't allow independent human rights observers across their borders. But I guess if there's a buck to be made, President Big Balls doesn't care. (Am I aware that we could justify banning arms sales to Saudi Arabia on the same basis? Of course I am! But hey, everyone has to sacrifice for the greater good.)

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Russia to investigate the kidnappings and killings of gay Chechen men, then Anmesty International helps you do that. You may remember the drill: Chechen officials abduct gay men out of their homes, detain them, torture them, even kill them -- and sometimes out them to their families and encourage "honor killings." Why your "honor" as a human being would be sullied by having a gay child I have no idea, but this is a thing in some parts of the world. The fact that it's a thing in some parts of the world doesn't make it right, though -- saying that's what Chechens do out of their sincere religious beliefs would not be an act of "cultural tolerance," but would rather be (at best!) an example of keeping your mind so open that your brains fall out. Human rights are human rights everywhere, and no "cultural relativism" can tolerate depriving folks of their rights just because of their sexual orientation. And I would very much like to believe that there aren't any good Americans cheering this monstrosity on. I'm not sure I do believe that, but I would very much like to.

Action: human rights, government spying, and affordable prescription drugs.

Avaaz helps you tell the Russian government to stop Chechnya's crackdown on gay men. Chechen officials have kidnapped some 100 gay men out of their homes, detained them in secret, tortured them with beatings and electric shocks, and in some cases even outed them to their families and overtly encouraged "honor killings." All pretty damn disgusting, to say the least, and yet you can't help but wonder if these Chechen officials are trying to tell us something about themselves. Meanwhile, staffers from the newspaper that exposed the crackdown have received death threats, a Chechen minister called the whole thing an "April Fool's Joke," and a spokeshack for the Chechen President said the paper's report had to be false because there are no gay folks in Russia. Said Chechen President later accused his attackers of perpetrating a "massive information attack" -- perhaps he meant "disinformation attack," or perhaps he got it right the first time. In any case, his words sure do have the sweet smell of Ms. Conway's "alternative facts," don't they?

Meanwhile, as Congress mulls whether to require warrants for cellphone searches at the border, the Trump Administration's Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) is mulling forcing some travelers to surrender the passwords to their social media accounts when they enter the country. Of course that's a privacy violation no one should tolerate, but DHS may want to consider whether making travelers surrender their passwords will prod the more unscrupulous among them -- you know, the ones they're trying to catch -- to simply start using different social media accounts away from DHS's prying eyes. DHS might also want to consider that collecting all these passwords sure does look like a way to hack into travelers' social media accounts and plant evidence -- a matter about which governments should be especially sensitive! -- or the possibility that other countries might demand our social media passwords upon entering their country. So Fly Don't Spy helps you tell DHS Secretary John Kelly to reject this "passwords, please" plan.

Finally, H.R. 1776/S. 771, the Improving Access to Affordable Prescription Drugs Act, would (as its title suggests) help good Americans get the drugs they need more affordably. Among many other things, the bill would let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, would allow the reimportation of cheaper, safe drugs, and would impose taxes on corporations that indulge in the kind of price spikes we saw with Daraprim and EpiPen in recent years. I'm actually not particularly crazy about Sec. 405, which would prevent big pharmaceutical corporations from taking tax deductions on their advertising -- spending money on advertising is an expense, whether you approve of it or not, and I'd prefer simply banning drug advertising from television altogether, a step Democrats are certainly too timid to take. Still, the Improving Access to Affordable Prescription Drugs Act is a fairly comprehensive bill that (short of something really terrific, like H.R. 676, the Medicare-for-All bill) will do a considerable amount of good. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support more affordable drugs for Americans by supporting H.R. 1776/S. 771.

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.

Around the table: the good news behind the bad news.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers grants final permit allowing completion of Dakota Access pipeline. Of course, their reversal is so abrupt (occurring not even two months after declaring they needed to do more environmental impact study) that they probably didn't cross their t's and dot their i's, which will matter to a federal judge even if it doesn't matter to President Trump. Expect more media coverage of Mr. Trump's apparent investments in Phillips 66, one of the corporations behind Dakota Access.

Senate confirms Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary. Three things about that: one, I'm pleased that we could make Mike Pence come out and break a 50-50 tie in the Senate; two, I'm also pleased the Trump Administration had to delay Jeff Sessions's confirmation vote because they needed his vote in the Senate to get DeVos through, and three, she still has to follow the law as Education Secretary, and we have tools to make her do that.

Organization conceived as a "progressive answer to ALEC" sees hope for positive change at the state level in the coming years. You won't be surprised by much of what you read here -- the State Innovation Exchange (or SiX) gets "more requests and more enthusiasm" from folks in red states than in blue ones, the left has failed to organize for the long-term like the right did in the early 1970s (and for bad reasons, too!), and a lot of state legislators work part-time for little money, and are thus susceptible to organizations like ALEC (and SiX, we hope!).

Politico says Republicans are worrying about Donald Trump's budget blowing a hole in the budget. Oh, horsedoodle -- of course fiscal "hawks" will eventually back Mr. Trump's budget, because deficits only matter when a Democrat's President. And remember what I said last month: "liberal" media reports on Republican "fissures" are all feints, designed to keep you from doing your job as a citizen, which is to communicate your will to your Representatives.

Bush Mobb attorney/"torture memo" author John "the Ballcrusher" Yoo shares his "grave concerns about Mr. Trump’s uses of presidential power." But of course we shouldn't be so impressed that someone with a law degree sees trouble with Rudy Giuliani's utterance that Mr. Trump wanted a "Muslim ban." And let's not indulge in all that "miss Bush yet?" silliness, too -- if not for people like John Yoo, Mr. Trump wouldn't be getting away with what he's getting away with today.

Finally, we learn that the solar-energy sector now provides twice as many jobs in America as the coal sector. The oil industry still employs more folks than solar, but the gas industry doesn't, not quite. Still, you just know coal corporations will use this statistic to argue that the solar power industry just isn't that "efficient." And then they'll have the cojones to say environmental regulations kill jobs! Venal CEOs kill jobs more efficiently than any regulation ever could.

Action: Social Security and Medicare cuts, and the Pompeo nomination.

The Alliance for Retired Americans is sponsoring a national call-in day today, to tell President Trump to keep his campaign promise to protect Medicare and Social Security from benefit cuts, so call 1.202.456.1111 to do that. You may also want to call your Reps and Senators (as always, you can find their phone numbers using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page) to notify them that you have communicated your will to President Trump, and that they should follow the people's will by rejecting Medicare and Social Security benefit cuts themselves. The aptly-named Johnson plan (named either for its sponsor, Rep. Sam Johnson of Texas, or for that body part Republicans keep swinging in our faces) would cut Social Security benefits dramatically, and Paul Ryan's plan to privatize Medicare would do the same to Medicare. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the 54% of Americans who voted for someone other than Donald Trump do not want their Medicare and Social Security benefits endangered -- and I bet the majority of Donald Trump's 46% vote share don't want that, either. See? Keeping Medicare and Social Security strong enjoys actual bipartisan support. And since I mentioned it, how come I'm not hearing anything from the "liberal" media about the vital importance of bipartisanship these days? Is "bipartisanship" only important when Democrats control the Presidency and Congress?

Also, the Senate is planning to vote on Rep. Mike Pompeo's nomination for CIA chief today, so you may want to get on the phone to your Senators and tell them to reject his nomination. The Senate hoped to confirm Mr. Pompeo on Friday, but Democrats apparently managed to delay that for one more working day, and that gives us one more chance to stop the nomination of a man who believes that government spying on innocent Americans is A-OK, that Mr. Snowden's whistleblowing of NSA spying on innocent Americans is "treason," that we should keep Guantánamo Bay open for all the "terrorists" we can't even press charges against after all these years, and that people who use email encryption are probably terrorists. And he's also another one who thinks Muslims don't condemn terrorism enough. Aren't you tired of hearing your Tea Party uncle say that all the time? Less than 30 seconds of googling will reveal literally thousands of instances of Muslims actually condemning terrorist attacks, but why do all that work, when there are Trump votaries to be enraged? Yeah, I know, Mr. Pompeo said he was against torture at his confirmation hearing. But given that he thinks the Bush administration didn't torture, and that he said he "can't imagine" Mr. Trump giving him an order to torture someone (he must think we don't remember a thing!), I find his professed opposition suspect. And so should you.

UPDATE. And the Presidential comments line isn't taking comments right now. Apparently it was turned off during the transition, but it's almost Tuesday already, so I have to assume turning it back on and hearing good Americans' comments is not a priority for the Trump Administration. You can contact Mr. Trump here, I suppose, and maybe also tell him to turn on his phone.

