Thieves in the Temple.

Action: "religious freedom" in Tennessee, militarization of law enforcement, and glyphosate bans.

Indiana's "religious freedom" bill you know all about, but tomorrow afternoon, a Tennessee House subcommittee will meet to discuss HB 0566, which would prevent public institutions of learning from disciplining students in counseling, social work, and psychology programs if they turn gay clients away due to their "sincerely-held religious beliefs." How do we determine if religious beliefs are "sincerely-held," by the way? Do we open people up and count rings? Anyway, you already know the trouble with that idea: if you're training in any counseling field, your instructors are supposed to ensure you get exposed to a wide diversity of problems and experiences -- and that means, not incidentally, that students who get accredited in Tennessee might not be able to work in very many other places in America, since people in other states can choose counselors whose schools did force their students to do all kinds of work and broaden their horizons. So the Tennessee Equality Project has begun a petition on change.org that helps you tell the Tennessee House Education, Instruction, and Programs Subcommittee to reject another "turn away the gays" bill.

Meanwhile, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your House Reps to support H.R. 1232, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act. What would H.R. 1232 do? It would, as its title suggests, stanch the flow of military goodies to local police forces, by disallowing such transfers in the name of counter-drug operations and by limiting the kinds of weapons DoD can transfer in the first place. The bill puts other hurdles up, too, and right-leaning folk might call that "bureaucracy," but I don't see what's so damn hard about accounting to your government why you need the weapons and how you're going to use them. Sadly, though weariness of tough-on-crime law enforcement strategies remains a bipartisan feeling among our nation's good citizens, only two of the 45 House sponsors of H.R. 1232 are Republicans -- libertarian-inflected Justin Amash of Michigan you'd probably figure, California gadfly Tom McClintock you probably wouldn't. But again: it doesn't matter what they want. It matters what we want. And if we believe it, sooner or later they'll have to believe it, too, if they want to keep their jobs.

Finally, hot on the heels of the World Health Organization's declaration that Monsanto-produced herbicide Roundup is a "probable carcinogen," CREDO helps you tell the EPA and FDA to ban glyphosate (Roundup's main ingredient) in herbicides. We've been using glyphosate on crops since the 1970s, and while glyphosate replaced some considerably less-healthy herbicides then commonly in use, often you don't know how bad something is until you've used it for a while, and when big ag is sponsoring most studies of the matter, well, you may not know how bad it is at all. But the WHO disregarded industry-funded science in concluding that glyphosate probably causes cancer, and while it didn't assess the precise risk of getting cancer from glyphosate, it found enough evidence that we really should be conservative about this. Glyphosate is now the most-used herbicide on Earth, its wide use prompting the development of genetically-engineered crops that can withstand it better, the promulgation of which has spurred, in turn, the development of glyphosate-resistant weeds. We should fight these trends, of course, but we should also get back into the mindset that we should grow our food, rather than buy it.

Around the table: from the truth about "religious conscience" laws to the truth about groundwater contamination.

Think Progress advises us that when the "liberal" media says Indiana's "religious freedom restoration act" is just like the others in 19 states and at the federal level, they're wrong. Long story short: 18 of the 19 others don't apply to disputes between private citizens at all -- and the RFRA of the other, Texas, specifically doesn't allow people to apply their "conscience" if doing so would run roughshod over someone else's civil rights. The state of the federal RFRA is less clear, thanks to the judicial activism of the Hobby Lobby ruling.

Ho hum, the "liberal" media moves the center ever-further rightward by reporting-not-challenging Sen. Cruz's assertion that Sen. McCain and Gov. Romney were "moderates," and therefore unelectable. And when the "liberal" media enables Scott Walker to win the nomination by "reporting" how he's more "moderate" than folks like Mr. Cruz, will they remember that Scott Walker told the Tea Party that candidates should "go big and go bold to win the center," and pointedly not "go to the center to win the center"? Nah -- illuminating that would require more than stenography.

And now for something completely overblown: some banksters have mulled withholding some donations to Democratic Senate candidates in protest of Sen. Warren's comments about them. So step one is to whine whine whine -- when people are so receptive to hearing banksters whine about how much their fee-fees get hurt these days! -- and step two is to maybe withhold what for these guys are very small-potatoes donations. Gosh, if Democrats would just let Howard Dean run their fundraising, they wouldn't have to worry about big money from big banks. I wonder why they haven't done that.

ProPublica finds holes in the CFPB's payday loan proposal. I'm more sanguine about it than they are, partly because I know regulation is an ongoing process as each side adjusts to the other, and partly because (as ProPublica says) the regulations will likely cut payday loans by at least 60 percent. But how did I miss the part where Congress won't let the CFPB set maximum interest rates? That sounds like a negative campaign ad waiting to happen!

FactCheck.org takes up what I imagine will be a Herculean task, "Fact-checking Ted Cruz." I highlight this post (titled "Part II") because of a meme that's been making the rounds lately, which I'll put through my right-wing translator so you can better understand it: ZOMG MORE BIZNIZZEZ FAILZ TAHN EVURZ!!!!! It's actually not true -- "The number of business establishment deaths is currently well below the record" ("set in late 2008" under a crumbling Republican Presidency, naturally), and anyway, people who repeat that lie don't take into account the number of business establishments that deserve to die, never really get off the ground, or go under for reasons unrelated to success or failure.

And FactCheck provides yet another public service, reminding us that when folks like Sen. Inhofe (E-OK) tell us that fracking has never caused "an instance of groundwater contamination," they're giving you less than half the story -- in this case because, well, we'll let the Inhofe spokeshack tell it: "(w)hat we are not saying is that a surface spill, faulty casing, bad drilling practices cannot be a problem." In other words, all the ways frackers either cut corners or display a human level of incompetence! Thanks for the honesty, I guess. FactCheck proceeds to illuminate the "thousands of cases" of groundwater contamination from oil and gas drilling.

Action: zombie Estate Tax repeal, oppression of Peruvian indigenous activists, and antibiotic-raised chicken.

Now that they control both houses of Congress, Republicans want to repeal the Estate Tax, again -- because the various Estate Tax cuts negotiated and signed by President Obama somehow aren't enough! And Republicans are trotting out one of the oldest zombie lies in the annals of zombie lies: that the Estate Tax "destroys family farms." Seriously, it's like they think no one in America has any memory of anything at all -- particularly, any memory of Republicans being completely unable to produce evidence of even one family farm sold off to pay the Estate Tax back in Tha Bush Mobb years. And yet they're at this mess again -- maybe they're a little subtler, but that's all. So now would be a good time to call your Reps and Senators, using the tools in the upper left hand corner of this page, and command them to oppose Estate Tax repeal. Nothing prevents you from adding that you think they're lying if they spread around horror stories about the Estate Tax hurting family farms. They want us to act all civilized to them? Then they need to stop lying on behalf of their wealthy donors, the real beneficiaries of Estate Tax repeal. It ain't that damn tough.

Meanwhile, a Peruvian appeals court ruled in late 2014 against Newmont Mining's efforts to build an open-pit gold mine on lands belonging to indigenous activist Máxima Acuña de Chaupe. How did Newmont Mining respond? By saying it'd respect the court's decision, then tucking its tail between its legs and going home? Well, no -- Newmont has prodded security officers to raid her home and destroy a part of it. This, after Newmont sued her to get her off the land she owns, after trying several times to evict her from said land themselves -- a nefarious effort helped along by the government of Peru, culminating in a hefty fine and a nearly three-year jail sentence for her and three others, all of which, happily, the appeals court eventually threw out. So Sum of Us helps you tell Newmont to stop harassing indigenous activists -- who could, after all, be any one of us one day, once our politicians interpret eminent domain laws as a tool to steal our homes and give them to their big donors, or some "free" trade agreement makes us bail out every corporation that wants to break our labor and environmental laws.

Finally, McDonald's has pledged to phase out antibiotic-raised chicken, joining Chick-Fil-A, Panera Bread, and Chipotle in that effort, but other fast-food chains haven't taken that step, and that's a big deal, since, generally, the poorer we get, the more fast food we eat. So CREDO helps you tell Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Subway, and Wendy's to stop using chicken raised with antibiotics. The reason we ask them is twofold: one, four out of every five antibiotics in America get used on healthy farm animals in order to make them meatier -- not, as you might imagine, on sick people and animals. That means bacteria will have many, many more opportunities to evolve into antibiotic-resistant bacteria like MRSA, and we might one day have a "post-antibiotic world" (in the World Health Organization's words) in which a single cut you wouldn't think twice about today could kill you. The other reason we ask them? Because petitioning our government hasn't done very much, even though courts have mandated that the FDA fix this problem for, ahem, decades now. We'll keep after our government, of course, because it's our duty, but why fight on only one front?

UPDATE. I did not know, at the time of this post's writing, that the Senate had already voted on Friday to repeal the Estate Tax 54-46. You'll want to concentrate your efforts on your House Reps; chances are that will look suspiciously like a party-line vote, but speaking out is always better than silence.

Around the table: internet freedom, corruption in Wisconsin, sentencing reform in New York, Army apologies, bad tax plans, and another right-wing attention hound in Congress.

Supreme Court of India strikes down one section of that nation's Information Technology Act and narrows government interpretation of another. The Court found that Section 66A of that Act allowed for too much state interference in freedom of expression, while the government's interpretation of Section 79 gave it too much power in forcing online platforms to take down content. But the Court still allowed the government to take down entire websites without very much oversight or transparency, so we still have some ways to go on this. Still, it was a good day.

Billionaire Wisconsinite gives over $1.5 million in secret donations to the pro-Walker Wisconsin Club for Growth -- then gets $1.8 million in tax credits over just two years from the Walker administration! Nice work if you can get it! Gov. Walker's spokeshack, Laurel Patrick, employs classic misdirection in the official response -- says Mr. Walker was "not involved" in the decision made by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation he chairs, and anyway Mr. Walker's Democratic predecessor gave Mr. Menard buku tax breaks, too (though of course she does not say whether Mr. Menard made secret donations to pro-Doyle groups). She'll do a heckuva job for President Walker, just like Ari Fleischer and Dana Perino did for Tha Bush Mobb.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) aims to end the state's nearly 200-year-old practice of treating 16-year-olds as adults in criminal proceedings -- but the plan isn't without its problems. Among them: it would make sentences stricter, allow judges to consider previous violent offenses if that person is charged with another one -- and he's using the state budget process to ram these changes through, which is, at the least, not terribly honest. Admittedly, some states do much worse, like try 12-year-olds as adults for serious crimes, which action is a lot like giving up the responsibilities of being civilized people.

Army Undersecretary apologizes to over 600 soldiers exposed to sarin and sulfur mustard gas in Iraq and then given substandard medical treatment afterward. Sounds like the Pentagon used a loophole to fail to report this matter to the Senate, plus they put a gag order on the soldiers exposed to the gas. But, you know, apologies, and bygones. And TEH TERRURIZTZ MUSTZ NOTZ WINZ!!!!!

Citizens for Tax Justice alerts us to Sen. Ted Cruz's support for the flat tax and the so-called FAIR Tax. The former would replace low- and high-income tax brackets with a single tax bracket, the latter would replace the income tax with a national 30% sales tax, and both would give the rich yet another massive, unearned tax cut while slamming middle-class working families hard. Say it with me: Ted Cruz will increase your taxes. Again: Ted Cruz will increase your taxes. Now all we need to do to make Ted toast is get the "liberal" media to keep repeating it -- a difficult task, admittedly, given their utter cowardice in the face of right-wing bluster.

Finally, Texas U.S. House Rep introduces bill that would force Air Force soldiers to say "so help me God" in their oaths, then defends his bill by saying, "Americans have the freedom of religion -- but not freedom from religion." He may be too impressed with his parallel construction to realize he's utterly misrepresented what the First Amendment says, but let's not call this guy "traitor," OK? Because the Constitution sets a high bar for that. Certainly there are plenty of other things we can call him -- like "moron," or, more precisely, "attention hound."

Around the table: the world is big and wild and half-insane.

The Center for Public Integrity describes the secretive group Law Enforcement Alliance of America, which has spent millions of dollars over the last fourteen years attacking state-level candidates it finds insufficiently "tough on crime." Woe betide you if you've ever failed, as a judge or legislator, to kill a murderer or sexual predator with your bare hands, because the LEAA will find out and crucify you -- and you will very likely never find out who gave the LEAA all that money to do it with, because it's a 501(c)(4) non-profit. The good news: the LEAA doesn't appear to have filed necessary tax forms in a few years.

Colombian government reports that American soldiers and contractors sexually abused upwards of 50 underage children from 2003 to 2007 -- and the "liberal" media remains silent on the matter. And I guess I can see why -- the story gives no room for right-wingers to call outraged liberals "anti-troop," since no one wants to be known as "objectively pro-pederasty."

Chris Morran at the Consumerist tells the worse-than-Kafkaesque tale of a man who has to sell the house he just bought in Washington state because no corporation can get internet to his house. (The man works from home, so it's not like he's selling his home because he can't play games or watch House of Cards.) Among the many cautionary tales: don't believe it when corporations (or our government) tell you that there's a crapload of competition in your zip code -- and don't let state legislators mandate that public utilities have to sell to resellers, not consumers.

Rep. Pete Sessions (E-TX) says Affordable Care Act enrollees cost the taxpayer $5 million each -- when, actually, they cost the taxpayer around $9,000 each. No sense in tasking Mr. Sessions's math skills, when he obviously pulled that number out of his nether regions. Seriously, though, $9,000 per person is actually too high, and that's because ACA enrollees are all buying private health care plans. A single payer plan would bring that number way down -- British folks pay less than $3,500 per person for the socialized medicine they're always complaining about, and the French pay a little over $4,000, with the Canadians paying a little more than that. And if you've been to the doctor in America, you know you're not getting more for your money -- but some CEO is.

Arizona Republican Senator suggests that maybe we should "requiring every American to attend a church of their choice on Sunday," to foster a "moral rebirth" in America that would, apparently, be the only thing that would ever prompt fewer folks to carry guns. Got that? No word on whether you can attend mosque on Friday or synagogue on Saturday (or Saturday evening Mass, that was always my preference back in the day) and still fulfill your civic obligation under such a mandate. All of which proves one thing: that most politicians really need to talk less. God does give you two ears and one mouth for a reason, after all.

Finally, alleged libertarian Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) actually introduces a budget amendment sharply increasing defense spending, despite his previous pronouncements that we should at least "look at" cutting defense spending. And THAT! Is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD!

Action: executive pay, marijuana reform, paycheck fairness, and chemical safety reform.

