Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: mostly very scary stories about the Republican Presidential clown car.

The Center for Effective Government releases "A Tale of Two Retirements," a report describing the gap between the retirement funding most people get and the retirement funding corporate CEOs get. A few of these CEOs are from corporations you may never have heard of, like the biggest CEO retirement package belongs to David Novak, CEO of YUM Brands. YUM Brands owns several well-known fast-food joints like Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, and while Mr. Novak will in all likelihood enjoy a retirement package of over $1 million per month, the employees who slave over those hot grills and friers will get bupkus. Income redistribution!

Dean Baker instructs us (among other things) that one of Marco Rubio's "new ideas" -- "flex-funding" welfare benefits -- is actually an idea that a) is 20 years old and thus old enough to take on six figures of college debt and b) failed. It is important to remember that, a lot of times, when right-wingers put forth "new ideas," they're actually failed, old ideas. You know, like tax-cuts-for-the-rich as "job creation." Shame the "liberal" media can't remember what fooled them last week, let alone what fooled them two decades ago.

Right-Wing Watch reminds us that, in an unusually succinct headline, "Ben Carson's Budget Plan Makes Absolutely No Sense." Key finding: his 10 percent flat income tax would bring in revenues of around $1 trillion, meaning that the federal budget deficit would balloon to $3 trillion. And he also insists that freezing, not cutting, federal spending would wipe out the deficit "in three or four years." I guess he figures if he says it calmly and confidently, it'll be true.

In a related development, Bryce Covert at Think Progress looks over Ted Cruz's tax plan and finds it wanting. Sen. Cruz would do a 10 percent flat income tax, too -- though his personal exemption would be rather larger than it is now, and he would also expand the EITC and the CTC -- and he'd close corporate tax loopholes and drop the corporate tax rate to 16 percent, which still wouldn't be better than the system we have now. Also, of course, the 10 percent flat tax would apply to capital gains, and (big shock!) he'd get rid of the Estate tax. When he says "imagine 4.9 million new jobs," "imagining" is all you'll be doing -- corporations won't create jobs if we "let" them; they'll only create jobs when we make them.

I've found the various tribulations of the Jeb Bush campaign as thought-provoking as anyone, but no matter how bad things look at a particular time, like now, I'd hesitate before declaring his candidacy "dead." Jeb Bush can take heart, so to speak, by recalling that John Kerry's campaign was similarly "dead" at this point in the 2004 cycle. And the Right to Rise SuperPAC, which just so happens to be dedicated to electing Jeb Bush, is still sitting on a huge pile of money, regardless of spending cuts at the Bush campaign proper (which he will never shut up about, if he recovers). Messrs. Trump and Carson have proven considerably more formidable than Herman Cain, but never count a bastard out.

Finally, the estimable Frank Rich, in similarly declaring Jeb Bush "finished," reminds us of something we may not always remember during the Obama Derangement Syndrome years: "(Jeb Bush) has seemed perpetually surprised by the heathens in the GOP’s midst. He should not have been. His own father, with his race-baiting Willie Horton campaign against Michael Dukakis, helped invite in the crazies. His brother and Karl Rove gave sotto voce encouragement to the gay-bashing forces of the religious right." I'd say the W/Rove axis inflamed "war on terror" crazies more than evangelical ones, but "establishment" Republicans who wring their hands about the "base" now should remind themselves: you reap what you sow.

Action: voting rights, and paid sick leave.

Astoundingly, neither House of Congress has acted on H.R. 2867/S. 1659, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, although the bill would put the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court (in Shelby County v. Holder) knocked out. The Court suggested that punishing Southern states and localities for voting rights violations committed decades ago isn't fair, but the majority also said that a pre-clearance formula that didn't depend on geography would be appropriate. Hence the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would require pre-clearance from states and localities that have demonstrated a pattern of voting rights violations over the last 15 years. Yet Congressfolk, when asked about the Voting Rights Advancement Act, still pretend the conversation is about punishing the South. Refusing to listen when the people are speaking clearly to you is evil -- so we must keep telling them until they finally do listen. People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act, so all eligible Americans can enjoy the freedom to vote.

Meanwhile, H.R. 932/S. 497, the Healthy Families Act, would mandate that businesses with more than 15 employees offer one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked, up to 56 hours annually (or seven full work days). Seven full work days of paid sick leave! It's a small step, but a necessary one. The Healthy Families Act doesn't mandate that small businesses with fewer than 15 employees offer paid sick leave, but it doesn't prevent it, nor does it prevent employers from offering more paid sick leave if they so choose. And employees could use this time to tend to their own illnesses or that of their families (be they children or elderly relatives). Paid sick leave may not be tremendously popular with today's Congressfolk, but it is very popular with their constituents -- i.e., their bosses -- and it's also becoming more and more popular with business and corporate leaders, who have figured out that it's better to give sick workers a day off than to compel them to come in and get sicker, and make other people sick. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Healthy Families Act.

Action: strong accounting standards, automatic voter registration, corporatist advisors, and corporate tax loopholes.

It's good news/bad news time! The good news? President Obama, after much public pressure, has nominated Georgetown law professor Lisa Fairfax to the Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC), instead of the corporatist lawyer he was reportedly considering. The bad news? Mary Jo White still heads up the SEC, and is as we speak actually considering weakening federal accounting standards that describe what publicly-traded corporations must reveal to the SEC about their financial health. Currently the standards force banksters to reveal whatever might make a reasonable investor act differently, but the SEC would let banksters reveal only that information that might reveal actual fraud. Would you, as an investor, want to know your corporation is going into the tank only when they're actually breaking the law? Or would you want fair warning of a corporation's health beforehand? Change these standards, and we might have another dozen Enrons. So CREDO helps you tell the SEC to require that corporations disclose all of what shareholders need to know.

Meanwhile, two states (Oregon and California) now automatically register citizens to vote when they renew drivers' licenses or photo IDs; why not make your state the third? Particularly when 39 states automatically register all men for the draft when they get their drivers' licenses? Legislators have introduced bills allowing automatic voter registration in 16 states; Republicans, naturally, raise the bugaboo of voter fraud, though they never tell you how often "voter fraud" actually occurs -- as if they're afraid you'll figure out they're full of soup! -- and when they say such bills put "private information out there," they're pretending every other form you have to fill out with the state doesn't. These bills streamline government bureaucratic procedures, too; aren't Republicans always complaining about bureaucracy? Or do they only care about "bureaucracy" when it costs some corporate crony of theirs some unearned money? So Roots Action helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to make voter registration automatic when you renew your drivers' license.

In other news, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, that champion of family values, will run for the House Speakership after all, after so much "hemming" and "hawing," and will likely win, after so much "hemming" and "hawing" from most right-wing House members. Naturally, he's determined to make a big splash by hiring corporatist lobbyist David Hoppe as his chief of staff. Perhaps he thinks Mr. Hoppe can offer invaluable, outsider advice about sorry I can't type the rest of that sentence without risking death from laughter. But Mr. Ryan, being as he will be almost completely in control of the legislation the House takes up, would be much better off not getting the bulk of his advice from a man who's made a career advising corporations to shirk their share of the tax burden by setting up "headquarters" no larger than a file in a filing cabinet in the Cayman Islands, a man who has lobbied for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as it has lurched so far right it's gone right off the map of America. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Mr. Ryan not to hire an unregenerate corporate lobbyist as his chief of staff.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to close the corporate tax loopholes that allow big corporations to pretend they make their profits "overseas" so they don't have to do their fair share to keep our civilization running, then Sign Here Now still helps you do that. How unpopular are overseas corporate tax loopholes now? Almost no one on the right defends them, aside from the few who still squawk about "job creators" like the last fourteen years of letting corporations do all the "job creating" hasn't beaten that lie to a bloody pulp. Even Ben Carson said we have to bring back offshored corporate profits on the Tom Joyner Morning Show last month. But right-wingers like Mr. Carson would impose a vastly-reduced tax rate on such profits, like Tha Bush Mobb did in 2004 -- and that would only encourage corporations to shove more of their profits overseas. We should compel corporations to pay the regular 35% rate on those profits. They'll still do fine; it's just that their CEOs just won't be able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Around the table: bacon as carcinogen, Black Friday as day off, hacking as security measure, and other ideas.

You've heard reports that ZOMG TEH BACUNZ CAUSEZ TEH CANCURZ LIKEZ TEH SMOKINGZ!!!!! Well, Sarah Zhang at Wired advises us that we should take that with the proverbial grain of salt. The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer did declare that the scientific evidence linking processed meat (including bacon) to cancer is as solid as the evidence for linking tobacco to cancer -- but that doesn't say bacon is as likely to give you cancer as tobacco is, and, the scientific evidence linking, for example, sunlight to cancer is equally strong. Verdict: you should of course eat fewer servings of processed meat, but you shouldn't go off the deep end worrying about it. If you're smoking, on the other hand, quit. I know it's hard, but do it.

Outdoor retailer REI declares it will not only close on Black Friday this year, but will give its employees a paid day off on that day. It's the right thing to do, letting workers spend time with their families, and it won't cost REI in the long run as much as Wall Street thinks, but the haters are already saying REI is a co-op and thus isn't as "hamstrung" in doing the right thing as big corporations with shareholders are, as if it's somehow unfair to organize your business as a co-op that's actually more accountable to your customers. But very few propagandists are good enough to provoke widespread sympathy for those poor, poor huge corporations that can't close on Black Friday because of money.

As you may know, the Copyright Office evaluates digital rights management (or DRM) exceptions every few years, and The Consumerist reports on the most recent exemptions. Gamers will be pleased to learn they can jailbreak games for local use where far-away servers have gone under, and security researchers can continue to hack into cars, medical devices, and voting machines as long as they don't cause anyone actual harm (i.e., hack into a pacemaker that someone's using). You still won't be able to move Kindle books to your new Nook, however -- apparently their creators feel the .mp3 file was a serious tactical error.

You've heard, perhaps, that Sen. Marco Rubio doesn't enjoy being in the Senate because things move so slowly? Well, the Miami Sun-Sentinel editorial board reminds us that the voters sent Mr. Rubio to the Senate to do a job, and if he doesn't like it, he ought to resign it, as Rep. Boehner did. They note, also, that Sens. Paul and Sanders have hardly missed any votes while campaigning, that Sen. Rubio is a hypocrite for calling out VA workers for failing to do their jobs when he's hardly at his own, and that Floridians actually have pressing issues, including "clogged highways" and "eroding beaches," requiring a staunch Senate advocate. This editorial contains all the campaign ad fodder Democrats would need to beat him soundly -- including Mr. Rubio's contention that "voting is not the most important part of the job." After John Kerry's voting record crippled him in 2004, you'd think Democrats would be sensitive to that.

In a perhaps related note, Ohio Gov. John Kasich says, at a debate "send-off" rally in western Ohio, that he's "about had it" with the "nonsense" in the Republican Presidential race. He may yet emerge as the establishment answer to Messrs. Trump and Carson, but let's remember that he'd govern this country as a far right-winger just as surely as the rest of them -- and he might be worse, since he'll have convinced everyone he's a "moderate" next to Messrs. Trump and Carson, when virtually anyone looks like a "moderate" next to those two. They love moving the center ever further right, when the real center in America is actually moving left.

Finally, courtesy one of our readers, here's a list of news sites, including some satirical ones and some other "satirical" ones, which pump out fake news that shows up in "liberal" media reports with alarming regularity. The list isn't comprehensive -- just yesterday I saw a "news" story from usatoday.com.co, which is most definitely not USA Today -- but it is instructive. Sadly, this development is more likely to provoke more "cybersecurity" legislation from Congress than to provide teachable moments about parsing truth from lies. I'd be happy to be proven wrong about that.

Action: freedom for Bassel Khartabil and a stay of execution for Ernest Johnson, plus "free" trade and the Alabama DMV scandal.

First things first. Earlier this week, we discussed the Syrian government's imprisonment of Bassel Khartabil, the man who made 3-D computer models of famous Syrian historical sites since destroyed by ISIS. Well, now we have a Change.org petition demanding Mr. Khartabil's release. In the wake of the Arab Spring protests that rocked oppressive governments all over the Middle East, the Syrian government arrested Mr. Khartabil in 2012, not long after that government started beating and killing good Syrian protestors. Mr. Khartabil has a long history fighting for open internet access in Syria -- which the Syrian government has, naturally, translated as "harming state security." Mr. Khartabil did some time at the Syrian network of detainment centers that Human Rights Watch calls "the torture archipelago," but when several publicly-known organizations wielded The Big Stick of Bad PR, they got the government to move him, at least, to a prison where his wife could see him -- but now they've moved him again without telling anyone where. So clearly the Syrian government is in desperate need of more embarrassment.

Also, the state of Missouri plans to execute Ernest Johnson on November 3, though Mr. Johnson is intellectually-disabled, and the U.S. Supreme Court has held, in Atkins v. Virginia, that executing intellectually-disabled folks violated the U.S. Constitution's 8th Amendment. (Which was not an Anthony Kennedy majority opinion, believe it or not -- though Justice Kennedy did join the majority opinion written by Justice Stevens.) But the state of Missouri has, apparently, ignored his I.Q. test of 67, ignoring his fetal alcohol syndrome, ignoring two brain injuries he suffered as a youth -- and honed in solely on his ability on the basketball court in arguing he's not disabled. Remember that time Ernest Johnson dropped 11 treys on the Lakers in 1984? No, you don't, because it never happened. Seriously, people are far more complex than Our Glorious Elites would have you believe; everyone has an ability you wouldn't expect, but no sane person would use that as an excuse to ignore the law. The execution's in November, but we have only a few days to tell the Governor to grant a stay and convene a Board of Inquiry, so the ACLU helps you do that.

In other news, Roots Action helps you tell the Congressional leadership of both parties to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," that nefarious "free" trade deal that would allow extralegal judicial bodies to nullify our laws if it costs some corporation money and would continue the death march of American jobs overseas. Of course, even though the centrist Democrat Hillary Clinton has come out against the TPP, supporting the TPP remains a "bipartisan" cause; still, our duty is the same no matter what our Congressfolk think. And their arguments favoring the TPP are becoming ever more desperate: President Obama essentially told the world that folks opposing the TPP are liars, Larry Summers slathered us with booga-booga about China before making promises he obviously never intended to keep about listening to the people more next time. Lately, Sen. Hatch, no great friend of labor or the environment, raised his hackles about inadequate protections for big pharmaceutical corporations, and Sen. Tillis expressed displeasure with proposals cutting off big tobacco access to the TPP's tribunals. Still, this is no time for complacency.

