Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning free speech, killer weed-killers, and corporate welfare.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Cambodia to release housing rights activist Tep Vanny from prison. Ms. Vanny is currently serving a 30-month sentence (of which she's already served two years) for "intentional violence with aggravating circumstances," which sounds better than what they ring activists up on in Saudi Arabia, I suppose, but that's nothing to brag about. The Cambodian government convicted her solely on written statements of purported witnesses, which, like, any government can do; you might more reasonably suspect that they're really convicting her of agitating against her government's ongoing evictions of over 20,000 good Cambodians from her community under its notorious Economic Land Concession scheme, which is, apparently, how the government gives land away to foreign corporations for "development." Untrammeled corporate power: it really is a menace everywhere on Earth. Luckily the world has folks like Ms. Vanny to fight it.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the news that a terminally-ill man who used Monsanto's signature weed-killer Roundup in his job as a school groundskeeper won a $289 million judgment against Monsanto after getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Penn PIRG helps you tell the EPA to ban Roundup. I'll bet the tort "reform" crowd is just aching to call this a frivolous lawsuit because of the massive award, but they'd have to explain how a 42-year-old man got terminal cancer after using Roundup at his job for just two years, and they'd also have to explain Monsanto knowing (per internal documents) that Roundup causes cancer for decades while insisting in public (and still insisting, no less!) that it doesn't. They'd be better off realizing that not putting more potentially carcinogenic chemicals in our food and water is actually a conservative impulse. You know, instead of insisting that whatever's good for big corporations is "conservative."

Finally, S. 1885, the AV START Act, would actually let corporations sell self-driving cars without ensuring they conform to federal safety standards, and worse, would pre-empt states from passing their own laws regarding self-driving cars. Conservatism! It's all about advancing solutions that make problems worse! It's also about keeping states from doing anything about driverless cars that run people over! Seriously, aside from the prospect of collecting corporate welfare, why is anyone excited about driverless cars? Are they really a better transportation option than buses or trains? Are we really going to have fewer accidents when we get rid of people? And how offensive is it that we have to fight like dogs to get public investment in actual revolutionary technologies like solar and wind, but self-driving cars somehow wind up on the fast track? Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumers by rejecting S. 1885.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, family leave, and nuclear waste.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: we've told Gov. Wolf to call a special legislative session to pass redistricting reform, but that won't mean anything if the legislature screws up the reform process again, so Fair Districts PA helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to do the right thing during a special session on redistricting reform. One of those "leaders" -- House State Government Committee Chair Daryl Metcalfe -- gutted not one but two redistricting bills in his own committee, and when House leaders successfully kept future redistricting bills out of his committee, legislators from both parties swamped those bills with hundreds of amendments. So, yes, we're demanding they come back during their time off to do their job because they've done an abominable job so far. They could redeem themselves by doing a good job this month, however.

Meanwhile, as several right-wing Senators work on a plan to divert Social Security funding into a paid family leave plan -- anything not to raise taxes on their corporate paymasters! -- Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 337, the FAMILY Act. The FAMILY Act would finally bring paid family leave to America by establishing the Federal Family and Medical Leave Insurance Trust Fund within the Social Security Administration. Monthly benefits would range between $580 and $4000, depending on your income, and an 0.2 percent payroll tax (that's two-tenths of one percent, not "two percent," "liberal" media!) would fund it. So when your right-wing uncle says IZ TEH GUBMINT GOINGZ TO DO EVERYTHINGZ!!!!, remind him that our taxes pay for our benefits, which any of us could use. Just remember: you won't convince him you're right -- but you might convince anyone else who might be listening that you're right.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject the proposed placement of a nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, then Food and Water Action still helps you do that. If you're tempted to respond well, you gotta put the waste somewhere, then you should ask yourself which is worse: storing nuclear waste in hardened containers near nuclear power plants, or transporting that waste across 44 American states and thus risking contamination from the inevitable trucking accident. And there's yet another reason we should reject nuclear power as a nation -- you know, along with the fact that you can get low carbon emissions from solar and wind, and the fact that power plants that present such a high risk of contamination from accidents and/or terrorist attacks tend to be so unpopular that they need massive government handouts to build them and keep them running. So, yeah, let's stop doing that.

Action: internet freedom, corporate welfare, and workplace democracy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your U.S. House Rep to nullify the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, then Stop the FCC still helps you do that. Net neutrality officially ended last Monday, as you know, and though the big telecom corporations haven't started censoring websites or slowing websites down or forcing you to watch junk news videos before your websites load or herding some of your websites into internet "slow lanes," but the only reason they haven't done these things yet is because they're not completely stupid -- they know it's better to take your freedoms away a bit at a time, rather than rush to take them all away at once. And net neutrality is about your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than have a bunch of big corporations tell you where to go. The Senate already passed a "resolution of disapproval" aiming to nullify the FCC's repeal; now the House must do the same. But they won't, unless we demand it.

Meanwhile, our Administration's Department of Energy has concocted a truly moronic scheme to force utilities to buy a set percentage of their electric power from coal and nuclear. Brought to you by the same people who call renewable energy standards "welfare handouts"! Coal corporations are failing, not because of some "war on coal" drama, but because natural gas is considerably cheaper, and solar and wind are price-competitive now. And nuclear power plants have never made any money. How do we know? Because our government keeps giving them "loan guarantees," which only "guarantee" that taxpayers bail them out when they fail! I wish I could believe that this chunk of corporate welfare is all about our coal miners, but it's not -- the only people our President cares about are other bosses, and he sees the rest of us as just tools. So the Sierra Club helps you demand that our Energy Department scuttle its plan to force utilities to buy more from failing fossil fuel corporations.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5728/S. 2810, the Workplace Democracy Act. The Workplace Democracy Act would amend the National Labor Relations Act to curb corporations mislabeling their employees "independent contractors," to keep corporations from forcing employees to attend anti-union presentations, to force more good-faith negotiating efforts between corporations and unions, to allow employees to choose a card-check election instead of a secret ballot election to join a union, and to repeal "right-to-work" laws at the state level -- among other things! The only other thing I would ask for would be to allow farm workers to organize. But this bill is the gold standard of labor legislation in these times -- and when we have strong unions, we have better wages and better working conditions. So don't believe the right-wing hype that unions "make us less free," because all they do is make corporations less free to hurt us.

Action: expanding Social Security yea, birth control "gag rules" nay, and corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations nay.

You may have heard of the sure-looks-coordinated attacks on Social Security from various local Fox TV stations in late May, so now Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits, not cut them. If your right-wing uncle demands to know where they money for that is going to come from, remind him that income over $128,400 doesn't even get taxed into Social Security. And certainly push back against the Social-Security-running-out-of-money hysteria, because the Social Security Trustees report for 2018 tells us that Social Security will pay out full benefits up until 2034 (and then pay out almost 80% of benefits thereafter); if we taxed income over $128,400 into the system, we could make Social Security fully solvent even further into the future and expand benefits so our seniors can have more to live on. Why would we not do this? Because our leaders are worse than thieves? Should we really let that stop us?

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed a regulation that would deny federal Title X funding to any family planning organizations that provide abortions, or refer folks to other abortion providers. This would, naturally, have the effect of denying any basic family planning help (including birth control and STD testing) to poor working families, since they're the ones who most depend on the agencies that get federal funding. And these agencies would very likely stop referring families to a procedure that's, you know, legal. All this, so our Administration can keep diddling the rage glands of right-wingers! I still hope that pro-lifers will one day see how the right has used them all these years; if right-wing politicians really cared about abortion, of course, they'd put a Constitutional amendment up for a vote, but I guess they think it's better "politics" to keep pro-lifers angry than to work to give them what they want. In any case, the Administration "gag rule" is bad public policy, so the ACLU helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its "gag rule" proposal.

Finally, our Administration has also proposed forcing utilities to buy from coal and nuclear power plants. Does that sound like the "free market at work" to you? They're hoping it sounds more like "securing the electric grid" to you, and they're also hoping that solar and wind power -- which are starting to compete, price-wise, with the more traditional energy sources -- will strike you as "insecure" power sources. They're not, of course -- the coal industry is full of its TEH SUN SETZ TEH WIND DIEZ!!!! billboards, but the sun always comes up in the morning, the wind always picks up again, and there is such a thing as battery storage. Meanwhile, giving bailouts to industries that are flailing -- not so coal miners won't lose their jobs, but so coal CEOs won't lose their 19th vacation homes -- doesn't exactly testify to a commitment to national economic security. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Energy Department to scuttle its plan to give welfare handouts to big coal and nuclear power corporations.

Action: farm policy, and nuclear waste storage.

Here's something else you might not know about H.R. 2, Congress's new, nefarious Farm Bill: Title IX would take consultative jurisdiction over pesticide harm to endangered species from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, so that the EPA has sole jurisdiction over the matter. Defenders of this move may argue that it "reduces bureaucracy" or "right-sizes regulation," but you already see the flaw in that reasoning: we would really leave pesticide oversight solely to this EPA? The whole reason we have several different actors look at the same thing is to prevent one bad actor from doing great harm; yes, it makes the process slower, but wouldn't a conservative argue for doing the right thing more slowly versus embracing a streamlined process above all? Hence Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the "Poisoned Pollinators Provision" of the Farm Bill.

Meanwhile, the House recently passed H.R. 3053, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, which would establish a massive nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain -- which the good citizens of Nevada have been fighting literally for decades now. Some proponents cite the danger of storing nuclear waste in over 100 areas of the country in order to justify concentrating it all in one location. Problem with that is trucks would have to transport all that waste all across America, and trucks have been known to crash on occasion, and that threatens the millions of good Americans who live near interstate highways with contaminated water and serious health care issues. Would we have these problems if we put the necessary effort into solar and wind power? No, we would not. Food and Water Action helps you to reject the House's plan to build a massive nuclear waste storage area at Yucca Mountain.

Action: wind power, prisoner rights, and Arctic drilling.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission lets gas drilling corporations conduct hydrofracturing (a.k.a. "fracking") on public lands, but thinks wind power is too dangerous to wildlife to allow onto public lands! Because of all the wind turbines that go rampaging through the forest, no doubt! Seriously, the Game Commission should really have said all that out loud before doing it. Fracking involves, among other things, leaking methane into the air, poisoning our air and water with carcinogens, and building pipelines that carve up land and run the too-high risk of spilling more poisons; what about that isn't dangerous to wildlife? Wind turbines, on the other hand, carve up rather little of the ground if you do it right, and fossil fuel corporations kill far more birds than wind power does. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell the Pennsylvania Game Commission to end its double standard for wind power development on public lands.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 2520, the Inmate Calling Technical Corrections Act. What would S. 2520 do? It would stop phone service corporations from extorting absurdly-high phone rates from the families of prisoners. And why should we care? Because prisoners who can stay in contact with their families go back to jail less often, because judges don't sentence prisoners to absurdly-high phone call rates, because families shouldn't be punished with those high rates either, and also, you know, because we're not cruel bastards. Speaking of which, our current FCC Chair apparently thinks the problem can be solved by stuffing burner phones into dead cats and throwing them over prison walls -- even though the very same corporations that "provide" phone "service" in prisons also provide prisons with cell-phone jamming devices! So let's speak out, not merely to treat prisoners and their families more humanely, but to better ensure this Administration's just humiliation.

Finally, as you may know, the Republican tax "reform" bill opens up the Arctic Refuge to drilling, even though we've been saying for years that the small amount of oil we'd get out of the Arctic Refuge doesn't outweigh the damage we'd do to clean air and water. Luckily, the Interior Department has to go through many public comment periods before anyone can drill in the Arctic, and though this Administration will try to go through those public comment periods as quickly as they can, so that fewer good Americans comment on the matter, they still have to go adhere to the process, because law and order. Hence the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell Interior Secretary Zinke to reject new drilling leases in the Arctic Refuge. He doesn't care what you think -- unless you've got some free trips or a $150,000 door you can give him, amirite? -- but, as always, it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want.

Action: clean water, renewable energy, paper ballots, and nukes.

H.R. 5609, the WATER Act, would help America rebuild our drinking water infrastructure, but right-wingers love seeing bills like this and asking BUT WHEREZ IZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!! One can, of course, answer that question in at least two ways. One, the bill pays for itself by expanding the amount of money made by controlled foreign corporations that can be taxed. Second, Flint still operates without a guarantee of clean water to its good citizens four years after the state of Michigan poisoned its water in a bid to save money -- and that very same state government has just agreed to let the Nestlé corporation pump out even more clean water per minute from the Great Lakes Basin at a pittance. If that doesn't register with you, then frankly your authority to complain about BIG GUMMINT SPENDINGZ!!!! is limited. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support clean water infrastructure by supporting the WATER Act.

H.R. 3671, the OFF Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, would, as its title suggests, help wean us off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy sources. The bill would mandate (among other things) that 80% of our electricity come from "clean energy" sources and 80% of our cars be zero-emission cars by 2027. But the bill doesn't just issue mandates that enterprising, can-do Americans should be able to meet -- it also offers the retraining and financial assistance that would help fossil fuel workers transition to a renewable energy economy. Other countries produce far more of their energy from renewable sources than we do; the only reason we lag is that we coddle fossil fuel corporation CEOs, who should, frankly, be leading the charge to renewable energy, not blocking it. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a renewable energy future by passing the OFF Fossil Fuels Act.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Public Citizen helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to fund a paper ballot voting system for Pennsylvania. We have reached an unexpected watershed in America, with our Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee actually calling for paper ballot elections in America (as a way of fighting Russian meddling, though it works just as well to keep computers from disappearing our votes), while Pennsylvania's own Secretary of State, Robert Torres, has mandated that the state phase out paperless voting machines by the end of 2019. You may have noticed that a major election year will be happening before then, and Pennsylvania will be many tens of millions of dollars short in its effort to replace paperless voting machines, so let's impress upon them the urgency of finding this money. Surely they can find some corporate welfare to cut.

