Thieves in the Temple.

Action: war-making, "free" trade, and clean water.

The good news? Congress might actually repeal the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF), just like we've been telling them to do for years. The bad news? Congress wants to replace it with an even worse one. S.J.Res. 59 would actually broaden the President's ability to start new wars against new "enemies" without a Constitutionally-mandated declaration of war from Congress, and would only let Congress reject these new wars after they begin -- you know, when most Congressfolk would be too cowardly to do that! Don't believe the hype that we must not ever "hamstring the President's ability to respond," because that is precisely the point of giving war-making power to Congress. Hence the Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject yet another unconstitutional AUMF that enables the President to wage war at will.

Meanwhile, multinational corporation Cooke Aquaculture has lately threatened to use the "investor-state dispute settlement" system in NAFTA to try to nullify a Washington state law against the open-sea net-pen fish farming it just so happens to practice! And this story gets so, so much better: Cooke lost hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon into the open sea (thus causing havoc in local ecosystems!) when its Cypress Island net-pen farm collapsed last summer, then lied to the state about the causes of the collapse and how many fish it lost! So, of course, when you've done so bad a job that the state has already revoked more than half of your net-pen leases, naturally you try to use NAFTA to get taxpayer-funded corporate welfare. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Cooke Aquaculture to abandon its efforts to use NAFTA to punish the good citizens of Washington state.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 1088 would actually roll back regulations that protect clean water for the good citizens of the commonwealth, by (among other things!) allowing fracking corporations to keep their toxic chemicals completely secret, exempting corporations from the responsibility of supplying folks with clean water when they pollute the water table, and letting drillers build their wells closer to your home and to your rivers and streams. I'm sure they'll also tell you that relaxing regulations on the smaller drilling wells is a way of right-sizing regulations for small businesses, which I'm sure you'll totally agree with once you're able to set your brown tap water on fire. Seriously, SB 1088 is a giant pile of fecal matter, and Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to protect good Pennsylvanians' clean water by rejecting SB 1088.

Around the table: the real reason Republicans keep falling, and other lessons.

J.F. Sargent reveals "The Real Reason Social Media Makes Hollywood So Nervous." Surprise! It's the same reason social media makes traditional print/TV media so nervous: it "has destabilized centuries-old power structures and amplified voices that have historically been ignored, silenced, trampled and punished." Yes, social media is "also vulnerable to the worst impulses of mob-mentality, petty grudges, rumor-mongering and cruelty," but if that latter picture is the only one Hollywood wants to focus upon -- and not, say, the very social-media-savvy #MarchForOurLives movement -- you have to wonder why.

No, the polio vaccine did not "cause cancer," any more than vaccines "cause" autism or "cause" disease because they generally have a tiny piece of the disease they're inoculating against -- you know, to teach the body what it's fighting? -- inside them. OK, the story FactCheck tells gets into considerably more detail than that, and is totally edifying, but sheesh, too many people don't know jack and yet are so proud of their University of Google degrees.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt will return from his Capitol Hill testimony to an agency "demoralized" by Mr. Pruitt's repeatedly throwing EPA employees under the bus during his testimony. Nobody could have predicted! And Administration votaries will continue to look at Mr. Pruitt, and his employer, as a "fighter," even though both men "fight" mainly by blaming all their problems on other people. Then again, most Administration votaries blame all their problems on other people -- and usually the wrong people.

Rep. Pat Meehan (R-PA), who had announced his retirement due to a sexual harassment scandal, has now resigned his seat. Which means another special election, likely in July or August, and what appetite will Republicans have to hold onto that seat, particularly since the districts will all change for the 2018 election? Seriously, this is a no-lose proposition for Democrats. Then again, they've demonstrated quite the aptitude for losing those.

Finally, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says "you have to wonder" if the fear of assassination is driving all these Republican retirements in Congress! OK, so I've dutifully wondered, and the short answer is no. The somewhat longer answer is no, you whiny snowflake. The somewhat-even-longer answer is no, they're not retiring because one out of the last bajillion mass shooters can be positively identified as a liberal -- they're retiring because they fear accountability from voters in November, just like they feared accountability from voters at all those townhalls they didn't have. Why does Rep. Brooks want to disappear voters from his analysis, I wonder?

Action: clean water, renewable energy, paper ballots, and nukes.

H.R. 5609, the WATER Act, would help America rebuild our drinking water infrastructure, but right-wingers love seeing bills like this and asking BUT WHEREZ IZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!! One can, of course, answer that question in at least two ways. One, the bill pays for itself by expanding the amount of money made by controlled foreign corporations that can be taxed. Second, Flint still operates without a guarantee of clean water to its good citizens four years after the state of Michigan poisoned its water in a bid to save money -- and that very same state government has just agreed to let the Nestlé corporation pump out even more clean water per minute from the Great Lakes Basin at a pittance. If that doesn't register with you, then frankly your authority to complain about BIG GUMMINT SPENDINGZ!!!! is limited. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support clean water infrastructure by supporting the WATER Act.

H.R. 3671, the OFF Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, would, as its title suggests, help wean us off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy sources. The bill would mandate (among other things) that 80% of our electricity come from "clean energy" sources and 80% of our cars be zero-emission cars by 2027. But the bill doesn't just issue mandates that enterprising, can-do Americans should be able to meet -- it also offers the retraining and financial assistance that would help fossil fuel workers transition to a renewable energy economy. Other countries produce far more of their energy from renewable sources than we do; the only reason we lag is that we coddle fossil fuel corporation CEOs, who should, frankly, be leading the charge to renewable energy, not blocking it. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a renewable energy future by passing the OFF Fossil Fuels Act.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Public Citizen helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to fund a paper ballot voting system for Pennsylvania. We have reached an unexpected watershed in America, with our Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee actually calling for paper ballot elections in America (as a way of fighting Russian meddling, though it works just as well to keep computers from disappearing our votes), while Pennsylvania's own Secretary of State, Robert Torres, has mandated that the state phase out paperless voting machines by the end of 2019. You may have noticed that a major election year will be happening before then, and Pennsylvania will be many tens of millions of dollars short in its effort to replace paperless voting machines, so let's impress upon them the urgency of finding this money. Surely they can find some corporate welfare to cut.

Finally, Congress is actually contemplating building more "usable," "low-yield" nuclear weapons. To deter Russia, of course, although both Russia and America have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world hundreds of times over already; what more "deterrence" is needed, or even possible? Proponents also say "low-yield" nuclear weapons give us more flexibility, though we already have low-yield nukes, and "low-yield" sure doesn't mean harmless -- a low-yield nuclear weapon will still wreak far more havoc than any military objective could possibly be worth. (You see, if you poison someone's home, forever, they tend to stay angry at you, forever, and be a source of potential conflict, forever.) One should hence question the wisdom of making nuclear weapons more "usable." The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the construction of any new "low-yield" nuclear weapons.

Around the table: untangling webs of corruption and weakness.

The Intercept gets an audio recording of current House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) telling a candidate for Colorado's 6th U.S. House district to get out of the way of the party's more corporate choice for that seat. If you're still tempted to say "get people who can win" (and, ah, haven't considered how that worked out in 2016), remember that the party gives a leg up in endorsements and fundraising to their preferred hacks, and then uses this "success" in endorsements and fundraising to justify more help! But if these hand-picked candidates are so great, why not let the primary voters choose them? Because no one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like a Democrat, that's why.

What's worse? That Mick Mulvaney came out and said if you gave to his House campaigns, he'd talk to you, and if you didn't, he wouldn't? Or that he came out and told banksters that if they want to hamstring the agency he now (nominally) leads, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they should give more money to Congressfolk? I kid, of course -- there is actually no point in trying to decide which is the pile of dung the flies have found and which is the pile they haven't found yet. Here's a lesson for Democrats, though: Republicans didn't prevent people like Mick Mulvaney from running for Congressional seats in 2010, and they won back the House that year, and look how he's made so little go such a long way!

Ho hum, the six biggest banksters saved nearly $3.6 billion in taxes just last quarter, thanks to the massive Republican tax "reform." Also, "(b)ank executives have said the majority of the savings from the lower tax rates will be returned to shareholders in the form of higher dividends and stock buybacks," i.e., not job creation. Some enterprising Democrat should run ads like that famous Mitch McConnell ad from 1984 where hound dogs looked for his opponent, except these hound dogs would look for that supposed $4,000 boon everyone was supposed to get from corporate tax cuts. Then again, you know, Democrats.

