Thieves in the Temple.

Action: "free" trade, and voting rights.

You've noticed that the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" includes a dozen Pacific nations but not the biggest Pacific nation of all, China? Find yourself relieved that the TPP at least doesn't give away our jobs and wages to a nation that combines the worst of totalitarian politics and neoliberal economics? Better sit down, then: our government is working on the China Bilateral Investment Treaty (or China BIT), subject to even more secrecy than the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," and we know why they kept that one secret -- because it would give corporations even more power than they already have and allow "investor-state tribunals" to nullify our laws. Of course, China BIT supporters say we have to "promote more foreign investment" in America, as if there's no way to do that except to make the rule of law worthless in America. Which is what, class? A hostage crisis, that's what -- let corporations nullify our laws, they're saying, or the foreign investment gets it! CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the China Bilateral Investment Treaty.

Finally, since voting is topical this year, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2867/S. 1659, the Voting Rights Advancement Act. We've already seen a lot of shenanigans this year -- voting booths unexpectedly unavailable or opening late, voters unexpectedly finding their party affiliation changed, voters of color having their credentials scrutinized more than white voters -- and the Voting Rights Advancement Act would help fix all of that, by mandating that any state or municipality with a demonstrated history of voting rights violations must submit any changes in voting rights or elections laws to the Department of Justice for pre-clearance. The Court threw out the Voting Rights Act's old pre-clearance formula in Shelby County v. Holder, arguing that it unfairly punished Southern states, but also stated that Congress could create a new pre-clearance formula that could pass muster with the Court. The Voting Rights Advancement Act has that formula, so let's get to it.

Around the table: warrantless wiretapping receives a challenge, and other stories.

The FISA Amendments Act, which codified Tha Bush Mobb's warrantless wiretapping program into law, may finally receive a Constitutional challenge. Our government has notified at least 10 terror suspects that some of the evidence against them came from warrantless wiretapping -- and a lawyer for two of them says he'll try to get that evidence thrown out. You have to wonder why our government suddenly started notifying suspects they're being warrantlessly wiretapped. If you're an eternal optimist, you might conclude that this is Barack Obama's way of finally killing the program dead, by getting judges to do it for him. Entertaining as that notion is, I'm not sure I'm that much an optimist.

At least two Oklahoma courts assert in a criminal case that if a girl gives oral sex while unconscious, it's not "forcible sodomy." under the law. Apparently, state law does not list "incapacitation due to the victim drinking alcohol" as one of the ways to put the force in "forcible sodomy." "We will not, in order to justify prosecution of a person for an offense, enlarge a statute beyond the fair meaning of its language," the appeals court said. Left unanswered is how an incapacitated person could possibly consent to sex, or how the "fair meaning" (not the "literal meaning," you notice) of "forcible sodomy" fails to include, well, forcing yourself on someone who's too drunk to fight you off.

Bill Scher, writing at Politico, offers Minnesota Sen. Al Franken as the best choice for Democratic Vice President. I'm by and large impressed with Sen. Franken -- he's written a lot of great bills that haven't become law mainly because Republicans hate good government -- but the idea that he's somehow "politically incorrect" in the manner of Donald Trump is as ludicrous as the idea that Rachel Maddow is a "liberal version of Sean Hannity." And the "liberal" media won't back off on this alleged "political incorrectness" just because they've given Mr. Trump a pass to say far worse things -- they'll report on them like they're "just as bad," because that's what's "fair." But yes, he's more liberal than Mrs. Clinton, Democrats don't have very many great choices, et cetera.

Consultant working for Sen. John McCain's re-election campaign gets busted after police find a meth lab, one within the reach of small children no less, in her home. Emily Pitha has, apparently, been a mainstay of Arizona Republican politics for many years, having also worked for former Sen. Jon Kyl and his successor, current Sen. Jeff Flake; the McCain campaign, of course, terminated its relationship with her after the arrest. None of this will surprise you if you watch House of Cards, and I don't expect this will be an issue in his re-election campaign, but if something this bizarre happens to him, say, two more times, that might be a sign he's done.

Finally, Donald Trump delivers an allegedly substantial foreign policy address that, in the words of BBC reporter Anthony Zurcher, is "essentially a calmly intoned reprise of the views he has expressed throughout the campaign." Mr. Trump may have figured out what Republican establishment-types have really been telling him: that if you say what's in the hearts of angry white dudes without sounding like an angry white dude, you'll do a lot better. He even read from a teleprompter this time, I understand. Of course, when Mr. Trump says he won't tell ISIS how he's going to beat them, he forgets -- just like they all do! -- that he's supposed to account to us, the American people, about things like that.

Action: protecting endangered species, and stopping the revolving door between Congress and lobbying firms.

Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk and your President to protect the Endangered Species Act from attacks against it. That may seem odd, since Congress itself has been conducting most of these attacks, but they're supposed to do our will, and I can find no evidence that the American people desire that endangered species should be allowed to go extinct, merely so that fossil fuel corporations can churn up the land further. Of course our Congressfolk don't put it like that: they either pretend they really, really like the Endangered Species Act as they're trying to gut it, or they pick the most obscure endangered species you can think of (never the Bald Eagle, which the ESA has of course rescued from annihilation as of 2007) and try to make you choose between that and cheap energy. Of course you know what that is, right? That's hostage-taking, and we don't do hostage-taking in America. When our leaders present us with such narrow choices, we tell them: find another way. Because that is the American way.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1959, which would permanently ban Congressfolk from ever becoming lobbyists after they leave office, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. "Public service should be for the public good," the lastest Demand Progress email missive tells me, "not an audition for a lavish lifestyle as a corporate lobbyist." Yes, if Congressfolk know they can make bajillions of dollars merely by pleasing the kind of people who might pay them out the wazoo when they leave Congress, then yes, they'll serve their actual constituents much less than their duty demands, if at all. And of course one can do tremendous harm by moving from public servant to well-paid lobbyist who prevents the public from getting more out of their public servants. And S. 1959's ban would not violate those Congresspersons' First Amendment rights, because the First Amendment guarantees your right to redress your grievances -- not the grievances of those who pay you more than you ever made in Congress.

Around the table: a setback on media consolidation, a victory against torture.

Bad news: the Department of Justice and the FCC have both given their conditional blessing to the Charter/Time-Warner merger. The conditions -- Charter can't impose data caps, Time-Warner can't enforce certain video content bans -- are not only negligible next to the problems (job losses, higher prices, worse service) media consolidation always exacerbates, but I imagine they could be challenged in court. How can our government force a data cap ban on Charter and not Comcast, they'll say? Of course, Charter agreed to the ban, so it may take some time to find a judge who would agree that the data cap ban is unfair, but the world's a big place.

U.S. District Court Judge allows torture victims to proceed in a lawsuit against the psychologists who ran the CIA torture program. Much as I'd like to see these monsters (especially the one who called the Senate torture report "a bunch of hooey," now there's a plainspoken man!) smacked down hard, I'm a bit torn that they're very likely going to be the only big players in the CIA torture game who ever suffer even a tiny bit for their role in subjecting folks to inhuman treatment and in trashing our heritage as a people who are better than torturers.

China Labor Watch finds that Pegatron Corporation factory workers used by Apple to make iPhones make $1.82/hour. Naturally, workers there testify that they can't get time off, nor can they make ends meet without working a lot of overtime. Say it with me: this is a massive wealth-redistribution-upward plan that not only redistributes wealth from Chinese workers to Apple executives, but from American workers to Apple executives, since back in the days before "free" trade American workers would have been putting these phones together.

Sen. Ted Cruz announces Carly Fiorina as his choice for his Vice Presidential running mate. That's an unusual move, given that Mr. Cruz has not captured the Republican Presidential nomination, and is less likely to do so now, given his rather poor showing in Tuesday's primaries -- Ronald Reagan was doing rather better when he promised to take Richard Schweiker as his running mate in 1976 (though that may have cost him the nomination). I will say his statement-not-about-Donald-Trump in paragraph six is absolutely spot-on, and should resonate with a lot of people. (In other news, I guess he hates John Kasich as much as a lot of other politicians supposedly do!)

Finally, Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels announces that the show will cut nearly a third of its ads next year -- but also plans to let advertisers "partner" with the show to offer "branded" content six times a year, which apparently means "weaving in brand messaging that more closely resembles the content viewers tuned in to watch." But doesn't that sound rather like something Saturday Night Live would have spoofed back in the day?

Action: encryption, and sentencing reform.

The notorious Burr-Feinstein anti-encryption bill has officially dropped, and its progenitors are making the usual nonsensical noises. Sen. Burr (R-NC) yammers on about how "consumers have a right to seek solutions that protect their information -- which involves strong encryption," but then presents a bill that makes "strong encryption" impossible by demanding a backdoor to encryption programs to which only our government will have a key, and by demanding "intelligible data" on demand when the whole point of encryption is to make data unintelligible to folks who aren't supposed to read it. Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) is no better, fearmongering that "terrorists and criminals are increasingly using encryption to foil law enforcement efforts," which statement is actually far from proven (and what, "terrorists" alone wasn't scary enough for her?). So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell Congress to protect your right to privacy and security by rejecting the Burr-Feinstein bill.

Meanwhile, S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, still awaits a vote from the Senate despite passing out of Judiciary six months ago today, so the ACLU helps you urge your Senators to support fair sentencing reform by voting for S. 2123. If S. 2123 passes, nonviolent drug offenders would get shorter mandatory minimum sentences, some nonviolent drug offenders could escape mandatory minimums entirely, and the Fair Sentencing Act's 2010 adjustment of the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity could be applied retroactively. The bill would also ease some of the more onerous conditions placed on juveniles tried and convicted as adults. Of course this bill isn't everything we'd want, but it is more than what we've got. Naturally, since it would do a modest good for the true owners of government, the American people, the Senate is taking its own sweet time considering it. But that only means we need to be more assertive in communicating our will. I have every faith that you'll do that.

Around the table: water thieves, torturers, spies, bad journalists, and scare numbers.

Nestlé isn't just gouging public water in Oregon and California: the good citizens of Kunkletown, Pennsylvania, are also struggling against a Nestlé attempt to pump out 200,000 gallons of water daily and sell it as bottled water. Nestlé got the local government's help, of course, with an ordinance that suddenly allowed massive amounts of water extraction in commercial zones, which had heretofore been illegal. The good news? Local townsfolk sued the local Board of Supervisors over the zoning change; they'll probably win that, and it's only their backup plan.

Rebecca Gordon, writing at The Nation, describes that time the CIA tortured an innocent man for upwards of seven years. Among the horrors committed against Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, better known as "Abu Zubaydah": being waterboarded 83 times in a month, being thrown shoulder-first into a concrete wall though our government's rules clearly said "flexible, false wall," being deprived of sleep for upwards of six days, and losing an eye under never-explained circumstances -- and, as icing on the cake, the CIA openly declared him to be an experiment to see how well "enhanced interrogation techniques" worked. But, you know, bygones, looking forward not backward, ad nauseam. A President Donald Trump would bring all these horrors back just to prove he's got big balls.

Ho hum, Michigan state police have been monitoring social media for comments about the government-created water crisis in Flint. No, the First Amendment doesn't protect you from threatening the entire state government on Facebook, but the Fourth Amendment protects you from police conducting fishing expeditions for such threats, and I'd say maybe police would be better served looking for the people who poisoned Flint's water in the first place, except that everyone already knows who and where they are. And no the police don't need to know how people feel and what they're willing to do because their government poisoned an entire city's water. That's one of them-there "if you need to ask, you'll never know" things.

Just in case you were wondering if Mexico was a real place, and not just a punching bag for Donald Trump: Mexican human rights activists allege that a smear campaign may be operating against them in the media. At issue: in general, accusations of human rights abuses by Mexican police and military, and in particular, a 2014 attack on a fleet of student buses in Ayotzinapa that killed 3 students and resulted in 43 others going "missing." A report on that massacre, elaborating on an earlier report's finding that police and military may have been involved in it, is due, so the timing of unsubstantiated media reports alleging the report's authors are corrupt is, to say the least, suspicious. Dig the Mexican columnist who alleges that TEH REAL SMEAR CAMPAIGN!!! is against the police and military, and then says the release of video footage depicting actual police torture of a suspect somehow backs his claim. Dude's got spunk -- he could go work for our "liberal" media!

Finally, we learn that over 60,000 Pennsylvania Democrats have switched parties between the first of the year and yesterday's primary, ostensibly to vote for Donald Trump. 60,000; that's a big number; 145,000 new Republican registrations just since Election Day 2015, that's an even bigger number. Sadly, we do not learn until paragraph 29 that Pennsylvania has 8 million voters, and that registered Democrats still hold a 900,000 voter advantage over Republicans. That's not to say Mr. Trump can't win Pennsylvania, or even that Democrats haven't forgotten how to talk to blue-collar voters, but the numbers the earlier paragraphs give you are still scare numbers. (Oh, and by my count, the article tells 11 stories of Pennsylvanians who've switched over for Trump. Think they would have had trouble finding 11 Pennsylvanians who switched the other way for Sanders? Or did they just not look?)

Action: internet freedom, and cable channel freedom.

Despite our efforts, the House passed H.R. 2666, the so-called No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, which purportedly prevents the FCC from regulating broadband prices but actually blows a hole in the FCC's Open Internet rules, so Free Press helps you tell your Senators to reject the anti-internet freedom bill. H.R. 2666 injures internet freedom by preventing the FCC from regulating broadband pricing, thus allowing broadband corporations to hide their net neutrality circumventions within fees, data caps, and tiers of service, so that the big telecoms could force you to watch junk news and reality show rubbish before taking you to the website you want to visit. Of course, good Americans who are already paying too much for cable are no doubt wondering why Congress opposes rate regulation so much. Thankfully, the House vote was basically a party-line vote that wouldn't be able to overcome a promised Obama veto if repeated. But talk to your Senator anyway. The time to communicate your will is always now; the time to flex your power is always now.

Meanwhile, in a peripherally-related note, the Parents Television Council still helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow people to buy their cable channels a la carte. As we discussed above, the internet is as great as it is because we can visit the sites we want to visit, without having to sit through all the mind-numbing content that big telecom corporations would prefer us to see because it attracts big advertising money. What these corporations want, then, is for the internet to be like cable TV, where you paying for dozens of channels you not only don't want but which you may find offensive -- MTV and FX for my brethren on the right, and any cable news channel for me. Forcing cable corporations to offer their channels a la carte would give you the measure of freedom you deserve as a TV viewer. And to those who say a la carte would hike your cable bills: cable prices rose rather faster than inflation between 1995 and 2011, so what would you be losing with a la carte? I know what you're losing without it -- your freedom.

