Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning whistleblowers, corporate transparency, and D.C. statehood.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would allow all federal whistleblowers to get jury trials. Before anyone you know responds with any pablum about "frivolous lawsuits," remind them that whistleblowers in the private sector already get this protection under the law, and intelligence community whistleblowers do, too. You could, if you like, also tell them that arguments about "frivolous lawsuits" tend to rely on anecdotal evidence (and bad anecdotal evidence, at that), and that corporations file about four out of every five lawsuits in America. But you might do better telling them that whistleblowing isn't so much about spotting corruption and getting paid as it is about putting yourself and your family through hell just to do the right thing. Most folks wouldn't want to be whistleblowers if they knew how unemployable they'd become -- but they also wouldn't disrespect the folks who do go through it, the way the "frivolous lawsuits" crowd does.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that -- but word is the House will vote on it this week, so act soon. The Corporate Transparency Act would force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners," i.e., the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence. And that will force banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors -- who all use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing -- out into the light. There's a reason these hoodlums all start corporations in America, and that reason is that America is (per a Global Financial Integrity study from 2014) the second-easiest nation on Earth to start an anonymous corporation, behind Kenya. And don't let right-wingers get it twisted -- you have a right to anonymous speech, but you don't have a right to anonymous money-making. Why? Because money isn't speech -- money is property.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your government that Washington, D.C. deserves statehood. Why? Because they want it, because they deserve it, because not giving them statehood deprives them of the representation in Congress that all other Americans have, and because the arguments against statehood are stupid. Of course said arguments generally boil down to NO MORE DEMOCRATZ IN TEH CONGRESSEZ!!!!!, but Jesus Mary and Joseph Republicans should try winning some damn elections in D.C. before whining about it. Nobody whines about Wyoming returning Republicans to virtually every state and federal office year after year! Funny that we mention Wyoming, because the argument that "Washington, D.C. is too small" falls apart when you realize that Washington, D.C. has more residents than Wyoming. And the argument that "Washington, D.C. is so badly-run that it doesn't deserve statehood" is a pile of dung, too -- particularly when you remember that Congress constantly meddles in its running. Anyway, remember when that U.N. official reported that some parts of rural Alabama had the worst poverty he'd ever seen in the developed world? Did we argue for taking away Alabama statehood then, in the face of obvious governmental failure? No, we did not.

Action: concerning social media, school lunch shaming, and Bahamian refugees.

In the wake of reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hobnobbing with notorious right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro -- ostensibly in order to understand why right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's "bias" against them! -- Free Press helps you tell Mr. Zuckerberg to adopt vigorous rules defending its users from abusive hate speech. So far Mr. Zuckerberg has hidden behind the First Amendment in his effort to avoid adopting such standards, but the First Amendment doesn't protect us from Facebook; it protects us from our government, and Facebook, as a publishing platform, has no obligation to publish every single noxious utterance of every single asshole in order to adhere to a notion of "free speech" -- or, at the very least, no obligation to make these utterances public. And if he wants to know why right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's bias, he doesn't have to ask Ben Shapiro -- he can ask me. Right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's bias because whining is all you can do when you can't win arguments on the merits. You're welcome.

Meanwhile, you've heard horror stories of schools sending collection notices to families who can't afford school lunches, or putting wristbands on their children so everyone can identify them by their debt? Sounds like something you'd have seen in Nazi Germany, right? Well, H.R. 3366/S. 1907, the No Shame at School Act, would put a stop to school lunch shaming, would prevent school districts from handing over parents' private info to debt collectors, and would streamline the certification process for school kids so that simple misspellings (for example) won't lead to school lunch debt. You'd think civilized people would know better than to make a kid's life miserable just because his parents don't make a whole lot of money -- so I guess that means the people who would do such things aren't particularly civilized. Civilization isn't just something we have to maintain, after all; it's also something we have to earn. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop school lunch shaming by passing the No Shame at School Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to allow Hurricane Dorian refugees save haven in America, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Hurricane Dorian slammed into the Bahamas last month, leaving over 70,000 good Bahamians without homes, but our President, of course, cited the possibility of allowing "some very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very very bad drug dealers" into the country, as if America has never had a vetting process for refugees, ever. Gosh, nobody ever said you have to be stupid every single time you show mercy; why do you suppose some people would like to link the two in your mind? And why do you suppose our President would want you to think we have always just let people into America willy-nilly? It couldn't be because fear is the only weapon he has left, could it? It's not like he can point to a whole lot of good works as President (or as a human being, really) and persuade people to support him that way. But we're better than him, so let's do better than him.

Action: concerning all kinds of corruption.

I know, this Administration's a total crapshow right now, but before we give the proper amount of attention to their drama, please use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Our House already passed all these bills, and our Senate has no business ignoring our will on voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, respectively. It's a shame we ever have to remind our Congressfolk that the people actually have concerns other than the miserable dramas Our Glorious Elites force upon us day after day, but nobody said our duty as citizens was easy. And they need us more than we need them.

And now, to the drama: you can also use the aforementioned tools on this page to locate your House Reps' phone numbers, so you can tell them to impeach our President; if you're still not entirely sure why you should do that, David Swanson gives us approximately 25 reasons. And yes, our Administration's Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, did actually say that our President withheld foreign aid to the Ukraine so Ukrainian investigators would get dirt on Democrat servers; as for the fact that he tried to walk it back later, well, you can't unring a bell. But worse than that, he said you are stupid if you think there's a problem with that! I'm not sure how else to interpret "I have news for everybody: get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy." If you are proud of your "worldly" cynicism, you probably find this argument persuasive, but if you find a civilization's moral standards worth upholding, and you demand that our politicians be better people than they are, you won't. Cynicism is evil, and evil demands only one response -- a fight to the death.

Finally, in the wake of the news that the next G7 meeting would be held at a property owned by our President, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our President's habit of profiting from his office as part of their impeachment effort. Our President has since changed his mind about holding the next G7 summit there, but I'm old enough to remember when politicians would avoid such corruption merely because it looked bad, and violating our Constitution's emoluments clause actually is bad, and you don't need a polisci degree to see why: when our President decides to hold a world meeting at one of his own properties, he's showing us that he doesn't care so much about us as he does his own pocketbook. Again, it's a shame I have to spell any of this out -- and it's a bigger shame that our President has spelled it out himself by saying, out loud, that he's not supposed to "dislike" the Saudis because, after all, they spend a lot of money at his hotels. But corruption doesn't smell better just because folks laugh about it more than they used to.

Around the table: time for another exciting installment of "how much is enough?"

David Brooks is getting far too much credit for saying "the only plausible choice" in a race between our President and Elizabeth Warren "is to support Warren." No one gets to talk about a "wave of insular intolerance coursing through parts of the American left" without noting that there are Nazi wannabes out there right now cracking heads, and I'm long past tired of all his cherry-picking of the data (he says Ms. Warren is "one of the few Democrats who could actually lose" based on one poll showing her losing six points with independent voters after a very narrow set of polling questions). You know what's worse, though? His dreaming about everyone-getting-together-and-getting-things-done when the 2016 election instructed us that voters are beyond tired of that scam. David Brooks: even when he's right, he's wrong.

Steve Wamhoff at ITEP says that "Depreciation Tax Breaks Are a Problem that Deserves More Attention." "Accelerated" depreciation, for example, lets corporations take a larger part of the deduction of a piece of equipment at the beginning, which means less tax revenue to pay for the services you've come to expect from your government. Services like, you know, police, libraries, and firefighters. And a lot of corporate tax breaks are about "reward(ing) companies in return for making investments they would have made anyway," which is, you know, stupid. I mean, they already get to expense these investments; how much is enough?

Gregory Shupak describes how our "liberal" media got "Alarmed" by an "Imaginary U.S. Pullout from Syria." This means that what he did was actually worse than reported: it not only leaves the Kurds to die, but doesn't get us out of the Middle East! Why, this guy's almost as good at getting important stuff completely wrong as Bush the Lesser was! It's clear our President framed his withdrawal the way he did to get some more anti-war votes in 2020, which might work, but at least he won't get them from anyone who's actually paying attention, like us. Sadly, when our "liberal" media gets it wrong, they divert our attention.

I think it's actually a big deal that former Ohio Governor/Presidential aspirant John Kasich thinks our House should impeach our President, regardless of the fact that he's not in office at present, and regardless of the fact that Mr. Mulvaney's press conference was so off the rails. But I feel compelled to note that we would be wrong to describe Mr. Kasich as a "moderate" merely because he demonstrates the presence of a soul with some consistency; we would more accurately describe him as a conservative -- which, of course, means you would better describe the folks who call themselves "conservative" on the TV as "reactionary" (if you value civility above all) or "bat-guano insane" (if you don't).

Finally, Hillary Clinton insinuates that Russia is "grooming" Rep. Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate in 2020 so our President wins re-election. Jesus Mary and Joseph does she really think she lost in 2016 because of Jill Stein? Mrs. Clinton lost that race because she didn't miss an opportunity to tell you she would ignore the people's will in favor of Our Glorious Elites' will -- which didn't stack up well against her opponent's railings against immigration and "free" trade, even -- and if Democratic party poobahs get their way, they'll make the same mistake in 2020 with a Biden or a Buttigieg, and a Tulsi Gabbard 2% showing won't be the reason they lose. Once our current President proved that an unqualified and unhinged asshole could win an election, the palette of the possible widened in America, so in 2020 we certainly don't need to hold ourselves hostage to another center-right can-win let's-work-with-arsonists candidate to win. Besides, you don't win big unless you bet big.

Action: concerning government spying, marketing to children, and clean water.

You may recall that our FISA court revealed that our FBI routinely conducts unauthorized searches of NSA-collected data; we have already told our Congressfolk this week that the NSA shouldn't be collecting that data without a warrant, but we also need to tell Congress to close the "backdoor loophole" that allows our FBI to access the information, as Defending Rights and Dissent helps us do. You know, a lot of good folks labor under the impression that the "grave threats we face" (I just can't help quoting then-Senator Obama explaining why he'd done a 180 on government spying!) are somehow unique to our time, and I could be glib and just say "read a history book," but I'd rather just say that the values that sustain us -- you know, things like courage, doing unto others, speaking truth to power -- are not unique to our time, but have been part of our heritage for uncounted years, and when we abandon those values in the name of "security" or "fighting grave threats," then we die the thousand deaths of the coward. So let's stay on our Congressfolk to help us preserve these values.

Meanwhile, the Children's Online Privacy Act (or COPPA) helps parents protect their children's privacy by restricting the data corporations can harvest from children and limiting how they use it. But naturally the big corporations look at kids as money pots, whose data they can use to empty their parents' pockets faster, and so they're pressuring our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to loosen up COPPA -- and that pressure may be working, as evidenced by our FTC's decision to review the effectiveness of COPPA several years before the law requires it, and one commissioner's statement that the review would "tak(e) care of children and data both," when the law only requires them to help take care of children, data being, as you know, a thing that does not require care. Always they pretend that things are just as (or more) important as people! But they're not, and we don't have to take this lying down: we can let the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood help us tell our FTC to do their legally-mandated job to protect children's privacy from the corporations that would exploit them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its own proposed rollback of coal ash storage rules, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. "What would be worse than over 100 toxic coal ash storage sites lying in high-risk flood zones?" their latest email missive asks. "Answer: loosening the laws that protect our health and communities from contamination by those sites." Yeah, you knew where that was going, too, didn't you? Coal ash is the byproduct of coal plants -- one might do better calling it coal poop -- and contains carcinogens and other dangerous chemicals. And this coal poop can very easily leech into good Americans' drinking water, as the folks in Roane County, TN and Eden, NC can attest. But then again, clean drinking water is only the bedrock of good health care in America; it's not money or power, which are literally the only things this Administration cares about. Power corrupts, and money only makes you miserable in time, but clean water will always sustain us -- if we will but work to keep it.

Action: concerning shareholder power, adoptee citizenship, copyright trolling, and paid family leave.

Apparently because no regulation that serves the public interest can be allowed to survive under this abomination of an Administration, our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) is mulling whether to roll back rules that would inform shareholders of big business decisions involving pollution, campaign contributions, and offshore tax evasion. I guess their reasoning (such as it is) is that shareholders don't care about anything but money, which is certainly true of our President, but as I keep saying, our President is not America, and I bet you won't even find very many Republican-appointed judges who don't understand that shareholders make decisions on where to invest for a variety of reasons -- a thesis proven by the very existence of shareholder resolutions aiming to get corporations to pay their executives less, or address climate change. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our SEC to scuttle its own efforts to make corporations less accountable to their shareholders. Protecting shareholders from corporate abuse is, after all, our SEC's very reason for existence. That's not my opinion; that's the law.

Meanwhile, our Administration has been deporting immigrants who were adopted by American citizens but never got citizenship when they were adopted. What, you thought adoption automatically led to citizenship? So did I! Our Administration never tires of looking for these little loopholes in the law, do they? All so they can look "tough" when the truth is they are not tough, they are weak -- only weak people care so much about looking tough, and only strong people possess the quality of mercy, particularly when it concerns folks who have spent almost their entire life in America. Hence H.R. 2731/S. 1554, the Adoptee Citizenship Act, would expand citizenship to immigrants adopted by Americans under certain conditions (i.e., the immigrant got adopted before turning 18, and was present in America at the time of adoption). You'll noted that, at this writing, the House version of this bill actually has more Republican sponsors than Democratic ones, which makes it what? An actual bipartisan bill! 18 Million Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Adoptee Citizenship Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to reject H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act. The CASE Act would push "small claims" into an "alternative" court which of course isn't a real court of law, but a "Copyright Claims Board," not staffed with judges but still empowered to levy up to $30,000 in fines if you (for example) share something copyrighted in a meme on Facebook. And dig Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) claiming that the $30,000 cap limits the scope of this bill to "truly small claims"! You think $30,000 is "small"? I suspect not. I suppose we can't expect much better from the political party whose current standard-bearer once claimed to have gotten his start in real estate with a "very small loan" -- of a million bucks! So now is the time to stand up -- not just for the rule of law, which guarantees us our day in court, but also for the notion that $30,000 isn't a "small claim." It's like our leaders don't understand a thing about regular folks, which is why we teach them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Most working Americans can't take time off to take care of themselves or a sick loved one, or a newborn baby, without taking a risk they'll lose their jobs or fall into a debt hole, but the FAMILY Act would create a national paid family medical leave program, and if you make $50,000 annually, you would pay a mere $8.33 monthly to enjoy its benefits. We could debate whether that tax rate (two-tenths of one percent paid by worker, the same amount paid by employer) should be progressive -- that your rate should be higher the more money you make -- but that alone wouldn't be a good reason to withhold support, particularly in one of the few rich nations that doesn't have any paid family leave for workers, unless employers are generous enough to give them or unions are canny enough to negotiate them. So let's get it done.

