Thieves in the Temple.

Action: the PATRIOT Act.

Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act expires at midnight tonight, so Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has called the Senate back in session, putatively beginning at 4 pm today, to hash out a PATRIOT Act reauthorization that will (ideally, for him) include a reauthorization of the scheme in which the NSA vacuums up all your metadata from your cell phones and emails. Could it be that with the news that the PATRIOT Act's bank reporting requirements made the prosecution of Dennis Hastert possible, that Congress will finally do the right thing and let the damn thing die? I kid, of course -- most Congressfolk think that kind of thing happens to other Congressfolk. But we've got a slew of action alerts opposing the surveillance state -- from Roots Action, the ACLU, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and the People's Email Network. I recommend calling your Senator afterward, as well. Sen. Paul (R-KY) has indicated he'll force Section 215 to expire tomorrow by withholding unanimous consent on any further vote attempts, and good for him if he does -- but let's not be complacent.

Why do we oppose the Big Gummint spying supposedly authorized by Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act? For the best of reasons: because we care about privacy and security. Of course we built this country partly on the notion that if you're not hurting anyone, you should be left alone, and the fact that I think corporations hurt people more than my conservative brethren do doesn't change that. But PATRIOT Act proponents love to suggest that PATRIOT Act opponents don't care about security, but the method of security Mitch McConnell seems to prefer -- to vacuum up all the place/time data of all Americans, regardless of whether or not our government thinks they're involved in foreign terrorism -- actually makes us less secure, by bombarding our intelligence agencies with more data than they could possibly ever sift through. And so it goes that our own government -- which, as you might imagine, is rather invested in telling us that their spying makes us safe -- has told us, more than once, that the NSA's bulk data-vacuuming program isn't a particularly effective terror-fighting tool.

Of course, we all know that breaking the death grip of corporate power over America would be the most effective terror-fighting tool, but restraining the power of our government so it doesn't have the power to inflict terror upon us will probably have to do in the short term. Perhaps we haven't said that enough -- while it's a bit facile to say, as Ronald Reagan once did, that a government that can do anything for you can do anything to you, certainly granting our government a power they could abuse so that they could do anything to you is a mistake. And if we could have a government that could wiretap your phones without warrant at the same time it stood apparently helpless as a Category 5 hurricane smashed one of our most vital port cities, certainly we can have a government that responds to our will to restrain corporate power while leaving us alone to tend our gardens. Indeed, this is what we fight for every day here.

Action: battling cruel anti-immigration legislation and dumb anti-progress sentiment.

H.R. 2484 would, as its title states, "amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to provide that certain aliens who are pregnant are ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States." The bill would also accomplish "other purposes," though congress.gov -- which has performed a lot worse since Republicans took over both houses of Congress, though I'd prefer to think that's mere coincidence -- cannot tell us what those "other purposes" are at this writing. The main purpose is enough: I did sit in front of my computer and scratch my head wondering why the hell anyone would want to keep pregnant foreigners from getting so much as a visa into the United States. Then I remembered: TEH ANCHOR BABIEZ!!!!! Remember back in early 2011, when actual U.S. Senators proposed actual legislation aiming to take away the citizenship of babies born here if their parents were undocumented immigrants? H.R. 2484 would pre-empt that, I guess. But nativists don't get all the say here in America, no matter how loud they shout or how much they stamp their feet. Keystone Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the cruel H.R. 2484.

Meanwhile, and I wish this was more of a surprise, New York Times columnist Claire Cain Miller says that "generous maternity leave and flexible rules on part-time work can make it harder for women to be promoted -- or even hired at all." How? Despite referring to no less than four studies (three of them published), she never actually tells us -- she gives us a big dose of correlation-not-causation, and if those four studies actually demonstrated what Ms. Miller says they do, it shouldn't have been that hard to explain. And, er, "(t)here is no simple way to prevent family-friendly policies from backfiring"? Of course there is -- make it illegal for corporations to justify not hiring or promoting women merely because they might get pregnant one day, and (here's the part people forget) enforce that law. Do civilized people really just throw up their hands the way Ms. Miller does? Do civilized people reflexively blame our troubles not on the people who cause them but on our attempts to fix them? You can contact the Times using the link at the beginning of this paragraph.

Around the table: from the death of the death penalty in Nebraska to an unused death sentence in Arkansas.

Nebraska becomes the 19th state to repeal the death penalty, as the legislature overrides Gov. Ricketts's veto. The repeal may not last, depending on how quickly death penalty supporters can get a ballot question before the voters, but that something like this could even happen in one of the reddest of red states is actually quite encouraging.

Pay careful attention to the title of Chris Hedges's Nation of Change op-ed: "Our Mania for Hope is a Curse." Not "hope is a curse," as you might be inclined to read it, but our mania for hope. I agree that being able to envision how bad dystopia could get is a vital skill for creating the new world out of the old -- though I, like I suspect most folks, envision life after dystopia more clearly, and that's a necessary skill as well.

Paul Craig Roberts gives yet another example of how "Free Financial Markets Are a Hoax," and though you may find the topic (manipulation of the futures markets in gold and silver) a bit esoteric, you'll recognize Our Glorious Elites' insistence that our economy is plagued by too much saving as, well, quite strange if you've looked at your own checkbook lately, and though I suppose "too much saving" could well apply to the trillions of dollars corporations still sit on instead of hiring people to make stuff, I wish they'd just say so instead of trying to sound smart. I wouldn't call the media "prostitutes," though, because prostitutes work for a living. I'd call them pimps instead.

Nick Walker reviews George Miller's latest film, Mad Max: Fury Road, and finds it compelling, not just for its feminism (the film, as you may know, features an "amazing badass disabled woman heroine") but for the film's "explicit and vivid portrayal of Max’s PTSD." It's not just "mens' rights jerks" that might be dissatisfied with the notion that "Max’s stoic demeanor is not the result of his being too 'manly' and 'cool' to be emotional, but rather the result of his being heartbroken and traumatized" -- I suspect, in fact, that most men and a considerable amount of women, frustrated with a world where you can't just buffalo your way through troubles that seem or are absurd, would also be dissatisfied -- which doesn't mean that art should coddle folks with such frustrations, of course.

Ho hum, AT&T sues the FCC over net neutrality, and asserts that net neutrality violates its First Amendment rights. If you still think corporations really do have rights and feelings and whatnot, then please attend the unspoken argument AT&T lawyers are making: our First Amendment rights are more important than yours. A vigorous net neutrality regime would ensure that corporations can't interfere with your First Amendment rights, not just of free speech but also of free association.

Finally, in a most tremendous surprise, 2002 Arkansas U.S. Senate candidate Jim Bob Duggar (who eventually lost the Republican primary to incumbent, who then lost the general election) did say during his campaign that incest should be punishable by death. Whether Mr. Duggar actually knew his son Josh had molested several of his sisters by the time he publicly declared his position on incest is unclear, but here's what's clear: you don't let your mouth write a check your ass can't cash.

Action: bankster handouts, school lunch funding, and Arctic oil drilling.

Last week we discussed Sen. Richard Shelby's latest attempt to give Wall Street banksters massive handouts. His bill did pass the Senate Finance Committee before the Memorial Day recess, but only by a 12-10 vote, which suggests that a similar vote in the full Senate could be filibustered -- but only if they know how we feel. Hence CREDO helps you tell Senate Democrats to unite against the Shelby bill. Why Senate Democrats? Because a united Democratic front against the bill is all we need to stop it dead, and because the Democratic leadership hears far too much from Wall Street already about how the bill is actually pro-small bank. "Liberal" media reporting buys this line, too -- here's how The Hill describes the provision that would limit the definition of the "systematically important financial institution," or "too big to fail" bank, so that only six banks, instead of over 30, would be made to keep large amounts of capital around so they (and we) can better withstand their bad decisions: they say the provision would "broaden() the definition of smaller banks eligible for exemptions from Dodd-Frank." Always they say this will help the small banks when they really mean this will help the banksters. That just means we have to be louder.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which funds school lunch programs for kids, expires on September 30, and USAction helps you tell Congress to renew and strengthen child nutrition programs. You might well be thinking, why, only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment would oppose reauthorizing child nutrition programs! But, as Ann Cooper has suggested, the most rightward members of Congress won't kill the program, but they'll hold the reauthorization hostage to the whims of their big donors -- they'll try to weaken fruit and vegetable requirements, reduce or eliminate whole-grain requirements, weaken salt restrictions, or let kids to buy school lunch items a la carte, which would encourage them to buy only the junkiest food options and skip the healthy stuff. A la carte packaging, as you know, is only for adults buying cable channels, not kids we're trying to keep from becoming obese and diabetic. Our opponents may even try to bring back that nefarious opt-out option for schools "struggling" to meet stricter nutrition standards. You'll want to oppose all of that in your letter. And if you want to call our opponents objectively pro-childhood obesity, I won't stand in your way.

Meanwhile, despite our quite reasonable activism against more Shell Oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean, President Obama has granted conditional approval to Shell to drill in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska. The "conditions" apparently have to do with Shell meeting "tougher restrictions on spills and leaks." But how could this happen, after Mr. Obama banned drilling in that area? Because at the time he issued the ban, he signaled his intention to honor previous drilling leases awarded there -- and Shell got its drilling leases back in 2008. Shell will still have to get state and federal permits in order to begin drilling, but I doubt that'll be much of an obstacle -- unless, of course, they screw up again, which we might more reasonably count on, since Arctic oil drilling, as we know, is even more fraught with danger than Gulf of Mexico oil drilling was. An oil spill in the frigid Arctic, for example, will be tougher to clean up than the 2010 Spillageddon in the relatively temperate Gulf was, and why should we presume Shell will be any more prepared for a massive spill than BP was? CREDO helps you tell President Obama to reject any further oil drilling in the Arctic.

Around the table: the "epistemological modesty" of refusing to admit you're wrong about wars that killed a lot of other people, and other follies.

FAIR finds many right-wingers willing to indulge in absurd pretentions about Iraq on Memorial Day. "History is an infinitely complex web of causations," David Brooks says, which doesn't impress those of us who were always right about Iraq, and who know that those who led us into war back then did not do so out of good intentions. And how can a "conservative" claim "epistemological modesty" and then support that war? Hey, real conservatives ask that question, too.

Ho hum, Charles Murray, a favorite author of Jeb Bush's, has just published a screed which suggests that, since right-wingers have had such trouble gutting our government through elections, the richest right-wingers should pretty much seize power and impose their will on the electorate. Because the rich don't have enough levers of power, apparently! Isn't this the I-don't-have-everything-so-I-have-nothing attitude conservatives hate about liberals? Oh, and Jeb Bush claiming that his love of Charles Murray makes him "a nerd, I guess"? Totally insulting to actual nerds -- my own apparently inexhaustible hunger for early Doctor Who production details, for example, is quite harmless by comparison.

Nonprofit Quarterly describes "The Next Recycling Frontier": recycling prescription drugs, from the folks who don't need them anymore to the folks who can't afford them. 38 states already have such programs (which often get their drugs from the excess supply in nursing homes), and the benefits they deliver to poor folks far, far outweigh the programs' costs. I wonder how Big Pharma will try to cripple these programs -- I mean, sooner or later they're going to see this recycling as money they should be making. Maybe they'll sue the recyclers for intellectual property theft! I wish I were kidding.

Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton appoints a fairly well-known formerly undocumented immigrant as her Latino Outreach Director. And my first thought was: yeah, Republicans, have a hissy fit about this. Because that won't make you look like nativists or anything. (Thing I did not know but perhaps should have: Ms. Praeli's mother was a housekeeper in Connecticut but a psychiatrist in Peru. This happens a lot.)

Finally, Sen. Marco Rubio says "mainstream Christian teaching" will soon become "hate speech" in our society, because "we've reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage you are labeled a homophobe and a hater." Two things: one, Mr. Rubio, like all weaklings, seems to think (and certainly wants you to think!) that criticism and shame and oppression are all the same thing. And two, is opposing gay marriage the only thing Christianity has ever taught? Because Republicans sure act like it is.

Action: torture, internet censorship, and the true meaning of *public* radio.

As you may know, nearly 160 nations have ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture -- but in nations such as Mexico, torture is still far too commonplace, with complaints going uninvestigated and perps evading justice. Mexico's federal government has convicted exactly seven folks -- seven! -- since 1991, though more than 7,000 good Mexicans have brought torture complaints in just the last three years. If you're thinking to yourself, I wonder how many of those complaints are rubbish, don't congratulate yourself too much -- you also should consider how many folks don't bring complaints forward because they know their government will do nothing (or worse, subject them to more torture), or how many folks can't bring complaints forward because their torture killed them. And, of course, if you're thinking to yourself, these folks are all just drug dealers and drug users, you still must justify torturing and killing anyone, ever. Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Mexico to eradicate torture throughout their land.

Meanwhile, the government of the small island Republic of Nauru -- with an area of 8.1 square miles and a population of just over 9,300 -- has been blocking Facebook and some other websites in a supposed attempt to protect Naurans from "abusive" online content. Some Nauruans see the block as a way of chilling free speech against their government, while other observers note that refugees in Nauru's camps rely on Facebook as a way of staying in contact with their family. The Nauruan government's defense of its actions doesn't exactly inspire confidence -- they claim they're only cutting off Facebook temporarily until they can figure out how to put an effective ban on child pornography and other abuses in place, which is not how you or I would do it, plus they think people who protest their ban are "bullies," when we could much more easily describe governments that cut off internet services willy-nilly as "bullies." Access Now helps you tell Nauru to abandon their free speech-chilling internet shutdown.

Finally, This American Life host Ira Glass has lately come under some heat for saying, of public radio, "My hope is that we can move away from a model of asking listeners for money and join the free market," adding that "I think we’re ready for capitalism which made this country so great. Public radio is ready for capitalism." Maybe he was trying to be "cheeky" or something, but he later backtracked, saying that of course public radio shouldn't "chase ratings and destroy everything that makes public radio special," but that corporations should "come on our shows and pay lots of money." But the correct funding model isn't "asking listeners for money" but taxpayers paying to fund public radio, and the solution to the funding dilemma isn't to take corporate money and thus be subject to corporate whims, but to ensure that our representatives in Congress allocate our tax dollars more in line with our priorities. And you can remind him of that, using the link at the beginning of this paragraph.

