Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: summarizing the latest in bad news.

I told you the Supreme Court wasn't done: the Court rules, in Janus v. AFSCME, that making government employees who are not union members (but work in union shops) pay certain union-related fees violates their First Amendment rights. Conflating money with speech is a persistent fault of the Roberts Court, but did the AFSCME make the best possible case? I mean, if a Supreme Court Justice won't figure out for himself how to distinguish between fees funding a union's political spending and fees funding spending on (for example) services that support workers in the workplace, it shouldn't be that hard to figure it out for him. (Then again, Justice Alito's opinion indulges in right-wing scaremongering about the "mounting costs of public-employee wages, benefits, and pensions.")

Both the Government Accountability Office (or GAO) and the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General plan to investigate our President's handling of family separations at the border. I wonder how long it'll be before our President loudly declares the GAO and all these pesky Inspectors General to be part of the "swamp" he says he wants to drain (recall that he wanted to replace all of our Inspectors General right after taking office, before being told, you know, how that would look).

In a related note, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds us that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. In other news, voter fraud is not particularly common, the "liberal" media is not particularly liberal, "moral values" are not particularly about whatever hurts gays and women, and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are not particularly real. Sometimes I do not understand why 25% of the electorate prefers to remain in a constant state of rage about utter bullshit.

The "liberal" media won't shut up about "civility" this week, but this New York Daily News article reminds us that a cookie shop owner refused to serve then-Vice President Biden in 2012 and nobody wrung their hands about "civility" then. Why, that's a better example of right-wing hypocrisy than the one I came up with off the top of my head the other day! It may be too much to hope that I'll only have to say this once, but protecting civilization is a lot more important than protecting civility.

Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez pulls off a stunning upset in the New York 14th House District Democratic primary, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says no bigs, it's just one district, takes all kinds of Democrats, yadda yadda yadda. Gosh, is Ms. Pelosi showing smarts here? Republicans win so often at least in part because they pretend to be so different from one another, though of course they're all cut from the same reactionary cloth, while Democrats have a well-deserved reputation of strangling new blood in its crib in their insane zeal for victory without work. Maybe, just maybe, Ms. Pelosi's finally getting it.

Finally, I know everyone's upset about Justice Kennedy's retirement, but as Mother Jones reminded us several hours before his announcement, Justice Kennedy hasn't been a swing vote, like, at all this past term. Yes, he was, over the years, better than we could have expected on gay rights and criminal justice reform, but n.b. that Chief Justice Warren was the swing vote in the cellphone warrants case. And Justice Kennedy was as corporatist as the rest of them -- recall that he wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United v. FEC.

Action: concerning disaster prevention, renewable energy, and Yellowstone Park.

The EPA has proposed getting rid of every disaster prevention measure in its Chemical Disaster Rule, because of course they are. The West Fertilizer Company chemical explosion that killed 15, injured over 160, and either damaged or destroyed over 150 buildings was not that long ago! And it was all over the news! And a chemical accident happens almost every other day in America, so why the hurry to get rid of what little our government has done to protect us since then? Because Scott Pruitt knows his days as EPA Administrator are numbered, just as surely as the right wing establishment in America knows its days are numbered, and they are grabbing everything that isn't nailed down. Actually taking steps to protect good citizens costs CEOs money, after all, and CEOs have yachts to gas up and vacation homes to buy! Public Citizen helps you tell the EPA to scuttle its plan to roll back protections against chemical disasters.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3671, the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act (or OFF Act), would get our electric grid entirely "off" fossil fuels and onto renewable energy by 2035, and if your first impulse is to say golly, that's only 17 years away, keep in mind that you could, in theory, power America's entire electric grid by covering a mere 100-square-mile area of Nevada with solar panels, so this isn't a very big ask. The OFF Act would also repeal fossil fuel subsidies, help out low-income homes trying to get more energy-efficient, and provide rebates for folks to buy clean energy cars. When some right-winger tells you this all sounds like welfare, go ahead and ask him where he was all those times our government gave corporate welfare handouts to fossil fuel corporations. In the meantime, Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support renewable energy by supporting the OFF Act.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell our Interior Department to ban mining in or near Yellowstone Park. Interior is mulling whether to open up some 30,000 acres of public lands in the northern part to gold and silver miners, among others. Hey, wasn't the California gold rush over 160 years ago? Yes, it was, but even in our post-gold standard era some folks never seem to get over the fever. We all know that mining in or near public lands tends to lead to pollution and wildlife habitat destruction, and word on the street is that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke might actually agree, having supported a mining ban at Yellowstone while he was in Congress, but you'd be quite justified to fear that our Administration would prefer only to listen to other bosses trying to extract the value from public lands for themselves. But that only means we need to speak out until they do our will. After all, you can only spend money once, but when public lands are gone, they're gone forever.

Action: concerning the Muslim ban, internet freedom, and immigration.

As you know, our Supreme Court upheld our President's Muslim ban yesterday, and though that might sound like the last word, it's really not, because Congress can choose to restrict our President's power to discriminate against people he doesn't like. Congress legislating and the Executive branch executing; what a novel idea! Hence the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to rescind our President's Muslim ban. Surely Congress will be all over this like white on rice, right? Actually, they've held exactly zero hearings on our President's Muslim travel ban since he put out his first one right as he was taking office, though they sure have devoted a lot of time to figuring out exactly how hard to screw families crossing the border and exactly how to hold DACA reauthorization hostage to border wall funding. But, as the owners of government, we can make our will known. Indeed, we-the-people making our will known is the only thing that has ever done any good in America.

Meanwhile, the FCC's net neutrality repeal took effect on June 11, as you know, giving Congress 60 working days (such as they "work") to nullify the repeal with a "resolution of disapproval" under the Congressional Review Act. The Senate has already passed such a resolution, and now it's up to the House; Stop the FCC still helps you tell your House Rep to support the discharge petition that will force Speaker Ryan to bring the House version of the "resolution of disapproval" to a full House vote. Don't brook any silliness from your Rep that "it's a lost cause because the President will veto it anyway." He almost certainly will veto it, but you should still do the right thing! You should still send a message that you support freedom for Americans to go where they want on the internet, rather than "freedom" for corporations to censor and throttle websites and turn our internet experience into cable TV. And we should make the President defend his veto. If he can.

Finally, you've also no doubt heard that our President would much rather just deport undocumented immigrants without due process -- after all, it's not like any of them could be running from terrorism or anything! And it's certainly not like a strong nation gives everyone due process, even when it's inconvenient. And Congress, of course, is no better than our man-child President -- Rep. Goodlatte's draconian anti-immigration bill failed last week, of course, and Speaker Ryan's "compromise" bill, get your surprised face ready, isn't much of a compromise -- it would allow our President to continue separating families at the border, cram immigrant families into our President's crony private prisons, and hold DACA reauthorization hostage to the President's border wall funding. He should ask Israel how well that wall is doing for them! Hence the ACLU helps you call your House Rep and demand they reject the Ryan "compromise" immigration bill.

Around the table: the dictator our President aspires to be, and other sad tales.

As Turkey's President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seems to have won another re-election, the incomparable Juan Cole reminds us how much of the Erdogan blueprint has been eagerly adopted by our own President. Filling the judiciary with "far-right ideologues" (thanks for being such a check on Presidential power, Mr. McConnell!), fomenting mistrust of the press for all the wrong reasons I feel compelled to add, allying with right-wing religious fools, and attempting to "shape the officer corps" (though I'd say not in Secretary Mattis's image per se) -- it happened there, and it's happening here, too. At least we haven't gotten to the point where our President's opponents all find themselves in jail like Mr. Erdogan's did. Yet.

Our Supreme Court upholds our President's Muslim ban in an entirely unconvincing manner -- accepting extremely debatable opinion, that ZOMG WE CAN'T VET ALL TEH IMMIGRANTZ!!!!!, as incontrovertible fact, just as they did in their Ohio caging law ruling earlier this month. At least Justice Sotomayor, in her dissent, points out that the majority, in its equally-notorious Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, looked at Colorado Civil Rights Commission members' opinions about religion with a proctoscope, but didn't think our President's stated opinions about keeping Muslims out of America worth noting. Aside from Justice Roberts's opinion on cellphone location warrants, this Court has really been stinking it up this term, and they're not done.

Caroline Chen at ProPublica notes that big pharma corporations underwrite some 75% of the FDA's scientific review budget, and then the FDA "Rush(es) Risky Drugs to Market." Why, it's almost like that's the idea! A long time ago, someone had the brilliant idea that they could cut taxes by making corporations pay "fees" funding essential government functions -- like, you know, regulating drugs so they don't hurt people! Note well that Uloric's own manufacturer found that many more Americans die from heart disease while they're on Uloric than if they're on some other gout medication, and Uloric costs $24,000 a year! And then there's Nuplazid, the drug that's supposed to treat hallucinations in Parkinson's patients that actually causes hallucinations. You will not be heartened to read about the FDA's approval process for that particular drug, which costs $33,000 annually.

Well, I was actually on Sarah Huckabee Sanders's side for once, sort of, but then one of our papers of record started bemoaning the lack of "civility" in American life, a concern I didn't hear uttered when, for example, folks hung President Obama in effigy. Once again, when liberals stand up for themselves, Our Glorious Elites suddenly wonder why we can't all get along. (BTW, I oppose kicking Ms. Sanders out of a restaurant just because she's evil, but I certainly do not oppose people gathering to heckle Ms. Nielson or Mr. Miller at separate restaurants. You'd better be able to handle that if you're an adult, let alone an adult working for the most powerful man on the planet.)

Finally, I was going to say something about the various absurdities at which right-wing media figures are grasping in order to justify our President's policy of separating parents and children when they cross the border, but then Tom Tomorrow's latest cartoon nailed the entire spectrum of this right-wing rationalization in one frame. One frame, out of six! And then two frames later he mocks the Civility Police, and then in the next frame he captures the entire spectrum of our Administration's often-contradictory responses to criticism about the affair. This one's absolutely brilliant and right about everything -- and I wish that meant more.

Action: concerning immigration, education, and clean water.

