Thieves in the Temple.

oops! I said it again.

Despite our efforts, U.S. Trade Rep. Ron Kirk still thinks he can pass a "free"-trade agreement with Panama. Yet Panama is a major tax haven for corporations (including TARP handout recipients Bank of America and AIG, who have dozens of subsidiaries in Panama). The proposed "free"-trade agreement with Panama would let companies like BoA and AIG challenge any U.S. government attempt to close offshore tax havens -- and guess who'd be paying up in damages? That's right, you, me, and our great-great-great grandchildren. But we can win on this, because plenty of House Democrats and Republicans oppose "free" trade agreements of any kind. And that, my friends, is bipartisanship you can believe in. Public Citizen helps you remind your Congressfolk to oppose the Panama "free"-trade agreement.

Speaking of corporate evil, the House may pass a credit card reform bill this week, but the Senate -- even with one of the Republicans' most devoted members finally throwing up his hands and defecting to the Democrats -- may stifle the people's will, again. That's why Consumers Union helps you call your Senators and tell them what's what. The bill in question, S. 414, would end the most egregious practices of credit card companies -- hiking fees on good customers for no damn good reason, preventing consumers from paying off higher-interest debt first, like that. We've been fighting for credit card reform for a long time now, and I believe President Obama is on board; it's time to get the Senate on board.

Meanwhile, Secretaries Salazar (Interior) and Locke (Commerce) have until May 9 to roll back Mr. Bush's most offensive endangered species regulations -- you remember? The ones that permitted all kinds of corporate aims to get front-and-center consideration over scientific aims when making environmental decisions? -- and CREDO helps you tell them to roll them back. What a sick, immoral, and decadent society we must be that we have to petition the Secretary of Commerce to get our own environment protected, but that's the way things are. And it's not gonna kill us to pretend to play their game. This time.

Finally, I must respond to those who (like Sen. Cornyn) claim that Sen. Specter's defection upsets our "system of checks and balances." You know, besides saying that "checks and balances" refers to the branches of government checking each other's power, not the ability of political parties to check each other. If voters wanted a Republican minority to check the "excesses" of a fairly timid, incremental Democratic party, then the voters would have elected more Republicans. And if voters decide they want a Republican minority to check a Democratic majority's "power," they can communicate their will to their Reps and Senators 24/7. Republicans need to stop whining and start asking themselves how they can earn the right to be a "check" or a "balance" against Democratic power. I'll give 'em a hint: stop acting like insane bastards. And start acting like conservatives. A healthy society needs sane, forceful conservatives to check the excesses of liberals. But our Republicans ain't those conservatives -- they've become the party of nativism, the party of gay-bashing, the party of woman-hating, and the party of corporate power über alles. I'm not asking them to be Dwight Eisenhower. I'm asking them to step up and say things like, the smallest community can make the best decisions. Or this solution is worse than the problem. Stuff like that. I'm really not asking for much. I'm just asking nominal conservatives to be conservatives.

maybe it's time to start catblogging.

No time for a lengthy post today, due to a morning appointment -- just thought I'd say how strange it is to live in a world where Arlen Specter is a Democrat.

Is it stranger than the world where Tom Coughlin actually won a Super Bowl ring? It may well be.

a satisfied mind.

S. 182, the Paycheck Fairness Act, would give the Equal Pay Act of 1963 more teeth. Women still make (depending on the study you read) between 78 and 88 cents on every dollar a man makes -- how would a man feel, I wonder, if the reverse were true? Much of S. 182 simply expands the language of the Equal Pay Act, but S. 182 also reinstates programs that would collect data on how well the Equal Pay Act is working. Hmm. I wonder why such a program was ever ended. Those who would claim that the Act would hurt small businesses should read Sec. 11 (c), which pretty clearly states that it wouldn't. The ACLU helps you contact your Senators.

American Rights at Work helps you call for the firing of Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis. Bank of America took almost $200 billion in bailout money, and then Mr. Lewis paid out some $3.6 billion in executive bonuses while also laying off 35,000 employees. That's a trifecta of evil if I ever saw one. Perhaps not coincidentally, Bank of America has its annual shareholder meeting tomorrow. You may be saying, hey, I'm not a shareholder, but since the bailout, well, actually, you are. And, hell, even if you're not, you still have an interest in reigning in corporate power, or else you'd be reading something else. Also, and I know this is short notice, the SEIU will host rallies in front of Bank of America offices today; you can find one near you here.

Meanwhile, I know tax day is past us, but I realize I forgot to point you (as I do every year) to United for a Fair Economy's Tax Fairness Calculator, which will tell you how much you're getting from Tha Bush Mobb tax cuts. The budget resolution coming out of Congress will probably end Tha Bush Mobb's tax cuts for the upper classes, but it won't end them until 2010, so Tha Bush Mobb's tax cuts are still going on, even as we (as UFE rightfully points out) borrow-and-spend on important spending matters. I've always felt very strongly that I shouldn't participate in Tha Bush Mobb's tax cuts, so I've donated my share of said tax cuts over the last eight years to the Bureau of the Public Debt. If you've got mouths to feed, of course, you will almost certainly feel differently. It's almost like that's the idea.

