Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: no we don't need to reassess the First Amendment! And other pronouncements.

Some legal scholars wonder whether we should expand the "clear and present danger" exception to the First Amendment, and thus curtail First Amendment speech, because of the rise of ISIS and their alleged success recruiting over the internet. Short answer: no -- the First Amendment doesn't run in one direction at a time, nor does it restrict free speech to one person at a time; someone can try to get you to blow things up, but other folks can also tell you why you shouldn't. Always Our Glorious Elites want to curtail your speech when some monster burns down a country, and always they think you're so weak that you'll easily succumb to anti-American propaganda. That's because they want to use their own anti-American propaganda.

Ho hum, Radley Balko at the Washington Post reminds us that 2015 did not bring some massive wave of cop-killing, nor did it bring some enormous crime wave. Sadly some 70 percent of Americans, according to Gallup, think crime is worse this year than last year. And simply presenting the facts won't help very much if the "liberal" media (not just Fox News!) foregrounds crime and violence in their programming as if nothing else ever happens in America.

Bernie Sanders says he can get Donald Trump supporters to vote for him. To which I respond: of course he can! That's why Our Glorious Elites convert the real grievances of Trump supporters into racism before folks like Mr. Sanders can get to them! But I do wish he'd make the most important link between terrorism and the income gap -- namely, that if we stop the rich from extorting debt tribute from us, we'll have a lot less terrorism everywhere. He'd better do that soon, too, so he has time to overcome the inevitable blowback from "liberal" media punditoids.

Fox Business host wonders how we'll ever be able to "get through these things that are going to happen" like the Tamir Rice shooting "and still be able to let the police do their job without any kind of real serious ridicule or things like Black Lives Matter?" OK, then: "Black Lives Matter" are not cuss words, "ridicule" (or, more precisely, oversight by the people) is not oppression, and the mere fact that corporate media can find black folks willing to brandish scare words like "the Ferguson effect" isn't all that interesting, the world being a big place and all. And courageous folks of all colors dare to imagine a world where shooting a 12-year-old boy with a toy gun isn't something that "just happens."

Finally, Donald Trump believes Bill Clinton's infidelities are "fair game" where Hillary Clinton is concerned, and even estimable liberals seem willing to let Mr. Trump achieve disaster with that idea, but I'm not sure he will. For one thing, while hitting Bill Clinton over his infidelities is a proven failed strategy, hitting Hillary Clinton over her toleration of those infidelities is something else entirely. Two, Mr. Trump, himself a committer of multiple infidelities, has clearly learned from right-wingers that you hit your opponents where you're vulnerable. And sadly, it's worked for plenty of them.

Around the table: a *completely startling* action from Kentucky's Governor, and other tales.

George Will thinks a Donald Trump nomination would end the Republican Party as a bastion of conservatism. And the first three paragraphs are so withering ("Perhaps the 56 journalists murdered were coincidental victims of amazingly random violence that the former KGB operative’s police state is powerless to stop") and so incisive ("(Mr. Trump's) compulsive boasting is evidence of insecurity. His unassuageable neediness suggests an aching hunger for others’ approval to ratify his self-admiration. His incessant announcements of his self-esteem indicate that he is not self-persuaded.") that I'm willing to overlook his belief that the Republican Party is currently a bastion of anything but reactionary politics. I was also hoping that he'd nail more precisely what about Mr. Trump isn't conservative (versus what about Mr. Trump is profoundly upsetting), but I'm even willing to overlook that.

Ho hum, a Tax Policy Center analysis finds that Mr. Trump's tax plan would add nearly a trillion dollars to our national debt annually over the next decade. No truth to the rumor that Mr. Trump responded NO IT WON'T BECAUSE MY ECONOMY WILL BE YUGE AND FULL OF ENERGY JUST LIKE MY SCHLONG AMIRITE? Anyway, the right-wing plan to cut taxes is, we should all know by now, not a plan to cut government spending, but a plan to force more of the tax burden onto working folks so that rich folks and corporations can pay less. And not so rich folks and corporations can "create jobs," either -- these folks are always trying to shed jobs, and the only job creator among you, rich folks, and corporations is you.

Jeb Bush tries desperately to criticize the Confederate flag without offending his townhall audience, like so: "The problem with the Confederate flag isn’t the Confederacy, the problem with the Confederate flag is what it began to represent later." Ah, no: the former Confederate states seceded because they wanted to keep black folks as slaves, so the problem with the Confederate flag derives directly from the Confederacy. And they still say Jeb is the smart one! He's shaping up to be this year's Mitt Romney, which is nothing to celebrate -- unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Romney was an actual moderate once.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: despite his stated support for restoring voting rights to felons under some circumstances, new Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin rescinds his predecessor's executive order doing just that. Why? Because "it is an issue that must be addressed through the legislature and by the will of the people," which is a funny thing to say on a day you issue four other executive orders. And how does he think Governors get to issue executive orders anyway? By some process other than the legislative branch delegating certain functions to the Executive? These teabaggers sure are fresh and bold -- particularly the ones who sucked at the bankster bailout teat, like Mr. Bevin.

Finally, Cornell University study finds that minimum wage hikes have not resulted in higher unemployment in the restaurant industry, despite repeated assertions by restaurant lobbies that it has. This won't come as a surprise to those of us who consider people, not corporations, to be the real job creators; of course, haters gonna hate, but regular folks can't be that emotionally invested in defending the high salaries of restaurant chain CEOs and their lobbyists. Can they?

Around the table: 'tis the season for getting Jesus's teachings exactly wrong.

Fox News hosts complain that too-sensitive school administrators are not only "sucking the joy out of Christmas," but putting us on the "cusp" of a "purge" of "Christianity from the public marketplace" and its possible replacement with "secular humanism" -- or "the rise of Islam," whatever. I think it's clear who's actually "sucking the joy out of Christmas." And a la carte cable packaging would help put an end to it.

Donald Trump responds to the accusation that his BFF Vlad Putin "kills journalists, political opponents and invades countries" with "well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, also, Joe...There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on, a lot of stupidity and that’s the way it is." Of course some folks wonder if Mr. Trump was really saying that our government kills journalists, but I don't need to go that far -- Mr. Trump's excusing the evil one person does because other people do it too is offensive enough.

Ho hum, New York tabloids blame Mayor De Blasio for the homelessness on New York streets, though homeless people have been on New York streets for rather longer than two years. Ever hear the media blame Reagan-era housing assistance program cuts for the explosion of homelessness? You could be the first. Or how about New York's absurdly high rents? Or is paying $4,000 a month for a broom closet in the Big Apple just Newton's Fourth Law?

Franklin Graham, declaring his disgust with Republicans, Democrats, and the Tea Party, declares himself an "independent" -- because the Republican-held Congress couldn't defund Planned Parenthood! As usual from right-wing preachers, this is tantrum at best, bullshit at worst -- and the road to hell is paved with the skulls of those who call themselves "independent" yet always support the candidates who stand furthest to the right. (Oh, and "there's no question" that "taxpayers" are, in fact, not "paying for abortions," Mr. Graham, because the Hyde Amendment prevents it.)

Finally, Old Bridge, NJ girl accidentally calls 911 after toppling an Elf from his Shelf, and therefore, apparently, risking the "loss of the magic of Christmas." I guess this'll be a funny family story in a few years, but it's also the kind of thing that makes you ask if we really need all these corporate-created "traditions" (let alone "traditions" that -- yep, I'm going there! -- make government spying seem a lot more normal).

Action: wage slavery, and voting rights.