What else can we do do to hinder our President from turning America into a land without due process? Well, consider that you may be invested in a pension fund that invests in private prison corporations -- including the ones in which our President would detain immigrant families seeking asylum "indefinitely." But don't flagellate yourself about "how I benefit from the harm done to others," not just because that's what our President and his votaries would like you to do, but also because even if you are "part of the problem" -- any problem! -- nothing on Earth prevents you from also being part of the solution. That is the promise of America. And pension funds hate the Big Stick of Bad PR just like every other corporation on Earth, so Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to divest from the private prison corporations that our government would use to detain immigrants indefinitely.

Meanwhile, Michigan's state Board of Education aims to scrub its social studies curriculum of almost any mentions of civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, or climate change. Oh, and it wouldn't talk of "core democratic values," either, because, get this, it sounded too partisan. All together now: waaaaaaaaaah! One of the big names behind the new "standards" is state Senator Patrick Colbeck -- can I mention he's a Republican, or would that be too partisan? -- who just so happens to be running for Governor. A guy who can't stand the notion that America has screwed up and yet has striven to do better shouldn't be running for village idiot, let alone Governor. (Also, too, he thinks the KKK didn't start out as a racist organization.) Hence Jeff Gaynor of Ann Arbor, MI has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Michigan state Board of Education to scuttle its plan to right-wash history in its K-12 social studies curriculum.

Finally, the Pennsylvania state legislature is mulling SB 1189, which would, get this, reclassify the Delaware River Basin Commission's (or DRBC's) fracking ban in the Basin as a taking of property, meaning the DRBC would have to buy out all the landowners with gas shale underneath their property in order to enforce the ban! If you noticed that the simple act of banning fracking in an area doesn't actually "take" anyone's property, and that good Pennsylvanians (possibly including yourself!) have already made their will known by commenting on the DRBC's fracking ban, you're not alone. Fracking puts dangerous chemicals into our drinking water, and momentarily cheaper energy is, frankly, too high a price to pay for losing our clean water (and thus the bedrock of decent health care!) forever. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to support our will and our right to clean water by rejecting SB 1189.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, the Bristol Bay, and antibiotic abuse.

SB 22, the Pennsylvania anti-gerrymandering bill, continues its tortured path through the state Assembly: though Daryl Metcalfe couldn't simply gut the bill like he did the last few anti-gerrymandering bills, he did personally introduce over 120 amendments, and a Montgomery County Democrat actually outdid him, introducing more than twice as many. That's how evil people operate in legislatures, by introducing so many amendments that everyone just throws up their hands and gives up. Not us, though! Fair Districts PA helps you instruct your PA state House Rep to vote "yea" on exactly one amendment, the Samuelson amendment (A08876), and then pass SB 22, as thus amended. The Samuelson amendment (available here, for your perusal) would establish an 11-member Commission to redistrict the state, and if they fail to do so by the specified deadlines, would allow the state Supreme Court to redistrict the state. That's worth all the trouble.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is taking public comments on whether to put an open-pit copper and gold mine and a natural gas pipeline in the middle of Alaska's Bristol Bay region, home to Alaska's sockeye salmon industry supporting some 14,000 jobs. Gosh, when put like that, it sure sounds appetizing, doesn't it? I guess they're hoping for comments reading yes, I would like to pollute the Bristol Bay, kill off the unique wildlife that lives there, and destroy all those jobs in Alaska's world-famous salmon industry. It's a trifecta! But Environmental Action helps you tell the Corps to reject the idea of putting mines and pipelines in the middle of a pristine and economically viable area of Alaska. I know, the EPA has decided to uphold Obama-era mine-waste standards in the Bristol Bay that make it well-nigh impossible to put gold and copper mines there. But we don't have nice things without hard work.

Finally, PennPIRG helps you tell big restaurant chain corporations to purge their supply chains of antibiotic-dependent meat. As you may know, America uses four our of every five antibiotics, no, not in sick people or sick animals, but in nominally healthy feed animals, partly because the antibiotics make the animals meatier, and partly because they help the animals endure the squalid conditions of factory farms. You know what using antibiotics like that also does? It creates "superbugs" that resist antibiotics, thus threatening a return to the days before antibiotics, when the next cut could kill you. Get the big chains (including McDonald's, Subway, and KFC) to stop using the pumped-up meat, and the "free" market might actually work its magic for once. We've managed to get a lot of the big chains to use more antibiotic-free chicken, but not beef, not yet -- and beef is the big game here, so to speak. So let's get to it!

Around our table: lesson #3088 in "why 'more Democrats' isn't the solution to our problems."

California state Assembly members blow massive holes in the state Senate's gold-standard net neutrality bill, to the point where the Senate bill's original author tries to withdraw it from consideration. And they announced their amendments late at night and then voted on them the next morning without debate, sorta like Daryl Metcalfe did to those anti-gerrymandering bills in Pennsylvania. And in case you were thinking all our problems would be over if we just elected more Democrats, note well that Democrats absolutely dominate both houses of the California state legislature, and they not only let this happen, they helped it to happen.

Here's something you may not know about our President's plan to let "small businesses" offer crappier health care plans that let insurers evade Obamacare coverage mandates: it has a loophole that allows big corporations to join "small business associations," as long as it doesn't upend a total size requirement, I presume. I mean, I'm not sure how else to read paragraph 17's report that "(u)ntil now, the Labor Department...often looked at the size of each company, rather than the group as a whole, to determine if it was a large or small employer." Thus will big corporations be able to foist crappy health insurance on their employees! (As an aside, it sure is odd that whenever we say "making insurers cover maternity care," our opponents say "burdensome regulations." I wonder why that is.)

Jessica Huseman's ProPublica report on the court case that struck down Kris Kobach's pet show-me-your-citizenship-papers-if-you-want-to-vote law catalogues a mighty dung-mountain of incompetence and malice, and is thus well worth the considerable amount of time it takes to read it, but I want to highlight, if I may, how Mr. Kobach came up with all those scare numbers about TEH THREE MILLYUNZ VOTEDZ ILLEGULLYZ!!!!! The academic who came up with that number found less than 40 folks out of 32,000 who said they were non-citizens registered to vote in 2008 -- and then said anywhere from 38,000 to 2.8 million folks had voted illegally, which is a range wide enough to be utterly meaningless. Naturally Mr. Kobach fell in love with the bigger number, just like our President. Look at them balls swing!

Ho hum, Factcheck.org reminds us that Presidents Bush the Lesser and Obama did not, in fact, separate families at the border with the sheer zeal of this Administration. And, you know, "they did it too" is bad argument even when it's correct -- it's a way of saying "I'm not going to defend my position on the merits, but I am going to subtly accuse you of hypocrisy for not crying out when the other guy did it." When they deflect to insulting you, they're announcing they're losers. I wish everyone understood that.

I was, frankly, hoping for more from this article, entitled "The Hope of a Blue Wave is Dangerous to Democracy." I take the author's point about everyone being overconfident about the 2016 elections, too (wasn't Chuck Schumer measuring drapes for the Majority Leader's office?), but I'd hoped for a larger message -- that "hoping to get more Democrats in office" has already disappointed the hell out of us, certainly, but more that democracy isn't about who we support but about what we do, every single day of our lives. It's a lesson those folks who went to townhalls to press their representatives about health care seem to have learned well, but we all need to learn it.

Finally, I do not believe that the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, VA, has a "right" to kick Sarah Huckabee Sanders out, even for being the face of our Administration's evil propaganda machine. People can eat where they like -- I mean, a big chunk of the civil rights movement was about that! And a big chunk of the gay rights movement is about similar matters! -- and the First Amendment right to free association does not flow in only one direction at a time. And, as any cook or waiter will tell you, there are subtler and more effective ways to get someone not to eat at your restaurant anymore.

Action: concerning health care, the Grand Canyon, and the Census.

Our President still obsesses over destroying the Affordable Care Act, our Congress still obsesses over destroying Medicare and Medicaid -- what's a citizen to do? Slice the Gourdian knot of health care absurdity in America by telling your Congressfolk to pass S. 1804, the Medicare for All Act, as Social Security Works helps you do. The Medicare for All Act would, as its title suggests, expand Medicare to include all Americans, which would end a lot of absurdities we've come to believe are just part of life, like ballooning premiums, surprise health care bills, and getting kicked off insurance for having pre-existing conditions. America spends more on health care than any other developed nation, and gets less for it -- nearly one out of every 10 Americans still don't have health insurance, and health insurance corporations charge pretty much whatever they want and dare you to do something about it. Expanding Medicare to include everyone? That'd be doing something about it.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Interior Secretary to make a temporary moratorium on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon permanent, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. Naturally President Obama's first Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, imposed the moratorium, but if Mr. Obama did it, then our current President must take a dump all over it, never mind that uranium mining there would absolutely poison the Colorado River, which runs through the Canyon and provides water to over 35 million Americans, not just for drinking but also for farming (the Colorado River provides water to the Imperial Valley in California, which produces over $1 billion annually in crops). If our President cares more for uranium mining bosses than for, you know, regular folks, then regular folks must stand up to him. I do wonder if it would impress our President to know that bighorn sheep live in the Grand Canyon, since the word "bighorn" does have the words "big" and "horn" in it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to scrap its attempt to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Some folks are still saying so what? when they hear about that, but it is, actually, a big deal -- our Constitution mandates that the Census count everyone living in America, citizen or not, but a lot of good folks whose papers are in order, but who have had trouble navigating our bureaucracy, will simply refuse to fill out the Census form if it asks them about their citizenship. Why? Because they don't want to give racists in our government more ammunition to hurt them, that's why. Can you blame them? And Census data helps determine the size of Congressional districts, as well distribution of federal funds, which means less representation and less money for districts with immigrant populations. Look, these folks pay taxes, and one of the services they get for their tax money is a Census that works for everyone.

Action: internet freedom, corporate welfare, and workplace democracy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your U.S. House Rep to nullify the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, then Stop the FCC still helps you do that. Net neutrality officially ended last Monday, as you know, and though the big telecom corporations haven't started censoring websites or slowing websites down or forcing you to watch junk news videos before your websites load or herding some of your websites into internet "slow lanes," but the only reason they haven't done these things yet is because they're not completely stupid -- they know it's better to take your freedoms away a bit at a time, rather than rush to take them all away at once. And net neutrality is about your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than have a bunch of big corporations tell you where to go. The Senate already passed a "resolution of disapproval" aiming to nullify the FCC's repeal; now the House must do the same. But they won't, unless we demand it.

