Thieves in the Temple.

We have movement on the corporate "personhood" issue: Sens. Tester (D-MT) and Udall (D-NM) have introduced Senate versions of Rep. McGovern's two constitutional amendments that would overturn Supreme Court rulings in Citizens United v. FEC (in which the Court held that corporations can make certain campaign contributions because they enjoy the "rights of personhood," including free speech) and Buckley v. Valeo (in which the Court struck down several campaign contribution limits due to free speech concerns). If you find yourself a little squeamish reading the McGovern/Udall amendment giving the federal government and the states the ability to restrict how much money can be spent on campaigns, remember that money isn't speech. If it were, then folks with more money would have more of a right to speech, and at that point we're not really talking about rights anymore, are we? Free Speech for People helps you tell Congress to end the absurdity of corporate "personhood."

Meanwhile, Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to support S. 338, which would permanently authorize funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The Land and Water Conservation Fund, in a wonderful burst of irony, collects oil and gas drilling fees in order to fund projects protecting parks, forests, and wildlife -- but in a far more bitter burst of irony, Congress has to appropriate those funds every year, and most years they divert that funding toward other, arguably less worthy projects. Hence the Florida Everglades, Arizona's Petrified Forest, and Virginia's Civil War battlegrounds don't get the attention they deserve, and neither do parks and recreation projects at the state level. And the Fund has an annual ceiling of $900 million by law -- a ceiling S. 338 would guarantee is fully-funded -- so deficit peacocks can't preen around it. Not that they really care about the deficit -- they care more about their oil and gas paymasters who want the public's land for themselves.

The House of Representatives has begun debate on its own Farm Bill, and where the Senate bill would cut food stamps by $4 billion over the next 10 years, the House would cut $20 billion over that period -- and that wouldn't actually reduce the deficit very much, but would cut off two million folks from food stamps, including almost 300,000 children who get free school meals. These social programs, you see, don't actually cost very much money in the grand scheme of things, but they do a lot of good for a lot of people, so cutting them actually hurts people more than, say, cutting $4 billion in annual oil subsidies would ever hurt an oil industry awash in profits. And hello! The economy still sucks out there, meaning more and more Americans have trouble just getting food to their tables. In this country of plenty, no less! The AFSCME helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose food stamp cuts.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep atrazine out of our drinking water. Atrazine is a fairly effective and inexpensive weed killer, and we use over 75 million pounds of it annually. But of course when I said "inexpensive" I only meant "for its producer": for the rest of us, who'll pay with breast and prostate cancer and birth defects and reproductive issues, atrazine is quite expensive, and we'll likely drink some of it today, since the United States Geological Survey has found atrazine in at least 80% of our streams and 40% of our ground water. The European Union banned atrazine back in 2004, but the EPA hasn't done anything about it despite acknowledging its toxicity, and atrazine's manufacturer, the Swiss corporation Syngenta, reported $1.6 billion in profits as recently as 2011. You know what that means, good peoples? That means it's up to us. As usual.

Next time you hear that your least-favorite CEO "gives back to the community" by serving on the board of your local orchestra, recall this tale, in which U.S. Bancorp CEO Richard Davis used his position on the board of the non-profit Minnesota Orchestra to lock out musicians who wouldn't take pay cuts up to 50%. That sure is some yeoman work on behalf of the community, isn't it? And who knew the orchestra was really all about the people who ran it?

Dick Cheney, still somehow a frequent guest on Fox News Sunday, tells us we can't know the details of surveillance programs because it's too dangerous and that since we "get to vote for senior officials, like the President of the United States, or like the senior officials in Congress," that we "have to have some trust in them." I eagerly await the pimp-slapping of Mr. Cheney administered by Zombie Ben Franklin.

Surprise, surprise: seven former Bank of Amerikkka employees claim that the Bank gave its staffers cash and gift cards if they met quotas for putting homeowners into foreclosure -- including homeowners in trial mortgage modifications. The really depressing part? How cheaply staffers could be bought. $25 in cash? A Bed, Bath, and Beyond gift card? Even the folks actually doing the dirty work don't reap the benefits the way their bosses, the banksters, do.

The Supreme Court strikes down Arizona's law requiring potential voters to produce proof of citizenship when they register -- by a healthy 7-2 margin, with curmudgeonly Antonin Scalia not only leading the charge, but asserting that federal election laws can pre-empt a lot of state election laws. Which I certainly didn't expect -- and which, ah, could also really suck, if we elect a Republican President and a Republican Congress anytime soon.

Finally, we learn yet another reason public schools don't have the funds they need to do the job we need them to do: corporations skimp on their tax obligations to the states. How do they do it? Same way they do everything else: by taking hostages. Does "give us tax breaks or we'll move to another state" sound familiar?