The Dodd-Frank financial services reform law mandated that banks (and other public corporations) reveal the relationship between CEO pay and median employee pay. Unfortunately, Dodd-Frank left it up to the Securities and Exchange Commission to put that rule into effect, and to decide exactly how much information that rule would mandate revealing; fast-forward nearly five years, and the SEC still hasn't done bupkus on this matter. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the SEC to enact the most vigorous CEO-to-median-worker pay rule possible. I'll try to put this simply: this economy doesn't work for people who work to contribute to society anymore. It works for people who already have money and can use mysterious financial "instruments" to induce corporations to succeed and fail not on the merits, but on their whims. Shining some light on CEO pay, particularly as it relates to worker pay, would allow good citizens to brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR effectively, and could help us reverse the downward moral and economic spiral this "New Economy" has created.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress and the President to make marijuana a Schedule II drug instead of a Schedule I drug via S. 683, the CARERS Act, then Keystone Progress joins with MoveOn to help you do that. Schedule I drugs, as you probably know, are drugs that are nominally extremely dangerous and have no medicinal benefits, so why is pot there? I'm sure it's at least partly because the cotton lobby has long wanted to strangle the hemp industry to death (pot, like many more useful things, comes from hemp), but I'm also sure hysteria over drugs in general has played a part. Yet heroin is a Schedule I drug because it will destroy your life completely; pot is about as dangerous as alcohol or tobacco, which the Controlled Substances Act doesn't schedule at all, and pot also has some utility in treating epilepsy, PTSD, cancer, and Parkinson's Disease. And you don't need to be a legalize-all-the-drugs libertarian to support this effort -- if nothing else, supporting this effort means we can crack down harder on meth manufacturers and their ilk.

In other news, Sen. Mikulski (D-MD) has reintroduced S. 862, the Paycheck Fairness Act, yesterday. S. 862 would address the persistent income gap between men and women for doing the same work by prohibiting employers from retaliating against workers who discuss their income with each other -- which is usually how women find out they've been discriminated against -- and also by forcing employers to prove that they pay men and women differently because of actual differences in qualifications, which most employers don't go very far out of their way to do. Republicans have consistently filibustered the Paycheck Fairness Act, and what are their objections? Obama, mainly, and trial lawyers, secondarily. You'll never convince a Republican that "Obama" is no reason to block progress -- maybe even after a real Democrat becomes President and makes the Obama years seem to them like paradise on Earth! -- but "trial lawyers" also means nothing in a nation where corporations file four out of every five lawsuits. Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Finally, S. 697, the Vitter/Udall chemical "reform" bill, is still out there confusing people about the definition of "reform." You're no doubt aware of its defects -- that it would prevent states from regulating dangerous chemicals while the EPA is evaluating them, and not only provides for a rather slow evaluating process for dangerous chemicals (the EPA would only have to start reviewing a little over two dozen of them within the next five years), but certainly doesn't take into account the EPA's chronic underfunding, which (though it might offend Sen. Enzi!) we should certainly address. Sen. Tom Udall's participation is rather disheartening, since he just won re-election rather handily in a very tough year; hopefully he won't tell us that we have to support this bill to get some progress, when, fact is, we don't -- especially not when S. 725, the Boxer/Markey bill, is also out there, albeit without big chemical corporations' support. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Vitter/Udall chemical "reform" bill, and support real chemical reform in America.

Around the table: this used to be the future.

A 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court decision strikes down a federal appeals court ruling saying that UPS didn't discriminate against a pregnant woman by failing to give her light duty work. Ever lift packages for UPS? Then you know a pregnant woman is really putting herself in danger by doing it. Naturally, the Court's decision is fairly narrow and technical, merely ruling that the federal appeals court didn't let the plaintiff make her case. But UPS has already changed its rule on this matter, so I'll call that victory.

Gov. Mike Pence signs "religious freedom" bill allowing businesses in Indiana to discriminate against gays and anyone else they don't like as long as they can use their "religious beliefs" as an excuse. That came not long after the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) declared (as GenCon did) that it would strongly consider pulling its annual meeting out of Indiana if the governor had signed the bill -- and not long before billion-dollar cloud computing corporation Salesforce declared it would "cancel() all programs that require our customers/employees to travel to Indiana to face discrimination." Maybe what the business community wants won't register with the nominally-Republican Mr. Pence after all.

Ho hum, three "progressive" Democrats join together to sell the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal to Teh Librulz. And they're peddling the same swill -- we better take this agreement or we'll have no say over trade, as if rejecting this agreement somehow isn't a way of having a "say" over trade. And fast-tracking these bills defeats the purpose of "having a say" in trade matters, since you have less of a say when you don't amend a bill or limit debate on it. On the plus side, I suppose: former Gov. Gregoire sounds like she's totally phoning in her fast-track support.

I guess it's mildly noteworthy that Sen. Ted Cruz has slammed the "special favors" in the form of "subsidies and special benefits" that big Wall Street corporations "seek out and get" from our federal government, and not because his wife worked at Goldman-Sachs until a few days ago. Pretty much anyone could have predicted that Republicans could put on the robes of populism as easily as Democrats could, but as always, I don't see very much action from Ted Cruz on matters such as these. Did he shut down the government over untrammeled Wall Street power? No, he shut it down over Obamacare, which he just signed up for, by the way.

Finally, the Consumerist plays "Where Are They Now?" with your favorite 1990s websites, like AOL, Geocities, anad AltaVista. Out of all the big '90s players, only Yahoo! (still a good news aggregator) still stands in anything like its original form, though AOL's sheer persistence is to be admired, I suppose -- though AltaVista (my search engine of choice until Google outdid it) or Netscape (which I used all the way into the middle of 2001, and whose soul exists in Firefox, my web brower of choice today) deserve more admiration, certainly. Maybe Geocities, too, which I always found hard to load in the '90s and I'm pretty sure that was my loss.

Action: dirty air amendments, Pentagon slush funds, fracking on public lands, and campaign finance disclosure for federal contractors.

First things first: Sen. Portman (R-OH), that reputed "moderate," has introduced a Senate budget amendment which would let states "opt out" of a Clean Air Act provision covering pollution from smokestacks. If you're the kind of person who likes to live and let live, and thinks that, well, maybe we can give individual states a little leeway regarding clean air laws, simply answer one simple question: do air pollutants respect state boundary lines? If the answer is "no" -- which, spoiler alert! The answer is no -- then you cannot in good conscience support such an amendment. And what does that have to do with budgeting anyway? Sen. Sanders offered an amendment closing corporate tax loopholes to pay for infrastructure improvements, and Sen. Enzi (R-WY) claimed he voted against it because Sen. Sanders's amendment should have been heard by a different committee. In light of that strange explanation, I wonder how Sen. Enzi will justify voting for Sen. Portman's amendment. Anyway, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Sen. Portman's dirty air amendment.

Meanwhile, despite its deficit-preening, Congress actually aims to add to the Department of Defense's Overseas Contingency Operations account for war-making, even though Congress has not declared a war, or done anything to restrain President Obama's war-making adventures in the Middle East, in some time now. This so-called "Pentagon slush fund" essentially allows Defense to skirt difficult questions like shouldn't we pay for wars out of whatever money we allocate through the budgeting process? and do we really want to keep paying for open-ended military adventures without clear goals? For some people, the latter is not a difficult question: they're the ones still saying ZOMG TEH MUZLIMZ WILL KILLZ ALL TEH PEEPULZ!!!!, which, as we remember from living through Tha Bush Mobb years, can be twisted to justify just about any policy objective. But they don't get all the say around here! So the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell Congress to end the "Pentagon slush-fund."

In other news, the Bureau of Land Management has released finalized rules for fracking on public lands, and, as you may expect, it takes a few steps forward (prohibiting those awful open pits for fracking fluid storage) while leaving a lot of work undone -- important work, like making fracking corporations disclose the chemicals they use to us, and not to some corporate, third-party website. Or getting rid of "trade secret exemptions" to disclosure rules. Or giving local communities more of a heads-up before fracking starts in their backyards. And we already know that fracking puts toxic chemicals in our drinking water -- so much so that it becomes flammable, gelatinous, or brackish -- and our air, just as we already know that claims that expanded fracking will slow the advance of climate change is rather optimistic, when you consider that methane packs a much larger climate-change wallop than even carbon dioxide. Luckily, Rep. Pocan (D-WI) has introduced a bill to ban fracking on public lands outright, and Food and Water Watch helps you tell the BLM to enact much stricter rules regarding fracking on public lands.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to force campaign finance disclosure from federal contractors, then both Common Cause and People for the American Way still help you do that. We can do that, of course, because, well, who pays federal contractors? We do, that's who -- with our taxes -- and don't we deserve to know what those contractors are doing with our money? You know, since it's our money? There's no arguing that we're "singling out" federal contractors unfairly, because, again -- and let me know if I'm belaboring the point -- it's our money. And though Congress would certainly try to stop President Obama from doing his job if he does issue such an order, they can't actually stop him unless they pass a bill either nullifying the order or stripping him of his authority to issue such an order -- and, well, President Obama would get to veto such a bill, and the Republicans in Congress couldn't override it, given their numbers. It's a no-brainer, really -- which is probably why Mr. Obama won't do it without massive public pressure.

Around the table: freedom for bigots and corporations! And other follies.

Jeb Bush says businesses have a right to discriminate against gay folks. And he's the "gay-friendly" Republican! I must have missed the part where "gay-friendly" means nothing more than "not actively trying to exterminate gays." Please, Jeb Bush, please say what you really want to say: when a business tries to sell high-end products to a wealthy audience, that's discrimination, too! Of course, it's not -- people can become wealthy if they want to buy those high-end products (though that's getting tougher all the time and I would never recommend such a spiritual path in the first place), but gay folks can't change being gay, any more than black folks can change being black. Enough with the special rights for bigots!

Speaking of which, Indiana seems poised to enact SB 101, a "religious conscience" bill allowing folks to discriminate against gays if they find gays icky their Jesus tells them gays are icky, but the corporation that puts on the Gen Con gaming convention in Indiana every year says it could leave the state over SB 101. And Gen Con is the biggest convention in Indianapolis every year, so the local economy would feel it. SB 101 has also drawn the ire of George Takei, also known as "the most popular man on Facebook." If nothing else, all this puts Gov. Pence in a tough spot. Who does he side with: bigots or corporations?

Senate Republicans vote down an amendment offered by Sen. Sanders (I-VT) that would have paid for nearly $500 billion in infrastructure improvements by closing offshore corporate tax loopholes. I wonder how many more times Republicans will vote to let corporations hide money (and jobs) overseas before any of them pays at the ballot box. It doesn't help when the "liberal" media regurgitates the Republican conflation of closing tax loopholes with tax hikes, or weakling Democrats don't run ads attacking what Republicans do.

Paul Krugman suggests that the advent of widespread air conditioning has a lot more to do with growing economies in Southern states than "low minimum wages and low taxes on rich people." Air conditioning makes hot and humid Southern climes more livable, after all -- hell, it does the same for hot and humid Northeastern summers (excepting the most recent summer, of course, which was almost unsettling in its mildness). And of course a "growing" economy isn't the same as a good economy -- with some economies, ain't nowhere to go but up.

Wisconsin Republicans "want to take away your weekend," according to Moshe Z. Marvit at The Nation. What they actually want to do is allow workers to "voluntarily" choose to work seven days in a row without the legally-mandated 24 hours of rest -- and since bosses can force workers to "volunteer" for such service, the article's title isn't anywhere near as overheated as it might sound. That would follow gutting of both public and private sector unions -- and I bet Gov. Walker signs this bill, too, since even when he says he won't do bad things he does them.

Finally, from the "somehow not The Onion" file: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who recently launched his Presidential campaign, is signing up for Obamacare! No lie: he was getting health insurance through his wife's plan, but his wife just took a leave of absence from her job at Goldman-Sachs in order to help out with his campaign, so they both have their hands out now. Just kidding, of course: the Affordable Care Act is hardly the "handout" right-wingers claim it is, but of course they call it a "handout" because they don't want our government doing anything for anyone other than big corporations. And also because they're haters.

Action: government spying, climate change, and paid family medical leave.

H.R. 1466, the Surveillance State Repeal Act, would, as its title suggests, repeal both the USA PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 -- because you might as well go big, and the aforementioned laws are two of the worst humiliations ever visited upon the American people by the Congress that purports to represent them. These two bills have birthed (or sanctioned) the massive surveillance state begun by George W. Bush and expanded by Barack Obama, which latter development should not have surprised anyone who watched Barack Obama the Candidate rail against warrantless wiretapping only to see Barack Obama the Senator vote for the FISA Amendments Act because of "the grave threats we face." And thanks to Edward Snowden's revelations, we also know that sunsetting the most controversial PATRIOT Act provisions hasn't delivered the oversight its supporters promised -- or else our government's spying upon us wouldn't have gotten so much worse over the years. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Surveillance State Repeal Act.

Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell oil corporation Royal Dutch Shell to sever ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Why? Well, mainly because ALEC has given us some of the most anti-freedom state legislation ever, which includes Voter ID laws, "Show Your Papers" laws, ag-gag laws, "three strikes" laws, tort "reform" laws, tax-cuts-for-the-rich laws, anti-community broadband laws -- need I continue? And Shell's CEO has said that climate change is an actual, real thing that we can and should fight, whereas ALEC says it's not, and with other corporations (now including British Petroleum!) lately cutting ties with ALEC for its climate change denialism, Shell is also feeling the pressure. And ALEC has also been supporting efforts to make home solar power users pay a "sun tax" out of the absurd belief that solar power users are "free riders" on the electric grid. No oil corporation should want to be caught up in any of ALEC's madness -- people are already suspicious enough of oil corporation motives, after all.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support paid family medical leave, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Most of us get 12 weeks of unpaid family medical leave, thanks to the Family Medical Leave Act, but try not getting paid for three months so you can take care of a newborn baby or a sick parent, or so you can get that surgery you've been putting off. You'll find yourself behind on your bills and with creditors knocking at your door, if you're lucky enough to still have a place to live. But the FAMILY Act (H.R. 1439) would allow you to make up to two-thirds of your salary while you're out taking care of business, and despite the squeals of the WE'RE BROKE!!!!! crowd, a .2% tax (that's one-tenth of two percent, "liberal" media, not "2 percent") would fund the entire thing, and then finally we could be like the 177 nations on Earth that have, for example, paid family leave for new mothers. Really, do you want to let your can-do pride put you in the poorhouse? Why not avail yourself of an insurance program that you pay into?