Meanwhile, our Administration's Department of Energy has concocted a truly moronic scheme to force utilities to buy a set percentage of their electric power from coal and nuclear. Brought to you by the same people who call renewable energy standards "welfare handouts"! Coal corporations are failing, not because of some "war on coal" drama, but because natural gas is considerably cheaper, and solar and wind are price-competitive now. And nuclear power plants have never made any money. How do we know? Because our government keeps giving them "loan guarantees," which only "guarantee" that taxpayers bail them out when they fail! I wish I could believe that this chunk of corporate welfare is all about our coal miners, but it's not -- the only people our President cares about are other bosses, and he sees the rest of us as just tools. So the Sierra Club helps you demand that our Energy Department scuttle its plan to force utilities to buy more from failing fossil fuel corporations.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5728/S. 2810, the Workplace Democracy Act. The Workplace Democracy Act would amend the National Labor Relations Act to curb corporations mislabeling their employees "independent contractors," to keep corporations from forcing employees to attend anti-union presentations, to force more good-faith negotiating efforts between corporations and unions, to allow employees to choose a card-check election instead of a secret ballot election to join a union, and to repeal "right-to-work" laws at the state level -- among other things! The only other thing I would ask for would be to allow farm workers to organize. But this bill is the gold standard of labor legislation in these times -- and when we have strong unions, we have better wages and better working conditions. So don't believe the right-wing hype that unions "make us less free," because all they do is make corporations less free to hurt us.

Action: concerning immigration, slavery, and renewable energy.

I'm guessing by now you've heard tape of the wailing of immigrant children who've been separated from their parents at the border, replete with a Border Patrol agent's attempted gallows humor; naturally our President blames everyone but himself for these separations, our Attorney General throws Pauline letters at anyone who says his policy is cruel, our HHS Secretary simply denies any of this is even happening, and certain Administration supporters call the children "crisis actors" -- all ways, you notice, of avoiding admitting that you support separating children from parents, since saying you support that makes you, you know, look like a cruel bastard. "Zero tolerance" policies generally being bad policies in any endeavor, People for the American Way helps you tell our government to end its policy of separating children from parents during border crossings.

Meanwhile, Turkmenistan is yet another nation that forces its citizens to work in the cotton fields during harvest time -- which isn't "bringing everyone together for the common good" so much as forcing free people into slavery for the enrichment of crony cotton executives -- and it also tends to, ah, mistreat activists who try to call attention to this depravity. Hence the government of Turkmenistan has kept Alternative Turkmenistan News (or ATM) reporter Gaspar Matalaev in a labor camp for the better part of two years after he interviewed and photographed folks during said harvest. Hence the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell Turkmenistan to release Mr. Matalaev. (You'll be pleased to learn that our government banned the importation of cotton from Turkmenistan last month -- though if our President ever decides he has cronies there, that could change in a New York minute.)

Finally, an organization called Brown's Last Chance helps you tell California Gov. Jerry Brown, term-limited (again!) in 2018, to put California on a surer path away from fossil fuels and toward renewables before he leaves office. Look up the word "mercurial" in the dictionary and you'll see Jerry Brown's picture, but Mr. Brown has been making an awful lot of noise lately about the danger climate change presents to our planet, so he might be inclined to a) stop giving permits to fossil fuel corporations for new drilling and b) phase fossil fuels out of California's energy grid. I'm frankly more concerned about the health effects oil and gas drilling have on the clean drinking water of good Californians -- you don't have health without clean water, and Mr. Brown's record on this matter, which includes letting farms spray fracking wastewater on their crops how do you like those strawberries now? rather undercuts his public handwringing about his legacy. Good thing we're here to help.

Around the table: with a completely unsurprising finding about American attitudes toward diversity.

Contra what you may have gathered from the 2016 election, Pew Research Center finds that almost six out of 10 Americans think having a lot of different ethnicities and nationalities here in America is a good thing. Also, too, less than one in 10 Americans think it's a bad thing -- and even among the furthest-right Republicans, only one in six think it's a bad thing. So how did we get this President, then? Because Democrats demanded you get behind a center-right candidate merely to avoid having a monster, and because Republicans got behind their man, thinking they'd at least get a Supreme Court Justice out of it. So if both parties enable virulent racists in different ways, then maybe they should stop enabling them?

Jonah Walters at Jacobin argues that Juneteenth -- or June 19, the day the U.S. Army announced to the slaves of Texas that they were free -- should be a national holiday. Yes, if we revere Independence Day, we should revere Juneteenth, too, and when right-wingers trot out their special rights disrespecting the Founding Fathers well what about tripe, remind them that slavery is bad, and we should celebrate when we triumph over slavery and give more freedom to more good Americans.

During the introduction to this lengthy piece about the life and times of Administration immigration policy expert/man desperately in need of a punch in the nose Stephen Miller, one of Mr. Miller's high school classmates speaks thusly: "(p)eople laughed at him because he was a buffoon, he was a performer, he thrived on spectacle. I’m very conscious now, looking back, that he was treated the same way that Trump was -- he wasn’t taken seriously." At once I saw that "taking someone seriously" doesn't mean pretending anything they have to say is worth carefully considering, but rather means seriously shaming them so that they don't take their hatred outside their homes ever again. (And, yeah, we should also have known that someone who loves drama the way Mr. Miller does would get fairly far in this sick, immoral, and decadent society. I mean, I wish ignoring these bastards was an option, but we're too far gone for that now.)

Toward the end of this article about Amazon's notorious facial "recognition" software, an Amazon spokeshack unfurls this dung nugget: "Our quality of life would be much worse today if we outlawed new technology because some people could choose to abuse the technology...Imagine if customers couldn’t buy a computer because it was possible to use that computer for illegal purposes?" Wow, not only is that a rhetorical hostage situation ("don't criticize our product, or all innovation and progress will stop forever!), it completely ignores critics' substantive complaint that not only is the product evil, the product also sucks (i.e., because all black people look alike to it).

Now this I did not expect: a U.S. District Court judge not only strikes down Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach's proof-of-citizenship-to-vote law, but requires him to take six hours of continuing legal ed. I was going to say, well, that's going to look awful good as he runs for Governor! But then, Mr. Kobach's base (now the same as our President's base, given their closeness) consists mainly of people who think ignorance of "Evidence 101" is a badge of honor. Ain't no judge going to tell me what I should already know, no sir! (Even when they learn Mr. Kobach is a Yale law school graduate, they'll decide he was learning the ways of the librul elites so he could better take them down.)

Finally, the Supreme Court may have given its blessing to Ohio's vote suppression scheme, but Greg Palast assures us that their decision, unlikely as this may sound, is "not the last word." Why? Because the Supreme Court was able to bless the Ohio scheme by assuming that a voter failing to return a postcard has actually moved -- but if plaintiffs can establish that Ohio has removed a significant number of voters who haven't moved, then the linchpin of the Court's assumption falls out, and their argument collapses. Would the Supreme Court admit such a thing? Likely not this Court. But other courts will hear it in the meantime -- and states that suppress the vote this way will not enjoy the Big Stick of Bad PR being administered to them.

Action: "free" trade, spying on protestors, and immigration policy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to sign on to a letter opposing the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system commonly found in "free" trade pacts like NAFTA, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Hilariously, ALEC circulated a letter supporting the job-killing, law-nullifying ISDS mechanism earlier this year -- and a staggering twelve legislators signed on. Then Public Citizen circulated its anti-ISDS letter, and by the end of May garnered almost four times the signatories ALEC got. Just about everyone in the real world opposes an unaccountable court system with the power to nullify our laws and exact tribute from taxpayers for the "harm" caused by said laws. Unfortunately, most of the folks who do support such an unaccountable court system are in Congress and in our President's cabinet -- and that's why we have to keep fighting.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell Amazon to stop selling their should-be-notorious Rekognition spyware to local police departments. Spying software that can find a mere hundred faces in a crowd (and, ah, isn't so good at correctly identifying the non-white faces) sure sounds like bad spying software, until you consider its real purpose: to harass protestors into silence. In an era where our government tries to hang felony rioting charges on over 200 J20 protestors, it's not hard to see the purpose of being able to "rekognize" a hundred people in a crowd and then follow them around until they give up speaking truth to power. Of course, as a real law-and-order devotee, you would also see a broad invitation to violate these good Americans' rights, by gathering information on them without probable cause. No, protesting our government isn't "probable cause." It's being an American.

Finally, the Tahirih Justice Center has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell our Attorney General to reverse his decision to deny asylum to folks running from domestic violence. He doesn't give a damn what you think, believing himself and the Administration to which he belongs to have been "ordained" by God, but our duty remains our duty. I'm going to go ahead and make the same two points I made the other day, because Mr. Sessions clearly has no answer for them if he's resorting to the letters of Paul to justify his actions. One, it'd be different if the governments these good folks are running from could actually protect them from domestic violence, but guess what? They can't. Two, if you think we shouldn't be letting folks in who are running from real trouble but we should be letting folks in just to work the President's hotels and wineries, you really have no standing to debate this issue at all.

Action: fighting unconstitutional war-making and bad GMO labeling standards.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject S.J.Res. 59, an Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) which would greatly expand our President's unconstitutional war-making power, then Win Without War still helps you do that. It doesn't matter which gang of war-mongering weaklings now control our foreign policy, and it doesn't matter what the President's name is -- all of our Presidents since 9.11 have abused the original 2001 AUMF, and by giving present and future Presidents the authority to declare certain forces as being "associated" with the Taliban/al-Qaeda/ISIS and wage war upon them, S.J.Res. 59 would further damage Congress's Constitutional right to declare war. And don't believe the hype that S.J.Res. 59 would provide for "adequate Congressional review," not if you've attended how Congressfolk actually vote when confronted with the "threat" of being called "weak on terror" by rage-addicted fools.