Action: PATRIOT Act expiration, and "free" trade.

One of the big stories late last week was how the Senate successfully thwarted efforts to extend key PATRIOT Act provisions by even one day (that last item falling to a unanimous consent objection from Sen. Paul). Sen. McConnell has called the Senate back to work this coming Sunday afternoon to hammer out a PATRIOT Act extension in advance of the midnight expiration; we haven't come this close to victory since Tom DeLay broke House rules so he could strong-arm enough of his caucus to vote down a PATRIOT Act reform about 11 years ago, but let's not get complacent: both Roots Action and CREDO help you stay on your Senators to let the PATRIOT Act wither and die. With the Roots Action alert, you'll also be addressing the German government, which has, apparently, greatly aided the American spying effort, Chancellor Merkel's alarm at NSA monitoring of her own calls notwithstanding. In either or both of these tools, you may want to mention your support for H.R. 1466, the Pocan-Massie Surveillance State Repeal Act, which would repeal both the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act.

In less inspiring news from the Senate, Mr. McConnell did manage to get a "free" trade "fast-track" bill through the Senate, but now that bill goes to the House, where it should have a tougher time passing, with weak Democratic support and (supposedly) weak Republican support on the right flank. That's how it should work, anyway, but it's not how it will work until we speak loud enough, hence both Public Citizen and Food and Water Watch help you tell your House Rep to reject "free" trade "fast-track." In case you were wondering how Fox News hacks were selling a corporatist trade deal supported by both Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell, they're calling "fast-track" "bipartisan legislation...to strengthen President Obama's hand in global trade talks." Think about that: Congress's stated intention to abdicate its duty to amend and debate legislation on our behalf "strengthens" Mr. Obama's "hand." You would think the threat of Congressional power on the people's behalf would strengthen his hand when he goes to negotiate trade with other nations, but not in our media's up-is-down world.

Around the table: Ireland approves same-sex marriage, and other stories.

Irish voters approve a constitutional amendment permitting same-sex marriage by a whopping 62-37 margin. One No campaigner lamented, "I would like to have seen that the rights of gay and lesbian men and women could have been respected without changing the definition of marriage," without explaining how some gay couple getting married, somewhere, changes "the definition of marriage" for already-married folk. Some people still seem to think something's not a right unless some other people don't have it.

The New York Times looks at the Senate's inability to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act or fund transportation projects and says the Senate "left behind a wreck of promises made by Mr. McConnell on how a renewed Senate would operate." The Times treats us to 24 paragraphs of analysis about how Democrats and Republicans are working together or not, while still evading the more important question of whether Democrats and Republicans are actually serving the American people or not. I mean, who cares "how the Senate works" if it's not working for us?

Robert Reich finds that antitrust enforcement "has been ambushed by the giant companies it was designed to contain." How do they do it? Besides using their immense power, that is? Well, Congress does like to cut Justice Department and FTC budgets, and the litany of right-wing judges appointed (mostly) by Republican Presidents means they tend to, ah, view antitrust lawsuits rather narrowly. You should attend Mr. Reich's description of how income gets redistributed upward thanks to little or no antitrust action in pharmaceuticals, airlines, health insurance, and internet service providers.

Michael T. Hertz runs into two Republicans who plan to vote for Bernie Sanders for President. Trouble is, Mr. Hertz finds only two-count-'em-two Republicans for Bernie, and this is a big country, with a lot of strange-bedfellows alliances (I could have run the "liberals for Buddy Roemer" fan club in early 2012, and look how well he did?). Would Bernie Sanders have been a "centrist" during the 1980s, as one of Mr. Hertz's two Republicans says? Though you had actual centrists in the Republican Party in the '80s -- why, Arlen Specter used to speak of the two dozen Senators who'd attend the monthly lunch of the Republican Moderate Caucus back then! -- I've found Mr. Sanders unwilling to raise taxes on the wealthy even to the level we had from 1981-86, so maybe so.

Finally, Edward Snowden gets off a zinger at the folks who profess a lack of concern over government spying because they "have nothing to hide" or "aren't doing anything wrong." I usually tell folks, "but any day now they could decide that whatever you're doing is a crime after all!" But maybe "that is no different than saying I don't care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say or freedom of the press because I have nothing to write" will do a better job persuading such folks.

UPDATE. Well, that didn't take long -- Bernie Sanders embraced a top tax bracket of 90% on CNBC today. So, yeah, I'm now leaning away from "maybe" as the answer to "is Bernie Sanders an '80s-style centrist?"

Around the table: "fast-track" passes, and three Republican Presidential candidates make fools of themselves while a fourth does some good.

Bad news, good folks: despite our efforts, the Senate passes the notorious "free" trade "fast-track" bill by a 62-37 margin. The battle goes on to the House -- where, presumably, more far-right Republicans would be anxious to deny President Obama the "victory" this deal somehow represents. We'll deal with that early next week.

In slightly better news, the Senate rejects both a long-term and a short-term extension of key PATRIOT Act provisions, including the one that (until lately!) gave the NSA its "authority" to vacuum up the metadata of American citizens. Sen. McConnell says he'll call the Senate back into session on May 31 (the day those provisions expire), but we'll be ready. I just hope Rand Paul is ready for the possibility that his latest ten-hour filibuster actually did America some good.

Ain't no situation bad enough that Mike Huckabee can't make it worse: with the revelations that Josh Duggar (one of TLC's 19 Kids and Counting) fondled sleeping young girls on multiple occasions during his early teens, Mr. Huckabee tries to make the Duggars' critics in to the villains, intoning that "'inexcusable' doesn't mean 'unforgivable.'" "(B)eing a minor means that one's judgment is not mature" is precisely why we shame those who take advantage of that fact, and that's no less true if children are the ones taking advantage. I wouldn't have sent young Josh Duggar to prison, either, but I wouldn't have lied to my church about getting him counseling, as his parents did, and Mr. Huckabee surely doesn't miss the point of the outrage against the Duggars -- that they enabled an actual child predator and then made a career of pointing to gays as "child predators." A civilized society has a duty to shame hypocrites, particularly when they cause the harm the Duggars have done, and while we'll forgive them in time, we won't do it now just because Mike Huckabee tried to give us all a guilt trip about it.

Jeb Bush says climate change is happening (give the man a gold star!), but that it's not "clear of what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural," adding that "for people to say the science is decided is really arrogant." Ah, yes, the "arrogance" of an intelligent consensus that just so happens to demand more of coal and oil corporations than they're currently willing to give! Maybe he figures that since he's Jeb Bush, not George W. Bush, he can lecture other people about arrogance.

Finally, Ted Cruz tells far-right evangelical pastors that Democrats' "devotion to mandatory gay marriage in all 50 states trumps any allegiance to religious liberty under the First Amendment." "Mandatory"? Did I miss the part where our government made Ted Cruz marry Pat Buchanan? And can Mr. Cruz name even one Democrat who has ever said our government should force churches to marry gays? Do not ignore his longer game, of calling Democrats "radical" and "extreme" so he can push the center further right, certainly not when so few Democrats are "radical" or "extreme" enough to call for more than a three percentage-point hike in the highest tax bracket, for example, not when they enable corporatists to get their "free" trade fast-track bill.

Action: an objectively pro-bankster proposal, and *a la carte* cable.

Perhaps he thought you wouldn't notice, but Sen. Shelby (R-AL) has proposed raising the level at which our government deems banks "systematically important," from banks with $50 billion in assets to banks with $500 billion in assets. What does this mean? If our government deems a bank "systematically important," it requires that such a bank have more capital on hand in case of hard times and/or stupid decisions. But Mr. Shelby's proposal would reduce the number of these banks from 31 to six, which (according to Bloomberg) would mean $66 billion more for banks to buy back stocks with. Of course, at least one lobbyist says "these banks are focused" on "meet(ing) more of the credit needs of small and mid-size businesses and consumers,” but that's utter BS -- banks are focused on grabbing all the money for themselves, and Mr. Shelby's proposal would only enable that folly. And enough with the whining about "hyper-regulated, incredibly rigorous supervision process" of banksters already! These are the people who ruined our economy! You may want to call your Senators about this proposal. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities (which, I know, have been few and far between, what with all the other terrible things Congress tries to do to us) to tell your Congressfolk to support legislation allowing cable consumers to buy the channels they want a la carte, then the Parents' Television Council still helps you do that. Now, Sens. McCain (R-AZ) and Blumenthal (D-CT) haven't introduced the Television Consumer Freedom Act in this Congress, perhaps out of a sense that it'd go nowhere, but we don't stop trying to do the right thing because it's harder, do we? I would hope not. And letting consumers pay for only the channels they want is the right thing to do, regardless of how inconvenient it would be for cable and media corporations. As it is now, I can't get the cable news channels to stop being cesspools of corruption and sensationalism, because I'm still paying for them as part of a package, even if I don't watch them. And my conservative brethren who find themselves profoundly offended by, say, MTV or FX are in the same boat. Our Glorious Elites have made this a society that only cares about money, so why not at least respect the power and dignity of withholding your money?

Around the table: brought to you by the words "religious," "freedom," "research," and "innovation."

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, faced with his legislature's refusal to pass one of them-there "religious freedom" laws that allow folks to discriminate against gays, issues an executive order aiming to accomplish what the legislature would not. And right-wingers everywhere are outraged that this Louisiana Caesar has defied the will of the people as expressed by the legislature, right? Right? I kid, of course. But wasn't this the same guy who said not too long ago that Republicans need to stop being the Stupid Party?

Ho hum, the House just passed H.R. 880, the so-called American Research and Competitiveness Act of 2015, which supposedly "spurs research and innovation" but would actually just gives corporations more welfare handouts that benefit no one but themselves. How so? The bill would allow research on pretty much whatever, such that a corporation could claim a tax deduction for "developing a new flavor of soft drink," which doesn't sound like a great boon to civilization, plus it would allow corporations to grab the tax credit retroactively via amended returns, as if corporations routinely go back in time to conduct research. And, of course, the tax cuts are unpaid for, because freedom. Personal to those who say corporations should determine what "research" really is: no, we need to do that. It's what civilized people do.

ProPublica describes "64K," a massive military headquarters in Afghanistan that gobbled up $25 million of taxpayer money and which we never used. Maybe that's an understatement: it's entirely possible our government never intended to use it, given that it wouldn't have been operational until after the Obama surge of 2010 ended, despite three of our generals openly advocating against its construction. But you know that jerk who keeps calling up NPR and listing million-dollar Big Gummint boondoggles involving poor people and unbuilt bridges? I bet he doesn't mention this one.

Did you hear about Luis Lang, the Republican who blamed the Affordable Care Act for his failure to get health insurance in advance of serious diabetes-related medical problems? Well, he's changed his tune, saying he's renounced the GOP and thinks America should have universal health care. He also said one of the reasons he didn't sign up originally was that the sign-up process was so terrible -- which it absolutely was, at least at the beginning -- and it's entirely possible he's been saying that all along and the "liberal" media simply didn't report it, because it made the story too "complex." But even if that weren't true, we still shouldn't dump on this guy -- most of what we learn, we learn through experience, not through thought experiment.

Finally, for a truly novel interpretation of whether the Iraq war was a mistake, House Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) claims that Mr. Bush wouldn't have invaded Iraq had he known Barack Obama would succeed him and screw everything up. Like George W. Bush ever cared about anything but the extreme short term! And the lengths to which these jerks have to go in order to avoid simply saying they were wrong! Needless to say, if Mr. Gohmert really thinks Barack Obama is "helping the enemies," he needs to stop grandstanding and call the FBI and have Mr. Obama arrested. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that he doesn't ever do that.

Action: torture in Morocco, and better federal contracting in America.

What do you do when good Moroccan citizens peacefully protest wrongdoing? Why, if you're the Moroccan government, you find them and beat the crap out of them, of course! And then, when they speak out about their treatment, you put them in jail! Plus, if you're a prosecutor, you ignore evidence of physical injuries, and if you're a judge, you forget to order a medical examination, and if you actually have to handle a medical examination, you lose its findings! Worse, when you speak out about your treatment, the government can prosecute you under laws forbidding slander and "falsely reporting torture," now that's awfully specific. But while this is a very corrupt system, it's not necessarily a competent one -- Moroccan authorities threw at least two protestors in prison for slandering police officers, though neither one of them actually accused a police officer of torturing them. Oops. Amnesty International helps you tell Morocco to stop torturing people and stop imprisoning people who speak out about it. The Big Stick of Bad PR can make Morocco look pretty bad to the rest of the world, and when the whole world shames you, it is a bit hard to hide.

Meanwhile, Sens. Warren (D-MA) and Sanders (I-VT) have lately written President Obama asking him to issue an executive order that would give certain "model employers" preference in federal contracting. What would make someone a "model employer"? Paying workers a living wage and good benefits, along with allowing workers to bargain collectively for those things. If you're sitting at home thinking, well, maybe we should give our federal contracts to the corporations who do the best work, regardless of how they treat their workers, then ask yourself: what corporations do the best work? It wasn't that long ago folks said, regardless of political inclination, that the corporations that treated their workers the best got the best work out of them and thus did the best work for society. Do we really believe the multitudinous corporations making buku bucks now by playing casino games with our economy do the "best work"? I'm pretty sure we don't. So CREDO helps you tell President Obama to ensure we issue federal contracts to corporations that treat their workers well. It is our money, after all, and we wouldn't like to see it go to some big corporation that only redistributes wealth upward to its CEO.

UPDATE. Word on the street is that Mitch McConnell wants to wrap up "free" trade "fast-track" in the Senate today, so the time to call your Senators and tell them to reject fast-track is now.

