Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: notes about clean water, health care, banksters, and gay marriage.

Uh oh: Michigan state officials were shipping clean water to at least one state building in Flint as early as January of last year -- or some nine months before Michigan finally acknowledged Flint's water had lead in it and was unsafe to drink. No doubt Michigan state officials will point to the presence of trihalomethanes, not lead, in the water as the reason for those shipments -- though given that many trihalomethanes (created as a by-product of chlorine treatment of water) are themselves carcinogenic, I'm not sure how that makes the state look better.

Surprise, surprise, Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, finds big "liberal" media organs funding attacks on single-payer -- big "liberal" media organs who just so happen to have big financial holdings in our current heavily-privatized health care system. Washington Post CEO Jeff Bezos has, of course, invested in several private health care initiatives, and Comcast (which owns Vox) has long partnered with the Kaiser Family Foundation, which itself has heavily invested in the Affordable Care Act's success. It's synergy! Haters will tell you that's no big deal because everyone is invested in everything else, like that's some natural state of affairs we should accept. I am puzzled that haters win so many of these rhetorical battles when they live in (and want you to live in) such a grey world.

The inimitable Mike Konczal explains why Bernie Sanders's Wall Street-related proposals won't do enough to rein in the banksters. I don't agree that breaking up the big banks and reinstalling Glass-Steagall won't do much -- saying they wouldn't have prevented Bear Stearns and Lehmann Brothers from going under in 2008 does not they wouldn't prevent the next catastrophe, or that they didn't prevent previous ones from happening -- but I do agree that the biggest problem with the banks is that they're so undercapitalized, because they're so obsessed with shareholder payouts. You'd think shareholders would be aware of the problems that would cause, too. Perhaps I've had too high an opinion of them all these years.

Oklahoma state House overwhelmingly passes bill "getting the state out of the marriage business" and handing it over to churches. That's how much some folks hate gay marriage, though of course this monstrosity's author cites the hardship suffered by county clerks who now have to sign off on gay marriage licenses. Such tough stuff right-wingers are made of! Of course, as the author points out, marriage is a legal contract, and as such always subject to oversight by the state on the people's behalf -- hence a lot of good Oklahomans are going to find themselves completely without the rights of marriage in the coming years, or, perhaps, they'll find their hated federal government administering those rights.

Finally, in a related note, infamous Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis agrees with a suck-up radio host that God chose her to stand against gay marriage. And you know what? She may be right! God may well have chosen her! And, like so many folks who broadcast their feeling that they were "chosen" by God, she may want to consider whether God chose her to be the face and voice of her cause so that her cause would fail.

Action: freedom for Omid Kokabee yea, a Senate vote on sentencing reform yea, and the extinction of elephants nay.

First things first: Iran convicted University of Texas/Austin physicist Omid Kokabee of having "connections with a hostile government" (i.e., ours) back in 2012, after the Iranian government (despite its best efforts, which included denying Mr. Kokabee access to a lawyer until his trial began) couldn't make a charge of "colluding against national security" stick. Perhaps not coincidentally, Mr. Kokabee had long refused to use his expertise on behalf of the Iranian military and intelligence forces, even after being offered financial assistance to pursue his Ph.D. in Iran. More scientists ought to be like this fellow, but the government of Iran arrested him in 2011 as he was winding up a visit with family and then held him mostly in solitary confinement for the next year-plus, so you can see why so many of the world's scientists might not be their best selves. Mr. Kokabee is his best self, though, so Change.org helps you tell Iran's Supreme Leader to free Mr. Kokabee.

Meanwhile, S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, has passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and is awaiting action by the full Senate -- but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hasn't yet permitted a vote on the bill, so the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell Sen. McConnell to put the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act to a full Senate vote. Maybe this kind of stuff just isn't that important to him, but he's got big responsibilities now, among them his stated aim to make Republican governance seem not all that scary, and so he should be fine with hearing from all of the American people about this, not just fat-cat elites in his home state. He might want to consider that if he can get a bill passed that reduces the deleterious effect of mandatory minimum sentences and eliminates solitary for juveniles, he can brag about it whenever Democrats complain that all he wants is chaos and disorder. It's a price I'm willing to pay to get more justice for more Americans.

Finally, the worldwide ivory trade is threatening the world's elephants with extinction, but more and more international online marketplaces (including Amazon and Google) are refusing to sell trinkets made with ivory -- Yahoo! Japan, where online ivory sales nearly quadrupled between 2010 and 2014, being a conspicuous exception. Scientists teach us that elephants are more than intelligent enough to know they're being massacred into nonexistence, and for what? We can now make durable materials in ways 19th century scientists would have called alchemy; losing the elephant from the face of the Earth forever ain't worth another ivory cane handle or another ivory carving of the Buddha or the Virgin Mary. Luckily for us, Yahoo! itself hasn't been doing well almost anywhere in its operations, losing money and hemorrhaging workers faster, even, than poachers can illegally kill elephants; Yahoo! sure could use a PR boost, or, at the very least, one fewer PR headache. Hence Avaaz helps you tell Yahoo! to disassociate itself from elephant poaching by forbidding ivory sales on its sites.

Around the table: where all the Jeb Bush money goes, and other sad tales.

Denmark Parliament approves a refugee bill permitting the government to seize refugee assets over 1,000 pounds sterling (about $1,420 at this writing) and to extend the waiting period for sending for their families from one year to three. Always the politicians think more cruelty will fix those dang terrorists! And while the 1,000-pound limit is the same limit Denmark uses for any of its citizens to receive state assistance, the bill originally called for a 300 pound limit, meaning that Parliament's thirst for balance (or symmetry, anyway) was late-coming, and everyone knows refugees need very specific state assistance that isn't traditional welfare. Hecukva job, Denmark politicians!

The incomparable Heather Digby Parton explains how "Donald Trump is Wrecking the Conservative Movement." Spoiler alert: he's demonstrating how little "conservative" voters actually care about the hifalutin philosophical structures of modern "conservatism" -- they're in it "to stick it to ethnic and racial minorities and make sure America is the biggest bad ass on the planet," not to reduce the size of government or protect "moral values" and "free markets." But I'm not sure there's any "mystery" as to "why smart conservatives didn't see this coming" -- if I've known for years that nihilism is the inevitable end of modern "conservatism," surely the "smart" people saw it coming too, and they'll welcome a President Trump because that's what they've wanted all along.

If you're wondering what's happened to the most famous "serious" alternative to Mr. Trump, Michelle Conlin and Grant Smith at Reuters can tell you: his campaign and his officially-unaffiliated SuperPAC have blown through upwards of $82 million in the last three quarters "in style," i.e., they've spend significant sums on private planes, luxury hotels, and well-catered country clubs. (Also on campaign ads, of course. You remember any of those, right?) The problem with spending lavish sums of money to attract more rich donors? That's money you're not spending making your case to voters, say, through a ground game. And, in this economy that redistributes ever more wealth upward to ever fewer folks, you're going to run out of rich donors eventually.

Daniel Denvir, writing at Salon, says it's time to talk about single-payer even though a Medicare-for-All system won't get through the next Congress. If you've been scratching your head wondering how the Affordable Care Act is supposed to lead to single-payer, you're not alone. And, as Mr. Denvir notes, no proposal improving the Affordable Care Act will get through the next Congress either, so we might as well start talking about what might actually solve people's problems, rather than what makes one "team" or the other feel better.

Finally, a Paramus, NJ family builds a geothermal snow-melting system that melts the two-plus feet of snow in their driveway without any shoveling. The Parikhs installed a year-round rainwater collection system and then used their solar-panel system to heat the water and run it under the driveway -- and then collected the melted snow-water to use for laundry, toileting, and irrigation. "We wanted to draw a line in the sand against climate change and not have a house that used gas or oil," the younger Mr. Parikh said. Good for them.

Action: overturning *Citizens United*, and stopping a massive privacy-invading database.

One week ago marked the six-year anniversary of Citizens United v. FEC, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protected much corporate political spending, so both Common Cause and CREDO help you tell your Congressfolk to support a Constitutional amendment that would once again allow our federal and state governments to control political spending. Once again: money is not speech -- speech is speech, and money is property, which thus can be regulated for the common good. And the politicians who depend on massive corporate spending to get elected have spent the last few years telling absurd horror stories of what campaign spending regulation would look like. It'll silence pastors! It'll let incumbents prohibit spending by challengers! -- none of which ever happened under McCain-Feingold, and none of which would survive a Constitutional challenge on any other grounds. Obviously these politicians aren't ashamed enough of ignoring our will. But that only means we keep communicating our will until they are appropriately ashamed.

Meanwhile, the European Union (or EU) aims to pass the EU Passenger Name Records Directive, which would create a massive directory of airline passenger information. And you won't have to be a European citizen to be in it -- all you need do is fly into Europe, and your flight information, the folks you've flown with, and the credit cards you've used to buy tickets will all be in there. When has creating such a huge database ever resulted in abuse by hackers or governments? And when has adding to the pile of information law enforcement has to sift ever slowed down their efforts? Besides always, that is. And your info would be in that database for at least five years, which means at least five years you'll be at risk of identity theft, credit card fraud, or government profiling. Best way to "get serious" about terrorism? Work to prevent foreign misadventures like the Iraq War, or domestic misadventures like the bubble economy. Access Now helps you tell the European Parliament to reject this massive anti-privacy project.