With Christmas day nearly upon us, CREDO helps you tell four American multinational corporations to use their vast power to improve wages and working conditions for the Chinese wage slaves who make the toys they sell. These are the toys that will appear under millions of Christmas trees this year, and who really wants their happiness to derive from the sorrow of millions of fellow human beings? No one, that's who -- not even the CEOs of big toy-selling corporations, who believe they must do what they do in order to maintain advantages over their competitors. Their behavior remains absurd in a world where we're all conscious of our eventual death, but in the meantime the workers who make these toys can't make ends meet even after they put in their 12-hour work shifts six days every week, just like American workers in the days before the New Deal, and the point of running a successful business isn't about finding new people to exploit. And no treating Chinese workers better wouldn't automatically mean higher prices -- it could just as easily mean the end of endless stock buybacks by corporate executives. If they get up some moral courage, that is.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to investigate Alabama's slew of DMV closures, which could affect the ability of half a million good Alabamans to meet the state's very strict Voter ID law, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. The state's Governor and legislature claim that the DMV closures -(which will leave over 30 counties without a single Division of Motor Vehicles, almost half of these in the state's "Black Belt") are a result of "budgetary troubles," but that's utter crap -- states with "budgetary troubles" typically pretend there's just no way to raise taxes on the wealthy and the corporate, when the wealthy and the corporate typically have very light tax burdens in these states. And you have to wonder why "budgetary troubles" never seem to result in cuts in corporate welfare handouts, but always seem to result in good citizens having to drive hours out of their way -- generally on weekdays, so they have to sacrifice a day's pay, or their jobs -- just to comply with a Voter ID law purporting to address non-existent "voter fraud."

Around the table: experimenting on poor children, and other horrors.

Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, catches the Washington Post featuring a video "experiment" where poor children, faced with the choice of a nice present for themselves or one for their parents, choose the one for their parents. Phrases like "cheap emotional pornography" and "shallow moralism" describe such "experiments" quite adequately, but we shouldn't forget that videos like these are usually the brainchild, as it were, of marketing corporations, and why do we tolerate the "liberal" media giving over news space to marketers again?

Debbie Nathan, writing in The Nation, explains "The Real Reason Sandra Bland Got Locked Up." Long story short: "Texas has no state income tax, and money for social services must come from somewhere. Gouging people with traffic tickets and criminal convictions is an easy way for the state, counties, and municipalities to collect lots of money." Defenders of the pay-as-you-fee state will tell you that the people who commit the crimes should be shouldering more of the burden, and I won't say I'm immune to that kind of moralizing, but I thought we asked criminals to pay for their crimes, not for politicians' lack of courage in explaining that taxes pay for things we all need, and forcing citizens to pay hundreds of dollars for an "improper lane change," while letting big corporations hold states hostage to bigger and bigger welfare handouts, is hardly just.

Why did the FBI hound Pete Seeger all those years, according to David Corn at Mother Jones? Because he wrote a letter, as an Army private in 1943, protesting a Californian American Legion proposal to deport all Japanese-Americans (even if they were citizens!) upon war's end -- and the Legion, of course, promptly passed that letter to the FBI. Later, the FBI learned that Mr. Seeger had joined the Communist Party (he didn't stay long) and that Woody Guthrie's guitar said "this machine kills Fascists," which the FBI seems to have taken personally for some reason. All this while Mr. Seeger was trying to get into the fight against Hitler! The FBI did seem to get the upper hand on him during the '50s, but more than seven decades after that first letter he died a beloved hero, with President Obama calling him "America's tuning fork."

At least one Washington Post fact-checker has given up the game, because there's too much anti-factual crap out there on the internet. You can insulate yourself from it fairly well if you avoid clickbait and avoid corporate-sounding domain names with that extra ".co" or ".net" or whatever at the end, but note well the NBC.com.co founder (who has nothing to do with NBC, see how that works?) who flat-out says he "specifically tries to invent stories that will provoke strong reactions in middle-aged conservatives." We're a truly sick, immoral, and decadent society if we cannot shame such a man into silence.

Finally, Ronald Reagan's daughter, Patti Davis, says her father would be "so appalled" by the current Republican candidates for President. I think she's right, and we liberals do find ourselves beginning a lot of sentences with "at least Reagan didn't" these days. Recall, however, that no less a personage than Ayn Rand called Ronald Reagan "the representative of the worst kind of conservatism."

Action: human rights in Saudi Arabia, and GMO experiments on people in Iowa.

Human rights lawyer Waleed Abu al-Khair has consecrated his life to defending activists such as Raif Badawi, as well as basic human rights such as the right not to be detained by the state without charge, and these works have already earned him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination at the relatively young age of 36 -- so, naturally, the Saudi Arabian government has put him in jail, where it apparently plans to keep him for the next 10 or 15 years. And, of course, they've beaten the crap out of him and moved him from one jail to another, ensuring his sleep deprivation in the meantime. And what were the "crimes" of which he was convicted? Oh, the usual -- "undermining the regime and officials," "inciting public opinion," "insulting the judiciary," which you'll recognize as exactly the sort of legalistic whining all insecure states indulge in. So Amnesty International helps you pressure the Saudi Arabian government to release him, while Just Foreign Policy helps you pressure our government to push for his release.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell Iowa State University and the Bill and Melenda Gates Foundation to stop their plans to test food with genetically-modified organisms (or GMOs) on people. If you remain of the mind that opposing GMOs is exactly the same as denying climate change, consider that vast scientific research not funded by self-interested parties (i.e., the fossil fuel corporations) supports the conclusion that the planet is warming unsustainably and that we're contributing mightily to that -- while the science claiming GMOs are A-OK mainly comes from self-interested parties which maintain an iron grip over their patented seeds such that more skeptical scientists can't get access to them. And this experiment they're working on? It would make bananas richer in Vitamin A for folks in Uganda. Why not improve access to foods already rich in Vitamin A, as USAID has done by introducing a sweet potato into Uganda with darker orange flesh and more beta-carotene (which your body turns into Vitamin A)? Probably because that doesn't make big ag corporations a lot of money.

Action: debt cancellation over greed, and people over big pharma.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the Department of Education to cancel all student loans issued to students at the now-notorious (and now-defunct) Corinthian Colleges between July 2011 and September 2014. Corinthian, as you may know, has become the poster child for the evils of for-profit colleges, promising students heightened job prospects -- in exchange for high-interest, high-fee loans, of course. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Corinthian in late 2014 for the cost of all student loans handed out to Corinthian students since July 2011, totaling some $530 million, and a U.S. District Judge in Illinois ruled in the CFPB's favor some two months ago; Corinthian has, in the meantime, declared bankruptcy and dissolved such that it can't actually pay the damages. So forgiving the loans would seem the fair thing to do. And no, there is no "moral hazard" in forgiving loans that never should have been issued in the first place. More politicians should attend to the actual moral hazard of extorting students based on lies.

Meanwhile, a collection of good-government organizations have begun a Sign Here Now petition helping you tell our government to put people over big pharmaceutical corporations. Martin Shkreli's behavior in hiking Daraprim's price more than fiftyfold is just one data point, and don't let anyone tell you he's an exception to the rule -- big pharma corporations typically hike drug prices so they can "fund research on new life-saving medications," but then spend a big chunk of their largesse on advertising, which, as you know, is not research. Then they try to take advantage of the tax system by stashing their profits offshore, or reincorporating as foreign corporations so they can shirk even more of their obligation to our communities, as Pfizer is trying to do. All this, while seniors pay more in Medicare's drug program because our laws prevent Medicare from negotiating its own drug prices, and tens of millions of good Americans let prescriptions for needed medications go unfilled last year simply because they couldn't afford to fill them. This hardly seems like the America I grew up in sometimes -- but that's why we fight.

Around the table: behold, the Dramaslayer!