So Think Progress asked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) what he thought of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (or ENDA) last week -- wow, already I feel like I'm starting a joke. But it's no joke: Mr. Rubio did not directly answer whether he'd support ENDA, which he says he hasn't read, but says "I’m not for any special protections based on orientation." If he'd read the bill, of course, he'd know that ENDA does not mandate any "special" protections based on orientation -- unless he thinks "the right not be fired just because you're gay" or "the right to be protected from retaliation by your employer" are "special" protections. I said it before and I'll say it again: what's rights for us ain't "special" for them. Why, ENDA (H.R. 1755/S. 815) doesn't even establish any affirmative action programs and still exempts religious organizations! The right will have to make up objections to this bill -- and I'm sure they will. In the meantime, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass ENDA.

Meanwhile, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the Tribune Company not to sell their newspapers to the Koch brothers. But anyone (even good government groups that have been fighting the Koch brothers' pro-pollution agenda for decades) would have an interest in making sure the Koch brothers don't have the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and the Hartford Courant and five other newspapers. After all, one Koch brothers front group (Americans for Prosperity) gave us the Tea Party and another (Patients United) helped gut health care reform, and that's before we get to the Cato Institute (founded by Charles Koch), the Heritage Foundation (funded by the brothers), or the so-called Competitive Enterprise Institute (also funded by the brothers). With all these mouthpieces, why do they need eight more newspapers? I guess when you have too much, you're jealous of folks who have more -- or you're paranoid and you don't feel safe until you have more. That's what mammon-worship gets you.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," a "free" trade agreement known to many folks as "NAFTA on steroids." You remember the "giant sucking sound" of jobs out of America that followed NAFTA, right? The Trans-Pacific "Partnership," which now includes the United States and ten other nations, will be all that and more, for what we know of the treaty (since no one actually negotiating it will let anyone read it!) is truly awful: the TPP would make affordable generic drugs a lot harder to come by, would subject all environmental, labor, and financial reform laws to extra-legal "investor tribunals," and would allow corporations to censor the internet even when it suspects someone's violating someone else's intellectual property rights. Any of that sound like a good idea to you? That must be why they don't want anyone to know about it! Thanks to the few leaks we've gotten, they're too late on that. But we still have to speak out.

The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can't patent human genes -- a decision so obvious they let Clarence Thomas write the opinion. Myriad still gets to patent artificial genes, of course -- but nobody's challenged their right to patents on artificial genes, so it's hardly, as USA Today writes, a "lifeline."

Moxie Marlinspike at Wired explains, much better than I've done thus far, why "I didn't do anything wrong" won't protect you from pervasive government surveillance. Long story short: you don't know you're not breaking a law because there are 27,000 pages just of federal law, technology collects so much more information than it used to do and can store it for so much longer, and very often we grow as a society when we break bad laws. Ask Rosa Parks about that one.

Waaaaah, a bunch of damn diaper-loaded brats in the House of Representatives refuse to help their own constituents navigate the Affordable Care Act. Memo to Tim Huelskamp: your job is to help your constituents navigate the law, whether you agree with it or not. And memo to Jason Chaffetz: the President doesn't make the laws. And it's a damn right-wing law to begin with -- blessed by both the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney, until Mr. Obama embraced it!

At the risk of opening a hole in space-time, let's note that Rick Santorum said something indisputably true last week -- that Republicans should have reached out to the workers who also "built that" in 2012. He may be a bit optimistic about the working class's willingness to listen to Republicans about anything -- though even that could change if Democrats keep doing next-to-nothing about the economy.

Congratulations are in order for the people of Iran, who elected moderate rightist cleric Hassan Mohani to succeed far-right ideologue Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as President over the weekend. But an earlier draft of that Reuters article claimed a Mohani victory would be a "surprise." Certainly no one who's actually lived under a hard-line regime, one that likely cheated its way to victory four years ago, would call it a "surprise."

Hard to believe, Harry, but Bill O'Reilly's really worried now about the surveillance state -- in a way he wasn't when it was Mr. Bush conducting the surveillance. You'd think something changed in the meantime. Well, he was always against government spying on him.

Finally, the Obama Administration has apparently raised the "social cost" of carbon emissions in its regulatory calculations, which could (among other things) make cost-benefit analyses reflect something other than lost corporate profits, for once. It's enough to make you think all these Clinton/Obama Third Way Democrats are actually smart -- until Jim Inhofe calls it a "carbon tax" and Glenn Beck claims the government is trying to tax your breathing. And when you realize Mr. Obama's bigger number is itself a compromise, you remember you're always better off fighting.