Around the table: includes tales of the "sensible center" and "politically incorrect" jerks.

Uh oh: another small town gets caught going "nothing to see here!" about lead in its water. Sebring, OH officials apparently didn't notify citizens of the problem even though the state EPA had been telling them to do so for at least two months. Water Superintendent James Bates looks like he's going to be the fall guy here -- though even the state EPA head says the agency should have pressed the matter a little more urgently, which may not be good news for the Republicans' New Establishment Hope, Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

File under "Symmetry Does Not Equal Fairness": Jim Naureckas at FAIR finds the Chicago Tribune warning about extremism "from both sides" in the Presidential race, alienating the "sensible center." I mean, sure, Donald Trump is a racist and Ted Cruz an aspiring mass-murderer, but heaven forbid we vote for a socialist like Bernie Sanders! Besides, I thought America already chose "socialism" when it elected Barack Obama twice. I mean, the "liberal" media broadcast accusations of his "socialism" pretty uncritically for years. Or don't words mean things anymore?

Two former Disney workers sue both their former employer and two corporations that specialize in outsourcing, claiming that they unlawfully lost their jobs to foreign workers on temporary H-1B visas. H-1B visas are for foreign workers with "special skills," but a) at least one plaintiff got high marks for his job performance and b) both plaintiffs trained their replacements, and neither of these facts testifies to the specialness of those foreign workers' skills. And make no mistake, both the American workers and the foreign workers who replace them get played by corporate executives here.

Chris Matthews wonders, out loud, on his MSNBC show Hardball, who's going to watch tonight's Trump-free Republican Presidential debate if it's just "the two Cuban guys." Why does he bring up their racial heritage, unprompted? He does not say. But this is the same Chris Matthews who long ago buttressed his apology for saying mean/sexist things about Hillary Clinton by saying "I don't like saying things so carefully, so politically correctly, that no one thinks they even said anything." But a lot of times, when folks think they're being "blunt" or "bold" or "politically incorrect," they're just being assholes.

Finally, former major league closer/loud-mouthed racist John Rocker has endorsed Donald Trump for President. "I've always wanted to see the person that’s like, 'Yeah, I’ve made these comments, these are my beliefs, and you know what, if you don’t like it stick it. I'm not apologizing, I’m not changing,'" he says, forgetting that a President's job is executing the will of the people, not telling people to "stick it" when they disagree with him. Mr. Rocker, who last pitched for Tampa Bay in 2003 (two games, one inning, eight batters faced, three walks, no strikeouts, 9.00 ERA), now charges more for an autograph if he puts a curse word in it. Donald Trump really brings out the best in all of us.

Action: the Iraq war, racist housing practices, and campaign finance disclosure.

Hot on the heels of the news that a Joint Chiefs of Staff report from September of 2002, lately fully-declassified, suggests that several high Bush Mobb officials already knew that their knowledge of Iraq's alleged WMD program didn't match the rhetorical fervor of their case for war, Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to demand that the New York Times investigate what senior Bush Administration officials knew and when they knew it. I know, asking the Times, which also botched its early reporting on the war, is a bit dicey, but I presume they want to continue being the "paper of record" in America, and any such investigation would shed considerable light, considering that so many Bush Mobbers are now advising current Republican Presidential candidates, and that the Democratic front-runner for President, former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, supported Tha Bush Mobb's case for war and famously never renounced that support, even "given what we know now" as of 2008, which I knew in 2002.

Meanwhile, in the wake of this lengthy exposé of racist and predatory lending practices at Clayton Homes, Inc. -- owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway corporation for almost a dozen years, and now the biggest player in the mobile home business in America -- CREDO helps you tell the Department of Justice and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to investigate these allegations. The charges detailed by Seattle Times reporters Mike Baker and Daniel Wagner really run the gamut, from harassing black co-workers to illegally telling folks their in-house lending corporation is the only one operating in a particular area to pushing minority home-buyers into far higher interest rates than they give their white home-buyers. And Mr. Buffett may be everyone's favorite billionaire, but that's not such a high bar to clear after all, particularly when Clayton's market share has exploded under his ownership, and when his corporation's response to the original report is so full of let's-see-what-sticks.

Finally, we learn that President Obama is actually contemplating issuing that Executive Order we've been demanding since the Supreme Court's nefarious Citizens United v. FEC decision -- the Order that would require federal contractors to disclose their political campaign contributions -- so the Peace Team still helps you tell President Obama to make federal contractor political spending transparent. Don't believe the hype that this Order would amount to Big Brother injuring the "free speech" of federal contractors -- federal contractors take taxpayer money, which is our money, and we deserve to know if they're using our money to buy themselves some lawmakers who'll represent their interests ahead of our interests, and we also deserve to know if they're using our money to buy lawmakers who'll funnel yet more of our money to their coffers so their executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Personal to those who'd object to my use of the Italics Hammer above: just be happy I never liked shouty caps.

Around the table: the havoc caused by stock buybacks and big-box stores, plus good news.

Mike Whitney reports at Counterpunch about the havoc stock buybacks can wreak on our economy. When executives repurchase their own corporation's shares, that's that much less money they're spending on, you know, making stuff and hiring people who'll make (and buy!) the stuff. It gets worse: those executives sell bonds to raise the cash to buy back stock, meaning they buy back that stock on credit -- and the folks who buy the bonds will be left high and dry when the whole system comes down. And then President Clintonortrump will insist that we have to save the banksters first.

Bloomberg chronicles a relatively new phenomenon: WalMart stores coming into town, putting the last local groceries out of business, and then leaving. WalMart would like you to believe it's because of their decision to hike their minimum wages, even though WalMart executives have said WalMart employees too often don't make enough even to shop at WalMart. Anyway, we call that a hostage situation -- don't make me pay my employees more, or the lone grocery within 30 minutes of you gets it! (As we've noted before, Walmart execs could pay worker wage hikes by cutting back on the stock buybacks.) This development could help bring back smaller groceries more responsive to local needs, but it'll be hell in the meantime.

U.S. Supreme Court rules that a 2012 decision barring automatic life-without-parole sentences for juveniles must be applied retroactively. These folks must now be given at least a parole hearing so they can, in Justice Kennedy's words, "be given the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect irreparable corruption." Justice Scalia, in his dissent, calls it "just a devious way of eliminating life without parole for juvenile offenders," which he says like it's a bad thing. A society that puts kids in jail for life is a sick, immoral, and decadent society, and should seek to reverse that sickness, immorality and decadence before it punishes more kids.

President Obama announces ban on solitary confinement for juveniles and for low-level offenders in federal prisons via executive order. The ban will directly affect few prisoners (as the federal system doesn't hold that many kids), but oftentimes when the feds start something like this, states follow. Eagerly awaiting the hordes of right-wingers who proclaim that ZOMG OBUMMER IZ TEH AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!!! OK, "eagerly awaiting" would be an overstatement.

Finally, Oakland city Council creates a nine-member Privacy Commission to monitor that city's proposed expansion of surveillance both within the city and at the port. Activists battled for over two years first to limit the expanded city-government spying to the port (which they succeeded in doing) and then to create a full-time Privacy Commission to, in one activist's words, "have the discussion about privacy at the beginning" of a project rather than after its implementation. And now comes the battle to preserve the victories they've won.

Action: "free" trade, lymphedema treatment coverage, and corporate land grabs.

Our government still plans to pursue the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," another "free" trade deal that would outsource our jobs and nullify our laws -- despite the outcry from good Americans across the ideological spectrum! -- so Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the TPP. You may recall how Congress repealed country-of-origin meat labeling laws after the WTO stated they violated two prior "free" trade agreements, but recent headlines also provide us with "free" trade horror stories, like the $15 billion lawsuit filed by TransCanada alleging that the Obama Administration's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline violates the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, i.e., NAFTA (or SHAFTYA). And one of those "investor-state tribunals" will hear the suit! Why should the American people pay a $15 billion bailout to a corporation that couldn't overcome well-organized public opposition to their pipeline? Can you say frivolous lawsuit, boys and girls?

Meanwhile, Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1608/S. 2373, the Lymphedema Treatment Act. Lymphedema allows damaged fluid to accumulate in areas of the body where lymph nodes and vessels are damaged, resulting in extreme swelling and a higher susceptibility to infection, and though some folks are born with it, most folks get it after undergoing radiation therapy for cancer. We can't cure lymphedema at present, but we can manage it, usually with compression therapy. So what would the Lymphedema Treatment Act do? It would mandate that Medicare cover lymphedema compression treatment items, and when Medicare covers them, that increases the possibility that private health insurers will one day cover them, too. Two of the bill's four Senate sponsors are Republicans, as are 64 of the House version's 179 sponsors (and the bill's main sponsor, Mr. Reichart of Washington), but since the bill doesn't actually injure someone, the "liberal" media won't call it "bipartisan." All the more reason to support it!

