Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: stories concerning monopolies, corruption, and racism.

Our President is reportedly "obsessed" with Amazon," and has allegedly "wondered aloud if there may be any way to go after Amazon with antitrust or competition law." You and I could come up with a few "ways" to do that, though I bet his Attorney General, being a doctrinaire "free" market Republican, would tell him it's just impossible. But ultimately I don't care that our President hates all the critical coverage he gets from the Washington Post (owned, as you recall, by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos) or even that he might think he's Superman and Mr. Bezos is Lex Luthor, just as long as it does our country some good. And breaking up Amazon would, quite frankly, do our country some good.

Mick Mulvaney isn't the only Administration official actively avoiding doing his job: Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has been scaling back enforcement of fair housing law and freezing enforcement actions. The good news? Laws limit how much you can pick and choose what parts of your job to do. The bad news? Good Americans will have to go to court to get Mr. Carson to do very much of anything. Note well, however, that the Houston low-income housing imbroglio involves a lot of Democrats, too.

Ho hum, FAIR reminds us that "Evidence of Violent Extremism is of Little Interest When the Killer is White." So, so many good lines, and here's just one: "Fortunately for Conditt, his race and politics seem to have insulated him from being labelled a 'snowflake' who refused to accept personal responsibility for his failures, and insulated his community from accusations of producing a super-predator who “doesn’t value life the way we do." Also n.b. that the Washington Post's Philip Bump writes about how "(w)e can identify much more easily" with Dylann Roof, apparently completely unaware that the easy answer to that statement would be what you mean "we," white man?

I would advise against using the lack of charges against two police officers for allegedly killing Alton Stirling as "proof" that body cameras don't work. I've found body camera testimony to be frequently chilling, and we can't tabulate the number of folks who haven't died at police hands because police know they're leaving video evidence of their actions, nor can we tabulate the number of folks who won't die at police hands in the future, as more police become acclimated to this sort of accountability. Of course you're tempted to throw up your hands when someone dies, but you shouldn't -- at least not without more evidence than this article provides (though I will concede that body cameras shouldn't only point at victims).

Finally, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker finally decides to hold two special state legislature elections after no less than three judges order him to start following the law and stop delaying them. I'd love to one day be sitting around a campfire saying hey, remember that time Scott Walker tried to get a judge to stop telling him to hold special elections so he could get a law passed that would let him not hold special elections? But by then Mr. Walker will be on his second term as U.S. President, because Democrats will still be a bunch of weaklings who still think polishing their civility trophies is more important than doing good works, or even winning.

Action: the Census, the minimum wage, and agricultural poisons.

You've heard that our Administration wants to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census? Well, Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 2580, which would prohibit questions about citizenship or immigration status on Census forms. You may well be thinking, what's the big deal? And while actual undocumented immigrants might well duck the Census regardless of whether it asks about their status, other folks -- like folks whose papers will expire in time, or folks whose papers are set for life but who often get mistaken for "illegal immigrants" -- might duck the Census, too, and that will reduce their representation in Congress and the funding that goes to their communities. The Census plays a big part in determining all that, so let's help it achieve an "actual enumeration" of the population, as the Constitution requires.

Meanwhile, Good Jobs Nation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 15/S. 1242, the Raise the Wage Act, which would increase the federal minimum wage to $15/hour over a seven-year period. No, it won't kill jobs, or else we'd see rampant unemployment in areas of the world where minimum wages like these are standard, and we don't. No, it's not too-much-too-soon, because the wage would go up gradually over seven years. And no, it won't kill small businesses, because more highly-paid employees will spend a lot of those extra wages at those same small businesses. If this bill passes, I expect a lot of its good ideas -- including narrowing the gaps between the standard minimum wage and both the tipped minimum wage and the disabled worker minimum wage -- will get stripped out. But let's start negotiating with our demands, rather than what we'll settle for.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state Governor to ban Monsanto's version of the herbicide dicamba that destroys crops on neighboring farms, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The State Plant Board of Arkansas banned this herbicide for that state's main growing season (though not for the entire growing year), but every state's got farms, and everyone depends on farms for food, and no one deserves to have their livelihood ruined by a pesticide that doesn't stay put where it's supposed to. And Monsanto developed this version of dicamba specifically to work on its own versions of cotton and soybean plants that resist dicamba more! Could they be trying to force farmers to use their products under threat of crop (and livelihood!) destruction? Hey, it's a question worth asking!

Action: voting rights, wage theft, and internet freedom.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the idea of stationing armed Secret Service folks at polling places, then CREDO still helps you do that. Yes, the Homeland (sic) Security (sic) appropriations bill that came out of the House actually lets our government do that; the Senate could strip the provision from the bill, and thus prevent our government from intimidating voters. Sadly, some people actually do support such voter intimidation, and they're more likely to just come out and say that they're trying to keep the wrong people from voting. It does not seem to occur to these folks that once Democrats get the Presidency back, as they inevitably will, they'll be able to deploy armed personnel at the voting booth, too, and keep their perceived enemies from voting. Maybe they think the Rapture, or an American President-for-Life, will happen first.

Meanwhile, Good Jobs Nation helps you tell Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to stop wage theft from truck drivers in his fair city. Port of L.A. trucking corporations pilfer about $850 million from truck drivers annually, from truck drivers who do not exactly swim in money to begin with. Mr. Garcetti might run for President in 2020, and none other than George Will plumped him up in a recent editorial, so you have every right to imagine that Mr. Garcetti is just another let's-all-get-along Democrat who'll let big corporations hurt whomever they like. Of course, if that's not really him --and I do prefer to believe the best about people! -- he could prove it by telling corporations to stop turning their employees into "independent contractors," which is their main tactic for stealing wages. After all, what good is power if you're not going to use it?

Finally, the FCC may have killed federal net neutrality regulations, but some two dozen city mayors have signed a pledge to refuse to do any municipal business with internet service-providing corporations unless they treat all their network traffic the same -- and, you know, a lot of people live in cities, enough that the Verizons and Comcasts of the world might find it too difficult to have one set of rules for urban areas and another for rural areas. Hence Free Press and a few other good-government organizations help you tell your city's Mayor to pledge not to do any of their city's business with corporations that won't protect our internet freedom. They can ignore our will and cause us pain all they want, but they'll have to answer to us -- whether that's in a court of law or the marketplace. And that's the way it ought to be in America.

Action: against two Presidential nominations.

Just Foreign Policy has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of former House Rep/current CIA chief Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State. I keep harping on Mr. Pompeo's apparent belief that merely using encryption for your online communications constitutes evidence of wrongdoing, but we should also oppose his nomination because he embraces torture and he has a hard-on for war with Iran -- a war that would go considerably worse than the Iraq adventure, and that adventure gave us ISIS. A strong nation doesn't need to bomb the crap out of every weaker nation that offends it, because a nation's strength depends on the goodness of its people and the responsiveness of its institutions. And when right-wingers want to bomb the crap out of everyone who offends them, you have every right to wonder: are they bereft of faith in the strength of our nation, or are they merely evil?

But wait, there's more! If Mr. Pompeo ascends to Secretary of State, that'll leave his current position of CIA director open -- and the President has appointed CIA deputy director Gina Haspel to replace him! Ms. Haspel, unfortunately, has shown a similar taste for torture, having run a CIA "black site" in Thailand and directed the destruction of torture videos made there. The Senate also just so happened to find in 2009 that none of Ms. Haspel's torture resulted in actionable intelligence, but of course you already suspected that. And again, a strong nation doesn't need to torture people. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to block the nomination of Gina Haspel to CIA director. No use saying that Ms. Haspel couldn't torture someone if she wanted to, because she could still send prisoners to black sites like the one Ms. Haspel used to run -- where, again, one can torture prisoners until they tell you what they think you want to hear, instead of the truth. No real security comes from that.

Around the table: comprising mostly warnings about the next war, plus Rick Santorum says The Worst Thing Ever, Again.

Alex Ward at Vox puts the problem with killing the Iran nuclear deal: per a former State Department official, "(i)f I were the North Koreans, and Trump pulled out of the deal with Iran, why should I make an agreement?" Logic is not this Administration's strong point, and of course its votaries think logic is Communist or something, so I suspect the Administration will make the bad deal described in paragraph 26 -- one that would let North Korea keep the nukes it's got, versus the actual deal the Administration has such a hard-on to scuttle, in which Iran can't have any nukes. After that I presume they'll Blame Obama.

Andrew Sullivan sees the appointment of the Mustache of Evil as National Security Advisor as "the next step toward tyranny." It's a good analysis worth reading in full, but I would caution against thinking the next war will come after the midterms -- President Kennedy's Cuban missile crisis just so happened to take place weeks before the 1962 midterms, and I suspect having the country rally around him saved a lot of Democrat ass that year.

Of course unidentified sources say income National Security Advisor John Bolton will "rein in" his "hawkish views" once he joins the Administration, because what else would they say? That's he's going to make damn sure we go to war with Iran, regardless of whether America wants that or not or whether it's a good idea or not? Besides, going around announcing you're going to break everything would lead people to suspect you're going to break everything, and people who want to break everything can't have that.

CNBC poll finds a little less than one third of Americans reporting having more take-home pay as a result of the recent Republican tax "reform." That doesn't mean more folks aren't getting more money in their paychecks, but they sure ain't getting what rich folks and big corporations are getting, and people are going to vote how they feel. It is a bit miraculous that we're seeing this kind of reporting -- you know, instead of all the parroting of right-wing talking points we normally see when the "liberal" media tries to talk about taxes.

