Thieves in the Temple.

Action: freedom for Saudi Arabian women, and freedom for Pennsylvania voters and legislators.

Hard to believe, Harry, but the government of Saudi Arabia not only doesn't want women driving without some man's permission, but plans to try two women drivers in its anti-terrorism court. And here we have the one great truth of the "war on terror" -- that the folks being terrorized are Our Glorious Elites, and their one great terror is that the people they're supposed to serve hate them for the things they do. You'd think Our Glorious Elites could afford a good therapist, but apparently they prefer to tell us that our civilized exercise of our inalienable rights in protesting their abuses of power comprise "terrorism." So this change.org petition helps you demand that Saudi Arabian King Abdullah release two women who have used social media to promote their opposition to the nation's de facto driving ban. Their use of social media is, in fact, the entire case of "terrorism" against them. Videos of women with uncovered faces! Photos of women driving! Anyone who actually feels "terrorized" by such things is an emotional cripple; anyone who pretends to feel terrorized by such things is a monster.

Meanwhile, you may not have known that Pennsylvania has some of the worst campaign finance laws in the nation, and is one of a mere 10 states that does not impose limits on campaign donors' gifts to state public officials and staffers. Chief Justice Roberts would have you believe that all that's just free speech, just so long as there's no actual quid pro quo (in which a donor promises a specific gift in exchange for a specific piece of legislation), but those of us in the real world unbound by philosophical ivory towers know better -- if you're a legislator, you receive "gifts" with the expectation that someone will come calling later with something they want done, and you interpret the word "gift" literally at your own peril. Pennsylvania does have laws requiring disclosure of gifts above a certain dollar amount, but really, we should do more to help legislators and their staffers avoid the appearance of corruption entirely. Hence Keystone Progress joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to enact more vigorous gift bans. While the bans detailed in the petition do allow some small gifts, they'll go a lot further in fighting corruption than mere disclosure has done.

Around the table: the overrated "Brownback effect," and other stories.

Martha Burk explains why the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" would be a bad deal for women. Long story short: this "free" trade deal would, in addition to all the other harm it would cause, cut off access to generic HIV drugs (which more women need these days) and outsource majority-female professions (like human resources departments, now there's irony for you). I notice that the protestor in the graphic holds up a sign saying the TPP would affect 40% of the world's Gross Domestic Product. You'd think Republicans would be up in arms about that figure -- after all, they got so hysterical about the Affordable Care Act affecting a mere 17% of America's economy.

University of Cambridge study finds that when police wear body cameras, they use less force on citizens. It's one study, so let's see it replicated, but it's hardly an unexpected result. And no it's not an example of TEH BIG BROTHERZ WATCHINGZ UZ!!!!!!, like warrantless wiretapping and NSA data-vacuuming -- it's an example of the people watching their public servants so they do less harm. People also complain too much about police turning the cameras off, as if there's just no way to subject such "mistakes" to discipline.

Israeli high court orders the West Bank settlement of Amona demolished, and its 300 residents relocated, within two years. The Israeli government didn't even authorize the settlement in 1995, and has for years admitted that it's illegal -- but keeps asking for extensions on relocation and keeps claiming it's bought some of the land in question. But why do the article's last two paragraphs (out of 10) concern a completely unrelated firebomb attack? Hysterically insisting that everything is intimately related to everything else is a right-wing trick that the "liberal" media certainly shouldn't enable.

ProPublica finds that banksters routinely "bragged" about how easily they could influence agencies like S&P's and Moody's to rate their tobacco-settlement bonds more highly than they deserved. And surprise, surprise, those same tobacco bonds (which, as you know, some states have used to fill budget holes, never mind the exorbitant fees or the consequences when the bonds come due) "have proved much riskier than advertised." If you thought conservatism was all about fiscal responsibility, recall that "conservatives" pushed for 49 states to adopt balanced-budget constitutional amendments, so that states become desperate for budget fixes like these (and others, like raiding their own pension funds). You could say balanced-budget amendments present yet another example of how "zero tolerance" policies hurt a lot more than they help.

Finally, Politico suggests that Republican governors won't cut state taxes much further, given how badly the Sam Brownback tax-cuts-for-the-rich "experiment" is going in Kansas. The article is larded with quotations from Republican operatives about how moving slow is the best way to go, etc., but I bet Republican "unwillingness" to cut taxes lasts only until the next self-created catastrophe they inflict on their states. And nothing prevents a Scott Walker from inflicting some other catastrophe -- like making Wisconsin a "right-to-work" state because WE'RE BROKE!!!!, for instance.

Action: clemency for Antonio Bascaro, and fairness in organ transplants.

First things first. Antonio Bascaro, now 80, has served a whopping 34 years in prison for a non-violent marijuana-importation offense -- while the ringleader of that operation has been free since 1994. Of course, we can guess why that is -- the ringleader probably had more info on other drug kingpins than any of his underlings did -- but that doesn't make it right. Mr. Bascaro has been, by all accounts, a model prisoner, a mere 20 credits away from a B.A. attempted entirely while incarcerated, and even more to the point, he meets recently-issued Justice Department guidelines for clemency, including a clean record before imprisonment and a sentence that's much longer than a similar sentence would be today. Hence a change.org petition helps you ask our government for clemency for Mr. Bascaro. If you're puzzled that I demand that we get tougher on criminal banksters and show more mercy toward non-violent drug offenders, consider that high among a civilization's virtues is knowing when to be merciful, and when not.

Meanwhile, another change.org petition helps you tell the federal Department of Health and Human Services to end discrimination against special needs kids when considering organ transplants. You might be tempted to say, well, we have a finite number of organs to transplant, so we always have to decide who to give them to, but we still have to decide correctly, and too often we deny special-needs children on the basis of incomplete or inaccurate medical records or, well, the simple belief that some kids aren't as much worth saving as others, that belief more often than not supported by some rather mistaken presumptions about particular patients' "ability" to take care of themselves after the transplant. Surely we've come some way in embracing the diversity apparent in the autistic community, for one example, or the Down's Syndrome community, for another. But, really, every life is precious, and we should save every life we can, regardless of who's a budding concert pianist and who isn't.

Around the table: from Antonio Weiss to Frank Capra.

David Dayen explains the problem with President Obama's nomination of Antonio Weiss as the Treasury Department's #3 official. Long story short: "Weiss’ history symbolizes what has gone wrong with American-style capitalism, with its focus on financial engineering rather than creating good products people might want." Sounds almost conservative, the idea we should be making products, instead of concocting ever-more-convoluted ways to redistribute worker-earned wealth upward to CEOs.

Republicans still want a Congressional Budgeting Office head who will count the alleged revenue-enhancing effects of tax cuts in its budget evaluations. Still not convinced "dynamic scoring" is, as Bush the Better might have said, "voodoo economics"? Federal revenues didn't recover for four years after Bush Mobb tax cuts, but have grown dramatically after just two years of tax hikes on income over $400,000, while Kansas is a quarter-billion dollars in the hole right now after four years of indiscriminate tax-cutting, and Wisconsin is staring at a two-year, $1.8 billion shortfall after Scott Walker's tax-cuts-for-his-pals.

The incomparable David Sirota cleverly notes all the "income redistribution" going on in red states -- both the aforementioned Kansas and New Jersey are robbing state pension plans to fix budget shortfalls caused by tax-cuts-for-the-rich and corporate tax breaks. (And, for balance, so did Illinois, under a Democratic Governor and Democrat-dominated legislature.) This quotation from Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback is absolutely priceless: "It’s kind of, uh, well, where are you going to go for the funds?" Oh, gosh, I don't know, maybe to all the rich folks to whom you gave tax cuts in the first place?

Good news, everyone: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has, as part of a settlement, barred two Virginia corporations from suing soldiers for debt in Virginia courts even if the soldiers live thousands of miles away. The settlement didn't include USA Living (formerly USA Discounters, about whom we read a few months ago), and didn't force the two corporations involved to admit wrongdoing, but it does represent progress for soldiers trapped unwittingly in a cycle of debt. Those who say it's their fault for not reading the fine print are welcome to try to convince me that trying to trap people in a cycle of debt is something a sane and moral culture should merely tolerate.

Finally, as we remain in the holiday spirit, we learn that Ayn Rand helped the FBI investigate Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life for supposed Communist leanings. The irony? Frank Capra was a fairly conservative fellow -- he didn't believe in Big Gummint help, and thought combatting atheism should be a top American priority. In other words, he's almost made to be worshiped by modern-day right-wingers -- though he (like Ms. Rand, I suspect) probably wouldn't recognize modern-day right-wingers as conservatives.

Around the table: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar defends civilization, and other stories.

In case you were wondering how to express your conviction that a civilized society needs both peaceful protestors and good police officers, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar teaches us how. Of course, if you were really wondering, then I haven't done my job -- we pay for police officers with our taxes, which means we respect the office even as we watch the officers and discipline them when they go wrong.

Baltimore Fox affiliate reports a protestor chant incorrectly, then apologizes for it, though only after a protestor confronted them. I guess I can see how they could have gotten it wrong without actually being malicious, but they could only have failed to listen to the entire chant out of intense laziness, and laziness isn't a better excuse than malice. What "journalists" tolerate from themselves anymore is profoundly offensive -- it's OK, because we apologized! is nothing to bring to the pearly gates.

Republicans are thinking of using "budget reconciliation" to repeal the Affordable Care Act, among other things. And presumably the very same "liberal" media punditoids who acted like civilization was falling because the Democrats used that very same tool to pass the ACA in the first place will be just as hysterical this time. Right?

Steve Benen finds that three campaign promises made by Republicans have been met -- under President Obama. Those three promises were a) getting unemployment under 6%, b) getting gas under $2.50/gallon, and c) getting GDP up to 5%. I wouldn't give Mr. Obama a lot of credit for any of this, but Republicans kept insisting that they could reach these goals with more tax cuts for gazillionaires. So we now have more evidence that tax-cuts-for-the-rich don't help an economy reach these goals, since taxes went up on income over $400,000 in early 2013.

Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) actually pleads guilty to felony tax fraud, but still won't resign his House seat. I suppose his apologists will be resourceful -- having now been deprived of the talking point that Mr. Grimm was being railroaded by Mr. Grimm's own plea, perhaps they'll shift to saying the crime's not that big a deal. I urge people who have that opinion to reassess it, hopefully before the next time they hit a pothole or the fire department takes too long getting to their house.

Finally, Erica Avery has 14 new book reviews at her website, So Much to Read. Ms. Avery has been reviewing books she's read (probably not all of them) for 18 years, whittling complex ideas down to their essence and refusing to take BS from any book, fiction or nonfiction. In this most recent batch you'll find, among other things, one young adult novel that "explor(es) teenage crisis, guilt, and depression, while leaving alone what can't be explained: the supernatural, and the cruelty of teenagers." You should also check out her Six Words reviews -- I guarantee at least a few of them will make you laugh out loud.