Around the table: featuring new installments of "why our President didn't make his tax returns public" and "why his supporters will never come around."

ProPublica has seen tax records from four of our President's properties, and says they "show major inconsistencies." How hard they must have bit their tongue! At least one source puts it more directly: "It really feels like there’s two sets of books -- it feels like a set of books for the tax guy and a set for the lender." This isn't that big a surprise, I suppose, if you recall the actions detailed here. I guess our President's votaries would call all that smart, but the rest of us would call it evidence of criminal behavior.

Gregory Shupak points out how our "liberal" media orchestrate a "False Balance Between Fascists and Anti-Fascists." Long story short: fascists are evil, antifascists aren't. Long story somewhat longer: fascists routinely resort to violence, while antifascists resort to violence as a last resort -- which can come more quickly than you might like, since fascists overtly want to create a world that's devoid of non-white people. A lot of things in this world are actually pretty simple -- but "liberal" media "balanced" coverage makes it more complicated. Why, it's almost like that's the whole idea.

Ho hum, L.A. police officers search non-white folks for contraband more often than white folks, but white folks are actually likely to have more of it. Oops, sorry, I forgot: we are never allowed to criticize police officers or else they just won't be able to do their jobs. At least, that's how a lot of punditoids act on TV! I mean, imagining police officers as so weak they can't do their jobs right if you hurt their fee-fees is actually quite insulting to them. Also, too, your First Amendment free speech rights exist pretty much exactly for this purpose.

Remember when our President signed an executive order purporting to keep lobbyists out of his Administration? Well, surprise, surprise, his Administration has employed four times as many lobbyists in three years as the previous Administration did in its first six. Which means he's doing about eight times as badly as his predecessor! You probably already suspected this, having witnessed our EPA and Department of Interior get headed up for lobbyists. What is the right-wing reaction to this news? Oh, probably something along the lines of YOU ARE TEH TRAITURZ!!!!!

Virginia Eubanks at The Guardian discusses the new frontier in debt harassment: "zombie debt collection." Here's how it works: our government decides you collected too much money in food stamps 30 years ago, sends you a notice alleging they told you about this all those years ago and because you didn't respond then you can't get a hearing now, and then garnishes your paycheck or tax refund, or your children's paycheck or tax refund. And are they going after big corporations that haven't paid their taxes? Of course not! They're going after poorer working families, like a boss. (Is it too much to ask that we turn "like a boss" into an insult?) Also, too, you know how well debt collectors tend to keep records, which is to say not well. And you won't be surprised to learn that the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform of 1996 begat this particular problem.

Finally, a friend pointed me to Julie Goldberg's 2017 article explaining the difference between "Christian" and "Christianist." Long story short: it's the same as the difference between "Muslim" and "Islamist" -- the former is a religious person, and the latter is a person trying to force their religion upon you. Long story somewhat longer: you can't reach any of our President's "Christian" supporters with any of Jesus's actual teachings because their "religion" isn't Christianity, it's tyranny -- and in America, certainly, it's also white racist tyranny. (I hate to pile on, but Christianists tend not to go to church a whole lot, either, and you can see why: if they did, they might meet people who can show them a better way to be.)

Action: concerning detainment, banksters, and wildlife.

Our Administration loves looking "tough" on immigrants, but H.R. 2415/S. 1243, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, would force our government to adopt actual standards for detention that are as good or better than American Bar Association's proposed standards from 2014. The bill would also allow our government to break contracts with private prison corporations that repeatedly violate these standards; I'd prefer never to use private corporations for detainment, but this bill would still improve matters. And the bill would mandate inspections of detainee facilities and investigations of detainee deaths in custody. These are reasonable, even mild, changes -- we should still work to prevent corporations (and "businessmen" like our President cough cough) from importing immigrants solely to drive wages down, and if we should do that, we'll better be able to show mercy to those running from real harm, but this bill will improve lives. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to advance the cause of civilization by passing the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo must have thought they'd done enough PR work to make everyone forget that they opened accounts for customers without their permission, because now they're apparently "forgetting" to close accounts their customers have asked them to close for a few months, which results in negative accounts and significant fees. Nice work if you can get it! Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to investigate Wells Fargo for its alleged wrongdoing. You might be wary of doing so, knowing how thoroughly our current Administration has gutted the CFPB, with the explicit purpose of making it "friendlier" to banksters. Why, that's like a cop saying he wants to be "friendlier" to burglars! And this, from the "law and order" Presidency! But I digress, and anyway, if this wrongdoing is as easy to diagnose as it sounds, our CFPB might want an easy victory to "prove" it's still working on our behalf. That would be cynical of them, but the result would be the same if they weren't so cynical -- money saved for customers, and justice done.

Finally, you know that we designate certain areas of the country as wilderness areas so that we can protect wildlife -- but what about the wildlife that has to migrate in order to survive, but finds highways and buildings in their way? H.R. 2795/S. 1499, the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act, would provide for endangered and threatened species by protecting new and existing wildlife corridors, a matter that'll become far more important for those species as climate change drives them to move to new habitats. And in the wake of the U.N. report saying that a million plant and animal species are in danger of extinction right now, well, that matter's actually pretty important. Folks who worry that WE'LL NEVER BUILDZ ANYZ OFZ TEH THINGZ EVAHZ AGAINZ!!!!! would do well to ask whether what they really want is never to be bothered by anything other than self-interest. Really, man-in-the-mirror moments such as these can be very instructive. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect threatened species by passing the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act.

Action: concerning free speech, government spying, and corporate "personhood."

You've no doubt heard by now that hundreds of thousands of good Hong Kong citizens have taken to the streets in protest of their government's attempts to pass a bill that could result in innocent citizens being extradited to China -- boy, that sure smells like corruption, doesn't it? -- and you may also have heard that Hong Kong's government has used violence to try to put down the protests. But you may not have heard (though you probably won't be surprised to hear) that Hong Kong law enforcement has been using American "crowd control" weapons to do it. Hence H.R. 4270, the Placing Restrictions on Teargas Exports and Crowd Control Technology to Hong Kong Act (or PROTECT Hong Kong Act), would prohibit the sales of the sorts of things police use to stifle good people's free speech rights -- and everyone has free speech rights, whether their governments recognize that or not. So Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to support free speech and peaceful protest in Hong Kong by passing the PROTECT Hong Kong Act.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell your House Reps to let Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act expire for good. Section 215, as you know, is the section that permits our government to hoover up financial, medical, and phone records without a warrant or even evidence of wrongdoing; it's the nightmare scenario dystopian writers warned us about for decades, and the fact that we're talking about it doesn't mean "it's not that big a deal," but only means dystopia doesn't arrive all at once or announce itself once it's here. (And, you know, Muslims and folks of color would probably disagree that "it's not that big a deal" in the first place.) But with even our National Security Agency opining that they don't really need all that information to do their work, and with Congress mulling USA PATRIOT Act reauthorization as we speak, now's a pretty good time to make our will known to our Congressfolk. I mean, anytime is a good time to make our will known, but we'd be fools to pass up good opportunities.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment that would help us rein in the campaign finance spending that lets big corporations have more say in our democracy than people do, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The Constitutional amendment in question is H.J.Res. 48, better known as the "Democracy for All" amendment, and would state explicitly that "(t)he rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only," and that "(a)rtificial entities" like corporations would be "subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law." That ought to help bring corporate power to heel, since corporate power is a problem right-wingers seem loathe to admit even exists. They pretend that since our Founders weren't very much concerned with it, we shouldn't be, either, but we're Americans, which means (among other things!) that we're not slaves to sophistry.

Action: concerning civil rights, impeachment, and law and order.

First things first: use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Yeah, I know, there's an impeachment effort going on, and we'll get to that, but our House has already worked to pass good legislation supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, and your Senators should work to pass this legislation, too. And if our President vetoes all of it, as I'm sure he would, then let him be accountable for it. It comes with the job, after all. Too often we excuse the inaction, or the bad actions, of our leaders. Let's stop doing that.

Meanwhile, you can use the aforementioned tools on this page to find phone numbers for your House Reps, too, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President for his wrongdoing. Don't call your Senators, though. They're supposed to try the impeachment. It's annoying to hear some of our Senators currently running for President call for impeachment, because that's rather like a judge demanding an indictment. But other Senators get their role wrong, too: Sen. Alexander said last week that though what our President did was "inappropriate," an impeachment proceeding would "only divide the country further." At least Mr. Alexander wasn't Administration crony Roger Stone, who said that impeachment would bring about "a spasm of violence and insurrection in this country like you’ve never seen" and that "a politician who votes for it will be endangering their own life." I don't know about you, but when evil people try to scare me into doing the wrong thing, that only makes me twice as resolved to do the right thing. Which is to call my Rep and tell them to impeach this arrogant, ignorant, unprincipled, sorry excuse for a President.

In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to hold Administration officials who ignore their subpoenas in contempt. Like me, you probably thought the law-and-order issues were pretty cut-and-dried, but apparently not! Apparently if our 46% President believes he can't be touched while in office, or that the impeachment proceeding against him is somehow "illegitimate," he can direct his underlings to defy legal writs to show up in court and testify! Actually, he can't do that, or else anyone could simply refuse to comply with the law, but Democrats in the House seem to be answering his defiance with a shrug, and though you might argue that we could interpret this collective shrug as a shrug of confidence, well, come on, these are Democrats we're talking about -- they're either weak, or they're actively collaborating with evil while merely appearing weak. But that's why we're here: to provide the steel in their spine so they can do the right thing.

Around the table: just because it's free speech doesn't mean it's not whining! And other lessons.

Our President received a well-covered setback in court last week, concerning his ability to keep Congress from seeing his tax returns, but he also got smacked down in two other rulings. A federal district judge stayed his rule denying green cards to folks who've ever received certain forms of public assistance -- calling the rule "simply a new agency policy of exclusion in search of a justification" -- and another federal district judge declared unlawful the "national emergency" declaration he used to fund a vanity border wall, and said he'd block the plan after getting input from both sides. Victories are hard to come by, but they do sustain us through tough times.

Georgia Southern University students burn books by a Latina author after a "contentious" Q-and-A she held there. Book-burning is as much constitutionally-protected speech as flag-burning, but I won't linger too long on that point, nor will I linger too long on how kids look like Nazis when they burn books, or the university's apparent ignorance of their in loco parentis rights -- rather, I'll linger, as is my habit, on the fact that anyone who burns books because they think they should have all the say about everything is a whining, diaper-loaded brat loudly advertising not their "toughness" but their insecurity. You know, like our President.

FAIR finds most of our big "liberal" media news organs strangely uninterested in studies finding that our military is a major driver of climate change. I'd long supposed that our obsession with building and moving was the main driver behind climate change, but I hadn't actually considered that our obsession with war-making plays a comparable role. And just as more efficient drive trains in automobiles got cancelled out, emissions-wise, by an increase in their construction, our military's honest efforts to combat climate change is likely to be cancelled out by the next 47 wars our politicians want to fight. And our "liberal" media loves war, so you won't hear about it from them.

On the heels of our surprise withdrawal from Syria/leaving of the Kurds to destruction at the hands of Turkey, Stephen Zunes at TruthOut reminds us how often our government has used the Kurds like a wet dishrag. And not just during the Persian Gulf War, either! We've also given Turkey truckloads of help in oppressing their own Kurdish population, all 15 million of them. (Mr. Zunes doesn't address it here, but the Kurds also did fight for the Allies in World War II, despite the impression our President may have given you. They fight the Nazis, they fight ISIS -- what does a brother have to do?)

Finally, in case you were wondering, Thom Hartmann at TruthOut reminds us how our Founders felt about impeachment. Long story short: our Founders obsessed about corruption, and how much damage an "executive" or "magistrate" (they weren't calling him "President" yet) could do. You probably already knew that in a general sense, but it's good to have it spelled out. Elbridge Gerry -- who ultimately didn't sign our Constitution because it didn't (yet) include a Bill of Rights -- spells out the need for "the necessity of impeachments" most plainly: "(a) good magistrate will not fear them. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them."

Around the table: from government spying to right-wing whining.

We have just learned that a FISA judge ruled a year ago that our FBI has been improperly searching through all the personal data our NSA has been hoovering up. And THAT! Is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! Who could have predicted that data collected about alleged foreign perpetrators would sweep up so much data on Americans, and that law enforcement would use that data? Who besides "anyone who thought about it for a minute," I mean? And you like how our FBI calls their investigations "assessments" so they can justify not following our Constitution and getting warrants?

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut reminds us that "Abandoning the Kurds is Not an Anti-war Move." You probably didn't need that reminder, being a subtle enough thinker thanks to your Master of Science at The School of Politicians Constantly Lying to You, but maybe you know someone who's got too much else to think about who needs to hear that the only two choices in foreign policy are not "stay in Syria forever" and "let all the Kurds die." (Dig, also, the National Security Council source who says our super-awesome greatest deal-maker ever President got "rolled" by Turkey.)

Book-length study reveals that, for the first time ever, the 400 richest American families pay a lower average tax rate than the bottom half of American families. BUT WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH 47 PERCENTZ WHO PAYS TEH NOTHINGZ!!!!!, say the haters. Well, the study takes into account all the things that right-wing trope doesn't, not just by including state and local taxes, but by including "indirect taxes" like business licenses and drivers' licenses, which cost the same for everyone and thus represent a larger percentage of working families' income than they do of the super-rich's income. Now cue right-wingers moving the goal-posts and cherry-picking irrelevancies.

You heard someone say Elizabeth Warren lied about being told to leave that teaching job she had years ago because she was pregnant? Well, they're wrong. The minute I read that Ms. Warren's employer actually voted to renew her contract and accepted her resignation with regret, I said "well, that doesn't actually prove that no one told her she shouldn't be working there because of her pregnancy"; I'd say it's gratifying that people have to go this far to prove her wrong, but lies travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on, as they say, and our super-corrupt President did successfully attach the "corruption" label to Hillary Clinton, so he'll also try to attach the "liar" label to Ms. Warren, even though he's the biggest liar we've ever seen; she'll be harder to take down, because she actually has a real agenda, unlike Mrs. Clinton, whose only agenda was victory. I guess right-wingers like lies OK as long as they're big. Or "bigly."