Finally, Congress is actually contemplating building more "usable," "low-yield" nuclear weapons. To deter Russia, of course, although both Russia and America have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world hundreds of times over already; what more "deterrence" is needed, or even possible? Proponents also say "low-yield" nuclear weapons give us more flexibility, though we already have low-yield nukes, and "low-yield" sure doesn't mean harmless -- a low-yield nuclear weapon will still wreak far more havoc than any military objective could possibly be worth. (You see, if you poison someone's home, forever, they tend to stay angry at you, forever, and be a source of potential conflict, forever.) One should hence question the wisdom of making nuclear weapons more "usable." The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the construction of any new "low-yield" nuclear weapons.

Action: discrimination, fossil fuel funding, and campaign finance reform.

S. 2525, the so-called First Amendment Defense Act, would not "defend the First Amendment" so much as give various bigots the "right" to discriminate against people they fear will give them cooties. No, their position does not deserve more civility than that. The First Amendment prevents our government from putting you in jail for your speech and prevents our government from establishing a state religion, but refusing to serve people because they're gay isn't "free speech," it's discrimination, and when our laws say you can't refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple because "conscience," our government isn't "establishing a state religion," but preventing you from discriminating against people who also have rights. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to protect everyone's rights by rejecting the First Amendment Defense Act.

Meanwhile, U.S. Bank's CEO said last year -- in the wake of popular pressure following the Dakota Access protests -- that his corporation would stop financing gas and oil pipelines. But, possibly because we can't look at everything at once, U.S. Bank has pumped some $2 billion into these pipelines, including nearly $500 million into Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation behind Dakota Access. Just so happens, however, that U.S. Bank's annual shareholder meeting is later on this week, so Climate Truth helps you tell U.S. Bank to divest from oil and gas producers. You know what would help get us off oil and gas, besides big energy corporations throwing money into solar and wind? Big banks deciding to invest more in solar and wind! I mean, don't our best and brightest entrepreneurs always look to the future and plan ahead? We may have to pressure them a bit harder to get them to be those people.

Finally, H.R. 4077/S. 1959, the Honest Ads Act, would put online political ads under the same scrutiny the law already gives to print and broadcast ads, meaning voters could more easily find out who's funding them. We couldn't find out who's funding these ads as easily as we could if Congress had passed the DISCLOSE Act on any of the multitudinous opportunities they had to do that, but online political ads have escaped even the amount of scrutiny other political ads get, because the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 specifies only print, broadcast, and "satellite" communication. Recall that in 1971 ARPANET was in its infancy, and it'd be 20 years before the High Performance Computing and Communication Act (authored by one Sen. Albert Gore, Jr.) kick-started the internet. So Issue One helps you tell your Congressfolk to support campaign finance reform by passing the Honest Ads Act.

Around the table: more thoughts about voting rights, media coverage, Presidential power, right-wing messaging, renewable energy, and free speech.

Aaron Sankin at Reveal reminds us of the other problem with the notorious Interstate Crosscheck voter info database: it's vulnerable to hackers, and thus exposes the personal data of millions of voters to identity theft. I wonder if that was a feature, not a bug! Seriously, I'll be happy if this is the reason the twenty-plus states still using Crosscheck to purge voters stop using it, though eight states have apparently stopped using Crosscheck for that purpose but are still sending voter data through an insecure system. (Also, consider that even though these states still sending voter data to Crosscheck may not be using Crosscheck to purge their own voter rolls, other states may be using that info to purge theirs.)

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept reports that Muslim terror suspects get on average seven times the "liberal" media attention that white terror suspects get, and their sentences are on average four times longer. This is not a terribly surprising development, once you recall how urgently our "liberal" media has rushed to portray various white terror suspects (the Planned Parenthood bomber and the Austin bomber leap to mind) with adjectives like "troubled," a courtesy our "liberal" media most emphatically does not extend to terrorists of the more Muslim persuasion, though surely they're just as human as white people, right? In any case, it sure is nice to have some hard data behind it.

Stan Collender at Forbes suggests that our President might try to get around the most recent appropriations bill by simply refusing to appropriate the money as the law has directed. And then dance around with no pants on, no doubt, while his votaries all squeal HE DID IT FOR US!!!!! If a President refuses to appropriate money as Congress has mandated, Congress gets to pass another bill forcing him to do so -- which means that if this President decides to throw up his hands, we'd be relying on Republican-held Congresses to do more than stamp their feet about it. Like Republicans didn't already think of all of that! It's win-win for them -- they get their cherished spending cuts and they get to blame the President for them!

Dig the balls on Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker, in the wake of Republicans losing yet another election there, saying that the left is the side of "anger and hatred." What recent Republican policy prescription has not been driven by "anger and hatred" -- specifically, the anger and hatred of Our Glorious Elites toward the American people? It's good, at least, to be reminded why Scott Walker is so dangerous -- not just because he remembers to claim that his side is the side of "optimism," but because he'll say up is down like up really is down, and thus persuades people who don't have the time (or the compulsion!) to attend these matters as closely as we do, but who do respond intuitively to "people who seem to know what they're talking about."

Portugal produced just about all of its electrical requirements for the month of March via renewable energy. Now, more than half of March's renewable power yield came from hydroelectricity, and not every nation's borders are nearly half coastline like Portugal's, but Portugal also met over 40 percent of its energy needs with wind power, and I can think of a few well-developed nations that don't do that well. Please, right-wingers, don't squeal that Portugal still had to use some fossil fuels over the month of March due to renewable energy storage issues, because a) it wasn't much and b) that's no justification for handing out corporate welfare to fossil fuel corporations or drilling off every conceivable coast.

Finally, Laura Ingraham just took a week off her Fox News show after being on the blunt end of a massive boycott for ridiculing one of the Parkland school shooting survivors, and some "liberal" media journalists are complaining that boycotts are bad and you should always meet speech with more speech, but Atrios reminds us why that's utter bunk. It isn't just that you and I can't get our speech out there the way a Laura Ingraham can, or that the First Amendment doesn't actually guarantee you a right to a paid gig for your speech, let alone immunity from criticism or adverse action from advertisers and activists -- it's also that people like Laura Ingraham are not actual journalists. They're what the industry calls "talent," and what I call (when I'm feeling very generous) "newsreaders." Journalists do seem awfully upset about the power of boycotts these days; does that mean they'd be even more upset about a la carte cable packaging?

Action: protecting free speech and public lands.

H.R. 1865, the so-called Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, would not only fail to help efforts to stop sex trafficking, but would actually chill online free speech. How? By holding internet service providing corporations liable for any sex trafficking arranged through their networks even without their knowledge. You think an ISP can monitor every piece of network traffic that flows through their servers? Of course not! That means ISPs will simply start censoring people left and right. Our laws already hold ISPs liable if they know about sex trafficking on their networks and do nothing about it, so H.R. 1865 is the epitome of law-and-order ball-swinging -- blaming the blameless, pretending you're tough when you're weak, and prosecuting so many people you can't effectively prosecute actual wrongdoers. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect free speech by rejecting H.R. 1865.

Meanwhile, our Bureau of Land Management, just 18 short months ago, enacted the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, which protects upwards of 22 million acres of California's Mojave and Sonoran Deserts from development, and also protects over three dozen unique species of animals. Guess what our Bureau of Land Management wants to do now that President Manchild runs things? Why, open up these areas to mining and gas and oil drilling, of course! That's offensive on the face of it, and when you realize that the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan also set aside land for renewable energy development, it's doubly offensive. But remember, kids: our President doesn't care about you unless you're someone's boss. Maybe if we were to remind him that solar and wind power corporations also have bosses, he'd change his tune a bit. In the meantime, CREDO helps you tell our BLM to reject efforts to open up protected federal lands to polluters.

UPDATE. The House has passed H.R. 1865, so redirect your efforts to calling your Senators to tell them to reject it. Tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers are, as always, in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a smartphone).

Action: protecting internet freedom, election security, and endangered species.

The FCC has formally published its nefarious net neutrality rule in the Federal Register as of February 22, which means Congress has 60 days from that date to pass a "resolution of disapproval" that would overturn it, so you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and ask them to support such a resolution. (I still don't have a bill number for it.) You should have an easy time arguing the point with your Senators: the FCC net neutrality repeal rule opens the floodgates for internet service providing corporations to block websites they don't like, to slow down websites they don't like, and generally inhibit your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than be herded into junk news ghettoes as ISPs would undoubtedly prefer. For all that, we're having trouble getting a 51st Senate vote in favor. So you may make the difference.

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2261, the Secure Elections Act. S. 2261 -- an actually-bipartisan bill with a motley crew of six sponsors, from James Lankford to Martin Heinrich -- would give states the financial support they need to update their voting machines so that they're safe from hackers, which is a big deal, not merely because we deserve secure elections, but because some 40 states have electronic voting machines that don't provide voters a whole lot of security. Attend Sec. 5(d), and you'll see that S. 2261 also essentially mandates paper ballots for federal elections; it doesn't do so for state and local elections, which you may rightly criticize -- and/or use against your Tea Party uncle when he says S. 2261 means TEH GUBMINT TAKEZ OVERZ!!!!! In the meantime, I'm not letting the perfect murder the good any more than I let the venal and foolish murder the good -- though, in my experience, the latter task takes up far more of my time.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to destroy the Endangered Species Act, then the Environmental Defense Fund still helps you do that. Why do Congressfolk try to destroy the Endangered Species Act? Because it happens to prevent some of their biggest donors from drilling for oil and gas wherever they like. But do oil and gas drilling corporations get all the say around here? Should we blithely sacrifice animal species forever so that corporate CEOs can make more money? And do we not have better ways to wean ourselves off foreign oil, like solar and wind power? Despite the obvious answers to these questions, too many Congressfolk want to automatically anoint state and local data as the "best available science," and they'd also like to hamstring species rehabilitation efforts with "economic impact" statements that only consider the "impact" to oil and gas drillers. So let's get to it.

Around the table: health care, deficits, Russia, fossil fuels, and liberal chances in right-wing districts.

Our President proposes expanding temporary, cut-rate health insurance plans so that they're considerably less temporary. And the result? More young, healthy people will roll the dice with these plans that don't have to cover the health care issues (including pre-existing conditions) that all other health insurance plans have to cover -- which will help make all the better health care plans more expensive. He might as well call it making health insurance suck again! Seriously, when I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

The incomparable Dean Baker reminds us that (all together now) Republicans obviously don't care about deficits, despite the "liberal" media's insistence that they really, really do. "This rule should be taught in Journalism 101," he writes: "Reporters should not infer views or beliefs." That's obviously true, but what's even more important is that growth-through-tax-cuts-for-the-rich has never worked -- it didn't work under Mr. Reagan, it didn't work under Bush the Lesser, and it won't work under our current President. You'd think the "liberal" media would have noted the disaster that Sam Brownback's tax-cutting "experiment" has been in Kansas just recently, but for the "liberal" media, yesterday is always another country.

Cato Institute senior fellow/Soul Coughing fan Julian Sanchez advances a novel theory: "Russia Wanted Trump to Win. And It Wanted to Get Caught." Mainly, "Project Latkha didn’t merely aim to influence the outcome of the election, but also its tone, and Americans’ attitudes toward their own democratic institutions." Also, "If we run with the hypothesis that Russia’s core goal was to sow doubt about the integrity and fairness of American elections — and, by implication, erode the credibility of any criticism aimed at Russia’s — then the ultimate exposure of their interference may well have been viewed not as frustrating that aim but as one more perverse way of advancing it." And if Congress passes laws stifling online free speech, that'll only remind you of Mr. bin Laden's long game -- not to take away America's freedoms, but to get America to do that for him.

Former U.S. House Rep. Dennis Kucinich, running in a rather crowded Democratic primary for Governor of Ohio, says he'll stop all gas and oil drilling there if he gets elected. The flesh is willing -- someone should have long ago said "(f)resh water and clean water are not negotiable issues" -- but the observer who criticizes Mr. Kucinich's plan for not emphasizing what he would do in the absence of gas and oil is spot-on. Mr. Kucinich's public works program concerns infrastructure and statewide public broadband, which is good, but doesn't seem to specify solar and wind projects, so that's a missed opportunity.

Finally, a Pennsylvania Democratic operative said this earlier this week: "Democrats have to realize that Republicans can run conservative candidates everywhere and get to 218 House seats. Democrats can’t run liberals everywhere and get to a majority." Of course, Republicans are running mostly reactionary candidates, not conservative ones, but I'd also question the meaning of the word "liberal," here: if "liberal" means "social liberals who let corporations do whatever they like," I'd completely agree with his assessment. But if "liberal" means "economic populist," then I think he's dead wrong. Liberal economic populists can win anywhere, anytime -- as long as the consultant class doesn't get to them first.

Action: "free" trade, Constitutional war-making, and offshore drilling.