UPDATE. Rep. Grimm did, in fact, resigned his House seat, two days after this post went up. Perhaps I should've known his intransigence wouldn't last, but you know, this is a crazy world, where new things happen all the time.

Around the table: meet Peter Shumlin, perfecting the art of Democrat weakness! And other stories.

Absolutely horrifying news from Vermont: Gov. Peter Shumlin has scrapped Vermont's plan to institute a single-payer health care plan by 2017, citing its cost, naturally. A state income tax rate of up to 9.5%, by Ford! Is he aware that some New Jersey residents already pay that much? And why does he shrink from an 11% payroll tax hike when corporations are already likely paying 20% of their workers' salary on health insurance? And did Mr. Shumlin ever calculate the boom in tax revenues that would happen when businesses and corporations relocate to Vermont, knowing health insurance would actually cost less for them? Oh, well -- "it is not the right time for Vermont" will surely be remembered alongside Mr. Churchill's "this was their finest hour." Typical Democrat weakness.

Ho hum, the Federal Reserve allows banksters to hold on to their private equity and hedge fund investments for two more years. You may recall that the "Volcker Rule" would prevent banks from holding various kinds of securities so that they, you know, act like banks, but banks got the reprieve after complaining that they'd have to sell these securities at "discount" prices to comply with the rule. Jesus Mary and Joseph what is the difference between being really rich and really really rich? At least Paul Volcker himself gets the best word, if not the last word.

Surprise, surprise, the "liberal" media uses the controversy over banking regulations to call Democratic populists "demanding and disruptive" and laud the "can-do desires of establishment Democrats." What the latter group "can do," of course, is sell out the popular will to the banksters, as if "governing" means ignoring your constituents, whose interests you're supposed to represent. When we see Congress trying to steal Social Security and Medicare for their corporate paymasters, the "liberal" media will call that "mature governing," and when Elizabeth Warren fights it, at least one "liberal" media figure (who wants to bet on whom it will be?) will drop the b-word on her.

Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President blames "those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protest" for the cold-blooded murder of two cops sitting in their patrol car. I guess it's too much to ask for a public figure to blame, oh, I don't know, the shooter, who did not carry a protest sign or break off from a crowd of protestors. The next fool who utters something like this will probably just up and call protestors "terrorists," and then we'll have to slay that zombie lie, over and over again. At least we'll be on the side of righteousness when we do.

Gallup poll finds President Obama's approval rating at its highest level in over half a year. But does author Justin Sink really think Mr. Obama's actions on behalf of that noxious spending bill might be a factor in his rise? Why can't it be because he's lately refused to let Republicans kick sand in his face for the first time in six years? People do respond to folks who don't back down, after all, even when they don't agree with them.

Finally, Ralph Nader, America's Greatest Citizen, reminds us that "Toys from Abusive Chinese Factories Bring No Holiday Cheer." You're likely familiar with most of the details already, but perhaps not this observation from China Labor Watch: "Many toy companies divide their toy orders among dozens or hundreds of factories...Toy companies will also use this as a basis for avoiding responsibility for poor labor conditions. For example, if CLW uncovers labor rights violations at a Disney supplier factory in China, Disney might respond that it only maintains a small number of orders in the plant and is unable to influence the factory’s behavior." Buy local and buy small, folks, and put the Christ back in Christmas.

Action: political redistricting, and fracking in Pennsylvania.

CREDO helps you tell big corporations like WalMart, AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon to stop donating millions of dollars to the Republican State Leadership Committee (or RSLC). Why? Well, as Mother Jones reports, the RSLC has been working these last few years to shoehorn huge numbers of black folks into "majority-minority" districts, so that they have less say in other districts. I'm not sure Republican majorities in so many state legislatures (and in Congress) is the result of that -- if the Democrats had done more in 2009 and 2010, Republicans wouldn't have done nearly as well as they did -- but I am pretty sure these majorities continue, in large part, because they've redrawn districts to their advantage once they got the power. I'm also pretty sure the Supreme Court will hear a lot of challenges to these districts, but that'll take time, and this Court isn't noted for seeing what's right in front of it. The good news? Telling these corporations they're responsible for resegregating America is a Big Stick of Bad PR they won't ignore. So let's use what we've got.

Meanwhile, the government of New York state just banned fracking, so Food and Water Watch helps you tell Gov.-elect Tom Wolf to ban fracking in Pennsylvania, too. Mr. Wolf did not advocate a fracking ban while running for election -- he ran on imposing impact fees on gas drillers, which Pennsylvania's Act 13, that shining example of small-government conservatism, made optional -- but surely he knows which way the wind blows, especially after the state Supreme Court struck down Act 13's provision preventing municipalities from enacting their own environmental safeguards on fracking. Fracking has never been popular in Pennsylvania, and though the state still has a Republican House and Senate, remember that Republican Senators from the Philly suburbs snuck in a fracking ban for their constituents into the state's 2012 budget, and remember, also, how many months the legislature delayed passing Act 13 simply because it was so unpopular. Turns out pollution is unpopular. Turns out dirty water is unpopular. I wonder how the "liberal" media missed it.

Action: methane pollution, overtime pay, and "free" trade.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the EPA and President Obama to regulate methane pollution from the oil and gas industry. Currently the EPA does not regulate methane pollution, which accounts for less than one-tenth of all the pollution we spew into the air but is, pound for pound, much worse for the climate than carbon dioxide, which must be why the methane mitigation industry (which seals leaks from gas drilling wells) is taking off in America. Oil and gas corporations won't like it, and I'll bet they'll cite falling oil prices as a reason for government inaction -- as if anyone who actually buys gas could possibly find that reasoning sympathetic, particularly if they know that oil prices were that high in the first place mainly because of speculation, or if they remember that people bashed Mr. Obama when oil prices were high, as well. And no you are not a hypocrite if you're trying to ban fracking and ask the EPA to regulate a by-product of fracking -- you're merely trying to fight for the common good on every front.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama has directed the Department of Labor to revise and simplify overtime pay rules. I'm old enough to remember when overtime was a big deal -- specifically, in 2003, when Tha Bush Mobb's Labor Department tried to make it harder for workers to get overtime, and America's Congressfolk were so bombarded by letters from their constituents that they actually voted against the Bush rules in legislation. Tha Bush Mobb's Senate lackey, Bill Frist, eventually folded the overtime rules into (get your surprised face ready) end-of-year omnibus spending legislation, but we'd made our point rather emphatically, and now we have a chance to get some real work done. Overtime rules currently cap the salary at which people can get overtime at a mere $23,000 annually (which, to be fair, Tha Bush Mobb Labor Department actually raised, from $8,000 annually); Moms Rising helps you tell the Department of Labor to raise that cap to $69,000 annually. No this won't "kill jobs" -- actually, it would force corporations to hire more people, so they pay less overtime, and this is one of the reasons we have overtime to begin with.

Finally, we recently passed the 21st anniversary of the Clinton-era North America Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, though a better name would be SHAFTYA, because that's what it's done, both to American workers whose jobs got magically changed into Mexican ones, and also to Mexican workers who found themselves trapped as wage slaves in American corporations. And our current Democratic President, having apparently learned nothing from the last one, still pushes the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and its attempts to subjugate American law to the whim of "investor-state tribunals" who will always come down on the side of some corporation's "right" to pay its workers in dung pellets and dump poisonous crap in our air and water. The TPP has, as you know, received rather little coverage from the "liberal" media, and even less critical coverage. Why? Because they fear our anger, that's why -- which we can make manifest by letting Public Citizen help us tell our Congressfolk to reject "free" trade agreements like the TPP that make a mockery of the rule of law.

Around the table: torture, environmental regulations, Big Gummint job creation, a bankster's paradise, a "liberal" media taunt, and the story of a fracking victory.

Glenn Greenwald reminds us that torture victims get even less time on "liberal" media outlets than torture opponents. Which, he says, helps explain recent polling finding a majority of Americans approve of torture: "Not having to think about actual human victims makes it easy to justify any sort of crime." And he also reminds us of the ways putting torture victims on TV could backfire. Still, stories of innocent folks tortured and (literally) left by the side of the road -- then blocked from suing our government because of "security" -- would be very effective, if the "liberal" media told them.

And here's yet another noxious result of the recent "bipartisan" omnibus spending "deal" -- it cuts the EPA's budget for the fifth year in a row. This despite polls finding that a huge (and actually bipartisan) majority of Americans think keeping our air clean is more important than relieving corporations of regulatory "burdens" and that the EPA should be doing more to enforce clean air and clean water laws. Funny, the answers you get from the American people when you ask how they feel about clean air and clean water.

Surprise, surprise, you know those Scandinavian nations? The ones with Big Gummint safety nets and high taxes on the rich? They actually do better at creating jobs than America does. America's U-6 unemployment rate, as you may know, is still above 11%. And if you recall that an unemployment check totalling $350 weekly doesn't put you in Shangri-La, you already know that unemployment insurance isn't much of an "incentive" against work. But good safety nets include programs that help people keep jobs in the first place -- programs like child and elder care, paid sick leave, high minimum wages, and public transportation.

Kevin Drum reports that the banksters plan an "aggressive push" toward loosening the financial service regulations that presumably keep them from crashing our economy again. On one hand, pretty much everyone in America hates more bailouts for banksters, which phrase would accurately describe what would happen if we loosened derivative regulations further and "overhauled" the Consumer Financial Product Bureau. On the other hand, most folks don't really understand how derivatives work, almost like that's the idea, and it's hard to focus your anger on things you don't really get. Still, we can do something about that, and one would hope that President Obama, too, will protect his legacy with the veto pen.

Bloomberg scribe Robert Schmidt seems to be taunting Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) over her opposition to the then-possible appointment of Lawrence Summers as Fed Chair, by noting that Mr. Summers has made $28 million since withdrawing his name from consideration. I call it "taunting" because I can't otherwise explain why someone would join those two facts in an article -- I mean, nobody roots for Larry Summers, and the whole point of opposing Mr. Summers was preventing him from doing the immense amount of damage he'd do as Fed Chair. Sounds like we won, regardless of what Mr. Schmidt seems to think.

Finally, Daily Kos diarist lipris describes how the anti-fracking movement won in New York state. Long story short: people who'd never been activists joined their ranks, they got municipalities to ban fracking (and won the approval of the state's highest court), and they hounded Gov. Cuomo wherever he went -- all of which moved public opinion in their direction and "boxed in" the Governor. These are the victories that get us through all the defeats.

Around the table: Arctic drilling, CEO pay, "jump-outs," wage theft, pension theft, and bad cartoons.

