Thieves in the Temple.

tire fire!

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Erie, PA Zoning Board has voted to proceed with a proposal to build a tire-burning plant. I trust you don't need to read the Erie County Medical Society's position statement on the plant to appreciate what a hazard that would be. Apparently the plant's progenitor, Erie Renewable Energy (!), considers the plant to be a "green" way of producing energy. What, the sun doesn't shine on Erie? The wind doesn't blow in Erie? As I've always said, if it smells like dung and looks like dung I don't need to put my damn nose in it. Hell, maybe burning dung would be better than burning tires. Anyway, the Erie City Council will vote tomorrow on whether to overturn the Zoning Board's decision. You may not be an Erie resident, but you may be someone who works there, lives anywhere nearby, or visits frequently -- or, hell, maybe you're just an American who gives a damn. So PennPIRG helps you oppose the plant. And, if you're in the neighborhood, KEEP will peaceably assemble outside Erie City Hall tomorrow at 8 am. Wear your Sunday best if you go. And keep the tire fires on King of the Hill.

Meanwhile, Michael Wolff wonders whether Rush Limbaugh's power is expanding or waning. Absent sourced audience figures, I'd guess it's about what it's been since around 1990. I don't think the actual audience figures matter as much as their devotion -- advertisers love a dependable audience, and Mr. Limbaugh's audience (like Mr. Hannity's, like Mr. Savage's) tunes in regularly. And this is the problem with all of the Big Media: they've figured out that if they can deliver a dependable audience, they can get dependable advertisers. At that point it doesn't really matter if they're particularly good at what they do (or particularly moral about what they do). Break that chain -- the one between advertisers and media that keeps consumers out -- and we'll have freedom. (In other news, radio's "endgame" is hardly "written," because a lot of poor people don't have the broadband internet access that would get them into the liberal blogosphere, because the music industry still hasn't abandoned the FM band (and their abandonment of the AM band midwifed talk radio as much as anything), and because (with any luck) we'll have a substantial expansion of low-power FM soon.)

big day.

The ACLU helps you petition Attorney General Holder to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate torture. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported the American government using torture at Guantánamo in 2004 and 2007, and the Spanish government just began a criminal probe aimed at Bush Mobb officials who authorized torture there as well. So the U.S. government seems a little bit behind the curve, if anything. We ought to start with the man in the mirror -- you know, act a little like we're not the world's only superpower.

Now that an actual U.S. Senator has endorsed single-payer health care, the People's Email Network reminds us that we can still support actual single-payer health care bill H.R. 676. Max Baucus says it's off the table and CNN seems to think nobody really supports it, but what do they know? Single-payer health care has had broad support in every poll of actual Americans I've ever seen. And that's probably before the pollees get told that the big drain on American health care costs is emergency room care for folks who don't have health care -- folks who will probably never be able to pay a thousand bucks to have someone look at the sniffles, and guess who pays if they don't? I'd like to think that voters' opinions actually do matter. Hell, the voters did elect Barack Obama, even though (as at least one Obama campaign higher-up has said) it seemed like he lost every day of cable news coverage.

I erred last week in suggesting that Mr. Obama hasn't used his bully pulpit to push decent credit-card reform bills through Congress -- apparently, he talked about this very matter on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno the previous week. That's quite an embarrassing mistake on my part. Oddly enough, House and Senate plan to move ahead with bills this week, and Consumers Union helps you call your Reps and Senators. Sadly, the banksters will also be leaning on their Reps and Senators whom they undoubtedly think they own. Sorry, banksters, the government belongs to us. And you guys ain't that popular. You don't even really have money. But let's not get complacent.

"Tuesday night, Senator Arlen Specter betrayed Pennsylvania's workers," begins the latest missive in my inbox from American Rights at Work. We could debate on whether it's really "betrayal" if you saw it coming, but these are the facts: Mr. Specter co-sponsored the Employee Free Choice Act in 2005, was a co-sponsor again in 2007, and then last week, when the bill was a handful of votes away from breaking a Senate filibuster, Mr. Specter voted the way his party wanted him to vote, like he always does when someone really needs him to do the right thing. He's toast in 2010 no matter what, but until then he's our public servant, so American Rights at Work encourages you to communicate your will to him, if you are a Pennsylvania resident. I guess he can't count on Pennsylvania's unions re-registering their members as Republicans so he can get past Pat Toomey in the primary, can he? And where's Barbara Hafer, anyway?

rhetorical boomerang.

H.R. 1549/S. 619, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act would, oddly enough, pretty much do what the title says it would do. 70 percent of all antibiotics in this country currently get used where? In livestock feed, i.e., not in sick people or animals. That means germs get a lot more reps fighting antibiotics, and that means germs get a lot stronger -- and people and animals, ultimately, get a lot weaker. Corporations will no doubt claim that the burden of proof demanded by Sec. 4 (b) (1) (c) is prohibitively difficult to meet -- which, I presume, is why Sec. 4 (c) provides for the phased elimination of antibiotics. If a big corporation can't get antibiotics out of its feed in two years, then it doesn't deserve to live. We would call that the genius of civilization, right, Paul O'Neill? Union of Concerned Scientists provides the contact tool.

so it goes.

Surprise! Some of the banksters who've randomly hiked interest rates on existing credit card balances also got federal bailout money -- Citibank, Chase, and Capitol One among them. And now they'll essentially get federal stimulus money, too -- the tax cut you'll get starting April 1, for example, will get sopped up by interest rate hikes if you carry $7,300 in credit card debt, which is the national average. The Federal Reserve ruled to stop such rate hikes, but the new rule doesn't take effect until July 2010, so it's open season on consumers until then. And what of legislation to get that rule in effect sooner? Surprise! It's stopped dead in Congress. So Consumers Union helps you appeal directly to President Obama to put the pressure of the bully pulpit on Congress. One hopes that Mr. Obama doesn't treat "political capital" as gingerly as Bill Clinton did early in his tenure. In fact, and I can't quite believe I'm saying this, he might do better to emulate Mr. Bush in this regard (and only this regard).