Around the table: changing history on Iraq, small businesses, the popularity of socialism, voter suppression, and Hillary Clinton meets the press.

Pat Robertson now suggests he sorta always knew the Iraq war was "a big mistake" -- even though he told folks at the time the war was "on solid ground...in terms of Christian, biblical concepts" and later suggested war opponents were traitors. The right is having so much trouble dealing with their sins in the Iraq war that some of them have resorted to rewriting history! Those of us who knew all along the case for war with Iraq was BS -- many of whom were actual conservatives, not fake ones like Mr. Robertson -- can sleep better at night, not having to fashion such Rube Goldbergian (or Jonah Goldbergian!) contraptions with which to excuse our sins.

Robert Reich also notices the rift between small businesses and large corporations over corporate tax "reform," and hopes it signals a permanent breach between the two. We can only hope that it does! But I doubt this disagreement actually reflects a sea change in the thinking of the big small business lobbies. Such a change could only come about if the big small business lobbies actually listened to the concerns of actual small businesses, which Mr. Reich helpfully lists at the end of his post.

Josh Harkinson at Mother Jones notes that Bernie Sanders's platform planks are actually quite popular with Americans, despite his being tainted with the "socialist" label. One of the planks that supposedly isn't popular is his anti-"free" trade agreement plank, but n.b. that the Pew study referenced therein, suggesting that 55% of Americans favor the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," almost certainly doesn't tell the whole story, as that very same study simultaneously found high American public support for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe and much lower American support for the TTIP's individual goals! Would Pew have found a 55% support rate among Americans for the TPP if they'd asked about investor-state tribunals or job outsourcing?

The Institute for Southern Studies profiles a father and daughter who had fled Liberia's civil wars during the 1990s and had since become naturalized citizens in North Carolina -- but who wound up getting stopped by poll workers because their names were on a list of nearly 1,500 voters whose "citizenship status" was "in question." The father pressed through and voted, but the daughter didn't, out of frustration, almost like that was the idea. The N.C. State Board of Elections actually wound up identifying very few improper votes through the list, just like every other right-wing voter "integrity" project, but I'm pretty sure they don't care, since their efforts did help get Thom Tillis into the Senate.

Finally, Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, notoriously tight-lipped as of late, takes half a dozen questions from reporters in Iowa. She didn't answer the first question, answered the implied question-behind-the-second-question much better than other former Iraq War supporters have done, hit the do-you-make-too-much-money question pretty well, didn't answer the fourth question which was worse than not answering the first, and answered the fifth question about as well as one could expect (I'm going to discount the sixth, which was obviously some reporter trying to get attention for him or herself, as she had already answered it). But I'm not seeing whatever it is that seems to inspire other people, let alone what I know would inspire liberals not just to vote for her, but run through a wall for her.

Action: government spying, corporate tax avoidance, and conservation funding.

Maybe Republicans are getting nervous, because Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act (among other nefarious sections) expires in less than two weeks, and All-Powerful Great and Glorious Real American President of Awesomeness Mitch McConnell has introduced S. 1357, which would reauthorize the PATRIOT Act's expiring provisions for two more months. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Senators to reject any short- or long-term reauthorization of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Section 215, you may recall, is where the NSA claims authority to vacuum up all American metadata from, though the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals recently rejected that reasoning. The Senate loves saying it needs "more time" to "get it right." Hello! You jerks reauthorized this crap four years ago! The fact that y'all wasted most of that time doesn't mean you get more time now. Seriously, they sound like schoolkids begging for more time to complete work because they misspent the time they had.

Meanwhile, Monsanto plans to buy Swiss big ag corporation Syngenta and then turn itself into a Swiss corporation for tax purposes, though they'll still be contaminating organic seed, and then suing farmers whose crops have been contaminated by Monsanto's GMO seed for "intellectual property theft", here in the U.S. -- they just won't be paying very much in corporate taxes here in the U.S. If this all sounds familiar, that's because Burger King accomplished the same feat last year by buying Canadian donut-and-coffee chain Tim Hortons and pretending they're all Canadian now. Hence MoveOn helps you tell Congress to pass H.R. 415/S. 198, the Stop Corporate Inversions Act. The Stop Corporate Inversions Act would amend the Internal Revenue Code so that corporations that try to "move" "overseas" in the manner of Burger King would still be subject to American taxation -- and thus would be less able to evade their responsibility to help pay for the roads, bridges, police, firefighters, and teachers. You know, the things we all support with our taxes.

Finally, the Land and Water Conservation Fund expires in September, and some members of Congress would like to kill it -- since, after all, it's been a fairly successful conservation program for 50 years, and every good thing government does must be killed, in order to prove that government does nothing good! The LWCF is our government's main method of acquiring and protecting lands for public parks and wildlife refuges, so killing the LWCF means more land for more corporations, which in turn means more oil drilling, more gas drilling, and more development, which all means more pollution. No one argues that we should stop all development and designate all land as a wildlife habitat -- we merely propose that our government have the means to do our will in preserving some of that land, not merely to be enjoyed by future generations, but to provide resources in the present (like clean water) for all of us. So CREDO helps you tell Congress to permanently extend and fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

Around the table: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Hoo boy am I tired of anti-protest memes like the one described here. The Shell Oil protestors drive in cars that run on oil and wear clothes manufactured using oil ha ha ha snort! Essentially, they're saying you're a hypocrite for not being God -- for not literally creating the world you live in (since you didn't conceive of, design, and build the air conditioner you put into your window, for example). I say I've known since forever that we're all potentially part of the solution as well as part of the problem, and walk away. And when big oil corporations claim to care deeply about the environment, then fight government regulations that would force them to turn that "caring" into action? You wonder why some folks' keen attention to hypocrisy hasn't spotted that one.

The now-bankrupt electronics chain Radio Shack might sell tens of millions of customers' data, including names and email addresses. Because, gosh, what else are they going to sell? Attenuating patch cords were all the rage back in the day, but not so much now. The FTC might stand in its way, though, having already told Radio Shack they'll have to get permission from those customers to sell that data. It might be an empty threat, but a Bush (or Walker) FTC would more likely download porn all day than even try to do its job.

FAIR finds "liberal" media journalists too quick to condemn Seymour Hersh's work questioning the official story about how Mr. bin Laden died. Mainly, they knock Mr. Hersh for using anonymous sources, when "liberal" media outlets use anonymous sources from inside our government all the time when they're busy writing our government's PR releases. And, ah, has the "liberal" media completely missed the Obama War on Whistleblowers?

Gov. Brownback steps in it yet again, as Kansas's recently-enacted limit of $25 in ATM withdrawals for welfare recipients might run afoul of federal law -- specifically, the Social Security Act, which mandates that folks "have adequate access to financial assistance" -- and thus put over $100 million in federal funding in danger. $100 million ain't chump change in Kansas; it might keep the lights on in that state, in fact. Meanwhile, Republicans will never put limits on lightning-fast bankster trading, even though that does more damage to the economy, because freedom!

Finally, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker met with religious evangelical elites in Washington, D.C. yesterday in a supposed effort to reassure them he's one of them, but Steve Benen is rightly skeptical that a "rift" exists between Mr. Walker and the right-wing evangelical brain-trust, calling the notion of a rift "bizarre." Let me guess how this story plays out: the brain-trust come away "reassured," and Mr. Walker won't talk about what he said to reassure them. This was how it played out for George W. Bush all those years ago, after all -- a man who also pretended to be a moderate so more people would vote for him. We'd be fools to fall for it again -- but I expect the "liberal" media will fall for it, though I'd be happy to be wrong about that.

Action: Republicans hate abortion and birth control ho-hum, plus the water situation in California.

Last week the House passed H.R. 36, which bans abortions after 20 weeks, and soon the Senate will take it up. Remember that almost all abortions happen before the 21st week, which means that this ban won't save very many fetuses at all. And though the bill makes exceptions for rape, incest, and the life (though not health) of the mother, the former two exceptions only apply if the rape or incest has been reported to law enforcement before the abortion, and you can easily see why that might not happen. In short, it's bad policy, not least because it won't reduce abortions. If we want to reduce abortions -- and we do -- we should stop being such hardasses about birth control, and we should stop lionizing sex in our media as if it's the Holy Grail of All Experience. And that means making birth control as available as the Obama Administration has tried to do, as well as shaming overly sexualized media programming, supporting a la carte cable packaging and net neutrality, and opposing media consolidation. In the meantime, CREDO helps you tell the Senate to reject the 20-week abortion ban.

In a related note, the Washington, D.C. City Council has lately passed a bill called the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Act, which prevents employers from firing workers for using birth control, getting an abortion, or becoming pregnant without being married -- or even having someone in your family who has done these things, all of which are legal. And yet Congress -- which somehow has the ability to essentially nullify laws passed by the D.C. City Council -- has trained its sights on this law, and would like to kill it. House Republicans say the law "unconstitutionally" "violates" the "religious freedom" of employers -- why should they be forced to keep employees who'd do what they would never do? they ask. More to the point is why an employer should care, as long as the employee does a good job. And for the umpteenth time, employers do not have a right to run roughshod over other people's rights! So People for the American Way helps you tell the House of Representatives to keep its hands off Washington, D.C.'s attempts to protect workers from discrimination.

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell California Gov. Jerry Brown to ban fracking in that state and crack down on oil corporations' abuse of the water supply. Why? Because the state has done bupkus to stop oil corporations from soaking up California's water (they use as much as the cities of San Francisco and San Diego combined every year), even as the Governor has mandated reduced water consumption by citizens, and also because we know fracking contaminates drinking water, and as you may have heard, drinking water ain't something California's got a lot of at the present moment. It's gotten so bad there that Chevron has been caught actually selling wastewater to farmers so they can irrigate their crops. And California doesn't test such water very vigorously, even though independent scientists have found carcinogens in it. At the risk of piling on, oil corporations have been dumping their sludge into unlined pits in the Central Valley, where a lot of California's agriculture just so happens to sit. So at least one household ain't eating any California strawberries this year!

Around the table: from Tha Bush Mobb "fraternity of failure" to the religious right's failure of conservatism..

Paul Krugman reminds us that becoming a Jeb Bush adviser seems to require a lot of failure. How does it happen that his advisers are the same folks who said we'd be welcomed as liberators in Iraq and that we'd start seeing a massive inflationary spiral six long years ago? "Simply raising questions about the orthodoxies of the moment leads to excommunication, from which there is no coming back," he says. "So the only 'experts' left standing are those who made all the approved mistakes." But President Obama made Timothy Geithner Treasury Secretary and gave a litany of Bush Mobbers defense and intelligence jobs -- which tells me that the "fraternity of failure" includes all of Our Glorious Elites.

President Obama announces that certain military equipment -- like armored vehicles and grenade launchers -- will no longer find their way into local police departments. I'm heartened that Sen. Paul couldn't figure out a way not to support Mr. Obama's action -- though I'm annoyed that the head of the national Fraternal Order of Police deployed bait-and-switch arguing to oppose it, saying that "(t)he vast majority of the equipment that civilian law enforcement gets from the military is administrative stuff or defensive in nature," without saying that Mr. Obama didn't necessarily ban any of that. Don't read the article's comments, though; some of America's worst people have decided to chime in there.

Bloomberg sees a "pivot" from "big money" to "small business" for Hillary Clinton, thus proving, I hope, that merely deploying a parallel construction doesn't cover a multitude of sins. What are Ms. Clinton's ideas for "cutting red tape" for small businesses? We never learn, though we do hear from a small business lobby, which isn't the same thing as hearing from a small business, and we also learn that Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) supports "free" trade because it will supposedly help small businesses. How? We never learn that, either, though Ms. Feinstein goes on to say that "95 percent of the trade is carried out by companies and business of less than 500 people," as if that proves her point, or as if a business with 500 people could really be called a small business.

Paul Buchheit writes about "The Plundering of a Nation by a Beloved Company." Spoiler alert: it's Apple, which has humblebragged about "stealing" ideas but never mentions that a lot of its best ideas came from the public sector. And now Apple goes very far out of its way to avoid paying corporate taxes in America, which seems a bit short-sighted given how many of its ideas have come from the public sector, amirite? Plus they treat their employees badly and hide their "offshore" profits in plain sight here in the U.S.

Finally, Tony Perkins has his shorts in a bunch about a new ABC comedy called The Real O'Neals, premiering in the fall and executive-produced by Dan Savage. Why? Because, I suppose, a show about a Catholic family dealing with a gay son equals "Christian-bashing," even if the Catholic family learns and grows, apparently. I've read an awful lot of Savage Love, and the most interesting thing about it isn't whatever sexual activities he gets letters about, but his dedication in reminding folks to set boundaries and stick to them, which seems to me a conservative impulse. But Tony Perkins, being a reactionary, wouldn't know anything about conservative impulses.

Action: "free" trade, smog standards, and GMO labeling.

Are you sitting down? Democrats have apparently agreed to cut Medicare benefits in order to retrain workers displaced by "free" trade agreements as a way to get "fast-track" passed. How absolutely disgusting Democrats are -- why should any reasonable person vote for them? Because they're not quite the knuckle-dragging ogres Republicans are? That's a hell of a selling point, and no wonder it has failed so miserably that we face giant Republican majorities in the House and the Senate these days. And there's no wishing House Republicans scuttle "fast-track," not anymore -- certainly not now that they're going to get their Medicare cuts and Democrats just gave them cover to do it! And they didn't just give them "cover," but fodder for the exact same kind of Republican attack ads that worked so well in 2010! Democrats are unconscionably stupid and/or evil -- who cares about the difference? -- but they haven't reckoned with us, the vast supermajority of American citizens across the political spectrum who oppose "free" trade and "fast-track," who are not fooled by the President's laughably moronic arguments, who need but raise our voices at once. CREDO, Sum of Us, and Public Citizen all help you fight "free" trade "fast-tracking.