Good news: President Obama has indefinitely banned oil and gas drilling in Bristol Bay, Alaska, a cause for which we've agitated here. Only an incoming President can reverse the ban, which a Republican President almost certainly will, because Obama. Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) doesn't oppose the ban, but finds it "frustrating" that the Obama Administration sees "conservation" as Alaska's "most pressing need." Then again, Republicans see "more money for their corporate paymasters" as all of America's most pressing need.

Fifteen Senators sign a letter to the SEC demanding that they implement a CEO-to-worker pay disclosure rule as mandated by the Dodd-Frank law. Financial corporations -- being, as they are, run by people without any sense of shame -- have pressured the SEC to delay or water down the rule, and they seem to be getting their way so far. SEC Chair Mary Jo White may prove to be an even worse Obama appointment than FCC Chair Tom Wheeler.

Nicole Flatow at Think Progress tells us all about "jump-outs," which is when a handful of police officers drive up and jump out of their cars all armed and armored-up -- and these police usually "jump out," observers tell us, at congregations of young black men on the street. Warrants? We don't need no stinkin' warrants! Funny how the drug problem never seems to get better in America, no matter how many unconstitutional acts we throw at it. It's almost like that's the idea. And the "war on terror" is exactly the same.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, upholding a seven-year old lower court ruling, ordered WalMart to pay $188 million in a class-action wage theft lawsuit. But WalMart will keep appealing, all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary, out of its CEOs' obviously very-deeply held conviction that all those people who sued them shouldn't have been allowed to sue as a class. That looks more to me like a "frivolous lawsuit" than any of the stupid stories tort "reformers" belch out.

And here's yet another odious result from that omnibus spending law Congress passed over the weekend: it allows pension plan trustees to cut benefits for current pensioners. Everybody understands that the future is the hardest thing to predict, but everybody also understands that pension funds should be investing safely, rather than giving themselves over to hedge funds, and everybody also understands that, you know, you should keep your damn promises.

Finally, fossil fuel corporation front group creates a cartoon calling the alleged effects of EPA environmental regulation "torture." But fossil fuel corporate CEOs will have a tough time convincing very many Americans that making a little less money -- the only actual negative effect of clean air and clean water regulations -- is anything like being beaten up, being forced to stand on broken feet, or being waterboarded. More likely they'll convince Americans that they're the biggest whiners in American history.

Action: investigating torture, and ending a draconian abortion ban in El Salvador.

Roots Action helps you tell President Obama to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of torture, or complicity therein, by officials of our government. Throwing up your hands and giving up, saying this country can't even indict a cop when he gets videotaped strangling a suspect, is not an option, and it's certainly not the attitude that got rid of slavery. And while Mr. Obama has professed to be a look-forward-not-backward type, the law doesn't give him that choice -- torture (or complicity therein) is a felony, and the U.S. has signed several international treaties compelling it to prosecute cases of torture, including the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which latter treaty clearly says, in Article II, that "(n)o exceptional circumstances whatsoever" can justify torture. It doesn't matter that Tha Bush Mobb started calling it "enhanced interrogation." Putting a sprig of basil on a pile of dung doesn't magically make it meatloaf.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International helps you tell El Salvador to end its total ban on abortion. Why? Because El Salvador doesn't allow abortion if the mother's life or health is in danger, nor does it allow abortion in case of rape -- meaning that women can go to jail for having miscarriages if the doctor who treats them suspects them of having had an abortion. Perhaps not coincidentally, one-third of women giving birth in El Salvador are 19 or younger, and over half of all deaths of pregnant females between 10 and 19 are suicides. Think about this as you watch right-wingers have swordfights over who's more "conservative." "I'm more conservative, because I oppose abortion in all cases!" "Oh yeah? Well, I'm more conservative because I'm against birth control!" I'm against miscarriage is exactly where that's headed. But any civilized society ought to be able to reduce abortions without falling all over each other trying to be more punitive. Punishment has its place, but it's not the only tool in the toolbox -- and when we abuse that tool, we abuse each other.

Around the table: fracking and oil trains, unsafe at any speed! And other stories.

America's Greatest Citizen, Ralph Nader, tells us why trains carrying crude oil are "unsafe at any speed." If you've told the Department of Transportation to mandate better tank cars and better emergency preparation, you'll be familiar with most of the issues Mr. Nader raises -- plus you'll learn (I did not know this!) that the number of tank cars on American railroads has increased fortyfold just over the last five years, that railroads were never supposed to transport such dangerous stuff (or they wouldn't run "next to schools and under football stadiums"), and that even the right-wing government of Canada has taken stronger steps to make oil transportation safer than the U.S. has.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announces his Administration will ban hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," due to health risks. Which are legion, as you know -- if you can't drink the water, you can't be healthy in the first place -- but it still took pretty much all of Mr. Cuomo's first term for him to make a decision. At least he made the right one -- and fracking supporters squealing ZOMG WHAT ABOUT TEH JOBZ!!!! should note that the state has already essentially banned tracking since 2009. Maybe they should get involved with solar and wind; I hear they're pretty promising, and they leave a lot less wreckage in their wake.

I'd rather not celebrate prematurely, but apparently at least four big telecom corporations have been privately telling investors that strong net neutrality regulations from the FCC wouldn't really change very much. This is the opposite of what they tell us, of course -- they tell us that ZOMG TEH REGULASHUNZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!!! It would have been nice if the author -- or, indeed, any of the folks the article quotes -- had remembered that the net neutrality regime is the regime everyone already lives under.

Paul Waldman says liberals seem "happy" with the budget fight we all just lost. I wonder to whom he's talking -- I hope it's not just people inside the Beltway, who are notoriously ignorant of things that happen outside the beltway. His thesis is that liberals came around to legislation they didn't particularly like (i.e., the Affordable Care Act) in 2009 and 2010 because it was better than the status quo, but that since "there won't be any more big liberal initiatives enacted through legislation" (any more?), liberals feel more, well, liberated. "Liberated" to draft Elizabeth Warren (a Republican until 1996) to run for President, apparently, but liberated to fight for good works despite the odds?

ProPublica tells us about the New York state Deputy Comptroller asking state charter school regulators to demand more financial transparency from charter schools -- and hearing nothing from any of them. Remember that the whole point of letting a charter school use public money is that the state must make sure the charter schools are doing what they're supposed to do. Why people think they can get away with just not doing their jobs is beyond me. Oh, wait, they all lived during Tha Bush Mobb years, too.

Around the table: largely about the artificial nexus between social policy and economic policy.

Rick Santorum will run for President again in 2016, and says, rather candidly, that he doesn't have to "lay out his bona fides" to the religious right ("That's done") and can focus on getting blue-collar workers back -- but with his hard-line stance on immigration. Well, it's not like America's Hispanic population is growing or anything. Seriously, of course Rick Santorum can win, but he'll need to rely more on economic populism (yes, economic populism in defense of corporatism can befuddle enough of the people enough of the time to win) and, this is important, he'll need to speak in his inside voice.

Sue Sturgis at the Institute for Southern Studies finds North Carolina making very little progress in its apparent effort to keep coal ash pits from leaking into drinking water sources. How? Well, Duke Energy has a lot of coal ash pits, but they also have a former employee as North Carolina's Governor, Pat McCrory, and he has put a lot of former Duke Energy workers in his brain trust. Then Gov. McCrory went on 60 Minutes to criticize Duke Energy's pollution record -- without mentioning that he wasn't actually doing anything to stop it! The EPA issues final coal ash rules next week, unless Great American Super-President Mitch McConnell has anything to say about it.

Openly gay South African model surprised to find himself on a Virginia billboard advertising an organization called Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays -- playing twins! Kyle Roux, as fate would have it, is not part of a set of twins; the organization simply used the same photo twice (a stock photo he made ten years ago, and you never know where those will wind up) and put different clothes on it each time. Does anyone still assume that identical twins should be alike in every conceivable way?

David Koch, of the infamous Koch brothers, asserts that he's really a "social liberal" on abortion and gay marriage -- and yet somehow just about everyone he supports doesn't share his values on social issues, despite his billions and his clout. I mean, a man with his money could have created a thriving Libertarian movement in this country, but instead he's given us the Tea Party. And I care even less about David Koch's "good" values than I do about Michael Bloomberg's -- and any pro-lifer who wants to bring back the 91% tax bracket is more my ally than any thousand pro-choice Third Way types.

Finally, the governments of France and the United States reach an accord on $60 million in reparations for Holocaust victims transported by the French national railroad corporation, SCNF. You may have helped bring this about, if you remember supporting Leo Bretholtz -- who only survived the death camps as a youth by jumping off one of those SCNF trains -- in his activism against SCNF. Mr. Bretholtz passed earlier this year (at the age of 93, which, like, good show!), but at least he got a measure of justice -- and it is like pulling teeth to get France to admit it did anything wrong during World War II.

Action: banning fracking on public lands, and disclosing GMO foods.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell our government to ban fracking on public lands. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) introduced H.R. 5844 last week, but the House has gone home for the year, so he'll have to reintroduce it again next year, in a Congress much less favorably disposed toward its passage. But we can change people's minds -- even people whose livelihood depends on them not changing their minds, which describes most of Congress. And you know what fracking on public lands means: not just cutting down forests, not just trucks carrying the toxic chemicals all around, but also polluting water, and once that water's polluted, it ain't coming back -- we're not going swimming in it, we're not going rafting in it, and we're certainly not drinking it. If these gas drillers could conduct hydrofracturing safely, they wouldn't have needed that exemption to the Clean Water Act they got from Tha Bush Mobb in 2005, which allowed them to keep the toxic chemicals they use in fracking a secret. Maybe one day they'll figure out how to frack safely, but that day ain't today.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4432, the so-called Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, did not advance in the House last week, as we feared. H.R. 4432 would, as you know, not only pre-empt any state laws mandating genetically-modified food labeling (as in Vermont, and in several other New England states, though their laws won't take effect until enough neighboring states pass similar laws), but would encourage the creation of yet another "voluntary" food-labeling system which should work about as well in telling us which foods have genetically-modified organisms as the current four- or five-digit system does -- which is "not well at all," as evidenced by the complete absence of five-digit produce codes beginning with the number 8. Hence Friends of the Earth helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 4432 and similar efforts to let corporations decide how much to disclose about what GMOs they're putting in the food we eat. If GMO foods were as safe as they say, then why have the big food corporations spent hundreds of millions of dollars defeating GMO-labeling initiatives at the state level?

Around the table: fighting evil in These Interesting Times.

