Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: the "Pharma Bro" bungles again, and other stories.

Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli has gone back on his promise to cut the price of Daraprim -- the drug whose price he raised from $13.50/pill to $750/pill, you remember -- to "a point that is more affordable and is able to allow the company to make a profit, but a very small profit." Actually, he's not going to cut it at all for consumers and will make an almost meaningless 50% cut to hospitals, "almost meaningless" because folks who need Daraprim are far more likely to take it at home than at a hospital. The good news? Daraprim's patent expired long ago, so Imprimis Pharmaceuticals has had some success selling a 99¢/pill version.

Clare Foran, writing in The Atlantic, describes some of the "Lifelong Republicans Who Love Bernie Sanders." But it's still based on anecdotal evidence, no matter how many good anecdotes it has, and doesn't even count the possibility that Republicans could be looking to screw with Hillary Clinton's chances in primaries. And though conservatives and liberals actually do agree on plenty, I would have liked to hear why more than six of 10 Republicans think corporations are too powerful. (Evaluating the hypothesis "because conservatives hate concentrated power anywhere" would have been a good start.)

Spike Lee suggests that women should go on "sex strikes" over sexual harassment and rape on college campuses. These are big issues, but Mr. Lee also has a film to promote that just so happens to center around a sex strike, and wouldn't a sex strike protesting sexual harassment and rape on campus wind up punishing the men who have consensual sex with women, rather than the assholes who actually commit the crimes?

Yale University study finds that corporate funding has driven the climate change denial movement. Which will not surprise you, but it's still nice to have some data behind it. Yale's Dr. Farrell found several "themes" behind corporate propaganda -- namely, that "climate change is cyclical in nature" (though you'd need to go an extra step to prove that this warming is cyclical; wonder why they don't!) and that "there were positive benefits to carbon dioxide" (there are positive benefits to pooping, but that doesn't mean you eat your own poop).

Factcheck.org analyzes whether ethanol use results in higher or lower carbon emissions, since, as you might expect, people with a vested interest in either result are arguing about it. They don't actually come down on one side or the other, but you probably already know that replacing a significant part of our gasoline with ethanol (which we haven't done yet, and may never do) would wreck American farmlands, and you probably also already know that the big corn lobby seems to care about little other than making more money off corn.

Finally, outgoing Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear issues an executive order restoring voting rights for 14,000 non-violent felons. You'll be pleased if you believe, as I do, that disenfranchisement after someone has paid their debt to society is cruel. Of course, Mr. Beshear's successor, Matt Bevin, is a teabagger, and despite the positive noises he's made thus far, he might well decide that cruelty is a bold new idea or something.

Around the table: "terrorizing the public for the terrorists," and other absurdities.

Umair Haque argues that Donald Trump has already peaked, because (and this summary won't do his argument justice) he's a troll and the only strategy available to a troll, after a time, is to say ever more outrageous things, which means he will inevitably alienate even his most loyal supporters. I hope Mr. Haque is right, but the real problem is bigger -- the folks who give attention to trolls like Mr. Trump simply move from one object of rage to the next, from terrorism to the deficit to Obamacare to regulations to immigration to Black Lives Matter to refugees, and Our Glorious Elites seem to have no problem finding new people for haters to hate and "populist" vehicles for their hate.

Adam Johnson, writing at Fair.org, finds the "liberal" media far too willing to "terrorize the public for the terrorists." I wouldn't call terrorism a "post-modern" crime, because the phrase "post-modern" sure sounds a lot like "post-now," but it is true that "blowing up a market 1,000 years ago, for example, before mass communication, would have been entirely pointless. To properly terrorize a population, the population must be aware of the threat, and to be aware of the threat relatively quickly, mass communication is required for economy of scale to be achieved." You'd hope the "liberal" media would be more aware of that, lest they go The Way of the Troll.

"People are Demanding Non-PC Comments on Terrorism," writes Danielle Egnew, "So Here's the Mother of Them All." Maybe not quite "the mother of" -- the demiurge of, I'll say -- and of course I wish her rant were shorter, but yes it's annoying to hear people constantly whining about "political correctness" merely because they just want to be able to use slurs and still have people like them, and yes they need to "grow up emotionally." And I think saying "the terrorists have won" every time some right-winger fearmongers about refugees or "impending terrorist attacks" is a good idea.

Fox News morons try to land a punch on John Oliver after his lengthy rant debunking refugee-related hysteria from the right. And what do they pick on? His Englishness, of course -- which shows their desperation, as resorting to the personal attack first and foremost always shows desperation. Welcome to "then they fight you," Mr. Oliver!

I'm a little late to this party, obviously, but the Economic Policy Institute provides a handy primer for arguing politics with your Tea Party uncle. OK, sure, Thanksgiving was yesterday, but there are more holidays coming, so you can get plenty of practice dealing with inanities like what did unions ever do for us? or why can't the (sic) government tighten its belt like the rest of us? Of course, you won't need to cite all of these facts all at once -- quick answers to what did unions ever do for us? include "weekends" and "eight-hour days." It could turn into a Life of Brian routine right quick.

Finally, both Costco and Red Lobster say they won't sell genetically-modified salmon. Congratulate yourself if you were one of the many who helped pressure Costco to repudiate GMO salmon (a variety of which the FDA approved last week, as you probably know). A Friends of the Earth spokesperson cleverly says "the market is rejecting GMO salmon," which of course we already know from big food corporations' efforts to fight mandatory GMO labeling and their utter refusal to voluntarily label GMO foods.

Action: dissent in Saudi Arabia, refugee hysteria in America, and dirty dealings in Congress.

"One of the absurdities of U.S. policy in the Middle East," the latest email missive from Just Foreign Policy begins, "is that the U.S. government loudly complains about ISIS beheading people for their beliefs but turns a blind eye when the government of Saudi Arabia does the same thing." Case in point: a Saudi Arabian court just sentenced Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh to death -- by beheading, of course -- for the "crime" of "apostasy." Any country that would make "apostasy" a crime (let alone a capital crime!) would, of course, reveal itself as a country deeply insecure and immature. And it would be a surprise to find that anyone prefers others to think of them that way. But the Big Stick of Bad PR works just as well in Saudi Arabia as it does anywhere else, so Just Foreign Policy helps you tell our government to demand that Saudi Arabia release Mr. Fayadh. Please do not tolerate the fool who says so what, he's just a Palestinian, as if anyone on Earth should be beheaded by the state for exercising their free speech rights.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4038, the so-called American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, passed the House late last week with significant Democratic support (though the tally finished one vote short of a veto-proof majority). You've no doubt heard of this bill, one that would make it far harder to allow Syrian and Iraqi refugees (or any refugee who has been in Syria or Iraq at any time after March 1, 2011) into this country, even though the process for letting these refugees in already takes close to two years on average, even though these refugees already go through a quite rigorous set of examinations and background checks, even though exactly zero refugees have committed terrorist attacks in America, even though refugees are, by definition, running from oppression. It looks to me like Congress wants to ban Syrian and Iraqi refugees without having the guts to come out and say so. So now the bill goes to the Senate, and so you can use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to tell your Senators to reject H.R. 4038.

Finally, Congress must pass appropriations bills to fund our government by December 11, a mere 16 days from now, so naturally they're moving with too much urgency to sneak anything odious by us, right? Oh, as if. Among the many nefarious goals of this Republican Congress is the killing of the FCC's net neutrality regulations -- the strong ones you demanded from the FCC, that would allow you, and not some big telecom corporation, to decide where you want to go on the internet. It wasn't that long ago that net neutrality enjoyed strong bipartisan support even among our political elites (of course, it has always enjoyed strong bipartisan support among American citizens), but with the election of a Democratic President Who Must Always Be Opposed at Any Cost to America, killing net neutrality has become an obsession with Congressional Republicans. But we can fight back, and toward that end, Free Press help you call your Congressfolk and tell them to do the people's will and preserve internet freedom by funding the FCC's net neutrality regulations.

Around the table: some necessary truths about refugees, welfare, and Donald Trump.

There are "No Excuses, No Exceptions" to "The Moral Imperative to Offer Refuge," writes Joseph G. Ramsey in Counterpunch. I can think of at least two readers who might be amused to see Kant's categorical imperative put to some good use, but Mr. Ramsey's characterization of what rageheads who would ban refugees really say -- "Let these people fend for themselves. Let them suffer. Let them sink into the mud of ramshackle refugee camps. Let them be crushed and flayed against iron fences and razor wire. Let them be swallowed by the seas. Let them starve where they squat" -- hits the point head-on. Of course, the "liberal" media would never air such a notion -- it's too hardcore for them.

After Trump supporters beat up a protestor shouting "black lives matter" at a Birmingham, AL rally, the man himself says "(m)aybe he should have been roughed up," because what the protestor was doing was "disgusting" and he was "a troublemaker, looking to make trouble" (that last part, apparently, is for folks who don't know what a troublemaker is). If Jeb Bush wants to position himself as the "serious" Republican candidate, he could try bashing Mr. Trump for approving of the beating of a protestor. He might also add that "being obnoxious" and a "troublemaker" aren't grounds for getting beaten up anywhere at any time. And he might even add that the media enables Donald Trump's antics, to the point where if Mr. Trump actually snapped someone's neck with his bare hands, the media would call the event "provocative."

Kasia Tarcyznska, writing at the Good Jobs First blog, explains how Kraft Heinz stands to gobble up $20 million in welfare handouts from Iowa taxpayers even though they're planning to eliminate 900 Iowan jobs. The good news? This is actually controversial in Iowa! And the Mayor of Davenport, IA (where Kraft Heinz will rebuild its existing plant) reminds us that without jobs, there's fewer taxpayer money to give away in the first place, almost like that's the idea.

Alec MacGillis, writing in ProPublica, tries to explain why so many areas of America with so many poor folks who depend on government assistance keep electing politicians determined to slash it. Long story short: poor folks who actually get assistance aren't voting, but the folks a step above them economically, who look down on them as "moochers," are -- and "these voters are consciously opting against a Democratic economic agenda that they see as bad for them and good for other people — specifically, those undeserving benefit-recipients in their midst." It'd be nice, also, if Democrats would use their power when they get it to force corporations to create good jobs and pay workers more so they don't need government assistance as much.

Finally, speaking of the relationship between welfare and work, an MIT/Harvard study evaluates seven welfare programs for working folks (more precisely, "cash transfer" programs) and finds that precisely zero of them "discourage(d) work." Six of the seven programs were "conditional" cash transfer programs (i.e., money from the state if you get your kids vaccinated and/or send them to school), but the unconditional cash transfer program from Mexico also saw no change in employment levels or hours worked due to the program. Of course, we're talking very small amounts of money in these programs -- the kind of welfare banksters and other corporations get are huge enough that they really do discourage work.

Action: GMO food labeling, and sentencing reform.