Action: demanding Medicare-for-All health insurance, and opposing two particularly noxious Trump Cabinet picks.

The People's Email Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare so that it includes all Americans, and thus bring single-payer health care to America. Hey, the morons did ask -- no, really, Congressfolk have actually been asking good Americans what we would like to do about health care once Republicans finally kill the Affordable Care Act. Perhaps they're hoping for a groundswell of support for the concept of the "health savings account," but of course they won't get that. Why? Because anyone can see that a "health savings account" is not insurance -- that it is literally not a situation where people pool their money together to help out any one of them at any one time, but rather a tax-free savings account you would use to pay for your own health insurance needs. And in a land where too many working families work their butts off and still can't pay all their bills, who has money to put into a special tax-free savings account? Rich folks, that's who. Which makes the "health savings account" what, kids? Yet another welfare handout for rich people, that's what. Better we expand the Medicare pool to include all of us, which would put a lot more healthy people in it. Now that's insurance!

Meanwhile, President-elect Trump has said that he not wants to make torture of terror suspects legal again; no doubt that's one of the many ways he got to his YUGE 46% share of the popular vote. Now, in recent weeks, we've heard that his pick for Secretary of Defense, former Gen. James Mattis, has opposed torture of terror suspects -- that he has, in fact, told Mr. Trump that he can do a lot more with a few beers and a pack of cigarettes. And that has, in fact, proven to be a far more effective way of getting good intelligence from terror suspects than torturing them until they tell you whatever they think will make you stop. But, of course, that doesn't mean our government won't heartily embrace torture when Mr. Trump takes office -- it could just mean Gen. Mattis loses a lot of arguments, probably to the torture-happy Mike Pompeo if the Senate confirms him as CIA chief. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell Mr. Pompeo to keep human rights (including the right not to be tortured by our government) in mind if and when he becomes CIA Chief. Sounds like a dead-end job, I know, but he probably doesn't get phone calls from anyone besides the Koch brothers, so this'll be good for him.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell Senate Democrats to do whatever they can to block the ascension of Rep. Tom Price to Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. We'll talk more about Mr. Trump's nominees tomorrow morning -- since Mr. McConnell plans to confirm a whole slew of them tomorrow, in the apparent hope that most folks won't find out how horrible they are! -- but Mr. Price deserves special consideration, for a number of reasons. For one, Mr. Price is another one who thinks "conservatism" means nothing so much as making life harder for gays and women, and as someone in charge of enforcing whatever remains of the Affordable Care Act after Congress is done with it, you know what that means -- no birth control coverage, and big gaps in health care coverage for gays. For another thing, Mr. Price wants to cut Medicaid, privatize Medicare, and slash CHIP funding, which latter item even most rank-and-file Republicans like. And if you think Mr. Trump really meant it when he said he'd protect Medicare, his nomination of Mr. Price should remind you that it's not your job as a citizen to "trust your President" -- it's your job to hold your President accountable.

UPDATE. Add a third noxious Trump Cabinet pick to oppose, as the Senate has begun hearings on Attorney General Jeff Sessions today. You can use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Senators and ask them to oppose the Sessions nomination. I'd make it quick, because I'm sure a lot of people are trying to get through -- don't recount the entire history of his mid-80s federal judgeship nomination, but just say you don't think he won't enforce civil rights laws. I think that's good enough. And remember: your Senators' staffers aren't there to argue with you; they're there to take down your will and relay it to their bosses. Good luck and God bless -- we're going to have a much bigger slate of noxious nominees to run through in the coming days.

Action: the Senate torture report, and Presidential conflicts of interest.

You've likely heard by now that -- in yet another apparent attempt to adhere to the letter of King Solomon's solution in 1 Kings 3:16-28, rather than its spirit -- President Obama won't make the Senate torture report public, but he will include it among his Presidential papers. That will no doubt protect the torture report from a more reactionary Senate bent on destroying it and covering up our shame as a nation, but it will also prevent the report from being released to the public for another dozen years -- by which time our incoming President (who may be out of office by then!) will have directed enough torture to provoke a new torture report from a new Senate, one which will also demonstrate that torture is (besides being wrong!) a terrible way to fight terrorism or get actionable intelligence from suspects, and those of us who would be looking toward retirement at that time will certainly wonder if our lives accomplished nothing. So let's try and head off all that madness, shall we? Roots Action helps you tell President Obama to make the Senate's torture report public. So far a heavily-censored 500-page executive summary is all the public knows about, and while it's made its point, the full 7,000-page horror would make an even better point. Hell, even some of our "liberal" media journalists might read it (or part of it, let's be realistic!), and be horrified at what it contains.

Meanwhile, a few Democratic Senators (including Sens. Warren and Merkley) will introduce a bill in January requiring the President and Vice President to divest from any entities that might pose a conflict of interest. You may have heard that our next President, Donald Trump, faces numerous conflicts of interest in which he may be directly able to influence policy affecting his business holdings. Think America's dealings with, say, Germany might be warped a bit by the fact that the Trump Organization owes so much money to Deutsche Bank? Think his IRS audits might come to a more rapid and favorable conclusion than he deserves because now the IRS will answer to him? There is also the Emolument Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which forbids American office-holders from receiving "any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State" without Congress's consent; we could easily imagine certain policy decisions of a Trump Administration leading to "presents" or "emoluments" ("emolument" being roughly equivalent to a salary or fee) for the President. We would be better describe this phenomenon, of course, as corruption. So People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to support the Warren/Merkley bill that would require Presidents and Vice Presidents to divest from their business and corporate holdings before taking office.

Around the table: the suspicious end of the Michigan recount, and other tales.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, informs us that the state of Michigan shut down its Presidential recount without counting over 75,000 ballots, mostly from Flint and Detroit. Mr. Trump's margin of victory there, naturally, was under 11,000 votes, and though poor optical scanners seem to be a major culprit, the state still wants you to believe that tens of thousands of folks waited in line all day to vote for everyone but President -- particularly in a year without a gubernatorial or Senatorial race in Michigan! This is what we get when we only get a choice between rabid Republicans and weak Democrats. It's well past time to make this choice moot, of course, by incessantly communicating our will to our Representatives regardless of their party (and this document, which we'll discuss further in the near future, provides some good advice on how to do that).

President Obama informs Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Sen. Feinstein that he'll include the Senate torture report among his Presidential records, but won't declassify it so the public can see it. Thus it'll take a dozen more years for the report to become public, though the pro-torture Donald Trump becomes President in a little over a month, and will, we presume, be out of office by the time this torture report becomes public, at which point the Senate may have done an entirely new investigation into torture committed by a Trump Administration. Don't worry, though: by that time, Senate Democrats, however many of them are left, will still be preaching caution and patience.

Lisa Graves at PR Watch informs us that Exxon CEO/Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson has been actively engaged in misleading the public about the ill effects of climate change. None of it will surprise you, and if you're hoping against hope that the incoming administration will embrace an "all-of-the-above" energy policy, note well that Mr. Tillerson blocked a shareholder resolution expressing a desire to expand Exxon's investment in alternative energy sources. You'd think a big corporation like Exxon could help us move toward a renewable energy grid a lot faster, given all its money. I guess they don't because solar and wind power don't translate as easily to absurdly high executive pay as oil and coal do.

Uh oh: a 2010 military investigation found that then-Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump's nominee for National Security Advisor, "inappropriately shared" classified info with foreign military personnel in Afghanistan -- after telling the world at the Republican convention that if he did "a tenth" of what Hillary Clinton did, he'd be "in jail." He appears to have done at least a tenth of it, but with the Fuck-You-I-Won Administration about to take power, even those Republicans inclined to complain about Mr. Flynn's mistakes will likely be silent.

The Hill notes the many relatively inflexible deadlines Republicans will face as they take complete control of our federal government early next year. All of which will be, for Republicans, "opportunities" to ram through their extraordinarily backward and unpopular agenda -- starting with the national debt limit on March 16. And it's absurd to think "Republicans having to negotiate with Donald Trump this time" will be a factor, since they're not going to be negotiating so much as they're collaborating. Still, go ahead and read the article; just don't be tempted to try to game everything out -- CHIP reauthorization, for example, should happen because it's a good program that does good things and because good Americans demand it, not because it fits neatly into someone's 13-dimensional chess game.