UPDATE. OMFG. I never in a million years saw that coming, and I do not wear the Horns of Irony when I say that. Arlen Specter is not and has not ever been a moderate or a maverick -- he's been a loyal Republican toadie except when he gets lots of cover from Democrats. And now he's actually a Democrat? Stunningly, given what Democrats have become over the last quarter-century-plus, a handful of Democrats do, in fact, stand to his right (i.e., Landrieu the Lesser, Bayh the Lesser, the Nelson twins, the Wal-Mart twins). I wonder what Richard Shelby -- who is also up in 2010, who switched to the Republicans in 1994, and who actually committed several acts of populism last September -- is thinking today.

you say Captain, I say "wot"?

On Wednesday, Rep. McDermott (D-WA) introduced H.R. 2023, a.k.a. the Sensible Estate Tax Act of 2009. And quite sensible it is! H.R. 2023 would impose a more progressive rate on estates (i.e., would impose slightly higher rates for the larger parts of estates). The bill would also bring back the credit for state Estate Taxes and permit one spouse to use the other spouse's exemption if that spouse dies first. The bill has other goodies, too. I wish it didn't refer to the "State Death Tax" in Section 5, though, because the Estate Tax is not a "death" tax. Otherwise, everyone who dies would have to pay it, versus the less than one percent -- less than one out of every hundred people! -- who actually do pay it. Tools for calling your Congressfolk are in the upper left-hand corner of this page. Call today. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, from the "Irony is Not Dead" file: this happened while I was away. Let me see if I have this straight: Democratic Rep. Jane Harman of California voted to legalize Mr. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, but went on TV last week to complain about being legally wiretapped by the NSA (that is, with a warrant), during a conversation she ended by saying "this conversation never happened." Sometimes all you can say is "wow." It gets better: this NSA investigation had legs -- until then-Attorney General Gonzales cut them off, because Ms. Harman was one of the warrantless wiretapping program's staunchest supporters. Good voters of the 36th District: could you please replace this clown in 2010? Send a Libertarian to Congress if you have to.

penny rants for the day of April 17, 2009.

Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn isn't sure if he'll run again in 2010. The though of his retirement would make me a bit sad, honestly. I've both praised and slammed him in this space, and on balance I hardly ever agree with him, but I've always believed him to be honest and authentic -- he's in Congress because he believes serving the public is a good thing, versus, say, others of his ideological ilk who believe serving the public is a quick and clever way of grabbing money and power for you and your friends. And Oklahoma wouldn't do better than him in 2010 -- they'd elect either some James Inhofe clone or some Democratic "centrist" like Dan Boren or Brad Henry, neither of whom would be worth a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate. I'd love to think some lefty populist in Oklahoma is ready to make a big statewide connection, but I doubt it.

Meanwhile, here's another installment of "Everything Wrong With Cable News in One Clip": Glenn Beck goes on The O'Reilly Factor on April 9 and they commiserate about how tough it is at the top of the ratings heap. It's such a joy to watch two well-off guys talking about themselves on a news program. And what is the news angle, exactly? How persecuted they are. Who could possibly care about the "persecutions" of the unjustly rich? You know, besides people who think all emotion must be rank sentimentality or else it can't be real? And let's make one other thing clear: no liberal waits in any parking lot with a baseball bat for either of these guys. If Glenn Beck really needs a police car in front of his house, I'm sure he's misrepresented the nature of his emergency.

In other news, George Will probably thinks his anti-jeans column shouldn't be taken all that seriously, but he's as dead wrong about that as he is about almost everything else he writes about. If I were looking for a source or a symptom of American "infantilism," I wouldn't point to folks wearing jeans -- I'd point to a media that lets grown men shout at each other all day and/or an economy that rewards gambling rather than work. And Mr. Will can only offer stereotypes to make his case: his gold digger, whose memory we supposedly insult by wearing his garb, was as likely a criminal as not, and the jeans-wearer whose "closest approximation of physical labor" is loading golf clubs represents almost nobody I know. I don't have to worry about "approximating" physical labor, because I do it at my job. But I guess a fellow who can stop column corrections with a single tantrum wouldn't get that.

Finally, everybody please take a moment to mourn the passing of Philadelphia Phillies announcer Harry Kalas, who died this past Tuesday at age 73 -- while preparing for that afternoon's ballgame, it turns out. Very few deaths make me feel old, but this is one of them: I've lived in the Philadelphia area just about all my life, and if I ever watched or heard a Phils game without him, I don't remember it. And his passing probably won't even hit me fully until I try to watch a game and he's not calling it. I'd hoped he'd call Ryan Howard's 500th home run, just like he got to call the 500th home run of Michael Jack Schmidt. Well, he will, just not here.

we have fed you all a thousand years.