Finally, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch still hasn't moved to investigate Alabama's suspicious closings of over 30 DMV centers all over the state -- closings supposedly forced by the state's budget troubles, but we're not idiots. Strict Voter ID laws plus closed DMVs equals a crapload of good Alabamans who won't be able to vote in elections because they can't get the photo ID they need. Gov. Robert Bentley has since announced that the DMVs will be open one day a month. Gosh, that's twelve days between now and Election Day 2016! Who wants to bet they'll all be weekdays? When folks have, you know, jobs they can't just blow off to truck down to what will obviously be a very overcrowded DMV? The generosity of our politicians, it just kills me. Voter ID laws put unfair burdens on the same poor, senior, and minority folks who haven't needed photo ID and who generally don't vote Republican because Republicans only show them the back of their hand. But, presumably, we still have a federal government that cares about these things, so CREDO helps you tell our Attorney General to investigate Alabama's DMV shenanigans.

Around the table: why the word "bipartisan" should make you afraid, and other life lessons.

U.S. Senate passes the nefarious CISA bill by a 74-21 margin. Yay bipartisanship! Democrats and Republicans coming together to screw their constituents! The good news? We managed to get it put off this long, and the Senate and the House still have to conference out a bill that can avoid the President's veto pen. One hopes they just say fuggedaboutit since there's an election on, but we're better off counting on our action than on their laziness.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches a factoid from a satire website making its way not just onto Sean Hannity's TV program, but Donald Trump's stump speeches and mainstream TV news. Real News Right Now is yet another "satire" site that just isn't good enough at satire to avoid this kind of confusion and you have to wonder if that's the point. Will Sean Hannity ever offer a correction to his viewers? Will his viewers ever wonder why Mr. Hannity might have been a little less-than-stringent about his fact-checking in that particular instance? I kid, of course.

The EPA will propose a rule that would compel plants processing natural gas to report their release of toxic chemicals. Gas drilling corporations get to keep the chemicals they use a secret from the public, thanks to that energy bill from 2005, but I presume that the plants processing the gas don't enjoy the same protection from the law. At best, it's a lateral move against gas drilling pollution; it may work, but I prefer to hit these things head-on.

Hey, were you just wondering how Gravity Payments, the corporation whose CEO decided to raise his employees' minimum wage to $70,000 annually over the next few years, was doing? Well, their revenues and profits have doubled since the announcement, while customer retention also went up and new customer inquiries went sky-high. Don't shed a tear for the two employees who quit, though, since (as you may recall) in July the New York Times was perfectly happy to air their grievances like they were the only grievances that mattered.

Finally, Ben Carson instructs us that not only wouldn't he sign a budget that raises the debt ceiling as President (though his wording leaves open the possibility that he'd sign a debt ceiling hike in separate legislation), but also that "I think the time to address that is at the beginning of the fiscal period, not at the end, because then you have other options." That's yet another statement that, back in the day, would have finished a Presidential campaign -- tell us, again, Dr. Carson, how it's more prudent to get things done early! -- but it also ignores the fact that Republicans wanted a government shutdown crisis and a debt ceiling crisis intertwined, because they thought it would make President Obama fold.

UPDATE. Mr. Hannity claims he got the "250,000 new refugees" figure cited above not from the Real News Right Now site, but from a September AP report quoting Secretary of State Kerry. I'll happily concede it's possible he got the number there, and maybe even that he or someone on his staff did the addition, but of course his defense opens him to new charges. For one, he did not previously say the 250,000 refugees represented three calendar years' worth of refugees, nor did he mention that the average number of refugees accepted by the United States annually since 1980 is about 83,000, which (surprise!) is almost 250,000 when multiplied by three years -- and both of these are, sadly, standard stratagems for folks both left and right who employ scare numbers. He is also incorrect to suggest that he had always said the refugees weren't just coming from Syria and Iraq; on both October 19 and 20, he offered the figure in the context of discussing Syrian and Iraqi refugees. One cannot read these statements differently without willfully misinterpreting them. So, as long as Sean Hannity commits larger crimes with numbers and context, he can take his little addition lesson and cram it.

Action: government spying, energy efficiency, methane regulation, and "banning the box."

Word on the street is that the U.S. Senate will vote on S. 754, the Cybersecurity Information Security Act, today, so Stopcyberspying.com helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject S. 754. You no doubt know why they should reject this bill -- it would make it much, much easier for big telecom corporations to hand over all your private data to the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA, regardless of whether you've actually done anything wrong or are the actual target of an actual investigation, and would also do nothing to address real cybersecurity issues, like encryption, malware, and bad network management. And the bill would also -- because big telecom corporations are so vital to American civilization that they must be protected from the consequences of their bad actions! -- grant broad immunity to those corporations that violate your rights in sharing your data. Even worse, though, the bill's own main sponsor, Richard Burr of North Carolina, has actually admitted that S. 754 won't actually prevent cyberattacks, but merely "limit the damage" afterward. That's not security, folks. This anti-freedom bill must die.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state Senate plans to vote, as early as today, on SB 805, which would slash funding to Act 129 energy efficiency programs. How? By allowing the Commonwealth's biggest energy gobblers to opt out of funding the program. Why, that's like allowing the country's biggest income earners to pay less in taxes than everyone else! Everyone who pays an electric bill in Pennsylvania has to pay a fee dedicated to Act 129 energy efficiency programs, so under SB 805, most good Pennsylvanians will still have to pay the fee, but the fattest cats won't. It must be because state politics aren't all that sexy, or "fees" aren't all that sexy, that politicians get away with such mess, because pretty much everyone favors more efficient energy production. And note to the "sun tax" crowd: letting the biggest energy users off the hook for paying into a system that benefits all of us is the very definition of a "free rider." The Sierra Club helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Senator to reject the anti-energy efficiency, anti-civilization, pro-fat cat bill SB 805.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA to enact the most vigorous methane pollution regulations possible, then the League of Conservation Voters still helps you do that. What's the trouble with methane? Methane is a far more efficient carrier of global warming emissions than coal emissions, and we're doing more and more fracking in America, and fracking isn't just a source of the chemical pollutants that get in our water tables and make our water unsafe to drink, wash with, or bathe in -- it's also a source of methane emissions, and the methane emissions problem with gas drilling is bad enough that a whole industry (the methane mitigation industry) now exists to deal with it. Right-wingers might call that job creation, but we don't need to cause (or enable) screw-ups just to create jobs. In fact, if folks are free from the kinds of pollution that makes them less healthy, they'll be free to create the kinds of jobs a truly sane, moral, and healthy civilization creates. Why not bring about that better world? Because fossil fuel corporations don't like it?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to issue an executive order mandating that federal employers and contractors stop asking job applicants about their criminal records, then Color of Change still helps you do that. This is better known as the "Ban the Box" campaign, because often in job applications you have to check a box if you've been convicted of a crime; banning the box doesn't prevent employers from doing background checks later, but it does give the applicant more of an opportunity to put forward their qualifications and aptitudes. See, that's what it's about -- giving folks trying to put their past behind them more opportunity. It's pointedly not about hamstringing employers' ability to find the people they want to hire, but it would help both sides if folks previously convicted of crimes can put their best foot forward. And folks who can't get work after they get out of jail often land right back in jail, which does not speak well of a society that aims to rehabilitate prisoners. Getting our government to "ban the box" is a step toward that goal.

Around the table: Tony Blair, higher education, Sam Brownback, Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and "slower money."

British ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair admits that the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which he supported wholeheartedly, helped create ISIS. Awfully big of him to say that, being so safely ensconced from the consequences of his decisions. Plus, he says "(i)t's not clear to me that, even if our policy did not work, subsequent policies have worked better," as if "our policy" didn't make the pursuit of alternate policies much, much more difficult.

Paul Buchheit at Nation of Change writes another link-filled primer, this time on what's wrong with higher education. Long story short: the number of administrators has exploded, more and more faculty members are becoming low-paid adjunct professors, tuition has increased three times faster than inflation, and college sports have become "modern minstrel shows." Long story somewhat shorter: this is what happens when you have a captive market, and governments abdicate their responsibility to oversee it on our behalf.

Ft. Hays State University poll finds a mere 18 percent of Kansans were either "somewhat" or "very" satisfied with Sam Brownback's performance as Governor, with 61 percent specifically saying his cut-taxes-for-rich-people-and-create-unicorns economic policy is either a "failure" or a "tremendous failure." Kudos to the many commenters on this article who said that as long as Democrats don't offer a viable alternative, they'll never beat people like Sam Brownback. Sadly, when Mr. Brownback finds he's only 10 points lower than Barack Obama, he'll just claim that the President is dragging all of our ratings down.

David Corn at Mother Jones suggests that evangelicals may want to reconsider their support of Ben Carson, given that his devotion to his church, the Seventh Day Adventists, who believe that most evangelicals will fight the godly when Jesus returns. But evangelicals voted for a Mormon for President in 2012; it's not so much whom they're voting for as whom they're voting against. If purity were more important to them than winning (which would be my hope!), then Rick Santorum wouldn't be in 223rd place right now.

Ho hum, Donald Trump describes how hard a time he's had of it by telling you how he went into Manhattan with a "small loan of a million dollars" from his father back in the day. You'd think a guy so legendarily sensitive to how people talk would know how "a small loan of a million dollars" would sound to them. But then, his supporters have already made up their minds, and you know how it is with people who've already made up their minds.

Finally, Keith Harrington tells us "Why Slower Money is the Key to a Real Economic Recovery." It's not enough to merely decry the more-and-faster economic model of the Wall Street casino economy; we must also design new models that slow down or prevent speculation, like the Direct Public Offering (or DPO) that can't be sold back to companies right away or to third-party buyers at all. (The financial transaction tax, or "Robin Hood tax," gets a mention here as well.)

Action: war in the Middle East, big money in political campaigns, and the "sun tax."

With the situation in Syria deteriorating "in spite of" President Obama's unilateral air strikes, Just Foreign Policy helps you tell our government to give more help to Syrian refugees and negotiate with all parties, including Russia and Iran, to end the bloodshed. Right-wingers who think negotiation is for weaklings might want to check themselves to make sure they're not projecting, and when they point to the Iran negotiations as an example of how negotiating with your enemies is always wrong because you can't "trust" them, they should note the stringent inspection regime that agreement produced, and thus should not expect that just because Iran would be involved with these negotiations that we would simply "trust" Iran about anything in particular. They should also know that bombing everyone into the stone age is not a mark of strength, but a mark of weakness. Accomplishing peace, real peace where everyone's a stakeholder and everyone's accountable, is strength. Is it too much to ask that reasonable adults get more of the say about things in America than rage-filled right-wingers?

Meanwhile, Common Cause helps you tell the IRS to vigorously regulate the so-called "social welfare" non-profits that have been spending millions of dollars on political campaigning. 501(c)4 groups can keep their donors secret because they have, historically, been civic organizations doing things like publishing community newspapers and organizing community sports leagues, but groups like Crossroads GPS, the nefarious creation of Karl Rove, are somehow 501(c)(4) "social welfare" non-profits despite pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into political campaigns. Do they seriously want to argue that trying to elect knuckle-dragging Republicans who will clamp down on any government program that actually helps people promotes "social welfare"? I'd be glad to have that argument. The IRS's actual proposal suggests they're not the model of courage right now, their investigations into right-wing groups some years back being totally overblown by both the right and the "liberal" media, but the right thing to do is still the right thing to do, whether right-wingers whine about it or not.

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your state legislators to fight back against big fossil fuel corporations' attempts to cripple the solar power industry. So far, the "sun tax" initiatives pushed by groups like the Koch brothers -- you know, the ones that try to cripple home solar power creators' ability to sell their power to utility corporations, under the absurd reasoning that folks who spent tens of thousands of dollars to create their own power are "free riders" -- have occurred at the state level, and in the aftermath of the 2016 elections, however they turn out, that could well change, but we should fight for solar power at the state level before the battle goes nationwide. And that means going directly to the same state legislators far too prone to regurgitate whatever ALEC tells them to. We really do live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society when so-called "conservatives" try to stop people from making their own power, and try to destroy an industry adding jobs at twenty times the national average. But this is a democracy, so we can fix that.

Around the table: the thing that could kill Ben Carson's campaign, and other stories.

From Taegan Goddard's Political Wire, we learn that back in May, Ben Carson proposed replacing all health insurance with "health savings accounts" -- and that includes Medicare. So Ben-Carson-the-Medicare-killer might be the Ben-Carson-campaign-killer. But if the "liberal" media couldn't be bothered to report it the first time, I bet they're even less inclined to report it now. (We also learn that Mr. Carson thinks the Iraq war was a bad idea. What tremendous courage, to oppose a war more than twelve years after it's begun.)

Colorado citizens will mull a single-payer-style health care reform in a 2016 ballot initiative. But Colorado's plan doesn't actually get rid of the private insurers; it merely streamlines the way they collect money by assessing taxes instead of charging premiums, and it also puts the responsibility for running the system into an elected board of trustees, rather than the state legislature. It's not really single-payer, but it would probably be an improvement upon the Affordable Care Act.

Andy Greenberg at Wired writes about the Syrian citizen Bassel Khartabil, whose 3-D models of the ruins at Palmyra have become, in the wake of ISIS attacks upon Syrian historical treasures, a critical historical artifact. The Assad regime has imprisoned Mr. Khartabil for over three years -- and a la Kafka's Joseph K., probably hasn't charged Mr. Khartabil with anything -- but further efforts by scientists and historians to preserve Syrian history in 3-D models may yet wield the Big Stick of Bad PR and get Mr. Khartabil out. (As an aside, ISIS must be quite insecure to insist that respect for one's own history is itself blasphemous. Why do insecure people get all the say about everything? Because they are the best tools against democracy Our Glorious Elites could ever hope for.)