Been hearing about the "massive fundraising advantage" Democrats allegedly have in the upcoming midterm elections? Well, don't believe the hype: NBC informs us that "(m)ajor national Republican and Democratic party groups" have spent over $48 million just on the seven Congressional special elections since January 2017, and Republican groups are outspending Democratic ones by a 3 to 1 margin. Getting a lot of bang for their buck, too, I see! Seriously, remember that when you hear that a candidate has raised x amount money, you have no idea what PAC or SuperPAC is going to inject y+z money into that race. Also, too, getting excited over who's raised what is horserace politics, and thus beneath your dignity as a citizen.

Finally, speaking of special elections, Republican Debbie Lesko won Tuesday night's special election in Arizona's 8th, but by a mere six points, in a district Republican Trent Franks had typically won by over 28 points in his races. I won't say, as one local Democrat consultant does, that a swing of 15 points here (the President won this district by 21) means a swing of 15 points everywhere, but I will say that Hiral Tipirneni's excellent showing means that Democrats can make a winning argument everywhere. Unless they bully all the liberals out of their Congressional primaries, that is.

Action: ranked-choice voting, food stamps, torture of autistic students, and the Sinclair/Tribune merger.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to create a ranked-choice (or instant runoff) voting system in Pennsylvania. A ranked-choice system allows you to designate first, second, third, and so on choices for elected offices, rather than simply designating one choice (very likely while holding your nose). The top two vote-getters then advance to a runoff election (hence the term "instant runoff"), and if your first choice didn't make it to the runoff, your second choice would get your vote (or your third, if your first and second choices don't make it, and so on). That means you'd never have to worry about "throwing away your vote" on a "spoiler" candidate again. Ranked-choice voting could help us break the wheel of voting for political parties that too often seem to conspire against us. And that's worth fighting for.

Meanwhile, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the upcoming Farm Bill if it winds up cutting benefits for low-income working families. Yeah, Congress is working on a Farm Bill again, and by "Congress," in this case, I mean Republicans. And you know what that means: more regulations that make it harder for good Americans to get the help they need -- because Republicans only like the regulations that actually constitute a burden! -- and more rules kicking more Americans off the food stamp program. They got some nerve, passing trillions of dollars in tax cuts mainly for the rich and then saying that big corporate tax cuts will trickle down to the poor! I rather suspect the poor are used to something else trickling down upon them from the rich. Food stamps: you pay for them, so you should be able to get them when you need them. This is not a very difficult principle to understand, or at least it shouldn't be.

In other news, you may recall that horrid 2002 video of the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts administering electric shock "therapy" to an autistic student 31 times in seven hours for refusing to take off his jacket. The Rotenberg Center is literally the only American program for disabled children using remote electric shocks as punishment, which is nothing to yell WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. Between 2014 and 2016, our FDA debated and then wrote regulations banning these shocks. Then what happened? A man who fervently hates all regulations that actually help good Americans got elected President, and since then, the FDA has done nothing about the matter. Typical. So the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the FDA to implement regulations banning electric shocks, and thus help end the torture of special-needs students in America.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC and the DOJ to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. There's no need to theorize about what could happen when one corporation owns over 200 TV stations nationwide and can reach into every corner of the country, because we've already seen from Sinclair what that means: trading favorable coverage of the President for more access, mandating that their anchors support the "war on terror" after 9.11, and forcing all their newsreaders to recite from the same script about "fake news." It ain't far from there to imagine the Administration itself writing their "news" copy, and then what would separate us from your average developing-world dictatorship? You know, aside from the fact that we have a lot more weapons? Our Glorious Elites' lust for mammon will bring the rest of us hardship and misery -- unless we speak out in numbers our government can't ignore.

Action: redistricting in Pennsylvania and Delaware, marijuana policy, and Medicaid work requirements.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe may have gutted HB 722, the redistricting reform bill -- an action which should cost him his job, though he's left such a long trail of slime I wonder what it'll take to get his district's voters to put someone-anyone-else in there -- but Fair Districts PA is on top of it, by helping you tell your PA state legislators to support SB 22 and a new House companion bill, HB 563. HB 563 is actually stronger then SB 22, in that it does more to prevent municipalities and counties getting split up across districts, and why not? The spirit of compromise is overrated, especially when the forces of evil only see your efforts to compromise with them as weakness, and take it as a cue to demand more and more and more from you. So let's give them some of their own medicine, and see how quickly they whine that we're mean to them.

Meanwhile, in a related note, Delaware's state legislature is also mulling an actual bipartisan bill, SB 27, that would create an independent commission to redraw state districts every 10 years, rather than continue to let politicians draw up their self-serving Rorschach blot districts that ensure their re-election but don't serve their constituents. Some folks may reasonably ask why we should take redistricting power from our representatives, rather than make them draw fair districts, since we're constantly trying to make our representatives do their job in so many other areas. Answer's simple: representation is a tool of democracy, not an end product, and if we can create a representative body that'll do a better, fairer job, we should. Hence Common Cause Delaware helps you tell Delaware state legislators to support fair redistricting by supporting SB 27.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4815/S. 1689, the Marijuana Justice Act, would remove pot from Schedule I classification under the Controlled Substances Act -- which is so, so overdue, since pot is nowhere near as dangerous as other Schedule I drugs like heroin -- and would end criminal penalties for folks who use or distribute pot. The bill would also expunge previous convictions for pot use or distribution, reduce funding to states that make a disproportionate number of pot-related arrests, and would even establish a Community Reinvestment Fund directed at helping "communities most affected by the war on drugs." So, this bill would legalize pot, empty the jails of folks convicted of using or selling pot, and even reinvest money in communities devasted by the "war on drugs." Sounds pretty comprehensive to me! And then in a few years we can lump pot in with tobacco and alcohol, like we should have been doing all along. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Marijuana Justice Act.

Finally, back in Pennsylvania, the reactionary state legislature is as we speak trying to impose various work requirements on Medicaid recipients, so Moms Rising helps you tell Pennsylvania politicians to stop trying to make it harder for good citizens to get Medicaid when they need it. Republicans were sure they could attack Medicaid and get away with it, but surprise, surprise! People actually get Medicaid, and very few, if any, of them regard themselves as cheats or freeloaders! Imposing work requirements for Medicaid recipients would have some honor if a) anyone could prove Medicaid fraud was all that widespread with more than a few anecdotes about "someone I know," or b) if more than half of Medicaid recipients weren't already working because they don't get paid enough, or c) if Medicaid's whole reason for being wasn't to help folks through rough spots in the first place. But alas, no -- some folks just settle for being mean to people they don't know. Let's make that harder.

Around the table: featuring lessons from a Nazi wannabe rally in Georgia.

"Militarized Cops At Tiny Georgia Neo-Nazi Rally Arrest Counterprotesters For Wearing Masks" is a headline you should never have to read in a civilized society, but yeah, that happened over the weekend. And they used an anti-KKK law (no protesting in white hoods, get it?) to do it! Which just goes to show that making laws to keep people from demonstrating -- even Nazi wannabes who would very much like everyone who opposes them to die -- just isn't a good idea. The good news? These little Nazi wannabe rallies are drawing fewer and fewer people. Maybe they really are vampires shriveling up in sunlight!

From the "All Corporate Media is Bad!" file: Comcast makes MSNBC's Morning Joe program run an eight-minute plug for "Comcast Cares Day," celebrating how magnificent Comcast is. Comcast owns MSNBC, as you know, as well as at least eight other NBC channels that also ran some version of that plug. It's good to be reminded, also, that Morning Joe threw Comcast's CEO softball questions on the air during Comcast's aborted attempt to assimilate Time-Warner, and that Comcast did its damnedest to stamp out coverage of the hated Trans-Pacific "Partnership." I guess it's good news that Comcast, still one of America's most hated corporations, didn't get what it wanted in either battle. And the fact that they continue to use David Fricking Cohen as one of their public faces suggests they have no idea how to win hearts and minds.

White man with no pants kills four and wounds four at a Nashville Waffle House, and a black man stops him from doing further harm by taking his rifle from him, suffering burns to his hand and forearm in the process. I sure hope I'm wrong about this, but I fear that I'm going to be hearing in a few days that James Shaw "is no angel." Because I'm already hearing about how "troubled" the shooter is.