AIG, meanwhile, continues to act like it has no idea it's the most despised corporation on the planet -- lodging a $300 million-plus lawsuit against the U.S. government to recover "overpaid" taxes paid by a Panama-based corporation that's also AIG's biggest shareholder, and pushing the Panama Free Trade Agreement (or PFFFFTA!) that would give foreign-based corporations the right to challenge U.S. regulations in foreign tribunals and collect "damages" paid by guess who? The American taxpayer, that's who. That sounds suspiciously like a wealth-redistribution-upward scheme to me, especially since corporations like to camp out in Panama due to its almost complete lack of corporate oversight. Now "free" trade agreements tend to meet with broad bipartisan opposition in Congress these last few years, but now's not the time to be complacent. So Public Citizen helps you oppose the Panama Free Trade Agreement.

Finally, Focus on the Family has mobilized against the nomination of Dawn Johnsen to Mr. Obama's Office of Legal Counsel. You may remember that the Office of Legal Counsel was where John "OK to crush a baby's testicles on the President's say-so" Yoo worked his dark magic. You may not know, however (because when did the "liberal" media cover it?) that Ms. Johnsen was one of John Yoo's most emphatic critics. Of course, for Focus on the Family, the Focus is on Ms. Johnsen's tenure as legal director of NARAL Pro-Choice America. Yawn. I'd be perfectly happy with Ms. Johnsen's appointment if she was a John Yoo critic who happened to be pro-life. But would the chowderheads at Focus on the Family leave her alone if that were true? Seriously, how have they earned the right to tell the rest of us sane people what to do? CREDO helps you hand out the beatdowns.

snark at the speed of sound!

I have no urgent action alerts today, nor urgent penny rants percolating, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to note that Senator Specter turned against the Employee Free Choice Act yesterday, citing the bad economy, etc., and promising to reconsider when the economy returns to "normalcy." Senator Specter's move is, of course, completely unexpected. And by "completely unexpected," please understand that I mean "what he always does when he's the deciding vote on something that will displease his party."

stairway to the stars.

States have the right, under the Clean Air Act, to adopt auto emission standards that are somewhat stricter than the federal government's, but outgoing EPA administrator Stephen Johnson denied the state of California that right while he was in office. Mr. Obama has told the EPA to reconsider that decision, but the automakers oppose it. Funny that they bellyache about paying their workers, but they have plenty of money to lobby the government against being forced to make cleaner cars -- which, if they understood the market, they would already be making. You still don't need to be subtle to describe events these days. Anyway, the EPA will accept comments from citizens about this matter, and the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you leave them. (Warning: completing the comments page will take you right to a page soliciting donations to UCS. I don't approve of that sort of thing, and I labor to keep my readers away from donation pages, even if I approve of the organization soliciting the donations. So don't feel any pressure to contribute.)

In other news, Media Matters reports that the "liberal" media have largely "forgotten" about Mr. Bush's tenure as President when discussing the current economic armageddon. Read the report and you will likely sense a certain amount of restraint in their prose style, as if the authors would really like give "liberal" media "reporters" a good smacking-up, but are trying to be polite. I'm entirely sympathetic to that feeling. The only consolation I enjoy in these times is this: the "liberal" media is dying by its own hand, and right-wing bloggers aren't together enough to replace it.

on a good day, I get the blues.

The House passed the TARP Reform and Accountability Act back in January. The bill would, among other things, prohibit paying bonuses to the 25 highest-paid employees of a TARP beneficiary, prohibit the use of TARP funds for acquisitions and mergers, and require a lot more transparency about where the money's going than the original TARP program provided. But strangely, the Senate hasn't acted on the bill; Common Cause helps you demand that the Senate do so. The banksters' bailout stinks to high heaven; if we can't repeal the damn thing, we ought to know where the money is going (or, more likely, not going). It is our money, after all.

I'm re-posting the EFF action alert in re the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, because on March 13 the Obama Administration cited "national security concerns" in denying a request for information about ACTA. That is quite, if I may say so, Bush-league. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall for that meeting: "if those darn kids download the new Pink single, then the terrorists will have won!" Maybe Attorney General Holder will countermand this madness when he issues new Freedom of Information Act guidelines, but that won't happen until late June. The time for sunlight is, as always, now. Also, the Senate will have to ratify ACTA, and you can't get the Senate to ratify ACTA if it's some big secret from the people they represent. I really didn't think I'd ever have to explain the fundamentals to Mr. Obama the way I had to explain them to Mr. Bush. I hope it doesn't happen again.

Meanwhile, many right-wingers are crying and-then-they-came-for-me over H.R. 1586, which I promoted here the other day and which would limit bonuses paid out to some TARP beneficiaries. The better of them claim that H.R. 1586 is either a bill of attainder (which would unfairly punish a single person or group) or an ex post facto law (which would punish someone for something that wasn't illegal before the law was passed), both of which the U.S. Constitution prohibits (Article I, Section 9). Having re-read H.R. 1586, I remain unconvinced that the bill is a "bill of attainder" or an "ex post facto" law, mainly because I do not regard taxation as "punishment" in a legal sense. The government has had the right to tax some income at a higher rate than others for as long as it's had the right to tax, and right-wingers would likely also argue that the Estate Tax is an "ex post facto" law. If right-wingers really want to slice through these issues, they ought to either a) amend the constitution to make all federal taxation illegal or b) help repeal TARP. I'm happy to report that they might have as much enthusiasm for the second item as for the first. I just wish they'd use their "tea parties" for that.