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to fight the transfer of sacred Oak Flat national forest land in Arizona to copper mining corporations, then CREDO still helps you do that. Lately Sen. Sanders (I-VT) has introduced legislation (S. 2248) that would repeal the land grab; if you're tempted to castigate the Vermonter for getting involved in Arizona politics when Arizona's two Senators backed the land grab, you may want to note that copper mining corporation Rio Tinto (which owns the corporation that'll get the land) has contributed buku bucks to Senator McCain -- and that Senator Flake used to lobby for Rio Tinto before he ever got elected to Congress. Clearly nothing to see here! Mining corporations have been trying to get their grubby mitts on this land for decades; I guess folks like Barry Goldwater and Dennis DeConcini and Jon Kyl were somehow holding them back. And, ah, if we're so concerned about "religious conscience" in America now, how come we're not concerned about Apache religious beliefs here? I would hate to think it's because they're not Christians.

Around the table: the crocodile tears of Washington, D.C.'s former Mayor, and other follies.

Tennessee House Civil Justice Subcommittee votes down Tennessee Natural Marriage Defense Act in well-attended hearing. If you agitated against that bill last week, congratulate yourself. But now, the bad news: Tennessee state legislators have filed no less than eleven bills aiming, in some way, to injure gay and transgendered folks, presuming to elevate the whole poop-sticking-to-wall process into a Pollock-style masterwork. More news, and alerts, as they arrive.

Janine Jackson at FAIR writes about our "liberal" media's tendency to give Donald Trump "a near-constant, legitimizing megaphone" instead of actually covering what he says and does with any critical acumen. It's one thing to presume that "liberal" media journalists are so lazy they settle for big drama like the kind Mr. Trump keeps dishing out -- but it's another thing entirely to find CBS CEO Les Moonves actively cheer on the "rancor" because it brings his media corporation more money. He even says "Go Donald!" Ten bucks says he's so post-modern he thinks it's all a joke.

Former Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray claims WalMart "shafted" his city by cancelling the construction of build two stores in poor neighborhoods after building three stores in more gentrified areas of the city. Naturally, WalMart's promise was "subject and contingent upon business conditions," and I'd feel like an idiot to presume that Mr. Gray and the rest of his government didn't already know that. It's enough to make you think that when Mr. Gray vetoed the city living wage ordinance in 2013 while Walmart was reminding him of their quite conditional "partnership," he was the one really doing the shafting.

Jeb Bush praises Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder for "stepping up right now" to handle the Flint water crisis. That would be the water crisis Gov. Snyder caused by appointing an "Emergency Manager" to run Flint with a mandate to cut costs, but bygones! I guess Mr. Bush figures he's reminding people that leadership is harder than Donald Trump would like you to think, but he's actually reminding people that he's on the side of the most despised Governor in America right now. Remember when I said you couldn't count a bastard out? I think maybe now you can count Jeb Bush out.

Finally, President Obama sits down for an interview with Politico, and suggests that "the degree to which the Republican rhetoric and Republican vision has moved not just to the right but has moved to a place that is unrecognizable." Why has that happened? He doesn't tell us and Politico doesn't ask, but it could be because of a center-right President too "busy" with "sav(ing) the auto industry" and "stabiliz(ing) Afghanistan" and the like to push politics where folks wanted it to go, which was leftward. I mean, did Ronald Reagan worry about cleaning up Jimmy Carter's mess, or did he announce a new sheriff was in town? This is why we still have a "running thread" asking "(w)hy are we still constrained by the terms of the debate that were set by Ronald Reagan 30 years ago?"

Action: bankster regulation, gas drilling, and birth control.

A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators have, again, proposed "regulatory reform" financial legislation. Of course, we can in large part trace the problems with Dodd-Frank (passed less than six years ago!) to our federal agencies simply failing to implement it, but of course this "bipartisan" solution would, naturally, make these agencies jump through additional hoops before regulating banksters, so better to call it "deform" than "reform." How have these Senators missed the actual bipartisan upswell of hatred of our financialized economy? Because our government, through its decades-long inaction, has allowed our economy to become so labyrinthine that (the story goes) only the worst usurers and parasites can really understand it -- under which logic we would also delegate criminal investigations to actual criminals. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject "reform" legislation that would "free" banksters to crap all over our economy again and again and again.

Meanwhile, Food and Water Watch helps you tell President Obama to declare a federal state of emergency in Porter Ranch, CA, and shut down the Aliso Canyon storage facility there, since it's been leaking methane into the atmosphere for three months now. It started with headaches and dizziness and nosebleeds and vomiting, and it'll end with massive amounts of carcinogens like benzene in the air and with even more climate change, since, as you know, methane is an even more "efficient" carbon delivery device than coal emissions. As an aside, there's no excuse for saying we can't have a state of emergency in Porter Ranch and a state of emergency in Flint, MI at the same time. First off, our government, being composed of, you know, multiple individuals, is not beholden to the problem individual minds have, that of being able to think of only one thing at a time. Also, pretending our government can do only one thing at a time just encourages the professional disaster-makers in the corporate sector.

Finally, SB 1105 in Pennsylvania's state legislature would guarantee that women have access to reproductive health services in the state. Birth control is legal, after all, and no one deserves to be harassed, or terrorized -- or killed! -- just for trying to get health care services at a facility that just so happens to provide birth control. I mean, evangelicals shouldn't be subject to harrassment, terrorism, or death just because they go to right-wing churches that rail against reproductive health services like they're the devil on this earth, should they? Of course not. And SB 1105 doesn't abridge the free-speech rights of pro-lifers to protest against reproductive health service clinics, since SB 1105 would criminalize the use of force, whether against people or property, at reproductive health care clinics. Of course, if you think you have the "right" to use force because you're a soldier of God, well, you really shouldn't have read this far anyway. Keystone Progress helps you tell your PA state legislator to support SB 1105.

Action: voting rights, and Flint's water crisis.

America observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day earlier this week -- and so both CREDO and the Sierra Club help you demand that our government pass H.R. 2867/S. 1659, the Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Supreme Court, as you know, invalidated Sec. 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in their 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision; Sec. 4(b) listed several mostly Southern states and municipalities that needed to pre-clear any changes to their voting laws, given their past history in suppressing voting rights, but the Supreme Court found the formula outdated -- and also said Congress could pass a new formula for determining which states or municipalities would need pre-clearance that speaks to current conditions. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would require pre-clearance in states and municipalities that have violated voters' rights 15 or more times within the past 25 years -- which could, theoretically, be any state or municipality, thus answering the Court's stated concern that the law was now unfair to the South. It won't answer other right-wingers' objections, though, because haters gonna hate.

Meanwhile, President Obama declared a federal state of emergency in Flint, MI, where, thanks to the Michigan state government's incompetence and venality, the drinking water now contains so much lead that much of it can actually be classified as toxic waste. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder wanted Flint declared a disaster area, but federal law only permits natural disasters to receive such a declaration, and this disaster is as man-made as they get. Was Mr. Snyder counting on getting that "disaster area" declaration when his "Emergency Manager" decided to "save money" by drawing Flint's water from the highly-polluted Flint River, and to mitigate the river's pollution by using chemicals that corroded the lead in Flint's water pipes? I put "save money" in quotation marks because the state won't save any money now that they've hurt so many of their citizens -- do these morons ever count the cost of all the lawsuits they have to fight and lose when they screw up? Anyway, CREDO helps you demand that our federal Justice Department thoroughly investigate the role of the Snyder Administration in this mess.

Around the table: why you shouldn't run government like a business, and other lessons.

Dave Johnson reminds us that "Government Run Like a Business Lead to Lead in Flint's Water." The article contains lots of good info, but paragraph 5 explains why government shouldn't "run like a business": "(i)t is supposed to organize itself to deliver services and make people’s lives better, not profit off the people." You don't buy a stake in government, after all; you own a stake in government merely by being a citizen. I almost wish Gov. Snyder's record as a "job creator" at Gateway -- "the company’s workforce contracted from 21,000 American workers in 2000 to 7,400 workers in 2003" -- wasn't relegated to a parenthetical.

Derek Royden describes "How the Oregon Militia Are Servants of Corporate Power." Their thirst for wingnut welfare (in the form of being "given" land for their cattle to graze on, rather than pay fees at about one-fifteenth the price some private corporation would charge them) you already know, but you may not know that their little occupation plays right into the hands of those corporations that want federal land "returned" to the states so they can wring it from a smaller government. ALEC has even written a model bill called the "Sagebrush Rebellion Act." That's some cojones right there.

New York state approves a proposed merger between Time-Warner and Charter -- and Time-Warner responds by jacking up its cable rates for consumers. Cable corporations will jack up rates simply because the day ends in a "y," but merger proponents do love to tell you mergers will lead to "lower prices," even though not a scintilla of common sense stands behind such an argument. (Don't worry, good folks -- the Department of Justice and/or the FCC could still stop the merger, and we'll continue to concentrate our efforts there.)

Jean Stevens relates the trials and tribulations of New York City car wash workers (or "carwasheros") as they try to improve their working conditions. Workers at 10 shops have unionized, and the city passed a wide-ranging bill aiming to reform car wash practices, but the latter bill faces a lawsuit from car wash owners (I'm no fan of forcing corporations to buy insurance against fines and penalties they might incur, but the due-process complaint seems frivolous, a union shop being one that can more easily resolve complaints before they trigger fines and penalties.)

Finally, Scott Jay writes about "the Postmodern Left and the Success of Neoliberalism." If you were wondering why fervently-hated banksters still get all the say about everything in America, Mr. Jay says "(t)he Postmodern Left avoids building actual power among the poor and the oppressed, instead focusing on self-promotional spectacles which feel like struggle and power but are entirely empty." That the "Postmodern Left" gets most of its rank-and-file from NGOs, which rely heavily on private funding, is also a considerable problem. As an aside, I didn't think "post-modern" was a cuss word back in my academy days, but I kinda do now.