Mr. Obama released the four (not three, as I thought) "torture" memos yesterday, and a firedoglake blogger describes the Bush Mobb's "reasoning" in one of them; like so much of Tha Bush Mobb's actions, it prompts open-mouthed silence, almost like that was the idea. Now the ACLU helps you demand that the Justice Department appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate detainee abuse and torture. Mr. Obama often tells us we should be looking forward, not backward. Sorry -- investigating wrongdoing rather requires looking backward.

Public Citizen now provides a website, fairarbitrationnow.org, aiming to fight forced arbitration agreements such as often appear in contracts for employment, insurance, credit cards, and nursing facilities, among others. Some may ask: what's the problem with arbitrating your issues? And aren't the courts clogged enough as it is? The answers, in reverse: a) to the degree that's true, it's irrelevant; b) the companies get to pick the arbitrators, generally assuring victory for them and not you, with no hope of appeal. The Founders would be aghast that some private system of justice has usurped the system they designed to protect all American citizens. From the aforementioned website, you can sign a petition, write your Reps, read a blog, sign up for more alerts, and share your stories about forced arbitration. Public Citizen will also host an event in D.C. on April 29; more details as they arrive.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Arlen Specter has been getting an earful this week about his critical about-face on the Employee Free Choice Act, and you can add to that earful by calling 1.202.224.4254, asking for Sen. Specter's office, and telling him why he ought to work for its passage (as he's done in the past). Workers need tools to fight for a better, fairer economy, versus the one we have now, where CEOs get "retention" bonuses for doing bad work while workers get shafted for doing good work. American Rights at Work would like you to tell them how the call went afterward, so they can track how the campaign's going. All of Sen. Specter's calculations are irrelevant: he's in the Senate to do the will of Pennsylvania's voters, not to weave and bob this way and that to fend off a primary challenge so that he can, maybe, one day, after all that, when he has more seniority, do the will of Pennsylvania's voters.

I'll have a set of penny rants later on today, and then I won't post again for another ten days or so, as I'll be out of town and away from my computer. Congress better be good little boys and girls until I get back, or there'll be hell to pay.

readings for the day of April 16, 2009.

The New York Times informs us, and I know this will come as a tremendous shock to you, that "Officials Say U.S. Wiretaps Exceeded Law." And "law" in this case is the FISA Amendments Act, which gave Mr. Bush everything he wanted in re warrantless wiretapping (and which Mr. Obama supported while Senator, citing "the grave threats that we face"). Who could have predicted that government, already given unconstitutional power to spy on its citizens, would then abuse even that power? You know, besides anyone who thought about it for a minute. The Obama Administration, for its part, said problems with the wiretapping program "had been resolved" (note passive voice). You can take your government's word for that at your peril. (Glenn Greenwald, as you might expect, has more -- plus he reminds us that today is the deadline for Mr. Obama to release 3 more Bush Mobb "torture" memos.)

And now, I offer a few readings to counter this teabagging madness that went on yesterday: first, Citizens for Tax Justice offers a "Q&A for Tax Day" report, in which we learn that Mr. Obama has proposed cutting taxes for 95 percent of Americans (probably closer to 100 percent of yesterday's teabaggers), that the rich do not shoulder too much of the tax burden (especially when you count payroll taxes and sales taxes as part of the tax burden, which you should), and that the richest 400 taxpayers pay only around 17% of their income in taxes. (The report should also note, in its response to part 1, question 3, that President Kennedy's tax cuts were also "supply-side" cuts, just like those of President Reagan and Mr. Bush.) Second, and this'll be shorter, Gallup's Tax Day poll suggests that most Americans think the rich don't pay their fair share of income taxes. Gallup also finds that there's almost no difference between how folks making less than $30,000 and folks making between $30,000 and $75,000 feel about whether the rich pay too little, but that folks making more than $75,000 are significantly less likely to think the rich are paying too little. More than half of those making over $75,000 still think the rich pay too little, however. Maybe this is why Republicans keep losing elections.

Finally, Media Matters reports on an "Emerging Culture of Paranoia" from right-wing media, a phenomenon dubbed "Obama Derangement Syndrome" by a most unlikely authority, right-wing activist David Horowitz. David Horowitz telling his brethren to chill? I never thought I'd see that. Media Matters specifically tabulates "violent, doomsday, and anti-intellectual rhetoric (aimed) at progressives in power, and specifically at President Obama," and, golly, what a list it makes -- 149 items by my count, and I assume it's not a-million-and-49 only because Media Matters staffers can't be everywhere at once. All this over a President who hasn't been sufficiently liberal, frankly -- I shudder to think what they would be doing over a President Ralph Nader.

this is a teabagging-free zone!

As I said yesterday, today is a nationwide call-in day for single-payer health care, and Public Citizen helps you call your Reps and Senators. The politicians don't want to talk about it, the corporations don't want to talk about it, and the "liberal" media don't want to talk about it, but Canadian-style single-payer health insurance is the clear choice of the American people in every survey I've ever seen; if we don't tell our Reps and Senators exactly that, they'll keep pretending not to hear us. They might keep pretending not to hear us anyway, but at least now they can be held accountable. All House Reps and well over a third of U.S. Senators are up for re-election in 2010, so they would have to answer, and fairly soon, for not listening.