You may have heard that the FDA has approved Aquabounty's GMO salmon -- but not as food, but as an animal drug, though the FDA also claims that the salmon is safe to eat. And supermarkets won't be selling Aquabounty's salmon as a "drug," but as food -- and they won't label that food as GMO food. That's as good an occasion as any to tell your Senators that you want genetically-modified organisms in food labeled as such, as Consumers Union helps you do. The fact that the FDA put Aquabounty's GMO salmon through a less rigorous process (for "animal drug" testing, versus food testing) for determining its safety doesn't bode well, nor does the FDA's reliance on Aquabounty's own studies which -- hard to believe, Harry! -- found the GMO salmon completely safe. Many grocery stores (including a few big chains like Kroger's, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods) won't sell any GMO salmon, but you may not be near any of these stores, and if you remain concerned that self-interested corporations have too much control over the GMO science, you ought to tell your Senators how you feel about it.

Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee advanced H.R. 3713, the Sentencing Reform Act, to the House floor, around a month after the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced its version, S. 2123 (called the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act); if these bills pass, House and Senate will need to go to conference to hammer out the differences. Both bills would reduce (but not eliminate) the burden of mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent federal drug offenders, both bills would expand the "safety valve" for judges to waive mandatory minimums, and both bills would allow judges to reduce crack cocaine sentences for prisoners sentenced before mid-2010, but each bill also creates a few new mandatory minimums (the House for heroin-related offenses, the Senate for domestic violence- and terrorism-related offenses) and the House bill also leaves off the Senate's reforms for federal prisoner treatment. Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell your House Rep and Senator, respectively, to support and improve their chambers' sentencing reform bills.

Around the table: Bernie Sanders's "democratic socialism" speech, plus more reactionary stupidity about terror and "treason."

As long anticipated, Bernie Sanders speaks at length about "democratic socialism." It's a good speech, and "(b)y the way, almost everything (FDR) proposed was called 'socialist'" needs to be said a lot more these days. But though he repeatedly invokes FDR, Mr. Sanders also misses the opportunity Eric Foner described in October -- the opportunity to remind Americans of the deep vein of historical progressivism (William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Populists and Progressives) that has helped make Americans freer. I also suspect the "liberal" media would rather cover the latest nativist filth emanating from Republican word-holes than they would Mr. Sanders's speech, which admittedly demands more of viewers than snark and sound bites do.

Fox News blowhard asks Iraq war vet/Democratic House Rep if he will "take responsibility if a refugee kills an American." Why do Democrats lose? Because they do not answer such questions in the most direct and obvious way, which is, in this case, no, because murderers are responsible for murder and terrorists are responsible for terror. Too many folks still think you always blame the wrong people! is a complaint you can only make against liberals.

Ex-CIA director James Woolsey says Edward Snowden should be tried and convicted for treason for his role in the Paris attacks. And then goes on to describe, at length, the numerous times Mr. Snowden wired money or shipped arms to ISIS, sheltered ISIS fighters from their pursuers, and developed the strategies ISIS used to kill innocent folks! I kid, of course -- for Mr. Woolsey, as for all emotional cripples, "treason" is just a word you use to hurt people who embarrass you, and certainly not a specific crime actually detailed in Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution.

Speaking of Mr. Snowden, Micah Lee interviews him in re maintaining your privacy on the internet during These Interesting Times. It's full of good tips, but why should the average non-activist care? "Because," Mr. Snowden says, "when you think about who the victims of surveillance are, on a day-to-day basis, you’re thinking about people who are in abusive spousal relationships, you’re thinking about people who are concerned about stalkers, you’re thinking about children who are concerned about their parents overhearing things." The last example is the weakest (under ideal circumstances, at least, parents should know what's going on with their kids), but I welcome the perspective.

I'll admit that my heart soared upon reading this "liberal" media column about health care entitled "The Country's Largest Private Health Insurer Throws a 'Tantrum' Over Lower Profits." "Tantrum" is exactly the word we ought to use, over and over again, when describing the pronouncements of worshipers of mammon. In this case, it's United Health Care saying it could pull out of the federal health care exchange because profits may not match the $1.6 billion it made in just the third quarter of 2015. Billion! In profits! Yup, that's a tantrum all right. I'm not that terribly invested in ensuring big corporate participation in the Affordable Care Act health care exchanges, though -- I'm more invested in Medicare-for-all.

Finally, Laura Mallonee, writing at Wired, describes the rise of female taxi cab drivers in India. Why is it happening? Because it's not necessarily safe for a woman to get a cab with a male driver, and because, well, why shouldn't it? Because of the "big taboo to see a women with that kind of responsibility, freedom, and mobility"? That's the kind of "big taboo" that good citizens all over the world fight to destroy every day, and the sooner women in India succeed in doing so, the better.

Action: campaign finance disclosure, and methane emissions.

Nearly six years after the Supreme Court ruled (in Citizens United v. FEC) that corporations have "the rights of personhood" and thus the right to make campaign donations with very few limits, what has President Obama done, besides urge Congress to fix it? Nothing. And he can issue an Executive Order mandating that all federal contractors disclose their campaign donations (which they're by definition using our money to do!), and he can tell the SEC to protect shareholders by forcing all publicly-traded corporations to do the same. Neither of these would be unprecedented -- Republicans have already thrown hissy fits over the much milder executive orders Mr. Obama has issued, and you may recall that in 2014 the FCC was trying to find some way, any way, to pretend they were issuing strong net neutrality rules without actually issuing strong net neutrality rules, until President Obama told America exactly what he preferred the FCC to do. So a broad coalition of good-government groups help you tell President Obama to fight big money in political campaigns for-real for-real. (The Peace Team, formerly the People's E-mail Network, helps you do the same.)

Meanwhile, the EPA is still taking public comments about its proposed methane emissions standards, and the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to issue the strongest methane regulations possible. Methane is, sadly, a ubiquitous by-product of fracking, and when folks tell you that fracking won't contribute as much to climate change as, say, coal production will, they're leaving out the fact that methane is actually a considerably more efficient deliverer of carbon emissions into our air than coal production, and an entire industry (the methane mitigation industry) has now arisen to contain the leakage of methane from fracking operations. Some would call that "job creation," but at the point one says that, one could call any disaster a "job-creation opportunity" at that point, and that would justify doing anything. The whole point of being civilized is that you choose to do some things and not others, and that the mass of knowledge and experience that civilization offers can guide you into choosing well. But justifying any old disaster as an "opportunity"? That's cynical, and therefore evil.

Around the table: some good news in Maine, and the usual fecal cavalcade of moronic Republican utterances.

Maine voters will decide whether to move all state elections to a "ranked choice" system, a.k.a. the "instant runoff" system, at the polls in 2016. I've long been a supporter of "instant runoff" voting, and one might suppose that Maine voters are disgusted enough with the enormously corrupt and incompetent Gov. LePage, who won with 38 and 48 percent of the vote in 2010 and 2014, respectively. But experience is the greatest teacher.

Rick Klein finds Jeb Bush apparently calculating to be the "serious" Republican alternative on foreign policy. BFD -- anyone can look serious next to those clowns, and one might not even need to put on glasses to do it. I suppose it might work, though, because you can never count a bastard out, particularly a bastard with an absurdly rich SuperPAC that just so happens to be devoted to his election.

Mayor of Roanoke, VA actually cites the Japanese internment camps as a reason to deny city services to Syrian refugees. Who are what, class? Running from terrorists. Who are therefore not terrorists. Because an actual terrorist would get into America some other way, a way that doesn't take nearly two years. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but not everyone has the right to have their opinion proclaimed as an opinion worth hearing.

Donald Trump wonders if maybe Muslims in America should wear some kind of special identification -- you know, like Jews had to wear in Nazi Germany. Is making some citizens wear a target the mark of a truly free and secure society? Someone needs to remind Donald Trump that the damn Nazis lost. And I'd wonder if maybe your average Trump voter might at least say well, wait a minute, that's something that could be done to me by a President Hillary Clinton, but Trump voters already typically think they're the most oppressed people on Earth because of Starbucks' red coffee cups or whatever manufactured outrage Our Glorious Elites enable on a daily basis.

Finally, Mr. Trump persists in calling Bernie Sanders a "Communist." And here's the paragraph I wrote last time he did that: "Virtually no one who brandishes 'Communist' as a scare word these days can conceive of one-party elections, the abolition of capital ownership, complete central planning of the economy, citizens living in one-bedroom apartments assigned by the state, or the fear of being literally followed around by police at any moment. But that's what Communism is, and calling Bernie Sanders a Communist insults all the billions of good people who suffered under real Communist oppression." Hey, if Mr. Trump isn't going to try harder, why should I?

Action: postal banking, and outrageous drug prices.

Close to three in 10 households don't have enough bank service around them, and so must turn to payday lenders or loansharks to get through tough times -- so why would anyone oppose the idea of the U.S. Postal Service offering basic banking services, like savings accounts, paycheck cashing, bill paying, and small lending? Particularly when banksters don't build out into underserved areas? Maybe it's because "objectively pro-usury," or because they're "objectively pro-poverty," or because they're "objectively pro-death spiral of debt." Seriously, you could reasonably accuse a politician who opposes postal banking of any of these things in campaign ads, and that politician would lose their re-election no matter how gerrymandered their district. But we don't even need the approval of Super-Awesome and Great and Perfect Real American President Paul Ryan for the USPS to offer basic banking services -- the Post Office already has the authority to offer them, if it chooses. Hence Sign for Good helps you tell the U.S. Postmaster General to start offering basic banking services to working families.

Meanwhile, from the "if you thought the Pharma Bro was bad" department: the cheaper of Vertex's two relatively new cystic fibrosis drug treatments costs patients (are you sitting down?) over $250,000 annually. And you won't be surprised to learn their reasoning for the high prices: because they invested a lot of money, because they need to charge a lot of money to invest in other drug treatments, and because, hell, Vertex has only made a profit once in the last 26 years! Of course, that last statement alone doesn't discount the possibility that they don't make a profit because they don't run their corporation very well -- or because they pay their executives too much (Vertex's CEO made close to $46 million last year). In any case, Juliana Keeping, whose petition at Change.org helps you tell Vertex to price its drugs more compassionately, puts it rather succinctly: "if we cannot afford it, it's as if it doesn't exist at all." And if we really can draw a direct line between Cystic Fibrosis Foundation donations and Vertex, then they're liars in addition to being greedheads.

Around the table: more arguments against letting your rage make all your decisions for you.

Lauren Kirchner, writing at ProPublica, reminds us that what we know about the effectiveness of mass surveillance suggests that, well, it's not that effective. What often gets lost about all this pre-emptive surveillance is that it's a damn lot of data to sift through, and can divert your attention away from actual terrorist threats. We might even wonder if that's what happened here, since ISIS's attacks in Paris seemed to blindside everyone in charge of preventing this sort of thing.

Nick Stockton, writing at Wired, reminds us that "Turning Away Refugees Won't Fight Terrorism, and Might Make It Worse." Apparently the theoretical possibility of "terrorists posing as refugees" is extraordinarily small -- approximately a dozen refugees, out of three million, have been expelled from American soil since 1975 -- but that's not all: coming here as a refugee takes so long that it's hard to imagine terrorists going through the 18-month-plus wait, and leaving refugees in harm's way in their home country or in a foreign country's camp can radicalize them, too.

Once-marginalized Muslim-haters, apparently unfamiliar with the concept of the Jeff George Victory Lap, are LOLing it up that Republicans seem anxious to adopt their positions. "Angry about #Paris?" twitters one. "Time for a moratorium on Muslim migration to US. If you make big policy decisions because you're "angry," why should we listen to you?