UPDATE. Yikes, almost forgot: hat tip to Lifelike or Like Life? for the March 13 "state secrets" development that compelled me to write the second paragraph above.

we don't need this fascist groove thang.

Thought the Cheney wing of Tha Bush Mobb was bad enough? Seymour Hersh suggests it might have been worse -- an "assassination ring," aimed at foreign enemies, may have reported directly to Tha Dicksta himself. Mr. Hersh further stated that the CIA has been running illegal ops against "domestic enemies." Now, he also suggested it may be a year or so before he has enough evidence to back these claims "for even the most skeptical." It sure ain't farfetched, though, to anyone even remotely familiar with Tha Bush Mobb's disregard for the law. And it's certainly worth a Justice-appointed special prosecutor and/or a Congressional investigation, which the People's Email Network helps you demand. The contact tool doesn't provide any pre-written text, but read the rawstory.com article and you'll have enough to say.

The stimulus package passed by Congress and signed by the President requires that any funding for broadband connection meets "nondiscrimination and network interconnection obligations," meaning that big telecoms won't be able to permit some files to download faster than others. That's essential for a well-functioning internet, but the big telecoms are pressing to get those restrictions out, so they can do what they already do on TV, in newspapers, and on cell phones: restrain you, good citizen, from picking what you would like to see. That's damn important -- the internet is the greatest opportunity for a really citizen-driven media we've ever had, and we need to keep it that way. And I don't need to remind you, I trust, that the big telecoms stand completely alone in their fight -- the fight to keep the internet open for citizens, not corporations is a truly bipartisan fight. Speaking of Free Press, they'll help you communicate your thoughts to your Congressfolk.

Finally, you've heard (here, more than once) that Mr. Obama plans to rescind the Bush Mobb rule that restricts the information patients can get from health care providers who have religious objections to legal procedures. The rule change, as with all Executive branch rule changes, requires a comment period, which ends April 9. If you haven't commented on the rule change yet, the ACLU will help you do it. (Of course, if you have already commented, don't comment again; that muddies the data.) The law, as currently written, permits some wiggle room for folks with religious objections to participate less in the implementation of abortion/birth control-related processes at their jobs. But as I've said before, I don't think there ought to be any wiggle room -- folks who work in health care who hate abortion and birth control ought to a) find another job or b) work to make abortion and birth control illegal, not chip away at the rights of the rest of us in an unlawful manner. I mean, I work in health care. One of my ten-thousand possible tasks is abortion-related, and I actively avoid doing it if I can. But if the boss tells me to do it, I do it, because it's my job. This is not difficult logic. Crybabies on the right seem to have trouble with it, though, and hopefully Mr. Obama will stop enabling them the way Mr. Bush did.

odds and ends.

If you've missed any opportunities to oppose AIG bonuses, don't worry, because I've got more: one from Common Cause, one from USPIRG, and an updated one from Public Citizen specifically supporting legislation that taxes bonus given to bailed-out companies at 100 percent. And where does Rush "I'm underpaid" Limbaugh get off telling us that "not one Republican voted for this bailout"? Even without Media Matters's help, it took me five minutes to find out that 65 Republicans voted for H.R. 3997 on September 29, and that 34 Republican Senators voted for H.R. 1424, the TARP bill that finally passed. Oh, and that 81 Republican House members voted for H.R. 1424. Oh, and in between me finding out all that, the cat threw up and I had to clean it up. Given that it took so little time for me to find all that out, it stands to reason that the "liberal" media, which can fact-check for a living versus in their spare time, will pound away at Mr. Limbaugh's lies. I'm not holding my breath.

SLDN still helps you ask your Rep to co-sponsor the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, which would end the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays and permit gays to serve openly in the military. Rep. Tauscher's bill has 134 co-sponsors; even if your Rep is a Republican, you can always tell them that there's no time for bigotry when we're fighting two wars. You may also tell them there's no time for discharging good soldiers while accepting folks with felony charges when we're fighting two wars. I guess our more articulate opponents in the Senate (calling Jim DeMint!) will instruct us that we must not abandon "our values" no matter how bad things get. That'd be fine, if "hating gays" were one of my values.

H.R. 1466, the Major Drug Trafficking Prosecution Act of 2009, would repeal mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders. Section 3 would also refocus federal resources on major drug traffickers, by requiring written approval from the Attorney General to prosecute federal cases involving small amounts of drugs. I think we've seen by now that mandatory minimums don't dissuade people from using drugs -- hell, nothing short of intervention dissuades addicts from using drugs. We've also seen that mandatory sentences affect African-Americans disproportionately -- no, not because "blacks use more drugs," but because judges apply the sentences inconsistently and blacks "just happen" to bear the brunt of it. We've also seen that "zero tolerance" policies usually drive those who pursue them quite mad. FAMM has the contact tool.

UPDATE. How about the Ironizer? You know, as a superhero surrogate for the ironic quote-marks thing I do (see paragraphs 2 and 3 above). Sounds appropriately science-fictiony, eh? Also, I know what Mr. Limbaugh's game is in paragraph 1 -- he's trying to confuse support for the stimulus package with bailout support in his listeners' minds. Why isn't the truth good enough for him? Especially since he was on the side of the angels during the bailout hysteria?

grey streets.