Action: voting rights, food stamps, and "free" trade.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: state Sen. Vincent Hughes (D-7) plans to introduce legislation which would automatically register good Pennsylvanians to vote whenever they get any sort of state service (like a drivers' license) from an agency the state currently authorizes to assist with voter registration. Voters who don't want to register to vote can simply opt out of that registration within three weeks, and registration of course doesn't obligate people to vote, which is as it should be. All of that should answer the haters who would exclaim TEH STATE FORCEZ TEH PEEPULZ TO DO THINGZ!!!! Nah, just kidding -- nothing ever satisfies a hater. Anyway, Keystone Progress helps you tell your PA Governor and state legislator to support making it easier, not harder, for voters to register and therefore vote. The state legislature did go through an awful lot of trouble, under Gov. Corbett, to pass draconian Voter ID laws that state courts eventually struck down. It's about time we made it easier for people to vote -- and make politicians work harder to persuade people to vote for them.

Meanwhile, you know that House and Senate Republican budgets are mean to working families while being quite obsequious to the "needs" of the wealthy for more tax cuts so they can "create jobs" -- but you may not know that these budgets cut food stamp funding, again. Clearly they're emboldened by the fact that they were able to get pretty hefty food stamp cuts last year out of a divided Congress, but I am prepared to accept a lengthy government shutdown, with all of the problems that entails, so that Congress doesn't cut food stamps any further. So Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to stop cutting food stamps. It's really very simple: if Congress pursued actual job-creation programs, like taxing millionaire income at 91% and closing corporate tax loopholes so the rich and the corporate will have to create jobs for other people just to avoid paying taxes on their money, maybe then we can cut food stamps. But posturing about the value of hard work, when our casino economy no longer rewards hard work, is quite disgusting, and our leaders should really avoid it.

Finally, I haven't passed along action alerts opposing "free" trade agreements and the "fast-tracking" thereof in a few days, so the Campaign for America's Future (among other organizations) helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject "fast-track," while Public Citizen helps you tell Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), lately the Democrats' point man on advancing the "free" trade agenda, to reject fast-track. And the newest hostage crisis our leaders have tried to perpetrate, in order to scare us into acquiescence of "free" trade's ability to nullify our laws? Their suggestion that doing this deal would give us some say over the world economy. That suggestion, of course, is completely illogical: doing a bad deal so we have some say is absurd, when we would presumably use that say to get a good deal, or to avoid a bad deal. And, as usual, none of that explains in any way why we need to "fast-track" the deal with as little debate and amendment as possible. Nothing the "free" traders say makes any damn sense -- I'd say the Emperor has no clothes, but calling them "Emperor" would be giving them too much credit.

Around the table: Mitch McConnell vs. the law, Republican fancy talk vs. Republican actions, Stephen King vs. Paul LePage, and other battles.

Yes, Virginia, Mitch McConnell has written a letter to every state Governor telling them to ignore their responsibility to craft a carbon emissions plan as mandated by the EPA, because the EPA's plan is "probably illegal." Everybody who wanted to jail Rosa Parks for breaking the law back in the day now thinks they're Rosa Parks! But Rosa Parks did eventually help change unjust and unconstitutional laws, while Mr. McConnell defends the right of corporations to hike your prices when they're told to pollute less. You wouldn't tolerate such behavior from your children, so why tolerate it from corporations?

E.J. Dionne notes that the House Republican budgets prove that Republicans are completely dedicated to making the income gap between rich and poor worse. You already knew that, but it's still good to hear it from the "liberal" media -- it increases the possibility that we might actually hear it again, and perhaps even again. And though the rich have gotten richer under President Obama, Republicans who fight tooth-and-nail even his modest efforts against that trend also deserve much of the blame -- and when they call the Affordable Care Act "socialism," no one should take them seriously when they suddenly say they care about the poor.

Paul Buchheit describes "How Privatization Degrades Our Daily Lives." Long story short: privatizing public services doesn't save money, it costs money. Long story somewhat longer: privatizing health care makes us captive to whatever health care corporations want, privatizing public housing gives that over to hifalutin bankster schemes, privatizing the internet gives us slower, more costly service, and the U.S. Post Office is so "terrible" that FedEx (a.k.a. Newt Gingrich's favorite corporation) uses it for three out of every 10 ground shipments. If you think privatization is a scam designed to enrich some politician's cronies, you're not alone. Ironic, since privatizers long argued that public corruption could be avoided by privatization.

Paul Krugman says pro-austerity arguments still hold sway in British media a mere six weeks ahead of its national elections. He's right about that, but I think he's a little too sanguine about how far we've come. I admit it feels like we've moved past reflexive pro-austerity arguments, but listening to Republicans try to rebrand their pro-austerity policies as "policies that help the poor" isn't very far from yesterday, and it only takes one more economic meltdown electing one more Republican President for it all to come back hard.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates fears the spread of artificial intelligence. But he sounds like he's simply been asleep during every one of Windows's multitudinous updates and patches. Duplicating or surpassing the human brain is a lot harder than folks realize, and software needs fairly constant maintenance -- especially with regards to security -- and I think the latter task, especially, is big enough that humans will need to do it for quite some time, even if arrogant CEOs disagree. We don't live in the future with jetpacks and men on Mars and Second Variety-style war machines -- we live in the future where a Space: 1999 reboot would have to be retitled.

Finally, Maine somehow-still-Governor Paul LePage really steps in it by claiming that author/Maine resident Stephen King moved to Florida to avoid Maine's taxes -- when Mr. King actually still lives in Maine most of the year and pays those Maine taxes. Democrats who actually want to win elections should listen to Mr. King's words here, because they're that good. And Democrats who want to continue losing to people like Paul LePage -- who himself has apparently forgotten that he grew up dirt-poor and needed the help of Olympia Snowe's late husband to get into college -- can go on paying their million-dollar consultants to help them craft a "message" that inspires nobody.

Action: the House budget, net neutrality, and Affordable Care Act coverage for pregnant women.

You knew it was coming: a slew of action alerts demanding that our Congressfolk reject the House Republican budget, which would give even more handouts to rich people and take real tax relief away from working families, which would slash Social Security benefits and privatize Medicare, which would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with nothing better. The National Women's Law Center helps you oppose both the House and Senate Republican budget for the damage they'll do to working families. The National Priorities Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Congressional Progressive Caucus's alternative, the People's Budget, which reflects American priorities better than the House Republican budget does. CREDO helps you tell Congressfolk to reject any cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid in their budgets, while Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent the Republicans' proposed conversion of Medicaid into a block grant program, which lets states use some Medicaid money not to provide health care for lower-income working families. You can bet a man like Scott Walker would give a chunk of Medicaid money away to his corporate cronies and call it "job creation," and we shouldn't stand for that.

Meanwhile, Congress is still spending a lot of time trying to undo the FCC's net neutrality proposals. You can only count on a few things these days, but here's one of them: if our government actually does something for the common benefit of all its people, Congress will do its damndest to destroy it. Why? Because where-oh-where will re-election campaign money come from if corporations can't get their way all the time? And also because Obama. So Demand Progress helps you calling the Congressfolk on the various Congressional committees that have tried to destroy the FCC's net neutrality proposal. (To contact your Reps and Senators generally, you can go here.) Over four million Americans submitted comments to the FCC demanding the most vigorous net neutrality regulations possible, and the FCC's proposal (which isn't "contrary to law," Sen. Cruz, because it uses powers already granted to it by legislation) would let people, not corporations, pick winners and losers on the internet. Yet Republicans still pretend ignorance of all that, because saying "we're doing whatever the big telecoms tell us to do" would give the game away.

Finally, did you know that if you happen to get pregnant outside of healthcare.gov's open enrollment period (from mid-November to mid-February), you can't get health insurance? And since a baby's on the way, you kinda need that. Of course, if certain "qualifying life events" happen to you outside of that enrollment period -- like, that you lose your job, get married, or actually give birth -- you can still sign up using healthcare.gov, but not if you get pregnant. Is that because the birth is nine months off? Hopefully not, because you'd need a lot of health care in the nine months leading up to the birth. So both Planned Parenthood and CREDO help you tell HHS Secretary Burwell to classify pregnancy as a "qualifying life event," and so enable women who don't have health insurance to get it via healthcare.gov if they become pregnant. And right-wingers who say "pregnancy is not a major life event" should answer why a birth is a major life event but pregnancy isn't -- or why pregnancy is a major life event when it's terminated, but not when it begins.

Around the table: Danny Schechter, R.I.P.

Citizens for Tax Justice evaluates the Republican House budget proposal, and finds it wanting. Key problems: their budget proposal repeals the Medicare tax expansion enacted in the Affordable Care Act and the Alternative Minimum Tax, though doing so would give a windfall to wealthy Americans, and allows the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit to expire, though doing so would put the hit on working families. It really is like Republicans are trying to do everything wrong.

Then again, two far-right Republicans stun an audience of scientists and activists by insisting that our federal government desperately needs to fund cancer research more than it does. "I think I can go to my 16-month old daughter and I can say, 'I borrowed money in your name to cure cancer' and she would thank me," Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-KS) said, and I only wish the rest of his party had a similar perspective -- instead, the House budget will almost certainly require cuts in NIH spending, because DEFICITZ!!!!

Two Oklahoma Congressdolts suggest that Chipotle's work in keeping animal abuse out of its supply chain justifies letting corporations do whatever they like because of their "religious conscience." "We must not fall prey to the hypocrisy of defending the freedom of operating a business on convictions of sustainability, but reject that same freedom when the convictions are based in faith," they write. Lousy parallel construction aside, we must reject codifying "convictions...based in faith" that run roughshod over other people's rights. Next up on Fox News: did Chipotle violate the rights of a pork supplier by cutting ties with them? It's a serious question!

Ho hum, Gov. Walker (E-WI) extolls the virtues of rural health care-related programs that his brand new budget just so happens to cut completely. And at least one of those programs -- the one helping doctors do residencies in rural areas -- started under his Democratic predecessor. Given the evasiveness of his spokeshack, Gov. Walker seems to think ignoring this little problem will make it go away -- an explicable calculation, given the "liberal" media's laziness. But if, say, Jeb Bush notices the problem, then the "liberal" media will have to cover it. Come to think of it, Scott Walker's never won a competitive primary, has he?

Fox News talking head, addressing President Obama's statements about mandatory voting, says "Do we really want everybody voting? I don’t think so!" I find it stupefying that anyone would say that -- if you think everyone around you is stupid, the problem is you, and if you're worried about stupid people voting, you train them up, as we say at work. Of course, in my experience, people who go on about "stupid people voting" are really worried those people won't vote the same way they do.

Finally, long-time media producer and News Dissector blogger Danny Schechter has died at the age of 72. It would be difficult to underestimate his influence on our work here, especially in this blog's early days. While I never saw his most famous Bush Mobb-era film, WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, I do highly recommend his 2006 film In Debt We Trust, made in the immediate aftermath of that nefarious bankruptcy "reform" law and in the climate of the housing bubble that gave banksters the ammunition they needed to bring down our economy.

Around the table: the West lets ISIS pummel anti-terror fighters in northern Syria, and other tragedies.

David Graeber, writing for the Guardian, writes about the success leftist Kurds in Rojava have had in maintaining democratic structures, at least until ISIS came along. If you're wondering why you hadn't heard of this before, n.b. that the Rojavan Revolutionary Party maintains ties to Turkey's Kurdish Workers Party, which Western governments (including ours) have classified as a terrorist organization. Perhaps the West should look into that matter a bit more, since you'd hate to think we'd pass up a chance to kick ISIS's collective ass merely because it would mean making common cause with hard-left groups that have actually changed over the years. Unless, of course, the West wants ISIS to be just strong enough so that Westerners keep electing reactionaries to office.

Jim Hightower explains the rise of for-profit debt collection corporations. Like the vulture capitalists described by Greg Palast, these debt collectors buy up personal debt from banks and other creditors for mere pennies per dollar, then come after the debtors fast and hard. And most of these debtors -- unable to afford lawyers because, you know, the economy -- wind up in default, and then these corporations will get to repossess property and garnish wages forever more. Nice work if you can get it! Silver lining? A lot of the debts these corporations buy are backed by unlawfully lousy paperwork -- the corporations get employees to sign affidavits attesting to their truth, but New York AG Eric Schneiderman has been pretty successful poking holes in said affidavits. Remind you of anything -- like, say, robosigning?

Jeb Bush tries to be clever, blaming the federal minimum wage for keeping folks in poverty, letting the rich get richer, and "squeezing the middle class." None of which explains why he says "state minimum wages are fine," since, by his logic, they presumably do all the same damage at the state level. Oh, and this notion that people won't be able to get jobs because the minimum wage were higher? Total horsedoodle -- most minimum wage jobs in America are fairly essential, and people would notice if they were suddenly gone because they paid $10/hour instead of $7.25/hour. But seriously, he cares. He really does. And that magically transmutes his pro-corporate positions into pro-people ones. Really.

California state government revokes health insurer Blue Shield of California's tax exempt status. Apparently all the constant rate-hiking, executive-overpaying, and profit-hoarding calls attention to itself after a while -- and Blue Shield's efforts at PR damage control after previous controversies turned out to be too little, too late. That multimillion dollar luxury box at a football stadium sure didn't help, either. I'm not even particularly opposed to letting a non-profit such as Blue Shield keep a little cash in reserve, but they're clearly gaming the system.

Finally, in an interview with Vice, President Obama says Republicans, at least as far as climate change is concerned, are "often motivated, principally, by opposing whatever it is that I propose." It's one thing for me to say it, but another thing entirely for him to finally come out with it. And yet he also says it's a "phase that the Republican party is going through right now," one it will "outgrow." Ask Bill Clinton if Republicans ever "outgrow" that "phase." Ask the next Democratic President, too, whenever we get another one of those.

Action: torture of bloggers, child labor on tobacco farms, and chemical safety reform.

It's Friday, which means, unfortunately, that Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi is due to get 50 lashes for the heinous crime of not only discussing religion in public, but encouraging other good Saudis to do the same. Actually, they convicted him of "violat(ing) Islamic values and propagat(ing) liberal thought," which sure doesn't sound any better. Mr. Badawi did receive 50 lashes on January 9 of this year, but apparently hasn't received any since, which could mean the Saudi Arabian government is somewhat sensitive to the bad publicity they'll get around the world -- or it could mean Mr. Badawi isn't well enough to withstand it. Either way, they should stop torturing him and release him, and stop giving other good Saudis trouble -- Islam surely can withstand a little sunlight, but the Saudi Arabian government insults Islam by acting otherwise. So Amnesty International helps you tell the Saudi Arabian government to stop oppressing people like Mr. Badawi simply because they exercise their God-given right to free speech.