FBI arrests "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli for securities fraud, after being "accused of repeatedly losing money for investors and lying to them about it" and "illegally taking assets from one of his companies to pay off debtors in another." Read the whole thing -- his trail of slime is even more impressive then I'd previously known. And surprise, surprise! The most hated rich man in America is not actually that good at holding onto money.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signs a bill scrapping the state elections board that has caused him so much trouble, as well as another bill legalizing the sort of campaign finance rule violations that have also caused him so much trouble. His slogan might as well be Conservatism: It's All About Me! And unless Wisconsin Democrats are willing to abandon their why-can't-we-all-get-along silliness and vow to repeal all of Scott Walker's nefarious works, they'll never win a damn thing in that state again, and Bob LaFollette's life work will have been for nothing. And I sure wouldn't want that on my conscience if I were a Wisconsin Democrat.

"The Fed's Own Data Contradicts Its Case for Raising Interest Rates," announces Timothy B. Lee at Vox. In short, it's raising rates because it's worried about a spike in inflation, but has projected that inflation will actually decrease in the short-term. Of course, banksters have been flogging fears of inflation in their largely-successful effort to prevent our government from spending any money to get us out of this mess.

Jackie Kucinich, writing at The Daily Beast, thinks Bernie Sanders isn't going "negative" enough -- against Hillary Clinton. And here you thought he'd be running against a Republican in November! People who believe you have to run down your primary opponents with a bulldozer tend to be political consultants, and I suspect they only talk to each other. To be sure, Mr. Sanders hasn't been negative enough against Trumpcruzcarsonrubio, and such negativity would get him the free airtime with which the "liberal" media has thus far been very parsimonious.

Arlington (TX) authorities hold a 12-year-old Sikh boy with heart condition in juvy for three days for having a solar panel charger on his backpack, which some aspiring Congressman among his classmates told the principal was a bomb. Said 12-year-old boy -- whose heart condition has required three open heart surgeries and thus, I presume, also required tending for the three days he was detained -- now wears an ankle bracelet and may face charges as an adult, all because a bunch of actual adults aren't adult enough to admit they fucked up.

Finally, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller says he "might just slap" the next person who wishes him "happy holidays." I'd be happy to say "Merry Christmas" to him, if that's what he prefers, but why must he indulge in drama about the matter? I guess we can't expect anything but drama from a guy who wears a cowboy hat in his Twitter thumbnail.

Around the table: human trafficking, terrorism, Republican hawkishness, criminal justice reform, rape kits, and collective bargaining.

Lengthy Associated Press investigation finds widespread human trafficking in Thailand's shrimp-processing industry. Those who would argue that "free" trade pacts are the only way to deal with this sort of thing would do well to note that Thailand actually has laws against human trafficking, and that the Big Stick of Bad PR can be employed against Thai officials (and their corporate customers) when they fail to enforce those laws. They should also recall how hard the State Department tried to get Malaysia off its human trafficking blacklist so that country could join the TPP. And finally, they should also know that no one in America puts a gun to your head and makes you eat cheap shrimp.

Ho hum, the CNN Republican Presidential "debate" went on-and-freaking-on about "radical Islamic terrorism," but no one, including the moderators, talked about terrorism by white people. No Dylann Roof, no Robert Dear, no James Holmes -- and you'd think at least a few of these guys (John Kasich and Chris Christie, maybe, but certainly Rand Paul) would want the opportunity to beat up on someone like Dylann Roof, if for no other reason than to look like people who are capable of thinking. But I guess we all live in Trumpland now -- a place of such energy!

In a related note, the Washington Post wonders if Republican Presidential candidates' "strikingly hawkish stances" will wind up alienating "swing voters." Setting aside that the Post talks about "hawkishness" as if they weren't the most hawkish major newspaper in the country a dozen years ago and thus helped cause a lot of the messes we're dealing with now: the only way to get voters to vote against their interests is to make them think they have to, and Republicans have another 10-plus months to do that.

Brendan Fischer at PRWatch instructs us that the Koch brothers' support for criminal justice reform is not only self-centered, but dangerous. The Koch brothers care less about drug sentencing reform or mass incarceration of folks of color than they do about "overcriminalization" of white-collar crime, though you've surely noticed that not very many folks are going to jail for white-collar crimes these days. They also push a tougher "intent" standard for crimes, as if intent matters more than result. Generally, it should be hard to convict folks of crimes, but that doesn't mean it should be easier to put people in jail for having a dime bag of coke than for rigging financial markets, especially when the latter destroys civilizations more than the former.

Memphis, TN has constructed a brand new facility for processing rape kits, and as a result has significantly cut down its 40-year backlog in just a few years. Out of 12,000 rape kits, the city has examined, or is in the process of examining, over 8,000 of them, and while the city still has to perform additional analysis on a little more than half of the ones they've started or finished, they're setting a good example that I hope other cities will emulate.

Finally, the Seattle City Council votes to allow for-hire drivers (like the ones that drive for Uber or Lyft) to bargain collectively for better pay and working conditions. The "sharing" economy is born of nothing other than corporate opportunism, and collective bargaining seems to me a First Amendment right, but I shudder to think that some folks out there will cite this development as the First Sign of an Irreversible Apocalpyse, just as some people did at the creation of Medicare. People like that are dead souls, but I'll keep praying for them, just as they're praying for me, I'm sure.

Action: feed animal abuse, and climate change denial.

Mercy for Animals has started a petition on Change.org that helps you tell poultry-processing corporation Perdue to stop abusing its chickens. I'm no fan of manipulatively spooky incidental music in hidden-camera videos, but watching workers not just stomp on live chicken heads but grind them under their boots and hearing other workers describe the health problems chickens get from Perdue's breeding methods is convincing enough. So much for all the good PR Perdue got from reducing antibiotic use! Perdue fired one worker after this video got publicity, but that just makes him the Lt. Calley of animal abusers, and workers don't abuse animals because they all wear Snidely Whiplash mustaches -- they abuse animals because they're under a lot of pressure to produce. So, even though the petition calls for a number of good works that Perdue could undertake -- including slower breeding, more space, and more humane killing methods -- I wish it had also called for hiring more workers and training them better. But you can hijack the "I'm signing because" box to add that.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether ExxonMobil unlawfully misled the public on climate change, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. As you may recall, we have evidence that ExxonMobil knew about the disastrous effects of climate change in the late 1980s, yet still embarked on an expensive and decades-long campaign of climate change disinformation. You'd think, knowing what was coming, they'd have spent all that money weaning themselves off oil and onto renewables, but of course doing so would have made it much harder to redistribute wealth upward to executives. I bet ExxonMobil executives would say they obfuscated on climate change out of their "duty to shareholders," but usually by "shareholders" they mean "executives like me," and one wonders if they ever put the matter honestly to their shareholders, because shareholders are pretty good people -- certainly better than the executives who use them as a human shield. Perhaps we can answer questions like these in court.

Around the table: the Flint drinking water emergency, and other stories.

Flint, MI Mayor declares a state of emergency over lead in drinking water, this after 20 months of resident complaints about the water quality. The emergency results, apparently, from Flint's drawing its drinking water from the Flint River rather than Detroit's water supply, though Flint has been reconnected to Detroit's water since October. Flint residents have also sued state and municipal officials, saying that the botched switch to Flint River water deprived them of their rights under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (that would be the bit that reads "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law").

Dean Baker tells us why we shouldn't privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Simply put, allowing private banks to offer securities backed by mortgages and guaranteed by our government will induce exactly the sort of Wild West behavior that proponents of privatization supposedly want us to avoid. Remember, when the stock market crashed, how grateful you were that we didn't privatize Social Security? I think that was a lesson.

Woodland (VA) town council votes against rezoning a residential/agricultural area to a manufacturing area so that a solar farm could operate there -- after hearing from residents that the solar farms stop photosynthesis, "suck up all the energy from the sun" and cause cancer. It's a damn shame when the longtime resident who blames the town's three existing solar farms for declining property values and job loss comes off as the smartest person in the room. And it is, of course, completely impossible that any of these folks could be paid shills for the fossil-fuel industry.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) has, per the Wall Street Journal, underreported his income by some $4 million over the last eight years, saying the 83 amendments to his financial disclosure forms resulted from "filing errors." I'm a little stunned that the Journal published this story, when Mr. Corker has been one of the banksters' most steadfast defenders during his two terms in the Senate.