Finally, Rudy Giuliani, who almost fled the country the other day, compares his and our President's predicament favorably to the Salem witch trials, and thankfully Bess Levin at Vanity Fair corrects the record about the Salem witch trials' supposed "fairness." When will right-wingers finally tire of their heroes constantly whining? They won't, because they characterize their own whining, and the whining of their heroes, as legitimate, and they characterize the legitimate grievances of folks who aren't on their "team" as "whining." They are truly irredeemable, and I leave their souls to God.

Action: concerning human rights in Iran and Yemen.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell the government of Iran to release human rights lawyer/activist Nasrin Sotoudeh, then Amnesty International still helps you do that. Iran threw Ms. Sotoudeh in prison back in 2011, ostensibly for "spreading propaganda" and "conspiring to harm state security" but more likely for representing opposition figures in court; Iran threw her in jail again in 2018, this time supposedly for "espionage," "dissemination of propaganda," and "stoking corruption and prostitution," but also for two other charges, "being a member of a human rights organization" and "disparaging the Supreme Leader of Iran," which you'll easily recognize as charges snowflake governments throw at people. The latter prison sentence is likely really over her activism against compulsory wearing of the hijab (or head covering) in public (hence "prostitution," I suppose). If Iran throws people in jail for that, they deserve all the bad PR they get from the rest of the world. So let's help them change their ways -- or give them what they deserve.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that our Congress is finishing up its annual defense spending bill, and annual appropriations bills are often our best opportunity to force our government to do right by us, so Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to include amendments defunding our involvement in the Saudi/UAE-led war on Yemen. We've gone extensively into why we shouldn't fund this war: because we're aiding and abetting in the committing of war crimes in Yemen, because the Houthi rebels targeted by the Saudi/UAE coalition are some of the best al-Qaeda fighters around, and because the Saudi/UAE rationale for war has always seemed like inside baseball at best and petty absurdity at worst. Why should we antagonize a President who has already vetoed some form of disengagement from the war on Yemen four times this year? Because duty is duty and will is will, and we have a much better chance of having our will done if we communicate it to our Congressfolk, even when it's not convenient for them to hear it. And of course, we should not worry about antagonizing the President. He should worry about antagonizing us.

Action: concerning banksters, whistleblowers, and abortion.

Another year, another attempt to "reform" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by privatizing them, which would effectively end their efforts to help low-income working families own homes. This idea didn't originate with our President, but he's sure glommed onto it, as he seems to glom on to all bad ideas eventually. Of course, privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would not "modernize" them, unless you have a very low opinion of modernity indeed, and it certainly wouldn't "stop another financial meltdown," because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't cause that meltdown to begin with. Bankster greed and hifalutin financial instruments caused the meltdown, and it'll cause another one -- particularly since hedge fund managers (whom our President supposedly hates, but you don't believe that, because it is to laugh) have grabbed themselves a big chunk of both corporations, and are now hoping to fully add them to their casino economy. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Meanwhile, with whistleblowers all in the news these days, S. 2529, the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act, would (as its title suggests) better protect those whistleblowers who expose corruption in the financial services sector of our economy. The bill would clarify that the protections of our laws extend to whistleblowers in commodities and securities (our Supreme Court apparently being unclear about that), would speed up the processing of whistleblower claims, and would beef up funding to the CFTC Consumer Protection Fund. If we'd had stronger whistleblower protections in 2008, the banksters might not have come so close to completely destroying our economy as they did. It's not beating a dead horse to keep reminding you of the 2008 bankster meltdown, since Congress too often seems to forget it happened. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good American citizens who expose fraud and corruption by passing the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act.

Finally, with an overturning (or, at least, a crippling) of Roe v. Wade within our Supreme Court's grasp, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act. States have been putting up hurdles to women getting abortions since the Republican wave of 2010, but this bill would prevent states from putting up these hurdles, which include forced ultrasounds, unnecessary tests, medically-inaccurate information, third-trimester abortion bans, forcing women to explain why they want the abortion and denying them if the state doesn't find their explanation "good enough," and absurd physical plant requirements for hospitals (this final item coming up before our Supreme Court shortly, in June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee). Like I said yesterday, rights are rights regardless of how legislatures "feel" about them, and no one makes a man write an essay on why he wants a vasectomy before letting him have one, do they?

Action: concerning cable fees, abortion, and public lands.

Tired of surprise cable TV fees that inflate your bill by over $35 a month? Well, H.R. 1220/S. 510, the TRUE Fees Act, would essentially outlaw those fees by forcing cable corporations to include all of them upfront in a base subscription price. The bill would also let you get out of your cable contract without penalty if your provider pushes some new fee on you. Big cable corporations of course oppose the TRUE Fees Act, and they might well be telling you that TEH BIG GUMMINT FORCEZ UZ TO IMPOSEZ TEH FEEZ!!!!!, but you should know that they've lied about that in court before, and you should also consider that such an objection really doesn't matter, since the TRUE Fees Act requires transparency. And if the big cable corporations call it a "rate-fixing" maneuver (which it's not!), they should be prepared for your reaction to be we can only hope! Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support cable customers by passing the TRUE Fees Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1692/S. 758, the EACH Woman Act, would repeal the Hyde Amendment that has (except in very limited circumstances) prevented our government from funding abortions over the last 40-plus years. The problem with the Hyde Amendment is that it essentially makes a matter of right (you have a right to have an abortion, after all, per our Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade) into a matter of means -- folks who have the right to have an abortion but can't afford abortions can't get them (if Medicare, Medicaid, or other government-subsidized health insurance won't help them). I guess for some folks that's a feature, not a bug, but a right is a right for everyone, not just for the people who can afford it, and none of us should use the powerless as a political pawn in order to gain a small advantage. Do I particularly want abortions to happen? Of course not! No one does! But a right is a right, regardless of what we "want," and we don't ask of rights that they never challenge us. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support abortion rights by passing the EACH Woman Act and thus repealing the Hyde Amendment.

Finally, H.R. 4273/S. 2467, the Transit to Trails Act, would fund more public transportation buildout to public parks, so that everyone can enjoy the public parks we all pay for with our taxes. After all, why should only people who can afford cars get to visit public parks? Why shouldn't everyone? Remember: anyone whose answer would include words like "riffraff" is an elitist, and elitism is un-American. At least, that's how I was brought up. And anyone would would answer with a statement like THEY GET TEH GOODIEZ WHY CAN'T I!!!! very likely isn't counting the goodies they already get with their tax dollars. Seriously, if you pay taxes, as prescribed by law, you should get to enjoy the things your taxes buy. And folks who ask WHEREZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!! should note the $10 million annual price tag, which ain't much in the context of an annual $4 trillion federal budget. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve our access to our public parks by passing the Transit to Trails Act.

Around the table: from Kentucky to Syria, and guess where we find more hope?

Hazard (KY) job program helps give recovering drug addicts work, pay, and "a sense of purpose" as they help build affordable housing. "Research is starting to show what advocates have known anecdotally: having a job makes a significant difference in long-term addiction recovery," but try getting a job without skills, or with a criminal record. The program helps half a dozen folks annually gain construction skills and get jobs; maybe a few of our billionaires could break off some of their largesse and fund more programs like these, particularly in rural areas like Hazard? Or do we have to tax them harder to get it done? It's a question worth pondering.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media repeatedly insinuates that Messrs. Sanders, Warren, and Biden for being "too old to be President." Mr. Sanders's heart attack is obviously worth contemplating when deciding whom to vote for in a Democratic primary, but writing off all septuagenarians as physically and mentally unable to do the job is an awfully convenient argument given that the Democratic nominee will almost certainly be one of three septuagenarians. Maybe the one who takes selfies for four hours after a rally? And our "liberal" media never seem to mention the 73-year-old who currently occupies the Oval Office. Maybe that's because he constantly acts like a spoiled brat.

Also ho hum, Republican megadonor/notorious "America Firster" still manages to get H1-B visas for foreign workers even as our President cracks down on said H1-B visas. Of course, our President also uses undocumented immigrants wherever he can, and his votaries excuse that, because BUILDZ TEH WALLZ!!!!!. When Charles Baudelaire said that genius was the ability to hold two disparate ideas in the mind at one time, I don't think he was actually describing hypocrites or their enablers.

Uh oh: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has apparently violated a court order preventing her office from going after some indebted Corinthian College students, and could face jail time. You'll remember Corinthian College as the for-profit college chain that went under in 2015, but not without putting a lot of its students in a big debt hole first; the Obama Administration set up a program to help some of them get loan forgiveness, but this Administration's Education Department has virtually (and unlawfully) shut down the program, resulting in students incorrectly getting billed for loans and even getting their wages or tax refunds garnished. Again: you can't just skimp on your duty under the law just because you don't want to do it, or because you don't believe it's your duty under the law.

Finally, I've been loathe to go after our President for pulling out of Syria, since I'm no fan of our presence in the Middle East, but I find it hard to believe that our only two choices were "stay in Syria indefinitely" or "let the Turks kill all the Kurds," especially with this supposedly uniquely talented "deal-maker" in charge. Naturally our President has opened himself to charges of corruption, given that he has, well, business in Turkey that he doesn't have with the Kurds. One sad part of all of this is that now even more of our descendants will say this is the way the world is and there's no sense in trying to change it. We can help avert that catastrophe by making this President into the poster child for How Not to Be.

Action: concerning anti-Semitism, corporate welfare, and endangered species.

You may have heard that a group of racists have begun compiling a "list" of Jewish critics on the Telegram chat platform. You may not have heard that this project was apparently too racist for both 4chan and Twitter! The compilers claim they don't intend any violence, but of course they haven't explained what other purpose the list could have -- it couldn't be a mere attempt to alert folks about who their critics are, because it only has Jews on it; gosh, you'd think fighting a World War over this crap would have given contemporary folks more instruction. But nobody said winning and securing victories over evil was easy, so Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell Telegram to take down the anti-Semitic list. Again, this is a public list, and Telegram's own terms of service indicate they're a lot tougher on public utterances than private ones, and again, our First Amendment does not protect terroristic threats (and what else could this public list of Jews be?).

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 1100 -- which supporters call the "Energize PA Legislative Package," but detractors call the "Ethane Cracker Welfare" bill -- would indeed give corporate welfare handouts to manufacturers of petrochemicals and fertilizers. They act like not paying taxes on your expenses isn't enough! Does HB 1100, in its purported effort to "energize" our power grid, include any tax breaks for solar, wind, or geothermal corporations? Of course not -- it's almost like the reactionary state legislature only cares about handing out welfare to corporations that pollute more. Not to pile on, but ethane crackers (which are "petrochemical," after all) generally turn fracked gas into single-use plastic, and nobody thinks we really need more of that clogging up our land and water. Hence both Penn Environment and Food and Water Watch help you tell your state Senators to fight pollution and corporate welfare by rejecting HB 1100.

Finally, in the wake of our Administration's regulatory changes designed to gut the Endangered Species Act, H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the Protect America's Wildlife and Fish in Need Conservation (or PAW and FIN) Act, may give us yet another clumsy legislative acronym, but it would essentially nullify these recent changes, and prevent any other Administration from using "economic factors" to decide how it's going to enforce the Endangered Species Act. You know, there really aren't that many people who complain about "burdensome" regulations; mostly CEOs complain about it, because it forces them to spend some of that money they'd earmarked for gilding the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. They don't put it like that, of course -- they say it's a "burden on small businesses," as if "small businesses" go around killing endangered species with drilling projects! The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect endangered species by passing the PAW and FIN Act.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, impeachment, and Social Security.

Happy Monday, good peoples! It's time, once again, to call your Senator and tell them to support voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And none of them get to play the well-the-bills-aren't-getting-voted-on card, because they could use the prestige of their offices -- that which remains, at least -- and publicly pressure Mr. McConnell into holding a vote on the bill. Of course, none of them really want to do that, since he's making himself look bad on their behalf, knowing that if he allows a vote on these bills and they all vote against them, they'll look bad. But again: their 13-dimensional chess games don't matter; only our will matters.

After that, you may want to get your House Reps on the phone and demand that they support an impeachment inquiry against our President. I haven't advocated for his impeachment up until now, partly because the President I really wanted impeached (that would be Bush the Lesser) did worse, partly because I didn't want the Russia investigation to distract us from our duties as citizens, and partly because, well, I wanted him to twist in the wind until his own vanity and ignorance buried him. But when a man admits to trying to leverage foreign aid into a foreign investigation of a political opponent, then Congress would be derelict in its duty if they did not impeach. The fact that he's tried to un-admit it in the following days means nothing. Really, though, impeachment is too good for him. Whatever happens to him, one thing must happen: I want our descendants to point to this man and say see this guy? Don't be him. If you're gonna be like him, you deserve to be alone until death.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 860/S. 629, the Social Security 2100 Act, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would accomplish much of what we've been trying to accomplish for years: it would put Social Security on sounder financial footing (not that you should believe any hysteria about the "cost" of "entitlements"!) by expanding the income that can be taxed into the system, and although I think it's actually rather odd to exempt income between $132,900 and $400,000, that's still a big improvement. The bill would also expand benefits to ensure our seniors have a more dignified retirement, and would index future cost-of-living increases to a measure of inflation that would actually reflect the bills seniors face -- and not the stupid "chained CPI," which would assume that if a price rises too high, folks will just switch to something else! Seniors have fixed costs (like medicine) they can't just "switch" their way out of! So let's pass the Social Security 2100 Act and treat our seniors better.

Around the table: concerning public banking, internet freedom, our IRS's priorities, our President's options, and small farmers.

State of California enacts public banking legislation. If I were the author of this article, I might not have run from noting that the only other public bank in America is in North Dakota right to TEH CRITICZ SAYZ!!!! in paragraph six, at least not without noting that North Dakota survived the end of the fracking bubble mostly because it has a public bank which even that state's Republican-dominated government has made no move to dismantle. And dig the fool comparing public banking to the DMV (dude, 1985 just called, it wants its right-wing propaganda back) and saying public banking "just doesn't work," as if he's oblivious to the fact that private banks nearly destroyed this economy not that long ago.