Finally, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas advises us to "Be Happy for Coal Miners Losing Their Health Insurance" because "That's Exactly What They Voted For." This is cruel for many, many reasons, which Jim Naureckas at FAIR dutifully tabulates, but there's one other thing: voting is not the end-all-be-all of democracy -- in a democracy, those who voted for Mr. Trump are perfectly free to call and write their Reps and express their will that their health care not get cut off, and they are also free to organize and agitate toward ensuring their representatives (and their President) do their will. That Mr. Moulitsas doesn't think of it that way makes me think he's become part of the "liberal" media establishment or something.

Action: protecting our environment, Electoral College reform, and the torture report.

And the hits just keep on coming! Donald Trump has nominated Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to be the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Name ring a bell? It should: Mr. Pruitt has, since taking office in 2011, sued the EPA over cross-state air pollution rules, mercury and arsenic pollution rules, and air quality rules for public lands -- not to mention, of course, his ongoing involvement in the lawsuit against the EPA's clean power plan. Remember when George W. Bush tapped the environmentally-ambiguous Christie Todd Whitman as EPA administrator in 2000? Donald Trump isn't even trying to disguise his agenda, which is, in case you didn't know, to steal whatever's left that belongs to the people, and that includes the power to keep filth out of our air and water, and thus keep ourselves and our posterity healthy. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Senators to oppose Mr. Pruitt's nomination to the EPA. The man can't even bring himself to admit climate change is actually happening! Couldn't be because of the $300,000-plus he's received from fossil fuel corporations since 2002, can it?

Meanwhile, Fix the Electoral College helps you tell your state legislators to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. What would this compact do? Well, once states comprising 270 electoral votes or more agree to it (currently 10 states, comprising 165 electoral votes, have passed it), those states will assign their electoral votes to the winner of the Presidential popular vote. Which makes perfect sense to me -- the President would be in charge of the Executive branch for an entire country, and if you protest that the Electoral College helps make states more important than they'd otherwise be, I'd simply respond that we've got Senators for that. Our Founders created an Electoral College partly so that the Electors could reject someone plainly unfit for office; these days, the Electoral College does not defy the popular will in this manner, and I wouldn't argue that it should. But no law or Constitutional article prevents states from telling their electors to vote according to the popular will. Indeed, it's kinda what we expect -- and haven't gotten in two of the last five Presidential elections.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell President Obama to declassify the Senate torture report. Even Sen. Feinstein (D-CA), who too often poses as a "tough on terror" politician, called the report "a total exposé of the ineffectiveness of torture," but thus far only a redacted 500-page Executive Summary has seen the light of day, leaving at least 6,500 more pages that might never see the light of day if Mr. Obama doesn't do something. (You think a President Trump would release it? Not when he's trying to get us to torture more!) This isn't a big ask for him, especially considering he did absolutely nothing-zero-zip-zilch-bupkus to bring our government's torturers to justice in eight years as President. And given that his successor, as I've said, would like nothing more than to let torturers run rampant in our government -- though torture doesn't stop terrorist attacks in real life like it does in the movies, and, BTW, is also wrong -- maybe Mr. Obama would like to protect some part of that "legacy" we're always hearing about.

Action: fighting the oppression of journalists, the sale of private data, and the abuse of animals.

First things first. You may have seen the work of Egyptian photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, better known as Shawkan, in such outlets as Time and BBC.com, but the Egyptian government has held him in detention for over three years now, torturing him the whole time. Holding a prisoner that long without charges is itself illegal in Egypt, but no matter -- the government finally filed half a dozen charges against him, including possession of a weapon, illegal assembly, murder, and attempted murder, but you could be excused for thinking his real "crime" was documenting the Rabaa massacre, where Egyptian government forces killed at least 800 protestors. Of course, protesting doesn't merit the death penalty, anywhere, at any time -- I wonder how many good Americans will remember that in the coming months and years -- and documenting government oppression doesn't merit criminal charges of any kind, particularly the trumped-up kind. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the Egyptian government to free Shawkan. Not incidentally, Shawkan has contracted Hepatitis C -- for which he's had a hard time getting medical treatment! -- but the Egyptian government has freed other political prisoners suffering from Hep C. Egypt can't even be consistent in how it oppresses its people! It's hard out there for a pimp.

Meanwhile, closer to home, big telecom corporation AT&T has been selling its analyses of your private call data to law enforcement agencies via its Hemisphere project -- and this is true whether you're an AT&T customer or not! (The chances are pretty good that you call AT&T customers or make calls on AT&T-built infrastructure on occasion.) Naturally AT&T hid what it was doing from, because this is immoral coming and going -- a corporation selling your private data and taxpayer money going to buy it! AT&T adds close to four billion records to its database every day, and no use hoping that law enforcement is taking on much more data than it can handle, because searching for data isn't anywhere near as hard as people might think, and desperate states will go a long way to hurt people (just like Egypt has, above). Hence Access Now helps you tell AT&T to stop selling your private information to law enforcement. No use trying to tell me that we need these kinds of tools to foil terrorists now-more-than-ever. You know what kind of tools foil terrorists? The kind of tools that promote real independence for Americans -- higher-paying jobs, good homes with less debt -- which are exactly the kinds of tools corporations are constantly trying to destroy, because then you'll be less dependent on them.

Finally, Dan McKernan of Chelsea, MI has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Michigan state Sen. Joe Hune (R-22) and state Rep. Gretchen Driskell (D-52) to fight the continuing abuse of animals at factory farms by opposing HB 5987. HB 5987 would extend the phase-out of battery cages in Michigan by five years, but this phase-out is already a 10-year process, passed by the state legislature seven years ago, and Michigan is the first state in the nation to mandate that factory farms phase out the kinds of cages that force animals into confined spaces for their entire lives -- not so food prices can be lower, mind you, but so factory farm executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Of course HB 5987 has a lot of industry support, and as long as big ag corporations can hold the threat of "less food" or "higher prices" over our heads, bills like HB 5987 will have a good chance of passing. The only things we have going for us, I guess, are our voices, and our tradition as civilized people who hate being needlessly cruel to animals for profit. But I'll take that -- big ag corporations are prisoners of their hunger for money, but we're free people.

Around the table: includes part 434 of "why the Trump infrastructure plan sucks."

North Dakota law enforcement personnel attack Standing Rock protestors with rubber bullets, water hoses, percussion grenades, and tear gas, injuring over 160 people and sending seven of these to the hospital. Protestors were attempting to remove two burned-out trucks police had put up as a barricade, forcing good North Dakotans to take a 20-mile detour; police, of course, justified the use of water hoses by saying the protestors were setting fires, though the proper term might be building fires, as in "to keep warm" or "make warm drinks," temperatures being well below freezing that night. (That means, yes, they used water hoses against protestors on a freezing night. Sad!)

The Institute for Southern Studies provides a Harper's Index-style list of voting rights problems during the 2016 election. The Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder, of course, opened the floodgates for all kinds of crap, not least of which is the more than 860 polling places closed this year in states that used to have to pre-clear their voting law changes with the DOJ. What we have left, at this moment, is shame -- not for the folks who voted for Mr. Trump, necessarily, but certainly for the politicians who went to great lengths to silence the "wrong" kind of people at the ballot box and did more to enable this monster than even the "liberal" media did.

Michigan state officials ask federal court to block a federal court order to keep delivering bottled water to the beleaguered residents of Flint. Apparently Michigan feels that setting up emergency water distribution centers that not everyone can get to (particularly the elderly) is enough, and that actually delivering clean water to residents is too hard. It sure was easy enough to put lead in their water. And what happened to you-break-it-you-fix-it?

Paul Krugman at the New York Times also finds the Trump infrastructure plan wanting. "If you want to build infrastructure, build infrastructure," he says. "It’s hard to see any reason for a roundabout, indirect method that would offer a few people extremely sweet deals, and would therefore provide both the means and the motive for large-scale corruption. Or maybe I should say, it’s hard to see any reason for this scheme unless the inevitable corruption is a feature, not a bug." Surely, he reminds us, our government can borrow as easily as any private investor can, interest rates being (still) so incredibly low -- but of course Mr. Trump's fellow Republicans, who would squeal SOCIALISM!!!! at such a thing, will eat up the Trump plan, regardless of what they might tell you now.

Finally, from the "Party like it's 1999!" file: Sen. John McCain, famously tortured by the Viet Cong during his time as a POW, says Mr. Trump won't be able to torture people as President because "it’s specifically, in law, now prohibited" and ""a whole bunch of us that would have them in court in a New York minute" if they tried and "no judge in America" would side with them. Those are some big words there; now let's see action.

Around the table: celebrating various Election Day victories (after witnessing a most necessary post-mortem for the Democratic Party).