Finally, the U.S. Senate unanimously passes S. 2044, the Consumer Review Freedom Act, which would prevent corporations from silencing customers who write negative reviews of their products. One shudders at the histrionics the House could employ to avoid considering this bill, given that even a Republican-controlled Senate passed the bill unanimously, but the Senate's action represents progress.

Action: child marriage, and preventable child deaths.

First things first: forced marriages of young girls remains a repugnant reality in many nations across our planet. But as members and defenders of civilization, we assert that a 13-year-old girl cannot even consent to have sex, and just as she cannot be a sexual partner, she also cannot be a wife and mother -- she ought to be a girl, and she also ought to be a student who gets to decide what she wants to be and go to school so she can become what she wants to be. These values maximize freedom for our children, but in Burkina Faso, at least one in three girls still get married before the age of 18, even though that's now against the law there. (Burkina Faso doesn't automatically confer citizenship upon birth, but does confer citizenship upon marriage, and I presume this has a good deal to do with girls getting married young there.) Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Burkina Faso to enforce its laws and ensure that families do not force girls into early marriages.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 3706/S. 1911, the Reach Every Mother and Child Act of 2015, then RESULTS still helps you do that. H.R. 3706/S. 1911 would direct our government to plan foreign aid in order to end preventable child deaths (including deaths during childbirth and shortly thereafter) in two decades. Sound ambitious? It shouldn't -- if we can now fit a thousand long-playing albums on a device the size of a deck of cards, we should easily be able to ensure that every child on the planet has a chance at a good life, one in which they can fulfill their will and contribute to the greater good. The world has halved preventable child deaths just in the last 25 years (against the tide of worldwide monetarist cruelty, no less!), but not every country on Earth has access to clean water or health care like we do, and they could use, and deserve, our help. No, I'm not kowtowing to the media-whipped fever pitch against foreigners that seems so popular these days. People are people, and helping them fight preventable child death will reduce terrorism.

Around the table: five more paragraphs that crush drama to bits.

Another day, another two-decades-plus military veteran reminding us that being "the good guy" in a gunfight isn't as easy as a lot of politicians would like us to imagine it is. Not that such testimony will penetrate (so to speak) the minds of those who act like having a gun is an excuse to masturbate your rage with both hands.

Ho hum, Josh Bivens reminds us that when right-wingers say ZOMG TEH REGULASHUNS CRUSH TEH PROFITZEZ!!!!! or TEH TAX RATEZ AREZ TOO HIGHZ FOR TEH CORPORASHUNZ TO COMPETEZ!!!!, they're just plain wrong, since corporate profits have been above 10% (after taxes) every year but one during the Obama era. The fact that post-tax profits were pretty high in well-regulated 1965-69 as well as fairly unregulated 2010-14 suggests that regulations actually have very little to do with profits, which we already know from the actual testimony of actual small businesses. Let me add that I highly approve of the word "coddling" in the article's title, because we coddle big corporations too much in America.

USDA finds that Maine is running its food stamp program so incompetently that it may ultimately have another state run the program for Maine. Of course, you can't discount the possibility that Gov. LePage wants exactly this result, so he can say Maine doesn't give out any food stamps and do a victory lap. Meanwhile, people who need assistance go hungry. You'd think Mr. LePage, having lived on the street for two years as a child, would get that.

Quaker school in Montgomery County, PA, strikes Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from its high school reading lists after students complain. I can imagine high school students making a coherent argument about why the book isn't appropriate for them, but generally schools should help students confront the multitudinous contradictions about race in America, not shun them out of "discomfort" -- this needs to be an America where people understand how Lincoln could have used the n-word and freed the slaves because slavery disgusted him. The good news? Plenty of schools still teach the book, and seem committed to grappling with issues both textual and cultural.

Finally, an Ohio seventh-grader faces criminal charges and expulsion after threatening to shoot a Muslim sixth-grader he called a "son of ISIS." I'm for expelling him, if that's all that'll make the kid ashamed of himself, but no no no the seventh-grader should not be charged with a crime and tried as an adult, because he's 13 years old and thus not old enough to know that threatening someone else's life is a serious matter. Throwing adult charges at him is not a way of teaching him that the school takes such threats seriously; it's a way of creating drama and getting publicity for yourself, which is not your job as a public school official. But for this boy to say such things to another boy, you do have to wonder how he's being raised.

Action: sane budgeting, and *a la carte* cable packaging.

Congress passed a five-day extension late last week to fund the government until this coming Wednesday, with Speaker Ryan suggesting more short extensions are in the offing, since he wants to do a spending bill "right" and not be held captive to an "arbitrary deadline." Running out of money is "arbitrary"? Try telling the clerk at your local grocery store about "arbitrary deadlines" when you can't pay for you food! And why would Mr. Ryan and his comrades have to pass endless piecemeal extensions? Because everything Republicans want is noxious to the American people, and he knows it. The politicians and their "liberal" media enablers can spin it however they like, but that's the damn truth. The American people do not want dirtier water or a crippled EPA; hence Friends of the Earth helps you remind your Congressfolk of this fact. The American people do not want our federal government to cripple state efforts to label GMO foods; hence Food and Water Watch helps you remind your Congressfolk of that fact. And Common Cause, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Peace Action West also help you tell your Congressfolk you want a clean budget bill, shorn of "poison pill" policy riders including those mentioned above -- and also including those that would infuse even more corporate money into political campaigns, and kill net neutrality so corporations can take control of your internet experience from you.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to force cable corporations to offer their TV channels a la carte, then the Parents Television Council still helps you do that. If you're like me, you have a somewhat different set of concerns than the PTC does, but that doesn't mean they have the wrong solution -- allowing good Americans to pay for their cable channels a la carte would let us vote with our pocketbooks, so to speak, and starve undeserving cable channels of unearned subscription fees and advertising revenue. You can make the cable company come out and block channels you don't like (and it's probably worth it to make them do that!), but you'd still be paying for them. And why pay to watch "journalists" rummage through mass shooters' apartments and play Amateur English Professor about their baby toys? Why pay to watch sensationalist fearmongers on cable news channels fellate Donald Trump all day? Ban all Muslims bomb everyone I'm YUGE you're a LOSER -- people who watch this garbage all day must be bitter and miserable people. Let's enable less of that, shall we?

Around the table: "free" trade, propaganda videos, privatized care, lost jobs, and foolish gun owners.

If your heart has swelled that Republicans are now saying that the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" probably won't pass Congress in 2016, Dave Johnson at the Campaign for America's Future warns you that Republicans are really mad that the TPP doesn't cause even more chaos and destruction. The main sticking point for Republicans these days? That the TPP doesn't allow tobacco corporations to use "investor-state tribunals" to nullify anti-smoking laws. When some Republican goes on about how much he hates the TPP but won't tell you exactly why he hates it, remember that the reason he hates it is most likely because it's not evil enough.

FAIR asserts that "Credulous Reporting of Deceptive Propaganda Made Planned Parenthood Attack Inevitable." I won't go that far -- assholes like Robert Dear are always one pathetic excuse away from going off -- but this is the place to draw a line from the ACORN video to the Shirley Sherrod video to the NPR fundraiser video to the Planned Parenthood videos, and it's also the place to wonder how so many "elite" "journalists," all at least as trained in semiotics as I am, somehow didn't understand that editing a video creates an entirely new video.