Elisabeth Hasselbeck advises President Obama to "accept a pause" in allowing Syrian refugees to come to the U.S., adding that he should do so with "the good-hearted nature that of course as a nation we want to accept refugees because they’re not all bad." Word salad aside, this is one of the most pernicious ideas in American culture -- the notion that you can do whatever you like, to whomever you like, as long as you're "nice" about it. I'm so old-fashioned I still think you reveal your "good-heartedness" in your good works, and that doing bad things with a smile on your face doesn't make them less bad.

Finally, Attorney General Loretta Lynch says there's "no data" to support the notion of a "Ferguson effect," whereby police are "afraid to do their jobs" because people are talking about them, or filming them. You already knew there was no data if you've been attending Radley Balko's articles on the subject at the Washington Post, but seriously, "Ferguson effect" hacks are essentially telling you that police officers can't do their jobs because their bosses, the public, are watching them. Always it's the people taking part in a democracy that really scares Our Glorious Elites.

Action: compassion for refugees, and honest appropriations bills for Americans.

You've no doubt heard from politicians that we should close our doors to all Syrian refugees, or just the non-Christian Syrian refugees, and you've no doubt also been hearing from the politicians that it's just too hard to do our due diligence in ensuring that Syrian refugees won't be bringing ISIS cooties with them. You'd think this country hadn't been admitting refugees for hundreds of years or something! In fact, refugees don't just show up on American soil -- often it takes two years, and occasionally it takes three, from application to resettlement, and that includes several rounds of security clearances. So Just Foreign Policy helps you tell the politicians to stop with the demagoguery and fearmongering about accepting Syrian refugees, and the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to continue accepting Syrian refugees. With any luck, the folks who still don't want to resettle any Syrians will be left with nothing to do but whine about how oppressed they are that nobody says "how high" when they say jump.

Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives would very much like to take the appropriations process hostage and gut clean air, clean water, and climate change regulations, so that their sugar daddies big corporate donors no longer have to be responsible for their pollution. And not just that, either -- earlier this year, we fought Rep. Crenshaw's (R-FL) rider defunding FCC net neutrality efforts in the Financial Services/General Appropriations bill. The people want clean air, clean water, and a more stable climate, and the freedom from health care crises that comes with it, and the people also want the freedom to determine where they want to go on the internet, rather than have some corporation force them to watch junk news first. But though we have the people's will at our backs, we still must speak out. Hence Friends of the Earth helps you tell your House Reps to reject any and all anti-environment policy riders in upcoming appropriations bills, and Free Press helps you tell the Senate to reject any and all anti-net neutrality riders in said bills.

Around the table: banksters, unions, socialists, values, and refugees.

Richard Eskow explains why reinstating the Glass-Steagall "wall" between banking and securities is essential. Long story short: "too big to fail" banks actually possessed around 4% of their stated assets before the financial armageddon of 2008, and now they have -- wait for it -- 5%. That means 95% of their financing is debt. And these are the heroes of the "fiscally-responsible" right! So banks would actually have less debt if they weren't involved in so many casino-economy games and were more involved in holding savings and lending to small businesses, which is what they always say they're going to do if we would just stop watching them.

Shaun Richman, writing at In These Times, suggest some ways unions could fight back against "right to work" laws. Unions could offer membership outside their contracted obligations, work to change the "at-will" employment standard at state levels (where an employer can fire you pretty much "at will") to a "just cause" standard (where an employer would have to have a good reason to fire you) -- and, basically, reach out to workers they don't necessarily represent, which unions have already started to do by fighting for the $15/hour minimum wage at municipal levels.

Sen. Bernie Sanders said at last week's debate that he would not raise the top tax bracket to where it was under President Eisenhower, at 91%. He then added, slyly, that he was "not that much of a socialist compared to Eisenhower," but even though I'd also prefer to end all those Bush Mobb tax cuts on dividend and capital gains income, we have a moral reason for a 91% tax bracket -- it prevents the wealthiest from running roughshod over the rest of us, as they've been doing for what seems like forever.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, supposedly the nicest Republican Presidential contender, says he would establish a "government agency" to promote "Judeo-Christian values" abroad. So I guess he thinks the problem with ISIS isn't that they're bastards, but that they're Muslim? Also, he wants "stringent background checks" on Syrian refugees, as if they're currently nonexistent. I suspect Mr. Kasich overestimates the size of both his heart and his brain.

Finally, Fox News's token non-insane television personality, Shepard Smith, condemns those who would close our borders to all refugees, saying "we cannot allow ourselves to become like those who want to destroy us" and "(w)e cannot resort to the tactics of the barbarians." All of that is true, and it may even give American rageheads some pause -- but only for a moment, before Ted Cruz or somebody reminds them how much short-term pleasure rage affords.

Action: the "war on terror," climate change, and energy efficiency.

After the ISIS attacks in Beirut and Paris, a lot of American politicians have been responding by pretending they're going to bomb the daylights out of everyone they don't like, or by declaring they won't take any refugees from Syria. To some Americans, that sounds like strength, but it's weakness -- anyone can bang on loud objects when they're angry, but it takes a grown-up to realize that, while banging on loud objects may be pleasurable for a short while, we're civilized people, with obligations not just to our past and to our present but also to our future, and a civilization that forgets that violence begets violence and mercy strengthens bonds will not last long. Hence CREDO helps you remind our government that civilized nations do not lash out in hatred when terrorists attack. Our government is currently bombing putative ISIS targets in Syria as we speak -- and they're conducting this bombing without the authority of Congress, I should add -- so regardless of what sympathetic noises President Obama has made in recent days, they need the reminder as much as any right-wing blowhard currently running for President.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans may vote on S.J.Res. 24, a "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify the EPA's carbon emissions plan, as early as today, so both the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Environmental Defense Fund help you tell your Senator to reject the bill. The EPA's Clean Power Plan would force energy corporations to cut their carbon emissions and convert more of their operations to renewable energy sources, but of course big energy corporations hate it, because being told to do anything differently than how they're doing it would prevent them from redistributing everyone else's wealth upward to themselves. No the EPA's plan isn't a "job-killer" but a job-creator, since the people who refit and redesign power plants presumably need jobs to do that, and it's not evidence of Big Gummint overreach, since it lets states develop their own plan that meets EPA targets, and it's certainly not a burden upon small businesses, since large corporations, not small businesses, do most of the polluting. So, really, right-wingers have no excuses to kill the EPA's Clean Power Plan. They could still be completely unreasonable, but let's expose that.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 805, which would allow Pennsylvania's biggest energy producing corporations to opt out of paying state energy efficiency program fees, still awaits a Senate vote. Could it be they're having trouble explaining why big corporations shouldn't have to pay into the state's energy efficiency program while you still have to? That means now is the time to strike! So the Sierra Club helps you tell your state Senators to oppose SB 805 via email, but also points you to the Secretary of the Senate's phone number, 1.717.787.5920, so that you may call your state Senator. Perhaps SB 805 flaks will claim that the big corporations will pass the savings on to their consumers. Ever see a big corporation pass its savings onto consumers? You may be the first! And if everyone else still has to pay into a system that actually saves all of us money in the first place, then we'll all wind up paying more anyway when the program falters due to shortfalls in funding. More and more it seems corporatists don't understand how things actually work.

Around the table: unpleasant-for-some truths about Muslims and terrorism, plus a Hillary Clinton 9.11/campaign finance gaffe.

Some simple math, courtesy Ben Debney in Counterpunch: "France has 6 million Muslims; if one tenth of one percent of these were jihadists, that percentage would amount to a hard core of 6,000. If France has that many jihadists, they are exceptionally lazy. If not, terrorism is not a specifically Muslim problem." Judging all Muslims by the assholes who bomb people would be like judging all pro-lifers by Scott Roeder.

And on cue: hopelessly moronic CNN anchors berate French Muslim for not "accept(ing) responsibility" for the Paris attacks. No one blames the murderers for murder anymore? One of the hopeless morons even says "I have yet to hear the condemnation from the Muslim community on this," which can only mean he's not listening, possibly because he's stuffed his walking-around money in his ears. I wish I could just ignore these morons, but because we don't have a la carte cable packaging in America, I'm still paying their salaries when I pay my cable bill, so I can't ignore them.

Juan Cole reminds us that the "20th century death toll" doesn't support the notion that Muslims are somehow uniquely murderous. Highly interesting fact: Belgian Christians alone killed four times as many folks, in the Congo alone, as Muslims killed in the entire 20th century, and Belgium was not among the two most active European nation in Africa. And in a world where even Buddhist monks have supported mass killing, you can't attribute the violence to one religion, even if it gets you hard.

Lydia Wilson discusses "What I Discovered from Interviewing ISIS Prisoners." Most ISIS fighters you find in prison cite the American occupation of Iraq as a galvanizing moment, but many of these also say they only joined ISIS because ISIS terrorized them and their families. ISIS is not in the habit of rescuing prisoners, which might inflect their testimony, but it's quite interesting to see prisoners passing up the opportunity to preach the ISIS gospel. Then again, ISIS apparently provides rather less religious indoctrination than their forebears in did. You have to wonder why.

Finally, Hillary Clinton invokes 9.11 in order to defend her campaign donations from Wall Street. She left unsaid, of course, why massive Wall Street donations remain so necessary so long after 9.11. "Invoking 9.11 to defend donations from banksters" is, of course, the kind meme even a bankster-worshiping Republican nominee can use against her, but I'm not sure it's as bad as the fact that she didn't actually answer Sen. Sanders's charge against her (that banksters give her money because they know they're going to get something in return).

Action: "free" trade, corporate welfare, and cosmetic safety.

As you know, the text of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" is finally out, and early analyses suggest the deal is even worse than we knew it was going to be from leaks. So both the People's Email Network and Roots Action help you tell your Congressfolk to reject this noxious "free" trade deal. The TPP would, as you know, would ship our jobs overseas and bring more unsafe products here, would make it harder to get the drugs you need to get better, would make it harder to speak freely on the internet, and (perhaps most noxious of all) would allow "investor-state tribunals" to nullify our laws if they cost some investor some money somewhere -- even if those laws protect the people against pollution, workplace injuries, or bankster schemes. The deal is so bad that its supporters (including President Obama and his former economic BFF, Lawrence Summers) can't defend it coherently -- Mr. Summers's last defense relied on booga-booga about China and a vague promise to stop passing bad "free" trade deals and get future "free" trade deals right if we'll only give up and let this one pass. He must think the American people are profoundly stupid. We're not.

Meanwhile, some four dozen big corporate tax breaks have expired, as they do every year, and Congress is anxious to renew them, as they do every year. Have any of them considered that the difficulty they have renewing such corporate welfare handouts as the "bonus depreciation" handout might well be due to the American people's hatred of corporate welfare handouts? I kid, of course: Congressfolk know full well what they do, and care more about their big donors than their real bosses, i.e., the American people. Naturally, at the same time our glorious representatives are figuring out how they're going to extend these handouts, they're waffling on extending expansions of actual tax relief for actual working families, namely the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC). Congress may well play the we're-broke game they never play with corporate welfare handouts -- unless we tell them not to. Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell Congress to prioritize tax relief for working families over corporate welfare handouts.

