Thieves in the Temple.

reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated.

Still moving stuff around, and still don't have a reliable internet connection, so light and/or nonexistent posting will continue for a bit.

I think my longer pieces should be paragraphs and my paragraphs should be sentences. When I was a boy, of course, my paragraphs were longer pieces and my longer pieces were, er, much longer pieces. That's what's great about getting older -- you learn to do more with less effort. Which you kind of have to do anyway.

light posting notice, for real.

I'm still sick, plus I'm moving soon; I expect these conditions will cut heavily into my posting time for the next week or so. But I expect to be back to normal after that.

Thanks for reading!

you go back, Jack/do it again/wheel turning 'round and 'round.

The House plans to take up the "Protect Marriage from Those People" amendment that the Senate rejected even bringing to cloture the other day, because they have nothing better to do.  Oh, wait, they do have something better to do:  they're trying to slash PBS and CPB funding, like, again.  Only $115 million this time, versus the zeroing-out they tried last year, when the climate was arguably friendlier to such a monstrosity, but as a famous philosopher used to say, I ain't gonna stand for it, baby.  That's true even though PBS has become a more pro-corporate network as the years have gone by (undoubtedly due, in part, to funding cuts in the past).  PBS is ours, and its mission is still worthwhile, and it's still worth preserving, and though so much of what we do is running from one hole in the dam to the other we still have to do it, so sign here.  Also, in case you missed it the first time, FAIR proposed unlinking CPB funding from the federal budgeting process back in the fall, and it's a proposal worth considering again.

Closer to home, Fair Trade activists in New Jersey (of whom I am one in name only) have prompted the state Assembly to introduce A.R. 178, which would make fair trade certified coffee, tea, and chocolate available in the NJ State House Complex.  It's a baby step, and we could do a great deal more in our private lives (like exploring some of these fair-trade merchants), but the bill is worth supporting, and here's where to go to support it if you're a New Jersey resident.

In case you haven't heard, Estate Tax repeal went our way yesterday:  the motion to proceed was blocked by 41 votes (one more than needed), including Republicans Chafee of Rhode Island and Voinovich of Ohio -- but not Max Baucus, the Nelson twins, Blanche Lincoln of the state of Wal-Mart, or Messrs. Rockefeller and Schumer, the latter two not being present.  Bill Frist went on about how "vicious" the Estate Tax is (is it really "vicious" to ask people who have too much money, like Bill Frist and the entire Frist brood, to contribute to the well-being of all Americans?) and how the vote was a stand on "principle."  Be sure to visit Bill Frist's presidential campaign website at www.nochance2008.org, where he takes all kinds of stands on "principle," some of them in a tutu.  Anyway, the Kyl, Baucus, and Snowe "compromises" I mentioned yesterday might be evaluated next week.  I want to continue filibustering, of course, but fellows like Ron Wyden and Mark Pryor and Evan Bayh might be eager to embrace a "compromise."  Our task is the same; we just need to be prepared.

filibuster today! filibuster tomorrow! filibuster forever!

According to United for a Fair Economy, the Estate Tax repeal vote is likely going to take place today.  And Senator Kyl isn't the only one with a "compromise" plan, either:  both Max Baucus (D-MT) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) are preparing "compromises" as well.  The Baucus plan is better than the Kyl plan and, in turn, the Snowe plan is better than the Baucus plan.  But any of the three will inflict near-irreparable damage on our fiscal health, and remember also, that the House repealed the Estate Tax, meaning that if the Senate passes any of these "compromise" plans, the bill that emerges from conference with the House will be even worse.  The only plan of action is to vote against cloture on Estate Tax repeal, and to vote against cloture on any of the "compromises" various Senators have offered.  Here's how to tell your Senator exactly that.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) will introduce an amendment to a must-pass funding bill that would shut down the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Georgia -- or, as yer daddy knew it, the School of the Americas (or, possibly, the "School of Assassins").  Because there are still fools who really believe that perception is reality, Tha Bush Mobb renamed the SOA as WHINSEC in 2001.  Many Latin American torturers learned their trade there, possibly from those seven training manuals the Pentagon released in 1996.  You can express your support for the closure of the School of Americas here.