Action: net neutrality, financial predators, and sentencing reform.

H.R. 2666, the so-called No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, would prohibit the FCC from regulating internet service prices -- which would render the FCC powerless to act when ISPs indulge in price-gouging or unduly restrictive data caps, since those are "rate issues." Even worse is S. 2283, the so-called Small Business Broadband Deployment Act, which would exempt small businesses from having to comply with net neutrality regulations -- and defines a small business as a business having fewer than 1,500 employees or 500,000 subscribers! Does that sound "small" to you? And don't the customers of these largely rural ISPs deserve the same right to go where they want to go on the internet as the rest of us? And while Comcast has some 139,000 employees now, how fast do you think they'd make the vast majority of them into "independent contractors" if this bill passed? Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject these attempts to destroy the FCC's net neutrality regulations, which enjoy the support of just about everyone not in some big telecom corporation's pocket.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4018 calls itself the "Consumer Choice and Protection Act," and purports to crack down on payday lenders and check-cashing joints (called "deferred presentment providers" in the bill, so now you know what that is), but actually does very badly at this sort of "cracking down." How? First, by amending the Truth in Lending Act to allow loose state laws on payday lending and check-cashing to supersede federal law, and second, by preventing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) from issuing any regulations pertaining to payday lenders or check-cashers for two full years after the bill's passage. And that latter item really tells you all you need to know about H.R. 4018, because the CFPB has been working on "deferred presentment provider" regulations; why not let the CFPB write their rules and let good Americans comment on them? Because that wouldn't get the result financial predators want, that's why. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 4018.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to support sentencing reform, then both the ACLU and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you do that. Both action alerts help you support S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, an actually bipartisan effort, unlike so many legislative initiatives that claim that mantle. "Incarceration in the U.S. has gone beyond a system of rehabilitation, retribution, or even deterrence," says the most recent email missive from FCNL. "It has become mass incarceration -- a set of reactive rather than effective practices." And that's absolutely true: we put as many people we can in jail simply because we're afraid of what will happen if we don't -- though we should be afraid of what will happen when we fail to rehabilitate wrongdoers. And S. 2123 is a step in the right direction: it will essentially end solitary confinement for children and roll back mandatory minimums, particularly drug-related mandatory minimums. It's the beginning of what we need to do to become a sane and healthy society again.

Around the table: a startling prediction from a former NFL wide receiver, and other stories.

Oxfam says that the top one percent of the world's population now has more wealth than the other 99% combined. So if they're the "job creators," why do they have more than everyone else? If they were really "creating jobs," rather than redistributing our wealth upward to themselves via their casino economy games, the wealth would actually be "trickling down." But if something's trickling down, it sure ain't wealth.

Dean Baker tells us the economy is not about to go into freefall just because the stock market has gone down more than 10 percent over the last few weeks. The stock market, after all, is not much of an "indicator" of anything -- not even, apparently, of the skill level of its biggest actors, who were taken aback by the bursting of the Chinese stock bubble. In other news, "the remedy for weak demand is more demand," but don't expect action from Congress, since that would require spending.

Disgusted as we should be with the Michigan government's stupidity and venality in its handling of Flint's water, we should not excuse the EPA for suspecting Flint's water was polluted as early as nine months ago and then failing to act. Best I can tell, the EPA notified the state's environmental department, which wanted to do, you know, more testing -- but the EPA's regional administrator doesn't come off as very concerned in emails, frankly. Her head should roll, maybe?

Of course, it could be worse: Sen. Marco Rubio, running for the Republican Presidential nomination, claims ignorance on the whole Flint matter. I'd be less annoyed about that, except that it took him 30 words to say "I don't know," and then 46 more words to say "I don't know" again -- when the correct answer to any question about Flint's drinking water is "no government should enable the pollution of good folks' drinking water." Isn't this guy supposed to be the future or something?

Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel restarts his campaign funding apparatus, in advance of a (possible) Senate run in 2018. Mr. Mandel says this move "gives Ohioans an opportunity to support my style of leadership" while "not forc(ing) me to make a decision anytime soon on what I'm going to do next," which leads one to suspect that his "style of leadership" is not to lead. Mr. Mandel lost the 2012 Senate race by only six points, but it would've been a lot closer if not for the presence of right-wing "independent" Scott Rupert in the race; in a non-Presidential election year, a genuinely good man, Sherrod Brown, might well lose, and to someone who shouldn't even be elected dog-catcher.

Finally, former Pittsburgh Steelers wideout Antwan Randle El says if he had to do it over again, he'd play baseball instead of football. Mr. Randle El might have trouble getting down stairs and remembering things, but his analysis of pro football's problems -- "(t)he kids are getting bigger and faster, so the concussions, the severe spinal cord injuries, are only going to get worse...Football players are in a car wreck every week" -- is spot on. When he says pro football might be gone in a quarter century, he might be right.

Action: "defending" marriage, refugee and visa politics, and battery cages.

Tomorrow the Tennessee House Civil Justice Committee plans to consider HB 1412/SB 1437, the so-called Tennessee Natural Marriage Defense Act, and by the name, I bet you can guess what it does -- it declares that the state will "defend natural marriage" and claims to nullify the Supreme Court's recent decision legalizing gay marriage across the nation. The bill's fiscal note instructs us that the bill's passage would cost the state money not just in marriage license fees, not just in lost tourism dollars, but also in federal funding (including welfare funding) that Tennessee simply won't get if it's not in compliance with the law. Under these circumstances, I'm tempted to let Tennessee do what it wants and suffer the not-inconsiderable consequences (certainly including "being ostracized by the rest of America"). But right is right and wrong is wrong and duty is duty, hence Change.org helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to reject the so-called Natural Marriage Defense Act. Don't be afraid to let them know you're from out of state -- they need to know we're all watching them.

In the wake of yet another fairly well-received Presidential State of the Union address, this one declaring (among other things) that we should "reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion," Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to offer two petitions: one helping you tell the Senate to reject any bills that would block Iraqi and/or Syrian refugees from entering America, the other helping you tell your Congressfolk to support a bill that would repeal a visa waiver ban on Europeans who hold dual citizenship with Iran, Iraq, Syria, or the Sudan. I've taken some flack for saying things like this, but I'll say it anyway: banning folks from certain countries just because of their nationality is racist. And banning dual-citizenship folks because of their heritage is also stupid -- a lot of Europeans with dual-nationality have never even set foot in Iran, Iraq, Syria, or the Sudan. I know, I know -- facts mean nothing to the rage-filled. But the rage-filled don't get all the say around here. I mean, this isn't 2005.

Finally, Katie Ernesto, of Meridian, ID, helps you tell the Idaho state Senate to ban battery cages for egg-producing chickens. Battery cages, as you probably remember, are so small that they hardly let chickens stand or spread their wings, plus the wire bottoms mangle their feet, plus these chickens tend to get "de-beaked" at birth so they don't peck the other chickens in the cage to death (because, surprise, surprise, if you stick a couple of chickens in a single cramped cage for their whole lives with nothing to do they'll take it out on each other). And several fast-food corporations (most recently Wendy's) have started to expel battery cage-produced eggs from their food production chains, but as California has instituted bans on battery cages, Idaho has, ah, pointed out its lack of battery-cage laws to chicken-producing corporations. A lot of Idaho legislators may well try to say, as state Sen. Corder did, that "industry should decide." Well, there's an inspiring bumper sticker: let the industry decide! And it's much less impressive if, like me, you think the people should decide.

Around the table: mostly good news which should not induce in us a sense of complacency.

Obama Administration issues moratorium on new coal leases, and promises overhaul of how our government manages leasing programs. Federal coal leasing is fraught with problems, as you know, not least among them a fee-assessment system riddled with loopholes; the Obama Administration also promises that coal leasing will, in the future, take climate change emissions into account. A new President could scuttle the whole program, but (as we learned, sadly, when Mr. Bush embraced climate change denialism) when the President does something, people start listening.

Iran releases four prisoners, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, in a prisoner-swap deal with the United States. You may recall some far-right Senators whining that the Iran nuclear deal didn't include Mr. Rezaian's release, but apparently our government is not compelled by laws of physics to negotiate one deal with one foreign government at one time. Kudos to you if you demanded that the Iranian government release Mr. Rezaian, because you helped get results, which is more than a lot of politicians do.

Federal dietary guidelines now suggest that less than 10 percent of your daily caloric intake should come from added sugars. That means no more than 200 calories from added sugars if you're eating 2,000 calories; that's 50 grams of sugar (or 12 1/2 teaspoons), which jibes with most contemporary science about the matter. Of course, far-rightists will squeal ZOMG TEH GUBMINT TELLZ US WHAT TO EATZ!!!!!, and without FDA-mandated food labeling concerning added sugar, most folks won't know exactly how much added sugar they're eating. (Hint: if the food doesn't contain fruit, milk, or sweet vegetables, it's more likely to have added sugar.)

