Nutted by reality.

The government of Bahrain is still oppressing its peacefully protesting citizens, even using tear gas on its Shi'ite majority, which might even skeeve out dictatorships that routinely use tear gas as crowd control. And yet our government still sells arms to the Bahraini government. H.R. 5749, the Arms Sale Responsibility Act, would at least prohibit arms sales to a nation unless the President certifies that the government of that nation isn't violating the human rights of its people. You might well respond, well, all that means is the President can "certify" anything he likes, but H.R. 5749 would also put a President on the spot, as all our laws ought to be doing already. Let a President Obama or a President Romney tell us some government isn't putting its people down when we all know better. Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Congressfolk to make sure we don't sell arms to nations that beat up on their people when their people protest that nation's government. Governments do belong to their people, right?

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Trader Joe's to sell only meat raised without antibiotics, now Change.org helps you do that. I can tell you (again) how using 80% of all antibiotics in America on nominally-healthy feed animals is a terrible idea, how using antibiotics on feed animals makes diseases more resistant, feed animals' descendants weaker, and factor farms less interested in raising feed animals under remotely human conditions -- or I can tell you how Change.org petition author Melissa Lee's ten-month-old daughter endured a horrifying week-long near-death experience thanks to Salmonella from ground turkey. Turns out the strain of Salmonella she had -- which put 136 people in the hospital in the summer of 2011 and sparked a massive recall of ground turkey -- was resistant to antibiotics. Gosh, nobody could have predicted that feeding antibiotics to feed animals willy-nilly would create antibiotic-resistant bugs! Nobody, that is, except anyone who thought about it -- and anyone who doesn't make all their money running a factory farm.