Our distinguished Representatives in the House recently passed an amendment to an agricultural appropriations bill that permitted big corporations like Wal-Mart and Shop-Rite to sell USDA-certified "organic" food with more inorganic crap in it than ever.  The short answer to such madness is:  don't buy organic food from any seller you don't know personally, or, at the very least, who isn't a big corporation.  (I've avoided the well-priced Swanson organic chicken broth at my supermarket for that very reason.)  But the fight is, as usual, never over:  The Organic Consumers Association has called for a boycott of Horizon and Aurora organic milk.  Why, you ask?  Because these corporations buy the majority of their milk from (surprise!) feedlots where the cows are almost always confined and have no access to pasture.  And what else can we do?  We can (until June 12) write a comment to the USDA calling for mandatory pasture access for cows on organic farms.  We can also call for an end to the immoral practice of importing calves from conventional farms to organic dairies.  Here's where to go.

priorities!

Don't look now, but the Republicans are about to hand yet another gift to the Democrats, if the Democrats are smart enough not to fumble it away.  A few Republican Reps from Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas want to hold up H.R. 9, which would reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.  Their reasoning?  Some provisions "single out" states for federal oversight -- you know, if those states have demonstrated a pattern of overt discrimination against blacks -- and reps from those states say they want us to "judge" them by what they do now rather than what they did in the past.  But I thought I was judging them by what they do now -- the aforementioned three states are still hotbeds for racial discrimination, and if Voting Rights Act provisions expire, they'll go back to doing what they did in the past with a quickness.  I'd hope that Democrats wouldn't be too polite not to mention that some folks want to hold up the Voting Rights Act while they're all for fast-tracking Estate Tax repeal and "protecting" marriage.  Majority Leader John Boehner now won't say exactly when the vote will be held; let your Reps you know you want that vote to proceed.

Also on deck, the House might be voting as soon as Friday on the COPE Act, which would turn the internet into a pay-to-play playground where corporations will force others to pay out the nose just to have their web pages load on your computer.  Both Common Cause and TrueMajority have email pages with which you may act quickly.  Use this page, however, to get your Rep's phone number and tell them to oppose COPE as long as it has no network neutrality provisions and to support either the Sensenbrenner/Conyers net neutrality bill (H.R. 5417), which passed the House Judiciary Committee two weeks ago by an almost 2-1 margin, or the Markey net neutrality bill (H.R. 5273), either of which may be offered as an amendment to COPE.

Pennsylvania residents, take note:  S.B. 180, currently in the Senate Committee on Banking and Commerce, would give consumers the right to proactively freeze their credit reports.  This would help Pennsylvania residents who, for example, might have had their personal information stolen at the Veterans Administration last month.  Consumers could prevent thieves from getting credit in their name, and then lift the freeze if they need to let creditors see their accounts so they can get credit themselves.  Committee Chairman Gibson Armstrong hasn't scheduled S.B. 180 for a vote; here's the place to encourage him to do that.

And of course, call your Senator and tell them to oppose Estate Tax repeal or Jon Kyl's Estate Tax "compromise" if you haven't done so already. Or, hell, even if you have.

Estate Tax update!

Our friends at the Coalition on Human Needs informs me that Estate Tax repeal probably won't proceed until Thursday, with a (you guessed it) "motion to proceed" on H.R. 8 (which repealed the Estate Tax in the House).  This motion will need 60 votes to move forward, meaning that if it doesn't get 60 votes, we can kill the damn thing right there.  Some Senators (roll call!  McCain!  Landrieu!  The Nelson twins!  The Wal-Mart twins from Arkansas!) will insist on starting the debate even if they oppose repeal, so they need to hear from us, again and again and again and again and again as the Cure used to say, about killing the "motion to proceed."

And our other friends (no, this does not mean we have only two friends) at Citizens for Tax Justice have compiled a list of estates that paid the Estate Tax in 2004 according to the IRS, broken down by state.  An astounding 1.2 percentof all the folks who died in 2004 were subject to the Estate Tax.  Which, right, means it's not a freakin' "death tax."  Maybe Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski deserve a phone call from non-Alaskans asking why on Earth they would ever consider putting the interests of 19 Alaskans above that of the other 626,000.

lots of love for the Estate Tax.