Heather Vogell at ProPublica describes how private corporations caring for the disabled bend politicians to their will, particularly when someone's died under their care. She tells a sad tale -- children dying of neglect and abuse, facilities using restraint techniques outlawed in other countries over a century ago, campaign money coincidentally popping up when states attempt reforms. Remember when someone tells you that the rich need more money to create jobs that the rich are just as likely, if not more likely, to use their unearned largesse as hush money when they foul up.

You knew WalMart's forays into China displaced good American jobs, but here comes the Economic Policy Institute to try and determine how many: over 400,000 jobs between 2001 and 2013, and that's a "conservative" estimate. EPI says over three-quarters of those were manufacturing jobs, which of course they were, since Chinese wage slaves get paid in dung pellets to do what Americans used to do for a wage they could live on, support a family on, and send kids to college on. Keep in mind, also, that WalMart's just one corporation -- overall, "(t)he growing goods trade deficit with China displaced 3.2 million U.S. jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013." That's a drag of 20,000 lost jobs every month. Is this a good time to remind you that China's only one country?

Finally, Charlie Renville, of Fargo, ND, wants his son's principal fired because his high school, enforcing school policy, wouldn't print a photo of his son with his favorite rifle in its yearbook. Even better, the dad says "so begins the fight for freedom." "Begins"? Such drama -- too many Americans want to be mentioned in the same breath as Frederick Douglass without actually doing any of the hard work of being Frederick Douglass. And "(t)he rifle is a rifle he built and it is his favorite rifle"? Should I get Zombie Gilbert and Sullivan to put that to music? Let's never mention this fool again.

Action: free speech, "radicalization," and refugees.

First things first. The Malaysian government has charged political cartoonist Zulkiflee Anwar "Zunar" Ulhaque under that nation's "Sedition Act" (remember when the Adams Administration rammed the Alien and Sedition Acts through Congress in the late 18th Century? Good times!). Which particular species of "sedition" did Zunar supposedly commit? The kind that "naturally" results from condemning the arrest and imprisonment of opposition leaders on Twitter, that's what. You know, just like that time Barack Obama totally threw Donald Trump in prison and then threw the political cartoonists who condemned it in prison on terrorism-related charges! Oh, sorry -- forgot which evil alternate universe I was in for a moment. Seriously, Amnesty International helps you tell the Malaysian government to stop oppressing its critics already, by releasing Zumar and other prisoners of conscience and repealing laws like the Sedition Act. I've said it before and I'll say it again: a government that jails its critics is a profoundly insecure government -- perhaps even a government that knows it's on its way out. I wish such governments would fall sooner, but pressuring those governments is still work worth doing.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the FBI has apparently developed a web-based computer game called "Don't Be a Puppet" that supposedly helps teachers and students identify the radicals in their midst! (Note to self: research the possibility that all evil alternate universes eventually converge.) What makes you a "risk" for turning into a terrorist radical, according to the FBI? Well, you know, having an Arabic name and asking folks on social media to come along on a "religious mission," just like the Aurora shooter, the Planned Parenthood shooter, the Minneapolis shooters, the Oregon shooter, the Charleston shooter -- beginning to see a pattern? And of course, absolutely no bullying whatsoever will ever occur as a result of kids playing this game! OK, I'll grant that in some schools, kids who play the game will be the ones getting bullied as "snitches," but how about we don't enable bullies by feeding them stupid information at all? The Bill of Rights Defense Committee helps you tell the FBI to drop plans to "help" educators and students stereotype others in their midst. Maybe we should work instead to restore a society that doesn't value sensationalism above all other things? Maybe? You think?

Finally, if you're tired of Donald Trump telling us we shouldn't let Muslims into the country until we can fix whatever's wrong with the process that allows mostly non-Muslims to shoot people up, and if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to support the relocation of Syrian refugees to the United States, then the Friends Committee on National Legislation still helps you do that. Would it do any good to reiterate, again, that refugees are typically the ones fleeing terrorism, not causing it? That refugees have perpetrated precisely zero terrorist attacks on American soil? That the process for vetting these refugees already takes between a year and a half and two years, and already has standards built in to account for radicalization and terrorism? I wonder whether it does any good to reiterate these things, since the folks who really need to hear them generally pretend they don't hear them and then change the subject, but I'm a fool for hope, I suppose, so I'll keep saying it. I'll say this, too: the people who've been going around pretending they're strong because they'd keep refugees out are not strong. They're weak. Strong people have mercy even when it's not convenient. Remember that every time you see Donald Trump scream on TV: he is a weak person.

Around the table: how Tom Friedman may have influenced Donald Trump's rhetoric, and other lessons.

Ever been shot? Good for you if you haven't, but, in case you were wondering, former Green Beret and combat medic Connor Narciso, writing at Wired, describes the science of getting shot, particularly vis a vis how getting shot looks on TV or in the movies. Example: "It isn’t uncommon to see heroes on the silver screen fighting courageously through their extremity wounds, when in fact the disruption of peripheral or junctional arteries can cause irreparable harm within minutes." Turns out this is also why no soldier or police officer aims for "flesh wounds."

From the "Even When He's Right He's Wrong" file: FAIR catches Thomas Friedman denouncing Donald Trump for his bomb-everything rhetoric -- and then tablulates a brief list of times Mr. Friedman himself indulged in bomb-everything rhetoric over the years. It is truly amazing how overheated, and uncivilized, Mr. Friedman's rhetoric was 16 years ago. Perhaps he thinks it's OK for a columnist to threaten to bomb everything, because a columnist has less influence than a President or a Presidential candidate -- unless, of course, Mr. Friedman's rhetoric has made Mr. Trump's rhetoric more palatable.

Speaking of The Donald (regrettably, as always), some Republicans profess fear that a Trump Presidential candidacy will affect Republicans down ballot -- to the point where Republicans might even lose the House. I'm torn between saying, "well, you reap what you sow, given all your efforts to stoke fear and rage in your supporters over the years," and "oh, pimp, stop lying -- you're all perfectly happy with riding a wave of ragehead supporters to victory, because what other electoral strategy will deliver victory to Republicans in 2016?"

McKay Coppins, writing at Buzzfeed, finds sources close to Ron and Rand Paul at a loss to explain the tension between the two camps. I'm not at a loss: why would Ron Paul like what his son has been doing? The son is a warped alternate-universe version of the father, minus only the goatee -- where Ron Paul stood his ground against Our Glorious Elites, Rand Paul wants the little people to believe he's standing his ground against Our Glorious Elites and then suck up to them.

Finally, Netflix expands its family medical leave program to its hourly workers. They don't get the same leave as the "talent," and the DVD workers don't get the same leave as the streaming workers (as if it's their fault streaming is making DVDs more obsolete all the time!), but even the DVD hourly workers can get 12 paid weeks annually, which is approximately 12 more paid weeks than most American workers get. And it wouldn't have happened without the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Action: better working conditions for garment workers in Cambodia, open licensing of federal education materials in America, and methane emission regulation in Pennsylvania.

14 garment-worker unions in Cambodia are campaigning for better pay and working conditions, and the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell major corporate retailers like WalMart, H&M, Gap, and Levi Strauss to pressure the Cambodian government to raise wages for Cambodian workers. Cambodian garment workers work up to 14 hours daily, with inadequate breaks, making the clothes you get relatively cheaply at major retailers, and these workers make $128 monthly. And if you're a Cambodian worker peacefully protesting these working conditions, you run the risk of getting shot to death by Cambodian police, as five protestors did a few years ago. The unions have demanded a $177/month minimum wage -- that doesn't seem like a lot of money to us, obviously, but a dollar goes a little farther in Cambodia than it does here, though perhaps not far enough for good Cambodians to shop at a WalMart, for example. Still, progress is progress, even when it's slow. And to those who whine that more money for Cambodian workers means they'll pay more at WalMart: is it ever moral to pay people in dung pellets?