In a completely unsurprising development, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) voted for the nomination of Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State in committee, after saying he wouldn't. Sen. Paul said he changed his mind after "receiving assurances" that Mr. Pompeo also opposes the Iraq and Afghanistan oh Jesus Mary and Joseph why do I bother? Unlike his father, Rand Paul only has principles when it doesn't matter; when it does, those principles are always negotiable. And given that the Pompeo nomination already had enough votes to succeed, why didn't he simply "stick to his principles," since it no longer mattered? Seriously, I don't see his endgame here -- it's not like he's ever going to be President.

Finally, a study finds that the President's most devoted supporters aren't driven by "economic anxiety" but by fear of losing their status in society -- or, as the study's author puts it, "It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all." All together now: waaaaaaah! My opinion doesn't count for everything anymore! But if you tell these voters that this is America and you should create your own damn status, they'd just respond that black people have their status handed to them -- a patently absurd contention if you have the ability to think clearly for seconds at a time -- and by the time you respond that what they call "handouts for blacks" are actually just attempts to keep white people from depriving blacks of their rights, these voters will have moved on to whatever else diddles their rage gland. The good news? Only 25% of the electorate is batshit insane, and the rest of us can -- and must -- contain them. It is the job of civilized people, after all.

Action: "free" trade, endangered species, Census data, and the Tongass Forest.

As you no doubt heard, our President floated the idea of getting back into the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal that he got us out of -- an action that would completely undo his one good work as a President. Of course he doesn't deserve sole credit for getting us out of the TPP, or even more than half the credit -- we deserve most of the credit for tanking the TPP, given that our activism against it killed it in the first place, and don't forget that we faced down unified and powerful support for the TPP from virtually all of our government and media elites. And the TPP remains just another "free" trade deal that would outsource our jobs and nullify our laws; for our President even to suggest re-entering it might well send a message to NAFTA renegotiators (who are working as we speak) that maybe they can go ahead and make that deal even worse. So Public Citizen helps you tell our leaders, one more time, to reject "free" trade deals that put corporations ahead of people.

Meanwhile, Wild Earth Guardians uses the occasion of Earth Day to remind us to tell our Congressfolk to keep their hands off the Endangered Species Act. Since the Endangered Species Act sure does seem to attract efforts to destroy it in the name of "reforming" it, "hands off the Endangered Species Act" does seem like the best thing to say to our Congressfolk right now. And these "reformers" aren't exactly interested in making the Endangered Species Act work more efficiently -- their real program is opening up more land to fossil fuel drillers, pesticide manufacturers, and loggers. That's right, it's all about the money. And it's not even about working families' money, but corporate CEO money, some of which (the part those CEOs don't use to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes) will presumably come back to these Congressfolk in the form of campaign donations. Addiction to big corporate money is a sickness, to be sure, but we don't have to tolerate it.

In other news, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep the Census Bureau from asking folks about their citizenship or their immigration status in 2020. It may sound common-sensical to you that the Census Bureau should ask folks whether they're really citizens or not, but let me explain why it actually isn't. First off, folks with cloudy immigration status already avoid the Census; the danger here is that folks whose immigration status is actually quite solid, but who have had trouble cutting through bureaucratic red tape in the past, will avoid the Census. Second, the Census doesn't just count people -- the Census also helps determine the size of Congressional districts, as well as our federal government distributes funding, which means less representation and less money for districts with immigrant populations. In short, the Census citizenship question is actually a backdoor way to deny government services to folks of color -- services they're paying for with their taxes even if they're not citizens! -- and why should we put up with that?

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject road building and logging in the Tongass National Forest. You know, it strikes me as a conservative position to argue that we should keep 1,000-year-old trees around, because they teach us a lot about history and science. Certainly a conservative wouldn't say it's better to cut them down and make them into things that don't last nearly as long, right? But today's "conservatives" seem to think that anything that makes some executive money is an unqualified moral good. And some of them think that mastering the natural world in this manner is itself an unqualified moral good, though that philosophy does sound almost exactly like a conservative stereotype of a liberal philosophy. But civilized people of either political persuasion always concern themselves with teaching our children about what lasts and what fades away -- and civilized people teach Congress about that, too.

Action: war-making powers, torture-supporting nominees, the quality of mercy, and the "balanced budget amendment."

Another day, another "bipartisan" attempt to find that elusive "balance" between following our Constitution's war-making procedure and letting the President bomb whomever he likes. S.J.Res. 59 would authorize our President to use military force against "the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and designated associated forces," but not just them, not really -- also against anyone else the President designates as "associated forces." Congress would get to reject such designations, but they'd have to do so within 60 days -- can you say "run out the clock," boys and girls? -- and they'd functionally have to reject new inclusions by two-thirds, so they can override the expected Presidential veto. No, terrorists are not "existential threats" -- they don't hurt us anywhere near as much as we hurt ourselves fearing them. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject this attempt to give the President more unconstitutional war-making powers.

Meanwhile, you didn't think I'd forgotten about the nominations of Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State and Gina Haspel to be CIA Director, did you? Word on the street (as of this writing) is that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will not report Mr. Pompeo out favorably -- the Committee has an 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats, with all Democrats and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) reportedly opposed -- but the full Senate might well vote on, and confirm, him anyway. And if Mr. Pompeo ascends to State, Ms. Haspel will be up for CIA Director; both individuals, as has been well-reported, support torture and generally frown upon privacy and human rights issues, and like other recent Administration hires including Zombie John Bolton, Mr. Pompeo seems anxious to start a war somewhere -- in Iran, he hopes, where he's in line with Administration dogma against the Iran nuclear deal, even though it's working. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to reject the Pompeo and Haspel nominations.

In other news, the family of one David Diaz has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell California Gov. Jerry Brown to free Mr. Diaz, given the increasing uncertainty surrounding his conviction in a 1997 shooting. The victim of that shooting says Mr. Diaz didn't do it, and no less than three witnesses now say police pressured them into identifying Mr. Diaz as the shooter. Sounds like reasonable doubt to me! If you still think Mr. Diaz should serve out his sentence because "he was 19 and Hispanic so he must've been guilty of something," please do two things: 1) slap yourself and 2) slap yourself again. Maybe a third time, if that's what it takes. Our Founders quite correctly oriented our laws so that the burden of proof rests with the accuser, not the accused, and folks who squeal about law and order all the time when confronted with this fact may want to stop bragging about how much they love our Constitution.

Finally, the House passed its nefarious "balanced budget amendment" last week -- though not by a two-thirds margin, which is what you need to amend our Constitution. So why is the Senate taking it up this week? To be jerks, of course, because if our Senators can do one thing well, it's be jerks. No, our government does not need to "balance its budget like we do," because a) we don't and b) the rest of the world actually has a lot of faith in the credit of the most powerful country on the planet. And a "balanced budget amendment" will result in what, class? Cuts to Medicare and Social Security, that's what. And do we deserve that, after having worked for them and fought for them and paid into them all our lives? No, we do not. Maybe Congress could balance the federal budget better if they stopped giving welfare handouts to the rich and to corporations! Anyway, CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the "balanced budget amendment."

Around the table: why Russiagate still comforts liberals, and other lessons.

Glenn Greenwald discusses with Daniel Denvir the "comforting answers" Russiagate "offers to despondent liberals." Long story short: "the Trump victory was a traumatizing and disorienting event for most people," leading folks to "crave an explanation that makes sense and that lets you feel like the world is safe and understandable again." Key reminder: the Russian troll effort was "primitive and pales in comparison to the amount of money spent on messaging by political campaigns, let alone US corporations and lobbyists." And regardless of who goes to jail over Russiagate, I still think the Democrat play-not-to-lose mentality and Republican vote suppression had more to do with the result than Russia could ever hope to have done.

Say, did you hear about that time the National Restaurant Association hired Frank Luntz's group to poll Americans about raising the minimum wage, which of course the "other NRA" opposes -- and found over 70% of Americans perfectly happy to pay restaurant workers more even if it meant higher prices? No? That's likely because the big restaurant lobby, as you might expect, isn't happy with the findings, even though it hired The Father of The Death Tax to get those findings. I am a little appalled that 29% of Americans opposed a minimum wage hike "even if the average food service employee can't make ends meet," until I remember that 25% of the electorate is batshit insane.