With NAFTA renegotiations still going on, Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that any NAFTA renegotiation "puts people and planet before corporate profits," as the petition succinctly puts it. During his Tuesday night State of the Union address, President Trump called for trade deals that "protect American workers and American intellectual property." But the trouble with that isn't just that he's packed his cabinet with "free" traders, but that, for him, "protecting American workers" means nothing so much as getting rid of clean air and clean water regulations, which protects corporate bottom lines more than it protects coal miners' jobs. How odd that he advanced "intellectual property," too, since in previous "free" trade deals "protecting intellectual property" mainly meant protecting corporate drug patents longer so other countries couldn't make generics. So we're going to need to remind the President about our priorities, not his.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4837, the aptly-named No Unconstitutional Strike Against North Korea Act, would prevent Mr. Trump from using the 2001 AUMF to launch a military strike on North Korea and would refuse to fund any such strike unless Congress declares war first. H.R. 4837 doesn't "outlaw" war with North Korea, but merely prevents Mr. Trump from going to war on his own, and while supporting H.R. 4837 will prompt some Americans into calling you a "snowflake," remember that they are the real snowflakes if they let their own insatiable rage prevent them from adhering to our Constitution and to law and order. Hence the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight warmongering by supporting H.R. 4837. Don't brook any silliness from your Congressfolk about their "unwillingness to tie the President's hands" -- being Commander-in-Chief means literally nothing until and unless Congress declares war. That's how it's supposed to work.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Trump Administration to abandon its plans to open up almost all American coasts to oil and gas drilling, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. The Sierra Club reminds us that the Obama Administration, after overwhelming public feedback, abandoned plans to hand out oil and gas drilling leases off our coasts in the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans; what changed between then and now? A manchild President who cares nothing about workers and everything about other bosses like himself, that's what. No, his plan to drill-everywhere-and-screw-the-consequences won't "create jobs" for oil and gas workers so much as it'll create unearned income for already-too-rich CEOs who live to get by with as few workers as possible. A visionary President would put good Americans to work retooling our electric grid so it can run on solar and wind power. A visionary politician would even run on that.

Action: internet freedom, and offshore drilling.

I still don't have a bill number for the proposed "resolution of disapproval" that would repeal the FCC's recent "Restoring Internet Freedom for Corporations and Certainly Not for You Little People" rule (which, as you can probably tell from my exaggerated title, itself repealed the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules), but you should still get on the horn with your Senators and tell them to support such a resolution. The resolution reportedly has 50 votes -- all 49 Senate Democrats plus Republican Susan Collins of Maine -- and only needs one more to pass the Senate. You can find phone numbers for your Senators using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or beneath this post, if you're on a smartphone) -- and you can also find tools for those Republicans Senators you hope might join the struggle, a thin hope, to be sure, but John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) occasionally get it in their heads to piss off the Trump Administration. Send Mr. McCain a get-well wish if you call him, since he's not presently well enough to even vote on bills.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to send a public comment to the Trump Administration demanding that they reverse their plan to open up all the coasts except those of their cronies' to expanded oil and gas drilling, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. What does expanded oil and gas drilling do? It gives us more oil and gas, in theory anyway, but we hardly need more of that choking off our clean air and muddying our clean water -- we need more renewable energy development in America, even as renewable energy sources like solar and wind are starting to become competitive price-wise with oil and gas. And if you responded to that sentence with a ha! If they're competitive, why do they need Big Gummint's help? Ha ha ha you liberals suck!, well, congratulations, because you're the moron who just told my audience why oil and gas don't need all the Big Gummint handouts, either. Thanks for playing, though, and remember to wipe off your screen.

Action: CHIP, offshore drilling, and antibiotic abuse.

As you know, Congress spent almost all of last year cutting taxes for corporations and the rich and trying to destroy our health care system, but they did not extend the Children's Health Insurance Program, which helps states insure some nine million children. CHIP's funding authorization expired on September 30, and some states are starting to run out of money! All of this really should be a devastating campaign ad all by itself, but Democrats would have to run them, and I suspect Democrat consultants are already telling all these upstarts running for Congressional seats that they should be "civil." But why should we be "civil" to people who do nothing but hurt people? Because we might have to "work with them"? When you encounter people who won't work, you work around them. Moms rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize CHIP already. But feel free to phone your Reps and Senators instead, and add that we won't forget what they've done.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has announced their plan to open almost all of America's vast coastlines to offshore drilling (except in Florida, of course, where they aim to burnish Gov. Scott's rep ahead of a possible Senate bid). But, as Penn Environment says in their latest email missive, "when you drill, you spill" -- there's no sense squealing that spills happen zero point zero zero eight percent of the time or whatever when one spill can wreck an ecosystem (not to mention the economy that depends on it!) for decades. And developing solar and wind power remains anathema to President Bigballs, who no doubt finds wind and solar executives too small-time for his taste. Still, no one will one day say we lost our clean air and clean water, but at least a few CEOs got to live even higher on the hog for a while!, so Penn Environment helps you tell the Trump Administration to abandon its plans for expanded offshore drilling.

Finally, the fast food corporation McDonald's has, commendably, declared it would source its chicken only from farms that only give animals antibiotics when they're sick. But McDonald's has not committed to sourcing their beef from similarly sensible farms, and we know McDonald's for its hamburgers more than its chicken sandwiches, amirite? As we know, factory farms tend to use antibiotics on animals to fatten them up and help them endure their squalid living conditions a little better, to the point where four out of five antibiotics in America go to nominally healthy feed animals. Thus we now we risk a civilization where superbugs could render antibiotics useless and the next cut you get could kill you, just like in the 19th century. But PennPIRG helps you tell McDonald's to do the right thing and gets its beef from antibiotic-free sources. If they did it, it'd be a big deal -- a lot of people eat McDonald's hamburgers, after all.

Around the table: the challenge of being crazy in a crazy time, and other issues.

Trump Administration allows states to start imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients. No use arguing that including various forms of "community engagement" in these requirements gives these Medicaid recipients a soft landing, because if you're too sick to work, you're too sick to take care of someone else who's sick, too. Also, most Medicaid recipients do work -- they just don't make enough money to afford private health insurance, because their bosses don't pay them enough, though they sure do pay themselves well enough. So Medicaid is not an "entitlement" -- and you or I might be a catastrophe or two away from needing it ourselves.

The next time President Trump calls some country that gives us a lot of immigrants a "shithole" country, he might do well to remember that to the degree that "Haiti and African nations" are unable to provide for their citizens to the degree that our government does, it may be because our government is among the many Western governments that have spent centuries plundering them. Yes, it's an unpleasant truth, but facing unpleasant truths is what helps folks grow and mature. Didn't conservatives used to say that all the time?

In the middle of a House vote rubber-stamping more government spying on good Americans, President Trump took positions both for and against the bill on Twitter. First he wondered if the Obama Administration had used these spying powers to go after him, then he said the bill was really about "foreign guys" on "foreign land" (which, uh, no) and that "(w)e need it!" Republicans have no standing to accuse anyone else of "flip-flopping" ever again -- though, having no shame, of course they will.

Good news, everyone! The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (or FERC) has unanimously rejected the Energy Department's plan to subsidize coal and nuclear power plants. The Energy Department proposed subsidizing these plants, supposedly as a way of making the electric grid more reliable, but -- as the article says repeatedly in a remarkable display of message discipline -- this was really a "coal bailout." I would have added that this was "our government trying to pick winners and losers," since solar and wind are starting to get competitive price-wise. A lot of Trump voters think this is the kind of bailout that's OK, because it'll put them back to work. But if we were to put them to work building out a renewable energy grid, they'd more likely see it for what it is.

Finally, infamous former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, now running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Arizona, still says Mr. Obama's birth certificate is a "forgery (sic) document" and that Congress should pass a "law" or a "regulation" requiring a background check of Presidential candidates. The most famous and obnoxious birther of them all may be President, but Mr. Obama has been out of office for almost a year now, and I'm not sure Mr. Arpaio will get people riled up enough merely by rehashing his greatest hits. You have to find new crazy, after all. Maybe Mr. Arpaio's past it.

Action: internet freedom for America, and renewable energy for Puerto Rico.

Last week, India's Telecom Regulatory Authority recommended strong net neutrality regulations protecting consumers' rights to go where they want on the internet, unfettered by corporate attempts to herd them into junk news or junk pop culture ghettos; of course, our pedantic right-wing FCC Chair appointed by a President who got only 46% of the popular vote wants to take our great country in the other direction -- not the direction of freedom for the American people, but the direction of "freedom" for corporations to make the American people less free, and gouge them in the process. So, though we've already left over 20 million comments supporting net neutrality with the FCC (most of which they've already come out and said they've ignored), you can keep calling your House Reps and Senators (and the three right-wing FCC Commissioners) about the matter, while Battle for the Net helps you find a pro-net neutrality protest tomorrow. (Verizon used to employ our FCC Chair, after all.) They want to silence us, so let's make sure they fail.

Meanwhile, Hurricanes Irma and Maria destroyed most of Puerto Rico's power infrastructure, as you know, and the Trump Administration has been handing out taxpayer-funded contracts to thoroughly undeserving corporations -- but Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to help Puerto Rico get power and clean water back, and to help them do so with renewable energy. The coal industry is all full of their TEH SUN SETZ TEH WIND DIEZ!!!!! billboards, but coal, oil, and gas are the real unreliable fuels, because they're all going to run out one day, and probably make our planet uninhabitable first. Meanwhile, the sun shines every day, and the wind always picks up eventually, there is such a thing as battery storage, and you can put up more solar panels and wind turbines a hell of a lot more easily than you can dig into the ground to find fossil fuels -- plus you won't be polluting the planet anywhere near as much. The good folks of Puerto Rico (American citizens, by the way!) deserve a lot better from our government, so let's make our government do better.

Action: "free" trade, and corporate welfare.

Replace NAFTA helps you tell your House Reps to reject any trade agreement, including the currently-being-renegotiated NAFTA, that includes the nefarious "investor-state tribunal" as a mechanism for resolving trade disputes. "Investor-state tribunals" (a.k.a. investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS) allow foreign corporations to sue our government if our government passes laws that "hurt" those corporations' investors -- and if they win, they can exact tribute from the American taxpayer. If you're on the left, you may worry about foreign corporations suing over clean air and clean water laws, and if you're on the right, you may worry about foreign corporations suing to end "right-to-work" laws at the state level, but either way, you worry about submitting to international tribunals that can nullify our laws. "Free" trade deals tend to have an ISDS mechanism, and it gets abused -- witness the corporations rushing into Spain to "develop solar power" right before that country started scaling down its solar subsidies, merely so they could sue Spain and win money! It can happen here -- unless we fight.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reject Energy Secretary Perry's proposal to force taxpayers to subsidize aging coal and nuclear power plants. Specifically, the proposal would require utilities to fund any coal and nuclear plants, even those that should be retired, as long as they keep 90 days' worth of fuel on-site. Presumably, the Trump Administration would sell this plan as a) something that improves the reliability of the electric grid and b) something that would keep coal miners employed. Of course, if you've been sentient over the last half-century or so, then you know that the electric grid is already quite reliable, and doesn't need the help -- indeed, Mr. Perry's own Department of Energy recently came to this very same conclusion in spite of him! -- and employing coal miners in decaying and noxious coal plants isn't nearly as good an idea as retraining them to build and maintain solar and wind plants, though these items are the real enemy as far as the Trump Administration is concerned. But they don't get all the say in America -- we do.

Around the table: an hour of sunshine for a million years of rain.

Senate Republicans vote to repeal the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's rule forbidding forced arbitration clauses in customer bank contracts. And they did it at night, without warning, because that's the only way for cowards to serve evil anymore. But Democrats deserve a big chunk of the blame for all of this, for utterly failing to use their power on behalf of their constituents all these years, which has left them with the prostrate Congressional minorities they now have.

Want to read something really depressing? Molly Ball at The Atlantic describes how the centrist Democrats at Third Way went on a "listening tour" of the midwest, but only seem to have heard the things they wanted to hear. And was it a thick-headed racist or ball-swinging sexist who finally made the Third Way hack throw up her hands? No, of course not -- it was the organic farming community and their alleged sense that "it was right and everybody else wasn’t" that got her hackles up. Typical. And Democrat politicos will listen to this self-serving swill and continue to lose races to Trumpholes.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, the Arizona Senate race is not in any way a "toss-up" pretty much regardless of Sen. Flake's retirement. And if you're imagining that Republicans are screwed because they won't find "a first-tier candidate who is acceptable to both establishment and Trump Republicans," then you'll be in for a surprise. Arizona Republicans will serve up the Trumphole Kelli Ward, and because it's Arizona, she'll beat the center-right Democrat who "can win." I mean, when you read that "Democrats would like nothing more than a Sinema-Ward general election," you should be scared.

The Union of Concerned Scientists provides "The Disinformation Playbook," a helpful guide to "How Business Interests Deceive, Misinform, and Buy Influence at the Expense of Public Health and Safety." The short list: they fake scientific research, they go all blitzkrieg on actual scientists, they pretend there are "other opinions" about science when there really aren't, they "buy credibility" via alliances with "academia and professional societies," and they flat-out manipulate government officials. You already knew or suspected most of these, but it's still nice to have the other team's playbook.

Finally, The Guardian tells us (because why should our own media tell us?) all about the Republican Mayor of Georgetown, Texas whose city gets all its electricity from renewable energy sources. Not because he's a tree-hugger, either: he found the prices of gas and wind and solar to be about the same, which is where it's been trending for years, but he also found the renewable energy providers willing to offer longer contracts, because that's what new technologies do when they're smart. Result: exactly the kind of clear-eyed decision-making of which most other politicians seem to be completely incapable. Think we can prompt Mr. Ross to mount a primary challenge to Ted Cruz? Or Greg Abbott?

Action: protecting the Rohingya, and promoting renewable energy.

Avaaz helps you tell our government to cut off support for the government of Burma until it stops the ongoing massacre of the Rohingya people by Burmese soldiers. Even with the 2015 electoral victory of the famous political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi, the military still holds far too much power in Burmese politics, and after a Rohingya raid on a police station, the military has killed several hundred Rohingya and displaced tens of thousands more, largely by burning their homes and villages. If you're inclined to argue that "the Rohingya started it," please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider whether killing hundreds and displacing thousands is a fitting punishment for a pre-dawn raid, and 3) recall that the Burmese have persecuted the Rohingya (whom they now routinely describe as terrorists) for a very long time, and it could have something to do with the fact that the Rohingya are mostly Muslim and the Burmese are mostly Buddhist. At least we, as good Americans, can exert some pressure on our government to use its leverage on Burma's government to rein in its military.