Mr. Obama, despite occasionally campaigning on a pledge to review "free"-trade agreements, has shown a disquieting willingness to pursue Bush Mobb "free"-trade agreements -- including one with Panama, which has become a notorious tax haven for American corporations seeking to avoid paying their share. Plenty of countries love it when American corporations call them "home" in order to avoid paying taxes here, but actually pursuing a "free"-trade agreement with one of them is seriously Bush-league. Public Citizen helps you tell your Reps and Senators to put a stop to this madness. And while we're on the subject of offshore tax havens, PennPIRG notes that Mr. Obama's budget proposal closed a lot of offshore tax havens, but Congress still hasn't produced a budget that will do same, so there's still time for you to demand that corporations don't get tax breaks that hurt the commonwealth.

Finally, tomorrow is the deadline for the Justice Department to release the infamous Bush Mobb "torture" memos they backed down from releasing a few weeks back. I mean, I know why Republicans don't want them released -- it'll make them look like thugs and murderers. Why Mr. Obama might want to protect Mr. Bush, though, I don't get. He doesn't really think the Republicans will let him have Ms. Johnsen and Mr. Koh on his legal staff if he doesn't release the memos, does he? If he does, he hasn't learned anything from watching Republicans over the last eight years -- once they smell blood, they keep slashing. Common Cause helps you petition the Justice Department to release the memos. The ACLU helps you do same, but don't sign both. It muddies the data.

a garden to tend.

Tomorrow, April 15, is (according to the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care) a nationwide call-in day for single-payer health care, and Public Citizen helps you call your Reps and Senators. "Taxpayer dollars should go to people, not insurance companies," their email missive tells me, and I couldn't have said it better. Whenever we hear about the free market, we hear about freedom for corporations, not freedom for consumers -- or we get some rubbish about how freedom for corporations equals freedom for consumers, which a brief look at your own checkbook will tell you is not how it is. Health care is the same: it should exist for us, not health insurance companies. If you want to read more about specific Congressional legislation, H.R. 676 is the relevant House bill; S. 703 is the relevant Senate bill. You can, of course, look up both these bills at thomas.

Meanwhile, the news that Michelle Obama has an organic garden at the White House did not sit too well with the Mid-America CropLife Association. Read the letter; it's as well-mannered as whining gets, obviously written by someone well-practiced at pointing to a pile of dung and calling it meatloaf. The letter wants us to believe, apparently, that merely by having an organic garden, Mrs. Obama insults everyone in "conventional" agriculture -- though it says so nicely, of course. Mrs. Obama is almost certainly a lot more polite than I am, but she has every right to say keep your Goddamn hands off my garden! Anyway, CREDO helps you hand out the beatdowns to MACA.

In other news, Time Warner Cable has instituted an interesting pricing scheme in several states -- you'd pay $15 per month to transfer one gigabyte of data, the equivalent of one 30-minute HD television show like you'd watch on Hulu, and then $2 for every gigabyte over that limit. The limit aims to force people to watch cable TV rather than look for cable TV shows online. Time Warner would do better to accept that people would rather watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it and rebuild their business model to accommodate the customers. And Time Warner's high-speed data costs actually went down in 2008, as their customer base increased by 10%. Sheesh. Free Press helps you call for a Congressional investigation. You may want to mention that Rep. Massa's plan to outlaw such pricing schemes sounds like a good idea to you. If it does sound like a good idea to you, that is. It sounds like one to me.

Finally, way down at the bottom of Chuck Todd's April 14 First Read entry, I discover that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal will employ a co-author on his book. Co-authors normally help with the nuts-and-bolts of writing, you know, and Gov. Jindal (not incidentally a Rhodes Scholar) doesn't have a writing problem, so why does he have a co-author? In his own words: "to make sure there's somebody else doing a lot of the heavy lifting... This isn't something that will take a lot of my time." And his party is the party of values? It's just OK to say you don't want to do the work you're supposed to do to write a book? Is it always we-deserve-something-for-nothing with these damn Republicans? Or does he think the "lazy college kid" vote is going to decide the 2012 election? Speaking as someone who has a full-time job and still writes and edits his own blog, I say: don't claim the rewards of doing the work if you don't, you know, do the work. Maybe I'm old-fashioned that way.

readings for the day of April 13, 2009: the wrath of Linkswarm!

