Keystone Progress helps you tell Congress not to cut Medicare and Medicaid. I know, it sounds like something we've told them a thousand times already, but we've got reason to tell them again: part of the debt limit "deal" from August forced Medicare cuts (along with defense cuts) if the Joint Committee on Stealing the People's Wealth didn't come to an agreement. Said Committee didn't come to an agreement, so the cuts -- specifically, cuts of Medicare payments to health care providers, which will induce some providers to stop taking Medicare -- begin in January of 2013. It has been highly amusing to watch Republicans talk about "getting all those defense cuts back one day." Hey, dungheads: if you want to keep your jobs, you'll try to get all the Medicare cuts back. And if Mr. Obama actually does veto any attempt to keep the cuts from taking place, then work the magic of bipartisanship and get a big enough margin to override his veto. These things are not very difficult.
Meanwhile, word on the street is that the FCC, currently evaluating media ownership rules, plans to leave media consolidation rules in more or less the same shape they were in 2006, when the FCC permitted, for the first time, cross-ownership of broadcast and newspaper media. Tell me why we bother electing Democrats again? The FCC fell down on net neutrality, and now that Byron Dorgan and Trent Lott and Chip Pickering are gone from Congress, they plan to fall down again on media consolidation? They're forgetting something: we ain't gone nowhere, and we drove Messrs. Dorgan and Lott and Pickering to do what they did to stop media consolidation back in the day. So Free Press helps you tell the FCC that we want less media consolidation, not more. Four corporations own most of the broadcast media in this country, and the result ain't better news, not with fewer reporters, fewer reports, and more PR propaganda presented as "news." The Founders could've told you that, but some people only seem to care what the Founders thought (or, more precisely, "thought") about abortion, gay marriage, and social welfare programs.
In other news, you may not know that Starbucks gift cards come with a surprise -- a forced arbitration clause preventing you, the gift card holder, from ever suing in a court over your gift card, or joining with other consumers in such a suit. You may well be saying: what's the big deal? It's a gift card! The big deal is that Starbucks could slap on hidden fees after you buy the card (just as they slapped hidden fees on certain bags of coffee). How do you feel about hidden fees again? Real good, right? And Starbucks could actually make a lot of money slapping hidden fees on millions of cards, meaning that if you want to stop that sort of dishonesty, you have to band together with other cardholders to sue. But Starbucks doesn't let you band together -- if you want to fight them, you'll have to fly out to Seattle to make your complaint with a corporation Starbucks pays to arbitrate its cases. Got a guess how that'll turn out? What the hell is the problem with taking matters to the courts, anyway? These aren't "frivolous lawsuits," not in a society where four out of five lawsuits are filed by corporations. So Public Citizen helps you tell Starbucks to abandon its "forced arbitration" clauses.
Finally, Southampton Academy's football team features a female starter, Mina Johnson, who garnered four sacks from the linebacker position in a Sept. 22 game -- but had to sit out two other games because rival football teams threatened forfeits if she played. Southampton's team is in Virginia, and the two other teams came from the North Carolina Independent Schools Athletic Association, which, guess what? Doesn't allow girls to play on boys' teams, even if the school doesn't have a corresponding girls' team. Of course the NCISAA's rule isn't fair, but does anyone else notice that the NCISAA rule gives teams an excuse to keep good certain football players off the field? You know, certain football players who can get to the quarterback from further away than most players and who just happen to be female? So the U.S. National Women's Tackle Football Team, in cooperation with change.org, helps you tell the NCISAA to change its rules so that, at the least, girls can play on boys' teams when there's no comparable girls' team. Certainly the NCISAA wouldn't want anyone to think it was using the rule to gain an unfair advantage on teams like Southampton.