Ted Cruz failed to disclose a loan of $1 million from his wife's employer, Goldman Sachs, in advance of his 2012 run for Senate. The big story isn't necessarily that he may have broken the law despite assurances from his campaign that the donation got disclosed somewhere, or that it blows apart the narrative that the Cruz clan sank all its savings into his Senate run -- but that Ted Cruz frequently rails against banksters and bailouts while taking bankster bailout money. Such hypocrisy should finish his campaign -- at least, it would, in a sane and healthy society.

Finally, Santa Fe, NM restaurant workers suggest a way to defend workers' rights without forming a union. The way includes filing National Labor Relations Board complaints and hitting the employer with the Big Stick of Bad PR, but the "Somos Model" (so named for Somos un Pueblo Unido, the local worker rights center), contains other good advice, too -- like don't talk the employer alone, or sign anything alone. Turns out, in some cases, that forming a union might actually be an "extra step" -- something the SEIU clearly believes, given its efforts to get a $15/hour minimum wage for folks who aren't SEIU members.

Action: lead poisoning remediation, and net neutrality.

In the wake of the massive lead poisoning crisis in Flint, MI, where twice as many kids now have dangerous amounts of lead in their blood, Color of Change helps you tell our government to restore full funding for the Center for Disease Control's Healthy Homes and Lead Poisoning Program. Our Congress has, naturally, cut such funding over the last three years; in 2012, Congress allocated $29 million to the program, but in the most recent omnibus bill allocated only $17 million, which was a $1.5 million increase over the previous fiscal year's number, but still not enough. While I'd hate to think it would take a disaster on the scale of Michigan's mismanagement of the Flint situation to get our Congress to act, I'm certainly not above using guilt and shame when appropriate. And no it is not "politically correct" to note that these crises seem to happen an awful lot in predominantly Black neighborhoods, neighborhoods redlined by active conspiracy among politicians, bankers, and real estate corporations. Just like in a lot of bad action films, Black folks too often get it first.

Meanwhile, the FCC's net neutrality rules may have survived the appropriations process in Congress, but the big telecom corporations are still trying to, ah, be creative in subverting the rules. T-Mobile, for example, now offers a "Binge On" service which lets you stream content from a select few big content providers like Hulu or Netflix without counting it against your data cap. Trouble is, if you want to stream content from, say, Youtube, you'll find not only that it counts against your data cap, but that the Youtube content gets to you a bit slower than the Hulu or Netflix content. And that's paid prioritization, the very thing net neutrality rules outlaw -- a corporation can't make it harder for you to access content if that content doesn't come from one of their "partners." You should get to go where you want to on the internet without worrying if it's going to cost you more or suddenly work more slowly. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell the FCC to stop T-Mobile's pro-corporate, anti-freedom "Binge On" plan.

Action: helping Madaya, Syria and Flint, Michigan, and protecting religious freedom.

In Syria, the Assad regime has laid siege to the town of Madaya (some 40 miles from Damascus) since July, encircling the town with landmines so no one escapes, and keeping aid out of the town, such that its 40,000 citizens are perpetually in danger of starving to death. The regime finally allowed food aid from the U.N. into the town earlier this week, but that'll last perhaps a month, and this occurred after Syria's U.N. Ambassador -- whom we will not name, lest he thinks his works have earned him anything but scorn -- not only declared that no one in Madaya was starving, but that media reports about that suffering were "fabricated." You won't be surprised to learn that Madaya residents took part in the massive peaceful protests preceding the Syrian civil war, and that now the Assad regime accuses Madaya of "harboring terrorists," by which I presume they mean anyone who doesn't like the regime. Hence Avaaz helps you tell U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to intervene to lift the siege.

Meanwhile, food processing corporation Cargill has lately fired nearly 200 Muslim workers for the offense of praying at their jobs. And not for, you know, interrupting their work to pray, but for praying on their 15-minute breaks or their lunch breaks, in designated rooms, no less, all of which Cargill had allowed since 2009. What changed their mind? Gosh, I don't know -- maybe they thought their plant workers were sitting in designated rooms not actually praying but beaming murderous energy to the Paris attackers; I mean, you just don't know what goes through the minds of CEOs these days. But our laws don't permit corporations to fire workers for praying if it doesn't cause "undue hardship" to the day's business, and being on your assigned break is pretty much the definition of not causing undue hardship. And not that I should have to say this, but replacing the word "Muslim" with the word "Christian" in the first two sentences above would result in the same injustice. So Sum of Us helps you tell Cargill to stop oppressing the religious freedom of its workers.

Finally, if you've been following the water emergency in Flint, MI -- in which Flint's "Emergency Manager" forced Flint to draw its drinking water from the polluted Flint River rather than Detroit's water supply in an effort to "cut costs" -- you know that Gov. Snyder has issued a state of emergency there, but this comes after the Governor knew Flint's water had high lead levels and still told them it was safe to drink and after our federal Department of Justice began investigating. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell the Obama Administration to declare a federal state of emergency in Flint and give Flint's citizens what they need to recover. Once kids take in lead (and the chemicals used to "clean" the river water corroded Flint's lead pipes so badly that those pipes now also pollute the cleaner Detroit water Flint gets again), the brain damage they suffer is pretty much permanent, meaning future health care costs will go up. And of course Flint will need new water pipes. So how does that "cost-cutting" move look now?

Around the table: Chelsea Clinton goes Karl Rove on Bernie Sanders, and other follies.

Look out: Chelsea Clinton says Bernie Sanders, if President, will "dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance." And neglects, apparently, to mention that Mr. Sanders has proposed a single-payer plan covering all Americans that would merely replace those plans. I fault Mr. Sanders for not simply saying he wants to expand Medicare to everyone, but that's a mere messaging matter, whereas the above-quoted passage is some Karl Rove-level BS.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation finds that the huge jump in patent suits might well be explained by the sharp rise in "patent trolling" in the Eastern District of Texas. That news may well prompt you to say, Texas, stop your grandstanding and secede from America already, but the news isn't all bad: even this Republican Congress has shown some interest in dealing with the problem, and lower court rulings have also chipped away at those trolls who patent every damn thing so they can win frivolous lawsuits against honest, hard-working Americans.

Virginia state legislator actually proposed legislation mandating that schools ban transgendered students from any bathroom other than the bathroom of the sex they got at birth. Now that's some small government there! And though the bill would "leave it up to schools" to figure out how to enforce the ban, we might as well call it the "Touch Kids' Junk" bill.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin informs our federal government that he plans to scuttle the state's legendarily successful health care exchange, Kynect. He's clearly learned from Scott Walker to do all your asshole stuff at the beginning of your term, so voters have four years to get used to it. Problem here is that Gov. Bevin would force half a million Kentuckians onto ZOMG OBAMACAREZ!!!!!, which means he might actually have trouble from his right in 2019. I know it's hard right now to imagine anyone to Mr. Bevin's right, but I assure you the forces of evil are building that beast as we speak.

Finally, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is getting a lot of good press for her Republican rebuttal to President Obama's State of the Union address the other night, but really, our "liberal" media should attend these things to the end, rather than just reach for the first quotation that might be about Donald Trump and run with it. It's sad we credit her for suggesting we need to "turn down the volume" of our disagreements, but we don't discredit her for presuming taxes aren't low for working families at the federal level, or for saying we "demonize" "innovators" when we criticize banksters, or for taking yet another Republican pass on what precise health care reforms would "lower costs," or for suggesting we can somehow let bigots discriminate against gays and still "respect differences in modern families."

UPDATE. I should have made clear, originally, that low taxes for working families is something that really only exists as far as federal taxation goes -- working families still get disproportionately hit by sales taxes and flat state income taxes. Error rectified above.

Action: the Iran nuke deal, and the Aliso Canyon gas leak.

Today the House may take up H.R. 3662, the so-called Iran Terror Finance Transparency Act, which would actually prevent President Obama from lifting sanctions against Iran, even though that's a condition of the seven-nation deal that has a pretty good chance of containing Iran's nuclear program. What a bunch of spoiled brats! Memo to Congress: you had your chance to scuttle this deal, and you failed; preventing implementation on a deal you couldn't defeat isn't "being tough with Iran" or even "exercising oversight," it's a moronic fit of pique, rather like defunding perfectly legal programs you don't like simply because you couldn't win the argument on the merits. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you hand out the beatdowns to your Congressfolk over this cowardly attempt to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal. Are our Congressfolk adults, or are they diaper-loaded brats looking to inflame as many rage-addled Americans as possible? I kid, of course; I know the answer to that question, and so do you. It's going to be a long 2016, folks.

Meanwhile, you may have heard about the Los Angeles-area gas storage facility that has been spewing methane since late October, called by some "the BP oil spill on land." Governor Brown has lately declared a state of emergency, but that won't shut down the facility, nor does it actually solve the multitudinous problems caused by the leak -- not just school closings and family relocations, but all the health problems associated with methane leaks, including vomiting, bloody noses, and rashes. And that's before we get to the fact that methane is, shall we say, an efficient deliverer of carbon emissions to our atmosphere. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell Gov. Brown to shut down the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to issue the most vigorous possible regulations of methane emissions from existing structures, so that we can prevent future Aliso Canyons. The EPA has begun writing rules covering such emissions from new plants, but new plants ain't running -- or leaking -- right now.

Around the table: from Powerball and the Thin White Duke to Republican campaign follies, this time including John Kasich.

