Thieves in the Temple.

citizen, heal thy government!

Pennsylvania (and Delaware Valley) residents, take note:  Campaign for America's Future will hold a public hearing on Mr. Bush's Medicare Part D imbroglio tomorrow, June 1, at the Pennwood Library on 301 S. Pine St. in Langhorne.  Local members of Congress have been invited to attend (though I have no word on whether they'll actually attend), and the event will premier a short video produced by Families USA and narrated by Walter Cronkite entitled "The Problems with the Medicare Drug Program -- and How to Fix Them."  There'll be an open discussion of the issues as well.  RSVP for this event here.  On a related note, H.R. 752 and S. 2342 will waive the penalty seniors face for not signing up by May 15; you may support that bill here.

You may have heard about the Veterans Administration losing personal data on over 26 million veterans (not just SS numbers and birthdates, as originally supposed, but phone numbers and addresses, too), exposing them to identity theft.  Consumers Union has an action page in which you may support stronger ID theft laws and reject weaker ones.  But who allows an employee to truck out ID info of 26.5 million people in the first place, to "work on at home" in a neighborhood that had seen a few burglaries in the recent past?  And then doesn't tell anyone what happened for two weeks and doesn't tell the public for three?  And then tells lies both little and big about what, exactly, was stolen?  The answer:  a corrupt, decadent, and immoral administration.  And how do we stop them?  Impeach, convict, and remove.  Really.  There must be ten thousand reasons to kick these bums out by now.

your Memorial Day affirmation.

Today we remember those who have died in the struggle for freedom, and that includes the 2,400-plus American soldiers who have died in Iraq.

The far right, desperate to find some wedge to drive between us and our ideals, will tell us that we are hypocrites to celebrate Memorial Day and yet oppose the war in Iraq. But though our soldiers are held hostage to an incompetent and arrogant commander-in-chief, I proclaim that these deaths in Iraq are just as meaningful as those of any other war. These men and women did not give their lives, it turns out, to defend America from a phantom WMD attack, or to secure freedom and prosperity in a nation now threatening to descend into civil war. And, no, I will certainly not accept that they have given their lives to defend the freedom and prosperity of Bush's crony corporations. These 2,400 men and women, it turns out, have given their lives to remind us of how far wrong we go when we neglect our duties as citizens and do not hold power accountable to truth. They have given their lives to remind us that our ideals do not make us perfect, or even good, unless we live up to those ideals, rather than coast on them. In this sense, these men and women may have made an even greater sacrifice than those who have died in other, more just wars.

May we never forget our pride in them. May we never forget our shame in ourselves. And may we make these feelings a twin engine to ensure that we never fight an unjust war again.

quick snark.

Mr. Bush's "special assistant and personal aide" gets into Harvard Business School despite having attended only one year of undergraduate studies.

Well, thank God Bush opposes affirmative action!

so long, Congress! Don't let the door smack you on the way out!

After today, Congress is off all next week. I don't want to complain about their 2,677 vacation days a year, because when they're not in session, they can't hurt us. But, before they go, they need to extend unemployment benefits for some 80,000 Katrina/Rita survivors. It's hard to believe that they'd go chill for a week without helping a brother out -- no, just kidding, it's not at all hard to believe they'd go chill for a week without helping a brother out, since they're planning to kill the Estate Tax next week despite all their other problems (including their whining over the raid of Bill Jefferson's office). Anyway, your Congressfolk require your instruction as to what to do on this matter.

In 2005, the House passed legislation increasing funding for stem cell research -- an impressive feat, when you consider Tom DeLay still ruled the House at the time -- but the Senate has yet to take up said legislation, and it's been, like, a year. Bill Frist promised, but Bill Frist only keeps the promises he makes to corporate greedheads and religious bigots. Perhaps Tha Dokta will listen if you instruct him further. Nah, not really. But sometimes it's right to speak out, no matter what the results. And anything that preempts legislation that would create "altered human embryos" has got to be good.

Enron's Lay, Skilling convicted of conspiracy, fraud.

Halle-freakin'-lujah!

After seeing Mr. Skilling's testimony before Congress, I knew he was going to be toast, but I thought Mr. Lay might squrim free, given that his prosecutor, early on, seemed more interested in picking fights than nailing down the facts.  I'm pleased to be wrong about that latter prediction.  "Thieves in the Temple" henceforth declares May 25 as a national holiday.

Sentencing, oddly, takes place on September 11.

behold, the italics hammer, which makes words cry in crookedness!

As Condi Rice once said, there are a lot of opportunities if you know where to take them, you know. Actually, that was the Pet Shop Boys, but the House is looking at rising gas prices as an opportunity to open up the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge for drilling again. No doubt right-wing blowhards stand at the ready to blast "environmental extremists" who would stop Tha Bush Mobb's plan to (according to Tha Bush Mobb's own Department of Energy) reduce prices by a penny per gallon by 2025. Tha Bush Mobb has already been drilling like mad in the nearby National Petroleum Reserve since 2001 -- after the Clinton Administration made a deal with the natives not to drill like mad, precisely, but maybe just drill like goofy -- but greed for oil and greed for sticking it to the environmentalists just can't be slaked in some cases. Think the putative history major who now occupies the Oval Office studied a fellow named Theodore Roosevelt? I did, so I reject their ANWR drilling plan, and here's how you can, too.

OMB Watch has another email tool with which to oppose the repeal of the Estate Tax or the Kyl "compromise" that would effectively repeal the Estate Tax. You'll probably hear in the coming weeks that the Kyl "compromise" would link the Estate Tax rate to the capital gains rate blah blah blah. You will probably not hear the "liberal media" tell you that this means slashing the tax rate from 45% to 15%, since the capital gains rate is 15%. Slashing a tax that only affects the richest 0.27% of Americans (for you John Podhoretz fans out there, that's twenty-seven hundredths of one percent, not twenty-seven percent!) by two-thirds is a terrible way to reduce the budget deficit and the national debt. How did we liberals become fiscally responsible all of a sudden? The answer: we always were, except during the Second World War -- which war, curiously enough, right-wingers now invoke when discussing the "necessity" of Bush Mobb deficits.

The Prescription Drug Right To Know act (SB 894), which would force drug companies to publish all clinical study results versus cherry-picking the ones that make their drugs look best, is currently in the Pennsylvania Senate Committee on Public Health & Welfare. Here's how to ask your senator, as well as Committee Chairman Jake Corman, to hold a hearing on SB 894. I suppose some right-wingers think that drug companies have "the right" to pick and choose what facts they tell the public, just as anyone making an argument has the right to pick and choose what facts they tell the public. Problem with that is that corporations ain't people and don't have the rights of people. Their only charge is to serve the public.

penny rants for the day of May 24, 2006.

We were speaking of "astroturf" groups not too long ago, were we not?  Well, we've got one:  a rival coalition called Hands Off the Internet opposes "government interference" in the internet, said "interference" being the Snowe/Dorgan/Inouye and Sensenbrenner/Conyers network neutrality bills (in the Senate and the House, respectively) that would protect the internet from the big telecoms' pay-to-play plans.  Since, last I checked, the federal government is our government, putatively representing our interests, then I must conclude that the Hands Off coalition actually opposes interference from the people in the internet.  And all the people would be "interfering" with would be corporate greed.  Hands Off ought to be ashamed of themselves -- they've been outclassed by the Christian Coalition, for God's sake.