The "Protect Marriage from Those People Amendment" or whatever is Tha Big Story this week, but it's not the most important story -- Estate Tax repeal is.  True Majority and Working for Change have pro-Estate Tax pages now, and the American Friends Service Committee (you know, the Quakers, or, in Cliff Kincaid's world, "radicals") will be sponsoring a toll-free number, 1.800.459.1887, with which you may communicate with your Senators tomorrow.  Mention to your Senators that you want them to vote against any motion or bill to repeal or drastically cut the Estate Tax (as the Kyl "compromise" would do).  Then mention that we're on to Bill Frist's plan to siphon attention away from his plan to repeal the Estate Tax by throwing out this divisive anti-gay marriage first -- and tell your Senator, also, that it won't work, because any good citizen can stretch a one-minute phone call into a two-minute phone call.  (As it happens, I have an anti-"marriage protection" my God that phrase makes me sick to my stomach alert from the Campaign to Defend the Constitution.)

Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration is contemplating unilaterally imposing its final contract offer (which includes severe pay cuts and pension cuts) upon its air traffic controllers -- which wouldn't have to happen if air traffic controllers had the same contract resolution process as other unionized federal employees, but, alas, they don't.  H.R. 5449 would rectify this matter, and you may want to let your Representative know that.

penny rants for the day of June 3, 2006.

I'd suspected that folks who blamed high gas prices on the switch from an MTBE additive to an ethanol additive were full of soup, and now Consumers Union tells me I'm right. For those of you who were a little disappointed that Jon Stewart didn't completely nail that Wall Street Journal hack who blamed high gas prices on anything and everything but greed for profits (and who didn't even mention MTBE or the reason why we switched from MTBE to ethanol, which was that MTBE contaminates groundwater), you are now armed the next time your Sean Hannity-loving uncle blames high gas prices on everyone but the folks who make the gas.

Guess how many points Rick Santorum is down now, according to Rasmussen Reports? Nope, more than that. Nope, more than that. And that. That, too. For a moment, I thought Casey the Younger's brand-new 23-point lead (not covered as a "surge" on the cover of the Philadelphia Daily News, as was Santorum's last three-point "surge") might be due to Santorum's embrace of "altered human embryos" as a stem-cell "alternative," but Santorum's numbers among Republicans have remained consistent, so I'm guessing the answer must be closer to home. And by "home" in this instance I mean "many hundreds of miles from that empty house in Pennsylvania he claims as his primary residence." Perhaps his near-mad fulminating over the "danger" presented to his children -- which fulmination, I presumed, was another calculated attempt on his part to keep rageheads coming to the polls on his behalf -- has backfired. Maybe we are not such a sick and decadent culture after all.

Is it time to revise my support-the-troops-not-the-war stance, in light of alleged atrocities committed by U.S. troops at Haditha and elsewhere? Hell no it ain't. "Support" never required turning a blind eye to evil in the first place. Of course we should punish troops who commit atrocities. But we should remember that when you put good people in an impossible situation, they'll do bad things, and we have to stop putting our troops in a position to do bad things -- which latter phrase strikes me as a good definition of "support." The buck for these atrocities stops at the office of the alleged commander-in-chief, who ignored any and all counsel that didn't agree with his own will and who thus has relinquished any moral standing to condemn the atrocities he hardly knew about anyway.

left, right!/you're toothless!

Courtesy Consumers Union, two more issues to act upon if you haven't already:  tell the House to raise gas mileage standards, and tell the House to protect the internet from the big telecoms who'd turn it into a pay-to-play playland.  USPIRG also joins the "network neutrality" battle by presenting a petition to stop the big telecoms from rigging the system so only the big boys can play.  I'm trying to think of as many ways to say "save network neutrality" as I can without actually using the words "network neutrality."  It is, as at least one writer has suggested, a very unwieldy meme.  So why are the big telecoms having so much trouble enforcing their will on Congress?

The ACLU has launched a nationwide initiative to end collaboration between phone companies and the NSA in illegal phone spying on innocent Americans.  (The ACLU's copy said "collusion," but I say "collaboration," because I'm a meany.)  This initiative consists, so far, of full-page ads in eight newspapers and complaints with regulators in 20 states, but it also consists of adding your voice to the ACLU's complaint.  The first hearing begins June 12, in Detroit, Michigan.  Hey, it's not like the Democrats are standing up.  Who's left but us?  (Find more information on the case here.)