Thieves in the Temple.

Action: clean water, and economic justice.

Bucks-Mont People for Clean Water -- an organization comprised of folks from Bucks and Montgomery Counties in eastern Pennsylvania -- has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to regulate (and, of course, limit) the amount of the toxic chemicals PFOA and PFOS in local drinking water. Studies have linked PFOS (commonly found in stain repellents) to chronic kidney disease, and have also linked PFOA (commonly found in Teflon) to kidney and testicular cancer, among other significant health issues; the EPA has set an advisory limit of 70 parts per trillion for these chemicals, but really any amount of PFOA and PFOS is toxic, so we should at the least set it to non-detectable levels, as local state Reps. Murt and Stephens have advocated. Reps. Murt and Stephens, I fell compelled to note, are Republicans; if they're advocating for such stringent clean water regulations despite the constant pressure they must get from party bosses to fight regulations, you can feel pretty safe in supporting them yourself.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell FBI Director James Comey and Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz to explain why no banksters have gone to jail for their involvement in the 2008 economic crash. Mr. Comey, you may recall, went to some lengths to explain why the FBI would not indict Hillary Clinton for allegedly conducting some Department of State business on a private email server, but our national law enforcement officers haven't gone after banksters who screwed good Americans out of their houses and damn near screwed the entire country out of a functioning economy, and the latter crime is certainly more serious than the former, even if it doesn't enable right-wingers to go after their bête noire Mrs. Clinton. And there's no use arguing that what the banksters did wasn't illegal, not when the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (created by an act of Congress in 2009, and issuing its report on the crisis in 2011) found ample reason to suspect more than a dozen institutions and nine executives of securities fraud. So enough of this "looking forward, not backward" nonsense.

Around the table: Democrat weakness, overtime pay, millennial longings, security questions, and the prisoners' strike.

Congress averts a government shutdown by extending funding through December 9 -- but includes neither of the legislative priorities Democrats supposedly fought for, i.e., funding for Flint clean water efforts and the SEC being permitted to mandate publicly-traded corporations disclose their campaign spending. Which means Democrats can now ride campaign ads about Republican opposition to clean water and campaign finance reform all the way to victory in November! I kid, of course -- the only thing Democrats do well is let Republicans kick sand in their face.

The House also passes H.R. 6094, which would delay the Obama Administration's overtime pay rules for another six months. Note well that some House Democrats were pushing a similar bill not long ago, though only five House Democrats actually voted for this one. President Obama has threatened a veto, and the House won't be able to override it without somehow getting 46 more votes. And, ah, note to the folks who are still complaining that the cost of living varies from region to region: one, that's one reason the Obama Administration didn't raise the pay threshold even higher, and two, state governments are mostly twiddling their thumbs on this matter, so our federal government must act.

Harold Meyerson reminds us that "Young Voters Love Gary Johnson -- For All the Wrong Reasons." Mr. Johnson would legalize pot, of course, though I doubt that's as important to young voters as his stated aims to ditch the surveillance state and fight police brutality against black folks -- but Mr. Johnson would also do nothing about climate change or student debt, and would replace what remains of our progressive income tax with a totally regressive national sales tax, all of which will hit our youngest voters the hardest. I haven't given enough credit to millennials for supporting Bernie Sanders, the only candidate for whom I could vote without holding my nose. But their support for Mr. Johnson just reinforces the stereotype we oldheads tend to have about them -- that they don't care about the future.

Lily Hay Newman at Wired suggests it's "Time to Kill Security Questions -- or Answer Them With Lies." The hacking of half a billion Yahoo! accounts suggest that security questions have become just another piece of data that can be stolen, and used against you -- you can imagine a hacker stealing your identity this way, particularly in an age where social networks reveal a lot of this stuff anyway. Hence security experts suggest that you lie when answering these questions, and though they suggest you lie by answering with a nonsensical series of numbers and symbols and then use a password manager to store it, I find the prospect of simply answering with lies (using "Blanco" for my mother's maiden name, for example) more fascinating, since what do your lies say about you? is one of the more interesting questions pondered in literature.

Finally, Beth Schwartzappel at BillMoyers.com presents "A Primer on the Nationwide Prisoners' Strike," now in its third week. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlaws slavery, of course -- "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." But I question whether the Constitution really allows inhumane treatment of a citizen under any circumstances, including as punishment for a crime. (Personal to the fools who think that sentence means "prison should be a country club": learn to read.)

Action: battling ANWR/Arctic drilling and the proposed Bayer/Monsanto merger.

The Senate is contemplating S. 3203, the so-called Alaska Economic Development and Access to Resources Act, which would allow new drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) and the Arctic Ocean. What are the problems with these plans again? Roll call! Drilling for oil in ANWR won't yield very much oil! Drilling for oil in the Arctic is even harder than drilling in the Gulf! ANWR provides clean drinking water to good Alaskans! ANWR is sacred ground to the Gwich'in people! ANWR provides an environment for polar bears and caribou! OK, so it's not as snappy as the Mousketeer roll call, but it is all true -- more economic development in ANWR and the Arctic Ocean will do nothing for good Alaskans, but will make a few oil corporation CEOs a bit richer. Remember the days when Sen. Stevens would wear his Hulk tie to the Senate whenever an ANWR drilling bill came up? Sen. Stevens is gone, God rest him, but his dream of tearing up land all good Alaskans need so that a few CEOs can make a bit more money is, sadly, still with us. So the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your Senators to reject ANWR and Arctic Ocean drilling.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Department of Justice to stop the proposed Bayer-Monsanto merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. Allowing Bayer to buy Monsanto will allow Bayer to completely disappear the hated name of Monsanto while still carrying on all the nefarious works that have given Monsanto its bad name -- which include, but are certainly not limited to, crushing farmers who don't adhere to Monsanto's absurdly strict seed contracts and making more and more farmers dependent on toxic pesticides and genetically-modified food. It gets worse: if Bayer gets to buy Monsanto, the resulting behemoth would control 70 percent of the world's cotton seed, and if the equally nefarious Dow-DuPont merger also goes through, the result would be four corporations controlling 90 percent of the world's seeds and crop chemicals, and no power should be that concentrated. The world's food supply depends on diversity and availability, after all -- and corporate power squashes diversity and availability. Civilized people don't put power before food.

Action: promoting transparency, health, and competition.

By now you know that Charlotte, NC Police Chief Kerr Putney has released some of the body- and dash-cam coverage recorded during the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, also executed by police, apparently, for being black in America. What he's released is damning enough -- revealing that Mr. Scott had a book, not a gun, on him, both of these items apparently looking exactly the same in the "heat of the moment" -- but come Saturday, he won't have to release any more of it, because the notorious North Carolina law (is there any other kind these days?) HB 972, prohibiting the public from seeing any dash- or body-cam coverage, goes into effect. Hence Color of Change helps you tell the Department of Justice to withhold federal grant money from North Carolina as long as HB 972 remains on the books. The DOJ is well within its rights to do so, and states don't have a right to demand and receive federal assistance. If states need more money, they could always raise taxes on the rich and corporations, though the right-wingers who run things in North Carolina want to have it both ways. But they don't get all the say about everything in America.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Green Actions helps you tell the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to reject the proposed PennEast pipeline. The PennEast pipeline would transport natural gas over a hundred miles from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, but it would transport it through the Delaware River Watershed, which not only provides drinking water for millions of citizens, but also provides fishing and swimming activities -- plus, you know, other animals live there. Who do not deserve to die en masse just because some corporation wants to ship natural gas all around the place. Naturally, the proposed route would also dig up a good part of the Watershed, which all by itself endangers clean water, clean air, recreation, and wildlife, before we contemplate the spectre of a pipeline leak. Also, too, this'll be fracked gas, which means that in addition to possibly polluting the water in the Delaware River Watershed, it'll definitely pollute the water wherever it's fracked from. And that's the sort of thing we should be discouraging, not encouraging -- until gas drilling corporations can do it without poisoning our air and water. They probably think they can't, but that's not the American can-do spirit, is it?

Finally, you may have heard that Hewlett-Packard has just activated a "feature" in its OfficeJet Pro printers that prevents them from working with any ink cartridges other than brand-spanking-new HP printer cartridges. Which, as you no doubt know, cost an actual crapload of money, particularly if you're printing in color. You probably also know that third-party and recycled ink cartridges actually cost a lot less money -- if your printer doesn't simply shut down and refuse to work with them, that is. Now, here's the point where right-wingers would say it's their printer and they should be allowed to do whatever they want -- which would confuse you, if you also thought right-wingers supported competition. HP's move destroys any chance any fledgling business would have at giving the customer a better deal for their ink -- and if HP is afraid they won't be able to make money off their printers without charging an arm and a leg for their ink, then they're doing capitalism wrong. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell HP to stop forcing customers to use only expensive HP printer cartridges.

Around the table: media fact-checking, class-action lawsuits, extortionate drug prices, sentencing reform, and more Trumpian whining.

First, we take the wayback machine to three days ago, when the Trump campaign said that it's not the business of debate moderators -- or, indeed, the media -- to be "virtual fact-checkers." Or real fact-checkers, I suppose! I only bring this up to remind you that during Tha Bush Mobb years, right-wingers said pretty much the same thing -- that is, they literally declared that the media should be mere stenographers of the Bush Administration's pronouncements, and never tell readers whether or not those pronouncements were true. Because TEH WAR ON TEH TERRORZ!!!!!, you see. People who fear the truth always act like this -- and they never demand so little of the media when a Democrat's in the Oval Office.

Two ex-employees have sued Wells Fargo on behalf of current and former employees, not only for wrongful termination and unlawful business practices but also wage theft (including overtime pay for employees forced to work off-the-clock to meet Wells Fargo's absurd account quotas). Right-wingers in the Senate love bashing Wells Fargo now, but recall that these are the same folks who try to kill the class-action lawsuit in America by constantly calling it "frivolous." Corporations still file four out of every five lawsuits in America, but I never hear right-wingers say anything about that -- unless you point it out to them, of course, and then they act shocked that you would think such a thing about a matter they never discuss.

Remember hearing that Mylan "only" makes $100 on every EpiPen double-pack it sells? Now we learn that Mylan underestimated that figure by at least $60 per double-pack -- by actually counting corporate taxes it doesn't pay! Mylan arrived at the $100 figure in part by assuming it pays a 37.5% corporate rate, which of course it doesn't, not least because it's "relocated" to the Netherlands. Mylan's spokeshack responds, "(t)ax is typically included in a standard profitability analysis" blah blah freaking blah. And here you thought corporations counted profits by subtracting actual spending from actual revenues.

Politico reports that House Speaker Paul Ryan would really, really like to move bipartisan sentencing reform legislation, but is kinda afraid to partly because of the Trump Monster. Why I doubt this is true: one, most of the House's farthest-right members are in districts so gerrymandered they can't lose them; two, those downballot Republicans who are in competitive races can only benefit by differentiating themselves from the Trump Monster; and three, the objections raised by far-right Republicans could easily be answered by referring them to the bills already passed out of Judiciary. Also, a politician's default setting is "to lie."

Finally, after a debate performance so ill-received that even freaking John Podhoretz's negative review made me laugh out loud, Donald Trump wonders aloud to Fox and Friends if the "terrible" microphone he had to use during that debate was "set up that way on purpose." Of course he doesn't "want to believe in conspiracy theories," but he just has to wonder. But then, that's what winners do, right? Blame their bad performances on the equipment? Seriously, don't believe the notion that Our Glorious Elites don't want him to win. Of course they want him to win, because he's the personification of all their evil values (you know -- always demanding something for nothing, skimping out on your obligations to others, whining about misfortune you clearly deserve), and if he wins, he legitimizes those values. But they also win if he loses, because then they can pretend those values were his and his alone -- and then they'll just wait for the 2018 midterms, after which point Democrats will likely be unable to even filibuster bills in the Senate.

Action: 9.11 families, government spying, and bankster loopholes.