Krystall Ball at the Huffington Post writes an excellent article, entitled, of course, "The Democratic Party Deserves to Die." Much has been made of the white working-class voters widely presumed to have delivered the Presidency to Mr. Trump -- as it should be, since our economy is crushing them! -- but Ms. Ball really takes you there, not just by describing (in paragraph 4) Democrat elitism almost as good as Thomas Frank usually does, but by showing us how her forgotten Ohio hometown could soon be your hometown if we're not careful. And yeah, trying to make a truck driver into a computer programmer is a bit like making everyone into a nail because you have a hammer.

More from the "Americans Aren't Stupid" file: voters in four states approve minimum wage hikes, while voters in South Dakota rejected a law that would have lowered the minimum wage for workers under 18. South Dakota voters, you may recall, also voted for a campaign finance disclosure initiative on Tuesday, this as they were delivering their electoral votes to Mr. Trump. My great worry now is that more states will get rid of ballot questions like Michigan did in 2012 ago after voters repealed their emergency-manager law. You'd think that'd be, you know, unpopular, but politicians only care about their popularity with their big donors -- unless we get in their grills and stay there.

In other good news, Maine voters approve a referendum that would institute ranked-choice (or "instant runoff") voting for state and federal elections. Voters would rank their choices for state and federal offices from 1 to 5; the candidate with the fewest "1" votes gets eliminated, with their votes going to those voters' second choice, and so on until someone gets a majority. Ranked-choice voting would have eliminated the entire reign of Gov. Paul LePage (first elected with 38 percent in 2010, then 48 percent in 2014), but third-party candidates are more persistent in Maine than elsewhere; now voters have limited the damage they can do, while still giving them a place in the process. (I'm not that invested in the notion that Hillary Clinton might have won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, etc. if those states had ranked-choice voting, though I suppose she might have.)

Kudos to Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post for asking the obvious question about the three states that legalized recreational marijuana on Tuesday: what happens to enforcement of the federal prohibition of marijuana under a Donald Trump Justice Department. President Obama, after all, essentially let Colorado and Washington state alone after they legalized marijuana in 2012. Naturally Mr. Trump has given mixed signals about it -- though neither Messrs. Giuliani nor Christie, both mentioned as possible Attorney General picks, have ever seemed particularly flexible about the matter.

Finally, in news almost as good as Evan "the Lesser" Bayh's utter drubbing in his attempt to win back that Indiana Senate seat he abandoned in a fit of pique in 2010, notorious Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff Joe Arpaio lost his re-election bid by 10 points. Mr. Arpaio was notorious for all his many attempts to prove he had bigger balls than the undocumented immigrants he detained, often making them wear pink underwear or work in 145-degree heat, which latter item certainly qualifies as torture. Yeah, we'll really miss that old coot -- unless, I suppose, he turns up in Mr. Trump's Administration.

Around the table: the death of Democratic populism, explained! And other things, also explained.

Matt Stoller at The Atlantic takes us back to the time "Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul" -- specifically, the time the "Watergate babies" that came into Congress in 1975 overthrew a populist anti-bank committee chair who had been in Congress for nearly half a century. Mr. Patman, a Texas House Rep, pretty much exemplifies all the contradictions about populism during the New Deal era -- he, like many populists and progressives of the era, was, at various times, a segregationist and a Vietnam War supporter, but his fierceness against bankster capitalism and corporate monopoly power remains unmatched by any member of Congress today, including Sen. Warren. Of course the whippersnappers who helped overthrow him also helped turn the Democratic party into the party of social liberalism, which essentially meant that economic populists were abandoned by both parties. Read the whole thing, though -- it's a marvelous history lesson, one that (as all great history lessons do) suggests what we can do about it if we only do it en masse.

Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals panel rules unanimously that torture is so unlawful that it's "beyond the power of even the president to declare such conduct lawful." You'd think a lot of right-wingers would applaud this decision, given that it declares the primacy of law and order over any faux-serious debate about military tactics, and restricts Presidential power just as the Founders intended, but instead they'll probably just yammer on about activist judges and that speech Jack Bauer gave on 24.

Dean Baker at TruthOut talks about the need to "retake the English language" when talking about "free" trade. He's made these points before, but he hasn't made them quite so clearly -- that it's literally impossible to call a trade pact a "free" trade deal if it codifies all sorts of policies, like expanding patent and copyright protections, that actually restrict trade, and a trade pact can hardly be a "free" trade when tariffs are already historically low. Also, too, "(t)he real story here is that the TPP is a deal about redistributing more income upward. It's imposing more competition on those at the middle and the bottom while maintaining and increasing forms of protectionism that benefits those at the top."

One more note for those whippersnappers supposedly thinking of voting for Gary Johnson: Gary Johnson doesn't like net neutrality. He can't really tell you why, either: his answer (from a 2011 interview) essentially boils down to government does it, so it's bad. Refuse to do anything because of "unintended consequences" and guess what? You will never do anything, because everything has unintended consequences. I know what the fully-intended consequences of opposing net neutrality are, though: that corporations, not you, will control your internet experience. It's bad enough they control your cable TV experience, though if we passed a strong a la carte cable packaging bill, we could change that.

A former porn star accuses Donald Trump of inappropriately kissing her, with Mr. Trump retorting, "I'm sure she's never been grabbed before." Why he recast her accusation as "grabbing" rather than "kissing" is unclear, unless he thought it made a better zinger, but no porn star deserves to be grabbed or kissed without their permission merely because they've done the deed in a movie -- using what happens under a contract to describe consent is moronic. (As an aside, why is he saying he'll sue all these women if he becomes President? Why not now?)

Finally, notorious cartoonist Jack Chick, purveyor of short, primitively-drawn religious tracts that have inspired mirth and scorn from young folks for decades, has died at the age of 92. Mr. Chick's little pamphlets, which religious folks have often distributed for free, rail against the occult, Catholicism, Communism, Islam, drugs, and homosexuality, among so, so many other things, and though of course I disagree profoundly with his notion that your only choice is either to believe in Jesus or go to hell, I must admit that he had a fierceness about him I can't help but admire -- a fierceness he could turn on himself occasionally, it seems. I'd be glib to say I'd feel differently about him if he'd taken over the world, because that was never going to happen -- he wasn't good enough at disguising his aims, possibly because he never tried. R.I.P.

Around the table: the "liberal" media, torture, voting rights, scare numbers, and one cray-cray campaign ad.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR notes the lack of "liberal" media coverage of October 11, the date of the voter registration deadline in 15 states and American Samoa -- odd, considering all the really unimportant things they choose to blather on about. Contrary to what you may have heard, the vast majority of folks who don't vote in American elections aren't registered to vote, and yet you don't hear very much about it anywhere outside of Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show; why, it's almost like that's the idea.

Three former detainees sue CIA contract psychologists who allegedly masterminded the CIA's torture program -- and can compel testimony from two former CIA officials. Not just any former CIA officials, either, but former a CIA Counterterrorism Center head and a former CIA acting general counsel. Now cue the right-wing whining machine about how "national security" will be compromised by such testimony. And folks also remember that the CIA torture program is one Donald Trump would bring back, right?

Erik J. Engstrom and Jason M. Roberts remind us (at the Washington Post) that, though the 4th Circuit struck down most of North Carolina's horrible Voter ID law, the court left in place the part of the law prohibiting straight-ticket voting. That may not sound like a big deal, when you think of the relatively short amount of time that'll add to one person's time voting, but more than one person will vote on Election Day, and that added time is going to add up to longer lines, voters going home, and voters failing to finish ballots. Do I need to add that this phenomenon tends to happen more in black areas?

Brace yourself, because this Hill piece about "States Confront(ing) Exploding Pension Costs" is a terrible article. Luckily, paragraph 11 gives it away when it describes Illinois's "obligations" as "due over the lifetime of current retirees and state employees who will be owed retirement benefits" -- at which point, hopefully, you remember that they typically give you the ZOMG $1.75 TRILLYUNZ!!!! scare number without adding "over 40 years," since that would, after all, make the scare number seem a lot less scary. Remembering that America has over 300 state and local pension funds would also make that number seem a lot less scary, as would recognizing that dividing a 40-year pension "liability" by tax revenues for one year is an absurd exercise. But there's money to be made in scaring people about pension fund "shortfalls" -- money that could be diverted to bankster hedge funds for the better returns that don't materialize, or money that could be diverted away from pension funds into corporate cronies' pockets for "job creation."