Jim Naureckas at FAIRNew York Times hack advising Democrats to be more like "liberals" and less like "progressives." Apparently "liberals" know better than to "eradicate" economic problems like the income gap -- apparently they'd be content with handing out welfare checks, rather than, you know, minimum wage hikes and job-creating taxes on the rich -- and "progressivism" is somehow "intrinsically opposed to conservation," which is as ridiculous as saying conservatism is intrinsically opposed to progress. Anyway, I've never called myself a "progressive," because it's long been the Democrat way of running away from the word "liberal," but articles like the Times's give liberals like me a bad name.

Another week, another Congressional special election in a deep-red district that's somehow a tossup in at least one poll, and we learn that the Republican nominee for Arizona's 8th, current state Senator Debbie Lesko, has "routinely" introduced bills that are little more than ALEC model bills with a few words changed. It'd be nice if her dependence on/work for ALEC scuttled her election bid, but certainly the news has arrived too late (the election's tomorrow), and besides, not everyone knows what the American Legislative Exchange Council is, or how nefarious their works have been over the decades.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted" file: Mitt Romney doesn't even get a majority of votes at the Utah Republican Convention to pick a U.S. Senate nominee (among others) for 2018, and will face a primary against a state Rep who got more votes. Mr. Romney thinks Utahns didn't care for him running at the convention and trying to get enough signatures to appear on the primary ballot anyway, and maybe he's right -- or maybe good Utahns, like everyone else, hate those whom they perceive as "Establishment" politicians.

Finally, in the wake of our newest Supreme Court Justice casting the deciding vote against a part of immigration law allowing detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants who have committed "violent" crimes, our President now wonders aloud if Justice Gorsuch is conservative enough. All together now: one counterexample does not destroy a trend. Also, too, why should a President expect Justices to toe his line? And why should we enable that sort of thinking? That's not what our Founders wanted, was it?

Action: pollution, internet freedom, and overtime pay.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Sierra Club helps you tell your state legislators to oppose a slew of pro-pollution bills -- HB 209, HB 1237, HB 1959, HB 1960, and HB 1792. These bills would, generally, make it harder to issue or enforce clean air and clean water regulations, and thus easier for fossil fuel executives to redistribute income upward to themselves. You can look up all these bills if you like, but I'll just say this: HB 209 is a real peach of a bill, one that would mandate that two regulations go down for every new one that comes up -- after all, it's not like regulations fulfill specific legal obligations or anything! -- and would establish, get this, an Office of the Repealer. Just imagine a man in a cape and tights going around yelling I AM THE REPEALER! and explaining to little Johnny that his tap water catching fire is the price of progress. Is that something legislators could take to the Pearly Gates, let alone their constituents?

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats still can't find a 51st vote for S.J.Res. 52, the resolution of disapproval that would overturn the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, and I think I know why: Republican John Kennedy of Louisiana, who's been doing a Hamlet act about supporting S.J.Res. 52, has signed on to a sham of a net neutrality bill sponsored by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who has fought internet freedom her whole damn career. Their bill would ban blocking and throttling websites, but doesn't address the issue of "paid prioritization," which would let ISPs allow some websites (from big media corporations that can pay out the nose for it!) to load faster on your computer than others, and "paid prioritization," as you might imagine, would stamp out small businesses trying to get heard on the internet. So don't believe the hype, and let Common Cause help you tell your Congressfolk that only S.J.Res. 52 will bring back our internet freedom.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunties to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4505/S. 2177, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The Restoring Overtime Pay Act would essentially restore the Department of Labor's Overtime Pay rule mandating that folks who make less than $48,000 annually must be paid time-and-a-half when they work overtime. And the bill would render moot the dispute over Labor's apparent overreach in crafting the rule, by essentially making the $48,000 limit an exemption to the white-collar overtime exemption. So what's left for right-wingers to squeal about? That overtime pay rules "kill jobs"? Strong overtime pay rules create jobs, by forcing corporations to hire more people instead of overworking the ones they've got. And it's really right-wingers' Personal Lord and Savior the Corporate CEO who kills jobs in America. So, again, don't believe the hype.

Around the table: tabulating bad arguments and their even worse consequences, plus some felons on parole get good news.

Federal prosecutors aim to criminalize many of the J20 protestors still up on felony rioting charges by citing their union membership -- specifically, their membership in International Workers of the World (a.k.a. the "Wobblies"). This is how desperate our government's case against J20 protestors has become -- invoking century-old whipping boys in order to scare up convictions. Hearing liberals constantly smeared as "Communists" seems almost modern by comparison, almost like that's the whole idea.

Adam Johnson at FAIR tabulates 26 "liberal" media editorials on the President's Syria strikes and finds, guess what, zero opposed. There's plenty of reason to oppose the Syria strikes, among them that Congress didn't authorize them as the Constitution mandates, and usually when a baseball player goes 0-for-26 he gets a couple of days off. What a shame that the "liberal" media pundits who constantly demand we waste more blood and treasure on stupid war-making never grab some deep pine.

Jeff Bryant at the Our Future blog tells us "Why Teacher Uprisings May Move to Blue States, Too.". Short answer: because the blue states deserve it, too, being as they've been full of corporate Democrats embracing austerity policies and pushing "school choice" as a way to funnel taxpayer money away from functioning public schools and into the coffers of cronies. The good news? Change only comes from the people, and it sure looks like that change is coming.

Get a load of all the high-level Republicans, including "straight talker" Ron Johnson, saying it's "too early" to talk about supporting the President's re-election effort in 2020! Of course the President filed to run in 2020 literally the day he took office in 2017, but this wishy-washy act from Congressional Republicans sure did work pretty well for them in 2016, so I can see why they're doing it. It might not work as well in the future, though, because The Man Who Couldn't Possibly Beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 has now been President for a year and a quarter, and that trail of slime he's left everywhere he's gone is a little harder to step over now.

Finally, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announces plans to restore voting rights to felons on parole -- by pardoning mass numbers of them. I couldn't care less that he's doing it because he fears he's going to lose his next gubernatorial primary to Cynthia Nixon, because it's the right thing to do -- felons' voting rights should never have been taken away in the first place. Naturally state Republicans call it an "outrageous power grab," as if their refusal to restore voting rights to felons is somehow not an outrageous power grab. All together now: waaaaaaaah!

Action: financial predation, compassionate release, and food safety.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has, apparently, not taken even one enforcement action against banks or debt collectors or credit card corporations over the last four months, and now it's soliciting public comments on a proposal to get rid of the "civil investigative demand" tool for its investigations, hoping that since you're not a lawyer, you won't say anything about it. But even if you're not a lawyer, you can look at the law describing the tool and see that its authors obviously built in safeguards to prevent governmental abuse. I must conclude, then, that the corporations who'll whine the most about this see any regulation of their activities as "abuse." Don't let the whiners win: Public Citizen helps you tell the CFPB to fulfill its legally-mandated duty to protect consumers from financial predators by preserving the civil investigative demand tool.

Meanwhile, S. 2471, the Granting Release And Compassion Effectively Act (or GRACE Act), would, as its title suggests, make it easier for criminals who are terminally ill to get a compassionate early release -- largely by requiring prisons to do better in notifying terminally prisoners of their options, and allowing prison staff and a prisoner's family members to help filing release requests -- and also make it easier for families to visit their terminally ill relatives while they're still in prison. We should interpret none of this as "being weak on law and order," since our civilization does (and should) value the quality of mercy. And the GRACE Act doesn't even ask all that much of us! I mean, Hollywood dark comedies aside, we don't presume that folks who can barely stand up for any length of time will go out and rob banks, do we? Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support merciful treatment of terminally ill prisoners by passing the GRACE Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our USDA to abandon its efforts to let pork processing corporations control far more of the pork inspection process, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Our USDA has already tried this with chicken earlier this year, but our activism against their attempts caused them to fail; perhaps they're figuring that fewer people eat pork than chicken and thus won't care as much. But folks do eat bacon, sausage, pulled pork, scrapple, and the like, so I suspect our USDA will find that it's calculated incorrectly. Speeding up processing lines and letting pork processing corporations do their own inspections won't just result in bad meat and sicker people -- in a nation where every incident of food poisoning in America seems to find its way to the news, I feel compelled to state again -- but it'll also result in more workplace injuries and more miserable workers. All that so pork processing executives can make more money! Does that sound like America to you?

Around the table: more thoughts about hubris and greed.

'Tis the season for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's "10 Things You Should Know on Tax Day." Roll call! American taxes are actually fairly low, and everyone pays them! The Republican tax "reform" gives most of its cuts to the wealthy! Tax cuts for the rich and corporations don't create jobs! The number of folks who pay the Estate Tax is now absurdly low! Plus charts.