Dick Cheney, confronted with the fact of one tortured detainee "chained to the wall of a cell, doused with water, froze to death" in what turned out to be "a case of mistaken identity," responds "But the problem I have was with all of the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield." To which I'd respond: so, by changing the subject, you're conceding the point? And Mr. Cheney has "no problem" with (at least!) a quarter of detainees being innocent? Precisely the opposite of Blackstone's formulation -- "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" -- which is only the basic building block of modern Western jurisprudence. This is why I can't stand Tha Bush Mobb: they were not only willing to sacrifice liberty for security, they were willing to sacrifice civilization for security, and you can't have security without either.

FAIR spots a Cincinnati Enquirer ad for new reporters telling prospective applicants that a major job function would be to "grow and monetize the 25-to-45 audience." Years from now the Enquirer will say, "nobody could have predicted the conflicts of interest that would have created!" Sadly, it's not that much a surprise -- I'm old enough to remember when journalism textbooks advised students to use PR releases to write articles -- but that certainly doesn't make it right. Journalists need to be adversaries of mammon, not votaries. The "liberal" media consistently gets that wrong. It's almost like that's the idea.

Ho hum, Red Cross staffers testify that senior officials told them not to partner with the highly-successful Occupy Sandy effort. The staffers couldn't point to a specific person who gave the order, which may be how the Red Cross wanted it. I shudder to think that the Red Cross brain trust worried about the optics of being associated with dirty hippies. Certainly they could have turned their elite donors' alleged concerns on their head and told them, we should work with anyone who does the right thing well, regardless of their stands on other issues, but we just don't hear that in These Interesting Times.

Surprise, surprise, government data suggests that elementary and secondary schools suspend black girls much more often than they suspend white girls. Also, in a finding I did not honestly suspect, Villanova researchers find these schools suspend dark-skinned girls three times more often than light-skinned girls. The anecdotes the Times offers also suggest that schools looking to get money from kids as a punishment for wrongdoing are going about it all wrong -- if someone doesn't have money, then what?

And here's another odious result of that noxious omnibus spending bill: IRS funding got cut by nearly $350 billion. Don't snicker: taxes pay for things we all need, after all, and every dollar IRS spends going after tax cheats gets us $10 back. Besides which, a lot of people who complain about taxes get money back from the IRS every year, and if we don't fund the IRS properly, they won't get paid as quick. And thank God CTJ points out that the less we fund the IRS, the less well it runs generally -- which spurs complaints from opportunistic politicians that they use to justify funding the IRS even less, which makes the IRS run even less well, ad nauseum.

Finally, two Bay Area residents are suing Comcast for using their home routers as Wifi hotspots! I can't believe a corporation would be that stupid! So stupid, apparently, that the spokeshack who responded to the Consumerist's article didn't seem to read the article beforehand, particularly that part about how the whole "opt-out" function seems to work erratically. Concentrated power: it makes people stupid. Maybe that's the silver lining of These Interesting Times.

Action: investigating banksters, shining light on tax abatements, and fighting big telecom mergers.

The People's Email Network helps you tell the Justice Department to investigate J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's lobbying of Congressfolk to support a bankster-friendly provision in the recent omnibus spending bill. That provision is, as you know, the one allowing big banksters to gamble with derivatives using taxpayer funds, which action Dodd-Frank formerly prohibited. Some of you may be tempted to call this "harassment" or "chilling free speech." But you'd need to prove the mere act of investigating constitutes "harassment," and lobbying for a provision which would stand to make you a lot of money isn't quite "free speech" -- you might more accurately describe it as a bribe or, depending on the nature of the communications between Mr. Dimon and certain Congressfolk, a threat, and neither of these comprise Constitutionally-protected speech, not even to Chief Justice Roberts. Too many folks already buy laws favorable to them -- and unfavorable to the people at large -- using campaign contributions as a cudgel, and (as former Republican Rep. Vance McAllister instructed us many months ago) they're not all as good at covering their tracks as they'd like us to think. Maybe Mr. Dimon is, but we'll never know unless we do something.

Meanwhile, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, or GASB, has proposed rules mandating state and local governments to report how much revenue they lose from "tax abatements," or tax breaks states and municipalities give to corporations for the benefit of the community. This is significant because the GASB has never done so before, and thus we can only estimate how many billions of dollars of taxpayer money -- our money -- states and municipalities spend on corporate welfare (though we think it's about $70 billion). It's also significant because the GASB develops the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP, which almost every state and municipality follows. But while GASB's efforts also contain some loopholes, chief among them that the new rules would make reporting the recipients of taxpayer money voluntary, and though corporations like to tell you that all voluntary requirements eventually become "mandatory," they don't, and the fact remains: voluntary doesn't mean mandatory. So Good Jobs First helps you file a public comment with the GASB supporting the strongest tax abatement reporting rules possible.

Meanwhile, Consumers Union helps you call FCC Chair Tom Wheeler's toll-free number at 1.888.598.4221 and tell him to reject the proposed Comcast/Time-Warner merger. Consumers Union would also like you to tell them how the call went. The public comment period on the merger ends December 23 (which is next Tuesday); clearly the FCC hopes that everyone will forget about the merger because it's the holidays and all, but we do not forget that mergers kill jobs, reduce competition, and hike prices. It's like Our Glorious Elites have completely forgotten that more businesses means more jobs and lower prices for consumers. I say "it's like" because I'm pretty sure they just want us to think they're that dumb, or they want us to forget how things actually work. Comcast, for its part, claims it's "really" competing with wireless services (which no one who has actually used a wireless service believes) and also says "the same people" have been opposing mergers for decades. Perhaps in the 1960s South, they'd have complained that "the same people always oppose Jim Crow laws." (If you'd prefer to send an email message, Consumers Union helps you do that, too.)

Around the table: evil, and how to defeat it.

The omnibus spending bill, the one with all those intolerable provisions, passed on Saturday night -- though not without a mini-revolt by two Republican Senators on immigration. But other than a few more nominations, the only political advantage the Democrats gained with the Cruz/Lee "fumble" is the handful of Republican Senators up in 2016 (Coats, Johnson, McCain, Murkowski, Toomey) now on record as "not being tough enough on immigration." Also, that Warren/Vitter amendment you may have heard about, which would have stripped the pro-bankster derivatives provision from the bill? It didn't even get a vote, because TEH MATURITY MEANZ GETTINGZ TEH THINGZ DONEZ!!!!! The Senate seems to think "mature" people come together to steal what belongs to the people and give it to their corporate paymasters, which is not a lesson I think we should impart to our young.

Most folks will read the Guardian's lengthy conversation with a long-time ISIS fighter and focus on this statement: "If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology." And it's true that the "war of liberation" Mr. Bush fought is little more than a perpetual motion machine for creating Islamic radicals, but you'd be cheating yourself if that's all you got from the article -- like, the ISIS fighter's sense that leaving ISIS would be futile, even as others within the organization also have their doubts. Personal to those who think the solution to the Bucca debacle would have been MORE TORTUREZ!!!!: detainment (which is often wrongful detainment) is motivation enough.

Speaking of torture, Andrew Emmett at Nation of Change covers some of the heinous CIA-committed crimes not covered by the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report. Lowlights: a man gives up information about a suspect, then gets waterboarded over 83 times in an unsuccessful attempt to get more information; two retired military psychologists make $81 million practicing torture on detainees, and the only man to go to jail for any of this is the fellow who handed a CIA investigator's business card to a New York Times reporter. It's enough to make you cynical, if you didn't already know cynicism is evil.

Mark and Paul Engler ask, "What Makes Nonviolent Movements Explode?" The answer: traditional organizing really doesn't -- though I remain convinced it does a lot of long-term good -- but "disruption and sacrifice" do. Pay particular attention to the "sacrifice" part, not just because sacrifice helps counter the backlash against disruption or because, in These Interesting Times, we're not as well-attuned to sacrifice as we should be, but also because that section tells the best stories -- and reminds us to use our enemies' power against them.

Finally, because we need some good news: Mohammad Usafi, who worked as a translator for the Marines in Afghanistan, has finally been reunited with his family in the Bay Area. You may recall from a previous action alert that the Taliban, in retaliation for Mr. Usafi's work on behalf of our military, murdered his father, kidnapped his youngest brother to extract a ransom, and then forced his family to flee to Pakistan. Well, thanks in part to your efforts, they're now here (just barely, it seems, thanks to a harrowing journey back into Afghanistan), and hopefully on track to become citizens.

Action: net neutrality, torture coverage, and police brutality.

Since being told again and again by just about everyone (including President Obama!) that they need to preserve network neutrality and prevent the big telecoms from imposing their "tiered service" plan so that they can control your internet experience instead of you, the FCC has done, well, nothing. Like I said, even the President told them to do what we've been telling them to do for years: to use their legal authority to reclassify broadband as a utility and then prevent the big telecoms from making sure Miley Cyrus twerking videos reach your computer faster than the sites you want to visit. Hence OpenMedia helps you write a letter to the editor supporting net neutrality to your local newspaper. I can guarantee you the other side (which, quelle surprise, includes the Tea Party!) will be recruiting their lemmings to write anti-net neutrality letters, so we might as well win that battle, too. Remember that net neutrality gives everyone a chance at success -- and the corporate plan to destroy it will ensure that only the richest will succeed. I want an America where ideas succeed, not money.

Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA torture has been out for less than half a week, and already the big "liberal" media outlets are bending over backwards to give torture advocates extensive airtime. We've heard too much from Dick Cheney already, though admittedly hearing anything from Dick Cheney is too much, but not only are the "liberal" media playing the he-said-he-said game (where the media utters some variation of "the CIA denies the story" without actually fact-checking the CIA's denials), they're lobbying softball questions at people who we now know lied about what they did and knew. You'd think "liberal" media types would have asked themselves, self, has enough time passed so that people might not remember how horribly wrong I was during Tha Bush Mobb years? -- and ultimately answered why, yes, it has, and now I can take credit for being right now as if I were right all along! Sadly, they have not. Hence FAIR helps you tell the "liberal" media to provide actual balance, and not fake balance, to their coverage of the torture report.

Finally, Michael Brown's parents have started a petition on Change.org asking Congress to pass a bill mandating that all police officers wear body cameras, in the hope that body cameras will reduce lethal force by police officers and thus save lives. I expect it will, and the fact that video of Eric Garner's strangling didn't save his life doesn't argue very well against it -- we do not assume that body cameras will save every life; we assume that body cameras will save more lives, as those rare police officers likely to go all Terminator on people who may or may not have committed crimes will be more likely to think twice about doing so. And we have also witnessed, just this week, an Albuquerque police officer lose his job for repeatedly having camera "malfunctions" during his own uses of force against citizens. I don't even buy arguments that body cameras extend the surveillance state, either -- if you're supposed to be serving the public, the public gets to watch you. Any power can be abused; containing that power, and preventing that abuse, is the work of a civilized society.