I have an action alert from True Majority demanding that Congress take AIG bonus money back, and I'll dutifully sign onto that. But I just don't think it's enough. I think we ought to take back every red cent of that bailout money that was supposed to get the economy moving again but hasn't, and if corporations resist, we need to send in military troops to collect it. Find that extreme? Then don't talk to my co-workers who've decided AIG execs should be treated exactly like terrorists or even put on trial for treason. At least Mr. Obama, unlike El Rushbo or this "liberal" media clown, seems to fathom that folks are angry at AIG for moral reasons, and aren't just a "lynch mob" or "a mob with pitchforks."

Meanwhile, Public Citizen wants good Pennsylvania citizens to put pressure on Republican Reps. Joe Platts, Charlie Dent, and Jim Gerlach to suppport radical changes in campaign financing. Pennsylvania is turning Democrat even faster than Arlen Specter knows, and Mr. Gerlach in particular just squeaked through a 2008 re-election against a guy who's probably already forgotten he ran, so the timing is, as they say, apt. Public Citizen states that the Fair Elections Now Act will combine the public campaign-financing approach of the former Fair Elections Act while still permitting the Dean/Obama small contributions approach. I'm such a damn purist that I'd prefer a bill that preserves the former and outlaws the latter -- the former already works in Maine and Arizona, and the latter is still to susceptible to corruption (i.e., from "bundlers"). But you can modify the contact tool if you like -- being a citizen means communicating your beliefs, not the beliefs you think will get Mr. Obama re-elected, or the beliefs that might get past a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists provides a handy guide to bioplastics. Where most plastics get made from crude oil, "bioplastics" get made from plant matter. Sounds good so far, right -- using plastic bags and plastic forks and spoons that aren't made from oil? But read on. Bioplastics can't be recycled (they have to be composted, and often by industrial composting plants that can generate the heat needed to compost them), and the plants that make bioplastics are often genetically-engineered, meaning the corporations that made them have no idea how much of your descendants' DNA they're about to rewrite. So you can either look for a "compostable" label on your bioplastics, or simply opt to use reusable/recyclable plastics -- or, one day, hope that the USDA writes guidelines on "organic" bioplastics (and that it's not Jeb Bush's, or George P. Bush's, USDA writing those guidelines). That's the jist of it, and unfortunately the link I've given above isn't permanent; when the article gets archived, I'll change the link.

have some more of that nasty, dirty, unserious populism that nobody ever likes except, well, a lot of people, because it is called populism, after all, and not something else, like "unpopulism."

Courtesy my facebook anti-media consolidation group, here's a website calling on CNBC to do a better job reporting the facts. You know, like they could've done before the economy went to crapville, but didn't. Want to get even more motivated to sign onto this effort? Then witness Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen take Jon Stewart to task for his twenty-minute "cheap shot at business media," whom he believes are just powerless to stop big financial meltdowns even though dozens of reporters (some of whom you've read here!) were warning about the coming meltdown for years. As for Mr. Cohen's suggestion that the big shots losing so much of their own money is evidence that they didn't even know: ever heard of arrogance? Could it be they thought they could play their game forever, even after they were caught playing it? Their "financial instruments" are "the functional equivalent of particle physics" for a reason.

And on that note, PennPIRG helps you demand that AIG stop paying out those clearly unearned bonuses. $165 million in "retention bonuses" after $170 billion in government bailouts? I remember when bonuses were supposed to be a reward for a job unusually well-done; now corporations pay them out (in AIG chair Edward Liddy's words) to "attract and retain the best and the brightest talent." Sound like a wealth-redistribution-upward racket to you? He also mocked the possibility of the "arbitrary" adjustment of compensation by the Treasury Department. Arbitrary? You're feeding at the government trough! Because you're terrible at what you do! I'm not confident Mr. Obama's going to do very much about this -- he's looking for ways to block the bonuses? Why isn't he ready to do battle now? Did he really think a stern talking-to from Mr. Geithner would straighten those AIG guys out? These are rich people. They don't play by normal people's rules. Unless normal people act.

we've got the beat!

You may not be surprised to learn that some recipients of TARP bailout money have also been advocating heavily against the Employee Free Choice Act. That doesn't necessarily mean those companies (including Citigroup and Bank of America) have actually been using bailout money to lobby against legislation, when they're supposed to be using bailout money to get the economy going again -- but it's certainly a question worth asking. CREDO helps you request an investigation into these matters, by both TARP's Inspector General and the Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel that reviews TARP. The whole point of TARP was to get loans flowing again, not do lobbying work. Or go off and get your nails done.

Meanwhile, Senator Feingold has reintroduced S. 482, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, which would require Senate candidates to file campaign finance disclosure information electronically. S. 482 has 28 co-sponsors from across the ideological spectrum, including Sherrod Brown and Lindsey Graham, Jon Tester and John McCain, Dick Durbin and Johnny Isakson. And yet, Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) has introduced the same poison pill amendment that killed the bill last time -- one that would force a non-profit organization to disclose names of all donors of $5,000 or more whenever said non-profit lodges a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee. Anyone else see that as intimidation? The Sunlight Foundation helps you call your Senators to see where they stand on this matter. I'd hate to think some of these good right-leaning Senators only support S. 482 because of Sen. Roberts's amendment.

Finally, as you may know, Jon Stewart put Jim "Mad Money" Cramer through the meat grinder the other night, and it was pretty glorious. I think the entire you're-serious-and-knowledgable-but-you're-throwing-cows-between-your-legs thing was tangential to the real problem, though. I think the real problem is that Jim Cramer argued for stronger government regulation of business when it wasn't fashionable to do so, yet he doesn't seem to think that stance has any "entertainment value." And maybe that's us, too. As a culture, we've decided that things like responsibility and community and public service are all kind of squaresville -- or, rather, we've let the "liberal" media decide that for us. I think that might change, though not for the best of reasons: after almost thirty years of us thinking we could get rich quick and very few of us getting rich at all, responsibility and community and public service are all we've got left.

meet the new boss, et cetera.