We regard America as being too civilized for child labor, Newt Gingrich's notion of replacing school janitors with 12-year-old students notwithstanding, but American laws actually exempt tobacco farms from child labor laws -- meaning that 12-year-old kids working long hours in tobacco fields absorb way more nicotine in their bodies than any body should, let alone a body still growing. Tobacco leaves leak out nicotine when they get wet; combine that with Southern humidity and you have workers absorbing as much nicotine as if they were actually smoking cigarettes. Still, three years ago we couldn't get our government to see the wisdom in changing that situation, but lately two tobacco corporations have stopped hiring workers younger than 16, with more than a dozen others promising to eliminate child labor from their supply chains -- but a promise isn't a call to complacency, it's an opening. So Avaaz helps you tell the Obama Administration to ban child labor on tobacco farms.

Finally, the Toxic Substances Control Act is nearly 40 years old, and two distinct paths toward reform have emerged. Sens. Vitter (R-LA) and Udall (D-NM) have introduced S. 697, the unfortunately-named Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, and I say "unfortunately-named" because the late Senator introduced much more vigorous chemical safety reform legislation before his death. Though S. 697 would make it a little easier for the EPA to test chemicals and restrict the bad ones, it would also block states and localities from passing tougher legislation, and if you suspect that big chemical corporations must have written the bill, you're not alone. But Sens. Boxer (D-CA) and Markey (D-MA) have also introduced S. 725, the Alan Reinstein and Trevor Schaefer Toxic Chemical Protection Act, and that bill would advance EPA testing without the poison pill (so to speak) of federal pre-emption. So the Center for Effective Government helps you support the most vigorous chemical safety reform legislation possible.

Around the table: government transparency, war in the Middle East, net neutrality, tax unfairness, shareholder power, and housing assistance.

The Associated Press finds the Obama Administration censors Freedom of Information Act (or FOIA) requests at an alarming rate. The Most Transparent Administration in History either denied or censored information in nearly four out of every 10 requests. The Administration, naturally, sees the glass half-full, saying it's produced "some or all" records in 9 of 10 requests -- once you leave out all the "unlawful" and "improper" requests and requests for "lost" records (and, to be fair, the folks who wouldn't pay for copies of records). But even that represents backward movement.

Ali Gharib at The Nation writes about "The Worst Case for War with Iran You'll Read in a Major Newspaper," specifically that of Joshua Muravchik in the Washington Post. Perhaps the warmongers have changed their tune a bit, leavening their arguments with a lot more "maybe" and "might" and "probably," but they still use scare anecdotes. Gosh, Mr. Muravchik can think of four times in the last century where the people didn't rally around their leaders when attacked! No, really, we're supposed to be impressed with that. And I don't agree that "(i)f this is the best the hawkish paper and its neoconservative allies can muster, maybe we will be okay after all," because the case for war with Iraq was pretty crappy, too.

Speaking of bad arguments, the big telecom corporations still peddle BS arguments against the FCC's net neutrality proposal. The FCC proposal doesn't assess new taxes or fees, doesn't regulate rates, and doesn't force ISPs to deliver some webpages to your computer faster than others, but that isn't stopping the ZOMG FCC IZ TEH TROJUN HORSEZ!!!! crowd, who think the FCC's order predicts, or even guarantees, "heavy government control of the internet." They keep missing the point: this government is ours, and if we think they're screwing something up, we organize to change it.

Another day, another study finding that tax breaks seem to benefit the richest folks. To which a large number of very self-impressed right-wingers respond TEHY MAKEZ TEH MOST MONEYZ SO TEHY GET TEH LARGESTZ TAX BREAKZ!!!!!, like there is no possible way to write a law otherwise. Naturally it doesn't help when President Obama decides to, say, scrap tax breaks for 529 savings plans entirely, instead of, oh, I don't know, put a ceiling on the possible tax benefits one could reap from such plans, so the rich don't sop it all up.

General Electric announces it will allow large shareholders to nominate alternative people for elections to its Board of Directors. Why doesn't this happen more often? Because the Board of Directors picks the CEO, and no CEO wants less certainty about who's going to be on the Board. I might say, well, progress is often slow, but currently only three GE shareholders (all big corporations themselves) hold enough stock to nominate alternative board members, and nothing prevents one corporation's CEO from serving on another corporation's board, so progress may be even slower here.

Finally, the Chicago Housing Authority fund has made questionable spending (and hoarding!) decisions while maintaining a wait list of over a quarter of a million people -- most of whom, perhaps not coincidentally, are not white. One can argue that paying down your agency's own debt is a good work, but paying 10 times what's required into your pension fund isn't, and buying up other government debt isn't the reason they exist -- the reason they exist is to provide affordable housing for people who need a hand up. I wonder if Mr. Garcia makes an issue of this in the upcoming Mayoral runoff.

Action: fracking, longwall mining, and forced arbitration.

Yesterday, five House Reps introduced five bills observers are calling the "Frack Pack" -- bills that would close loopholes in clean air and clean water law currently enjoyed by oil and gas drilling corporations -- and the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your House Reps to support these efforts. As you know, Tha Bush Mobb's 2005 energy bill exempted frackers from certain Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and Clean Air Act provisions, like reporting what chemicals they use, but the five bills -- (perhaps too cleverly) named the FRAC, BREATHE, SHARED, FRESHER, and CLEANER Acts -- would, among other things, mandate corporate chemical disclosure and groundwater testing in drilling areas, and this would strengthen the case scientists have already made, that fracking uses chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects, neurological disorders, and respiratory illnesses. We couldn't get the FRAC Act through decisive Democratic majorities in 2009 and 2010, but that doesn't mean we give up. You never give up doing the right thing.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania is one of the few states in which coal corporations still practice longwall mining, where miners slice along the surface of a mile-long coal face (a "long wall") while another group of miners tries to keep the roof above the coal face from collapsing too haphazardly. As you might gather, what's roof to coal miners is ground to the rest of us, so when their roof collapses, buildings might collapse above it, and not just into the ground, either, but also into streams we depend upon for clean water, which pollutes those streams and/or diverts them in ways that affect local ecosystems. But the state Department of Environmental Protection is supposed to track longwall mining damages more assiduously than they've done lately; perhaps now that the voters have deposed the anti-environment Gov. Tom Corbett and replaced him with a Governor with a greener sheen, we'll get better results -- but only if we demand them. So the Sierra Club helps you tell the DEP to hold mining corporations accountable for the damage longwall mining does.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to end forced arbitration clauses in the sort of contracts consumers sign every day, then Americans for Civil Rights and Public Citizen still helps you do that. It occurs to me I've been far too nice to Republicans when excoriating their fervent desire to destroy the CFPB. After the manner of the right-wing blogger who infamously called anti-war activists "objectively pro-Saddam" back in the day, perhaps I should be calling Republicans trying to destroy the CFPB objectively pro-fraud. Or objectively pro-bankster. Or objectively pro-payday loan, or objectively pro-crippling student loan debt, or objectively pro-credit card fraud. Certainly we could accurately describe them as objectively pro-extralegal tribunal denying consumers their day in court when a corporation screws them over. I know, it's not real snappy. But it is true, and what nourishes us in the end when snappiness deserts us? Truth, that's what.

Around the table: when is supporting a mandate not really supporting a mandate? When you're Scott Walker, of course. And other stories.

Scott Klinger at the Center for Effective Government tells us what we might expect from the budgeting hulabaloo. Surprise, surprise, Congress will cut as many good programs that help good Americans as they can get away with. Also, "(e)xpect the funding cuts to be concentrated toward the end of the 10-year budget window, so the public won’t feel much pain before the Congressional and Presidential election in 2016," and also, I might add, so that future Congresses can kick that can even further down the road.

And speaking of actual budget boondoggles Republicans won't dare touch, Good Jobs First, using its noteworthy Subsidy Tracker database, tells us that a solid two-thirds of federally-awarded "business grants and special tax credits" go to large corporations. Keep that in mind when your Republican Congressidiot tells you that we need to extend those tax credits for TEH SMALL BIZNIZZEZ!!!!! Of course Good Jobs First tabulated a little over $4 billion in handouts annually, and before you say that's not much in the context of a $4 trillion budget, remember that social spending really does deliver quite the bang for your buck, so we could spend $4 billion a lot differently and do a lot more good.

Nathan Newman informs us that "Big Data Is an Economic Justice Issue, Not Just a Privacy Problem." There's no "long story short" possible here, but you won't be surprised to learn that concentrating so much personal data into so few corporate hands tends to reinforce the income-redistribution-upward phenomenon we too often observe these days. And Mr. Newman's threefold policy prescription -- mandating more consent from customers, considering data control in antitrust actions, and banning big data-driven price discrimination -- is quite apt; if I get an action alert, you'll get an action alert.

Gov. Scott Walker (E-WI) supports the Renewable Fuel Standard, but tells Tea Partiers that doesn't really reflect a reversal of his "real" position, since he doesn't want new renewable energy mandates and wants to phase old ones out. Figures that the only Big Gummint initiative he supports is one that'll win him friends among big corn types in Iowa. Of course changing your position isn't the same thing as telling people you'll do one thing and then doing another -- the latter of which is far worse and is also Scott Walker's stock-in-trade -- but if his Republican primary opponents manage to take him down by confusing the two, I won't complain.

Finally, the Obama Administration announces that the Affordable Care Act has helped over 16 million Americans to get health insurance. That number sounds, if anything, a little low, and certainly it'd be higher if certain states weren't playing around with the Medicaid expansion. The bad news? If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell, nearly 10 million of them will lose their coverage -- all because someone couldn't be bothered to be a little more specific about whether federally-run exchanges can offer subsidies in a 2,000 page-plus bill. OK, and also because some people are just assholes, but you don't hand an asshole a gun, ever.

Action: net neutrality, climate change, and "free" trade.

As you know, the FCC issued a strong network neutrality proposal last month, one that would protect your right to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than let big telecom corporations try to force you into "fast lanes" pummeling you with sensationalist corporate content. And, as you also know, Republicans in Congress, again doing the work their corporate paymasters bid them do, have introduced the offensively-named "Internet Freedom Act," which would prevent the FCC from protecting your right to go where you want on the internet. Make no mistake, the "Internet Freedom Act" isn't concerned with your freedom, but with the "freedom" of big telecoms to make even more money while making your internet service worse. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Internet Freedom Act, and preserve real net neutrality for real people. Don't be impressed by corporate hacks telling you that of course they oppose censorship. Everyone opposes censorship, but corporations still want you to go where they want you to go, versus where you want to go.

Meanwhile, the EPA will issue final rules limiting power plant carbon emissions this summer, and though the rules as they stand will do a considerable amount of good, they could be doing more. The rules still hand out too many incentives for states to invest in gas drilling rather than coal production, when gas drilling still presents too many threats to our environment -- not just to drinking water, but to climate change itself, as the methane released by gas drilling packs a lot more carbon emissions than coal pollution does. And the EPA doesn't take into account how well we've already done in transitioning to renewable energy sources: the EPA's plan, as it stands, only requires 12 percent of total 2030 electricity production to come from renewable sources, when several states have adopted standards that would double that by the same date. Of course the big fossil fuel corporations are pushing back, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight for everything we think is right. So the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell the EPA to write better climate change regulations.

Finally, Congress may wait until April to "fast-track" the notorious Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade bill, but that doesn't mean we're safe -- the time is still now to tell your Congressfolk to reject "free" trade agreements that nullify our laws and outsource our jobs, and also to reject "fast-tracking" those agreements, which makes a mockery of our democratic values, so Public Citizen helps you do that. And the big news about the TPP this week? That the Obama Administration will hold a classified briefing about the TPP with a few House Democrats today -- like this is about war strategy or something. Of course the meeting's "classified" nature means its attendees can't talk about what they've heard there -- and Mr. Obama has the cojones to say folks shouldn't criticize the deal until they know more about it! As Rep. Doggett asks: what are they afraid of? Are they afraid that ordinary Americans would hate the idea that corporations wanting to befoul our clean air and clean water could use the TPP's "investor-state tribunals" to override our laws and then extract tribute from the people?

Around the table: the stupid, the greed, the arrogance, it all burns.

House Republicans propose a budget, and boy is it a stinker: it would turn Medicare into a voucher program, again, would turn Medicaid and food stamps into block grant programs that states could spend on things other than Medicaid and food stamps, again, and would repeal the Affordable Care Act, again. And as for "balancing the budget in 10 years," you could do it this year if you brought back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income. You're tempted to say, why do they never learn? -- until you remember that they never learn because weakling Democrats try to work with these monsters, instead of shame them, as civilized people would do.

Robert Reich, in "The iEverything and the Redistributional Imperative," apparently sees modern technology as a job-killing Leviathan. But the corporations who say they're serving 450 million customers with just 50 employees probably aren't saying how many "consultants" and "independent contractors" they use, nor do they tell you how many other corporations they depend on. Also, "advanced sensors, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, big data," et al need service technicians, even if their arrogant paymasters don't think so. I rue the upward redistribution of income as much as anyone, but I think he overstates the role of technology in that trend.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush says he'd repeal the Affordable Care Act and "really" reform health care by doing what he did with Medicaid in Florida -- but Bloomberg reminds us that he really, really bollocksed that up, to the point where the state has largely scrapped his "reforms." "Too many plans, too much administration and plenty of patient confusion, along with too little spending," says one pediatric cardiologist, and boy does most of that sound conservative. Well, nobody could have predicted that giving health insurance corporations so much power could possibly lead to those insurers hardly wanting to cover anything! And "letting the consumer decide," when the consumer can't predict the future, also turned out not so great.

On the eve of a tough re-election fight, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares his opposition to a Palestinian state -- which is, believe it or not, a reversal for Mr. Netanyahu. He has, it seems, learned from Messrs. Ahmedinejad, Bush the Lesser, and Berlusconi that when you're in trouble, you double down on your mistakes -- voters still respect the air of decisiveness, especially when your opponents are unimpressive. Haaretz's exit polling showed Mr. Netanyahu's party with a very narrow lead over Mr. Herzog's as of 9 PM EST last night -- though, with 11 parties standing to win seats, he'll need to create a coalition.

Finally, new Republican foreign policy architect Sen. Tom Cotton, a U.S. Senator for all of two months now, informs Face the Nation viewers that "we have to stand up to Iran’s attempts to drive for regional dominance" because "(t)hey already control Teheran and, increasingly, they control Damascus and Beirut and Baghdad. And now, Sana’a as well." It is true that Iran controls Teheran, and has for a long time now, in much the same manner as the United States controls Washington, D.C. And why does Little Tommy think Iran has such "regional dominance"? Could it be because his Personal Lord and Savior George W. Bush invaded Iran's main regional rival on ridiculous pretexts? The stupid, it burns.