UPDATE. For whatever reason, the Parents Television Council email tool from the second paragraph above works only with some difficulty. You can always call your House Reps and Senators directly, however, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page.

Around the table: the "secret shame" of Americans, and other stories.

Neal Gabler, writing in The Atlantic, informs us that nearly half of all Americans literally cannot come up with $400 in a crisis. Mr. Gabler's own story of living hand-to-mouth will no doubt seem sadly familiar, and if you're thinking maybe the problem is that folks have money tied up in other things that are hard to convert to hard cash, well, no -- net worth has been declining since (guess when?) the mid-1980s. There's a lot more to the article than this, but let me just add that this is yet another reason Voter ID laws are such a bad idea -- folks who never had the necessary paperwork, or who lose the paperwork, are very likely not going to be able to come up with the cash to fix it.

Spencer Ackerman, writing at The Guardian, reports on the lives of six families who had a family member killed by American drones. They say "the strike lasts a moment and the consequences last a lifetime," in Mr. Ackerman's words, and most of them don't even know who the target really was -- after all, drones kill a lot of civilians. A victim who nearly lost his left leg to a drone strike says "(y)ou're worse off injured than being dead," and folks rarely even get financial reparations for the damage done. Incredibly, not everyone chooses hatred, which gives me hope. But, ah, what terror do these drone strikes help avert again?

Ho hum, University of Washington study finds very little evidence of price hikes in Seattle due to that city's $15/hour minimum wage hike. They did find a lot of business owners who fretted about having to raise prices, and a good amount of low-income workers who didn't think the wage hike would do very much for them. Still, TEH HIGH PRICEZ ARE TEH INEVITABULZ!!!!! is yet another right-wing "common sense" notion that seems to get beaten up a lot by reality.

David Corn, writing at Mother Jones, also thinks Bernie Sanders's relatively good performance in polls against Republicans won't continue once Republicans start pummeling him with the "socialist" hammer. Maybe he's right, but Republicans called the center-right President Obama a "socialist" for so long that folks might be tired of hearing it. Also, if I'm Bernie Sanders, this is the conversation I want to have -- if socialism is such a bad thing, how come I draw crowds of 20,000+ wherever I go? How come so many independents and Republicans support me? I also hope he has the sense to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, and say red-baiting is the last refuge of the scoundrel who's lost every other argument.

Finally, former Sen. Harris Wofford writes about his upcoming marriage to a man. 90-year-old Mr. Wofford survived his wife of 48 years, his "best friend" and "best critic," then years later met his future husband while swimming alone in the Ft. Lauderdale surf, and if you're familiar with the notion that folks' sexuality can change as they get older, you won't find that surprising. "(M)atrimony is not based on anyone’s sexual nature, choices or dreams," he tells us. "It is based on love." Good for him for finding it again.

Action: Social Security, and gerrymandering.

You've perhaps seen that hilarious comic by Barry Deutsch, which reminds us that the very first thing every "bipartisan" hack wants to cut about government spending is Social Security? Well, a few years ago, blogger Atrios voiced his belief that we should increase Social Security benefits, not cut them, because Social Security benefits should offer a higher level of security and, of course, because we're not hateful monsters, and that belief found its way into actual legislation introduced by former Senators Harkin and Begich. Hence the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security, not cut it. The EPI also reminds us that pension funds ain't what they used to be, which makes better Social Security benefits a more urgent matter. Don't be fooled by your Congressfolks' profession of "concern" for Social Security. To paraphrase several famous philosophers: the secret of success is sincerity; once you can fake that, you've got it made.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state legislature has again had serious trouble passing a budget, even though that's one of the things legislatures do, and the bad news is they'll keep trying to pass right-wing budgets that nobody wants as long as they get to gerrymander the state's districts in a partisan manner. You'll no doubt hear from legislators that being safe from electoral challenges actually makes them more responsive to their constituents' will. Don't laugh: no less a personage than former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich once said that all those massive corporate donations he received actually made him more independent. Of course, we know from being sentient life forms that such arguments are utter horsedoodle -- big donations make politicians into errand-boys for their donors' "needs," and being safe from facing candidates who might beat them means they'll never be accountable for their venality. So Common Cause helps you tell your PA state legislators to support independent redistricting in Pennsylvania.

Around the table: the "real Donald Trump," and other absurdities.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted It Except a Sentient Life Form" file: Donald Trump's handlers are now telling the Republican establishment that the billionaire has been "projecting an image" which they should not confuse with The Real Donald Trump, who is exactly like them. And then Mr. Trump tells a Connecticut that no way no how is he going to "tone it down," which I presume is also part of the scam. Seriously, though, at the point they try to persuade people that they should ignore bad behavior in public precisely because it's calculated to be drama, they argue for a politics in which we shouldn't make any decisions using evidence, but rather look for some "ironic" "calculation" lurking behind the evidence. And that's not happening, not in my America.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe issues executive order re-enfranchising some 200,000 convicted felons. His order only applies to those who have completed their sentences, and certainly the timing is a bit suspicious, but then again the drive to disenfranchise felons in the first place was also largely a matter of partisanship. And I can't abide the critics who say his order is too broad, because these felons should never have lost the right to vote at all. If society assigns you a debt to repay, society doesn't get to punish you again just because one party wants to win, or some folks want to ventilate their rage a little more.

Surprise, surprise, Philadelphia's Mayor wants to fund universal preschool with a soda tax -- and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have the reactions you'd expect. Though my right-wing readers will likely find this surprising again, I don't like the soda tax either -- as Mr. Sanders says, it hits the poor harder than it hits the wealthy, which is exactly the opposite of how taxes ought to be. And not only are there better ways to fund universal preschool, there's a better way to fight childhood obesity -- like ending the massive welfare handouts for big ag corporations that allow cheap high-fructose corn syrup to exist, and allow soda to remain at literally the same price since 1981. I know Mrs. Clinton would never advocate for such a thing, and I'm afraid Mr. Sanders wouldn't, either, which is why we went with the corporate tax angle.

Adam Johnson, who's proving quite a find for FAIR, tells us to "Forget 'Bernie Bros' -- The Worst Trolls Work in Corporate Media." I don't know about "worst" trolls -- there are some pretty bad trolls out there! -- but the "liberal" media columnist justifying a ridiculous headline by saying "provocative headlines provoke" is, as Mr. Johnson says, the "the living, breathing definition of trolling," because it seeks to manipulate rather than inform. I tend to avert my eyes from headlines saying someone "called out" so-and-so, or headlines ending in "and it was glorious," for pretty much the same reason -- I'd rather have authentic emotional reactions to what I read.

Finally, Erin Sagen, writing at Yes!, discusses some of the challenges farmers face as they try to save seeds in a sustainable manner. This is a big deal not just because of big corporate "suicide seeds," or seeds designed not to yield more or better crops but simply to withstand proprietary pesticides, or big ag lawsuits against farmers whose seeds have been contaminated by GMO seeds and are thus "guilty" of "intellectual property theft" -- it's also a big deal because big corporate farming, in its quest to redistribute farmer wealth upward to its executives, frowns on things like crop rotation and crop diversity as "costs." I long for the day when "cost-benefit analyses" accurately represent the real cost of what corporations do to our economy, our civilization, and our lives.

Around the table: leaner government, religious liberty, police extortion, stupid arguments, and "free" college.

"Want a Leaner Federal Government?" asks John DiIulio and Paul Verkuil ask. "Hire More Federal Workers." Their argument is actually a little obscure, but certainly if we stopped outsourcing and privatizing federal work, we would save the taxpayer money, which is the same as reducing spending, and hiring more federal workers would certainly reduce the amount of money we spend on the emergencies we have because we don't have enough workers to do the work. You could probably tell that to your boss, too.

Henry Rollins answers the question of whether to boycott North Carolina in an article entitled "North Carolina, I Love You, But Your Governor is an Asshole." Remembering the good folks he met as a youth and as part of "a broke band on the road," he finds himself wishing Bruce Springsteen hadn't canceled his Greensboro show: "I wish he had spoken to the thousands of people who were there about what had just happened to the greatness of their state, then told them where he was donating all that money. The cancellation, in a way, allows McCrory to end the conversation, which I think should be just beginning." I'm sort of halfway myself -- every time I think I don't want to punish good North Carolingians either, I remember that they elected that Governor.

ProPublica and the New York Daily News catch New York City police running stings in immigrant-owned stores and then using "public nuisance" charges to get what they want from them, including huge fines and the freedom to conduct warrantless searches whenever. The NYPD gets to close stores until the "public nuisance" has been "dealt with" in court, which is rather like punishment before the crime, and naturally the NYPD conducts these shenanigans almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods. In a sane and healthy society, heads would roll over this. In this sick, immoral, and decadent society, it took ProPublica and the Daily News almost three whole years to even put this report together.

Ho hum, South Carolina sheriff compares the NAACP to the KKK, and adds that "the most racist people in America right now sometimes are minorities." And then lists the multitudinous offenses committed by the NAACP that compare to lynching, intimidation, and murder! I kid, of course -- Sheriff Wright seems to think the NAACP is racist merely for concentrating on remediating the injuries caused by racism, which is a little like calling women who fight rape "sexist." Plus, he has a black friend too and just wishes we could all get along. But I don't want to get along with stupid people -- I want stupid people to better themselves, preferably out of sight and earshot.

Finally, in case you were taken in by all this sneering right-wingers do about "free college," Robert M. Nelson reminds us that state universities in New York were, in fact, tuition-free (and paid for by taxes) until the early 1960s. And the road to sky-high tuition rates and crippling student loan debt -- both of which have made banksters very, very rich -- began with a Democratic Congress and Republican President starting a student loan program that ultimately got managed by the banks but backed by the taxpayer, meaning banksters take none of the risk but reap all the rewards. Yes, a financial transaction tax (or Robin Hood tax) (or Wall Street sales tax!) would certainly do better at funding public colleges -- and Donald Trump's kids could still go to private colleges on their dad's dime, to address the noxious argument advanced by Mrs. Clinton.

Around the table: R.I.P., Prince Rogers Nelson.

Federal Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit overturns a Virginia school board's policy forcing transgendered students to use the bathroom of their birth gender. The Court cited (among other things) the board's ignorance of federal rules emanating from the Department of Education, which could mean trouble for North Carolina's public schools -- if they want to continue receiving federal funding, that is. Oh well, they can always secede.

Nick Hanauer and Robert Reich explain that, contra "the right’s end-of-the-world, Chicken-Little economics," the Labor Department's expansion of overtime will help working families, not hurt them, and it won't hurt businesses, either. Good to see someone treating the right's objections with the respect they deserve, i.e., none. I mean, how can right-wingers simultaneously argue about the natural supremacy of entrepreneurs and these same entrepreneurs' inability to wriggle free of the "burden" of paying more of their employees time-and-a-half when they work overtime? (And saying the rules will hurt working families is what, class? Besides the opposite of the truth, I mean? A hostage situation, that's what.)

FISA court finds that the NSA is -- get your surprised face ready! -- holding onto the data it vacuums up from its indiscriminate surveillance of Americans for longer than it's supposed to. And our government failed to inform them of this fact! "The NSA apparently can't even tell the truth to a court in which it has the luxury of making its submissions ex parte and whose decisions aren't released until months after the fact in heavily-redacted form," writer Tim Cushing tells us, with an almost British understatement. Which instructs us that the main difference between the Bush and Obama Administrations on government spying -- aside from the Obama Administration doing a lot more of it, of course! -- is that the Obama Administration sounds smarter when doing it.

In the wake of the FCC's efforts to open up the cable set-top box market, Comcast announces a deal with Samsung in which some Samsung TV owners can use an app instead of a box. Naturally, Comcast is doing a Jeff George Victory Lap about the whole thing, but, ah, what if you don't own a Samsung TV? Or a Samsung TV that wasn't manufactured this year? Or if you move to an area of the country where Comcast hasn't dug in its tentacles? Also, the cloud-DVR function Comcast offers in conjunction with the app would also cost money. Yup, no need for government "interference" here.

Finally, in the wake of Prince's passing, Dylan Matthews lists 14 songs that testify to his legendary status, as a musician and as a creature (and creator!) of his times. I'm bummed he doesn't include 1995's "P Control," which exemplifies Prince's devotion to "women's sexuality, experience, and power" even more than the titles listed, but if you're of a certain age, you'll connect with most of it. I'm reminded, also, of my surprise when Casey Kasem called "1999" a protest song, though of course "1999" is more than a protest song, just as "When You Were Mine" is more than a song about a threesome.

Action: voting rights, cable set-top boxes, and school meal reauthorization.

CREDO helps you tell the Election Assistance Commission's Inspector General to investigate the EAC Director's recent decision to let Kansas, Alabama, and Georgia require proof of citizenship to vote. What's that, you say? Shouldn't you have to prove you're a citizen to vote? Here's a better question: do you routinely carry information proving your citizenship around with you? No, that's not your driver's license: it's your birth certificate, your passport, your certificate of citizenship, or your naturalization certificate, and you carry none of these in your wallet. And no, these states do not intend to target "undocumented immigrants" -- they mean to target black and Latino voters. These states have already pulled similar shenanigans, after all -- closing down DMVs in black neighborhoods (Alabama), putting out Spanish-language voting guides with inaccurate info (Kansas), or just plain old sitting on voter registrations from black folks (Georgia). So I'm going to go out on a limb and predict they won't ask any white voters for their paperwork.

Meanwhile, you may not have given any thought to this matter, but your set-top cable box may be costing you as much as $230 annually. But your cable provider won't permit you to use any other device with their service -- instead, they require you to get the box they want you to get and then overcharge you for it every month. The FCC has proposed rules that would force big cable corporations to allow you to use the box you want, even if it's not their box, and if you've watched Hulu or Netflix over your Wii or XBox, you already know this isn't some pipe dream. Of course, the cable corporations are treating it like that, and they're counting on you not to notice all the fees they stick in that bill you pay every month. But President Obama has, surprisingly, spoken out in favor of the FCC proposals, and the FCC is accepting public comments on the matter now, so Demand Progress helps you tell the FCC to protect consumers from excessive set-top box fees and require cable corporations to give us more choice in the matter.