Things look awfully bad for Louisiana House Democrat William Jefferson, the man on whom Republicans have pinned their hopes that they can make "corruption" a bipartisan issue.  They couldn't have picked a better guy, actually -- ninety g's wrapped in foil in the freezer is the kind of gift Democrats have been fumbling away for years -- but now Mr. Jefferson has an unlikely ally:  Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who has demanded that the FBI return documents seized from Jefferson's Congressional office and remove the agents who seized them from the Jefferson case.  Hastert's problem, apparently, is that the executive branch has searched a Congressperson's office, which he suggests violates the "separation of powers" principle -- yet said search seems to be a rare instance of Tha Bush Mobb actually respecting that principle, because the FBI got a warrant from a U.S. District Court judge to conduct the search.  It'd be easy to conclude that Tha Bush Mobb wants to nail Jefferson more than they want to nail terrorists, and it'd also be easy to criticize Tha Bush Mobb for constantly claiming "executive privilege" when they've apparently denied a similar privilege to Mr. Jefferson in this instance, but Mr. Hastert has to make a much better case before I'll buy it.  A man's home is his castle, but is a public servant's office his castle?

Fox News employee Brit Hume -- who, not too long ago, said to occasional Fox News analyst Juan Williams that "someone needs to hose you down" after Williams had the temerity to criticize Tha Bush Mobb -- accused Williams of referring to illegal immigration opponents as "Southern cracker(s)" when Williams hadn't even come close to using the epithet.  Williams's thankfully immediate rejoinder did omit the fact that Williams did originally refer to supporters of hard-line immigration proposals as "white," but I think his analysis -- Tha Bush Mobb's immigration stance seeks to appease white voters in the South and "somewhat" in the West -- is generally accurate, even though it has the word "white" in it.  And before Brit Hume accuses anyone else of bigotry, he ought to start with the man in the mirror.

Finally, Governor Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) makes an extraordinary statement in paragraph 17 of this article:  the prodigious amount of money he's able to raise keeps him independent of special interests.  This, after sixteen paragraphs of listing well-connected folks who attend his dining events and contribute money.  Quite arch of the Chicago Tribune, I suppose, though you might also call it an example of "burying the lead."  Look, here's a simple rule for politicians:  anyone who gives you a pile of cash is a special interest.  No one gives a candidate a pile of money out of altruism; they're hoping to get some possibly indeterminate future favor back.  Public campaign financing (which Senator Kennedy has recently endorsed) would solve most of these problems, and (as I've said many times before) would not be an undue burden on the taxpayer.

in which our hero helps expose some of the unsavory characters behind Estate Tax repeal, and then gives birth to a new meme.

That $70 billion tax giveaway mostly-to-the-rich went better than expected, because they really wanted a $70 billion tax giveaway that would be entirely-to-the-rich, but here's why they really did it: Estate Tax repeal comes up for a vote soon -- according to one government stat, repeal would cost $1 trillion over the first ten years -- and Unionvoice has a quickie letter you can dash off to your Congressfolk. You might want to mention, in your letter (which, as usual, you can rewrite to your taste) that the push for repeal has always been an "astroturf" campaign, led by a handful of rich families with ties to Wal-Mart (surprise!), Gallo wine, and Mars, Inc., among others; Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy have the full story. If Estate Tax repeal -- or its ugly cousin, the Kyl "compromise" -- ever pass in this country, after all the lies that have been told in the name of the "death tax," I don't know if I'll ever stop feeling ashamed for America.

I have another action alert against the AT&T/BellSouth merger, and, as you may recall, this merger has become newsworthy for another reason -- AT&T and BellSouth were two of the three big telecoms that turned over phone records to the NSA, according to USA Today. If they merge, they'll be that much harder to avoid getting service from (indeed, AT&T has been pretty good to its unions, so I've advocated getting AT&T service in the past) and there'll be at least one fewer decision-maker to stand in the way of abusing the trust we place in them as consumers. Needless to say, the push by the big telecoms to create a pay-to-play system on the internet is another reason to oppose the merger. Eureka -- call what the big telecoms want pay-to-play! I'll send out the alarm!

the true meaning of "grassroots."

I knew there was a reason to like Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), despite so many of the things he's done lately -- not only has he recently co-sponsored the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, he's co-sponsored the House bill that would preserve network neutrality on the internet.  H.R. 5417 is the Sensenbrenner-Conyers Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act; meanwhile, S. 2917 is the Snowe-Dorgan Internet Freedom Preservation Act.  The tide is turning on the big telecoms' attempt to turn the internet into their fiefdom -- Google, eBay, and Amazon have joined the battle against the telecoms -- but Mr. Bush will probably do the big telecoms' bidding and veto both acts if they cross his desk, or worse, he'll "negotiate" a toothless agreement with the House and Senate.  What does that mean?  It means this fight is going to go on for a long time.  So keep the calls to your Reps and Senators coming.

In a related note, SaveAccess.org, a national coalition of community media organizations and individuals, plans a nationwide day of protests in New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco tomorrow, May 24, called the "National Day of Out(r)age."  And what are their targets?  The big telecom bills that restrict public channels and balkanize the internet; telecom collusion with the National Security Agency in violating the Fourth Amendment; excessive telecom bribery, er, contributions to Congressfolk; "astroturf" groups that resemble grassroots citizens groups but are in fact backed by big telecom money; and telecom mergers/takeovers that have resulted in the slashing of thousands of jobs.  Congress was quite taken aback by the email/calling campaign that eventually defeated the FCC's plan to loosen restrictions on how much telecoms could own in a given market in 2003; I wonder if the street action on the above-named issues will deliver a similar jolt.  It probably would, if more sympathetic right-wing groups (like the National Rifle Association or the Parents Television Council) were involved, but let's hope anyway.  Find more information about the various protests here.

Finally, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has, for whatever reason, proposed a relatively robust standard for grass-fed animals like cattle, sheep, and bison:  in order to qualify as a "grass-fed" animal, the animal must be fed a life-long diet consisting of almost 100 percent grass or forage.  Grass-fed animals feed outside, rather than in a pen, where they're far more likely to ingest too many pesticides (from grains) and antibiotics.  The USDA originally proposed an 80 percent figure, but that figure isn't as strict as it sounds -- most cattle spend only the last few months of their lives in factory farms eating grain, and that's how they get ruined.  The USDA is taking comments on this proposal, which I suppose means that factory farm activists are ready to pound the USDA with comments so the USDA has an out ("hey, 'the people' wanted the less rigorous standard").  But sustainable livestock producers pressured the USDA into the tougher standard in the first place, so I presume they don't think the battle's won yet, and neither should we.  This is the page to read the federal notice for the label and submit comments.

(Posting may be a bit light for a while -- for some reason I'm experiencing a recurrence of nearly every physical ailment that's bothered me over the past month. Thanks for reading.)

another reason to impeach Bush and Cheney.