Meanwhile, the Center for Effective Government has begun a petition on Change.org that helps you tell the EPA that we want a stronger smog standard than they're at present prepared to issue. Scientists inform us that ozone levels (smog is ground-level ozone pollution, after all) above 60 parts per billion cause heart and lung issues that can stunt the health of children or cause the elderly to die prematurely, and fully two-thirds of Americans live in areas where smog levels go above that, but the EPA has proposed limiting ozone/smog levels to 75 parts per billion, which they no doubt did after hearing big corporations whine and cry and stomp their feet about the lost vacation homes it would deprive their CEOs of having all the jobs it would "kill." I mean, sure, the EPA levels are an improvement, but we don't just sit back and wait for "improvements," we demand justice. What is justice? That the EPA enact the standards our best science tells us to enact, and the 19th vacation home of some CEO be damned.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to fight for mandatory GMO labeling, now Just Label It helps you tell Quaker and PepsiCo to drop their opposition to GMO labeling and stop funding corporate campaigning against such labeling. Why them? Because Quaker prides itself on the health-friendliness (and family-friendliness) of its brand, and also because PepsiCo owns Quaker, and also because the Big Stick of Bad PR works. And have I mentioned that I'm a bit tired of hearing that we've always genetically-manipulated crops? We have crossbred crops to increase yields and hardiness, sure -- and we haven't always been smart about that, either; "we manipulated crops before and we're still here" isn't actually the Justification of Everything That Came Before that it sounds like -- but we haven't historically fiddled around with crop DNA merely so that it can withstand more of some corporation's proprietary (and probably carcinogenic) pesticides. That's not only short-sighted, it's greedy, and we must fight these things.

Around the table: various follies from Republican Presidential candidates, and other stories.

Jeb Bush says engaging in "hypotheticals" over whether he would or wouldn't have gone to war in Iraq "does a disservice to a lot of people who sacrificed a lot." Because, apparently, that's what leaders do in these sick, immoral, and decadent times: they hide behind the troops in order to avoid difficult questions and insult their interrogators. And always remember that the list of "people who sacrificed a lot" include precisely zero Bush Mobb cronies.

Spencer Black points out that Gov. Scott Walker's economic record is dismal by any reasonable measure: Forbes magazine has Wisconsin last in short-term job growth, next to last in long-term job growth, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics has Wisconsin in the bottom tenth in wage growth and damn near that in overall job growth. But when Hillary Clinton runs this ad, Scott Walker will just make like George W. Bush and complain about all the negativity in political ads. The "liberal" media will roll over for that meme, but Ms. Clinton doesn't have to.

In a stunning development, the Nebraska legislature just overwhelmingly voted to abolish the death penalty, though Nebraska's Governor insists he'll veto the legislation if/when it hits his desk. In case you were wondering, Nebraska is the only American state with a unicameral (one-house) legislature, can foil a gubernatorial veto with a mere three-fifths vote (versus two-thirds), and subjects bills to three separate votes before passing them (of which the aforementioned vote was only the first).

The Consumerist explains "Why Cord Cutters Aren't Getting the Holy Grail TV of Streaming Services Just Yet. Long story short: it has nothing to do with technology. Long story somewhat longer: streaming services can't offer live sports, mainly because the high cost would make them less attractive options (would you pay more than $10/month for Netflix or Hulu Plus?)

Be prepared to hear a lot more of this real soon: ex-HP executive/Republican Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina says her administration "doubled the size" of HP and "took the growth rate from 2 to 9 percent." FactCheck explains at length why this is bunk (main reasons: anyone can "double the size" of their corporation by merging with another one, and profits actually went down during her tenure), but n.b. that Ms. Fiorina's PAC criticizes another fact-checker by saying "(w)hen dealing with complex information like SEC reports for $90 billion companies, you could cherry-pick different data sets to get the answers you want." That's what desperate people do when they're down -- they try to sow discord in your mind.

Finally, the Straight Dope tackles the question: "How Safe is the Cloud?" And answers: fairly safe (given the amount of server redundancy cloud services have), though inconveniences could happen. Left unaddressed are your privacy concerns, especially significant in our post-warrant dystopia, and whether corporations will push us into cloudland more for their convenience than ours. I imagine it won't be long before they stop making external hard drives, even though it's dangerous to simply discard old technologies when new ones come along -- though folks who only care about the short term (which number comprises, by the evidence, a vast majority of CEOs) don't ever think that way.

Around the table: a sad delusion about "free" trade, and other stories.

The Obama Administration claims that there is "deep and wide Democratic support for trade." For trade? Of course Democrats support trade -- I bet they support commerce, too! But do Democrats support "free" trade agreements that outsource our jobs and nullify our laws? That's a different question, and n.b. that polling using weaker questions (did NAFTA do us good, etc.) do not show "deep and wide support" among Americans as a whole, let alone Democrats as a group.

Ho hum, our federal government has spent over $3 billion developing charter schools over the last 20 years, but hardly performs any oversight to ensure the schools do what they're supposed to do. Yet Education Secretary Duncan seems to think the solution is more money, and if that looks to you like a scam to deliver taxpayer money to someone's cronies, you're not alone. And anyone who argues that we shouldn't spend any more money on public schools needs to answer why we should be diverting any money to charter schools.

Sales executive claims she got fired after she disabled an app her employer required her to have on her phone that tracked her movements 24/7. The story is actually even worse, and Antonin Scalia is going to be pissed when he hears about it! Your job can monitor you a great deal when you're on the clock, and can require that you be on-call at times, but tracking your every movement is a sign the employer can't trust anybody, and maybe shouldn't be an employer, then. I mean, not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur.

From the "Did He Really Say That?" file: Jeb Bush thinks we don't need the Affordable Care Act because the Apple Watch will have health care apps in five years that can help you manage your sugar intake (for example) better than ever before. That's damn near a Chickens for Checkups moment there. You know, a big reason we have health insurance is to deal with things we don't foresee -- oh, forget it, it's Jeb Bush. I wonder if he's throwing this thing now.

Finally, Facebook announces that it will pay contractors and vendors a minimum of $15/hour, and would also give them three weeks' vacation and would pay a $4,000 bonus for having a child (which won't make up for all one's lost pay during one's 12 weeks of FMLA, but it's a step forward). Those who would exclaim that this proves the free market really does provide should wonder if perhaps the massive protests for a $15/hour minimum wage might just have had something to do with Facebook's decision. But as I said, this is progress.

Action: government spying, campaign finance disclosure, and uranium mining in the Grand Canyon area.

And just like that, the House passed the USA FREEDOM Act, now watered down beyond our ability to tolerate it as free people, now a bill that actually makes certain intelligence practices a court just struck down legal again, a bill that makes it all but impossible to challenge unconstitutional surveillance in the courts, a bill that (like the nefarious FISA Amendments Act!) grants not just immunity but compensation to the corporations that help our government spy on us. Hence CREDO helps you tell Congress to let critical parts of the PATRIOT Act expire in early June, and Roots Action still helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the far superior H.R. 1466, the Surveillance State Repeal Act, instead of the USA FREEDOM Act. H.R. 1466 would repeal both the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act -- meaning our government would have to get a warrant from a judge to investigate Americans for alleged terrorism -- and even makes it a little easier for whistleblowers from within the ranks of intelligence agencies or their contractors to submit complaints about our government's wrongdoing. President Obama won't like that, but he doesn't get all the say around here.

Meanwhile, the SEC still hasn't issued rules mandating that publicly-traded corporations reveal their political contributions, despite receiving hundreds of thousands of public comments supporting the notion, despite the fact that these corporations are really spending someone else's money -- their shareholders' money -- to elect candidates who support more unearned tax breaks for large corporations. And when we say "shareholders," we don't just mean people who invest directly in corporations, go to shareholder meetings to vote on resolutions, and the like -- we mean just about anyone who has invested in a 401(k) or a pension fund, since those funds also invest in corporations. So justifying the public interest in such campaign finance disclosure is quite easy, whereas justifying the corporate interest becomes increasingly difficult -- while even our right-wing Supreme Court Justices wonder aloud why disclosure isn't enough, Senate Majority Leader McConnell likens disclosure to bullying. Both Roots Action and Public Citizen help you tell our government to support campaign finance disclosure for publicly-traded corporations.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell our government to close uranium mines in the Grand Canyon region. Didn't we do this already, you may be wondering? And the answer is yes: thanks in part to our pressure, former Interior Secretary Salazar issued a moratorium putting the Grand Canyon region off-limits to new uranium mines for the next 20 years. Trouble is, that order apparently didn't assess the possibility that corporations would re-open old mines and start up again, and Energy Fuels Resources, Inc., plans to do just that in mid-June, which would make its mine the first operating uranium mine within six miles of the Grand Canyon in 20 years. Now, it isn't just that, hey, this is the Grand Freaking Canyon we're talking about here -- uranium mining contaminates groundwater, and this mine not only threatens the basins that provide the indigenous Havasupai people with their one and only source of clean drinking water, but all the water in the Colorado River Basin, which supplies drinking water to over one out of every eight Americans. A little short-term profit doesn't justify that.

Around the table: in which we do not let go of the past the way right-wingers would like us to do.

According to Bloomberg, friction between small businesses and large corporations has developed over corporate tax reform. Their story suggests that small businesses want highest-bracket income tax reductions along with corporate tax rate reductions, since small businesses would more likely be subject to the personal income tax. But big "small business" lobbies, not actual small businesses, are pushing this narrative, and there simply aren't that many "enterprises like restaurants and hardware stores that would be hurt by higher marginal rates." We've killed this zombie already, but it keeps getting up.

Daily Kos diarist finds that, beginning in 2013, "new voter registrations originating via (North Carolina's) public assistance (welfare) offices had suddenly and inexplicably collapsed by 66%." And that fact may well be breaking federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which mandates that states must actively try to register every citizen who uses state services. I'm sure this is all a complete coincidence with a perfectly reasonable expl ha ha sorry I couldn't even type that in jest.

Tea Party House Rep changes his position on foreign aid (he was inflexibly opposed) once he visits Ethiopia and Kenya and sees the good foreign aid can do. I hesitate to criticize Mr. Emmer too much -- we don't learn everything by thought experiment, and actual real world experience can be just the right tonic for radical ideologies -- but he could just be grabbing attention for himself with a statement he never intends to follow through upon. Shame it's come to the point where I think that whenever a Republican starts making sense, but it has. I'll certainly apologize if I find I'm wrong.

In a post-Citizens United world, corporations are trying harder than ever to get their employees to donate to political causes of their choosing. Again, it's stunning to see how easily people can be bought -- BP employees who donate a dollar for every $40 they make get choice parking spots, and yes I've worked enough jobs to see how something like that could be tempting, but grown-ups know how to avoid such temptations. Corporations offer the usual protests (we don't require employees to do anything nudge-nudge, we don't tell them which party to donate to wink-wink), which are, I imagine, just true enough to keep them out of jail.

Finally, Jeb Bush, who earlier suggested that he'd have invaded Iraq just like his brother did, now says that, given the "failures of the intelligence community," of course he wouldn't have done something so stupid. The reversal is almost Romneyesque. Three things: one, I knew the case for war was horsedoodle back in 2002, so I'm not impressed with arguments that suggest "we all got it wrong"; two, the "intelligence community" didn't fail us anywhere near as much as our leaders failed us, and three, these jerks took a huge dump all over the country I love with their little Iraq adventure, and "knowing what I know now" is their way of pretending they didn't.

Action: ALEC's tax exempt status, paid family medical leave, and fast-food commercials aimed at children.

Did you know the nefarious American Legislative Exchange Council -- a.k.a. ALEC, the organization responsible for so many regressive laws at the state level -- has registered itself as a charity? Yes, ALEC is a 501(c)(3) entity, and 501(c)(3) entities are usually corporations that do charitable, religious, scientific, or literary work -- a lot of amateur sports organizations are also 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entities. Does ALEC's work weakening unions, disenfranchising voters, cutting corporate taxes, or watering down environmental regulations sound like charity to you? Note, also, that a 501(c)(3) has to be either a public charity -- and must by law have very broad public support (i.e., not from a few rich donors) -- or a private foundation which exists mainly to make donations to other good causes. Sounds like ALEC found a loophole and drove a Mack truck through it. So Common Cause helps you tell the IRS to investigate ALEC's tax status. And no, we are not a "lynch mob" "out to get ALEC." We are good folks prodding our government to enforce the law.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support paid family medical leave via H.R. 1439/S. 786, the FAMILY Act, Moms Rising still helps you do that. Apparently John Oliver -- he of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver -- delivered another inspiring ten-minute-plus rant excoriating American politicians for failing to support paid family medical leave in America. The United States is one of two-count-'em-two countries that don't give new mothers paid medical leave; Papua New Guinea is the other. That's not something we want to chant WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. I suppose the BUT WHOZ WILLZ PAY FOR ITZ!!!!! crowd will want to know how we're going to afford it, so n.b. that the FAMILY Act would impose an 0.2% tax (that's two-tenths of one percent, not "two percent") on the wages employers pay. Boy would I be annoyed to hear anyone respond that "they'll just pass that cost on their customers." I mean, any of their customers might need paid family medical leave one day, and would thus benefit from the tax more than corporations could hurt them with it.

Finally, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood joins with Corporate Accountability International to help you tell McDonald's to stop all marketing aimed at children. Why? Because children have got it in their heads that fast food is really neat and cool, when actually it's a major cause of the epidemic of juvenile obesity and Type 2 diabetes. And when right-wingers admonish us to simply "toughen up" and not get our kids fast food all the time, ask them why McDonald's has so many toys and mascots and Happy Meals. Surely they don't think that stuff is aimed at responsible adults! And of course it's not -- it's aimed at children, who we know can't make very many decisions affecting their welfare at a young age. And yet corporations insist on doing it, relentlessly, such that weary parents get worn down. If you know you're doing that, and you know you're wrong for doing it, then why do you keep doing it? And why should we allow you to evade responsibility for doing it, while, again, heaping all of the blame on the victim?

Around the table: items about voting, rape kits, predatory lenders, public employees, for-profit colleges, and solar roads.