Meanwhile, the Department of Education is mulling rules requiring open licensing for all Department-funded education content. This is, actually, a big deal -- no other federal agency makes its grant-funded materials so freely available to the taxpayers who have funded it, and students and educators could access federally-funded material without jumping through more hoops (as I've said, they've already paid for these materials with their taxes). Best of all, open licensing would permit a level of oversight by the American people over education materials that we haven't enjoyed until now. People who "worry" that open licensing will give an "unfair advantage" to public education over private education should consider, again, that public education belongs to all the people, so all the people should be able to oversee it. Who has a problem with oversight, again? People with something to hide, that's who. The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell the Department of Education to permit open licensing of Department-funded education materials.

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to direct the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to crack down on methane emissions from oil and gas drillers. Pennsylvania is second among American states in producing natural gas from shale, and that also means, sadly, that Pennsylvania is near the forefront of American states not just in air and water polluted from fracking, but also from methane emissions. If you've heard that natural gas is better to our climate than coal or oil, don't believe it -- methane packs a climate change punch some 80 times larger than coal production does, and the more gas drilling we do, the worse climate change will be. Yes, there is an entire industry (the methane mitigation industry) devoted to remediating the problem, but you still have to get the gas drillers to care about the problem, and my experience with big corporations over the last few decades is that the people who run them don't care about problems they have to spend money to fix. This is one reason we need governments of the people, for the people, and by the people -- to restrain the behavior of big corporations.

Action: Syrian peace talks, and saner pork production.

Syrian Kurds can't get into Saudi Arabia-led peace talks regarding the future of their country, even though they fight ISIS harder than almost anyone. Why? Apparently because the Turkish government doesn't want them there, apparently. If you know the autocrat who runs Turkey, you must ask: why does he get veto power over anything? And the whole point of peace talks is to talk to people you don't want to talk to, so you can all live together. Hence Just Foreign Policy helps you tell our government to demand a place for Syrian Kurds at any peace negotiation. Some folks -- folks who don't just want to come out and say they don't want to talk to any Middle Easterners, I suspect -- will complain that if we insist on Syrian Kurds' participation in the peace process, it'll gum up the process. Well, peace is hard. And maintaining peace is hard. But making war all the time, with other people's children, and then calling other people "traitors" when they criticize your stupidity? That's too easy. Civilized people need to stop doing that.

Meanwhile, the group Compassion Over Killing has started a petition on Change.org helping you tell the USDA and Hormel to end their participation in a "pilot" program aiming to allow pork-producing corporations to speed up their pig slaughter lines and do so with less oversight by our government. Less oversight by our government means less oversight by us, and I put "pilot" in quotation marks for a reason -- obviously, both big agriculture corporations and our government are hot to declare this program a success whether it actually is a success or not. Which, by the way, it won't be -- as you know either from watching the video or, ah, doing any kind of real work, the faster the slaughter line, the more abuse workers will heap upon the slaughtered, simply because the pressure to produce is too great. And the less we-the-people can inspect what they're doing, the less we'll know about the food we eat -- which, in this case, will have more pus and feces in it than safe food would have. And who will deny we have a right to know?

Around the table: mass shootings, union-bashing, working families, political correctness, and Donald Trump.

Have there really been more mass shootings than days this year? No, there have been more like four mass shootings this year, according to Mark Follman at Mother Jones. Just as right-wingers need to stop whining about Syrian refugees coming to eat their children, civilized people must also resist the urge to get hysterical about the problem, because getting hysterical just makes the problem worse.

Dean Baker catches a Washington Post hack desperate to prove that unions are anti-worker. How? Because union efforts to raise worker wages "force" corporations to outsource jobs to cheaper foreign locales -- even though corporations pretty much use any excuse to pay people less, as even the Washington Post hack acknowledges. Can you say "hostage crisis," boys and girls? Don't demand better treatment from your employers, or the jobs get it!

Bernie Sanders defends his persistence in talking about working families instead of terrorism. But why does it have to be one or the other? We meddle in Middle Eastern affairs at the behest of the same elite class that redistributes worker income upward to themselves and then tries to tell you that some dark-skinned person (foreign or not, it makes no difference to them) is really stealing your American dream. And you'd have a damn sight less terrorism (not to mention mass shootings) if more good jobs were available.

Seth Meyers rips the Republicans a new one because they're constantly whining about Mr. Obama refusing to utter the words "radical Muslim terrorist," in that precise order. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- this is political correctness, far worse than your college-age granddaughter insisting you say "woman" instead of "girl." (Mr. Meyers does get in a bunch of other good digs, I must admit -- and I never cared that much for his stewardship of Weekend Update.)

Finally, John Nichols, writing at The Nation, says it's time for "responsible Republicans" to declare they won't back Donald Trump if he wins the Republican Presidential nomination. That'd be nice, but by and large they won't -- not just because there aren't very many "responsible Republicans" left, but because too many Republicans do what they do because they're mortally afraid of Democrats winning, as if Democratic victories somehow forestall capitulation to Republicans in the name of "bipartisanship."

Action: *a la carte* cable, and campaign spending disclosure.

First up: "liberal" media news coverage of recent mass shootings has been an abomination. A civilized person can only take so much sensationalism and so much emotional manipulation, and there is a point where you have to ask whether saturation coverage actually enables more of these emotional cripples to think they can achieve immortality by shooting up their workplace or some other place they don't like -- and, of course, once you ask that, you also have to ask if maybe that's the whole idea of saturation coverage. I despair that we'll ever get better news coverage out of the "liberal" media merely by demanding it -- but we may get better news coverage by telling Congress to force the big cable corporations to offer their channels a la carte, as the Parents Television Council helps you do. We won't get better behavior out of the "liberal" media until we threaten to cut off their life blood -- the subscription fees cable corporations extract from us for channels we don't watch, and then the advertising largesse that comes along with the forced exposure undeserving channels get.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to issue an executive order mandating that federal contractors disclose their political campaign spending, Common Cause still helps you do that. He doesn't need permission from New Ultra-Awesome and Great Real American President Paul Ryan or Super-Fantastic and Great Real American President Mitch McConnell to do it, and this is our money, taxpayer money, being rerouted by federal contractors so they can buy Congressfolk who will enact the corporate welfare policies they prefer, so of course the President has a compelling reason to do this on our behalf. The linked petition above also tells the President to use his bully pulpit to get his appointees at the SEC, the IRS, and the FCC to use their authority to unmask campaign donors, and also tells him to fill five FEC openings with people who'll actually be watchdogs for the public. And if Congress doesn't like it, let them whine about it. Who really wants to be remembered by the American people as the one who threw a tantrum when the President tried to stop the flow of big corporate money to political campaigns?

Action: toward sane budgeting and tax policy.

Don't believe the hype that "extremists" want to take the federal budgeting process hostage -- the entire Establishment wants to take the federal budgeting process hostage, so they can keep our economy stagnant and keep redistributing your income upward to their corporate paymasters, and teabaggers in Congress are merely their Useful Idiots. So must-pass appropriations legislation contains "riders" defunding net neutrality, rolling back financial service reforms, gutting clean air and water laws, and swamping campaigns with even more money. Naturally, the American people don't want more corporate control of the internet, more bankster casino tricks, more disgusting campaign ads, or dirtier air and water, but we must make ourselves heard. Both the National Priorities Project and People for the American Way help you email your Congressfolk to reject "poison pills" such as these in the budget. But follow up by calling your Congressfolk, using the links in the upper left-hand corner of this page, so we can tie up their phone lines and make them know our will. Then, perhaps, we can consign their nefarious arguments to the dustbin of history where they belong.