UPDATE. And Benjamin Netanyahu wins a more decisive victory in the Israeli elections than exit polls had suggested, with his path to forming a new government clearer than expected. It proves the point I'd made, but sigh.

Action: fracking on public lands, banning gay adults from the Boy Scouts, and regulating nuclear power plants.

We've had good and bad news about fracking lately. The good news? New York banned fracking statewide, and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has lately imposed a moratorium on fracking in state forests. The bad news? Frackers still train their sights on many of our national treasures -- including the Otero Mesa in New Mexico. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated a Bureau of Land Management plan to let oil and gas corporations drill there in 2009, and the Department of the Interior (under Secretary Salazar, who was pretty good on environmental issues in that region) proposed making the Otero Mesa a national monument, but President Obama has done nothing about that proposal. Perhaps he needs some persuasion from the people: Penn Environment helps you tell Mr. Obama to ban fracking on federal public park lands. These are our lands, after all -- ours to enjoy, and ours to depend upon when we need it, because public lands not only supply some of our best hunting and recreation grounds, but also our clean water, which stands most at risk from fracking.

Meanwhile, you may know that the Boy Scouts of America stopped kicking out gay scouts merely because of their homosexuality back in January of 2014, but they have maintained their ban on gay adults as scout leaders. I guess that was a bridge too far for them, but bigotry expressed against only some people you don't like is still bigotry, and the notion that gay scout leaders would "indoctrinate" young kids is especially repugnant. First off, if you're not gay, no one can talk you into being gay. Second, does the Boy Scouts of America really think gays have nothing else on their minds besides gay sex? I mean, the Boy Scouts don't ban heterosexuals from their meetings because they think they're going to talk about heterosexual sex all the time. I come up against this notion again and again when confronting folks who hate gays, and I'm getting tired of it. But now two gay adults recently banned from the Boy Scouts hope to change that, by helping you tell the Boy Scouts of America to reverse their policy banning gay adults from being scoutmasters.

Finally, some four years after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan -- which caused the evacuation of 300,000 good folks from the area, some 120,000 of whom still haven't returned home -- our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) isn't working fast enough to prevent a Fukushima from happening here, which, given how many nuclear reactors just happen to be sitting on faultlines, is a near-certainty. And some one-third of Americans live near a nuclear reactor, so if any one of them melts down, the loss of life and livelihood will be intolerable. So Public Citizen helps you tell the NRC to get its act together and make nuclear power plants safer. The NRC has proposed 12 recommendations to make nuclear plants safer, but hasn't fully followed through on all of them, and hearing "these things take time" won't comfort anyone who loses a loved one if some reactor blows up between now and then. And the main reason it takes so long is that we still pay too much attention to the "needs" of the nuclear industry's biggest players, when they should be attending more to our needs.

Around the table: research apps, apparent "niceness," "liberal" media hypocrisy, "right to work," and homelessness.

The Consumerist notes that collecting users' medical data to help researchers, as Apple's new app suite ResearchKit would do, has some issues. And it ain't all about the privacy, though you may not have as much of that as you think, either -- issues mostly derive from users and researchers not "interacting in person in some way," which opens the door to made-up data, data skewed by class (since wealthier people tend to own smartphones, though I suspect that's changing as time goes on), and data that just isn't that useful, since every user's medical problems may not be that much of a help to anyone else.

If you were looking for one post summarizing all the reasons Scott Walker would make a terrible President, thank Right Wing Watch, because they wrote a great one -- replete with 32 links, including seven in one glorious paragraph. It occurs to me that when folks like Ted Cruz run for President, they make folks like Scott Walker look somehow "moderate," and that's mainly, I still think, because Sen. Cruz projects a "passionate" demeanor while Gov. Walker projects a "level" one. Confusing a man's outward "niceness" and his radical, reactionary works is a dangerous mistake, and I hope the American people understand that sooner rather than later.

I don't mean to assert that Hillary Clinton's email imbroglio is much ado about nothing, because it's not, but Joe Conason is right to remind us that the "liberal" media has been ignoring those times Republican Presidential candidates -- and Presidents! -- did similar things. Jeb Bush has released perhaps one in 10 emails he wrote as Florida's Governor, Scott Walker concocted a complete shadow email system while he was Milwaukee County executive -- and the Administration of Mr. Accountability One himself, George W. Bush, lost millions of emails and never archived millions more.

Since it's apparently Scott Walker day around here, let us at least celebrate the fact that Wisconsin unions have sued to keep that state's notorious "right to work" law from taking effect, asserting that the law allows the state to take a union's property (i.e. union dues, used to provide services to workers) without "just compensation." That might succeed and it might not, but let's get to business: people who join a union without knowing they're going to pay dues are ignorant, and people who think they're paying more in dues than they're gaining in income are dumb.

Finally, Carl Gibson writes about the research suggesting that it's cheaper to put the homeless in homes than it is to leave them out on the street. Right-wingers imagine that leaving the homeless to their own devices is "fiscally responsible," but the Big Gummint "socialist" solution of putting them in existing homes (or build tiny homes for them, as Occupy Madison did in Wisconsin's capital city) would actually cost the taxpayer less -- because the taxpayer pays to put homeless folks in the ER, or put them in jail, or put them in shelters, or (even) to put them on planes and ship them out of town, a spectacularly useless and cruel stunt.

Action: smarter sentencing, climate change, and food stamps.

H.R. 920/S. 502, the Smarter Sentencing Act, is one of those rare instances of a bill that's actually bipartisan in the way the people's will is actually bipartisan -- you know, versus thinks like "free" trade deals, where the elites on both sides come together in a "bipartisan" manner to screw the people over. The Smarter Sentencing Act goes further than much other sentencing-related legislation we've supported here: it would cut mandatory minimum drug sentences in half, give judges more flexibility in sentencing drug offenders, and allow folks sentenced to crack-related crimes before 2010 to get their sentences reduced. And did I mention bipartisan! Senate sponsors range from Sheldon Whitehouse on the left to Ted Cruz on the right; House sponsors range from Barbara Lee to Raul Labrador. I wish this bipartisan smart-on-crime trend yielded more results -- politicians have been making these noises for a decade now -- but that just means we have to keep pushing. Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Smarter Sentencing Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer to end its association with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Since folks started organizing to sever corporate ties with ALEC in 2012, over 100 corporations (lately including Google, Facebook, and eBay) have stopped associating with the group responsible for writing the Voter ID bills and right-to-work bills (among so many other backward, pro-corporate bills!) so many states have passed over the years. Why Pfizer? Because ALEC has lately declared its "skepticism" in re climate change, and Pfizer has declared the opposite; you'd think Pfizer wouldn't want to associate with folks who think climate change is a hoax perpetrated by an environmental lobby they want you to think is far more powerful than it actually is (so that you don't think the fossil-fuel lobby is as powerful as it is, naturally). And, once we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR, perhaps Pfizer will do the right thing and help starve the ALEC beast of the money it needs to continue working on behalf of its corporate paymasters.

Finally, Republicans are still strutting around like they own America -- an impression they got, perhaps, from the national Democrats' second Election Day lie-down in four years -- and as a result they're actually talking about cutting our food stamp program further. Congress successfully cut food stamps by almost $9 billion over 10 years in the nefarious 2014 Farm Bill reauth, but still Republicans yammer on about fraud and inefficiency, though they haven't been able to actually prove any claims about fraud and inefficiency. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk that you won't tolerate any more cuts to food stamp programs that working families need. Why do they need it? Because too many American corporations still act in an utterly immoral manner -- sitting on trillions of dollars in "earnings," extracting handouts and bailouts from weakling Congressfolk, spending money on stock buybacks instead of investing in America. And when corporations act like that, people suffer. It's well past time politicians started acting like people are more important than corporations.

Around the table: stagnant wages, climate change, student loans, HIV transmission, and Dr. Mengele's research, such as it was.

Harold Meyerson at the Washington Post instructs us as to "Why Salaries Don't Rise." Long story short: corporations direct more of their earnings to shareholders than to investing in equipment or workers, and a lot of the biggest shareholders are barely emotionally invested in their corporations given the lightning-quick pace of stock trades these days. But that sounds like stuff a 91% tax on millionaire income could fix.

Noelle Sedor at the Los Angeles Times says a "fee and dividend" system would be better than a cap-and-trade system at reducing climate change. She says Republicans would like it, too, which is rather optimistic -- the only thing Republicans "like" is whatever their richest corporate paymasters like. And remember that once upon a time cap-and-trade was "the option Republicans would like," so I'm going to stay a regulate-and-punish man, myself.

Michael Klare at TomDispatch wonders: "Is Big Oil Finally Entering a Climate Change World?" The oil corporations have, over the last dozen or so years, embarked on a "production-maximizing" strategy, requiring them to drill for oil in more difficult places (shale, offshore, Iraq) -- but now, faced with (at the least) a slowed acceleration in demand for oil, oil corporations may have to accept that crude oil prices won't justify such drilling. I wouldn't underestimate the ability of the far-too-powerful to make us all pay buku bucks for oil again, though.

13 Democratic Senators introduce a bill that would allow folks to discharge their privately-held student loans in bankruptcy proceedings. Because, as you may remember, the 2005 bankruptcy "reform" law doesn't allow you to do that. The bad news? Private student loans account for a mere 15% of all student loans. The good news? President Obama may be able to change that on his own, without having to run to Mega-Awesome Godlike President of Gigundis America Mitch McConnell for permission.

San Diego man is about to become the first person ever prosecuted under a California law barring willful transmission of HIV. I'm the kind of person who generally thinks whatever two adults consent to do in the bedroom is none of my business, but not if you're trampling on someone else's rights, and giving people HIV without telling them certainly tramples on their rights.

Finally, a Straight Dope reader asks whether Dr. Mengele produced any "useful" medical research in the tortuous "experiments" he carried out on concentration camp victims. You'd expect something good to come even of the worst evil, but Dr. Mengele's studies were "overly concerned with efficient methods of killing people" and "tainted by racial bias and the use of atypically unhealthy subject groups." Peacetime lab work using brains of concentration camp victims did yield results in re neurological disorders, but that doesn't mean we tolerate evil, ever.

Around the table: with generous helpings of your standard right-wing hypocrisy.

"Right-to-Work and Abortion Reversals Follow Pattern for Scott Walker," says Brendan Fischer at PR Watch. That "pattern," incidentally, is a pattern of saying he won't do things like "right to work" and a 20-week abortion ban and then doing them -- once he's elected, that is. And I knew he didn't run his 2010 campaign on taking bargaining rights away from public unions, but I didn't know that he actually said he would do the opposite if governor. The Democrat who's willing to run ten thousand ads saying "you can't trust Scott Walker" might have a chance against him in the 2016 Presidential race. Hillary Clinton might have a little pot-kettle-black problem with that, but such problems have never stopped right-wingers, so why should it stop her?

Katherine McFate tells us "What We Lose with a Privatized Postal Service." Money, for one thing. Community, for another -- "(i)n many small towns," small towns not adequately served by the big private delivery corporations I must add, "the local post office continues to be a community hub, a place to meet neighbors and get news." And will your harried FedEx or UPS driver check on the elderly? Not likely. Ms. McFate reminds us that the USPS could be doing even more for communities, like offering basic banking services.

Mike Konczal writes that "liberal nihilism" keeps us from fighting for real reforms that would help working families make more money. I'm not sure the nihilists he's describing -- the ones that overstate the effect of technology on jobs and wages, for example -- are liberals. I'm not even sure they're nihilists; these days, nihilist behavior is pretty much all on the right. I will agree, though, that refusing to discuss the roles of the Federal Reserve, the "shareholder revolution," and government policy in stagnant wages does ensure that nothing of consequence gets done.

The Consumerist warns us that hackers can hijack your Facebook account -- which means a lot more these days, as so many folks never log out of Facebook, and other websites have access to that Facebook login almost as a matter of course. The good news: the hack requires that you click on a malicious link for it to work -- and we're much better at avoiding clicking suspicious links in hysterical emails than we used to be. Still, be careful out there.

Ho hum, Andrews University, a Christian college in Michigan, has forbade students from holding a bake sale to benefit homeless gay youth because doing so would "conflict" with its "mission and practices." That's right, a Christian college just told its students basically not to act like Christ. Note well that the college Dean wouldn't come out and say AULL4One can't raise money for at-risk gay youth because AULL4One isn't trying to turn them straight, but he didn't exactly deny it, either.

Finally, a retired Army Major General calls the 47 Republicans' letter to the government of Iran, one clearly meant to undermine nuclear negotiations involving the U.S. and Iran, "mutinous." He also said the 47 Senator's ringleader, Sen. Tom Cotton, "should know better" as an Army veteran to avoid such a "gross breach of discipline," but that Mr. Cotton "simply does not care." Next up on Fox News: is Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton the right kind of soldier?

Action: forced arbitration, medical marijuana, and a strangely-settled lawsuit.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to end forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. Those could be the contracts you sign to get a cell phone, set up a bank account, or do any number of other things. We've been trying to end this practice for years, because forced arbitration clauses prevent you from suing to redress grievances in court, but (as the name suggests) force you to redress grievances using an arbitrator paid for by the corporation that caused the grievance in the first place -- and how do you think those work out? Turns out Dodd-Frank gave the CFPB the power to prohibit corporations from putting these forced arbitration clauses in the contracts you sign with them, after completing a study first. Seriously, let Republicans try to say there's "no problem" with you being deprived of your right to a day in court. Let them squeal about "frivolous lawsuits," as if the problem you might have with your bank is "frivolous." Let them whine about "nanny states," which they only do when it's your government actually helping you.

Meanwhile, Sens. Paul (R-KY), Booker (D-NJ) and Gillibrand (D-NY) have introduced S. 683, the CARERS Act. Congress.gov doesn't have a summary for S. 683 as of this writing, meaning I can't tell how tortured the acronym is, but while the bill wouldn't legalize marijuana, it would do more toward that end than ever before. The bill would legalize certain strains of medicinal marijuana nationwide, and it would let VA doctors prescribe medical marijuana to veterans. Perhaps most importantly, the bill would reclassify marijuana as a Schedule II drug. Currently, per the Controlled Substances Act, it's a Schedule I drug, reserved for very dangerous drugs with no medical uses, like heroin; placement on Schedule I makes research into medicinal uses and practices very difficult, as you might imagine, and we know marijuana has some medical utility in alleviating symptoms associated with HIV, cancer treatment, and neurological pain disorders. So Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the CARERS Act, and thus support saner drug policy in America.