Judd Legum and Bryce Covert explain "Powerball’s $1.3 Billion Swindle Of Americans." Long story short: since mostly working families play the lottery, and the lottery is a big revenue-raiser for states, lottery tickets essentially amount to a "regressive tax on the poor" -- and now that rule changes have made jackpots much harder to win, and therefore much bigger, that "tax" is going to get bigger, too. Also, don't believe the hype when you hear states say they're dedicating lottery proceeds to education.

John Nichols, writing at The Nation, says David Bowie, who repeatedly professed to be apolitical, nonetheless "changed politics...by challenging societal assumptions and the limits of debate in profound ways," mainly by "(breaking) the boundaries of gender roles and sexuality," especially in the early 1970s. He was, after all, the most famous LGBTQ person in the world for a very long time. Meanwhile, Jim Naureckas writing at FAIR, focuses on Mr. Bowie's media criticism, at least from "the papers want to know whose shirts you wear" (from 1969's "Space Oddity") through 1980's Scary Monsters, wherein he sang "Put a bullet in my brain/And it makes all the papers."

Ohio Governor and Presidential candidate John Kasich pooh-poohs the idea that women need family medical leave, saying, instead, that new mothers should have "the flexibility to be able to work at home online." What to do if you can't actually do your work from home? How to compel employers to offer the work-at-home option? Oh, details. Remember, this is the "sane" and "compassionate" Republican running for President. And he's placing second in some New Hampshire polls as we speak.

Ted Cruz will address a "National Security Forum" at a South Carolina church led by a pastor who actually asked God for a military coup to "save" us from the "serious tyranny" of Barack Obama back in 2013. Mr. Cruz sure picks his pals real well, and I doubt Hillary Clinton will let him forget it -- I mean, it's low-hanging fruit as far as negative campaign ad fodder. And why did this pastor "pray" for a coup not unlike those that have afflicted South America for decades? Either because he didn't have the guts to instigate it himself, or because he'd actually be ashamed to be a traitor. I'd like to think the latter is the case, but I can't be sure.

Finally, we are reminded that Bernie Sanders pulls about the same support in polling among Democrats than Donald Trump does among Republicans -- and got one minute in traditional over-the-air nightly newscasts for every 24 minutes Mr. Trump got in 2015. And there you see the difference between how a sick, immoral, and decadent society treats a man who says sick, immoral, and decadent things, and how it treats a man who constantly prescribes medicine for its sickness.

Action: closing Guantánamo, protecting dissent, and making the Grand Canyon into a national monument.

As the Guantánamo Bay facility begins its 15th year, Amnesty International points us to a petition, on Whitehouse.gov, which helps you tell President Obama to, once and for all, close the Guantánamo Bay facility and thus end that blight on our history and our commitment to democracy. I'll admit that there are many fewer detainees at Guantánamo than at the beginning of the Obama Administration, but Guantánamo still houses more than 100 detainees, most held for a decade or more, without charge. If these are "the worst of the worst," you have to wonder why we can't charge them with anything, and thus you also have to wonder why we've tortured so many of them. The petition needs 100,000 signatures to mandate a White House response -- I can recall petitions only requiring 25,000 signatures before getting a White House response, and I don't know why the goalposts have moved, but that only means we must, as Phil Jackson used to say, "play above the referees."

Meanwhile, the Israeli Knesset is mulling a bill that would label certain national advocacy groups as "foreign agents," based on their reliance on funds from European governments. Sound common-sensical to you? Then ask yourself why the bill excludes other national groups that rely heavily on funds from foreign individuals, when a bill aiming to make foreign influence "transparent" should do both. Alas, we learn that groups fighting the occupation tend to rely on foreign government funding, while groups relying on buku bucks from folks like Sheldon Adelson tend to support the occupation. It's a damn shame what good people will do when they're insecure about the worth of their own institutions and freedoms. And Jesus Mary and Joseph even the Washington Post has come out against this bill, saying it uses "the kind of tactic that Russia and China have used to squelch dissent." Ouch! Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell Congress to speak out against this retrograde effort at Israeli "security."

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to designate the Grand Canyon as a national monument and so protect it forever from uranium mining, then CREDO still helps you do that. Hard to believe that anyone would want to mine for uranium in the Grand Freaking Canyon -- one of the world's most beautiful places and no looking at photographs will not prepare you for how awesome it is -- but some folks have no shame. Some folks are not appropriately attentive to the fact that the Colorado River runs through the Canyon and provides drinking water to seven states, either. Now, it's not out of the question that President Obama would do it -- his former Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, proved to be rather receptive to environmental issues concerning his home state (he's from Colorado) and issued a 20-year moratorium on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon area. But it's still our duty to communicate our will to our President, particularly when local politicians, perhaps looking to make big donors richer, have challenged the moratorium.

Action: keeping children out of solitary confinement, and separating basic banking from securities trading.

Activist Five Mualimm-ak has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell our government to stop putting juvenile prisoners in solitary confinement. Solitary confinement -- long ago regarded as a more humane alternative to hanging or public flogging -- has, like many tools, been overused and abused over time, and current scientific research tells us that the sensory deprivation and lack of human contact associated with solitary can lead to, or exacerbate, mental illnesses. Plus, it's not even particularly effective -- as early as 2006, researchers associated solitary confinement with more violence inside prisons and more crime committed by prisoners after release. And here we are, the beacon of civilization, putting children in solitary! Their brains aren't even developed enough to make adult decisions, so how are they supposed to cope? If it's true, as some folks say, that kids are worse than ever, that only means we, as adults, have to do better by our children. And we don't do better being crueler to them.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders addressed Wall Street reform last week, and while I'd go farther than he would in some areas, I agree that we need to bring back the Glass-Steagall "wall of separation" between banking and securities, so Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1709, the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act. Would it help us "break up the big banks," as so many of us would like to do? Yes, it would, merely by requiring the biggest banks to spin off that part of their corporation that plays the stock market. And why should we break up the big banks? Because big corporate power strangles freedom just as surely as big government surveillance does, and while you can make your government more accountable to you by exercising your rights as a citizen and organizing other citizens, you can't stop a bank from buying more unearned tax breaks for itself from Congress -- unless you're a shareholder, and you can organize enough other shareholders, and maybe not even then. And frankly, I prefer the club I was born into more than the club I'd have to buy into.

Around the table: horrible Presidential candidate tricks (plus Gary Johnson enters the race).

Ho hum, Jeb Bush would "help poor people" by ending food stamps and TANF, and letting states apply for "Right to Rise" grants from our federal government to (all together now) give states more "flexibility" and promote "transformative ideas to eliminate poverty and increase opportunity." If you read that last part as "transformative ideas to enable corruption and increase graft," you're not alone. "We have spent trillions of dollars on the 'War on Poverty,' but there are now still more than 46 million Americans living in poverty," Mr. Bush says, ignoring the most recent three-plus decades when we've converted this economy from one that helps people move up into one that keeps people down, which conversion more aptly explains rampant poverty today than the food stamps and welfare no one can live high on the hog on.

White nationalist SuperPAC robocalls in Iowa on behalf of Donald Trump for the Republican Presidential nomination. Don't hold your breath waiting for Mr. Trump to condemn them ("they've got YUGE ENERGY!!!!"), but I suspect these robocalls will backfire, since a) no one likes any robocalls and b) even most racists don't want to identify as "white nationalists." Next time the American National SuperPAC tries this trick, though -- maybe on behalf of someone a bit more subtle than Mr. Trump, maybe not -- it might not backfire. Once people come out of the closet as racists, they've got nothing left to do but double down.

No, Gov. Christie, 30 percent of the Gitmo detainees released by President Obama have not "returned to terrorism." Government data suggests that 5 percent have, with another 5 percent that might have -- and that, on balance, some 18% released by both Messrs. Obama and Bush have "returned" to terrorist activities, per the same data. Of course, I'm putting all these words in quotation marks because a lot of detainees were never terrorists to begin with. And you still have to wonder about the competence of a government that can hold people for 10 years but can't charge them with anything.

Former New Mexico Governor (and former Republican) Gary Johnson announces he will run for the Libertarian nomination for President in 2016. He has a lot going for him -- he's very personable, he has significant Executive branch experience, and his diagnosis that "(t)here’s no place for someone who’s a fiscal conservative and a social liberal in either party" will persuade a lot of folks. On the other hand, Mike Huckabee was very personable in 2008, and he's borderline unwatchable now. I hope Gary Johnson is made of stronger stuff.

Finally, Hillary Clinton releases an ad telling the world that Republicans are awful and she's the only Democratic Presidential candidate who can stop them. You know what we call that, right? A hostage crisis! We'd be more accurate to say only the people can stop those awful Republicans, and since voting is the beginning of one's citizenship duties, not the end, voting for a palatable Democrat in one Presidential election is hardly a panacea for what ails our nation. I can't help but wonder about the timing, too -- Bernie Sanders just laid into Wall Street banksters the other day.

Around the table: the liberal love for George W. Bush, and other absurdities.

Sen. Bernie Sanders delivers a withering Jeremiad denouncing banksters and the chaos and drama they cause in our economy. He's got good policy prescriptions, and he even backs up his statement that "the business model on Wall Street is fraud" pretty well (i.e., he notes that even banksters believe that's true). But I'd go further: why not a 7% cap on credit card rates, versus a 15% cap? And how about a 2% cap on mortgage rates? Believe me, banks will still make money under these conditions -- they just won't make enough to write the tax laws so they can make even more money doing nothing.