UPDATE. The House passed the omnibus spending bill last night, 219-206; the bill now goes to the Senate, so now it's time to call your Senators and tell them to strip out the bill's multitudinous offending provisions (detailed in yesterday's action post) -- or, if they can't strip out the offending provisions, vote "no" on the whole thing. I don't care if it shuts down our government. I will not be a hostage to evil.

ANOTHER UPDATE. Common Cause helps you tell President Obama to veto the spending bill, if and when it passes the Senate. Personal to those who say Democrats will get blamed for the shutdown if the Senate doesn't pass this noxious bill: one, I don't care; two, Democrats can make their case to the people; and three, maybe if Democrats had done something with all those massive majorities the people gave them six years ago, they wouldn't be in the pickle they're in now -- and more to the point, we wouldn't be in the pickle we're in now.

Around the table: banksters vs. charity, one cop vs. body cameras, corporations vs. retail workers, Republicans vs. math, and "sprayLD" vs. ALD.

"Donor-advised funds run by huge money management firms are exploding," says the lede in Jesse Eisenger's article, "The Wall Street Takeover of Charity." The problem? Donor-advised funds don't have to spend all the money their donors put into them right away -- indeed, these funds disbursed $10 billion of the $17 billion they received in 2013 -- which means that while donors get the tax advantages of having donated, good causes don't. Which also means that the funds plow most of the money they get into other investments, a situation Mr. Eisenger dryly says "gets the notion of charity wrong." It's like the banksters can even make money screwing up charitable giving. And they are screwing it up.

City of Albuquerque, NM, fires police officer Jeremy Dear some eight months after he shot and killed a 19-year-old alleged truck thief without recording the incident on his lapel camera, as all city police officers must do. The city did not say for sure if Mr. Dear's camera malfunctioned or if he simply turned it off before shooting, but apparently Mr. Dear has demonstrated a pattern of not recording video. You'd think a good cop would note any malfunctions to his superior, if only to prevent further malfunctions and, yes, to be able to produce evidence of his innocence. Oh, and one more time: do we punish car thieves by shooting them to death?

Harold Meyerson describes the recent "Retail Workers' Bill of Rights" enacted in San Francisco, which mandates that employers give workers their schedule at least two weeks in advance, pay workers upon canceling scheduled shifts, and offer part-timers more work before hiring more workers. That last item looks a bit wiggly to me, but also probably represents actual compromise between right and left on the issue. It's bad, though, when you can't even count on working a certain number of hours. I thought the Reagan Revolution was supposed to liberate us and make us all our own bosses.

Republicans want the Congressional Budgeting Office to add "dynamic scoring" to their budget estimates, on the grounds that CBO estimates don't take into account all the revenues that come from tax cuts. But you remember what happened when President Reagan cut taxes? Revenues fell and the deficit exploded. And when Bush the Lesser cut taxes? Revenues fell and the deficit exploded (and I'm counting the Bush bailout in that explosion, because that's where it belongs). They didn't work because the rich don't spend the windfall they get from tax cuts; they hoard it, like you or I would. Why, it's almost like that's the idea!

Finally, Canadian researchers develop a faster way of "solarizing" surfaces, by spraying tiny solar cells directly onto a film that then coats the surface. "SprayLD" achieves roughly the same efficiency as the more established (and much slower) ALD method, and though an efficiency rate of just under 8 percent doesn't compare with, say, rooftop solar, there are many more surfaces in the world than there are roofs.

Action: starring a horrible, no good, very bad spending bill, plus items about Social Security, oppression in Saudi Arabia, and GMO salmon.

Today the House plans to vote on a bill keeping our government running; the Senate may follow. And this bill is a real stinker. Chief among any reasonable person's complaints against the bill is it allows banksters to gamble in derivatives with taxpayer money. You know what that means, right, good folks? More bailouts -- and maybe they'll get to steal our savings accounts this time. But it gets worse: rich folks could be allowed to contribute ten times as much money to political parties as they're currently allowed to do. And the bill also cuts OSHA funding, raises limits on trucker work hours, and lets big agricultural corporations dump more crap in our water -- because a vote for Republicans is, apparently, a vote for workplace accidents, getting killed on the highway, and poisoned water, in addition to a vote for banksters and corporate campaign ads. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to remove all the poison pills attached to this spending measure, or vote against it. And yes I would rather shut down our government than pass this bill. We deserve more from our government than the back of its hand.

Meanwhile, the Strengthening Social Security Act -- which would fund increased Social Security benefits by subjecting income over $117,000 to the payroll tax -- lost both its Senate champions in 2014, one (Tom Harkin of Iowa) to retirement and the other (Mark Begich of Alaska) to a Republican opponent. But Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio will reintroduce the bill when the Senate reconvenes in January; that Senate will have more knuckle-draggers than any Senate in recent memory, but to paraphrase a famous philosopher, you go to war with the Senate you have, not the Senate you wish you had. And if the new Republican majority refuses to listen to us, let them suffer the shame of doing so, because not only is Social Security very popular (keeping, as it does, so many seniors out of poverty), so is increasing Social Security benefits. And to hell with those who say we feel "entitled" to everything -- we worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, so it's ours. Social Security Works helps you tell your Senators to support the Strengthening Social Security Act in the new Congress.

In other news, Saudi Arabia has imprisoned Raif Badawi since 2012, for the following supposed crimes: "setting up a website that undermines general security," "ridiculing Islamic religious figures," and "going beyond the realm of obedience." What had he actually done? He had hosted a website from which some writers had criticized religious officials, and had alleged that one Islamic school had become a "den for terrorists." The Saudi government tried to get him for "apostasy," too, which carries a death sentence, but haven't succeeded, though not for lack of trying. Think of whether anyone in the United States, crazy as this country has become, has advocated putting people in jail for criticizing religious figures. No one has, at least not yet. And even Harry Reid's pet bills, SOPA and PIPA, which would have stifled internet free speech in the name of "copyright infringement" and "security," met with such forceful opposition that they couldn't pass. But clearly Saudi Arabian elites must learn, even more than our elites must learn, that free speech doesn't "undermine" our security but enhances it. Amnesty International helps you tell Saudi Arabia to free Mr. Badawi.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FDA to keep AquaBounty's genetically-modified salmon off our supermarket shelves, then CREDO still helps you do that. What's the problem with Aquabounty's genetically-modified salmon? After all, AquaBounty says it safe, and what motive could it possibly have for lying, besides, you know, making gobs and gobs of money? Aquabounty has modified this salmon so that it grows twice as fast as salmon normally grow and eats five times what normal salmon eat, which means it would wreak havoc on nearby aquatic environments if it ever escapes a fish farm -- which it will, sooner or later, especially given AquaBounty's well-documented inability to keep its own salmon within its Panama breeding facility. You have to wonder if that's the idea -- to turn all salmon into perpetual teenage salmon, consequences to the food chain be damned. It gets worse: our government doesn't require labeling of GMO food, so the only way you'll know you haven't eaten it is if you eat USDA-certified organic salmon -- and, well, when Aquabounty's salmon gets out, maybe not even then.

Around the table: solar power improves! And Our Glorious Elites become ever more decadent and useless.

Glenn Greenwald live-blogs the executive summary of the Senate's CIA torture report, and, well, it's pretty disgusting. I sure hope all the folks who said, back in 2002, that I don't care what they do as long as they protect us are feeling the appropriate amount of shame today. I actually have hope that they do -- as opposed to the hope I have that the perpetrators of these crimes feel shame, which I know is impossible.

Speaking of which, Dick Cheney dismissed the report, continuing to maintain that CIA torture saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. Of course, we learn early on that he hadn't actually read the report, but was responding to "news reports about it" -- from the same "liberal" media outlets that failed to report accurately on it in the first place, one presumes. Really, the article should have ended right there. It certainly shouldn't have let him erect straw men so he could knock them down.

U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear appeals from British Petroleum about the settlement it reached with businesses and folks over the 2010 Spillageddon in the Gulf. The Supreme Court does seem to be at its best when it does nothing, though I bet even John "What More Can a Corporation Do?" Roberts responded with disdain upon hearing that BP was trying to weasel its way out of a settlement it had reached. Oh, and if folks are actually trying to defraud BP, then they're criminals -- not an excuse to skip out on your obligations to law-abiding folk.

Big Republican donors, deciding they'd like to spend less money, are apparently trying to decide on a single "establishment" candidate for the 2016 Presidential race. I say "apparently" because the Times says they'd choose from among Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Mitt Romney, when Scott Walker is going to be the nominee. Really, it's a complete waste of time talking about anyone else. Could rich Republicans be that dumb -- or is that just what they want us to think?

Finally, Australian solar power researchers have figured out how to get commercially-available solar panels to convert 40% of the sunlight that hits it into electricity. These solar power systems generally deliver less than 20% efficiency, so this is a big deal -- and the efficiency boost involves those same mirrored towers I've made plenty of fun of in this space. Well, a man learns.

Action: fighting torture, pollution, greed, and stupidity.

As you know by now, the Senate has released a 500-page executive summary on CIA torture, and what a long, strange trip it's been to get here. The report won't surprise you if you've been sentient since Tha Bush Mobb years -- that the CIA and its contractors tortured over a hundred folks in at least three countries, that everyone from the President on down knew about it in alarmingly precise detail, that the CIA didn't actually prevent a terrorist attack by torturing someone, as torture enthusiasts might wish. But it's not enough for a civilized nation to know; a civilized nation must also act. So both the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights help you demand that Attorney General Holder appoint a special prosecutor to investigate CIA torture in our name. Given the number of knuckle-draggers elected to the new Congress, it's fairly safe to assume that Attorney General Holder, who did resign a number of months ago, isn't going anywhere soon, and will likely be stuck with any torture investigation the Obama Administration begins at our request. And that would be the beginning of justice.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to tighten up its coal regulation proposals. You may recall the DEP's hilarious-if-it-didn't-make-us-sick proposal from April, which would have allowed coal corporations to average their emissions across power plants, which would, of course, have allowed them to pollute more in more populated areas. In July, the EPA sent them back to the drawing board, and while the new proposal is an improvement, it still allows power plants that haven't installed the latest equipment to keep polluting at higher levels than plants that have, which isn't a real good way to incentivize installing the latest equipment. The proposal also lets power plants average their pollution over a month rather than a day, which means plants can wait until bad air days to discharge more pollution. Sound like a good idea to you? Here's a good idea: clean air. Every time a Republican whines about "regulations," a Democrat should respond with "clean air." Democrats are too weak to do it, but we're not.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to insist that retirement planners avoid conflict-of-interest problems when investing our retirement money. Seems commonsensical enough, but not in These Interesting Times, where the rich think they have a right to do anything that makes them more money, no matter who among us gets hurt, and where their ability to buy Congressfolk is perhaps unmatched in American history. Still, the Department of Labor is planning to release regulations that would protect those of us who invest in 401(k)s and IRAs from financial planners who invest our money to their benefit, not ours. People who say that no financial planner would do that are almost certainly lying to you. We witnessed, during this most recent Economic Armageddon, a single hedge fund manager make a billion dollars by getting people to invest in securities he knew were crap, and had himself bet against. In a world where banksters can do that, we need to protect ourselves. Why would civilized people find it offensive that our government, which belongs to us, should help us protect ourselves?