Meanwhile, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) has introduced H.R. 3671, the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, which would ban the use of fossil fuels in the production of electricity or automobiles by 2035. H.R. 3671 would also end fossil fuel subsidies, impose a moratorium on new fossil fuel projects (like pipelines), extend tax credits for wind and solar production, and ease the transition of fossil-fuel workers to the new power grid by extending unemployment benefits, health insurance, and job training to those workers for several years. You know, just in case your Trump-supporting uncle was about to say BUT TEH WORKERZ!!!!! It's a fairly ambitious plan (more ambitious than China's plans, which we discussed yesterday), but if you've attended the falling prices of solar and wind power over the years, you know it can be done -- and you also know fossil fuel corporations will do anything to hold on to their unearned power. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support renewable energy by supporting H.R. 3671.

Action: government oppression, offshore drilling, and bad media.

The government of Turkey sure has been on a roll lately, purging itself of thousands of workers President Erdogan has deemed insufficiently loyal after an apparent attempted coup in 2016, and arresting and detaining many more private citizens, including 10 human rights workers at a meeting at a hotel near Istanbul about a month ago. Among these detainees is an Avaaz staff member named Özlem, and Avaaz helps you call for her release. Also among them is Idil Eser, head of Amnesty International's Turkish branch, and Amnesty International helps you call for her release as well. If you can put a face to Turkey's oppression, you make it that much harder for Turkey to oppress folks. If you can put a relatively prestigious face (like Ms. Eser's) on Turkey's reign of terror, you can certainly move the needle a bit. But if you can also put a relatively unknown face (like Özlem's) on it, you can remind good folks all over the world that folks like them get caught up in government oppression, too. We might also find it useful to remind President Trump (whose Administration has, surprisingly, condemned the arrests, instead of ignoring them) that the Big Stick of Bad PR can come his way if he gets ideas.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration wants to open our coasts to offshore drilling again, apparently thinking we've all forgotten the Spillageddon in the Gulf a mere seven years ago, a spill that made British Petroleum look like the most heartless corporation in the world (in a contest that always has a lot of entrants!) and devastated the local economies of Louisiana and Florida for years to come. But, you know, some oil or gas CEO needs to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so to hell with what the people need! Naturally the Department of the Interior will only take comments on the offshore drilling plan for another six days, so Food and Water Watch helps you tell our government to protect our water and our livelihoods and stop new offshore drilling. No use arguing this is about "American energy independence" -- real American energy independence would begin with expanding renewable energy sources like solar and wind. Trouble is, that program would also grant us independence from oil and gas CEOs getting all the say about everything, and we can't have that in the greatest democratic experiment in Earth's history!

Finally, Media Matters helps you tell major corporations to stop advertising on Sean Hannity's Fox News show. While it's true that Mr. Hannity's program has morphed from a garden variety right-wing hackfest into a full-blown Trump TV operation, basically we should be encouraging corporate advertisers to run away from his program because of everything he's ever said. (OK, he hasn't been as bad on gays as other right-winger blowhards, but that's nothing to take to the Pearly Gates.) And just to review: the First Amendment protects you from your government; it does not protect you from your employer or from your advertisers, and it certainly does not protect you from activists, critics, or customers. I say this not just to pre-empt charges that a campaign targeting Mr. Hannity's advertisers somehow "oppresses" him, but to pre-empt corporate attempts to expand this "right" into a weapon they could wield against, say, a disgruntled customer's negative online review of their product, or even a customer's desire to buy a competitor's product, or no product. When our politicians constantly whine about the First Amendment when someone criticizes them, these things are not so hard to imagine.

Action: health care, Medicare drug prices, and clean water.

Sen. McConnell (E-KY) has postponed voting on the latest iteration of the Senate health care "reform" bill, ostensibly because Sen. McCain (R-AZ) just had surgery, but call your Senators anyway and tell them to reject this bill, too. Why? Certainly because it injures Medicaid just as much as it did before, but also because it would do a brand new injury to Obamacare exchange users by allowing health insurance corporations sell a crappy, high-deductible plan as long as they sell Obamacare-compliant plans as well. Not only does that allow insurers to evade the pre-existing conditions ban in their crappy, high-deductible plans, it siphons off most of the healthy people from the good plans, which means sicker people will use the good plans, which will make the good plans more expensive. The new Senate bill excises three (but not all) of the tax major-cuts-for-the-rich, but don't celebrate: if the Senate passes this bill, the House's bill will still have all those tax cuts in it, and guess what'll happen next? The reconciliation bill will have all those tax-cuts-for-the-rich in it. I mean, I'm no oracle, and I know they'll do that. So let's stop them.

Meanwhile, Sen. Sanders (I-VT) says he'll wait until after this whole Senate health care "reform" bill is over and done with before he introduces a single-payer health care bill, but no power in the universe constrains us from expressing our will about health care issues, so Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices. Medicare has only had a prescription drug program since 2003, and one of the prices of creating it was that Medicare could not negotiate for better drug prices with big pharmaceutical corporations, you know, because that was "big government" or something. You won't be persuaded by that argument, of course, if you think of "big government" as our government, nor will you be persuaded if you think lower drug prices for seniors is a better goal than inflated salaries for big pharma CEOs, which is basically the choice here. Oh, and don't count on President Trump's "leadership" on this matter; he thinks Medicare is the biggest price-fixer on the market, despite its complete inability to negotiate drug prices! That's why you never count on "Presidential leadership" -- and you only count on your leadership.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to keep banning fracking in the Delaware River area. The Delaware River still provides drinking water to 15 million Americans, so fouling it up with carcinogenic fracking chemicals would be a bad idea. Don't let right-wingers browbeat you with their ZOMG WE NEEDZ TO GET OFF TEH FOREIGN OILZ!!!!!, because if we get ourselves off foreign oil but can't drink our own damn water, then we've played the game wrong. Also, there are other ways to get yourself off foreign oil -- solar and wind power, for example. And certainly don't let right-wingers drone on about the cost to small businesses and the higher energy bills, because, again, our descendents won't be sitting around a fire telling each other that even though no one can drink the water now, it sure was a good thing that electricity bills were a little cheaper! If that's even true, of course -- I mean, really, between "lower electricity bills for regular folks" and "more unearned money for executives so they're better able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home," the latter is the more likely outcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: "free" trade, oppression of activists, and climate change.

President Trump, as you know, has informed Congress of his intention to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, a.k.a. NAFTA. I'm quite pleased he withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," which more than one observer described as "NAFTA on steroids," but you can excuse me for thinking Mr. Trump doesn't really have the American people's best interests at heart, as evidenced by his stated intention to keep the most odious thing about NAFTA -- the "investor-state tribunals" that let corporations exact tribute from American taxpayers for having the temerity to pass laws that "cost" those corporations money (you know, like labor and clean air/clean water laws). And here you thought Donald Trump was the law and order President! I'd hope a good lawyer would argue at one of these tribunals that good environmental regulations actually save corporations money in health care costs, but I'd rather defend our right to make laws. Hence Sign for Good helps you tell the Trump Administration to negotiate a trade pact that actually does right by American workers.

Meanwhile, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressperson to help pressure Israel to drop charges against Palestinian activist Issa Amro. Mr. Amro founded Youth Against Settlements in 2003, after successfully campaigning to reopen Palestine Polytechnic University (where he was an engineering student), which the Israeli army had closed; for the past decade and a half he has preached nonviolence and civil disobedience against the Israeli occupation, and for his trouble he's been arrested dozens of times. Now Israel has indicted him on 18 charges, and some of these -- like "insulting a soldier" and "spitting in the direction of a settler" -- sure bear the mark of a state that can't win an argument on the merits. And you couldn't reasonably claim that Mr. Amro's commitment to nonviolence is a sham (if that were true, I think we'd know by now!), nor could you claim that Mr. Amro's aims are so unpalatable it doesn't matter what his methods are, particularly when we've founded a nation on precisely the notion that folks should be free to express themselves in a civilized manner, regardless of their ideas.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell ExxonMobil and Chevron to help fight climate change. This action alert comes hot on the heels of the news that an astounding 62% of ExxonMobil shareholders approved a resolution at last week's annual shareholder meeting calling for ExxonMobil to plan for the changes in its business model that fighting climate change would require; that resolution is non-binding, of course, but if you're a CEO, you ignore a six-in-ten majority of your shareholders at your own peril. Resolutions involving climate change and corporate lobbying also gained ground at the annual Chevron shareholder meeting. I've long said that shareholders don't care exclusively about money, and though the behavior of shareholders (particularly during the Obama years) has sometimes challenged that belief, I'm pleased to see my faith in them rewarded here. Yet I'm also quite irritated that shareholders ever had to tell fossil-fuel executives (our best and brightest, supposedly) to do the obvious. The sun and the wind always come back eventually, but fossil fuels will be gone sooner than we think.

Action: fighting cruel budgets, polluters, and banksters.

What's not to like about the Trump budget? Why, that it throws people off Medicaid so more poor workers will die, that it cuts food stamps so more kids and seniors will starve, that it cuts Social Security disability funding so workers who get hurt can become poor, that it cuts student loan programs so more students will be crushed by debt, and that it slashes renewable energy funding and clean air and clean water enforcement so Trump cronies can make even more unearned money and the rest of us can get sicker. OK, I don't know if Mr. Trump intended all those things with his budget, but intent matters a lot less than result, and those will be the results. And if anyone tells you that TRUMP HAZ TEH PAID FAMILY LEAVEZ HA HA YOU ARE TEH STUPIDZ!!!!!, remind them that Mr. Trump's six-week paid family leave program is, like his infrastructure plan, a boutique plan. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) and keep those anti-Trump budget phone calls to your Reps and Senators coming.

Meanwhile, I'm no great fan of the Paris climate accord, but I'm not above using Mr. Trump's withdrawal therefrom as a news hook to persuade you to tell your Governor to work harder to protect good Americans from the ill effects of pollution and climate change, as Penn Environment helps you do. When you can't get our federal government to do something, you can still get your state and local governments to do it -- indeed, it really ought to be easier, since you have fewer people to influence, and it's also how a lot of great change happens in America, and if today's state governments also seem only to respond to their biggest donors, that only means we must redouble our efforts. Renewable energy standards -- you know, the ones Rick Perry is so anxious to get rid of, how's that for "small government"? -- have come about entirely at the state level, and with Mr. Trump caring more about his fossil fuel cronies than the real job creators in the up-and-coming solar and wind industries, our state governments are our best bet for renewable energy investment, too. So let's get to stepping.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 10, the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, then People's Action still helps you do that. You might think that conservatism animates Republican politicians these days, but you'd be wrong -- nothing animates Republican politicians so much as delivering more unearned money to their biggest donors, whether through more tax-cuts-for-the-rich or more "relief" from the "burden" of regulation. But ask yourself: why is keeping banksters from cheating you a "burden"? Why is keeping financial predators from taking your home and your savings a "burden"? Frankly, the unchecked power of banksters, who do nothing but play casino games with our economy and want nothing so much as to make us all their debt slaves, is the real burden. And they crashed our economy not even a decade ago with their casino games, and given the "freedom" Congress wants to give them, they'll do it again and again and again -- and extract tribute in the form of bailouts again and again and again. Well, folks, we've got to break that wheel.

Action: ADA "reform," birth control, and renewable energy.

Just when you thought some things were safe from this Congress, along comes H.R. 620, the so-called American Disabilities Act Education and Reform Act of 2017, reminding us that when Congress says they're going to "reform" something, you should be scared. H.R. 620 would require disabled folks to give a written notice directly to any business owner who they think has violated the act (by, for example, not providing a wheelchair ramp), and then gives that business owner nearly half a year to make progress toward fixing a problem. They could no longer file a complaint with the Department of Justice or files a lawsuit on their own, since, hey, that actually works better. H.R. 620 is all about hurting people so that business owners don't have to follow the law, which is precisely the problem with America today. You may use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators about this matter. Don't brook any whining about the ADA "causing frivolous lawsuits," not when corporations file four out of every five lawsuits in America.

Meanwhile, thanks to a leaked rule proposal, we now know that the Trump Administration plans to allow employers to block their employees' access to birth control coverage if it conflicts with said employer's "religious beliefs." Because, after all, your employer's "religious beliefs" are so much more important than yours! Seriously, I'm sick of the notion that bosses have earned more rights than the rest of us -- though, of course, the apotheosis of the beliefs that bosses-are-great-and-people-suck is now our President. Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the Trump Administration to stop trying to take women's rights away in the name of "religious freedom." Oh, and to anyone itching to lecture me about how hard CEOs have worked for the "right" to tell people what sort of health care they can have: you don't "work" for rights. You have rights because you're an American. And you don't have "more rights" because you have more money. You have more power, but not more rights, and it's time to learn the difference. (That's before we get to whether Our Glorious Elites have earned anything.)

Finally, Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry has lately suggested that the Administration might actually fight state-level renewable energy standards! How would he do that? Well, apparently he'd start by commissioning a study on "grid reliability" that will say guess what, since it's headed by a Kochhead? That coal and oil and gas and nuclear are "more reliable" than sun and wind, even though sun and wind will actually be around forever and, you know, storage of energy before it's used is an actual thing. And what could we call this little idea of Mr. Perry's? We could certainly call it corporate welfare, since it clearly aims to prop up the dirty fuel industries, and thus also the outlandish salaries of their CEOs. But we could most certainly not call it conservative for our federal government to attack standards that good Americans want and have fought hard to pass at the state level -- standards that have helped solar and wind become more competitive, price-wise. So Penn Environment helps you tell the Energy Department to stop trying to kill state-level renewable energy standards.