Finally, there is so, so much wrong with Senator Rick Santorum's suggestion that high school students should learn CPR instead of protesting gun violence, and the fact that CPR doesn't help you if you're bleeding to death isn't the half of it. He wants you to think "t(aking) action to ask someone to pass a law" equals "looking to someone else to solve (your) problem," when it actually equals getting your representatives, who are called "representatives" for a reason, to do their jobs. And he says kids should be asking "(h)ow do I as an individual deal with this problem," because if kids ask "how do we come together to deal with problems," then people like Rick Santorum don't win elections anymore. But worst of all: he thinks kids should accept the reality that they could be shot to death at school for no damn reason, and prepare for that eventually not by demanding more from their leaders but by learning CPR. I mean, c'mon, America is a can-do nation.

Action: fighting fracking and trophy hunting of endangered species.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to ban fracking and fracking-related activities within the Basin, then CREDO still helps you do that, and with the deadline for comments on the DRBC's proposed ban coming this week, the time to speak out is now. The DRBC has proposed banning the actual practice of fracking in the Basin, which is good, but has also proposed allowing gas drilling corporations to import and release fracking wastewater into the Delaware, which is most emphatically not good. If the whole point of banning fracking is to protect our clean water and thus our health, then why would you let corporations dump nasty-ass wastewater into the drinking water of 15 million good Americans? Imagine King Solomon actually splitting the baby in half and you'll see that this is exactly the sort of "compromise" that makes good Americans hate their representatives. So let's beat it down.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop the importation of elephant hunting trophies, then Avaaz still helps you do that. Don't you just love people who try to tell you that since elephants aren't endangered here in America, then American hunters should be allowed to go over to Africa (where they are endangered) and bring home as many trophies as they like? And these are the same people who constantly whine about TEH MORAL VALUEZ!!!!! They're also, sadly, the same people who respond to any criticism with a defense of hunting in general, as if we weren't talking about the precise immorality of hunting endangered species. But these kind of folks don't get all the say around here. Why is that? Because they haven't earned it. I mean, if you want all the say about everything, you should at least, like, know things, and not just stamp your feet louder than everyone else.

Around the table: the real lesson of the PA-18 special election, and other stories.

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times reminds us how little the Republican tax "reform" is doing for workers. Mr. Hiltzik reminds us that if corporations were serious about using their tax cut largess to make workers' lives better, they'd have given permanent raises, not bonuses that disappear almost as fast as they appear. And he also reminds us that Pfizer could reap immense rewards (not just of money, but of prestige) if they actually found a good treatment for Alzheimer's and Parkinsons, difficult as that's proven to be. And that's perhaps more emblematic of our times -- Our Best and Brightest corporations, which our laws supposedly need to "set free" from "regulatory burdens," constantly choose the easy way out when given the chance. And the easy way out now tends to be more lucrative, which is not how it should be in a civilized society.

Ho hum, the Treasury Department projects that our budget deficit will go up to nearly $1 trillion this year! And none of the President's votaries, who wouldn't stop whining about the Obama deficits, will complain about this one, because TEH TAX CUTZ!!!!! Which, as demonstrated in the above paragraph, are doing such great work for America.

Also ho hum, we learn that none other than OMB/CFPB director Mick Mulvaney was the one who approved the Labor Department's disastrous decision to bury the study that said their now-abandoned "tip-stealing" rule would actually result in bosses stealing their workers' tips! I presume one day Mr. Mulvaney will realize he's gone all-in on the wrong side, and suffer appropriately for it. I kid, of course -- Mr. Mulvaney will get wingnut welfare from Fox News forever after all the harm he's done our country. (If only we could buy our cable channels a la carte! Then there might not be any media wingnut welfare to give!)

Here's something genuinely surprising: the Senate Intelligence Committee, currently dominated by Republicans, says (among other things) that we should conduct elections with paper ballots. You and I have been saying this for close to 20 years, but I'm not going to be annoyed about that, or about the fact that their concern isn't machines disappearing votes but Russian meddling -- it's the right prescription, and I didn't think they had it in them to even say so. Now let's see if they actually help fund paper ballots at the state level.

Speaking of things you and I have known for 20 years, Paul Krugman at the New York Times instructs us that the entire Republican program is a "bait and switch" -- they promise all kinds of things to voters, but what they deliver is nothing more than "upward redistribution of income" from workers to bosses. But his analysis is valuable, because it confines itself to the PA-18 election, in which the Republicans tried "three different bait-and-switch strategies" -- roll call! Tax cuts are great! Tariffs will bring back the steel jobs! Democrats hate God and America! -- that failed to deliver victory for Mr. Saccone in a district the President won by nearly 20 points. But, you know, it isn't that the voters are "wising up" (the voters are actually plenty wise already!) so much as that Democrats like Conor Lamb -- who ran against the tax cuts and Obamacare repeal, and who ran for expanding Social Security -- are giving voters someone to vote for, and that's a thing that might even overcome whatever war the President plans to start the last week in October.

Finally, a Dane County Circuit Judge tells Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker that he must hold special elections to fill two vacant state legislature seats, even if he's really, really afraid Republicans will lose both, as they lost a Republican-held (and rather grotesquely-gerrymandered) seat less than two months ago. And who was the gay-humping, baby-killing, flag-burning, socialist-loving Governor who appointed this judge? I won't tell you his name, but his initials are "Scott Walker."

Action: domestic terror, Puerto Rico, and Pebble Mine.

Color of Change helps you urge Austin Police Chief Brian Manley to condemn the package bombings that have plagued that city this month as domestic terror attacks. Hey, if we're going to go around calling things terrorism, we ought to at least be consistent about it, and not just call them terror attacks when non-whites perpetrate them. The "liberal" media have been falling all over themselves trying to understand the Austin bomber -- even though most of his victims being non-white sure does make it easy to understand as far as I'm concerned -- and our President, naturally, has said very little about it, except to do a victory lap when the bomber blew himself up (though I suppose that's an improvement over "I hope they catch the people," which was his main utterance about the synagogue bomb threats last year). On the plus side, Mr. Manley hasn't ruled out calling these attacks domestic terrorism, so some pressure may be all that's needed.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico six months ago now, and still a little over one-tenth of the island doesn't have electricity and thousands of folks still don't have clean drinking water; even worse, our government has gotten into the habit of helping out Puerto Rico only if a) it makes money for banksters and b) if Puerto Rico dismantles laws that help good Puerto Ricans, like minimum wage laws, which is no better than a hostage crisis -- gut your good laws, or I'll leave you destroyed!. Hence CPD Action helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them to help rebuild Puerto Rico without demanding that they cripple themselves before banksters. I shouldn't have to spell this out, but rebuilding Puerto Rico so it can get back on its feet is itself an investment in America -- Puerto Ricans are American citizens, after all -- and if we give federal aid rather than bankster loans to Puerto Rico, then we, the American people, will do the investing.

Finally, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has, in a welcome development, insisted on maintaining Obama-era rules restricting mine-waste disposal in Alaska's Bristol Bay -- which makes it much, much harder for mining corporations to start up the proposed Pebble Mine project there, and that's good news for Alaska's sockeye salmon industry, which would have suffered greatly from mine waste polluting the bay waters in which the salmon live. And yet some corporations are just now putting money into the project, perhaps anticipating that the stocks can't go any lower after Mr. Pruitt's announcement. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell recent investor First Quantum to withdraw its funds from the Pebble Mine project. It sure looks like this could be the last nail in the coffin for Pebble Mine, but if I've learned one thing over the years, it's that bad ideas keep popping up like zombies. So we have to remain vigilant, and keep fighting.

Around the table: containing critical reminders about the Iraq war, Social Security, racism, corruption, and cowardice.

On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Iraq war, Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon reminds us that "America Destroyed My Country." Our invasion made Iraq worse off, yet those "liberal" media personalities who cheered on the invasion the loudest still get paid, and some of our worst Americans have achieved a wholly unearned measure of redemption merely by drawing the line against our new President, who seems worse than Mr. Bush only because unlike Mr. Bush he's unable to maintain even a veneer of civilization. Perhaps, by attending the author's visit to Basra in the third-to-last paragraph, we can begin to appreciate the enormity of our crime -- not merely by observing how "exhausted and polluted" the city now is, but by noting all the good Iraqis who still struggle against despair, and who deserve better.

Ho hum, Dean Baker finds yet another push from the Washington Post to gut Medicare and Social Security. Key point: "It's also important to keep in mind that average wages are projected to be more than 25 percent higher in 2035 than they are today," which doesn't mean those wages will keep up with inflation, but does mean that doomsday predictions about Social Security's solvency (and, for that matter, doomsday predictions about pension funds generally) tend to assume that wages will stay exactly the same as they are now, which is actually a very, very difficult thing to accomplish, even when rich people make all the decisions in America.

Adam Johnson at FAIR notes how easily black kids become "juveniles" in "liberal" media reporting. It's good to see someone else reminding everyone that you don't treat kids like adults because they're incapable of adult decision-making, and I'm grateful that Mr. Johnson says calling kids "juveniles" is a way of effacing the fact that they're actually, you know, kids. This is, of course, all part of a broader pattern -- other black victims of police violence become "no angels" in "liberal" media reporting, and some black murder victims even get to have their arrest records broadcast on "liberal" media articles after their murder! But please, right-wingers, tell us again how racism is dead.