Finally (cue cheers from the convention floor!), as we've said, everyone has been trying to wring unearned concessions from the ongoing battle to fund our federal government, and Maine Sen. Susan Collins is, sadly, no different -- she's been trying to change the maximum number of hours a big rig driver can work from 70 hours a week to 82. Too many truck drivers already travel the country and see none of it, and if you think that extra 12 hours a week isn't so bad, ask yourself how well you function after working double the amount of hours in a given work. And truckers spend most of that time driving -- again, how well do you function after driving even a few hours? -- and truck accidents kill around one-tenth of all those who die in auto accidents every year, though one-tenth of all drivers aren't truck drivers. As if to add insult to injury, four out of five Americans oppose truckers spending more time on the road, and I bet that figure's even higher among truckers. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our government to keep limits on truck driver work hours, and thus keep us all a bit safer.

Around the table: where money does not equal speech for the 443rd time.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) whines its collective ass off at a December 3 workshop called "Playing the Shame Game: A Campaign that Threatens Corporate Free Speech." Even worse than the notion that there's something wrong with shaming people who deserve it is the notion that shareholder resolutions "threaten" "free speech." I'm going to say this one more time: money isn't speech. And the First Amendment protects you from your government; it does not protect you from criticism or activism, and people who think it does may be better off living in a country with fewer freedoms.

The New York Times finds several Republican Attorneys General colluding with large energy corporations to challenge federal environmental regulations. The Times does a good job plumbing the depth of that collusion, particularly as it relates to Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who takes mountains of money from oil and coal corporations who write memos from him and still has the cojones to say "the founders recognized that power concentrated in a few is a bad thing," as if "the few," in modern America, couldn't possibly be corporate CEOs.

We don't talk about this enough, but the Pentagon informs us that in 2012, suicide surpassed war as the major cause of death among American troops -- accounting for about three in every 10 deaths in 2012 and 2013. Travel accidents are way down the list; cancer is right behind war, and sadly that's no surprise, either. The Pentagon won't say so, but while the "war on terror" has made individual Bush and Obama Administration cronies quite rich, it has demoralized some of our soldiers so much that they take their own lives.

On the occasion of Mary Landrieu's defeat in the Louisiana Senate runoff, the estimable Michael Tomasky advises Democrats to cut bait and forget about ever winning in the Deep South again. That's a damn tempting argument, but in the final analysis, I don't want Democrats to wash their hands of an entire region so much as I want them to be populists and turn Southerners' multitudinous resentments against the corporatists who have actually earned those resentments. The Jim Webb Presidential campaign may tell us how effective a plan that will be.

Finally, Dave Johnson notes the absolute dearth of "liberal" media coverage about the Trans-Pacific Trade "Partnership" talks. Why doesn't the "liberal" media write more stories about it? Because then they'd have to say what's in it, and then no one would like it, and then those same "liberal" media outlets would fear becoming poor as a punishment for offending Our Glorious Elites. Better poor than completely useless to your community and your civilization, that's what I say. Guess which category contains most "liberal" media types.

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: job gains, pension foolery, health care spending, whistleblowing, and science fiction as a candle in the dark.

Paul Krugman notes the most recent job gains (over 300,000 last month, plus an uptick in wages) teaches us some important lessons. Like: the recessions we have now are harder to end, because they generally reflect bursting bubbles rather than government design -- but the economy would have recovered more quickly with more vigorous government spending. Personal to people who actually believe Barack Obama injured the fragile recovery by being mean to Wall Street: if Wall Street folks are our best and brightest, surely they can handle criticism, or overcome its alleged effects on the market.

David Sirota keeps following the story of public pensions invested in risky Wall Street funds, this time writing about states unwilling to disclose to state workers how they're investing their funds. They say it's because TEH TRADE SECRETZ!!!!!, but we know the truth: state employees would be disgusted to find their money getting siphoned off in huge bankster fees, without seeing any benefit. The mention of Rhode Island treasurer/Governor-elect Gina Raimondo (who invested a huge chunk of state pension money in a Wall Street hedge fund) reminds me that the third-place finisher in that race got 21% of the vote, which shows how popular pension fund secrecy is with voters if anything does.

NBC News reports that the growth in U.S. health care spending in 2013 was the "lowest on record," at 3.6%, but neglects to provide more context -- like, for example, that growth has stayed between 3.8% and 4.1% since 2009, was 8.9% as recently as 2003, and was 11% in 1990. (Download the "NHE Tables" from this page, and see Table 23 for further information.) Perhaps the crappy economy has slowed health care spending -- or perhaps the Affordable Care Act has given private health insurers the incentive to slow growth. After all, if a health insurance corporation has to spend 85% of its income on actual health care, CEOs have less incentive to charge hostage prices and keep the rest for themselves.

Whistleblower alleges that mutual fund Vanguard has grown into a $3 trillion corporation at least partly through "transfer pricing abuse." The whistleblower, a former Vanguard tax attorney, filed suit in New York though he lives in Pennsylvania and Vanguard is also headquartered there; New York, apparently, has an unusually strong False Claims Act (which, like the federal law of the same name, allows governments to go after those who've defrauded them). And it strikes me that, in my ideal republic where no corporation could own another corporation, we wouldn't deal with "transfer pricing" at all.

Finally, Mary Hansen talks to Walidah Imarisha, a writer who says that science fiction and related genres (which she groups as "visionary fiction") can allow us to imagine alternatives to the unjust systems we contend with in our daily lives. I'm not entirely on board, as I also figure Dystopian cautionary tales serve a purpose, and I still contend that phrases like "the state keeping us safe" are redundant if we are the state, an ideal I still work toward. But I don't assume that vigorous action must always come from government, and the work of making a world where "(e)very single individual in our community is our community" is my work as well.

Action: bankster shenanigans, food labeling, and "free" trade.

More follies from our government's inability to pass a rudimentary spending bill: now the banksters want to hold the process hostage, to their desire to orchestrate derivates trades using FDIC-insured subsidiaries, meaning the FDIC will have to pay when they screw up -- which, of course, means we'll have to pay when they screw up. You'd think banksters would have some shame, six years after becoming the most hated people in America for their role in smearing shit all over the American economy, but then again, as long as our government and the "liberal" media keep coddling them, I guess they'll remain insulated from the consequences of their actions. Which is why Public Citizen helps you tell our government that you oppose any more taxpayer-funded bailouts for banksters. If you feel it's necessary to follow up with a phone call making heavy use of the words "bailout" and "banksters," I certainly won't stop you. I might even point out I've got tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page with which you may get your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers.

Meanwhile, the House also plans a hearing on H.R. 4432, the so-called Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, a bill heavily-supported by major food manufacturing corporations but not terribly well-supported by the American people, who by vast majorities prefer to know they're sticking genetically-modified food in their mouths beforehand. H.R. 4432 would prevent states from mandating GMO labeling, and would allow corporations to "voluntarily" label GMO food, though anyone who's ever noticed the four-digit numbers on produce knows we already have a voluntary labeling system, and guess what? Nobody's using it to label their GMO food. (If they did, you'd see a number "8" in front of the four digits you usually see. Ever see that? Of course you haven't.) And you'd think that corporations spending tens of millions to defeat GMO labeling initiatives would instead spend that money educating folks about how safe GMO food is. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your House Reps to reject H.R. 4432, and work for a regime that would really make our food safe and accurately-labeled.

Finally, trade pact negotiators are supposedly trying to put the finishing touches on the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" in our nation's capital this week. I know what kind of "finishing touch" I'd like to put on the TPP -- the five-knuckle "touch" that finishes "free" trade deals in this country for good. We know (among other things!) that the TPP would subject our laws (including our labor and environmental protections) to the whim of "investor-state tribunals" that would overturn our laws whenever they see some "injury" to some corporation's profit margin. Better they recognize that laws protect people from injury by mindless corporations seeking to shave a few pennies off their expenses by dumping crap in our air and our water, or by neglecting their duty to keep their workers safe from harm. But not only does our government want to pass this agreement, they want to do so on a "fast-track" basis that limits Congressional debate. Why, it's like they're afraid that the people would have a chance to say no to the pact! So Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject these "free" trade, fast-track schemes.

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.

Around the table: "right to work," coming to a city or county near you! And other tales.

Moshe Z. Marvit spots the organizations behind "right-to-work" laws plotting to get those laws passed at the municipal and county levels. "Right-to-work" laws essentially allow workers to enjoy union representation without paying dues, which does little except starve unions -- it doesn't lower wages, or right-wingers would have said so, and if it doesn't lower wages, as Mr. Marvit notes, it's hard to argue that it "lures businesses." Trouble for right-to-work proponents is that Taft-Hartley's allowance of right-to-work laws in a "State or Territory," and "territory" means "territory," not "city" or "state." But it only takes one judge to say differently.

Community broadband fans, take note: the government of Chanute, KS, population 9,119, has decided to offer its gigabit fiber-optic service to homes and businesses, and AT&T is throwing a tantrum about it. AT&T is trying to block Chanute's service at the state level, and when you note that Chanute's service costs a mere $5 more monthly than AT&T's DSL service that is not even one one-hundredth as fast, you can sorta see why. Chanute's utilities director seems fairly more optimistic that he'll get the OK from the state to raise bonds. I'm not -- unless Sam Brownback decides to let his foot up off the throat of Kansas now that he's got his second term.

Citizens for Tax Justice finds the House one-year corporate welfare extension bill only a little less nauseating than their planned 10-year extension. Note well: "Often a lawmaker or a special interest group will argue that the tax extender legislation should be enacted because it includes some provision that seems well-intentioned but makes up only a tiny fraction of the cost of the overall package of tax breaks." Is a $40 tax break for teachers who buy school supplies (or even the wind power tax credit or mortgage debt forgiveness exception) really worth tens of billions of dollars in corporate handouts? Given that no law of physics prevents Congress from passing worthwhile tax credits on their own, I call that a hostage situation.

Know that Red Cross claim that they spend 91 cents out of every donated dollar actually helping people? Well, not exactly -- over the last few years they've spent as much as a quarter of their donations on administrative overhead including fundraising, which meets the recommendation issued by the Better Business Bureau. But that might also be bunkum, since some 70% of Red Cross spending relates to its blood business -- where the Red Cross takes donated blood and sells it to hospitals and health care facilities. And you thought you were donating it!