Noel Ignatiev writes "To Those Who Believe in Voting." I believe that voting is merely the beginning of your duty as an American citizen; Mr. Ignatiev thinks you should skip voting and get to the organizing, protesting, and demonstrating. You should get to the organizing, protesting, and demonstrating! But vote first, because bad politicians tend to do very well in elections where fewer people vote (cases in point: 2010 and 2014).

Shafaq Hasan at Non-Profit Quarterly investigates "The Socioeconomics of the Rape Kit Backlog." And surprise! The lower your position on the socioeconomic ladder, the more likely you are to be raped, and the more likely any rape kit from your rape will sit there (as at least 11,000 have done in Detroit alone), uninvestigated by an either overworked or apathetic police force. I tend toward "overworked," generally, but not when it comes to rape -- and I suspect anyone who's ever heard men talk would agree.

Ho hum, Republicans are trying to attach another must-pass bill amendment killing Pentagon regulations aiming to protect soldiers from predatory lenders. Because why not, when the "liberal" media won't lift a finger to report it? But just you watch, when you march against President Scott Walker's war, how quickly the Republicans will say you "hate the troops."

The Center for Effective Government promotes "Public Service Recognition Week," which government workers at federal, state, and local levels surely need, in a time when the "liberal" media uses them for throat-punching practice. And n.b. that as we've cut government workers, we've increased contract workers, who generally get paid more and don't do as good a job as civil servants do, so says John DiIulio, who should know, having outed Tha Bush Mobb's ignorance of, and apathy toward, good public policy earlier than almost anyone else.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged several former and current executives of for-profit college chain ITT with fraud. For the usual -- "concealment" of bad job placement figures and lying to investors about how badly their student loans were doing. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also sued ITT a little over a year ago. Think those ads, ubiquitous if you're home watching Magnum, P.I. during the day, might go the way of Corinthian College?

Finally, the first "solar road" in existence in the Netherlands is actually producing more power than its engineers thought it would after six months. Its developers built the road for bike traffic, but they're working on one that could handle cars, trucks, and buses. Solar roads aren't as energy-efficient as rooftop solar (because you can't tilt the road, of course), but there are lots of roads, and it'd be hard to imagine us not needing them, the hovercar having apparently gone the way of the personal jetpack.

Action: climate change, sexual assault, and women's health care.

H.R. 2042, the so-called Ratepayer Protection Act, moved quickly through the House Energy and Commerce Committee at the end of last month, getting formally introduced and passed in a mere 48 hours. The bill hasn't come before the full House yet, but it's just a matter of time, and, as with so many bad ideas, they'll probably put it to a vote when no one's watching. Hence Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your House Rep to vote against the Ratepayer Protection Act. Why would we want them to reject something so innocuously-named? Because the name's a scam: the bill would essentially let states opt out of the EPA's plan to limit carbon emissions, by allowing them not to implement any reductions as long as some lawsuit against the plan, somewhere in their state, is being litigated. The only "ratepayers" this bill protects, then, are big coal corporations. All this mess, even though said plan gives states a lot of leeway in producing their own methods of meeting carbon reduction goals! That'll teach President Obama to reach out to the other side, right? I kid, of course.

H.R. 1310/S. 590, the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, would start to address the problem of on-campus rape, by toughening up penalties for colleges when they don't report sexual assaults accurately, surveying students in a consistent and transparent manner, mandating uniform codes for investigation and discipline, and requiring a minimum amount of training for college personnel so they don't interfere with sexual assault investigations. If you're the fellow who says it's too hard to tell what women want, or that the lines between rape and consensual sex are too blurry, then please stop reading. No, seriously: I would feel tainted if you read on. Maintaining a civilized society requires maintaining boundaries, and it also requires seeing beyond your own self-interest, and statements like "it's too hard to tell what women want" lend themselves too easily to a lot of men's self-interest. Here's a good rule: if you're not sure she wants to have sex with you, don't have sex with her. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Campus Accountability and Safety Act.

Finally, HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell affirmed earlier this week that health insurers are to provide all the legal options available to them that the Affordable Care Act mandates. If you're wondering why she went through the trouble, note that the National Women's Law Center studied plans from 100 health insurers and found that half of them -- half! -- failed to cover all FDA-approved birth control methods and/or demanded co-pays for birth control and preventive care for women and/or limited maternity/postnatal coverage rather arbitrarily and/or skirted their responsibilities in other ways. For those of you who saw the words "birth control" and immediately decided it was all based on "sincerely-held religious beliefs": if you think your religion abhors birth control, you wouldn't respond by limiting coverage or demanding co-pays; you'd refuse to cover any of it. No, I think health insurance corporations are just being jerks here. So CREDO helps you tell health insurance corporations to give women all the health care options the law requires them to give.

Around the table: from the momentary failure of "fast-track" to a positive development in desalination.

In a surprising show of party unity, Democrats filibuster a motion to open debate on the "free" trade "fast track" bill. Only Sen. Carper of Delaware -- you remember, the man who carried so much water for that awful bankruptcy "reform" bill in 2005, only to see MBNA cut thousands of jobs in his state the following year? -- voted with the Republicans. I wonder if the "liberal" media chuckles at the "irony" of Democrats refusing to start debate on a bill that would ultimately stifle debate on "free" trade agreements if passed. Seriously, treat yourself to something nice now, because you did good -- and then get ready for the next push.

Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks at length about his experiences in West Baltimore growing up and the relationship of public policy to the conditions that help foment rioting. Key quotation: "But I have a problem when you begin the clock with the violence on Tuesday. Because the fact of the matter is that the lives of black people in this city, the lives of black people in this country have been violent for a long time. Violence is how enslavement actually happened...Jim Crow was enforced through violence. That was the way things that got done. You didn’t politely ask somebody not to show up and vote. You stood in front of voting booths with guns, that’s what you did. And the state backed this; it was state-backed violence."

Paul Buchheit presents another linkswarmed editorial, this one explaining why "the rich don't care about creating jobs." Of course the roots of the problem are narcissism and laziness -- that is, the narcissism of the very wealthy who think they did all of it themselves and the laziness of the very wealthy who make billions of dollars in unearned tax breaks. Among the links: studies proving that tax cuts generally lose revenue and that Minnesota's tax-and-build philosophy works better than Kansas's "experiment" on its citizens.

Worried about the "job-killing robots"? Well, Dean Baker comes to the rescue! Long story short: if it were TEH ROBOTZ!!!!, we'd see a lot more growth in productivity than we're seeing in this economy, and instead of seeing so many high- and semi-skilled jobs disappearing, we'd see mostly semi-skilled jobs disappearing, since manufacturing and clerical work are the jobs machines can most easily displace. Of course, if you remember the "robosigning" scandal involving the banksters, or even if you've used the automated checkout lanes at your local supermarket, you probably wouldn't need Dean Baker to tell you the job-killing robots ain't here yet.

It shouldn't be news when a Republican Presidential candidate admits the obvious, but that's where we are: Chris Christie says "global warming is real" and "human activities contribute to it." But n.b. that he says America (or groups of states) "can't be acting unilaterally" when China is belching so much filth, which would be the excuse of a Christie Presidency when it does nothing -- and is now the excuse of a Christie Governorship that pulled New Jersey out of a regional climate-change pact. And, ah, he was in New Hampshire and said he didn't think Tom Brady cheated? There's some straight talk for you.

Finally, MIT engineers develop a desalination machine that runs on solar power. That's a two-fer for developing nations that currently have little access to clean water or electricity. The machine works much better with merely brackish water (the ocean's salt water has considerably more salt to remove), but this could be a tremendous help. Now cue the incomprehensible laughter of right-wingers, for whom all progress deserves savage ridicule.

Action: "free" trade, oil trains, and student loan debt.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Senators to reject both "fast-track" and "free" trade agreements that steal our jobs and nullify our laws. (You can also call 1.877.415.8656, if you'd prefer to call them.) President Obama's decision to address "free" trade at the headquarters of infamous overseas sweatshop-using corporation Nike has no doubt fueled hopes that Mr. Obama must be sabotaging the agreement, since no one so smart would do something so dumb. But he still does damage by maintaining that fair trade champions like Sen. Warren are "simply wrong." What, exactly, are they wrong about? Mr. Obama doesn't say. Is he, too, subject to the same confidentiality agreements our Reps and Senators are, agreements that apparently only apply to the people's representatives -- and therefore the people -- and not the corporate lobbyists negotiating the deal? And why does this deal need to be fast-tracked, with limited debate and no amendments? Especially since it's all such a big secret? No one will say, and apparently the "liberal" media won't ask, either. But we are not fools.

Meanwhile, you may have heard about the oil train that derailed and caught fire last week in North Dakota, causing massive oil spills and forcing thousands of folks from their homes. You may also have heard that the Department of Transportation revised our government's rules for oil transportation via rail, and that these rules don't do everything we'd hoped they would. But we don't have to wait for the next time DOT gets around to evaluating the matter, for H.R. 1804/S. 859, the Crude-By-Rail Safety Act, would require more inspections of routes carrying hazardous materials, prohibit certain out-of-date and dangerous kinds of rail cars for the purpose of transporting crude oil, and mandate that corporations transporting crude oil give local emergency crews more information about when their crude will be coming through their neck of the woods. When Congressfolk decide only to listen to big corporations about this matter, too, we should call them objectively pro-oil train accident. Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Crude-By-Rail Safety Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Department of Education to offer debt relief to the many Corinthian College students still on the hook for massive student loans even though Corinthian has folded, then Democracy for America helps you do that. Why not just let the kids suffer for their mistakes? Because Corinthian, until very recently the largest for-profit college chain in America, has consistently falsified job placement data to attract students -- and they've taken taxpayer money, our money, to do it. They may never go to jail for what they've done, but I'd be a fool to think they didn't do what they did because they knew it'd be easy money for no work; even in bankruptcy they'll be able to wipe out their debts, which, as you know, big corporations can do a lot more easily than people at all. And again: people want to blame the victim without blaming the big corporations that took advantage of the victim and should have known better. Why do people ignore the larger actors who should know better? Does dumpin on the victim make someone feel that good?

Around the table: learning the wrong lessons from the British election, and other stories.

Israeli soldiers testify about the savagery they've seen, and committed, during their occupation of Palestine. I won't long-story-short this one, because you should read it. One hopes it might turn the tide of American public opinion decisively against the Netanyahu Administration -- which isn't as hard as it sounds, since American politicians are far more pro-Israel than the public -- but the "liberal" media would have to be outraged first, and they tend only to be outraged when our government doesn't cut Medicare benefits fast enough.

David Frum sees lessons for American right-wingers in the victory of David Cameron and the Conservative Party in British elections last week. Sadly, a lot of these lessons (the Tories have sort-of made peace with universal health care and practice tolerance toward women and gays) are lessons right-wingers in America will never adopt, while others (the Tories have privatized the post office, cut corporate taxes, and stand ready to eliminate estate taxes) are lessons most Americans aren't particularly eager to learn. And I can't help but think Mr. Frum doesn't include France as one of America's "closest allies" not because France opposed the Iraq War, but because it would blow his theory apart. France, of course, sent its nominally conservative President packing in favor of a Socialist in 2012, which suggests that conservatives aren't "ascending" in these nations so much as voters are continuing to punish the parties in charge during the 2008 financial services meltdown and subsequent recession.

Speaking of "lessons from Great Britain," FAIR finds too many American "liberal" media outlets telling Britain's Labour Party that they should move to the right to remain relevant. Which is to laugh, if you remember Margaret Thatcher's early praise for Tony Blair or Gordon Brown's lecture about how outsourced foreign labor helps guarantee lower prices at home, let alone the Miliband-led Labour platform promoting balanced budgets and cuts in corporate taxes and social benefits. And I'm no great expert on British politics, but I noticed that the very liberal Scottish National Party ate 40 Labour seats on election night, and that Mr. Cameron's promise of a vote on Britain's continued participation in the European Union (which Labour didn't match, of course!) took the wind out of UKIP's sails.

We haven't visited Paul Krugman in a while; what's he talking about today? Why, "Wall Street Vampires," of course! But mainly Mr. Krugman writes about how well Dodd-Frank is actually working, which it is, on some levels: the CFPB's zeal has had a "chilling effect on abusive lending practices," while corporations that had been trying to become banksters are trying to become corporations again. He even deploys the word "chimera" very cleverly in paragraph 7; try getting that out of your average cable news talking head.

Rick Cohen at Non-Profit Quarterly asks, "What Exactly Are Charter Schools Accomplishing for the Educational System?" Long story short: they're not accomplishing new-and-better ideas, nor are they accomplishing better results, individual success stories aside (remember, folks: anecdotes aren't arguments, even when they're uplifting). I'd be less generous than Mr. Cohen and say they're "accomplishing" the siphoning off of taxpayer money (i.e., our money) to schools that can cook their success figures more easily than public schools can.

Finally, Ezra Klein theorizes that the lack of exciting, riveting news lately is driving cable news ratings downward. I'd prefer to believe it's because people are finally sick of the gluttonous, venal morons who spew forth endless streams of fecal matter on cable news networks, or even that folks who can afford broadband can more easily bypass cable news these days, but Mr. Klein's analysis does have explanatory power, and it's enough to make a man hope These Interesting Times become a lot more dull.

Action: antibiotic abuse, government spying, and pollution.

America ain't the only place to fight antibiotic abuse on factory farms -- why, countries all over the world farm, and they, too, wrestle with this problem! In fact, the European Union will be wrestling with this problem today, so Avaaz helps you tell the EU to outlaw antibiotic abuse on factory farms. If you're thinking the European Union may be more receptive to the notion that pumping nominally-healthy feed animals full of antibiotics just so they'll make more meat could have the potentially civilization-destroying side effect of creating antibiotic-resistant superbugs, you may be right -- after all, the EU is actually holding hearings about the matter, and try getting our own Congress to do that, even when Democrats run things. Plus, a few European nations have already cut antibiotic use on farms. More than that, Europe has proven more resistant to the rise of the factory farm than the United States has -- turns out their politicians go a bit more out of their way to protect the small farmer than we do, almost like they're actual conservatives or something. Still, let's not be complacent.