Finally, this week the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (or HELP) Committee will mull S. 1014, the Personal Care Products Safety Act, and Breast Cancer Action helps you demand more vigorous action against carcinogens in personal care products than the current bill would take. More and more scientists are linking cosmetics to cancer, but S. 1014 doesn't go far enough in protecting good Americans from carcinogens: it would make the FDA evaluate a mere five chemicals annually, and though cosmetic manufacturing corporations would have to provide a list of chemicals they use to the FDA, they wouldn't have to put those ingredients on their product labels -- you know, where good Americans might actually get to read them. Perhaps most importantly, the FDA would, under S. 1014, assume all chemicals are safe until they're discovered to be harmful, rather than force corporations to prove their chemicals are safe to begin with. There is, also, the matter of funding the FDA's new mandates, which S. 1014 doesn't address. You're supposed to spend money to prevent wrongdoing, after all.

Around the table: the "war on terror" and other follies.

In the wake of the latest round of ISIS attacks in Beirut and Paris, Chris Floyd reminds us that there would have been no ISIS without Tha Bush Mobb's Excellent Iraq Adventure. Keep that in mind when the politicians tell you the answer to terror is more war, as Mr. Trump has done in saying he'll "bomb the (crap) out of ISIS" a) like President Obama isn't already doing that and b) like you should fight fire with gasoline.

Republican Presidential candidates take Democratic Presidential candidates to task for refusing to utter the words "radical Islamic terrorism." They would throw the biggest hissy fit in the history of big hissy fits if anyone referred to, say, Kevin Swanson as a "radical Christian" (and not even as a "terrorist"!), but this obsession they have with precise diction is rather politically correct, wouldn't you say? It's like right-wingers have become what they most hate or something.

In the wake of another round of megamergers, the incomparable Harold Meyerson calls for "A New Trust-Busting Movement in America." I'll admit I'm surprised upon learning that mergers result in higher prices for consumers four times out of five that it's not five times out of five. Mr. Meyerson also reviews the proliferation of the forced arbitration clauses that are ubiquitous in almost every contract you sign now, whether it's for a credit card or a cable line or a car rental.

Daily Kos diarist Grizzard notes that some white folks decried the fires and looting after Michael Brown's shooting and wondered why blacks couldn't just protest peacefully -- but now that black college students are protesting peacefully at the University of Missouri, they're raising a whole new set of criticisms. In other news, Lucy pulls the football away before Charlie Brown kicks it, again. It's enough to make you think some white folks just don't want black folks to succeed at changing anything. Hey, it's not my fault that's how it looks.

Finally, Sarah van Gelder at Yes! magazine writes about an interfaith effort to wipe out debt among the poorest citizens of Cincinnati, OH. Those who would point out the "moral hazard" of forgiving debt should read the lengthy interview with Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann contained therein -- and should consider more closely the actual moral hazard of letting the banksters do whatever they want without regard to their obligation to serve communities.

Around the table: Muslims react to the Paris attacks, and other stories.

Muslims worldwide condemn terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday. Remember this when right-wingers say ZOMG WHY DO TEH MUZLIMZ NEVER CONDEMNZ TEH TERRORIZMZ!!!!!

Hackers reveal that Securus Technologies, which provides phone service to many of our nation's prisons, has been recording phone calls between prisoners and attorneys, meaning they very likely violated attorney-client confidentiality and thus broke the law. Some fools will laugh when they hear this and say, so what, they're just prisoners. I sure hope such folks don't have to revise their opinions by going to jail themselves.

Maine Attorney General sues a Planned Parenthood protestor for protesting too loudly. Both state and federal law guarantee a citizen's right to get legal health services without "disruption," and while Mr. Ingalls's protests can apparently be heard "in the second-floor counseling and examination rooms of the facility," I don't think that alone would meet the bar. But I presume he could be prosecuted if he's violating noise ordinances, since the First Amendment only guarantees a right to speak, not a right to speak at a volume that actually physically interferes with others' speech.

Ain't nothing so bad that Rand Paul can't make it worse: Sen. Paul, in saying that "only certain opinions are acceptable on college campuses," adds that "(i)t’s almost like they’ll put you in prison for challenging the religious dogma on climate change." Mr. Paul would have to prove there's anything particularly "religious" or "dogmatic" about climate change, but more to the point, it is not "almost" like "prison" until colleges start actually detaining students for expressing contrary views. You'd think a "libertarian" would be more sensitive to all of that.

Finally, the notorious House Freedom Caucus apparently plans to draft a Contract On With America II. They think of themselves as "anti-establishment," but make no mistake: their wish list, which includes "overhauling" Social Security and Medicare, repealing the Estate Tax, cutting regulations, cutting corporate taxes, and expanding offshore drilling, is an establishment wet dream. Democrats could run against that by defending Social Security and Medicare, by defending clean air and clean water regulations, and by defending making everyone, including the wealthy and corporations, pay their fair share so we can all have bridges and roads and libraries and firefighters and police officers. I kid, of course -- Democrats don't have the guts to do any of that.

Action: treating our soldiers better, and protecting our right to criticize products online.

First things first. Former U.S. Marine Tim Foster has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Congress to change a law that forbids disabled vets from getting disability compensation if they've also received separation pay. As it is now, if the military downsizes, and gives you a severance package (a.k.a. "separation pay") to help you ease your way back into civilian society, the military won't give you disability pay if VA doctors diagnose you as disabled -- no, even if you're disabled as a result of your military service. This doesn't constitute "double-dipping" at all -- these are two entirely separate payments with two entirely separate causes, and making one contingent upon repayment of the other has no utility other than to pay soldiers less money than they've earned. Our government is so anxious to go to war all the time, but comes up with excuse after excuse to avoid taking care of our soldiers after the wars are over, and we've got to change that. Getting rid of this particular absurd hurdle is a good way to start.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2110/S. 2044, the Consumer Review Freedom Act, addresses the problem good Americans often have when they post negative reviews of a product -- they find themselves violating an agreement they made with that product's maker. If you think posting a negative review of a product, in good faith, shouldn't be illegal, you'll be pleased to learn that the courts generally agree with you -- or they find that contracts that give one side (i.e., the corporation) the power to completely dominate the other side (i.e., you) is unconscionable and therefore unenforceable. You might well be saying to yourself: self, then why do we need legislation protecting our right to post negative reviews of products? Because most people get scared into silence or inaction by unconscionable contracts, and thus don't enjoy the protections they deserve in the first place. The EFF link above explains the problems it has with the Consumer Review Freedom Act, and you can refer to it as you call your Reps and Senators about the bill. They'll never see it coming.

Around the table: from dystopian crime-fighting to the latest thing that should end Donald Trump's campaign.

You may recognize it from Philip K. Dick's peerless dystopianism, but "pre-crime mapping tools" are here now, prodding police to, ah, expand their notion of probable cause beyond the boundaries we have long accepted. A conservative would remind us that we've accepted such boundaries for so long for good reason, but a "tough-on crime" reactionary wouldn't, despite the vast potential for abusing Software That Tells the Future, which certainly widens the palette of excuses law enforcement could use to detain whomever whenever. And not just because inductive reasoning has its limits -- too often, the data such software uses just isn't very good.

Corey Robin, writing at FAIR, finds a putative liberal declaring that "(s)ome of the most potent threats to free speech these days come not from our government or corporations, but from our citizenry" -- specifically, college kids protesting racism on college campuses. Of course warrantless wiretapping and NSA data vacuuming are more "potent" threats to free speech, but too many folks forget that the First Amendment doesn't run in one direction at a time -- folks who don't like what protestors say can speak out in response. And though I don't think the First Amendment protects you from your employer the way it protects you from your government, corporations are still a bigger threat to free speech than being scolded by a college kid.

Dean Baker catches Tom Friedman bashing one of the few things anyone should like about Donald Trump, his support for taxpayer-funded universal health care. Naturally he doesn't like Mr. Trump, and even more naturally he goes out of his way to mention his health care stance, as if the average of any two opinions equals "the middle." Mr. Friedman also complains that raising the top tax bracket to 50 percent would "only" cover about a quarter of the deficit, which rather inadvertently makes the argument that a 91% tax bracket would wipe out a lot more of the deficit. File under "The Uselessness of Moderates."

The Union of Concerned Scientists treats us to a video (run time: 2 minutes, 18 seconds) countering some of the propaganda against electric vehicles and their advantages in combatting pollution. So when your Tea Party uncle lists the reasons you're stupid for wanting an electric car, you can remind him that, yes, manufacturing batteries is slightly more carbon-intensive than manufacturing internal combustion engines, but using electricity to run your car still pollutes much less than using gasoline -- unless you live in places like West Virginia or Kentucky, which depend almost entirely on coal for their electricity, and guess what? Most people don't, and even fewer people will in the future.

Finally, Pamela Engel at Business Insider catches something you might have missed from the last Republican debate: Donald Trump complaining that "wages are too high." That's the kind of statement that would have finished a campaign back in the day -- and his subtle suggestion that higher wages discourage work wouldn't have played too well with voters, either. Still, while Trump supporters would hate being told they make too much money just as much as anyone else would, they're as likely to presume that their hero was really talking about Those Other People Who Make Too Much Money, not them.

Action: tax relief for working families, and getting fracking wastewater out of organic food.

Moms Rising helps you "welcome" Paul Ryan to the House Speakership by telling him to prioritize keeping the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) strong. That means keeping them both at the levels set by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 (i.e., "the stimulus"). Rep. Ryan is on the record as a supporter of the EITC and CTC -- why, he has even used the word "ownership" in expressing his support for these tax credits! -- so a "change of heart" in this matter would make him seem (more!) like just another politician who talks a good game but plays his paymasters' game. And as Speaker of the House, he now has a lot more power to decide what legislation gets a vote and what legislation languishes in committee purgatory. Since over 60 million families depend on the EITC and the CTC -- including one of every four current or former military families -- he may want to give this matter the appropriate amount of urgency. Hopefully he will not follow the lead of some Republicans who want to extend the EITC and the CTC to wealthier families who don't really need it.

Meanwhile, some agricultural concerns are still using wastewater from fracking operations to irrigate their crops, including food you might eat. Someone thought this was their only option to get through a drought, and I can't entirely blame them. But someone else thought this was a terrific way to make money off of wastewater, and I can blame them. The USDA has not, apparently, ruled on whether organic farmers can still call their food organic if they're using this crap on their crops, so the Sierra Club helps you tell the USDA to revise organic food standards to exclude oil-based wastewater. Organic food already must be devoid of conventional pesticides and fertilizers based on oil and sewage sludge, so your organic food shouldn't be treated with oil-based wastewater, either. Even well-meaning folks will no doubt tell me that we have to let organic farmers do this or they'll die out. Unfortunately, that's a hostage situation, and I don't do hostage situations, particularly where your food is concerned. Moreover, we have other policy choices available to us -- like not letting big agricultural corporations get "too big to fail."

Around the table: the "liberal" media strikes again! And other developments.