Jeb Bush, obviously flabbergasted that he's nowhere near being the front-runner in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination, has "remov(ed) senior staff from the payroll" and cut payroll by 40 percent, in an apparent effort to stay afloat. You're tempted to respond, "because nothing improves morale like cutting jobs and pay," until you remember that the Right to Rise SuperPAC, which is of course dedicated to Mr. Bush's election though not formally affiliated with Mr. Bush, still has a lot of money.

Finally, in Louisiana's all-in gubernatorial primary, Democrat state Rep. John Bel Edwards (no relation!) and Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter advance to the November runoff. Mr. Edwards garnered nearly 40% of the vote, to Mr. Vitter's 23%; but the two other Republican candidates running, public safety commissioner Scott Angelle and Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, garnered 19% and 15%, respectively, and though Mr. Dardenne certainly isn't Mr. Vitter's biggest fan, one would expect most of those votes to go to Mr. Vitter in the runoff. And I'm not sure Mr. Edwards is, well, different enough from Mr. Vitter to take advantage of all the bad press Mr. Vitter's been getting lately (most, but not all, of said bad press relating to Mr. Vitter's "very serious sin" first reported in 2007).

Around the table: how to talk about "democratic socialism," and other lessons.

Good news, everyone: thanks in part to your activism, the FCC has imposed a number of stringent caps on the phone rates prisoners pay. Gone are the monopolistic practices that charge prisoners as much as $14 per minute; in their place are rate caps lower than 22 cents per minute, plus additional caps on the "ancillary" fees phone corporations impose to squeeze prisoners for even more money. Stunning thing about the FCC's vote is that it was 3-2 -- meaning two out of five FCC commissioners might reasonably be accused of having hearts of stone.

In a peripherally related note, we have a highly interesting finding at the end of this article about automatic voter registration: Republican support for automatic voter registration dropped from 53 percent in March to 38 percent in June, after Mrs. Clinton spoke out in favor of it -- and that support went down to 28 percent once respondents were explicitly told that Mrs. Clinton supported it. If Republicans are trying to convince us they're not mindless drones with the same kind of emotional investment in politics that they have in their favorite sports teams, they're not doing a very good job of it by "changing their mind" about policies once they find out Some Hated Democrat supports it.

Eric Foner, writing in The Nation, says Bernie Sanders should talk about "democratic socialism" by invoking the history of American fighters for progress, instead of talking about how European societies work. I think Mr. Foner is 100 percent right (especially when he talks about Southern slaveowners as the out-of-control wealthy), and I'm not sure Mr. Sanders has given this matter enough thought. He might miss this opportunity, and that would be a shame. I'd be happy to be wrong, of course.

Dave Johnson asks, "(w)hat would you say if you learned that the same corporations funding...corporate-conservative anti-government 'deficit' propaganda actually owed the government more than $600 billion (billion with a 'b'), and another $90 billion each year?" I'd say, why do I never see this information in campaign ads? I mean, no one actually favors corruption.

Finally, Maine Gov. Paul LePage (E) actually says, out loud, that expanding public campaign financing would be like "giving your wife your checkbook." Then, like all bad comedians, he says the joke again, because it's always your fault you didn't laugh! Perhaps those of us who share checkbooks with our wives just aren't able to relate. Seriously, though, it's awfully mean to project all your faults onto other people the way he does.

Action: government spying, justice for Tamir Rice, sane work schedules for Urban Outfitters employees, and private prisons.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has taken up the so-called Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (S. 754); strange how quickly this supposedly gridlocked Congress can get to work on bills that would not actually make us safer, but would create broad government spying powers and would grant sweeping immunity to telecom corporations that violate the rights of their users. Anyone else think there's nothing wrong with doing good intelligence work and getting warrants? No one gets to throw 9.11 in my face when I say that, because Tha Bush Mobb simply failed to act on the good intelligence the FBI and the CIA gave them -- and then demanded more unconstitutional surveillance powers, rather than fixing their own mistakes. Anyway, S. 754 also, in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's words, doesn't address real cybersecurity issues like "unencrypted files, poor computer architecture, un-updated servers, and employees (or contractors) clicking malware links," so both the EFF and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee help you tell your Senators to reject CISA.

Meanwhile, you may have heard of the tragic shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland almost a year ago, where police shot Mr. Rice after receiving a 911 call about a "male black" carrying a gun in public. The 911 caller did suggest Mr. Rice's firearm was "probably a fake" and that Mr. Rice was "probably a juvenile," but the police officers on the scene apparently did not have that information, and later we learned that both officers, well, may have had problems serving black citizens, with one of them having been judged "emotionally unstable" by his last police department. One can criticize a kid for not realizing the kind of trouble he could get into if he waves around a fake firearm that looks fairly real from a distance, but that doesn't mean he deserved to be shot dead -- nor does it mean that Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty should drag his feet on bringing the case for prosecution of the two officers to a Grand Jury. Hence Color of Change helps you tell Mr. McGinty to step aside and let an independent special prosecutor handle the investigation.

In other news, the corporate clothing chain Urban Outfitters has dropped on-call scheduling for its retail employees -- but only in New York state, home to 16 of its 176 U.S. stores (12 of these 16 in New York City). Last I looked, America had 49 other states, and in these, Urban Outfitter retail employees will still be unable to consistently spend time with their families, arrange child care, or (heaven forfend!) hold a second job or go to school so they can get a better job. Urban Outfitters still wants the good PR from giving a few of their employees one week's notice of their work schedules, but they want to do that without doing all the work they need to do to earn that good PR. Hence Jobs with Justice helps you tell Urban Outfitters to end on-call scheduling for all of its employees, in all of its stores. Urban Outfitters does give off the vibe, with all its hipster/ironic/occasionally offensive clothing designs, that it thinks of places like Idaho and Utah (one store each) as flyover country. But let's not let Urban Outfitter actually treat workers there that way.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 3543/S. 2054, the Justice is Not for Sale Act, which would end outsourcing of our governments' prison functions to private contractors, then CREDO still helps you do that. Some of my compatriots on the left hasten to remind me that the vast majority of prisons in America are still publicly-run, to which I respond: so far! I certainly don't want to wait until the next generation of even more brazen far-right wingers sell off even more public functions to their cronies before I admit there's a problem. And there is a problem: prisoners in private, for-profit prisons go back to prison more frequently than those in public prisons, almost like that makes private prisons more money or something. The Justice is Not for Sale Act would not only wind down all federal, state, and local private prisons within three years, it would give the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau authority over prison phone rates and reinstate the parole system for federal prisoners that American hasn't had since 1984. Now that's negotiating!

Around the table: starring hypocrites, pimps, greedy CEOs, and reactionaries.

Daniel Drezner, writing at the Washington Post, still thinks Donald Trump will have a lot of trouble winning the Republican Presidential nomination. His two main points: Mr. Trump hasn't done the work that would actually turn voters out (like buy voter databases and hire field staff), and Howard Dean, also, looked fairly inevitable in 2004 "right up to the moment people voted." Mr. Drezner isn't the only one who's ever cited Howard Dean in suggesting that actually pulling the lever for Donald Trump might give a lot of folks pause once they're in the voting booth. But Democratic primary voters are a different animal than Republican primary voters -- I wonder what, if anything, gives the latter pause.

The "liberal" media has heavily reported Paul Ryan's desire to spend more time with family as an obstacle to him taking the Speakership, but Bryce Covert at Think Progress reminds us that Mr. Ryan has consistently opposed policies that would help poor working families achieve a similar work-life balance, like paid sick leave. It's one thing to walk the walk about work-life balance yourself, and another thing entirely to cut off poor people at the knees so they can't do the same, because you say it's a "culture problem" when people can't get jobs corporations aren't creating.

The incomparable Dave Zirin reminds us not to resort to false innocence or cynicism when confronting the Louisville basketball recruiting scandal, wherein the University of Louisville allegedly paid a "Louisville madam" to ply players and recruits with sex. The path of cynicism is always the wrong path -- I'd put "always" in shouty-caps, if I weren't philosophically opposed to shouty-caps -- but the path of false innocence, a path to which I'm just as susceptible as anyone else, also blinds us to the sexism of this apparent "recruiting tool." I mean, just because "everyone does it" doesn't mean it's not outrageous.

This Center for American Progress report tells us, in about as restrained a voice as is humanly possible, what's wrong with the economy: corporations don't invest in the future, despite high profits and low borrowing costs. The right counters that corporations just need more tax cuts, but we've had nearly four decades now of evidence that tax cuts haven't done much for the economy but have starved our government of necessary revenues. And though CAP won't come out and say it, I will: corporations won't invest because the CEOs want all the money for themselves. I'll say this, too: when we condemn corporations who only care about short-term profits, we're the conservatives in the room, not the corporate lackeys in the Republican party.

Finally, there's Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, again, saying that Adolf Hitler really didn't want to kill the Jews but the then-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was (of course!) a Palestinian, forced his hand. But you know what's getting lost in all the brouhaha about this, ah, questionable thesis? That Hitler killed the Jews. You'd think a "conservative hero" like Mr. Netanyahu would know to blame the people who actually do evil, rather than the people who "forced" them to do evil. But maybe Mr. Netanyahu doesn't get that because he's a reactionary, not a conservative, and reactionaries don't get anything but what makes them angry or hard.

Action: President Obama's new FDA nominee nay, junk food funding public schools nay, and healthy mothers and children worldwide yea.

CREDO helps you tell your Senator to oppose President Obama's nomination of Dr. Robert Califf as the new head of the Food and Drug Administration. Even the New York Times describes Dr. Califf as having "deeper ties to the pharmaceutical industry than any F.D.A. commissioner in recent memory," and we need that heading up the FDA like we need banksters in charge of regulating the economy. Seriously, folks who tell you that only big pharma flaks can truly understand all the myriad issues concerning drug safety are like the folks who insist only banksters understand banking well enough to regulate it -- they're either unaware of, or deliberately trying to slip past you, the simple fact that both arguments have obvious conflict of interest problems. You don't put criminals in charge of law enforcement because they "understand" crime, right? But this nomination is, apparently, the result of our President pre-emptively giving in to Republicans, who have a terrible habit of obstructing his nominees even when they're in the minority. We're not their hostages; we're free people, free to demand better.

Meanwhile, we learn that fast food corporation McDonald's has created the "McTeacher's Night," where school teachers serve up burgers, fries, and soda to their young students. It's supposedly to raise money for schools, but (stop me if you've heard this one before!) schools actually make very little money from these "fundraisers," and students get to have their teachers legitimize the junk food McDonald's sells, which sends mixed messages to children at a time when children are already absolutely swamped with TV ads about junk food. Somebody at McDonald's clearly thinks this is the most brilliant idea they ever came up with -- right down to the part where McDonald's takes 80 percent of the proceeds -- and if Scott Walker were still running for President, he'd call this "innovative" private sector thinking. Call me old-fashioned, but I think we should fund our schools properly and get our kids to eat right. Hence Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell McDonald's to stop using public school funding issues as a way of pushing their unhealthy products on their kids.

Finally, H.R. 3706/S. 1911, the Reach Every Mother and Child Act of 2015 (often called the "Reach Act" for short), would direct our government to figure out how to provide foreign aid in such a way as to "end preventable maternal, newborn, and child deaths globally within a generation." Though UNICEF tells us that we now see half the preventable child deaths we saw in 1990, we'd all prefer "none," and countries without consistent access to health care and clean water -- or peace! -- could sure use our help in achieving this goal. Indeed, that's really what foreign aid is for: helping people who need it, rather than helping some corporate crony get richer. So why, fundamentally, do we conduct efforts like this? Because people ain't free when they're dead, that's why -- and helping mothers and children survive what they previously might not have survived increases the number of people who can make the world better. So RESULTS helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Reach Act. I just hope that Donald Trump realizes that this effort is going to be his job if he becomes President.

Around the table: the end of the Jim Webb Experience, and other somewhat bigger stories.

Big pharmaceutical corporations have big problems with the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," big enough that it could get scuttled. But given that both left and right are now attacking the same part of the deal for different reasons, Mr. Obama could pick up a lot of support for the plan by saying, see, both sides hate it! It must be good! Which is rather like Solomon actually splitting the baby in half.

Paul Ryan now says he'll run for Speaker, if he can be a "unity candidate," i.e., one who's not completely controlled by the "Freedom Caucus." But I think this is all theatre. Paul Ryan may not be a member of the "Freedom Caucus," but he's surely one of them; the only difference between them is that he's willing to wait a little longer to turn America into dystopia. But I'm not sure how many members of the "liberal" media still fall for the notion that Paul Ryan possesses deep intellect and devotion to policy-making.

ProPublica wonders if the 21st Century Cures Act would "cure patients or the drug industry." The FDA, of course, has already "streamlined" its processes, if we measure by acceptance rates, but the real problem is the narrative that pits government regulation against innovation -- as if regulation never, ever spurs innovation, as if it's not the FDA's job to keep unsafe medical products off the market, as if a product that's unsafe could possibly be "innovative." Only if we're "innovating" on the definition of "safety" so that it includes things that aren't safe, amirite?

Ho hum, Good Jobs First releases a study finding that states actually give large corporations the lion's share of taxpayer assistance, regardless of how much they go on about their love of small businesses. Big corporations get 90% of the money states give out, and that's not counting programs that small businesses can't even reasonably take advantage of. The more testosterone-addled among us might say well, that's how it should be, because they're bigger! But, actually, "large corporations should get more assistance than small businesses" is not Newton's Fourth Law -- legislatures could write laws that only assist small businesses, though large corporations really, really wouldn't like that.

Finally, in a development that wasn't likely to be widely noted even before Vice President Biden's announcement yesterday that he wouldn't run for President in 2016, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb is ending his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, though he may make an independent run at the same office. It can't just be the "liberal" media's fault that Mr. Webb's unorthodox message, designed to sell left-wing economic populism to disenchanted white men, never resonated -- Mr. Webb doesn't seem to enjoy campaigning or fundraising (not that I blame him!), and Bernie Sanders has basically stolen whatever populist thunder Mr. Webb might have had. I doubt an independent Webb run would hand the Presidency to Donald Trump, though plenty of liberals would stupidly blame Mr. Webb if it did.

Action: "free" trade, school vouchers, voting rights, and predatory prison phone call rates.