On Friday, President Obama vetoed H.R. 3815/S. 2040, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would have allowed families of 9.11 victims to sue the Saudi Arabian government over its alleged role in the attacks -- and might well have the happy effect of showing more Americans how damaging our blind alliance with Saudi Arabia is. The bill doesn't actually claim the government of Saudi Arabia did the deed, but merely allows 9.11 families to have their day in court over the issue. Mr. Obama vetoed the bill, apparently out of concern for the concept of "sovereign immunity" (an ancient legal doctrine which generally prevents states from being sued), but other laws (the Federal Tort Claims Act and the Tucker Act, to name two) have already modified the concept over the years, and anyway that's a bit rich coming from the guy who's still pressing a "free" trade deal that would vastly expand corporations' ability to sue governments and extort bailouts from taxpayers. So Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn in helping you tell your Congressfolk to override the veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.

Meanwhile, you know the police use "Stingray" devices (which tricks cell phones into giving up all their info by pretending to be cell phone towers) to conduct all sorts of surveillance they're not authorized by a warrant to get. But you may not know that the Stingray's effects can be even worse -- they can keep protestors from reaching each other, and they can also keep folks from making 911 calls, which could mean the difference between life and death. Police could also use stingrays to spoof messages from other people's phones, a power that could not possibly be abused by the unscrupulous. Hate to pile on, but the FBI routinely makes local police sign agreements that prevent them from telling judges about their use. Folks still unconvinced can answer this question: if you know a technology will cause considerably more harm than good, why would you use it? Forgive me if I sound a bit conservative about this matter. Decide the Future helps you tell the FCC to prohibit local police from using stingrays. (The FCC has jurisdiction over the frequencies Stingrays use, which are the same frequencies that phones use.)

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to close the "carried interest loophole" that allows hedge fund managers to pay a lower rate on their taxes than many working families, then Sign Here Now still helps you do that. Hedge fund managers can make millions of dollars a day and still pay a lower rate than folks who work for a living! How is that conducive to freedom? A right-winger might argue that freedom thrives whenever we allow individuals to get the most freedom for themselves, but if those individuals can get enough freedom to dictate our lives to the rest of us, how are we then more free? And that's what tax loopholes for the rich do: they give the rich more power to run roughshod over the rest of us. And if you're having trouble figuring out what exactly a hedge fund manager does to earn all that money, you're not stupid or uneducated, you're just awake. Too many banksters make bajillions of dollars not by helping people make better products or processes, but by moving properties around in a giant shell game. As Americans, we deserve a lot better than that, and we must demand it.

Action: fighting voter suppression, police harassment of protestors, and gas chamber euthanasia for pets.

The Peace Team helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate the "Interstate Crosscheck" database for criminal violations. (You may also use this link, if you're using a smartphone.) "Interstate Crosscheck," as you know from the reports of Greg Palast and other journalists, is a massive database purporting to stop people from voting multiple times across state lines by tallying up all the folks with the same first and last names from different states. You can already see the problem with that, right? America is a big, big place, and plenty of people have the same first and last names! Worse, of course, is that minority folks tend to have the same first and last names more than other folks, which means the database disproportionately affects minority voters. But that's not all! The list doesn't even consistently check last names, Jr. or Sr. voters, or Social Security numbers. If that sounds as much like a voter suppression scam to you as it does to me, then tell the DOJ what you want them to do about it.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate police interference in protestors' monitoring of police behavior. One Michael Picard of Connecticut has lately filed a lawsuit alleging that, a little over a year ago, police officers harassed him and took the cell phone he was using to record their behavior -- only to fail to realize that they hadn't turned the phone off after taking it, thus accidentally recording what sounds an awful lot like two police officers conspiring to fabricate evidence and level frivolous charges against Mr. Picard in order to "cover our ass (sic)." Mr. Picard is a well-known local protestor -- opposed to DUI checkpoints, apparently, and wont to film police officers at those checkpoints -- but that doesn't matter, because he still has rights. And so do the rest of us -- police can't come up to you and tell you that filming them is "illegal," because it isn't; it's Constitutionally-protected free speech. It doesn't violate their rights as citizens, either, because they're public servants. And remember: their next target could always be you.

Finally, Caitlin Halliday, of Kaysville, UT, has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Utah state legislature to outlaw gas chambers as a method of euthanizing pets. Most pets have relatively quick and painless injections available to them, but 30 animal shelters in America (including seven in Utah) still euthanizes pets in a gas chamber, which euthanizes multiple pets at once. No one, I hope, is tempted to applaud the efficiency of these devices, especially not when death can take up to a half hour and where scared pets lash out at each other. Some people actually argue that gas chambers are cheaper than lethal injections. Well, I'm one of those old-fashioned people who thinks you don't make every decision in life based on monetary cost -- and certainly not decisions involving the suffering of your loved ones, which your pets most assuredly are. We should more often make decisions based on the cost to our souls, and I sure do hope the Utah legislature (which has already failed to pass a bill banning gas chamber euthanasia) can find their soul in this matter.

Around the table: with stories concerning "free" trade, fracking, education, voting, and free speech.

"Liberal" media coverage of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" continues to disappoint. Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches the New York Times not only pulling the same shenanigans as before -- they "report" majorities of Americans supporting "free" trade by playing shell games with the terms "free trade," "trade," and "trade agreements" -- but also cherry-picked the numbers from a cited study in order to make it seem like more Americans like "free" trade. Recall that the only thing threatening the passage of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" has been public opinion -- most politicians want it, most "liberal" media outlets want it, but the owners of government, the people, generally do not, or we wouldn't be hearing bad arguments from the best of our media outlets (and, of course, racist booga-booga about China from the worst).

The EPA plans to keep allowing offshore oil and gas drilling corporations to dump unlimited amounts of fracking wastewater in the Gulf of Mexico. You may recall that a very widely-covered oil spill occurred in that Gulf just six years ago, and at least one agency says the EPA's draft proposals violates the Clean Water Act. The proposal does mandate that offshore fracking outlets keep an inventory (which regulators may review at any time) of fracking chemicals, which could puncture the cult of secrecy surrounding fracking chemicals as a result of the 2005 energy bill keeping them confidential -- if the EPA enforces it. You think Donald Trump's EPA will enforce it? Of course not -- it's not YUGE or BYOOTIFUL enough.

The Department of Education strips the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (or ACICS) of its authority to accredit for-profit colleges. A welcome development, even if the ACICS showed signs of getting its act together in recent months, but of course I still don't understand why our government doesn't do all the accrediting itself on our behalf. Because Big Gummint is always wrong? What of our government? No use arguing that government doing the work puts bureaucrats between us and our goal, when private accreditation ensures another layer of bureaucrats between us and our goal -- a layer far less accountable to the people, of course, like that was the idea or something.

ProPublica looks at how various early voting regimes encourage (or fail to encourage) turnout. Key findings: in-person absentee voting and same-day registration seem to boost minority turnout the most (no wonder North Carolina tried to do away with them!), and voting by mail tends to boost turnout the first time it's used but not much thereafter (which doesn't discredit it, since a small boost in turnout following a large boost in turnout still represents an improvement). The jury's out on automatic voter registration, obviously, since only five states have it, and none have run it in an election yet.

Finally, Rob Boston at the Wall of Separation blog reminds us that arguing with street preachers doesn't actually violate their First Amendment rights. Which should come as no surprise, of course -- we should know already that the First Amendment doesn't flow in one direction at a time, and that the First Amendment shields you from your government, not other people exercising their First Amendment rights. But we should take every opportunity to smash the notion that criticism equals oppression, a notion I hear mostly from the right these days.

Around the table: what "accountability" and "responsibility" mean to banksters, and other hard lessons.

Massachusetts Supreme Court throws out conviction of black man for unlawful firearm possession, on the basis that police didn't have probable cause to stop him. But the more interesting finding? That when a black man runs from police, he's not in and of itself giving enough evidence of guilt to constitute "probable cause" -- that he "might just as easily be motivated by the desire to avoid the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity." This is not "judicial activism," of course, but the application of common sense to the law -- which does not, and cannot, mandate that black men be suspected and stopped by police, after all.

The incomparable Dave Lindorff reminds us that Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf has promised "accountability" and "taking responsibility" for his corporation's transgressions, but won't do anything that might suggest an actual commitment to accountability and responsibility, like resigning or giving back his unearned millions. Mr. Lindorff then imagines what that would be like if we all did that -- speeders can admit "accountability" and "responsibility" and then drive away, murderers can admit "accountability" and "responsibility" and then leave the courtroom untouched, and so on. But for many tax cheats, of course, this is already the reality -- as long as you're not one of the "little people," that is.

Mylan CEO Heather Bresch tells Congress that Mylan "only" makes $50 in profit per dose of EpiPen. Which almost certainly isn't true (surely Ms. Bresch counts overpaying herself as one of the "costs" that interfere with profits), but is rather beside the point -- if you sell millions of these every year, then you're still making a lot of money. Rep. Chaffetz (R-UT) gets in a lot of good shots during the hearing, but let's see if he supports any action afterward.

In other Mylan-related news, Mylan had some, ah, friends in high places helping it get the EpiPen into public schools -- none other than Gayle Manchin, head of the National Association of State Boards of Education, and, of course, the wife of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and, more interestingly, the mother of Mylan CEO Heather Bresch. How clever of Mrs. Manchin to put forward an initiative to get schools to keep more life-saving allergy medications on site -- and to get our government to give certain funding preferences to schools that complied! Still, this is a turd that can be polished by creating/allowing more competition for the EpiPen. That wouldn't be the only happy ending to this story, though -- when Sen. Manchin gets blown out in his re-election effort in 2018, he'll get to annoy his wife and daughter a lot more.

Finally, a solid one-third of U.S. Senators go on record supporting a public health care option, but Democrat "moderates" up for re-election in 2018 sound far more skeptical. How many times must I tell these pimps! They will not lose re-election because they support a public health care option, they'll lose because they oppose it -- poll after poll tells us that a majority of Americans support a single-payer system, which is rather to the left of a public option. The three Senators named -- Heidtkamp of North Dakota, Tester of Montana, and McCaskill of Missouri -- are all toast in 2018, if they insist on taking the road of cowardice.

Action: concerning refugees, police brutality, and antibiotic abuse.

You've heard that stupid Skittles rant lately emanating from Donald Trump, Jr.? About how you wouldn't eat from a bowl of Skittles if you knew three of them were poisonous, and how that's supposedly just like the choice we face when admitting refugees, ha ha ha? Setting aside the utter stupidity of the metaphor (if a single Skittle could kill a human being, what might it do to the other Skittles in the bowl? And how is a single terrorist attack a poison that destroys an entire country?), the metaphor isn't even apt: refugees have perpetrated precisely zero terrorist attacks in American history (perhaps because they themselves are running from terror in their own countries), meaning that particular bowl contains precisely zero poisonous Skittles. Hence the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase our support for refugees when they come to America. And let's only use the word "poison" as a metaphor for things that actually hurt our beloved country -- you know, like Donald Trump's ongoing quest to legitimize racists.

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of at least two more senseless killings of black men by police, the ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5221, the Preventing Tragedies Between Police and Communities Act, which would mandate state and local police departments receiving certain federal funding to train their officers in de-escalation, and would also mandate that states and localities require their officers to use de-escalation techniques before they use violence. Though certain individuals would like you to think that police always do the right thing and don't need to be told what to do by Big Gummint, de-escalation training is, frankly, not a big ask -- we already ask soldiers in war zones to perform half a dozen tasks before shooting to kill, and no matter what Donald Trump tells you, inner cities are not war zones, so why do we tolerate the notion that police officers have "no alternative" but to shoot to kill where black men are concerned? The America I love is not the country where we throw up our hands and decide we have no choice but to kill black men. Not on my watch, anyway.