Finally, Congress has been negligent in reauthorizing school breakfast and lunch programs. Obviously Congress hasn't been so negligent as to let kids starve while they're at school, at least not yet, but without an actual sense of what our government will spend on school meals for the next few years, schools won't know what equipment they'll be able to afford or what staff they'll be able to hire, among other things that actually require long-range planning. Of course, Congress likes that sort of chaos, more so now, even, than in Tha Bush Mobb years. But, once again: it doesn't matter what they want, it matters what we want, and that's a stable school lunch program with nutritious meals for kids. Really, you'd have to be a Scrooge McSmallgovernment to disagree. Hence the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell Congress to reauthorize the school meal program already. Note that Pew's email action tool helps you demand they keep the USDA's stricter nutrition standards, too, since Congress has been so hot to gut those.

Around the table: underwater homeowner relief, at last! And other stories.

Federal Housing Finance Agency finally grants mortgage reductions to more than 30,000 homeowners who owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth. Sen. Warren promptly (and rightly!) reminds us that "(t)he big banks got their money immediately" while homeowners had to wait damn near eight years. And if underwater homeowners had received the help they needed back in 2008 instead of 2016? They would have detoxified all those toxic securities that crashed the economy. But then, certain politically well-connected banksters wouldn't have been paid. No, really, that's what stopped our government from doing the right thing -- certainly banksters didn't get a mandate from the voters in 2008!

Ho hum, Adam Johnson at FAIR finds the "liberal" media gives more space to Verizon than its striking workers when covering the strike. (The score was 31-13 quotations from four news sources -- two traditional, two "new" -- over the first week of coverage; that score isn't even symmetrical, let alone fair.) I do appreciate Mr. Johnson's generosity in allowing that Verizon's "highly-sophisticated public relations machine" would overwhelm even the best journalists, but maybe basing the proverbial first draft of history so much on quotations isn't the best way to go.

Sir Elton John secures an injunction from a British court that could actually put journalists in jail for mentioning his or his husband's names in a story -- which, given the sexual imbroglios both men have been accused of lately, journalists will be tempted to do. We have to remind ourselves that Britain really doesn't have a First Amendment, which would prevent this kind of high-handedness in America -- and make those well-to-do folks who are guilty of extramarital transgressions, or far worse ones, work considerably harder to hide them.

A Consumerist investigation finds that, surprising as it may seem, it is Dunkin' Donuts' national policy to prompt consumers to enter the three-digit CVV code "for transactions that meet certain criteria" when using their credit cards -- but it is not their policy for clerks to demand that you say these numbers out loud so everyone can hear them, as clerks at upwards of two New York locations seemed to think. Call me old-fashioned, but I still think you shouldn't be ashamed of paying for things like that with cash -- save your credit cards for larger or remote purchases. Just because it's easy doesn't mean you should do it.

Finally, the Tennessee state legislature withdrew its notorious "bathroom bill" earlier this week -- congratulate yourselves if you worked against that bill, and then get ready for them to bring it up all over again later on this year -- and now some state legislators are riding the waaaambulance about it, with the state Senate Speaker Pro Tempore warning that business interests that opposed the bill should maybe think twice next time about asking the legislature for corporate incentives. Which is worse: that legislators would unfairly and unlawfully withhold corporate welfare goodies from organizations that advocate against these bills, or that legislators hand out corporate welfare goodies in the first place? I'm honestly not sure.

Action: refugees, voter registration, and methane pollution.

Just when you thought the refugee-bashing had stopped, along comes South Carolina bill S. 997, which passed the state Senate a few weeks back and now awaits action by the state House. S. 997 would create that dreaded "refugee registry" contemplated by Donald Trump not long ago, and would mandate state law enforcement officials to "confirm" that refugees placed in South Carolina "do not pose a public safety risk" and then report back to the state legislature about that matter. As if vetting by the FBI, DHS, and the State Department weren't enough! I doubt S. 997 proves South Carolina legislators really care about preventing risks to safety and security -- refugees already get upwards of 18 months of vetting by our federal government, and they have perpetrated exactly zero terrorist attacks in American history. The fact that refugees are generally running from terrorism in their home country might have something to do with that. The ACLU helps you tell South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to veto S. 997, and thus prevent the state from persecuting refugees.

Meanwhile, three states now automatically register people to vote at the moment they get drivers' licenses. Now you may well ask: didn't the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 require voter registration at the same time you got a driver's license? Actually, no -- that law required states to allow you to opt in to voter registration at the DMV, whereas the laws lately passed in Oregon, California, and West Virginia require you to opt out if you don't want to register to vote while you're at the DMV. Voter registration was, once upon a time, a way to get more people to vote (and, not insignificantly, a way to avoid rioting when voters got turned away on Election Day), but now it's become more of a hindrance to voting than a help. And no it doesn't "cause voter fraud," particularly when you actually need more paperwork to get a driver's license. (The three aforementioned state laws keep traditional voter registration available.) Hence Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to support automatic voter registration.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to leave a public comment on the Bureau of Land Management's proposed rules limiting methane emissions from gas drilling projects on public lands, then the Environmental Defense Fund still helps you do that. This is your last chance to comment on this matter, though, because the deadline for comments is tomorrow. The BLM rules address venting, flaring, and leaks, and really, who would justify deliberately allowing methane gas into the air, or burning off gas to put more toxins into the air, or, you know, having leaky equipment? No reasonable person would, that's who. Of course, the unreasonable go to some lengths to appear reasonable, by complaining about Big Gummint interference (as if your government doesn't belong to you!) and hurting small businesses (which would suffer more from pollution than from increased utility bills) and suchlike. But if we don't have clean water to drink or clean air to breathe, we'll be in no position to celebrate the pristine purity of anyone's ideology.

Around the table: a hazy shade of liberal.

Shikha Dalmia, writing at The Week, describes how FBI anti-terror programs actually make us less safe. Long story short: they're coercing a big chunk of their informant network to inform on their neighbors, and most of the "terror plots" they've foiled, they've also started, supposedly in an effort to make the real terrorists expose themselves (and not at all to justify their existence and their budgets, no, sir). Right-wingers will no doubt ask what alternatives we have to fight terrorism. And, as always, I'll respond that they mostly begin and end with "restrain the most powerful members of society from running roughshod over the rest of us," which (among other things!) curtails their ability to foment hysteria and/or screw things up badly enough that fomenting hysteria is their only option.

George Monbiot identifies "The Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems": neoliberalism. You might look at that word and think it means "people like the DLC," but not quite: in economics, the word "liberal" means "liberalizing" policies so that individuals, not collective organizations, make the most decisions -- which means unions and governments have less power to ensure general prosperity. Mr. Monbiot reminds us that "(f)reedom from trade unions...means the freedom to suppress wages" and "freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers," but I wish he'd proposed an actual solution at the end, instead of suggesting that the left merely hides in the past.

A spokeshack for Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina lashes out at the famous musicians that have pulled out of North Carolina shows since HB 2 passed. What command of tired right-wing tropes Mr. McCrory's team has -- "Hollywood elitists," check, "selective outrage," check. (Boston, whom I didn't know was still touring, will no doubt be amused to be counted among the "elitists.") And don't look at the polls showing Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper ahead -- if Roy Cooper pretends to be Pat McCrory Lite in this election, then we'll be settling in for another four years of Mr. McCrory. Book it.

ProPublica takes a very well-linked look at Ohio Gov. John Kasich's career. If you've been tempted to think of him as a "moderate" or "compassionate," you'll hopefully have sworn off that temptation by article's end. I did not know that Mr. Kasich created a privatized job-development agency called JobsOhio that, like Scott Walker's Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, has been plagued with accusations of corruption and waste. I'd like to see that become a bigger issue if he gets the nomination, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for the "liberal" media to find it interesting.

Finally, MacLean's offers up a 2012 interview with Rush drummer Neal Peart. Mr. Peart's tales of young Rushdom are humorous and poignant, and his famous libertarianism has evolved over the years, at least to the point where he can diagnose Republican hypocrisy as easily as his fans can. Naturally I disagree that political liberalism is all about control; I argue that liberalism is actually about freedom, because only when we restrain the most powerful members of society from running roughshod over the rest of us can we all truly be free.

Action: pro-discrimination bills, chemical plant safety, and equal pay.

By now you've noticed the wage of anti-gay and anti-transgendered legislation cropping up in state legislatures all over the country, and fighting them has been rather like playing a game of whack-a-mole with a pencil; hence the ACLU helps you tell all the nation's Governors to fight these pro-discrimination bills wherever they crop up. And they could crop up anywhere a state is having, say, budgeting troubles, which is, sadly, most states. The two so-called "religious liberty" bills that have successfully passed, in North Carolina and Mississippi, have provoked backlash from all over the country, just as Indiana's "religious liberty" bill did last year -- Paypal scrapped plans to build a headquarters in North Carolina, Charles Barkley has been vocal in urging the NBA to move its next All-Star Game out of Charlotte, and both Bruce Springsteen and Bryan Adams have canceled concerts in North Carolina and Mississippi, respectively. Certainly nothing prevents us from reminding other Governors that the backlash could hurt them, too.

Meanwhile, we have lately observed the third anniversary of the huge fertilizer plant explosion that killed 15 and injured dozens of others in West, Texas -- and the EPA is now welcoming public comments on its Risk Management Plan for chemical plants, which aims to prevent such explosions from happening and guide first responders in the event they do happen. The EPA has made some necessary changes, but needs to make more -- the plan needs to cover more chemical plants and needs to ensure chemical plants coordinate with local communities more, among other things. UCS is right to note that the EPA's plan directly affects communities of color, which sit next to chemical plants more frequently, for some reason. And the objections from right-wingers and corporatists? Let me guess: REGULASHUNZ BIG GUMMINT OVERREACHEZ SMALL BIZNIZZIZ COMMUNIZM SOCIALIZM NAZIZM!!!!!! The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell the EPA to create the most vigorous possible Risk Management plan for chemical plants.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the United States Soccer Federation (or USSF) to start paying the U.S. women's national soccer team the same as it pays the U.S. men's national soccer team, then CREDO still helps you do that. The women's team has won three World Cup titles (1991, 1999, 2015) and four Olympic gold medals (1996, 2004, 2008, 2012), while the men's team got as far as the quarter-final round in World Cup play only once in the last quarter-century (2002); it's enough to make you ask, what's a woman got to do? Are you about to instruct me that the U.S. women's team does so well in the world only because America's Title IX funding far outstrips any support any other country gives to its women's sports -- or because more sports compete for male athletes in America than in other countries, or for female athletes in this country? You'd still have to explain why the women's soccer team should be paid 40% as much as the men's soccer team -- or, indeed, why women should ever be paid less for doing the same job.

Around the table: follies about taxes, crime, and D&D.

In honor of Tax Day, Jared Bernstein offers up five ways to fix our tax system. We should do all five -- especially "stop defunding the IRS," since only petulant whiners defund the IRS -- but I'm not seeing "tax the rich at 91% just like in the old days" on his list. Since Mr. Bernstein used to advise Vice President Biden, I guess I shouldn't have expected that. Still, yay, taxes pay for things! And we can make them pay for better things!

Retro Report covers the Dungeons & Dragons controversy from the late '70s and early '80s. Yes, Virginia, right-wingers saw Satan everywhere then, too, and they manipulated the "liberal" media then, too! And yes, less principled manipulators (like William Dear) also reared their ugly heads back then. Make sure you watch all the way to the end, so you can hear Pulitzer-winning novelist Junot Díaz tell you why D&D did right by him as a youth. Total time of video: 12 minutes, 59 seconds.

Boots Riley instructs us that "rising black-on-black crime" is a myth, and worse, it's a myth bad people use to try to keep blacks from agitating for, you know, not being beaten up and killed by police. No, really: black-on-black crime is actually down over the last 50 years, and crime rates in black neighborhoods are similar to crime rates in those white neighborhoods with similar incomes. (I'll give Spike Lee the benefit of the doubt about the item in paragraph 4, though; his characters say a lot of things you're not necessarily supposed to agree with.)

Dean Baker, writing at TruthOut, notes that deficit "hawks" squeal a lot about budget deficits' "effects" on "the children," without noting that their pet budget cuts do more to hurt children. Deficit-hysteria budget cuts, after all, gave us lead in Flint's drinking water, which has given all of Flint's children permanent brain damage. Mr. Baker also cites other drags on our children's future that don't seem to interest deficit "hawks," like patent and copyright monopolies that keep prices artificially high. But he only alludes to the biggest drag on our children's future, one explained much more thoroughly by Michael Hudson -- the massive amounts of debt taken on by corporations and homeowners, both of which essentially redistribute income from working families to banksters and large shareholders.

Finally, Republican state legislators in Kansas profess outrage that Gov. Brownback's massive tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-corporations haven't been the "shot of adrenaline" the state needs. They're lying, of course -- they knew this would happen, they knew it wouldn't cost them their jobs in a state where Democrats are even weaker than they are everywhere else, and they're only complaining now because their constituents, who rely on the services the state can't provide anymore, are complaining. Ultimately, they will do nothing, and Democrats won't capitalize on their doing nothing. Still, blaming Kansas's problems on "global issues," as Mr. Brownback does, sure doesn't sound like leadership, does it?

Action: fracking regulations, "free" trade, and Verizon strikers.

The Pennsylvania state Department of Environmental Protection has worked, for five years, on stronger oil and gas drilling regulations that would force corporations to cut their air and water pollution. But five years is, apparently, not long enough for oil and gas corporations, who have apparently prompted state politicians to attack the DEP's work. As if the whole point of democracy were to give big corporations all the say about everything! The DEP's new standards would, among other things, ban those huge open-air pits that frackers use to store wastewater -- that's right, the same pits that leech into your drinking water and occasionally catch fire and pump toxins into the air. Yeah, what a hardship it would be for these corporations to have to stop doing that. Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to support the DEP's efforts to keep gas and oil waste from negatively impacting our health. We deserve more from our democracy, after all, than the back of some corporation's hand.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership", then the Sierra Club helps you do that. The Sierra Club reminds us that the "investor-state tribunals" found in the TPP and other "free" trade pacts will directly result in your tax money going into the pockets of big corporate CEOs -- like the CEOs of TransCanada. TransCanada, as you recall, wanted to build the Keystone XL pipeline in America, but after the Obama Administration rejected it, TransCanada decided to sue, in a NAFTA-created tribunal, for $15 billion. If they win, that means $100 leaves your pocket (given about 150 million American taxpayers) and magically reappears in their pockets! Income redistribution! Remember, also, that Congress's stated wariness about passing the TPP before Election Day is a bald lie -- they will try to ram it down our throats the very next day. And we need to be ready for that. The best way to get ready for that now is to tell them no repeatedly until they get it.