H.R. 1409, the Employee Free Choice Act, is back in the House and Senate. Between the actually-stuck-between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place-this-time Arlen Specter and the handful of Democrats (i.e., Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, the Wal-Mart twins) who might cave to big business pressure, I don't know if there's enough support for the bill in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. But let the Republicans filibuster, especially because they'll filibuster based on lies -- H.R. 1409, like its many ancestors, still doesn't "outlaw" a secret ballot but provides the workers, rather than the employers, with the option of doing a card-check election. I'm amused, also, to read about folks talking about union intimidation. These same folks never talk about corporate intimidation, which (as we've talked about here many times) is far worse. Besides, how much of a say should big corporations get anyway, after running our economy into the ground for their own purposes? American Rights at Work helps you call your Reps and Senators.

FAIR points me to this explosion of ignorance, from CNN medical reporter Elizabeth Cohen: "Fifteen years ago you sometimes heard -- actually you heard quite a bit -- people saying: 'Let's have a single-payer system like in Canada. The government is going to be the health insurer for everybody.' You don't hear that as much as you used to. So more people are on the same page more than they once were." "You don't hear that as much as you used to" from "people" because the "liberal" media doesn't cover it. And which "people" are we talking about, anyway? "Important" people, "serious" people, or the American people? Ask the American people and you'll find they're on the same page they were 15 years ago -- it's just not the same page CNN's putative medical reporters are on. The relevant email address -- you know, to ask for accurate portrayal of broad public support for single-payer health insurance -- is elizabeth dot cohen at turner dot com.

Meanwhile, the House passed mortgage cram-down legislation, but in the watered-down form I described the other day. Funny how the financial industry still gets the last word on everything even though they've destroyed the American economy. I wouldn't give the guy who burned down my house the last word on any decision I made after that, but the putative Democrats in Congress still commit such sins, all in the name of bipartisanship or listening to all sides or getting things done. Now, the act still must pass the Senate, and though it seems unlikely that the Senate will be more progressive than the House, one must hope. CREDO helps you demand that mortgage cram-down legislation helps people, not bankers. Who already got $700 billion in taxpayer money with no strings attached. I'm not sure I'm explaining how I feel about the financial industry well enough. Let me know how I can explain myself more effectively.

Finally, Citizens for Tax Justice reports on the tax provisions in Mr. Obama's budget, and finds them wanting -- mainly because the Obama budget won't raise enough revenue even with the repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the top 1% (and such whining about that already!), but also because extending the Bush tax cuts Mr. Obama wants to extend (i.e. almost all of them) will give the bottom 60% of taxpayers less than 20% of the benefits in 2011. Mr. Obama's own tax cut in his own stimulus package was far better. But ultimately, what I find wanting about Mr. Obama's tax proposals is that they relate at all to the Bush tax cuts. Extend these, repeal these, extend this but at this level -- why are we still beholden to the actions of the worst President since Harding if not McKinley? Why do Mr. Bush's stupid ideas still dominate the debate? Why doesn't Mr. Obama, the man who allegedly embodies hope and change, simply propose a new bunch of tax proposals that actually achieve his stated budgetary ends? Why not create a 90% bracket for the top one-fifth of one percent of taxpayers, for example, or raise the personal exemption to the level of the living wage? Those two proposals would do some good. And let Republicans stand and oppose them. Even with the "liberal" media carrying their water, it'll only hasten their demise.

seems like a long time.

Senator Durbin (D-IL) has introduced S. 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009. Broadly, S. 510 would mandate more inspections of facilities and (for the first time) set rules for produce safety. S. 510 would also give the FDA the authority to pull tainted food products from shelves; currently corporations "voluntarily" participate in recalls, because, you know, the last eight years have proven that you can always trust corporations to do the right thing. Now, S. 510 also mandates that "high-risk" facilities be inspected yearly (beginning two years from now) and other facilities every four years, and that seems, to me, to be the sort of compromising you do after you introduce the bill, not before. I've been pressing for yearly inspections of all food-producing facilities. Come on, it'll create jobs! Robots don't inspect food-producing facilities, people do! Consumers Union helps you communicate your thoughts to your Senators.

I didn't see the point in including whistleblower protections in the stimulus bill -- I generally don't like attaching bills to other bills -- but I feel like I've been a real thickhead about it. Of course good folks who blow the whistle on waste and fraud and abuse require protection from government retribution, and of course a stimulus bill, which authorizes the federal government to pay for all sorts of things and which could yet be a hotbed for waste and fraud and abuse, is an appropriate place to include whistleblower protections. So, my bad, and Public Citizen helps you argue the point with your Congressfolk.

Union for Concerned Scientists helps you oppose a proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. Sounds innocuous, right? Well, it's not -- the GNEP would attempt to extract weapons-usable plutonium from commercial nuclear waste. They call that "reprocessing," but I call it a bullseye on your back for terrorists, a way to provoke other nations to start building their own weapons, an incentive for over-subsidized nuclear producers to make more waste, and probably a few other things, too. The Department of Energy (essentially an arm of the Department of Defense since Reagan's day) must take public comments on GNEP, which was a Bush Mobb initiative; said comments are due March 16, and you can use the link above to leave them.