HUD Secretary Ben Carson tells a House subcommittee that his wife picked out the $31,000 dining set that violated federal law and brought an ethics firestorm down upon him. If the President's votaries heard anything, of course, they heard that it was his wife's fault, which I suspect is what most of them think about everything in their lives most of the time. They might have also applauded Mr. Carson when he said "I’m not a person who spends a lot of time thinking about how something looks," and thus received him into their hearts as One of the Good Ones. Really, the Administration does care how everything looks -- to their votaries.

Finally, on a sad note, the Senate failed to take up S.J.Res. 55, which would have ended U.S. involvement in the Saudi Arabian war on Yemen, by a 55-45 vote. Not precisely along party lines, either: Republican Mike Lee of Utah was a co-sponsor of S.J.Res. 55, and four Republicans voted with him in favor of taking up the resolution, which means what, class? A bunch of Democrats voted the wrong way, that's what! Ten of them, in fact, including four up for re-election in states the President won and -- as if to remind us that we shouldn't overpraise recent Democrat electoral successes in special elections -- Doug Jones of Alabama.

Action: Social Security, consumer data protection, and social media.

So Paul Ryan wants to create a commission to "fix" Social Security? What's "broken" about Social Security, which keeps millions of seniors out of poverty and helps them have the dignified retirement they deserve? Well, according to Mr. Ryan, "reforming" Social Security is one way to "tackle the debt and the deficit." You know another way of "tackling the debt and the deficit"? Not passing tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, that's what! But of course Mr. Ryan supported that, and of course he revels in doomsday predictions about Social Security becoming insolvent. Why, I'm old enough to remember when they said Social Security would run out of money in 2016! So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any Social Security "Commission" designed to cut our hard-earned benefits, but feel free to go further and tell your Congressfolk that lifting the cap on payroll taxes so that income over $128,400 can be taxed into the system is a better idea.

Meanwhile, Congress is also doing its damnedest to let Equifax avoid telling customers when they're responsible for data breaches! It really is like we have a Bizarro World Congress, one that observes all the negative media coverage over Equifax exposing the personal data of nearly 150 million good Americans to hackers and identity thieves and responds by saying well, let's protect Equifax from all the bad publicity, even though they earned it! Problem solved! And the legislation in question would also overrule stronger state-level laws demanding more disclosure from corporations that lose your data, because, after all, being a conservative is all about letting states do what they like, until they don't do what you like! Hey, I'm just going by the evidence! So Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject proposed legislation that would give even more corporate welfare handouts to big credit monitoring corporations.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Facebook to stop marketing its Messenger app to children under 14, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Frankly, kids have a tough enough time navigating social media without Facebook dangling more shiny objects in front of them, and saying oh, lighten up, liberal, kids can handle more than you thinkis a) inaccurate, given that studies have found that 8th graders are generally unhappier the more they use social media, and b) disrespectful of parents' rights to make those decisions for their children. No, b) is not an exaggeration: kids today have so, so many more avenues to get led down an emotional rabbit hole than we did when we were young, and parents absolutely have the right to tell their kids no to any of it. Otherwise, how can parents even raise children? How can they teach them what's valuable and lasting in our civilization? I sure wouldn't leave it up to social media corporations to teach them that.

Action: government spying, clean water, and war in Yemen.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 4943/S. 2383, the CLOUD Act. Why? Because the CLOUD Act would let American police grab your private data -- your emails, your videos, your online photos, your chat logs -- no matter where it's stored on the planet (and it could be anywhere!), and it'd also let foreign police get your private data from American corporations. Never mind a little thing called a warrant. And it'd allow our President to enter into "executive agreements" with other nations that would let them ignore our privacy laws while presumably following their own, weaker ones, never mind a little thing called foreign entanglements. This is the kind of thing that has historically gotten conservatives very upset, but with today's "conservatives" little more than shells of their ancestors, you might be tempted to hope right-wing suspicion of foreigners helps defeat this bill. But we're better off hoping our own activism kills it.

Meanwhile, closer to home, we learn from a USA Today investigation Pennsylvania has more schools and learning facilities with lead in their drinking water than every other American state, and since any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, that's nothing to crow WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. But HB 2025 would mandate that every state public school test its water for lead every two years, make the results of those tests public, and cut off any drinking water sources with more than 5 ppb of lead. This'd seem like a no-brainer, but too often our leaders seem like they're the ones who've spent their whole life drinking lead-contaminated water, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to support clean water and healthy child development by passing HB 2025. It's well past time we were able to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about something good our politicians have done, but we won't be able to, unless we speak out.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to support S.J.Res. 54, the resolution that would end American war-making in Yemen without Congressional authorization, then Defending Rights and Dissent still helps you do that. Word on the street is that the Senate will vote on S.J.Res. 54 this week, so you want to get a word in before that vote. To sum: Saudi Arabia has been waging war, with our help, on the Houthi rebels in Yemen for years, and though you may debate the wisdom of that -- personally, I think waging war on the Houthi rebels who are some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth is a bad idea, and that overplaying alleged Houthi ties to Iran is mere fearmongering -- you can't challenge the fact that Congress never declared war on Yemen, nor did Congress grant power to the President to act via the War Powers Act. Nor should you object that S.J.Res. 55 "hamstrings the President from acting," because, well, that's the idea.

Around the table: guns, education, populism, decadence, and strategy.

Zenobia Jeffries at Yes! magazine writes about black folks who have strongly embraced gun ownership in the wake of the "megalomaniac" who's now President. Many years ago, I embraced a very rigid view of Second Amendment rights out of a similar fear that Tha Bush Mobb would haul me away, but I've come to believe that, in a civilized society, that you don't locate the idea of "self-defense" solely in a handgun, but mainly in the values and institutions that neuter megalomaniac Presidents in the first place -- and if those values and institutions, frankly, haven't worked very well for black folks (just ask Philandro Castile!), our task is to make them work well, not abandon them.

Betsy DeVos's Department of Education informs Department workers that they'll no longer negotiate with those workers' chosen representative, the American Federation of Government Employees Council 252, but instead imposes a "collective bargaining agreement" upon them. I can't fathom the circumstances under which this could possibly be legal -- I can imagine even John Roberts saying that if management imposes its will on labor without negotiating, it can't be said to be "collective bargaining," or even "bargaining." But then, this is the Administration way: do what you want, regardless of the law, and dare anyone to stop you.

It really shouldn't surprise us by now that West Virginia's public school teachers don't fit snugly into the red-blue paradigm, nor should it surprise us that socially-conservative-but-pro-union is really a thing. I also don't think West Virginia's particular brand of pro-union populism should be a template for the rest of the country, since West Virginia's economy relies on coal more than any other state. And "bringing jobs back to coal country" might be more about reclaiming used-up coal land for agriculture and renewable energy than recasting REGULASHUNZ BAD!!! as a populist tenet.

If you want a true indicator of how sick, immoral, and decadent our society has become, you need look no further than all the cable news personalities the Administration has either hired or is contemplating hiring. The President has recently hired CNBC's ridiculous Larry Kudlow to replace the almost-as-ridiculous Gary Cohn as his top economic advisor, and one Fox and Friends host (not a famous one) has actually moved up in the State Department. TV news is the worst news, which means cable TV news is the worst of the worst. Hence another reason to demand the ability to buy our cable channels a la carte: so we don't have to financially support these morons as they schmooze their way into our government.

Finally, Republicans are apparently hoping that they can keep their Senate majority by having the President go to states he won and talk about how "Democrats are hindering his agenda." I'm not sure how big the President's "base" is, really, and it sure does seem "counterintuitive" to have him go around the country and whine about how he can't get anything done. On the other hand, since this President isn't a Democrat, the "liberal" media will be much less likely to cover all of his whining as whining. And out of all the Senators up from states the President won, the only two I'd miss are Tammy Baldwin and Sherrod Brown.

Action: torture, immigration, and factory farm pollution.

Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to reject the President's nominations of CIA chief Mike Pompeo to become Secretary of State and current CIA deputy chief Gina Haspel to take over Mr. Pompeo's current job. One doesn't want to get into the habit of starting sentences with "well at least Rex Tillerson didn't," but Mr. Tillerson's general lack of enthusiasm for scuttling the Iran nuclear deal and bombing the crap out of North Korea are two positive attributes Mr. Pompeo doesn't share. Plus, Mr. Pompeo thinks you might be a criminal if you use encryption! Ms. Haspel's apparent rise to the top is no less offensive, as she oversaw a notorious CIA torture farm during Tha Bush Mobb years. As Dexter Filkins at The New Yorker reminded us early last year, if not for Mr. Obama's let's-look-forward attitude to prosecuting CIA torturers, "people like Haspel, quite plausibly, could have gone to prison." Can we at least keep her from becoming CIA Director?

Meanwhile, some Pennsylvania Republican state reps want to pass HB 28, a bill that would let any municipal employee contact our federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) department, at any time, while forcing municipalities to jail folks whenever ICE asks (with none of those pesky judges to get in the way!) or risk losing state funding. I guess if you can't win the argument, you start taking hostages -- give ICE whatever it wants, or the money gets it! You don't let just any state employee contact ICE because state employees all have superiors who should be handling such contacts, and you don't let ICE force towns to jail folks because you want feds to get warrants before getting cooperation from localities. You'd think nominally conservative politicians would be sensitive to all of that. So the ACLU helps you tell your PA state rep to preserve local rights and reject HB 28.