The Trans-Pacific "Partnership," as you know, is a done deal, awaiting ratification by the various signatory nations, including ours. Roots Action's petition, with which you may tell Congress to reject the TPP, goes like this: "We are writing to urge the Congress to reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This agreement would destroy jobs, degrade the environment, undermine the Internet and weaken U.S. democracy and sovereignty." That's all true, and fairly succinct besides -- and if your Rep or Senator decides to write you back with a bunch of booga-booga about China or bipartisanship, remember that, as a citizen, you don't necessarily have to explain yourself to your Reps or Senators; you need only communicate your will. (They still have to explain themselves to you, of course -- and if they're snippy about that, well, they can always get another job, more easily than you or I can, I would think.) Public Citizen also helps you tell Congress to reject the TPP; their missive is a bit longer, if you prefer that (I go back and forth myself). Either way, the time to act, as usual, is now.

Meanwhile, the House plans to vote on H.R. 10 tomorrow; H.R. 10 would extend the voucher program in Washington, D.C. that allows taxpayer money to be diverted toward private and religious schools. See? House Republicans can get it together long enough to vote on bad ideas! Maybe next week they'll vote to put junk food back in public schools! But seriously, how does H.R. 10 harm the country? By diverting public money -- taxpayer money, your money -- away from the public schools that belong to you, the schools over which you have more control, toward private schools that will not necessarily accept your children, do not necessarily do a better job than public schools just because they're private, and are often religious schools. And making you, the taxpayer, pay to support religions you don't agree with? You'd think the "sincere religious belief" crowd would relate to that. But they do not, since the religious schools they'd fund are their people, and their people are always better than you. People for the American Way helps you tell your House Reps to reject the D.C. voucher program and reject H.R. 10.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the U.S. Attorney General to investigate whether Alabama's plan to shutter more than 30 DMVs across the state violates the Voting Rights Act, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. What do DMVs have to do with voting rights? Well, Alabama has one of them there Voter ID laws -- you know, the ones that make everyone produce photo ID at the voting booth even though hardly anyone actually commits the kind of voter fraud Voter ID laws supposedly protect against. And the most common place to go to get the photo ID that would satisfy Voter ID laws is the DMV. So why is Alabama closing 30 more DMVs? Well, they say it's because of "budget problems," but lots of states have budget problems, particularly in the last seven years or so, and very few of them resort to this manner of "resolving" them -- and surprise, surprise, the DMV closures will disproportionately affect black folks, rural folks, and seniors, many of whom have been voting for longer than many Alabama state legislators have been alive! So, yeah, let's try to kill this rubbish.

Finally, the FCC is mulling whether to stop phone corporations from charging prisoners and their families more than 20 times the cost of a phone call made on the outside, and they could issue new regulations in mere days. So if you haven't done it already, Sum of Us helps you tell the FCC to cap the predatory phone rates some big telecom corporations charge prisoners to keep in contact with their families. Should families have to pay thousands of dollars annually to keep in touch with their loved ones in jail -- particularly when we know that the more contact prisoners have with their families, the less likely they'll backslide once they're out of jail? If you think the answer is "yes," you should point out exactly where judges have issued sentences including "gouging the prisoner for phone calls to his/her family." Too many Americans still think it's OK to pile on whatever punishment they think prisoners deserve (never mind what society has already given them!) to prove they're tougher than everyone else. But this is a civilized society, so they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Around the table: explaining socialism, the death of Twitter, and fantasy football, while stupid right-wingers still defy explanation.

Realizing that outing himself as a "Democratic socialist" might require some explanation, Sen. Bernie Sanders announces he'll give a speech on the matter, previewing it to an Iowa City audience by reminding them that public libraries, police departments, and fire departments are basically socialist institutions. His instinct to do this now (with over a year to go before Election Day) is spot on, and hopefully he also has the instinct to explain it again and again without getting exasperated (after all, who hasn't needed difficult concepts explained to them more than once?). But if the "liberal" media refuses to cover it or covers it badly -- which is not exactly a losing bet -- he'll have a much tougher time of it.

Donald Trump suggests that 9.11 wouldn't have happened on his watch because he's "extremely, extremely tough on illegal immigration." It's one thing to say you wouldn't have ignored the warnings from various CIA and FBI operatives pre-9.11, or that you wouldn't have been so obsessed with Saddam Hussein that you took your eye off Osama bin Laden -- and it's another thing entirely to say 9.11 wouldn't have happened under your watch because you just would have been tougher, never mind exactly how. When the Donald's in the room, you can cut the testosterone with a knife. Recall the testosterone-addled man who occupied the Oval Office on 9.11 and you'll know that's not a compliment.

Umair Haque, writing at Medium, tells us "Why Twitter's Dying and What You Can Learn From It." Long story short: people abuse each other on Twitter, not just with "violent threats," but "the endless bickering, the predictable snark, the general atmosphere of little violences that permeate the social web...and the fact that the average person can’t do anything about it," like, you know, call a cop. I might describe the problem somewhat differently: folks mistake Twitter for a community when it's merely a tool you might use to create or strengthen a community. But he makes other great points, too many to list here, frankly, and you can't argue with the moral compass of a man who seems to feel physical pain at the uttering of the word "monetization."

Bill Scher reminds us, in wondering why today's Republican Presidential candidates never seem to criticize the Republican-held Congress, remembers that then-Gov. George W. Bush slammed the House in 1999 for trying to delay Earned Income Tax Credit payments to working families, saying "I don’t think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor." That would be a much more interesting anecdote if George W. Bush didn't go on to govern America for eight years as a far right-winger, little interested in governing, mostly obsessed with posturing for some rage-addled segment of the electorate or other.

Wired asks if you need "skill or dumb luck" to win at fantasy sports, like fantasy football. Short answer: yes! As this year's Peyton Manning owners no doubt know very well, success in a fantasy football league is still at some level a crapshoot, no matter how much homework you've done beforehand (and you can do a lot). But while the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 prohibited internet gambling except for fantasy sports (which the law explicitly calls a game of skill), this law doesn't pre-empt state law, so states also get to determine whether a game has a particular "skill level" -- though states haven't made such determinations consistently, to say the least.

Finally, Kennedy Montgomery, discussing a study concerning how attractive men find women who are smarter than them, suggests that at least one of the women conducting the study "has maybe had a very tough time meeting gentlemen in her life." And she goes on: "I’m not saying that I know the woman or know anything about her," before slamming her some more. Yikes, if you don't know anything, then why open your mouth? Perhaps more precisely, why do people think being a jerk is funny?

Action: war in Afghanistan, environmental regulation in Pennsylvania, and sentencing reform in America.

As you know, President Obama has reversed course somewhat in Afghanistan, saying he'll leave almost 10,000 troops there through 2016 and then more than 5,000 troops there afterward -- but, as you also know, President Obama promised he'd end the war in Afghanistan for-real for-real, so CREDO helps you remind President Obama to keep his promise to end the 14-years-and-counting Afghanistan war. Not that we should be surprised -- he said he'd end the Iraq war, too, before beginning his unauthorized-by-Congress air strikes in Syria purportedly designed to attack ISIS. Still, a man does become concerned with his legacy six or seven years into his Administration, and a man does become concerned, also, with the multitudinous promises he's made that he hasn't kept. At least you'd like to think so! We're not exactly dealing with a promising military situation there, either -- the corrupt Afghanistan government can't seem to get by without us, and they need a lot more of our help than we're willing to give. I was long a proponent of the get-bin-Laden-get-out school. Well, we got bin Laden, so we should have gotten out long ago.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state legislature apparently plans to take up, as early as today, HB 965/SB 562, which would impede the ability of the state to implement and enforce environmental regulations. We strive to impede the ability of the state to spy on us and throw us in jail when we haven't done anything wrong, but we strive to improve the ability of the state to keep big corporations from polluting our air and water, and we do both of these things because we love freedom -- not just the freedom from state harassment, but the freedom to be healthy and pursue happiness. And no, corporate titans do not "exercise their right to pursue happiness" when they try to cajole legislatures into passing bills that would reduce public transparency on regulatory changes and allow Assembly committees to essentially nullify regulatory changes without actually going through the trouble of passing laws -- they're running roughshod over our right to pursue happiness. So both the Sierra Club and Penn Environment help you tell the Pennsylvania state legislature to respect the regulatory process and reject HB 965.

Finally, Congress comes back to work today, and the Senate Judiciary Committee might actually act on S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, beginning with a hearing on sentencing reform today. S. 2123 wouldn't gut the mandatory minimum sentencing regime in America, but it would take steps toward making that regime less repressive -- it would reduce some mandatory minimum sentences, give judges more room to give non-violent drug offenders sentences lower than the relevant mandatory minimums, and would apply previous mandatory minimum reforms retroactively, i.e., to prisoners who were sentenced before the reforms went into effect. When we supported the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, you may recall, we wanted current federal prisoners to be eligible for the reduced mandatory minimums the law mandates, and couldn't get it; with S. 2123, we can. The bill isn't everything a good American could want, but it will put us in a good position to get more of what we want in the future. Hence the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Senator to support reasonable sentencing reform in America by supporting S. 2123.

Around the table: of constructive economic policy and disruptive technology.

Boo hoo, the super-rich need therapy, too, because of the unique problems of having wealth. As if the rich aren't "isolated" because building a society that worships wealth above all isolates all of us, or this isolation isn't so often a conscious aim of the super-rich. If the "liberal" media were actually making the people who crapped all over our economy feel "ashamed," my response would be bravo! But when one "wealth psychologist" says "I am not necessarily comparing it to what people of color have to go through" before going ahead and comparing it to what people of color have to go through, I'm reminded that there are still far too many "liberal" media folks who'd tell a struggling black man to "start with the man in the mirror" but would never say that to John Paulson.

The New York Times runs a story claiming that increasing taxes on the rich would actually do quite a lot, but it doesn't go all the way. The return of the 91% tax bracket still apparently has the name of Voldemort to the "liberal" media, and no it is not true that we should not bring back the 91% tax bracket because "at some point, higher tax rates would discourage extra investment and work" -- it would make CEOs pay themselves less with corporate revenues, and then shield those revenues from taxation by hiring people to make stuff, which would go a long way toward bringing back a thriving middle class.

Robert Reich argues that Hillary Clinton's Wall Street policy prescriptions won't be enough. Mr. Reich approves of the thrust of her plan, which would impose fees on banks that depend less on deposits and more on short-term funding, and would regulate mutual funds and hedge funds more stringently, but Mr. Reich argues it won't be enough, simply because the banksters are too politically powerful now, so we ought to break them up. I concur -- not just because I've long said the biggest enemy of the small bank is the big bank, but because banksters resist any change, this after they took a massive crap all over the economy. You'd think they'd feel shame or something.

Cade Metz at Wired tells us why the internet porn business isn't as "ridiculously lucrative" as it was, say, 10 years ago. Long story perhaps a bit too short: it's now ridiculously easy to see porn for free on your home computer -- to the point where it's become a "low-margin" business, in the testimony of one porn app entrepreneur -- while at the same time it's actually quite difficult to get porn on the smartphones most folks use to surf the internet these days. There's a bit more to the story than that, but that's the jist of it.

Finally, Ana Swanson at the Washington Post covers actual disruptive technologies, and concludes that the most disruptive technology of the last 100 years is the refrigerator. And, if you think about it, it's true: as another writer says, "(a) whole arsenal of home preservation techniques, from cheese-making to meat-smoking to egg-pickling to ketchup-making, receded from daily use within a single generation." This and other technologies (including the dishwasher, the clothes-washer, and the vacuum cleaner) resulted in a big drop in the time working families spent on meal-prep, laundry, and house-cleaning: from 58 hours weekly in 1900 to just 18 in 1970. (Remind your libertarian friends, though, that without clean water regulations and product safety laws, there'd be much fewer of us around to celebrate these labor-saving devices.)

Around the table: attack of the blueshirts.

Bernie Sanders Has a Secret Weapon and the Media Elites Just Don't Get It," announces The Nation -- his secret weapon being "the gift of plain speech." I'd diagnose the problem slightly differently -- that the "liberal" media ignore Mr. Sanders's gift, while playing up the absurdly overheated pronouncements of Donald Trump and Ben Carson as evidence that they, somehow, possess "the gift of plain speech."

Speaking of Mr. Sanders, we learn that he actually rejected a $2,700 donation from the so-called "pharma bro," Martin Shkreli. You remember, the fellow who bought that toxoplasmosis drug and promptly jacked up its price fiftyfold, immunocompromised patients be damned? Naturally, Mr. Shkreli again suggests that without exorbitant drug prices, "innovation" won't happen. Always with the hostage-taking, these rich people -- "let me jack up drug prices fiftyfold, or the innovation gets it!"

Surprise, surprise, John Kasich's tax plan is negligibly better than any of the other Republican Presidential candidates' tax plans -- he'd hike the EITC, but he'd repeal the Estate tax, cut corporate taxes, cut investment income taxes, and cut the top income bracket from 39.6% to 28%. The moral of this story: we shouldn't praise John Kasich for sounding reasonable every once in a while -- we should excoriate the others for sounding reasonable so little of the time.

RNC Chairman Reince Preibus says that if Republicans don't win the 2016 Presidential election, "we're cooked as a party for quite a while." Dramatic much? If Republicans could claw out of the hole they dug for themselves in 2008, they can surely get out of this much shallower hole. All they'd have to do is obstruct the Democratic President on everything and then have their corporate cronies gin up a new "grassroots" movement the way they ginned up the Tea Party.

Finally, Trump supporter in a blue T-shirt curses and spits on a pro-immigration protestor. I concocted a nice theory explaining this incident -- that everyone thinks violence is wrong, but everyone who actually commits violence insists that whatever provoked them to violence was unique and justified. But upon further reflection I'll stick with my old theory, that a good chunk of the American electorate -- the same folks who insisted that criticizing Bush the Lesser was treason and then became teabaggers -- just likes being enraged and getting attention for being enraged. In that spirit, I propose that we call such people blueshirts.

Action: supporting free speech in Saudi Arabia, tax relief for working families, and campaign spending disclosure for federal contractors.