I think the Washington Post has actually been pretty good since Jeff Bezos assimilated it, but FAIR catches the Post business page thumping Uber on several occasions without disclosing that Mr. Bezos has a billion-dollar-plus stake in Uber. And the Post generally mentions Mr. Bezos's position as CEO of Amazon when reporting on Amazon. File this under "why one corporation shouldn't own another corporation."

Chris Morran at The Consumerist reports that Comcast has instructed its employees to portray its data caps as an issue of "fairness," where heavy data users pay more than the light ones -- but Comcast still doesn't actually cut prices for light data users. Doing something like that would have been fatal in the old days, but not now that big telecom corporations have monopolies of entire markets. Odd, also, that Comcast runs so many ads encouraging you to use a lot of data, almost like they want everyone to blow through the caps or something.

Fast-food workers all over America demonstrated for higher wages again on Tuesday, and at least one "liberal" media reporter suggests to a demonstrator that "some people say" that since paramedics don't often make $15/hour, fast-food workers shouldn't, either. The demonstrator did fine with that, but she could also have said that paramedics should be making a lot more than $15/hour, or that paramedics' low salaries don't justify paying everyone even less -- or even that "some people say" is code for "I say" and everyone in America knows it.

"Prosperity gospel" preacher at North Carolina megachurch says he'd violate Jesus's teachings if he actually said very much about his church's finances, including how much he paid for his brand new house. Some cojones he's got there, especially when earlier he said his million-dollar-plus house was "not that great of a house." So God commands preachers to keep silent about what they spend, and he couldn't have spent that much because it's "not that great of a house"? C'mon, moron, pick one.

Finally, Ben Carson discourses at length about how much "unfair" scrutiny he's getting and how little Barack Obama ever got. Those of us who tired of hearing about Jeremiah Wright every damn day for weeks on end will find that surprising, as will those of us who heard about that damn birth certificate for years on end -- as will those of us who have been sentient at any point over the last eight years. So waaaah and bullshit.

Action: corporate taxes, sane work scheduling, and media consolidation.

You may have heard that big pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer, headquartered presently in New York City, plans to "move" to Ireland, where it can enjoy a smaller tax burden and shirk its responsibility to help fund the road and bridges and police and firefighters and Medicare fraud catchers here in America. You will recognize this tactic as a "corporate inversion," and virtually no one is in favor of it, though liberals tend to react by demanding laws preventing corporate inversions and right-wingers tend to react by squealing about how the supposedly onerous corporate tax rate "forces" corporations to do bad things. Setting aside that our corporate tax system is shot so full of loopholes that a lot of big corporations get refunds from our government, this right-wing reaction I've just described is rather like excusing criminal behavior because of external circumstances, a courtesy right-wingers never extend to, say, black folks. But I digress. Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell Pfizer to abandon its plan to "move" to Ireland so they can evade their fair share of taxes in America.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to pass H.R. 3071/S. 1772, the Schedules That Work Act, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. It occurs to me that our parents' generation didn't have to face the proliferation of "unpredictable" schedules, partly because they lived in a civilization that used progressive taxation and vigorous regulation to create plenty of fairly stable jobs, and partly because, in those days, a lot of families were one-income families. Fast forward to today, and after thirty-plus years of deregulation and tax-cutting those jobs are mostly gone, with unstable and supposedly "unskilled" work taking its place, and now the vast majority of all families have two working parents, not one, because they need two incomes to get by. If we're going to help families raise their kids properly, we must at least ensure that their work schedules are stable and communicated to them in advance. And no, the work we do now isn't too "unpredictable" for stable scheduling -- Our Glorious Elites just want more chaos in our lives.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC and the Senate to reject the proposed Charter/Time-Warner merger, then Demand Progress helps you do that. Why reject the merger? Because mergers reduce competition, and if Charter buys Time-Warner, then some eight out of every 10 homes will have to get internet service from either Charter or Comcast, and that's not enough competition. When only two corporations dominate a service, and then don't compete with each other directly in various markets, then consumers get held hostage to higher prices and bad service. We also reject the merger because mergers like these don't "create" jobs, they kill jobs, as the behemoth rising from the ashes of two corporations sheds "redundant" jobs. They say they do that in search of greater "efficiency," and I suppose they're correct, in that mergers more "efficiently" deliver your money into the pockets of CEOs. But that's all about CEOs, not people. Am I old-fashioned to say that corporations should be about serving people, and not about grabbing as much money as they can?

Around the table: more tales about political correctness and Democrat weakness.

Barack Obama writes a pretty generic editorial supporting the Trans-Pacific "Partnership." Two problems: one, nobody and I mean nobody ever opposed exports, so arguing that corporations that export do better than corporations that don't is simply a red herring. Two, if you're looking for some assurance that the "investor-state tribunals" won't nullify our laws and force us to bail out big corporations whenever they dump crap into our air and water, you won't find it here. There's no China-bashing, at least, though he probably figures he can leave that to Larry Summers.

Bristol Palin says the whole Starbucks red cup controversy is "an attempt by the left to make Christians look stupid." And she might be on to something! Starbucks may well have rid their cups of all those snowflakes and reindeer because they knew someone would have a tantrum about it and they knew that would bring them more publicity, and I would of course disapprove of such cynical calculation, since I prefer enabling fewer tantrums. But naturally Ms. Palin can't take that theory all the way -- that is, to instruct Christians to ignore what Starbucks is doing -- because if she did, she couldn't drink from the cup of self-pity.

Hillary Clinton describes the problems with charter schools fairly lucidly and succinctly. She's saying the right things, again, which means it will be quite disappointing when she doesn't act on them so she can prize "bipartisanship" above all. You have to wonder, too, how charter schools had this very specific purpose (i.e., to be a sort of laboratory for public schools) and yet so quickly morphed into something else entirely.

U.S. Supreme Court decides not to take up a challenge to California's non-profit donor review law, one that allows the state to determine whether a particular non-profit group is actually doing charitable work. The plaintiffs allege freedom of speech infringement yadda yadda yadda, but the state doesn't even reveal donor names publicly. In any case, this Court has always looked more kindly on campaign finance disclosure than on campaign spending limits. Perhaps the next right-wing court, the one that makes the Roberts Court look as liberal as the Rehnquist Court looks now, attacks all campaign finance disclosure as Communist and un-American.

Finally, Sen. Ted Cruz says atheists should never be President, adding that "(a)ny president who doesn't begin every day on his knees isn't fit to be commander in chief of this nation." Again: how is this not "political correctness"? How is this not an attempt to scare people into adhering to a particular, rigid ideology, and condemning those fellow-travelers who would deviate, however slightly, from that ideology? This seems the very soul of "political correctness" to me.

Action: clean budgeting, and methane regulation.

Congress lately came to an agreement on raising the debt limit and setting a broad outline for federal spending -- but Congress still has to actually authorize federal spending, via appropriations bills, and that is where Republicans plan to try to roll back clean air and clean water protections and financial regulations. Not that this is news -- Sen. McConnell said he was going to do this even before Republicans took back the Senate. But USAction helps you tell Republican House leadership to pass clean appropriations bills, devoid of harmful and unpopular policy riders. Republicans no doubt think that because they got elected, the public approves of whatever they want to do. They're wrong. First, most of these Republicans only got elected because their districts are so gerrymandered they'd virtually have to crucify a kitten and drink its blood to lose an election. Second, their job is to do the people's will, not their own will. What is the people's will? The people want government to give them a hand up when they need it and stay out of their way when they don't. But if your political philosophy begins with "government shouldn't," you're probably not adhering to the people's will.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA to set the most vigorous methane limits possible for the gas and oil industries, then the Environmental Defense Fund still helps you do that. Methane, as you know, is a much more efficient greenhouse-gas producer than anything a coal plant belches out -- the methane mitigation industry has risen up just to deal with all the methane leakage from fracking operations, for example. Of course, the gas and oil industries don't care about any of that -- they only care about their profits. I wish I could describe the situation differently, but I can't. Sadly for them, the arguments they deploy in opposition to EPA methane regulation are the same-old same-old -- ZOMG TEH RULEZ WILL KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!! One more time: regulations create jobs for all the people who have to refit plants and processes so that they meet new standards. Reducing pollution always requires good old fashioned American can-do, and there's so little of that around now that our fat-cat class is so fat. But we can stoke that spirit again, by forcing gas and oil drillers to conduct their work without killing our climate.

Around the table: starring Ben Carson and Alan Simpson as "Goofus and Gallant."

Boy, I really thought we were done with this "War on Christmas" crap, but apparently we're not: right-wing evangelicals say that coffee corporation Starbucks has, in handing out red coffeecups with no snowflakes, reindeer, or Santas on them, "REMOVED CHRISTMAS from their cups because they hate Jesus" (caps in original). My memory of the stations of the cross isn't airtight, but I don't remember seeing snowflakes, reindeer, or Santa Claus at any of them. 'Tis the season, apparently, for folks to throw tantrums so they can get attention.

Robert Reich reveals "What I Learned on My Red State Book Tour." Spoiler alert: "many of the conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers I met agreed with much of what I had to say, and I agreed with them," which will only surprise folks who believe in "liberal" media stereotypes. Yes, "crony capitalism," "factory farms," "'free' trade," and "too big to fail banks" all meet with broad bipartisan opposition, and this is the precise opposite of what the "liberal" media tells you when they talk about "bipartisanship."

Elias Isquith at Salon interviews New York Times journalist Charlie Savage about how President Obama seemed to change his mind about the "security (sic) state." Mr. Savage points to two main factors: one, Mr. Obama objected to Mr. Bush's warrantless wiretapping because he felt they were lawless, but when Congress rewrote the laws to conform to what Mr. Bush was doing, that objection disappeared. Two, the "underwear bomber" seemed to have put a scare into Mr. Obama. A potential third factor, the "deep state" described by Michael Glennon among others, gets some mention at the end.

Julia Angwin at ProPublica tells us that Vizio "Smart TVs" can "track your viewing habits and share (them) with advertisers," who can then target you on your smartphone. You can opt out, but why should you have to opt out? Really, they should give you the option of opting in, like Samsung and LG smart TVs. Apparently a loophole in the law (specifically, the Video Privacy Protection Act) allows smart TV makers to do this. Don't worry, though -- Congress is always looking out for the consumer and will offer a fix post-haste. I kid, of course.

Ben Carson actually blames "political correctness" for drug addiction. No, that really is the way to read his answer to an admittedly vague John Dickerson question on Face the Nation: people get addicted to drugs because they "lack something," and what do they lack? Contact with other people, as very bright folks have lately said? Well, no -- they lack "the values and principles" that make America great, and since people have apparently replaced that with "political correctness," then political correctness causes drug addiction. Political correctness is an evil, but right-wingers indulge in it all the time (see first paragraph above), and folks who treat it as the worst evil in America are themselves "lacking something."

Finally, former Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson offers an extraordinarily lucid description of some of the real moral crises plaguing this nation. He likes college kids, but says they're being conditioned to be "consumers" rather than citizens, and he uses "class warfare" the way it should be used, against the forces that would make everyone work for less money. I'll admit I never liked Mr. Simpson as a youth -- I thought he was as out there as Newt Gingrich, and maybe he sounds better now because Out There 2015 is hardly visible from Out There 1987. But maybe, just maybe, I wasn't listening to him as well as I should have back then.