In case you were wondering why the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the FCC's nefarious net neutrality repeal: the judges agreed that the FCC had "broad authority" to reclassify (or, perhaps, re-reclassify) broadband services as "information services" as long as they could come up with a convincing argument to do so. But I still suspect a lawsuit challenging the FCC's process in soliciting public comments would succeed, and this Buzzfeed report, in part describing efforts to jam the FCC's inboxes with fake anti-net neutrality comments, could provide plenty of ammo toward that effort.

ProPublica finally hears back from the IRS on why it targets poor folks disproportionately vis a vis rich folks, and you won't like the answer: it's too expensive to target rich folks. On one hand, thanks, Republicans who gin up BS scandals to justify cutting IRS funding, and thanks also, Democrats, for going along with Republican drama! On the other hand, the IRS should know that great reward only follows great risk. And Democrats who run campaign ads on how the IRS goes after poor people oh never mind these are Democrats we're talking about.

Austin Sarat at The Conversation asks the horrifying question: "Could President Trump be impeached and convicted – but also reelected?" His answer: yes, since our Constitution is silent on the matter of what a man removed from office could do afterward -- specifically deferring that question to the Senate, in the course of its trial of the House's impeachment. My answer: yes, if Democrats spend 2020 doing victory laps and don't stand for anything regular Americans want. You know, kinda like they did in 2016.

Finally, I'm as displeased as anyone else that our Agriculture Secretary told Wisconsin dairy farmers that small dairy farms may not be able to survive in a world dominated by factory farms -- seriously, a dairy farmer about to cut his own wrists doesn't want to hear that our economy doesn't guarantee him a livelihood! -- but I am puzzled that Secretary Perdue seems to think the rise of big ag corporations is a relatively recent development, as if Hollywood didn't make half a dozen films about this very subject all at once in the mid-'80s. I feel compelled to note, of course, that his pessimism about small farmers is a bit odd, coming as it does from a public servant who has some power to protect small farmers from oblivion. Such pessimism certainly isn't part of the American can-do spirit.

Action: concerning drug policy, fossil fuels, and family planning funding.

H.R. 3884/S. 2227, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, would remove pot from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act -- which would make pot legal all across America -- and would also provide for reinvestment in communities most affected by pot arrests and would help folks serving pot-related sentences get them commuted or reduced. Frankly, the MORE Act's sentencing reforms and community reinvestment provisions aren't as direct (and therefore not as effective, I would think) as those of H.R. 1456/S. 597, the Marijuana Justice Act, but the Marijuana Justice Act's lead sponsor, Sen. Booker, is now a co-sponsor of the MORE Act. The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the MORE Act, but they allow you to edit the message, so nothing stops you, really, from using it to demand more effective drug policy reform legislation like the Marijuana Justice Act. Be sure to read both bills at Congress.gov beforehand, though; they're not long.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell General Electric to scuttle its plan to build coal plants across the planet. They must be figuring that since coal doesn't make any money in America anymore -- and that's not because of some imaginary "war on coal" but because of natural gas that's now much cheaper and renewable energy sources that are getting there -- they can make money building coal plants overseas. They might even be figuring that some of these countries would be lucky to have a coal plant! But that would be short-sighted and self-serving of them, since those countries would be even luckier to have renewable energy systems, which are just as easy for a corporation to build anymore. You have to wonder why GE doesn't do that! It couldn't be because, as Ralph Nader used to say, you can't own the sun and the wind, could it? I kid, of course -- the stew of short-sightedness and self-servingness I've already identified explains everything quite well. It's why I like people better than corporations.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to stop handing out Title X funds to notorious anti-birth control and anti-abortion centers, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. I expect this HHS effort to die in court one day -- the law authorizing our government to disperse Title X funding mandates that it fund comprehensive family planning services, not services that withhold information about abortion for supposed "conscience" reasons. Seriously, if that's your conscience, you're in the wrong business! I feel compelled to note that it's not necessarily conservative to oppose abortion -- Barry Goldwater used to say that the uterus was one more thing our government shouldn't meddle in. But a real conservative who opposes abortion wouldn't direct public funds to anti-abortion centers like this; a real conservative would amend our Constitution to outlaw abortion. You have to wonder why they don't.

Action: concerning government spying, climate change, and endangered species.

Demand Progress helps you tell your House Reps to repeal Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which allows our government to collect information (like financial transactions and medical records) on good Americans who've done not a damn thing wrong. Hopefully we're running out of people who would protest but you could become a terrorist one day, you never know! Sadly, the surest way to run out of those people would be to have more of them know their government is spying on them, because we all think we're completely innocent and it's only those people who need our government to keep tabs on them. But when you give government that power, you know they're going to have their own definition of "those people," and that definition is going to skew black and brown and Muslim. You may not be black, brown, or Muslim, but this is America, so someone you know and love probably is, and you shouldn't wait until they get caught in our government's dragnet before you do something about it.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that several big asset management corporations have begun to push big corporations to address climate change -- but BlackRock hasn't, and has, in fact, undermined shareholder resolutions aimed at getting big corporations to change their ways and pollute less. Shareholder resolutions are about the closest thing investors have to democracy in the corporate world (though it's certainly not preferable to democracy!), and even a resolution with substantial minority support can get corporate boards to do the right thing, but BlackRock, with all the billions it controls, doesn't seem to be on board, and that may be your money tied up in there if you have a pension or retirement account somewhere. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell BlackRock to start pushing corporations to do more to combat climate change. Don't believe them if they tell you retirees will suffer if you make us do the thing! Hopefully you recognize that as a) hostage-taking and b) not at all the American can-do spirit.

Finally, H.R. 2245, the Ceasing the Importation of Large Animal Trophies (or CECIL) Act, is of course named for the endangered African lion killed by a hunter back in 2015 -- you remember Walter Palmer, the most hated man in America that week? -- and it would help prevent more "trophies" from coming into the United States. If you're hung up on the notion that an animal that's endangered over there might not be endangered here, please note that our Endangered Species Act does list animals from other nations. And you'll also want to attend Sec. 3 of the bill, which would mandate that our Secretary of the Interior certify, before handing out any hunting permits, that the a potential trophy animal's country of origin "adequately provides for the conservation and monitoring for that species." If we enact and enforce such protections, we'll have fewer rich jerks showing off their trophies of vulnerable animals. So Environmental Action helps you tell your House Reps to protect endangered species by passing the CECIL Act.

Action: concerning hate speech, pollution, and paid family leave.

Facebook may have instituted a ban on explicit racist hate speech, but they seem to be having a little trouble enforcing it; that couldn't be because Facebook makes millions of dollars from ads promoting hate speech, could it? I suppose they'll tell us that they have a big platform and it's just very hard to find every instance of hate speech, but that only means their executives can break off some of their billions and hire more people to do the job. And remember what Dean Baker taught us: that Facebook is really a publishing platform, and thus should be subject to the same rules every other publishing house has to follow (though the law doesn't see it that way); they don't have a "right" to put up all manner of hate speech any more than ABC has to accept every single idea for a sitcom they get. Hence Free Press helps you tell Facebook to do a damn sight better at keeping racist pablum off its platform. (While we're at it, we might as well let CREDO helps us tell Twitter to do the same, since Twitter's brain trust, such as it is, doesn't even seem to find it a priority.)

Meanwhile, another day, another Obama-era anti-pollution regulation our current Administration wants to roll back because Obama! This time, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) wants to make it easier for coal corporations to spew out coal ash, because what's a little undrinkable water when there are already absurdly high executive salaries to plump up even further? Of course, our EPA will accept public comments on their proposal until October 15, so Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to reject its own proposal to roll back coal ash protections. Coal ash puts arsenic, lead, and other carcinogens in our groundwater, which makes folks sick; just ask the good citizens of Roane County, TN, where a coal ash pond ruptured in 2008, spewing forth over a billion gallons of coal ash slurry, or the good citizens of Eden, NC, where a pipe running underneath a Duke Energy coal ash pond ruptured and spewed nearly 40,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River. They're the folks our EPA is supposed to protect from pollution.

Finally, H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act, would, as you may know, establish a paid family leave program in America, to be funded by a 0.4% payroll tax to be divided equally between employer and employee, and no, that's not "4 percent" or "40 percent," in case our "liberal" media tells you that. People who make that "mistake" on cable news programs should be fired! Sorry, I've seen that too often to just let it go. This means that if you make $50,000 annually, you'd pay a total of $100 annually to support a program where everyone who works (including yourself!) can get family medical leave benefits. $100! That's $8.33 a month! That's a little over five junior bacon cheeseburgers at Wendy's! I don't like how we always sacrifice so that Our Glorious Elites don't have to, but this is hardly a crippling sacrifice, and (unless you're self-employed) you won't even be footing the whole bill out of your paycheck. Hence CREDO helps you tell our Congressfolk to support working families by passing the FAMILY Act.

Around the table: impeachment is too good for this clown! And other lessons.

Remember when our President said he wouldn't cut Medicare? Well, apparently he's planning an executive order that would expand privatized "Medicare Advantage" health insurance plans -- which would likely result in Medicare benefit cuts for everyone else. Remember when Republicans used to whine about President Obama's executive orders? AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!!!, they squealed. Good times! The idea that our President will save a socialist government program from "socialism" is laughable, and should only remind you that the whole idea of Medicare for All is that everyone gets the "advantage."

Justice Department Inspector General's report on a week-long power outage at a Brooklyn jail in the middle of winter "seems more preoccupied with the episode as a public relations blunder than as a humanitarian disaster," says Nick Pinto at The Intercept. And that's exactly why we're a sick, immoral, and decadent society: we constantly grope at the "optics" of something evil, rather than just getting up and calling that thing evil. Also too, we don't think of America as a place where "humanitarian disasters" occur, though we should, since they do.

Former Bush Mobb advisor opined back in January that our President won't be impeached and removed from office, but will resign in exchange for immunity for himself and his family. I'd rather let him twist in office than cut that deal -- a deal that'll likely never happen anyway simply because of the number of people, at state and federal levels, you'd have to get on board with it. And if the economy is going to be as bad in 2020 as Mr. Steinberg says (and I'm far from convinced it will be that bad), what leverage would our President have to cut a deal? Why, even the damn Democrats might not take that deal!

We learn from Connor Sheets at ProPublica that sheriffs in Alabama are releasing prisoners on "medical bond" when they get sick so the state won't have to pay any of their medical bills. Naturally at least one Alabama DA is worried that prisoners who get out on medical bond will break into your house, and one sheriff also seems to think prisoners can get "a dozen honey buns" on commissary. Are we sure it's the inmates who are sick? And note well that if we a) get rid of cash bail and b) expanded Medicare to include everyone, we wouldn't be faced with decisions like this in the first place.

Finally, the incomparable Dean Baker calls our Administration's attempt to drill for oil in ANWR "a gratuitous act of environmental destruction." Further, "people in power" are "taking actions that show they don’t give a damn about the world they pass on to future generations" and "spitting in the face of people who value the environment to show they can wreak destruction for no good reason whatsoever." These are all completely accurate statements, and it is not "uncivil" to say them -- and people who would say so are telling you (guess what?) that they can't win the argument on the merits.

Action: concerning war with Iran, billboards in space, and facial recognition technology.

As you no doubt know, our President's in a good bit of trouble right at the moment! And you know what that could mean? Why, it could mean war with Iran! Yeah, I know, he's made noises about not wanting war with Iran, and he did cut John Bolton loose not too long ago, but he's also done a lot of saber-rattling lately and plans to send more troops to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Now, a lot of his attempts to gin up a war have fallen flat so far, and you have to hope we all remember how Bill Clinton fired a couple of missiles in Mr. bin Laden's direction a couple days after admitting to his affair with Ms. Lewinsky -- not to mention all the times we got color-coded terror alerts from Tha Bush Mobb after some unrelated reversal or other! But, just in case our President is able to change the subject from his own rotten doings, Demand Progress helps you tell our Congressfolk to ensure our President can't go to war with Iran without Congressional approval. You know, like our Constitution says.

Meanwhile, some corporations want to put giant billboards in orbit! Yes, it's true! Like we don't have enough crap in the sky! Actually, the "billboards" will be groups of satellites that congregate to form the image of a corporate logo, but the difference is semantic, and the end result will be the same: you won't be able to look up at the sky without someone trying to sell you something. And, ah, you can imagine what'll happen if even more satellites occupy the night sky, right? Some of them will accidentally crash into each other. This may be what led the late, great Carl Sagan to call billboards in the sky an "abomination." Yes, not only is this a bad idea, it's an old idea, which also makes it a zombie idea. Well, we all know what to do with zombies, so Environmental Action helps you tell your House Reps to put the beatdown on the notion of giant floating billboards in the sky. People spend their time wishing for a better future and floating billboards is what they come up with?

Speaking of which, Fight for the Future helps you tell major live event corporations not to use facial recognition technology at their events. Why? Facial recognition technology invades the privacy you expect to have at a live event -- yes, you do expect some privacy, even at a "public event"; does everyone need to know where you are at all times? Facial recognition technology is also pretty terrible; no doubt you have heard that facial recognition technology, like your Tea Party uncle, can't tell black people apart very well. No government at any level regulates facial recognition technology very well -- for example, none of them regulate how long a corporation can hold onto the data it's scraped at a live show. And using this bad, unregulated, invasive technology can do folks real harm -- it can get them deported, detained, or otherwise harassed, again because our governments don't do their job and regulate how corporations can use the technology. And rather than hold our breath and wait for governments to do their job, let's just not use the crap, OK?

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, trade agreements, and surprise hotel fees

It's Monday, which means it's the day we call our Senators and tell them to support voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers. We give Mob Boss Mitch a lot of guff, and justifiably so, for refusing to even hold votes on any of this legislation because he thinks he's the boss of us and he knows better than us, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Democrats might have passed all these bills because they knew they wouldn't pass and it would make them look good without actually accomplishing anything. But their 13-dimensional chess games don't matter; only our will matters.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them not to vote on the USMCA trade agreement (a.k.a. "NAFTA 2.0") until our Administration fixes it. Specifically, you'll ask them to ensure our Administration gets rid of the corporate welfare for big pharma and improves the labor/environmental standards, and I think you should also make a point of saying that you want the changes to the investor/state dispute settlement (or ISDS) system either kept or made even better, because the USMCA isn't all bad just because the President who negotiated it is an irredeemable asshole. If they renegotiated the deal to get rid of the corporate welfare and the lax standards but also put back the ISDS system that enables foreign investors to nullify our laws and allows corporations to outsource our jobs, I'd say that's an even worse deal. So be sure you communicate your will precisely to your Congressfolk. They just love "mishearing" you, or telling you their pile of crap is exactly the meatloaf you asked for.