Finally, Verizon workers are still on strike for better working conditions, so National People's Action helps you tell Verizon's CEO, Lowell McAdam, to agree to a fair contract that secures well-paying jobs for its workers. Certainly some will ask: why are they on strike? it's not like they're fast food workers or anything! Well, for one thing, they've been working a contract since last August, so they've actually demonstrated tremendous restraint in waiting until last week to strike. And Verizon has made roughly $13 billion in profits annually since 2013 -- and, contra what Mr. McAdam said last week, pays around 12% of that in taxes to America annually -- but still flogs the zombie line that it must "cut costs" (i.e., worker pay, benefits, and job security) in order to "keep up with a changing marketplace." Apparently the marketplace changes, like, every minute of every day, which is kinda hard to believe in a country with only four major phone carriers. And here you thought our entrepreneurs were our boldest and brightest.

Around the table: an ancient warning about sugar, and other tales.

Michael Hudson weighs in on the significance of the now-famous Panama Papers. Better strap in, though, because he covers a lot of ground -- how Panama and Liberia are less "countries" than tax havens for foreign criminals and American oil/gas corporations, how foreign criminal income props up American military spending and doesn't get taxed, how money laundering takes cash to plenty of locations before it winds up in a tax haven like Delaware or Wyoming. Mr. Hudson also says we won't fix this, since politicians won't be able to tax corporations hard again and get campaign contributions from them. Of course I disagree that it's hopeless -- it's sorta my job -- but I appreciate why he thinks so.

Geoff Gilbert, writing at TruthOut, speculates as to "How Sanders Could Lay the Foundation for a Third US Political Party." He finds hope in Mr. Sanders's fundraising, which is both enormously impressive and relatively free of big corporate influence. But he'd actually have to retain that fundraising apparatus and/or hand it over to an actual third-party operation, neither of which is a given. And Mr. Gilbert may be optimistic (certainly in the short term!) in thinking a 24-7 Youtube channel can counteract the force of traditional media, especially if Mr. Sanders can't sign up the "dream team" Mr. Gilbert describes. I mean, I like the theory, obviously, but I also know that lots of eyeballs remain glued to TV.

Ian Leslie, writing at The Guardian, tells the story of British scientist John Yudkin, roundly dismissed for warning, way back in 1972, that sugar, not fat, was the biggest danger to our health. More people accept the sugar-is-poison notion today, but of course in the old days Mr. Yudkin became a pariah, despite the obvious strength of his signal insight -- that heart disease, which had increased dramatically in the first half of the 20th century, correlated more precisely with sugar intake than saturated fat intake, especially since Westerners had been eating saturated fat forever (it even shows up in breast milk!) but had only taken up sugar in the previous few centuries. Sadly, the story also includes a counter-hypothesis (the Seven Countries study) that turned out to be as self-serving in some ways as Samuel Eliot Morison's infamous craniometry studies, and ideological descendants of Seven Countries who employ personal attacks against their contemporary opponents.

University of Sheffield students testify that they're having trouble finishing their reading because of time constraints. Speaking as someone who didn't finish all the reading in college either, I think the mote in these kids' eyes is their social lives -- your first time away from home, and all the possibilities and challenges that entails, leaves less time for Arnold and Achebe. I suppose the slow evolution of media from books to screens has a not inconsiderable influence as well, but I always maintain that screens can supplement books. (I actually did dip into the comments, against my better judgment, and found some unusually frank and useful tips on not-reading-the-whole-text from a commenter named Contabs.)

Finally, tens of thousands of California voters seem to have mistakenly declared their affiliation with the far-right American Independent Party. It could be a fault with the state's voter registration form (which has a box for "no party preference" rather than "independent"), or it could be the fault of inattentive voters. At least the American Independent Party, an offshoot of the many George Wallace campaigns for President, has officially abandoned racial segregation as a goal.

Action: GMO crop regulation, FBI whistleblower protection, and food menu labeling.

This U.S. Department of Agriculture may be as slavish a servant of big agricultural corporations as we have ever seen, but it still has lawfully-mandated duties, and luckily these include taking public comments on their proposed changes to the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service's new genetically-modified crop approval process. And their proposal -- surprise, surprise! -- stinks pretty awful, in that it seems to have been formulated by folks who don't understand that corporations don't create GMO crops to increase yields or promote healthier food, but to withstand ever-higher doses of their own proprietary pesticides. The APHIS proposal doesn't consider a lot of the ill effects of GMO crops, including increased weed resistance to ever-expanding use of pesticides, and GMO seed propensity to drift into fields that don't grow GMO crops. Food and Water Watch helps you tell the USDA to put health-related issues front and center when considering whether to approve GMO crops.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced S. 2390, the FBI Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, and the full Senate will soon consider it. S. 2390 would prevent the FBI from retaliating against whistleblowers, and would give whistleblowers the right to have their case reviewed by an Inspector General, the Attorney General, or a federal court. If you're aware of the Obama Administration's "war on whistleblowers" -- a war that has not only claimed good Americans blowing the whistle on medical device problems, CIA torture, and warrantless wiretapping, but also many good FBI officers -- then you probably see that FBI whistleblowers need more protection. And the Senate, at least, also seems to see this need -- S. 2390 has 11 sponsors, including lead sponsor Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and 10 other Senators evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Senator to help government workers who want to expose corruption and wrongdoing by supporting S. 2390.

Finally, the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) have been working on restaurant menu labeling guidelines since 2010 -- which would, among other things, include information about calories, fat, sodium, and sugar -- but they still haven't finished the job, so Moms Rising helps you tell the FDA and HHS to enact the most vigorous restaurant menu food labeling guidelines possible. This isn't some outrageous Big Gummint mandate, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of big food corporations (including Starbucks and Panera) have voluntarily started such labeling, and that some states and municipalities have enacted their own mandates. I suppose the more resourceful troublemakers among us will complain that people aren't literate enough about these things generally so-what's-the-point, but naturally the more scientific studies tell us that folks actually do make better choices with better information. Giving folks stuff to read promotes literacy, who'da thunk it? And, of course, we don't abide folks trying to convince us to let the perfect murder the good.

Around the table: beating down zombie lies about taxes (among other things).

General Electric and Verizon executives assert in recent op-eds that they do-too pay their fair share of taxes in America, but Citizens for Tax Justice tells us why they're wrong. Verizon's CEO claims his corporation payed a 35% tax rate in 2015, but we know Verizon has actually paid about 12% to our government over the last 15 years. General Electric's CEO swears that GE pays "billions" of dollars in taxes, but that's essentially a scare number -- "billions" out of many, many more billions in profits simply isn't as impressive as he'd like you to think.

Lynn Stuart Parramore, writing at TruthOut, says "The Biggest Threat to the 99% Isn't the 1%, It's the 0.1%," and I'm glad someone else is saying it. The top 1% tax bracket starts at around $350,000, after all, and folks making $350,000 annually are doing pretty well, but they're certainly not "in the club," as it were. "The one percent" is a spiffy idea, made to catch the elbow of folks having a lot on their minds. But a lot of Ms. Parramore's descriptions of the 0.1% life can catch those elbows just as easily.

Courtney Baleister, writing at Wired, tells us the supermarket is a "terrible way to get food," and that "app-fueled services" can help kill it. The theoretical ease with which we can all communicate now should help us cut out a lot of the middlemen that separate us from farmers -- and that would help us demolish the big ag food model -- but even the best of the services described (I vote for Quinciple, though you may prefer Farmigo) depend on buying and storing in bulk, which is the main reason the supermarket model needs to be supplanted. I'll stick with farmers' markets and my CSA share.

From the "Because It's Good to Be Reminded" file: Ted Cruz says he can get 5% GDP growth through tax cuts alone. His supporters (like Arthur Laffer, why is anyone still having him on TV?) like to tell you that President Reagan got 7% GDP growth in 1984, without reminding you that he signed massive tax increases into law in 1982 and 1984, and the economy has hardly seen 4% growth in GDP since then -- indeed, GDP growth has averaged less than 2% since 2000. And we routinely had 4% GDP growth in the 1960s, when (perhaps not coincidentally) top tax rates were much, much higher than they are now. Hate to pile on, but how did those Bush Mobb tax cuts work out?

Finally, Adam Johnson, writing for FAIR, tabulates the "liberal" media's "Ten Laziest Takes of Election Season 2016." Your mileage may vary on the ordering (Jesus Mary and Joseph how I hate the Tone Police!), but definitely the "liberal" media's habit of lumping the obviously-dissimilar-even-if-they-share-some-and-I-do-mean-some-supporters Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump together should be near the top. It's like they think symmetry equals fairness or something.

Around the table: horrible truths about taxes, college endowments, and Democrat weakness.

Just in time for Tax Day (April 18 this year), Citizens for Tax Justice reports that, once you add in all the taxes everyone pays, most folks' tax bills approximate their share of income. Sadly, this won't satisfy your Tea Party uncle, who will insist that the higher tax rates on federal income taxes are the only ones that matter (as if you pay sales taxes, payroll taxes, and gas taxes with Monopoly money or something!) -- but it also shouldn't satisfy you, if you know 19% is a much, much bigger bite out of $15,000 than 33% is out of a million bucks, when you look at what's left and what it'll pay for.

Some politicians have mooted the possibility of taxing universities rather harder than we do now. This is in a world where Ivy League endowments run in the tens of billions and may grow by a billion dollars annually, where Yale actually spends more on fund managers than it spends on students, where folks call Ivy League colleges "hedge funds with universities attached." These schools will tell you they're already spending a lot of students via free tuition for students whose families make less than a certain amount -- but that amount tends to be quite low (two parents making $75,000 annually ain't doing as well as they used to!) and these colleges are not only holding onto billions of dollars, but they tend to own a lot of property that doesn't get taxed.

6th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that law enforcement can collect cellphone metadata without a warrant. How on Earth? Because the metadata in question -- in this particular criminal case, location data -- "say nothing about the content of any calls." Even those of you who did not train with structuralist literary theorists will find that statement a bit narrow. But if the FBI got all those cellphone numbers from a suspect who had already confessed and was cooperating with them, I don't understand how they could have failed to convince a judge to issue a warrant.

From the "I'm glad someone (else) is saying it" file: Lisa Graves, writing at The Hill, cites that famous LuntzGlobal survey finding widespread support among business leaders for minimum wage hikes, paid sick leaves, and the like, and wonders how state Chambers of Commerce can claim to represent their members. You know, since state Chambers of Commerce (and, of course, the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce) tend to fight all of those things tooth and nail. Of course, the Chambers don't represent business owners -- they represent mammon. And we all know where mammon-worship gets you.

Finally, Seth Abramson says "The Democrats Are Flawlessly Executing a 10-Point Plan to Lose the 2016 Presidential Election." Mr. Abramson, too, is more enamored of John Kasich's chops than most folks, and I've long said Hillary Clinton's support is a mile wide and a foot deep, and taking a chance on Bernie Sanders has political benefits the party doesn't seem wired to understand, and, of course, one should generally avoid underestimating the ability of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But I also think Donald Trump is more resilient than Mr. Abramson thinks, I don't think Hillary Clinton's ambiguous relationship with the truth is even comparable to Mr. Trump's, and I don't think another round of Republicans churning out the same Clinton-hate they've been churning out for literally a quarter century will play particularly well with voters.

Action: "free" trade, the Grand Canyon, and whistleblowers.

What happened when Colombia made a big chunk of the Amazon rainforest into a national park? An American mining corporation slapped a $16.5 billion lawsuit against the Colombian government, that's what. They wanted to mine for gold there, and because our nation has a "free" trade agreement with Colombia, the Tobie Mining and Energy corporation is suing for "lost investments" totalling over one-fifth of Colombia's entire national budget! One more time: governments have a right to take, and protect, land on behalf of the people they represent and for the purposes the people demand -- and that right (which, again, is really the right of the people of Colombia) supersedes the "right" of any corporation to make money. This is the very thing we've been talking about in the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" that our government plans to ram through after the election -- the mockery its "investor-state tribunals" would make of law and order, via their subjugation of people to mammon. So Sum of Us helps you tell Tobie to drop its lawsuit against Colombia.

Meanwhile, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Obama to protect the Grand Canyon from uranium mining corporations (and other actors who would pollute that national treasure) by creating a Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument. Don't believe the hype that such a declaration would make Obama into Hitler -- if creating a national monument against the wishes of greedy corporations were all that made a President into Hitler, well, wouldn't we have elected, and therefore survived, a lot of Hitlers already? And certainly don't believe the hype promulgated by certain members of Arizona's Congressional delegation that the states should make these decisions, when what they really want is for their cronies to make those decisions. Indeed, Sen. McCain is up for re-election in 2016, and has even drawn a formidable Democratic opponent, who could rather easily attack Sen. McCain for being against the Grand Canyon. (Well, unless she's no better than he is, which is always a possibility.)

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4619/S. 2591, the Whistleblower Augmented Reward and Nonretaliation Act (or WARN Act), which would strengthen protections for whistleblowers who expose bankster criminality, then the National Whistleblowers Center still helps you do that. We'll need all hands on deck just not only to get this bill considered -- you think a Republican-held Congress would do anything to help people if it might also deprive their bankster friends of unearned money? -- but also to get it signed by a Democratic President whose has made his utter contempt for whistleblowers all too obvious over the years. Hey, maybe we can convince Republicans to vote for it by telling them it's anti-Obama! Seriously, financial sector whistleblowers have fewer protections than whistleblowers in other fields, but they deserve protection no less than anyone else for the critical and dare I say patriotic duty they perform in exposing wrongdoing.

Around the table: what being on the White House "kill list" is like, and other horrors.

Malik Jalal, writing in the Independent, tells you how being on the White House's "kill list" has affected his life. Put yourself in his shoes, and imagine keeping away from your family so they don't get "accidentally" bombed to death by drones, and you'll find it a sobering assessment. If you're wondering if Mr. Jalal has maybe "done something" to be on the list, ask yourself who decides who's on a "kill list," or whether the very existence of a "kill list" doesn't actually rid the world of terrorists but merely creates more of them.

FDIC and the Fed find that five big banksters have failed to come up with "credible" plans to wind their businesses down in case of financial instability, and as such can be subject to stricter regulation and/or breaking up in to smaller banks. That's ostensibly so these banksters can't crash the economy with their bad gambles and then receive massive taxpayer bailouts, like, you know, in 2008. But the two agencies couldn't agree on Goldman Sachs and gave Citigroup a shot at fixing the flaws in their plan. Perhaps not coincidentally, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have been perhaps the most connected banksters in our government (and worst actors in our economy) for many years.