A few weeks back, good folks started pressuring world governments to urge Saudi Arabia to cancel the execution of 21-year-old activist Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr, and since then the governments of the United Kingdom and France have started to apply such pressure on the Saudi government. Guess which government hasn't? That's right, our government, beacon of freedom and hope around the world. You'd think even a teabagger could find it in his heart to oppose the sentencing of a 17-year-old to death just for exercising his free speech rights, let alone beheading him, crucifying him, and displaying his body in public for three days like we all live on Game of Thrones. So why has our putatively liberal Administration done nothing? Surely it doesn't need Mitch McConnell's permission to condemn Saudi Arabia not merely for being barbaric, but for breaking its own laws (Saudi Arabia ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1996, which gives that Convention the force of law there). Hence Avaaz helps you pressure our government to try to keep Saudi Arabia from executing a political prisoner.

Meanwhile, you know how Congress constantly wrings its hands over the "tax extenders" that basically comprise welfare handouts for corporations? And how little Congress ever thinks about the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or Child Tax Credit (CTC), which give actual tax relief to working families? It's well past time to change the conversation about tax credits, so the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the 2009 improvements to the EITC and the CTC permanent. Making big corporate "research" tax credits permanent won't create jobs -- working people with more money in their pockets is what creates jobs. In fact, it's the only really dependable way to create jobs. Big corporate tax credits don't create jobs so much as they create richer corporate executives. And one more time, the EITC and the CTC aren't "handouts" -- they help folks get through, and they stimulate the economy, but they don't make people quit their jobs and stay home and watch Matlock reruns all day. (I do recommend watching Matlock reruns in your spare time, by the way.)

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to issue an Executive Order mandating that federal contractors disclose their campaign spending, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. Imagine, President Obama actually being able to do something good for the American people without having to run to Super Great and Awesome Real American President Mitch McConnell for approval. Sadly, it's easier to imagine than to witness: Mr. Obama has been making noise about signing such an Executive Order for literally years now, and we still haven't seen it, even though money is not speech, even though a similar initiative mulled by the SEC got over a million comments in favor, even though campaign ads are almost certainly the least popular thing anyone could see on TV, even though polling tells us two-thirds of Republicans think the Supreme Court screwed up in Citizens United. You'd think that famed seeker of bipartisan consensus Barack Obama would be able to tell when bipartisanship all but shouts in his face. I guess we just have to keep telling him.

Around the table: the "liberal" media, social benefits, charter schools, legal loansharking, drug legalization, and a living wage.

Ho hum, numerous polls (even ones done by "liberal" media outlets!) find that viewers thought Bernie Sanders "won" Tuesday night's Presidential debate, and by landslide margins, but "liberal" media pundits mostly claim that Hillary Clinton "won" it. We should speak as little of "winning" as possible, since this is not a sporting event, but it does behoove us to note that Our Glorious Elites do seem to grade Their Preferred Candidates on a curve.

Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post tells us that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders "need each other" for Democrats to succeed. Which anyone knows, if they've attended how Republicans have used their "Tea Party" and "establishment" "wings" to transmute governing failure into electoral success. But don't miss Mr. Meyerson's excellent analysis of why "social benefit" programs do better in Europe than here. It has less to do with everyone in America thinking we're temporarily-embarrassed millionaires and more to do with workers getting major representation on foreign corporate boards.

The Columbus Dispatch finds Ohio charter schools performing rather less well than the Ohio Department of Education said they were in a federal grant application. The corruption revealed within is truly breathtaking -- even the man who resigned two days after "scrubbing" data in the application still looks like a crook. Jesus Mary and Joseph what is wrong with accountability? Besides the fact that it makes it harder to steal taxpayer money for doing a bad job, I mean.

Zeke Faux at Bloomberg Business writes about two formerly ultrareligious Jewish men from Brooklyn who made millions in the "merchant cash advance" business, where you loan money to small businesses at usurious rates but get around the law by not calling what you're giving out a loan. The two gentlemen are mildly interesting, I suppose -- they were dirt poor growing up, got cynical about religion like most teenage boys do, and enjoyed working with developmentally-disabled adults in their early 20s -- but they morphed into the kind of bosses who'd steal your chair if you weren't making them enough money, which is, I suppose, what making tons of money without doing any real work will do to you.

Radley Balko asserts that the proliferation of methamphetamines doesn't argue for making drugs illegal so much as it argues for legalizing them -- not only with data showing that cracking down on meth hasn't reduced meth use (or, more specifically, meth lab raids), but with a new finding that meth prices go down in Kentucky counties that prohibit alcohol. As the late Sam Kinison once said, "if you give us back the pot, we'll forget about the crack." Drug addiction does take away your freedoms as surely as any government or corporation, but a civilized society could manage drug addiction in more or less the way Mr. Balko describes.

Finally, Fox News's Andrea Tantaros says waitstaff won't "work their tail off" if they get a higher wage instead of getting tips. She seems to have a very low opinion of people, if she thinks a living wage will represent the end of most people's ambitions (what, no waiter ever wants to become a manager? Or a restauranteur, even?) -- and what she might call "ambition" I might call desperation. But Jesse Watters's answer -- "I like to be able to slap down a fat tip to impress the waitress. Don’t take that away from me. I like to be able to show off a little bit" -- is considerably worse. Conservatism was not, last I looked, about "whatever gets you hard."

Action: corporate tax avoidance, antibiotic abuse in feed animals, and the proposed Charter/Time-Warner merger.

Sign Here Now helps you tell Congress to force American corporations to bring back the more than $2 trillion they've socked in offshore tax havens and pay their fair share on it. That last part's important -- even some Republican Presidential candidates favor bringing that money back home, but they also favor those corporations paying far less than the 35% corporate tax rate on it. So those corporations can "create jobs," they'll say, even though the last corporate tax amnesty from 2004 didn't result in a whole lot of job creation -- in fact, some of the corporations that brought home the most money back then cut jobs and paid out the profits they returned to shareholders. That's not a way to create jobs -- giving corporations no choice but to create jobs is how you create jobs, since corporations all seem to regard jobs as an "expense," rather than an engine of economic development. Plus letting corporations bring home profits at a lower rate only makes them sock more money overseas. Your mama taught you that enabling bad behavior creates more of it; why don't our Congressfolk know that?

Meanwhile, USPIRG helps you tell Congress to ban antibiotic abuse in feed animals. Factory farms, as you know, give nearly four out of every five antibiotics produced in America to healthy feed animals, partly to make them "meatier" and partly so they can better endure the horrendous conditions they'll face in factory farms (standing in absurdly small areas, usually in their own poop, et cetera). But we know that creates superbugs, and USPIRG projects that some 80,000 Americans will get the infamous superbug MRSA this year, and since MRSA can't be killed with the antibiotics we have, it's too often deadly, killing around 11,000 good Americans every year. It's not the only thing causing antibiotic-resistant superbugs, but when we're using four out of five antibiotics on animals that aren't actually sick, we know it's contributing a lot. And no, the end of routine antibiotic use on factory farms won't mean TEH END OF CHEAP FOOD!!! But if it did, wouldn't it be worth it, you know, not to have to go back to the 19th century where the next cut you get could kill you?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to stop Charter's attempt to buy Time-Warner Cable, then Common Cause still helps you do that. We applied enough pressure to help stop Comcast's attempt to buy Time-Warner, but this merger will be little different: it would create another cable/broadband behemoth like Comcast, and the resulting behemoth would control both the New York and Los Angeles cable and broadband markets, and are good New Yorkers and Los Angelenos less deserving of cable and broadband choice than the rest of us? Not that we have very much of it, either -- most markets are dominated by one provider or another, meaning consumers become captive to whatever lousy service that provider wants to charge ever-higher prices for. And don't let right-wingers tell you that you have information choices on the internet, for these are the same people trying to kill the net neutrality that allows you the choice you have, and having a choice of one corporation providing that internet service is little better than voting in a Communist election.

Around the table: more observations about the ongoing slow-motion wreck that is American politics.

William Greider, writing at The Nation sees in the ongoing GOP House caucus chaos "the final unraveling of Nixon's 'Southern strategy.'" That is, perhaps, an optimistic assessment. I'm more inclined to think that voters swayed by the Southern strategy don't really want to accomplish anything -- they want to feel rage and then get attention for their rage, which means the business wing of the party can eventually patronize them and then go back to using them to win elections. One can only hope the business wing of the party is as bad at strategy as they now are at business.

In a related note, Francis Wilkinson says that the "Archconservatives' Real Enemy is Democracy." That's true, of course -- a lot of far-right fools will reveal as much with startlingly little prodding -- and I'm glad to see that Mr. Wilkinson also sees no difference between the Freedom Caucus's aims and "mainstream" Republican aims. But could he kick the word "conservative" out of his description of the far right? They don't deserve it. They deserve the word "reactionary."

Mike Huckabee -- he's still running for President, isn't he? -- says "I trust Bernie Sanders with my tax dollars like I trust a North Korean chef with my labrador!" Now that he's had the "courage" to say something that racist, maybe he'll jump to double-digits in the polls! Seriously, though, the sight of grown men jumping up and down to get attention gets downright sickening after a while.

Various Republicans declare they're disgusted with the Senate filibuster and would like to get rid of it. They shouldn't -- they should make Senators earn it by actually talking. Both parties have been absolutely ridiculous about this matter in recent years, each one declaring it an evil when they're in the majority and a necessity when they're in the minority with no apparent recollection of having ever felt differently. But Republicans should consider that if they get rid of the filibuster, and Democrats win the Presidency and retake the House and the Senate in 2016 (not outside the realm of possibility, this!), and actually do some good things for the American people, Republicans might lose their low-turnout midterm advantage in 2018.

Finally, "sources" say that Sen. McConnell (E-KY) wants "significant changes" to Social Security and Medicare, along with a rollback of clean water regulations, in exchange for getting a budget passed and raising the debt limit. Never mind "negotiation" -- in a sane and healthy society, supporting these policy initiatives (let alone holding our government's funding and credit hostage to them!) would destroy political careers, for who besides an ideologue supports dirty water or a weakened Medicare or Social Security? But I guess that just means we have a lot more work to do.

Action: featuring political prisoners, banksters, and fossil fuel corporations.

First things first. The government of Iran has imprisoned Bahareh Hedayat since 2010, for "crimes" including "insulting the President," "insulting the Supreme Leader," protesting discrimination against women, and writing a letter encouraging other good Iranians to continue struggling peacefully for change. Oh, and also "gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security," which is what they all say when all their "charges" make them sound like whiny brats who can't take the heat. And Ms. Hedayat's sentence runs until 2020. Note to American right-wingers: this is what oppression actually is -- this is not criticism or shame from your friends and neighbors, this is a government actually taking people's freedom away because they said and did things that government didn't like. Still, the Big Stick of Bad PR works here as it does elsewhere; Iran's government may pretend it doesn't care very much what other folks think, but they live in a world with other people in it just like the rest of us, so Change.org helps you tell the Iranian government to release Ms. Hedayat.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1709, the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Sometimes you have to communicate your will to your Congressfolk hundreds of times before they get it, and we're better off thinking that doing something will help than throwing up our hands and giving up, because that would be throwing up your hands and giving up on democracy, and I won't have that, not in my America. Yes, it's disheartening that we're seven years into the Hope and Change era and banksters still run the damn show, but banksters are also the George Zimmerman of the economy -- they get away with horrible crap, but everyone hates them. The 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act would help keep banksters out of the speculation business, and thus force them to do the things that actually help economies, like loaning money to budding small businesses. Really, I don't want banksters to be so hated. I want them to stop doing the things that prompt the rest of us to hate them. And I'm happy to help them do that.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell ExxonMobil to cut ties with ALEC. ExxonMobil has, as you might imagine, more incentive to cut ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council than most: ALEC has become synonymous with climate change denialism, and a big fossil-fuel corporation like ExxonMobil would want to at least pretend they care about the world they're going to leave to future generations. And no amount of advertising about their "commitment" to reversing the effects of climate change would convince anyone if they still hung with ALEC. Of course they'll tell us that hanging with ALEC is solely about ALEC's reactionary economics, as if that is going to make any of us happy, but we know better. And ExxonMobil has one other incentive: having done a crapload of actual climate change research back in the day, they face the possibility of a RICO lawsuit, much like the one that punished the tobacco corporations for lying about the health effects of cigarettes. There's no need to keep that arrow in your quiver if you're not inclined to do so.

Action: "free" trade, and sentencing reform.

In the wake of the completion of negotiations on the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" -- that massive "free" trade deal that would, among other things, allow corporations to run roughshod over our clean air and clean water laws and charge you more for the prescription drugs you need -- Avaaz helps you tell Congress to reject it. The TPP would subject our laws to the whims of "investor-state tribunals" more than ever before, and these tribunals would mainly concern themselves with whether a nation's law costs investors money, as if some rich person losing money is the worst thing that could ever happen in the world. And if the tribunal does rule in favor of the corporation, the taxpayers of a particular nation will have to foot the bill -- and you know what we call that? A never-ending bailout, that's what. The TPP would also extend corporate monopoly power over prescription drugs such that affordable generics will take a lot longer to hit the market. Keep in mind that this is just what we know from leaks. If this sounds horrible to you, and it should, then contact your Congressfolk with a quickness.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration will release some 6,000 federal prisoners by the end of the month, thanks to the U.S. Sentencing Commission's 2014 easement of sentences for non-violent drug-related crimes (and its subsequent decision to apply that relief retroactively to folks already serving such sentences). But this is only an early step toward finally reforming our criminal justice system so that it's not all about punishment and is more about rehabilitation, which should be the primary goal of a good criminal justice system. S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, would enact a number of reforms, which include reducing certain mandatory minimum sentences, applying the relief from other sentencing reforms retroactively, and expanding the "safety valve" system that allows judges to reduce mandatory minimums when appropriate to the crime. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Senators to support the bill, and thus support sentencing reform. Don't be afraid to remind your Senator that being "tough on crime" is no way to run a just society, let alone a safe one.

Action: clean budgeting, hospital bombings, and voting rights.