Finally, Congress is mulling a pair of bills -- H.R. 848, the so-called Farm Regulatory Certainty Act, and S. 2421, the so-called Fair Agricultural Reporting Method Act -- that would (as you no doubt gathered from the words "regulatory certainty") hamstring our ability to counteract factory farm pollution. H.R. 848 would prevent us from suing factory farms under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act when factory farms pollute our water, and S. 2421 would let factory farms keep more of their toxic gas emissions secret from nearby communities. If Democrats had any guts, they'd be hammering Republicans with ads calling them objectively pro-pollution and objectively pro-dirty water and objectively pro-dirty air, but you know the chances of that happening. Which means, as usual, it's up to us. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from factory farm pollution by rejecting H.R. 848 and S. 2421.

Around the table: with horrible truths about the Pennsylvania 18th district special election.

The President's nominee for CIA director, current CIA deputy director Gina Haspel, allegedly ran a CIA "black site" in Thailand where prisoners got waterboarded, and may even have ordered the destruction of video evidence of that torture. Right-wingers, of course, are squealing that ProPublica got the identity of one tortured suspect wrong, which of course automatically means she never ever tortured anyone ever ha ha ha suck it liberals! Seriously, though, this is what we get for looking forward, not backward. Right, Mr. Obama?

Study finds that of the 150 counties that get the most food stamps, 136 are rural. A majority of counties isn't the same as a majority of recipients, but surely this finding means our "liberal" media and our politicians underplay the prevalence of food stamp usage in rural counties. That's because of racism, of course -- keep telling rural food stamp recipients that any cuts in the program are really for TEH BLACKZ!!!! and they'll keep voting Republican. Unless, of course, Democrats start running campaign ads about Republican cutting your food stamps. I kid, of course -- these are Democrats we're talking about.

Turns out at least two stories about Executive branch corruption are worse than we thought: EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's little "cone of silence" wound up costing $43,000, not $25,000, and the Carsons did-too pick out their $31,000 dining set on the taxpayer dime. I wouldn't blame you for thinking this doesn't look a whole lot like "draining the swamp," but you must remember that when they say "drain the swamp," they really mean "stick it to liberals."

Senate votes by a nearly 2-1 margin to pass the nefarious S. 2155, which would loosen financial regulations on big banksters. Any good news? The House thinks the Senate bill isn't evil enough, and wants even more easing of regulatory "burdens," so when House and Senate go to conference out differing versions of the same bill, Democrats can filibuster the resulting conference bill. Yes, even the ones who voted for it the first time who feel "betrayed" by the changed conference bill. I mean, Jon Tester's not a fool -- if the President's going to remain this unpopular, why throw him a lifeline?

Now that Democrat Conor Lamb has upset Republican Rick Saccone in the Pennsylvania 18th special election -- in a district the President won by almost 20 points in 2016 -- some Republicans, including the President himself, are scrambling to claim Mr. Lamb as a conservative. Because he's personally pro-life but believes abortion should be legal, an opinion that has impressed exactly zero pro-lifers since Geraldine Ferraro? Because he "doesn't like" Nancy Pelosi, another opinion that will have zero consequences in the real world? They're even resorting to lies like saying he "love(s) the tax cuts," which is the precise opposite of the truth, without breathing a word about Mr. Lamb's many attacks on repealing Obamacare and slashing Medicare and Social Security. Well, when you've got nothing but you still feel the need to flap your yap, what can you do but lie?

Finally, and perhaps even worse, Republicans were calling Mr. Lamb's opponent, Rick Saccone, an "F candidate" even before the election. Mr. Saccone is an ignorant, blustering fool, certainly, but you don't even have to look at our President to see that he's not exactly an anomaly -- that in fact he represents the natural progression of the mainstream Republican candidate. When Republicans spend decades defending indefensible Presidents and policies and provoking their most rage-addled adherents with bad arguments and lies, then Rick Saccone is precisely the kind of person winds up carrying their banner. Seriously, they're all "F candidates" now.

Action: corporate welfare, EPA research, and oil drilling on public lands.

H.R. 5108/S. 2459, the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, would roll back a lot of the corporate welfare that the Republicans' recent tax "reform" bill handed out, by treating "foreign" corporations more like domestic corporations if they do most of their work here in America, and thus collect more taxes from them. When you think about it, you'll see how unfair the "inverted corporation" concept is to small businesses -- no small business in America has the financial ability to buy, say, a Canadian corporation like Tim Hortons and then pretend it's a "foreign" corporation to avoid paying taxes in America. But that's what Burger King did in 2015, and they're getting away with it even though most Burger Kings -- and the good folks who work there, and the good folks who eat there -- are right here in America. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to crack down on corporate welfare by supporting the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act.

Meanwhile, EPA Administrator Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt is, as we speak, trying to close the National Center for Environmental Research (or NCER), which does scientific research on threats to children's health. Indeed, the NCER has done important work on childhood asthma, early births, immune system issues, neurodevelopmental problems; lately it's done work arsenic in baby food and pesticide levels in farmworkers' children, which I'm sure you heard about on the news. Do these sound like the things we should be doing less of? And n.b. I said "we" -- if our government does research, that means we pay for it, and we prod our Congressfolk to oversee it; if our government decided research is best left to the "free" market, then we will find ourselves learning mainly whatever big corporations want us to know. Indeed, it's almost like that's the whole idea! So Penn PIRG helps you tell the EPA not to close the NCER.

Finally, the Project on Government Oversight (or POGO) reported last month on how little money our government collects from oil drilling corporations on public lands, and now POGO (via Sign for Good) helps you tell the President to make these corporations pay their fair share for using the land that belongs to all of us. It ain't just that, you know, oil drillers tend to pollute stuff, it's also that our government had reduced the amount of money it's charged oil drillers by almost 96% over the last 35 years! No doubt the President stands ready to whine that if we charge oil drillers too much for using our land, they won't be able to make any money and create jobs, which is to laugh. Even if corporations ever created jobs when they weren't forced to, either by policy or circumstance, why would we believe that we can't have both jobs and royalties earned for the public? Isn't this America, the can-do country that always finds a way and that rejects artificial hostage situations?

Action: internet freedom, non-cruel budgeting, and antibiotic abuse.

S.J.Res. 52, the "resolution of disapproval" that would take down the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, now counts the entire Democratic Senate caucus of 49 members as sponsors; Maine Republican Susan Collins has also indicated she'll vote for the resolution, giving it 50 out of 100 votes. That means we need one more vote, and the rest of the Republican caucus seems united against it; yes, Sen. Kennedy (R-LA) has hemmed and hawed, but one has to wonder if that's just part of the drama they want to create. Their drama doesn't matter, of course: if we speak out loudly enough, someone will break, and thus help us restore the principle that you, not some corporation, should determine where you want to go on the internet, and that internet corporations shouldn't be able censor, block or throttle websites or give preferential treatment to those other corporations that give them tribute. Hence US PIRG helps you tell your Senators to support internet freedom by supporting S.J.Res. 52.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to defy the Administration's budget proposal and demand that the Environmental Protection Agency receive all the funding it needs to do its job, then Environmental Action helps you do that. It's not like the folks who want to breathe clean air and drink clean water are some minority in America, after all! Yet when Republicans control any part of our government, they force-feed us a diet of BIG GUBMINT BAD!!! and REGULASHUNZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!! and TEH BATTULZ FOR TEH CLEAN AIRZ AND TEH CLEAN WATURZ ARE ALREADYZ WONZ!!!!! Yes, they really say that last thing, as if science never progresses, and as if dismantling the very regulations that protect our air and water won't somehow result in, you know, dirty air and dirty water. But most Americans know the value of a rule of law that protects that air and water -- and law and order must be funded, after all.

Finally, McDonald's has committed to sourcing its American chicken from farms that avoid overprescribing antibiotics. That's no small thing, since four out of every five antibiotics in America get used not on sick people or sick animals, but on healthy feed animals, and that means more antibiotic-resistant superbugs, more dead Americans, and the spectre of a future where the next cut you get means death. But, ah, McDonald's isn't known for its chicken, right? McDonald's has sold "billions and billions" of hamburgers, commitment to fight against antibiotic abuse would be more effective, if it actually sourced its beef from farms that don't abuse antibiotics. Yeah, it may not be cheaper in the short run, but a) Big Macs ain't exactly expensive now and b) why does the short run matter more than the long run? Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell McDonald's CEO Steve Easterbrook to source beef and pork from more antibiotic-free farms.

Action: vote suppression, fair sentencing, and the war on Yemen.

The notorious "Interstate Crosscheck" program supposedly aims to catch voter fraud by tabulating people with similar names registered in multiple states, but -- as America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, has documented at length -- "Interstate Crosscheck" actually foments vote suppression by allowing states to simply deregister voters who have similar names to folks in other states, and a great many of these folks just so happen to be black or Hispanic. "Interstate Crosscheck" flags voters without checking middle names or Social Security numbers, and if you're sitting there thinking that just means that these folks registered with different middle names, I would remind you of the phrase innocent until proven guilty, which is a bedrock principle of our judicial system, after all. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your state to stop or decline participation in "Interstate Crosscheck."

Meanwhile, did you know that in Pennsylvania you can get your drivers' license suspended for six months (or longer) after doing time on a drug-related offense, even if that offense had nothing to do with driving your car unsafely? An important part of law and order is ensuring sentences fit crimes; another important part of law and order is ensuring that convicted criminals can rehabilitate themselves, but it's awfully hard to get a job, get an apartment, see your family, or participate in your community without a car, especially in places with very little public transportation. If that sounds like "setting folks up to fail and go back to jail," well, that just so happens to be the very market model of the private prison corporation. But HB 163 would repeal the law mandating license suspensions for drug-related convictions, so the ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to support rehabilitation of prisoners by supporting HB 163.