Finally, The Consumerist told us not long ago that most big restaurant chains still rely too much on antibiotic-raised meat, Consumers Union helps you tell those big restaurant chains -- including Burger King, Applebee's, Starbucks, and Olive Garden -- to do better at keeping antibiotic abuse out of their meat supply chains. As you know, four out of every five antibiotics in America get used not on sick people or animals but on nominally healthy farm animals, partly so they'll produce more meat and partly so they'll endure miserable factory farm conditions better. But you may well be asking: OK, but why the big restaurant chains? Why not just avoid eating at them? For one thing, you're perfectly free to use more than one tool to complete a task, particularly when the Big Stick of Bad PR works pretty well in this area. For another thing, a lot of people eat at these restaurants, and you won't be able to convince them not to just by telling them that eating too much antibiotic-raised meat could bring about a world of superbugs that medicines can't cure anymore.

Around the table: should we make richer folks may more for minor fines? And other thorny questions.

Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic describes the "sliding scale" fines many European nations assess for minor infractions like speeding -- fines that depend on the income of the lawbreaker, meaning a speeding ticket for a wealthy man could run as high as $50,000. I'm actually finding myself averse to the idea that a police officer could look up your income as easily as all that -- though I certainly recognize that fines and fees disproportionately hurt the poor in America, and would prefer good, progressive taxation, at all levels of government, as a revenue-raising tool to those fines and fees. I have no compunction about applying such a "sliding scale" system to corporate malfeasance, however -- corporations aren't people, after all, and we'd never have to hear again about we shouldn't fine corporations for bad behavior because small businesses can't pay the fines.

Senators from both political parties are having an awful lot of fun bashing Wells Fargo for its lawbreaking, but Matthew Yglesias at Vox reminds us that Republican lawmakers have been trying to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency that helped discover the lawbreaking in the first place. I find Mr. Yglesias's thinking a bit foggy at times, but he hits it right on the head here: "Banking committee Republicans want to grandstand when banks get caught, while voting to make it much less likely that banks actually do get caught." Their number includes Sen. Shelby (R-AL), who excoriated Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf when he appeared before Mr. Shelby's committee but who also constantly whines about our government being a "nanny state." Well, if banksters act like big babies, maybe they need a nanny.

Normal Solomon catches AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka pushing for the Dakota Access Pipeline to proceed, saying "it is fundamentally unfair to hold union members’ livelihoods and their families’ financial security hostage to endless delay." I've been saying it's fundamentally unfair for corporate CEOs to hold jobs hostage to whatever they want, but here Mr. Trumka does their work for them. I mean, I'm always saying we have to build stuff to create jobs, but our options for "building stuff to create jobs" isn't limited to building fossil fuel pipelines -- we could build wind and solar farms, for example -- and it's a bit sad to see Mr. Trumka holding to old notions as surely as fossil fuel CEOs do.

Thanks to America's few remaining journalists, we have learned that Indiana Governor (and Donald Trump running mate) Mike Pence once argued, in the right-wing Indiana Policy Review, that employers shouldn't hire gays. Why? Because they "are not, as a group, able-bodied. They are known to carry extremely high rates of disease brought on because of the nature of their sexual practices and the promiscuity which is a hallmark of their lifestyle." You knew that was rubbish, of course, as soon as you read "(t)hey are known," which is how they all put it when they're advancing something plainly ridiculous. And no use claiming "it was so long ago" -- just last year, Gov. Pence was the biggest supporter of Indiana's "religious liberty" law, until the Big Stick of Bad PR hit him.

Finally, Donald Trump discourses at length to a North Carolina rally audience about how much he loves "OPM," or Other People's Money. Which is pretty spectacular timing, given allegations that his charitable foundation literally used Other People's Money to pay off lawsuits. You and I would be ashamed to use Other People's Money in this manner, but big, bold, Donald Trump ain't got no time for shame. You think Naughty by Nature will let a Clinton ad riff off "OPP"?

Action: bankster misbehavior nay, public health insurance yea, and campaign finance disclosure yea.

As you know, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf answered questions before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday; he said he was sorry, etc., and would make amends, etc., etc., but note well that Wells Fargo has fired the employees who were ordered to open fake accounts for customers, while the executive who gave those orders hasn't given back any of her nearly $125 million in retirement money. After all, rules are for us "little people," not the "job creators" without whom, we are constantly told, we would be nothing. Hence CREDO helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to use its authority to "claw back" income from Wells Fargo executives who oversaw lawbreaking. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law passed in 2010 give the CFPB the authority to do that, and why not? They're ill-gotten gains, after all -- money those executives could not have made without lawbreaking. And people who complain about schoolkids getting "participation trophies" have no business excusing all the bonuses banksters hand out to themselves; they hand out so many anymore it's hard to tell what they did to deserve them. Besides coerce employees into breaking the law, that is.

Meanwhile, several big health insurance corporations are either leaving the Affordable Care Act-created health exchanges or threatening to do so, but let's not view this development as merely an opportunity to laugh at big corporations whining because their CEOs can't gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home boo-freaking-hoo, though it is surely an opportunity to do that, one we should not pass up. We can also press our advantage in other ways, such as agitating for a public health care option, as Presente helps you do. President Obama unconscionably used the public option as a bait-and-switch to get liberals to support a right-wing health care reform law -- one that has made our health care system better, to be sure, but how difficult is it to improve on that system, really? -- but that doesn't mean we can't press for a public option, even if we really want a Medicare-for-all system. A public option, whereby one would buy into Medicare or something like it (though I can't imagine why it wouldn't, or shouldn't, be Medicare) would give HMOs the vigorous competition they all say they like about capitalism. So let's give it to them.

Finally, H.R. 430/S. 229, the DISCLOSE Act, would mandate that corporations, unions, and "certain other entities" (including political action committees) disclose any campaign spending they undertake over $10,000; they would also have to identify all donors who gave over $1,000 toward such efforts. The majority in the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC decision seemed flabbergasted that anyone would want to restrict campaign spending when disclosure would seem to be an adequate replacement. Silly Supreme Court Justices! The DISCLOSE Act "only" got 59 out of 100 Senate votes in 2010, which, as we all know, means it's exactly as much a law as it would have been if it had received zero votes in favor. Still, since we now must amend the U.S. Constitution to get decent campaign finance laws back, we are perfectly right to insist on disclosure of big donors in the meantime, even if Super Great and Awesome Real American President Mitch McConnell, once a supporter of campaign finance disclosure, now thinks it's "bullying." Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the DISCLOSE Act.

Around the table: drug prices, antibiotic abuse, anti-competitive practices, and the strange, strange world of Donald Trump.

Why is Mylan, owner/extorter behind the EpiPen, trying to get the EpiPen placed on a federal list of "preventive medical services"? To lower prices for the people who need it, since most folks getting those services must (per the Affordable Care Act) get them for no out-of-pocket cost? Well, not quite: as the New York Times reports, getting on that list won't hurt Mylan's profits, but would mean our government and private insurers would have to pay the cost -- meaning, ultimately, we'll all pay for it, either through taxes or higher insurance premiums. That's at least the second time Mylan's tried PR sleight-of-hand. Getting more competition for EpiPen would be a better idea; expanding Medicare to include everyone would be a better idea yet.

Health advocacy coalition finds that most of America's 25 biggest restaurant chains aren't doing anywhere near enough to get antibiotic-free meat out of their supply chains. In case you were wondering, Panera and Chipotle do the best job, with Subway and Chick-Fil-A a little behind them. McDonald's still hasn't gotten antibiotics out of its pork, though it's gotten them out of its chicken, while Dunkin Donuts has actually gone backward by changing its antibiotics mandate to a suggestion. It'd be nice to just ignore what most of the big restaurant chains do, but most Americans aren't ignoring them. At least we're getting more commitment and more action out of them, but we've got a long way to go.

ProPublica looks at Amazon's pricing algorithm, and finds it wanting. Yes, the algorithm that purports to "find the lowest price" and put it in the "buy box" usually finds that price at Amazon or at a seller who's paid for product placement, regardless of where one might actually find the lowest price. And when you drill deeper on the "more buying choices" page, Amazon tends to omit shipping costs for the same categories of sellers -- which works if you've bought Amazon Prime (and get free shipping), but is rather misleading if you don't. Naturally, Amazon's spokeshack says price isn't everything, which is what they all say when they get caught with their pants down. Also, too, the EU considers practices like these anticompetitive, which our government would, too, if it didn't defer to the corporations who give mere lip service to the notion of "competition."

Donald Trump says "our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before," adding, just in case you missed it, "ever, ever, ever." Slavery, Jim Crow -- both wiped out with one rhetorical flourish! Still, if Donald Trump wants to press his point about inner-city poverty and misery in Presidential debates -- and a lot of right-wingers would like him to! -- Hillary Clinton could respond thusly: "well, inner cities are miserable because of predatory landlords like you, Mr. Trump, who took $850 million in tax breaks from New York City over the years, who even took a grant intended for small businesses destroyed by 9.11 in order to rebuild a building that wasn't even damaged by 9.11."

Finally, Robert Reich describes a zinger he gets off on a Trump supporter. Long story short: the man supports Trump because he's a great businessman, one who could turn a $200 million family fortune into a $4.5 billion fortune, and then Mr. Reich responds, "(b)ut if he had just put that $200 million into an index fund and reinvested the dividends, he’d be worth twelve billion today." The "$850 million in tax subsidies" is a little like twisting the knife, but hey, it's true. The more ominous sign from the anecdote? The Trump supporter acknowledges that Mr. Trump is "a little bit much," which is a hell of an understatement -- and which suggests that mainstream Republicans are now pretty used to him.

Action: fighting discrimination, greed, and more greed.

CREDO helps you tell Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell to ensure that child placement services receiving federal funding don't discriminate against children and adults on the basis of sexuality. That means no child placement service receiving federal funding can slow-walk an adoption of a gay or transgendered kid, or prevent gay or transgendered adults from adopting kids, or they'll lose their federal funding. I just can't wait for right-wingers to whine and cry and stamp their feet over this -- TEH GUBMINT IZ DISCRIMINATINGZ AGAINSTZ MY RIGHTZ TO DISCRIMINATEZ BECUZ TEH JESUSEZ!!!!! The Constitution guarantees that your free speech won't land you in jail, but it does not guarantee you that your free speech will automatically win you federal funding. It would be equally amusing/annoying to see nominal "conservatives" argue that their pet placement services can't survive without federal funding. Jesus Mary and Joseph if they placed children with parents on the basis of how good the parents are, rather than who the parents sleep with, maybe they'd do well enough not to need federal help.

Meanwhile, even as Mylan, manufacturer of EpiPen, continues to extort the patients who'd die without it, Congress seems helpless to do anything -- because that would require work, and most of these bozos make not working a point of pride! -- but the Executive branch can use its own powers to end this disgusting situation, so Social Security Works helps you tell President Obama to use all the levers he can to prevent drug corporations from charging absurd prices for life-saving medications. Happily Mr. Obama is less inclined to defer to Congress than he used to be, and he's also far from powerless in this matter -- the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 (that's Birch Bayh and Bob Dole, BTW) empowers our government to license other corporations to produce a federally-funded drug (like the EpiPen, and also like most other drugs) if the corporation that holds the patent doesn't offer it at a "reasonable price." And Mr. Obama doesn't have to go to Super Great and Awesome Real American President Mitch McConnell for permission. So let's tell him to do it. We are the owners of government, after all -- and, also, the real owners of the EpiPen.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to close the tax loopholes that allow hedge fund managers to pay a lower effective tax rate than working families, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. As you know, the "carried interest loophole" enables hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate (23.8%, at most) on the money they make because they get to call it "capital gains," rather than what it is: income for providing a service to investors. Your Congressfolk would rather do nothing about the loophole, because TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!! But a truly free market promotes freedom for everyone, not just certain individuals. And those of us who live in the real world know that the powerful use their power to protect their position, and protecting their position means the rest of us must be less free to become our best selves. Really, Our Glorious Elites' worship of mammon is coming very close to destroying us all. Closing the "carried interest" loophole won't fix all of that, but it would certainly be a very good start. After all, hedge fund managers aren't better than us.

Around the table: contains several unpleasant reminders about Tha Bush Mobb.