United for a Fair Economy asks: "Safe, Fair and Sustainable: Do President Obama's Tax Proposals Measure Up?" Short answer: Mr. Obama could have done a lot more -- like embrace the Institute for Policy Studies's report entitled "Reversing the Great Tax Shift: Seven Steps to Finance Our Economic Recovery Fairly." The "Great Tax Shift" would be that shift of the tax burden from rich to poor over the last quarter-century-plus. So the Teabaggers' protests this Wednesday (pushed vigorously by the "fair and balanced" TV Pravda) are almost three decades late and aimed at the wrong President and the wrong policies. It's almost like that's the idea.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald suggests that Mr. Obama's Guantánamo might be the Bagram, Afghanistan prison camp. Mr. Bush frequently moved prisoners out of Guantánamo to the Bagram camp out of an overly-literal-wonder-why reading of Boumediene v. Bush, but now Mr. Obama has embraced Mr. Bush's reading of that decision, although a George W. Bush-appointed federal judge has already rejected such an interpretation. (Probably the Supreme Court will reject it, as well, in a Justice Kennedy-led 5-4.) You won't hear as much from liberals about Bagram as you did about Guantánamo, but I bet right-wingers don't embrace Mr. Obama's new-found "sense" on the matter, either, any more than they'll praise him for rescuing Captain Phillips from Somali pirates over the weekend. I'd prefer to be wrong about all that, of course.

penny rants for the day of April 12, 2009.

Newspapers are dying, for real, not because "labor costs are too high" or "technology is changing too fast," but because the folks who run newspapers screw up dramatically and then pay themselves like they're royalty. Wow, that was shorter than I thought it would be. I'd hoped to integrate Rory O'Connor's lengthy examination of the New York Times's demands on Boston Globe laborers while it pays its own publishers millions in stock options, as well as Philadelphia magazine's note that the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News publisher paid its poobahs six-figure bonuses shortly before declaring bankruptcy. But I didn't integrate them very well into my argument, I'm afraid. I hope you can forgive me.

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), who I've both praised and slammed in this space, tells us there are socialists in Congress, and when pressed, says there are 17 of them. I don't know if he said 35 the next day, or if he uttered the phrase "card-carrying." If we understand socialism to mean government ownership of the means of production of all goods, then I'm not even a socialist; I'd be perfectly happy to let corporations dictate the sale of non-essentials. Mr. Bachus's district, by the way, is one of the very safest Republican districts in the country -- which may help explain his wild lucidity swings.

six ninja swords of super-action Friday!

Republicans apparently plan to filibuster two Legal Counsel nominations if the Obama Administration releases four more Bush Mobb "torture" memos. But what do Republicans have to hide? They did the right thing these last eight years, right? Surely they can account for their actions in a way that will inspire us and bring us all together, right? In other news, monkeys just flew out of my butt. The People's Email Network helps you demand the release of the four "torture" memos. And if the right wing whines so much about the appointments of Ms. Johnsen and Mr. Koh, then I must conclude that they would make good public servants.

The CCR (the Center for Constitutional Rights, not Creedence Clearwater Revival) helps you demand that Congress amend the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq. (Their White Paper dealing specifically with the War Powers Act can be found here.) This alert comes along at the right time, as Mr. Obama has just asked Congress for another supplemental spending bill of $83.4 billion to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has promised that he'll never ask for another supplemental war spending bill again. I foresee this promise getting broken. I hope I'm wrong.

We were just talking about Mr. Obama's sudden secrecy regarding Mr. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program; now CREDO helps you demand that Mr. Obama "let the courts decide" whether the lawsuit against AT&T for its role in Mr. Bush's illegal and unconstitutional program should proceed. I think the court in question is going to decide that anyway, but we should let Mr. Obama know we're watching him. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Electronic Freedom Foundation (which has been assisting the AT&T plaintiffs) argues that Mr. Obama has actually expanded Mr. Bush's "state secrets" arguments in motioning for the court to dismiss the suit. If, for the sake of argument, the FISA Amendments Act and the PATRIOT Act really do immunize the government from ever being held accountable for its warrantless wiretapping, then obviously the laws ought to be changed -- or, more to the point, they ought to be declared unconstitutional by a court, since any blind, deaf and dumb infant can see they are.

I have three more action alerts that reprise previous action alerts: one from Peace Action West, asking that Mr. Obama negotiate an "Incidents at Sea" agreement with Iran; another from Common Cause, asking you to support the Fair Elections Now Act; and a third from USPIRG, calling for you to join a "donor strike" until the Fair Elections Now Act gets passed. Don't use the first two alerts if you've already contacted your Congressfolk about these things; that muddies the data. As for the third item, I imagine most citizens are on a kind of "donor strike" now, as they don't have extra cash to give to politicians. Myself, I think Sen. Feingold's 2010 re-election effort (to cite one example) warrants my financial support regardless of how crappy the whole system is. Naturally, your conscience may vary.

(Yikes. With my posting frequency, you'd never know Congress has been off all week.)

surprise, pimps! It's penny rants for the day of April 9, 2009.