President Obama threatens veto of H.R. 2666, the bill supposedly concerning broadband rate regulation that actually seriously injures, if not kills, internet freedom. "(C)able and phone companies could claim that FCC rules against blocking and throttling -- concepts at the core of federal net neutrality protections -- amount to rate regulation," author Sam Gustin writes, putting it rather more succinctly than I did yesterday. The House plans to vote on H.R. 2666 today (you can call your House Reps using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page), so we'll see if it can get a veto-proof majority. Then, of course, it still has to go through the Senate.

The Guardian looks at some 70 million comments left on its articles over the last decade, and finds -- surprise, surprise! -- that of the 10 writers who receive the most abusive comments, eight are women and the other two are black men. The Guardian doesn't just block threats to life and safety, but also abusive speech toward the author, ad hominem attacks on both journalists and other commenters, "dismissive trolling" (which mocks the author or the reader for thinking the subject serious enough to merit coverage), and "whataboutery" (the kind of thing that earns the "are you conceding the point by changing the subject" response from me). That's pretty hardcore -- I tend to let people argue or behave badly and then ridicule them for it, but in any case, the First Amendment only protects you from your government, not from The Guardian's (or anyone else's) rules for commenting.

Finally, Three New York Times op-ed writers ask "Did Blacks Really Endorse the 1994 Crime Bill?" Short answer: not really. Somewhat longer answer: black leaders did, in fact, want less crime (duh), but also wanted more of the kind of investment in their communities that might have actually curtailed crime for the long term, and, well, they didn't get that. They got longer sentences instead. And "(w)hen blacks ask for better policing," the writers say, "legislators tend to hear more instead. It's true that a lot of black Congressfolk voted for it, just as a lot of Medicare-for-All advocates voted for the Affordable Care Act -- but that's hardly a signal of devotion.

Action: "encryption" bills, Verizon strikers, and "bathroom" bills.

CREDO helps you tell Congress to reject the disastrous Burr-Feinstein "encryption" bill. When folks who work on information technology for a living call the bill "ludicrous," "dangerous," and "technically illiterate," we should at least listen. For the bill, as you know, would force corporations to hand over data to our government "in an intelligible format" any time they're given a court order to do so -- which, as we discussed last time, rather flies in the face of the definition of the word "encrypt." And the trouble wouldn't end there: if corporations can't offer end-to-end encryption to their customers -- as the bill essentially requires, so that corporations can comply with all the other onerous demands our government would make -- then it won't just be government spies who benefit, but hackers and crooks all over the planet. And the bill wouldn't require foreign corporations to do any of these things, thus placing American corporations at a competitive disadvantage -- this, from politicians who whine that the corporate tax rate hamstrings such competition!

Meanwhile, upwards of 39,000 Verizon workers went on strike yesterday morning. A lot of good folks will still read that statement and cringe inwardly -- the most famous strikes of the last forty years, after all, are strikes by professional athletes most of us think are overpaid to begin with -- but these Verizon workers have been working without a contract since August, and their parent corporation made nearly $2 billion in profits every month so far in 2016, so we know they've got the money to take care of the people who actually do the work. Of course, being bosses, they've demanded givebacks in job security, pay, and benefits, so as to better redistribute income upward from the people who work to the people who sit in offices and "plan." I wish I could be more respectful to these bosses -- I've never said bosses are unnecessary, or should be paid the same as workers -- but you have to earn my respect. Hence Jobs With Justice helps you tell Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam to do right by his workers.

Finally, the Tennessee House Education Committee has passed HB 2414, Tennessee's notorious "bathroom" bill, meaning the full House could vote on it any freaking minute now, so the ACLU still helps you tell Tennessee lawmakers to reject the "bathroom" bill and stop using politics to injure transgendered folks. The Tennessee Equality Project has a new nickname for HB 2414 -- the "Gender Inspection" bill, since that's the image conjured up by a ban on transgendered folks using the bathroom of the gender they are now, rather than the one they were born with. Think of that -- "gender inspectors" outside bathrooms, in schools, in courthouses, in other public buildings. Real American, eh? And to those who ask what about my religious beliefs?, I say: what about your religious beliefs should ensure that you only get the world you want to get? Does not the world test us, after all, to see if our faith is strong? Once you decide the world is an abomination and that you can do whatever you like to remake it in your image, you've proven your faith is lacking.

Around the table: even more follies from the political class.

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory announces an executive order purporting to "fix" the problems -- problems other people perceive, of course -- with his state's notorious bathroom bill, HB 2. His announcement is about what you'd expect -- comprises a bunch of actions that don't actually do anything, and whines a lot about the "selective outrage" of the opposition, which includes a lot of his buddies in the business sector. Is this a civilized way to run a government?

Maya Schenwar, writing at TruthOut, says "(t)he legacy of many of history's 'prison reforms' is, simply, more prison," and cites a "prison reform" bill recently passed in the Alabama Senate as a case in point. The Alabama bill would ultimately wind up incarcerating more folks by demolishing some old, bad PR-tinged prisons and building new "state-of-the-art" ones, this despite crime rates falling all across the land (and incarceration rates, er, not). This is always a danger when progress becomes inevitable: that reactionaries will put a flower on their dung pile and call it "progress."

San Francisco public library hires a full-time social worker to make sure homeless folk get services. San Francisco has a lot of homeless folk, as you know, and a lot of them find sanctuary in libraries, so this is a creative work-around. It is only a work-around, though -- putting people up in small homes is a better work-around, and reversing the me-first-and-only economic policies of the last 35-plus years will do the most to actually fix the problem. Thing I did not know but should have known: approaching homeless folk inside a safe space is actually a bit more delicate than approaching them on the "neutral territory" of the street.

MorningConsult.com projects that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz would lose decisively to Hillary Clinton -- but that Mrs. Clinton would lose just as decisively to John Kasich. It could happen -- Mr. Kasich is easily the best of the three Republicans remaining, which might be true even if that weren't such a low bar to clear -- and I can see him winning Ohio, Wisconsin, Colorado, Maine, and New Hampshire. I'm less convinced he can win Michigan, even less convinced that he could win Minnesota or Pennsylvania, and not at all convinced he can win Oregon. Caveat: this model has lots of undecideds everywhere -- Mr. Kasich doesn't even clear 50 in Ohio yet, and Mrs. Clinton barely clears 50 in New York. (They do not appear to have tested Bernie Sanders against the Republicans; I can see Mr. Sanders beating all three, though perhaps not with 300 electoral votes, and again Mr. Kasich would be the toughest opponent.)

Finally, Hillary Clinton, at a fundraisers, jokes with New York City Mayor Bill Di Blasio that "it took you long enough" to endorse her, and he jokes that he's late with his endorsement because he's on "CP time" (a.k.a., "colored people time"). Worse, it looks like it was a joke they all planned, with Mrs. Clinton explaining to her black co-star that Mr. Di Blasio really meant "cautious politician time." That's how he ran, after all! Mr. Di Blasio doesn't get a pass because he has a black wife and son -- even if they're all OK with saying "CP time" to each other, such a contract certainly wouldn't automatically extend to the public sphere. Democrats: so smart, they're stupid.

Action: net neutrality, equal pay, and campaign finance.

Suddenly the House of Representatives is all hot to pass H.R. 2666, entitled the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act. They not only act like "regulation" is a cuss word, but they think regulating broadband internet rates would somehow sound bad to the numerous broadband internet users already paying too much for service. H.R. 2666 would forbid the FCC from ever regulating broadband rates, so the FCC couldn't stop Comcast and Charter from jacking up rates or inventing fees. Even worse, the bill's alleged net neutrality exemptions don't actually exist -- Sec. 3 of H.R. 2666 purports to exempt any FCC rate action that would relate to paid prioritization, but cites "section 8.9 of title 47, Code of Federal Regulations," when section 8.7, not 8.9, covers paid prioritization. I'm sure that's an "administrative error." End result: the big telecoms could charge for visiting certain websites or create tiers of service -- and thus neuter net neutrality. So Free Press helps you call your House Reps and tell them to reject the net neutrality end-around, H.R. 2666.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the U.S. Women's Soccer team, despite winning the World Cup, despite drawing more TV viewers in their World Cup-winning match than any other soccer game in American history, gets paid approximately a quarter of what the U.S. Men's Soccer team gets paid, and has filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (or EEOC) to correct this injustice. Can anyone say level playing field? Folks interested in perpetuating this disparity argue that women's soccer doesn't generate as much revenue or viewership, but both of these are demonstrably untrue -- the U.S. Women's Soccer team generates more revenue than the Men's team, in fact. If this doesn't sound like the most important thing in the world, remember a few things: one, that signing on to Moms Rising's petition to the EEOC demanding equal pay for the U.S. Women's Soccer team will take you less than 60 seconds, and two, that the young girls who grow up rooting for them shouldn't have to get used to getting paid less because they're girls.

Finally, we've talked about forcing corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners" (i.e., owners who collect money from corporate revenues), in part so we can identify folks trying to spend millions of dollars to influence elections -- but the FEC can also do something about that, by ferreting out the "ghost corporations" that exist solely to hide the identity of big political donors. "Ghost corporations" often come into existence mere days before making six- and seven-figure contributions to SuperPACs, almost like that was their sole reason for existence or something. But federal law already bans funneling cash through "straw donors," and the difference between a "straw donor" and a "ghost corporation" might well be merely semantic, so Demand Progress helps you tell the FEC to crack down on possible campaign finance violations by investigating these "ghost corporations." The good news? Both Republican and Democratic FEC members have suggested this is something they'd be compelled to do. But we still gotta tell them, because it's our job.

Around the table: featuring two tales about memory.

Washington, D.C. police arrest more than 500 "Democracy Spring" protestors on Monday, which may be a record. The bad news? Perhaps 1,000 protestors, total, attended Monday's protest, and that number ain't gonna put the scare in Ted Cruz or Pat Toomey, to name two Senators who have promulgated ridiculous arguments against one of the protestors' demands, a Constitutional amendment that would have overturned the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC decision. Also, virtually everyone arrested was released almost immediately, which means the state has learned perhaps the most important lesson of mass protests: don't let protestors clog up the jails. Still, give this thing time; it could get bigger.

Panel of three federal judges will hear a suit by Wisconsin Democrats that Wisconsin Republicans carved up legislative districts for maximum partisan advantage. This case could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court -- which hasn't settled on a standard that would say exactly when a district has become so gerrymandered along partisan lines that it actually violates voting rights. The "wasted vote" test, however, hasn't been heard by the high Court yet, so if it survives the panel, it might stick.

Hoo boy, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder now claims his staff misled him about Flint water quality. And his story seems designed to make you think he wears an "S" on his chest. Anyone else think we would have heard this story a lot earlier if it were true? That photo of a protestor's sign, though -- ah, the word "Nazi" doesn't describe just any species of anti-democratic practice. Also, let's also avoid using the word "nerd" as a pejorative. Some of the world's finest people are nerds.

Erika Hayasaki, writing at Wired, relates "The Strange Case of the Woman Who Couldn't Remember Her Past -- and Can't Imagine Her Future." More precisely, "(s)he knows plenty of facts about her life, but she lacks the ability to mentally relive any of it, the way you or I might meander back in our minds and evoke a particular afternoon." I find the whole thing unnerving, but Ms. McKinnon is a likable person who has led a fairly successful life, and of course the world of people who are the "protagonists" of their memories has always been just theory to her. Besides which, the world of episodic memory is also the world of regret.

Finally, Bill Scher asks, "Can Democrats Take Back the Senate?" Short answer: yes -- even folks like Chuck Grassley and John McCain should be worrying. But Democrats may not even be able to maintain a filibuster after the next election -- by my lights, five Democratic Senators up in 2018 (Donnelly, Heitkamp, Manchin, McCaskill, Tester) are pretty much toast, with six more (Baldwin, Brown, Casey the Younger, Kaine if he's not Vice President, Bill Nelson, Stabenow) in trouble, and no vulnerable Republicans will be up. 2020 offers a better environment for Democrats, in theory -- but I see only two vulnerable Republicans (Ernst and Gardner). All of which would be depressing -- if you're in the habit of counting on Democrats to do the right thing, rather than counting on yourself to make politicians do the right thing, regardless of their party.

Action: retirement advisors, refugee families, and antibiotic abuse.

You recall how late last week, the Department of Labor ruled that investment advisors handling retirement accounts and pensions must adhere to a "fiduciary standard," meaning they must put their clients' best interests before their own? You'd think that's pretty common-sensical, right? Yet some Congressfolk are talking about passing legislation preventing the Department of Labor's rules from taking effect. If Democrats weren't such weaklings, this is an argument they'd relish having -- I'd be running statements like do you seriously oppose making retirement advisors work for their clients rather than themselves? in ads all over TV and the internet, but Democrats would probably call that "uncivil." But again: it doesn't matter what greedy Republicans and spineless Democrats want; it matters what we want. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to stand up for retirees and future retirees by rejecting legislation that would weaken the fiduciary standard for retirement advisors.

Meanwhile, Mohammad Yousaf Yahyapur worked as a translator and administrative liaison for American journalists in Afghanistan during the war, and so naturally he faced death threats and sought refuge here in the U.S. He's been a refugee since 2013 (would Donald Trump call him "one of the good ones"?), but the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (or USCIS) hasn't acted on his request to bring his wife and three kids over for permanent residency status. Hence Megan Phan, of Syracuse, NY -- whose own grandfather did similar work in Vietnam during the war, and suffered similar hardships until he was able to emigrate with his family to America -- has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Senators Schumer and Gillibrand of New York to push the USCIS to grant permanent residency to Mohammad's family. If Mr. Yahyapur faced death threats for his work in Afghanistan, what do you think his family faces now? Are we in the business of stifling our generosity to those who risk their lives to help our war efforts? Not in my America, we're not.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell five major fast-food corporations to stop serving meat from animals shot through with antibiotics. With nearly four out of every five antibiotics in America used not on sick people or animals but on healthy animals just to make them produce a little more meat and endure their squalid living conditions a little better, two million Americans get hit by superbugs every year, and 20,000 of them die, and that's too high a price to pay for richer big ag CEOs. You may well be saying to yourself, self, why go after fast-food corporations for this? It's not like they're in the business of making healthy food anyway! But fast-food corporations are very sensitive to bad PR -- they get a lot of it already for, you know, serving unhealthy food and contributing to childhood obesity and paying their workers in dung pellets -- and they have lately proven somewhat nimble in adjusting their practices. And a lot of people eat fast food, so antibiotic abuse puts a lot of people in danger. So let's help each other out.

Around the table: dutifully tabulating the folly of banksters, politicians, and right-wing state governments.