Meanwhile, in a related note, Saudi Arabia has begun its attack on the Yemeni port of Hodeidah -- an attack that threatens to exacerbate Yemen's near-famine conditions, since some 80% of Yemen's food imports go through Hodeidah, and an attack that we are enabling, with intelligence on air strike targeting. If you think you missed the part where Congress declared war on Yemen, well, you didn't: we have assisted Saudi attacks on Yemen, in violation of our Constitution and our laws, since the beginning of the Obama Administration. And for what? To extend Saudi power in the region? To destroy of some of the best ISIS-fighters out there in the Houthi rebels the Saudis are trying to crush? These are questions worth asking! Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell your Congressfolk to invoke the War Powers Act against our enabling of the Saudi attacks on Yemen.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to dramatically improve its proposed GMO labeling standard, then Just Label It helps you do that. They actually to put a sunflower with a smiley face to signify that a food has genetically-modified ingredients! And they'd use the term "BE" (for "bio-engineered), a term nobody knows, rather than the term "GMO," a term everyone knows. And they're also allowing labels to point you to a we address or use a QR code instead of just writing "this food has GMOs in it." Gosh, it's like they have something to hide! And there is nothing conservative about the USDA proposal. A real conservative would call all that smiley-face QR code crap "bureaucratic red tape." A real conservative would say we should clearly label GMOs so consumers can make their own decisions. And a real conservative would wonder if GMOs will cause more problems than they solve.

Around the table: concerning automation, corruption, wage theft, tax cuts for the rich, more tax cuts for the rich, and rogue ICE agents.

With all the anti-worker hysteria of ZOMG TEH AUTOMATIONZ WILL KILLZ ALL TEH JOBZ!!!!!, Neil Irwin at the New York Times highlights a number of very reasonable solutions we could implement to prevent such a job-ocalypse. These do not include a universal basic income, which right-wingers will use to destroy Medicare and Social Security -- they include work-sharing programs, codifying "maximum employment" policies in law, and shortening monopoly protections for trademarks and patents. But they should also include bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, which really is the thing that will prevent executives from throwing living-breathing workers under the bus for their not-very-well-working machines.

Ho hum, Florida Gov. Rick Scott's decision to issue "emergency contracts" for hurricane cleanup will cost Florida taxpayers at least $28 million more than if he'd relied on existing contracts for hurricane cleanup. I am, of course, reminded of Florida Republican U.S. House Rep. Carlos Curbelo instructing us last August that doing hurricane cleanup the right way saves more money than doing it the quick way, but Gov. Scott spent valuable time and money doing the whole rebidding process over again. Why, that's something you'd do if you were trying to help out your cronies, not protect taxpayers from "special interests"! The POGO general counsel's statement that Mr. Scott's decision did not reflect "good business sense" should be a Democrat campaign ad, but then again, these are Democrats we're talking about.

Sam Pizzigati wonders why big corporations, which can afford not to commit wage theft, still do so. Decline in unions yes, attacks on regulation certainly, but also the simple fact that "(t)he outrageously generous rewards that have become so commonplace in Corporate America give the executives who run our top corporations an ongoing — and almost irresistible — incentive to behave outrageously." Best way to fight the problem at its source? "(E)nd" "eye-popping CEO pay packages." At the risk of beating a dead horse, bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income would be the best way to do that -- certainly better than the so-convoluted-they-must-be-designed-to-fail ways center-right Democrats have come up with over the years.

Remember when tax "reform" supporters in the White House claimed that their tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-for-corporations would put an extra $4,000 in every family's bank account? Well, it's fair to ask where that "$4,000 Raise" went, as Leo Gerard does. Wages actually went down 0.1% for non-supervisory workers from May of last year to May of this year once you factor in inflation -- and I think you would only "forget" to factor in inflation when you're trying to lie about economic policy! -- while less than five percent of American workers got raises or bonuses. Most of that tax-cut largesse, as you probably recall, goes toward executive stock buybacks and higher dividends for shareholders. I may have mentioned this before, but you could run a lot of good ads along the "Where's My Tax Cut?" meme -- you could even send out bloodhounds to find it, like Mitch McConnell did in those ads for his first Senate campaign back in the day. But again, Democrats would have to run these ads, and they wouldn't be civil.

Greg LeRoy at CityLab informs us that workers at Amazon's second headquarters, wherever they build it, will very likely be paying their state taxes directly to their employer, since whichever states "wins" the bid to host HQ2 will be giving massive corporate welfare handouts to Amazon. Where is the state that will stand its ground and say no, you clowns already get to deduct your expenses, so further "deductions" would be immoral, since it would cheat present and future generations of the services they pay for with their taxes? I don't know, since 18 of 50 states are in the running, and maybe the other 32 would like to be, but can't be, for various reasons, possibly including that Amazon would consider a lot of those states "flyover country."

Finally, ICE agents detain 62-year-old man who has permanent resident status and has been in America for literally almost half a century -- over an 18-year-old domestic violence complaint for which the man had already completed probation and anger management. Even if you want to spend valuable time and money combing through all these records for the "bad" immigrants -- hell, even if you want to assert that domestic violence should carry a worse sentence than that! -- you have to respect our nation's traditions and laws enough to leave people alone who have already paid their debt to society as mandated by the court that convicted them. Then again, for a lot of Americans, generally the ones who complain about "law and order" the most, there really is no law and order; there is only whatever satisfies their prejudice and their rage.

Action: internet freedom, email privacy, and robocallers.

Roots Action helps you tell your state government to contract only with internet service providing corporations that respect net neutrality. Net neutrality, as you know, is the principle that demands that ISPs treat all network traffic the same, and that's the same principle that allows you, and not some corporation, to determine where you want to go on the internet. It's also the same principle that the FCC repealed late last year, because for them, corporate "freedom" to bilk us and herd us into junk news ghettoes is more important than our actual freedom to associate freely on the internet. But the state of Montana has already declared it won't contract with corporations that don't respect net neutrality; if enough states follow suit, those corporations are more likely to throw up their hands and keep things more or less the way they are. The FCC will hate it, but they're walnuts in the batter of eternity, and we're not.

Meanwhile, here's a welcome development: the Email Privacy Act, once unanimously passed by the House only to fall to some truly disgusting Senatorial machinations, is now a part of the House's version of the defense authorization bill. Now, the Senate will pass its own version, which might or might not include it, or the two bodies might conference it out -- but that's where we come in, by using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to tell our Senators to include the Email Privacy Act as part of the defense authorization bill. Unlike the poison pills they usually try to attach to defense authorization bills, the Email Privacy Act actually relates to national security, since it would require our government to get a warrant whenever it wants to look at personal emails left on a corporate server. So give your Senators a call; they won't see it coming.

Finally, if you have a cellphone, you're almost certainly getting phone calls from numbers that look like real people but are actually robocallers trying to separate you from your money; I can't tell you how many of these phone numbers I've put through a reverse lookup at Whitepages.com only to find they're "suspected spam" and/or "flagged as scam or fraud." Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell our FCC to enact the most vigorous possible regulations restricting the power of robocallers to disrupt our lives. Yeah, the FCC is in charge of that, and they don't give one rat's hind quarter about you or I; they only care about their corporate cronies. But said corporate cronies have no particular interest in protecting robocallers, since they're a) extremely unpopular and b) generally small-time crooks at best. And if robocallers induce folks to use their cellphones less frequently, corporations will care about that. So let's get cracking.

Around the table: news about nukes, monopolies, and right-wing snowflakes.

I've been quite patient, but since our President is doing the dance-with-no-pants about it, I'll say it: this nuclear "deal" between our President and North Korea is a nothingburger on a dung bun. I'd ask how any sane person pulls out of an Iran deal that actually keeps Iran from making nukes and then signsa "deal" with North Korea that only gets "assurances" that North Korea will denuclearize, but I know that question answers itself. Could this be the moment when we finally -- finally! -- see significant numbers of mainstream Republicans breaking off from our President? I mean, they're all proud of what defense hawks they are, and while the President's votaries love him, he can't get re-elected without the support of those other Republicans. If they keep mum through this, I shudder to think what will shake them out of their stupor.

John C. O'Day at FAIR notices that the "liberal" media seems happy to report on our President's authoritarian tendencies, but then goes blind about them when they have to confront the fact that we wage war all over the planet and have enough nukes to destroy the world 200 times over. (Dig especially the narrative twist at the end of the third paragraph.) Now, maybe the "liberal" media think that's "balance." You know what I think -- that symmetry isn't balance, and balance isn't fairness. Fairness doesn't obsess over whether all the negative columns are the same size; fairness gives everyone their due, as they've earned it. Yes, I am a little impatient about these matters.

The incomparable David Dayen explains why "The AT&T-Time Warner Merger Ruling Is Bad for the Country." Long story short: modern thinking about antitrusts (first developed during the Reagan era, of course) posits that judges should only evaluate big corporate mergers on the literal dollar-and-cents cost to consumers, "when common sense clearly demonstrates the dangers of concentration." You know, the more power concentrated in the fewer hands, the worse off we all are? You knew it before I said it, but contemporary judges, who study for years to get where they are, pretend they don't know it. It's a damn shame. (Dear trolls: don't spout off about "precedent," since there's plenty of actual precedent -- not to mention the plain text of antitrust law! -- to do antitrust protections the right way, too.)

Virginia Republicans send 2017 almost-gubernatorial nominee/Confederate flag-hugger Corey Stewart up against Democratic incumbent Tim Kaine in this year's U.S. Senate race. Mr. Stewart has promised a "vicious" campaign against Mr. Kaine; maybe he'll outdo Ed Gillespie in that regard. But do you suppose Mr. Stewart will have the smarts to challenge Sen. Kaine on his support for giving the President even more war-making power? After all, wrapping yourself in the Confederate flag will only take you so far, even in Virginia. (Mr. Kaine, for his part, would do better to put "taking health care away from folks" first in any list tabulating Mr. Stewart's bad ideas.)

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) -- the man who gives empty suits a bad name -- not only calls criticism of Twitter's CEO for ordering from Chick-Fil-A during Pride Month "bullying" but is even fundraising off it. Ugh, one more time: criticism is not bullying. Gosh, does Mr. Rubio ever hear criticism from any of his friends? Or are they all tired of how he acts when he does? If he really thinks folks are being "bullied" every time someone disagrees with their regressive views on homosexuality, then he's a damn snowflake. Snowflakes deserve representation, of course, but (like the rest of us) they deserve much better than to be represented by other snowflakes in Congress.