Finally, S.J.Res. 54, the bill that would end American participation in Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen, is a good bill, but the similarly-numbered S.J.Res. 55 would let our government keep helping Saudi Arabia in its war against Yemen as long as our Secretary of State (whomever that is!) certifies that Saudi Arabia is making a "good faith effort" at diplomacy and helping to alleviate the near-famine and near-plague conditions in Yemen that have resulted from the war. In other words, it lets Senators look like they're doing something about the war without actually doing something about it! Don't brook any silliness about how this fake resolution gives the President more "flexibility," because Presidents don't need "flexibility" -- they just need good Americans to tell them what to do. Hence Just Foreign Policy and Change.org help you tell your Senator to reject S.J.Res. 55 and actually do something about starving Yemeni citizens.

Around the table: chaos is what they want, part 264.

When you read that the White House has "scold(ed) Cabinet members" for their numerous ethical lapses including six-figure doors and five-figure dining sets, or that they're "alarmed" that their own Education Secretary couldn't answer basic questions about her job on 60 Minutes, your first intuition might be to say "well, what were they expecting?" But your second, and wiser, intuition would be to declare reports of White House "alarm" about these matters as drama, meant to distract you from more important (and nefarious) doings. Believe me, things are going exactly as the Administration wants and expects.

Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media has long justified defense spending hikes on the basis of "modernization" of our weaponry. After all, when you can already destroy the world hundreds of times over, and spend three times what China spends and 10 times what Russia spends, how else do you sell continued military spending? Meanwhile, here's a list of "(t)hings that the government is somehow never obligated to “modernize”: healthcare, education, family leave policy."

The incorrigible Matthew Yglesias at Vox informs us that liberals aren't actually becoming more "politically correct," but actually support free speech more than they used to, and more than right-wingers do now. As usual, he's got facts and figures to back his thesis up (including the one showing college students are less supportive of insult policies and the like than folks who aren't in college, which is a pretty priceless finding), but who needs science when you've got isolated anecdotes -- and unquenchable rage?

Northern California District Court judge tells EPA Administrator Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt to stop lollygagging on implementing the smog rules the EPA issued in 2015. Because, really, that fact that your party's Presidential candidate happened to win three swing states with pluralities-not-majorities and thus get a solid majority of the Electoral vote even as he only got 46% of the popular vote doesn't mean you can do any damn thing you want just because you head up the EPA. Has it occurred to him that this is why that one guy cussed at him on an airplane?

Finally, we should not rejoice that Rex Tillerson is out as Secretary of State -- history will instruct us that he either cheered on the Administration's purge of the State Department or stood by and did nothing, and the fact that his President threw him under the bus in public repeatedly doesn't make him a good man, merely a better one than the President, which is nothing to take to the Pearly Gates. And the man who may succeed him, CIA head/teabagger Mike Pompeo, could be substantially worse. Mr. Pompeo, after all, is the man who suggested that folks who use encryption to protect their privacy on the internet might well be criminals, and it can't be a good thing having a man that narrow dealing with, you know, the world. (As an aside, wanna know why they stayed in-house for the next CIA head, instead of giving it to Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas? Because that could flip another Senate seat to Democrats, that's why!)

Action: free speech, discrimination against the disabled, and war in Yemen.

H.R. 1865, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, would (despite its noble-sounding name) harm the very people it purports to protect. How? It would allow folks to sue internet service providing corporations for virtually any sex trafficking that happens on their network, rather than just the sex trafficking they knew about and failed to report -- which means that social workers and victims won't be able to (for example) use message boards to talk about their experiences, since ISPs won't want to take the risk of being hauled into jail. ISPs would more likely just censor such content, even though it isn't sex trafficking -- and, now that the FCC has repealed net neutrality, ISPs will be able to censor folks a whole lot more easily than they previously could. Didn't conservatives used to say we should only go after the people who actually do wrong? The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject H.R. 1865.

While you've got your Senators on the phone, you may want to remind them to reject H.R. 620, the so-called ADA Education and Reform Act. Why? Because instead of focusing on punishing corporations that discriminate against the disabled, H.R. 620 would force would-be plaintiffs in a lawsuit against a business that discriminated against them to tell the businesses first and cite, in copious detail, the specific laws they've violated (like how the bill makes victims "educate" their attackers?), and then give them six months to come up with a "plan" to stop discriminating and make "significant progress" toward executing that plan. Remember: when Our Glorious Elites whine about TEH FRIVOLUSS LAWSUITZ!!!!!, they only mean lawsuits filed by people against corporations. When a corporation sues you for no damn good reason, they don't give one rat's hind-quarter about it. So don't let them have all the say about the things that affect our lives.

Finally, while you still have your Senators on the phone, you can tell them to support S.J.Res. 54, which would stop our government from aiding and abetting the Saudi war on Yemen -- which war, as you no doubt remember, has the added bonus of killing some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda in the whole world! Remember hearing that our President would bring "different thinking" to foreign policy, with maybe a little less indiscriminate war-making? Then again, you heard that from Candidate George W. Bush before he became President George W. Bush, too. Don't buy any bridges from the Department of Defense about how our work against Yemen doesn't constitute "hostilities" (I wish I were joking about that!), nor should you take any guff about "hamstringing the President in foreign policy-making." Congress is supposed to hamstring the President in foreign policy-making! It's a feature of our Constitution, not a bug.

Action: battling the police state, banksters, and hunting extremists.

First things first: the House's Homeland Security appropriations bill actually allows the President to put the Secret Service at any polling place he likes during federal elections. The Secret Service can accompany the President to the polls, but putting Secret Service folks randomly at polls sure sounds like our government trying to intimidate us, doesn't it? A spokesperson for the Senate's Homeland Security Chair, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, says that bit is not in the bill the Senate Homeland Security Committee passed this week, but that doesn't mean it won't be in the conference bill, and therefore, shortly thereafter, the law. This would be a very, very good time to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and call your Senators and demand that they reject this legislative rider.

While you've got them on the phone, you'll want to tell them to reject S. 2155, the so-called Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which has not yet received a full vote in the Senate, but which has about a dozen Democrat co-sponsors when it shouldn't have any sponsors, period. You may have heard that they're trying to change the bill a bit to make it more palatable. Your first objection to that statement might be how do you make a crap sandwich palatable? But, as David Dayen reports in The Intercept, the "fixes" the Senate has made won't actually fix a damn thing. And it gets worse: the House, which has passed even worse financial "reform" bills, aims to try to get their financial deregulation wish list jammed into the Senate bill via a "manager's amendment." All this, for a bill the CBO says will heighten the risk of another bankster meltdown. So the word of the day is "no."

Finally, the President has decided that he's going to ditch a ban on elephant trophies after all. I guess he figured we've all forgotten about that picture of his son holding a severed elephant tail! Uh, no: Environmental Action helps you tell our President to keep our ban on hunting elephants. Don't brook any nonsense from trolls that if you support the ban on hunting elephants, you must hate hunting. Really, what a flatugasm of immaturity -- I mean, if I said folks who support lifting the ban must really hate elephants, they'd all have a tantrum about it. Elephants' numbers have dropped dramatically over the last half-century, and hunting them down is a big reason why; don't hunters disapprove of hunting species into extinction? Or is that yet another tenet of conservatism that's just not conservative enough anymore for the rageheads who get into sword fights over the meaning of the word "conservative" these days?

Around the table: a noted centrist suggests that Democrat centrists stop meddling in Congressional primaries, and other tales.

Elizabeth Hinton thinks we should "Turn Prisons Into Colleges." If we could keep prisoners away from the for-profit sector, though, that'd be nice. I suppose the ragehead crowd will squeal PRIZUNZ ARE FOR TEH PUNISHMENTZ!!!!, though actually prisons are for rehabilitation. But those who only care about punishment and retribution can take heart that a lot of prisoners would find studying to be an absolute chore, at least at first. What rageheads will say when more of those prisoners become functioning members of society again? Oh, who am I kidding -- they'll point to the ones who don't and declare the whole thing a failure. And their heroes will say PRIVATEZ PRIZONZ ARE TEH ANSWURZ!!!!!

Our Department of Defense tells Congress it can't tell them not to refuel Saudi planes that go on to drop bombs on Yemen, which suggest a certain ignorance, on Defense's part, on how the Constitution is actually supposed to work. They're not even trying to argue that the 2001 AUMF, which needs to be repealed yesterday if not sooner, gives them all the authority they need! Instead, they're trying to say helping Saudi Arabia bomb Yemen doesn't "constitute 'hostilities'." Anyone want to ask any Yemenis about that?

Ho hum, the Obama Administration started a commission that finally got some health care help for Cold War-era nuclear workers exposed to toxins, but the current Administration has let that commission's expired seats (i.e., all of them) go unfilled. Because GUBMINT BAD REGULASHUNZ BAD ADMINISTRATIVEZ STATEZ BAD!!!! I predict that once someone explains to President Manchild that a lot of these workers probably voted for him, he promptly takes to Twitter to slam Democrats for holding up his nominees, even though they literally can't now.

Well, this is a watershed moment: brilliant but occasionally infuriating centrist Matthew Yglesias not only says the DCCC should stop trying to pick nominees for voters, but that the Democrats' whole elect-someone-who-can-win theory has "very little evidence" to back it. Which we've known for a while -- long before 2016, even! -- but again, nice to have some science behind it, and nice to hear it from an unlikely source, too. Studies do not, in fact, show that candidates who "moderate" their positions do better, and where have Democrats been cleaning up in special elections so far this cycle? In red areas where they did better before 2016, and notin places like Georgia's 6th district, where Barack Obama got shelled but where Hillary Clinton barely lost.