Action: health care, fossil fuel handouts, and the Bears Ears National Monument.

Congress could vote on Obamacare repeal bill as early as today, but even if they don't, use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your House Reps and tell them to reject it. This bill is actually worse than the previous one, because it allows states to charge citizens more for their pre-existing conditions, which basically renders Obamacare's ban on pre-existing conditions meaningless. And the bill would still do all the horrible things it would have done if it had passed last month -- it would throw upwards of 20 million people off their health insurance, it would change Obamacare subsidies so more working families couldn't afford insurance, it would steal hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare by repealing tax hikes on higher incomes, and it would get rid of the Medicaid expansion. You know, in a sane and moral society, "moderate" Rep. Tom MacArthur, the co-author of the pre-existing conditions amendment, would lose his next election in his purple New Jersey district by 20 points. But in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, he'll probably beat whatever milquetoast the Democrats put up.

Meanwhile, in the wake of a Trump tax "plan" that would give away trillions of dollars in taxpayer money -- i.e., our money -- to himself and his rich pals, Friends of the Earth helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal billions of dollars in tax subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. I mean, if you're serious about tax reform, you'd get rid of the $4 billion or so annually in fossil fuel subsidies. That's not a whole lot of money in the context of a $4 trillion annual budget, but if you believe our government should use taxpayer money to subsidize emerging industries, then why would you support subsidizing oil, natural gas, and coal? Oh, wait, let me guess -- because they're domestic sources of energy, as if wind and solar somehow aren't. And the wind and solar industries have to pull teeth to get help from our government, whereas these ancient, far dirtier industries get handouts. And no, fossil fuel subsidies don't "protect workers," either -- these subsidies only protect the ability of CEOs to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, and these are the same CEOs who'd fire all of their workers if they could.

Finally, WildEarth Guardians helps you tell Interior Secretary Zinke to preserve the recently-designated Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. President Trump has lately ordered Interior to re-evaluate all the national monuments designated over the last 21 years, and he singled out Bears Ears in his public statements; why does he have this hard-on to get rid of this monument? I mean, sure, fossil fuel corporations want to drill there, but they want to drill everywhere. I'd hate to think it was because President Obama designated it last year, and that if-it's-Obama-it-must-die. But it could also be because our government currently allows the five Native American nations for whom Bears Ears is sacred take a significant role in managing that monument. In any case, you can remind Secretary Zinke that it actually takes a couple of years to designate a national monument, and that new Secretaries don't just get to come in and do whatever they like for whatever reason they like. If they do, they tend to get sued in court, and because the process of designating national monuments is governed by laws, not men, they tend to lose.

Around the table: corporate welfare, local control, job creation, executive pay, federal spokeshackery, and Medicaid expansion.

You gotta love a headline that goes "Corporate Incentives Cost U.S. $45 Billion in 2015, Don’t Really Work." Not just because it's true, but because it reminds us that one does get tired pointing out the obvious -- and it's perfectly OK to let on that you're tired of pointing out the obvious! Feelings are never wrong, after all. Though if a 33-state, 26-year database helps validate your feelings, you take it.

Two Pennsylvania towns ban fracking wastewater injection within their borders -- and the Pennsylvania DEP sues them. And conservatives all over America rally to the side of Grant and Highland townships, celebrating their flexing of local power! Well, conservatives, maybe -- but the reactionaries who call themselves conservative are of course complaining about every local town picking and choosing which laws it wants to follow. Of course, they said similar things about Rosa Parks.

Maddie Oatman at Mother Jones asks why President Trump is so obsessed with bringing back coal jobs, and ignoring the growth of wind power all over the Midwest. Seems commonsensical, dontcha think? The wind and the sun are everywhere, even in depressed areas of the country left behind by corporatism and "free" trade. Of course, we know Mr. Trump ignores this phenemonon: he's just aping his votaries who think renewable energy is something only liberals like, and thus something to be despised as if it were Satan himself. Look at them balls swing!

From the "My God Right-Wingers Never Stop Whining" file: the acting SEC Chair has delayed implementation of a Dodd-Frank CEO-to-worker pay-ratio rule, citing the "unanticipated compliance difficulties" corporations are suddenly having. It took the SEC almost seven years to write this rule, and these are our boldest and brightest entrepreneurs -- the TV always says so! -- but still they find reporting executive-to-worker pay ratios "onerous"? And they want us to feel sorry for them? Let them cry into thousand-dollar bills.

Trump Administration spokeshack Sean Spicer calls ProPublica a "left-wing blog" in dismissing its reporting about Mr. Trump's newfound (and undisclosed) ability to draw money at will from businesses in his trust -- and ProPublica responds with 15 tweets taking him down. I'd have just left it at number four myself, but I understand their frustration. One can only hope that Mr. Spicer becomes more like Scott McClellan and Tony Snow, who couldn't hide their disgust at shilling for Tha Bush Mobb after a while, than Ari Fleischer and Dana Perino, who happily peddled Bush Mobb swill.

Finally, some bad news: the Kansas state House fails to override Gov. Brownback's veto of the legislature's Medicaid expansion bill by a mere three votes. The final tally was 81 to 44; two legislators who voted against the expansion voted for the override, but also vice versa, and I would hate to think this was all theatre for the benefit of "moderate" Republicans. And remember when you read that "opponents of expansion questioned whether Kansas could afford it" that these folks all voted for the tax-cuts-for-the-rich that put them in this mess.

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

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

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

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

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

Penny Rants for Wednesday, February 1, 2017: pipeline accidents, Obamacare repeal -- and the coming horror.

Yonatan Zunger goes into some excruciating detail about "What 'Things Going Wrong'" in America "Can Look Like." Increased pressure to fire Latinos (because they "might be undocumented"), mass surveillance-then-registration-then-internment-then-deportation of Muslims, mass crackdowns on black protestors -- yeah, people, it's gonna be bad. But I bring this article up mainly for paragraph 13, which really gets at how horrible people like Donald Trump can get broad support: "when people are already stretched to their absolute limit emotionally, with financial stresses, family stresses, medical stresses, lack of a clear future stresses, then hearing anyone else ask for something — even if that something is as simple as 'the right to walk down the street without being murdered' — feels like an added imposition. And that can lead to a backlash, not just from people who are inherently racist or the like, but also from people who aren’t and just don’t want yet another thing dropped on their plate." The solution, of course, would be to alleviate these stresses with good legislation -- Medicare-for-all, tax hikes on the rich, actual infrastructure funding for public projects. That's going to take a lot more work now, but the first step is pointing it out.

"Protestors Say Pipelines Are Dangerous. Are They?" asks this provocative article from Inside Energy. Paragraph 4 tells you all you need to know whenever some right-winger says BUT TEH PIPELINE ACCIDENTZ HARDLY EVER HAPPENZ!!!!: "According to data from federal regulators, there is actually a low probability of a pipeline accident. But when there is an accident, the impact can be huge." I mean, really, saying that only .0x percent of pipelines burst doesn't matter when one pipeline bursting can cause so much damage to a regional water table. But the article concerns itself mainly with pipeline safety to human beings, which is important, but is hardly the only indicator of a pipeline's safety. And if right-wingers tell you that you'd better support pipelines because they're safer than rail transportation (pipelines spilled three times the oil that railways did between 2004 and 2012, per the IEA, but pipelines also moved nine times the oil railways did), you can always demand to know why the discussion always has to be about the safety of oil and gas transport, and never about the safety of solar and wind power. (They'll squeal about dead birds and "wind turbine syndrome," but they have always overstated these dangers.)

I do get tired of hearing about how Republicans are wringing their hands over how they're really going to repeal Obamacare. I mean, it's all theatre. Here's how Obamacare repeal will go down: Republicans will repeal all the taxes (on the rich!) that fund the Affordable Care Act, then they'll repeal the mandate on citizens to buy insurance -- but they'll leave in the ban on pre-existing conditions, since that's very popular, and then watch premiums for everyone skyrocket when the uninsured don't bother to buy insurance until they're sick. Republicans might pass their stupid "health savings accounts" or "buying insurance across state lines" initiatives, or they might not. But it won't really matter; Republicans thrive on failure the way some insects thrive on dung. Republicans will deal with the mess by doing one (or more) of these three things: 1) hope people blame their employers when they get thrown off their now much-more-expensive health insurance, 2) blame the whole mess on Democrats, and 3) hope for a terrorist attack to take everyone's mind off their skyrocketing health care costs. Remember: I say these things out loud so they're less likely to happen.

Around the table: the Trump infrastructure plan as "developer welfare," and other hard lessons.

Michael Hudson aptly describes "Trump's Infrastructure Plan" as "Developer Welfare." He describes how the Wall Street-financed construction of the 2nd Avenue line in New York City benefits the landlords along the line -- who are already raising rents on the people who were supposed to benefit from the line! And of course the MTA financed 2nd Avenue by borrowing from banksters, and now will be paying banksters interest in perpetuity. And that's the kind of "infrastructure" you'll see from Mr. Trump -- infrastructure that doesn't actually help ordinary Americans, but helps banksters and landlords, who seem to be his real constituency.

Spencer Woodman at The Intercept now finds eight U.S. states contemplating laws criminalizing peaceful protest in some way. What do they have to be afraid of? Well, North Dakota is mulling whether to make it OK to run over a protestor "accidentally," and supporters of that initiative actually have the cojones to tell you that the momentarily-successful Standing Rock protests make such legislation necessary! You know what else might make Standing Rock-style protests go away? Committing to renewable energy sources like solar and wind. Of course, big fossil fuel corporations think there's no money in that, but they're wrong.

Fox News poll shows the Affordable Care Act is actually more popular than Donald Trump right now. And finding that 50% approvals for the ACA is fairly unprecedented -- during that interminable debate over the matter in 2009 and 2010, you couldn't find even 40% approval for the thing (though, as the "liberal" media usually ignored, a lot of folks, and not all of them liberals, disapproved of it because it wasn't single-payer). Could it be that folks like something better as soon as they fear they're going to lose it? Or that Republicans have failed so badly at convincing people they can do better? It's probably both.

Lost in the brouhaha over "grizzly bears" at Betsy DeVos's last confirmation hearing was her apparent conviction that disabled students shouldn't get equal access to public education under the law, which conviction not only runs afoul of over 40-year-old federal law, but also of basic human decency. Privatize the whole system, as Mr. DeVos is eager to do, and you're likely to have a crapload of corrupt charter schools taking public money to break public laws. Anyone else think we ought to just commit to making our public services be the best they can be, instead of giving in to the promises of snake oil salesfolk?

Surprise, surprise, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama has found the state guilty of "unconstitutional racial gerrymandering" in 12 state legislature districts (three Senate, nine House). Alabama will have to redraw those 12 districts before 2018, if they don't appeal, which they may do, even though the plaintiffs alleged that 36 districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. Still, it's something that the state drew a dozen districts so badly that even Judge William Pryor (lately mooted as Mr. Trump's next choice for the U.S. Supreme Court) wasn't willing to explain them away.

Finally, San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich lights into President Trump in a radio rant. You may not have known the five-time NBA champion head coach was also a champion of civilization, but he is, declaring that "respect has to be earned," that "if our children would've said (what Mr. Trump said when he mocked a disabled reporter)" he'd have "grounded" them, that "the people around (Mr. Trump)...have the cynical approach and disingenuous attitude to really defend him and try to make it look like he didn't say what he said," and that Mr. Trump can't reach out to people he's hurt or offended because "bullies don't do that." And I haven't heard this anywhere else: "Instead of honoring the 117 people behind him (who died in the line of duty) where he was speaking (at the CIA offices), he talked about the size of the (inauguration) crowd." So what's Mr. Trump gonna do? Call Pop a loser?

Around the table: the horrible truth about corporate welfare, and other tales.

At last we're about to find out the true cost of corporate welfare nationwide, thanks to a change in federal accounting standards for states and municipalities. Corporate welfare (where corporations get tax breaks to "create jobs locally," or maybe not!) tends to cost even more than you think -- those good Mississippians who wound up paying a billion dollars more for the privilege of having a Nissan plant in their town have my sympathy (as do the Nissan workers who were somehow paying their taxes right to Nissan!). If we can make 2017 the year corporate welfare wouldn't disappear from the papers and news programs, it won't be a total loss.

In a related note, Alec MacGillis at ProPublica looks at all of Energy Secretary nominee Rick Perry's corporate giveaways while he was Governor of Texas, totaling some $19 billion annually. Surprise, surprise, being a Rick Perry donor was a pretty good way of getting to the head of the feeding trough, and though Texas had so few hands on the handouts, they still screwed up a lot anyway -- Citgo got welfare even though it was clearly going to move to Texas anyway, for example, while Chevron got even more money by promising to build a giant office tower that still ain't there. Then, of course, there's the Texas Energy Center, somehow able to take taxpayer money and create jobs while not actually existing.

One hesitates to recommend articles declaring that either conservatives or liberals might become a "permanent minority" in America, but Daniel Rogers at The Guardian makes a good case that liberals are "(f)aced with an existential threat." Thankfully, he doesn't argue that "getting whites back" means "abandoning blacks" or pandering to racism -- it means "changing the story" so that it's not about Big Gummint but Big Power, and it also means getting local, since that's where change begins. You already know this if you saw Republicans win big at the state level not just in 2010, but in 1994. And, ah, what did both of those years have in common? A weak Democratic power structure that sold out to corporate power and prided itself on its tolerance and its smarts.

Waqas Mirza at AlterNet reminds us that, bad as Donald Trump plans to be on Islamophobia, Democrats ain't been much better. Terrorist watch lists -- which, you recall, were a central feature of Congressional Democrats' "sit-in" after the Orlando shootings -- tend to be comprised of, guess what, mostly Muslims, and local and federal law enforcement infiltration of Muslim communities is hardly something only Republican Administrations do. And for all of Mr. Obama's attempts to be just as tough (but smarter, there's that word again!) on terror as Republicans, how many right-wingers ever applauded his efforts? Maybe it's time to, you know, stop trying to take other nations' resources and then attack them when they don't comply.