Meanwhile, the most recent iteration of H.R. 3361, the USA FREEDOM Act, is a watered-down version of the last one, which was itself a watered-down version of previous bills, but H.R. 1466, the Surveillance State Repeal Act, would actually go a long way toward dismantling the surveillance state that has grown far worse under President Obama than Senator Obama ever said it would, and Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support real privacy free speech protections by supporting the Surveillance State Repeal Act. H.R. 1466 would end PATRIOT Act-inspired mass surveillance of Americans and would restore the Fourth Amendment protections decimated by the FISA Amendment Act. That's right, you'd have to get a warrant from a judge to conduct a terrorism-related investigation again, which is how it should be. I know, I know -- such things sound quaint. But these rights have always worked well for us, and abridging them hasn't worked; it hasn't even made us safer. So let's tell our Congressfolk to do the right thing.

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf to close the loophole that allows the Brunner Island coal plant belch forth more smog. How does this loophole work? While the state does plan to modify smog regulations so coal plants that have installed the best pollution-control equipment actually use it, such a mandate can't apply to coal plants that haven't installed such equipment, such as the Brunner Island plant, which doesn't sit on an island per se but sits near the Susquehanna River some 15 miles south of Harrisburg. Areas downwind from Brunner Island already experience unsafe smog levels and the heightened case load of asthma and heart troubles that go with it, but big coal interests no doubt stand at the ready to say that stopping pollution will kill jobs. Of course it'll help create jobs for people who design and manufacture better pollution-control equipment, plus it'll save us all money in health care costs. Why doesn't that matter to big coal? Because the only money big coal cares about is the money its CEOs can pocket.

Around the table: the British election, "free" trade, Congressional "prerogatives," Rand Paul's posturing, and Carly Fiorina's unfitness for command.

Neil Clark at Russia Today analyzes the Conservative Party's resounding victory in British elections last Thursday. His reasoning is mostly sound (Labour party weakness, a dominant right-wing media, big corporate money flowing into Tory coffers, even a "born to rule" attitude among Tory leaders), but complaints about the "first-past-the-post" system sound like sour grapes to me, not just because I advocate the notion that public action should be vigorous enough to render the political party of the representative a meaningless matter -- the British also don't redraw their Parliamentary districts with any regularity, as American states do. I can easily think of reasons why they don't, but that doesn't justify not doing it.

President Obama inexplicably went to Nike headquarters on Saturday to make what USA Today inexplicably calls a "progressive case for trade." You know the script -- "the right kind of agreements," "the past versus the present," the strawman arguing of "trade works" when we criticize "free" trade, not trade. At least the article (paragraph 11) almost wonders out loud why the agreement needs to be fast-tracked. Not to be incorrigible or anything, but I don't even buy the argument that the TPP will improve other countries' labor standards -- the problem in those nations isn't the law, but enforcing the law, and the "investor-state tribunals" will let corporations overwrite those laws anyway.

The Intercept reports that Congressional lawyers argued in court last summer that the SEC shouldn't have been allowed to conduct an insider trading probe, because "lawmakers and their staff are constitutionally-protected from such inquiries given the nature of their work." Now, I'm no lawyer, but I suspect that the moment lawmakers and staff break the law -- and insider trading not only breaks the law, but breaks a law Congress high-fived itself for passing not even three years ago -- you don't automatically get to hide behind the Constitution.

Sen. Rand Paul says Democratic Presidential candidate (and former Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton made Libya a "jihadist wonderland." But though he can talk the talk, he's never walked the walk -- remember how quickly this foreign policy "skeptic" wilted when it was time to support Mr. Obama's bombing raids in Iraq and Syria? Or how quickly he's abandoned even his meek criticisms of aid to Israel? How are we supposed to imagine he's going to be better as President?

Finally, David Corn reminds us, in excruciating detail, why Carly Fiorina's tenure as Hewlett-Packard CEO would make her a bad President. You know the long-story-short -- cut jobs, lost the company money, got pushed out with a $21 million parachute -- but you may not have remembered that she once justified outsourcing by saying "(t)here is no job that is America's God-given right anymore" or that HP's stock price jumped 7% the day they let her go.

Around the table: another couple of dumb things Republicans have said, plus a city sues a bankster and Guatemalan farmers fight "free" trade.

The House's richest member, California Republican Darrell Issa (net worth: $448 million) says our poorest folks are "the envy of the world." He's not completely full of soup, but why would one suggest people should stop trying to make the world better just because our poor don't literally live in holes as much as in other countries? Recall that the John Birch society used to tell blacks they didn't have to agitate against Jim Crow laws because they have more color TVs than most of the rest of the world, and you'll find your answer. And, ah, to the degree our poor do have more access to things like heat and clean water than their brethren in Africa or India, it's because we're civilized enough to force our government to keep water clean and subsidize heating bills. But I suppose Darrell Issa thinks people like him are responsible for all of that.

Independent audit finds that Gov. Walker's Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (or WEDC) has hardly kept track of whether the corporations to which it's giving money to create jobs are actually creating jobs. This should be a much, much bigger story -- this is the jewel of Mr. Walker's economic policy, and it's either become a slush fund for Mr. Walker's corporate cronies or an incredibly incompetently-managed bureaucracy piddling away Wisconsin taxpayer money. It is, in short, everything wrong with right-wing economic policy. Which is why the "liberal" media won't touch it.

The City of Los Angeles sues Wells Fargo, but not for the reason you'd think -- apparently some Wells Fargo employees have been opening completely fake credit card and checking accounts using their customers' information. They were trying to meet sales quotas, apparently, but you shouldn't have to see customers get assessed fees for products they didn't want and get their credit reports get dinged for inquiries they didn't want made to know you're doing wrong. I'd still like to know how draconian Wells Fargo's sales quotas were -- there is a point at which yearning for statistical certainty becomes pedantry.

I've concentrated perhaps too much on how "free" trade adversely affects working families in America, but "free" trade harms working families in Guatemala, too -- and they're fighting back. Battered on all sides by big landowners, their government's mad embrace of African palm trees, and cheap American corn exports, Guatemalan farmers are growing a diverse range of crops, in an attempt to simultaneously sell to markets and feed their people, and they're growing them organically, to avoid becoming slaves to the pesticide industry. They also agitate for more equitable laws at the federal level. I wish them all the best.

Finally, Jeb Bush tells an audience of Republican donors that he looks to his brother George W. Bush for advice on Middle East politics. Some witnesses say he was really talking about Israel, and Israel was the jewel of Bush the Lesser's foreign policy, but that was only by default, and asking George W. Bush for advice about anything is sort of like asking the 1980-81 Winnipeg Jets for advice on winning hockey games. But let's not forget that President Obama hired a lot of Bush the Lesser's failures, too. I mean, really, John freaking Brennan? Or Robert Gates, whom Bush the Better couldn't get confirmed back in the day?

Around the table: government spying, community banks, suspect populism, health care, and the minimum wage.

2nd Circuit Court of Appeals rules that Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act does not, in fact, authorize the massive NSA data-vacuuming program. No truth to the rumor that John Boehner responded, "see, I told you the PATRIOT Act was harmless! So, of course, we will reauthorize the PATRIOT Act, because terrorism and kittens, but we will do nothing about NSA spying -- though we will continue to bash the President for doing the things Congress should do, but which Congress delegated to the Executive branch long ago."

Stacy Mitchell, writing at Yes! magazine, informs us that one out of every four community banks has failed since the 2008 financial services meltdown, and that we should treat that as a "national crisis." Why the urgency? Because local banks know their communities better and know risks better, while banksters use a one size fits all approach to loaning money. Bonus: you learn how to criticize regulatory burdens on small banks without having to get rid of all regulations, a skill most right-wingers do not seem to possess.

Mike Huckabee, now running for President, declares his opposition to "free" trade "fast-tracking" (though not "free" trade itself, necessarily), and even declares we shouldn't cut Social Security benefits or end Social Security's disability program. He's no stranger to economic populism -- in the first 2008 Republican Presidential debate he declared that Republicans didn't deserve power if they weren't going to get serious about corporate crime, stunning the audience into silence -- but if Republicans say something you agree with anymore, you can be pretty sure they're going to do the opposite. Shame it's come to that, but it has.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott wants Big Gummint money to run his own much lamer version of a Medicaid expansion, but he doesn't want a Medicaid expansion via the Affordable Care Act -- so he's suing Big Gummint to get the money. Aren't conservatives always saying people try to solve too many of their problems with lawsuits? Naturally, Mr. Scott supported the Medicaid expansion when he was running for re-election, but doesn't now. Why the change in position? Because fuck you I won, that's why.

Finally, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he might raise the minimum wage for fast-food workers -- and in New York he can do that all by himself. So what's the opposing position? That it's illegal? Whoops, it's not in New York. That it's unprecedented? Nope, it's not that, either. That he didn't wait for the legislature to "work its will"? Wow, that's not even true. How about that it's "uncommon" or "arbitrary"? These could be argued, but the restaurant industry bigwig quoted in the article doesn't do a very good job of it -- she merely asserts and expects the assertion to do the work of proof, which is usually a sign of desperation.

Action: a financial speculation tax, better drug policy, and stricter controls on foreign meat.

Are you tired, good citizens, of seeing banksters continue to flourish in Our Ongoing Economic Armageddon, while the rest of us scrape by? Of course you are. And do you want an America where our financial titans engage in activities that actually help small businesses succeed and that actually help create jobs and better products and processes -- rather than simply enrich its biggest actors in an ongoing game of roulette? Then Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a financial speculation tax (or "Robin Hood tax") that would slow down all the volatile, software-driven, "high-speed" trading Wall Street does. While Rep. Ellison (D-MN) has introduced a bill that would institute this tax -- or, rather, reinstitute it, since such a tax did exist in America until the early '70s -- Public Citizen wouldn't make you support that particular bill, if you think (like me) that a financial transaction tax should be higher (say, one percent) than the figures that get bandied about in the Beltway, which range from 0.03% to 0.5%.

Lately, the House of Representatives voted against letting VA doctors discuss or recommend medical marijuana to their patients for the next calendar year. But does good news come from this development? Of course it does -- despite the Republicans' current 60-vote majority in the House, the vote itself failed only by a mere three votes, and that's called progress, especially in a society that has long completely overreacted to the threat posed by pot. Though these wheels grind slowly, the powerful are coming around to the superior wisdom of the electorate in this instance. And H.R. 1538/S. 683, the CARERS Act, would let states legalize medical marijuana without worrying that the federal government will shut them down, would let VA doctors recommend medical marijuana to the soldiers who need it, and would let researchers work on pot without worrying the feds are going to bust their door down. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to loosen medical marijuana restrictions so the people can benefit.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to keep unlabeled Chinese chicken out of our school lunches, then Food and Water Watch helps you do that. How does this happen? As we noted earlier this week, country-of-origin labeling for meat, fruit, and vegetables began in America in 2008, but the law doesn't require country-of-origin labeling for processed foods from other countries, and though the USDA has banned Chinese raw chicken from coming here, noting the Chinese government's laxity with food safety regulation and inspection, the USDA still green-lighted shipments of Chinese processed chicken here, though the same lax regulation and inspection regimes apply. The good news? Your Congressfolk are as sensitive to the Big Stick of Bad PR as anyone else, and with the recent news that American fast food eateries in China somehow got Chinese processed chicken for their nuggets, it'll be harder for even the most noxious teabagger to wield the Big Stick of Let the Corporations Do Whatever They Want.

Around the table: in which we get hit by some smooth criminals.

If, like me, you've been looking around wondering where the next bubble is coming from, Mike Whitney tells us it's already here -- in the form of corporate stock buybacks. I was rooting for something more useful, like a renewable energy bubble or a 3-D printing bubble, to follow Tha Bush Mobb's housing bubble and the Clinton years' internet bubble, but alas, no -- now, apparently, even our bubbles only benefit the 0.1%. But like all bubbles, it's debt-financed -- the Fed's interest rates are still near zero, after all -- leaving open the very real possibility that all these stocks the rich have bought back will soon be worth nothing. And if somehow we find ourselves on the hook, that bailout would be even less popular than the last one, if that's possible.

You've heard of the Topeka waitress who wouldn't take a tip from Kansas Gov. Brownback, instead telling him to spend the tip on education? Well, a Kansas GOP poobah strikes back, saying the "liberal" media has been "publicizing her arrogant stupidity and utter ignorance." So what's he afraid of? Suggesting citizens are "arrogant" for presuming they could tell our leaders how to do things better is pretty fucking un-American, and I bet when actually ignorant teabaggers drew Hitler mustaches on President Obama he thought it was hilarious. In other news, a blind, deaf, and dumb infant could tell Sam Brownback how to run a state better, even if, apparently, his last Democratic opponent couldn't convince good Kansans that he could.

The FCC plans to regulate the cost of prisoner phone calls, since they're out of freaking control, but the National Sheriffs' Association (not these guys) says they might cut off prisoner phone calls entirely in retaliation. "Retaliation" might actually be too nice a word for a bunch of folks acting like diaper-loaded brats. You wonder why they'd even care, and then you find out: they get kickbacks from the big telecom corporations extorting the prisoners. But in right-wingers' minds, these sheriffs could be national heroes, just like Cliven Bundy was until he embarrassed right-wingers by spouting off about black folks.

Get your surprised face ready: geoscientists have found fracking chemicals in Pennsylvania drinking water near fracking wells. Fracking corporations are quick to respond ha ha you cannot prove these chemicals didn't come from some other household compound and ha ha we wipe our butts with your money! But scientists note that the further away from drilling sites you get, the less chemicals you find, and certainly the frackers are not about to assert that people simply don't use makeup or paint their walls in certain areas of the state. Then again, maybe they are -- these are interesting times, after all.