Armand V. Cucciniello III, writing in USA Today, says Ted Cruz may be even worse than Donald Trump as a nominee, because Mr. Trump at least can cut a deal, while all Mr. Cruz has done in the Senate is "say 'no.'" I've said it before and I'll say it again -- the fact that Mr. Cruz is now the "establishment" candidate, whose success provokes "relief" from Republicans, now makes me think Donald Trump isn't a trick Democrats pulled on Republicans, but a trick Republicans pulled on us. (If Mr. Trump gets the nod and Gen. Matiss runs as a far-right "independent," I'll think the same thing.)

Ho hum, Yves Smith, writing at Naked Capitalism, catches J.P. Morgan-Chase CEO Jamie Dimon telling a bunch of falsehoods in order to argue that our government should stay off his back. Aside from being untrue, the statement that big banks can perform "mission-critical services...that regional and community banks simply cannot do" is rhetorical hostage-taking -- don't make my bank smaller, he's saying, or these mission-critical services get it! Also, there's booga-booga about China. Seriously, though, read the whole thing, if for no other reason than to put another nail in the idea that the right has all the economic thinkers.

Just about everyone uses words like "ludicrous" and "technically illiterate" to describe the draft encryption bill emanating from Sens. Burr and Feinstein late last week. Speaking to "illiteracy," I really should have been more clear the other day about a matter of diction. "Encrypt" doesn't literally mean "protect" or "keep safe," even though it has the word "crypt" in it, and even though "encryption" should lead to safety and security -- "encrypt" literally means to convert a message into cipher or code. So demanding that folks make their encrypted data "intelligible" literally means "make your encrypted data unencrypted." But they're not stupid; they just want us to think so.

Louisiana judge orders the release of seven indigent men -- all facing felony charges including murder, rape, assault, and armed robbery -- because the state has failed to fund their defense, and further says that this failure violates the men's Sixth Amendment rights. A brief perusal of said Sixth Amendment reveals that Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Arthur Hunter is absolutely right, and also suggests that maybe the government of Louisiana should stop pretending that tax cuts magically increase state revenues. I mean, does Duck Dynasty really need tax breaks?

Finally, Kansas Secretary of State gets caught putting out voter guides in Spanish with incorrect information. The Spanish-language edition said voters could register up to 15 days before an election, when the law actually says 21, and naturally the English-language edition had the correct info. After eight years of watching malice-disguised-as-incompetence from Tha Bush Mobb, I'd be a real schmuck to believe that this was all due to "administrative error." Someone needs to lose their job over this, too. Color me skeptical that anyone will.

Action: corporate disclosure, fair treatment of farm workers, and fair legal access for refugee children.

As the Panama Papers promise more revelations Our Glorious Elites would prefer remain in the dark, here comes H.R. 4450/S. 2489, the Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which would force corporations to disclose the names of all their beneficial owners (that is, the owners who actually make money when a corporation makes money). Why do that? Partly because it would help law enforcement find terrorists and stop money laundering, partly because it would shine a light on the massive campaign donations that distort our democracy, but also because folks use anonymous "shell corporations" to hide their profits so our government can't tax them, and when they do that, it means less money for roads, for schools, for police, and for firefighters -- and more taxes that must be collected from working families and small businesses, who are already paying their fair share. So CREDO helps you tell Congress to support the Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act, and thus support law and order in America.

Meanwhile, blueberry season is upon us soon, but blueberry season in America really only runs from June through August, so you're getting your blueberries from nations like Chile and Peru if you eat them during the winter. And if you suspect blueberry workers in those countries may not be the best-treated, well, the big ag corporation that produces nearly half the blueberries Americans buy from Peru has lately fired and pressed charges against nine of its workers -- who, perhaps not coincidentally, comprise all nine officers from their union's executive committee. As it happens, one of our "free" trade agreements is with Peru, and demands better worker treatment from Peruvian corporations, but action on that front could take time, if it ever comes -- and these workers need their jobs back now. Hence the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell Tal S.A. to hire these workers back, stop harassing them, and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with them in good faith. And remember: you eat the blueberries, so you have the leverage.

Finally, H.R. 4646/S. 2540, the Fair Day in Court for Kids Act, would require our government to provide counsel for foreign children and "vulnerable" individuals (such as disabled folks or torture victims), so they can at least have representation in court while they try to stay in America. Denying them good representation isn't a way to "streamline" the process or "save money, after all; it's just a way to be cruel while pretending not to be cruel. The bill would also prevent our government from deporting them until after providing them with all documents (excepting privileged or national security-related documents) relating to their time here, and it would (via pilot programs) increase case management services to certain aliens, including enrollment of children in school and health care. Yes, a sane and healthy civilization can provide such services, even if doing so doesn't inflame the rage glands of right-wingers very well. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Fair Day in Court for Kids Act.

Around the table: right-wing billionaires mull an "independent" "savior," and other tales.

A draft of a "bipartisan" encryption bill has dropped in the Senate, and it's as awful as you might imagine. "Its broad wording allows the government to hold virtually anyone responsible for what a user might do with encryption," and the bill would force said "virtually anyone" to provide data pursuant to a court order "in an intelligible format," which fact would require telecoms to build backdoors into their software (after all, if it's not hackable, it's not "intelligible"). Remember: if Congress calls something "bipartisan," chances are no one in America actually wants it. When I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Remember on Wednesday, when we discussed a Frank Luntz-conducted study showing that most business leaders support a minimum wage hike? Well, that wasn't the whole story: those business leaders also support, in large numbers, paid sick leave, expanded maternity and paternity leave, and reducing on-call scheduling. But don't worry: Frank Luntz stands ready to help right-wing hacks change the subject. About that scheduling item: you'd think business leaders, most of whom have written a schedule at one time or other, would want more predictable scheduling for their workers simply because it's easier for the person writing the schedule. I guess the disconnect is between "do what works" and "do whatever makes me the most money," which latter mindset is alluring even if you're not particularly greedy.

As you know, former President Bill Clinton got into a lengthy argument with Black Lives Matter protestors, and I just want to make sure you know he did it for show -- that is, to show off for white voters who don't like BLM all that much, in the hopes they'll vote for his wife, which even with Donald Trump in the race isn't a vain hope. How do I know he did it for show? Because, back in July, he sang a rather different tune to the NAACP about that crime bill he defended at very considerable length to BLM, saying back then that it had, in fact, put too many people in jail. I never hated Republicans as much during the Clinton era as I have during the Obama era, because the Clintons were all about the drama, and so they made a lot of that trouble for themselves. I guess we should brace ourselves for more of that if she wins.

Those right-wing billionaires looking for a third-party candidate if Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination may have found their man: retired Marine General James "Mad Dog" Mattis. I give them credit for coming up with someone not many folks have heard of -- though he was also the target of a write-in campaign in 2012, which surely doesn't happen by accident -- but why do we trust right-wing billionaires to pick our next President again? His "independence" will surely be for show. And their forecast, that Gen. Mattis could deny the Democrats enough states to throw the election to the House, isn't that savvy, either -- they don't think he'd steal more votes from Mr. Trump? Particularly when they're counting on him to show up Mr. Trump's fake toughness?

Finally, British Prime Minister David Cameron is in some trouble at home due to the Panama Papers' revelation of his late father's involvement in tax-free investing, and he's called the whole issue a "private matter." But leave it to Edward Snowden to come up with a zinger at Mr. Cameron's expense: "Oh, now he's interested in privacy." Some days a good joke is all you need.

Around the table: the political correctness of right-wingers, and other stories.

Surprise, surprise, a lot of the businesses blasting the North Carolina government for its pro-discrimination law HB 2 gave big bucks to the politicians who made it possible. More precisely, these businesses gave millions of dollars to two D.C.-based organizations, including the Republican Governors Association, that then funneled that money to the North Carolina Republicans who brought about this monstrosity. Perhaps that's why it doesn't seem to occur to them that they helped enable the very thing they now denounce.

In a peripherally-related note, Ian Millhiser at Think Progress suggests that the Mississippi "religious liberty" law may die an ugly death at the hands of the Supreme Court. Why? Because the Court ruled, in Romer v. Evans, that Colorado's notoriously anti-gay Amendment 2 "singl(es) out a certain class of citizens for disfavored legal status," and Mississippi's HB 1523 does the same, granting "an unambiguous permission slip to engage in discrimination" that "religious" folks can use against "a certain class of citizens," and only that class of citizens -- namely LGBT folks. Question for far-right evangelicals: does sending a trans girl home until she comes back to school dressed as a boy sound remotely like a way to win hearts and minds for Christ? Or does it sound more like a way to act out about the world not being exactly the way you'd like it to be?

In case you were letting your guard down about this economic "recovery" of ours, the incomparable David Dayen tells us a Princeton/Harvard study on the "1099 economy" -- composed mainly of temp, on-call, freelance, and contract workers, but also of independent contractors -- grew from 10 percent of the workforce in 2005 to almost 16 percent today. Some right-winger, somewhere, will try to sell this as a boon of "freedom" and "independence," but it's not -- these workers get no health care, no workers comp, no overtime, no paid leave, and now there are 9 million more of them than there were a decade ago. So this development "certainly informs this anti-establishment, anti-business-as-usual political moment." One answer: multi-employer benefit plans.

Sarah Anderson has a good idea: framing the "financial speculation tax" as a "Wall Street sales tax," as in, "if we have to pay sales taxes, why doesn't Wall Street?" The "financial speculation tax," the "financial transaction tax," and even the "Robin Hood tax" haven't caught fire, so maybe the "Wall Street sales tax" will. I hesitate only because I oppose sales taxes generally, but this "sales tax" wouldn't even be like the sales taxes we put up with -- it would hit higher-income traders using computers harder, because they make more trades, often hundreds in a day. Now I'm thinking the "Wall Street sales tax" should be higher than 1 percent. After all, you and I pay over 8 percent on average.

Finally, Florida Gov. Rick Scott reveals his improbably thin skin by saying the woman who chewed him out at a Gainesville Starbucks "refused to Pledge Allegiance to the flag." No, that's a quotation, dropped in clearly to provoke his more rage-addled supporters. Apparently, in her previous life as a city commissioner, Ms. Jennings rose to say the pledge at meetings but did not always recite it. Gosh, and they say liberals are the Thought Police? They say liberals are politically correct? (As an aside, "one statement, inexplicable" was a pretty funny lede. Kudos to writer Jason Silverstein!)

Action: sentencing reform, safer pork processing, voting rights, and campaign finance.

Word on the street is that the House may actually be ready to move on sentencing reform -- not on S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, but on two bills that would, put together, accomplish most of what S. 2123 would accomplish. H.R. 3713, the Sentencing Reform Act, would allow judges to issue sentences shorter than mandatory minimum sentences for certain non-violent drug offenders; it would also reduce mandatory minimums for other offenders and make the crack/powder cocaine sentencing reforms of 2010 retroactive, as S. 2123 would do. And H.R. 759, the Recidivism Risk Reduction Act, would direct our government to build a "Post-Sentencing Risk and Needs Assessment System" that would help give prisoners the kind of productive activities that would help them avoid breaking the law again -- and that is the slab of S. 2123 that H.R. 3713 doesn't address. So the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 3713 and H.R. 759, and thus bring some sentencing reform to America.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has allowed a few pork processors to run high-speed pig slaughterhouses, which (and stop me if you've heard this before!) run some 20 percent faster than most slaughterhouses and have (sigh) less government oversight. Because, as we know, running slaughterhouses even faster is automatically better in every way! It creates even healthier pigs than factory farms already do with their filthy housing and antibiotic overuse! And slaughtering pigs faster never results in more food contamination, injured workers, or increased cruelty at the hands of overworked, frustrated workers! Of course, this USDA program is only a "pilot program," but that's how the USDA does its dirty work -- pork processing corporations don't want to give up all that money they're redistributing upward from workers and consumers to themselves, nor do they want to welcome federal inspectors back into their facilities if they can help it. Hence CREDO helps you tell the USDA to stop their high-speed pig slaughter program.

Finally, Sign for Good helps you tell Congress to enact four reforms that would expand voting rights and curtail the deleterious effect of big money in political campaigns. Which are almost the same thing, if you think about it -- votes mean rather little when Congressfolk only talk to the corporations that give them the most money. The bills that would directly expand voting rights are, of course, the Voting Rights Advancement Act (which would give the Voting Rights Act the teeth the Supreme Court knocked out in Shelby v. Holder) and the Voter Empowerment Act (which would increase citizen access to online and same-day voter registration). The campaign finance initiatives are the "Democracy for All" constitutional amendment (which would amend the Constitution to allow federal and state governments to make campaign finance laws again) and the Fair Elections Now Act (which would create a small donor-based public campaign finance system). Corporatists can speak very, very loudly with their money, but the people are still stronger -- if we make ourselves heard.

Around the table: good folks giving politicians what-for, and other tales.

Trevor Timm, writing at The Guardian, explains "Why the Panama Papers Should Be a U.S. Election Issue." Long story short: even if no Americans are named therein, the Panama Papers highlight how "American" it's become to use offshore tax havens. Of course, corporate tax avoidance isn't exactly popular -- even the Treasury's rather meek corporate inversion rules have induced Pfizer to abandon its plan to merge with Allergan and become "foreign" -- but it is by and large legal, thanks to politicians who never listen to the people.

Hot on the heels of Rep. Grothman's rather frank admission that Voter ID helps Republicans out in Wisconsin, a former Republican staffer testifies that Republicans in Wisconsin's state legislature were "literally talking and plotting to deny someone, a fellow citizen, their constitutional right" to vote, particularly in "certain neighborhoods in Milwaukee and on our college campuses." The words "voter suppression" may never have passed their lips, because Scott Walker's New Republican Reich may be many things but they're not stupid. Still, we always knew it, and it's nice to have insider testimony.

Peter Maass, writing at The Intercept, reminds us that, whatever Donald Trump's ridiculous pronouncements about expanding libel laws, President Obama is the one who's used the Espionage Act of 1917 to "prosecute more leakers and whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined." Which should also remind you that the guy who blew the whistle on CIA torture (John Kiriakou) is in jail while the torturers themselves aren't (because we're "looking forward"!) and that the Obama Administration's hatred of whistleblowers is so total that even FDA workers suffered blowback after trying to call attention to malfunctioning medical devices.

Dean Baker finds complaints about the "lack of specifics" in Bernie Sanders's answers to the New York Daily News to be "silly." I mention this mainly because he reminds us that the same "liberal" media so anxious to castigate Sen. Sanders acts like Paul Ryan is TEH WONKIEST WONK EVAH!!!!, even though (or perhaps because!) he has "has repeatedly proposed eliminating most of the federal government." Then again, if Bernie Sanders knew the precise statute that would permit him to prosecute banksters for mortgage fraud, the "liberal" media would probably just call him a nerd.