Some folks say impeachment isn't worth it, because if the House impeaches Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and then the Senate tries and convicts them and removes them from office, we might get stuck with someone even worse.

The trouble with that theory is that the Constitution has already limited the pool of successors. If Messrs. Bush and Cheney were removed from office today, we would be "stuck" with Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who, as President Pro Tempore of the Senate, is next in line for the Presidency. If the Democrats take control of the Senate in 2006, the President Pro Tempore would be Robert Byrd of West Virginia. I think this would be a good situation regardless of your affinity for either man, since each of them are approximately 388 years old and almost certainly wouldn't run for re-election in 2008. I can't imagine either Senator being much more than a caretaker for the remainder of the 2004-2008 term, either -- given the circumstances of a Bush/Cheney removal from office, you'd think they would approach their new assignment with some trepidation.

UPDATE. As I noted in a later post, this entire analysis is horsedoodle -- the Speaker of the House, not the President Pro Tempore, is next in line after the President and Vice-President. I regret the error, though not the wish for either Messrs. Byrd or Stevens as President. Please make a note of it.

on some of Mr. McCain's recent remarks concerning youth, wisdom, and debating your countryfolk.

Mr. McCain faced a hostile crowd at the New School's commencement ceremony on Friday, not long after giving essentially the same speech to a less overtly hostile crowd at Liberty University's commencement ceremony.  I presume that Mr. McCain's defenders, however many of them remain, praise his message to both sides in America that neither has a monopoly on wisdom and that everyone needs to calm down.  Sounds noble, doesn't it?

I wish it were.  This message would be noble if it addressed the reality of our surroundings.  But the problem with American discourse is not that both sides are shouting at each other.  The problem with American discourse is that when left-wingers try to argue reasonably with right-wingers, right-wingers accuse us of weakness and treason and siding with the terrorists.  It should not be surprising that we occasionally (and not often enough, in my view) respond angrily to that.  So I find it rather patronizing to have Mr. McCain suggest that, far from having legitimate and quite possibly insoluble grievances against the right wing he's rushing to embrace these days, I'm merely one of those people who thinks he knows everything and never listens to the other side.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that it's not conservatives I won't listen to, but the knuckle-draggers who have stolen the conservative mantle.  And I do not claim infinite knowledge.  I merely claim that I do not need to have infinite knowledge to condemn a war fought this incompetently on such fictitious pretexts.  I do not need to have infinite knowledge to point out that this right-wing "effort" to "save" Social Security is nothing more than a pension raid.  I do not need to have infinite knowledge to recognize that this government cares less for keeping America safe -- whether from terrorist attacks or Category 5 hurricanes -- than it does for spying on its political enemies in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  I do not need to have infinite knowledge to see that Republican economic policy perpetuates a shell-game economy that benefits large corporations and not American citizens.  And, much as I'd love to think these are merely differences among "countrymen," I think I have every right to suspect the good intentions of the people who pushed this war down the throat of half of America, who never considered the multitude of better alternatives to shoring up Social Security, who ignored warnings on PDbs and fiddled while New Orleans drowned, who passed numerous tax cuts that only benefit CEOs and portfolio managers.

I'd agree with Mr. McCain if current American discourse actually dealt with how we're going to achieve the promotion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans, and not with the emperor being stark naked and the emperor's defenders bullying anyone with the temerity to point it out.  If one side commits innumerable acts of malice and incompetence and then "debates" mainly by accusing the other side of treason, the problem cannot be solved by both sides getting together over beer and hot dogs and volleyball and passing the talking stick around the campfire and musing that the greater part of wisdom is recognizing what you don't know.

As the Book of Ecclesiastes says, there is a time for war and a time for peace.  Now is not the time to break bread with the folks who claim moral superiority when they wage war in order to steal American treasure for Bush's crony corporations.  Now is not the time to break bread with the folks who want their perversion of God's voice to be the only voice in the public square.  Right now, these people are all dead to me.  Thankfully, they are not now, nor will they ever be, the majority of Americans, Americans who can think and feel.  I'm happy to reach out to them.

But not to John McCain's new friends.  They haven't earned it.

UPDATE. As I note in a later post, I regretted the quotation I used from the Book of Ecclesiastes. We're not "at war" with our fellow Americans. "There is a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing" is obviously far more apt. Maybe sadder, too. Please make a note of it.

penny rants for the day of May 20, 2006.

Tha Bush Mobb's war on labor continues apace:  on May 15, the National Labor Relations Board ruled, along party lines, that a treatment center for children and adolescents did not retaliate against its employees when it terminated its funding from the United Way, after United Way supported employees' bargaining efforts. Said loss of funding, of course, adversely affected hours and pay for employees at the center.  The Board ruled that this action wasn't "retaliation" because the treatment center merely acted in response to an "intrusion" by a third party.  By injuring its own employees?  Who were doing nothing illegal?  Do conservatives really want judges to interpret the law so narrowly that the law provides no justice to anyone but corporations?  To paraphrase a recent American philosopher:  if this isn't "retaliation," then the word "retaliation" has no meaning.

The news is not all bad on the people-power front, though:  the House passed several pro-environment provisions as part of the Interior Appropriations process this past week.  Among these:  the 25-year-old moratorim on off-shore drilling (you remember that?) remained intact,the EPA's plan to weaken toxic chemical information rules got scuttled, and subsidies for logging in Alaska's Tongass National forest were eliminated.  The Interior Appropriations bill still has to go to the Senate, and that Tongass item might get conferenced out, because you know how Ted Stevens is.  Still, the time to fight is always now, and the time to celebrate is always now.  As long as we don't get complacent, that is.

You know, I'm pretty proud of the action alert pages I put up here -- I think they're generally very well-written and well-argued -- and occasionally I check to see what sort of action alert pages the other side puts up.  What I've found, not surprisingly, is that they are utter crap, and they are utter crap mainly because they lie.  Case in point:  this anti-Estate Tax offering, courtesy the American Conservative (sic) Union, entitled "the IRS is coming to your funeral."  No, the IRS is not coming to your funeral, unless you're one of the twenty-seven one-hundredths of one percent of the population who'll likely pay the Estate Tax in 2006.  That's 27 out of 10,000 people who die, not 27 out of 100 who die.  It is therefore not a "death tax" unless everyone who dies pays it.  Which, as I've just said, they don't.  How many times must I tell these pimps!

watch out/son of a gun/superhero number one.

The Senate's nefarious plan to repeal or gut the Estate Tax has been delayed a month -- you know, so they could posture on ethics and high gas prices -- but Bill Frist never saw a handout to the rich he didn't like, so the Senate will move to eviscerate the Estate Tax probably at about the same time they conduct their push against gay marriage. The Coalition on Human Needs provides an email action page with which citizens can contact their Senators, and Americans for a Fair Estate Tax (a coalition which includes OMB Watch, United for a Fair Economy, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and many others) has drafted a letter opposing Estate Tax evisceration, and you may add your organization to the letter's signers if you're authorized to sign on your organization's behalf.