In an equally surprising development, the New York Times seems to prefer presenting the 2016 Presidential race as if 800 Republican candidates are running against Hillary Clinton, even though at least three other candidates are running for the Democratic nomination. We can't discount the possibility that the Times is simply acting out a subconscious fantasy of right-wingers, to surround Hillary Clinton with as many Republican men as possible. But if, like me, you regard Ms. Clinton's support as being a mile wide and a foot deep, you might see an even deeper ulterior motive here.

Finally, Montana sheriffs catch a man accused of forgery after he liked his own wanted poster on the county Facebook page. I guess he wanted to keep tabs on how his pursuit was going. Never mind that it's not hard to get an IP address from liking a Facebook post, even on a public computer -- I bet getting the warrant was even easier.

Action: expanding Medicare coverage, relief for Corinthian College students, and saner nuclear policy.

H.R. 1608, the Lymphedema Treatment Act, would make Medicare cover lymphedema treatment by listing certain lymphedema treatment equipment -- including compression garments, bandaging systems, and the supplies they require -- as "durable medical equipment" under the Social Security Act. Lymphedema (which overloads damaged lymph nodes with protein-rich lymphatic fluid) is a debilitating condition, and most lymphedema sufferers get it as a result of cancer treatment, meaning their already-compromised immune systems get compromised even further. Why doesn't Medicare already cover it? Because Medicare doesn't cover everything under the sun, and that's why we keep maintaining it. Why not make all health insurers cover it? Because then the winged monkeys of Congress will squeal BIG GUMMINT TYRANNYZ!!!! -- and also because if Medicare does it, private insurers will eventually do it anyway, which the bill's lead sponsor, actual moderate Republican Dave Reichert (WA-8), may have calculated. So Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your House Rep to support lymphedema treatment.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that for-profit college corporation Corinthian Colleges closed its remaining campuses last week (dealing Sen. Rubio a PR black eye in the process, which is a plus). Corinthian apparently couldn't withstand the pressure of quite-deserved government action against them for telling students they were providing a good education leading to good jobs, and instead trapping them in a cycle of debt for degrees of little worth, all while leeching money from taxpayers. But the Department of Education actually intends to leave those Corinthian students on the hook for those loans, so Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the DOE to help provide relief to those students. I know right-wingers are asking: aren't these kids dumb for taking out those loans? Setting aside all of us, as youths, did dumb stuff that sounded too good to be true, these students were lied to by the people loaning them money. Too many people rush to blame the victim for getting into a mess, while conveniently forgetting to blame the folks who used the victim for their own ends.

Finally, H.R. 1534/S. 831, the Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures Act (or SANE Act), would target specific nuclear-related defense expenditures that our government, despite being led by the supposedly weak-on-defense President Barack Obama, has actually been escalating. But zeroing out funds for long-range bombers and ICBMs, while restricting funds for certain other weapons systems, would save us (yes, us, since our government spends money on weapons with taxes, and we're taxpayers) $10 billion annually over the next decade, and if that doesn't sound like a lot of money in the context of a $4 trillion budget, remember that we could be doing a lot of good with $10 billion -- I mean creating-jobs good, like with infrastructure repair and development projects, or stimulate-the-economy good, like with rescinding last year's food stamp cuts. Plus, it's not like we don't have enough nukes or nuke delivery devices already -- still enough to blow up the world 200 times over, which fact might deter nations from declaring war on us, but which fact doesn't seem to discourage terrorists from attacking us, either at home or overseas. Hence Peace Action West helps you tell Congress to restrain nuclear spending by passing the SANE Act.

Around the table: corruption, trade deficits, corporate hackery, regulatory shortcomings, and stupid tax credit tricks.

Republican Special Prosecutor Frances Schmitz, currently leading a bipartisan corruption investigation into Gov. Scott Walker's campaign finance dealings, comes out and all but calls Mr. Walker a liar. Like how Mr. Walker calls the John Doe probe a "witch hunt" "trying to intimidate people," as if you, the voter, are somehow the one getting intimidated and witch-hunted? I have no problem with the people intimidating the powerful. And the best part of all this for Mr. Schmitz? Given all the Walker underlings who've gone to jail lately, it might be more dangerous to be an ally of Scott Walker than an enemy.

Our trade deficits are going up, up, up, and our trade deficit with South Korea has more than doubled since President Obama's last "free" trade deal with (of course) South Korea. And could those "free" traders saying don't judge the TPP based on past deals maybe enlighten us on why the TPP will be so much different? No, they could not -- especially since they're so determined to keep its text secret.

Ho hum, the Union of Concerned Scientists finds that the majority of anti-food labeling comments to the FDA come from food corporations. And contra the elitist asshole who claimed not too long ago that industry comments will always win over those of citizens because they're just better, the food industry says things like "there is scant evidence to support the idea that added sugar contributes to ill health," which begs the question of whether they've outsourced their PR to a group of monkeys with typewriters.

North America's largest firefighters' union says the DOT's new rules concerning oil and gas transportation by train will be something of a hindrance in their disaster response. While the DOT's regulations does apparently improve standards for rail car construction and speed, they don't require corporations to notify local fire departments beforehand that hazardous materials are coming, which, yeah, is a hindrance, since you can't fight past fires with future knowledge.

Finally, we learn that as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is cutting funding for state colleges, Duck Dynasty is still getting its notorious tax windfall. Priorities! And Mr. Jindal seems to think getting rid of the entertainment tax credit would be like a tax increase! Ah, no -- it would be like a tax cut for everyone else, since the state would no longer be bleeding money supporting a TV program that's not exactly going to pull up stakes and move to Pennsylvania, now, is it?

Action: Social Security and Medicare, country-of-origin food labeling, and GMO food labeling.

The Pension Rights Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand benefits, not cut them, for all the good Americans who receive Social Security and Medicare. They remind us that Congress attached pension "reform" legislation, allowing most "multiemployer" (i.e., union) pension funds to cut benefits if they fear they'll run out of money within the next 20 years, to the nefarious "cromnibus" spending bill late last year, and they worry that'll set a "precedent." But I don't worry about giving our elites the idea that they can just steal our retirements, because they've clearly got that idea already. I do worry that we aren't communicating to them quite often enough that Social Security and Medicare are ours, and that we'll fight for what's ours. And I have no patience for trolls who pipe up that Congress can do what it wants with Social Security and Medicare ha ha snort, as if Congress isn't also ours, as if we can't turn out Representatives and Senators if they turn on us -- or, preferably, dissuade them from their pension-burglary plans before it comes to that.

Meanwhile, our government instituted country of origin labeling (or COOL) back in 2008 for meat, fruit, and vegetables, but naturally the big food processing corporations are still sore about it and are spending gazillions of dollars to fight it, both at the federal level with our government and at the international level with the World Trade Organization. And I shudder to think what'll happen if Congress ratifies the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," under which corporations can more easily nullify our laws. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell President Obama to reject any legislation that weakens or eliminates country-of-origin labeling. Why? Because more and more of us would rather buy food that was made nearby, partly because it uses up less transportation energy, partly because we can more easily establish a face-to-face relationship with a food provider who's nearby, and partly because we can avoid foods from nations that don't have very good food safety laws. What's wrong with any of that -- other than the fact that it might deprive some CEO of some unearned millions?

Finally, H.R. 913/S. 511, the Genetically Engineered Food Right-to-Know Act of 2015 would, as you might expect, force corporations to label any food containing genetically-engineered ingredients as genetically-modified or containing GMO ingredients. The mandate excludes restaurant food (along with some more reasonable exceptions); I see the hand of the restaurant lobby in this, and I'd find such an exception more acceptable if it happened as a result of negotiation with Republicans. But when you start negotiating at your endpoint, you show weakness to your opponent, and you never show weakness to your opponent. The bill would also forbid corporations from labeling GMO foods as "natural," and though plenty of folks who'd argue that the things we do to food are just as "natural" as anything else, we're not doing ontology here -- shoppers don't expect "natural" foods to have been engineered in the lab to better withstand some proprietary pesticide. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support your right to know if there are any GMOs in your food.

Around the table: from a reconsideration of *The Wire* to an unexpected proposal from Scott Walker.

Dave Zirin says his experience of the Baltimore unrest has taken some of the luster off his love for the HBO drama The Wire. Why? "I am now seeing what the The Wire was missing, despite its much lauded, painstaking verisimilitude: the voices of people organizing together for change," which absence renders the show's pessimism "childish." I love The Wire myself, and while every work of art has its flaws, and you love works of art largely because of what you see of yourself in them anyway, Mr. Zirin is dead-on. Read the whole thing, and maybe one day HBO will give us a series about the struggles of community organizers.

Dean Baker catches USA Today distorting the facts in an unabashed pro-"free" trade piece. Long story short: USA Today talks "manufacturing output" as if our government doesn't count parts made overseas as part of "output" here, plus they don't adjust for inflation, just like the oldheads who whinge on about how they made $2/hour in 1969 and it never hurt them none. Also, "manufacturing output" sure isn't the same as "manufacturing jobs."

FAIR catches Chuck Todd utterly failing to mention Bernie Sanders on Meet the Press the same day he mentioned a dozen other Presidential candidates, and Mr. Todd responds -- by saying that he had him on eight months ago (or approximately eight months before he declared his candidacy), and that he's mentioned him on the show's website, when we all know that websites are where big news corporations push coverage they don't want on the TV. I'm so glad I didn't take that bet that he'd show any humility at all in his response to criticism. Working in the "liberal" media means never having to admit you're wrong, after all.

ProPublica reports that the more traditional colleges and universities have joined the fight against Obama Administration proposals that would make for-profit colleges adhere to stricter rules or lose federal funding. Yes, it's hard to believe, since, as the author says, "the higher education establishment has viewed the for-profit education business" like "the cousin with the rap sheet who seeks a cut of the family inheritance." I wouldn't count out the possibility that these "traditional" venues of learning might want to become more like "the cousin with the rap sheet" themselves. Still, it's quite anti-intellectual to come down on the side of less accountability for how our government spends our money.

Finally, in a burst of honesty I hadn't expected, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says he'd like to institute "right-to-work" laws at the federal level. And he pretends there's some irony in being a small-government guy but wanting big government intervention here, as if anything a government does is automatically anti-freedom. Of course, the "opportunity" he's talking about unleashing here is the "opportunity" to make less money at your job, and for your non-union workers to enjoy union benefits without paying for them. The best thing that could happen now is for him to say he was taken out of context when questioned about it, which, given the eventuality that he'll have to please moderate voters, is not outside the realm of possibility.

Action: ending forced arbitration, getting better public royalties from coal corporations, and stopping fracking pollution.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support two bills that would stop corporations from using forced arbitration to rip off their customers: H.R. 2087/S. 1133, the Arbitration Fairness Act, and H.R. 2079/S. 1122, the CLASS Act. The former bill would eliminate forced arbitration clauses from all employment and customer contracts, while the latter would prevent universities from putting those clauses in student enrollment contracts. Both of these bills will allow you to fight for your rights in a court of law, as you're entitled to do, without having to take your claims before some arbitrator who knows full well which side is paying him. Seems commonsensical, doesn't it? Well, beware of yet another onslaught against common sense from the right: that these bills will promote "frivolous lawsuits." Right-wingers must think very little of people, to think that Americans are constantly trying to get over. I suppose if I told them how little they think of people, they'd respond that it's the trial lawyers who mislead them into doing evil. But I know people. People ain't stupid, either.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Office of Natural Resources Revenue to enact the most vigorous coal royalty reforms possible, then both the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters help you do that. So what are we reforming, exactly? The price the taxpayer gets from the coal that corporations extract from public lands, that's what. You'd think our government would be looking out for us here, since it's our land and our money, but they seem to look out for coal corporations more, regardless of what right-wing war-on-coal propagandists will tell you. Current regulations allow coal corporations to pay royalties not on the money they make selling their coal to utilities -- which is how you'd think it would be done, right? -- but on the money they make selling their coal to a shell corporation they own which then sells the coal to utilities. ONRR's reforms would base royalties on a coal corporation's first sale to a middleman they don't own, but that's not enough -- like I said, it's our land, and our money, so we should base the rate on the final sale.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Pennsylvania DEP to issue the most vigorous fracking safety rules possible, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Want some more motivation to comment on the DEP proposal? Here it is: Pennsylvania Independent Petroleum Producers President Mark Cline remarked back in late March that the DEP should give "operators who know the industry best" more say in the commenting period, adding that comments either supporting the DEP proposal or demanding more from it are, and I quote, "coming from people who don’t really have a clue what they’re talking about." Setting aside the fact that he didn't bother proving he knows more than you or I: don't these "operators" who supposedly "know the industry best" have a conflict of interest in their comments to our government? I mean, it sure does seem an awful lot these days like "knowing the industry best" means "letting the industry do whatever makes its CEOs the most money and damn everything else." Why should we take that guff from anybody?

Around the table: featuring dumb people spewing forth dumb ideas about government, plus a potentially-revolutionary solar battery.

Right-wing Pennsylvania House Rep blames big government (among so many other villains!) for the unrest in Baltimore. Just two points, neither related to Rep. Kelly's profound disrespect for black folks: one, Mr. Kelly (born 1948) doesn't tell you that "the town and the times I was raised in," with "the greatest people the world could possibly have imagined," all happened when we taxed millionaire income at 91% or 70% and when the federal minimum wage had more buying power than it does today. Two, when he blames "big government," he's still blaming the people, since the government belongs to the people. In other words, typical teabagger anti-reasoning.

Paul Buchheit reveals "The Five-Step Process to Privatize Everything." They are: convince yourself you did everything on your own, insist that government is antithetical to freedom, get rich (that one's important!), defund government until it works so badly that privatization starts to look better, and "remain ignorant of any troublesome facts," like that privatization generally works even worse than a government deliberately made to work badly. Again we should ask the right-wing haters: how is government antithetical to freedom if government belongs to you?