Pursuant to the point that tax cuts for the rich and for corporations don't actually create jobs, Sam Pizzigati relates the story of Toys "R" Us's success during the New Deal era and its recent bankruptcy at the height of the let's-not-tax-corporations era. Once the highest tax bracket dropped to around 28 percent, "(b)ehaving entrepreneurially in the classic sense -- identifying an unmet consumer need, meeting that need with style and panache -- would now not be enough for many of America’s wealthiest. Patiently building up a business could eat up too much time. Behaving ruthlessly could pile up the millions quite a bit quicker." And so it went for Toys "R" Us, which squeezed advertisers, manufacturers, and workers, made its CEO very, very rich, and fell prey to private equity vultures.

Dean Baker reminds us that the relatively poor performance of Harvard's endowment over the last 10 years proves that "Hedge Fund Managers Get Rich Even When They Mess Up." Add that to the relatively poor performance of certain state pension funds who have apparently been bamboozled into thinking hedge fund managers know what they're doing! If they're not handing work to hedge fund managers out of sheer corruption, of course. Tha Bush Mobb taught us, I hope, to consider the possibility that what looks like incompetence might just be malice.

Alleged "moderate" Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) says he'll resign his seat in the coming weeks, rather than at the end of his term. And you know what that means: another special election in Pennsylvania! And the last one went so well for Republicans! Voters will fill the 15th district seat (much of which will go into the new 7th district, once the new district maps take effect with the general election later this year) as early as July -- or as late as November, though that latter option sure sounds like a recipe for mass confusion. Usually I'd say Republicans are better at exploiting chaos, but I don't know anymore. They've had a lot more practice lately, and seem to be worse at it.

Finally, CNBC catches Goldman Sachs analysts asking if "curing patients" using gene therapy is "a sustainable business model." They cite the example of Gilead Sciences's massive sales drop after developing a very good Hepatitis C treatment, one with a cure rate over 90%. More cures means less patients, you see! And there you have the very reason we are a sick, immoral, and decadent society: Our Glorious Elites don't say curing Hep C is something we ought to be doing because it's an unqualified good, like we do -- they wonder if it can make money. Thus gene therapy research might well give us eugenic manipulation, which only the rich would be able to afford, but not cures for diseases regular folks get, because only the former "makes money"! Are we actually in an episode of Black Mirror?

Action: protecting clean water, internet freedom, and the Grand Canyon.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency to enforce Clean Water act standards in Pennsylvania. Apparently the Keystone State ranks second out of 50 states for exceeding these pollution standards, and this is yet another thing you don't want to be shouting WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. Yet the EPA has, as you might expect, scaled back on its enforcement of the law, given that our Administration apparently only thinks "law and order" is for black folks and that all regulation keeping corporations from polluting is a "burden" on them. Corporations exceeded permitted pollution levels over 600 times during 2016 and 2017, with one Montgomery County prison exceeding its waste pollution limit 80 times. I guess they figure they'll just break the law and dare us to stop them. How like our President they are! But that doesn't mean we have to put up with it.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your city's Mayor to pledge only to do city business with internet service-providing corporations that honor net neutrality principles, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The FCC may have gutted net neutrality at the federal level, but that doesn't stop folks at the state and local levels from demanding that the Verizons and Comcasts of the world still treat all internet traffic the same, so that you can decide where you want to go on the internet, rather than letting corporations tell you where you can go. Of course, ISPs would only have to observe net neutrality principles when they do business with city governments if this effort is successful -- but if they just give up and decide it's too hard to distinguish every bit of network traffic to see exactly where it's going, we won't complain.

Finally, our Administration still has a jones to open up the Grand Canyon area to uranium mining. Why? To save mining jobs for The Forgotten Man, as our President would say? Ah, no -- uranium mining will first and foremost enrich mining CEOs, because our President only cares about other bosses. And a lot of folks who would get mining jobs probably would also prefer not to be sickened by uranium-tainted drinking water, and just so happens the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to good citizens in five American states, runs through the Grand Canyon. (Psst: that's how it became a Grand Canyon.) The Obama Administration imposed a 20-year moratorium on uranium mining in or near the Grand Canyon, but, you know, Obama did it, so it must now be undone. Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to reject uranium mining in the Grand Canyon.

Action: discrimination, fossil fuel funding, and campaign finance reform.

S. 2525, the so-called First Amendment Defense Act, would not "defend the First Amendment" so much as give various bigots the "right" to discriminate against people they fear will give them cooties. No, their position does not deserve more civility than that. The First Amendment prevents our government from putting you in jail for your speech and prevents our government from establishing a state religion, but refusing to serve people because they're gay isn't "free speech," it's discrimination, and when our laws say you can't refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple because "conscience," our government isn't "establishing a state religion," but preventing you from discriminating against people who also have rights. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to protect everyone's rights by rejecting the First Amendment Defense Act.

Meanwhile, U.S. Bank's CEO said last year -- in the wake of popular pressure following the Dakota Access protests -- that his corporation would stop financing gas and oil pipelines. But, possibly because we can't look at everything at once, U.S. Bank has pumped some $2 billion into these pipelines, including nearly $500 million into Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation behind Dakota Access. Just so happens, however, that U.S. Bank's annual shareholder meeting is later on this week, so Climate Truth helps you tell U.S. Bank to divest from oil and gas producers. You know what would help get us off oil and gas, besides big energy corporations throwing money into solar and wind? Big banks deciding to invest more in solar and wind! I mean, don't our best and brightest entrepreneurs always look to the future and plan ahead? We may have to pressure them a bit harder to get them to be those people.

Finally, H.R. 4077/S. 1959, the Honest Ads Act, would put online political ads under the same scrutiny the law already gives to print and broadcast ads, meaning voters could more easily find out who's funding them. We couldn't find out who's funding these ads as easily as we could if Congress had passed the DISCLOSE Act on any of the multitudinous opportunities they had to do that, but online political ads have escaped even the amount of scrutiny other political ads get, because the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 specifies only print, broadcast, and "satellite" communication. Recall that in 1971 ARPANET was in its infancy, and it'd be 20 years before the High Performance Computing and Communication Act (authored by one Sen. Albert Gore, Jr.) kick-started the internet. So Issue One helps you tell your Congressfolk to support campaign finance reform by passing the Honest Ads Act.

Around the table: from an apparent "free" trade reversal to the "retirement" of the House Speaker.

Remember when we could say "at least he got us out of that awful Trans-Pacific 'Partnership'"? Well, now our President is contemplating re-entering talks on the hated "free" trade deal. And by the looks of this article our "liberal" media is all set to enable him -- we don't even hear a substantive word about "free" trade opponents (a group which includes, like, everybody) until paragraph 18. The good news? A President Hillary Clinton would have already rejoined TPP by now, and thus sent her party on the road to massive losses in the House and Senate in November.

Chauncey DeVega at Salon reminds us how Republicans manage to keep their votaries and hurt them at the same time: by redirecting their rage at "individuals and groups they view as the Other." That's why the fever ain't breaking, Mr. Obama! The sad part about all of this is that we could just have easily said "Republicans leave the vast majority of their voters' bellies empty" but "fill their voters' hearts and minds with rage, hate and resentment" when Mr. Bush was President.

In a truly revolting development, Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R) guts HB 722 -- which would have created an independent commission to handle redistricting -- with an amendment that puts power back in the hands of politicians. This he did, apparently, without showing his amendment to anyone first -- which is what folks always do when they've got the superior argument! -- and naturally his rewrite also cuts the state Supreme Court out of the process entirely, because waaaaaaaah! Could the good citizens of Butler County please turn this monster out this year? A shrub could do a better job.

Ho hum, Republicans who helped write the recent tax "reform" bill just so happen to be getting, on average, over $300,000 from "pass-through" business tax cuts. If I were Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), I'd use that information to absolutely savage probable Republican opponent Rep. Jim Renacci, who's one of the 15. If I were Rep. Jacky Rosen, the probable Democratic nominee in this year's U.S. Senate race in Nevada, I'd use that information to savage incumbent Sen. Dean Heller. And they both might be game for that! I just hope the consultants don't get in their ear first.