As you've heard, the process of electing a new House Speaker has become, shall we say, a bit more convoluted of late, as House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has taken himself out of the running, and though reports alleged an affair between Mr. McCarthy and another House Rep, I won't discount the possibility Republicans cooked up that story to make Mr. McCarthy's decision seem, well, normal -- since your gut probably tells you he didn't want the job because the House Republican caucus has gone bat-guano. At any rate, now is not the time to pretend that we have to "deal with" crazy people because they "have power." They have no power but the power we the people allow them. Hence CREDO helps you tell Democratic leadership not to cave to any manufactured hostage crisis over the budget, and Public Citizen still helps you tell your Reps to pass clean budget deals, with no corporate giveaways. Don't let Democrats say they're worried about getting blamed for shutting the government down if they stand their ground. When you stand your ground, people have your back.

Meanwhile, CREDO also helps you tell our government to comply with a "full and transparent" investigation into our government's bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz. Note well that the "liberal" media took nearly two days to start parroting the line that the Taliban used the hospital as a "human shield," and that assertion essentially amounts to a personal attack on Doctors Without Borders. You know what I always say: once your opponents resort to personal attacks, they've lost the argument. In fact, go ahead and say that to every single moron who tells you you're wrong because "you're getting your information from the liberal media," since that's also a personal attack. And I'll brook no hostage-crisis rhetoric from right-wingers that such an investigation weakens the war effort and/or endangers the troops. If a war can wither under the weight of such an investigation, then the war obviously isn't worth fighting to begin with. And what's the best way to keep our troops out of harm's way again? Don't send them off to stupid wars, that's what.

Finally, you remember that Alabama not only requires its citizens to produce photo ID at the polling place -- a requirement that already puts an unfair onus on those seniors, poor folks, and minorities who've never needed that photo ID before, or who lack the means to get the ID -- but is also closing DMV offices all over the state (blaming a "budget crisis," which of course can only ever be resolved by hurting the citizenry!), such that 28 of Alabama's 67 counties will have not one single DMV. Would it surprise you to learn that those 28 counties serve a lot of black voters? So People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2867/S. 1659, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would give our government more power to stop state-level voting rights violations like Alabama's, and CREDO helps you tell U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to investigate Alabama's actions. The Supreme Court may have eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in its Shelby County v. Holder decision, but our Attorney General can still investigate, and we can restore voting rights with the Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Around the table: "entitlements," child care, voting rights, gun restrictions, and what happens to old Pizza Huts.

House Republican "Freedom Caucus" questionnaire reveals that they'd demand "significant structural entitlement reforms" to lift the debt limit. Again, it should be grotesquely easy to run ads in "Freedom Caucus" districts claiming your Representative wants to make our government default and ruin our economy if he doesn't get to cut your Medicare benefits and your Social Security benefits, but Democrats are too weak to do it.

The Economic Policy Institute finds the cost of child care rising, such that care costs for two-child families exceed rent in most areas of the country. Will child care cost reform be the target of yet another clunky, Obamacare-style reform effort twenty years hence, as student loan debt would be under a President Hillary Clinton? Or can we cut to the chase and just close corporate tax loopholes and tax millionaire income at 91% already?

Count Jeb Bush as another Republican who thinks racism is over, at least as far as reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act. Does he know that the Voting Rights Amendment Act actually answers his main criticism -- that we're "not living in 1960" -- by basing the preclearance formula on actual, recent voting rights violations, not geographic location? And will the "liberal" media ever question him on that basis? I kid, of course.

In the wake of absurd comments that "armed Jews could have stopped Hitler," a reader reminds me of this Salon report from early 2013, where we would have learned that the 1938 law supposedly tightening gun restrictions in Germany actually loosened them. If I were as unscrupulous as some folks, I could argue that loose gun laws actually enabled Hitler; since I try to avoid confusing causation with correlation, I won't. But the right's little first-person video game shooter thought experiments are making my attempts to argue that we shouldn't restrict gun ownership much more difficult.

Finally, Taylor Glascock at Wired reports on how abandoned Pizza Hut buildings get repurposed. The old Pizza Huts speak to a time when fast-food joints could, literally, stand on their own, without depending on the casual foot traffic of strip malls. Being the possessor of at least a half dozen happy memories of eating at old Pizza Huts, I may not be qualified to set the limits of useful nostalgia in this case.

Around the table: from the non-ISIS ISIS plot to the worker-owned co-op rising from the ashes of a failed corporation.

FAIR catches the "liberal" media howling about an ISIS nuke plot that doesn't demonstrate ISIS involvement in said plot. Details! They're so hard! But this is how they'll create another generation of rage-filled citizens the next Republican President will harvest. And like the last generation, they'll forget all about terrorism the moment their Personal Lord and Savior takes a giant dump all over the economy, and then rebrand themselves as teabaggers for the next center-right Democratic President.

California enacts the strongest digital privacy law in America -- by virtue of requiring that law enforcement get a warrant before compelling any business to turn over any electronic data. Alberto Gonzales would find that concept "quaint," and Barack Obama would oppose it because of "the grave threats we face," but this is America, so their kind don't get all the say around here.

Ho hum, North Carolina's reactionary state legislature imposes auto and appliance repair taxes in order to pay for another round of tax cuts for the rich. How hard would it be for Democrats to run TV ads showing some state legislator helping some guy in a monocle literally take money out of working people's pockets? I mean, that took me ten seconds to work out. But Democrats are either too "polite" to do it or too "smart" to think of it. Please understand that by "polite" and "smart," I mean weak.

Double ho hum, Notre Dame study finds a strong correlation between corporations that pay their executives in stock options and corporations with a lot of product safety issues. But don't they say stock options make an executive more invested in his corporation's success? Not when "success" no longer includes making good products -- or safe ones. Naturally, CEOs who've run their corporation for a while have fewer product safety issues. Why, it's almost like sticking around and building something lasting is, like, good for the world or something.

Right Wing Watch catches Mike Huckabee endorsing a boycott of Frito Lay over its gay-friendliness -- and remembers that Mr. Huckabee called a similar boycott of Chick-Fil-A over its gay-unfriendliness "economic terrorism." Don't people know they're not talking into the void? But even worse is the guy who suggested the boycott, who thinks we're now all supposed to "participate" in gay weddings (I bet Mr. Lane doesn't even get invited to them!) and also says that in the year 2000 we'll all be put in jail if we don't "cheer" gay weddings. Evidence of these assertions? I kid, of course. Let's never speak of this David Lane dodo again.

Finally, we check in with worker-owned co-op New Era Windows, and find them doing quite well. You remember when Republic Windows and Doors closed down in 2008 and the workers occupied the factory to keep it open and keep their jobs? (Even some Libertarians approved!) Well, Republic sold the factory to a California corporation Serious Materials, which then tried to shut the factory down again -- so the workers occupied it, again. And then Serious Materials buckled under popular pressure (which you may have helped apply, if you were reading this blog in 2011) and sold the factory to the workers, and now they're back on their feet and thinking they might be a model for other corporations. Times could get tough, and greed could see an opening to creep back in, but they're showing it can be done, so good for them.

Action: government spying in France, forced labor in Uzbekistan, and chemical safety in the U.S.

France is considering a bill that would give its secret service (the DGSE) the same sort of government spying capabilities our NSA has -- spying on phone calls and vacuuming up data without warrants, with very limited independent oversight on how it's using its powers. Because all that's worked out so well, and has been popular with so many people! Keep in mind, when considering the madness the French Parliament contemplates here, that we're still the only nation with a First Amendment guarantee that the government can't put you in jail merely because you spoke out against it. As a result, citizens of other nations are more likely than we are to consider free speech as something that ought to have "sensible" limits (besides the obvious limits on libel, slander, and terroristic threats), and that opens the door a bit wider for government spying initiatives like this one. But if our great gift to the world is our democracy, then we have a duty to weigh in on what the French government plans to do. Hence Access Now helps you tell the French Senate to reject the surveillance bill passed by the French National Assembly.

Meanwhile, Uzbekistan continues to force many of its citizens into labor every October in that nation's cotton fields, for little or not pay and for the monetary reward of that government's corporate cronies. (Personal to right-wingers constantly squealing about our "socialist" President: this is what a state-run economy looks like.) Worse, the World Bank invests hundreds of millions of dollars into agricultural projects in Uzbekistan, which helps prop up the slave labor regime. And Uzbekistan is the world's fifth-leading cotton exporter, so Uzbek cotton could wind up in your clothes. The World Bank has said it'll withdraw from Uzbekistan if it discovers evidence of slave labor there, but it might not be all that motivated to look hard for it. Hence the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell the World Bank to investigate the matter vigorously. Let's at least put them in the position of falling back on the old but if we leave, we won't be able to effect change there argument -- which you no doubt recognize by now is a hostage situation.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban flame-retardants in household furniture, then Friends of the Earth still helps you do that. I expect you know the long-story-short by now -- flame retardants don't particularly retard fires even as well as their name would suggest, and they typically contain toxic chemicals scientists have found cause brain-development issues in children, as well as cancer and reproductive issues in everyone. And when furniture with flame retardants does catch fire, it releases toxic fumes and smoke, which makes them harder to contain and thus puts firefighters at more risk. (Yes, firefighting is not a risk-free job, but there's no point in making it riskier if we can avoid doing so.) Deadline for comments to the CPSC is October 19, and we shouldn't expect positive action from Congress (which is still poised to pass a bad chemical safety "reform" bill they had the cojones to name after Frank Lautenberg), so now is the time to get cracking.

Around our table: Howard Stern vs. Roger Waters, Jeb Bush vs. the truth, and other battles.

Howard Stern slams Roger Waters for boycotting Israel, pointing out that Mr. Waters lives in "America, a country that was founded on white people coming in and obliterating the native population," and asking, therefore, "why don't we all just leave?" That would be a trenchant criticism if Mr. Waters had actually demanded that Israelites themselves leave Israel, which he has not. Acting like any criticism of Israel is an existential threat is the kind of thing I don't tolerate from right-wingers, so why would I tolerate it from anyone else?

Sen. Sanders announces plans to revive the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have allowed workers to form a union using a card-check process instead of a secret ballot election, but he's calling it the Workplace Democracy Act. Which is wise, since the "liberal" media covered the Employee Free Choice Act so, so badly (often, back in the day, I felt like I was literally the only person in America debunking the zombie IT KILLZ TEH SECRET BALLUTZ!!!! claim). Once I get an action alert, you'll hear about it.

Speaking of Bernie Sanders, there's Jeb Bush flogging that ZOMG 18 TRILLYUNZ IN NEW SPENDINGZ!!!!! figure. He knows that number's been thoroughly debunked, right? Of course he does, and he doesn't care. "The Olympic gold medal for most promises made in the year before an election" is an effective meme, though. I can only hope he gets bad advice from his handlers about it.

And we now hear testimony from numerous combat veterans and federal agents that it takes more to foil mass murderers than being "a good guy with a gun." I welcome any expert testimony that shatters this notion we all succumb to sooner or later -- that we can be heroes in exactly the manner of fictional movie characters and fictional first-person video game characters. It takes more to be a hero than one well-placed shot. One might start by helping to change the world from a place where frustrations constantly beset us into one where we have the economic power we used to have as late as the 1970s, which is, luckily, the work we do at this blog every day.

Paul Theroux decries "The Hypocrisy of 'Helping' the Poor" -- the hypocrisy of big corporate titans helping the poor, that is. These are the "grotesquely wealthy American chief executives" who "made their fortunes by impoverishing whole American communities, having outsourced their manufacturing to China or India, Vietnam or Mexico." And then he tells you about his three-year tour of the Deep South, where some small towns have annual tax bases literally smaller than what a CEO makes in a few calendar days, where community organizers never hear from the Clinton Foundation. This is the kind of thing that would make me wish I had a lot of money -- if I didn't already know that the process of getting a lot of money would hopelessly corrupt my soul.

Finally, we check in with So Much to Read, where Erica Avery has nine new book reviews. She's wry as ever: about a book called The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, she notes that "'unspeakable' is a tall order." And I, too, have often wondered (particularly when contemplating the Eisenhower era) if I'd find "stifling conformity and obligatory self-effacement a fair price to pay for a society with the best education system in the world and no real poverty." (And for those of you in a hurry, there's still "Six Words.")

Action: worker safety, hydropower, and fracking.

The International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell clothing corporation H&M to make the safety renovations that would help prevent further mass deaths of Bangladeshi workers in factory fires. Why? Because, apparently, H&M has been dragging its feet on those renovations, even though H&M committed to them. As your mama taught you, you should really do the things you commit to doing in life, even if you don't really want to do them, or if you perceive that they'll cost you money. I know the pressures of modern life just as well as everyone else -- it's all rush, rush, rush to do the things that make you money, and we cut corners because we get away with it so often. But we haven't properly learned, as a civilization, that the 999 times you get away with doing things like putting factory workers in unsafe buildings are never worth the one time your factory burns down and hundreds of people die. We had better learn it, though, or we're all going to hell. Telling H&M to fulfill their commitment to save lives is the one small thing we're going to do right now to help avoid that catastrophe.

Meanwhile, H.R. 8, the North American Energy Security and Infrastructure Act, would allow hydropower corporations (like those that build dams) to ignore their obligations to keep water clean and avoid injuring wild habitats. Dams get 50-year licenses, and those of us who aren't going to live another 50 years know quite acutely that once you fail to license a dam so that it complies with changing environmental conditions and more vigorous building standards, you're stuck with it for a very long time. And H.R. 8 would also place state duties in federal hands and federal duties in state hands wherever doing so would help corporate interests avoid acting like the better stewards of fish, wildlife, and clean water we'd otherwise want them to be. All so certain politicians can appear to support renewable power -- which hydropower certainly is (Alaska ranks first among American states in renewable energy production because of hydropower), but you don't let it kill animals and pollute clean water. Hence American Rivers helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 8 and protect clean water and wildlife.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to ban fracking on public lands, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. In signing, you'd ask your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1902, the Protect Our Public Lands Act, which would simply prohibit hydraulic fracturing on public lands leased to private drilling corporations. As it stands now, assessments that we can reliably keep fracking from poisoning clean water supplies are unduly optimistic -- especially since a 2005 energy bill allowed frackers to avoid disclosing the chemicals they use in their operations. The EPA's recent report, largely mischaracterized in the "liberal" media as a decisive declaration about fracking's safety, did not actually research the subject rigorously enough, largely due to a lack of cooperation from drillers, and did find incidents of water contamination from fracking. And how are "trade secrets," once revealed to our government and not to a corporation's competitors, no longer secret? We have laws against government officials revealing trade secrets, after all. It's enough to make you think gas drilling concerns want to keep something else a secret.