Finally, I'd like to remind everyone that the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network will hold their "Freedom to Serve" rally tomorrow in Washington, D.C. (The rally would oppose the effective ban on gays serving in the military, in case you've just tuned in.) Demonstrators will meet on the West Front Lawn (between the Capitol and the reflecting pool) at noon. You can find more details here, if you can get down there. I'd bet that more folks will attend the "Freedom to Serve" rally than those "Tea Parties" right-wingers are throwing against the stimulus package.

hard times.

Mr. Obama made some commitments on the campaign trail -- no, not about earmarks, no matter what Sean Hannity says, but about trade agreement reform. Yet apparently the Administration has signaled that Mr. Bush's NAFTA expansion deals with Panama, Colombia, and Korea could be brought before Congress. That would seem to me to be the opposite of trade agreement reform. Perhaps Mr. Obama, as a devotee of "rising above partisanship," would recognize that opposition to "free" trade agreements comes from both liberals and conservatives. Perhaps he'd also realize that said opposition is expanding, now that we've had a chance to see what "globalization" has wrought. But he could also be like all the others and just do what big business wants, which is "globalize" more and redistribute more wealth to the super-rich. So we will need to press him.

Finally, someone's got an email tool supporting the return of the Fairness Doctrine, and I should have guessed it'd be the People's Email Network. Opponents of the Fairness Doctrine (repealed in the '80s) say that it had a "chilling" effect on alternate viewpoints. They're smoking crack -- corporations do a much better job "chilling" alternate viewpoints than the government ever did. For example, where do you hear about single-payer health care, the choice of the majority of Americans when polled about health care reform, in the "liberal" media? The Fairness Doctrine shouldn't be the only thing we work on -- media consolidation, LPFMs, and a la carte cable packaging (to name three more "alternate viewpoints" with wide bipartisan support that the "liberal" media hardly covers) are certainly more pressing concerns. But the Fairness Doctrine would do some good if we got it back. It might get you one more view than the government's during a news broadcast -- hell, it might encourage the "liberal" media to do more fact-based reporting, versus the "analysis"-"based" "reporting" they do now. And Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage really have nothing to worry about from a Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine won't stop them from screening calls, nor will it stop them from pretending to have technical difficulties when they're losing an argument.

return of the Italics Hammer! And the Hyphenator! And the, er, as-yet-unnamed ironic quotation marks superhero!

The Center for Constitutional Rights has launched an online campaign calling for accountability and criminal prosecutions of those Bush administration officials responsible for torture and war crimes. Sen. Leahy wants a "truth commission" that would investigate Bush Mobb crimes, but he may be more interested in the "truth" than in putting folks in jail, and I'm such a jerk that I insist on both. Without the ironic quotation marks, that is. Also, CREDO provides a contact tool with which you may call for the impeachment of federal judge Jay Bybee, who authored several legal memos defending torture and warrantless wiretapping and, what do you know, managed to get a lifetime appointment to the federal bench afterward. So much for Democratic "intransigence" on Bush federal judicial appointments.

Rep. Tauscher (D-CA) introduced the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, which would prohibit discrimination in the armed services based on sexual orientation, and SLDN assists you in enlisting your Rep to be a co-sponsor. With two ongoing wars, do we really have room to be bigots? And, as Nathaniel Frank pointed out on The Daily Show last night, we're now taking more and more folks with criminal records while still kicking out six or seven hundred gays every year for the far less heinous crime of failing to deny their biology. To those in our armed services who aren't comfortable serving alongside gays, I say: if you want to win wars, you'll suck it in. I don't think there are that many of them, frankly, at least not anymore.

Mr. Obama has moved to overturn Mr. Bush's rule limiting the information patients can receive on reproductive services (if it "violates" the "religious" "rights" of the person providing services, that is), but of course Mr. Obama must first solicit public comments on the proposed rule change (as with all rule changes). You can bet the forces of "religious" "anti-discrimination" will be sending a bajillion public comments whining about how some health care provider who's against abortion and/or birth control should never ever have to talk about abortion and/or birth control et cetera. Sorry, hypothetical health care provider -- if that's how you feel, you have to find another job, at least as long as abortion and birth control are legal, because your feelings are impacting your ability to do your job, and your feelings are also abridging the rights of patients to get all the information they need to make informed, rational decisions about their future. So Planned Parenthood helps you leave public comments about this issue.

Finally, the Electronic Freedom Foundation now provides an online how-to guide for protecting your private data against government spying. It's a bit involved, but quite worthwhile. And no, having Mr. Obama as your President is no guarantee that warrantless wiretapping will ever stop. For one thing, no Executive gives up power very easily once he has it. For another thing, warrantless wiretapping is now the law, thanks to that gutless Democrat Congress of 2008, and Mr. Obama's job is to enforce the law. And let's not forget that Republicans are very likely one terrorist attack away from a miraculous comeback (which I'm sure they've talked about at party leadership meetings), and I'm sure they're prepared to take Mr. Bush's program of repression-in-the-name-of-freedom much further than he did. No, we are far from out of the woods, and we need to remember that.

the late light-posting notice.

Ah, yeah. I'm going to be away from my computer (and Philadelphia) for a few days, so please patronize the other excellent blogs on my blogroll and/or entertain yourself with the news that Newt Gingrich will consider running for President in 2012. Please remember to visit his campaign website at nochance2012.org.

the revolution will not be RFID-chipped!