In a not-tremendously-unexpected development, the Obama Justice Department has defended Mr. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program against a lawsuit brought by AT&T customers -- citing, you guessed it, national security. That's damn Bush-league of them. Apparently the Obama Administration believes that "(d)isclosure of the information sought by the customers, 'which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.'" All this to catch folks who can be caught with Frank Church-style FISA tools, folks who are less likely to kill you than a bathtub fall! No, frankly, national security is not at stake no matter how much whining I hear about it, and I think at some point the Supreme Court will end this madness -- once the Court gets a lawsuit they can't refuse to hear for some other reason, I think they'll rule 5-4 against Tha Bush Mobb and the Obama Administration, given Justice Kennedy's Libertarian streak in re criminal proceedings. And then, finally, can we hear some canaries sing?

Meanwhile, the Obama Justice Department also dropped charges against former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) (and then a federal judge later overturned his conviction) because of rampant prosecutorial misconduct. I think justice has been served here, but what an irritating response from Alaska Republicans -- to demand the resignation of Alaska Democratic Sen. Mark Begich and redo the entire election! I know Alaska hadn't previously sent a Democrat to the Senate since re-electing Mike Gravel in 1974, and I'm also pretty sure that Mr. Begich wouldn't have beaten Mr. Stevens without that week-before-the-election conviction. But maybe Alaska Republicans ought to ask their own party's Justice Department about the extraordinary timing. Alternately, they can ask me: as I suggested a few months ago, maybe the Bush Justice Department went after Ted Stevens because they liked to throw red meat to extremists and he didn't.

Finally, I knew the Obama landslide would drive a lot of right-wingers nuts, but I never thought the madness would reach ace pollster Scott Rasmussen. Yes, I know he gives a lot of space to the likes of Tony Blankley and Michelle Malkin and Larry Kudlow (and Susan Estrich is hardly a counterweight!), but I'd always found his polls to be both instructive and accurate, and I've linked to them numerous times. So why has he changed up his Presidential tracking poll? You know, so that Mr. Obama's "strongly approve" and "strongly disapprove" ratings show up in the graphic but his total approval and disapproval ratings don't? I think the numbers tell you why: Mr. Bush's approval ratings in the Rasmussen daily tracking poll were consistently between 35 and 38 in his last few years; now Mr. Obama's "strongly approve" ratings are around 35. I'd hate to think Mr. Rasmussen would want to trick his more inattentive readers (or, more precisely, encourage his right-wing friends to trick their more inattentive readers) into thinking that Mr. Obama is only about as popular as Mr. Bush. Sadly, that's the conclusion I must accept. And by "sadly," in this instance, I do mean "sadly."

odds and sods.

Free Press still provides a contact page supporting the Local Community Radio Act. The House bill is H.R. 1147, co-sponsored by Reps. Doyle (D-PA) and Terry (R-NE); the Senate bill is S. 592, co-sponsored by Sens. Cantwell (D-WA) and McCain (R-AZ). The bills essentially repeal a section of a 2001 Appropriations bill that a) prescribed minimum distance separations between certain FM stations and b) tied the FCC's hands in ever changing those minimum distance separations. We've since found, of course, that the need for "minimum distance separations" was way overblown by big telecoms scared of competition from smaller stations. I wonder why they'd be scared. It can't be because they all play the same 80 songs every day and can't be bothered to do stories of local interest, right?

The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network now provides a letter-to-the-editor tool with which you may demand that President Obama repeal don't-ask-don't-tell and let gays serve openly in the military. Of course Rep. Tauscher (D-PA) has introduced legislation doing that, but Mr. Obama could also use his Constitutionally-granted power as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces to lift the ban, just as President Truman Executive-ordered racial segregation out of the Armed Forces. And don't let thinky-think righties fool you -- they made the same arguments in favor of segregation then as they're doing now in favor of discrimination against gays. If you're looking for more to say about it, consult this Political Animal post, or any of the many posts in which I've said we can't be bigots and win two wars at the same time.

Mr. Obama plans to overturn Tha Bush Mobb's rule preventing patients from getting complete information about perfectly legal health care options like abortion and birth control, and Planned Parenthood reminds us that the public comment period on that proposed rule change ends today. If you haven't left comments yet, they'll help you do that. And remember: if you work in health care (as I do), and you just can't talk about birth control or abortion or even HIV testing with someone who could benefit from information about these things, then you need to go work in some other field. Unless you have the magic power to make all these things illegal -- a magic power, it turns out, George W. Bush didn't even have.

all-defense Wednesday!

Just Foreign Policy assists you in supporting H.Con.Res. 94 -- a joint production of Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and Geoff Davis (R-KY) -- which calls on President Obama to negotiate an "Incidents-at-Sea" agreement with Iran. You may recall the January 6, 2008 incident involving five Iranian patrol boats and three U.S. Navy vessels; H.Con.Res. 94 would call on Mr. Obama to prevent a reoccurrence of such an incident by negotiating a deal with Iran establishing protocols and standardization of communications between the U.S. and Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. Paragraph 14 of the bill (searchable at thomas.loc.gov; search for "H.Con.Res. 94") lists some of those protocols, and these sound quite reasonable. Of course, the part of America that still gets its shorts in a bunch over phrases like "negotiating a deal with Iran" has probably forgotten that we had similar agreements in place with the Soviet Union back in the Cold War days. But those people have already run the country into the ground; they've earned no veto power over the rest of us, and every reasonable thing we do deals another blow to their power.