Finally, dig this campaign ad coming from Louisiana Republican U.S. Senate candidate John Kennedy. Unfavorable comparisons to Steve Martin's "What I Believe" routine are of course inevitable, but what to make of the last line? "I believe that love is the answer," Mr. Kennedy intones, as the camera pans over apparent photos of his family, "but you oughta own a handgun just in case." Ah, in case the family turns out for Charles Boustany on primary day? I sure hope not.

Around the table: governments torturing citizens, banksters exploiting prisoners, and Donald Trump.

Amnesty Internation announces they have "credible evidence" that the Turkish government is cracking down on the Turkish people with arbitrary detainment, torture, and rape. That followed President Erdogan's emergency declaration, which followed the "suspension" of some 50,000 civil servants, the detainment of almost 1,000 judges and prosecutors, and the suspension of over 2,700 more judges. Also, too, they detained 60 schoolkids for treason. Arresting kids for treason! You might say Mr. Erdogan's actions are explicable, given the apparent coup attempt in mid-July, but I'd just say a leader who feels he must go to such lengths to restore "order" is no kind of leader at all. Not that he was a peach to begin with, of course.

Arun Gupta at The Nation describes the latest (legal!) scam perpetrated in the prison system: they take the prisoners' cash and give them ATM cards when they get out -- ATM cards that are larded with hidden fees. Anyone else think law enforcement will get money from banksters to arrest people on bogus charges, take their money, and given them fee-laden ATM cards when they put them back on the street that night? Of course, prisoners who serve longer sentences get this done to them, too. Don't be the fool who says who cares? They shouldn't have done anything wrong! After all, you might spend a night, or a year, in the clink someday -- maybe for something you can't even imagine could be a crime now! -- and then you'll see what it's like to keep paying after you thought you were done paying.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence tells right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, apparently with a straight face, that "name-calling" has no "place in public life," all because President Obama called Donald Trump a demagogue. Examples of Donald Trump's own name-calling are, of course, easily accessible, apparently, to everyone except Mike Pence (and Hugh Hewitt, who didn't question Mr. Pence on "name-calling" any further). But I wouldn't presume (as the Politico writer does) that this is Messrs. Trump and Pence "getting tangled up in mixed messaging on tactics." I'm pretty sure the "mixed messaging" is the tactic -- being a Republican (let alone a Trump votary!) requires exactly this sort of mental disconnect all the time.

Finally, speaking of Mr. Trump, what to make of his declaration at an Ohio rally that "I'm afraid the election's gonna be rigged, I have to be honest"? That he's not so confident in Voter ID laws delivering him unearned victories in Wisconsin and North Carolina after all? That he's trying to gin up anger and resentment among votaries who can't possibly see how he could have lost? Or that, like a baseball manager in last place by mid-May complaining about injuries, he's just getting his excuses ready? Number three sounds the most reasonable, but I bet it's number two. Then again, with Donald Trump, it's always number two.

UPDATE. I originally identified Mr. Erdogan as the Prime Minister of Turkey, a position he held until 2014; he is now that nation's President. I've corrected the error.

Around the table: more tales about national security, the "liberal" media, banksters, racism, and Donald Trump.

Obama Administration clears Mohamedou Ould Slahi -- author of the famous Guantánamo Diary, describing the extensive torture he received during his dozen-plus years in detainment -- for release. Without charges, naturally; how splendid, that our government can torture a guy for more than a dozen years but can't even file a freaking charge. Good for you if you advocated for his release, but just remember that going from "being cleared for release" from Guantánamo to actually being released can be yet another long road.

In a peripherally-related note, Adam Johnson at FAIR catches the New York Times discussing the recently-deposed Roger Ailes "direct(ing) (Fox News) to break with classic journalistic detachment to get fully behind the war efforts of the George W. Bush White House" -- as if the New York Times's own pro-war reporting didn't also signify a "break with classic journalistic detachment." You'll remember Judith Miller's "reporting" and the pervasive drum-beat for war among most Times columnists as well as I do; I suppose the Times would respond that Mr. Ailes gave an actual order to support the Iraq war, while the Times editorial board was too smart to do that out loud or in writing. Then again, I'm not even sure that's true -- Our Glorious Elites are really sick, immoral, and decadent.

Government Accountability Office (or GAO) will look into Central States Pension Fund management, after Teamster activists point out that bankster fund managers have endangered the fund's ability to pay future retirees. Of course, as the Fund was losing billions of dollars on risky investments in Russian banks and low-rated mortgage bonds, firms like Goldman Sachs (of course!) made a crapload of money off their "management" in fees. As we know, of course, the whole point of a pension fund is not to outperform some other fund, but to be there for retirees, which is why pension funds used to put their money in safe investments. But bold thinkers continue to have too much say about everything in America.

Yet another Congressional hopeful seems to think slurs against Chinese folks will get him into office. Former Democratic Governor/Senate hopeful Ted Strickland has passed out fortune cookies whose fortunes say "Rob Portman. The Best Senator China's Ever Had." This brings back such happy memories of that awful Peter Hoekstra ad, that awful DSCC ad against Pat Toomey, and that awful Jack Conway ad. You can criticize "free" trade without being racist, but you shouldn't pander to the worst in people just to get them to vote against bad candidates.

Finally, you may have heard about Donald Trump's big speech the other night, and FactCheck gets you up to speed on its many fabrications and distortions. Sadly, I must report that it was, as written, a fairly effective speech -- converting the Hillary slogan "I'm with her" to "I'm with you" was particularly brilliant -- but of course he shouted the whole thing, and people really do get tired of that. And Mr. Trump is, of course, just another loudmouth who talks about law and order as if that never, ever has anything to do with polluters or corporate crime, when polluters can destroy clean air and clean water forever, and we still haven't recovered from what the banksters did to us in 2008.

Around the table: from unelected bureaucrats in Puerto Rico to a transgendered woman in the Utah Senate race.

Robert Reich describes the five basic principles of patriotism. "Coming together," "sharing the burdens," "preserving...our democracy," "work(ing) to improve our government," and avoiding "divisiveness" are five pretty good values, of course, but why are they American? Because Americans say so, that's why, and if a foolish and venal aristocracy has seized power in our land, that doesn't make us less patriotic.

Over 50 retired generals and admirals call on both political parties to reject torture in party platforms. And this is where that constant right-wing refrain "listen to the generals" comes in! Or not -- right-wingers know, in their hearts, that they only listen to the generals (and everyone else!) when they already agree with them.

Senate approves their version of the nefarious PROMESA Act, which would allow unelected bureaucrats to take money from good Puerto Ricans and give it to banksters. Maybe if Democrats put it like that, it wouldn't have passed. No use telling me that "Puerto Rico should pay its debts like everyone else," when a) everyone else doesn't pay their debts, especially the very wealthy, and b) they don't have debts because of good Puerto Ricans, but because of corrupt banksters and politicians.

John Nichols profiles Misty Snow, a trans woman who just won the Democratic nomination in the Utah 2016 U.S. Senate race. Ms. Snow ticks off a lot of the right boxes -- she supports a $15/hour minimum wage, Medicare-for-all health care, and campaign finance reform, among other things -- though I'd be really impressed if she also says that all of Mike Lee's feints left (on Afghanistan, criminal justice reform, and government spying) don't seem to have amounted for much. Utah is one of the most Republican states in the union, so this could be a very educational race. Maybe even Democrats will learn something from it!

Michael Corcoran at TruthOut tells us Hillary Clinton's short list for VP has only three names on it. Elizabeth Warren won't get it because Wall Street will have a hissy fit, and that leaves Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine and HUD Secretary Julian Castro. I've been telling co-workers that Mr. Kaine is the pick, but then I read this passage about Mr. Castro: "because he has never served in Congress or run for federal office, it is hard to examine his financial backers or even find out his statements on scores of issues." So it's Castro, then.

Finally, The Straight Dope reveals why tabloids generally don't get sued into oblivion. The biggest theoretical issue, of course, is proving they printed information they knew was false; it's not like you can cut open a reporter or an editor and count rings. "Ah, 59 rings! A prime number! He knew!" More interesting, though, is the first paragraph's account of defamation lawsuits against Gawker secretly funded by Peter Thiel, who's still sore about being outed by Gawker back in 2007, summarized thusly: "If you’ve got enough money, you don’t need to prove libel or privacy violation in your own case...You just have to spend eight or nine years burying your nemesis in other people’s cases until you find one with enough merit to put ’em out of their misery."

Action: maltreatment of asylum-seekers, and campaign finance reform.