Finally, we learn that the costs of solar power production have fallen so much that they might actually be lower than the costs of coal production by 2025, and several nations are already paying very, very little for it. Coal industry flacks, naturally, say that since the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine all day that the cost is actually much higher -- ignoring the fact that the wind blows and the sun shines all over the world and that areas with more sun and wind could supply the other parts of the world with power. That's probably what really upsets coal magnates -- that they'll be left out in the cold, so to speak. And you thought these were our best and brightest, ready to handle the rough-and-tumble of the free market!

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: drug sentencing, water pollution, and the Grand Canyon.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell President Obama to release thousands of low-risk prisoners who committed non-violence offenses in time for the holidays. Hopefully, folks released would include folks still serving crack cocaine sentences under the sentencing regime before it was reformed in the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. The Fair Sentencing Act reduced the disparity between crack and powder cocaine minimum sentences from a ratio of 500 to 1 to a ratio of 17 to 1, but quite a few folks are still serving time under the old ratio, and why do that? The newly emboldened racist right will squeal about TEH THOUSANDZ OF PREDATURZ ON TEH STREETZ!!!! -- and they may not even hide behind coded language anymore! -- but good Americans don't gin up drama like that, only bad ones do. Speaking of which, we sure ain't getting any clemency under a President Trump, who declares his Presidency will be a "law and order" Presidency. Of course, Mr. Trump only thinks of black people when he thinks of "law and order," not the corporate criminals he's putting on his cabinet. But we'll still be around to remind everyone of what mercy really means.

Meanwhile, investigators have found lead and copper in the water at the Eastham Unit Prison in Lovelady, Texas, and prisoners there have testified to the water's "sulfur-like smell," "offensive taste," and "gritty residue." The prison administration apparently knows about the problem, as it has provided its guards with clean water, but not their prisoners. I can already hear the Trump votaries rolling their eyes and saying so what? They're prisoners! But as civilized people, we keep the water clean for prisoners as much we do as for everyone else -- I mean, how can you rehabilitate prisoners if you're poisoning them at the same time? And why do we heap punishment after punishment upon prisoners when their sentences and prison rules (which surely do not say "poison the prisoners' water") already detail their punishment? Also, too, consider the quality of mercy, a matter Jesus said more about than he ever said about gay marriage. Roots Action helps you tell the U.S. Justice Department and the Centers for Disease Control to investigate the water pollution at the Eastham Unit Prison.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to declare a national monument around the Grand Canyon National Park and thus protect it for future generations, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. You know why this is particularly urgent: partly because corporations want to get their grubby mitts on the uranium in the area, and they don't care if it pollutes the Colorado River or not, though the river provides drinking water to seven states -- but mainly because the Grand Canyon is a national treasure, part of that great American heritage we ought to be passing on to future generations, rather than digging into so we can get a little energy today for nuclear power plants that can hardly sustain themselves without massive welfare handouts from our government in the first place! No, really, they can't -- and we can't compare their reliance on government handouts to wind power tax credits, since a) wind power is a lot younger and b) fossil fuel corporations spend all their time trying to crush wind power, instead of embrace it.

Around the table: featuring good news from Wisconsin, for once.

"Alt-right (sic) Founder Questions Whether Jews Are People," says a CNN chyron. For the record, the members of the subsequent panel do, in fact, think Jews are people, which will only impress you if you feel you don't hear "water is wet" enough on the news. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump "dresses down" reporters at Trump Tower, while those same reporters are all trying to ask how they're going to get access to a Trump Administration! If CNN reporters want "access" to news, I imagine that more than a few Standing Rock protestors who wouldn't mind talking to them. Folks, this is why we need a la carte cable -- because cable news networks will never not suck until all their sucking starts hurting their pocketbooks.

And of course while the "liberal" media wastes valuable time analyzing some racist dirtbag's utterings, they're also totally bollocksing up their headlines when covering the police attack on Standing Rock protestors from Sunday night. It's no good trying to tell me people shouldn't just read the headlines, when one would more properly castigate news organs for writing misleading headlines -- just as one should avoid complaining that foreclosed-upon homeowners should have known what they were getting into, without blaming banksters for misleading those homeowners. Certain people are awfully blind to corporate evil these days. I wonder why.

Panel of three federal judges rules that Wisconsin's 2011 redistricting is an "unconstitutional political gerrymander, finding that it "was intended to burden the representational rights of Democratic voters throughout the decennial period by impeding their ability to translate their votes into legislative seats." You probably already suspected that, if you noticed that votes for Democratic and Republican state legislature candidates in Wisconsin were fairly even, yet Republicans got a 65-33 majority in the lower house and a 20-13 majority in the Senate. The decision establishes a method with which one could theoretically test whether a particular redistricting effort is too partisan; the Supreme Court has resisted hearing gerrymandering cases before, and if it doesn't take this one, the ruling will stand (and Wisconsin will have to redistrict again prior to the 2018 elections), but if the Court takes it, the ruling might still stand, as Justice Kennedy has expressed openness to establishing a partisan gerrymandering test. And if it does, a lot more redistricting, all over America, will occur before 2018.

Mr. Trump's nominee for CIA Director, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Koch Brothers), says "use of strong encryption in personal communications may itself be a red flag," i.e., it might tell the CIA you're a terrorist. How strange, that Mr. Pompeo appears not to understand that some people use encryption to keep their governments from finding them and killing them -- and some journalists use encryption to protect their sources from discovery. I don't suspect that anyone can actually tell him these things -- I suspect that, like his boss, he's just happy swinging his dick around.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate describes how North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory -- who appears to have lost his re-election bid to Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper by less than 7,500 votes -- is trying to "steal" the election anyway. Here's how that would work: Mr. McCrory would file lawsuit after lawsuit in an attempt to delay Mr. Cooper from being certified the winner -- which would essentially throw the election to the Republican-dominated legislature, which would then, of course, declare Mr. McCrory the winner. You'd hope that all the bad PR from this plan would give a man pause, but Mr. McCrory is, shall we say, a special case. You'd also hope that a man who charges as much voter fraud as he's done would not want to open that particular Pandora's Box in North Carolina, where reports of bad actors suppressing putative Democrat votes are considerably more believable than the "evidence" from the McCrory camp that even Republican-controlled county election boards have rejected.

Finally, you've no doubt heard about the multitudinous conflicts of interest Mr. Trump will have once he takes office, but here's one that really captures the emptiness of his soul: he apparently encouraged British politician/fellow white supremacist Nigel Farage to oppose offshore wind farms that would "mar" the view from Mr. Trump's Scottish golf resorts. A man who stands in the way of progress because it might cost him money (or, perhaps more precisely, pride) -- I'd say "congratulations, Trump supporters, that's what you really voted for," but for all I know they'd respond "hell yeah!"

Action: free speech in Turkey, and fracking wastewater dumping in the ocean.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Turkish government to repeal laws mandating jail time for things like "insulting the Turkist state." The latest news hook is the impending trial (the latest over over 100!) of Turkish lawyer/journalist Eren Keskin for criticizing the military's killing of a 12-year-old boy; you'd think criticizing that would be a no-brainer, but in Turkey, apparently, the government actually prefers citizens with no brains. Turkey, of course, has a long and storied history of imprisoning journalists for criticizing the government, and that's only gotten worse lately, as an apparent failed coup (or dare I say false flag operation? Now, see, in America I can say that!) has spurred Turkish President Erdogan to be even more repressive than he's been in the past. And of course Ms. Keskin has a long history of speaking out for justice, particularly for Turkey's Kurdish minority -- you know, the same folks who have been fighting back pretty well against ISIS? Sometimes we forget the rest of the world does not have a First Amendment protecting its citizens from being put in jail by their governments merely for speaking out. Still, the Big Stick of Bad PR is not to be trifled with, even by the aspiring Sultan-with-absolute-power of Turkey.

Meanwhile, Environmental Action helps you tell President Obama to ban dumping fracking wastewater into our oceans. The Bureau of Ocean Management now allows this practice, even though fracking wastewater typically contains many toxins and carcinogens, like lead, benzene, and chromium-6. If you're not concerned about the cleanliness of ocean water because no one drinks it, consider two things: one, that San Diego's effort to desalinate ocean water is actually going pretty well, and two, that other creatures live in the oceans, creatures who will suffer because of the crap we're dumping in their habitats, and that we depend on a lot of those creatures in some way, whether for food (and the industries that make them into food) or for controlling other predatory species in the ocean. Consider, also, that we've done a pretty bad job predicting the harm our pollution has done so far. And finally, consider that the only reason we're not moving more quickly to a renewable energy grid, as Ralph Nader has said, is because no one can own the sun or the wind. You'd think owning the technology to convert sunlight and wind into energy would be enough, but some people can never get enough. However, a civilized society ensures those people don't get all the say about everything.

Action: two alerts about gas drilling.

The EPA, as you may know, enacted federal methane emissions standards earlier this year, which is very important, given that, contrary to corporate propaganda, methane emissions deliver a far, far bigger carbon emissions punch than coal pollution does. But the EPA has only acted on new and modified power plants and drilling operations -- what of all the long-standing oil and gas drilling operations? By 2018, 90% of all methane emissions will be coming from operations not covered by current EPA rules, which makes sense, given that gas and oil drilling methods have improved over the years, and any operation that hasn't improved must be polluting more. And what's the cost to gas drilling corporations? Not lost jobs, not higher energy prices, but less income for the CEOs to gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes. And we're all breathing this air, and we're all drinking this water, so we're all in this together. The Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to ensure that methane emissions regulations cover older oil and gas drilling operations as well as newer ones.

Meanwhile, SEPTA wants to build a power plant in North Philly that would power their regional rail lines with natural gas -- which will not only cause air pollution in local Philadelphia neighborhoods, but will cause water and air pollution elsewhere, since gas extraction comes with polluted water and air. I wouldn't be upset if residents of Pennsylvania's famous "T" were to protest the befouling of their own neighborhoods so that some citified public transit operation could run a little more cheaply. For its part, SEPTA has actually been claiming that a gas-run power plant would help shield against unpredictable storms brought by climate change -- as if gas extraction, as we have just discussed, doesn't itself exacerbate climate change. They also say using renewable energy won't work, because it's not cheap enough -- as if a large public agency has literally no power to negotiate energy prices! Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell SEPTA to abandon its gas-powered dreams and power their regional rail lines with solar and wind power instead.

Around the table: should we make richer folks may more for minor fines? And other thorny questions.

Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic describes the "sliding scale" fines many European nations assess for minor infractions like speeding -- fines that depend on the income of the lawbreaker, meaning a speeding ticket for a wealthy man could run as high as $50,000. I'm actually finding myself averse to the idea that a police officer could look up your income as easily as all that -- though I certainly recognize that fines and fees disproportionately hurt the poor in America, and would prefer good, progressive taxation, at all levels of government, as a revenue-raising tool to those fines and fees. I have no compunction about applying such a "sliding scale" system to corporate malfeasance, however -- corporations aren't people, after all, and we'd never have to hear again about we shouldn't fine corporations for bad behavior because small businesses can't pay the fines.

Senators from both political parties are having an awful lot of fun bashing Wells Fargo for its lawbreaking, but Matthew Yglesias at Vox reminds us that Republican lawmakers have been trying to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency that helped discover the lawbreaking in the first place. I find Mr. Yglesias's thinking a bit foggy at times, but he hits it right on the head here: "Banking committee Republicans want to grandstand when banks get caught, while voting to make it much less likely that banks actually do get caught." Their number includes Sen. Shelby (R-AL), who excoriated Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf when he appeared before Mr. Shelby's committee but who also constantly whines about our government being a "nanny state." Well, if banksters act like big babies, maybe they need a nanny.

Normal Solomon catches AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka pushing for the Dakota Access Pipeline to proceed, saying "it is fundamentally unfair to hold union members’ livelihoods and their families’ financial security hostage to endless delay." I've been saying it's fundamentally unfair for corporate CEOs to hold jobs hostage to whatever they want, but here Mr. Trumka does their work for them. I mean, I'm always saying we have to build stuff to create jobs, but our options for "building stuff to create jobs" isn't limited to building fossil fuel pipelines -- we could build wind and solar farms, for example -- and it's a bit sad to see Mr. Trumka holding to old notions as surely as fossil fuel CEOs do.

Thanks to America's few remaining journalists, we have learned that Indiana Governor (and Donald Trump running mate) Mike Pence once argued, in the right-wing Indiana Policy Review, that employers shouldn't hire gays. Why? Because they "are not, as a group, able-bodied. They are known to carry extremely high rates of disease brought on because of the nature of their sexual practices and the promiscuity which is a hallmark of their lifestyle." You knew that was rubbish, of course, as soon as you read "(t)hey are known," which is how they all put it when they're advancing something plainly ridiculous. And no use claiming "it was so long ago" -- just last year, Gov. Pence was the biggest supporter of Indiana's "religious liberty" law, until the Big Stick of Bad PR hit him.

Finally, Donald Trump discourses at length to a North Carolina rally audience about how much he loves "OPM," or Other People's Money. Which is pretty spectacular timing, given allegations that his charitable foundation literally used Other People's Money to pay off lawsuits. You and I would be ashamed to use Other People's Money in this manner, but big, bold, Donald Trump ain't got no time for shame. You think Naughty by Nature will let a Clinton ad riff off "OPP"?

Around the table: from government spying to liberal politicians failing to learn the real lessons of their defeat.