Finally, if you're fed up with surprise fees in your hotel bills -- fees that bleed almost $3 billion a year out of our bank accounts -- then Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4489, the Hotel Advertising Transparency Act of 2019. H.R. 4489 -- per one of its sponsors, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) -- "would require the prices regularly advertised by hotels and online travel agencies to include all mandatory fees that will be charged to a consumer, excluding taxes." Hence they won't be able to hide their "WiFi fees" and their "in-room safe fees" and their "resort fees" and even their "towel fees" (I know, right?) in their "low" prices. Gosh, how long before they start charging "bed fees" and "wall fees" and "floor fees" and "no secret camera behind your mirror fees"? Hotels have largely concocted these hidden fees in response to the pressure of winning in online comparison shopping, which only proves (as if we needed more proof!) that the future ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Action: concerning worker safety and discriminatory travel bans.

H.R. 3668, the Asuncion Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, would mandate that our Secretary of Labor, whomever that is, issue regulations that prevent workers from dying of heat exposure. Heat causes more deaths than any other weather-related phenomena, after all, and it'd be nice to have national standards that might protect workers from falling dead after 10 hours picking grapes in 105 degree heat, as Mr. Valdivia himself did in 2004. If you read the bill, you'll be pleased to see that it tells the Secretary of Labor to create a good heat exposure standard -- if the Secretary of Labor, whomever that is, decides, for example, to simply ignore the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's 2016 recommended standard for heat exposure, then they'll run afoul of Sec. 4(a)(1) of the bill, and federal courts will strike it down. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect workers by passing the Asuncion Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, and thus repeal our President's infamous Muslim ban, then CREDO still helps you do that. The House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees have begun hearings on this bill this week, so this might get to a full House bill in the coming months, and then get added to the list of bills we tell the Senate to pass even though "Mob Boss Mitch" won't let them come to a vote. Even if the bill dies in the Senate, we always do good when we communicate our will to our Congressfolk, and if they refuse to do our will, then we have them on the record as having failed us. The NO BAN Act wouldn't just roll back our President's Muslim ban -- which our Supreme Court blessed even though our President said, out loud, that he totally intended to single out Muslims -- but would greatly hamper his ability to issue future bans based on religion. And that is kind of the point of our Constitution, gang -- to prevent Presidents from having all the say about everything.

Action: concerning corruption and more corruption.

You may have heard that our House of Representatives has launched a formal impeachment inquiry against our President, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to get our President's tax returns as part of any impeachment effort. Don't brook any silliness from the right about "re-litigating the 2016 election" -- the same election in which 54% of the electorate voted against our President and he only won by getting pluralities in three swing states, but I digress -- because if he's really got nothing to be afraid of, he ought to cough up his tax returns. More likely he does have a lot to be afraid of -- not just of good Americans finding out exactly how compromised he is, which should be the focus of an impeachment investigation, but also of good Americans finding out he's actually dirt-poor in real terms, which would be icing on the cake. But generally, if the President fears it, we ought to do it.

In a related note, Win Without War still helps you tell Speaker Pelosi to ensure that the part of the House defense authorization bill that forbids our Department of Defense from spending taxpayer money at our President's properties makes it through conference. You can almost see her saying well, we don't need this now, because we've got an impeachment going on, can you? You can also see the impeachment effort falling flat, and then we'll be left with neither a justly-disgraced President nor the force of law preventing taxpayer money going right into said President's pockets. Really, it's the right thing to do, keeping taxpayer money from lining our President's pockets; you can imagine our Founders agreeing, right? You can also imagine our Founders spinning in their graves over the continued drama of this President abusing his power and enriching himself off these abuses. But you can't count on Congress to stop it -- unless we make our will unmistakably known to them.

Around the table: concerning the elusive "independent" voter and the even more elusive "booming economy."

Good news, everyone! A 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals panel has struck down our FCC's latest attempt to loosen media consolidation rules. FCC Chair Pai bemoaned the fact that federal judges have been striking down such FCC efforts for 15 years, claiming that "no evidence or reasoning — newspapers going out of business, broadcast radio struggling, broadcast TV facing stiffer competition than ever —...will persuade them to change their minds," though you and I might argue that media consolidation itself drives all this "struggling," "going out of business," and "facing stiffer competition than ever," and thus more media consolidation isn't the answer. It makes sense, of course, when you remember that Mr. Pai only cares about media owners, and not regular Americans whom our media supposedly serve. And certainly not local media.

What's vital to kicking climate change's ass, according to Vandana Shiva at Truthout? "Biodiversity-based agriculture," that's what. "The Earth has roughly 300,000 edible plant species," she writes, "but the contemporary global human community eats only 200 of them. And, according to the New Scientist, 'half our plant-sourced protein and calories come from just three: maize, rice and wheat.'" Why? Because big ag corporations prefer to grow only one thing, since that's the best way to make money redistribute wealth upward to executives. Of course, big ag doesn't grow stuff just for food, but also for fuel, which (hate to disturb all those right-wingers who think every liberal is an ethanol addict) ain't good for our world, either.

Another day, another study suggesting that our "liberal" media's obsession with the "moderate," "undecided," or "independent" voter is a myth. And surprise, surprise, when you ask these "moderate," "undecided," or "independent" voters about economic and immigration issues, they're all over the liberal-conservative continuum. Actually, it looks to me like a plurality (though not a majority) of "independent" voters are in the "more egalitarian"/"more pro-immigration" quadrant -- and a more pronounced plurality of "moderate" voters also camp out there. How interesting.

You may have heard that some 69% of American voters don't like our President personally, but the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll reporting that result also said that 19 of those percentage points came from folks who dislike our President personally but like his policies, which makes the number of folks who don't like him or his policies 50%, so we should worry more about the fact that roughly a quarter of the electorate is bat-guano insane and eats up every slab of drama he puts out, while another quarter is happy to "hold their noses" at the polls and say "but regulations and judges!" Of course, a take-no-prisoners Democratic nominee who could change the subject to what Americans actually care about could beat him.

Our President loves talking about his GREATESTZ ECONOMIEZ EVERZ!!!!!, but Robert Reich reminds us that wages have gone up barely a blip over the last 40 years, the unemployment rate's low in part because a lot of folks have given up looking for work and a lot of others who'd like full-time work only have part-time work, and health care and housing costs are skyrocketing well beyond the pace of inflation. And the next time someone says I have to balance my checkbook, why can't government?, just remind them that Americans actually have $4 trillion in consumer debt right now, and that figure excludes mortgages. Which are also debt, even if it works out reasonably well if you hold on to the house long enough.

Next time you hear about how corporations would really rather like someone other than our current President in that office, recall that said corporations are not only getting a lot out of our President's deregulatory agenda, they've been the ones actually setting the agenda. "And those rollbacks really have touched on so many different areas where the government is supposed to be protecting the public, not protecting corporate profits," says Public Citizen's Amit Narang. Of course, we should know better than this already, having witnessed so much corporate hand-wringing over our President before he won. Why, it's almost like they ran a scam on us or something.

Finally, you may have heard that House Democrats are opening up an impeachment inquiry into our President, and, well, our President didn't take the news well: "Such an important day at the United Nations, so much work and so much success, and the Democrats purposely had to ruin and demean it with more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage. So bad for our Country!" All together now: waaaaaaaaah! If a liberal complained like this, right-wingers would call it whining; now they just echo their Personal Lord and Savior's words. I guess they've become that which they most hate.

Action: concerning airplane safety and pollution.

In the wake of the news that our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) never actually independently looked at the cause of two deadly Boeing crashes, but rather let Boeing tell them what they found out on their own, Penn PIRG helps you tell our FAA to stop outsourcing its regulatory duties to the private corporations it nominally oversees. It's a simple principle, really -- make corporations follow the law and do the right thing, rather than ask them if they're following the law and doing the right thing and just take their word for it -- but it has too often seemed a difficult task for the last six Presidential Administrations. Of course too many Americans (though not a majority) still regard regulations as a "burden" upon corporations. They don't regard laws against burglary as a "burden" on burglars, and they tend to change their tune when regulatory failure directly affects them, but we can't wait for their wisdom to catch up with ours.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our legislature is trying, yet again, to pass bills that would hamstring our state's ability to keep big oil and gas drilling corporations from polluting. HB 1106 would give our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) a mere 30 days to review gas and oil drilling permits, which wouldn't allow time for legally-mandated public comments, while HB 1107 would terminate all DEP employees currently involved in permit evaluations and would replace them with a five-member Commission appointed, of course, by the legislature. Again, it sure seems like politicians' anti-regulatory fervor only seems to affect good regulations. Might we call HB 1106/HB 1107 supporters objectively pro-pollution? Hey, civility is their shield and sword, not mine; mine is truth. The Center for Coalfield Justice helps you tell your PA state legislator to protect us from pollution by rejecting HB 1106 and HB 1107.

Action: concerning copyrights and monopolies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from copyright trolls by rejecting H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act. Yeah, this bill would provide an "alternative" to fighting copyright issues out in court, and whenever someone proposes an "alternative" to the day in court that is your right, you should be suspicious. The CASE Act, as it happens, would create a "Copyright Claims Board" -- not even composed of judges, but of "claims officers" -- that could enforce penalties of up to $30,000 against you. $30,000! Nearly half of Americans don't have even $400 lying around! And what might you do to get a judgment against you? Share a meme or a video online! Seriously, that's all you might have to do! And it's something you probably do all the time! Of course, a copyright troll knows where all the loopholes in the law are, but why should they get more say than we do?

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FDIC to block the proposed BB&T/SunTrust merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. Haven't heard of BB&T or SunTrust? Southerners have -- and if we allow them to merge, then we'll all hear about the resulting behemoth they're planning to call Truist. Truist? I guess they think if people hear the name enough, they'll think it's a real word, and I can't entirely blame them for that, I suppose, since these are the days Our Glorious Elites repeat almost anything enough that large segments of the population will believe it. But I'm so old-fashioned I only want to keep corporations from getting so big that they run roughshod over our rights, and this would be the biggest merger allowed to go through since the 2008 bankster meltdown that almost destroyed our economy. Unless we stand in the way, of course -- and we should stand in the way. Why do we let money make all our decisions for us? And what kind of world will we leave for our children and our children's children?

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and war with Iran.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act, well, you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers. Regardless of what they say, it is absolutely your Senators' job to be supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections. Don't be thrown off by Mob Boss Mitch's recent embrace of $250 million in federal funding for secure elections, either. The SAFE act would provide more than that, plus it would mandate paper ballots, which would be a lot better than having our votes simply disappear into the ether. Though some Senators would want them to disappear.

Meanwhile, with ramped-up saber rattling over Iran in the news lately, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the recent must-pass defense bill explicitly forbids our President from waging war in Iran without Congressional approval. I know, our President fired long-time Iran war-monger John Bolton, and told Lindsey Graham to stop trying to push him into a war he doesn't want, but that's all drama -- our President (who still loves another Iran war-monger, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo) could merely be waiting until Iran does something, or possibly "does something." Don't tolerate the folks who whimper that "we don't want to tie the President's hands" by forcing him to go to Congress for a war declaration as our Constitution requires. How many times must I tell these pimps! Congress is supposed to tie the President's hands in exactly this manner, so that our President doesn't haul us off to war after war after war. This is one of the reasons we broke away from King George III, for Christ's sake!

Around the table: chronicling more drama and venality from Our Glorious Elites.

Soon-to-be-released study documents some of the ill effects of our use of depleted uranium weapons in Iraq. You won't like the pictures. The study concerns the relationship between how far Iraqis live from the Tallil Air Force Base, which has been burning waste in open-air pits since 2003, and the rate of birth defects and levels of uranium and thorium found in local Iraqi citizens' hair. Surprise, surprise, the close you are, the sicker you are. No use chalking this up to "the horrors of war," because this was a shitty war propping up a shitty President. Vanity always has a price, but too often the vain don't pay it.

Ho hum, the Washington Post writes articles about Uber without disclosing owner Jeff Bezos's massive investment in Uber. And note well The Artist Formerly Known as Jane Galt writing that we shouldn't ask Uber and Lyft to treat their workers right because those corporations are "hemorrhaging money," which not only obscures the fact that their investors somehow get richer while these corporations hemorrhage money, but is what, class? That's right, a manufactured hostage crisis -- "don't make the corporations treat the workers better, or the corporations get it!" Although that's "the genius of capitalism," isn't it -- that a corporation dies when it doesn't make money? Not when your boss has sunk $400 million into the corporation in question, I guess.

Speaking of America's Soon-to-Be Least Popular CEO, we learn that Mr. Bezos's recent move to stop covering health care for Whole Foods's part-time workers wound up saving him a total of six hours of pay. This is what monopolies do to people! This is why we shouldn't let tycoons buy up as many corporations as they can! Some fools will say that's a drop in the bucket to Mr. Bezos, but it ain't a drop in the bucket to any of his workers. Also, too, Amazon doesn't pay any taxes.

It's time for another important reminder about Presidential drama! When you witness things like our President fighting with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) about whether we should bomb the crap out of Iran, keep in mind that you're looking at a "fight" that makes our President look rational and makes Republicans look like they have significant disagreements about policy, when he's not and they don't. As I always say, it's drama, and it's not even particularly good drama.

Good news, good peoples! Federal District Court Judge blocks enforcement of South Dakota law that would put pipeline protestors in jail for 25 years. Judge Piersol is right to suggest that a "Riot Boosting" law could have put Dr. King in jail for decades, too, but I have to say how gobsmacked I am that governments are going so far out of their way to protect the investments of private corporations. It sure doesn't seem like the "spirit of capitalism" in which conservatives supposedly believe. In fact, it seems a lot more like corporate welfare.

Finally, Christina H at Cracked tells us all about "6 Famous 'Frivolous Lawsuit' Stories That Are Total B.S." I have never, not even one time, heard a story from the tort "reform" crowd that didn't devolve into these-aren't-all-the-facts or the-system-did-actually-work. And generally half-told anecdotes are what you get, because tort "reform" proponents aren't going to cite very much actual science in a country where corporations, not people, file four out of every five lawsuits. So when someone says I'm gonna tell you a story about frivolous lawsuits, either be on your guard or walk away.

Action: concerning war with Iran, racist housing policy, and school lunch shaming.