In an effort to show his moderate supporters that his speech at Liberty University isn't all he's about, I suppose, Senator John McCain will address the New School Commencement Ceremony today at 1.30pm at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, and New School activists will gather outside to protest the speech along with other local anti-war activists. If you go, gather in front of the main box office entrance on 7th Ave. & 34th St, and bring pro-education and anti-war signs like "books not bombs." I should note that the New School's President -- Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic Governor and Senator from Nebraska -- served in the Senate with McCain from 1988-2000, and like McCain has been a vocal supporter of the Iraq war.

This do-nothing Congress does whatever it can to help big business executives gild their plumbing, and so it goes with H.R. 4341, which would exempt factory farms from pollution reporting and cleanup provisions in both the Superfund law and the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act. Congress plans to attach H.R. 4341 to a must-pass spending bill. And no, the exemption is not necessary because factory farms are a relatively recent feature on our economic landscape. The only issue is whether or not factory farms are a blight on our economic landscape, which they are -- ask anyone who lives downwind or downstream from one. Find your Representative's phone number here, and read the Sierra Club's fact sheet about the issue here.

in which our hero once again accuses warrantless wiretapping defenders of future hypocrisy.

The ACLU has another action page opposing further funding for NSA warrantless wiretapping as well as the nomination of General Hayden to the CIA director's post, which should be a scandal. I grow weary of right-wingers telling us that the Founders did not spell out an inalienable right to privacy, so therefore it doesn't exist.  We'll see how they feel when Hillary Clinton becomes their President and moves against them far more ruthlessly and cunningly than the bumbler who currently occupies the office.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee passed a bill on May 9 giving the President (sic) the authority to revise fuel economy standards for cars.  Mr. Bush asked for this authority, but that doesn't mean he'll actually use it.  This is a fellow who "doesn't believe" in government's ability to do good, and by fiddling while our economy collapses he seems determined to prove it.  However, Reps. Boehlert (R-NY) and Markey (D-MA) plan to propose an amendment to the bill when it reaches the full House that would require an increase in the fuel economy of both cars and light trucks to 33 miles per gallon by 2016.  You know what you must do, citizen.

Finally, the Pennsylvania General Assembly will consider H.B. 2163, the "Prescription Drug Right to Know Act," which would (among other things) require pharmaceuticals to disclose the results of all clinical trials performed on drugs distributed in the Commonwealth, instead of cherry-picking the clinical trials that make their products look the best.  PennPIRG, which supports the legislation, is looking for Pennsylvania citizens who've been hurt by unanticipated side effects from drugs (like those whose heart problems worsened after taking Vioxx, or children who exhibited suicidal behavior after taking Paxil); if you are a Pennsylvania resident, you can tell said story here.

penny rants for the day of May 17, 2006.

So Bill O'Reilly woke up one morning and said, "hey, I want to do another show about how people who fight prejudice are the real fascists, so I gotta find the most obscure bill I can find in a state legislature -- I'll bet those pinheads in California are cooking something up -- and I'll do a segment on what a menace it is, and I'll get Michelle Malkin on to hit softballs, and I'll get some unknown weakling liberal to be the 'balance' ha ha. And I'll lie to the liberal about what the show's really about if I have to, so she'll look even weaker." And voila! O'Reilly opines (and Malkin agrees) that, thanks to a California state bill that would force history classes to "recognize" contributions from the LGBT community, teachers will not be able to say bad things about Jeffrey Dahmer because he was a "gay cannibal." This sure brings back memories of my high school history class, when we covered the contributions made by cannibals extensively, and spent three entire classes discussing and ridiculing Jeffrey Dahmer's sexual orientation. I'd hate to think the p.c. crowd could prevent us from doing that. Seriously, Billy Boy can't just come out and say he hates gays, so he must resort to these unlikely, irrelevant, and manipulative hypotheticals. And Ms. Malkin can't come out and say she hates gays, either, so she maims the art of rhetoric: implies that bills like this somehow keep kids from learning geography (because, according to Newton's Fourth Law, you can only teach one or the other!) and somehow deduces that the Ninth Circuit will interpret the bill to prevent sports teams from being all-male or all-female. In a healthy culture, we'd ignore "pundits" and "celebrities" like these and they'd go away, but this isn't a healthy culture -- it's a culture in which the Effin' News Channel (or some only slightly less odious "news" organization) can pump a busload of money into any blowhard and make them "important."

According to the Washington Post, DNC Chair Howard Dean and DSCC Chair Rahm Emanuel supposedly had a tiff the other day, over Dean's insistence on investing in Democratic efforts in all 50 states instead of the handful of races the Democrats supposedly could win now in order to take back Congress. I think Dean has it right. Emanuel has forgotten (or, possibly, has never learned) that Democrats succeeded in the middle of the previous century because they planned and promised for the long haul; a quarter-century of short-term political thinking has nearly ruined this country and this culture, and we don't need more of it. Perhaps Emanuel thinks We (Still) Have to Beat Bush Now, but the people are already doing that -- Mr. Bush is having a much harder time getting his agenda across than he should with a Republican House and a Republican Senate and an entire first term spent fearmongering the populace. Rather than whine about how much money Howard Dean is spending in Mississippi, Democrats could conceivably follow the example of the people (as Jack Murtha and Russ Feingold have done) and stand up for something.

Finally, because we like to laugh, FAIR has compiled a list of the times New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has predicted that "the next six months" will be crucial in determining which direction Iraq will take. It seems Mr. Friedman has been predicting a do-or-die six months in Iraq for about two and a half years. Perhaps Mr. Friedman thinks the more guesses you make, the more likely you'll be right sooner or later. In this he would be little different from the folks who read whatever they like into Nostradamus or Revelation.

quarantine.

The House didn't pass their budget last week, even after moderates demanded and got another $3.1 billion to keep Labor/HHS/Education funding at a standstill. I think it would be a bit unfair to say "the moderates are standing their ground with Election Day only six months away," because they've been stirring since Katrina. But I also think I'd be naive to think that we're not going to see a big falloff in moderate behavior in the House if the Republicans hold onto it, and remember the House passed that tax cut bill last week that was only slightly better than it could have been for all of our agitation. So this is as usual no time for complacency; your House reps need to hear from you again this week, and with any luck, we'll be holding up this budget until the year 2525. (You may also call your Reps toll-free at 1.800.459.1887, courtesy of the American Friends Service Committee, which has launched a budget campaign to be found here.

Jobs with Justice, in concert with the Ruckus Society (there's a name sure to give Cliff Kincaid an ulcer!), hosts "Quarantine Wal-Mart," a nationwide day of coordinated action against Wal-Mart on Friday, June 2 -- which, perhaps not coincidentally, is the very day Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott convenes Wal-Mart's annual shareholders meeting. The The idea is that citizens in hazmat suits, armed with yellow caution tape, will be putting Wal-Mart sites across the country under "quarantine" as a "threat to public health" because of Wal-Mart's notoriously limited health-care options. Not just at Wal-Mart stores and potential sites for Wal-Mart stores, either -- the hazmat suits will also target public officials who have gone on the record in supporting new Wal-Mart sites, aswelll as Wal-Mart's board members. You can find more information at the "Quarantine Wal-Mart" website.