And what are Mr. Sanders' potential Republican opponents up to? Running campaign ads in Iowa and New Hampshire about terrorism and ISIS and who'll "chop" their "head" off and who's "serious" about fighting them, that's what. Well, they say talk about what you know, and these guys know fearmongering. Seriously, we could have made these two paragraphs a Goofus and Gallant strip.

Praise the Lord that Amanda Girard reminds us of "Five Taxpayer Handouts the Bundys Receive While Railing Against Government 'Tyranny.'" Not just in subsidies or "animal damage control" or Small Business Administration loans, either -- grazing on federal land costs ranchers less than seven cents on every dollar that private landowners charge, and ranchers also get a massive Big Gummint discount when they lease federal land directly. But you already got all that information from the "liberal" media when that whole Cliven Bundy thing blew up in 2014, right? I kid, of course.

Senate Republicans mull plan to end pre-debate filibusters on the Senate floor. Always the majority party wants to slash away at the filibuster and the minority party wants to keep it, and it doesn't matter which party is which -- Democratic majorities famously ended the filibuster for budget resolutions in the early '90s and also for Presidential judicial appointments a little over two years ago, that last item after minority Democrats decried Republican attempts to do the same in the mid-2000s. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the Senate needs to get rid of holds (which are the real obstruction) and force Senators to sustain filibusters by actually talking for hours on end, rather than signifying their intent to filibuster and then going out to dinner.

Consistently-ignored Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee says that "a lot" of Christian leaders on the right are "scared to death" that a President Huckabee might actually end abortion, because then they "wouldn’t have the ability to do urgent fundraising because if we slay the dragon, what dragon do they continue to fight?" And you know what? He's likely right about that -- you may recall Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) saying something even harsher about certain Tea Party groups. And I can never shake the feeling that Democrats threw the last two midterm elections so they could fundraise off the crazy things all these newly-elected Republicans would say.

Finally, John C. O'Day, writing at FAIR, finds a lot of liberal commentators suddenly pining away for the good old days of George W. Bush, specifically because Mr. Bush didn't publicly demonize Muslims like a lot of today's Republican Presidential candidates do. This is a grim development, but not a surprising one -- I began many sentences during the Bush years with "at least Reagan didn't." But we have to work against thinking Bush-wasn't-so-bad when what's really happening is that our politicians keep getting worse, and will keep doing so until we a) stop the money-flow to their campaigns and b) force big telecom corporations to offer cable channels a la carte.

Action: "free" trade, and coal ash disposal.

The reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce has endorsed the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," as the National Association of Manufacturers did earlier this week -- yet Sen. McConnell says he still thinks it's unlikely Congress will bring this notorious "free" trade deal up before Election Day. Whom to believe? It doesn't matter, because our will and our duty is the same, so both CREDO and Friends of the Earth help you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership." Why? Because it will ship more of our jobs overseas and allow corporations to nullify more of our laws than even previous "free" trade agreements have done -- why, the WTO essentially nullified our country-of-origin meat labeling laws earlier this year. Why else? Because even its defenders can't defend it -- they suggest that you're against "trade" if you oppose it, like we're completely stupid, and they acknowledge that past "free" trade deals have done badly and promise to listen to you for-real for-real if you just let them pass this one. Their immorality is matched only by their stupidity. We've held them off this long; we can't let them win now.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to do a better job protecting the residents of La Belle, PA from coal ash. What's going on here? The FirstEnergy corporation must close its Little Blue Run coal ash disposal site, the largest in America, because it's over 40 years old and thus unlined (lining wasn't required back then) and has thus polluted the groundwater there. FirstEnergy already has another coal ash disposal site near La Belle, some 90 miles away -- but the good citizens of La Belle are already sick, as it were, of the effects of the current coal ash site, which include cancer and kidney failure. You have to wonder, as at least one environmental lawyer has wondered, why the coal ash is unsafe in Little Blue Run but no biggie in La Belle. And you might suspect that the state simply thinks La Belle and its people are too far gone anyway, so letting FirstEnergy ship its filth upriver is no biggie. And you might not like that, if you still think America is the land where no one ever gives up or gives in.

Action: human rights in Saudi Arabia, and no more golden parachutes for federal banking regulators.

The year is young, but Saudi Arabia's government has done some things that have even penetrated the thickness of the "liberal" media -- we've catalogued their habit of throwing people who disagree with the government in jail, but last Saturday Saudi Arabia executed a prominent Shia cleric and 46 others, ostensibly for "terrorism," though one has to wonder if their definition of "terrorism" might be closer to what reasonable folks would call "criticism." Saudi Arabia also ended a ceasefire with Shia rebels in Yemen that same day, a matter to which one might pay less attention if Saudi Arabia weren't a Sunni state. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell President Obama to exert more pressure on Saudi Arabia's government to cut out with the human rights abuses and the sectarian violence. Saudi Arabia has more oil than God, so they may not care what Mr. Obama has to say. But our government's alliance with Saudi Arabia has to change. And since we're not getting rid of oil as an energy source tomorrow, we must work other levers.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell President Obama to issue an Executive Order mandating that no administration official who comes from the bankster class can collect the kind of compensation they often get from their soon-to-be former employers for getting a job in government. The phenomenon we're describing is the "golden parachute," of course, though another name for it might be "bribe," since one doesn't expect that a bankster's former employer is giving him all that money to join the government so he can serve someone other than that employer. But if you work for our government, you should serve the people, rather than find loopholes your former employer can drive a Mack truck through. Note well, of course, that this is yet another thing President Obama can do without consulting Super Great and Magnificent One True American President Mitch McConnell or Super Awesome and Luminescent Other True American President Paul Ryan. He shouldn't worry about called a dictator for doing so, because they say he's a dictator just for drawing 12 breaths a minute.

Action: class action lawsuits, breed-specific bans, and *a la carte* cable packaging.

H.R. 1927, the so-called Fairness in Class Litigation Act, would force folks who join in class-action lawsuits to affirm that every last one of them suffered "the same type and scope of injury as the named class representative or representatives." Sound innocuous? It's not: the law already demands enough such commonality in classes, and no two people are that alike or go through exactly the same circumstances in life leading to the exact same injuries. And the bill's opponents call it the "Volkswagen Bailout Act" for a reason: it would cripple the ability of good citizens who've been damaged by Volkswagen's cheating on emissions controls -- to the point where corporations would be emboldened to do very bad things on a very large scale, knowing they would face no accountability. The House may vote on H.R. 1927 this week, so you may want to call your House Reps (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page) and tell them to oppose the "Volkswagen Bailout bill." They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, Anna Sanchez has started a petition on Change.org, which helps you demand that the Department of Defense lift breed-specific bans on dogs on military bases. Apparently Ms. Sanchez can't keep her bulldog on military housing, and if that sounds a little strict, note that her military housing officer says the dog's jaws "look very pitbull." A veterinarian has testified to the contrary, but why make decisions based on actual expertise? And for the record, every pitbull I've known has been a loving companion -- they tend to be a bit boisterous and protective of the pack, but the intelligent dog-owner can mitigate these with good training -- and our society's animus toward pitbulls might as well be racism, especially considering that the belief that pitbulls go around biting everyone is anecdotal, not scientific (the CDC can't confirm that any dog breeds are "more likely to bite" than any other). All breed-specific bans do is confirm the prejudices of the ignorant. And we have enough of that in America.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to force cable corporations to offer channels a la carte, so you don't have to pay for cable channels that offend you, then the Parents Television Council still helps you do that. Why? Because if we keep paying for cable channels that offend us (cough all the cable news channels cough), they'll have no incentive to stop doing what offends us. Cable news channels will have no incentive to stop serving up sensationalist and/or rage-inducing crap, no incentive to stop putting on "experts" who are little more than paid shills for polluters, torturers, and usurers, and no incentive to challenge the rank stupidity of our elected officials. Morever, their advertisers will have no incentive to stop advertising with them, since the number of people who watch them will be, theoretically, the same as the number of people who pay for them. Big corporations understand one thing: money. Don't give it to them, and they'll start listening.

Around the table: "free" trade, solar power, the minimum wage, and a pair of moronic utterings.

The National Association of Manufacturers endorses the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal, and conventional wisdom holds that other "business groups," like the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will follow. And then our politicians will reassure themselves that they actually listened to the people. Put six beers in any one of them and he might confess that he listened to "the people that mattered."

Ben Ho makes "the conservative case" for solar power subsidies. But too many of today's reactionaries who inaccurately call themselves "conservative" won't hear it, because, for them, "conservatism" means nothing so much as doing whatever big corporations want. OK, perhaps I'm oversimplifying -- it also means hating gays and women.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo plans to hike the minimum wage for state university workers to $15/hour, as he did last year for New York City fast-food workers. The SUNY board still has to approve, of course, but is it possible we'll one day stop thinking of this Governor Cuomo as Cuomo the Lesser? I had never considered that before.

A New York Times look into Trump family history digs up this nugget: during the 1980s, Mr. Trump cut off health care benefits to his extremely sick grand-nephew, and said he did it because "I was angry that they (the boy's parents) sued." In a sane and moral society, such a story would finish a Presidential candidate. But in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, Mr. Trump's votaries will praise him for his straight talk. And then he'll praise their energy! And then the "liberal" media will cover all of this as if it would be of any interest to a sane person.