Finally, the state of New Jersey sued ExxonMobil back in 2004 for almost $9 billion over damage to around 1,500 acres of state wetlands -- but Gov. Christie just settled that lawsuit for less than $250 million. And ExxonMobil has given nearly $2 million to the Republican Governors Association (which Mr. Christie now runs) since 2009, which sure looks like a nice return on one's investment. Just so happens Mr. Christie's first Attorney General -- who would have proceeded with the case against ExxonMobil -- was a lawyer with ExxonMobil. And Mr. Christie's departing deputy Chief of Staff has entered an "exclusive strategic partnership" with a lobbying firm also employed by ExxonMobil to lobby the New Jersey state government in Trenton. None of this looks good for any attempt Mr. Christie might have made to alleviate good citizens' concerns about conflicts of interest. At any rate, Sum of Us helps you tell Mr. Christie to call off his settlement with ExxonMobil and let justice take its course. Mr. Christie doesn't care what you think -- just like his idol, George W. "the Big Guy" Bush -- but that hardly circumscribes our duty to offer our counsel.

Around the table: Republicans demonstrate How Not to Be, part 447.

"Cookie-Cutter ALEC Right-to-Work Bills Pop in Multiple States," announces PR Watch. You'll see the uncanny similarities between ALEC's model "right-to-work" bill and the "right-to-work" bill in New Hampshire, and you'll get to track "right-to-work" bills Missouri, New Mexico, West Virginia, and other states. ALEC is even trying to get those bills passed at the local level, which usually requires enabling legislation ("enabling," what a perfect word!) at the state level. But we'll fight at every level.

The Consumerist describes an unlikely ally we have in our battle against payday lenders: faith-based groups. It's always heart-warming to hear a religious figure say things like "(t)his is not a liberal versus conservative issue, this is simply a right or wrong issue," and more so to see churches educating their communities or establishing their own alternative loan programs to serve them. But it's a shame we have to be even a little surprised when faith-based groups join a battle against evil.

The Economic Policy Institute finds that more education doesn't guarantee you'll be safe from declining wages -- that folks with "some college" are finding their wages declining the fastest, and even folks with advanced degrees aren't getting ahead. So when your right-wing uncle (or next Republican President) says the solution to getting ahead is just getting more schooling -- preferably in "something useful"! -- you have yet another arrow in the quiver. If you want to pile on, you might mention how awful student debt has become.

Richard Eskow wonders if strong populist support for Social Security and Medicare will help determine who advances in the Democratic primary to succeed retiring Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski. Rep. Donna Edwards has outflanked Rep. Chris Van Hollen in her zeal to protect these compacts so far -- and I don't see Mr. Van Hollen, a figure in House Democratic leadership for some time, retorting that he was "willing to consider" cuts to Social Security and Medicare because he's a leader and leaders have to work with the other side. Jesus Mary and Joseph you don't work with the other side when they're trying to burn everything down, you work around them.

Finally, just as several Republican Senators are admitting that maybe that letter to Iran wasn't such a hot idea, at least two Capitol Hill aides have advanced a novel interpretation of Republican intentions: that the letter was "a 'cheeky' reminder of the congressional branch’s prerogatives," and that the Obama Administration "has no sense of humor." Depends on which cheek they mean, I suppose. Seriously, though: grown-ups don't hide behind "jokes."

Action: net neutrality, and campaign finance disclosure for federal contractors.

The FCC may have made the right call on net neutrality regulations, but that won't stop Marsha Blackburn! Rep. Blackburn (E-TN) has introduced H.R. 1212, perversely entitled the Internet Freedom Act; the bill would reverse what the FCC did and prevent them from doing it again in the future. Of course you must ask: freedom for whom? Not freedom for you, that's for sure, because you'll have freedom if you get to pick where you go on the internet -- she must mean freedom for big corporations to censor and slow down websites and deliver their "partners"' websites to you more quickly, so that if you want to read your favorite ass-kicking-name-taking political websites, you'll be forced to look at Miley Cyrus twerking videos or some other hysteria first. Note, also, that 29 of the bill's 31 sponsors have received campaign contributions from big telecoms -- one almost wonders what on Earth is wrong with the other two! -- and Ms. Blackburn herself has received over $250,000 from these corporations over the years. Free Press helps you tell your House Rep to preserve real internet freedom and reject Ms. Blackburn's bill.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous action alerts helping you tell President Obama to issue an Executive order mandating campaign finance disclosure for federal contractors, then the People's Email Network also helps you do that. This is not "unfair" to federal contractors -- federal contractors know if they take government money they need to follow government rules. No private investor would invest without some control over their investment, so why should our government -- especially considering they write their checks with our money? This bears repeating: the corporatists constantly whinge on about "big government," hoping you'll forget that this government is yours -- it derives its authority from you, and the money it spends is your money. And if right-wingers really think that the American people don't deserve to know how big corporations are spending their money, I wish they'd just come out and say so, instead of squealing ZOMG OBAMA TEH DIKTATUR!!!!, when they called you "traitor" for questioning any of their Personal Lord and Savior George W. Bush's Executive orders back in the day.

Around the table: starving the beast in the Appalachians, and other stories.

Andrew Cockburn suggests that the "mystique of high-value targeting" won't defeat ISIS. Why? If you saw Munich, you already know the answer: take out one target, and another one jumps right in its place, and so it goes with ISIS, which steps up its attacks when a leader dies, to a large degree because they're "invariably and immediately replaced, and almost always by someone (often a relative ready for revenge) younger, more aggressive, and eager to prove himself." We might do better by, oh, I don't know, trying not to control other countries so we can take their resources from them, and then making war on them when we don't get our way. I know it's not as sexy, but it just might work better.

The European Union seems headed in the wrong direction on its net neutrality proposal -- this, after the EU Parliament declared its support for strong net neutrality principles. You'll recognize the demons the EU would set loose -- paid prioritization, actual censorship -- and you'll also recognize the pushback (the "Keep the Internet Open" manifesto signed by youth from 24 different EU countries). I hope they look at what's happened in America so far and realize that they can win.

The battle over solar power in Florida remains interesting, as a group called Conservatives for Energy Freedom is blasting Americans for Prosperity (who else?) for opposing a ballot initiative that would make rooftop solar easier to do in the Sunshine State. When you see the Christian Coalition and the Sierra Club on the same side of something, you might conclude it's actual bipartisanship, not the fake corporate "bipartisanship" the two political parties continually foist upon us.

So Gov. Walker (E-WI) signs the "right-to-work" bill he was so "reluctant" to push, and President Obama slams it. But where was the President when the Employee Free Choice Act was one vote short of breaking a filibuster? Not working the phones, like he was when he was trying to get Ben Bernanke another term at the Fed (or, to his credit, when he was trying to get don't-ask-don't-tell repealed). Meanwhile, Mr. Walker thinks Mr. Obama should look to Wisconsin if he wants to get things done -- a state lagging behind most of the rest of the country in job creation!

Finally, we learn that telling big banks to stop funding mountaintop removal coal-mining is having an impact, as PNC Bank -- only the nation's 7th largest bank, but one of the banks most invested in mountaintop removal -- announces it will no longer fund two coal corporations still practicing mountaintop removal, which effectively ends their involvement in funding the practice. You may remember telling PNC to do that last year. PNC joins otherwise unsavory bankster corporations such as Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo in this refusal. Now that's what I call "starving the beast."

Action: tax relief for working families, strong dietary guidelines, and shareholder transparency.

Various Congressfolk have lately introduced bills to expand and make permanent the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the American Opportunity Tax Credit, as well as reform the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. If you don't think about these things when you hear about "tax reform," there's good reason for that -- our "liberal" media seems to agree with Republicans that the only permissible policy prescriptions for tax reform are those that cut corporate taxes and wealthy folks' taxes. But neither of these actually put money back into the pockets of working families, like the EITC, CTC, et al do -- and working families, as you know, are far more likely to put that money back into our economy, whereas wealthy and corporate types tend to hoard their windfalls. Hence NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell Congress to focus on tax relief for people who work, rather than people who don't. Yes, the divide is now that great -- the wealthy don't actually work, or even enable work, so much as they redistribute income upward to themselves.

Meanwhile, the FDA's new labeling guidelines would mandate that corporations tell you how much sugar they've added to the product -- and this is no small thing. But the USDA has recommended updating Americans' dietary guidelines, and these guidelines would suggest that added sugar shouldn't comprise more than 10% of our caloric intake. Which might actually be a bit high -- 200 calories (10% of 2,000) is a little more than 13 teaspoons of sugar daily -- but naturally the big food corporations oppose the notion anyway. And if your right-wing uncle says ZOMG TEH GUBMINT CONTROLZ TEH DIETZ!!!!, feel free to tell him he should be more concerned about warrantless wiretapping and NSA data-vacuuming, which are actual injuries our government does us. You may want him to consider, also, that sugar corporations might be behind whatever "source" is telling him that the Obamas want to control what he eats. In the meantime, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell the USDA to issue the most vigorous Dietary Guidelines possible, especially in re added sugar intake.

Finally, you may remember that Antonio Weiss stood to gain a $21 million bonus from his employer if he was able to get that Treasury Undersecretary job in our government. This and similar developments have, perhaps not surprisingly, made shareholders quite angry, and some of them have petitioned for disclosure of those bonuses once they're made. Bankster CEOs, naturally, oppose such transparency to their shareholders, and why not? It's not like they pay those bonuses out with shareholder money or anything. Oh, wait, yes, they do. It's like being a CEO means never having to be accountable to anyone, even the people who pay you. And it's also like moving from the private sector to our government means never having to be accountable to anyone, even the people who pay you -- those people being taxpayers, meaning you and I. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell three big banking corporations to drop their opposition to shareholder transparency resolutions. What are they afraid of? That people will think banksters only care about money? Sorry, banksters -- all of America already thinks that.

Around the table: Senators breaking laws, religious folks feeling persecuted, zombie lies about the economy refusing to go away -- it can be challenging sometimes.

Daily Kos diarist Lestatdelc says that the now-infamous letter from 47 GOP Senators to the government of Iran violates the Logan Act. Clearly the 47 Senators -- by voicing the strange argument, to the government of Iran, that the next President could simply overturn any agreement on nuclear non-proliferation the U.N.-backed negotiations produce -- have demonstrated, at the least, "intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof," though I suspect only the State Department has standing to sue these Senators under the Logan Act. Let's stop already with the "treason" talk, though, because that's a much higher bar.

The Department of Justice will charge Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) with corruption this week. Sounds like pretty typical stuff, too -- Mr. Menendez allegedly got sizable gifts from an eye surgeon and then worked to change Medicare reimbursement policies that just so happened to benefit said eye surgeon -- though it's no less tolerable for being typical. Meanwhile, Republicans consistently block any attempt at campaign finance disclosure or reform, and President Obama still seems too timid to push for Executive branch action that would go a long way toward such reform.

Lawrence Summers tells us that "a good TPP" would benefit America. In other news, a winged horse would help you fight evil, an especially meaningful set of numbers would win you the lottery, and tax cuts for the wealthy would jump-start the economy. Seriously, saying we should get "free" trade agreements "right," and suggesting that the alternative would be to put America at the mercy of nations that negotiate other trade agreements -- these things sound like the desperate flailings of a man who knows he's lost the argument. And we're not "judging" the TPP against a "past in which U.S. workers did not face foreign competition" -- we're judging it by what we know from leaks is in the TPP. Would it be piling on to note that Mr. Summers's argument doesn't at all justify fast-tracking the agreement's passage? No, it would not be piling on.

The Pew National Trusts provides a handy graph characterizing how difficult it is to drill in the Arctic region. Thing I did not know but probably should have known: the nearest U.S. Coast Guard station from the Arctic is nearly a thousand miles away, and getting from that station to the Arctic by sea will be far worse than doing so by air, because Alaska is so, so huge -- people really don't understand how huge it is, though the second map certainly helps in that regard.

Robert Boston, writing in Salon, presents "The Ultimate Guide to Debunking Right-Wingers' Insane Persecution Fantasies." Terrific as this article is -- it excerpts Mr. Boston's book, called Taking Liberties: Why Religious Freedom Doesn't Give You the Right to Tell Other People What to Do, which I will seek out -- I wonder whether facts will ever convince right-wingers of anything. A better response to your right-wing uncle's religious persecution fever-dream might be: "do you hear how you sound when you whine like this?" I'm completely serious about that -- shame might reach them more quickly than facts do.

Finally, the architect of Tha Bush Mobb's tax cuts seems to be back in favor on Capitol Hill, still pushing tax theories thoroughly discredited by events in actual space-time. I had forgotten exactly how he'd managed to make Tha Bush Mobb tax cuts seem to cost less than they actually did, but I'm glad to be reminded -- and so is Scott Walker, I'm sure, who knows that, in the absence of Democrats who'd actually fight for working families, it's a lot easier to fool the people.

Action: campaign finance disclosure, smog pollution in Pennsylvania, and "free" trade.

Maryland state Sen. Jamie Raskin has developed a model bill that would mandate that corporations take a vote of their shareholders before making campaign contributions and disclose those contributions on their corporate website within 48 hours, and Roots Action helps you tell your state legislator to introduce similar legislation. Mr. Raskin's model legislation would go further than that, by preventing corporations owned by institutional investors that can't take political positions from making any campaign donations at all, and would also mandate rebating to shareholders of that percentage of a corporation's donations they don't agree with. I don't agree with the fourth item -- it's the same logic that employers use to refuse to pay for birth control for their employees -- but we've tried to do the first two at the national level and the third item makes perfect sense. I guess next we'll hear from right-wingers that such bills are like "bullying." But let them defend the notion that allowing shareholders to determine how their corporation spends its money is "bullying."

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you (change this link!) tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to work harder to reduce smog pollution in Pennsylvania. How bad is smog in Pennsylvania? Pennsylvania doesn't get all the ink of a Los Angeles or Houston or Teheran, but 17 Pennsylvania counties have areas that don't meet federal smog pollution standards. Now, this doesn't mean everybody in those counties chokes on smog every day, but it does mean that on bad days, folks with asthma suffer a lot worse, and it also means that more people get heart attacks in the short run and lung and heart disease in the long run. Who stands in our way? Coal corporations, of course, whose CEOs don't want to reduce their emissions even when they already possess the technology to do so, apparently because freedom Obama Hitler small businesses. But, even though it might not seem like it, they don't get all the say around here. And Tom Wolf certainly doesn't get a pass because he's a Democrat.