Finally, Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott must regret stopping off at a Starbucks in Gainesville on Tuesday, after a local woman gave him what-for over (among other things) his refusal to expand Medicaid, saying "(y)ou should be ashamed to show your face around here." You'll recall that he said he supported expanding Medicaid while running for re-election in 2014, then flip-flopped once he was elected, because he won and you didn't. As for his "I created a million jobs" spiel: ah, no, the people of Florida created a million jobs, through their demand for goods and services -- and might have created more, except for Mr. Scott's perpetual hard-on for tax-cuts-for-the-rich getting in the way.

Action: promoting fair redistricting, equal rights, and consumer protection.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled earlier this week that apportioning districts by population, rather than by eligible voters, did not violate the U.S. Constitution. But you know that won't be the end of it -- the folks who failed (by 8-0, I feel compelled to point out using the Italics Hammer) at the Supreme Court will take their battle to the states next, and quite a few of these state legislatures, which have spent the last few years passing Voter ID laws and "right-to-work" laws and "religious liberty" laws and "bathroom" bills and ag-gag laws and other obnoxiousness, will happily pounce upon the opportunity to pretend that folks who can't vote (whether because of their immigration status or their status as a felon) don't deserve a voice in our democracy. The forces of evil love it when our vote means less. Sadly, you don't have to wonder why. Common Cause helps you tell your state Governor to ensure that state and federal legislative districts continue to represent all the people therein.

Meanwhile, back in Tennessee, HB 1840 -- a.k.a., the Counseling Discrimination bill, or "Hate Bill 1840" -- states that "(n)o counselor or therapist providing counseling or therapy services shall be required to counsel or serve a client as to goals, outcomes, or behaviors that conflict with a sincerely held religious belief of the counselor or therapist." Want to be sexually active again after being raped? No can do, say counselors with "sincere religious beliefs" about how sex outside marriage "led" to your rape. Want to work through being bullied by other kids because you're gay? Forget it, because this bill would let counselors bully you, too! Want to get counseling about getting a sex change? Oh, you know how that'll go. I'm so tired of coddling folks who think religious people's "rights" supersede everyone's rights. So the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam to veto HB 1840 if it reaches his desk.

Finally, the FTC ruled back in 2014 that advertising for the Your Baby Can Read products could no longer claim the product, consisting of videos, "lift-a-flap" books, and flash cards, could help babies learn to read before they learn to walk, or that using Your Baby Can Read would help babies who used it do so much better in life than other babies. Turns out the evidence for such claims is lacking if not non-existent -- but like all true believers, Your Baby Can Read's creator, Robert Titzer, is persistent like a bad debt. So he's back with Your Baby Can Learn, and though you might think he's on more solid ground by replacing "read" with "learn," it turns out scientists tell us that having babies sit down and watch videos actually hinders their learning process, via disturbed sleep and delayed language skills. Hence Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell the FTC to address these new claims from the Your Baby Can Read folks.

Around the table: voting rights, encryption, "irresponsible" journalism, "religious liberty," and retirement advice.

Surprise, surprise, Wisconsin's Voter ID law caused some drama during Tuesday's primary elections, with students and people of color suffering the most. The problems described in the above article aren't as pronounced as the problems experienced by, say, Cleveland voters on Election Day 2004 or Arizona primary voters last month, but that's surely nothing to brag about! Yet I expect Gov. Walker will say the relatively high turnout means criticisms of Voter ID are overblown -- though the high turnout might be better explained by two close Presidential races, and we could just as easily speculate that turnout would have been even higher without Voter ID, and no American citizen should have any problems voting. Anyway, 2.1 million voters voted in Tuesday's primaries, but over 3 million voted on Election Day 2012, so on Election Day 2016 will likely give us a better picture of the havoc Voter ID can wreak.

Online messaging service WhatsApp has now encrypted every communication made on its service from end to end. As it happens, WhatsApp is more popular overseas than here, but that could change (especially now!), and in the meantime, one billion good folks, using all kinds of phones, can now communicate with each other without worrying about WhatsApp giving over their communications to our government. Let's repeat, though: using an encrypted service is not in and of itself grounds for suspicion. Even if our government wants you to think so.

The release of the Panama Papers has already toppled a Prime Minister, but Adam Johnson at FAIR points out that the journalistic consortium that made the release of the Panama Papers possible doesn't need to imply that Wikileaks was "irresponsible" back in 2010. And when journalists say they wouldn't want leaks to actually hurt innocent people, they ought to describe the times that's actually happened, rather than assume it sounds reasonable enough not to be challenged. After all, even a Pentagon review can't find any innocent people the Chelsea Manning leaks actually hurt, and I bet they were looking pretty hard.

Paypal scraps plans to open a new office, potentially employing 400 people, in Charlotte, NC, and its CEO specifically cites North Carolina's recent "religious liberty" law as the reason. Sadly, the city of Charlotte passed the ordinance allowing transgendered folks to use the bathroom of their self-identified sex, which "provoked" the hysteria resulting in HB 2. Some right-wingers would criticize PayPal for pulling out of the city that tried to do good, but you know what? Punishing evil isn't always fair, and letting the perfect murder the good is always a stupid idea.

Finally, some good news from the White House: the Department of Labor has finalized new rules imposing a "fiduciary duty" standard on retirement fund advisors -- meaning they will have to put your needs before their own when making investment decisions with your money. Banksters were fighting this, naturally, because greed, but if you took a stand and left a comment with the Department of Labor supporting the rules (a matter The Hill doesn't seem to think is as important as what the banksters had to say, for some reason), then go treat yourself. And then get ready for when Congress tries to nullify the rules, as they'll try to do, because moronic.

Action: fighting bigotry, banksters, and outsourcing.

North Carolina and Mississippi may have enacted "bathroom bills" -- the kind that force transgendered students to go to the bathroom of their birth gender, rather than the gender they are now -- but Tennessee's bathroom bills, HB 2414 and SB 2387, have had a tough time moving through their respective houses. We shouldn't be complacent -- you'll recall how long it took Pennsylvania's notorious fracking bill to work through the state legislature back in 2012, until legislators essentially passed it when they thought no one was looking -- but organized popular will has held the bill at bay so far. And Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam hasn't said whether he'll sign a bathroom bill if it reaches his desk, and just because he's a Republican doesn't mean he'll sign it -- when earlier this year Georgia Gov. Deal and South Dakota Gov. Daugaard, both Republicans, vetoed similar legislation. Still, the Tennessee Equality Project helps you remind Gov. Haslam to veto any discriminatory bathroom bills that might reach his desk.

Meanwhile, the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill passed in 2010, and though it wasn't everything we wanted, it's not going to be much of anything if Executive branch agencies don't finish writing the rules and regulations Dodd-Frank mandates -- rules that would limit obscene executive bonuses, financial speculation in food markets, and deceptive marketing of toxic securities, to name three examples. Of course, as you may have heard, there's a Presidential election this year, which means the next President might not even bother finishing up the work Dodd-Frank has begun. Some folks would like you to think that means it's time to throw up your hands and walk away, but in fact the opposite is true -- the fact that we're seven months (!) away from a Presidential election means it's even more important that the relevant federal agencies need to finish the work they're mandated to do. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government to finish implementing Dodd-Frank by the end of 2016.

Finally, Mondeléz, the corporation that owns Nabisco, has sent layoff notices to over 250 workers in its Chicago plant, so that it can move to Mexico, where the labor is cheaper and rather less well-protected than in America (though Our Glorious Elites are trying to change that!). As you may recall, Mondeléz CEO Irene Rosenfeld made $21 million last year, but still asked the Chicago workers to take a massive cut in pay and benefits. And you won't be surprised to learn that Nabisco has taken tens of millions of dollars in corporate welfare handouts from city and state over the years, most in the form of tax cuts. The lesson? When a corporation threatens to pull out of a city if it doesn't get handouts from the taxpayer, it'll just keep threatening to pull out if it doesn't get more and more handouts from the taxpayer -- and that's no guarantee it won't pull out anyway! That's what we call a hostage situation. But we're not hostages, so Jobs with Justice helps you tell Mondeléz to save decent-paying jobs here in America.

Around the table: contains horrible truths about "religious liberty" laws.

Over our objections, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signs that state's notorious pro-discrimination "religious liberty" bill. Gov. Bryant says "when people in the secular community want to attack a bill, and (sic) they give the worst possible examples of what will happen." Setting aside that multitudinous people of faith have also condemned the bill: if bill makes the "worst" "possible," why would you ever sign it?

Better news: the U.S. Supreme Court rules, in 8-0 decision, that states may use total population when contemplating redistricting. The plaintiffs had argued states should consider eligible voters when drawing districts, because putting them in districts with more eligible voters diluted their power -- as if one only has power in a democracy when one votes, or as if representatives don't represent everyone in their district. The Court did not say states must draw districts based on total population; we'll see what happens when some state legislature (Wisconsin?) decides to ignore disenfranchised felons and immigrants with-papers-and-without.

Contra what big corporate lobbies pretending to represent the interests of small business tell you, a survey of business executives finds 80 percent of them support a minimum wage hike. Punchline: that survey was conducted by LuntzGlobal -- that's right, as in notorious Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who you'd think would have been emotionally invested in the opposite result. Of course, LuntzGlobal provides this information as a preface to telling you how to stop minimum wage hikes. "Most folks think there are bigger priorities," they say, before listing several other priorities that do not actually conflict with a higher minimum wage. That's all right-wingers know how to do: tell you how to change the subject. But remember: changing the subject concedes the point.

ProPublica joins with Mother Jones to explain "Why North Carolina's New Anti-LGBT Law is a Trojan Horse." Long story short: it's even worse that it looks -- it doesn't just prevent gays from suing employers for discrimination in state courts, it prevents everyone from doing that. Because Jesus, I guess? I wonder why they used the pro-discrimination law as a cover for that. It couldn't be because they knew how unpopular it would be, could it?

Finally, the U.S. Treasury Department issued new rules that may discourage American corporations from buying foreign corporations and then "moving" "overseas" to avoid American taxes. But, like everything Democrats do these days, they're awfully convoluted, and they're convoluted so that you won't be able to tell that they're really not that strong. And Republicans still whine about them! Personally, I think no corporation should ever own another corporation, domestic or foreign. They'll call that "inefficient," I suppose, but then they think people having jobs is "inefficient."

Action: auditing the Pentagon, and labeling GMO foods.

H.R. 942/S. 327, the Audit the Pentagon Act, would compel the Department of Defense to account for how it spends taxpayer money, also known as our money. Tales of Pentagon waste and fraud are legion, yet the Defense Department doesn't properly account for the money it spends (or wastes, as the case may be), though we actually do have laws that tell them to do that. As it happens, the House and Senate versions would approach their stated aim differently -- the House version would simply cut discretionary defense spending by half a percentage point if the Defense Department doesn't produce a clean audit, while also preventing the Secretary of Defense from trying to achieve that cut out of soldiers' pay or health care, but the Senate version is rather more convoluted, imposing consequences for failing to produce an audit that include more supervision of defense spending and the Defense Department being unable to move funds around after 2019. Maybe it'll work, but why be an engineer when a hammer will do the job? So CREDO helps you support the House version of the Audit the Pentagon Act.

Meanwhile, with the various House and Senate versions of the so-called Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act dead for the moment, S. 2621, the Biotechnology Food Labeling Uniformity Act, would require the FDA to mandate that all genetically-modified organisms in food to be labeled as such. Labeling could occur in four different ways under Section 2 of the bill, and none of these ways, you'll note, are the QR codes you can't read without a smartphone -- all four ways are, in fact, easily decipherable by anyone who can read. The bill does contain a few exemptions (for food in which genetically-engineered organisms comprise less than 0.9% of the food's weight, or for food produced using genetically-engineered vaccines or enzymes), but while these exemptions may wind up exempting the entire cheese industry, for example, the bill is still tighter with regard to exemptions than Vermont's law -- which would be nullified, if S. 2621 passes. Hence Just Label It helps you tell your Senators to pass stronger GMO labeling legislation than they've thus far considered.

Around the table: nuclear winter, voter ID, dark money, Confederate "heritage," and a victory against coal pollution.

The most recent RetroReport video covers the theory of nuclear winter and how it affected nuclear arms issues, particularly during the Reagan Administration. Scientists are more likely to think the effect would be more like "nuclear fall" now than nuclear winter, but when even a drop of a few degrees across the planet could wreak havoc on food production (and, ah, indirectly lead to more war), that's not exactly a comfort. Time of video: 11 minutes, 58 seconds.

Ari Berman and Michael Waldman discuss, at length, how voting law changes (including Voter ID laws and the Supreme Court's invalidation of a critical part of the Voting Rights Act) could affect the 2016 elections. I'd say "good to know someone else has noticed," but I always hope I'm wrong about the worst. Among the things you may not know: Texas's Voter ID law considers a concealed-carry permit "valid ID" but not a college student's ID, wonder why that is. Mr. Waldman's book, The Fight to Vote, looks like a good one.

In a peripherally-related note, Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut reviews Jane Mayer's book, Dark Money, which describes the decades-long plan by America's überwealthy to deform democracy along corporatist lines. Among the many items of note: the extent to which the Koch brothers literally funded the Tea Party movement, a fact missed by most of the "liberal" media at the time, though not missed by you or I. If Occupy had had that kind of money, the Democrats would have retaken the House in 2012.

Gov. Bryant of Mississippi has declared April "Confederate Heritage Month," which sadly is not in and of itself unusual in the South, but his declaration omits any mention of slavery, which actually is unusual. Hip revisionists are wrong -- the South seceded not over "states' rights" but over the "right" to own black folks, and President Lincoln fought the Civil War not just to reunify America but to end slavery. Naturally, Gov. Bryant's spokeshack says the Governor "believes Mississippi’s history deserves study and reflection, no matter how unpleasant or complicated parts of it may be," without mentioning that the Governor left the most "unpleasant" part of that history out.

Finally, Nick Engelfried, writing at Waging Nonviolence, describes "How Montanans Stopped the Largest New Coal Mine in North America." You'll recognize much of the story -- big government agencies plotting "coal sacrifice zones," coal-hauling railroads running through lower-income areas -- plus lots of direct action, including protestors chaining themselves to desks, sit-ins at the Montana state capitol building, protests and blockades on the rail lines themselves, and the 100,000 public comments activists were able to gather opposing the Otter Creek Mine. External factors also helped (China's declining coal demand, Arch Coal's bankruptcy), but what's the shame in that? Good Montanans did a good job helping to protect their air and water from pollution.