Around the table: "free" trade secrecy, corporate tax avoidance, paid family leave, and solutions for gun violence big and small.

TPP negotiators forced negotiators from Australia and New Zealand to keep TPP text secret for four years, in order to "facilitate candid and productive negotiations," naturally. The article doesn't say whether American trade negotiators also had to sign such a "gag rule," but if they did, it would violate American law (Sec. 106 (a)(1)(B) of Public Law No. 114-26, to be precise) mandating that the President make the TPP text public for 60 days after the President "enters into" a trade agreement. I suppose President Obama's end-around could be to make Congress ratify the agreement before he "enters into" it, which would obviate his legal obligation to publish the TPP's text. And that would just be one more reason to tell your Congressfolk to vote against it.

Citizens for Tax Justice reports that offshore corporate tax shell games are alive and well in 2015, as nearly three out of four Fortune 500 corporations maintain overseas tax havens -- over twenty tax havens each, on average -- and three out of five of those corporations maintaining tax havens maintain one in Bermuda and/or the Cayman Islands, both notorious tax havens. That's $2.1 trillion that could be fixing bridges, upgrading sewers, paying teachers -- or turning our fossil fuel-dependent energy grid into a more renewable one. And no, tax havens don't "create jobs," or we'd have more and better jobs right now.

D.C. City Council introduces bill granting workers in the city 16 weeks of paid family leave, which would be the most generous package in the country, if passed. It also means staff members working for the numerous right-wing Congressfolk who'll live here over the next few years will enjoy the best family leave plan in the nation as their employers try to destroy it everywhere else. I'd be surprised if this hadn't occurred to President Obama.

Matthew Rodriguez at Mic offers "Six Surprising Ways to Curb Gun Violence That Have Nothing to Do With Gun Control." These are: increased access to drug/alcohol rehab, reforming sentencing guidelines for drug users, breaking the "school-to-prison pipeline," addressing structural racial inequality (this section is a bit low on actual solutions, though ending redlining would be a big start), narrowing the income gap between rich and poor, and addressing structural gender inequality. Yep, that ought to do it. And I'm glad someone is saying it.

In the meantime, a school in Indiana has implemented a number of reforms designed to thwart school shooters, including "hardened" doors and walls, doors that automatically lock, key fobs that contact the police faster than 911 calls, and smoke to disable shooters trapped in hallways. None of these require additional gun control measures or additional guns in the hands of school personnel, nor are they "Big Brother" measures, like forced ID for students and personnel. I wish them the best in preventing the next tragedy.

Action: "free" trade, vote suppression, and land and water conservation.

TPP negotiators suddenly finished up the mother of all "free" trade deals on Monday -- and, as you know, this one really is a mother, as it allows "investor-state tribunals" to nullify more of a nation's laws than ever before, merely because some law concerning clean water or occupational hazards "cost" some investors some money. You might recall that TPP negotiations looked like they'd hit the rocks last month, before this recent rush; if that was indeed a feint, I guess I should take pride that Our Glorious Elites found world public opinion against the TPP enough of a threat that they should try to shock-and-awe us. But they may not even succeed in doing that, because U.S. law now requires that the text of the TPP be posted for all the public to read for 60 days. Leaks of TPP conventions have thus far not made us hopeful, and though the "liberal" media will do its best to ignore the TPP's text, they don't have all the say in what gets out to the public anymore. Hence a gaggle of organizations -- the Sierra Club, Food and Water Watch, Sum of Us, and the People's Email Network-- help you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" that puts mammon over people.

Any other day, this item would have led off: the state of Alabama has one of those oppressive Voter ID laws that help prevent seniors, poor folks, and minorities from voting, and now the state actually plans to close over 30 Division of Motor Vehicle offices -- which is where most folks go to get the ID that can get them their Voter ID -- which would leave nearly 30 Alabama counties without a single DMV office. Coincidence? "Budget difficulties"? C'mon, I'm not a schmuck. So Common Cause helps you tell Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley to do what he can to protect the right to vote in Alabama. Voter ID laws don't just affect folks who've never needed drivers' licenses before, they also affect seniors who were born long ago to midwives, since midwives didn't routinely write birth certificates back then, and how many of these seniors can even get drivers' licenses now? And the cost of fixing your paperwork so that you can vote now is prohibitive for some folks -- more so if they have to drive 100 miles to get to a DMV. Long story short: if you're going to impose draconian voting requirements upon your citizens, you should help them meet those requirements, not hinder them.

And finally, here's another item I could have led with: Congress let the Land and Water Conservation Fund expire at the end of September, though there seemed to be plenty of bipartisan support in Congress to keep it going. Perhaps that was just a ruse -- perhaps Congress wants us to blame "environmental extremists" on John Boehner's right flank so that we won't blame the entire Congress for doing what was clearly its will all along. Congress makes it so hard for me to believe the best about people! Naturally, their will doesn't matter in a democracy so much as our will, and I can't imagine that the American people, as a whole, would be so anxious to end a program that not only funds our government's efforts to buy land in order to preserve it, but actually insures the continuance of the fossil fuel activities that fund it. It really seems like there's something for everyone in there, you know? And as our energy grid moves more toward renewables, we can certainly adjust the funding mechanism. In the meantime, the Wilderness Society helps you tell Congress to restart the Land and Water Conservation Program.

Around the table: the dangers of the passive voice, the complexities of the sneaker market, and other conundrums.

U.S. bombs hospital in Afghanistan, killing over 20 people and wounding at least 35 more, and the "liberal" media falls all over itself to avoid saying our government did it. Three things: one, saying "stuff happens during wartime" is one thing, and saying "stuff happened during wartime and no one is responsible" is another thing entirely. Two, as FAIR's hilarious headline suggests, you should always look at sentence structure -- if the "liberal" media is using the passive voice, you have every right to suspect they're covering something up. Three, the "human shield" argument is bogus, or the "liberal" media would have deployed it earlier.

Alec MacGillis at ProPublica asks if the gun lobby's power is "overstated." They'd run through a wall for their beliefs and others wouldn't, but Mr. MacGillis points to certain inarguable factors (narrowing demographics of pro-gun folks, for one). Yet I'm reminded of how no one can verify the "Rush Limbaugh has 20 million listeners" statement either -- if the gun lobby's power is overstated, the fact that our "liberal" media constantly does the overstating surely helps create that power.

Ho hum, Joshua Holland at The Nation finds that the right alienates more than just Hispanics with their anti-immigration cant. Less than half of immigrants these days come from Hispanic nations, African immigrants to the U.S. double every decade, and one in five immigrants would be folks we would call "white" immigrants, from Canada and Europe. But regardless of demographic trends, the right will still have an outsized voice, especially during midterms, as long as Democrats continue to do nothing about anything while in power. It's almost like that's the idea.

Former NBA star Stephon Marbury re-releases his $15 sneakers, saying that his Starburys are just as good as $200 Air Jordans and that Michael Jordan has been "robbing the hood." The message might be muted, though: I'm not sure I'd base my pitch on how cheaply I can make the stuff I sell, not when most folks now know that people who make slave-wages make those shoes. Kids today don't care about Stephon Marbury, either -- partly because he plays in China these days, but mainly because the "liberal" media trains everyone to think sensationally.

Finally, Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas writes again about right-wingers blowing a gasket at the release of the Tesla Model X. Right-wingers still rant about Tesla getting taxpayer money while ignoring the subsidies other auto corporations get, and they still go on about electricity coming from coal when the Tesla Model X will use electricity far more efficiently than other cars use gas. And though I try to think the best of people, I bet the guy who says he's also opposed to oil subsidies never even calls his Congressperson about it.

Action: sentencing reform, medical billing, and prescription drug affordability.

S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, wouldn't repeal mandatory minimum sentences, but it would make sentencing fairer. S. 2123 would reduce several mandatory sentences for drug and/or violent felony convictions, and would make these sentences retroactive, so that current offenders can get reduced sentences as well. It would also get relief for thousands of crack cocaine offenders under the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the sentence disparity between crack and powder cocaine users. And it would allow judges to sentence certain non-violent drug offenders more appropriately. If the bill doesn't do everything you'd like it to do (it doesn't do everything I'd like it to do!), it still would, if passed, make progress in sentencing reform in America, and it wouldn't preclude further efforts to make progress; note, also, that S. 2123 has six Democratic sponsors and four Republican sponsors, suggesting that it might be the result of actual negotiation. Hence the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Senator to support the sentencing reform in S. 2123.

Meanwhile, Consumer Reports reported this month on "surprise medical bills," which occur when your health care provider subcontracts certain aspects of your care -- specialists, lab work, anaesthesia, like that -- to providers outside your health insurance provider's network, which, as you know, results in higher costs. Thing is, your health care providers currently have no obligation to tell you when they're outsourcing any part of your care outside your network, hence the surprise. And much of this problem is emergency-related -- when you need your appendix out, as one Texas resident found out, you're not haggling over which available surgeon is in your network. Yes it does occur to me that single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care would obliterate this problem. But in the meantime, we need to tell our lawmakers to ensure that the privately-run health care system in this country doesn't repeatedly screw us over. So Consumers Union helps you tell your lawmakers to close the loopholes that could cost you tens of thousands of dollars in unexpected health care costs.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3513/S. 2023, the Prescription Drug Affordability Act of 2015, then CREDO still helps you do that. Would the Prescription Drug Affordability Act eliminate obnoxious pricks like Martin Shkreli, who pays about $20,000 more for a bottle of wine than I do? No, but it would make it harder for them to jack up drug prices fiftyfold in a day. And this bill would force big pharmaceutical corporations to disclose their pricing; naturally they've resisted such a move, almost as if they have something to hide. The bill would allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, and while most people support such a thing, a lot of people would ask what it has to do with getting drug prices down for everyone. And I would answer that over 49 million Americans are currently enrolled in Medicare, which means Medicare is a big, big pool with a lot of negotiating power -- and thus also a lot of power to drag prices down even for folks who don't get Medicare yet. That's what Mr. Bush really feared when he wouldn't allow Medicare to negotiate its own prices years ago.

Around the table: the horrible truth about bankster parasites.

Got a few minutes? Then read this lengthy transcript of a Counterpunch interview with Michael Hudson on "Parasites in the Body Economic." Long story short: the banksters are the parasites, the ones who "make() the host think that the free rider, the parasite, is its baby, part of its body, to convince the host actually to protect the parasite over itself." And you'll be reminded that "(n)eoliberals say they’re against government, but what they’re really against is democratic government" (italics mine, of course). Mr. Hudson also analyzes recent events in Latvia and the Ukraine (spoiler alert: the banksters benefit and the people suffer).

Dave Johnson at the Campaign for America's Future describes the two reactionaries President Obama has nominated to the U.S. Postal Service's governing board. One's a privatizer and the other's a payday loan lobbyist -- I'd say, "hell, why not nominate some charter school charlatan for Education Secretary while we're at it," but sadly Mr. Obama accomplished that feat in 2008. Mr. Obama perhaps thinks the "bipartisan" "consensus" about the Post Office is best expressed by the folks who would benefit financially from privatizing it, and not, you know, the vast number of Americans (like myself) who defend the USPS from all our government's done to it.

Daily Kos Elections explains why Ohio Sen. Rob Portman is running so hard on the Planned Parenthood "scandal." To put it simply: you may have more voters who support Planned Parenthood, but they wouldn't necessarily run through a wall for Planned Parenthood -- and the ones who hate Planned Parenthood would. And you can easily imagine Ohio Republicans disgusted with the party's grandstanding on Planned Parenthood still voting for Mr. Portman because he's "good on the other stuff" -- or perhaps even because they admire his actual courage on gay marriage in 2013.

Buried in this piece tracking the multitudinous machinations behind the House Speaker race oh God I almost put myself to sleep there is the strange assertion that "conservatives" might like to run their own candidates for Majority Leader and Whip against the two "establishment" choices. Does Politico really think Steve Scalise and Tom Price aren't "conservative" enough for the party's far-right flank? It is true they're both reactionaries, but Politico is another "liberal" media organ that wants you to think all you have to do to be "conservative" is stand to the right of whomever stands furthest right. I maintain that you have to work a little harder at it than that.

Paris sees its nitrogen dioxide levels drop by as much as 40% after banning cars on less than a third of its streets for one day. Paris has a lot of trouble keeping its air clean lately, so perhaps this'll do some good, especially in a city with a top-notch public transportation system. But anyone who's been to Paris would be compelled to ask: are they planning a day without motorcycles as well? After all, motorcycles, while more fuel-efficient than cars, are hardly the "clean alternative" to cars some folks say they are.

Finally, New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran, already facing 64 charges related to possible campaign finance fraud, gets a 65th charge of "identity theft" added. That's not "identity theft" as we've come to understand it, though -- she listed a former state Senator as her campaign treasurer in 2010 and this, apparently, came as a surprise to him. Ms. Duran, herself a long-time state Senator, became Secretary of State in the 2010 Tea Party wave. In all, she has been accused of stealing some $13,000 in donations for her personal use; such things may not be very titillating, but they're still wrong.

Action: the Social Security disability fund vs. Republicans, Puerto Rico vs. vulture capitalists, and encryption vs. our government.

Remember earlier this year, when Republicans used budgetary shenanigans to starve Social Security's Disability Fund? And then they mocked folks on SSI as if they were all either weaklings or scam artists? Well, H.R. 3621/S. 2090, the Social Security Earned Benefits Payment Act, would overcome that stratagem by spelling out exactly how much our Treasury will pay into the Disability Fund in years to come. The Treasury would pay a bit more into the fund from 2016-2020 (and then will go back to paying what they're paying today), but that move is long overdue, since we did have a major financial services meltdown from which this economy still hasn't really recovered. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Social Security disability program. And yes, even people on SSI have earned their benefits -- they paid into it, didn't they? It's like Congress doesn't understand the whole concept of insurance -- everybody pays in, and everybody won't collect, but everybody can collect, at different times of need. Congressfolk ain't nothing but rank strangers to me.