Finally, some good news: Sen. Hatch (R-UT) has said he probably won't introduce a "free" trade "fast-track" bill until April, which might well have something to do with the fact that virtually everyone outside of corporate boardrooms and Congressional halls hates "free" trade pacts that outsource our jobs to foreign wage slaves and subjugate our laws to extralegal "investor-state tribunals." These tribunals, as you know, can decide that because a corporation lost money due to some labor or environmental law, that the taxpayers of a particular nation should reimburse them the money they lost! And never mind that we can demonstrate fairly easily that labor and environmental laws actually save corporations money -- the "investor-state tribunal" should really be known by another name: a bailout tribunal, since it forces taxpayers to bail out the corporations who break our laws. Anyway, the "fast-track" bill isn't coming soon, but when it comes, it's bound to come quick, so Public Citizen still helps you tell your Reps to reject "fast-tracking" "free" trade bills.

Action: prepaid cards, racial profiling, and nutrition standards.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to issue vigorous rules that protect consumers from the excesses of prepaid cards. More working families use these cards than ever before, especially those who aren't properly served by local banks, or who can't get credit cards to begin with -- and some bosses are actually using them to pay their workers! But prepaid cards have their problems, such as the fees you wind up paying for setting up the card in the first place, or the "monthly maintenance fees" you pay even if you don't use it, or the fee for reloading the card with cash, or the fee for getting money out of an ATM, or even the fee for checking the balance on your card. And, as Consumer Reports reminded us in 2012, the purveyors of prepaid cards may make them out to be better for building a credit record than they really are, and they may also overstate the security you'll get if it gets lost or stolen. Taking care of people really isn't all that hard -- it just means big corporations have to start making honest money again.

Meanwhile, as you may know, the Department of Justice has decided not to indict former Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson for his role in shooting Michael Brown to death, although the DOJ did find that police in Ferguson and St. Louis profile and persecute black (and brown) citizens as a matter of routine. The two findings aren't necessarily contradictory; I thought Mr. Wilson should have been indicted by someone, but DOJ tends not to bring indictments unless they're pretty sure they'll get a conviction (amirite, Sen. Menendez?), and it's usually easier to prove aggregate trends about wrongdoing than to single out individuals for wrongdoing. Nonetheless, the Obama Administration still has options available, and Moms Rising helps you tell President Obama to issue Executive orders to alleviate racial profiling by police officers in America. These orders could include slowing the flow of military weapons to police departments, enforcing existing bans on racial profiling more vigorously, and collecting data about police uses of force more thoroughly.

Finally, the USDA, as you know, has done one thing right over the last six years, and that's to issue stronger regulations about school lunch nutrition -- so, naturally, Congressional Republicans have been falling all over themselves trying to cut them down, trying to give all public school districts the ability to "opt out" of the standards, when nine out of 10 school districts are adjusting just fine, thank you! These Republicans may have left their rage face in the closet and put their concerned face on when they talk about cutting school lunch nutrition standards, but let's not be too kind to rageheads when they don't actually raise their voices or call everything Hitler, because the result here would be still be Republicans putting their mania for ensuring our government can never deliver any services to its owners, the American people, ahead of the reduced health care costs that more nutritious school lunch food gives us. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve, not sabotage, healthy school lunch standards.

Around the table: voter suppression, tax "reform," job creation, deceptive advertising, "rehoming" adoptees, and Clintonian secrecy.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's march from Montgomery to Selma, Greg Palast describes the new frontier in suppressing minority votes. Long story short: "Interstate Crosscheck" purports to list voters who may have voted twice, but actually just lists voters with similar names across state lines -- voters more likely to be minorities (and vote Democrat) than other voters, what a coincidence -- and enables state officials to toss their voter registrations. State officials have been loath to release the lists, saying the names on it are under criminal investigation -- but note well how many of these "investigations" have even come to indictments. (Hint: more than negative-one, but less than one.)

Sens. Rubio (R-FL) and Lee (R-UT) have released a tax "reform" plan that, get your surprised face ready, would do the exact opposite of what it supposedly aims to do. Corporations don't invest in their physical plants or their workers not because they're being taxed at 35% -- the biggest corporations pay about a third of that, thanks to all the loopholes they buy from our representatives in Congress, and if we actually did tax them at 35% and close all the unearned loopholes they enjoy, they would actually spend more on their physical plants and their workers just to avoid paying taxes. Would it be piling on to note that their "simplified" two-bracket income tax system would raise taxes on lower-income workers and cut them for wealthy workers? No, it would not be piling on.

Robert Borosage provides "a sober look" at the jobs numbers from February. February saw nearly 300,000 jobs created and the official unemployment rate go down another tenth of a point, but worker wages are just now starting to go up a tick, and anyway "12 months of job creation over 200,000" and "five years of consecutive job growth" sound a lot less impressive when you recall the job losses in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, and you realized that a lot of these newly-created jobs pay less than the ones we lost.

Allstar Marketing Group, Inc. -- maker of such as-seen-on-TV staples as Snuggies and Magic Mesh door covers -- agrees to pay $8 million over the deceptions it perpetrated on its customers. Which were more convoluted than you might expect -- I'm sure "separate processing and handling fees" is old hat to most of us by now, but not allowing customers to bypass the buy-one-get-one-free process over the phone or the internet or even edit their own orders before placing them might be news to you.

By now you probably know the story of the Arkansas Tea Party state Rep who "rehomed" three children he and his wife had adopted, one of them to a man who subsequently raped her. At least two details are worth repeating: one, that "rehoming" is somehow legal in a lot of places, and two, that the Harris family feels very, very sorry -- for themselves. If, indeed, reactive attachment disorder took place, then you still must wonder why they were so unprepared for it that they handed off one of their adoptive children to a pederast.

Finally, Hillary Clinton has really stepped in it by conducting our government's business on her own email server while Secretary of State. If your best defense is that you want State to release all the emails you haven't lost or erased, and also other people do it, too, well, that's not a good sign. Her defense even has a scare number in it -- "55,000 pages of emails" may sound all big and bad, but if that comprised all the emails, she would have said so. Still, nobody who defended Tha Bush Mobb when they "lost" all those emails pertaining to their U.S. Attorney shenanigans has any reasonable claim to outrage now.

Action: against torturing bloggers, militarizing law enforcement, and drilling in the Arctic.

Saudi Arabian blogger and activist Raif Badawi -- sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for the shocking crime of discussing religion and politics on his blog -- has reportedly not received his 50 lashes, scheduled on Fridays, for nearly two months now. Perhaps that means the Saudi government knows the whole world is watching -- or perhaps it means Mr. Badawi is not a well man (he suffers from hypertension to begin with, and being tortured in prison doesn't exactly make you healthier). Either way, Amnesty International helps you tell the Saudi Arabian government to release Raif Badawi, while Avaaz helps you urge the German Vice Chancellor, visiting Saudi Arabia as we speak, to advocate for Mr. Badawi's release. Do they not realize that, in torturing Mr. Badawi, they reinforce our opinion that they're intolerant, hateful, and insecure? Do they not realize that religion doesn't need a state's help propping it up? Do they not realize that dissent makes faith stronger, not weaker?

Meanwhile, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) has reintroduced H.R. 1232, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, and if it's the same bill he introduced last Congress (again, congress.gov has been very slow in getting these details to us lately), it would stop the free flow of military weapons to local and state police departments. It might have a harder time passing this Congress than the last one, this Congress being even more packed with people who think you hate America if you criticize the actions of some police officers, but right is right and duty is duty. And I suspect rank-and-file police officers think the same way we do about this matter -- that big guns and big tanks and big armor actually aren't that effective in doing real police work, and that walking a beat and getting to know a community would prevent more problems than more and bigger weapons ever would. Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1232 and help police do the job they're supposed to do. Because that, not blind obedience, is our job as citizens.

Finally, the Obama Administration may have protected a good chunk of Alaska's coast from drilling, but (as often happens with the Obama Administration) they're prepared to let oil and gas corporations go drill-happy in the rest of the Arctic area we control, as well as off the Atlantic coasts. It'd be too easy to simply respond "Spillageddon in the Gulf" and "Shell oil rig running aground" to these desires, but the fact of the matter is this: the oil and gas corporations have no real incentive to drill safely. No, really -- even if they get caught breaking the law, as BP has done, their penalties become tax write-offs, which essentially means a new bailout every time they let a big spill happen. And they will let it happen, and it will do decades-long damage everywhere it happens -- and in the Arctic, a spill will be much harder to clean up. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our government to reject oil and gas drilling in the Arctic or Atlantic Oceans, while the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell the Department of the Interior to stop Arctic drilling, and CREDO helps you tell Interior to stop Atlantic drilling.

Around the table: a closer look at Dr. Evil's PR machine, and other stories.

Think Progress takes a fresh look at Richard "Dr. Evil" Berman's pro-corporate PR regime, which deploys a dizzying array of Astroturf groups in its arsenal. Key quotation, from Dr. Evil himself: "If you put enough information (sic) out there...you get in people’s mind a tie. They don’t know who is right...people are not prepared to get aggressive in moving one way or another. I’ll take a tie any day if I’m trying to preserve the status quo." The antidote? Be more aggressive with the facts than Mr. Berman is with the "information." That takes all of us, though.

Harold Meyerson at the Washington Post also describes the study showing that corporations don't invest very much in workers or research or facilities anymore. "In the 1960s and ’70s," he writes, "about 40 cents of every dollar that a corporation either borrowed or realized in net earnings went into investment in its facilities, research or new hires. Since the ’80s, however, just 10 cents of those dollars have gone to investment." Of course, with stock buybacks taking up more and more of a corporation's spending, we've also gone from the "shareholder revolution" to the CEO revolution.

ProPublica joins with NPR to describe "The Demolition of Workers' Compensation." Used to be that corporations would help support injured workers in exchange for workers not suing them -- a "grand bargain," wouldn't you know! -- but now states cut benefits and force more folks to rely on taxpayer assistance. The folks doing such "reforming" claim states have to attract new business, naturally, as if states don't offer unique business opportunities based on their natural resources or their location or anything. The tort "reform" movement, which demonizes people who file lawsuits, doesn't help matters, either.

Republican state Rep in Texas introduces bill that would repeal any marijuana-related law in the state, effectively legalizing the drug. Rep. Simpson makes some amusing arguments ("The conservative thought is that government doesn't need to fix something that God made good"), but his bill wouldn't regulate or tax marijuana, either, and unless you're against all regulation and taxation, why wouldn't you do both?

Finally, Heather Digby Parton becomes the first person to convince me that demographics might really be on the Democrats' side in national elections -- mainly by reminding us that George W. Bush actually did reach out to minorities, albeit in ways both useless (he favored immigration reform, but look how successful that was!) and patronizing (who cares if you speak Spanish if you also support policies that deprive working folks of economic opportunities?), and no Republican today emulates this behavior. I still say you never underestimate the ability of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but maybe it'll be a bit harder for them to do that in 2016 than I thought.

Action: voting rights, saner sentencing, and campaign finance disclosure.

Various good-government groups will, this coming weekend, commemorate the 50th anniversary of the civil rights march from Montgomery to Selma led by Dr. King (dramatized in the outstanding film Selma), and hence the ACLU helps you tell Congress to repair the damage the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act in its Shelby County v. Holder decision. As you remember, the Supreme Court found the Voting Rights Act's preclearance formula outdated (though, given the swift post-ruling proliferation of anti-voter legislation in a lot of the states the original Voting Rights Act targeted, maybe not so much out of date, amirite?). But the Court did not preclude (could not have precluded, really, so let's not give them too much credit) a different formula with which the Justice Department could preclear new state laws regarding voting rights, hence H.R. 885, the Voting Rights Amendment Act, an actual bipartisan piece of legislation. I would not be tremendously offended if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell worked to pass this legislation to prove that a Republican-run Congress isn't something to fear.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous alerts concerning H.R. 706/S. 353, the Justice Safety Valve Act, then Lisa Angelos, of Sandy, UT, has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your Congressfolk to support fairer and saner sentencing for non-violent drug offenders. Ms. Angelos, as it happens, has a very personal reason to support the bill: her brother, a father of three, got 55 years in prison for a pot-related offense a little over a decade ago, and (in what has become a familiar refrain) the presiding judge opposed the sentence that mandatory minimum laws forced him to give. The Justice Safety Valve Act wouldn't change or repeal mandatory minimum laws, but it would give judges the ability to give sentences below statutory minimums if they can justify doing so, and the bill would also give all parties involved the opportunity to respond to the judge's decision. So, the bill would not only let judges judge a bit, but it would still allow a fair hearing of opinions about the judge's judging. Sounds like a win-win -- but only, of course, if we make ourselves heard.

Finally, President Obama has spoken more than once about the need for a constitutional amendment to overturn the nefarious Citizens United decision, but if you're a bit tired of Mr. Obama acting like there's little he can do about campaign finance corruption, you're not alone, and there are indeed many tools available to him. One such tool -- which would not require approval from Great American Super-Awesome President of Fun Mitch McConnell or his trusty sidekick Orange Johnny -- would be an executive order mandating campaign finance disclosure from any corporation that receives federal contracts. That would mean any corporation spending our money must account for its campaign spending to us. And note that corporations getting federal contracts could very well donate to those politicians who have helped them get federal contracts in the first place -- and if that isn't a recipe for corruption, I don't know what is. Hence both People for the American Way and Free Speech for People help you tell Mr. Obama to mandate campaign finance disclosure for federal contractors.

Around the table: good news about gay marriage and antibiotic-raised chickens, plus Scott Walker's anti-Wisconsin idea, revealed.

His removal of the phrase "the search for truth" from the University of Wisconsin's mission statement got all the ink, but Gov. Walker's plans for UW are more nefarious than that. By getting rid of programs such as the "institute for excellence in urban education" at UW-Milwaukee and the "center for environmental education" at UW-Stevens Point, and adding the phrase "to meet the state's workforce needs" to the mission statement, Mr. Walker plans to turn the state college system into "a glorified technical school that produces workers for corporations," which conjures up the unhelpful image of an actual university system replaced with a system little better than the for-profit schools that disappear into the night with your money.

Good news in Nebraska: a U.S. District Court judge has ruled that state's same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional. The bad news? This judge has struck down the ban once before, in 2005, and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed it a year later. But, as you know, a lot has happened since then -- not just 37 states legalizing gay marriage, but the Supreme Court striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, not to mention Prop 8's death at the hands of Judge Walker and President Obama's endorsement of gay marriage. So stay tuned.