On the big-telecoms-giving-your-data-to-Tha-Bush-Mobb front, Electron Press publisher Phil Harris shares strategies for contacting your phone company at the News Dissector blog. Strategies include: asking that your name be taken off "the list" that's given to the NSA; mentioning that Qwest didn't comply with the NSA and that you might be looking into local phone providers as well; suggesting that you might join one of the class action lawsuits filed in New Jersey this past Friday; and pointing out that the "Privacy of Customer Information" section the Communications Act of 1934 as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 prohibits violations of consumer privacy without a court order. Scroll about a third of the way down the page and read the entire thing, though, because my summary really doesn't do it justice.

can you hear me now? how about now?

On the Verizon/AT&T/BellSouth front, today would be a good day to call Senator Arlen Specter at 1.202.224.4254 and tell him to make phone company execs testify before Judiciary about handing over citizens' phone records to Tha Bush Mobb under oath.  Those last two words are important; having fellows over for a chat didn't work with the oil company execs and it didn't work with Alberto Gonzales (Senator Specter himself, clearly flustered, could probably attest to the latter) and it's not going to work with these Useful Idiots for al-Qaeda, either.  Be respectful when you talk to the Senator's office, though.  I think Senator Specter is overrated in all kinds of ways, but he's earned a respectful tone.  That's more than I can say for Mr. McCain these days.

While we're on the topic of rampant NSA wiretapping without warrants, General Michael Hayden is Mr. Bush's new appointee to replace the mysteriously-departed Porter Goss as head of the CIA.  I don't care that much about whether General Hayden is military or not, or whether he's Rumsfeld-friendly or not; I care that he clearly doesn't understand the Fourth Amendment.  Remember when he didn't remember that the words "probable cause" appear in the Fourth Amendment, right after proclaiming that he understood the Fourth Amendment perfectly well thank you very much?  Tha Bush Mobb's fusion of arrogance and ignorance is becoming quite an annoyance.  I would think a clear understanding of the Fourth Amendment would be a prerequisite for running a spy agency, but then, I'm not a bold thinker like Mr. Bush.  I'm all "stuck in the past," I guess, though admittedly "stuck in the past" is one way of saying "conservative."  Anyway, enough spleen:  fact, is, your Senators might also be amenable to ditching this guy.  Russ Feingold, who actually believes that the phrase "advise and consent" has a narrow application even when it's not applicable to Harriet Miers, will probably oppose the Hayden nomination.  Even the previously unheralded Saxby Chambliss of Georgia has expressed his reservations.  Maybe your Senator will feel the same, especially when he or she is reminded that their job is to represent their constituents.

Courtesy of the League of Conservation Voters, I have more information about the Interior and Environment Appropriations bill the House votes on this week.  Rep. Peterson (R-PA) wants to use this opportunity lift the 25-year-old ban on offshore natural gas drilling.  Not every Republican likes this idea, of course -- Florida's Mel Martinez has co-sponsored (with fellow Florida Senator Bill Nelson) legislation designed to thwart attempts like these.  Reps. Oberstar (D-MN), Leach (R-IA) and Dingell (D-MI) will offer a Clean Water amendment, undercutting EPA attempts to undermine clean water protections, and Reps. Chabot (R-OH) and Andrews (D-NJ) will offer an amendment ending taxpayer subsidies for logging roads in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska -- which Ted Stevens won't like, but maybe we should try to make him tired of breaking out his Incredible Hulk tie for the big legislative battles.  Express your feelings about these matters here.

Sunday: a day of rest, everywhere except at "thieves in the temple."

Y'all home from church yet?  Y'all read the Sunday sports page yet?  OK, good.  Unfortunately I missed a day last week and so I'm behind on my action alerts.  But these only require emails, so it shouldn't take too long.

Thought the Democrats were taking back the House this year?  Think again -- Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi has apparently instructed Democratic House members that, if they regain the House, they won't try to impeach Mr. Bush -- this though polls instruct us that if Mr. Bush lied about why we went to Iraq (if?), a majority say he ought to be impeached.  If she's really worried about holding on to independent voters who've now remembered that blustering like Bush isn't statecraft, here's how she could answer a cowardly question like Tim Russert's "is impeachment off the table":  "Tim, it's the job of every citizen, especially members of Congress, to hold the President (sic) accountable to the popular will, because the President's (sic) job is to enforce the popular will.  We're going to investigate thoroughly what Mr. Bush has done during his first term, and if we find there's not enough evidence to impeach him, then we won't impeach him.  And if we find there's enough to impeach him, we will, because that's our job and anything less would be cowardice.  The relevant email address is sf.nancy@mail.house.gov.

There's been some action against the big telecoms' effort to extort money from websites so they can get to your computer faster:  Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) has introduced H.R. 5273, the "Network Neutrality Act of 2006," and Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) have added the "Snowe/Dorgan Internet Freedom Amendment" to the Senate version of COPE; also, Rep. Markey has been adding similar amendments to the House version of COPE for some time.  The Peoria (Ill.) Journal-Star editorialized thusly the other day:  "The companies hope, for instance, to charge Yahoo! so that its site loads faster than Google's, or to make rival Net-phone firms like Vonage pay to use their broadband pipes. The first idea is akin to a gas station charging a Chevy driver more than a Honda driver. The latter is like AT&T putting static on your line when a Verizon customer calls. Neither is exactly competitive."  Sounds sort of conservative when put like that, doesn't it, but then we already know that the bearers of that mantle these days are reactionary corporate fascists and not conservatives.  Express your support for network neutrality here.  (Also, Harold Feld has written a "network neutrality primer" which you can read here.)

The House plans to vote on the Department of Interior's appropriations on May 17; last week the Appropriations committee added a "Sense of Congress" resolution calling for mandatory global warming emission reductions, and this week Reps. Hilda Solis (D-CA) and Frank Pallone (D-NJ) plan to add another amendment countermanding the EPA's recent push to weaken the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), which tells communities about toxic chemicals released into their land, water, and air.  The former amendment won't have much power, but both of them are worth supporting, and you may do so here.

when a man lies, he murders a part of the world.

So at least three big telecoms -- Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth -- have turned over tens of millions of records to Tha Bush Mobb since 9.11 without warrants being issued.  Any program that makes a momentary hero of House Majority Leader John Boehner must be truly awful.  The program's defenders, as per usual, resort either to bullying (i.e. Senator Kyl bellowing "we are at war") or hair-splitting (giving up phone records without names isn't so bad, never mind that Tha Bush Mobb could rather easily match those phone records to names using other databases if it so desires).  Tha Topp Dogg himself merely asserts that he's protecting privacy rights and then walks away from further questions, because he's "the decider" or whatever and your opinion doesn't really matter anyway.

Monday morning Senator Specter is going to get a lot of phone calls demanding that he hold Judiciary hearings on the matter and put everyone under oath this time, but there are still things we can do over the weekend.

First, the ACLU will be presenting a petition to the three aforementioned phone companies demanding that they hold your phone records in the strictest privacy.

Second, Working Assets Long Distance helpfully provides contact information for AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth.  Be respectful when talking to them, or not; I don't care about the feelings of multinationals. Don't curse, though.