DC Circuit Court of Appeals tosses organic farmers' lawsuit against Monsanto -- but also makes Monsanto promise not to sue farmers whose seed has been inadvertently contaminated with Monsanto Frankenseed for "intellectual property theft." That's not a great victory for us -- how a corporation escapes punishment for "inadvertently" contaminating the world with its Frankenseed and then suing small farmers for "benefiting" from having that seed blow onto their crops is beyond me. Also left unsolved: organic farmers still won't be able to earn a USDA organic certification if Monsanto Frankenseed contaminates their crop -- and Monsanto could still battle each-and-every farmer whose seed they've contaminated in an attempt to "discover" if the contamination was "inadvertent," which litigation would still wreck small farmers while hurting Monsanto's bottom line rather little. Republicans who hate "frivolous lawsuits" might want to turn their attention to what's happening here, maybe? Soon Monsanto takes on the rest of the world, which opposes genetically-modified food and is starting to turn back American wheat at the border. I hope we don't have to learn a painful lesson about who's more powerful then.

Meanwhile, Citizens for Tax Justice reminds us why we need a corporate income tax. Apparently some folks have been saying that, since corporate profits eventually go to shareholders, we should just abolish the corporate income tax and adjust personal income tax rates accordingly. Sounds appetizing, doesn't it? But behold: corporations don't eventually pass on all their profits to individuals -- most of their profits go into tax-exempt entities like pensions and university endowments -- and corporations can also hold onto their profits for years before disbursing them. So, yeah, when you've argued from a completely inaccurate premise, the whole thing pretty much falls apart. Furthermore, most dividends go to high-income individuals anyway, so the corporate tax winds up doing at least some of the work a progressive income tax code should be doing. Of course, dividend taxes shouldn't be lower than income taxes in the first place; even Ronald Reagan said so. But hopefully we've nipped this whole argument in the bud -- though you can't underestimate the "liberal" media's ability to ignore good arguments, since they were still peddling rubbish about the Bush tax cuts and small businesses as late as last December.

Remember ag-gag laws? The ones that would hamstring activists trying to expose abusive practices at factory farms? Well, they've proven unpopular enough that even though four states passed ag-gag laws in 2012, 12 states haven't been able to replicate that success this year -- even Tennessee's Republican Governor, Bill Haslam, vetoed one after massive public pressure. Which pressure we'll keep up, by telling our Congressfolk to prohibit ag-gag laws at the federal level. I suppose you have to give the pro-ag-gag folks credit, not just for designing their laws so that you actually must report any abuse you witness before you can determine if it's a pattern even worth reporting, but for deploying phrases like "farm protection legislation" when the laws really only "protect" big factory farms. They even insinuate that just because a practice is "standard," it's OK. But we can think of lots of things that once were "standard" but we'd never accept now.

Meanwhile, you know that big pharmaceutical corporations make money hand over fist, but did you know that they occasionally pay off the generic drug manufacturers to wait a few years before coming out with cheaper generic drugs? The FTC calls this practice "pay for delay," and they estimate that "pay for delay" costs American consumers an extra $3.5 billion annually. That's a nice chunk of change! I suppose since big pharma pays it out to generic drug corporations, they can cry poor and thus convince Congress to turn a blind eye to anything else they might be doing, but no doubt they've calculated that they can pay generic drug makers a relatively small amount now so they can make a lot more later. What a boon the "free" market is! Of course high-cost drugs actually make people less free -- or, you know, dead, which is hardly the kind of freedom our Constitution ensures. So PennPIRG helps you tell Congress to stop this awful practice.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to speak out against our government's data-collecting mania, I've got two more. Access Now helps you pressure the major internet corporations to push Congress to stop the Obama Administration's data vacuuming endeavors, and a slew of organizations (including OpenMedia and Demand Progress) help you tell Congress to investigate the NSA data-vacuuming program. Folks have told me that since they're not doing anything wrong, we shouldn't worry. But while our Constitution prevents our government from prosecuting you for things you did before Congress made those things illegal, nothing prevents our government from deciding to fight "new" terrorist "threats" whose "profile" your photos and tweets and blog posts and shopping habits magically fit. So even if you're not flying planes into federal tax buildings, you need to fight this.

You may have heard about that building collapse in Philadelphia late last week, the one that killed six folks shopping at the Salvation Army thrift shop next door; you may also have heard that the crane operator might have been quite, quite high while demolishing the building. You may not have heard, however, that OSHA inspected the site last month, but didn't shut it down, despite numerous local complaints. Well, that will surely comfort the families of the dead.

Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) said Mr. Snowden's leaks to the press in re Mr. Obama's collection of Verizon phone data was "an act of treason." Setting aside my visceral disgust with anyone who demonstrates difficulty understanding Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, Ms. Feinstein insists these are legal activities, and therefore, presumably, known to any self-respecting terrorist, so it's hard to say Mr. Snowden's loose lips have even sunk any ships.

Some "liberal" media punditoids take a different tack in re bashing Mr. Snowden: narcissism. Don't any of you little people dare try to change the world, they seem to say, because that would be narcissistic of you -- never mind that most objective observers would say that if anyone suffers from the ravages of too much self-love, it's Our Glorious Elites. Postscript: you may not be prepared for David Brooks's ramblings on the subject. They're profoundly awful.

The Washington Post's Neil Irwin seems sanguine about the rate at which the economy's adding jobs. And though he wishes the economy would add more higher-paying jobs, if more people were working, he tells us, wages might be even lower, and anyway it's better than the alternative, which is Spain. Actually, another alternative might be Australia, where the minimum wage is $15/hr and the unemployment rate's a little over five percent, but strangely this doesn't rate a mention.

Northeastern Colorado county mulls seceeding from the state, complaining that Democrats in the state legislature have gone just absolutely wild. What a bunch of whiners these wannabe secessionists are! If they were leaving the country I'd just say let them go, but if they go the way of West Virginia they'll put two more Republicans in the Senate, so perhaps we should also encourage the secession of Atlanta and its suburbs from Georgia.

The Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to finalize rules requiring coal corporations to stop discharging toxic coal ash into our waterways. That would mean less mercury, arsenic, and lead in your drinking water. So what would the EPA have coal corporations do instead? The EPA would force coal corporations to transition out of using ponds to store their coal ash waste and into using "dry bottom ash systems," some of which you can read about here, if you're up to it. The forces of corporate power, in addition to yelling COMMUNISM SOCIALISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!! at every attempt to make sure we drink clean water, will tell us that forcing coal corporations to move to dry systems will make your utility bills go up. We could make many objections to that, but let's just boil them down to one: is that the world we want to live in, where the big corporations always hold us hostage so we don't make the world a better place? OK, two: if you can't drink the water, your cheap energy doesn't matter.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. Congress passed the Equal Pay Act fifty years ago, when women made about 59 cents on every dollar their male counterparts made, and now women make 77 cents on the dollar -- which is better, certainly, but which also isn't a dollar on the dollar, which is what women deserve. It's hard to imagine objections people could have to closing loopholes and tightening enforcement of what's already the law. OK, it's not that hard to imagine: a lot of right-wingers claim the bill is a boon for trial lawyers, as if women should redress allegations of corporate illegality somewhere other than the courts. Or maybe they'll tell us corporations have a First Amendment right to keep information about what they're paying their workers private -- as if workers have no First Amendment right to find out if their boss is screwing them! Argument-by-dog-whistle is no way to advance civilization.

University of California-San Francisco Medical Center begins phasing out meat raised from animals pumped with antibiotics. Where America's grocers hesitate, a major West Coast hospital (which will serve over 650,000 meals this year) jumps in, praise the Lord.

Entrepreneur uses recycled cell phones to help developing nations step up their medical care, to the point where text-message reminders from doctors dramatically ramped up childhood vaccinations in one region in India. Moral: when we give folks tools that actually help them do what they need to do, they'll use them quickly and enthusiastically.

Worker hourly pay drops a rather precipitous 3.8% during the first quarter of this year. On balance, worker pay has barely kept ahead of inflation these last four years, yet remain productive. Well, in my experience, most workers are pretty good people trying to do the best at their jobs regardless of how miserable they are -- though only the bad workers ever seem to get the press.

Chicago Sun-Times fires all its photographers, and starts training reporters to shoot pictures with their iPhones. They do this just three months after laying off seven editors, because it's not like editors and photographers have expertise or anything. And they trot out the old business is changing line -- as in, it's getting harder and harder to gild my plumbing when I don't do real journalism anymore and all these workers insist on having money to buy food and raise children.

Finally, the National Journal notes that young voters and minority voters tend not to turn out in midterm elections the way they do in Presidential elections. Well, perhaps this is the year Democrats finally figure that out, and start organizing to turn out those voters! Just kidding -- these are Democrats we're talking about.

Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian reports that the Obama Administration requested, and received, FISA permission to collect phone log data of all Verizon customers. Now Senators from both sides of the aisle have been quick to respond that data-vacuuming program isn't a new one, that they've been briefed on its existence for seven long years now, that it's authorized by Sec. 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and that, in Mr. Chambliss's words, "we have collected significant information on bad guys." I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on that, and not just because Mr. Chambliss didn't name any "bad guys" or even because "collecting significant information" on bad guys isn't the same as stopping bad guys -- plenty of government officials have testified that all this data-vacuuming we're doing has overwhelmed them with bad intel. When we demand warrants and probable cause, we're not merely protecting the innocent from government oppression -- we're setting a bar that sifts the malcontents from the real terrorists. Demand Progress, the ACLU, and Free Press have the action alerts.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to halt all field trials of unapproved genetically-modified crops, Organic Consumers still helps you do that. You could get away with planting unapproved GE crops in the field if and only if you could be absolutely sure that none of the Frankenseed will escape the field and find its way onto someone else's field. Given the fact that wind blows seed just about everywhere, and animals carry seed just about everywhere, how likely does that seem? The Frankenwheat found in an Oregon wheat field got field-tested in 15 other states. And Monsanto is now doing open-air field tests of a slightly-different glyphosate-resistant Frankenwheat in North Dakota and Hawaii. The USDA has responded with its best Alfred E. Neumann impression, telling us that the FDA found the Frankenwheat safe in 2004. The FDA in 2004? My God, that was Mr. Bush's FDA! An FDA even worse than Mr. Obama's! Why should I take their word for a damn thing?

For the last week, hundreds of thousands of good Turkish citizens have been peacefully protesting -- first, the planned closing of Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul, and then their government's reaction. Their government has been beating them, kicking them, and using tear gas on them (sometimes even firing tear gas canisters into folks' homes!), while claiming that foreigners with their foreign social media have been foreignly corrupting Turkey with their foreignness, and also their foreignness. But since beating peaceful protestors is wrong, Amnesty International helps you tell the Turkish government to can it already. The Turkish government ought to be happy to see so many people out in the streets because they give a damn about what happens in their country, but they're not -- they're a government whose ruling party hasn't been seriously challenged in over ten years, and they've become more restrictive of its citizens' media and free speech rights as the years have gone on. So they might want to listen this time, or they'll become a relic with a quickness.

Did you know corporations could patent genes? Apparently they can, and they have patented over 40 percent of the human genome, even though typically you don't get to patent stuff that occurs in nature. But if some corporation or other has patented almost half your genes, that means said corporation can legally stop, say, your doctor from drawing your blood and testing any part thereof patented by someone else. This doesn't happen very often in practice, praise the Lord, but Myriad Genetics has patented two genes (BRCA1 and BRCA2) that can cause breast and/or ovarian cancer if they're mutated, and one in 400 women may carry the mutated gene. But you may never find out if you're one of them, because Myriad has been stopping any clinic that tests for breast or ovarian cancer from actually testing for those mutated genes. The Supreme Court is mulling whether to allow this madness to continue, but in the meantime the ACLU helps you tell the U.S. Patent Office to stop issuing genes for patents until the Court makes up its mind.

Meanwhile, the WalMart strikes continue in advance of the corporation's annual shareholders' meeting, and WalMart has responded by getting a restraining order from an Arkansas judge forbidding anyone from walking onto WalMart property unless they're shopping. Some of these shareholders might be shopping for somewhere else to put their money, maybe? So American Rights at Work and Jobs for Justice help you tell WalMart to make their workers' lives better. It ain't as if they ain't got the cash -- four Walton family members rank in the world's top 20 billionaires, with a collective worth of over $107 billion. I suppose some folks respond well, that must be how they got so rich! But they should look in the mirror and ask themselves: is that how we want to get rich? By cutting our workers' hours and making them work odd hours and paying them less than they need to live on so they have to get food stamps and Medicaid? Really, anyone can do that. But not everyone can go on strike when they're already living on the edge. That takes courage.

The Supreme Court rules, in Maryland v. King, that it's A-OK to take DNA from suspects without a warrant because DNA is like, you know, fingerprints and stuff, and John W. Whitehead eviscerates their logic. Warning: you'll find Antonin Scalia on the right side of an argument, as happens more often than the Stopped Clock Rule would explain. What the hell is the matter with getting a damn warrant? Life ain't 24.

Sen. Lautenberg's untimely death has already led right-wingers to warn New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) that selecting some moderate to replace him in the interim will finish him in 2016. More likely, Mr. Christie tells far right-wingers to go to hell, sooner rather than later, and those right-wingers vote for him in large numbers anyway in 2016, given how much of a rage they've let themselves get whipped up into over SOSHALIZM!!!!!! -- and if Mr. Christie does win in 2016, which is far from unlikely, he's going to do a lot of their bidding anyway.