Sum of Us helps you tell Spanish corporation Ferrovial to withdraw from its contracts running inhumane detention centers on Manus Island and Nauru. Some background: Australia detains asylum-seekers, who are running from war and torture in their homelands, on these islands -- and then outsources their operation to private corporations. But the 1,200-plus asylum-seekers detained at these two centers suffer inhumane treatment condemned by the U.N.; if a government wants to treat people badly, I'd rather it do the dirty work itself, because then it would have to be more directly accountable to the people. But involving private contractors adds another layer between the people and their government, almost like that's the idea. At least, that would be the idea from government's end -- the idea from the corporation's end, of course, is to make money, and the prevailing "wisdom" among corporations is that you only make money by cutting costs, and treating asylum-seekers humanely costs money. But the Big Stick of Bad PR may yet force Ferrovial to yield -- if we wield it.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5494/S. 6, the We the People Act, would combine a number of popular and effective ways to regulate campaign finance in America -- it combines the DISCLOSE Act (which fell to a 41-Senator filibuster in 2010), the Financial Services Conflict of Interest Act, a bill regulating SuperPAC coordination, a bill mandating 48-hour disclosure of PAC donations over $1,000, and a bill banning Congressfolk from lobbying, among others. Sounds ambitious? So did cleaning up the Augean stables -- and if anything, cleaning up the Augean stables is a day spent tending your tomato plants next to the task of wrenching our government free from wealthy donors. Sadly, the We the People Act would give right-wing mouth-holes more opportunities to throw old arguments against the wall (disclosure is bullying, etc.) to see what sticks. The good news? All their arguments are the kind of rubbish only desperate people throw against the wall. So People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to loosen the grip big money has on our elections by supporting the We the People Act.

Action: Honduras, missile "defense," and pipeline safety.

H.R. 5474, the Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, would cut off our government's funding of military and police operations in Honduras, until the Honduran government conducts appropriate human rights investigations. The money ain't big, at least as far as our budget is concerned -- $18 million -- but you can bet Honduras is counting on it, and frankly it's well past time our government did something about a regime that overthrew the so-liberal-he-made-the-corporations-sad President in 2009 while our State Department was mulling over the precise definition of the word "coup." And this regime has apparently committed numerous human rights violations since then, including the murder of the Honduran activist Ms. Caceres in early March. A regime that detains, tortures, rapes, and murders its own people is a sorry regime indeed, but a regine that has the power to induce better behavior from such a regime but does nothing is a shameful one. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5474, and thus support human rights in Honduras.

Meanwhile, our government also plods on with the mindlessness of missile "defense," having built such "defense" sites in Alaska, California, and Romania and eager to build more of them in places like New York and Ohio. Why do I put "defense" in quotation marks? Because missile "defense" depends on notoriously inaccurate missiles suddenly acquiring the capability of shooting down other nation's missiles in mid-air, when those missiles can defend against our missiles easily (and inexpensively) with reflective paint or Mylar ballons as decoys. Furthermore, we know that "successful" missile defense tests are generally rigged so that they're impossible to fail! And what do missile "defense" proponents say when confronted with all of this evidence? Just launch more missiles at the incoming missile -- which, surely, our opponents would never think of! Hence Roots action helps you tell our government to scrap plans to expand our missile "defense" program. What should we do instead, you ask? Gosh, I don't know -- how about doing the hard work of making and maintaining peace?

Finally, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (or PHMSA) has actually proposed fairly strong pipeline safety rules -- which, naturally, the big energy corporations hate, because these rules would hamper their ability to redistribute worker income upward to executives. Good pipe safety regulation actually creates jobs, after all -- jobs for engineers and designers and inspectors and technicians -- and as any modern executive knows, you can't keep all the money yourself if you have to pay other people. But America has endured far too many pipeline bursts over the years, and these bursts aren't very easy to clean up (though they're fairly inexpensive to clean up, for the corporations who put crappy pipelines out there, as long as they can count on the government doing everything for them!). Indeed, you may recall how TransCanada's long record of skimping on pipeline safety helped doom its attempt to build the Keystone XL pipeline. So the Sierra Club helps you tell the PHMSA to implement the most vigorous pipeline safety rules possible.

Around the table: starring torture, terror, and the "Vampire Squid."

CIA medical staff gave strikingly detailed instructions about how to torture terror suspects, declassified documents reveal. Some right-wingers will say, see? They provided boundaries to pain and degradation! They were civilized about their torture!, but they'll forget that torture is useless. And the best I can say about the behavior described in these documents is that they might inspire a thousand dystopian novels.

Lost in reporting of the Democratic filibuster over gun control in the Senate last week is that Democrats would use terrorist watchlists to deny certain folks guns. I feel compelled to note that folks on a terrorist watch list have not been convicted of a crime -- or even accused of a crime, really, since showing up on a list doesn't indicate an indictment or even an arrest -- and that you or I could wind up on a terrorist watchlist without any "concrete facts" or "irrefutable evidence" connecting us to actual terrorism (versus the kind of activities that "terrorize" corporatists and their lackeys in Congress). That's before we get to how hard it is to get off a list, or how easy it is for folks on the watchlist to get harassed for other reasons. (And they say the intelligence agencies don't share information!) And, as Paul Craig Roberts used to say, with 1.1 million folks enmeshed in the watchlist system, you'd think we'd be having a lot more terrorist attacks.

From Jonas Schmidt Hansen at Occupy.com, we learn that Goldman Sachs bought 19% of Denmark's public energy corporation two years ago for rather less than the corporation's value, and just made a nearly $2 billion windfall on that investment. You'll really hate this story -- though Denmark has a strong economy, and hundreds of thousands of its good citizens protested the privatization of Dong Energy, Denmark's old minister of finance sold it anyway, and even gave Goldman Sachs veto power over board decisions (why, that's an even better deal than Republicans had when they had only 41 out of 100 Senators!). Plus, Dong (and Goldman Sachs) will get bailed out by the Danish taxpayer if/when it goes down. The word we have for all of this is corruption -- and this, in one of the least corrupt nations on Earth.

How would Microsoft turn its proposed purchase of LinkedIn into yet another undeserved corporate welfare tax break? By taking out a $28 billion loan to buy LinkedIn while also using over $100 billion in offshore holdings as collateral, that's how. Which means they'll get to deduct the interest on the loan they don't need from their taxes, and the rest of us (i.e., working families and small businesses) will have to pay more for the services we all use. Naturally, Microsoft's offshore holdings somehow account for more than half the corporation's profits, though they only employ about one out of every 50 Microsoft employees. Nice work if you can get it!

Yet another "liberal" media report talks about net neutrality as if it were only about the "harm" it would cause to corporations. And this report came from NPR! The sad part is that the same blogger who talked on the radio about "stifling innovation" and "reduced investment" -- as if big telecoms don't spend all their energies fighting innovation! As if we should be held hostage to corporate threats of "reduced investment" that they absolutely will not carry out! -- wrote a much better report on the matter for an NPR blog, which of course won't get as much play as whatever NPR puts on the radio. Why, it's almost like that's the idea.

Finally, Sheila Bapat at Yes! magazine writes about how "domestic workers have been building a powerful, inclusive movement -- the domestic workers’ movement -- through organizing outside of traditional unions." The non-profit "workers' centers" at this heart of this movement bypass traditional organizing tactics and go straight to activism for better wages and better treatment. I think unions are necessary, though building one is more a long-term strategy than a short-term one, but given how badly these workers get treated, and (especially!) given how little attention unions pay to domestic workers, I can certainly understand their impatience. And I'm certainly not going to argue with their results -- building a union ain't no good anyway unless you keep agitating for a better life, which latter itemm these good folks are getting plenty of practice in doing.

Action: torture, internet privacy, and gay rights.

The CIA has apparently "accidentally" destroyed its copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report from the last Congress. No, it wasn't the only copy in the whole world, but understand that the torture report actually had little chance of seeing the light of day to begin with -- so far our government has only released the report's 700-page executive summary, and a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel has lately ruled that the Freedom of Information Act can't compel disclosure of the other 6,200-plus pages, since the FOIA doesn't apply to "Congressional documents." Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell President Obama to declassify the Senate torture report and ensure that the National Archives and Record Administration preserve it. Let's not pretend that other countries learning that we torture "compromises national security," nor let us suppose the National Archives should only record the good we do -- if we can't accept, and learn from, the evil we do, we have no business aspiring to be the greatest country on Earth.