Finally, Democrats score yet another special election victory in Wisconsin -- in the Senate 1st District election that Wisconsin's snowflake Governor, Scott Walker, tried his damnedest not to hold! Republicans have held this Senate seat for 40 years, by the way -- and it's up again in five months, and a lot can happen in five months, so who knows, they might take it back. But probably not if now-Sen. Frostman foregrounds health care, tax cuts for the rich, and clean water as his main issues, as he does on his campaign website.

Action: black lung disease, wastewater, and EPA funding.

First things first. The Black Lung Disability Trust Fund -- which, as you can tell by the name, helps coal miners with their extensive health issues -- has never been funded properly, such that the GAO now informs us that it's billions of dollars in debt. Even better, the tax on coal corporations which funds the trust will go down by more than half later on this year! Right-wingers will demand that we fund the trust some other way than making that those "poor" coal CEOs pony up more money, but that's a real Pandora's box right there -- after all, why not fund the trust by, oh, I don't know, repealing corporate tax cuts and tax cuts for the rich? Because SOCIALISM COMMUNISM NAZISM, that's why. So get a head start on solving this problem for-real for-real by allowing Change.org help you to tell your Congressfolk to support coal miners over coal executives by properly funding the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.

Meanwhile, did you know that the state of Pennsylvania has been spraying gas and oil drilling wastewater on our roads to, get this, keep the dust down? Where carcinogenic and radioactive elements can easily drift into the air or work their way to our water tables? I will smack the next pimp who responds that well, dust is a problem on Pennsylvania roads, as if the mere existence of a problem automatically validates any conceivable solution. A more crafty pimp would say that this "solution" allows gas and oil corporations to "dispose" of their waste without resorting to, say, open-air pits, but, again, the mere existence of a bad solution doesn't automatically validate any other conceivable bad solution. I don't like radioactive and cancer-causing crap when it's on my California strawberries; why would I like it on my roads? Penn Environment helps you tell the state DEP to stop spraying down our roads with wastewater.

Finally, Congress is still trying to gut EPA clean air and clean water programs. How many times must I tell these pimps! Clean air and clean water programs are not BIG GUMMINT GONE AMOK!!!!, nor do they "hurt small businesses" (which certainly don't pollute at the rate fossil fuel corporations pollute!) -- these programs protect the American people, because without clean air and clean water, you can't have healthy Americans. And when you have healthy Americans (will right-wingers follow this line of reasoning?), you have lower health care costs. See? Clean air and clean water programs actually save money -- they just don't deposit those savings directly into fossil fuel CEO bank accounts, so Congress doesn't care about them. So we make them care. The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to put Americans before big donors by fully funding clean air and clean water programs.

Action: unconstitutional war-making, drug policy, and GMO labeling.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is still mulling S.J.Res. 59, the authorization to use military force that would replace the 2001 AUMF (good), but actually expand the President's unconstitutional authority to wage war wherever he likes (so bad it's not worth the good). And this bill has a bipartisan sheen, with three Democratic co-sponsors out of six total. So why is the Senate taking so long to consider it? Because they know it's a pile of dung -- and, more to the point, they know we know it's a pile of dung. I suppose they'll wait until right before the election to jam it through, and squeal about TEH NASHUNUL SECURITEEZ!!!!! when we oppose them, though they're taking so long with it we could easily retort that it must not really be that important. Now would be a good time to call your Reps and Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to reject S.J.Res. 59.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6043/S. 3032, the STATES Act, would allow states that have legalized marijuana to enforce their own marijuana laws without interference from our federal government. Oddly, our President has endorsed this bill, setting up yet another quarrel with his Attorney General, Mr. Sessions, who acts like pot is the root of all evil. Less oddly, though, the STATES Act has almost as many Republican sponsors (in both House and Senate versions) as Democratic sponsors. Why, it almost looks like actual bipartisanship, in that both parties seem to like it and the American people seem to like it! Why do I suspect we're being set up for a massive disappointment -- say, when the House version passes, but the Senate weighs it down with poison pill amendments? None of that will matter if we speak up loudly enough, so the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane drug policy by passing the STATES Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to enact a real genetically-modified food-labeling standard, and not the BS one they're trying to enact, then MoveOn still helps you do that. Some things haven't changed with the change in Administrations, and one of them is the USDA's determination to pretend they're enacting a "clear" GMO labeling standard when they're obviously trying their damnedest not to. You don't exempt sugars and oils from your standard, since just about everything has one or other in it. You don't exempt gene-editing from your standard as if "gene editing" somehow isn't "genetic modification." And you certainly don't let corporations put hifalutin scanning codes or website addresses on their labels in lieu of a simple statement like this product has GMOs in it. The USDA also literally put a happy face on some of their sample GMO logos! You have to ask: what are they so afraid of?

Around the table: on "Establishment" Democrats, asylum seekers, internet freedom, and voting rights.

Here's a great article by Richard Eskow at the OurFuture blog, reminding us that "Establishment Wins are Bad for Democrats -- and the Country." I mean, if the Democratic establishment was so great, Hillary Clinton would be President right now and Democrats would control the Senate. Say what you want about Republicans (I do!), but they sure know how to get new blood every few years or so, while Democrats constantly wage war on all their new blood. (Mr. Eskow also reminds us that Tha Bush Mobb paved the way for our current President, and yes people sure do look at those years with rose-colored glasses anymore. I remember those years; they sucked. And the subsequent eight years of a Democrat establishment sucked only a little less -- and also paved the way for our current predicament.)

Our Supreme Court, in yet another 5-4 decision, upholds the state of Ohio's ongoing effort to purge voters from the registration rolls for missing one election. It's bad when the dissent accuses the majority of having simply misread the law. Justice Alito essentially argues that the right to vote -- specifically, the right not to be deregistered simply because you haven't voted, a right actually codified in federal law -- is less important than the "right" of states to "clean up" their voting rolls. Call me old-fashioned, but I think state administrations should serve people, not the other way around.

Attorney General Sessions orders immigration judges to curtail asylum grants to gang violence and domestic violence victims. If the countries from which they came could actually protect these good people from such violence, I'd agree with Mr. Sessions's decision, but since they can't, it just looks cruel. And Mr. Sessions has no business saying America can't let everyone in, when America finds it fairly easy to let in cheap labor for our President's resorts and our President's winery. Seriously, once we end corporate "free" trade deals, enact a $15/hour minimum wage, and repeal the exclusion of farm workers from the National Labor Relations Act's protections, our government will be in a far better position to be as compassionate as its people are.

The ACLU instructs us as to "How Net Neutrality Will End." Long story short: as I said yesterday, freedoms die better a bit at a time. Long story somewhat longer: "Once June 11 comes and goes, we should expect the ISPs will do little to nothing in response. Then, after some time has passed, they will point to their inaction as proof we were wrong to distrust them and their promises not to violate net neutrality in the absence of a federal mandate. And guess what will happen next? Drip. Drip. Drip. And before we know it, a flood will have washed away the free and open internet we all rely on." Pay special attention to the second sentence in that quoted passage, since that'll also be the Republicans' answer if Democrats actually run pro-net neutrality ads this year. Remember, also, that most big telecom corporations are monopolies in the media markets in which they operate, so when one of them starts censoring websites, you and I can't just "go buy from someone else."

Republican candidate for the New Jersey's 2nd U.S. House district says "(t)he whole idea of diversity is a bunch of crap and un-American." There's really no putting lipstick on that pig (the "whole" idea? Really?), especially in a country where most folks think the whole idea of who-you-know elitism is un-American. Now, maybe this fellow thinks facing a right-wing Democrat in the general election lets him be as obnoxious as he wants to be (I wonder where he got that idea!), but in New Jersey, which the President lost by 14 points and where a seven-term incumbent Republican got turned out of New Jersey's 5th for being too stridently anti-gay, he could mark himself as someone too obnoxious to hold public office.

Finally, a U.S. District judge in Indiana has issued an injunction against an Indiana state law that would automatically deregister voters who appear on the notorious "Interstate Crosscheck" database. That'll probably hold until after the midterms -- but eventually the Supreme Court will gets its hands on it, and given how they ruled in the Ohio case (second paragraph above), they'll probably reinstate it. Where is the plaintiff who will assert that deregistering a voter based on appearance in a ridiculous database constitutes punishing someone without proving they committed a crime? I mean, that's the law-and-order argument, and I'd like to see Neil Gorsuch squirm in his seat after being confronted with it.

Action: fighting for internet freedom, law and order, and clean water.

Net neutrality officially ended yesterday. You may not have noticed, possibly because the big telecoms are awaiting the results of a litany of lawsuits against the FCC's net neutrality repeal, or possibly because they're waiting to see if the House follows the Senate's lead and passes the "resolution of disapproval" that would reverse the FCC's repeal -- but most likely because Jesus Mary and Joseph even the big telecoms aren't that stupid! If Comcast or Verizon were to suddenly, say, put data caps on everyone's broadband today, or start censoring websites today, their customers would clog their phone lines for days! No, the big telecoms know, just like all corporations know: deprive people of their freedoms a little at a time, and they tend not to notice -- or revolt. Let's stop this catastrophe by telling our House Reps to sign on to the discharge petition that would force a vote on the aforementioned "resolution of disapproval," as Consumer Reports helps us do.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the UAE plan to attack the Hodeidah port in Yemen, through which 80% of the nation's food exports pass through, which would make the already-near-famine conditions in Yemen considerably worse. I know someone is responding to that news with a shrug and a well, that's war, you hit your enemies where it hurts them the most. The problem with that philosophy -- besides, you know, the cruel way it makes a game of life and death -- is that Yemen is not our enemy, and our government continues to arm Saudi Arabia in its war against Yemen, in violation of both our Constitution's War Powers clause and the 1973 War Powers Act. Hence Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Congressfolk to use our leverage as the most powerful nation on Earth to stop this planned attack on Yemen. Why, even the Washington Post opposes this attack -- and they usually cheer on our war-making! That should be a sign.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5609, the WATER Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. What would the WATER Act do? The WATER Act would allocate $35 billion annually to improving clean water and wastewater infrastructure. You remember our President running on infrastructure, right? And you remember how the state government of Michigan poisoned Flint's drinking water? And you've been hearing about how thousands of American neighborhoods have twice the lead poisoning levels as Flint did? It's hard to imagine your Congressfolk opposing making good Americans' drinking water cleaner, isn't it? I kid, of course -- it's not hard to imagine our Congressfolk being the cruel and heartless people they too often actually are. That's why we communicate our will to them -- and it's also why we shame them when they ignore our will. (We could turn them out of office a lot more easily, too, if Democrats would actually stand for things.)