Our President apparently plans to pardon former Bush Mobb crony Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the only person convicted of anything over the Valerie Plame scandal back in the day. But how much good is this really going to do for Republicans in the short term? Scooter Libby isn't some martyr whose framed visage hangs on every rage-filled voter's wall, and even if the President's votaries care about nothing except "pissing off the liberals" (which is quite possible!), I still don't see them doing victory laps around the voting booths on Election Day because of it.

Finally, on the occasion of U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan's announcement that he'll retire from the House at the end of this term, Sam Fullwood III at ThinkProgress examines Mr. Ryan's legacy of "Cruelty Toward the Poor." But I doubt we're seeing the "curtain come() down" on his career of evil, because now he can earn millions of dollars spewing the same filth by becoming a lobbyist, a think tank fellow, or (God forbid!) a cable news commentator. In other words, Mr. Ryan's reward for quitting will be a promotion and a significant pay hike. Nice work if you can get it!

Action: "free" trade, Medicaid, and Pebble Mine.

Word on the street is that NAFTA negotiators are working around the clock so they can get a "deal" done by June, so Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk, again, that "free" trade deals are supposed to work for us, not exclusively for big corporations. Word on the street is, also, that (contrary to what the President said last year) the Administration actually does want to get rid of "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanisms, which, if true, like, hallelujah, but naturally big corporate negotiators are trying to put a stop to that, and you have already seen how well our President stands up to other bosses. To the fools who say if ISDS is so bad how come we're not hearing about all the times it gets abused ha ha snort: you wouldn't say it's OK to leave a pile of gas-soaked rags in the middle of a boiler room because most days the building doesn't blow up, would you?

Meanwhile, closer to home, the reactionary Pennsylvania state Assembly is looking for ways to make it harder for poor people to get Medicaid when they need it, under the auspices of fighting fraud they can't prove is rampant and wouldn't take real steps to fight anyway. No, they'd rather say that everyone who needs Medicaid is a loser who just won't go find a job, when a) they're wrong and b) the whole point of programs like Medicaid is to support folks when times are hard and they can't find a job, which if right-wingers had their druthers would be, like, always, so averse are they to government intervention of any kind. It really is like they designed their whole philosophy to be a self-perpetuating rage machine. Hence Keystone Progress helps you tell your PA state legislator to stop making Medicaid recipients jump through flaming hoops on a unicycle before getting the help they need.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell First Quantum not to invest in the infamous Pebble Mine project, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Pebble Mine project does seem to be on its last legs, not just because everyone knows it'll pollute Alaska's Bristol Bay and thus also destroy the world's largest sockeye salmon industry, but because even Scott Pruitt's EPA has maintained Obama-era restrictions on mine waste disposal in Bristol Bay. And yet so often we have seen how hard it is to kill off bad ideas once and for all -- they keep popping up like a game of zombie whack-a-mole -- and we also know that an investment most people shun tends to bring in last-minute investors like, well, dung brings in flies. And a lot of these investors don't just take advantage of the buy-low-sell-high adage: they're looking to extract value from failure, like our banksters do. And why should we enable that?

Action: police training, and media consolidation.

H.R. 1870/S. 814, the Police Training and Independent Review Act, would require states to a) train police officers more thoroughly on "ethnic and racial bias, cultural diversity, and police interaction with the disabled, mentally ill, and new immigrants," and b) appoint independent prosecutors to investigate (and, if necessary, prosecute) all deaths-by-law-enforcement. States that fail to do these things would have certain federal assistance programs cut by 20%. I know some folks stopped reading as soon as their eyes hit the words "ethnic and racial bias," but really, this is not too much to ask of our police officers. Hence the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your Congressfolk to support better training and accountability for police officers by supporting the Police Training and Independent Review Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then Free Press still helps you do that. Sinclair would have the ability to reach 70 percent of Americans if the merger goes through, which is reason enough to reject it (though certainly that video of Sinclair anchors reciting the exact same script about "fake news" is a bad look). Want another reason? Here it is: Sinclair's Chair has apparently told the President, out loud, that "(w)e are here to deliver your message." I mean, gosh, even Fox is cagier than that! And the above-linked article also warns us of yet another reason to reject the merger, and thus curtail Sinclair's reach: Sinclair is still trying to get chips installed in new cellphones which "would enable authorities to broadcast direct to any American’s phone." Strangely, the FCC has resisted mandating that chip so far -- but just wait until President Even-Worse comes along.

Around the table: the President is not America for the 443rd time, and other musings.

Louisiana and Minnesota legislators introduce anti-protest bills in the wake of protests over pipeline expansions in those states. And the Louisiana bill actually goes further than model ALEC "critical infrastructure" legislation in that you don't actually have to set foot on a pipeline site to go to jail. Again: if you have to pass laws to stifle protests, you've lost the argument. Adults admit when they lose arguments. I guess that means these legislators aren't adults. You know, just like our President.

Jessica Rich at Wired reminds us that -- in the wake of the news that 87 million Americans, not 50 million, may have had their personal info on Facebook compromised by Cambridge Analytica -- that we need basic internet privacy laws in America. Recall that Congress repealed FCC broadband privacy regulations in 2017 and a campaign ad may present itself: the Facebook scandal proves we need stronger privacy laws -- but your Republican Congressperson voted to gut federal privacy laws! Think Democrats will run that? Nah; running ads like that might make people think you'll actually work for them.

Alvin Chang at Vox draws a straight line from tax-cuts-for-the-rich in Oklahoma to the Oklahoma teachers' strike, now almost two weeks old. Over the last 14 years, the state legislature has cut the top bracket from 6.65% to 5%, which wound up depriving Oklahoma of some $350 million in annual education spending, such that Oklahoma kids now only go to school four days a week. You recall, no doubt, that tax-cuts-for-the-rich has put Kansas's public schools in peril, too, though at least Kansas didn't respond to hard economic times by sponsoring an "Oilfield Prayer Day," as Oklahoma did.

Ed Henry at Fox News may have won numerous plaudits for his unexpectedly scorching interview with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, but the network's other programs either a) ignored the interview or b) gave it as much pro-Administration spin as possible. And this is exactly how one would do evil propaganda -- put up the occasional negative report to say "see, we're not so bad," and then bury that negative report as deeply as possible on programming that gets the most eyeballs. It's rather similar to how they've been using Shepard Smith for years. Hell, it's how they've been using their internet reporting for years.

Finally, hot on the heels of two FBI raids of the office of our President's personal lawyer, our President calls the FBI raid "an attack on our country in the truest sense." If he has a serious point to make about, say, the way the FBI got its warrants for the raid, you'll never hear it underneath all his TEH UNFAIRNEZZ!!!! and TEH WITCH HUNTZ!!!! And one more time: the President is not America. I locate the greatness of America in our people and our traditions, not our President. Perhaps Dr. Johnson should have said that conflating yourself with your country is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Action: war in the Middle East, and the "balanced budget amendment."

In re whatever we're planning to do to Syria in the next day or two: Robert Naiman at Just Foreign Policy has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that our President gets Congressional authorization before beginning any military action against Syria. Our Glorious Elites will scream TIME IZ OV TEH ESSENCEZ!!!!! in our ears, in an attempt to get us to back yet another military action in the Middle East that will backfire against us in time, but we should remember two things: one, that our Constitution mandates that Congress, not the President, authorizes war, and two, that we don't know if Syria's government attacked its citizens with chemical weapons. After all, we couldn't prove they did last time Mr. Trump threw a bunch of missiles at them. That's why you don't leave foreign policy-making up to the President.

Meanwhile, earlier this week I argued against the "balanced budget amendment" the House will start considering soon on purely philosophical grounds -- and both Social Security Works and Americans for Tax Fairness still help you tell your Congressfolk to reject it -- but these organizations remind me that I didn't do enough to describe exactly what kind of havoc a balanced budget amendment could wreak. The amendment, if it passes, would force automatic cuts to programs like Medicare and Social Security, programs, I feel compelled to say once again, we earned by paying into all our lives. The amendment would also require a three-fifths vote, rather than a majority vote, to overspend its budget or raise taxes on rich folks and/or corporations. Thus Republicans could cut our earned benefits without actually having to vote on it! It's a win-win! For everyone but the American people, that is.