You've heard that our President doesn't want to go to war with Iran? Don't you believe it! No, him firing John Bolton doesn't mean we're in the clear, and him fighting Lindsey Graham over Iran policy doesn't mean we're in the clear, either. What would put us in the clear? Communicating our will to our Congressfolk that we don't want another stupid war in the Middle East, that's what! Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Khanna-Gaetz amendment, forbidding funding of any military operations in Iran without explicit Congressional approval, in must-pass defense authorization legislation. Seriously, if you're thinking that maybe this President is "different," or that only he can stop the "deep state," stop that. True, this President may be less adept at maneuvering the levers of power than his predecessors, but he only cares about his own ego, and the only people who can stop the "deep state" are us. So we need to keep working.

Meanwhile, our Administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed gutting civil rights protections mandated by the Fair Housing Act, so the National Women's Law Center helps you tell our HUD to stop its efforts to let more landlords discriminate against folks of color. I don't know what their rationale for this move is. I kinda hope it isn't we don't need these protections anymore, because, gosh, have they talked to a real estate agent? Real estate was, for many years, the last place you could get away with saying something openly racist like "this is a good neighborhood because it's mostly white." Actually, I do know what their rationale is -- our President and his father got sued real good back in the 1970s for refusing to put folks of color in their apartments. Is this his revenge? I kinda hope not, because a man who'd do that is a small man indeed, and I prefer to believe the best about people.

Finally, you may have heard that schools have been shaming kids whose parents can't pay school lunch fees, sometimes by making kids wear wristbands (gosh, so many people love strutting around these days, I wonder why?) or by putting their names on public lists. I've said we shouldn't be afraid to shame people, but we shouldn't shame kids who did nothing wrong -- we should shame adults who, for example, redistribute everyone's income upward to themselves! Anyway, H.R. 3366/S. 1907, the No Shame at School Act, would prohibit this kind of school lunch shaming, plus it would prevent school districts from handing over parents' private info to debt collectors -- because this, too, is apparently a thing now -- and it would streamline the certification process for school kids so that simple misspellings (for example) won't lead to school lunch debt. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out working families by passing the No Shame at School Act.

Action: concerning our Estate Tax, patent trolls, and compassion for hurricane victims.

S. 309, the For the 99.8% Act, would hike our Estate Tax on larger-income estates, i.e., those over $750,000, and create more progressive brackets for Estate Taxes, such that folks who leave billion-dollar estates would pay 77 percent on that part of the estate over a billion dollars, and estates over $10 million dollars would get taxed overall at rates much closer to 50% than they are now. (The high end of the Estate Tax rate is currently 40 percent.) Right-wingers have been having all the say about this matter for a long time now, what with their calling it the "death tax" even though (as the bill's title suggests!) much fewer than 1% of Americans will ever have to pay it! And if we don't tax large estates, then we won't be able to restrain the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to make Estate Taxes fairer and more vigorous by passing the For the 99.8 Percent Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3666/S. 2082, the so-called STRONGER Patents Act, would let patent trolls have their way in America by gutting the inter partes review process, which allows folks to challenge the validity of patents. And a lot of patents, quite frankly, need to be challenged, or else the Patent Office wouldn't have thrown out over 1,500 patents over the last seven years (more than one every other day!) via the IPR process. Patent trolls go around patenting every widely-used thing they can, like crowdfunding and messaging and picture menus, so they can sue craploads of people and win craploads of money, and of course Congress wants to make patents "stronger" so they can withstand scrutiny, rather than making them better so that real innovators can benefit from their work. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect real innovation in America by rejecting the STRONGER Patents Act.

Finally, Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas hard, depriving tens of thousands of good Bahamians of access to food, water, and shelter, but our President, peach of a man that he is, doesn't want to allow any victims of the hurricane to seek refuge in America, because some of them are bad people, or something. He really wants you to think this country has just never had a system to vet people who want to come here! Of course the Temporary Protected Status (or TPS) system has long existed to help out folks who flee their country because of natural disasters, hence H.R. 4272, the TPS for Victims of Hurricane Dorian Act, would allow Bahamians to live and work here for the next 18 months. 18 months! Some folks enjoy TPS status for decades, so bad off are their home countries. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to show some compassion by passing the TPS for Victims of Hurricane Dorian Act.

Action: concerning jobs for good people and book deals for bad people.

H.R. 3614, the Restricting Credit Checks for Employment Decisions Act, would prevent most employers from using credit checks as a part of their hiring decisions. What's wrong with that, you ask? Well, credit reports tend to have mistakes -- and you'd hate to pass someone over because of such a mistake, wouldn't you? -- and credit reports predict employee performance about as well as those 300-question "integrity tests" did back in the '80s. And another thing: we did have a major financial services meltdown a little over a decade ago, and that wrecked a lot of good folks' credit. You know what else wrecks people's credit and has little to do with job performance? Massive health care bills, that's what. The result? Folks who get slammed by life and can't get work wind up with bad credit -- and then can't get a job because of their bad credit! If that seems absurd to you, US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families who hit hard times by passing the Restricting Credit Checks for Employment Decisions Act.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell book publishing corporation Macmillan Publishers to terminate its book deal with former Administration spokeshack Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Isn't that mean, you ask? No meaner than she's been to everyone she's come into contact with, that's for sure! And isn't that "abridgment of her free speech rights"? No, it's not -- our First Amendment guarantees that our government can't throw you in jail for your speech; it does not guarantee a book contract for everyone in America. I'm not hopeful that Macmillan will see the light here -- their PR flacks cited her "grace under pressure" (it's not "grace" just because you don't yell!) and how she spent years "battling the media," rather than her years battling the popular will. But, as I've said, Ms. Sanders doesn't have a "right" to a book contract, and we have the right to protest Macmillan's decision. They also have the right to tell us to go scratch. But that's not going to be a good look someday. Think of how many Bush Mobbers have book contracts these days!

Action: concerning government spying and corporate spying.

The notorious USA PATRIOT Act, as you likely know, has been renewed through the end of this calendar year, and that gives us another opportunity to tell our Congressfolk to stop unconstitutional government spying, as Demand Progress helps you do. Congress changed Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to stop government collection of citizen metadata without a warrant -- though it requires big telecom corporations to collect this information, which our government can then get with a warrant. That ain't nothing, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) deserves credit for forcing the PATRIOT Act's expiration in 2015 (if only for a calendar day) so that its reauthorization would be an improvement. Still, expanded government spying not only violates our civil rights, but doesn't stop terrorist attacks -- though it does give our government even more tools to spy on protestors and folks of color. And you may have noticed that this Administration is openly hostile to protestors and folks of color! So let's make Congress do the right thing.

Meanwhile, speaking of runaway surveillance, you've seen ads for Amazon Ring, right? The video doorbell that allows you to see who's ringing your bell if you're out of the house, or something? Well, turns out over 400 police departments are "partnering" with Amazon to spy on people's homes using their Ring doorbells. They're not putting it like that, of course, and they're taking great pains to say that folks don't have to hand over their footage to police who request them, and it sure is a good thing that police never, ever abuse their power to coerce folks into handing over such info. Seriously, a private corporation with a massive surveillance network is bad enough, but a private corporation with that network collaborating with the police is considerably worse. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell your local officials to spurn such a partnership with Amazon. While you're at it, you ought to tell Alexa to get the hell out of your house. Being spied on ain't worth the 10 seconds you save because you don't have to physically find Barry White on your iPod.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and Administration corruption.

Happy Monday, good peoples! You know what comes next: the list of bills we're going to call our Senators and tell them to pass, namely H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And now that H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, has also passed the House, we can add it to this list, and all future lists, until Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell deigns to allow a vote on them. What's he so afraid of? That by allowing a vote he'll let his caucus go on record as opposing voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, secure elections, and public lands? Of course that is something to be afraid of, since all these things are actually quite popular with the American people and don't hurt anyone but already-too-rich CEOs. But if you want to be a Senator, you should have at least some cojones.

Meanwhile, with the news that our government has been putting up military personnel at one of our President's hotels in Scotland at taxpayer expense, and that Vice President Pence stayed at one of our President's hotels several hours away from his actual business in Ireland, Win Without War helps you tell House Speaker Pelosi to support an amendment to the defense authorization bill that would prevent our military from staying at our President's hotels. Time was that anyone in a position to divert taxpayer money to their own properties would at least make some effort at disguising what they're doing, but we live in a truly sick, immoral, and decadent time, when our President simultaneously thumbs his nose at the rule of law and declares that he alone can protect law and order! Some folks applaud his money-making, no doubt thinking of themselves (in Will Rogers's phrase) not as poor folks but as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." But most of us have been so poor for so long now that we don't wink at corruption anymore.

Around the table: don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya, John Bolton! And other tales.

"John Bolton Tried His Best to Draw the U.S. Into a War," writes Alex Emmons at The Intercept. "Luckily, He Failed." But don't suggest that our President was crazy-like-a-fox and brought Mr. Bolton into the fold so he could expose his fraudulent ideas, because our President flat-out pissed all over the Iran nuclear agreement when it was working and reimposed sanctions on Iran, supposedly so he could get a "better deal." And with what leverage? You'll recall the shot-down drone and the seized tankers and you'll see that our President never had any leverage -- after all, are you going to bomb the crap out of a country that's playing the diplomatic equivalent of I'm-not-touching-you?

A retired Air Force colonel blows the whistle on what he calls "gross financial mismanagement" and "gross waste" at our Guantánamo Bay detention center. I'll admit I was gobsmacked to discover that even one conviction (and exactly one conviction!) has ever come out of Guantánamo. But that's what you get when you create drama over "dangerous people" who would "go back to terrorism" if they were ever released, never mind that we can hardly convict them of anything after 10, 15, or almost 20 years. (See, it's not just our President who creates drama. George W. Bush was a master at it.)

Voter ID, Interstate Crosscheck, and voting roll purges you know about, but states and localities have been suppressing the vote in one other important way: closing polling places, too often without notice. 13 states now have over 1,000 fewer polling places than they did six years ago; I wonder why? A lot of them close polling places supposedly because they're not compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act, but why close it and not, say, make it ADA-compliant? Don't say "because that costs money," because that answer won't win in court.

Ho hum, leaked documents reveal how our FBI is hiding data about how it responds to white supremacist violence versus black protestor "violence." They call it all "Racially-Motivated Violent Extremism," just as not too many years ago they called it all "Abortion Extremism" when mainly anti-abortion folks committed the violence. Yet the FBI still tabulates the "Racially-Motivated Violent Extremism" by race, and thus should be able to account for their actions.

Finally, the number of folks without health insurance in America went up in 2018 for the first time in nine years. You won't be surprised at the main culprit -- a drop in public health insurance program coverage under a reactionary Administration -- nor will you be surprised that Southern and Hispanic children seem to get hit harder. Boy, it sure is a good thing our President promised really great health care for everyone, and then said he'd do something about high drug prices before declaring that high drug prices were all Medicare's fault. Also, too, why is he so desperate to annihilate pre-existing condition bans? Pre-existing condition bans are the one thing about Obamacare everyone likes. Oh, I guess that's our answer.

Action: concerning corporate tax avoidance, health care, and workplace harassment.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell Congress to investigate allegations of over $2.5 billion in tax dodging on the part of Walmart. Walmart apparently created a fake overseas entity in a foreign country that (conveniently) neither the foreign country nor ours would claim jurisdiction upon, but whatever the details, fact is Walmart doesn't pay enough in taxes, and that means less of the good services we all expect from our tax money. I know some folks, unscrupulous and not, will claim that we're taking "low prices" hostage by "going after Walmart." But saying don't make Walmart pay more in taxes, or we won't be able to afford paper towels is itself a hostage crisis, and quite unbecoming of the American can-do spirit. As for the folks who don't have anywhere to get their groceries other than Walmart, we can do other things to fix that -- like, say, aiding farmers' markets and breaking monopolies.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Rep to co-sponsor H.R. 1384, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. H.R. 1384 has 118 co-sponsors, but as you know, the House has 435 members, 235 of whom are Democrats, meaning that just over half of the more left-leaning party supports Medicare-for-All. And they should support it! The Medicare for All Act would insure all Americans, cut costs (mainly by cutting administrative overhead), and let you keep your doctor (by forcing doctors to accept Medicare for All health insurance, except those who only perform services the bill doesn't cover, like high-end plastic surgery). The big health insurance corporations say folks like their health insurers ("until they actually try to use it" is the part they leave out!) and generally fearmongering the population. But we're can-do Americans, and we don't have to put up with that.

Finally, H.R. 2148/S. 1082, the BE HEARD in the Workplace Act, would expand protections against workplace harassment in a number of ways. The bill would, for the first time, expand the law's protections to interns, trainees, volunteers, independent contractors, and small business workers, and would also help workers redress the harm caused them by harassment by outlawing forced arbitration agreements and restricting the use of non-disclosure agreements. (You'll recall that Gretchen Carlson couldn't take Fox News's Roger Ailes to court for his sexual harassment of her because of a forced arbitration agreement in her employment contract.) And if you hear someone say this bill would prevent them from doing business, you're free to wonder how much of their business model depends on harassment. The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families by passing the BE HEARD Act.

Action: concerning war on Yemen, public water, and public lands.

So what else is up with the must-pass defense spending bill? The House version restricts our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen -- a war where we're somehow helping kill some of the best al-Qaeda fighters on Earth! -- and prevents our government from selling weapons to the Saudi/UAE coalition; the Senate version, naturally, doesn't have these provisions, but it's conference time, and why should we settle for weak conference bills when we could demand strong ones? Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep strong anti-war provisions in the defense spending bill. I don't care that our President might veto it -- wasn't he supposed to bring a different kind of foreign policy to the Oval Office, instead of doing whatever Israel and Saudi Arabia want him to do? Meanwhile, good Yemenis starve to death and watch their children get bombed at school.

Meanwhile, Nestlé is at it again, this time trying to get its permit renewed to draw over a million gallons of public water per day from Florida's Santa Fe River. How many times must I tell these pimps! People need all the water they can get! They sure as hell don't need some big corporation siphoning it off and selling it back to them! Naturally, the Suwannee River Water Management District (which covers the Santa Fe) has declared the Santa Fe to be "in recovery" as of 2014 -- meaning that it didn't meet the District's minimum requirements for river flows and water levels -- and back then, Nestlé was "only" siphoning off a quarter of what it's proposing now! I doubt the Santa Fe would "recover" from Nestlé suddenly drawing off four times the water it used to draw off. Hence CREDO helps you tell the Suwannee River Water Management District to reject Nestlé's petition to siphon off even more public water than it did before the Santa Fe declined.