Naturally, Congress is also trying to extend corporate welfare giveaways in the tax code, while wringing their hands over extending actual tax relief to actual working families in the form of improvements to the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC). A lot of corporate welfare handouts -- like the "active financing exception," which allows corporations to defer payment on taxes they claim was "earned" "overseas" -- expire annually, and usually only get renewed when our government has to fund itself. Why is that? Because any Congressfolk who tried to enact any of these things at any other time would instantly become a pariah. Meanwhile, they pretend the EITC and the CTC don't stimulate the economy, when both of these tax relief programs put money right back into the pockets of people who'll actually spend it and thus, you know, stimulate the economy. Both Americans for Financial Reform and the Coalition on Human Needs help you tell your Congressfolk to get their tax-cutting priorities in order -- which means prioritizing working families over CEOs and actual people over corporations.

Around the table: featuring various political horse-race follies, plus a Tea Partier fighting for solar power in Florida.

The Right to Rise PAC, dedicated to electing Jeb Bush President, is mulling a $75 million ad blitz at Mr. Bush's Republican opponents not named Trump, so that Mr. Bush can, perhaps, be the Last Man Standing against Mr. Trump. Two observations: one, $75 million could pay 1,250 people $50,000 plus health care benefits for one year (I'm allotting $10,000 per head for the health insurance). Two, spending $75 million just to cut down Cruzrubioetal is a pretty sad statement on campaign finance, and saying "I'm not these guys" or "I'm not Trump" doesn't fix Mr. Bush's main problem -- that he can't get anyone to vote for him by saying "I am Jeb Bush."

Scroll down in this All Things Considered interview with former Bush Mobb media maven Mark McKinnon and you'll find this nugget: "(t)here's just very little return on media dollars anymore in politics because people just don't believe political advertising. They're just demanding authenticity and something that they think is real, and they know that advertising is not real." While you're certainly better off (both morally and pragmatically!) spending money on getting out the vote, I don't think people are anywhere near as on their guard about political ads as Mr. McKinnon thinks. A good ad about a good candidate can still win hearts and minds. Problem might be that Republicans have nothing but bad candidates, and thus will have to spend a lot of money papering over that hole.

Charlie Cook tells us that "independents" really aren't that independent -- that the vast majority of "independent" voters who lean one way or another vote that way or other. But I think Mr. Cook understates the case a bit, if anything -- so, so many obviously reactionary people have described themselves as "independent" over the last dozen years or so that you'd be right to suspect the road to hell is paved with their skulls.

David Brooks at the New York Times tells us that Donald Trump isn't going to be the nominee because primary voters are going to think a lot more about it between now and their primaries. Pink rug metaphor aside, I get where Mr. Brooks is coming from, and I hope he's right (and who has ever said that before?). But I still think he's confusing the kind of fellow he is with the kind of folks Trump voters are, not that he's ever alone in making that mistake. And as I said before, counting on Democrats to hesitate before voting for Howard Dean in 2004, when Democratic primary voters are often reasonable to a fault, is a whole different thing than counting on rabid, rage-filled Republican primary voters to hesitate about Mr. Trump.

Finally, The Guardian profiles Debbie Dooley, a founding director of the Tea Party Patriots who has hit a Damascus moment over her staunch support for solar energy in Florida.. Many corporate Tea Party backers oppose solar, for reasons you can imagine. I'm always hoping that more Tea Partiers see the light, and I don't need for them to renounce conservatism, certainly -- as Ms. Dooley instructs us, there is no natural opposition between conservatism and solar power, only between corporatism and solar power, or partisanship and solar power. I wish her the best in her effort to bring more solar power to good Floridians.

Around the table: how fighting climate change *creates* jobs, and other concrete cold facts.

Robert Pollin reminds us that we can-so create jobs and beat climate change at the same time. "(B)uilding a green economy requires hiring workers at much greater rates than maintaining the world's currently-dominant fossil fuel-based energy infrastructure" does, and I don't even think very many fossil-fuel workers will lose their jobs as a result -- nobody's ever heard of "retraining"? -- and the "higher costs" of renewable energy will tumble as renewable energy efforts expand (and at least one international organization has already found parity between renewable and fossil fuel production costs). Big corporate CEOs will have to forego gilding the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes, of course, which is always why we can't have nice things.

Surprise, surprise, Scott Walker's new work requirement for the Wisconsin food stamp program has kicked 15,000 good Wisconsin citizens off the rolls just in time for the holidays. Nobody could have predicted that making your "job-creation" program entirely into a corporate welfare program would actually induce businesses and jobs to flee the state, leaving folks with much less opportunity to meet work requirements! Nobody, that is, except for the various hands inside Scott Walker's puppet head. I long for the day when we think of this guy when we hear the name "Scott Walker," and not America's Worst Governor.

Ho hum, Glenn Greenwald notes the preponderance of "experts" who are consistently wrong about foreign policy on CBS's flagship Sunday morning news program Face the Nation. Reminds me of the time some "liberal" media flak condemned the possibility of Sen. Feingold as Senate Foreign Affairs Chair. Someone who was always right about Iraq in charge of the Seante Foreign Affairs Committee? Perish the thought.

Ted Rall picks apart the "Phony Generosity" of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Read the whole thing, as the devil is in the details, but note two points: one, that "(n)o one can work hard enough to earn one billion dollars," and two, that Mr. Zuckerberg could be creating jobs right now by hiring some 24-7 customer service reps -- which I presume he doesn't do now because Facebook has a virtual monopoly on its kind of social media and thus you'll just eat whatever service problems you're having (I haven't had that many, admittedly, but Facebook hasn't dealt with them in a timely manner, either).

Finally, another day, another moronic politician blaming someone other than Robert Dear for the Planned Parenthood shootings, except that this Colorado state Rep blames Planned Parenthood and only Planned Parenthood for the shootings. How many times must I tell these pimps! Blame the shooter for the shooting. Right-wingers say things like this to liberals all the time, but I bet the only reason they wouldn't like it if you blamed the World Trade Center for 9.11 is that it obstructs you from blaming Muslims.

Action: freedom of the press, TV drug ads, and postal banking.

Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell our President and Congress to pressure Turkey to free two journalists who reported on allegations of arms smuggling by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization to Syrian rebels. A Turkish court charged Messrs. Dündar and Gül with spying and "divulging state secrets" last week for reporting published in Cumhuriyet back in May, and given that Reporters Without Borders ranks Turkey a mere 149th out of 180 nations in press freedom, it's not difficult to surmise that the Turkish government won't be treating the two men particularly well in detention. What does Turkey have to fear, you have to wonder? It can't be that folks will think they're trying to topple Assad, a leader perhaps not even beloved by his own mother. Perhaps they're afraid folks will find out they're helping ISIS, and not even deliberately, either -- when arms go to war zones, they all too frequently don't wind up where they're supposed to. Whatever the reason, the good citizens of Turkey deserve to know what their government's up to.

Meanwhile, Denise Kinney, of Gig Harbor, WA, has started a Change.org petition which helps you tell Congress to ban advertising of pharmaceutical drugs on TV. Big pharmaceutical corporations spend more then $4 billion annually on drugs, and you better believe they cite that as yet another reason your drugs have to cost so much. Further, the only other nation that allows such drug ads on TV is New Zealand, and the American Medical Association has called for a ban on such ads. I'm not the sort of fellow who reflexively defers to experts; I'm not even the sort of fellow who's afraid to find out about health-related matters on his own. But I'm old enough to remember when you simply didn't see TV ads about specific drugs, and I also see the problem in constantly urging consumers to tell their doctors to try them out on drugs that may not work and may actually do them harm. And I keep coming back to all that money spent on advertising and wonder why it can't be spent on research -- and I keep thinking Big Pharma would rather they, and not your doctor, controlled what drugs you get.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the U.S. Postmaster General to institute postal banking services like check-cashing, bill-paying, and fee-free ATMs, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. Why should the U.S. Post Office provide these services? Because they're damn good at what they do, that's why -- no, they're only losing money because Congress mandated that they pre-fund their pension fund 85 years in advance, a requirement Congress makes of precisely zero corporations or other federal entities -- and because banksters, who always whine about "unfair" competition from the government, don't actually want to go into urban and rural areas that need banking services. But post offices can provide good, basic banking services, and thus prevent urban and rural communities from falling prey to payday lenders and their death-spiral of debt. Best of all, the Postmaster General doesn't need permission from Congress or the President to start basic banking services. Still, she could certainly use our encouragement, and we certainly shouldn't be parsimonious about giving it.