Finally, we have yet another casualty of the rush to get the government funded: House leadership strips the Massie-Sensenbrenner-Lofgren defense appropriations bill amendment -- which would have curtailed NSA "backdoor" searches on American data, and which passed the House by an almost 3-1 margin back in June -- out of the end-of-year omnibus spending bill. The House leadership, selling out actual bipartisan, popular, and needed legislation in the name of "getting something done"? Why, that is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD!

Action: protecting school lunch nutrition standards and Bristol Bay ecosystems.

Some Republicans in Congress still want to make the Department of Agriculture's school lunch nutrition standards "flexible," because, you know, one in 10 school districts is lagging behind the other nine in implementing the standards and also because one Congressman heard that one kid somewhere threw away an apple he got at school. Figures that the one thing the USDA has done right during President Obama's tenure finds itself in Republican crosshairs. Why do these fools continue to have jobs? It can't all be because of gerrymandering, or else the Democrat wave of 2006 wouldn't have happened. I suspect it's also because Democratic candidates are too weak to run ads calling their opponents objectively pro-childhood obesity and objectively pro-junk food and objectively pro-diabetes, like they deserve if they want to let school districts "opt out" of the standards. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to gut school lunch nutrition standards. We fought for them, after all, and when you fight for something, there's always a chance you're going to have to defend it later.

Meanwhile, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell President Obama and Secretary of the Interior Jewell to protect Alaska's Bristol Bay from oil and gas drilling. While it is true that drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean is very dangerous (it's much harder to clean up a spill in those frigid waters than in the relatively warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico), and that we don't know enough about the ecosystems up there to fully comprehend what damage we'll do to them, it is also true that the Bristol Bay area in Alaska is home to a thriving salmon industry, an industry that would be seriously threatened by a Spillageddon of the order of the one in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 -- a Spillageddon that, given just what we know of oil corporation spill management practices, or of Shell's various misadventures in the Arctic, will happen sooner rather than later. And we're always much better protecting an industry that creates jobs for people, and which we can manage sustainably, than we are drilling for oil or gas in a scheme that will enrich a few CEOs and do little-if-anything for anyone else.

Around the table: the rich get richer, Republicans go further right, the "liberal" media excuses some riots and not others, and other tragedies.

Paul Waldman finds that Republican voters tend to move far rightward on issues where elite Republicans virulently oppose President Obama. That's a sad finding, but a little more analysis would have been in order. Does Barack Obama's steadfast refusal to pursue more liberal policy objectives (like massive government spending on infrastructure, Medicare-for-all, and the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income) give Republican voters nothing to hang onto but the ravings of the far-right? In other words, does Democrat weakness spur Republicans rightward?

Hard to believe, Harry, but the IRS informs us that the richest 400 Americans paid roughly the same percentage of their income in taxes as middle-class families earning about $105,000 annually. How did this happen? You can blame Bush the Lesser for much of it -- mainly, for cutting dividend taxes and capital gains taxes to absurd lows, supposedly to "encourage investment and job creation" and tell me how well that worked out -- but Mr. Obama has only bumped up the capital gains rate to 20% (from 15%), and capital gains accounts for two-thirds of the top 400 richest Americans' income. Paging Jim Webb!

Alternet presents "11 Stupid Reasons White People Have Rioted." I don't assert that there's any good reason to riot, by the way, but I do concur that the "liberal" media makes all kinds of ooga-booga noises when black folks riot over injustice, but takes a boys-will-be-boys attitude when white folks riot over their local sports franchise winning or losing the big game. And also over disco and pumpkins.

ProPublica finds that public schools frequently underreport how often they're using restraints on schoolkids. Federal law mandates such reporting, but the city of New York reported precisely zero instances in 2012, despite settling a high-profile lawsuit over, well, tying a five-year-old autistic kid to a stretcher that very same year. Public schools should be able to handle their children without resorting to such punishment, but I also blame the media, where children learn that the most disgusting kinds of attention-seeking gain the biggest rewards.

Stephen Hawking warns that artificial intelligence could doom humankind, because "(h)umans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded." Seems a reasonable assumption, but the BBC spends no time analyzing it, instead spending three paragraphs subtly insulting Mr. Hawking for using AI in his own speaking apparatus. My own hope is that our lack of understanding of our own brain functions will prevent us from creating supercomputers that think better than us, though I suppose such ignorance doesn't preclude the possibility we'll create such computers by accident.

Finally, Arizona pastor suggests our world can be AIDS-free "by Christmas" if we just "execute() the homos like God recommends." Even more hilarious than Mr. Anderson's sense that God makes "recommendations" (clearly he's too much a coward to call it a "command"!) is his attempt to prove his point "with science" -- he says "homos" are responsible for 78% of new HIV infections "among males," thus inadvertently suggesting that bottom-of-the-barrel infection rates among lesbians makes them God's chosen people! Anyway, let us never mention the name of Steven Anderson again.

Action: protesting injustice, and civilized tax policy.

By now you know that a New York grand jury won't charge the police officer who put Eric Garner in a chokehold and killed him, a decision even more perplexing than the Missouri grand jury's decision in the Michael Brown shooting, since we actually have video of the chokehold. As in the Ferguson grand jury hearing, the prosecutor apparently decided to inundate the grand jury with much more evidence than has historically been appropriate in grand jury hearings, as if trying to make this jury do the work of the jury that would actually decide Mr. Pantaleo's innocence or guilt. If grand juries do, in fact, typically decide on dozens of possible indictments daily, then presenting a mountain of data on any one possible indictment doesn't actually save taxpayer money, either. In any event, the Center for Constitutional Rights will hold a rally protesting the grand jury's decision this evening, at 5.30 pm, at Foley Square in Manhattan (on Duane Street, between Lafayette and Center Streets). If you go, the Center for Constitutional Rights advises you to look for the CCR banner.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives passed a one-year deal yesterday extending all sorts of expiring corporate tax breaks, and that bill now goes to the Senate, which apparently will spend very little amending it, and then, presumably, to President Obama, whose press secretary has suggested can "live with" a one-year extension, versus the 10-year extension the House had been contemplating. But sigh, because Mr. Obama threatened a veto in the first place because the bill didn't include Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or Child Tax Credit (CTC) extensions. Hence the new House bill isn't a "compromise" because it's only a year long; it's a victory for the Republicans because it doesn't address the EITC or CTC. So we will have to be the steel in the President's spine, again. Both CREDO and Moms Rising help you remind Congress that they're supposed to be looking out for people, not corporations, when they write tax law. As an aside, it sure is a good thing Rep. Camp (D-MI) isn't running for office again, because "These measures have never been paid for" would have been a bullseye for his next opponent.

Around the table: an actual victory for justice and civilization! And more right-wing attempts to destroy both.

Good news: the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals halted the execution of Scott Panetti (scheduled to take place yesterday), until it can consider "late-arriving and complex legal questions at issue in this matter." The 5th Circuit may ultimately allow Texas to carry out the sentence, against a man who tried to call Jesus Christ, John F. Kennedy, and the Pope as witnesses in his murder trial, but every reprieve is a victory for justice and civilization.

Despite Gov. Scott Walker's public pronouncements that he has no interest in turning Wisconsin into a "right-to-work" state, some of his allies have announced plans to do just that. And then Scott Walker can say it was the people who wanted it! But citing declining union membership in public sector unions since Act 10 would be rather like citing declining automobile travel on highways after installing steel spikes on every exit ramp. And if Mary Burke had pledged to veto any budget that didn't repeal Act 10, she'd probably be Governor right now.

Judd Legum at Think Progress reminds us that Missouri could still prosecute Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown if "the court having criminal jurisdiction" over the case can find a lawyer willing to prosecute it. Let me guess how the right wing would react to such a development: ZOMG ACTIVIZT JUDGEZ!!!!! (Mr. Legum refers to Missouri state law; I have no idea if New York state has a similar law, now that a grand jury has declined to prosecute Eric Garner's strangler, which decision is, if anything, even more befuddling.)

Matt Wood at FreePress explains why net neutrality won't result in new fees for everyone. One simple answer would be, "well, because we've had net neutrality all these years, and where are these billyuns and billyuns of dollars in fees?" Another simple answer would be, "net neutrality opponents only come up with this kind of ooga-booga now, when they've had eight years?" But Mr. Wood negotiates the actual legal issues patiently and thoroughly.

I shouldn't be spending any time debunking utter rubbish like this, but no, the average "welfare family" does not get $61,000 in annual welfare benefits. How did David Barton come up with this number? Among other things, he counts Medicaid and CHIP spending as if it's actual income going to actual people, and he counts spending on folks above the poverty line as spending on folks below the poverty line. As the Center for Budget Priorities put it, "(p)roviding a frail senior with nursing home care does not mean that the typical low-income family with children is receiving huge amounts of benefits that give it a high standard of living."

Finally, those blessed individuals at Fox and Friends think it would be "great" if you had to pass a civics test before you can vote, apparently blissfully unaware that, well, that was a feature of Jim Crow laws. And I bet their ideal test would require you to say that when Moses handed the Constitution down from Mt. Sinai, he said that it doesn't authorize the government to help anyone, but does demand that government give massive handouts to corporations. A lot of alleged small government types seem to want to give governments new powers to keep people from voting. I wonder why that is.

Action: body cameras for police officers, "country of origin" labels on food, and renewable energy tax breaks.

In the wake of Michael Brown's death, and a grand jury's failure to indict his shooter, now-former police officer Darren Wilson, for manslaughter, even, Color of Change helps you tell our federal, state, and local authorities to mandate body cameras for police. Will such cameras be too cumbersome for police to do their job? Certainly no more cumbersome than all the military armor many of them wear. Will such cameras invade their privacy? No; do you have an overarching right to privacy when you're on the job? Will such cameras help prevent tragedies like Mr. Brown's death? I feel certain they will; police will be much less tempted to resort to unnecessary deadly force if they know how it's going to look on film. Will cops make the life-or-death decisions they need to make too slowly if they're worrying about how they look on film? Give me a break; how many folks over the last few decades have grown up not imagining what they look like on film? And will cameras also help the vast majority of police who do a good job defend themselves against false accusations? Yes, they will, and that's a good thing.

Meanwhile, it's end-of-year keep-our-government-running appropriations bill time in Congress, which means that unscrupulous actors want to hold the process hostage to get goodies they don't deserve. Case in point: the big agricultural corporations that want to get rid of "country of origin" labels for the food we buy at markets. President Bush signed legislation mandating these labels in 2008 (making that era seem like the very model of bipartisanship compared to this one!), and I'm quite happy, frankly, that I can take into account where food comes from when I'm at the supermarket. Big corporations don't want me to know this information, though. What are they afraid of? That we'll actually take the whole use-less-gas-to-transport-food thing seriously, and thus patronize more local farmers than we otherwise would? Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Senators to reject efforts to get rid of "country of origin" labels on the food we eat. Personal to those who claim it's "racist" to want to get your food sourced as locally as possible: do you only "fight racism" when it suits some big corporation's greed?