Micah Lee at The Intercept reminds us that our government is collecting all our internet data, and that this is "many orders of magnitude more invasive" than collecting phone metadata. And though you and I know what "collected" means, the NSA doesn't consider this data "collected" until an analyst queries it. At least their justifications for their illegal, immoral actions are getting worse.

Lost in the controversy over Jeb Bush's statement that "people have to work longer hours" to get the economy rolling again is this reminder from Alan Pyke at Think Progress: that American workers are already substantially more productive than we were even a dozen years ago, but still can't get ahead, because our wage gains over that time have been basically flat. Of course, Jeb Bush wouldn't get that, because he's always been a boss, and never been a worker.

FactCheck.org catches Republican Presidential aspirant Ted Cruz alleging that the Hispanic unemployment rate has "gone up" under President Obama. It's gone from 10.1% at Mr. Obama's inauguration to 6.6% now, so he's simply wrong. Maybe "simply wrong" can be his campaign slogan. Or "I meant it's gone up at various times during the Obama years," a virtually useless statement when describing broad trends.

Denmark found itself able to produce 140% of its energy needs solely through wind power on Thursday; it was an especially windy day, but Denmark's turbines weren't even operating at full capacity, so that's still quite an achievement. It sure is a good thing Our Glorious Elites here in America know that wind power just can't work, because dirty Birkenstock-wearing hippies ha ha ha.

Finally, across the Atlantic, the interim leader of Great Britain's Labour Party tells her caucus they shouldn't vote against the Tories' plan to cut tax credits for working families. "We cannot simply say to the public you were wrong at the election," she says -- but, sadly, she does not add, "we can say to the public that we were wrong for failing to give you a populist alternative to the Tories, an alternative that would fight for your struggle to make ends meet," though that would be true.

Action: humane working conditions, wind power, and accountability for retirement planners.

Qatar will host the World Cup in 2022, which should mean all kinds of job-creating construction -- except that corporations are taking advantage of Qatar's "guest worker" program, in which folks come from nearby countries with the hope of making a better life, and then get their passports taken away and are made to slave away in 120 degree heat with little or no food or water. And this has been going on for a while -- 2014 saw the deaths of over 180 workers in some World Cup-related project or other. Luckily, we can apply pressure, not just to Qatar's government, but to the American corporation overseeing much of the World Cup-related construction: CH2M Hill, whose CEO lives in Colorado. CH2M Hill blames the worker abuse the government of Qatar and local contractors there, but if CH2M Hill's leaders didn't know Qatar was a wage slave zone, then I'm Benedict Cumberbatch. (Full disclosure: I am not Benedict Cumberbatch.) So Avaaz helps you tell CH2M Hill and Qatar's government to treat Qatar's guest workers a lot better. Personal to those who say, well, those workers took their chances: is abusing workers ever OK?

Meanwhile, the Cape Wind offshore wind farm, long delayed by wealthy folks on the Cape who claim that the gotta-squint-to-see-it wind farm constitutes an eyesore, has met another obstacle: the nearly two dozen lawsuits against it over the years have helped cause Cape Wind to miss crucial financing and construction deadlines, which prompted National Grid to cancel its power-purchase agreement (or PPA) with the wind farm. National Grid would have bought half of Cape Wind's power, but no longer; without utility corporations to buy Cape Wind's power, Cape Wind has rather less chance of succeeding. And if the numerous lawsuits against Cape Wind seem a little odd to you, consider that one of the driving forces behind the Alliance for Nantucket Sound, which has filed many of the suits, is none other than Bill Koch -- that's right, of those Kochs -- which tells me it's not an "eyesore" issue at all, but an issue of a coal guy not wanting any competition from a power source he can't control. You know what that makes these lawsuits? Frivolous lawsuits, that's what. Hence CREDO helps you tell National Grid to get back on board with the Cape Wind project.

Finally, some good news: the Department of Labor has decided it will require all financial advisors to put customers' interests ahead of their own when giving retirement account advice. You'd think that'd be common sense, but common sense is the bitter enemy of the financial sector today, which cares about money and nothing else. And already the banksters are advocating against it: too many financial planners will lose their jobs, they say, as if no one else -- hell, maybe even some honest people! -- could possibly rise up to fill the resulting void. Banksters argue for the "genius of the free market" and the "creative destruction" it supposedly works upon economies when anyone else is on the receiving end, but let banksters themselves be the target of actual free market justice, and they whine like diaper-loaded brats until they get their handouts and bailouts. Well, perhaps that's unfair: diaper-loaded brats can eventually get their diapers changed, but banksters will still be banksters, demanding taxpayer handouts and giving nothing back to civilization. So Public Citizen helps you support a vigorous fiduciary responsibility rule for retirement planners.

Action: net neutrality, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Keystone XL.

As you know, FCC Chair Tom Wheeler, after an almost unprecedented amount of public comment, has proposed reclassifying broadband internet (including wireless broadband) as a public utility under Title II of the Communications Act, which is exactly the step the FCC must take in order to enact vigorous network neutrality regulations, which protect your ability to decide what you want to see on the internet, free of any corporate interference in the form of "tiered service" or slowing down of website loading or outright censorship. But the FCC still has to enact vigorous net neutrality regulations, so CREDO, Demand Progress, and Consumers Union all help you tell them to do that. With that out of the way, take a look at the latest pieces of excrement the anti-net neutrality folks have spewed forth, including a Michael "the Lesser" Powell "argument" in the Wall Street Journal -- wasn't he running the FCC when it reclassified broadband so that it couldn't regulate net neutrality? Why, yes, he was! -- and a broadband corporation-produced video spreading more stupidity and fear-mongering. With enemies like these, we should have won ages ago. The only reason we didn't? Our enemies are flush with mammon.

Meanwhile, Republicans should explain their hatred of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Do they really want to stop our government from protecting its owners, the American people, from financial scams? Do they really want for-profit colleges to entrap more students in a downward spiral of debt? Do they really want more folks to get kicked out of their houses because of unscrupulous lenders? Do they really want Wall Street to redistribute even more American worker wealth upward to themselves? Or are they just mad that President Obama went and created a new bureau presumably peopled with bureaucrats? Sen. Shelby, not even two years after the 2008 financial services meltdown, infamously claimed that Street didn't need a "nanny state." while we were still crawling from the wreckage of the 2008 financial services meltdown no less. Setting aside the obvious difference between law enforcement and a "nanny state": if anyone needs a nanny state, it's the banksters, who make more and more money and do less and less good. National People's Action joins with several other worthy organizations to help you tell Congress to reject any dismantling or crippling of the CFPB.

Finally, President Obama has a Keystone XL pipeline bill to veto; he's said he's going to veto the bill, but he still hasn't done so yet, so the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the President to veto the Keystone XL bill, and also to reject the pipeline's approval for good. He could very well veto the bill and approve the pipeline later, as you know -- his original reason for vetoing the bill, as you may recall, was that it would step on the toes of the Nebraska Supreme Court, an excuse that dissipated within days. But he has plenty of reasons to reject the pipeline -- tar sands crude is notoriously climate-unfriendly, TransCanada has built notoriously unsafe pipelines, and the pipeline moves Canadian oil over heartland drinking water so it can be sold to foreign markets, thus doing not thing one for American energy independence. Remember Sen. Grassley's famous wind production tax credit? That does more for American energy independence than Keystone XL ever will, but naturally Congress let that lapse, even though Mr. Grassley's party now controls both houses of Congress. And we could certainly do more for real energy independence, but Keystone XL ain't it.

Around the table: from a blind Congressperson to a new economy.

An unnamed U.S. Congressperson tells "some things I wish the voters knew about the people elected to represent them." All nine of them are pretty much true, but that doesn't give me a better opinion of the author, who's still a whiny coward who thinks keeping his or her job is more important than doing the right thing. And I think we all know by now that clawing your way up a bad system so one day you'll be powerful enough to do the right thing is fool's gold.

Gov. Walker (E-WI) released his two-year budget last week, and among the goodies is $250,000 to study the "health effects" of wind power. Yeah, that's right, the "health effects" of wind power, because people in completely rural areas attribute all kinds of ailments to the noise. Absent evidence, or even convincing anecdotes, I say the same thing I always say: you want to hear real noise, you live in New Jersey. Boy, it sure is a good thing fracking or coal burning never made anyone sick. (Do I need sarcasm tags?)

Kelley Davidson at Occupy.com describes the burgeoning grassroots anti-fracking movement in Kentucky. The occasion? Gas drillers think they might be able to reach Kentucky's Rogersville Shale -- and also a shale oil fire (sparked, apparently, by a brush fire, and what are the chances?) burning for almost three months now, spewing carcinogenic sulfur dioxide into the air. If frackers get their hands on the Rogersville Shale, it'll also be about brackish/gelatinous/flammable drinking and bathing water.

America's second-largest health insurer gets hit by hackers, and its consumers could pay a heavy price -- the hackers got personal ID data for just about everyone Anthem serves, and though they didn't get health care or credit card data, what they got is enough to put any of them in a serious identity-theft bind. The only really good news is that Anthem noticed, and acted, relatively early.

ProPublica tells the story of the OtisKnee knee replacement device, a device causing enough pain and suffering to patients that its manufacturing corporation just settled with the Justice Department for $80 million -- but also one that was never submitted to the FDA for approval. How? The FDA requires testing for Class III medical devices (like pacemakers) and some Class II medical devices -- but OtisMed called their knee cutter a Class I device. Class I devices usually include forceps, bandages, and dental floss, not devices for cutting into your knee. In other words, it happens because our process for ensuring medical device safety is too influenced by corporations more afraid of losing money in sales than losing money in lawsuits.

Finally, the "liberal" media likes to call the "sharing" economy, exemplified by Uber, the wave of the future, but the worker-owned co-op would do better by people trying to make a better life, and Fast Company describes the rise of the worker-owned taxi co-op in Denver, Colorado. Even President Reagan agreed that when the workers own the corporation, the corporation does better for everyone; I just wish that had been higher on his priority list, or the rest of his agenda might have been a bit more palatable.

Action: a better life for workers, and the wind power tax credit.

Fast-food worker strikes took place in almost 200 cities last week (joined by home health care workers in some areas), about a week after WalMart workers conducted a Black Friday strike. Some folks have tried to tell me these folks are stupid for striking, because they can be so easily replaced. But these workers' actions are only "stupid" to the willingly blind. The easiest thing for these workers to do would be to keep their heads down and keep on working 12 or 16 or 18 hours a day in the hope that they can keep up with rent and electric and water and internet and food and clothes for their children. The hard thing to do is to say, I'm going to risk my job to call attention to my plight and the plight of those I work with. What looks like "stupidity" to the ideologically rigid looks like courage to the rest of us, and though I'm not proud we, as a nation, have let things come to this, I'm proud to live in the same country as those willing to risk everything for a better life. Hence USAction helps you call for a $15/hour minimum wage and more power for workers.

Meanwhile, Republicans take control of both Houses of Congress next month, and you know what they're like about environmental matters: they hate any and all clean air and clean water regulations -- though clean air and clean water are, as you can imagine, quite popular -- and the only energy producers they like are coal and oil producers. It didn't used to be like that: the wind power tax credit was the brainchild of Iowa Republican Charles Grassley back in the 1990s. But all you can get from this Republican House is a wind power tax credit extension until the end of this year, and we have to do better than that. Hence Friends of the Earth helps you tell this not-as-Republican Congress to renew the wind power tax credit for two years. Remember: when someone blurts out I hate all tax breaks whenever you argue for an extension of the wind power tax credit, they're lying, not just because they can't argue against a tax credit that actually creates jobs and stimulates the economy, but also because they can't argue against giving wind power producers a little breathing room without seeming cruel.

Around the table: more tales about struggle and folly.

"The Poor Used to Have the Most Opportunity in America," reports Matt O'Brien at the Washington Post's Wonkblog, but "Now the Rich Do." What he means, of course, is that incomes rose faster for the bottom 10% than they did for the top 1% during the 1960s, but even during the '90s, top 1% incomes rose five times faster annually than for the bottom 10%, and I shudder to think what those figures are for the Obama years. Mistake: intimating, first, that there are any "Republican reformers," and second, that Paul Ryan is one. Maybe he meant "deformer."

The New York Times profiles Terrance Wise, a fast-food worker helping to lead the charge for a higher minimum wage in Missouri. "(S)ometimes a calming presence, sometimes an inspiring activist," Mr. West has worked in fast food since his teen years, when the choices to escape his urban nightmare were to "play sports or sell drugs," and lately his family got evicted from their apartment even though he was working two full-time jobs at the time. But even here, the Times can't resist inserting three paragraphs of ZOMG TEH $15 HURTZ TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!!

Stop me if you've heard this one before: the Sunlight Foundation finds that corporations receive $760 from our government for every dollar (that's right, every one dollar) they spend in lobbying and campaign contributions. If that ratio seems a little big, note that corporate "winnings" include (among other things!) bailouts, loans, tax breaks, and federal contracts. To my eyes, this is yet another campaign ad that writes itself, one that would result in victory for any Democrat, in any district, who would use it. But, given Democrat weakness, we're more likely to see Republicans use it, and then promptly sell out their constituents some more.

Electric car corporation Tesla breaks ground on solar- and wind-powered "battery gigafactory" in Nevada, which may one day result in Tesla drivers being able to cut their local electric utility out of the loop completely. Tesla intends the batteries not just for its cars, after all, but for the "storage market," which means the market for folks creating and storing their electricity at home (usually via solar panels). I guess the electric utilities will buy legislation from their state legislators -- oh, wait, that's what all those "sun tax" bills were supposed to do.