Meanwhile, the FCC has proposed rules that would give consumers more control over how information internet service providers use, share, or sell their private information. I've heard a lot of reasonable folks say things like you should get used to not having any privacy on the internet, and while they mean to remind you not to be a blithering idiot in public or to avoid scams that sound too good to be true -- both worthwhile reminders no matter how often we get them! -- we should be able to have some privacy on the internet, and we should certainly be able to make big telecom corporations get our permission before doing anything with our private information, and we should get notifications from those corporations whenever that information gets stolen. Of course, big telecoms don't want to do any of this, supposedly because it would "confuse" consumers -- which certainly betrays their very, very low opinion of the people whose money makes their businesses possible. Don't we tend toward believing in folks' capabilities in a free country? Demand Progress helps you tell the FCC to mandate the most vigorous privacy protections possible for consumers on the internet.

Finally, in case you were wondering if the struggle for gay rights is over now that the Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage across the land, recall that many state legislatures have made foster care systems a battleground in their attempts to enshrine a "right" to discriminate against people who offend your "religious" "conscience." Some politicians think that if you don't want LGBTQ parents to foster kids because cooties, you should be allowed to prevent them from doing that -- and if foster parents don't want to foster LGBTQ kids, they should be allowed to do that. Just to make things clear: you have a right to be a bigot -- but you don't have a right to abridge other people's rights with your bigotry, or because of your bigotry. How strange, that folks pass up all the character-building opportunities meeting people unlike them can provide. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell HHS Secretary Burwell to forbid foster care services receiving federal funding from discriminating against LGBTQ kids or parents. I know, the right will call that Big Gummint, just like they never called the PATRIOT Act or warrantless wiretapping Big Gummint, but haters gonna hate, and we don't pander to hate, even if it carries a cross.

Action: Guantánamo Bay detainment, endangered species, and school meal nutrition.

The ACLU helps you tell our government to free Mohamedou Ould Slahi from Guantánamo Bay posthaste. Our government has detained Mr. Slahi at Guantánamo since 2002; you suppose they found anything to charge him with during that time, spanning four different Presidential terms? No, they have not -- despite being beaten, isolated, and sexually assaulted, among other offenses, which, again, testifies to how little good torture does. (Please do not be the pimp who says YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT INTELLIGENCE HE GAVE THEM THAT THWARTED ANOTHER TERRORIST ATTACK HA HA HA HA DIRTY HIPPIE! Believe me, if Tha Bush Mobb had done any of that, Fox News would have televised the circle jerk they had afterward.) You may recall Mr. Slahi as the man who wrote a 500-page memoir, by hand, about his treatment at Guantánamo (got a few hours? Read it, minus some 2,500 U.S. government-mandated redactions, here); he had, back in the day, fought alongside mujahideen against the Communists in Afghanistan, then became disgusted when the mujahideen started shooting each other once the Communists fell. I suppose that's why we detained him. But that doesn't make it right. It doesn't even make it not evil.

Meanwhile, some Congressfolk have slipped attacks on the Endangered Species Act into the National Defense Authorization Act. Naturally they couldn't gut the Act merely by introducing stand-alone bills, even when they put words like "reform" into those bills, so they're putting their nefarious works into must-pass legislation. Trouble is, of course, that blocking defense authorization bills because you don't like one or two things in them is no longer unprecedented -- Republicans, you may recall, filibustered a defense authorization bill back in 2010 merely because it had a don't-ask-don't-tell repeal in it, happy to risk being called "weak on defense" if it meant hating on gays a little bit. President Obama has already threatened to veto the House's version of the NDAA, and the House didn't pass the bill with enough votes to override a veto. Let Congress try to convince America that people who don't like anti-endangered species bills equal "weak" people; that won't fly even with "liberal" media help. Still, Congress needs to hear from us about this, so Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to block any attacks on endangered species in the defense authorization bill.

Finally, the House Education and Workforce Committee has passed H.R. 5003, the so-called Improving Child Nutrition and Education Act, and the full House may take it up soon. H.R. 5003 would cut funding for school meals for poorer students, would roll back nutrition standards for a la carte school meals, and would allow states who whine about how hard the standards are to achieve to lower federal standards for all other states -- all of which means more junk food and less fruit and vegetables. Funny that nominal "conservatives" would complain about letting the lowest-scoring kid in math class dictate the syllabus, but would think that's OK when states underperform other states in getting nutritious food to their children. How does any of this "improve" nutrition, or education? Does Congress think dealing with diabetes and childhood obesity builds character? Here's what's better for kids: eating healthy and being healthy, so they can take on the actual challenges of childhood and education and actually build character. The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 5003 and pass real school meal reauthorization legislation.

Around the table: "free" trade, "entitlement" "reform," and other fictions.

Hillary Clinton says she opposes the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," that Congress shouldn't vote on it before or after the November election, and that we need a "fundamental rethink" of future trade agreements. That's an awfully big commitment -- it doesn't just mean "during the lame duck session," which she may want you to think it means; "after the election" would cover at least up to November 2020. But when she goes back on her word, as I expect she will, she'll probably still say she was taken out of context.

Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, wonders why "entitlement" "reformers" talk about how we can't "afford" Social Security and Medicare, but not so much about how we can't afford corporate tax loopholes and military spending. Oh, but it's even worse than that: when they talk about military spending, they're more likely to talk about veterans' pensions (apparently we can't afford that, either!) than weapons boondoggles or wars fought off-budget. I've also noticed that our "liberal" media never talks about closing corporate tax loopholes without talking about the absolute necessity of reducing the corporate tax rate. This is why we can't have nice things in America.

Uh oh: Republican Rep. Steve Knight says "I think Social Security was a bad idea" at a candidate debate. There's no way to claim he was taken out of context, either. His statement is ready-made for a Democrat attack ad; now watch them pass it up because it's "uncivil," or because their 13-dimensional chess game requires them to keep a Republican Rep in a district President Obama only lost 50-48 in 2012. (On the other hand, the Senate Majority PAC pulls no punches in this ad attacking Nevada Republican Rep./Senatorial candidate Joe Heck for calling the foreclosure crisis "a blip on the radar.")

Rupert Stone, writing at Newsweek, reminds us that science teaches us that torture doesn't get us very good intelligence. Among other things, torture damages the brain enough that terror suspects can hardly keep their heads together enough to answer questions intelligently. Millions of Americans squeal in response: but what about the incontrovertible science of my inexhaustible rage? Also, they saw on TV that it works.

Finally, Bill Scher picks out Donald Trump's secret weapon in his attempt to appear populist: "incoherence." You can pick out pretty much whatever you like from what Donald Trump says -- if you think he wants to give the rich a tax cut, you can find support for that, and if you think he wants to raise taxes on the rich, you can find support for that, too. And given that so many of Mr. Trump's supporters believe whatever reflects best on their Personal Lord and Savior, I expect "incoherence" to remain a valued strategy for Mr. Trump. Hey, it worked for George W. Bush.

Around the table: a setback on media consolidation, a victory against torture.

Bad news: the Department of Justice and the FCC have both given their conditional blessing to the Charter/Time-Warner merger. The conditions -- Charter can't impose data caps, Time-Warner can't enforce certain video content bans -- are not only negligible next to the problems (job losses, higher prices, worse service) media consolidation always exacerbates, but I imagine they could be challenged in court. How can our government force a data cap ban on Charter and not Comcast, they'll say? Of course, Charter agreed to the ban, so it may take some time to find a judge who would agree that the data cap ban is unfair, but the world's a big place.

U.S. District Court Judge allows torture victims to proceed in a lawsuit against the psychologists who ran the CIA torture program. Much as I'd like to see these monsters (especially the one who called the Senate torture report "a bunch of hooey," now there's a plainspoken man!) smacked down hard, I'm a bit torn that they're very likely going to be the only big players in the CIA torture game who ever suffer even a tiny bit for their role in subjecting folks to inhuman treatment and in trashing our heritage as a people who are better than torturers.

China Labor Watch finds that Pegatron Corporation factory workers used by Apple to make iPhones make $1.82/hour. Naturally, workers there testify that they can't get time off, nor can they make ends meet without working a lot of overtime. Say it with me: this is a massive wealth-redistribution-upward plan that not only redistributes wealth from Chinese workers to Apple executives, but from American workers to Apple executives, since back in the days before "free" trade American workers would have been putting these phones together.

Sen. Ted Cruz announces Carly Fiorina as his choice for his Vice Presidential running mate. That's an unusual move, given that Mr. Cruz has not captured the Republican Presidential nomination, and is less likely to do so now, given his rather poor showing in Tuesday's primaries -- Ronald Reagan was doing rather better when he promised to take Richard Schweiker as his running mate in 1976 (though that may have cost him the nomination). I will say his statement-not-about-Donald-Trump in paragraph six is absolutely spot-on, and should resonate with a lot of people. (In other news, I guess he hates John Kasich as much as a lot of other politicians supposedly do!)