It would not be untoward for those of us who use any of these services to switch service providers; I use Working Assets exclusively these days.  And, no, it's not "economic terrorism" or some such garbage to boycott corporations who abuse the trust we place in them.  A better example of "economic terrorism" would be, just off the top of my head, Verizon's late 2003 slashing of 21,000 jobs because of the "volatility" and "unpredictability" of the telecommunications market, with no concurrent slashing of CEO Ivan Seidenberg's $90 million -- ninety million dollars! -- in compensation.  Perhaps not coincidentally, this is the very reason I ended my association with Verizon in early 2004.  Odd, isn't it, that often when we oppose economic oppression, we also wind up opposing fascism as well?

action in a hurry.

The House passed the $70 billion tax cut yesterday with a lot of Democratic help, but perhaps not coincidentally this tax cut included Alternative Minimum Tax relief, just as the Senate bill did late last year.  The Senate is ready to consider the bill shortly, and since we care more about supporting good bills than better-than-nothing bills, they need to be carpet-bombed with calls.  The House also takes up more budget cuts to social services today; they need to be carpet-bombed, too.

Meanwhile, despite being commanded by Congress to write rules banning pesticide testing on women and children, the EPA has written rules that cleverly allow pesticide testing on women and children if the company never intended to offer results of pesticide testing to the EPA.  Why we'd be giving pesticide companies the option of not offering results I don't know, but I expect a certain office in the EPA to be playing a lot of computer solitaire in the coming months.  Unless we can shame the EPA into protecting people and not corporations, of course.  (PennPIRG put this action page together before the EPA issued the rules, but it requires little if any editing.)

penny rants for the day of May 11, 2006.

Rummy had a tough time with former CIA analyst and Counterpunch contributor Ray McGovern in Atlanta last week, but you'd hardly know it from the "liberal media" coverage. Hard to believe, I know. Among other things, they claimed that McGovern got Rumsfeld quotations wrong when he hadn't, they divorced Rumsfeld's responses from their proper contexts, and they called McGovern a "heckler" though he was grilling Rumsfeld as part of a question-and-answer session and was not part of the group actually heckling Rumsfeld. I can't tell whether mistakes like these derive from intellectual laziness or simple malice. I can tell that it doesn't matter, however.

In our continuing effort to distinguish between right-wing control freaks and actual conservatives, we offer this article by Craig Fields of Gun Owners of America, in which he quite effectively defends network neutrality as a free market tool. There's not exactly a shortage of conservative bloggers out there who regard the internet-just-the-way-it-is as the very "marketplace of ideas" Oliver Wendell Holmes intended, and with any luck, we'll be able to give all of them a voice here.

alive and kicking.

The reaper's scythe slashes through today and tomorrow in Congress!  First off, there's H.R. 4297, a $70 billion tax cut bill that will (per United for a Fair Economy) hand out an average of $42,000 in tax cuts for each millionaire household while handing out an average of $20 in tax cuts for the middle fifth of taxpayers (whose incomes themselves average just under $36,000).  Normally I don't like to deal in "averages," which can be misleading, but the difference between a $42,000 average and a $20 average is a little difficult to spin.  You can call your Senators and your Representatives, using my handy toolbox links or by calling 1.800.459.1887, and you can also send an email using this tool.  Second off, there are those house budget cuts I've been going on about, which thankfully don't have much support from moderate Republican Reps.  Some of these good fellows (Chris Shays and Rob Simmons leap to mind) are no doubt getting an earful from the House leadership that they'll be left twisting during what will be tough re-election fights in 2006, but no job is worth having if your boss is a manipulative jerk, and no job is worth having if you can't do the right thing, and they need to hear these things from the constituents.  Read more about the House leadership's nefarious plans here, and use either the toll-free number or the House contact links above to contact your Reps.  You may also want to tell your Congressfolk that their bullying ahead on tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the needy is one of the reasons they get low approval ratings from nearly every sentient life form in America.

Peter DeFazio (D-OR) has introduced H.C.R. 391, which expresses "the sense of Congress" that Mr. Bush cannot initiate military action against Iran without congressional authorization, as required Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution; the resolution already has 60 co-signers.  It's a shame that we have to remind Mr. Bush that the Constitution limits his powers to do even more damage to the world scene than he's already done, but we'll keep reminding him like he's a damn schoolchild, because that's the amount of respect he's earned.  I'm not going to lie and say that Iran isn't trying to build nukes, but plenty of hot spot countries have nukes (for example, Pakistan could become a fundamentalist Muslim regime at any moment, and India has been worse on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty thus far than Iran), and Mr. Ahmedinejad isn't going to nuke Israel no matter how much ugliness spews from his mouth.  Your Rep's contact info can be found here, as always.

Finally, tomorrow from 7 pm to 9 pm at the Friends Meeting House at 15 Rutherford Place in Manhattan, conscientious objectors from regions as diverse as South Korea, Columbia, Israel, Bosnia/Hercegovina, and the United States will discuss "the potential of conscientious objection as a strategy for building a global anti-war movement."  Rutherford Place is a short street between Second and Third Avenue which runs from 15th to 17th Streets, and the corner of 15th and Rutherford faces Stuyvesant Park.  This public event is part of Operation Refuse War, which will be holding events in New York City and Washington, D.C. from the 11th through the 16th.  Check out www.operationrefusewar.org for more information.

come gather 'round people.

May 15 is the deadline for seniors to sign up for Tha Bush Mobb's nefarious Medicare Part D drug plan, that plan so deliberately convoluted that less than one-fifth of eligible seniors have voluntarily signed up.  And on May 15, seniors who haven't signed up will be hit with heavy, lifetime penalties, which MoveOn artfully calls a "senior tax" -- a premium increase of 1% per month, or, if you're keeping score at home, a premium increase that will rise three times faster than inflation just during the first year.  That'll teach those uppity seniors to see through Tha Bush Mobb's giveaway to the drug companies!  Thankfully, the Part D drug plan was a hard sell in the first place, and today's Republicans see moral and political value in bucking Mr. Bush, and, er, just between you and me, Tha Bush Mobb is going to suffer a lot more reversals this month.  There's never been a better time, in other words, to sign this MoveOn petition and demand the revocation of the May 15 deadline.  Needless to say, that's a stronger position than the official Democratic position, which is to extend the deadline.  How many times must I tell these pimps!  You never start negotiations with what you'll settle for!  You start by demanding even more than you really want so you wind up with more than what you'll settle for!  Republicans did this all the time when they were in the minority!  Why do the Democrats never learn?

The times are so crazy that Senator George Voinovich (R-OH), rebuking Congress's attempts to make Mr. Bush's nefarious tax cuts permanent, has all but called for a tax increase.  (Scroll down past the Paul Hackett item in the link referenced above.)  Voinovich, a staunch fiscal conservative who has been holding up Bush budgets for years and who supposedly fished a penny out of urinal while Governor of Ohio, has not yet sponsored legislation that would increase taxes "temporarily."  If you'd like to encourage him to do so -- and even if the Bill Frist-led Senate or the Denny Hastert-led House won't do it, trying is still the right thing to do -- his phone number in Washington is 202.224.3353.  You can find local phone numbers at his six Ohio offices here.  Be respectful to the man, because he's earned that much.  Also, encourage him to hit the rich more than the poor; some misguided fiscal conservatives believe that tax hikes should be the same percentage across the board, though you and I don't pay our bills in percentages.

duty now for the future.