Finally, the Administration has told Idaho it can't break the Affordable Care Act as nakedly as it had planned to do, by selling health insurance plans that don't comply with Affordable Care Act requirements in re pre-existing conditions, for example. Still, we shouldn't congratulate the Executive branch for doing its job, nor should we ignore all the wink-winks in Ms. Verma's letter to Idaho Gov. Otter, which could just as easily have read "we told you how to break Obamacare, but NOOOOO! You had to do it your way!" And, ah, what "freedoms" is Gov. Otter talking about Obamacare destroying? The "freedom" to buy crappy health insurance that won't be there for you when you need it?

Around the table: there are a lot of opportunities, if you know where to take them, you know.

The President enacts tariffs on steel and aluminum, and the World's Last Economist, Michael Hudson, tells us why that's such a terrible idea. While it's true that great nations got great through protectionism, not "free" trade -- and have since lied to themselves about it to get other nations to buy into "free" trade! -- generally you don't put tariffs on raw materials, but the finished products that come from them, so if imported steel gets more expensive, steel corporations not only won't invest in new plants or jobs, they'll make less money in profits. (We won't even get into the plan to lift the tariffs on Mexico if they pay for the border wall. I mean, that's just rock stupid. And the President's votaries will love it.)

Good Kansans are challenging their state's show-your-citizenship-papers voting registration law, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who's both the defendant and the defendant's counsel here, tells the plaintiffs they just aren't trying hard enough to get registered. I couldn't blame you for asking if voting is your right, why do we have to try so hard to get registered? But you also have to remember that folks like Mr. Kobach can pretty much take the day off whenever they like without any consequences, so they don't understand what working families have to go through.

Interior Department reportedly spends almost $140,000 for a "Secretary's door." At that price, that door better open up into a better universe than this one, and, ah, when you call the contractor who did the work and they hang up on you without saying goodbye, that's a bad, bad look! And of course Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke thinks his department's budget should be cut! The pricey door shouldn't surprise you, though: Ryan Zinke, you may recall, is the man who literally rode into his first day on the job. Drama: it's all Republicans have to offer.

The Straight Dope wonders if bacteriophages, or viruses that can infect and change bacteria, will save us from the coming antibiotics crisis -- you know, the crisis that comes from using four out of five antibiotics in healthy feed animals as a way of producing more meat? Initial analysis: they could help, but they're not necessarily a magic bullet, particularly when it's hard to turn them into cash cows for big pharma (and, to be fair, when Western regulatory agencies have no history of handling them). Maybe we spend tax dollars researching phages, and then keeping the results for the public? Maybe we ban antibiotic abuse? Just saying!

Finally, we should absolutely celebrate that the West Virginia teachers' nine-day wildcat strike won them (and other state employees) a 5% pay hike, but we should also recall that the state decided to fund these increases by cutting state health care spending. A truly skilled Democratic consultant would call that an opportunityto run campaign ads against Republican state legislators who chose to cut health care instead of, say, raise taxes on rich folks. But I kid, of course -- Democrat consultants are always too busy polishing their civility trophies to try something like, you know, winning.

Action: campaign finance, vote suppression, and discrimination.

Congress has (sigh) only two weeks to pass another spending bill, etc., to avoid yet another government shutdown, etc., etc., and word on the street is that Republicans want to take us hostage yet again, etc., etc., etc., to gut campaign finance laws a little more, so their sugar daddies can spend even more money influencing elections. So both Common Cause and Public Citizen help you call your Congressfolk and tell them that you will not stand for any of that. Republicans hope to (among other things!) gut enforcement of the famous Johnson Amendment law prohibiting politicking from the pulpit and forbid the SEC from forcing publicly-held corporations to disclose their campaign spending. Money in politics being unpopular across the political spectrum, how much of a chance would Republicans have to pass this fecal mess as a stand-alone bill? Approximately none. And remember: folks who try to do dirty work in the dark are admitting they can't win in the light.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your state Secretary of State to stop participating in the nefarious "Interstate Crosscheck" database. Why? Because "Interstate Crosscheck," under the guise of "stopping voter fraud," is actually a tool to stop people from voting, by helping states deregister people who have similar names to folks in other states. But a lot of people have similar names to people who live in other states -- especially black and Hispanic folks, it just so happens! And folks can stay on a state's voting rolls for years after they move out, and it doesn't mean they're breaking the law! And "Interstate Crosscheck" doesn't even check Social Security numbers or middle names! And, seriously, depriving folks of the right to vote before proving they've done anything wrong should offend anyone who values law and order. So your state Secretaries of State need to hear from you, with a quickness.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Administration to scrap its plans to let employers discriminate against their employees in the name of "religious conscience," then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. That's what the Administration's proposed rule would do -- it'd let some boss's conception of his own "conscience" deny you the health care you need, and to hell with whatever your conscience tells you. If you're a gay couple trying to get fertility treatments, a woman trying to get a birth control prescription filled, or just someone whose boss doesn't believe in (for example) bipolar manic depression, then you could find yourself out in the cold thanks to someone else's "conscience." But our President believes, first and foremost, that only other bosses matter, and folks who work for a living don't. So will remind Mr. 46%, as often as necessary, that we actually do matter.

Action: with three more ways to fight greedy corporations.

Consumer Reports helps you tell Consumer Financial Protection Bureau acting Director Mick Mulvaney to regulate financial corporations as vigorously as the American people have come to expect. He doesn't give one rat's hind-quarter what you and I think, but it's our duty to tell him anyway. Since taking over the CFPB, Mr. Mulvaney has declared that the agency should be less about regulation and more about advice to consumers, which is precisely not what the American people wanted after banksters nearly destroyed our economy in 2008. That wasn't even 10 years ago, and yet folks like Mr. Mulvaney still spew out their REGULASHUNZ BAD!!!! absurdities like no one can remember back that far. And without the CFPB, which has to date returned almost $12 billion to consumers harmed by financial predators, we would likely never have caught Wells Fargo opening accounts for customers who didn't want them. So let's protect the things that protect us.

Meanwhile, Nestlé still pumps a crapload of water annually (as much as 160 million gallons) out of the San Bernardino National Forest in California -- and their permit to do that expired three decades ago! And the California Water Board finally told Nestlé back in December to stop drawing that water, but of course they haven't, because law and order! That's water belonging to the good people of California, who did recently suffer through a five-year drought, as you may recall -- and Nestlé was drawing water from San Bernardino to sell as bottled water the whole time. Bottled water is a scam, not just because the water from your tap is clean enough, but also because Nestlé pays so little for the water it bottles and charges so much. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell the U.S. Forest Service to enforce the rule of law and prevent Nestlé from siphoning public water from the San Bernardino National Forest.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Monsanto sued the government of Arkansas for banning the use of its dicamba herbicide during the upcoming growing season -- and an Arkansas county circuit court judge threw the lawsuit out. This is good news for vegetable and peanut farmers, whose crops suffered immense damage from the dicamba herbicide drifting from soybean farms over to their farms. Of course, Monsanto thinks the judge's decision causes "irreparable harm" to the corporation that made nearly $8 billion in profit in fiscal 2017. All together now: waaaaaaah! Corporations do seem to love creating proprietary pesticides that only work with proprietary crops, and vice versa, but if you're as annoyed as I am that these efforts to "increase crop yields" seem to do little but increase corporate profits at great expense to small farmers, then Penn PIRG helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to ban dicamba here in the Keystone State.

Action: internet freedom, the Equality Act, and the DREAM Act.

The latest Color of Change email reminds me that the sixth anniversary of Trayvon Martin's death at the hands of wannabe cop George Zimmerman passed last week -- which in turn reminds me that the Sanford, FL police were all set to do nothing about it, until Mr. Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, started a petition on Change.org. Fast-forward over 2.2 million signatures, and Mr. Zimmerman stood trial for Mr. Martin's murder, and though he got off, countless black kids caught in future "wrong" neighborhoods who might have died will now live, as future wannabe cops decide taking the law into their own hands isn't worth becoming the next Most Hated Man in America. Now imagine how difficult it would have been for Ms. Fulton's petition to get traction if your ISP could simply block it, or slow it down, or bombard you with junk news pop-ups before signing it. Well, the FCC's recent anti-net neutrality rule allows your ISP to do all that now. Hence Stop the FCC helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote for H.J.Res. 129/S.J.Res. 52, the "resolution of disapproval" that would overturn the FCC's recent anti-net neutrality rule.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2282, the Equality Act, would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to extend its protections against discrimination to gays and transgenders. That would not only make it illegal to fire good folks or deny them access to credit or housing just because they're gay, but it'd also nullify, in one fell swoop, all those noxious state "religious freedom" laws that allow folks to discriminate because they think their Jesus told them to. So Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support equality for gays by supporting H.R. 2282. And to those friends or relatives of yours who whine DONT TEH RELIJUZ HAVEZ TEH RIGHTZ TOOZ!!!!!, remind them that your rights don't include running roughshod over other people's rights, and that a Jesus who cares only about making sure you don't get gay cooties on you is no Jesus worth knowing. Of course, the Jesus I know is worth knowing -- and couldn't possibly favor discriminating against folks who are gay because God made them that way.