Meanwhile, the U.S. still continues its drone-strikes on Pakistan, helping to create thousands of homeless Pakistanis within their own borders. As I've said before, I believe Mr. Bush tied Mr. Obama's hands in this matter -- by putting so many of our soldiers in Iraq, he has to some degree kept Mr. Obama from putting boots on the ground at the Afghanistan/Pakistan border so we can snuff out Mr. bin Laden without blowing a bunch of innocents to kingdom come. But the right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it's the hard thing to do. So Peace Action West helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose more air strikes that harm civilians. With any luck, American boots will bring Mr. bin Laden to the justice he so richly deserves. Because drone strikes ain't winning any hearts-and-minds.

Despite the expressed will of Mr. Obama, Secretary Gates, and (not incidentally) the American people that we cut the waste from our defense budget, Congress plans to push back. There'll be a lot of fearmongering from folks who stand to lose defense boondoggles in their backyards -- connect the dots between paragraphs 5 and 7 in this AP article, for example, and you'll understand the real problem Senator Chambliss has with the Obama team's aims. So True Majority helps you communicate your will via a letter-to-the-editor. (Also -- because I'm all about balance, you know -- note that Winslow Wheeler expresses doubt about Mr. Gates's will to reform.)

in which we discuss things the White Rabbit never dreamed of.

Defense Secretary Gates's budget briefing yesterday suggests that he gets it -- that defense spending ought to, you know, defend the country effectively. My personal favorite line is this one: "Our conventional modernization goals should be tied to the actual and prospective capabilities of known future adversaries -- not by what might be technologically feasible for a potential adversary given unlimited time and resources." He might be telling us that defending against the latter "threat" is a way of sending taxpayer money down the defense contractor boondoggle-hole. So True Majority helps you make sure Congress gets the message. That includes Senator McCain, who's been plenty critical of wasteful defense spending in the past (and usefully so), but who might feel the perverse need to defend Tha Bush Mobb's record of "defending" America.

I'm still not totally sold on H.R. 1826/S. 752, a.k.a. the Fair Elections Now Act. The Fair Elections Now Act would set up a public campaign financing system, would prohibit joint fundraising committees, and would also severely limit coordination with political party committees, and all of these are good things. Yet it would also still permit small, private donations like the ones that made Howard Dean a household name and helped make Barack Obama President. Small donations would suit me in the current system, but in a public system it would keep a loophole open for "bundlers" -- folks like Norman Hsu and George W. Bush's "Pioneers" who were able to organize and collect hard money donations in the millions in the wake of McCain/Feingold. The Fair Elections Now Act would improve on that, I suppose, since the maximum "hard money" donation would be $100 (versus the current $2,300), meaning bundlers would have to work harder, or there'd have to be more of them. See, the bill would create jobs! But seriously, I'd prefer an entirely public system, and I'm going to modify the text in Public Citizen's contact tool to say so. You are free, of course, to use the tool as they made it.

chemical valley.

You may have heard about the August chemical explosion in a West Virginia Bayer plant that killed two employees and caused a scare in Kanawha Valley. You may not have heard that Bayer recently invoked national security in trying to keep information about the accident from the public -- specifically, they claimed protection under the Maritime Transportation Security Act because they have a dock for barge shipments, though the accident happened nowhere near the barge. Thankfully they appear to have lost that battle, but their shameless attempt to hide their mistakes under the cloak of "national security" only demands more sunlight. Toward that end, True Majority helps you demand better chemical security legislation from Congress. Among the things True Majority helps you ask for: allowing states to set stronger security standards than the federal government.

S. 500/H.R. 1608, a.k.a. the Protecting Consumers from Unreasonable Credit Rates Act of 2009, would close loopholes allowing usurious interest rates on payday loans, tax refund loans, car title loans, and the like. For those of you who'd never do any of those things anyway, the bill would also cap all interest rates at 36%, so that credit card companies can't take advantage of differing laws in different states to jack up your interest rate. Wow, this sounds suspiciously like the government actually trying to protect people from financial predators. Free-marketeers will no doubt chafe at a "national maximum interest rate," but the free market should primarily benefit consumers, not corporations. The idea that maximum freedom for corporations magically trickles down to the consumer? Come on, we've all got eyes. Anyway, Consumers Union assists you in supporting the bill.

Meanwhile, Dick Polman tells us why the Iowa Supreme Court's recent decision to permit same-sex marriage is actually a constitutionally-sound decision. (And, as usual, some of the right-wing trolls who infest his site clearly haven't read the article before commenting on it. Thanks again, guys.) Of course, whatever the Iowa state Constitution says, the U.S. Constitution probably doesn't protect gay rights very well, and won't until Congress extends the protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to gays (which it has no plans to do, as far as I know). As for Mr. Polman's headline, I'd guard against the prejudice that Iowa is some sort of backward state -- Iowa is full of populists, always has been, and populists can be mobilized just as easily by the left as by the right. That the left hasn't mobilized them as much in recent decades doesn't change that fact. Hell, even their Republican Senator ain't so bad. Now, if the Utah Supreme Court comes out for gay marriage (so to speak), then we'll all know we've crossed a rubicon.

more sunlight, please.