The New York Times describes the nearly $900 million in tax breaks he's collected from the city over the years to build his various projects. If Hillary Clinton wants to hit Mr. Trump hard again, she could do worse than call him "Donald Trump: Welfare Queen." Paragraph 11 -- which describes how Mr. Trump took advantage of a post-9.11 federal grant intended for small businesses to "rebuild" a property that he even said on 9.11 "wasn't affected" by the attack -- should be its own ad, if not an ad campaign.

Dean Baker at TruthOut marks the eighth anniversary of the Lehmann Brothers collapse to puncture various myths about the subsequent bailouts. Like that claim you heard that we'd have suffered a decade of double-digit unemployment without the financial services bailout? Actually, the claim was that we'd suffer a decade of double-digit unemployment without any stimulus actions whatsoever. And the bailout -- still the greatest humiliation George W. Bush visited upon the American people, and that's saying something -- doesn't even qualify as stimulus, really; after all, who got stimulated by that, except bankster executives dependent on their unearned bonuses?

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism tells us "How the SEC Enabled the Gross Under-Reporing of CEO Pay." Long story short: the SEC does actually try to measure money made from stock options (which constitute the bulk of CEO pay), but their measuring tool doesn't capture the inside information CEOs typically have about stock value, which means it doesn't capture what CEOs really make from executing those options -- and which ultimately means that CEOs at America's 500 biggest corporations don't actually make a "mere" 373 times what average workers make, but more like 949 times. That's right, for every buck you and I make, they make $949, and for contributing what to society, exactly, that someone else couldn't do? Recall that most Americans think the ratio is actually more like 30:1 -- and would prefer that it were seven to one.

Ho hum, 21 of the 27 states suing the Obama Administration over the EPA's Clean Power Plan are on track to meet the Plan's 2024 emissions reduction requirements. Several state Attorneys General retort that their lawsuit isn't about clean air so much as it's about state "sovereignty" and federal "coercion and commandeering." The Plan that allows states to figure out how to meet the standards on their own is "coercive"? Next time, a Democratic President should just tell them what to do and how to do it and make federal funding for all kinds of unrelated things contingent upon it, and maybe then they'll understand what "coercion" actually is. Right now, they just sound like a bunch of spoiled brats who never want to do anything they're supposed to do. Good readers, please let me know if you feel like I'm holding back about this.

You could almost imagine why Jim Newell at Slate would tell you "Gary Johnson Is Not Worth Any Liberal's Protest Vote," but it's still good to be reminded. Mr. Johnson would balance the budget solely by cutting spending, would replace income and payroll taxes with a national sales tax, and would vastly cut the kind of regulations that actually protect us from harm -- but, actually, it's not difficult to see why young folks flock to him. Sure, he's a genuine fellow, and the major party choices are uninspiring to say the least -- but young people all think they're going to live forever, and haven't faced that fact that their old age is going to be tough if Medicare and Social Security aren't there.

Finally, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence thinks Dick Cheney is a terrific role model for his own Vice Presidency. Because Tha Dicksta was "very active," you see, never mind that what Dick Cheney was very active about was the destruction of the country we love. Of course, where you and I see destruction, bold thinkers like Mike Pence see freedom -- and if that only means freedom for their corporate paymasters, well, too bad for us little people.

Action: "free" trade, fuel efficiency, and women's health.

I'll admit that things are looking up on the "free" trade front, with French and German leaders declaring the TTIP "free" trade deal all but dead, and Congressional leaders saying they won't bring the TPP up for a vote during the lame-duck period. I think they're lying, of course -- they could attach its ratification to one of the many must-pass spending bills Congress will leave to the last minute. Still, breathe deep and consider that the only reason our leaders haven't rammed these "deals" through already is that the public opposes them, which is exactly how it's supposed to work, but too often doesn't. So Sum of Us helps you tell Our Glorious Elites to end the use of the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) courts that "free" trade deals empower -- not only because they nullify our laws, enable pollution, and keep their rulings secret, but because they encourage corporations to shop around the world for trade-related problems that'll allow them to manufacture grievances with governments and extract taxpayer tribute. In other words, corporations use ISDS to file frivolous lawsuits.

Meanwhile, our government mandated stronger auto mileage standards back in 2012, and auto manufacturing corporations embraced them. But if you thought that seemed too good to be true, maybe you were on to something: the EPA and the NHTSA are now reviewing the standards, and some automaking corporations are pushing them to weaken them. So Consumers Union helps you tell our government to keep fuel efficiency standards strong. Upon hearing that seven in 10 Americans think auto mileage standards should be stronger, I imagined right-wingers advancing the argument that those three-in-10 who disagree are an aggrieved minority who should get veto power over the standards. Majority rule is not always the right thing to do -- if seven in 10 Americans decided that the other three-in-10 should be their slaves, we would not permit that, because that would oppress the three. But higher mileage standards, frankly, don't oppress three in 10 Americans -- not even if they feel "oppressed" by less pollution, less climate change, and lower health care costs.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 448/S. 217, the Women's Health Protection Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Women's Health Protection Act would essentially repeal all the state-level laws we've seen over the last five-plus years -- which include laws requiring medically unnecessary ultrasounds, absurd physical plant requirements for abortion clinics, unnecessary hospital-admission privileges for abortion practitioners -- that don't actually protect women's health or even reduce abortions, but merely harass women who seek an abortion. Women already approach the decision to end a pregnancy with a gravity that I, as a man, cannot even contemplate, and mandating all the extra hoops and guilt trips demonstrates a profound disrespect for women that is precisely the kind of childish thing a man should put behind him. And, please, withhold the "just don't have sex if you don't want to have a child" lecture. A man, certainly, should know better than to preach abstinence to anyone -- particularly if he's going to turn around and tell his buddies about his latest conquest.

Action: arms control, coal pollution, and the Garland nomination.

The Senate may vote on S.J.Res. 39, which would scuttle over $1 billion in proposed arms transactions between our government and Saudi Arabia, as early as tomorrow, so Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Senators to support S.J.Res. 39, and thus curtail our involvement in Saudi Arabia's war with Yemen. It's nice to have some bipartisan heft to this bill, originally sponsored by Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, and since joined by fellow Republican Mike Lee of Utah and Democrats Al Franken of Minnesota, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, and Chris Murphy of Connecticut. The Saudi Arabian government has been killing civilians rather indiscriminately (and committing other human rights violations) in its war with Yemen, but S.J.Res. 39 would prevent Saudi Arabia from getting their hands on hundreds of tanks, grenade launchers, and machine guns. We have had a tendency to give our allies in the Middle East whatever they want, and they've acted as you'd expect someone to act when they get everything they want -- intolerably. But it's well past time we used our leverage more wisely.

Meanwhile, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hasn't updated coal corporations' water permits so they comply with the EPA's new limits on water pollution from coal plants, so the Sierra Club helps you tell the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to protect good Pennsylvanians' water from coal plant pollution. Actually, "hasn't updated" may be an understatement: Pennsylvania has let a lot of coal plant water permits expire, some for years at a time, and I wouldn't blame you for seeing the withered hand of Tom Corbett, with his infamous DEP led for many years by the notoriously secretive Michael Krancer, behind those delays. But we're supposed to get action on the environment from Democrat executives, aren't we? Tom Wolf has been in power almost two years, and we're still getting more arsenic, more mercury, more selenium in our drinking water from coal pollution than we should be. But remember: politics isn't a spectator sport, and nothing in the world prevents us from demanding more from our leaders than they're otherwise inclined to give, and if we speak out enough, we will see action.

Finally, Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination has now hung out there for six months, for no good reason. I mean, Republicans have their "reasons," like that a nomination during a Presidential election year is "unprecedented" (like Antonin Scalia should have had the foresight to die next year, and also, it's not) or that "the American people should have a voice" (like the people have no voice at any time other than Election Day, wonder why they'd want you to think that), but we know the real reason: they're afraid of losing the nominally conservative majority on the Court for the foreseeable future. Hence the Sierra Club still helps you tell your Senators to hold hearings on the Garland nomination already. It is a relatively old action alert, though, so you'll have to edit out some of the more dated information (if only the election were still 300 days away!). But the action alert does not compel you to demand his confirmation, only to hold hearings, which really is the least they could do. I'm OK with confirming Mr. Garland myself -- moderates tend to drift leftward once they're on the Supreme Court.

Around the table: prisoners on strike, journalists silent about mistreatment of journalists, corrupt politicians corrupting, drug-resistant infections still infecting, and Trump still Trumping.

The largest prison workers' strike in American history enters its second week. I'm no fan of free/cheap prison labor, either, and no, putting people in jail doesn't entitle us to do anything we want to them, because prisoners have specific sentences that detail their debt to society, and heaping more punishments upon them merely because they're incarcerated is cruel and uncivilized. Rageaholics waiting for the next "outrage" to be peddled to them by the "liberal" media will, of course, be unpersuaded by that argument, but they don't get all the say in America. I applaud the courage of the striking prisoners, who remain largely at the mercy of whatever retaliatory measures their captors can come up with, including but not limited to sudden charges of "terrorism."

North Dakota arrests Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman for "criminal trespassing," i.e., asking tough questions of Dakota pipeline security guards -- and the "liberal" media seems largely uninterested. You would think as journalists they would be aghast at this kind of treatment of one of their own -- but then, they probably don't consider Ms. Goodman "one of their own," because she doesn't hobnob with the powerful people they hobnob with. Here's a clue: if you're a journalist who cares about which rich and powerful person you're in with, you're doing journalism wrong.

The Guardian publishes some 1,500 pages detailing allegations of campaign finance law violations by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. The evidence the article presents is pretty damning -- if you thought Bill Clinton's "that depends on your definition of the word 'is'" was damning, just imagine the hifalutin legal contortions Scott Walker will have to employ to explain how statements like "I got $1m from John Menard today" doesn't subvert the law. "That depends on your definition of the word 'got'," he'll say! Of course, Mr. Walker may never go to trial, since these papers were all supposed to be destroyed.

Reuters finds that, 15 years after our government declared antibiotic-resistant infections a "grave threat," those infections have become a much greater threat. Worse than that, even, is that our state and federal governments don't even count deaths from those infections -- you're more likely to see Scott Walker talking about campaign money he's "got" than you are to see the word "MRSA" on a death certificate. But, yeah, let's keep using up that antibiotic hand soap. And let's keep prescribing antibiotics just to shut patients up. And, most importantly, let's make sure factory farms still use antibiotics indiscriminately on feed animals.

Finally, more than one analyst has suggested that maybe Donald Trump has really jumped the shark this time, by making his big "birther" press conference into an "infomercial" for his new hotel in Washington. The theory goes like this: if you piss off the press (this time, by making them wait for your big announcement by promoting your hotel), you're finished. How I know it might be true this time? I remember how Scott Walker couldn't get traction last year after treating the media with open disdain. Also, Jake Tapper gets off not one but two zingers about it. (As an aside, Mr. Trump can't even admit his big birther mistake without blaming someone else for it; is that leadership? Hell, is that grown-up behavior?)

Around the table: an *even worse* boss than Donald Trump, and other amazing stories.

Lawsuit seeks to end Georgia's practice of throwing out voter registration forms that don't precisely match information in other state databases. Apparently even an extra hyphen in your name can get you disenfranchised -- and, surprise, surprise! Black folks seem to get their voter registration forms thrown out at a disproportionate rate. That reminds me of the "Interstate Crosscheck" database, which states use to disenfranchise voters with similar names to voters in other states -- another tactic that just so happens to hurt minorities at a disproportionate rate. All to catch the phantom "voter fraudster," which Tha Bush Mobb's Justice Department couldn't even find in any significant numbers.

How's this for cojones? Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf blames his employees for all those fake accounts Wells Fargo created for its customers. Those would be the same employees under constant pressure to meet sales quotas -- though of course Mr. Stumpf never actually said "break the law or I'll fire you," and while that may be the only evidence John Roberts would admit in a fraud case, the rest of us aren't so literal that we screen out the truth. And our leaders wonder why we don't respect them anymore!