Action: "free" trade, and GMO food labeling.

The text of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" finally came out last week, and America's Greatest Citizen, Ralph Nader, calls it "the most brazen corporate power grab in history," one that will, as we already knew, give corporations the power to nullify our laws and run roughshod over our democracy by suing to overturn our laws in "investor-state tribunals," and these tribunals certainly won't be evaluating lawsuits by the people against the corporations. And it not only violates the rule of law in this nation and in other nations, not only attacks the worker and clean air and water protections we've fought for and won, not only reduces our access to drugs and a free, open internet, but it could even allow corporations to nullify our financial regulations, putting us all at risk to have banksters crap all over our economy again. I wonder if Mr. Obama will say these things are "just not true" now that the text is out and anyone can read it. I kid, of course -- he'll keep saying these things are "just not true" because he's counting on you not having read it, since you have a job and a family and such. Don't let him cow you: both Public Citizen and Food and Water Watch help you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership."

Meanwhile, the Senate still hasn't considered H.R. 1599, the so-called Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, but word on the street is that Sen. Stabenow (D-MI) is trying to put together a GMO food-labeling bill that can attract bipartisan support. Whenever Congress tries to do something "bipartisan," you should be suspicious, since experience tells us that our government thinks "bipartisanship" means Democrats and Republicans coming together to give corporations whatever they want. But they don't get all the say around here; we do. Hence Consumers Union helps you tell your Senator what you want from a GMO food-labeling bill: a strong mandatory GMO label on all food that's easy to read and comprehend. In other words, not a UPC-style barcode, because not everyone has a smartphone. You'll also demand that Congress stop trying to keep states from passing strong GMO labeling laws, as a few states have done. The Consumers Union tool says, fairly succinctly, "I should have the right to make my own decisions about the food I buy and eat, and not have those choices taken away by Congress." Congress should never take away your rights in order to appease their big corporate donors.

Around the table: exploding both the "Ferguson effect" and the "businesses dying" myths, among other tasks.

British government prepares to approve massive government spying bill, one that would explicitly allow the government to collect data in bulk, mandate corporate co-operation with that effort, and "severely" restrict citizens' ability to challenge that collection in court. In this, our government has actually outclassed that of the United Kingdom. Speaking of "limits" to data collection/examination powers in this context should not please civil libertarians -- once the government has all the data, it has the ability to examine that data unlawfully.

Ho hum, Fox News cites "the Ferguson effect" in claiming that violence against police officers has gone up, when in fact violence against police officers has gone down. But of course Fox News's main aim is to keep its viewers in a state of rage about something, and who cares what that is? Could be the "war on terror," could be the deficit, could be regulations, could be immigration, could be "Black Lives Matter" -- they don't care, as long as they're making money, which they will continue to do as long as the American people can't have a la carte cable packaging.

Dept. of Education announces "transparency measures" designed to make accreditation agencies do a better job, particularly when evaluating those pesky for-profit colleges where students may not graduate but may well accumulate a lot of debt. If you're wondering why our Dept. of Education doesn't do all the accrediting itself, as I was, note well that the law doesn't appear to allow that. Next time Democrats hold both Houses of Congress and the Presidency, they might want to fix that, instead of spending all their time reaching out to Republicans.

Factcheck.org instructs us that "business deaths" do not, in fact, "outnumber" "business births" -- they did between 2009 and 2011, precisely the time you might have expected that to be true, but not in 2012 or 2013. The Census Bureau has revised the relevant figures for 2012 and 2013 this year, true, but you'd expect Republicans to be on top of that, right? I would further argue that "the number of business deaths" isn't a very telling statistic to begin with -- how many of those "deaths" were because they were bad ideas, or badly run? Also more telling is that the rate of business "births" has fallen rather dramatically, on average, since 1978, a year we had more regulations and more taxation than we have now. But these things don't help Republicans confuse you into voting for them, so we don't hear much about them.

Ain't nothing so bad Ben Carson can't make it worse, and so it goes with the ZOMG MEN IN TEH WIMMINZ BATHROOMZ!!!!! campaign that killed an anti-discrimination ordinance in Houston. How does Mr. Carson slice this particular knot? By declaring that transgendered folks should have their own bathrooms, because "it's not fair for them to make everybody else uncomfortable." Like the rest of them, he fudges the difference between security, which is our government's job to ensure, and comfort, which is not our government's job to ensure. And how do you tell if someone in the bathroom with you is transgendered? Don't you have better things to do while you're there?

Finally, holy crap Louisiana Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Bel Edwards started running an add essentially accusing his opponent, U.S. Senator David Vitter, of skipping a vote honoring veterans to "answer() a prostitute's call." But did the notorious "D.C. madam" really call then-Rep. Vitter "minutes after" the vote on that fateful day in February of 2001? Because, so far, the evidence suggests both events happened the same day, and that's correlation-not-causation territory. I'm fascinated, though, that Mr. Edwards has a big lead in polls right now and he still launched this weapon -- I can't tell if he ran this ad because he thinks he's got it in the bag or because he knows he doesn't.

Around the table: the decline of the swing voter, and other matters, explained.

Terrance Heath recounts some of the victories we earned on Election Day. Maine's Clean Elections law expansion you probably already know about, but Seattle voters passed the famous "Democracy Voucher" program, Elizabeth, NJ voters passed a paid sick leave law, Tacoma, WA voters hiked their minimum wage, and Jefferson County, CO voters recalled three school board members who had thrown a right-wing hissy fit about AP history exams. I'm not sure whether to count Ohio's redistricting reforms as a win, though -- the end result could be hyperpartisan maps that have to be redone every four years, versus every 10.

The Obama Administration rejects the notorious Keystone XL pipeline. This move fits in with his modus operandi of taking tough decisions only when he's in no danger of suffering politically from them, but we should still celebrate, because it couldn't have happened without us. Note to pro-Keystone PR flaks: rejecting the Keystone pipeline is not "thumbing your nose" at folks who want to reduce our dependence on foreign oil if there are other ways to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, which there are. And question for Sen. Barrasso (R-WY): if people who want to reduce pollution are a "special interest," then what are banksters?

Comcast plans to institute data caps for cities in several Southern states in December. These will be extraordinarily unpopular, but as long as Comcast has monopoly status in these cities, they'll be hard for ordinary people like ourselves to dislodge, unless we go to the FCC. Kudos to Consumerist writer Kate Cox for referring to David Cohen as a Comcast "mouthpiece." "Lobbyist" is too good for the man who slammed the entire anti-consolidation movement.

In a surprising development by non-Louisiana standards, Republican Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, the fourth-place finisher in Louisiana's gubernatorial runoff last month, has endorsed the Democratic candidate still standing, John Bel Edwards, for Governor, rather than endorse Republican U.S. Senator David Vitter. That doesn't mean Dardenne's voters will automatically flock to Edwards, though; though polling thus far suggests they are flocking to Mr. Edwards, the runoff election is still two weeks away, and those voters are still more likely to vote for Mr. Vitter in the end.

The Washington Post chronicles "The Astonishing Decline of the American Swing Voter." But voters perceiving "sharp differences" between the two parties isn't evidence of actual sharp differences between two parties lurching further right. And I'd volunteer a different cause for the swing voter's decline: the ongoing Republican witch-hunt, first against President Clinton, then against liberal "traitors" under Mr. Bush, then against President Obama, has hardened everyone against each other, almost like that was the idea or something. My thesis might be more difficult to test scientifically.

Finally, noted non-liberal Jesse Ventura, in a lucid analysis that won't surprise anyone who's paid attention to him over the last 20 years, says Donald Trump "is using words he doesn't understand" when he refers to Bernie Sanders as a "Communist." And I'd say Mr. Trump isn't the only one! Virtually no one who brandishes "Communist" as a scare word these days can conceive of one-party elections, the abolition of capital ownership, complete central planning of the economy, citizens living in one-bedroom apartments assigned by the state, or the fear of being literally followed around by police at any moment. But that's what Communism is, and calling Bernie Sanders a Communist insults all the billions of good people who suffered under real Communist oppression.

Action: wildlife whistleblowers, cell phone robocalls, and clean water.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell four Executive branch departments (Interior, Commerce, Treasury, and Agriculture) to implement laws regarding rewards for wildlife crime whistleblowers. The Obama Administration treats whistleblowers like traitors, but they're not traitors -- they're patriots saving the taxpayer money, and if they make our government look bad in the process, then our government deserves to look bad. Seriously, we can't be so defensive about Democratic administrations that we forget the difference between right and wrong. Congress mandated that these four departments implement whistleblower rewards for public servants who provide information about poaching and wildlife trafficking crimes that lead to convictions -- in 1981. For those of you keeping score, that was 34 years ago, more than enough time to foul up your first marriage to your high school sweetheart or realize you're on the wrong career track. Why should we ever make public servants wait that long to enjoy full protection under the law?

Meanwhile, some Congresscritter or other managed to get a poison pill into the most recent debt limit/budget bill, which now allows corporations to robocall your cell phone. Shades of the omnibus spending bill from late 2003, another "must-pass" bill that incorporated loosened media consolidation rules and loosened overtime regulations therein, even though both initiatives were wildly unpopular, and had even been voted down by both Houses of Congress that year. At least S. 2235, the HANG UP Act, would re-ban robocalls to your cell phones -- if we make the House and Senate feel our wrath, of course. Do not be swayed by politicians who contend that debt collectors have a right to contact debtors, because they don't have a right to make harassing robocalls, they don't have a right to harass relatives or references, and they don't have a right to keep calling numbers that have been reassigned to non-debtors (which harasses them). So Consumers Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the HANG Up Act, and keep robocalls off our cell phones.

In other news, hydropower corporations have launched the "Unlock Hydro" campaign, with which they hope to get bills like H.R. 8 passed, bills that would reduce hydropower corporations' responsibility to take clean water and thriving wildlife into account when they build their dams, bills that would switch federal and state responsibilities wherever doing so would allow hydropower corporations to evade their responsibilities as stewards of civilization. "Unlock hydro," indeed -- as if clean water and healthy wildlife are "locks," waiting to be sliced open by the sledgehammer of industry! Clean water and healthy wildlife aren't locks -- worshipping mammon such that you ignore your responsibilities is a far worse "lock" than any clean water regulation could ever be. And by "evading responsibilities" I don't just mean building without seeing what already lives there -- I mean pushing the cost of cleaning up any messes these hydropower corporations make onto the taxpayer, which is what, class? A bailout, simple and plain. American Rivers helps you tell your Congressfolks to reject these pro-money, anti-responsibility, and anti-clean water bills like H.R. 8.

Around the table: what would happen if we got rid of the Senate? And other follies.

Here's some good news from Election Day: Maine voters approved a ballot initiative to expand their state's Clean Election Law. This was the ballot question Gov. LePage likened to "giving your wife your checkbook," a phrase he repeated in case you didn't laugh the first time. While it's good to expand public campaign financing programs, it's also good to stick it to Paul LePage.