Finally, one of the Oregon "militia" members currently occupying the Melheur national wildlife refuge says that "the Black Lives Matter movement" doesn't "get any backlash, not on the level that we're getting." And thus he indulges in the two great right-wing pastimes: ignoring everything that's going on around you, and feeling sorry for yourself.

Action: corporate welfare in Oregon, and oil wastewater in organic food.

Rep. Walden (R-OR) has introduced a bill concerning Oregon's Klamath River Basin, but you should not confuse it with the Klamath Basin Water Recovery and Economic Restoration Act of 2015, introduced by Sen. Wyden (D-OR). The Klamath Basin contains both the Klamath National Forest and the Fremont-Winema National Forest, and though the Basin has been the subject of disputes among farmers, Native Americans, conservationists, and local officials, they've all come together to negotiate three agreements governing use of the area. Sen. Wyden's bill would codify all three of these agreements in federal law, but Rep. Walden's bill would codify only two of them, excepting the agreement mandating the removal of four local dams -- and the Walden bill would also push those national forests onto two Oregon counties, which very likely won't be able to afford their maintenance and thus will likely sell them off to loggers. And if you liked that bit of corporate welfare, Rep. Walden's bill has another one -- it specifically exempts the corporation that owns the dams from any liability if the dams' removal winds up harming the environment. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Walden bill.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to prohibit the use of oil wastewater to irrigate organic crops, then the League of Conservation Voters still helps you do that. We all know that California, which supplies a great deal of America's fruits and vegetables, is suffering from a terrible drought, which has prompted California agricultural concerns to irrigate their crops with something, but you buy organic fruits and vegetables to get away from wastewater irrigation, not to tolerate it because conditions aren't what we'd like them to be. And if federal standards mandate that organic food can't have any oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, then they damn sure should mandate that organic food can't be awash in oil wastewater, either. A lot of good folks are going to look the other way about this, if they can be convinced that organic farms will die out if they can't get a get-out-of-jail-free card on this matter, at least until the drought lessens. But again: I don't do hostage situations. And we should patronize small, local organic farmers, who can survive droughts better than big ag corporations can. Big corporations deal in volume, after all, and thus get hurt by big events like droughts worse than the small farmers who don't deal in volume.

Around the table: the Malheur "militia" is a corporate tool, and other horrible truths.

In re the Oregon "militia" that has occupied the Malheur wildlife refuge, John Nichols asks, "What Do the Bundy Brothers Have Against Wildlife?" And their real complaint isn't about Gubmint Gone Wild, or even mandatory minimum laws affecting Dwight and Steven Hammond -- it's about our federal government failing to relinquish all federal lands to ranchers and miners (and corporations, though of course they won't say so). Our federal government protects federal land for our benefit, or at least does so with enough of our oversight, but these "militia" folk seem to think "our government" means a government that does only the things they want it to do.

But there's good news: social media users have pointed out en masse that if the Oregon "militia" members were black or Muslim, Our Glorious Elites would be calling them "terrorists." As a friend of mine reminded me yesterday, the "militia" members haven't done anything violent yet, and may not. Still, "y'all Qaeda" and "Vanilla ISIS" is chickens-coming-home-to-roost territory for the American right. The right will never cop to understanding that, irony (like science) being a thing to be hated whenever it doesn't give you the answers you want.

Glenn Greenwald reminds us that Our Glorious Elites only care about "privacy" when the NSA spies on them. As per usual, his demolition of Rep. Hoekstra's hypocrisy is worth experiencing in full, and I'm pleased to be reminded that former Rep. Harman, Tha Bush Mobb's favorite Democrat this side of Joe Lieberman, also seemed shocked, shocked! back in 2009 after discovering that the NSA listened in on her phone conversations (and the NSA actually had a warrant that time!). But these revelations won't spark soul-searching any more than all that David Petraeus drama did in 2012. And Our Glorious Elites will tell you soul-searching is for little people like us. I wish I were kidding about that.

Congress is actually talking corporate tax reform again, and The Hill finds liberals in Washington, such as there are, playing offense. A little more aggressiveness from liberals would be good to see -- I've had more than enough of the "bipartisanship" that means "Democrats and Republicans coming together to do whatever Republicans want" -- and yes our corporate tax code needs to bring in more money, not less, not least because corporate power needs to be reined in as surely as wealthy individuals' power needs to be reined in. We will provide the steel for our Congressfolk's spines whenever we can.

Finally, Jake Kilroy, writing at Take Part, describes one non-profit's efforts to distribute oral-swab self-tests for HIV to folks in Africa. AIDS is a big problem in Africa, not least because so many African elites deny it's a problem and so many others deny it's a problem "good" people have, and giving good Africans the ability to test themselves could do a lot to help solve the problem -- but sadly I can also imagine bigots beating up anyone who they think is carrying around test kits, or describing anyone who uses one as gay or a prostitute.

Action: fighting privatization and animal cruelty.

Ho hum, Congress wants to privatize the air traffic control system. Why? Privatization votaries will say it's because everything government does sucks and everything private corporations do is awesome -- never mind that when your government fouls up, you can do more about it, because your government belongs to you. Never mind, also, that when our government sells off its services to private corporations, services don't necessarily get better -- in England and Canada, privatizing traffic control led to massive job losses and huge hikes in ticket fees. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that such privatization efforts also resulted in certain folks with a significant investment in these efforts becoming quite wealthy. No use justifying it by saying WE'RE BROKE!!!! either, because we're seeing how it works in Spain and Greece -- no amount of privatization is ever enough, and no amount ever seems to shrink government debts or kickstart economies. So Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to abandon efforts to privatize air traffic control systems.

Meanwhile, Mercy for Animals has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Wendy's to ban eggs from animals raised in battery cages like those used in factory farms. You know the drill with these cages: animals can barely stand or spread their wings in them, and birds often get trampled or mangled in cage wires, and then left to rot when they die, often right next to bird that are still laying eggs. Say it with me: no "cheap" food is worth torturing animals like this, and yes, I insist, as a civilized person, that you treat your feed animals with respect and dignity, not in the least because doing so tends to give you better meat, even if it doesn't make poultry CEOs as rich. If you're the kind of person who wonders why we should bother doing things like this because no one ever changes, etc., note well that many of Wendy's competitors in the fast-food business -- including McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King, and Panera -- have already begun transitioning to cage-free eggs. No one ever succeeded by throwing their arms in the air and walking away, after all.

UPDATE. Well, that was quick -- Wendy's has agreed to make its eggs cage-free by 2020. Good work, folks!

Around the table: banned books, creationism, bathroom bans, political correctness, campaign finance disclosure, and hair spray.

Israel education ministry bans high schools from teaching a novel about a Jewish/Palestinian love affair. Why? The ministry says that "(a)dolescent youth tend to romanticize and don't have, in many cases, the systematic point of view that includes considerations about preserving the identity of the nation and the significance of assimilation." Yeah, it sure would be a shame if kids didn't learn to be more "systematic" about such things. The decision shows, at the very least, a lack of confidence in Israeli school teachers' ability to help students understand the book, which is not terribly secure of the ministry.

Creationist asserts that "God put things" in the Bible "that would appear without digging to be contradictions" in order to "weed out" non-believers. With that logic, such as it is, you could write a bad novel with flatly contradictory plot turns and then say you wrote it that way to "weed out" the "non-believers" who noticed them. And while I defended creationism in an equally absurd manner when I was 13, that was a long time ago (never mind how long!), and this guy doesn't look 13, even if he hasn't put away childish things.

Ho hum, Indiana state legislator tries to get attention for himself by introducing a bill forcing transgendered folks to use public restrooms according to their sex at birth, not their sex at present. Would it be too much to ask to get ahead of the inevitable pederasty hysteria this time? Transgendered doesn't equal pederast any more than gay equals pederast, and pretending that such equations exist insults everyone's intelligence.

From the "I Wish I'd Said That" file: Paul Waldman, writing at The American Prospect, says, about right-wingers obsessing about "political correctness," "(t)he truth is that what conservatives (sic) call political correctness is often better described as 'people telling you not to be such a jerk.'" And I've watched political correctness inflict a lot of "friendly fire" in my day, but I've also learned that good folks stop doing that to other good folks as they get older and as they get better at empathy and mercy. But all Trumpcruzcarsonetal do with their rhetoric is enable whiners who take being told to act like civilized human beings as an excuse for a don't-tread-on-me tantrum.

Wealthy California Republican may succeed in getting an initiative on the ballot that would force state legislators to actually wear the logos of their 10 biggest donors on their dresses and suits whenever they get up to speak in the legislature! The biggest problem will be figuring out how to depict individuals in logos, I suppose. But where a William and Mary professor sees "a textbook example of invalid compulsory speech," I see "disclosure."

Finally, Everyone's Favorite Blowhard blames President Obama for having to use a pump instead of an aerosol hair spray. Of course, the EPA, FDA, and CPSC banned chlorofluorocarbons, not aerosols, in 1978, some 30 years before Mr. Obama took office, and non-CFC aerosol hair sprays still exist -- though Mr. Trump may have a reason for not knowing these things, amirite? Possibly worse is his apparent belief that whatever he sprays in his penthouse stays in his penthouse.