Donald Trump's campaign deletes lengthy press release/diatribe against the "FDA Food Police" and "inspection overkill" from its website. You think they heard, maybe on the news or something, that food poisoning is unpopular? Or did they learn that the most recent food safety overhaul in Congress (passed in 2010) actually had broad bipartisan support in both Houses? Strangely, throwing up for hours on end because of something you ate is a far worse prospect, for most Americans, than stricter regulations on farmers and food production facilities -- and, truth be known, regulations are really only unpopular with a) the corporations that have to comply with them and b) the rageaholics they can manipulate into being angry about that, in addition to all the other things they're angry about.

House Democrats urge the Justice Department to investigate the Donald J. Trump Foundation, at least in part because of that suspicious campaign donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. I just can't wait for the first right-winger who calls such a thing "unprecedented," as if Mr. Trump's opponent didn't get investigated for her private emails and for the Benghazi disaster. (And if you confront a right-winger thusly, and they quickly say well, hers was justified, it's perfectly OK to remind them that they've just changed the subject -- which was that a Trump investigation would be unprecedented -- and that changing the subject concedes the point.)

Finally, dig this ad by Missouri Secretary of State/U.S. Senate candidate Jason Kander. I'm not behind background checks for terror suspects, because that's a loophole an aspiring dictator can drive a Mack truck through, but the ad really is a masterful document -- he acknowledges Sen. Blunt's attacks on his gun-control positions without repeating them, then talks about his military service and his record in the state legislature, all while putting a rifle together blindfolded. If this ad is any indication of his political skill, Mr. Kander has a good chance of winning his race -- polling presently puts him between three and seven points behind the incumbent, but Roy Blunt ain't exactly beloved by the Show Me State.

Action: fighting slavery, banksters, and monopolies.

As you may know, the government of Uzbekistan forces its good citizens to pick cotton during their annual harvest. Doesn't matter what you do for a living -- you could be a nurse, a teacher, a college student, or a business owner -- you're out there picking cotton 10 hours a day. And while Uzbekistan has improved some work conditions and started to phase out child labor on the cotton fields, they've also cracked down hard on the good Uzbeks who continue to press for an end to the practice. But the President who has enforced this policy for the last 25 years, Islam Karimov, has lately died, which (sad as it may be for the Karimov family) does provide us an opportunity to agitate for the abolition of forced labor. I would invite right-wingers who claim that taxation is slavery and regulations are oppression to look at what's happening in Uzbekistan to see what slavery and oppression are really like. (Or they could work on a Hawaiian fishing boat, but I digress.) Hence the International Labor Rights Foundation helps you tell the Uzbekistan government to end forced labor in that nation.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5983, the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, would give the banksters even more power. Didn't Wells Fargo just get fined nearly $200 million for opening up accounts people didn't want and even charging fees on those unwanted accounts? But Congress's only impulse, it seems, is to keep your government from protecting you from banksters. Hence H.R. 5983 would (among other things!) prevent our government from breaking up too-big-to-fail banks, let retirement investors put their own greed ahead of their clients' needs, gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, repeal the Durbin Amendment limiting the fees businesses pay to banks for debit card use, force all financial regulations to be approved all over again by Congress, and repeal the CEO-to-employee pay rule Dodd-Frank mandates. In other words, H.R. 5983 is an absolute fecal storm, and no amount of lying about "protecting small businesses" (by making them pay higher fees to banks? Really?) can cover that. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Financial CHOICE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell American and European governments to reject the proposed Monsanto-Bayer merger, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Bayer is a German corporation (a real one, unlike so many of today's "foreign" corporations like Burger King, which "moved" merely to avoid paying their fair share of American taxes), so European regulators might have as much to say about it as ours do. Or more; our government just greenlighted Charter/Time-Warner, after all. Who would benefit from one corporation having so much so much say over chemicals and agriculture? Nobody but Bayer's executives. And Monsanto's endless line of GMO seeds that don't deliver healthier food in higher yields but merely withstand its own proprietary pesticides better would continue, to the greater detriment of us all. And let's not even get started on what farmers would have to do to survive under an even bigger big ag conglomerate. I mean, giving farmers, not big corporations, more power over the food supply would be the conservative thing to do.

Action: anti-science legislation, harassment of protestors, and antibiotic abuse.

Congress has a number of appropriations bills to pass, as you know, and Congress would like nothing better than to use the threat of a government shutdown to ram through all sorts of legislative riders that wouldn't stand the light of day if they tried to pass them on their own -- legislative riders that would hamper the EPA's ability to enforce the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, for example. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject anti-science legislative riders in upcoming budget bills. Your average right-wing Congressperson -- who will generally be smart enough not to say that they oppose pro-science protections because they tend to cost their big donors money -- will probably hang their head unctuously and declare that we just don't have the money to protect folks from pollution. At that point, you're perfectly free to ask, "do we have endless money to take care of the intractable health care problems that pollution causes?" Of course, their big donors won't bear the cost of those problems -- but we will.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate allegations of police harassing, and retaliating against, folks who film and otherwise monitor their behavior. You probably already know that, try as they might, police officers can't simply tell you to stop running your smartphone camera in their general direction, because that violates your First Amendment rights. Still, if you use your smartphone camera to document police misconduct, they might try some stuff, like taking your camera from you and/or sending a handful of armed officers to arrest you for unpaid traffic tickets, and that just adds to the list of stuff you have to fight -- and discourages others from speaking out. But just as television blew the lid off the Vietnam War by showing its horrors, the age of smartphones has put police brutality out front-and-center. It's not that the good old days were better; it's that the good old days covered up better. But this genie ain't going back in this bottle, and police officers are public servants who should not get special protections (like protection from their own misconduct) while they're serving the public.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell McDonald's to get antibiotic-raised beef, poultry, and pork out of its supply chains, and thus out of its meals. It'd be easy to say, oh, to hell with them, they're McDonald's, fast food shouldn't even exist, but that would be letting the perfect murder the good -- we live in a world where plenty of people eat at McDonald's every day, and since we're not likely to observe the disappearance of fast food in our lifetimes, we might as well agitate for better behavior from fast food purveyors. And McDonald's, like the other fast food corporations, has shown itself to be responsive to the Big Stick of Bad PR, which we wield here for very good reason: overuse of antibiotics in feed animals makes bacteria more resistant, until we find ourselves in a "post-antibiotic world," where the slightest cut can be deadly -- just like it was in the old days! Surely even the most reactionary individual doesn't want a return to such "innocence," and surely even the most corporatist individual can see the limits of just letting food producing corporations do exactly as they please.

Action: "free" trade, immigrant veterans, and lead poisoning.

A few dozen organizations have coordinated to make today "TPP Call-In Day" -- as in, call your Reps and Senators to tell them you don't want them to pass the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," a "free" trade deal the Obama Administration is still pushing. Americans across the ideological spectrum abhor the "free" trade deal that will outsource more American jobs and allow corporations unprecedented power to nullify American laws, via the "investor-state tribunal," through which corporations could allege that laws protecting air and water and workers cost them money, and thus exact a bailout from the American people. Most of our Congressfolk are actually talking a good game about this -- I was floored to hear from our state's junior Senator that he actually opposed it, because I'm old enough to remember when there wasn't a "free" trade deal Pat Toomey didn't like. But fact is, they're only talking a good game, and there's still plenty of time for them to pull a gotcha on the American people. So use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page -- or use this toll-free phone number, 888-659-7351 -- and call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject the TPP.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5695, the Veterans Visa and Protection Act, would establish a visa program for non-citizen military veterans, so that those veterans will ultimately be able to naturalize as American citizens -- and so our government can stop deporting them. It's one thing to come to America to make a better life for yourself, but it's another thing entirely to come to America and risk your life to defend our country. A lot of these veterans, unfortunately, think that military service automatically confers citizenship, but it doesn't -- and our government hasn't always been clear about what a non-citizen veteran needs to do to become a citizen (and, in less sunny moments, I suspect our government deports non-citizen veterans because they won't be able to get health benefits once they're deported). Now I bet some folks would hear about H.R. 5695 and worry that a terrorist will use a veteran visa program to infiltrate our country and cause mayhem, but becoming a soldier to accomplish that? That sure is a long game. The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Veterans Visa and Protection Act.

Finally, the lead crisis in Flint, MI may have passed from the nightly news, but it's still a crisis for the good people of Flint -- the state of Michigan, as far as I can tell, has handed out water-testing kits and water bottles, and that's what they're bragging about, and Congress has done even less than that, although they have plenty of options, including funding relief, funding childhood lead prevention programs, establishing water testing programs at schools and child care centers, and reauthorizing the Drinking Water Safe Revolving Fund. Some Congressfolk will attempt to exact spending cuts elsewhere (and not in oil corporation subsidies, for example!) in exchange for these necessary programs. But when half a million children have lead in their blood, and any amount of lead causes brain damage, then treating emergencies like the Flint water crisis as opportunities to make pet spending cuts elsewhere is unconscionably cruel, and unworthy of civilized people. The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to do right by the folks in Flint, and stop lead poisoning in their drinking water.

Around the table: right-wingers are the *real* whiners, part 292.

Charles Blow at the New York Times finds Hillary Clinton's characterization of half of Donald Trump's voters as belonging to a "basket of deplorables" (racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, etc.) is morally apt. I'd argue it's probably about statistically accurate, too -- I recall Bush the Lesser's approvals bottoming out around 25%, and deciding that meant about a quarter of America is bat-guano insane, and, well, if somewhat less than 50% of Americans support Mr. Trump, and half of them are nuts, you've got about the same percentage. (As an aside, I think she chose the phrase "basket of deplorables" precisely because it doesn't roll of the tongue -- rageheads can feel rage about anything, of course, but they can't win many folks to their side on the merits, particularly if they might have to explain what "deplorable" means, or how they fit into a metaphorical "basket.")

Adam Davidson at the New Yorker cautions us against getting too elated about the record fine the CFPB just handed out to Wells Fargo for signing up its customers for accounts they didn't want. You'll recognize most of the problems -- the fine represents an infinitesimal slice of Wells Fargo's profits, no executives got fired though they're responsible for what happens at their corporation, and other banksters are probably getting away with as much but are cleverer about covering it up -- but you may not immediately recognize the big problem: the phrase "bank cross-selling" is so ingrained in corporate-speak that it doesn't get a rise out of most Americans for the unethical, should-be-illegal practice it is. I'll do my best to change that.

With the 15th anniversary of 9.11 behind us, here's an October 2001 report from Jim Naureckas at FAIR, which reminds us that, contra what the "liberal" media tells us, retaliating with bombs and guns against terrorists doesn't exactly stop terrorism. And, of course, whenever blowing up people didn't deter terrorism, the "liberal" media just said we didn't blow up enough people. You might be inclined, if you're a reasonable person, to think that violence breeds violence. You might also be inclined, if you're a reasonable person, to think that rushing in and violating other nations' sovereignty -- as we have done incessantly in the Middle East for decades -- also breeds violence.

Donald Trump would like to have a debate with Hillary Clinton without moderators. That might actually be a good idea, but Mr. Trump can't help but crap all over it by saying he wants a debate without moderators because he thinks moderators will be unfair to him. Everyone else has to put up with a moderator who may ask them things they don't like, but why should he? The whining coming from the right is unconscionable these days -- they demand exemptions from any rules that might make them look bad, and blame any hardship they've earned on someone else's "bias," but don't you dare talk about redlining or police brutality, or they'll say those people just have to "follow the rules."

Speaking of whining, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin fears that, if Hillary Clinton is elected, "the tree of liberty" might need to be "watered" by the "blood" not just of "tyrants," but "patriots." You might also translate all of that as whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine. Hillary Clinton is a center-right politician, and when far-rightists whine about how horrible America will be if she becomes President, you don't have to be scared. You have to ridicule and shame these people. That is your patriotic duty.

Action: public corruption, and endangered species.