Action: discrimination in Mississippi nay; consumer protection at the FTC yea.

As you likely know, the Mississippi state legislature passed the mother of all pro-discrimination "religious liberty" bills late last week, and Mississippi's Governor, Phil Bryant, will very likely sign the bill today. Hence the ACLU helps you tell Gov. Bryant to veto the bill. The ACLU's contact tool is heavy on the appeal to reason (bill would damage state's relationship with businesses, possibly cut off federal public school funding), which might well be for the best, because this isn't the kind of bill that brings out my reasonable side. How could it, when it lets county clerks refuse to license gay marriages, forces transgendered kids back into the bathrooms (and school uniforms!) of their birth sex, lets adoption agencies and homeless shelters refuse to work with single mothers or couples they think are having pre-marital sex, and permits doctors to refuse to counsel gays or pregnant teens? Are religious people really this weak, that they need their government to protect them from ever having to deal with people unlike them?

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission (or FTC), normally composed of five commissioners, now has only three, with Julie Brill's resignation; thus President Obama has a unique opportunity to appoint two new commissioners who will actually act on behalf of the American people, rather than represent a cush job for some corporate lawyer eager to destroy pro-consumer regulations on behalf of his or her next employer. Hence CREDO helps you tell Mr. Obama to appoint strong, independent watchdogs to the FTC. This should be a relatively simple ask -- the FTC's mission, as mandated by the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, is to fight anti-competitive business practices (including monopolies) and to protect consumers from fraud; does any reasonable person assert that businesses never engage in fraud or anti-competitive practices anymore? Only the politicians who obey the every whim of their corporate paymasters do that. And corporations "harmed" by regulation on behalf of the public may want to ask if their practices naturally de-select them from existence.

Around the table: zombie lies about "religious liberty" and Voter ID.

Andrés Sepúlveda, currently serving time for various crimes relating to the 2014 Colombian Presidential election, tells Bloomberg BusinessWeek how he conspired to rig multiple elections in Latin America for nearly a decade, working arm-in-arm (until the end, and that's why he's in jail!) with a man known as the "Karl Rove of Latin America." Mr. Sepúlveda's major insight: "voters trusted what they thought were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media more than they did experts on television and in newspapers" -- which make sense, since establishment media don't earn anyone's trust -- and that such "spontaneous expressions" could be fabricated with ease and (importantly!) with little money. But at the risk of beating a dead horse: elections are a lot easier to rig when candidates don't inspire any confidence that they'll work for (or even try to work for!) the people. Hence his statement that he's "100 percent sure" this Presidential election is being tampered with is hardly surprising -- and it shouldn't scare us. (I doubt he's reformed, by the way.)

This is not a happy story: the NYC chapter of Habitat for Humanity took over $20 million in stimulus money to renovate abandoned buildings in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood -- but wound up helping push residents out of apartments there, and even into homelessness, in order to acquire the buildings in the first place. Stimulus demands are partly to blame -- Habitat NYC had to buy properties on the open market, rather than from the city, which doesn't sound like a welfare handout to big developers at all! -- but Habitat screwed up in choosing Bed-Stuy, which despite its high foreclosure rate didn't actually have very many vacant properties since rent-regulated tenants lived in them. Having embarked on this path, but finding the law in their way, Habitat NYC made other moves that, well, made the whole thing look less like incompetence and more like corruption.

We learn from Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut that over the last few years, more and more colleges have been applying for, and receiving, Title IX exemptions -- which allows them to keep hoovering up taxpayer dollars while discriminating against whichever students seem to offend their "deeply-held religious beliefs." So, one more time: a university's "right" to be exempt from non-discrimination laws is not greater than a student's right to be protected by non-discrimination laws. Sadly, the law doesn't give our government much leeway to say stop yer whining and do the right thing already. I think it should be simple: take taxpayer money, follow the taxpayer's rules.

Ho hum, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS), who said a little over a week ago that considering the Merrick Garland nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was his "job," now says he's looked into Judge Garland enough to know all he needs to know and no longer supports holding hearings on his nomination. And I'm sure all those Tea Party threats to primary him in his upcoming election (yes, he's up this year!) had nothing whatsoever to do with it. And naturally, Sen. Moran is one of the few members of the Senate's informal Tea Party caucus! The swordfighting never ends on the right.

Finally, Fox and Friends's Steve Doocy assures us that Voter ID laws are "fair because when I go to CVS, I got to get out a driver’s license if I’m going to buy Benadryl." I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Mr. Doocy wasn't born in a poor hospital or outside a hospital back in the pre-World War II era such that he'd have no birth certificate, or that he's never been poor enough to have to choose between paying his bills and spending hundreds of dollars to replace lost official documentation he'd need to vote, or that he's never lived in a rural area where the state closed down all the DMVs so he has to take a day off from work to get a driver's license he may not use for any other purpose. Which reminds me: talking only to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker about the matter isn't exactly "fair and balanced."

Around the table: an actual death panel *not* operated by Barack Obama, and other tales.

New York state legislators pass a complex minimum wage hike that would raise the wage to $15/hour in New York City by the end of 2018, but allow a considerably slower hike in other parts of the state. That sounds almost like actual compromise -- it costs a lot more to live in New York City than elsewhere in the state, of course -- and also not the kind of compromise I'd expect from a center-right Democratic Governor. New York also became the fifth American state to enact paid family medical leave -- and their version is stunningly progressive compared to the other four states' laws. Good show, New York.

Sara Morrison, writing at The Guardian, chides President Obama for demanding more aggressive questioning of folks like Donald Trump from the media -- given the irrational zeal with which Mr. Obama has gone after the whistleblowers who could help journalists do their job. I take her point, but being tough on Donald Trump should be a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel situation, when he says patently ridiculous things and then denies he said them like no one ever invented the tape recorder. And one could more easily argue that Mr. Obama's obfuscation makes a journalist's job harder, if very many "liberal" media journalists were interested in doing a good job in the first place.

C.J. Polychroniou, writing at TruthOut, interviews author Helena Norberg-Hodge about how "Globalized Monoculture is Consuming the Planet." This is far worse than food-is-grown-to-be-sold-not-eaten -- "When you want to market your products globally, diversity is inefficient," she reminds us, though of course when we're talking "efficiency" here, we're really talking about how "efficiently" income can be redistributed upward to bosses. But she also says "our major problem is a lack of vision, not innate greed," a statement I find quite sympathetic, though I also presume this "lack of vision" causes or enables greed.

FBI arrests hospice services CEO for instructing nurses to kill patients who had lived in hospice care too long. Apparently Medicare imposes caps on annual hospice care, and if patients live so long they go over the caps, the hospice service corporations don't make money -- hence the orders to literally OD patients as they got near or over the cap. At least one nurse resigned rather than comply with the order; about three others, we don't know, but a homicide charge isn't out of the question. Note to right-wingers: this is what a "death panel" actually looks like.

Finally, next time you hear that BERNIE SANDERZ HAZ NEVER PASSEDZ ANY OF TEH BILLZ!!!!!, Michael Sainato, writing at the New York Observer, reminds us that Sen. Sanders passed more legislative amendments during his 14-year run in the House than any other House Rep. Mr. Sainato mentions his national cancer registry, his ban on imported products made with child labor, and his community health center funding increase, but the People's War blog lists quite a few more amendments, 42 in all covering his House and Senate years (and they include a small business paperwork-reduction amendment from 1995 -- gosh, why weren't Republicans on that like white on rice?). Caveat: his amendment run in the House occurred mostly under Republican House control, but that fact alone should not compel us to think he'll repeat that success, if he becomes The Hated One (i.e., the next Democratic President).

Around the table: the real relationship between Barack Obama and banksters, and other horrible truths.

Part two of Chris Hedges's Days of Revolt interview with economist Michael Hudson covers, at length, how much dirty work the Obama Administration has done on the banksters' behalf. Among their ill deeds: stopping any effort at mortgage write-downs, funneling trillions of dollars to banksters instead of writing down debt, preventing the IMF from writing down Greek debt, and worst of all, pretending to understand the people's needs and desires and then "delivering" them to his real constituents, the banksters. I sure do feel a lot better about not voting for him twice.

Mississippi's state legislature passes the mother of all "religious liberty" bills. You name it, this bill does it: clerks won't have to issue marriage licenses to gays, businesses can fire people for being gay or transgendered, adoption agencies won't have to place children with couples they think are having premarital sex, doctors won't have to counsel anyone who offends their "religious" sensibilities, and, well, you get the picture. And whereas Indiana and North Carolina suffered corporate backlash for their pro-discrimination bills, I don't presume the home state of Jr. Food Mart, C Spire Wireless, and MCI-surely-you-remember-them will feel that sort of pain. Southerners like talking about secession all the time; how about we start talking expulsion?

Dan Fischer writes a lengthy report at Counterpunch regarding the reflexively pro-gas drilling policies of Connecticut's Governor, Democrat Dannel Malloy. Connecticut doesn't even have shale gas to drill, but the Malloy Administration has funded plenty of pipeline projects -- including one a mere 105 feet from the Indian Point nuclear power plant, which is rather like putting a bomb right next to another bomb -- and fracked-gas power plants that suspiciously sit in low-income neighborhoods of color. Attend well the lies Gov. Malloy employs to justify what are essentially kickbacks to large contributors, beginning in the "Cooking the Climate" section. Spoiler alert: they're the same lies Republicans tell to accomplish the same ends.

Obama Administration pardon attorney resigns, claiming that President Obama isn't "following through" on promises to grant early releases to low-level federal drug offenders serving long sentences. The main problem? So many petitioners (wouldn't you be one, if you were in that situation?), and not enough workers to process them, just like with every other government agency since the early 1980s. Racism also rears its ugly head, as white petitioners are four times more likely to get early releases than people of color. Maybe this is why Barack Obama gets no love from right-wingers -- even when he outdoes Republicans at withholding mercy, it's obviously because the whole process is farkakte.

Finally, the Engage! blog describes a sort of extended Milgram's experiment which finds that "agreeable, conscientous" people are more likely to follow orders most of us would find evil (like delivering electric shocks to an innocent person) while "more contrarian, less agreeable" folks would more likely refuse to follow such orders. "The irony is that a personality disposition normally seen as antisocial -- disagreeableness -- may actually be linked to 'pro-social' behavior," says one observer, but that's likely no surprise to you if, like me, you think real compromise can't happen between people who won't stand their ground, and that being "agreeable" is worthless unless you're willing to be disagreeable.

Action: the Charter/Time-Warner merger, and ethics for Pennsylvania public figures.

Word on the street is that the FCC plans to approve the Charter/Time-Warner merger, the one that would make Charter almost as big as Comcast and thus give those two corporations nearly 80 percent of the cable market in America. Higher prices, job destruction, lousy service, less competition -- apparently none of these things, which always happen when media corporations consolidate, have persuaded the FCC to take action. Now, this won't necessarily be the end of the matter -- you may recall that the Justice Department, not the FCC (then run by Julius Genachowski, so glad to be rid of him, still can't quite believe he was outclassed by his Bush-appointed predecessor and his big telecom lobbyist successor), stopped the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger back in 2011, merely by suing in federal court to block it. Still, I'd rather not let it come to that, even if the Justice Department chooses to oppose this proposed merger as well. So No More Mergers still helps you call the FCC and tell them to reject the proposed Charter/Time-Warner merger.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has lately proposed an ethics reform package consisting of campaign contribution limits, a gift ban for public officials, heightened disclosure of their outside income, and an end to pay-to-play arrangements for state contracts. If that doesn't sound like a big deal to you, read that first item again: "campaign contribution limits." That's right, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania doesn't have them, at all, which makes us virtually unique in America. And this notion of a public official's "outside income" might not go down so well in, say, Alabama, where the law prevents public officials from receiving any income from private sources. And Pennsylvania is also one of 10 states that doesn't limit gifts to public officials. It may be called a "gift," but no one gives a public servant one without expecting something in return. Hence Common Cause helps you tell your PA state legislator to pass strong ethics legislation in Pennsylvania.

Around the table: containing good news for law-and-order types.

Maryland Court of Special Appeals issues opinion stating not only that police must get a warrant before using a "stingray" -- a device that acts like a cell phone tower for the purpose of gathering cell phone user information -- but must "fully explain to the court what exactly the device does and how it is used." People who don't think that's an onerous duty for police probably opposed the Miranda ruling, too. Also, police can't apply for a pen registers (which only authorize collection of phone numbers) and then try to collect other info using the stingray, because that's dishonest -- almost as dishonest as cooking up nonexistent "informants" to "provide" the info a stingray gathered. And police can no longer hide behind nondisclosure agreements with stingray manufacturers to avoid doing the right thing. It's a shame that the "war on terror" and the "war on drugs" have complicated what really are very simple matters, but good for Maryland.

Economist Robert Pollin says "Bernie Sanders Will Make the Economy Great Again." How? Single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care would dramatically reduce our country's spending on health care; a $15/hour minimum wage would vastly increase worker spending power with minimal rise in business costs; a financial transaction (or "Robin Hood") tax would raise a lot of money and reduce financial speculation; and gross domestic product would go up in a way that would actually favor workers, rather than banksters, for once. You probably knew all that already, but it's good to have it all in one place.

Kate Gould, writing at TruthOut, proposes a "non-military" solution to the ISIS problem. More bombs and more ground troops might get right-wingers hard, but it also creates more ISIS militants, who look at the carnage all around them and decide ISIS must be right. Ending the wars in Syria and Iraq, stemming the flow of arms to these and nearby regions, stopping Iraq's oppression of Sunni-majority areas, and fighting poverty in the Middle East will (to use a simpler metaphor than the "artichoke" metaphor Ms. Gould employs) starve ISIS of the oxygen it needs to make fire.

The New York Times observes a considerable amount of infighting among nominal conservatives -- mainly about whether conservatism has become too intolerant and too prone to believing the wildest lies. Many of the folks who say conservatism is just fine, thank you, don't deserve to be called "conservative," and Jonah Goldberg weighs in by saying TEH LIBRULZ ARE WORSEZ!!!!!! And if you came across the phrase "epistemic closure" and decided it meant political correctness, well, I wouldn't blame you.

Finally, Trump supporters grope and pepper-spray a 15-year-old girl at a rally in Janesville, WI. Yeah, she was a protestor, but does that make it OK to grope underage girls and then spray pepper in their faces? Let's see Teh Donald talk his way out of this one. Is it too much to hope that praising his supporters' "energy" or saying the girl was "asking for it" just won't do this time?