Finally, the President's arbitrary deadline for ending protections for certain immigrants brought here as children under the DACA program officially passed two days ago. Two federal courts have issued injunctions preventing the Administration from ending DACA, and the Supreme Court has lately decided to let those injunctions stand, but that doesn't mean the Administration hasn't done these immigrants any harm -- some 20,000 DACA recipients have already lost their protections and can't get them back, and many of the rest are understandably hesitant about going through the process again when they can't be sure it'll do them any good. Just to review: this isn't about "chain migration," yet another formerly innocuous term right-wingers have tried to turn into a cuss word merely by repeating it with a sneer -- this is about not being cruel to people who had literally no choice in coming to America, and who wouldn't recognize the country to which we'd deport them back. Hence the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3440/S. 1615, the DREAM Act.

Around the table: describing another frontier in fearmongering, and other tales.

If Sinclair gets to gobble up Tribune Media, what sort of things can we expect on our local news programs? Why, ginned up anti-Muslim terror reports, of course! Or, as they call them, "Terrorism Alert Desk" segments, which, you won't be surprised to learn, are not exactly substantive. Sinclair ran run about 200 of them last year, and I guess if you see one more than every other calendar day, you might start to think TEH MUZLIMZ ARE TEH KILLINGZ TEH PEEPULZ!!!! everywhere. You have to remind yourself that 1.5 billion Muslims inhabit the Earth, and "Imam Reads to Blind Grandmother" isn't likely to hit the "Terrorism Alert Desk." Or even the "news desk."

Jim Naureckas at FAIR finds a Pew Research Center study anxious to point out that the youngs are liberal and the olds aren't, but strangely not anxious to point out that just about every age group has become more liberal over the last seven years. He also points out, toward the end, that social media outlets have enabled more Americans to get past the "media gatekeepers" -- and that those gatekeepers love telling us we're all in our own "bubbles," rather than the bubble they would prefer to keep us in.

Every once in a while you need to hear a former Republican remind us that Republicans only have "one idea" anymore, and that idea is tax cuts. It's good to hear someone count "the administration's dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its rules against consumer fraud" as an offense against law and order. And it's also good to hear someone remind everyone that Sen. Flake sure talks a good game about the President's various offenses against civilization, but "votes with machine-like consistency in favor of the president’s destructive agenda and unqualified nominees." Mr. Flake gave us the "resolution of disapproval" that repealed internet privacy protections, you recall.

Ho hum, the President announces stiff new tariffs against imported aluminum and steel, and then we learn that one of his advisors, the notorious Carl Icahn, just so happened to have sold over $30 million of stock in the heavily steel-dependent Manitowoc Company during a ten-day period starting on February 12. I have no opinion on whether these tariffs are actually a good idea, but here's the trouble: Mr. Icahn hadn't traded any stocks in Manitowoc for almost three years before February 12, and of course steel stocks (including Manitowoc's) went down bigly after the President's announcement. Could that be illegal insider trading? And could the "insider" who supplied Mr. Icahn with his info be the President? These are questions worth asking.

Finally, Office of Management and Budget releases report stating that "major" federal regulations enacted between 2006 and 2016 had financial benefits that far, far outweighed their costs. You would think this Administration, in particular, would have tried to cook the books, but apparently they just settled for hoping that we'd never notice, what with all the drama that surrounds our President. Also, too, OMB found that regulations tend not to be "a significant factor in employment," meaning regulations don't kill jobs. That won't stop Republicans from repeating a bunch of crap, nor will it prevent the "liberal" media from failing to question them on it. Which is why we trust ourselves.

Action: defending free speech, law and order, and civilized budgeting.

The Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (or BDS) movement aims to hit Israel in its pocketbook, thus hoping to end its continuing occupation of Palestine. States like New York and Florida have responded by refusing to contract with corporations that support the BDS movement, and though I find these state actions odious, I'm not willing to say corporations supporting BDS have a "right" to taxpayer-funded contracts. But S. 720, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, would go considerably farther: it would "prohibit() any U.S. person engaged (in) interstate or foreign commerce from supporting...any boycott fostered or imposed by any international governmental organization against Israel or any request by any international governmental organization to impose such a boycott." That should sound an awful lot like our government telling us what to think, or else! So Jewish Voice for Peace helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them to oppose S. 720.

Meanwhile, Sens. Sanders (I-VT), Lee (R-UT) and Murphy (D-CT) have introduced S.J.Res. 54, which would require our President to remove our soldiers from Yemen (or from areas of the world where they're supporting Saudi Arabia's war against Yemen) until such time as Congress actually declares war there. S.J.Res. 54 makes an exemption for efforts against al-Qaeda, but of course you already know that the Saudis are fighting the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and the Houthi rebels have proven to be some of the best al-Qaeda fighters in the world -- so maybe the best way to fight al-Qaeda is to simply pull out. Don't brook any silliness about TEH CONGREZZEZ TYINGZ TEH PREZNITZ HANDZ IN TEH YEMENZ!!!!, because that's the whole point -- letting the President wage whatever war he likes wherever he likes is not just un-American, it's unconstitutional. Hence both Stop the War and CREDO help you tell your Congressfolk to support human rights in Yemen, and the rule of law in America, by supporting S.J.Res. 54.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject the President's latest budget that takes from working families to pay for his tax-cuts-for-the-rich, then CREDO still helps you do that. This budget, as you know, would slash (among other things!) food stamps, housing assistance, infrastructure spending, Medicaid, Social Security, and the EPA -- but would increase defense spending, which is more and more like a corporate welfare program. And the Administration has the cojones to say their budget shows compassion to the poor people who pay taxes! As if those folks don't benefit from any of these programs at all! Of course a lot of the Administration's "forgotten Americans" use these programs at various times in their lives, and they "use" EPA funding, too, in the sense that the EPA can keep their air and water clean if it has enough money to enforce the law. So let's help these "forgotten Americans" by opposing the President's budget.

Action: fighting for financial regulation, free speech, and the rights of the disabled.

I have three action alerts today, all on bad bills we've covered recently, and all three might get a Senate vote this week -- because why would the Senate ever vote on good bills before bad ones? -- so you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject all three bills.

First up is S. 2155, the so-called Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, and by this title you already know three things: 1) by "economic growth" they mean "whatever makes CEOs richer," 2) by "regulatory relief" they mean "kill whatever regulations protect good Americans from financial predators," and 3) by "consumer protection" they mean "we stuck those two words on the end of the bill's title to fool people." Of course the bill's proponents -- who include far too many Democrats, including the Man Who Would Be Vice President, Tim Kaine of Virginia -- say that changing the law so that banks with between $50 and $250 billion in capital assets get less regulatory oversight is all about helping "community banks." But that's bollocks, unless (as David Dayen noted last week) we think banks with stadiums named after them are "community banks." Just for reference, my credit union, which is much closer to an actual "community bank" than any Borg-like bankster chain, has a little over $1 billion in assets. So, seriously, "community banks" my ass.

Second up is H.R. 1865, the so-called Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, which expand folks' ability to sue internet service providing corporations for any sex trafficking that occurs on their networks whether they know about it or not. Aren't conservatives always saying liberals "blame the wrong people"? Well, here's the nominally "conservative" Republican party doing just that. Just so happens our laws already allow good folks to sue ISPs that knowingly aid and abet sex trafficking, so why does H.R. 1865 exist? Probably to induce ISPs to pre-emptively censor content, or simply shut down content, and that sound you hear is our free speech rights going down the drain. Think any social worker or sex trafficking victim will ever open up on a message board again? Think folks who oppose gutting free speech rights just to appear "tough on crime" will ever post about it on a blog again? Well, I will -- but I can understand why other folks won't.

Finally, we have H.R. 620, the so-called ADA Education and Reform Act, where "ADA" means the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act. Didn't know the ADA needed "reforming," did you? Well, it sure doesn't need this "reform": H.R. 620 would require that good disabled folks "educate" those corporations that discriminated against them before suing them -- you like how Congress would make the victims "educate" their oppressors, about things they should have known about for over 25 years, no less? And H.R. 620 would also let those corporations off the hook if they come up with a plan to address discrimination and make some indeterminate "significant progress" on that plan. Pimps, if you don't put up a ramp so the wheelchair-bound can access your store, or if you don't hire folks just because they're disabled, you're not some aggrieved party in need of "relief" from "frivolous" lawsuits -- you're wrong, and instead of whining about how hard it is to make a buck, you ought to just make it right. You know, like a grown-up.

So: one phone call to each Senator, telling them to reject S. 2155, H.R. 1865, and H.R. 620; it'll take only a few minutes, and you'll do a great deal of good. Even if all three bills pass, you'll have done your part for freedom and justice, and the more you do your part, the more it adds up -- first to the point where we win more victories when we have the superior argument, and ultimately (a man can dream!) to the point where we have Congressional representatives who actually represent us, and not just their big donors. So good luck, and God bless.

Around the table: concerning working families, corporate taxes, health care, financial regulation, and public lands.

Thinking about picking up Uber or Lyft as a side job? Well, think again: an MIT study finds that Uber and Lyft drivers, once they're done paying all the costs like gas and insurance and repairs that Uber and Lyft don't pay, make a median income of $3.37 an hour. The paper's co-author says "(t)his business model is not currently sustainable," though perhaps he's too polite to say that this model doesn't actually aim to sustain itself per se, but rather aims to redistribute income upward from workers to executives and shareholders.

Ho hum, American corporations spend over $200 billion in stock buybacks over the last two months. But the President's votaries will go to the polls with BUT TEH THOUZANDZ DOLLARZ BONUZEZ!!!!! on their minds, even though some of them would react badly to the news that corporations mainly use their big tax cuts to consolidate their power so that they're less accountable to their shareholders, of whom there are generally many fewer after a stock buyback.