What do we get from Congress when gas prices go too high?  First we get an offer of a $100 rebate, which even Rush Limbaugh seemed to think of more as a $100 bribe, and then we get another push for drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve and another push for offshore drilling.  Thankfully, courtesy Republican Christopher Shays of Connecticut and Democrat Maurice Hinchey of New York, we also get H.R. 4384, the "Energy for Our Future Act," which would repeal some $8 billion in tax breaks for gas, nuclear, and coal companies as well as oil companies, create new incentives for energy and renewable efficiency, and raise miles-per-gallon standards for cars.  Want your Rep to sign on?  Then say so.  No need to stop there, though:  you could also call for your Reps and Senators to hold bipartisan hearings on high oil prices and put oil company barons under oath this time.

If you weren't able to call your Senators about S. 2686, the "Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act" drafted by Senator Stevens, the Electonic Freedom Foundation now has an action page for you to write your Senators.  EFF helpfully points out that, no matter how rigidly Congress allows corporations use broadcast flags to dictate to you how you'll use their content, pirates will always be able to bypass those flags.  I'm not a pirate, nor am I particularly tech-savvy, and I could bypass those flags.

penny rants for the day of May 6, 2006: "You know -- fiction."

Hey, kids!  It's time once again to play "Reichstag 2006," the fun family game in which we speculate on how Tha Bush Mobb might fake a terrorist attack to justify invading Iran, China, Venezuela, or Freedonia!  And today's speculation comes courtesy of the Wayne Madsen Report (found, oddly enough, at waynemadsenreport.com).  A May 1 report (scroll down; the site doesn't permalink individual entries) describes oldheads within the Federal Aviation Administration demanding that the Pentagon prove its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their remote pilots aren't a danger to other aircraft.  Can you say "UAV crashes into United Airlines flight, ties to Iran suspected," kids?  Sounds pretty clever, don't it?  Except that some blogger insisted on repeating it to his handful of readers, who no doubt will repeat it to others.  Remember:  it doesn't matter whether or not we're right about such speculations -- in fact, we'd rather not be right.  But the more we put these paranoid speculations out there, the less likely they are to happen.

Don't look now, but the normally politically-adept Rick Santorum might have just cost himself the election.  Long an opponent of stem-cell research on the false grounds that it's kinda like abortion, the Senator has now called for stem-cell research using, if you can believe it, "altered human embryos," which are different from those other human embryos because they don't implant in a uterus.  Which sounds an awful lot like hair-splitting, or nuance, to me.  Didn't Rick Santorum watch any sci-fi movies as a kid?  Doesn't this sound like, I don't know, using new life forms like a wet dishrag?  What's next, Parts:  The Clonus Horror?  As one bioethicist puts it in the article cited above, "(s)imply redefining something as 'not an embryo' doesn't make it not an embryo."  I wish I'd said that.  All of this now makes Bob Casey the Younger, still implacably opposed to stem-cell research, look like the more pro-life candidate in the race.  Santorum didn't alienate many of his most devout followers with his sudden shift on the Dover intelligent design case, but he will with this move.  And I wonder if Arlen Specter (despite his protestations to the contrary) planned it that way.  (I also wonder, incidentally, why N.J. Republican Rep. Chris Smith's umbilical stem-cell efforts haven't borne more fruit, especially since said efforts have bipartisan support.)

I don't have anything to say about Stephen Colbert's tour de force performance at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner that you haven't already heard me say.  But I'm going to link to it, because I'm with Billy Wilder on this:  if you want to tell people bad news, you have to make them laugh.  He didn't make many of those money-grubbers at the dinner laugh, true, but he sure made a lot of patriotic American citizens laugh, and that's what counts.

we're back here again?

Rep. George Miller (D-CA) has introduced H.R. 2429, the Fair Minimum Wage Act.  H.R. 2429 would increase the paltry minimum wage from $5.15 (where it's been stuck since 1996) to $7.25 within one year.  Naturally, the House leadership has better things to do than allow a vote on whether poor people should enjoy a slightly higher level of poverty, but H.R. 614, if signed by more than half of the House, would force consideration of H.R. 2429 by the full House.  Your Representative may want to sign onto H.R. 614, and he or she may also want to support H.R. 2429.  As usual, here's where to look them up.

Senator Stevens introduces a major telecom bill; Harold Feld covers the bits he likes here and the bits he doesn't like here and here; it's all a bit techy, but not prohibitively so.  To sum, you ought to call your Senator and express your opposition to the bill (if you do in fact oppose it), because the bill revives the broadcast flag (which would all but prevent you from recording your favorite shows for your own use) and prohibits municipalities from building their own wireless networks (local control, a putatively conservative value, apparently means little to Ted Stevens when big corporations are involved).

good news, bad news.

Campaign for America's Future staged a fairly creative stunt on Capitol Hill yesterday: they got a few dozen recent college graduates and parents to march through the halls of Congress in graduation caps and gowns, and then "stormed" the office of House Majority Leader John Boehner, pressing his staff to defend the Rep's recent anti-student votes. (See photographs here.) They presented the Campaign's petition -- signed by more than fifteen thousand people, possibly including you -- calling on Boehner to slash interest rates on college loans in half, and increase student grant aid, as per the bill sponsored by George Miller (House) and Richard Durbin (Senate), the Reverse the Raid on Student Aid Act of 2006. Some ten news outlets covered the event. We could use about two thousand creative stunts like these per day. But no doubt some right-wingers are gearing up to decry "terrorist attacks" on John Boehner's office -- and then their Tony Snow-worshiping comrades will look reasonable defending Mr. Boehner's right to ask these people to make an appointment. That's what we call "good cop, bad cop."

By four freakin' votes, the House passed a lame ethics bill yesterday. (A stronger Democratic-backed bill lost by three votes.) Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) is right to call the bill "an election-year stunt," even though his statement is itself an election-year stunt. Though the bill does force legislation to identify earmarks and their sponsors (because Senator Coburn put the fear in them!), the bill's paid travel provision is quite possibly even worse than previously reported. Let's do the damn math: a Congressperson makes over three times what I make in a year, and after I've paid the rent and filled up the tank and packed my fridge with organic carrots I still have a thousand bucks left over at the end of every month. So, if I had the vacation time of a Congressperson, it seems to me I could go on a trip that "helps me understand issues" between six and twelve times a year without going into debt. So why on earth can't a Congressperson, who makes my annual salary right around the Ides of March, pay for their own damn edification out of their own damn pocket?

I feel like a bullet in the gun of Robert Ford.