Finally, Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels announces that the show will cut nearly a third of its ads next year -- but also plans to let advertisers "partner" with the show to offer "branded" content six times a year, which apparently means "weaving in brand messaging that more closely resembles the content viewers tuned in to watch." But doesn't that sound rather like something Saturday Night Live would have spoofed back in the day?

Around the table: water thieves, torturers, spies, bad journalists, and scare numbers.

Nestlé isn't just gouging public water in Oregon and California: the good citizens of Kunkletown, Pennsylvania, are also struggling against a Nestlé attempt to pump out 200,000 gallons of water daily and sell it as bottled water. Nestlé got the local government's help, of course, with an ordinance that suddenly allowed massive amounts of water extraction in commercial zones, which had heretofore been illegal. The good news? Local townsfolk sued the local Board of Supervisors over the zoning change; they'll probably win that, and it's only their backup plan.

Rebecca Gordon, writing at The Nation, describes that time the CIA tortured an innocent man for upwards of seven years. Among the horrors committed against Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, better known as "Abu Zubaydah": being waterboarded 83 times in a month, being thrown shoulder-first into a concrete wall though our government's rules clearly said "flexible, false wall," being deprived of sleep for upwards of six days, and losing an eye under never-explained circumstances -- and, as icing on the cake, the CIA openly declared him to be an experiment to see how well "enhanced interrogation techniques" worked. But, you know, bygones, looking forward not backward, ad nauseam. A President Donald Trump would bring all these horrors back just to prove he's got big balls.

Ho hum, Michigan state police have been monitoring social media for comments about the government-created water crisis in Flint. No, the First Amendment doesn't protect you from threatening the entire state government on Facebook, but the Fourth Amendment protects you from police conducting fishing expeditions for such threats, and I'd say maybe police would be better served looking for the people who poisoned Flint's water in the first place, except that everyone already knows who and where they are. And no the police don't need to know how people feel and what they're willing to do because their government poisoned an entire city's water. That's one of them-there "if you need to ask, you'll never know" things.

Just in case you were wondering if Mexico was a real place, and not just a punching bag for Donald Trump: Mexican human rights activists allege that a smear campaign may be operating against them in the media. At issue: in general, accusations of human rights abuses by Mexican police and military, and in particular, a 2014 attack on a fleet of student buses in Ayotzinapa that killed 3 students and resulted in 43 others going "missing." A report on that massacre, elaborating on an earlier report's finding that police and military may have been involved in it, is due, so the timing of unsubstantiated media reports alleging the report's authors are corrupt is, to say the least, suspicious. Dig the Mexican columnist who alleges that TEH REAL SMEAR CAMPAIGN!!! is against the police and military, and then says the release of video footage depicting actual police torture of a suspect somehow backs his claim. Dude's got spunk -- he could go work for our "liberal" media!

Finally, we learn that over 60,000 Pennsylvania Democrats have switched parties between the first of the year and yesterday's primary, ostensibly to vote for Donald Trump. 60,000; that's a big number; 145,000 new Republican registrations just since Election Day 2015, that's an even bigger number. Sadly, we do not learn until paragraph 29 that Pennsylvania has 8 million voters, and that registered Democrats still hold a 900,000 voter advantage over Republicans. That's not to say Mr. Trump can't win Pennsylvania, or even that Democrats haven't forgotten how to talk to blue-collar voters, but the numbers the earlier paragraphs give you are still scare numbers. (Oh, and by my count, the article tells 11 stories of Pennsylvanians who've switched over for Trump. Think they would have had trouble finding 11 Pennsylvanians who switched the other way for Sanders? Or did they just not look?)

Action: GMO crop regulation, FBI whistleblower protection, and food menu labeling.

This U.S. Department of Agriculture may be as slavish a servant of big agricultural corporations as we have ever seen, but it still has lawfully-mandated duties, and luckily these include taking public comments on their proposed changes to the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service's new genetically-modified crop approval process. And their proposal -- surprise, surprise! -- stinks pretty awful, in that it seems to have been formulated by folks who don't understand that corporations don't create GMO crops to increase yields or promote healthier food, but to withstand ever-higher doses of their own proprietary pesticides. The APHIS proposal doesn't consider a lot of the ill effects of GMO crops, including increased weed resistance to ever-expanding use of pesticides, and GMO seed propensity to drift into fields that don't grow GMO crops. Food and Water Watch helps you tell the USDA to put health-related issues front and center when considering whether to approve GMO crops.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced S. 2390, the FBI Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, and the full Senate will soon consider it. S. 2390 would prevent the FBI from retaliating against whistleblowers, and would give whistleblowers the right to have their case reviewed by an Inspector General, the Attorney General, or a federal court. If you're aware of the Obama Administration's "war on whistleblowers" -- a war that has not only claimed good Americans blowing the whistle on medical device problems, CIA torture, and warrantless wiretapping, but also many good FBI officers -- then you probably see that FBI whistleblowers need more protection. And the Senate, at least, also seems to see this need -- S. 2390 has 11 sponsors, including lead sponsor Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and 10 other Senators evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Senator to help government workers who want to expose corruption and wrongdoing by supporting S. 2390.

Finally, the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) have been working on restaurant menu labeling guidelines since 2010 -- which would, among other things, include information about calories, fat, sodium, and sugar -- but they still haven't finished the job, so Moms Rising helps you tell the FDA and HHS to enact the most vigorous restaurant menu food labeling guidelines possible. This isn't some outrageous Big Gummint mandate, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of big food corporations (including Starbucks and Panera) have voluntarily started such labeling, and that some states and municipalities have enacted their own mandates. I suppose the more resourceful troublemakers among us will complain that people aren't literate enough about these things generally so-what's-the-point, but naturally the more scientific studies tell us that folks actually do make better choices with better information. Giving folks stuff to read promotes literacy, who'da thunk it? And, of course, we don't abide folks trying to convince us to let the perfect murder the good.

Around the table: good folks giving politicians what-for, and other tales.

Trevor Timm, writing at The Guardian, explains "Why the Panama Papers Should Be a U.S. Election Issue." Long story short: even if no Americans are named therein, the Panama Papers highlight how "American" it's become to use offshore tax havens. Of course, corporate tax avoidance isn't exactly popular -- even the Treasury's rather meek corporate inversion rules have induced Pfizer to abandon its plan to merge with Allergan and become "foreign" -- but it is by and large legal, thanks to politicians who never listen to the people.

Hot on the heels of Rep. Grothman's rather frank admission that Voter ID helps Republicans out in Wisconsin, a former Republican staffer testifies that Republicans in Wisconsin's state legislature were "literally talking and plotting to deny someone, a fellow citizen, their constitutional right" to vote, particularly in "certain neighborhoods in Milwaukee and on our college campuses." The words "voter suppression" may never have passed their lips, because Scott Walker's New Republican Reich may be many things but they're not stupid. Still, we always knew it, and it's nice to have insider testimony.

Peter Maass, writing at The Intercept, reminds us that, whatever Donald Trump's ridiculous pronouncements about expanding libel laws, President Obama is the one who's used the Espionage Act of 1917 to "prosecute more leakers and whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined." Which should also remind you that the guy who blew the whistle on CIA torture (John Kiriakou) is in jail while the torturers themselves aren't (because we're "looking forward"!) and that the Obama Administration's hatred of whistleblowers is so total that even FDA workers suffered blowback after trying to call attention to malfunctioning medical devices.

Dean Baker finds complaints about the "lack of specifics" in Bernie Sanders's answers to the New York Daily News to be "silly." I mention this mainly because he reminds us that the same "liberal" media so anxious to castigate Sen. Sanders acts like Paul Ryan is TEH WONKIEST WONK EVAH!!!!, even though (or perhaps because!) he has "has repeatedly proposed eliminating most of the federal government." Then again, if Bernie Sanders knew the precise statute that would permit him to prosecute banksters for mortgage fraud, the "liberal" media would probably just call him a nerd.

Finally, Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott must regret stopping off at a Starbucks in Gainesville on Tuesday, after a local woman gave him what-for over (among other things) his refusal to expand Medicaid, saying "(y)ou should be ashamed to show your face around here." You'll recall that he said he supported expanding Medicaid while running for re-election in 2014, then flip-flopped once he was elected, because he won and you didn't. As for his "I created a million jobs" spiel: ah, no, the people of Florida created a million jobs, through their demand for goods and services -- and might have created more, except for Mr. Scott's perpetual hard-on for tax-cuts-for-the-rich getting in the way.