Action: fairer sentencing, governmental corruption, and equal rights for gays.

First things first: the Pennsylvania state legislature will vote this week on whether to implement a "risk assessment" tool for sentencing guidelines. Philip K. Dick stories make good movies, not good laws, and if you saw "risk assessment" and thought "another way to put black people in prison for longer," you win a prize! I guess our state legislators want credit for recognizing that folks of color do, in fact, have it harder than white folks do in many ways, but you and I could think of a thousand better ways to fix that. And, strictly speaking, we can't predict whether an individual will commit more crimes once out of prison -- and it is individuals we'd be sending to jail, after all! -- and moreover we shouldn't, not if we really believe in rehabilitating prisoners, not if we really believe in giving folks a second chance after they've paid their debt to society. Hence Color of Change helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject "risk assessment" for sentencing.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to get rid of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, then Climate Truth still helps you do that. It is kind of a shame that if he does get fired, or resign under pressure -- and almost half of Congress has called for his head at this writing! -- he'll be remembered not as the man who tried to gut clean air and clean water laws and wasn't even particularly good at that, but as the man who pulled every lever of power he could in order to get perks for himself and his family. Our President, you may recall, declared his support for the beleaguered Mr. Pruitt months ago, possibly (as some have speculated) because he wanted Mr. Pruitt on hand in case he fired his Attorney General, Mr. Sessions. But now that yet another Fox News bloviator with the President's ear, Jeannie Pirro, appears to want Mr. Sessions's job, maybe that'll make Mr. Pruitt obsolete in our President's eyes. Even if it puts yet another Fox News shouting head in our government, it'd be good to get rid of Scott Pruitt.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2282/S. 1006, the Equality Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Equality Act would extend Civil Rights Act protections to gays, so that (to give a few examples) landlords couldn't kick them out for being gay, bosses couldn't fire them for being gay, and businesses couldn't deny them services because they're gay. Do you suppose this is a useless task because this Congress, which seems only to care about hurting the American people and delivering more taxpayer money to their corporate cronies, would never pass it? Please disabuse yourself of that notion if you have it, because fighting for justice is never useless -- if nothing else, we can get members of Congress on the record about whether they'd vote for the Equality Act or not, and if they say they'd vote against it, regardless of whatever nonsensical justification they might offer, we have many tools to embarrass them in public. Remember: civilized folks do shame those who deserve it.

Around the table: in which we examine gutting pre-existing condition bans, letting businesses turn away folks of color, and other stupid ideas.

Our Administration plans to argue that the Affordable Care Act is null and void now that its mandate no longer carries a financial penalty. Are there really that many people out there who still feel so angry that Barack Obama passed the Heritage Foundation's health care plan from the '90s? Because I bet more people would be angry if our Administration succeeds in getting rid of the pre-existing conditions ban, which is what striking down the Affordable Care Act would do. And not even five months before midterms!

Thanks to the vagaries of social media algorithms, yesterday I came across Neil Clark's 2014 requiem for Pete Seeger in The American Conservative called "Pete Seeger's Conservative Socialism," and Mr. Clark explains why healthy civilizations need conservatism better than I've done any of the 500 times I've tried to do it. I don't mean, of course, that healthy civilizations need what passes for contemporary "conservatism," with its corporatism, nativism, and politically-correct swordfighting -- I mean something more like "a vision of the ideal society" "rooted firmly in the past," a vision that fights selfishness instead of worshiping at its altar, and a vision that just so happens to reject "culture wars" and asks whether technological advances will wind up making our problems worse. We need real conservatism to root us so we can make real progress in delivering justice to those who deserve it; too bad the "conservatism" you see on TV is all people shouting at you.

South Dakota state legislator claims that businesses should be able to turn away folks of color if they like -- adding that "(p)eople shouldn’t be able to use their minority status to bully a business," which, like, wow, misunderstand the nature of power much? Always these clowns want businesses to have more rights than people! The legislator later apologized for his statement (after scrubbing it from his Facebook page, of course), but, ah, what apology is possible once you've said you're pro-discrimination? And didn't he get the memo from our President, that apologies for your obnoxious comments are no longer necessary?

Mitt Romney says our President will "solidly" win re-election in 2020. I'm inclined to agree that our President, despite his abominable term thus far, is in a very good position for re-election, but I utterly disagree with Mr. Romney's reasoning that Democrats likely nominating a "fringe" candidate (cough Bernie Sanders cough) is one of the reasons why. I would argue -- indeed, have argued -- that nominating yet another let's-all-get-along-but-inevitably-compromised moderate is the surest way to ensure our President's re-election. You don't beat a freak with a candidate like that.

Should we be that upset that the DNC has adopted a rule stating that all Democratic Presidential candidates must declare themselves to be Democrats? I mean, yes, it looks like it's aimed squarely at Bernie Sanders, and it gives the appearance of having learned exactly the wrong lesson from 2016, but Mr. Sanders actually has run in numerous Democratic primaries in Vermont and won them, only to decline the nominations and then run in general elections as an independent. So the rule change might more likely affect the attempt of some billionaire (cough Mark Cuban cough Tom Steyer cough) or some movie star (cough The Rock cough) to run in Democratic primaries.

Finally, gosh what a mess Scott Pruitt has gotten himself into because he can't keep his grubby hands off of anything. Surely Chris Christie (the first, and fired, head of the Administration transition team) would have found an EPA Administrator who'd gut clean air and clean water regulations without being so obviously corrupt. Alas, we have Scott Pruitt, who uses people, and uses them up. Our President must find him quite the kindred spirit.

Action: expanding Social Security yea, birth control "gag rules" nay, and corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations nay.

You may have heard of the sure-looks-coordinated attacks on Social Security from various local Fox TV stations in late May, so now Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits, not cut them. If your right-wing uncle demands to know where they money for that is going to come from, remind him that income over $128,400 doesn't even get taxed into Social Security. And certainly push back against the Social-Security-running-out-of-money hysteria, because the Social Security Trustees report for 2018 tells us that Social Security will pay out full benefits up until 2034 (and then pay out almost 80% of benefits thereafter); if we taxed income over $128,400 into the system, we could make Social Security fully solvent even further into the future and expand benefits so our seniors can have more to live on. Why would we not do this? Because our leaders are worse than thieves? Should we really let that stop us?

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed a regulation that would deny federal Title X funding to any family planning organizations that provide abortions, or refer folks to other abortion providers. This would, naturally, have the effect of denying any basic family planning help (including birth control and STD testing) to poor working families, since they're the ones who most depend on the agencies that get federal funding. And these agencies would very likely stop referring families to a procedure that's, you know, legal. All this, so our Administration can keep diddling the rage glands of right-wingers! I still hope that pro-lifers will one day see how the right has used them all these years; if right-wing politicians really cared about abortion, of course, they'd put a Constitutional amendment up for a vote, but I guess they think it's better "politics" to keep pro-lifers angry than to work to give them what they want. In any case, the Administration "gag rule" is bad public policy, so the ACLU helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its "gag rule" proposal.

Finally, our Administration has also proposed forcing utilities to buy from coal and nuclear power plants. Does that sound like the "free market at work" to you? They're hoping it sounds more like "securing the electric grid" to you, and they're also hoping that solar and wind power -- which are starting to compete, price-wise, with the more traditional energy sources -- will strike you as "insecure" power sources. They're not, of course -- the coal industry is full of its TEH SUN SETZ TEH WIND DIEZ!!!! billboards, but the sun always comes up in the morning, the wind always picks up again, and there is such a thing as battery storage. Meanwhile, giving bailouts to industries that are flailing -- not so coal miners won't lose their jobs, but so coal CEOs won't lose their 19th vacation homes -- doesn't exactly testify to a commitment to national economic security. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Energy Department to scuttle its plan to give welfare handouts to big coal and nuclear power corporations.

Around the table: what about America don't right-wingers get? And other questions.

Buried deep in this account of the sudden disappearance of a political cartoonist's work from the pages of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is its new editorial director, one Keith Burris, claiming that our activism against this Administration constitutes "a mania, a fever, a hissy fit by the self-anointed guardians of all that is good and enlightened in America." Setting aside that, just as "Bush derangement syndrome" more aptly described the behavior of Bush Mobb supporters, the "mania," "fever," and "hissy fits" all come from the President and his votaries: does Mr. Burris not know that this is America? In America, we are, all of us, in fact, "self-appointed guardians" of civilization. That's how America is supposed to work. It's what separates us from aristocracies, monarchies, and dictatorships. And if you think I look down on you for no good reason, your task, as an American -- as a guardian of civilization! -- is most pointedly not to whine about it. Your task is to prove me wrong, and change my mind. If you can't, you may want to consider whether that's your failing, not mine.

Our President can't stop jerking off to our low unemployment numbers, but we should remember that the "official" unemployment rate doesn't count people who've stopped looking for work, or people who work part-time but would rather work full-time. Worse, the U6 rate that supposedly counts these people -- now at 7.6%, or about twice the official unemployment rate -- may not even be that accurate! Economist Robert Pollin suggests that when you consider that the percentage of adults in the workforce is considerably lower than it was 10 years ago, the real unemployment rate could be as high as 11%. That's before you get to the fact that we don't make the money we used to, for reasons including the decline of unions and the rise of outsourcing. (Mr. Pollin also says our government needs to invest in a "Green New Deal" that creates renewable energy jobs, and of course he's right about that.)

Perhaps sensing he's under fire for avoiding meeting with his Consumer Advisory Board as mandated by law, CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney fires all 25 members of the Consumer Advisory Board, and tells them they can't reapply, almost certainly as a prelude to packing the Board with banksters. And dig the CFPB spokeshack suggesting that the fired Advisory Board members are upset because they might lose their "taxpayer funded junkets to Washington" where they're supposedly "wined and dined by the Bureau"! I hope most Americans understand that if you cared that much about perks, you'd never go into consumer protection advocacy.