Demand Progress helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate Donald Trump for bribery, relating to his donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2013 right around the time she was deciding whether to investigate Trump University. You all know the timeline by now: Ms. Bondi's office began investigating Trump University and the Trump Institute for fraud in late 2013; then she made a phone call to Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump donated $25,000 to her PAC -- and then Ms. Bondi's office dropped the Trump investigation. Is it likely that Ms. Bondi and Mr. Trump actually discussed a quid pro quo arrangement on the phone? No, it is not. Is the timing still so suspicious you'd feel like a schmuck if you didn't investigate such a charge involving the man who said not long ago that when you give money to politicians, "they do whatever the hell you want them to do"? Yes, it is. Do not be the one to protest that such an investigation would be unprecedented, as if Donald Trump himself hasn't been unprecedented in all kinds of bad ways -- and, ah, as if Hillary Clinton hadn't just been investigated for her emails.

Meanwhile, Casey Jones of Atlantic Beach, FL, has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the city of Atlantic Beach to require beachfront homeowners to turn their lights off at night during sea turtles' hatching periods. I'm sure that sounds a bit obscure, so here's some background: baby sea turtles hatch at night on land, and then instinctively head toward the moon, thus making it to their natural home in the ocean, but if baby sea turtles see a light on in someone's window, they head toward that instead, and then they won't make the ocean, and get eaten by predators on land (like crabs). All five species of sea turtles indigenous to Florida are endangered, and they hatch from May to October. Such ordinances protecting sea turtles have already passed on two neighboring beaches in Florida (Jacksonville Beach and Neptune Beach, so it's not crazy to assume it can be done. Of course, those homeowners inclined to throw a don't-tread-on-me tantrum every time they don't get their way won't be impressed with any of these arguments. But they don't get all the say about everything in America.

Action: cluster bombs, and prison privatization.

You may have heard that Textron, the last American manufacturer of cluster bombs, has announced it'll stop making them, citing "reduced orders" and "the current political environment." Of course, under a President Trump, the "political environment" could change, and governments will demand these YUGE and BYOOTIFUL weapons again, even though they have an unfortunate tendency to, you know, not go off for many years, until some unlucky civilian comes across one, well after the war has ended. Is the shame of killing civilians after wars are over really worth any short-term military advantage cluster bombs bring? At least 100 nations don't think so, since they've ratified the U.N. Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits the use, transfer, or stockpiling of cluster bombs -- but the United States ain't one of them, and neither is Saudi Arabia, which hasn't received cluster bombs from our government since May, after reports that Saudi Arabia had used them rather indiscriminately in Yemen. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk that America should ratify the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Department of Homeland Security (sic) to stop using private prisons to detain immigrants and refugees, then Color of Change still helps you do that. Why do we care that our government uses private prisons? Because private prisons are out to make a profit, and it's far too easy for their executives to convince themselves that cutting corners is a good way to make more profit. "Cutting corners" can, of course, include denying detainees medical care, making them sleep on cold floors, giving them food with maggots in it, and letting guards sexually assault them. Please navigate away from this blog post if you think all of that's perfectly OK to allow to happen to anyone. This is yet another reason why we shouldn't privatize public functions -- because some corporation can get away with providing bad service, whereas a government is accountable to you (whether they like it or not!) and would have a tougher time getting away with it. As long as we stay on them, that is -- and they always try to distract us with this or that partisan horsedoodle.

Around the table: why the white working class votes right, and other puzzles.

Theo Anderson at In These Times describes sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild's work answering the question "Why the White Working Class Votes Conservative." Long story short: these voters aren't deluded about the harm untrammeled corporate power can cause, but they consider government an even greater evil, since they perceive that government handouts go to "the people who get ahead without putting in the hard work." And then "(t)he result is a vicious cycle of dysfunction. Anti-government anger leads to deregulation of industry, which is then free to inflict more havoc, which intensifies the sense of loss and anger, which is then directed primarily at the government." (As an aside, I don't agree that Thomas Frank doesn't delve into "the lived experience of conservatives"; actually, I came away with more respect for right-wingers after I read it.)

Frank Stricker at Counterpunch asks whether we can really bring back all the factory jobs we've outsourced. Short answer: no. Somewhat longer answer: we won't bring back 31,000,000 factory jobs, but creating 10,000,000 more jobs would get us closer to full employment. How do you do that? You spend taxpayer money on physical infrastructure work and on public education. "Neither candidate has made a major commitment in these areas," he concludes, and you can see why neither would make a move to invest in public education -- they'd fear losing big donor money from the charter school crowd.

Sarah Anderson at OtherWords notes that even though Presidential candidates from both parties bash fat-cat banksters, they present very few effective solutions to the problem. Why, it's almost like that's the idea! Even the Obama Administration's CEO pay reporting requirement doesn't have "real teeth" in it, she writes, because it doesn't (for example) link CEO pay practices to government contracting. That could be something the next President tries to do (if that President's name is Clinton, of course -- you think Donald Trump would even think of something like this?), though we'll hear nothing but nanny state and violates our rights from the pro-bankster waaambulance. Even though the Obama Administration hasn't done enough to curb their power, you'd still think they'd have shame by now.

Physicist Vandana Shiva reminds us that we don't need genetically-engineered "golden rice" to deliver Vitamin A. You may well take issue with Dr. Shiva's list of foods that can give you your RDA of Vitamin A, a list that includes "one carrot" and "one mango," by saying, well, you can't grow carrots and mangos wherever you like. But the truth is only that you can't grow these things en masse wherever you like, and growing food the corporate way is not the only way to grow food. Big ag corporations hate crop diversity, because it's harder than just growing the same thing for acres on end, and because it doesn't redistribute income upward to executives like growing the same thing for acres on end does.

Ho hum, big dirty energy corporations paid for meetings between their representatives and Republican Attorneys General in August of 2015, and there they collaborated on a plan to sue the Obama Administration to stop the EPA's Clean Power Plan. It's not the collaboration that upsets me, of course -- it's the massive six-figure donations the Republican Attorneys General Association, and though it may not upset John Roberts that these corporations weren't stupid enough (as far as we know!) to spell out what they wanted in exchange for what they were giving, we'd be schmucks to pretend it's just coincidence. Didn't Donald Trump tell us that politicians who take big donations "do whatever the hell you want them to"?

Finally, James Hohmann at the Washington Post asks if President Obama "squandered an opportunity" by nominating Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. The matter is actually far more interesting to contemplate than I expected -- NOW's President, for example, says that if Mr. Obama had appointed, say, a black woman instead, not only would the liberal wing of the Democratic party have been more galvanized in support, but right-wingers would have attacked her "viciously," thus exposing the real aim of the Republican Party. I'm not sure Republican aims can be any more exposed than they are, and I'm certainly not opposed to a Justice Garland -- moderates tend to drift leftward once they're on the Supreme Court. But Mr. Hohmann collects the most evidence yet that the Garland nomination is just another example of Barack Obama playing 13-dimensional chess with himself.

Around the table: *Star Trek* as a beacon of optimism -- and all the contemporary corruption and venality that stands in its way.

Donald Trump's sizable, illegal 2013 donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi -- right before Ms. Bondi declined to join other state Attorneys General in investigating Trump University -- is finally getting significant coverage in the "liberal" media, and now we learn that Mr. Trump also hosted a fundraiser for Ms. Bondi during her 2014 re-election effort. No use telling me that she might not have understood all the details of the Trump University case before taking the cash, because if there was even a chance she would have to investigate him, she should have refused the donation. And, remember, Donald Trump is the fellow who said "when you give" to politicians, "they do whatever the hell you want them to do." (As an aside, why does Mr. Trump's campaign manager think repeating the word "concierge" in the context of State Department dealings with the Clinton Foundation will resonate at all, with anybody?)

I was honestly surprised to read this: LSU-educated judges in Louisiana tend to hand out harsher sentences to juveniles after LSU loses a football game. That may well be because I'm not a Southerner -- the study's authors found not one surprised individual in Baton Rouge after sharing their findings. Still, they're judges! In case you were wondering, the judges studied tended to be white, male, and Democrat, while the offenders tended to be black; that doesn't prove a racial animus on the judges' part, but what does that matter if it portends a racist result?

AP reporters Martha Mendoza and Margie Mason describe the horrors endured by foreign boat workers supporting Hawaii's fishing industry. Some 700 foreign workers, mostly from Southeast Asia, make less than a dollar an hour and are confined to their boats for years at a time; in other words, they're wage slaves -- and, naturally, they're good fishermen whose catch fetches high prices. I was sad to learn that the late Daniel Inouye, a liberal lion of the U.S. Senate for almost half a century, originally pushed for the legal loopholes that allow this wage slavery, and that current liberal lion Sen. Mazie Hirono seems more preoccupied with security than wage slavery. In any case, Costco and Whole Foods customers, in particular, may want to ask where their fish comes from.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in a joint action with the city of Los Angeles, orders Wells Fargo to pay $185 million in penalties and refunds, as restitution for a number of consumer abuses including opening accounts for consumers without their permission. Oh, but Wells Fargo employees didn't just open these unwanted accounts to meet sales quotas -- they also transferred funds from those customers' other accounts without telling them, which not only meant customers didn't know they were short on cash, but also meant customers incurred fees and penalties without knowing it. For something they didn't want and didn't ask for, I feel compelled to repeat with the Italics Hammer. But please, right-wingers, tell us again how the CFPB represents nothing more than a "bureaucratic" "nanny" oppressing those poor banksters.

Finally, on the occasion of the 50th (!) anniversary of the initial broadcast of Star Trek, Charlie Jane Anders at Wired invites us to imagine a world where Star Trek never existed -- where, for example, George Lucas didn't have Star Trek to interact with as he was putting Star Wars together, or '80s and '90s TV sci-fi didn't enjoy the resurgence it did because of Next Generation. Star Trek's main achievement? That it was the first sci-fi TV show to depict "space exploration as a serious endeavor, one undertaken by a crew of professionals," and combined "1930s pulp space opera with the rising tide of social criticism in 1960s sci-fi novels." The original Star Trek (and its three TV successors) also came from a confident America, one sure it could provide a better world for its descendants than it inherited; its world had moved past greed, racism, even money. But in today's America, we run to stand still, and not coincidentally J.J. Abrams's Star Trek films show a Federation on its heels.

Around the table: tabulating more election-related absurdities, plus bonus good news about another for-profit college closing down.

Kennesaw State University Dean of Students sends memo warning of "unauthorized individuals are walking around with clipboards claiming they are registering students to vote," some of whom "are targeting particular student populations." An unnamed student at the college -- Georgia's third-largest public university -- says the scam basically pretends to register black students so they can't vote on Election Day. But please, right-wingers, keep complaining about how voter fraud always comes from liberals.

ITT Technical Institute closes all of its campuses around the country, mere weeks after the Department of Education bans it from enrolling students using federal student loans. Current ITT students with federal loans, as well as those who've left ITT within the last 120 days, will be able to have their loans forgiven, and California students with private loans can apply for relief from the state, which news makes the ITT spokeshack's whining -- "(t)he damage done to our students and employees, as well as to our shareholders and the American taxpayers, is irrevocable" -- particularly inappropriate.

You've heard that charter schools are a black family's only way out of failing public schools? Well, Jeff Bryant at the OurFuture blog informs us that that isn't true, either. When even your biggest charter school boosters tell you flatly that it's very hard for black kids to get into these schools, you know it's all a crock. Anyone else think the real solution would be to fund public schools properly, thus giving our schools the resources they need to produce top-notch students? Or is that quaint?

Judge issues arrest warrant for Riverside County (CA) district attorney who oversaw a surveillance operation so vast that it accounted, at one point, for almost one out of every five wiretapping warrants in America. The warrants were almost all drug-related, resulting in a lot of arrests and property seizures (though the article doesn't say much about convictions!) ranging as far east as Virginia. But, seriously: America has over 3,000 counties; how does one county account for close to 20% of all surveillance warrants? And no, we shouldn't applaud him because at least he got the warrants, unlike two recent U.S. Presidents I can name. Last I looked, America is not the land of lowered expectations.