Action: torturers, and overtime pay.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nominations of Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State and Gina Haspel as CIA Director, then Defending Rights and Dissent still helps you do that. It really shouldn't be too much to ask that folks in our government who support torture shouldn't get promoted, just as it shouldn't be too much to ask that "liberal" media figures who cheered on the Iraq war shouldn't still be "trusted sources of news and analysis." But please don't get cynical and assume that failing upward is just the way the world is now, because it's not the way the world should be, and helping to make the world we've got into the world-that-should-be is an American citizen's solemn duty, one that does not discharge with difficulty or failure. And stopping the Pompeo and Haspel nominations is as good a place to start the day's work as any.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4505/S. 2177, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, would restore the Obama Administration's overtime pay standard struck down by a federal District court judge -- thus mandating overtime pay for folks making up to about $48,000 annually, rather than $24,000. As you may know, Judge Mazzant ruled that the Department of Labor could not lawfully raise the overtime pay threshold without considering whether workers' job duties (i.e., whether they work in an executive or administrative capacity) exempt them from the threshold, but Sec. 3 (a) of the bill essentially makes the salary threshold an exemption-within-the-exemption, rendering that distinction moot (as I've always said it should be!) for workers below a certain income. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand overtime pay for working families by passing the Restoring Overtime Pay Act.

Action: fighting corruption, identity theft, and "balanced budget" amendments.

Early last week it looked like EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt had done a few, ah, questionable things, but it's just gotten worse and worse for him since then, as we've learned that his security detail is three times larger than his predecessor's, that he defied the White House's will in handing out massive pay raises to two of his cronies, and that he reassigned or demoted no less than five EPA officials who questioned his spending. Well, I guess that $43,000 "cone of silence" can't protect him from everything! We even learned that the energy lobbyist couple who rented out that $50-a-night-only-the-nights-you-stay-there condo got sick enough of him that they changed the locks on him. If only we could do that! I guess we'll have to settle for calling for his removal, as EDF Action, Public Citizen, Food and Water Action,, and People for the American Way all help you do.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that the name "Equifax" has, in the public's eyes, become synonymous with "corporation that doesn't care about protecting your data," our Congressfolk still seem desperate to pass legislation that would make it easier for corporations like Equifax to get away with losing your data to identity thieves. Maybe that's how Congress should work in the Bizarro World, but not this one. Hence one of the provisions of the notorious and nefarious S. 2155, passed by the Senate passed almost a month ago, would actually pre-empt stronger laws against identity theft at the state level. Because telling states they have no choice but to put up with weak federal anti-fraud laws is what being a conservative is all about! Seriously, the hypocrisy is strong with this bill. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your House Reps to support stronger pro-consumer, anti-fraud legislation by rejecting S. 2155.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk you oppose a "balanced budget amendment" to our Constutition. Often you hear from people who ought to know better I have to balance my budget, so why can't Congress? But no one who lives and works in America goes an entire lifetime without taking on some debt at some time in order to secure a better future. If we demanded a "balanced budget" of ourselves like we demand it of our government, we could never get a mortgage on a house, we could never buy a car with anything but cash, we could never make necessary home repairs on a credit card, and we could never pay for higher education with a loan. And heaven forbid you get cancer! Republicans have some nerve squealing about TEH BALANCEDZ BUDGETZ!!!! so soon after exploding our annual deficits with their tax-cuts-for-the-rich bill. So let's readjust their priorities.

Around the table: more thoughts about voting rights, media coverage, Presidential power, right-wing messaging, renewable energy, and free speech.

Aaron Sankin at Reveal reminds us of the other problem with the notorious Interstate Crosscheck voter info database: it's vulnerable to hackers, and thus exposes the personal data of millions of voters to identity theft. I wonder if that was a feature, not a bug! Seriously, I'll be happy if this is the reason the twenty-plus states still using Crosscheck to purge voters stop using it, though eight states have apparently stopped using Crosscheck for that purpose but are still sending voter data through an insecure system. (Also, consider that even though these states still sending voter data to Crosscheck may not be using Crosscheck to purge their own voter rolls, other states may be using that info to purge theirs.)

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept reports that Muslim terror suspects get on average seven times the "liberal" media attention that white terror suspects get, and their sentences are on average four times longer. This is not a terribly surprising development, once you recall how urgently our "liberal" media has rushed to portray various white terror suspects (the Planned Parenthood bomber and the Austin bomber leap to mind) with adjectives like "troubled," a courtesy our "liberal" media most emphatically does not extend to terrorists of the more Muslim persuasion, though surely they're just as human as white people, right? In any case, it sure is nice to have some hard data behind it.

Stan Collender at Forbes suggests that our President might try to get around the most recent appropriations bill by simply refusing to appropriate the money as the law has directed. And then dance around with no pants on, no doubt, while his votaries all squeal HE DID IT FOR US!!!!! If a President refuses to appropriate money as Congress has mandated, Congress gets to pass another bill forcing him to do so -- which means that if this President decides to throw up his hands, we'd be relying on Republican-held Congresses to do more than stamp their feet about it. Like Republicans didn't already think of all of that! It's win-win for them -- they get their cherished spending cuts and they get to blame the President for them!

Dig the balls on Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker, in the wake of Republicans losing yet another election there, saying that the left is the side of "anger and hatred." What recent Republican policy prescription has not been driven by "anger and hatred" -- specifically, the anger and hatred of Our Glorious Elites toward the American people? It's good, at least, to be reminded why Scott Walker is so dangerous -- not just because he remembers to claim that his side is the side of "optimism," but because he'll say up is down like up really is down, and thus persuades people who don't have the time (or the compulsion!) to attend these matters as closely as we do, but who do respond intuitively to "people who seem to know what they're talking about."

Portugal produced just about all of its electrical requirements for the month of March via renewable energy. Now, more than half of March's renewable power yield came from hydroelectricity, and not every nation's borders are nearly half coastline like Portugal's, but Portugal also met over 40 percent of its energy needs with wind power, and I can think of a few well-developed nations that don't do that well. Please, right-wingers, don't squeal that Portugal still had to use some fossil fuels over the month of March due to renewable energy storage issues, because a) it wasn't much and b) that's no justification for handing out corporate welfare to fossil fuel corporations or drilling off every conceivable coast.

Finally, Laura Ingraham just took a week off her Fox News show after being on the blunt end of a massive boycott for ridiculing one of the Parkland school shooting survivors, and some "liberal" media journalists are complaining that boycotts are bad and you should always meet speech with more speech, but Atrios reminds us why that's utter bunk. It isn't just that you and I can't get our speech out there the way a Laura Ingraham can, or that the First Amendment doesn't actually guarantee you a right to a paid gig for your speech, let alone immunity from criticism or adverse action from advertisers and activists -- it's also that people like Laura Ingraham are not actual journalists. They're what the industry calls "talent," and what I call (when I'm feeling very generous) "newsreaders." Journalists do seem awfully upset about the power of boycotts these days; does that mean they'd be even more upset about a la carte cable packaging?

Action: media monopolies, corruption, and food inspection.

So that video showing Sinclair "local" news anchors all saying the same damn thing: is that not the best argument ever against monopolized media? And is it also not the best argument ever against letting Sinclair buy Tribune Media so it can have even more TV stations spouting the same thing? Hence Free Press helps you tell the FCC to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger. The FCC, under Ajit Pai, doesn't care what you think -- well, not unless you present "new facts into the record" or "serious legal arguments," and if it contradicts their freedom-only-for-corporations philosophy, then not then, either, really. Still, duty is duty, and if we want actual local TV news stations to cover actual local TV news, then we have to fight for it, as we have to fight for anything worth having. Even if we must have right-wing windbags on the local news, they should be local right-wing windbags.

Meanwhile, the EPA Inspector General has been investigating Administrator Scott Pruitt's various spending habits, and Climate Hawks Vote helps you tell the IG's Office to expand its investigations into Mr. Pruitt's possible corruption. It sure doesn't look good for Mr. Pruitt once you add up his $40,000-plus "cone of silence" phonebooth, his rock star-style security entourage, his flying First Class on the taxpayer dime because one coach passenger cussed at him, and his $50-a-night-only-the-nights-you-stay condo he rented from an energy lobbyist's wife. But of course our President reportedly has Mr. Pruitt's back, and I doubt that'll change, since gutting regulations that actually help Americans is the one ideological cause to which our President will always remain a slave. So, as always, we must make the change.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to abandon plans to privatize and speed up hog slaughter inspections, then the National Employment Law Project still helps you do that. It seems like every time someone gets food poisoning it makes the news, so why would our government want to embrace policies that will inevitably result in more food poisoning? Pretty much for the reason I described in the previous paragraph: the current Administration believes that all regulations that actually help people must be destroyed, because regulations that help people invariably prevent corporate executives from gilding the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, and when faced with the choice between the right not to be made sick by your food and the "right" to even more unearned money, our Administration will always choose the latter. Unless we get in their grills, that is.