Finally, our President has been trying to get our National Forest Service to re-evaluate whether the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which applies to national forests, also applies to the Tongass National Forest, and perhaps suspecting he'd lose that argument (as evidenced by the fact that the name "Tongass National Forest" does, in fact, contain the words "national" and "forest" in it), he's now told our Secretary of Agriculture to open up some 10 million acres of the Tongass to loggers! Brazil's Mr. Bolsonaro told farmers and loggers to burn whatever they wanted out of the Amazon, and then our President did what? He got jealous! Our President really does teach us all about the Seven Deadly Sins. And we can in turn teach him about, you know, the rule of law and the fact that words do actually mean things by telling our Department of Agriculture to reject any plans to allow logging in the Tongass National Forest, as CREDO helps us do.

Around the table: concerning internet freedom, corruption, voting rights, health care, and gerrymandering.

Thinking "I don't miss net neutrality"? Well, Northeastern/UMass-Amherst researchers have found that AT&T throttles Netflix and YouTube over two-thirds of the time and Amazon Prime not at all for its wireless customers. "(A)nd it’s not based on networks being overloaded," one of the researchers strains to point out. And every streaming service, as I'm sure you're aware by now, doesn't carry everything. This ain't like Verizon throttling California firefighters in the middle of a wildfire, but it might take more of this to get the public at large (and not just the few million Americans paying attention) to fight for what this President and his FCC have taken from us.

As our President takes over $120 million from emergency management funds and gives it to ICE, we learn that our Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) has spent nearly $120 million on office furniture. Priorities! To be absolutely fair and balanced, Fox News reported in early 2015 that the Obama DHS had spent $150 million on office furniture -- from 2010 to 2014, suggesting that this Administration is nearly twice as corrupt as the last one, and proving that when Democrats throw money at DHS, it doesn't impress right-wingers.

The state of Ohio plans to purge over 200,000, but is using a list riddled with thousands of errors. An "error," of course, is a voter on the list who hasn't died, hasn't moved, and has voted within the last six years; the problem with using lists like these -- you know, besides that they're obviously aimed at deregistering voters who tend to vote against the dominant political party in Ohio right now -- is that folks don't find out they've been deregistered until it's too late, because who asks themselves, self, am I still registered to vote, having done literally nothing to warrant deregistration?

Ho hum, ABC puts a panel on to discuss Medicare-for-All, using right-wing Republican Chris Christie and right-wing Democrat Rahm Emanuel for balance. Gosh, Wendell Potter or Timothy Faust not available that day? I mean, it's not like you just can't find people who'll make the case for Medicare-for-All -- even people who want to be on TV and get famous! -- though I'm sure you can't find as many elite cronies to do it. The good news? We're now past the "first they ignore you" and "then they ridicule you" phases of the debate into the "then they fight you." "Then you win" comes after that -- although, admittedly, it might take a while.

Finally, you've likely heard of the late Thomas Hofeller, the "master of modern gerrymandering," and the cache of files his daughter found after he passed? Well, Igor Derysh at Salon describes how Mr. Hofeller helped North Carolina gerrymander its districts specifically to dilute the black vote. Mr. Hofeller said, out loud, that he was trying to help "non-Hispanic whites," so it's hard to see how anyone could say this wasn't about race, especially after confronting his voluminous research on voters' racial makeup (and noting how the legislature split the largest historically black college in America into two Republican districts). The good news is that North Carolina's Supreme Court struck down that state's maps last week; now we hope our Supreme Court doesn't meddle (which it didn't in Pennsylvania).

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, factory farm waste, PFAS chemicals, and food safety.

California actually passed strong campaign finance disclosure legislation in 2017, but that law didn't cover everything -- it still lets big donors push out mass text messages without revealing themselves, and it also hides the big donors behind massive petitioning efforts. But AB 201 and SB 47 would close these loopholes, so the California Clean Money Action Fund helps you tell California state legislators to do more to expose big campaign donors by passing these bills. AB 201 would force candidates to put their names on text messages and PACs to put committee names or URLs leading to disclosure info; SB 47 would require petition gatherers to disclose the top three donors of that petition before soliciting a signature. We're looking at a few hundred million text messages and over two dozen ballot initiatives (in 2018) that require more sunlight, so this isn't a "solution looking for a problem" -- you know, like Voter ID or Interstate Crosscheck.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3844, the Farmer Fairness Act, would at least address this issue as it related to factory farm waste. As it is now, big ag corporations have gamed the system so that the small farmers who own the animals on factory farms take all the blame for the waste on big factory farms, while the big ag corporations make off with all the profit! But the Farmer Fairness Act would "require all persons exercising substantial operational control over the concentrated animal feeding operation," which would include anyone who "exercises any control over the activities, operation, or management of a concentrated animal feeding operation." Hence both small farmer and big factory farm would be on the hook for polluting nearby rivers and streams with their animal waste. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big ag domination of small farmers by passing the Farmer Fairness Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would better address the clean-up of ubiquitous and poisonous PFAS chemicals, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. Specifically, you'd tell your Congressfolk to support provisions of the must-pass defense authorization bill that would better track PFAS contamination and better coordinate PFAS cleanup efforts; this is a big deal -- not just because scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, thyroid disease, and liver damage, not just because you can find PFAS chemicals in so many commonplace items ranging from nonstick saucepans to food packaging, but also because firefighting foam is a major source of PFAS chemicals, and our soldiers do put out a lot of fires. So, for once, let's pass some defense spending that helps all of us, and not just some defense contracting corporation's CEO.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our Administration's plans to reduce safety inspections at pork processing plants, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. What on Earth has possessed our last two Administrations to try to mess with meat inspections? Do they not know that food poisoning always gets into the news? It seems like the best of our politicians listen too much to big agricultural corporations like they know everything, when mostly what they know is how to redistribute income upward from consumers (and farmers!) to themselves. Some "expertise," that. Of course, the worst of our politicians only pretend to be that stupid, but actually mean to make their big ag cronies richer and damn the consequences for everyone else. Oh, well, I guess Americans are only the people who eat the food. Seriously, we deserve better, from both our food processing corporations and our politicians.

Action: concerning robocalls, working families, Arctic drilling, and racist policing.

Both houses of Congress have passed anti-robocall bills, and now they must conference out a bill to send to our President, and you know how House/Senate conferences can be a good place to pull all the teeth from good legislation, so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the strongest possible anti-robocall bill. The ideal bill would give good Americans free call-blocking tools and anti-spoofing technology, force all robocallers to get your permission before even calling you, and get tough with those who'd violate either of these tenets. Yes, there's a time to get tough and a time to go easy; usually the emptiest wagons of our law-and-order discourse get tough and easy at all the wrong times, but I can assure you that getting tough on robocallers would be getting it right. None of us want people we don't know calling us, particularly if they're just trying to separate us from our money.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3760/S. 2112, the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act, would fix a major injustice inflicted upon domestic workers: their near-total exclusion from the protection of federal labor laws. Domestic workers often can't get overtime pay, can't get workers' comp, and can't get justice when their employer harasses them; would you put up with that if it were you, or someone you loved? No use protesting that my boss treats me/my loved one fine, so I don't need the law, because laws are for everyone, and if something happened to you or your loved one, you might find our your boss is a fair-weather friend, and then you'll need the protection of the law. Would it be piling on to mention that most domestic workers are folks of color? No, it would not be piling on. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act.

In other news, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, may come up for a vote in the House this week -- at which point I guess we'll be adding it to our weekly list of good House bills that Mob Boss Mitch won't allow the Senate to vote on, but it's still very much worth it to call your House Rep and tell them to support the bill, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps you do. Drilling anywhere in the Arctic is a dicey proposition, as it's much harder to clean up a spill in frigid waters than it is in more temperate waters and oil corporations don't even want to do that, right, BP? But drilling in the Arctic also interferes with a) a thriving salmon industry and b) a Native American population that deserves our protection from corporate greed. Sadly, we also must consider that this President can't be trusted to develop a region with any other aim in mind than to enrich his cronies. So let's stand against him and his venality yet again.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FBI to stop targeting folks who protest fascism, cruel immigration policy, and racist policing, then Free Press still helps you do that. Right-wing politicians from our President on down have the gall to think these are the folks who threaten our nation, while all these white supremacist murderers swing their penises in our faces! Of course, these white supremacists generally support right-wing politicians from our President on down, but our FBI is supposed to be above all that, and if, historically, they haven't been, that's no reason to demand better of them, since, really, they work for us. And I'll brook no silliness about how they're our "first defense" against trouble and thus we should let them do what they want. Civilized people set boundaries, tell these "defenders" when they've gone too far, and take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. That's not too much to ask of us.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, and secure elections.

It's Monday, so it's time to call your Senators once again and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. You can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page if you're on a cellphone; and you can find Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell's phone numbers here, though you'll have to scroll down a bit to find them. I mention Mob Boss Mitch, of course, because our House has passed all of these bills, but our Senate hasn't, because Mr. McConnell won't allow any votes on them. Didn't know that was how democracy worked, did you? Anyway, you don't have to tell your Senators why they should pass these bills, unless you really want to -- their staffers are there to take down your will, not argue with you about it. But I'm going to go ahead and describe the bills (and the paltry arguments against them) in some detail, since I haven't in a while, and I want you to get to the phone with the most confidence you can have. If you do, they'll sense that, and if enough of us call them, they'll bend to our will.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, includes a lot of terrific initiatives -- it would allow national automatic voter registration, require disclosure of large campaign contributions, create a public campaign financing system, make Election Day a national holiday, and mandate that states use nonpartisan commissions to draw up districts. All of these things have large support across the ideological spectrum, and their opposites (making it harder to vote or register to vote, letting state legislators carve out Rorschach-blot fiefdoms, letting corporations spend whatever they want to elect their lackeys) don't. What did Mob Boss Mitch have to say about the For the People Act? He called it "a Democrat power grab," which every right-winger in America would call whining if a liberal said something similar. And if a man equates more access to voting with Democrats getting more power, he might want to think about how maybe Republicans aren't convincing enough people to vote for them. That'd be pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps thinking, wouldn't it? So your Senators have no excuse to oppose the For the People Act. That's going to be a theme in the next several paragraphs.

H.R. 5, the Equality Act, would amend the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folk, who can still get fired, denied housing, and denied credit just because of who they are and whom they love. The objections to the Equality Act are truly ludicrous and, frankly, reminiscent of racist objections to fair housing laws in the 1960s -- haters say they'll be "forced" to hire gay or transgender folk when the truth is the law would force them not to discriminate against them merely because they're gay or transgender, and folks who can't tell the difference between these things may not be cut out for the hard work of civilization. But wait, there's more! Haters pretend employers will be prevented from firing gay or transgender folk for good reasons, which they won't, and that male athletes will get sex changes in droves to compete and dominate in women's sports leagues, which, like, can you see such athletes hanging out with their crew after doing something like that? I mean, duh. The haters are not only wrong, they're stupidly wrong. That's also going to be a theme in the next several paragraphs.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, is not a "boon to trial lawyers" as its opponents say, but merely a bill that would give women more tools to fight pay discrimination. The bill would outlaw clauses in employment contracts that prevent workers from talking about their pay, and would prevent retaliation against employees who do talk about their pay -- and these are important, since talking about your pay is usually how you find out you're being shafted. The bill would still allow employers to pay men and women differently based on bona fide factors like, you know, skill levels and qualifications, but would restrict employers' ability to manufacture a "bona fide factor" merely based on salary. You know, of course he's more qualified, I pay him more, QED? The bill would also stiffen penalties for discriminating against women workers. And somehow all those good things get translated into BUT TEH TRIALZ LAWYERZ!!!!! in the right-wing mind, as if the words "trial lawyers" are a magic spell that transforms all bad arguments into good ones. Ranting about "trial lawyers" is just playing team sports, but our real duty as citizens is to do good works.

H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour gradually over the next six years -- yeah, I made sure to put those last six words there, for all the haters who say IT'S TOO TEH FASTZ!!!!! -- and would increase that minimum wage every year thereafter in accordance with the rise in the median hourly wage, so that maybe we'll never have to hear again how some 70-year-old made $2/hour when they were starting out and what's wrong with kids today? When they made $2/hour, it had the buying power of $12-$15/hour, which is, as you see, higher than our current minimum wage. The bill would also hike the minimum wages for tipped workers and disabled workers gradually and close the gap between these and the regular minimum wage -- because you don't think big corporations will try to convert everyone into a tipped or disabled employee just to avoid paying them more? Dear reader, they will. So don't brook these complaints, or any scare numbers about "jobs lost" that either won't actually happen or would amount to a drop in the bucket of monthly job creation numbers, and certainly wouldn't compare with all the good folks a higher minimum wage would bring out of poverty.

H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, would reverse the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order which originally encoded the principle of net neutrality in law. Net neutrality, as you know, dictates that internet service-providing corporations should deliver all files to your computer at the same speed and with the same priority -- and this principle alone has made the internet the greatest information-sharing source of all time. But the corporatists at the FCC hated that, because it meant you had the power to determine where you wanted to go on the internet, and corporations had less power to herd you into junk news ghettoes like they do so easily on TV or in print. So don't brook, for example, Justice Kavanaugh's argument that corporations have a First Amendment "right" to restrict whatever internet traffic they like, as if we somehow don't have First Amendment rights to visit whatever website we want! Net neutrality used to be a principle that enjoyed bipartisan support among politicians -- and it still enjoys broad, bipartisan support among regular Americans like ourselves. So, again, our Senators have no excuse not to support this bill.

H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, would mandate voter-verified paper ballots for federal elections. This is a big deal, since (as we just saw in Mississippi) a lot of electronic voting machines don't let you vote for the person for whom you want to vote! Sometimes, when you've been doing something a certain way for hundreds of years, a machine actually can't do it better! Voter-verified paper ballots won't stop unscrupulous politicians from creating boxes of fake ballots, I suppose, but if you want to do that, you have to get a lot of other people to buy in, and only one of them needs to snitch to make your "victory" illegitimate. And you can steal votes a lot more easily with software, particularly when it's developed by some private corporation that'll fire any "snitch" who speaks out about its flaws. The bill would also fund state efforts to update their voting systems, which you know some states "forget" to do in their black and brown neighborhoods. As with H.R. 1, the For the People Act, you have to wonder why Mob Boss Mitch thinks it's just not worth it to make sure everyone can vote. What could he be afraid of?