Around the table: murderers have blood on their hands, and other truths.

Liz Stinson at Wired describes Abou Naddara, the anonymous Syrian film collective that has released one- to five-minute videos offering slices of Syrian life roughly every Friday since 2011. And though I suspect they're anonymous because they have to be, their films eschew depictions of violence and spend more time with workers and families than mainstream or state-sponsored media would otherwise be inclined to do.

Paul Buchheit reviews "The Secret Five-Step Plan to Privatize Everything." Here you will find much that needs to be repeated: nobody "does it on their own," "free marketeers" pose a false dichotomy between government and freedom, and governmental incompetence is just another tool with which to further destroy government. Key quotation, courtesy George Lakoff: "Individualism begins after the roads are built, after individualists have had an education, after medical research has cured their diseases."

I know I'm going to be swimming against the tide with this, but Ed Krayewski at Reason argues forcefully that we shouldn't blame Black Lives Matter for police officer deaths or the pro-life movement for the Planned Parenthood shootings. Saying Carly Fiorina has "blood on her hands" is inaccurate -- no matter her own sins in her comments afterward, Robert Dear and no one else has blood on his hands for that -- and we absolutely can't blur the line between murderer and enabler if we're going to restore this sick, immoral, and decadent society to health.

Max Berger at The Nation argues that we're seeing a lot of "white male terrorism" now because social justice movements are winning. The argument is quite attractive, but I have to hope he's right, because it sure does seem like all the enemies of progress has been in their "death throes" for more than a decade. Generally, I suspect we should avoid confusing violence with tipping points merely just because progress is hard-won and slow.

Finally, I think we have a winner in the "America's Biggest Asshole" sweepstakes, in the tale of a Mississippi man who shot a Waffle House waitress to death after she told him to stop smoking inside the restaurant. To reiterate: Johnny Mount shot Julie Brightwell because she told him to stop putting himself and those around him in danger of getting lung cancer, as he had already agreed to do merely by patronizing that establishment. Right-wingers constantly criticize college kids for being too "sensitive," but this guy personifies such "sensitivity," and no right-wingers will say so, because guns. Next: Donald Trump praises Mr. Mount's energy.

Around the table: the secret of Donald Trump's appeal, revealed! And other stories.

Dean Obeidallah writes that "The GOP Ignores the Bigger Terror Threat from the Right." Of course they do: people like Dylann Roof and Wade Michael Page and Frazier Glenn Miller are all potential Republican voters, and thus Republicans can't trifle with them. I guess the rest of us will just have to be courageous for those Republicans and remind them that we do not coddle and enable crazy fools. But that's our duty as civilized people. (And, no, really, right-wing extremists are more likely to kill you than Muslim terrorists are -- though, strictly speaking, Muslim terrorists are also right-wing extremists.)

In a related note, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) tells Hugh Hewitt that "the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats." And then provides extensive statistical evidence and overwhelming rhetorical skill to back his claim, right? Of course not -- he merely cherry-picks anecdotes of Democrat-appointed judges who "release violent criminals" (surely he knows most judges at the federal level by now are Republican appointees?) and an Obama appointee who once represented an accused "cop-killer." Plus he acts like stripping convicted felons of the right to vote isn't unconstitutional or something. Is this what a Harvard education gets you?

In yet another related note, Pittsburgh cab passenger shoots Muslim cab driver, after subjecting said cab driver to a lengthy rant about subjects including Pakistan, ISIS, Muhammed, and his own time spent in jail. What an honor it is to share a nation and a culture with such people as this shooter! I bet he fancies himself a funny guy, too, perhaps even a satirist. Of course, good satirists don't actually shoot people. Good satirists don't even fantasize about shooting people, though they may depict morons getting their due after shooting people or fantasizing about shooting people. Hate to get all Victor Bergman on you, but I wonder if that psychological disconnect is at play here.

Kalev Leetaru, writing at Forbes, guides us through the encryption debate in America. By the time you learn that any U.S. ban on encryption would merely drive terrorists into the arms of other countries that don't ban encryption -- or drive them to create their own encryption software, as al-Qaeda has done -- you'll hopefully start to suspect that the impetus to ban encryption is little more than a way for governments to spy on their citizens. But Mr. Leetaru also points to solutions when he discusses "the lack of skilled linguists, unfamiliarity with cultural narratives, and emphasis on collection rather than analysis" in the intelligence community.

C. Robert Gibson explains "How Organized Labor's Allegiance to Establishment Democrats is Killing Unions." The SEIU's endorsement of Mrs. Clinton shows how unions "prioritiz(e) political connections in high places over the best interests of its members," Mr. Gibson says, and that turns into a hostage crisis where unions dare not withhold support for even the most milquetoast Democrat, lest some ogre of a Republican win -- and any hostage situation gets progressively worse for the hostage the further it goes on.

Finally, Rick Perlstein reveals the "secret" to Donald Trump's continued ride at the top of GOP primary polls, and it turns out to be The Apprentice, the reality TV show he hosted for a decade. Lots of people watched The Apprentice, even if intellectuals didn't, and on that show he has been rehearsing the kind of values (or, more precisely, "values") that have helped keep him aloft in the polls, just as Ronald Reagan did (a lot more genially, which was probably necessary to his survival back then) as host of two anthology TV shows in the '50s and '60s.

Action: demanding sanity in federal budgeting and refugee processing.

Congress must pass appropriations legislation in 10 days, and Republicans want to use that fact to attach "poison pills," which may well include defunding of the FCC's net neutrality rules, rolling back of financial reform laws, further loosening of campaign finance regulations, and nullification of certain laws protecting our air and water. Can you say "hostage crisis," boys and girls? I don't know how much plainer I can put this, but all of these things are extremely unpopular, and all of these things will injure the American people, and rationalizing that Republicans control both Houses and thus have "earned the right" to injure us so gets it exactly wrong: representatives are supposed to represent our will, regardless of party affiliation, and you cannot read the people's will and conclude that the people want more corporate control of the internet, more predatory activity from banksters, more money in campaign ads, and dirtier air and water. Only someone who listens exclusively to big campaign donors could conclude that. So, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page, you can call your Reps and Senators and tell them you don't want noxious "legislative riders" that hurt people. And best we do that today.

In other news, the Senate could vote on H.R. 4038, the so-called American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act (commonly called the SAFE Act, though its initials actually spell out ASAFE -- which means what, exactly? SAFE for Assholes?), as early as tomorrow, so US Action helps you tell your Senators to reject H.R. 4038 and commit to accepting 100,000 Syrian refugees. No, we don't have to take all refugees, from everywhere, but there are plenty more than 100,000 trying to get out of Syria, and even France, not known for its historic backbone, has committed to taking 30,000 Syrian refugees, in the wake of a historic terror attack no less. Our Congress, meanwhile, rushes to add bureaucratic hurdles to a lengthy and well-running refugee vetting process that already takes more than 18 months to complete and already rejects terrorists pretty well, as evidenced (if nothing else!) by the fact that refugees have committed precisely zero terrorist acts on American soil. Our Congressfolk: they make Zombie Pierre Laval proud. Yes, those are fighting words, but how many of these weaklings in Congress can even throw a punch?

UPDATE. Inserted wikipedia entry on Pierre Laval in second paragraph above in case you didn't know him off the top of your head.