Around the table: including a *completely unsurprising finding* about tax "reform"!

Ho hum, Tax Policy Center analysis finds that folks making more than $732,000 are getting over $32,000 from the Republican tax "reform," while folks making less than $25,000 are getting a mere $40. If your first inclination is to say BUT TEH RICHEZ MAKES MORE OF TEH MONEYZ HA HA HA HA!!!!!, you might try grabbing a calculator and figuring out that folks making less than $25,000 are getting a mere one-sixth of one percent of their income back from the "tax cut," while wealthy folks are getting a far more robust 4.3 percent of their income back. And if your response then is to say THEY DESERVEZ ITZ MOREZ BECAUZ THEY CREATEZ THE JOBZ!!!!!, maybe you ought to just slap yourself. I can only repeat "CEOs would never hire anyone if they didn't have to" and "people who buy stuff create jobs" so many times, after all.

Campaigns in seven states and the District of Columbia have begun to close the "carried interest loophole" enjoyed by hedge fund managers at the state level. And all of conservatism rose up at once to marvel at the wondrous works "states' rights" can do! I kid, of course -- the "conservatives" you always see on TV care about nothing other than rich people having more money. Still, they might do well to attend what actual conservatives might be thinking -- that restraining the rich, particularly those rich who don't really do anything of value but move money around in a giant shell game, might help the little guy pull himself up by his proverbial bootstraps a bit better.

So you've heard about that $50-a-day-only-the-days-he-stayed-there condo EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt rented from an energy lobbyist's wife? Well, turns out the EPA approved a Canadian corporation's application for a pipeline extension, and that lobbyist worked for that very same corporation! "Any attempt to draw that link is patently false," an EPA spokeshack said, "because, gosh, if it pollutes and makes some CEO richer, we're going to approve it, regardless of whatever perks the Administrator might be getting!" OK, I made up that last part -- or, at least, I made up the part where the spokeshack said it out loud. Anyone else think maybe "knowing the industry you're regulating" is a farcical explanation for corruption?

In case you were wondering how "Fair and Balanced" Fox News was covering the shooting of Stephon Clark in Sacramento by police officers, Dina Radtke at MediaMatters informs us that Fox News has rather de-empasized the shooting and rather overemphasized the protests. Interesting, isn't it, that the on-air personalities say "violence" and then describe protestors standing on tables and being demanding and blocking other folks from going places and breaking one window? Gosh, I'm old enough to remember when violence was violent! But if you're getting all your news from Fox, chances are you're not doing this kind of tabulation anyway -- you're just waiting, breathlessly, to have your rage gland diddled.

Kentucky state legislature actually passes law preventing radiologists from diagnosing black lung disease from X-rays, and would leave the matter solely to pulmonologists. Turns out Kentucky has only six federally-certified pulmonologists, and four of them work for coal corporations, which might well have an interest in reducing the number of black lung diagnoses! Also, radiologists are doctors, too, plus they're better at reading X-rays, as you might guess from the word "radiologist," and of course they tend to find more black lung sufferers than the aforementioned pulmonologists do! But I'm sure our President, that champion of the forgotten, will sweep in and fix everything! I kid, of course.

Finally, Mike Elgan at Computer World says email is "the best social network." With email you can connect with "a lot of users," "filter spam and harassment," "interact with people on all the social networks," avoid advertising, and enjoy better search capabilities, among other things. Meanwhile, social media "are designed...to turn you into an addict," "so that you spend hours every day descending into a rabbit hole of unproductive distraction." But you can do a lot better getting your news by subscribing to email lists (ahem!) than by compulsively checking your social media feeds. Hell, email's a better way to get your news than cable news channels, too.

Action: discrimination, overtime pay, and methane emissions.

Another day, another "bathroom bill," this time in Tennessee, where it's passed out of one House committee (though not the full state House) and will get consideration in a Senate committee starting today. HB 2620 would force the state of Tennessee -- and thus the good taxpayers of Tennessee -- to pay all legal fees whenever a school district in the state decides to adopt a policy that would force transgender students to go to the restroom of their gender-at-birth. Surely its authors know that transgender students who sue against these kinds of policies under Title IX will win, and will likely win sizable settlements, so I must conclude that the legislature intends to cut off the nose of the taxpayer to spite the legislature's face. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state reps to reject that state's latest "bathroom bill."

Meanwhile, H.R. 4505/S. 2177, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, would undo the damage caused by court rulings (or a lack of thoroughness on the part of the Obama Administration, if you prefer) nullifying the Labor Department's 2016 overtime pay hike, by mandating that the Department of Labor raise its overtime pay threshold to the approximate point the Obama Administration originally raised the threshold, or about $48,000 annually. Thus folks making less than that would get paid time-and-a-half starting with their ninth hour in a working day or their 41st hour in a working week. The bill would also automatically update the threshold every three years, based on new income data. So a number of good government groups help you tell your Congressfolk to support better overtime pay for American workers by supporting the Restoring Overtime Pay Act.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to cap methane emissions from existing gas fracking wells. Gov. Wolf has gone the full Obama route on regulating the methane emissions that not only pollute our air and pack a bigger climate-change punch than coal, but help deprive good Pennsylvanians of the royalties they could earn from that energy source -- by capping emissions from new fracking wells, but not the thousands and thousands of old ones. Don't the old ones pollute worse? But that is, of course, a typical Democrat attempt at a cutting-the-baby-in-half "compromise," with an industry that doesn't care about anything but delivering money to its executives. And we have a few decades of data now to suggest that when you pander to big corporations, they just demand more. So let's stop compromising on clean air, since it clearly doesn't even buy us any time.

Around the table: more thoughts about law and order, health care, and media folly.

Self-described former "Second Amendment absolutist" says it's now time for "common-sense gun control." I wholly sympathize, having only lately accepted Thom Hartmann's prescriptions for a) regulating semi-automatics as strictly as we regulate automatics and b) regulating guns generally the same way we regulate cars. Averse as I am to making people pay over and over again for their past crimes, I would caution expanding background checks too broadly -- I would only want to check someone's criminal background if they were buying an automatic or semi-automatic, and only because these guns are basically killing machines, and thus machines whose sole purpose is to deprive other people of their rights (like, you know, life).

The unsuccessful prosecution of the Pulse shooter's widow constitutes, for Maha Ahmed at The Intercept, "The Criminalization of Domestic Abuse Survivors." Shooter Omar Mateen being dead, prosecutors rang up his abused wife, Noor Salman, on charges for which she has since been acquitted but which took up two years of her life fighting. Prosecutors often go after "somebody to punish," in one observer's words, and "(a)buse victims often end up being that 'somebody'" -- and a prosecutor has a lot of ways to bend these victims to their will, like charging them with failure to protect their children from abusers. With the vast majority of women in prison having suffered domestic abuse at some point in their lives, you'd think we could intervene more effectively than we do. But I sometimes think we'll even get past racism before we get past sexism.

Texas woman gets five years in prison for voting illegally -- because she was a convicted felon who did not understand that she had to finish the supervised release part of her sentence before she could get her right to vote back. Maybe she should have known beforehand, and maybe we should be treating folks who commit tax fraud more harshly than we do, but none of that matters in this instance, because she should never have lost her right to vote in the first place! Laws depriving folks of their right to vote because of felony convictions are a stain on our nation, and not merely because a vote isn't anything like a Tommy gun.

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times notes that the current Administration's "sabotage" of the Affordable Care Act will result in our government spending $33 billion more to insure 6.4 million fewer people. I like saying "heck of a job" to things like that as much as the next guy, but as a journalist (and a damn good one, by the way!) I suppose Mr. Hiltzik can't just come out and say the obvious: why, it's almost like spending more federal money and covering fewer Americans is the whole idea! Luckily, I'm not a journalist, so I get to say it.

Finally, the notoriously right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns nearly 200 TV stations and will own over 40 more if its proposed merger with Tribune Media goes through, has apparently forced its media personalities to read the same script about the "the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country." And then an enterprising Twitter user put together an 11-second video (embedded at the above link) depicting at least nine of these media personalities saying the exact same thing. A bunch of "local" news stations all owned by the same corporation all denouncing "fake news" and "media bias" in exactly the same way? Didn't I see that on Black Mirror?