Conor Freidsdorf at The Atlantic notes that Bill O'Reilly planned to repeat his 2008 radio rant against right-wing "Kool-Aid-drinking idiots" on his more-widely-viewed TV program that night, but backed down in the face of pressure from then-Fox head Roger Ailes. What Mr. Freidsdorf forgets is that Bill O'Reilly criticized right-wing talk radio for opposing the Bush bailout -- the one time right-wing talk radio was on the side of the angels! -- and while Mr. O'Reilly only alluded to Rush Limbaugh in that rant, he called out Barney Frank and Chris Dodd by name.

Finally, former Rep. Allen West (R-FL) has converted his House campaign account into a federal Political Action Committee, called the Deep Strike PAC. It sounds like a damn porn film!

Remember when San Jose Mercury-News reporter Gary Webb detailed an unholy trinity comprising the CIA, the Contras, and inner-city crack cocaine dealers? And remember how other big newspapers conducted an unfair smear campaign against him, making him persona non grata in the journalism biz and partly causing his suicide? Well, one of his inquisitors, an ex-L.A. Times reporter named Jesse Katz, has apologized for the whole thing. Great timing, dude -- even the suicide was nine years ago. I hope Zombie Gary Webb eats his brain.

Bad news, everyone: the Vermont state Senate did pass a GMO labeling law -- but it would only go into effect if four other states pass similar laws. To allay corporate "concerns" about having to label their food differently, I presume. You'd think these Frankenfood manufacturers all hired monks with quill pens to write their food labels.

Citizens for Tax Justice reports that Apple, lately the subject of Congressional investigation for tax avoidance, is hardly alone among multinational corporations in sending money to overseas tax havens. But we've been talking about this for years now, and all our Congressfolk do is pretend that making it worse (a territorial tax system? Are you kidding?) will solve the problem. We need to get new Congressfolk.

Actress Jean Stapleton, most famous as All in the Family's Edith Bunker, dies at 90. That's a big chunk of my childhood gone -- that voice (which wasn't her voice at all, as you know if you saw her in anything else!) filled my living room in the '70s. And Edith wasn't dumb or naive, no -- All in the Family often ended with five minutes of her explaining the meaning of the first 20 minutes to Gloria.

Also, U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) dies at 89. I always liked him -- he was my Senator for many years -- but I had forgotten that he's the main reason we have a national drinking age of 21, the main reason you can't smoke on airplanes, and the main reason over 350,000 Jews and others were able to leave oppressive regimes after 1990. That's a pretty good CV, especially for a Senator who spent his entire career in the post-New Deal era.

The Senate takes up the Farm Bill again this week, and we've already had a win and a loss: a Durbin-Coburn amendment began the hard work of limiting crop insurance subsidies for big corporations, but a Gillibrand amendment that would have restored over $4 billion in food stamps got shot down, with 28 Democrats helping the Republicans do the shooting. And they call that fiscal sanity! But Food and Water Watch helps you email your Senators about amendments to the Farm Bill. Their list is pretty comprehensive; it includes, among others, two Barbara Boxer (D-CA) amendments that would force labeling of genetically-modified food, a Begich (D-AK) amendment that would ban genetically-engineered salmon, a Gillibrand (D-NY) amendment that would tackle antibiotic abuse in factory farm animals, a slew of factory farm-spanking amendments authored by Democrats Tester and Rockefeller as well as Republicans Grassley and Enzi, and a Shaheen (D-NH) amendment limiting crop insurance payouts to $50,000. The big agricultural concerns will try to drown us out, but they're nothing compared to us. After all, we're people.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Pennsylvania state Senate is actually mulling legislation (SB 975) that would legalize payday loans extracting 300% annual interest. Sigh. They're calling SB 975 a "micro-loan" bill, but if it looks like dung and smells like dung you don't need to eat it because Pennsylvania politicians call it meatloaf. And back in 2002, the state legislature actually passed a tough payday lending law -- one that limited the size of loans to $500, limited fees to $75, and limited interest to 20% for the first $300 and a mere 7.5% for any money over $300. Pennsylvania law also doesn't allow borrowers to take out a second payday loan until they've paid off the first, which keeps them out of an endless cycle of debt brought on by a temporary cash crisis. So why break something that's been working well for over a decade? I'd hate to think it's because the big banksters want to get into the payday loan business, but we can't discount the possibility. Keystone Progress helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject SB 975, and keep our payday loan laws strong.