Alec MacGillis at ProPublica wonders, quite reasonably, why so many hedge fund managers are still donating to Hillary Clinton's campaign, when Mrs. Clinton has made so many promises to rein in hedge fund excesses. It's easy to blame Donald Trump for the shift, but I still suspect elite opposition to Mr. Trump is a false flag operation, and it's more likely that hedge fund managers are putting all their chips on Mrs. Clinton because they expect something in return -- like continued inaction on the carried interest loophole. I mean, it's one thing to make a promise, and another thing entirely to keep it.

Finally, Donald Trump says the way keep ISIS from rising again after he defeats them is to go into Iraq and "take the oil." Well, it's not like "taking the oil" has been the cause of all our Middle East problems or anything. Seriously, was Mr. Trump asleep whenever Ron Paul went on about American culpability in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh after Mr. Mossadegh nationalized BP oil fields? Apparently he also doesn't remember that ISIS came together in Tha Bush Mobb's detainment camps in Iraq. Please, Americans, do not vote for this clown. Vote for Gary Johnson if you have to.

Action: women's health, and clean air.

H.R. 448/S. 217, the Women's Health Protection Act, would roll back a lot of the assaults on abortion rights we've seen at the state level over the last few years -- assaults all undertaken in the name of "protecting women," naturally. But restricting the number of health care professionals who can perform abortion-related procedures and tests, requiring women to declare their reasons for their abortion or make unnecessary medical visits, and requiring abortion clinics to measure up to standards required at no other health care facility don't actually protect women -- they just make it harder for women to get abortions, which is still their Constitutional right (and quite specifically not a state's right to restrict), per the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. Hence Sign Here Now helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Women's Health Protection Act. If your Congressfolk write back opposing your view and unctuously proclaiming their support for protecting women's health, you are free to ask why abortion-related services should be subject to more such "protection" than other health services.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia metropolitan area suffered another "code orange" day in recent weeks, meaning the air quality was bad enough that "sensitive groups" of people, including children and seniors, should have limited their outdoor activity, and that we all should have limited our contribution to air pollution. You may know what I'm going to say next: that air pollution limits our freedom, and thus should not be as loosely-regulated as right-wing corporatist whiners would like. I mean, if you can't go outside for fear you might get sick, you're not exactly free, are you? No, not even if some coal CEO can gild the plumbing on his 19th vacation home, which is the only "freedom" we get out of more pollution. Now, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) has tightened air pollution standards for coal plants lately, but has also exempted the Brunner Island coal plants from these standards, even though polluted air from Brunner Island still reaches the Philly area. So the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to step in and force the Brunner Island plant to meet federal standards for smog pollution.

Around the table: what we call "popular" Our Glorious Elites call "marginal," and other lessons that bear repeating.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches the New York Times arguing that British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has "marginalized his party" with his positions on re-nationalizing energy corporations, spending on poor working families, and Israel-Palestine relations -- except that all of his positions just so happen to be popular with British folks. Remember when the "liberal" media consistently told us opposing the Iraq war was a "hard-left" position -- even though the majority of Americans opposed it? Remember when Barack Obama slammed the "sanctimonious" "purists" who opposed extending Bush Mobb tax cuts for the rich -- even though the majority of Americans agreed with those "purists"? If Our Glorious Elites tell us a policy position is marginal, that's almost a sure sign that it's not so much marginal as popular.

Dean Baker evaluates another "free" trade supporter's arguments that the Trans-Pacific" Partnership will "help the world's poor," "boost growth" and "open Asian markets more," and finds them wanting. Key points: the TPP will likely only boost growth by two-hundreds of one percentage point over 15 years -- that's less than one-fiftieth of our weak economy's GDP growth over the last three months! -- and Asian nations, far from "ma(king) most of the concessions," stand to gain the most from loosened trade restrictions. And what will be the cost to "the world's poor" of the expanded "investor-state tribunal," when corporations can simply exact tribute from their government in a secret court, and prevent their government from enacting laws to protect them from those corporations?

The Washington Post notes that Democratic leaders have largely pulled their spending from the Ohio Senate race, in which former Gov. Ted Strickland is taking on Republican incumbent Sen. Rob Portman -- and suggests the party isn't confident that Mr. Strickland will prevail. Which is an entirely reasonable conclusion -- and probably the correct one! -- but I wonder if such machinations are actually part of a long possum game on Mr. Strickland's behalf. Note well that Mr. Strickland, left for dead in his 2010 gubernatorial re-election effort, actually only lost that race by two points -- and that Republican groups pulled their spending first last month, which, if a possum game were to continue, would necessitate a similar Democratic pullout. Consider, also, that 2016 (unlike 2010) should see Presidential election turnout, and that Donald Trump may yet prove toxic at the top of the ticket. Again, I could be wrong, and admittedly Mr. Strickland hasn't done a good job either raising money or campaigning, but I think the various chess moves support either theory at this point. (The Colorado Senate race, also covered in the Post article, probably is what it looks like -- though, really, who'd have thought Michael Bennet could ever be a formidable incumbent?)

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman begins investigating possible antitrust violations in a state program that helps schools keep EpiPens on hand. Also, two U.S. Senators (Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota) and one House Rep (Tammy Duckworth of Illinois) have written the FCC and the DOJ, respectively, suggesting that the New York program might also violate federal law. But, please, right-wingers, keep telling us how "free markets" always operate in the best interests of consumers -- even, presumably, the ones who have to pay hundreds of dollars more for life-saving medication than they would have under a government that actually enforced strong antitrust legislation.

Finally, Al Gore advises us not to vote for third-party candidates in 2016, adding wryly that "in my experience it matters a lot" in re issues such as climate change. Yes, Barack Obama's EPA has done a pretty good job while George W. Bush made climate change denialism mainstream, and I firmly expect that a Hillary Clinton EPA would similarly outperform a Donald Trump or a Mike Pence EPA. Still, Mr. Gore's comments efface the real problem with two-party politics: that Democrats run solely on the fact that they're not the ogres Republicans are, and when they do that, they perpetrate just another rhetorical hostage crisis --- vote for me, or the country gets it! I'm no great Jill Stein fan, as it happens, but Democrats had better hope a more formidable progressive third-party candidate never comes along, or they'll be the burnt toast they presume the Republican Party will be.

Action: poisoned workers, purity tests, and the Grand Canyon.

You may have heard that over 200 workers at Samsung's display and computer chip factories in South Korea have contracted serious illnesses, including lymphoma, leukemia, lupus, and multiple sclerosis, and 76 of them had died; most of these workers, contrary to what you might expect, were in their twenties and thirties, and were, in the words of one retired worker, "uninformed kids from the countryside" that Samsung used like they were "disposable cups." You may not have heard that Samsung did not disclose the harmful chemicals to which these workers were all exposed, out of a concern for protecting trade secrets. You recall that gas drilling corporations also use the trade-secret rationale to justify refusing to disclose the chemicals they pump into your drinking and bathing water; it's getting to the point where we can safely assume that when a corporation says "trade secret," it really means "I'm not telling you because I'm doing you harm." So Sum of Us helps you tell Samsung to compensate the families of workers who died in their factories.

Meanwhile, both houses of the California state legislature have passed AB 2844, a bill which would force all businesses and non-profits contracting with the state to declare that they do not have a policy of boycotting a "sovereign nation." If that sounds a bit obscure, consider that Israel is a sovereign nation, and that the BDS movement (boycott, divest, sanctions) aims to change Israel's policies toward Palestine by refraining from investing in, or using the products of, those corporations that contract with Israel. I don't think bills like AB 2844 violate the First Amendment -- no entity has a right to government contracts, and really, in my view, governments should be performing, not outsourcing, the tasks that the people have given them via legislation and taxes -- but I do think AB 2844 will be almost prohibitively difficult to enforce, and states shouldn't use purity tests to hand out contracts. AB 2844 now goes to Gov. Brown, historically tight-lipped about signing controversial bills, and Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell Gov. Brown to veto the anti-BDS bill, AB 2844.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell President Obama to designate the Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument, and thus protect the Grand Canyon from uranium mining forever. The Grand Canyon has been a national park for almost a century, but mining corporations want to dig up the area around the Canyon for uranium, which would, as you might expect, pollute the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to seven Western states. Mr. Obama's previous Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar (lately appointed by Hillary Clinton to run her transition team), rather unexpectedly imposed a uranium-mining moratorium on the Grand Canyon area, but that's going to expire one day, and designating the area as a national monument would prevent uranium mining there forever. A lot of good folks probably already think the Grand Canyon is a national monument because, hello, have you seen that thing? But a national treasure and a National Monument are two entirely different things. If Mr. Obama is so concerned about his legacy, he can forget all about the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and designate the Grand Canyon area a national monument.

Around the table: corruption, "free" trade, the "liberal" media, the lame-duck, and racist flatugasma.

Paul Waldman at the Washington Post asks why the "liberal" media seems so bent on making Hillary Clinton into the "corrupt" candidate, when Donald Trump's corruption is more palpable. I don't think Mrs. Clinton isn't corrupt -- I'm more inclined to think she's just very good at hiding her corruption -- but covering Mr. Trump's bizarre/bigoted/stupid utterings ad nauseam does seem to be a way of not covering business dealings for which, frankly, we have a lot more evidence of corruption than we have for anything Mrs. Clinton has done. You have to wonder if that's the whole idea -- certainly it is for Mr. Trump. (And while the "liberal" media doesn't look very hard at the Clinton Foundation, since the "liberal" media are frequently Foundation donors, they sure did look awful hard at Benghazi and her emails, which an alien visitor to this planet would find quite bizarre.)

The incomparable David Dayen tells us about "The Big Problem With The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Super Court That We’re Not Talking About" -- namely, that banksters have already begun to turn "investor-state dispute settlement" into a giant casino, where corporations can buy, say, solar power facilities in Spain just as Spain is cutting solar power plants and pretend they've been "wronged." And because ISDS has so little transparency built-in, there's no telling if someone funding an investor's suit today becomes an "aggrieved" investor tomorrow. Read to the end, so you can learn why we never even needed a mechanism for foreign investors to get justice from other nations: "very rich investors...have the power to purchase insurance against these kind of political risks. There’s no reason why it should be the taxpayer [who] pays."

Adam Johnson at FAIR catches The Guardian publishing a fairly positive, Gates Foundation-sponsored piece about Bridge Academies International-sponsored education privatization initiatives in Liberia -- without noting that Bill Gates himself is a major investor in Bridge Academies International. Synergy! Possibly The Guardian thinks noting the article is itself sponsored by the Gates Foundation lets them off the hook, but not very many people know Bill Gates has invested in (not donated to!) Bridge Academies, so that would be lazy thinking on their part. I don't think privatizing public schools is the answer in Liberia, either -- I think the answer there is the same as it is everywhere: making public officials accountable to their government's owners, the people.

Various right-wingers would like to prevent Congress from reconvening for a lame-duck session at all, using the argument that representatives who've been kicked out of office shouldn't get to make big policy decisions. I find the spirit of that argument sympathetic, I suppose, and not necessarily because this lame-duck could include ramming through a "free" trade deal the American people don't want, but not every lawmaker is going to get kicked out of office on Election Day, and everyone knows new Congressfolk get inaugurated in January, so moving the inauguration date to, say, the day after Election Day would be a better solution to that problem, if it's a problem worth solving. I also think Rep. Dent's assessment -- that folks who support ending the lame-duck are "just looking for an excuse to do nothing" -- is fairly accurate.

Finally, you may have heard about Maine Gov. Paul LePage's assertion that blacks and Hispanics account for "90-plus percent" of all heroin trafficking-related arrests in his state, but it's nice to know, I guess, that the story told by actual crime statistics doesn't even vaguely resemble that assessment. The FBI doesn't keep such statistics for Hispanics, but a mere 7% of total drug arrests in Maine were black folks in 2014; even if the black population of Maine is only around 1%, you still have to account for racial profiling in arrests -- and, ah, 7% is nowhere near "90-plus percent". Word on the street is that Mr. LePage gets his "90-plus percent" figure from his vast collection of newspaper clippings of drug arrests; setting aside the possibility that he just "forgets" to clip reports of white arrests, you'd think he'd have more important things to do on his work time than scrapbooking. I long for the day when we never have to speak of Paul LePage again.