The incomparable Michael Hiltzik notes that the current Administration will spend $33 billion more next year to cover almost nine million fewer Americans, which might strike fiscal conservatives, if any remain, as unconscionably stupid. In a related note, the Genius-in-Chief told the CPAC crowd that his Administration is bringing out "tremendous plans" "at a fraction of the cost that are much better than Obamacare," though he's actually bringing out expanded short-term plans that are cheap because they cover almost nothing -- and siphon off younger, healthier folk from the bigger pools, which makes their health care more expensive. Why does our President tell us cheaper equals better? Because that's how he's made money his whole life.

The equally-incomparable David Dayen reminds us that Republicans and Democrats can't agree on gun control in the wake of the Parkland mass shooting, but can "come together" on gutting financial regulations. Well, that's what "bipartisanship" is all about, after all: Democrats and Republicans coming together to give Republicans whatever they want. Over two-thirds of the biggest banks in America will benefit from "loosened" regulations, with the help of at least three Democrat Senators up for re-election in 2018; why folks like Jon Tester don't figure that "bucking the party" and "bucking the banksters" could actually be the same thing I'll never understand.

Finally, a Project on Government Oversight report finds that our government has been routinely screwing Americans out of royalties when corporations drill for oil and gas on public lands. Our government used to charge about $40 in royalties for ever dollar they do now; how would you feel if that was your money? Oh, wait: it is your money. One of the tricks they use, apparently, is to declare a certain tract of land or oceanfloor "non-viable," and then act all surprised, I guess, when some low-bidding corporation drills the crap out of it and makes a killing. They say if we charge what it's worth we'll kill jobs, but it won't -- it'll only deprive a few corporate executives of some unearned money. Besides, we're the boss here.

Action: birth control, discrimination, and Social Security.

El Salvador's abortion ban, which has no exception for rape, incest, or life of the mother, has apparently prompted the government there to force 13-year-old girls to give birth, and the government also routinely arrests and jails women for miscarriages and stillbirths. Nobody could have predicted that such a "zero tolerance" policy would lead to such abject injustice! Has the government of El Salvador helped a sister out by maybe making contraception easily available? Of course not -- the number one birth control method for women in El Salvador is still sterilization. Of course, we shouldn't congratulate ourselves on our relative enlightenment -- not even 35 years ago you could hardly talk about condoms in America! -- but injustice is injustice, and we should fight it wherever we find it. So Amnesty International helps you tell El Salvador's Minister of Justice to end that nation's total abortion ban.

Meanwhile, the House passed the nefarious H.R. 620 earlier this month, and though they call H.R. 620 the ADA Education and Reform Act, it actually forces victims of discrimination to "educate" perpetrators (like big corporations that don't build entry ramps) about their discrimination -- discrimination that's been illegal for close to 30 years, so where have they been?. Then the discriminators get to avoid the suit entirely as long as they put together a plan to stop discriminating and make some undefined "substantial progress" in executing that plan in six months' time! The right loves to whine about TEH TOO MANYZ LAWSUITZ!!!!, but they'd rather look for "frivolous" lawsuits among the wheelchair-bound than, say, corporations, which file the vast majority of lawsuits in America. So Brittany Mozingo, of Martins Ferry, OH, has started a petition on Change.org with which you may tell your Senators to protect the disabled by rejecting H.R. 620.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to lift the cap on payroll taxes, so that income above $128,400 can be taxed into the Social Security system. If the wealthier members of society paid more into Social Security -- a burden they can most certainly bear! -- then people like our President and Paul Ryan wouldn't be able to argue that we have to cut Social Security benefits or get rid of Social Security Disability benefits or cut the Social Security Administration's budget. Moreover, "sensible" "bipartisan" Democrats wouldn't be able to use hifalutin techniques like "Chained CPI" (which tells us so, so little about seniors' fixed costs!) to cut earned benefits. Even better, with the payroll tax cap gone, our seniors could enjoy a more dignified and secure retirement. That is, after all, the point of Social Security, though depriving bad people of bad arguments is a nice side effect.

Around the table: tabulating continuing bad behavior from the "liberal" media, corporate front groups, and, of course, our President.

Wondering how the Republican tax "reform" plan started getting positive numbers? It may have been because the "liberal" media kept parroting right-wing talking points about thousand-dollar bonuses, which were a) not given to all workers by all corporations and b) pale next to the windfall those corporations are going to get. The bad news? When you refuse to pay workers what they're worth for so long, a thousand-dollar bonus will feel like manna from heaven, rather than a small pile of money that'll be gone in two weeks. The good news? Only around 25% of Americans seem to be noticing a tax cut in their paychecks, and that number maps too easily onto my old saw that 25% of the electorate is insane. Remember when President Obama got a tax cut designed not to be noticed into your paycheck? Remember how the 2010 midterms went for him?

On the other hand, Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic suggests that Democrats will fumble away their chance to take back Congress by "fail(ing) to effectively challenge the GOP claim that its tax-cut plan is benefiting average families." We're seeing a little evidence Democrats understand this -- ads supporting Sens. McCaskill and Donnelly mention the probability that tax-cuts-for-the-rich will lead to Medicare cuts for seniors -- but, gosh, the reality we've described above (people not seeing bigger paychecks, small bonuses spent and forgotten) should be fairly compelling, too. I'd shoot an ad with a bunch of bloodhounds looking for tax cuts. Hey, it worked for Mitch McConnell against Dee Huddleston in 1984.

Democrats formally introduce the resolution of disapproval aiming to overturn the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, and the corporate lobbyists have already begun their whining. Dig the "Broadband for America" group's asinine assertion that "such a significant policy issue should (not) be decided by an obscure legislative device that bypasses congressional debate and important input from the public." They sure didn't complain when Republicans used that very same "obscure legislative device" to repeal FCC consumer internet privacy protections, and they didn't defend "important input from the public" when the FCC came out and said it ignored most of the public comments it got, so Broadband for America, whoever they are, can drink a big glass of STFU.

The U.S. Geological Survey plans to eliminate its Biological Survey Unit, which costs a mere $1.6 million annually (out of a $4 trillion-plus budget!) and keeps over a million plant and animal specimens. Civilizations do not do this; sick, immoral, and decadent societies do this, and the more they say they're doing it for the coal miner in West Virginia or the single mother in Detroit -- who do both benefit from research on plants and animals in America -- the sicker, more immoral, and more decadent they become. And only truly sick individuals like Newt Gingrich say some billionaire could do it if it's that important, like only billionaires can do important things. We do it, as Americans, because we do important things.

In case you were wondering, no, we shouldn't deprive gun owners of due process rights just because the President gets frustrated with having to think hard about things that require hard thinking. We have preserved due process rights over the centuries precisely to prevent governments like this one from becoming too powerful, but sadly I bet a lot of the President's votaries agreed with him, even the biggest gun-lovers among them (who, after all, always think it's those other people who deserves to have their rights violated). Being civilized is hard work. It's supposed to be hard work. And folks who don't like doing the hard work should go live in a police state. It's that simple.

Finally, notorious right-wing gasbag Erick Erickson says Parkland high school student David Hogg is a "bully." Our Glorious Elites, feeling "bullied" by high school students! And dig how they suggest that anyone who proposes a boycott is a "bully" -- where's their love for the "free" market? And dig how Mr. Erickson says "(h)igh school kids are not people we should take seriously on any subject," as if that's not profoundly elitist, and thus also anti-American! Our Glorious Elites do nothing, ever, but bully the people, and then pretend they're the victims when the people finally push back. May God have mercy on their immortal souls.

Action: "free" trade, gun violence research, and the DREAM Act.

NAFTA renegotiation drags on -- out of sight of the American people or their Representatives in Congress, naturally, since it's not like the people are the owners of government or anything. But regardless of what comes out, Congress will still have to vote on it if they want to, you know, enact it, so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that any renegotiated NAFTA protects working families and protects our clean air and clean water. Previous "free" trade deals have represented a race to the bottom, as countries find themselves hamstrung from passing (or enforcing) laws protecting their people because some trade pact won't let them do it. Our President has talked a good game on trade, and has withdrawn us from the hated Trans-Pacific "Partnership," but that doesn't mean he won't make NAFTA even worse, as all the "free" traders he put in his cabinet "wield their influence." Fortunately, this is America, where the people always get a vote. And not just on Election Day.

Meanwhile, Sarah Clements, of Newtown, CT, has started a petition on Change.org, which helps you demand that Congress repeal the Dickey Amendment, which has effectively banned gun violence research for 20 years. The Dickey Amendment to the 1996 omnibus spending bill states that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control," but, really, facts are facts, and it doesn't really matter what those facts "advocate" or "promote," particularly since Congress would still be able to ignore the CDC's findings. And former Rep. Jay Dickey (R-AK) himself said in 2012 that we should absolutely research the causes of gun violence. But since the findings of such research might ultimately cost some gun corporation CEO the money to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, I guess we can't have nice things. Unless we demand them, of course.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean DREAM Act, without the kind of poison pill amendments that placate bigots. If you're of the mind, as I am, that corporations use foreign workers to drive down wages, you still shouldn't be so cruel as to demand that folks brought here as children, brought here without their consent, be deported to home countries they don't recognize after spending literally decades here and building a life here. Don't let two recent court decisions preventing the Administration from sending DACA recipients home next week, nor the Supreme Court's recent decision not to expedite the Administration's appeal of those courts' decisions, lull you into complacency. Congress still doesn't want to get this done, so afraid are Republicans of the President's supporters. But an obnoxious minority doesn't get all the say about anything. At least, not if this is America.