Finally, speaking of the appropriations process, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Congress to renew tax credits that actually create jobs in the renewable energy sector. Some will call you hypocrite if you support some tax credits for businesses and not others, but don't listen to them, because haters gonna hate, and because some tax credits are better than others and any civilization that relies on taxes to function has to decide which ones are better. Naturally, fossil fuel corporations think they won the 2014 midterms, and are poised to squash anyone who gets in their way, instead of, oh, I don't know, rejecting the permanent handouts they already get and choosing instead to invest in renewable energy sources themselves, thus getting ahead of the technological curve. Seriously, you'd think oil and coal corporations would have diversified, being as they're run by Our Glorious Entrepreneurs Who Are the Biggest Risk-Takers and Greatest Americans Evah. So if fossil fuel corporations seem a little scaredy-cat, maybe they're not the übermensch their enablers say they are.

Around the table: campaign finance, bankster shenanigans, executive pay, speed limits, and the minimum wage.

Sen. McConnell (E-KY) plans to attach a rider to a must-pass spending bill that would essentially gut the remaining campaign finance laws in America. But President Obama could win that argument easily, even in the "liberal" media: folks across the political spectrum despise corporate campaign ads so virulently that Mr. McConnell can't even squawk about "bipartisanship" if Mr. Obama balks. Mr. McConnell might have an easier time pretending to defend the First Amendment," since we do have to work a little bit to make people see the absurdity of that argument. (You know, by pointing out that money isn't speech, and that corporations aren't people, for starters.)

G20 leaders not only want banksters to be able to confiscate bank deposits Cyprus-style if they gamble their way into trouble, they want to be able to confiscate pension funds, too. The more pension funds get involved with banksters, at no discernable benefit to themselves I feel compelled to add, the easier such thievery will get, and the FDIC won't help much, because derivatives are so huge now that the FDIC can't possibly cover them all, and somehow derivatives are now first in line when it's time to feed at the government trough. Still, the linked sentence above would be a pretty terrific 30-second campaign ad. Any Democrat who runs it would obliterate his opponent. Maybe even in Wyoming.

Good news: thanks in part to shareholder activism, British oil corporation BG Group has abandoned plans to give its new CEO a lavish compensation package. Personal to those who squeal ZOMG HOW WILL TEH COMPANEEZ ATTRACTZ TEH TALENTZ!!!! Businesses are supposed to identify and train talent, not steal it from some other business in a perpetual game of Musical Deck Chairs on the Titanic. Seriously, do business leaders have no responsibilities anymore?

Montana lawmaker proposes raising the speed limit to 85 on state highways, citing over-75 MPH speed limits in three nearby states. Most of these big highways were built for 75-80 MPH travel back in the day -- the 55 MPH speed limit is a relatively recent phenomenon -- but getting from A to B even more quickly in a big, sparsely-populated state isn't a be-all-end-all. And given that fuel efficiency tends to dip above 55, one state Senator's complaint that he could have gotten to his oil field job an hour faster if he could have legally driven 85 is, well, a bit odd.

Finally, Chicago City Council votes to advance a $13/hour minimum wage-by-2019 plan backed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, even as the Illinois state legislature considers a statewide $11/hour minimum wage (as well as a ban on higher city minimum wages, there's small government for you!). Should I pile on? Really, should I pile on? Yes, I should pile on -- bankster-buddy Rahm Emanuel probably only supports a hike at all because he's up for re-election, yet his two main opponents support a considerably higher minimum wage, leaving Mr. Emanuel, despite his efforts, as the right-winger in this race.

Action: killing the car "kill switch," and justice for Liu Ping.

Hard as it may be to believe, some two million cars now come equipped, as it were, with GPS-based kill switches. Why? So that lenders can literally shut off cars remotely if borrowers aren't current on their payments. Kill switch operators claim they can't shut off cars while they're actually running, but some folks have testified to the New York Times that's not exactly true, and note well that loans with kill-switches attached generally go to very poor people. People who respond ZOMG WHEN WILLZ THOSE PEOPLEZ BE RESPONZIBULZ!!!!! need to remember first that they're also bill-juggling debtors (who but a rich person buys a house with cash, after all?), and second that putting people at risk of stranding or even death is never an acceptable punishment for being late with a car payment. Only Wisconsin bans these kill switches (I bet Scott Walker would love to change that!), but New York, where a state Senator has introduced a bill (S. 7946) that would outlaw auto kill switches, might follow suit. So Watchdog.net helps you tell the New York state legislature to ban automobile kill switches.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International helps you tell the Chinese government to release Liu Ping. Liu Ping worked at an iron and steel plant until her mid-40s, when the plant forced her to retire; that was five years ago, and she began agitating for better pensions for forced retirees. Social Security defenders, you know what I'm talking about. Naturally, the Chinese government responded by detaining her for 10 days in 2010; the next year, she tried to run as a local delegate to the National People's Congress, but despite legally qualifying for the ballot, the local election director's office threw her name off anyway, because of "foreign influences" or something. In 2013, she participated in (and organized) demonstrations aiming to force Chinese government officials to disclose their wealth -- after all, in Communist China, no one's supposed to be super-wealthy, right? Now, perhaps not coincidentally, she's in jail serving 6 1/2 years for rubbish charges including "using a cult organization to undermine the law." You like the idea of good folks going to jail because they try to expose corruption? Of course not. So let's shame the totalitarians in the eyes of the world.

Around the table: how we should really talk about values, and other advice.

Michael Keegan writes about "The Values Election We Didn't Have -- and Must Have," but he doesn't go all the way. "A higher minimum wage," after all, isn't a value, but a policy prescription. When the right talks about "values," they're really talking, exclusively, about oppressing gays, women, and minorities. But we need to talk about values like, you know, telling the truth, keeping your promises, and helping out those who need help. Against Republicans who, as Mr. Keegan says, "cloak() their extremism," we'll win those arguments every time.

A pair of economists argue that the widening divide between rich and poor in America is holding our economy back. Messrs. Cynamon and Fazzari describe their research (and refute opposing arguments) patiently and without resorting to mumbo-jumbo. Also, n.b. that "(i)f we lose our trust in the legal system and the legitimacy of the market, then we will lose trust in cooperation." This must be why Our Glorious Elites shit the bed all the time -- to induce us to give up. That ain't happening, not in my America.

Journal of Patient Safety revises conflict-of-interest disclosure policies after finding that nine of 10 articles from one Dr. Chuck Denham contained potential conflicts of interest and that five of these went undisclosed. And this is a perfect place to have a discussion about values! Telling the truth and keeping your promises are worthwhile values of a civilized society, right? Well, apparently Dr. Denham didn't tell the truth about his connections, nor did he keep his promise to provide unbiased and transparent research.

New York Times three-named columnist hammers Sen. Elizabeth Warren's alleged "rage," as supposedly exemplified by a recent Washington Post piece of hers, without actually presenting a shred of evidence that he even read Ms. Warren's piece to begin with. No, really, it's that bad. But I guess this is how the "liberal" media will try to torpedo a Warren Presidential bid -- their talking heads will say she's "full of rage," then nudge their buddies and say, because you know how women are, amirite?

Finally, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman declares he won't run for the Republican nomination for President in 2016. Sen. Portman, you may recall, reversed his stand on gay marriage in early 2013, but said that had nothing to do with his decision not to run (and it probably didn't -- I'm sure the National Organization for Marriage doesn't make him shake in his boots), citing instead his desires to get things done with the incoming Republican Senate majority and run for re-election. In both these things, he may be feeling a bit optimistic.

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.

Around the table: how the rich get richer, and other horrible truths.

Aida Manduley writes a lengthy primer describing how to argue about the racial politics surrounding the Darren Wilson non-indictment. I disagree about the efficacy of riots (it's tough to shame your oppressor once you riot), but I certainly see that Black Friday riots (for example) just don't provoke the same reaction from pundits that Ferguson seems to do. And I'd add that folks who leap from "you criticized the actions of one officer" to "you hate all cops" are perhaps not cut out for the hard work of maintaining a civilization, and would perhaps be happier in an actual police state, where one need never question whether the police have done the right thing in any instance.

Danielle Kurtzleben explains an apparent paradox: how the ultra-rich are getting richer as their wages have fallen. Long story short: the 400 highest-income tax returns happen to garner an outsized share of capital gains, dividends, and interest income, and tax rates on those types of income have fallen rather dramatically since, oh, about 2003. Remember when President Reagan said wages should never be taxed more than capital gains and dividends? Well, Mr. Bush said to hell with that. Shocking bit: when UPenn/UBonn economists say the optimal top tax rate should be 90 percent, which I rarely hear from economists.

ProPublica reviews federal crude oil train transport data and finds most localities still unaware of the potential problems coming with crude oil trains. And now that crude trains go through more densely populated areas (like Philadelphia), well, you can see the difficulty of evacuating tens of thousands of folks, rather than thousands, or hundreds. I still don't see why releasing route information to state management officials is a "security issue" for railroads -- unless they think state management agencies are rife with terrorists, which (at the risk of being too understated) is quite unlikely.

Surprise, surprise, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie vetoes bill banning certain inhumane gestation crates for pigs -- thus, in the words of one state Senator, currying favor with Iowa Republican primary voters and "Big Pork interests." Perhaps those voters should ask themselves if factory farms really represent their interests. I mean, cheap food can't be all people care about, right? Especially when such food mainly enriches big ag CEOs at the expense of small farmers?

The National Journal wonders if new FDA calorie-labeling requirements for restaurants will "shame" consumers into eating better. To which I answer: we can only hope! Even asking the question is a way of saying information doesn't really matter. And really, citing a study "in McDonald's stores" finding "no significant change in consumption behavior"? Why do they think people go to McDonald's? And suggesting that "if you want people to eat better, don't make them do math" is insulting -- like the requirements ask anyone to do multivariable calculus!

Finally, former Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) forms an exploratory committee for a Presidential run, and Markos Moulitsas is clearly pretty sour about it. I wouldn't have spoken about the need for bipartisanship either, and I could describe my own differences with Mr. Webb at some length, but Mr. Moulitsas insults him by comparing him to Herman Cain, especially after he (obviously very grudgingly) concedes that Mr. Webb's economic populism is "pretty good." I say that even trying to get poor whites to stop voting for people who keep on crushing them is a worthwhile effort, one Mr. Webb may be uniquely well-suited to lead. I just hope a President Webb doesn't magically transform into another deficit peacock.