H.R. 12/S. 123, the Voter Empowerment Act of 2013, makes online voter registration easier, makes intimidating voters harder, helps more disabled folks vote, and lets felons vote again once they get out of jail. And the bill directly addresses, and prohibits, voter "caging." You remember "caging," right, from Greg Palast's 2004 BBC Newsnight report? Where the state (in this case, Florida) sends fundraising solicitations or address verification letters to certain (i.e. black) voters, and then puts the voters who don't respond on a special list alleging that they might not be eligible to vote? Clever, huh? Why do people in power waste valuable time and attention on such matters, when they could just, you know, do something valuable for the folks they serve? The Brennan Center for Justice provides more information, and you can use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to urge your Reps and Senators to support the Voter Empowerment Act. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, Congress still works on the Farm Bill, and shows little or no interest in reforming one of the greatest injustices built into the Farm Bill for decades -- that giant multinational corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Archer-Daniels-Midland somehow collect the vast majority of agricultural subsidies. Indeed, between 1995 and 2011, less than four percent of America's farmers collected 75 percent of all of these subsidies. I pity the fool who raises his hand to say, but that makes sense, because those corporations are bigger! But if a pimp needs a slap I'm game to give it: big corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and ADM shouldn't be getting more government help than the small farmers who need it more -- and certainly not to keep the price of corn syrup (and therefore soda and other junk foods) artificially low, which also keeps our children artificially fat. So USPIRG helps you tell your Senators to fight big subsidies for big agricultural corporations.

In other sad food news, an Oregon farmer has discovered genetically-engineered wheat growing on his farm. He didn't plant it, and even better, this particular strain of GE wheat never even received government approval for planting. And this wheat is one of them-there glycophate-resistant strains! Hey, we were going after glycophates in pesticides not too long ago! Now, nobody necessarily broke the law in planting this strain of wheat -- most likely, the strain was part of a field test. But maybe there should be a law against that, since we can't contain the ill effects any more than we can contain the wind or the animals that carry the GE seed from field to field. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell the USDA to halt all field testing of genetically-modified crops. Note well that many trade partners have outlawed GE crops, and that organic crops won't be organic once tainted with GE seed. These alone should be incentive enough for the USDA to act -- even if, you know, they don't take public service seriously or something.

Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), you may have heard the litany of flatugasms coming from (male) Fox News contributors lately, concerning Pew Research's finding that a record number of families with minor children (40%) now feature the mother as the breadwinner. No use slamming these fools any more than their own words (and their own co-workers) have slammed them -- best to remember, as Moms Rising reminds us, that women still earn 77 cents on their male counterparts' dollar, breadwinners or not, and mothers and women of color fare rather worse than that. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to pass H.R. 377/S. 84, the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act would give us better tools with which to enforce the Equal Pay Act -- such as prohibiting employers from disciplining workers who discuss their salaries with their co-workers, and putting gender-based discrimination on equal legal footing with other forms of wage discrimination. I'd be hard-pressed to imagine legitimate objections to either of those items.

Good news: Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) will automatically restore voting rights to non-violent felons who've completed their obligations to civil society. Personally I don't think felons should lose any voting rights, even while they're in prison -- the prison term is the price they pay for what they've done, right? -- but this is a good start.

Another day, another right-winger claiming that Comcast and Verizon have a "First Amendment" right to carry whatever networks they want. Sadly, this right-winger is D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh, one of Mr. Bush's most notoriously unqualified employees. Doesn't even know the difference between a service provider and a bookseller -- and he seems to think our First Amendment right to decide what we want to watch isn't part of the question.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) says she's against pay equity laws because "women don't want the decisions made in Washington. They want...to make those decisions for themselves." And in a world where you don't get pay increases just because you deserve them, how does she think women get pay equity? Does she know the meaning of the words "our government"? And I noticed "I didn’t want to be given a job because I was a female" -- she must think it's OK to just change the subject if you're losing the argument.

New York Mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner (D) says he's developed "an almost rhinocerosly thick skin" in re all the nasty things people say to him. Which are all deserved, by the way -- if you're going to be the Single Payer Health Care Guy, you don't also get to be the Takes Pictures of His Cock and Sends Them to Young Female Twitter Followers Guy. And "rhinocerosly" is not a word. I'm old enough to remember when making up words ended campaigns.

New York Times economics writer gives us "The Trouble with Taxing Corporations." Never mind that his proof that it's so much trouble consists of exactly three anecdotes in 33 paragraphs, or that his proposed solutions (the national sales tax? Over my dead body!) are mostly right-wing -- this notion that doing something about corporate taxes might be the right thing to do, but we should give up doing it because it's so hard? I'd dare call that un-American.