U.S. District Judge rules that our Administration cannot, in fact, deny municipalities certain law enforcement funding because they won't go beyond the law in cooperating with the Administration's efforts to find undocumented immigrants. All the Administration would have to do is get the right warrants, but ball-swingers don't do that -- instead, they tell bald lies about immigrant "crime spikes" and violate the Constitution and the law, particularly the Administrative Procedure Act. Remember the Administrative Procedure Act, because it helps prevent the Executive branch from doing whatever the fuck it likes, and it may hang a few other Executive branch initiatives (like maybe the FCC's net neutrality repeal) before too long.

Finally, we learn that advertisers have been fleeing the Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham programs at the Fox News Channel. Apparently their pro-Administration stance doesn't endear them to advertisers anymore, and I'm sure Mr. Hannity's brain-dead conspiracy theories and Ms. Ingraham's attacks on school shooting survivors don't help. In the absence of a la carte cable packaging, which would allow us to simply not pay for channels that disgust us, shaming advertisers into abandoning shows is about our best tool for bringing morality and sanity back to America.

Action: the "war on terror," living wages, and immigration policy.

Amnesty International helps you demand that our government account for its actions in Raqqa. As you may know, ISIS left Raqqa, its self-styled "capitol," late last year, but (as you may also recall) 250 ISIS fighters got to leave Raqqa with their families and all the weapons they could carry in a literally three-mile-long convoy. The good citizens of Raqqa should have been so lucky! We bombed the crap out of Raqqa, reducing it to rubble and killing entire families of civilians despite yammering on about "precision" bombing. What do you suppose we were aiming at, precisely? Perhaps we were aiming at "perpetuating the 'war on terror' forever so that voters will feel no choice but to cling to bad leaders." Of course, crippling a city's ability to function while getting no assurance that a well-armed ISIS won't be back sure doesn't sound like the result of good leadership. But perhaps good leadership can begin again -- with accountability.

Meanwhile, Good Jobs Nation (along with other good government groups) helps you tell the Disney corporation to start paying its workers a living wage. Disney rakes in the dough, and its CEO made $36 million last year, but Disney's workers are like the rest of us, trying to figure out which bills they can get away with not paying this month because they don't make enough money. Oh, and an astounding two-thirds of Orange County (CA) Disneyland workers report not being able to put enough food on the table, with 10 percent of them reporting recent homelessness. Disneyland wages have gone down over the years, in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, and no, these ain't all young kids getting their first job -- a little over two out of five workers are over 30, with a little less than one in five are over 54. Don't they all deserve a job that pays enough for them to make ends meet? They are human beings, after all.

Finally, Roots Action (along with other good government groups) helps you tell Attorney General Sessions to stop splitting up children from their parents during border crossings. We told Congress to rein in this activity the other day, but really it's Mr. Sessions's job to do it, since he insists on a "zero tolerance" policy toward border crossings -- never mind whether some of these folks might have a legitimate case for asylum! -- which results in the forced separation of children and parents. The bad news? The President's most devoted followers really do believe this is the best (i.e., "toughest") way to go about things, and they may even think so because these immigrants are generally brown and black. The good news? These people didn't just emerge -- they're the same people the right-wing noise machine has been marching around from one manufactured outrage to another for decades now. And they don't get all the say around here!

Action: the Equality Act yea, state-sanctioned racism nay, and investigating Betsy DeVos yea.

In light of the Supreme Court's Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado decision -- which reversed a lower court decision concerning a cake shop that wouldn't bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, but affirmed that our Constitution doesn't bestow a "right to discriminate" to businesses that serve the public -- the ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2282/S. 1006, the Equality Act. What would the Equality Act do? It would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that its protections explicitly include gay and transgender folks, which would go a long way toward fighting the "religious" "conscience" objections, since no one (at least for now!) asserts a right to discriminate against people of color based on, for example, the Hamitic myth. But too many good Americans claim a "right" to discriminate simply by saying "Jesus told me." Replace the word "Jesus" with, say, the word "Moloch," and you'd see how absurd that is.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell the FBI to drop the "Black Identity Extremist" label it's been using to spy on black activists. You and I may see peaceful black protestors in the streets, but the FBI sees "violent extremists," and it's no use arguing that they're just preparing for the worst, not when this kind of "preparing for the worst" causes violence. And not with this President in office, the one sieg-heiled by various Nazi wannabes before he was inaugurated, the one who didn't know hate crimes were on the rise after his inauguration though he already knew who was criticizing him on Twitter, the one who thinks black NFL players should maybe be deported for not standing at attention while the national anthem is playing. I mean, seriously, where's the "white identity extremist" label describing a far, far larger share of domestic terrorism? Nowhere to be found -- unless the FBI is contemplating a "fine people" label that means the same thing.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell the Department of Education's Inspector General to investigate some of the strange doings of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. You remember Ms. DeVos, don't you? The one who couldn't get confirmed by the Senate without Vice President Pence's tie-breaking vote? Her tenure hasn't exactly taken off from there -- you could point to protestors following her everywhere or her failure to visit impoverished public schools or her apparent cluelessness in a recent 60 Minutes interview, but the Inspector General won't investigate that stuff, because it's just embarrassing. Now, her order to scuttle thousands of civil rights cases because they had a backlog? Her getting rid of the unit that looks into for-profit college fraud? Her delay of loan forgiveness for students defrauded by said for-profit colleges? The Inspector General sure as hell could look into all of that, because it might represent law-breaking.

Around our table: how print media dies, and other lessons.

Sarah Posner at The Nation discusses why the Supreme Court's recent Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling "Is Not as Harmless as You Think." Long story short: while the Court affirmed that the decision doesn't confer a right to discrimination on the basis of "religious" "conscience," the Court sure did turn over every rock in Colorado trying to find some evidence of "animus" against religion, and everyone who's ever heard a public official say religious bigots are knuckle-draggers now has a reason to try again. (Justice Kennedy's obsession with "animus" hasn't come out of the blue, though -- his finding of an "animus" against gays in Colorado's notorious Amendment 2 led him to strike it down.)

Why is the Denver Post laying off journalists left and right, you may be wondering? Well, in a CounterSpin interview, we learn that the banksters who bought the Post demand double-digit profits and think the best way to accomplish that is to hemorrhage jobs. And make the writers fill a three-byline quota daily (as if stories don't depend on work or something!), which results in even more rewritten PR releases. It's hard for those of us who work for a living to comprehend, but the biggest money-makers in America don't have better ideas or even better processes anymore; they just know how to suck the marrow out of an almost-dead body. And then they call themselves "job creators" and look down on you and I for "not working as hard as they do"! It's fucking un-American, frankly.

Ho hum, a lot of people who wrote that steaming piece of a tax "reform" bill are now going to work as lobbyists for the big corporations who benefit the most from that legislation. If you respond that this is as-it-should-be-because-it's-always-been-this-way, you'll want to consider more closely whether these folks might have written legislation the way they did because they knew they could cash in on their "expertise" more easily. You might also think of some other things that used to be always-this-way (you know, like segregation) and maybe demand a little more of your values than you're doing now.

After our President disinvited the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles from a White House visit in yet another manic fit of whining self-pity, the Fox News (sic) Channel, in reporting on the matter, showed photographs of several Eagles players, including tight end Zach Ertz, supposedly kneeling during the anthem, when these players were actually praying before the game. After Mr. Ertz dressed them down publicly on Twitter, Fox News admitted the error and apologized for it, but defensive end Chris Long wasn't impressed, and he shouldn't be: FNC knows full well that their million-plus votaries have already seen the report and diddled their rage glands over it, so Mission Accomplished! (As an aside, our President sure seems to have summoned a thundercloud in Reggie Bush.)

Finally, some good news: a Maine Superior Court justice has ruled that Maine Gov. Paul LePage (E) must implement the Medicaid expansion voters approved last year. You know, it's easy to take pot-shots at Paul LePage for his apparently bottomless cruelty, so let's just recall that he grew up a very poor Franco-American, suffered at the hand of an abusive, alcoholic father, was literally homeless for about a year as a pre-teen, and even though he worked hard in high school still couldn't get into college until a Maine state legislator named Pete Snowe (yep, the late husband of the former U.S. Senator) convinced said college to give him his entrance exam in French and vouched for his ability to catch up with his English. Let all that sink in, and then be sad at how thoroughly he's forgotten where he came from.

Action: internet freedom, voting security, and immigration.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Rep to vote in favor of H.J.Res. 129, the "resolution of disapproval" that would invalidate the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, then you can call your Reps using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone). Rep. Doyle (D-PA) has filed a discharge petition to force a vote on H.J.Res. 129, and if we assume that all 193 House Democrats will sign it (as of May 24, 124 had done so), we'll still need 25 Republicans to get on board, since a discharge petition needs 218 votes to force a vote. All that means is that we'll have to phone them until they do come on board -- and net neutrality has been an actual bipartisan cause in the past, so it shouldn't be so damn hard. But we have less than a week before the FCC's net neutrality repeal goes into full effect -- so, for the sake of our freedom to go where we want to go on the internet, instead of where some corporation would prefer us to go, we must act.

Meanwhile, we've known for a long time that our elections could be a lot more secure -- and now, even our Congressfolk seem to agree, what with the Senate Intelligence Committee calling for paper ballot elections. Hence Sign Here Now helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that will really secure American elections. Specifically, you would ask Congress to do four things: one, audit elections to ensure they're running right; two, require paper ballot elections (or, at the least, paper trails for electronic ballot elections); three, allow all Americans to vote by mail; and four, develop a plan to respond to foreign attacks on our elections. I don't care that much that Congress is more afraid of TEH RUSSIANZ!!!!! than the nefarious American forces trying to steal your vote; I care more that Congress does the right thing. And we should certainly demand that they do the right thing. You'd think they wouldn't need any prompting to do the right thing, but here we are.