Meanwhile, Greece ain't the only country suffering from a cycle of debt -- vulture capitalists descended upon Puerto Rico many years ago, and now they aim to collect on that nation's bad fortune. The Conservative government of Great Britain has outlawed vulture capitalism, but here in America, of course, the vultures are the hidden dominators of our financial system, the folks banksters aspire to be one day. And one of them just so happens to be in charge of our Treasury's response to the PR crisis -- one Antonio Weiss, whose former employer (the one that paid him a $21 million bonus when he joined Treasury) happens to be very, very interested in the outcome. So Presente helps you tell the Treasury Department to remove Mr. Weiss from his role overseeing the Puerto Rico crisis. There is, by the way, no arguing that Puerto Rico did this by spending too much on its people, as if we should merely excuse the evil of lenders because of the perceived foolishness of borrowers, as if banksters didn't put PR into this mess by demanding privatization and other forms of corporate welfare in their terms of lending.

Finally, Access Now helps you tell President Obama to support data encryption and stop trying to coerce service providers and programmers into building "back doors" in their programs. Those who would argue that WE NEEDZ TEH DATA TO STOP TEH TURRURIZTZ!!!!! should reacquaint themselves with the notion of a warrant -- if you can convince a judge to give you a warrant, you can get the data you need, and you certainly don't need access to every conceivable piece of data at every time to stop terror attacks. You know what stops terror attacks? Governments working for people instead of corporations. I mean that: we'll always have a few crazy people, but the economy that gives people the back of its hand, that only works for its biggest actors, that regards jobs as a drain on prosperity and not the engine of prosperity, only creates more crazy people -- more so than unrestricted access to guns ever has or will -- and thus more terrorism. In the meantime, we have earned our privacy -- and we have also earned protection from the hackers and criminals who would also exploit government-mandated "back doors."

Around the table: notes about gun violence and dumb Republican Presidential candidates, plus a positive note about credit unions and small businesses.

Jeb Bush has taken a lot of (absolutely justified!) guff for saying "stuff happens" in response to the Oregon shooting, but his deeper point is worth pondering: "we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else." He's absolutely right -- but he has no standing to say it, because he's the guy who supports (and would extend) the economic and social policies that have divided us so much in the first place that we now have to "reconnect."

And then Mr. Bush stepped in it further, with his bizarre analogy of our need to do something about gun violence after a mass murder with our need to do something about pool safety after a child drowns in a pool -- but Mr. Bush signed exactly that sort of legislation while Governor of Florida. So that's why it was on his mind -- it was a sort of apology for his record! He is the smart Bush, right?

In a related note, a student/veteran/registered concealed gun carrier says he didn't intervene in the Oregon shooting at least partly because he was afraid he'd be targeted by arriving police. I remain profoundly skeptical that clamping down on or eliminating guns will ever be more than a band-aid solution for what ails us, but I've also come to recognize, over the years, that having a gun isn't the panacea for all security issues that some folks seem to think it is. Also, if the Feds come for you, you're not going to shoot your way out of it.

Ho hum, Factcheck.org slams Ben Carson's outlandish claim that "a lot" of folks crossing the border illegally are from "Iraq, and Somalia and Russia." His source, apparently, was a conversation with a Republican Sheriff in Arizona about three such apprehended immigrants, one from each country. Three! As Neal Gabler would say, three incidents of chicken pox don't constitute an epidemic. What a ghastly mistake I made in lifting this blog's ban on mentioning Ben Carson -- Donald Trump's histrionics are considerably more instructive.

Finally, Abigail Savitch-Lew, writing at Yes! magazine, chronicles the trials and tribulations of credit unions loaning to small businesses serving working families on the Lower East Side of New York City. The Lower East Side People’s FCU profiled therein was, almost 30 years ago, literally the only bank within a hundred square-block area; now it's just about the only bank consistently serving "the low-income and immigrant community of the Lower East Side."

Around the table: the "liberal" media, "free" trade, the Better Business Bureau, auto security hacks, and two dumb pronouncements on women's health.

Folks are debating the pros and cons of giving the Oregon shooter very much attentio, but FAIR suggests that mass media coverage of these shootings make them "contagious," more so than first-person shooter video games, for example. Some folks will cry "censorship" at the prospect of less media coverage of mass murders, but should we obligate our media to share prurient details we don't need to know in order to avoid trouble? Maybe we should try making mass murder boring, in addition to shameful. It'll mean fewer episodes of Criminal Minds, but there are enough of those.

Trans-Pacific "Partnership" negotiations have restarted (not with a whole lot of notice in the media, you may have noticed), and the U.S. proposes excluding tobacco corporations from using "investor-state tribunals" to nullify anti-smoking laws in other nations. I'm no great fan of the tobacco industry, obviously, but that provision sounds a bit like a bill of attainder, and we generally avoid those. They've opened a real Pandora's Box there, though -- why not prevent chemical corporations and oil and gas drilling corporations from using the tribunals as well?

The Consumerist reminds us of all the reasons why the Better Business Bureau just isn't the brand name it used to be. It's not just the BBB that's lost its luster, though -- the whole notion of "better business," while it obviously matters to the small businesses I encounter in my travels, seems to matter very little to Our Glorious Elites, who seem to think "better businesses" do nothing but redistribute worker wealth upward to CEOs.

Auto security expert finds that auto dealer diagnostic tools could be a vehicle for hacking any car that comes into the dealership for repair, meaning a malware-infected car could come into a dealership and infect any other car that comes through. That could affect your car's transmission or brakes, both of which would be bad. This isn't a call to avoid buying any new cars, of course -- it's a call to be mindful that security is a journey, not a destination.

Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) says funding Planned Parenthood isn't necessary because "as a guy," he enjoyes many options for health care. Remember back in the day when Idaho Sen. Steve Symms became pro-choice because he decided abortion was a matter "between a man and his God"? Good times, eh? Well, Glenn Grothman is half the man Steve Symms is. Recall that Mr. Grothman's predecessor, longtime Republican Rep. Tom Petri, pointedly refused to endorse him in 2014.

Finally, Marco Rubio alleges that harvesting fetal tissue from aborted fetuses has essentially created "an industry" where people are "pushed into abortions," and then, under assertive counter-questioning, he says "people" "look forward to having abortions." Of course he didn't mean that, but when you're running for President, you're supposed to be able to avoid saying dumb crap. And beginning a sentence with "I just think" is the clue that he's on his heels and he's about to say something really stupid. Our parents had Dan Quayle; we've got Marco Rubio.

Action: saving a Saudi Arabian activist, and getting the Associated Press to stop using the term "child prostitute."

First things first. Saudi Arabia plans to execute 21-year-old Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr -- for participating in the Arab Spring protests, naturally -- and after they behead and crucify him, they'll display his body in public for three days. I'm not exactly sure where to start with all of that. I could start with "who crucifies people anymore?" or "who displays dead bodies in public for three days anymore?" or "who thinks demonstrating against the government is a crime, let alone a crime warranting death, anymore?" I could also start with Mr. al-Nimr being a mere 17 when sentenced to death, thus contravening the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Saudi Arabia ratified in 1996, or with Mr. al-Nimr's two appeals of his conviction being heard in secret. Mr. al-Nimr could be executed at any moment -- the King still needs to sign off -- so we're left with hoping that the Saudi Arabian government is as afraid of world opinion as they obviously are of their own people. Hence Avaaz helps you tell the governments of the world to pressure Saudi Arabia into stopping this barbaric execution.

Meanwhile, the Human Rights Project for Girls has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Associated Press to stop using the term "child prostitute" in its stories about child sex trafficking. Why? Because a prostitute is, at the very least, an adult who has consented to have sex for money. Can a child consent to such a thing? No, a child cannot, by legal definition -- there is no wiggle room possible under the law, no "but she was old for her age!" possible under the law. A child who is forced to work the sex trade isn't "finding her way in the world," she's being kidnapped, raped and molested, and almost certainly beaten, not to mention being manipulated and controlled by evil adults who are, again by legal definition, old enough to know better. I suppose "child prostitute" was probably a more shocking term back in the day, but for better or worse, it isn't now -- it's a term that actually helps obscure the horror of child sex trafficking. We're a sick, immoral, and decadent society because we've all but forgotten what "consent" is. Forgive me for thinking we can change that.

Around the table: possible homes for refugees, stolen health care for retirees, and other stories.

An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study concludes that using computers in the classroom hurts student performance instead of improving it. I wish I heard more from conservatives about things like this -- after all, wouldn't they be the ones preferring classics to moderns, novels to television, and Tennyson to Twitter? Then again, I don't hear much from conservatives at all these days -- and I hear more than enough from the reactionaries who claim to be conservative, who seem down for whatever makes their corporate paymasters more money, which computerized classrooms certainly do.

Michelle Goldberg asks if child protective services have "gone too far" -- a question the "liberal" media seems more eager to ask, Ms. Goldberg notes, now that relatively affluent white folks (not just working poor minority folks) are getting caught up in CPS webs. It may seem ironic that, as we've allowed governments to abandon responsibility for keeping the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us, that we've gone mad over keeping children supervised at all times -- ironic, that is, until you remember that Tha Bush Mobb couldn't save New Orleans from drowning but could wiretap your phones.

Alec MacGillis at ProPublica describes how over 200 Indiana miners and families "with no direct connection to Patriot Coal" somehow lost their retirement health care benefits as a result of the Patriot Coal bankruptcy in 2013. Their employer passed on the responsibility for their health care years ago to a subsidiary that may well have been "set up to fail." This is why we shouldn't let corporations own other corporations, and it's also why we shouldn't let the bankster economy rule our lives.

Beenish Ahmed at Think Progress wonders if abandoned European villages could help house the world's refugees. Villages are dying out all over the continent, after all -- a lot of hamlets sell so cheaply that you or I could almost buy one -- and an influx of refugees could boost flagging economies. But you would hope European corporations wouldn't take advantage of these refugees and pay them in dung pellets, because that would be cruel (and, as it happens, doing so wouldn't stimulate local economies very much, either).

Finally, FAIR catches a Washington Post writer "analyzing" Bernie Sanders's platform. Read the whole thing and digest all the ignorance, scare numbers and the unspoken hypocrisy of the Sanders haters, but note well also: "government control" is your control, because this is your government, regardless of who's President or which party controls Congress. Why do I have this nagging feeling that you acting like your government belongs to you is what the "liberal" media really fears?

Action: reining in prescription drug prices and prisoners' local phone call rates.

H.R. 3513/S. 2023, the Prescription Drug Affordability Act, would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time, and would close the notorious Medicare Part D "donut hole" of prescription drug coverage by 2017 instead of 2020. It would also force big pharma corporations to offer price rebates to the poor, make it easier to get cheaper drugs from Canada, stiffen penalties for corporations that delay the transition to generic drugs, and force big pharma corporations to disclose how they break down their spending on drugs. In short, it's the kind of health care bill Democrats would have passed in 2010 if they'd had a clue. In the wake of Martin Shkreli's apparently boundless greed -- a greed even Donald Trump finds distasteful! -- I wonder what Republicans will say in response to the fact of this bill. Wait, I know: TEH BILL KILLZ TEH INNOVASHUNZ!!!!! They must think very little of society, to suggest that the drive to innovate can only exist in the presence of overpriced drugs. National People's Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight high drug prices by passing the Prescription Drug Affordability Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to keep big telecom corporations from charging prisoners an arm and a leg just to make local phone calls to their loved ones, then Free Press still helps you do that. The FCC actually did start cracking down on the egregious rates phone corporations charge for long-distance calls, but they haven't done the same for local calls yet; well, no time like the present. I know there are still a few people out there who never got tired of being "tough on crime," who say that they're prisoners and they did wrong and they don't deserve anything. But those people are full of soup, for two reasons. One, studies have shown what most folks would figure if they thought about it for a minute -- that when prisoners can keep in touch with their loved ones, they commit fewer crimes once their sentence ends. Two, we're either a civilized society or we're not -- we either set boundaries on what payment we extract from our prisoners for their crimes, or we do whatever we like whenever we're feeling angry or slighted, laws and morals be damned. In short, you don't need to be a bleeding heart to see it my way.

Around the table: starring absurdly expensive cancer drugs and permeable concrete.

Martin Shkreli has done some good, though surely by accident, by helping highlight how many other drugs are absurdly expensive, like the anti-cancer drug Gleevec, which sells for around 660 times what it costs. Even in England, where true socialized medicine keeps costs down, it still sells for about 200 times more than it costs. How do the big pharma corporations respond? With the same old crap: lower prices would stifle gilding the plumbing on our CEO's 19th vacation home, ahem, innovation.

Robert Reich explains "Why We Must End Upward Pre-Distributions to the Rich." He diagnoses the malady correctly, but we shouldn't call it "pre-distribution" -- gosh, why do liberals have to make everything so hard? The other side has already given us the words to use against them: what the rich are doing to us now is "income redistribution," simple and plain, and they're redistributing that income from working families to their bosses. It's more words, sure, but I'd rather rely on words everyone already knows than words that rhyme with words everyone already knows.

College Republican asks a pointed question of Marco Rubio during an Iowa town hall. Dan Herrera seems like a terrific kid -- I certainly did not expect him to say "I don’t like waking up every morning knowing that I’m wrapping my hands around my nieces’ and nephews’ necks, choking them out with the exhaust that I’m emitting" -- but he was still too impressed that Mr. Rubio didn't just dismiss his concerns. What a shame that Republicans have lowered our standards so much that we think "I oppose pollution, too" is something to praise! But I'll keep hope alive and hope Mr. Herrera can help get his party to do the right thing more often.

Natasha Geiling at Think Progress describes a permeable concrete that can absorb a thousand gallons of water a minute and filter that water back into the ground. And Tarmac's Topmix Permeable filters out impurities like motor oil in the process. There's a downside -- Tarmac doesn't recommend paving highways with it, and we don't know how it'll hold up in really frigid climes -- but the technology has promise, and I wish Tarmac the best.

Finally, Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion, writing at Slate, debunk seven lies and half-truths people like to trot out about slavery. Why do people spread these things around? Because they fancy themselves smarter than other people (whom they may commonly call "sheep"), they think the unusual is always more important than the commonplace, or they merely enjoy fomenting confusion and chaos.