Health care's our first topic today, since alerts about health care seem to have bunched up in my inbox lately. Consumers Union helps you support Mr. Obama's budget proposal that would invest over $600 billion in reforming health care over 10 years; if, like me, you think that this proposal is (at best) beside the point, you can always modify the message. Or, you could use Public Citizen's contact tool, which directly supports Rep. Conyers's single-payer health care plan, H.R. 676. Or, if you're the kind of person who thinks sending emails is a waste of time and you have off from work on March 11, you can march down to D.C. and protest outside the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where the AHIP group will be meeting, apparently, to discuss ways of derailing any government-led health care initiative. "Bring your health insurance bills," the article says, "and we'll bring the matches." Health insurance corporations made about $13 billion in profits last year, mainly by nickel-and-diming the folks they serve. If government does that, you can vote them out. What are you going to do if your own HMO does that (as it's done to me just this past week)? No, you're not going to just go get another one, because it's not as easy as that. Anyone who's actually tried that knows that. It's almost as if that were the idea.

The People's Email Network helps you fight a proposed National Animal Identification System (or NAIS). Why? Supposedly, NAIS will help us fight the kind of food spoilage that has resulted in recent salmonella outbreaks by putting computer chips in the animals so their location can be identified on a global positioning system. I say "supposedly" because it actually won't help us fight food spoilage -- since most meat spoilage happens after slaughter, and since the factory farms that give us the most tainted meat get exempted from using RFID chips, and since many recent outbreaks have happened with a corporation's full knowledge, and since most bad meat comes from essentially inbred animals pumped full of antibiotics, and since most of the filth that gets into our systems comes from animal waste (which, presumably, will not be chipped), you're still going to get bad spinach, bad ground beef, bad peanuts, bad whatever. Unless you shop small and local. Oh, almost forgot: the burden of tagging an animal falls much harder on small businesses than on the agribusiness giants who, oddly enough, helped develop NAIS. You'd almost think the whole idea of NAIS is to drive small and in many cases organic farmers out of business. You'd almost think Tha Bush Mobb never left. Tell the Obama Administration that in your letter. I wonder what they'll say. Also, please note that the U.S. House Agriculture Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry will hold a hearing on NAIS on March 11. Maybe you can stop off there, after you're done burning your health insurance bills in front of the Ritz-Carlton.

Finally, hot on the heels of David Vitter's omnibus appropriations bill amendment that would strip Title X family planning funding for Planned Parenthood, we have a Jim DeMint amendment (one of 19, apparently!) that would keep birth control completely unaffordable for those who need it. Wow. Like I say, I don't hate on pro-lifers -- in a society where men could give birth, I'd be anti-abortion myself. But gentlemen like Messrs. Vitter and DeMint are just haters to go after family planning and birth control. Birth control! What on earth is wrong with the government removing barriers to (not even funding) birth control? Government is supposed to get out of the way of an individual's pursuit of liberty and happiness, right? Well, sometimes having a child later is part of that pursuit -- sometimes doing great work for your community and your society comes first and starting a family comes second. Frankly, Mr. DeMint's amendment sounds to me like just another way of saying women aren't anything but breeders. I know better, and so do you. The Capitol Switchboard number is 202.224.3121 -- or you can call your Senator directly, using any of the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page.

"Thieves in the Temple" in a hurry.

Thanks to an alert reader who really ought to start his own political blog soon, I have two readings that suggest that the Constitution was in even worse shape under George W. Bush than we thought: Scott Horton at Harper's says the nine memos the Obama Administration released Monday prove we were effectively a dictatorship between 2001 and 2009, and Glenn Greenwald explains why we, as Americans, have difficulty coming to terms with the horrors our leaders perpetrate.

Also, much mayhem will happen with the Omnibus Appropriations Bill before very long, -- already Senator David Vitter (Sanctimonious Hypocrite-LA) has introduced an amendment stripping federal family planning funding for Planned Parenthood, and Senator John Ensign (R-NV) wants the D.C. school vouchers program to continue even though it's failed in its mission and doesn't respect church-state separation the way the Constitution demands. So check both those links out.

a hazy shade of liberal!

The Office of Management and Budget -- now headed by the capable Peter Orszag -- is soliciting comments toward a review of regulatory practices (culminating, most likely, in a new Obama executive order), and OMB Watch blogger Matthew Madia suggests some specific things for which you might ask. These would include: less interference from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (I'd think if anyone should be "interfering" in the Executive branch's regulations, it's the people, their Congress, and the courts); more public exposure of communications among agencies, the White House, and outside interests; less use of "scientific uncertainty" as an excuse not to regulate (Newton didn't explain everything either, yet bridges still get built); and avoiding cost-benefit analysis as The Explanation for Everything. (The first anonymous commenter also makes a number of terrific suggestions.) Anyway, you might promote these ideas, or you might argue for others, or you might argue for the inherent morality of government regulation (in that it keeps the powerful from running roughshod over the rest of us). The relevant email address is oira_submission at omb dot eop dot gov, or you may fax your recommendations to 202.395.7245. Deadline is March 16.

This action alert from openleft, opposing Blue Dog "modifications" to H.R. 200, the mortgage cram-down bill, is a week old, but the bill has been modified and hasn't been voted upon, so there's still time to do something about it. According to the Hill, the financial service industry objects to H.R. 200, saying it "(allows) too many homeowners to head to bankruptcy courts" and "does not limit the size of a mortgage that can be reduced." Here's the thing: "too many" rich folks already get to renegotiate their vacation homes under current law, while someone in their own house can't, and frankly I think the judge should be the one who gets to determine "the size" that can be "reduced" -- certainly not the financial services industry, whose recklessness led to this crisis. Section 4 of H.R. 200 has been considerably amended since the bill's introduction, and does a lot of what the financial service industry wanted it to do -- you can only get your claim reduced if you sell the house, for example. It's time to call your Congressfolk and let them know they can't get away with this. You might want to remind your Congressfolk that financial service industry lobbyists are about the least popular people in the country right now.