Action: "free" trade, extortionate drug prices, and overtime pay.

Both the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" (or TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment "Partnership" (or TTIP) face the wrath of the American people, such that even Our Glorious Elites are starting to say they can't get them done. But 23 nations are still negotiating the Trade in Services Agreement (or TISA) in secret, meaning we only know what's in it from leaks -- just like with the TPP! Chief among its issues: it may make it damn near impossible to reverse privatization of public services, and it'll hamstring our government from regulating banksters on our behalf. Hence Keystone Progress joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to reject the TISA "free" trade agreement, too. If you're feeling a little overwhelmed with all the "free" trade pacts that need killing, just remember two things: one, they want you to feel overwhelmed! And two, it only takes a minute to tell your Congressperson what to do -- and if you have to tell them a dozen times, well, that's around a dozen minutes. And they spend a lot more time than that trying to manipulate you into opposing your own interests.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell the Department of the Treasury to investigate Gilead Sciences for offshoring billions of dollars in profits. Gilead, in case you didn't know, makes Sovaldi, a Hepatitis C treatment -- with the help of federal funding, naturally! -- that costs them a mere $150 to manufacture but costs you over $175,000 to use, if you're unfortunate enough to have Hep C. Nice work if you can get it! And, ah, nice cure if you can get it, which, if you're merely working 40 hours a week, you can't. So, a couple years of overpaid executives and stock buybacks later, we learn that Gilead not only doesn't pay its fair share of taxes in America, thanks to its Irish subsidiary, but the Irish subsidiary doesn't pay its fair share of taxes to Ireland, because it claims to be a resident of the Bahamas! Why get the Treasury Department to investigate? Because if it's as bad as it looks, an investigation of Gilead will send a signal to all the other Big Pharma corporations that shuffle their profits around the globe in a never-ending shell game. Their executives clearly didn't get the message from their parents to do the right thing, so it's up to us to remind them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject any bills that would weaken the Obama Administration's new overtime rules, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. These overtime rules, as you know, would more than double the salary under which workers must be paid overtime by their employer; but the haters in Congress (which, sadly, include a lot of "moderate" Democrats) whine about the "damage" the rules would do to businesses. Because it's possible I didn't make myself clear enough the last time I tried to whack that mole: any corporation that would be so adversely affected by the rules mandating they pay more of their workers overtime that it'd have to close up shop is already running very badly, and why should we coddle executives who can't run things well? We don't force corporations to pay time-and-a-half for overtime to give some workers a way to make more money -- we do it to give corporations an incentive to stop overworking the workers they've got and go hire and train more workers to do the work. CEOs wouldn't ever hire anyone if it were up to them; thankfully, it's up to us.

Around the table: statecraft vs. "statecraft," and populism vs. "populism."

Michael Corcoran at TruthOut reminds us that the "liberal" media have a "deep-seated conflict of interest" in their reporting (or non-reporting) of Clinton Foundation donors having so much access to Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State -- specifically because a lot of "liberal" media figures are Clinton Foundation donors themselves. As we know, big donors generally aren't stupid enough to ask for a quid pro quo (which would get even John Roberts's antennae up), but they sure want something for their money. People have got to get over the idea that criticizing Hillary Clinton is the same as electing Donald Trump; as a citizen, your right to give honest counsel to your representatives is sacrosanct, and great responsibilities come with it, such as the responsibility to oppose what you don't agree with regardless of which "team" pushes it.

Michael Dear at Politico notes that "The World Is Full of Walls That Don’t Work," and wonders why Donald Trump is so bent on building one, since he's so obsessed with "winning." of course, Donald Trump isn't preoccupied with "winning" the "battle" against immigrants -- he's preoccupied with winning the election, which doesn't have to have anything to do with winning any real battles, or even putting forth workable policy initiatives. I suppose it's something that Mr. Dear's first in-depth example of an unworkable wall is the one dividing Israel and Palestine.

You know not to buy EpiPen on eBay by now, but Laura Northrup at The Consumerist tells you why you shouldn't buy them online from Canada, either. Only around one in 25 online pharmacies claiming to sell cheaper drugs from Canada actually meet U.S. or Canadian standards, so only use online sites with the domain ".pharmacy" in their addresses -- or get your doctor to prescribe Adrenaclick (not EpiPen, since one isn't a substitute for the other). And how about we let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, too? If we do that, we can really get drug prices down in this country (since Medicare represents a very large pool of drug consumers).

Trump toady Wayne Allen Root says people who get "free stuff" from the government shouldn't be allowed to vote because of their "conflict of interest" in voting for politicians who "give" them "free stuff." The idea that any good citizen should be stripped of their right to vote, for any reason, is not only a disgusting piece of un-American filth, it's a desperate argument -- arguing for disenfranchising people with whom you disagree tells the world you can't win arguments on the merits. Even when Mr. Root decides, upon minimal reflection, that folks who get Medicare and Social Security can still vote because they paid into them, he advertises his ignorance: we pay for all government services, including food stamps and "free health care," and we could, theoretically, need to avail ourselves of such services at any time. How about we never speak of this Wayne Allen Root again?

Finally, Shailly Gupta Barnes at In These Times interviews Bob Zellner about his community organizing work in the late '60s, which included members of the Ku Klux Klan. Two important lessons to learn here: one, Mr. Zellner's work was life-threatening -- in fact, he almost got killed by the Klan at his very first civil rights demonstration in the '60s. Two, Mr. Zellner didn't build bridges by compromising all his principles, like professional whiners about "bipartisanship" do -- he did it by concentrating on what he and the Klan had in common, which turned out, at first, to be a mutual experience of government spying. That could work again today -- though people like Bernie Sanders, not people like Donald Trump, can make it work.

Action: corporate taxes, and bankster speculation.

Americans for Tax Fairness joins with MoveOn to help you tell our Treasury Department to investigate Apple for its profit-shifting activities. The reason? The European Union has lately determined that Apple owes $14.5 billion in taxes to Ireland, where a subsidiary resides, or, perhaps more precisely, "resides." And Apple has become notorious over the years for offshoring profits actually made in the United States offshore to foreign subsidiaries -- currently the computer corporation has over $200 billion stashed overseas, and could owe the American taxpayer some $60 billion of that. Moreover, Apple CEO Tim Cook has earned some extra notoriety for claiming that he's not going to repatriate Apple profits until the corporate tax system becomes more "fair," like a kid taking his ball and going home. Possibly he doesn't understand how the corporate tax system really works -- i.e., that corporations buy tax breaks very cheaply from Congressfolk. If so, that's his problem, but corporate tax avoidance is also our problem, because it cheats the public of the services we expect from our government. And so we fight.

Meanwhile, I get no end of pleasure from the fact that both political parties -- the one that's completely owned by corporations, and the one that's slightly less than completely owned by corporations -- have explicitly called for the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall wall that used to separate traditional banking functions from securities speculation, so CREDO helps you tell Congressional Republican leadership to support legislation re-erecting the Glass-Steagall wall. Why tell Republican leaders and not Democratic leaders? Because Democratic leaders all talk a good game about Glass-Steagall, but they'd really rather not bring it back, out of fear that corporate campaign donations would promptly dry up, so they use Republican opposition as a shield for their own inaction. They could pass Glass-Steagall tomorrow if they actually tried, and most of their constituents (liberal and conservative) want them to do it. So let's see if we can forcibly remove the Republicans-are-intransigent arrow from their quiver. Congressional Republicans may be greedy, bigoted, and soulless, but they're certainly not stupid.

Action: rebuilding our water infrastructure, and protecting domestic violence victims.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5313, the WATER Act. The WATER Act -- the acronym stands for Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity and Reliability, which isn't bad, as Congressional bill acronyms go -- would, as you might expect, fund the restoration and upgrading of our water grid, which would not only ensure that we have clean water, but would also create jobs. Health care in America really begins with clean water; when we don't have it, we can't stay healthy, and if we can't stay healthy, we can't be free. Sadly, I'm afraid that bills like the WATER Act won't pass until a lot more neighborhoods suffer what Flint, MI suffered. That's not necessarily because folks are saying those (expletives) in Flint, screw them, although I'm sure a few people are. It's more that people don't demand change until it directly affects them, which is totally understandable, since we don't usually learn through thought experiment. That said, encouraging empathy in oneself and others is a worthwhile endeavor -- and solving our water infrastructure problems before they affect mass numbers of Americans is another one.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell the Department of Housing and Urban Development to do everything it can do to protect women from domestic violence predators in their homes. From what can HUD protect women? Well, it can protect them from "nuisance ordinances," which enable landlords to evict tenants who make too much trouble, the definition of "trouble" including women who make "too many" 911 calls on their abusive partners; it can also protect them from housing discrimination, so that women who do leave their abusive partners can more easily get safe housing. And how would it accomplish these aims? By issuing guidances on how "nuisance ordinances" should be interpreted, and enforcing protections already legislated in the Violence Against Women Act and the Fair Housing Act. Do not be the fool who says what's the big deal? You should just leave anyone who hits you -- unless you've never been in love with anyone, because then you'd have an excuse, I guess. And certainly don't claim Big Gummint would be oppressing municipalities that pass "nuisance ordinances," which are little more than cudgels landlords use to evict tenants more easily.

Around the table: "free" trade, clean water, charter schools, bad decisions, and bad arguments.

Kate Aronoff at In These Times thinks both the TPP and TTIP "free" trade deals may be "dead in the water." It'd be nice to think so -- Germany's Vice Chancellor says TTIP is dead, Mitch McConnell says the Senate won't vote on it in the lame duck, and even my state's junior Senator, Pat Toomey, who never met a "free" trade deal he didn't like, has written me a lengthy letter explaining why he opposes the TPP -- but we have to remember that Our Glorious Elites are very, very desperate people right now, and they won't hesitate to ram these deals through the minute they think we're not ready. So we're going to be ready, now and after Election Day.

The state of California and the EPA prepare to inject more toxic waste into state groundwater, even though groundwater reserves have accounted for some 60% of all water consumed there over the last three years. Specifically, the EPA allows disposal of toxic waste wells into some 700,000 waste wells across America, when we can't guarantee they won't hit groundwater, which California officials admit they already have. Plus, you know, they're already spraying toxic wastewater on your strawberries. But please, Donald Trump, tell us again how there's no drought in California and all water shortages are caused by regulations protecting a "three-inch fish."

Molly Knefel at TruthOut thinks we may be at, or approaching, "A Turning Point for the Charter School Movement" -- as in, the moment where our society doesn't accept its snake oil relatively uncritically. What's changed? More reporting on charter school corruption and racism, both of which have flourished under the precise opposite of the public oversight we were all promised. Sad that it's come to this, though -- there never should have been a "charter school movement" in America to begin with, and Democratic politicians deserve upwards of half the blame for that movement ever becoming dominant in our discourse. But are we really there? Voters in Massachusetts won't decide this November whether to outlaw charter schools, but whether to lift the cap on the number of charters schools Massachusetts can have or not, and I'm not entirely sure that's progress.

You weren't planning on doing this, but Ashlee Kieler at The Consumerist reminds us that buying EpiPen on eBay is a terrible idea. For one thing, selling it without a prescription is illegal, and for another thing, you don't know if you're buying an expired package, a package that's been tampered with, or a package that's empty -- none of which you want to find out right after a bee sting. Of course, eBay policies forbid this sort of thing, too, but EpiPen ads are still popping up. Maybe eBay should hire more human workers to keep up with this sort of thing; after all, I understand many good Americans still need jobs.

Finally, Richard Eskow at the OurFuture blog picks apart a Megan McArdle piece alleging that "health care is a business, not a right." It's a pretty masterful dissection -- even the subtler ad hominem attacks are entirely appropriate -- but it's also worth nothing that folks like Ms. McArdle really aren't interested in protecting "business" so much as in protecting greed. Or, to put it another way, folks like Ms. McArdle want the greedy to have more rights than the rest of us, such that the rest of us find exercising our rights a lot harder -- which may make certain individuals more free, but makes most of us less free.