Consumers Union likes to send me all their alerts at once, which is awfully convenient but doesn't permit me to be as snarky as I'd like to be, so here's what they're working on (which you and I could also be working on):  the Senate's push to overturn state laws that control health care premiums and guarantee coverage of services like mammograms and diabetes treatment; the big telecoms' desire to seek "relief" from local regulations that would force them to extend service to all areas of a locality, no matter how many black people live there; Congress's difficulty in choosing the better of two ID theft laws; proposed USDA rules that would force the government to tell citizens about the recall of tainted meat at restaurants but not many other institutions; CU's push to get states to pass laws requiring public reports on hospital infection rates; and big dairy's push to keep their cows from grazing outdoors and still call their milk "organic."  Sounds like a lot of work for one afternoon, but it's really not -- took me less than ten minutes.  Consumers Union has more info at each link.

Unions have been taking a lot of hits in this "new economy" or "neoliberal economy" or "shell-game economy" or whatever, but the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 1696 and S. 842) would ensure that when a majority of employees in a workplace decide to form a union, they can do so without the standard harrassment, intimidation, and retaliation they now face.  Specifically, the Employee Free Choice Act would force employers to recognize a union once a majority of workers signed cards authorizing union representation.  The bill also would provide for mediation and arbitration of first-contract disputes and authorize stronger penalties for employers that violate workers' rights in forming unions and negotiationg contracts.  As usual, here's contact info for your Reps and your Senators.

keep on plugging.

MoveOn joins the fight against the big telecoms' plans to Balkanize the internet -- and if we've got MoveOn, we've got serious numbers.  I confess I've been having some difficulty explaining exactly what's wrong with the big telecoms' push in Congress to charge other companies additional fees for faster internet service, so I'm pleased that MoveOn has passed along snopes.com's analysis:  "Simply put, network neutrality means that no web site's traffic has precedence over any other's...Whether a user searches for recipes using Google, reads an article on snopes.com, or looks at a friend's MySpace profile, all of that data is treated equally and delivered from the originating web site to the user's web browser with the same priority."  That's Oliver Wendell Holmes's "marketplace of ideas" right there -- all data delivered with the same priority and you decide which data is worthwhile.  I'll add that if Google or snopes or MySpace has to pay a fee to AT&T and Comcast just to ensure folks will see their sites, or just to get their sites to work right, then you and I and everyone else will pay more.  Note the word more -- while a few Useful Idiots rant that "you can't have everything for free," I'm still paying upwards of $45 a month to my service provider just to get this message out.  Some members of Congress are feeling the heat, which isn't cowardice so much as it's doing their job; here's MoveOn's own heat-applying method.

The Senate had no stomach for cutting spending in health care, education, nutrition aid, housing, Head Start and job training from Mr. Bush's rotten-egg stink bomb of a budget -- not even as a pretext to do Mr. Bush's and Bill Frist's favorite thing, which is give more welfare to the rich in the form of tax cuts -- but the House, as befits its mercurial nature I suppose, has at least one more trick they're going to try this week.  Whether they set a budget or not, Congress still must set a total spending figure for all annually-funded programs, at which point the Appropriations Committee disburses that total among defense, international, and domestic programs.  Reports indicate the House leadership will use the total from Mr. Bush's budget, a total low enough that it'll serve as a pretext for cuts in domestic programs.  Big ones, too -- as I've said before, Republicans only mean "social spending" when they talk about "runaway spending," and aside from the major entitlement programs, social spending really doesn't cost that much.  The toll-free number to call is 1.800.459.1887; ask to be connected to your Rep's office.  You can also get contact info for your Rep here, as always, or sign this petition.

In a similar vein, OMB Watch informs us that Congress plans this year to consider a long-held dream of What's the Matter with Kansas star Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) to force all government agencies -- including, among others, OSHA, PBS, Head Start, the Legal Services Corporation, conservation programs, toxic waste clean-up programs, and programs for seniors and the disabled -- to justify their existence before a "sunset commission" or be exterminated.  The Republican leadership apparently had to promise consideration of H.R. 2470 (or, possibly, a slightly different bill introduced by Republican Kevin Brady of Texas, H.R. 3277) just to get far-right conservatives on board with the most recent budget resolution.  The Tiahrt bill would just about complete the radical right's work in "starving the beast," and though it pointedly excludes defense and entitlement programs it also looks like it would hardly touch earmarks or corporate welfare, imagine that.  I don't like the idea that a small, unelected commission gets to axe government programs instead of our elected representatives, and most folks in this climate won't like that idea, either -- unless, I suppose, the bill's supporters can lie about it effectively.  The bill hasn't made it out of the Committee on Government Reform, but Denny Hastert and John Boehner keep the promises they make to right-wingers, so it will.  Keep tabs on the bill, and read more about the bill, here.

happy freakin' first day of May, all y'all!

On Friday, the Senate Judiciary Committee refused to consider two bills that would have made Mr. Bush's warrantless NSA wiretapping legal, and Senator Specter also launched a broadside -- an amendment that would cut funding to Mr. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program unless Tha Bush Mobb is a little more forthcoming in describing the program.  Let's not get carried away praising Senator Specter, since he's also the author of one of the two bills Judiciary didn't consider.  But let's also support his amendment by calling our Senators; the ACLU has a find-your-Senator tool here.  (The two bills Judiciary didn't consider are S. 2453 and S. 2455.)

As you know, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is up for renewal, and one of its most important areas is the "pre-clearance" process found in Section 5.  Section 5 allows the Justice Department to oversee state districts with patterns of voting discrimination.  Quite a few right-wingers in Congress probably think this is the kind  of thing we've worked past, that the practice of, say, removing voting machines from largely black, largely Democratic neighborhoods and putting them in largely white, largely Republican ones is just run-of-the-mill Election Day maneuvering.  But that's the sort of thing Section 5 is supposed to prevent, and don't be disheartened because this particular Justice Department is too busy saying "well, George Washington eavesdropped!" to prevent real injustice.  I've got tools to contact your Rep and to contact your Senator about renewing the Voting Rights Act.  Also, U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) wrote a NYT op-ed about the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 2005, and here's where you can read a good chunk of it.

The Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) moratorium has helped protect both American coasts from oil drilling since the early 1980s, but the Senate hopes to change all of that with S. 2253, which would open an area of the Gulf of Mexico to offshore drilling.  You can oppose that here.  No doubt S. 2253's supporters have little patience with its opponents -- don't you want lower gas prices, they'll say, as if drilling off the Florida shore is the only way to accomplish that.  Perhaps not coincidentally, a bipartisan group of Senators has introduced S. 2025, the "Fuel Choices for American Security Act" (it must be an OK bill, since it spells FCASA), which contains a package of incentives and standards aiming to reduce American oil use by 10 million barrels a day.  That ain't much -- I still dream of a larger push to retrofit American houses and utilities with solar and wind power -- but it's a whole lot better than more corporate welfare for oil companies, and here's how to get your Congressfolk to sign on.  (The House companion bill is H.R. 4409.)

In other news, a Republican proposal to give $100 rebates to 100 million Americans to help counter gas prices apparently met with ridicule from constituents.  My fellow Americans make me proud!  (And Rush Limbaugh proves the stopped-clock rule.)

UPDATE. The Senate's contact page isn't working for some reason. Get phone number info using the ACLU page link in the first paragraph.