I've been getting a lot of "pass President Obama's budget" alerts in my inbox, but I haven't passed them along, because I don't work for him. But I'll pass along United for a Fair Economy's take, and give you their contact tool, because their analysis is the best I've seen. In sum: the Obama budget represents a good start on health care/education/clean energy spending, but doesn't do enough to reduce racial wealth disparity and waste and fraud in military spending, plus (the deal-maker for me) it doesn't make enough progressive change in the income tax code. Maybe, like Mr. Reagan, Mr. Obama wants to save the serious tax stuff for his second term. But my job is to demand the right thing now. (And, for laughs, Citizens for Tax Justice analyzes Rep. Paul Ryan's "alternate" Republican House budget, and, not surprisingly, finds it wanting. Republicans will try to put lipstick on any pig, won't they?)

Consumers Union helps you petition President Obama and HHS Secretary-designate Sebelius to mandate disclosure of medical errors. The Institute of Medicine called for mandatory reporting of medical errors (not just the ones resulting in patient death) back in 1999. Guess what happened between then and now? George W. Bush happened, that's what. No, I'm not going overboard in blaming Mr. Bush for the lack of sunlight on medical errors -- Mr. Bush's version of corporate accountability was always "voluntary reporting," which, as we've seen, works very badly. I don't need to mention that medical errors also lay a heavy financial cost on all of us. If we can get a handle on how many medical errors get made, we can get a handle on how to fix them, which saves lives and money. Simple logic, all of it, except to corporatists. I won't even taint the phrase "free market" by associating them with that concept.

The Center for Constitutional Rights helps you support an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis-era ban on travel to Cuba. The relevant bills are H.R. 874 and S. 428. Banning all travel to Cuba doesn't just seem like a way of keeping families apart forever. It also seems like a way of saying traditional, constitutional methods of law enforcement don't work -- are we really so terrible at finding bad actors that we have to ban travel to and from an entire nation? I would think the tools the Founders gave us are good enough, even though Serious People seem to disagree.

played twice.

Public Citizen helps you support S. 540, the Medical Device Safety Act, which would permit folks to sue medical device manufacturers in state courts under state laws. The Supreme Court ruled (in Riegel v. Medtronic) that the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act pre-empted lawsuits at the state level involving federally-approved devices, and I believe they ruled correctly -- I am, like Justice Scalia, a bit of a literalist. But I also believe states should be able to pass tougher laws than the federal government if they think those laws will protect folks better, so I think amending the original law is necessary. I also found amending the text in the contact tool to reflect my views was necessary. (I then had to cut-and-paste it to my Senators' webforms; you may or may not have the same problem.)

The National Whistleblowers Center continues campaigning for stronger whistleblower protections for federal employees, mainly with a contact tool directed at President Obama. Though stronger protections for federal employees didn't make it into the stimulus bill, stronger protections for state and local employees did, and that's good, since they'll have a lot to do with how stimulus money gets spent. Mr. Obama does have that bully pulpit thing going for him, and he's still quite popular despite what the "liberal" media might think, so appealing to him for help still has some use. I'm not even convinced that he doesn't care. Not yet, anyway.

it only takes a minute.

You may have heard that AT&T and Comcast have been burying public access TV stations in their networks -- Comcast put said stations only in their digital tier, and AT&T's U-Verse crammed all public access stations into one channel. With the Big Newspaper outlets all in financial trouble brought on by their own commitment to short-term profits, public access channels can serve an important function in communities -- but not if the Big Telecoms get their way. Luckily, the city of Lansing, Michigan petitioned the FCC to declare that the Big Telecoms treat PEG (public/educational/governmental) channels the same as the commercial basic TV channels. So the FCC is soliciting comments, which Free Press helps you leave. Do it quickly, though: the commenting period expires today. (Yeah, I know -- I only just found out myself. But it only takes a minute.)

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suggested on TV Pravda the other day that he wouldn't act very quickly to repeal don't-ask-don't-tell, so SLDN helps you go over his head and tell Mr. Obama not to wait. I mean, we're fighting two wars and we're discharging gays for no reason other than their gayness while lowering standards for other applicants. Besides, as the SLDN's most recent email missive reminds me, "people who speak Arabic, Urdu, Pashto and Dari aren't exactly easy to come by." I get tired of hearing Serious People suggest that we can't act now because "we've got a lot on our plate." No: people raising families in this economic armageddon have a lot on their plate. People doing their damndest to protect-and-serve in Iraq and Afghanistan have a lot on their plate. Serious People have nothing better to do than to do the right thing, yet they hardly ever do it. It's almost like hardship builds character or something.