In late 2009, when the government of Yemen claimed responsibility for raining cluster bombs down on the village of al Majala -- which may have killed up to 14 al-Qaeda operatives, but definitely killed 41 villagers, over half of them children -- Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye reported that Yemen didn't carry out the bombings, but our government did. And what's his reward for doing the right thing? A sham trial and five-year sentence in 2011 on vague terrorism-related charges. Local Yemeni pressure (see, it happens everywhere!) almost convinced the Yemeni President to release Mr. Shaye -- until our President "expressed concern" over his release. Well, he ain't the boss of us: Roots Action helps you tell both Mr. Obama and the Yemeni government to release Mr. Shaye. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but because that could be you or I one day, and it may not even take a Republican administration to bring it about.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that at least a hundred WalMart workers have gone on strike this morning, some of whom plan to remain on strike until WalMart's next shareholders' meeting on June 7. Workers have been striking all over WalMart's supply chain lately, but 500 WalMart workers struck on Black Friday (after being forced to attend a meeting advising against striking on Thanksgiving night), and a few Maryland workers struck again in early February. I've been told these striking workers are stupid because the economy is bad and they could be replaced rather easily in this economy. Replace the word "stupid" with the word "courageous" and I'd agree -- what is it about low wages, few benefits, and lousy hours do some folks find so excusable? One striking WalMart worker, Barbara Gertz of Colorado, has started a petition via CREDO that helps you tell WalMart's braintrust to make their workers' lives a bit more livable.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Mr. Obama to ban fracking on federal lands, including our national parks and forests, Penn Environment still helps you do that. You know the story by now -- despite all the signs of hope we had seen from the Obama Administration that they'd propose tough rules that would protect our public lands from the destruction wrought by fracking, the Obama Administration wound up proposing weak rules that don't demand disclosure of fracking chemicals, don't force gas drilling corporations to secure their fracking waste, don't require frackers to keep a safe distance from homes, schools, and hospitals, and don't ban diesel fuel. And these are our lands! Contrary to what you may have heard from your Tea Party uncle, we don't oppose fracking on public lands because they're pretty and we're hippies. We oppose it because we use that land, and because we renew that land so that our children and our childrens' children may use it.

Tea Party caller suggests the best way to get Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) to "listen" on immigration reform is to "shoot her." I eagerly await rebuke from Sarah Palin and other self-anointed members of the Civility Police. How long before Susan Collins decides, like Olympia Snowe, that she's had enough of all this shit?

2010 Alaska Republican Senate nominee Joe Miller files papers to run for the 2014 Alaska Senate election. Mark Begich must be seriously hoping he wins, and not just because he's a clown -- he's also a man whose stated political philosophy stands at odds with Alaska citizens' desire to have their Senators bring home the bacon.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) announces that this term will be her last term in the House. Adds that it has nothing to do with all those pesky ethics charges or to her close election in 2012 or to the fool she's generally made of herself. Democrats aren't too happy, as her retirement takes away their putative candidate's main campaign issue, but the rest of us are happy, because we're always happy when embarrassing people leave our government. Though she could take on Al Franken in 2014, I suppose.

Finally, a study finds that a soda drinking habit can be as bad or worse on your teeth as a meth or coke habit. (The American Beverage Association, perhaps not surprisingly, disputes the study.) But cocaine and meth have other problems! you might be tempted to say. Soda does, too -- diabetes, obesity, the taxpayer money spent keeping high-fructose corn syrup cheap not going to address our lousy economy and our failing infrastructure, to name three.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 897, the Bank on Student Loan Fairness Act. S. 897 would chop the federal student loan rate for the upcoming academic year from 3.4% to 0.75%, the rate at the Federal Reserve's so-called "discount window," which often makes short-term loans to banks. Turns out S. 897 also looks to the short term (it only covers loans for students starting school during the 2013-14 academic year), but the slashed rate will help them stay out of debt, since tuition rates have risen much faster than inflation for decades now. And lately it's occurred to me that one of the main drivers behind the fivefold increase in student debt must be parents who only make enough money to survive, not to save. Those who'd tell you household income has only gone up since the Reagan era forget not only that most pre-Reagan households had one income while post-Reagan households had two, but that wages haven't been outrunning inflation for some time. Obviously we'll need to correct all of that, too, lest we become a society of wage-slaves.

Meanwhile, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1150, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. Their latest email missive begins: "Imagine your child went to a school that was so crowded and dirty that you had to sprinkle antibiotics on their cereal just to keep them from getting sick. You wouldn’t stand for it, would you? Yet that is what’s happening on industrial farms every day: chickens, turkeys, cows, and pigs are raised in such poor conditions that the only way to keep them from getting sick is to put antibiotics in their daily feed." Of course, you wouldn't stand for your children being slaughtered and sold for their meat, either, but the analogy's otherwise quite accurate: animals grow up in tiny cages where they can hardly move out of the way of their own filth, so they get sick, so they get pumped full of antibiotics -- which then makes bacteria more resistant, and makes us sick. The factory farms who benefit most will hold the low price of meat hostage to our attempts to end their antibiotic addiction. The response? I thought this was a can-do country.