S. 160, the D.C. Voting Rights Act, did pass the Senate, but with a pair of poison pills -- or, at least, you might think they're poison pills. S. 160 now prohibits reviving the Fairness Doctrine, which is a poison pill to me, and fully half the bill now repeals a slew of gun-control laws in Washington, D.C. That, frankly, is not a poison pill to me -- I think Washington's gun control laws are way, way too stringent. In fact, I'm not a big fan of gun control, period. There -- I've said it, and I'm glad. But I'm not a big fan of attaching pet projects to other bills -- S. 160 ought to be about its original purpose, not about anything else. Could it be that the Republicans took the inclusion of a new seat in Utah, an obvious compromise move, as a signal to ask for anything else they could get away with? Nah, they never do that. Public Citizen provides the contact tool. Of course I had to amend it considerably in order to make it reflect my views.

Meanwhile, HHS plans to revise the Bush Mobb rule letting doctors refuse to provide women with information about abortion and birth control. Yet HHS still argues for a "tightly-written" conscience clause (which, admittedly, would reflect current U.S. law regarding medical providers and abortion), versus the right and just thing, which is no conscience clause. I don't hate on pro-lifers, but it's like this: abortion is legal. It's immoral for government to threaten institutions that won't let doctors withhold information on legal procedures. If you don't want doctors to provide information about abortion, make it illegal. Same with birth control, which the Obama administration seems to want to protect. (At the risk of piling on: could the above-referenced Washington Post article be any more biased in favor of right-wingers? Did the Post really need to bury the one source who didn't think Tha Bush Mobb's rule was "middle ground" and then let the source who did think it was "middle ground" have the last word on her? A lot of right-wingers think getting everything they want is "middle ground." We need to stop enabling them.)

UPDATE. "Thieves in the Temple" wishes a speedy recovery for Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE), who will have surgery today after doctors found a spot on his lung.

go tell that long-tongued liar.

Despite vast majorities in the House and Senate and that crucial one-seat majority in the President's office, there's still a pretty good chance Democrats will screw up the Estate Tax. Mr. Obama advocates freezing the exemption at 2009 levels ($3.5 million for singles and $7 million for couples), but one could do a lot better -- one could accept United for a Fair Economy's proposal of a $2 million exemption per individual and then, dig this, introduce a progressive schedule for estates. Since so many estates are, you know, bigger than the wildest dreams of Henry Ford. So UFE provides a petition calling for the preservation, not repeal, of the Estate Tax. UFE would also like you to consider personally lobbying for the Estate Tax in Washington, D.C., on March 10 and 11, but that's only for residents of Kentucky, Missouri, Virginia, North Carolina, and Washington. You can sign up for that lobby day here, or wait for UFE to announce another group of states for its April lobbying push.

Meanwhile, the Sunlight Foundation has launched a campaign, called the "Read the Bill" campaign, which would get Congress to post non-emergency legislation and conference reports on the internet for public comment 72 hours before any House or Senate votes. Read the Bill's news hook, of course, is the stimulus bill which wound up being 1100 pages long and being delivered only 13 hours before votes -- though you may also remember the PATRIOT Act being dumped on Congress literally the night before the vote. I've read a few bills in my time, and I've found plenty that are actually pretty easy to read and plenty more that are deliberately obscure and clearly have something to hide. So let's help drag them out into the sunlight -- and let's make sure there are as few definitions of "emergency legislation" as possible. You may find the petition, perhaps not surprisingly, at readthebill.org.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell Attorney General Holder to compel Karl Rove to comply with Congressional subpoenas. What does Mr. Holder have to do with this, you ask? Mr. Rove, bless him, still claims "executive privilege" in refusing to appear before Congress to answer questions about whatever went down while George W. Bush occupied the Oval Office -- though, you may have noticed, there's a different fellow in that office now. The Obama Administration has been oddly silent about whether Mr. Rove enjoys "executive privilege." Possibly they want to preserve "executive privilege" for themselves, possibly they don't want to assert that "executive privilege" even exists, whatever -- but we might be able to get the Attorney General to compel Mr. Rove's testimony with a little force message multiplication. I mean, why would Karl Rove be afraid of testifying before Congress? I thought he could talk his way out of anything.

readings for the day of March 1, 2009.

Ralph Nader explains how credit unions have weathered the economic armageddon. "They are well-capitalized because of regulation and because they do not have an incentive to go for high-risk, highly leveraged speculation to increase stock values and the value of the bosses' stock options as do the commercial banks," Mr. Nader says. "Credit Unions have no shareholders nor stock nor stock options; they are responsible to their owner-members who are their customers." Further, as a Credit Union National Association economist explains, credit unions, are "portfolio lenders. That means they hold in their portfolios most of the loans they originate instead of selling them to investors, so they care about the financial performance of those loans." All of that must sound very boring to the bold men who've been running roughshod over us for most of this decade. Mr. Nader does sound an alarm, though: credit unions might decide to become more like commercial banks. But that only means their owners -- i.e., us -- need to stay involved in their operation.

Matthew Yglesias takes on the age-old debate over a-state's-job-versus-the-federal-government's job, and suggests that most of the legitimate problems citizens face (starting a business, licensing and zoning) are actually caused by state and local governments. I've argued in the past that state and local governments are better-equipped to handle state and local issues only when the federal government does its job as far as national regulation, but Mr. Yglesias suggests I might not even be right about that. He suggests more citizen involvement in state and local politics would help (or, rather, that our obsession with national politics makes us less able to be effective at lower levels). Plus, his first commenter might be right about Libertarians even though I want to believe better about them.