Even the International Monetary Fund says "(t)he decline in unionization in recent decades has fed the rise in incomes at the top." "While some inequality can increase efficiency by strengthening incentives to work and invest, recent research suggests that higher inequality is associated with lower and less sustainable growth in the medium run," they go on to say, leading one to wonder exactly how right-wingers can justify more than three decades of "strengthening incentives to work and invest."

After a New York City TV program captures a terminally ill man's dying moments on camera, New York state Assembly mulls whether filming patients receiving medical treatments without their consent should be a felony. I don't think we deter crime very well simply by making punishments bigger, but since Mr. Chanko's death doesn't qualify as a snuff film (he would have died whether a film crew was there to record his last moments or not), and his family found a surprising number of obstacles to their attempts to redress the resulting heartbreak, the legislature clearly needs to do something, if not precisely this.

Finally, McDonald's announces that it will phase out, over two years, chicken made with antibiotics used to treat humans. That may not be as big a deal as it sounds -- the illnesses antibiotics target really don't care which species the antibiotics are for, and McDonald's hasn't yet made similar commitments for its beef and pork products, or its overseas eateries -- but it is progress.

Action: unsafe oil refineries, and "personal belief" exemptions from vaccines.

As a strike by oil workers drags on, the Sierra Club helps you tell oil corporations' management to get serious about workplace safety. U.S. oil refineries suffer a serious workplace accident -- involving fires, explosions, or releases of toxic chemicals -- about once every eight days; imagine if your workplace put you in mortal danger around once a week. You may respond, well, oil drilling is dangerous work, but should a civilized society tolerate an unsafe workplace anywhere? Is keeping ordinary citizens inside their homes for days on end because the local oil refinery caught fire and pumped toxins into the air really what we should settle for, as the "price" of having oil? If oil refineries force workers to work 12 hours at a time, sometimes every day for two weeks, then why not hire more people? Let me guess: oil corporations, like big banksters, are now only about how much money executives can extract from their corporations with the least amount of work. We have every right to demand better.

Meanwhile, the California legislature is mulling SB 277, which would end the practice of letting parents "opt out" of immunizing their children because of their "personal beliefs," whatever they are, and Marin County parents Carl and Jodi Krawitt have started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell California's government to cut out the "personal exemptions" for immunization. The Krawitts, you may know from the news, have a seven-year-old son whose four-year battle with leukemia left his immune system compromised to the point where he couldn't receive vaccinations -- this, because California state laws "respect" the "personal" "choices" of parents regarding their stupid fears that vaccinations cause autism, which, by the way, they don't. Why do the stupid people get all the say about everything again? A civilized society would not allow "personal choices" like these if they abridged the rights of other people not to have measles or whooping cough. But civilization requires maintenance, and that's why we're here.

Around the table: who *else* gets rich off of our bloated prison system, and other stories.

Who makes money off all the people we put in prison? A lot of people, actually -- folks who run corporations that supply food, phone service, and health care to prisoners, but also corporations that use prison labor to process food, package computer accessories, and make clothing. Some corporations even use prisoners as telemarketers in call centers! Cheap services and wage slavery make buku bucks for greedy CEOs, so you can see why it's like pulling teeth to reform our drug and sentencing laws.

Another day, another study blowing a hole in the myth that tax cuts for corporations creates jobs. The Center for Effective Government found that -- get your surprised face ready -- the 14 corporations with the lowest effective tax rate all either created very few jobs from 2008-2012 or hemorrhaged jobs, while the 14 corporations with the highest effective tax rates almost all created jobs during that same period, with nine of the latter group creating more jobs than the corporation that created the most jobs in the former. Seriously, if the tax cut clown car were right, the more highly-taxed corporations should be creating fewer jobs than the more lightly-taxed ones.

"KKK Was Terrorizing America Decades Before Islamic State Appeared," writes Julia Craven at the Huffington Post. A horrifying and detailed history follows. Folks who claim that reminding good citizens about these atrocities is "un-American" need to explain how admitting your wrongdoings and working to fix them is "un-American."

Two animal-rights activists challenge the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006 on constitutional grounds. The defendants contend that our government has never defined "terrorism" to include non-violent acts (against people, presumably), and though I have my own concerns about releasing animals who've never lived in the wild into the wild, I've always thought people "terrorized" by what animal rights activists do are weaklings who certainly do not deserve to be coddled by the law. How is a burglary conviction (which these two men have already served) not enough in this case?

Finally, the normally respectable Warren Buffett says Sen. Warren should be "less angry" toward the wealthy and even suggests she "get(s) too violent" with her opponents. I don't think the charge of sexism passes muster in this instance, not because Mr. Buffett is better than the average bankster, but because the pro-bankster forces have lately accused everyone who opposes them of excessive anger, as if they should expect something less than anger when they crash our economy in acts of greed.

Action: stopping the proliferation of GMO apples, and preventing BP from deducting its fines from its taxes.

As you may know, the USDA approved the GMO apple that doesn't turn brown when left out in the air, despite the many comments they received against such approval, but that doesn't mean we can't put pressure on food sellers who might sell GMO apples, and so Food and Water Watch helps you tell fast-food corporations to reject the GMO apple when considering what to sell at their eateries. You may well be asking yourself, self, why are we bothering with fast-food purveyors? But in fact we have good reasons to do that: fast-food corporations actually do sell a lot of apples, and will sell more as they work harder to shed their reputation as a place where you can only get food that's bad for you. And a lot of people eat fast food, because it's cheap, so a lot of working families are going to wind up getting exposed to GMO apples if the fast-food corporations decide to sell them. For fast-food corporations, of course, rejecting the GMO apple benefits their PR karma more than it affects their bottom line. So this could be a win for everyone, which is nice when it happens.

Meanwhile, BP may still face civil penalties nearing $14 billion for their role in taking a massive oil dump in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico back in 2010 -- but they may yet push a significant chunk of those penalties onto we-the-taxpayers. Funny thing, how corporations get to deduct their fines and penalties as "expenses" and thus get a big chunk of those fines and penalties knocked off their tax bill, which essentially means the taxpayer pays them! Now, a more cynical person would use that news as an excuse to throw up his hands and say, see? Government doesn't work! Just let the oil companies do what they want, since that's what they do anyway! But we reject cynicism here, so we see it a little differently -- as in, why should we force taxpayers to pay for some corporation's neglect? Hence PennPIRG helps you tell the Justice Department to prevent BP, or any other corporation, from deducting fines and payments resulting from misconduct off their taxes. Why? Because it's the right thing to do, and you'd hate to live in an America where you couldn't do the right thing.

Around the table: gerrymandering explained in one graph! And other stories.

Nationwide oil plant worker strike spreads in its fourth week, now including 6,500 workers at 15 plants. The core grievance? Workplace safety, which includes issues like forced overtime, since overtime tends to tire you out and make you a less effective worker, and in the oil industry, that could make you a dead worker. And here you thought overtime was an incentive to hire more workers! Not for some greedy executives, apparently.

Consumer Reports provides a handy guide to the GMO foods issue. Unlike National Geographic and Scientific American, they don't come down solidly on the side of GMO safety: "The contention that GMOs pose no risks to human health can’t be supported by studies that have measured a time frame that is too short to determine the effects of exposure over a lifetime," they quote the head of Physicians for Social Responsibility. And they also note that, ironically enough, the absence of a strong GMO labeling regimen actually reduces the possibility that we'll get good science.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reveals that Starz has claimed a federal manufacturing tax deduction because it says it's "manufactured" programs like Spartacus and Outlander. The definition of "manufacturing" has been degraded in plenty of other ways over the years, but news of Starz's, shall we say, outlandish claim might well anger enough people to demand a change. Some of those might even be Spartacus fans.

Ho hum, Michigan state House passes so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act allowing public servants to refuse service to folks because of their "conscience." What manner of "conscience" leads folks to serve only those members of the public they want to serve, I wonder? And there is a difference between practicing your faith and using your faith to steamroll over other people's rights. Yes, I'm going to repeat these things ad nauseam until the other side finally shuts their yaps in shame.

Finally, Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post puts up a simple chart that will completely explain gerrymandering, or the practice of redrawing legislative districts to your own benefit. It really is marvelously simple, and it really will explain everything -- well, except for how Democrats didn't seem to anticipate that reaching out to Republicans in 2009 would result in getting little of consequence done, which would result in Democrats losing elections at federal and state levels, which would result in Republicans controlling state legislatures, which would result in Republicans redrawing districts to their own benefit.

Action: sane nuclear policy, and "free" trade.

The President's budget actually requests an increase in nuclear weapons spending, to $12 billion, and while that's small potatoes compared to other areas of the budget, we could spend at least some of that money a lot better than we do. Hence Sen. Markey has introduced the Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures (or SANE) Act, which would cut $10 billion annually in nuke spending. There is no reasonable way to argue against that goal by saying ZOMG TEH TERRURIZTZ WILL WIN!!!!! Terrorists use whatever's at hand to achieve their goals, and they usually don't have nuclear weapons lying around -- a terrorist might get his hands on a nuke one day, but that's an argument to build fewer nukes, not more. It's also an argument to strengthen programs that secure loose nuclear materials, programs toward which Congress has had considerable ambivalence lately. Finally, hitting a terrorist with a nuclear bomb is a bit like hitting a roach with a sledgehammer, and missing the roach. So Peace Action West helps you tell your Congressfolk to cut nuclear weapons spending.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that a "fast-track" bill -- one that would, as you know, permit little debate and no amendments on the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade agreement -- could be introduced into Congress any day now. Perhaps with Sen. Warren's Washington Post op-ed slamming the pact's "investor-state tribunals" -- the ones that would nullify American laws so that corporations could extract tribute from the American people at will -- our Congressfolk will get cold feet for a while, but eventually they will bring it forward, and so Public Citizen helps you tell your Representatives to reject "fast-tracking" "free" trade agreements. No one who has defended the TPP has yet bothered to explain why the bill needs less debate and speedier passage -- indeed, folks who defend the TPP seem to assume that defending it from criticisms alone argues for less debate and speedier passage, when any moderately accomplished student of logic would tell you it doesn't. What do they have to hide, you might wonder? "Free" trade's record of unsafe products, job outsourcing, and wrecked economies, maybe?

Around the table: retirement planners, corporate tax breaks, data security, drug testing, and real estate co-ops.

Richard Eskow describes the Department of Labor's efforts to make more retirement planners put their customers first. Among the heartening news items: the fiduciary rule has picked up support from some unlikely Democrats, such as Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, both long presumed to be more sympathetic to Wall Street than circumstances require.

On the occasion of the release of Season 3 of the Netflix series House of Cards, Citizens for Tax Justice informs us that Netflix has been extracting tax breaks from the state of Maryland that benefit the state's taxpayers very little. In fact, they threatened to pull out of Maryland entirely if they didn't get millions of dollars more tax breaks before Season 3. Seems to me a smart government would, at most, only give tax credits to get film producers to set up shop in their state, and then phase the credits out once they're in. But keeping the gravy train rolling (as Louisiana has also done with Duck Dynasty, for example) looks a lot like cronyism and corruption.

ProPublica finds that our government hasn't delivered on promises to crack down on health care providers who don't protect their customers' data security and privacy well enough. HHS's Office for Civil Rights, which oversees data privacy issues, has fined only 22 health care organizations over the last five years for data breaches -- out of over 1,000 large data breaches and over 100,000 smaller ones. Even in a society which should pride itself on how well it protects the innocent from being wrongfully accused and convicted, that's significantly less than you'd expect.

Ho hum, seven states have found that drug-testing welfare applicants wastes a lot of money and doesn't catch very many drug users. But of course drug-testing welfare applicants (and, if Scott Walker gets his way in Wisconsin, unemployment applicants) is a two-fer for the right: it hampers welfare spending on actual needy people, and demonizes said needy people. Like a lot of what Our Glorious Elites call "good politics," it's lousy policy. And, ah, are we going to get drug addicts any help?

Finally, Yes! magazine tells us about the nation's first real estate cooperative in northeastern Minneapolis, where a group of neighbors came together to buy and convert abandoned buildings. For a mere $1,000, a resident could buy into the cooperative, and some 200 residents later, the co-op has turned two abandoned buildings into three thriving local, small businesses. State and local governments had a role in their success; I hope the model spreads to other distressed areas of America, because there are too many.

Around the table: "free" trade, the Minnesota renaissance, the Hewlett-Packard decline, stock buybacks, and Scott Walker's unfortunate comparison.

In a just about perfect op-ed, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) excoriates the "investor-state tribunals" in the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" agreement. I'm beyond pleased that someone with a megaphone is willing to describe, in detail, how the tribunals would nullify our laws and force taxpayers to bail out the corporations who'd break those laws, but I can't help but wonder if she's also signaling the terms under which she'd accept a TPP (one without tribunals, for example). That would be to weep, not least because we still have "investor-state tribunals" on the books from previous "free" trade agreements.

Carl Gibson tells the story of billionaire Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, who erased his state's budget deficit, created jobs, and lowered unemployment by -- surprise, surprise -- hiking taxes on high incomes and raising the minimum wage. Despite this success, right-wingers continue to say businesses will just leave states for other states whenever taxes go up, although picking up everything you've built and going somewhere else is actually quite hard, and brandishing the threat of businesses leaving is kinda like what, good folks? A hostage situation, that's what.

"Hewlett-Packard shows how to fatten shareholders while firing workers," says the Los Angeles Times's Michael Hiltzik. Which is a drama we've seen played repeatedly during this Super-Awesome Amazing Fun Time Economic Recovery, but it is a bit depressing to see the same folks -- like former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who also spent over $100 million to lose badly to Jerry Brown in the 2010 California gubernatorial race -- take over corporations and drive them into the ground, with no apparent vision (of, gosh, better products, maybe?) other than fancy corporate restructuring. Maybe they're not our "best and brightest"?

In a related item, study finds that corporations borrow money to invest in products, workers, and facilities less and less and borrow to spend on stock buybacks more and more. That's for when right-wingers tell you we have to tax corporations less so they can invest in all the things they hardly invest in anymore. Key quotation: "Finance is no longer an instrument for getting money into productive businesses, but getting money out of them."

Finally, Scott Walker tells the CPAC crowd that since he took on "100,000 protestors" over his anti-union initiatives, he can take on ISIS, too. His spokeshack later did him a big solid by saying that of course he didn't mean to equate pro-union protestors with ISIS terrorists, that he just meant that he can do the difficult things leaders need to do. Hopefully most Americans remember that the last time they voted for George W. Bush because he did the difficult things, he did the difficult things so badly that he almost destroyed our country. But given that Democrats do so little to make you vote for them, and then don't remind you of the handful of good things they do, we'll probably have to run that experiment again. I just hope we're still around to learn from it, again.