Matt Taibbi makes "The Case for Bernie Sanders," and it's also a case against "liberal" media coverage of politics, which he likens to "high school" in that it's "a brutish, interminable exercise in policing mindless social rules." "Sanders is a clear outlier in a generation that has forgotten what it means to be a public servant," he writes, and if he's "grumpy," it's because there's a lot to be grumpy about. I apologize that my paraphrasing and quoting doesn't do justice to Mr. Taibbi's piece.

Hot on the heels of the charter school foundation-funded study that basically declared online charter schools worthless is we learn that actual corporations exist to help students cheat in online charter schools. And this isn't like reading Cliffs Notes instead of Great Expectations -- No Need to Study provides someone who'll assume your identity and take the class and tests for you. The good news? If we can get corporations like No Need to Study some bad PR, online colleges will either embrace online, real-time video and other tools to fight cheaters, or they'll never earn the prestige they need to earn to survive.

Had you been wondering how Charter was going to sell its plan to buy Time-Warner to the people? Me neither, but Kate Cox at The Consumerist went through the trouble of reading Charter's response to public commenters opposing the merger, so we didn't have to. Spoiler alert: Charter raises exactly zero points we haven't refuted to death in this space, and a few of these are, in addition to being easily refutable, mind-bogglingly stupid as well.

Ireland plans to decriminalize possession of small amounts of drugs and shift from a punishment model to a treatment model for drug addicts, though it will remain illegal to sell or distribute illicit drugs. When your Tea Party uncle decries Old Europe letting people get high in "supervised injecting rooms," remind him that they're also getting treatment so they shoot up less, and they're actually saving taxpayer money wasted on the "war on drugs."

Finally, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) embarks on a rambling "thought experiment" asking "would anything be lost if the Senate didn’t exist?" Such an "experiment" likely does not impress those of us who think it's actually a good idea to have two legislative bodies review a bill to lessen our chances of passing something harmful. Why, such a notion may even sound conservative, but of course teabaggers like Mr. Sasse aren't actual conservatives -- they're reactionaries looking to pass reactionary bills more easily.

Action: banksters, pensions, hedge funds, and fossil fuels.

Stunningly, Goldman Sachs is trying to buy a GE Capital online banking organ worth some $16 billion. I was just saying to myself, self, you know what the real problem with America is? Banksters just aren't big enough! What would this acquisition do for the American people? Spoiler alert: it would do nothing for the American people, though it would do something for ideologues who think you should be able to buy whatever you like and push the consequences onto others. And it would make Goldman Sachs bigger, at a time when we really should be making sure banks are smaller and thus more responsive to a community's needs. I know, I know, that sounds so conservative, but it's also right. Anyway, the Federal Reserve can quash the acquisition if it so chooses; it may not be inclined to choose to do so, being as it is populated with former Goldman Sachs execs, but our duty is no different. So CREDO helps you demand more public scrutiny of the Goldman Sachs/GE Capital deal. It's good that GE is trying to get out of banking, by the way, but no law of physics compels them to sell their assets to someone even bigger.

"Corporations are channeling unprecedented amounts of secret money into our elections," Public Citizen's latest email missive begins. "Even worse, they're doing it with our retirement savings." How, you ask? Pension funds invest in big corporations that spend money secretly -- which means your money could be going to Congressional and Presidential candidates who would, once in office, go around screaming WE'RE BROKE!!!! and then "fix" the "problem" of "being broke" by stealing your retirement savings from you! Nice work if you can get it! Hence Public Citizen asks you to tell America's largest retirement savings manager, the Vanguard Group, to keep our money out of political campaigns. Will this work? It's hard to tell -- on one hand, Vanguard's executives no doubt want to keep making money, and this will make that task a bit harder, but on the other, bad PR is bad PR, and Vanguard has a lot of leverage, leverage I imagine it would hate to lose. But you know what won't work? Doing nothing. So let's not be those people who do nothing because we're afraid of failure.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2889/S. 1686, the Carried Interest Fairness Act of 2016, would close loopholes that allow hedge fund managers to have their income taxed as "capital gains," rather than, you know, as "income." The capital gains tax rate is, as you know, 15%, which is considerably lower than the income rate most hedge fund managers would pay on their millions (that would be 39.6%) -- and that means hedge fund managers pay a lower tax rate than the police officers, firefighters, nurses, and teachers who do a lot more to hold our civilization together. Praise the Lord that some Democrats have finally figured out that maybe instead of folding such initiatives as the Carried Interest Fairness Act into these Leviathan bills that nobody understands, putting them up as single-issue bills would do better! Certainly it would force Republicans into defending the loopholes hedge fund managers enjoy, which even Donald Trump and Jeb Bush won't do. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Carried Interest Fairness Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Justice Department to investigate whether Exxon covered up climate change research while pumping millions of dollars into climate change denialism, then Food and Water Watch still helps you do that. There is, as you know, precedent for this sort of investigation -- the landmark tobacco settlement began with an investigation into whether they covered up knowledge that cigarettes cause cancer -- and there is also, as you know, evidence that Exxon knew the disastrous consequences of human-aided climate change but chose to "emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions" about climate change and "urge a balanced approach," the "balance," presumably, being between the vast amount of scientific research (including Exxon's own research!) and the funhouse-mirror "science" corporations prefer folks to believe. And by their own hand they damned themselves, saying they chose the path they chose because the impact of regulatory efforts would "come sooner" than the impacts "from climate change itself." I'd say there's certainly enough there for an investigation.

Around the table: discrimination against gays, corporate taxes, automatic email replies, private tax collectors, charter school stratagems, and, yes, that Chris Christie video.

Bad news from Election Day: Houston citizens fall prey to right-wing fearmongering and repeal a non-discrimination ordinance. Those who really believed the fever-dreams of right-wing scare groups -- that non-discrimination ordinances don't protect gays from getting fired for being gay so much as they "allow men to dress as women and enter restrooms and prey on children" -- need to get a clue. And in turn, non-discrimination proponents need to stop being so thinky-think about every damn thing.

IRS audit finds that Coca-Cola owes some $3 billion more in taxes, thanks to its practice of transferring profits offshore. And the Tea Party goes up in arms, saying that poor, poor Coca-Cola actually pays more of its taxes than a lot of other corporations (though, ah, they still don't pay the actual corporate tax rate) and the IRS should stop picking on poor, poor corporations just trying to create jobs. OK, I'm kidding -- they haven't done that. But give them time.

"Ever wished your phone could automaticaly reply to your email messages?" asks Cade Metz at Wired. Short answer: no. Long answer: hell no! But Google is developing something called "Smart Reply," which would scan the content of your emails and present you with canned replies you can deploy. Using the term "AI" to describe what Smart Reply does, it turns out, is a bit hysterical -- Smart Reply is less likely to let Google (or some AI bot) take over your email account than to become the butt of jokes the way autocorrect has.

Kelly Phillips Erb, writing at Forbes, describes why we should have the IRS conduct tax collection services rather than privatize them, as Republicans in Congress have been trying to do for years. Whether you're a fan of the IRS or not, private tax collectors have done their job very badly, at considerable cost to the taxpayer, private tax collectors don't have the same mandate to protect your private data, and their very existence creates more opportunities for scammers to take your money. That's why we oversee our government, folks -- we have far less control over private entities.

Ho hum, pro-charter school foundation realizes its "top-down approach...does not adequately address the needs and desires of parents, local advocacy groups and community groups," so now they're shifting tactics -- to "building an active coalition of supporters" and "cultivating local advocacy partners." In short, they're moving from trying to impose their will on people to trying to get people to "buy in" to the will they're trying to impose on them. Sadly, this kind of thing does help bad people get their way -- but only if good people don't speak up.

Finally, this video from a New Hampshire townhall, in which New Jersey Governor Chris Christie advocates a treatment approach to drug addiction instead of a punitive one, is all the rage on the internets right now, and for good reason: he does a great job articulating his point, in a frank but not aggressive manner. It's not like this is a new position he's taking, either. I hope he can reach a few right-wingers this way, and maybe even help turn them back into actual conservatives.

Action: Keystone XL, sustainable food, and endangered species.

TransCanada, the corporation aiming to build the Keystone XL pipeline, has asked the Obama Administration to suspend its process for evaluating TransCanada's application for permits. So TransCanada can bone up on pipe safety? Sadly, no: TransCanada cites Nebraska's latest route review process as the reason -- and I'm all for Nebraska taking its time approving the pipeline's route, since that's a big chunk of heartland drinking water that's going to go down if the pipeline bursts there -- but more likely TransCanada is afraid the Obama Administration will deny their application, and if he suspends the process, they'll take their chances that a new President not named Sanders will be more likely to approve it. (Secretary Clinton has said she opposes the pipeline, but that's now -- we'll see what she does if she wins.) You have to wonder if the bottoming out of crude oil prices all over the planet might have something to do with it, too. In any case, now is the time to put more pressure on President Obama to reject the pipeline, which bothFriends of the Earth and the Sierra Club both help you do.

Meanwhile, the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell Darden Restaurants to do more to support the well-being of civilized people by better promoting local agriculture, sustainable food production, and higher wages for its workers. Why Darden Restaurants? Because it's the biggest-grossing casual dining corporation in America -- as it should be, if it owns Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, and the Capital Grille, among many others! -- and if you can get the biggest operation to change its ways, other operations will follow suit. And Darden should be hungry for some good PR, given the bath they took not too long ago about their CEO making over 1,900 times what his lowest-paid tipped employee makes. Asking Darden to do a lot of different things (all things, I reiterate, that will bring them good publicity) increases the possibility they'll do any one of them. If I had to pick one, I'd say pay their workers better, but if they depended less on factory farms, or upped their veggie portions, or bought more food from local and regional producers, well, those are all victories, too.

Finally, our Congressfolk still aim to kill the Endangered Species Act, because protecting endangered species interferes with Congressfolk's goal of selling off public land to their mining and drilling cronies. To think that some of these folks are so "pure" that they don't even get any kind of kickback for that -- they really believe that selling off public lands to make their donors richer is moral and just and requires no additional compensation! And I normally admire purism! I guess I prefer my purism uncorrupted by mammon. In any case, having explained why politicians try to kill the Endangered Species Act, I should explain why we defend it. Yes, killing off an entire population of a species, forever, is immoral, but it's also bad for us -- when a species's numbers starts to dwindle, that's an alarm that something's wrong with the ecosystem upon which they depend, and we depend on those ecosystems, too, no matter how remote they are. So Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect endangered species, and in so doing also protect us.

Around the table: more from the Republican clown car, plus college accreditation shortcomings.

Putative libertarian Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah introduces bill that purports to limit law enforcement's use of stingrays (which can capture the data on your cell phone) without a warrant -- but, naturally, the bill contains broad exceptions for "national security" and FISA. And I do mean broad -- "conspiratorial activities threatening the national security interest" could mean a lot of things. File under "The Uselessness of Libertarian Republicans."

Steve Benen notes that Paul Ryan, since ascending to the Speakership, has hired eight-count-'em-eight new communications staffers and zero policy staffers. What do we expect, though, from a political party that thinks they can convince America that dung is meatloaf if they just message it right? (Mr. Benen is right, though, to note that getting rid of staffers who actually know policy and hiring more PR flaks is a long-standing problem. I suspect the enterprising messager could make campaign ads attacking Republicans on this very basis.)