Ho hum, President Obama seems to have conned another nominally Democratic House Rep into voting for "free" trade. If he'd only spent this much time getting mortgage cramdown passed, he might have done some good! And Ami Bera (CA-7) is another one who thinks we can "do this right" without amending the agreement, or debating it for more than an hour. Congratulations, Mr. Bera! You're now toast in 2016 -- for who will fight to elect a guy who likes "free" trade? No, the district's swingy nature does not mean "free" trade support is a position that will get people to vote for you! You know what might get people to vote for you? Holding positions that normal people actually hold.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announces goal of making a solar-powered home battery, called "Powerwall," that would "fundamentally change the way the world uses energy." I'm not sure this'll be much more than a replacement for a home generator, the kind of thing you use during blackouts, but that's still a good thing, and I presume future Powerwalls will do more. While the battery's cost doesn't sound prohibitive, n.b. that it doesn't include installation or a power inverter (or, I presume, solar panels).

Finally, Alan Keyes seems to think a pro-gay marriage ruling from the Supreme Court would be "just cause for war." Trying to wade through his paragraph-long sentences is difficult, almost like that's the idea, but n.b. that he doesn't explain why an "inalienable right" enjoyed by "the people" can only be enjoyed by some people -- or how extending that right to all people "degrades" or "discards" that right. Also, he shouldn't threaten "war" just because he doesn't get his way; it makes him sound like a diaper-loaded brat.

Action: free trade, government spying in France, and GMO salmon.

A "free" trade "fast-track" bill will hit the Senate floor this week, so both Public Citizen and Jewish Voice for Peace help you tell your Congressfolk to reject it. Do not accept any BS that "fast-tracking" or "free" trade is "bipartisan," when the exact opposite is true, at least among the American people whose paychecks don't depend on doing whatever their corporate paymasters want. Do not accept President Obama's claim that he's fought for working families his whole Presidency (very badly, by the evidence!), when that statement ignores the very specific criticisms we've brought against "free" trade bills. Do not accept his assertion that "free" trade critics are "dishonest" for suggesting the TPP negotiations have been "secret," when our representatives in Congress haven't been allowed to see it until after hundreds of corporate lobbyists have had their mitts on it, and they're still not allowed to say what's in it. And remember that when Barack Obama calls Elizabeth Warren "dishonest" for giving your opinions a voice, it's because he doesn't have the guts to call you "dishonest."

Meanwhile, the French Parliament plans a vote this week on an "Information Bill" that would give the French Executive branch unprecedented power to spy on good French citizens without due process. The bill would allow the French government to trick users' mobile devices into thinking they're connecting to a cell tower when they're actually connecting to a device that sucks up all their data. The bill would also force internet service providers to suction up user data and let the government read emails and tap phones without a warrant. You don't need to be an expert in French Constitutional law to see how dangerous all of this would be -- it would give the French government more tools to oppress its citizenry whenever it feels like it, under the guise of "investigating terrorism," much as the USA PATRIOT Act has done in America. We all know that the Charlie Hebdo massacre was awful, but that's no reason to make every French citizen a government target, so Access Now helps you tell the French Parliament to reject violating French citizens' freedom and privacy in the name of counterterrorism.

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell the FDA to reject the GMO salmon. Yes, that's still up for debate at the FDA, after all these years. But the GMO salmon wouldn't be labeled as such in stores, and the only scientific study thus far done on the GMO salmon was conducted by AquaBounty, who judged it safe after reviewing exactly six salmon. (Admittedly, what other answer would one expect? This thing, that we've spent a lot of time and money on, and upon which we stand to make a lot of money, turned out to be unsafe, so sorry!) And what makes this particular salmon different is that AquaBounty has jacked up their reproductive process so that they grow up (to "market size") a lot faster than non-modified salmon, thus causing problems in the ecosystems in which they live as well as elevated hormone levels in food. And now apparently the FDA is now trying to approve the GMO salmon as an animal drug, where the scientific evaluation process will be a bit less rigorous. But come on, FDA, we're not schmucks. This whole process has, we could say, strained our credulity.

Around the table: from ye olde Iraq war follies to the solemn pronouncements of anti-gay marriage activists.

Jon Stewart excoriates former New York Times reporter Judith Miller for "help(ing)" Tha Bush Mobb commit "the most devastating mistake in foreign policy that we've made in, like, 100 years." Her response: that "everyone got it wrong," not just her. Having never believed Tha Bush Mobb's absurd case for war with Iraq, I can honestly say that I didn't "get it wrong," and I know a lot of people, liberal and conservative, who also didn't get it wrong. Of course she means all of her elite friends got it wrong. And given how much suffering (i.e., none) they've endured for getting it wrong, you have to wonder if they "got it wrong" on purpose.

President Obama sits down with more than two dozen center-right House Democrats and assures them that if they vote his way on "free" trade "fast-tracking," he'll campaign for them. Why on Earth does Mr. Obama imagine that'll help these folks in a tough campaign? And why does this article only quote one of those House Reps, and is it coincidence that this particular House Rep is very pro-"free" trade and pro-"fast track"? We only have his word, after all, that Mr. Obama "answered every single question" and "rebutted every single critique, respectfully," since in public, Mr. Obama's "rebuttals" to valid "free" trade criticisms include questioning the honesty and integrity of the critic. The "liberal" media could at least get their stories straight.

The Straight Dope asks if negative campaigning works. Long story short: the science suggests that it does, but the science is also not particularly thorough, especially before, say, 2000. We do know that negative campaigning about "inconsistent voting, broken campaign promises, contributions from special interest groups, and dubious business practices" works a lot better than negative campaigning about your opponent's personal foibles (exhibit A: Bill Clinton).

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders raises $1.5 million within 24 hours of announcing his candidacy for President. That worked out to a little over $40 per donor, which is encouraging, and also beat the marks Sens. Cruz, Paul, and Rubio set in their first 24 hours. Of course, Mr. Sanders won't have massive secretive SuperPACs behind him like those three will, but money ain't everything, and it's been a long time since liberals have had a candidate they'd run through a wall for. (I'm not sure I should count Howard Dean, since he wasn't all that liberal.)

Finally, Former Republican Lieutenant Governor nominee E.W. Jackson announces that anti-gay activists "will give our lives standing for the truth." I'd say who am I to tell you how to remove yourself from the gene pool?, but they'll take other people's lives in such a fight, a fact I suspect Mr. Jackson doesn't want you to ponder. Plus he wants extra credit for not actually acting like an ogre as he's being one, and he suggests that the only alternative to doing his will is chaos and disorder, which is what, class? A hostage situation. In other news, "ex-gay activist" Janet Boynes really needs to polish her stage presence -- if you can't remember your allies' names, you shouldn't be up at the podium. (Plus "we're not going back to slavery"? What does that even mean?)

Around the table: Kansas school closings, credit card scammers, and at least three putative "conservatives" who don't understand the meaning of the word.

At least half a dozen school districts in Kansas will be closing at least a week early this year, thanks to state budget cuts. I wonder how many kids now think of Gov. Brownback as The Coolest Governor Ever. Seriously, I grew up in southern New Jersey, so of course this seems to me utterly unthinkable, but nothing is unthinkable to a right-winger like Gov. Brownback or future President Walker, and I despair that what's happening in Kansas will make Republicans unpalatable to the electorate in 2016 -- that would mean both the Democratic nominee and the "liberal" media would actually discuss the matter, instead of "taking the high road" or hiding behind "balance," respectively.

House Republicans actually tried to insert a provision into the latest defense appropriations bill that would have prevented the Department of Defense from cracking down on lenders who prey on our soldiers. It went down, quite narrowly, in Committee, but what do you call Congressfolk who value some payday lender "constituent" over their actual constituents? "Objectively pro-poverty"? "Objectively pro-bankruptcy"? "Objectively pro-financial predators"? You know what you don't call them: conservative, because only a corporatist mammon-worshiper would propose such a thing.

Ho hum, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) wants to fix his state's budget hole by borrowing against tobacco settlement money, to the tune of $750 million. Which, if you've been following the issue, means he'll put his state in an even bigger hole down the line, especially if Louisiana has to bail out the tobacco bonds, which seems likely. But remember: this guy is a fiscal conservative, according to Beltway "wisdom." Why? Because he tries to cut every tax that impacts rich folk that he can, thus shifting more of the burden of paying for state services onto working families. I wouldn't call him a "fiscal conservative," though -- I'd call him, well, let's just say I'd call him much worse.

Here's some news you can use: the Consumerist teaches you "How Scammers Trick You into Giving Up That Security Code on the Back of Your Credit Card." Spoiler alert: scammers use fear of data breaches at retailers to pretend to be someone who needs that three-digit code. Long story short: give no information, hang up, and then call the real customer service number on the back of your credit card and ask if something's really happening.

Finally, a Maryland state legislator thinks it'd be a jim-dandy idea to take food stamps away from Baltimore protestors' parents. Why do I think he'd be against that if those protestors were agitating against abortion? And why do I get the suspicion that he'd never call a bankster a "thug"? What was his name, anyway, this apparent gadfly of the Maryland right? Oh, who cares -- we're never going to speak of him again.

Action: the "other" Keystone XL, offshore drilling, and smarter sentencing.

If President Obama hasn't killed Keystone XL dead because our government has a process for evaluating it that must be respected, as he says, then why has his Administration fast-tracked approval of an expansion of Enbridge's Alberta Clipper tar sands pipeline? This pipeline runs through the northernmost regions of Minnesota and Wisconsin, so we the people ought to have a say about the deleterious effects an expansion might have on public safety and climate change. But earlier this week we learned from State Department emails that State approved that expansion with no public notice, no public comment period, and no environmental impact evaluation, and hoo boy do those emails sound inappropriately deferential -- the State Department seems to think it should be heeding Enbridge's schedule, rather than, you know, ours. Luckily, construction of the expansion is nowhere near complete, so CREDO helps you tell President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry to stop the Alberta Clipper expansion.

Meanwhile, speaking of oil, Public Citizen helps you tell President Obama to halt any further expansion of offshore drilling. Sadly, we know from catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon Spillageddon in 2010 that it's not so much a question of whether they'll be another one, but when. And we also know that the big corporations don't like having clean-up crews on hand for big spills, because that costs money. But surely our government has learned from its mistakes, right? Well, no: Congress has passed no legislation on the matter, and federal regulators are just now proposing new rules addressing what happened five years ago, which oil corporations will have another 10 years before they get around to complying with them -- by which time we could be neck-deep in some Arctic catastrophe that will be even harder to clean up than that mess in the relatively temperate Gulf was. If we can't make offshore drilling safe, we shouldn't do it. I know, I know: that sounds conservative. It's a risk I'll take for love of country.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 920/S. 502, the Smarter Sentencing Act, then Families Against Mandatory Minimums still helps you do that. The Smarter Sentencing Act, as you know, would help give judges more of the flexibility they should have when sentencing non-violent federal drug offenders; currently they're far too hamstrung by mandatory minimum laws to dispense justice properly. However, you may not know that a passel of religious groups stand with us on this matter -- not just the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and the Union for Reform Judaism, but Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition and Tony Perkins's Family Research Council also not only support more merciful (and practical) sentencing laws, and are actually in Washington lobbying for that as we speak. And I'm just as happy to stand with right-wing evangelicals on this matter as I am to stand with them on a la carte cable packaging.

Around the table: tales of various court cases, plus an embarassing predicament for Marco Rubio.

Supreme Court rules, in a 5-4 decision, that Florida can continue to bar judges and judicial candidates from soliciting campaign contributions. That might surprise you, given that the 5 comprised the four nominally liberal justices and John "Corporations are People" Roberts, but the decision (authored by Chief Justice Roberts) asserts that "States may regulate judicial elections differently than they regulate political elections, because the role of judges differs from the role of politicians." Justice Scalia's dissent is fairly cogent, but neither Justice wants to deal with the notion that money ain't speech.

U.S. District Court Judge dismisses a motion for an injunction against Vermont's GMO-labeling law, meaning the law will stand, for now, but will probably face another day in court. I'm sorry, but the corporate claims of "being harmed now" and "burdensome new speech requirements" make me laugh -- no corporation employs a hundred monks with quill pens to write their food labels, and more to the point, these are our Mostest Brilliantest Entrepreneuriest Entrepreneurs ever, the very highest class of folk in America or so their spokeshacks constantly tell us, but they sound like whiners whenever they're told to do something they don't want to do.

U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a lower court ruling over the Affordable Care Act's birth control mandate, giving new hope to groups that don't want to comply. Dig down into the weeds of this case and you'll be ashamed for the "religious freedom groups" (thanks again, "liberal" media!) who filed the lawsuit in the first place: they wanted to be exempt not merely from providing birth control for their employees, but from filling out more paperwork to gain exemption from the mandate, "more paperwork" here meaning writing a letter or filling out two pages of forms. What weaklings! But weaklings will plant their flags on just about anything and call it a "revolution."

Terrance Heath finds that right-wing media seem to have trouble seeing Baltimore police as in any way a problem. It's one thing to assert that police officers have a thankless job (made more thankless, I think police officers would agree, by the mad rush for good-looking crime stats that David Simon has described at length), but the right's insistence that criticism equals hatred is well beyond childish. And let's see how much right-wingers love their police officers when it's time for contract negotiations -- or when one of their political heroes "gets tough" about pensions for state and local public employees, since police officers are public employees, after all.

Finally, we learn that Sen. Marco Rubio sent a letter to the Department of Education last summer arguing for "leniency" for the for-profit education corporation Corinthian Colleges -- which just the other day shuttered its remaining two dozen-plus campuses. You may recall that Mr. Rubio supported "a new, independent accrediting process" for colleges not too long ago, one that would better recognize "innovative, lower-cost competitors"; do you suppose he was thinking of Corinthian (which, on at least one campus, cooked job-placement numbers by paying other businesses a couple grand per head to "hire" graduates for 30 days or so before firing them, all so it could continue eating taxpayer money!) when he said that? Either way, being President requires better decision-making acumen than Mr. Rubio has demonstrated here.