Finally, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) thinks cigarette taxes had an outsized role in Eric Garner's death. Cigarette taxes actually came about as part of the massive settlement against tobacco corporations which lied to the public for decades about how dangerous their products were, but for Rand Paul, I'm sure that was just another "frivolous lawsuit" attacking poor, defenseless multinational corporations. And even his criticism of "broken windows" policing likely comes from a conviction that it's no big thing to cheat our government of revenues so it can pay for programs that benefit all of us. If he ever goes after corporate tax cheats, I'll be happy to reassess. But I won't hold my breath.

Action: tax relief for real people, and an "energy hub" that isn't a mere income-redistribution-upward scheme.

The big news from last week on the tax front was this: President Obama said he'd veto any bill that extended corporate tax handouts without extending tax relief for working families. This means he, like many progressive groups, wants extensions of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC), though the bill Congress has been working on exclusively addresses handouts for corporations. Harry Reid's office did its best "what bill?" act, but we all know better, being, as we are, not schmucks. Congress comes back to work today, such as they ever do any actual work, and they'll probably get on with prioritizing corporate welfare over tax relief for actual people, so USAction helps you tell your Congressfolk to prioritize working families over corporations in considering tax policy. They get an earful of ZOMG EXTEND TEH TAX BREAKS OR TEH ECONOMIEZ WILLZ DIEZ!!!!! from corporate lobbyists. You may want to remind them that folks who think like that seem to think very little of the American people, who are the real drivers of the economy.

Meanwhile, oil and gas interests will hold a conference this Friday at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, and if you're local, you can join a rally outside Drexel's Creese Student Center this Friday morning at 9 am, protesting further attempts by the oil and gas industries to make Philadelphia, in the words of one activist, a "sacrifice zone," where the will of the people gets sacrificed to the oil and gas industries' greed for more money; Food and Water Watch provides more details on the rally here. Naturally, the oil and gas industries busy polluting our air and our water want you to think that making Philadelphia an "energy hub" -- that is, a place where pipelines and industry meet to transport oil, gas, and other items all over the country and overseas -- will create jobs. But that's persuasive if and only if more oil/gas infrastructure is the only way to create jobs. We could create jobs by turning Philadelphia into a renewable energy hub, where research and development take place -- and if you've driven past Lincoln Financial Field lately, you know that effort is something we can build on, too.

Action: extending the wind power tax credit, and protecting federal and military pensions.

It's the "lame duck" session of this Congress -- that two-month period before a new, and even lamer, Congress comes in -- and so they're obsessing over corporate tax cut extensions, because if there's anything corporations need, it's more money. And if corporations needed tax cuts to "create jobs," surely the U6 unemployment rate (which counts folks who've given up looking for work and folks who work part-time but can't get full-time work) would be much lower than 11.5%. But I digress. One tax break that actually works, one that of course you have to pull teeth to get Congress to extend, is the Production Tax Credit for wind power. If you ever pore over charts of wind power production spikes, you find that wind power production tends to lag after the PTC expires (as Congress has allowed it to do five times since 1992), and that wind power production tends to be strong when the tax credit's in place. And more wind power means less asthma, less heart disease, and less climate change wierdness. So the Sierra Club helps you tell Congress to extend the wind power tax break.

Meanwhile, Rep. Cartwright (D-PA) has introduced H.R. 3310, the Annuity Safety and Security Under Reasonable Enforcement Act, and don't let the fact that the bill's name spells out the acronym ASSURE annoy you, because the ASSURE Act would do our federal retirees and veterans a lot of good. You may not know that some corporations now offer "pension advances" to federal and military retirees, often without telling them that these aren't "advances" so much as loans with interest rates as high as 46 percent, which traps our federal and military retirees in a cycle of debt. And taking these "advances" reduces how much our retirees will get in the future when they need it -- and folks are going to be living a long time from now on, so they'll almost certainly need it. Among other things, the ASSURE Act would mandate more disclosure of these facts by the "pension advance" crowd, and would cap the interest rates they could charge (that cap would currently be about 6.25 percent). The Pension Rights Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect pensioners and support the ASSURE Act.

Around the table: from the sublime to the ridiculous in five steps.

Take as much time as you need to read Andrew Bacevich's extensive argument concerning "Counterculture Conservatism," written for The American Conservative shortly after President Obama's re-election. Mr. Bacevitch and I differ on "Original Sin, by whatever name" -- I think people are basically good but corruptible -- but I believe in the utility of "respect(ing) received wisdom" (and "respect" doesn't imply slavish or histrionic devotion), and I also believe the family has been "supplant(ed) with the hyper-powered -- if also alienated -- individual." I'll likely continue to imagine that "hyper-powered individual" as bankster more than bureaucrat.

Institute of Self-Reliance report finds that locally-owned wind and solar businesses create more jobs than big corporations. Which is obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a minute -- big corporations are all about doing the most work with the fewest people -- but while I think big corporate investment would help make solar and wind widespread, I would also prefer that state and federal governments remove obstacles for small businesses. (I'm a little surprised that while the article makes welcome criticisms of federal solar tax credits, it doesn't mention the "sun tax" legislation pushed by fossil-fuel corporations.)

ProPublica describes where some of our tobacco settlement dollars go -- at least in Niagara County, NY, where short-term windfalls from tobacco bonds got invested in some very silly stuff. Key insight, from the very beginning: "A central tenet of government finance is that money borrowed over the long term should be spent on projects that will outlast the debt." In other news, you don't use higher-interest debt to pay off lower-interest debt.

FTC orders one of them there work-from-home corporation to pay $25 million to customers who found they could not work from home as easily as they were led to believe. In case you were wondering, that scam generally works by promising you THOUSANDZ UV TEH DOLLARZ!!!! by working from your couch or wherever, then demanding you pay a few hundred bucks for a starter kit, then demanding thousands of dollars more for more "business tools," and so on, and so on. It's rather like that Nigerian email scam from last decade.

Finally, VA-10 Republican U.S. House candidate Barbara Comstock suggests that we track undocumented immigrants the way FedEx tracks packages! You may recognize this particular nugget as the speck of dirt around which Newt Gingrich formed that absolute pearl of a book, Real Change, back in 2008. Of course you already know the problem: undocumented immigrants not only don't present themselves in large cardboard boxes with barcodes on the side, but they also have some considerable interest in, well, not being found, which tends to confound tracking efforts. Next from Ms. Comstock: everyone should have a barcode on their hand just like in the Bible!

Action: depleted uranium in Iraq, GMO vaccines in organic food, and the EPA's climate change plan.

What's yet another outstanding legacy of our little adventure in Iraq? Increased incidences of cancer and birth defects due to depleted uranium shells, that's what! Scientists have found uranium in the urine and semen of 1991 Gulf War veterans, and since the half-life of depleted uranium is 4.1 billion years, Iraqi citizens stand a very good chance of experiencing the ill effects of depleted uranium for, basically, ever. The U.N. has tried to pass resolutions since 2007 aiming to discover where depleted uranium weapons have been used and find out more about what their long-term harmful effects will be -- but the U.S. belongs to the U.N. Security Council, composed of the five most powerful nations on Earth, and so the U.S. essentially has veto power over any such resolution, and hasn't been afraid to use it, whether its President was Mr. Accountability None or the Nobel Peace Prize winner who has actually outdone his predecessor in launching unconstitutional wars. Hence Roots Action helps you tell our government to stop opposing such resolutions and face up to at least some of the harm it's caused in its Iraq adventures.

Meanwhile, we've spoken a bit about organic food labeling lately -- specifically about the possibility that loopholes in organic food standards could allow genetically-modified vitamins into organic food -- but the organic food standards do have one pretty outsized loophole: they allow genetically-modified vaccines in livestock. And while the standards require the NOSB to review any proposed use of GMO vaccines and only approve such vaccines where non-GMO alternatives don't exist, and while the NOSB hasn't approved a single such vaccine for that use, no one has even submitted such a vaccine for review -- and yet the NOSB admits that GMO vaccines find their way into organic food! How could such a thing happen? If you answer "because the NOSB hasn't been doing its job," you win first prize. But you know what a better prize would be? A better prize would be to outlaw GMO vaccines in organic food entirely, and then get all up in the NOSB's grill to actually enforce the standard this time, and so the Organic Consumers Association helps you do that. It's a tough job, but so's anything worth doing.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA's to propose the most vigorous carbon emissions standards possible, then Public Citizen helps you do that. But I warn you: if you use Public Citizen's tool, you'll be asking for more vigorous standards than the EPA has actually proposed. In what areas could the EPA's Clean Power Plan be improved? The Clean Power Plan could demand more renewable energy from states, it could stop pushing natural gas as an alternative to coal (especially since gas drilling leaks methane, which traps 80 times the heat that carbon dioxide does), and it could eliminate nuclear power, which does pollute less than coal or gas but which has never been economically viable without massive government handouts. And don't believe the hype that wind and solar "cost" more than coal. First, any new technology costs less as it's deployed more, and second, they only "cost" more to the corporations that would make them -- when you add in the health care savings and the climate change savings, they cost less to our civilization.

Around the table: the "will of the market," properly understood! Plus other items.

FBI director says corporate encryption of smartphones "will have very serious consequences for law enforcement and national security agencies at every level" -- that such encryption could stall murder investigations or free suspects. Obviously Mr. Comey doesn't take Blackstone's formulation very seriously, and worrying about "suspects going free" suggests he doesn't know how he comes off to ordinary people, who worry more about criminals going free. Should I be grateful that President Obama can only find second-rate fearmongers?

Author Andrew Schmookler argues that "while the right is connected to their moral and spiritual passions (even though that connection has been made on the basis of lies), Liberal America is not," largely because so many liberals consider notions like "good" and "evil" subjective matters. I wandered through that valley myself many years ago, but luckily I crawled out of it, even though I still practice seeing the good in my enemies. These days, if I don't actually see that much good in my enemies, I'm pretty sure that's because it's not there.

An EU study finds wind power is actually cheaper than coal or gas -- because the EU study actually counts the costs of breathing foul air and fighting climate change. Can any of our enterprising "liberal" media journalists ask Mitch McConnell what he thinks about all of that? Of course not -- then they would lose "access" to Mr. McConnell, like that means a damn when he's only going to feed you BS.

The Huffington Post finds that fast-food sandwich chain Jimmy John's makes their workers sign a draconian "non-competitiveness" agreement, effectively barring employees from working at any of Jimmy John's competitors for two years after they leave the corporation. It gets better: Jimmy John's defines "competitors" to include any nearby shop "deriving more than 10% of its revenue" from selling subs and sandwiches. You have to wonder what they're afraid of. It's probably not that some disgruntled employee will tell their local hospital cafeteria about the oil-to-vinegar ratio in the Gargantuan's "homemade Italian dressing."

Paul Krugman dissects right-wing claims that "the will of the markets" demands less government spending. He saves the best for last: "when people talk about what markets demand, what they’re really doing is trying to bully us into doing what they themselves want." A close second: he notes that rates of interest on American and European government debt have been close to zero for years, suggesting more that "markets are practically begging governments to borrow and spend" than that markets want governments to stay out of the economy.

Finally, Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) voices his fears that ISIS fighters will infect themselves with ebola and travel to America. And go around sneezing on people, no doubt. I think the kind of religious "devotion" that would induce one to give oneself ebola in order to maybe infect a few enemies is actually pretty rare, thank God, yet Mr. Johnson calls it "a clear and present danger." Ron Johnson: he gives the "citizen legislator" a bad name.

Action: renewable energy, "free" trade, and campaign finance disclosure.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the EPA's carbon emissions plan actually gives states a considerable amount of leeway to meet the EPA's standards; President Obama perhaps imagined that would satisfy folks who purport to be concerned about "states' rights," but they seem to have been rather mute in their admiration. Nonetheless, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) gets to draw up its own climate change plan, and the Sierra Club helps you tell Pennsylvania's DEP to adopt a vigorous plan that puts renewable energy at its center. Pennsylvania's a big coal state, as you know, and it's now a big natural gas state, too, thanks to Gov. Corbett's willingness to let gas drillers do whatever they like, clean drinking water be damned. But Pennsylvania also has pretty solid solar and wind sectors, and so may well lead the way for other states to transform their energy grids. Pennsylvania's dirty energy interests will no doubt stand in the way. But why should they get all the say around here? They'll only get all the say around here if we let it happen.

Word on the street is that House Speaker Boehner (E-OH) wants to force the nefarious "fast-track" plan down our throats after the elections. You all remember what "fast-track" is, right? It's the only way our government can force "free" trade on an unwilling electorate -- by forcing our Representatives in the House and Senate to vote on a "free" trade treaty in a largely debate-free, amendment-free manner that obviously leaves little time for sober consideration. Wasn't Mr. Boehner just saying he has "knuckleheads" in his caucus? Would some of said "knuckleheads" buck the Speaker's will and oppose "free" trade? Just kidding -- the supposed "craziness" of the Knucklehead Caucus is just an act; they'll all buckle down and do their corporate paymasters' bidding when it comes to "free" trade, though their constituents across the political spectrum oppose "free" trade deals that give away American jobs and American clean water protections and American clean air protections. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose "fast-track" and bad "free" trade deals.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the SEC to mandate that publicly-held corporations disclose their campaign spending to their shareholders, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You know the story -- the SEC mulled such a rule for several years, received a record million-plus comments (most in support), and then promptly removed the rule from its 2014 agenda, because it needed a nap or something. But don't shareholders deserve to know how corporate CEOs are spending their money? What are corporations afraid of -- backlash from shareholders who don't like that CEOs are spending their money trying to elect complete knuckle-draggers like Josh Mandel? Mr. Mandel rode some $40 million in spending on his behalf to get within striking distance of incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2012. In a mid-term year, when Democratic turnout tends to be lower, Mr. Mandel might have won with all that dirty money behind him. And that would have been a tragedy, since Mr. Brown is a good man, while Mr. Mandel shouldn't be dogcatcher, let alone Ohio's state Treasurer.