Annie Waldman notes that the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (or ACICS) seems to oversee a lot of for-profit schools where students don't finish school very much and are swamped in debt. ACICS's President told Sen. Warren that his agency couldn't take "any kind of action" without "evidence," by which he meant the "outcome" of federal investigations, not merely the fact thereof. But if your students suffer under more debt and complete school less frequently, what evidence, exactly, are you waiting on?

Ben Carson alleges that a rival Presidential campaign leaked his ties to medical supplement corporation Mannatech, ties he denied having at that CNBC debate last week. The reporter who broke the story nine months ago, National Review's Jim Geraghty, denies the charge, but why isn't Ben Carson blaming himself for thinking he could just deny something that had already been widely-reported? I can't just blame the softball question that prompted the charge.

Finally, the Washington Post talks to some voters who support Donald Trump. There'll be no surprises -- they're mostly older folks who think of the Reagan era or the '70s or the Eisenhower/Kennedy era as the last American golden age, and they all admire a man who "talks like a regular guy." But you also know all these folks are going to vote for whomever the Republican nominee is, Trump or no, and none of them want to bring back things that actually made America great, like the 91% tax bracket and aggressive corporate taxation. And I hear too much complaining about "everything (being) about race" -- "everything wasn't about race" in the '50s because too many folks didn't even question segregation. And, ah, hate to pile on, but the Eisenhower era would never have produced a Donald Trump -- he's only this well-off because of the casino economy Ronald Reagan began to bring about.

Action: police in schools, better redistricting, and corporate campaign contributions.

By now you've heard about the Columbia, South Carolina police officer who body-slammed a Black girl to the ground in a high school, for not getting out of her chair when told to. Infuriating, to be sure, but here's the big question: what on Earth was a police officer doing in school in the first place? Yeah, I know this happens all the time now, but why? Because Kids Today Don't Respect Authority, a tune every generation plays? (Every generation also plays its follow-up, No This Generation Is Really Different.) If kids don't respect your authority in the classroom, that's almost certainly because you don't respect your authority, either, and they're certainly not going to respect it if they know a police officer is in the building ready to hand out beatdowns. Hence the ACLU helps you tell Richland County Authorities to enact common-sense reforms when having police interact with children -- like, don't have police there in the first place unless it's actually a very serious problem. I turned out all right without police patrolling my school's halls, and so can today's kids.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 484 would amend Pennsylvania's constitution to allow the legislature to appoint an 11-member commission -- four each from the Commonwealth's two largest political parties, plus three more whom are registered with neither party -- to redraw state and federal districts every 10 years. Typically the legislature itself redraws the districts, but we've seen all too well how that turns out: the party in charge of the legislature tends to, ah, favor itself in the redrawing of districts, creating those hysterical "gerrymandered" districts that legislators now have the technology to draw to exclude individual houses, districts that look like no amoeba or Rorshach blot ever created. I'm always saying that when representatives don't do the people's will, the people should throw them out. But, in practice, that's hard, and it shouldn't be -- no representative is entitled to a job representing the people. So Common Cause helps you tell your Pennsylvania state rep to support SB 484, and thus support more power for the people of the Commonwealth.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to mandate, via executive order, that all federal contractors disclose their campaign financing, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. If you hear from right-wingers that such an order would violate those contractors' free speech rights, here's how to answer them: if you take the taxpayer's money, as federal contractors do by definition, you have to follow the taxpayer's rules, which would (in this instance) be set by the President with the authority Congress granted him. And since you're the taxpayer, it's your money these contractors spend to influence elections and issues. Just as you never hand over your gun to someone who might use it against you, we really shouldn't hand over our money to corporations who'll then use it to influence our representatives to get more unearned goodies from us. But, as long as we have federal contractors, we ought to at least be able to know what they're doing with our money, so that we can at least wield The Big Stick of Bad PR against them. Bad PR is still quite powerful.

UPDATE. I erred in failing to point out that SB 484 in Pennsylvania covers state-level redistricting as well as federal; error corrected above.

Around the table: "banning the box," the "new Willie Horton," online charter schools, forced arbitration, and Paul Ryan's charming views about paid family leave.

President Obama issues executive order "banning the box" for federal employers (though not federal contractors). This means that, instead of presenting a job application with a check-box asking if applicants have ever been in prison, federal employers will have to wait until later in the process to check backgrounds, and thus ex-prisoners will get to put their best foot forward and make more of their lives than they might otherwise had an opportunity to do. I wish he'd included federal contractors (which would have made a much bigger difference), but this still represents progress.

In a peripherally-related development, Politico headlines a story about Mr. Obama's plan to release 6,000 non-violent drug offenders thusly: "Has Obama Set Loose a New Willie Horton?" I presume they won't use the I'm-just-asking defense -- I bet they'll claim they mean "Willie Horton" not in the near-literal, is-one-of-these-folks-actually-going-to-murder-someone sense, but in the "Willie Horton as political football" sense. It doesn't matter, because it sure looks like racist fearmongering. (In other news, Ted Cruz is completely useless -- he "favors reform," except when his opponents actually try reform.)

Study on online charter schools, partly funded by private charter school foundation, "effectively says that the average student who attends might as well not enroll," particularly where math is concerned. But you probably knew this, if you figure the charter school "movement" is basically a way to undermine public schools and steal taxpayer money at the same time, or if you've ever gone online and found yourself four clicks away from where you intended to be.

Forced arbitration makes the New York Times! OK, they've probably covered it before -- after all, a main foe of forced arbitration, Sen. Blumenthal, lives just over the border in Connecticut -- but this is about as good a primer about (in one law professor's words) "the whole-scale privatization of the justice system" that you'll get. Warning: some of the items contained therein will make you very angry. Which, I assure you, is because you're a good person.

Finally, even Fox News Sunday all but tells Paul Ryan he's a hypocrite for wanting more time with his family while opposing bills that would help all workers have more time with their families. Remember, "some new federal entitlement" and "a new unfunded entitlement" don't actually have any bad words in them, regardless of Mr. Ryan's tone. And the FAMILY Act, which would essentially make the Family Medical Leave Act paid, is actually funded by a laughably small payroll tax. So when Paul Ryan brandishes "unfunded" as a scare word, he's not even right.

Action: climate change, country-of-origin labeling, and fairness for pregnant workers.

Some 49 Senators (including two coal-state Democrats who are probably toast in 2018 no matter what) have co-sponsored S.J.Res. 24, a "resolution of disapproval" aiming to gut the EPA's carbon emissions plan. Why? Because they're doing what their big donors tell them to do. No, really, that is the reason. They'll say it's other things, like "states' rights," even though the EPA's Clean Power Plan already empowers states to come up with their own plans for meeting the EPA's goals. And they'll use "small businesses" as a human shield, like always, citing the higher utility prices small businesses will have to pay if we have to produce more of our power from solar and wind and suchlike, never mind the higher prices we're all going to pay for everything if we don't, or that big utilities use any excuse to jack prices up anyway. No, they're protecting their big donors' ability to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. But they don't get all the say around here! The Sierra Club helps you tell your Senators to support the Clean Power Plan and reject legislation that would weaken or destroy it.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2393 is called the Country of Origin Labeling Amendments Act, but it doesn't "amend" country-of-origin labeling laws for meat so much as it repeals them. The House passed H.R. 2393 in June, but the Senate hasn't taken it up yet. Perhaps they know how unpopular repealing country-of-origin labeling laws are! They'll say their hands are tied, of course, since the World Trade Organization ruled that our country-of-origin labeling laws violated at least two "free" trade agreements and put other nations at an "unfair" competitive disadvantage. If it's not entirely clear to you how merely mentioning where meat comes from constitutes a "disadvantage," you're not alone. And of course, this is the same Congress that wants to ram another "free" trade deal, the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," down the throats of the people. I know it ain't just me who sees the essential relationship between two of the most unpopular legislatives in America. CREDO helps you tell your Senator to reject H.R. 2393 and save our country-of-origin meat labeling laws from the nullifying force of trade agreements.

Finally, H.R. 2654/S. 1512, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, may have a shot at getting passed, since the Senate version, at least, demonstrates some collaboration between Democrat Bob Casey, Jr., of Pennsylvania and Republicans Dean Heller of Nevada and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would mandate that employers make reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers on the job -- which may mean something as small as letting an employee sit down to do her job or carry around a water bottle or have more access to the rest room -- and would forbid rejecting a job applicant just because she's pregnant, or requiring pregnant employees to take unpaid leave if reasonable accommodations can be made, or otherwise retaliating against an employee for getting pregnant. That anyone would do that may seem incomprehensible -- until you remember that corporations are actually quite anti-family, since families distract workers from the important business of making the CEO as much money as possible. But Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Around the table: in which good citizens pursue renewable energy while politicians pursue cronyism and corruption.

Mary Hansen at Yes! magazine finds West Virginia citizens more willing to embrace renewable energy than their state government, whether through co-ops, municipal solar projects, or fighting "sun taxes." If West Virginia stays the course on coal, "(w)e’re sacrificing our health and our lives so that people in other states can save a few cents on their electricity bills," one resident says, and he's right, but it's actually worse than that -- they're actually sacrificing their health and lives so some CEO can gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home.

John Nichols, writing at The Nation, reminds us that new House Speaker Paul Ryan is actually fairly unpopular these days in his hometown of Janesville, WI -- and suggests that's perhaps because he consistently chooses Wall Street's priorities over Main Street's. It is worth remembering, since we don't always remember every dumb vote every bad politician takes, that Mr. Ryan voted for the biggest humiliation George W. Bush visited upon the American people, the financial services bailout of 2008. No one who does that can ever assert they're on the people's side -- or that they're conservative.

Another day, another study asserting that the Economic Armageddon of 2008 could have been much, much worse if not for the "policy responses" of late 2008 and early 2009, including both the bailout and the stimulus bill, apparently. You'll never convince me the bailout did a damn thing for anyone but the banksters, but the stimulus did some good, I suppose. Still, we should have done a lot better, and "things could have been worse" is really not what you want on your headstone.

Jeb Bush admits he's "conflicted" about the death penalty and thinks we should "reform" it -- but the one thing he mentions reforming (apparently he thinks it takes too long to kill someone on death row!) actually makes him seem more like the giddy executioner he wasn't in Florida (and his brother was, in Texas). Jeb Bush appears practiced at seeming like a decent human being one moment and then an awful one the next. But then, a lot of people like their politicians like that.

Let's give Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the credit he deserves for retracting his earlier statement that a Palestinian mullah "gave Hitler the idea" to kill the Jews, because it is better than most politicians' corrections. But I'd have substituted "(c)ontrary to the impression that was created" with "contrary to the impression I created." And I insist that who "decided" to kill the Jews is not nearly as important a matter as who actually killed the Jews.

Finally, Hillary Clinton calls for an end to racial profiling, and also for ending (not just narrowing) the sentencing disparity between powder cocaine-related offenses and crack cocaine-related offenses. Hopefully we'll hear little from the "liberal" media about how Hillary Clinton is moving left with these announcements. She's not "moving left" -- she's moving to the center, that is to say, the real center where most folks actually are, not some imaginary "center" that bisects the shifting line between Republicans running ever further right and Democrats breathlessly trying to catch up.