Finally, our Administration has gotten into the nasty habit of separating immigrant children from their parents when they try to cross the border together -- because they're treating border crossings as criminal cases, not civil cases, and when you do that, you must, by law, separate parents and children. So, naturally, our President blames TEH DEMOCRATZ!!!!, because they don't march in jackboot lockstep with his agenda. Sad! The linked report from two sentences ago describes, in some detail, how child-parent separation in this instance is a result of many laws and policies, but Congress can fix this, no, not by just doing whatever the President wants, but by pursuing legislation that restrains him and his bottomless desire to stoke rage in his acolytes. Thus the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to force our President to pursue more humane immigration policy that doesn't force the separation of parents and children.

Action: Puerto Rico, Palestine, and the Equal Rights Amendment.

In light of the New England Journal of Medicine study suggesting that the actual death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria is at least twelve times higher than the official death count, Climate Hawks Vote helps you tell your Congressfolk to do more to ensure Puerto Rico's recovery from the Hurricane. Specifically, you'd ask Congress to offer Puerto Rico more aid and more debt forgiveness, help Puerto Rico rebuild so that it stays in public hands and uses more renewable energy, and investigate our Administration's incompetence in helping Puerto Rico rebuild. I rate the first two items as the most important -- banksters have saddled Puerto Rico with debt the way they saddled Greece with debt, and those same banksters would love nothing more than to privatize Puerto Rico's power grid. They call it an opportunity to steal more of the people's wealth, but I call it an opportunity to do things right, and we should make the best of it.

Meanwhile, with "liberal" media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict so weighted toward Israel, Roots Action helps you tell "liberal" media outlets to provide more coverage of Palestinian activists and victims, and more context for reports of violence in the region. Roots Action's petition also helps you demand that reporting on Israeli killing of Palestinians "use the active voice," which is to say, none of this "such-and-such number of people died in a clash" when the actual story is "Israeli forces killed x number of Palestinians." You know that "liberal" media types, who are so proud of knowing so much more about writing than you or I, will be insulted to be told to use active verbs. As you know, they have the same problem discussing police killings -- though not Palestinian killings of Israelis. The American people are nowhere near as one-sided about these issues as our elites in government and media are -- and our media need to recognize that.

Finally, Illinois recently became the 37th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. But wait, you may be asking, didn't the Equal Rights Amendment expire decades ago? Well, it's true that Congress did write the Equal Rights Amendment with an expiration, but it's also true that the Constitution plainly does not require an amendment to be passed within a certain period of time -- in fact, Congress first passed the 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (concerning Congressional pay) in 1789, but the 38th state didn't ratify it until 1992, or 203 years later, if you're keeping score at home. So United4Equality helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them to support H.J.Res. 53/S.J.Res. 5, which would excise the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment, thus bringing it back to life. (Don't believe it if ERA opponents try to tell you that changing the amendment would, or should, require a revote -- Congress changes laws all the time, and doesn't require revotes on those laws when they do!)

Around the table: describing yet another measure of the cost of this Presidency.

Ho hum, our Administration plans to try, again, to force utilities to buy their power from otherwise-failing coal and nuclear power plants, under the guise of "national security." You'd think a truly strong nation wouldn't be so reliant on power sources that are losing more and more money (particularly nuclear power plants, which rarely if ever make money and too often require "loan guarantees," which we might better describe as "taxpayer bailouts"). And no, this isn't about protecting coal miner jobs; it's about gilding the plumbing in coal and nuclear CEOs' 19th vacation homes.

Gregory Shupak at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media, when covering the Israel-Palestine conflict, just about never considers a one-state solution within which Israelis and Palestinians would have equal rights. No use telling me that these folks "just can't get along," when you know as well as I do that all kinds of folks get along quite well until some selfish actor starts blaring in their ear. Also, too, one side having vastly superior firepower and foreign economic support does tend to make conflicts "historic."

Beth Schwartzapfel at The Marshall Project explains why those $2 or $5 co-pays prisoners need to see doctors are actually quite onerous. Long story short: because they hardly make any damn money to begin with! Long story somewhat longer: when you make literally five cents an hour, as those at the bottom of the wage scale do in Oklahoma, a $4 co-pay is more like a $580 co-pay. And if you're tempted to say well, co-pays discourage unnecessary doctor's visits, you may want to consider whether it actually discourages necessary doctor's visits, and thus increases inmate health care costs, which of course are borne by the taxpayer one way or the other. How about that -- the compassionate solution is also the fiscally-responsible solution.

I'd taken it for granted that the NFL could force its players to stand and "respect" the flag and the national anthem, however stupid they'd look for doing so, but Kathy Wilkes at In These Times argues that the NFL owners' recent actions might actually be illegal. Suing our President for attempting to "influence or threaten to influence a private employment decision" might be an uphill battle (even on the merits!), but the players have a much better case against the NFL if it imposed its ban without bargaining with the players at all, as sure seems to be the case.

Finally, in a truly shocking development, we learn that the cost to the taxpayer of sending our President to his Mar-a-Lago resort has so far exceeded the cost to the taxpayer of Robert Mueller's investigation of said President's possible lawbreaking in re his ties to Russia. Now guess which "cost" our President has been whining about on Twitter. You may also recall that the cost of sending our President to Mar-a-Lago also dwarfs at least one other "cost" our President has found onerous -- that of taking care of the health care needs of our transgender soldiers. The good news? His venality, though it knows no bounds, doesn't reflect on the American people -- it reflects on American elites, who have spent the last several decades screwing everything up. They deserve each other.

Around the table: including items about protests, banksters, and internet freedom.

Let's begin and end with good news today: D.C. Superior Court Chief Judge Robert Morin dismisses felony conspiracy charges with prejudice (meaning prosecutors can't bring the charges again) for ten J20 defendants. Our government can't seem to put any Inauguration Day protestors in jail, which tends to happen when you round up too many people, overcharge them, and keep evidence that might exonerate them away from the trial. But if you're tempted to think that we can't be an authoritarian nation now because this particular group of would-be authoritarians is incompetent, remember that incompetent people are still dangerous.

Speaking of dangerous incompetence, the Federal Reserve has proposed a revision of the so-called Volcker Rule, which aims to protect consumers by forcing banks to prevent their proprietary trading from destroying their customers' assets, that would of course let banksters self-regulate more. Remember: when they say a regulation is "too complicated to enforce," they really mean "doing the right thing is hard and we're lazy." If you recall how banksters whined about getting only five years to separate their basic banking and investing functions, you know I'm right.

If you find yourself feeling sympathetic with Papua New Guinea's apparent desire to ban Facebook within its borders, well, I wouldn't entirely blame you, but I would urge you to remember that Facebook is a tool, and if people misuse the tool, that might reflect more on those people than on the tool. You might also want to consider (and the article takes too long to get to this point, in my opinion) whether Papua New Guinea's real problem with Facebook is that too many good citizens are using Facebook to expose government corruption.

Dean Baker catches the New York Times suggesting that Italy leaving the EU would not square with "economic logic," although you might think "economic logic" would suggest that countries that can actually control their own currency can withstand economic downturns more easily. Well, if you're obsessed with TEH PRINTINGZ MONEYZ!!!!!, maybe you don't think that, or much of anything else. And n.b., again, the "liberal" media self-pity! They imagine that it's "impolitic" to say Italy should stay with the Euro, when more likely it's just stupid.

Ho hum, the White House appears to be ignoring requests for information from the Government Accountability Office (or GAO). This doesn't seem to me to be the kind of thing that should be legal. So I guess now we'll have to pass laws making the Executive branch talk to Congress's investigative arm, since this Executive branch runs away from the chance to be accountable to the people's representatives in Congress. (Don't read the comments, by the way, because a troll has infected them.)

Finally, the California state Senate passes a net neutrality bill that the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls "a gold standard for states looking to protect net neutrality. The bill would restore the internet protections enshrined in the FCC's 2015 Open Internet order -- you know, the one Ajit Pai's FCC repealed -- but it would also prevent internet service providing corporations from exempting some corporate content from monthly data caps, a practice known as "zero-rating." The bill still has to get through the state House and then be signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, who seems like the kind of guy who'd like it, but who is also quite the mercurial fellow.

Action: fighting unlawful detainment, gerrymandering, and Social Security fearmongering.

Toffiq al-Bihani has spent the last 16 years in the Guantánamo Bay detainment camp -- despite having been cleared to leave Guantánamo since 2010, with the Saudi Arabian government agreeing to take him back. Has he been charged with anything in all that time? Of course not. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think it's un-American to stick somebody in a cell for over 16 years without charging them with something. And those who would protest that he's not an American, so he has no rights really need to read the previous sentence and then drink a big glass of STFU. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell our government to release Mr. al-Bihani. You may notice that Amnesty addresses your email to Defense Secretary Mattis, which I guess is an admission that addressing the missive to our President would be a big waste of time. Still, might as well talk to the last remotely sane person in our President's war cabinet, as long as he's there.

Meanwhile, closer to home, SB 22, the famous anti-gerrymandering, redistricting reform bill, will get a Pennsylvania state Senate vote next week, and if it passes -- which seems likely, since it received a unanimous vote out of committee -- it will then move on to the state House; meanwhile, with the nefarious Daryl Metcalfe (E) gutting previous House-introduced anti-gerrymandering bills in the House State Government Committee he apparently rules with an iron fist, HB 722 has been reborn as HB 2402. Hence Fair Districts PA helps you tell PA House Speaker Mike Turzai to ensure that these redistricting reform bills get the hearing they deserve. Like, say, not in Mr. Metcalfe's committee, since Mr. Metcalfe actually came out and said that if Democrats like it, he's not going to do it. When one man acts like a dictator, the rest of us must stand up to him -- until he stands down.

Finally, you may have heard that more than five dozen Fox local TV affiliates ran news reports in late May suggesting that Social Security will start running out of money in just a few years and that benefit cuts are coming. Why, I'm old enough to remember when Social Security was going to run out of money in 2016! Seriously, acting like benefit cuts is TEH ONLY OPTIONZ!!!! is something folks say when they want to raid someone's pension, and news outlets really should avoid the appearance of wanting to raid someone's pension. And the Fox affiliates repeatedly misquoted the 2017 Social Security Board of Trustees report, which sure made the "crisis" seem a lot worse! Why, it's almost like that was the whole idea. So Social Security Works helps you tell these Fox affiliates to stop with the one-sided, factually incorrect reports about Social Security already.