Speaking of Mob Boss Mitch, he talks a lot these days about "bills we can pass," and acts like taking votes on bills that "can't pass" are a "waste of time." You know that's all rubbish -- even if these bills fail to pass the Senate, forcing your Senators to go on the record against voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, and secure elections is certainly worthwhile. But I want you to really think about Mob Boss Mitch's words, and measure the sheer contempt for the popular will they betray: nothing is worth doing unless a group of Senators pass a bill the President will sign. That's nowhere near the way it should work! How should it work? Absent a legitimate Constitutional concern -- and not just the bogus "concerns" of big donors passed off as "legitimate" concerns -- our Reps and Senators should pass the bills we tell them to pass, and the President should sign the bills we tell him to sign. We cannot rest until we have a system that works this way -- and when we get that system, we cannot rest in our duty to conserve that system for future generations, who will then have to work to keep it. But when we can do that, we'll have the "more perfect union" of which President Lincoln dreamed.

Around the table: from unconstitutional watchlists to Presidential drama.

In a stunning and welcome development, a U.S. District Court judge has ruled that our government's "terrorist watchlist" is unconstitutional. As Paul Craig Roberts would say, if 2.1 million Americans are on a terrorism watchlist, why aren't we having major terrorist attacks every day? Of course you already know the answer, just like you know the answer to "why don't they charge these Guantánamo detainees with crimes after 15 years?" I do not look forward to our Supreme Court justifying the watchlist as an Executive branch prerogative in the "war on terror," but in the meantime, I feel the same as Hassan Shibly does: proud to be an American.

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst actually tells townhall meeting attendees that Congressfolk need to "sit down behind closed doors so we’re not being scrutinized by this group or the other, and just have an open and honest conversation." After all, our representatives can only have "an open and honest conversation" if none of their constituents/bosses are listening to them! Ms. Ernst should also know that no one says "you're throwing Granny off a cliff!" when folks propose expanding Social Security -- only when folks propose hurting or destroying it. "Behind closed doors" really should be a career-ending utterance, but we can't be sure her eventual Democratic opponent will even bring it up.

You know our FBI prefers to harass black protestors as white supremacists actually shoot people up, but you may not know that our FBI also loves considering immigration activists as "violent extremists" even though they present no evidence of any immigration activists actually committing any violence. Don't worry, though -- entities like Fox News will just redefine "violence" until it includes "speaking out against injustice." After all, why should Our Glorious Elites be forced to endure criticism from people with First Amendment rights?

I get that obituaries of controversial figures will tend to avoid those figures' controversial nature, but the New York Times's obit of David Koch sure seems to go way over the top. He was a "man-about-town philanthropist," a "seemingly limitless storehouse of Elks club-inflected jokes," even a "playboy," not the founder of numerous right-wing think tanks that still pollute our discourse with bad arguments, or the founder of the corporation that has paid three quarters of a billion dollars in pollution fines and no doubt should have paid a lot more. What can you say, though? Elites gonna elite.

I'm a bit stunned that the normally outstanding ProPublica actually published a hit piece on Medicare-for-All -- a much higher-quality hit piece than you'd get from some health insurance industry hack, I'll grant, but seriously, why would we make Democratic Presidential candidates' prevarications the piece of dirt around which we form a pearl? Journalists would be on much surer ground actually reading the Medicare-for-All bill (which would explicitly let you keep your doctor and explicitly cover everything without copays, regardless of what the article's headline says) and wondering whether the bill that might eventually become law might not resemble it enough. (Oh, and that's not $32 trillion more over 10 years if the private health insurance industry goes away, it's $32 trillion total, which is still $17 trillion less than CMS has predicted we'll spend over that time. And rather than worry about how high taxes would go, we could fund it by assessing employers a fee per employee that'll be less than they're already paying for private health insurance. They'd be fools not to take the savings.)

Finally, Katha Pollitt at The Nation compiles an unfortunately-not-all-inclusive list of our President's misdeeds during the month of August, and it's a list undreamt of by the best mid-century satirists. I do not expect such a list to reach our President's votaries, of course, and I also suspect it won't reach Republicans inclined to say yes-he-acts-badly-but-judges-and-regulations. The 100 million or so people who didn't vote for President in 2016? Yeah, they might be receptive -- but only if the Democrats decide to offer an actual alternative in 2020. These folks are just gonna be "mad at both sides" if Joe Biden is the nominee. Indeed, that's surely the purpose of all our President's drama.

Action: concerning birth control and media monopolies.

Our Administration is trying its damnedest to redirect public Title X funding away from organizations like Planned Parenthood and toward organizations like Obria, which is notorious for giving incorrect information about abortion and for refusing to give birth control to its patients, even though birth control sure seems like the best way to reduce abortions. If you're tempted to think that this move merely reflects a shift in our government's priorities, remember that providing comprehensive family planning services is the whole purpose of Title X, and I don't think even now you'll find too many federal judges who'd be convinced that Congress explicitly authorized the provision of half-assed family planning. Shame that the law-and-order crowd doesn't see our Administration's poor funding of family planning as a law-and-order issue; maybe if more black people were involved in the law-breaking, they'd see it. Anyway, Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to stop illegally giving taxpayer money to fake family planning centers.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Justice Department to block the proposed CBS/Viacom merger. CBS and Viacom are saying they need to merge so they can compete with Netflix, Disney, and the like, but who cares what's good for CBS? I'm such a bastard I only care what's good for America, and you know what happens when big corporations merge: they cut jobs, raise prices, and redistribute more worker income upward to their executives -- which, admittedly, sounds exactly like the program of this entire Administration, whose Attorney General, William Barr, is another one who thinks "freedom" is all about letting corporations do whatever they want and damn the consequences for the rest of us. But the fewer corporations that own all of our media, the worse it is for us, not just in lost jobs and lost income, but in lost freedom to get the kind of critical information and alternate viewpoints with which civilized people make good decisions. When a big corporation owns a media outlet, after all, that media outlet not only avoids criticizing its owner, but any other big corporation that owner does business with. And that's just another kind of corruption we need to fight.

Action: concerning taxes and "free" trade.

David Koch passed away a few weeks ago, and if we want to make his life truly meaningful, we can, at the least, allow Americans for Tax Fairness to help us tell our Congressfolk to close the loopholes that result in the kind of absurd fortunes like the one Mr. Koch amassed largely tax-free. Some folks on the right indulge in a sort of hyper-individualism, in which they assert that we're only free when one person is as free as we can imagine, and if you see a kind of logic in that, you must also see that when one person achieves that much freedom, they trample over everyone else's freedom merely to make a meaningful life for themselves. When we restrained the freedom of the richest individuals, we created the greatest middle class in history -- and in recent decades we've destroyed that middle class by indulging in these individualist fantasies, where we celebrate those with billions of dollars they can never spend, fleets of classic cars they can never drive, or the umpteen huge vacation homes they can't live in at once. So let's promote some real freedom.

Meanwhile, the Amazon rainforest, a.k.a. "the lungs of the Earth," continues to burn, largely because of the lawless regime of Brazil's President, Jair Bolsonaro, who has encouraged loggers and farmers to burn trees in order to "spur development" -- and, not incidentally, infringe on the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Mr. Bolsonaro, as disgusting a human being as has ever held office, has gone on to accuse non-governmental organizations of setting the fire themselves, and has figured their motive as trying to make money off climate change, though sane people know that no environmental group will ever make as much money fighting climate change as a big corporation will make causing it. Anyway, while European nations offer financial aid with one hand, they're planning to conclude yet another of those notorious "free" trade "deals" with Mercosur, a sort of South American common market composed of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. If you're familiar with "free" trade, you know that'll just make everything worse, so Sum of Us helps you tell the European Union to scuttle the EU-Mercosur "free" trade "deal."

Action: concerning war in Yemen, methane pollution, and discrimination.

Both Houses of Congress have passed defense spending bills that include amendments that would get our soldiers out of the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen and stop our government from selling weapons that kill good Yemenis -- but, of course, now both Houses have to go to Congress, and some folks who should know better (Sen. Reed of Rhode Island, for one) are making noises about ensuring they pass a bill that our President will actually sign. How many times must I tell these pimps! You do the people's will, and you let the President take the heat for ignoring it! I tell you, they've got some serious Stockholm Syndrome sufferers in our Congress. Hence Avaaz provides some phone numbers: you can call Sen. Reed at 202.224.4642, Speaker Pelosi at 202.225.4965, and House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith at 202.225.8901, and tell them to keep anti-war amendments in the defense spending bill. It has to pass, after all, so our Congress holds all the cards here. They ought to start acting like it.

Meanwhile, our Administration has announced its final proposal for methane pollution limits -- and of course they're gutting them, because if a regulation actually protects good Americans from corporate pollution, it cannot stand! (Alternately, if President Obama issued a regulation, it cannot stand!) Allowing gas and oil drilling corporations to leak methane from their wells and pipelines willy-nilly not only packs a bigger climate-change punch than coal emissions do, they also deprive good Americans of royalties if the drilling operations are on public lands -- methane is, after all, a usable energy source. Hence Penn Environment, Environmental Action, and the Environmental Defense Fund all help you tell our EPA to reject its own proposal to increase methane pollution. Why bother telling our Administration to do things they don't want to do? Because they're taking public comments on it, meaning they have to come up with a very, very good reason to ignore the public will, or else the courts will smack them down -- as they've done to a great many of our Administration's regulatory "efforts" so far.

Finally, our Administration is also trying to let corporations get federal contracts and discriminate against people on the basis of their "religious" "conscience." Using religion as an excuse to discriminate is an old scam -- folks used the Bible to justify slavery, after all -- and using "religious" "conscience" to (for example) fire pregnant workers, avoid hiring gays, and force transgender employees into the wrong bathrooms isn't significantly different. Chances are it ultimately won't pass Supreme Court muster, since our Supreme Court ruled in the Hobby Lobby case that closely-held corporations (i.e., ones with a handful of owners), and not just any old corporation with a knuckle-dragging CEO, can exercise "religious" "conscience." But this Administration doesn't care about law and order; they only care about stoking rage in their votaries. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your Department of Labor to reject its own proposal to allow federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of "religious" "conscience."

Around the table: from economic blues to voting machine foul-ups.

Dean Baker thinks that though "The Economy Looks Grim for Workers," it "Might Not Bring Recession." Why not? Because very few sectors of the economy (housing construction, auto sales) are big enough to take the economy down by themselves anymore, and I bet banksters tell us this is why we should let them run everything! After all, that time the banksters took down the economy by themselves was so long ago! I still suspect the economy might take a dive merely because it's been in recovery so long (even if, as Mr. Baker suggests, we might better put "recovery" in quotation marks), but Mr. Baker's thesis is certainly more convincing than reading the tea leaves of inverted yield curves on T-bonds.

Nate Silver says Joe Biden doesn't have an enthusiasm problem so much as an "Iowa problem," and though I think we really ought to describe the difference between enthusiasm for beating a hated incumbent from enthusiasm for electing a new one, I do recall John McCain also having a similar problem in 2008 (he finished fourth in the Iowa caucuses that January), and then over the next few months Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney basically split the not-McCain vote so that Mr. McCain won the nomination; I suppose you could see Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren playing the Huckabee/Romney parts in a similar drama. But all that's not a good sign for Joe Biden, either -- John McCain lost the 2008 general, after all, and you probably remember that back in 2000 John McCain was the upstart who made people excited to vote for him, and when has Joe Biden ever been that?

181 CEOs sign a Business Roundtable resolution proclaiming that they can't just worry about delivering more money to shareholders anymore, and that they also have to worry about workers and our climate, among other things, but Tom Conway at OurFuture reminds us that they're just pulling a stunt and that we will need to "force" them to really clean up their act. I've long said that forcing CEOs to pay a 91% tax on income over a million bucks and forcing their corporations to pay a 55% tax rate will bring them back into the fold of civilized people, but the other reforms Mr. Conway cites in paragraphs 25 and 27 will also help. (Note well, also, that these corporations declaring that they have to do more for our communities don't pay a whole lot of taxes to begin with.)

Jesus Mary and Joseph Jon Ossoff is thinking of running for Senate. Mr. Ossoff rode that boatload of funding for the 2017 Georgia 6th House special election all the way to 48%, just as I figured he would -- he was, after all, another center-right Democrat who said an awful lot about right-sizing regulations and bringing high-tech jobs to the region and very little about his major accomplishment in life (his production of an al-Jazeera report exposing ISIS sex slavery). And a Black Lives Matter activist wound up winning Georgia's 6th in 2018, proving, again, that "raising a lot of money" is nowhere near as important as "inspire people to vote for you."

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gets the Queen to close Parliament for most of the two months before the U.K. has to exit the European Union at the end of October, precisely so they can't stop the no-deal Brexit Mr. Johnson seems to desire. They call it "coup-like," but I see this as abject desperation on Mr. Johnson's part, and people do understand that British elections aren't like American Presidential elections, right? Mr. Johnson's position depends on a) his party's electoral fortunes or b) his ability to form a coalition government if the Tories don't get more than half the seats in the House of Commons, so people "liking" Boris Johnson means rather little if they don't also like his party, the same party that can't seem to hammer out a deal to gracefully exit the EU. And if expected food/fuel/medicine shortages materialize, then how does he win after everyone saw him go out of his way to bring them about? He won't be running against Joe Biden, after all.

Finally, Mississippi voters went to the polls earlier this week to vote in primaries for various statewide offices, and voters in upwards of nine counties reported that they tried to vote for one Republican gubernatorial candidate but got their vote switched to another, who just so happens to be the state's sitting Lieutenant Governor. And that's why we need paper ballots -- ballot counters would have to alter them or "lose" them to steal an election, and most of them would pause before doing that, but nobody feels guilty when a "faulty" machine does it for them.

Action: concerning fair housing, racism, and our duty as civilized people to shame those who have wronged us.

Our Department of Housing and Urban Development (or HUD) has proposed using algorithms to evaluate housing applicants. Ask yourself: why does an algorithm need to handle a task humans have been handling for years? The answer: because algorithms don't have families and don't need to use the bathroom. In other words, because they're not people. Call me old-fashioned, but if something's important enough to do, a person should do it. And if you think people are fallible, well, algorithms are worse -- facial recognition algorithms think all black people look alike, job-recruiting algorithms can't hire women, and social media algorithms can't root out violent racists. And HUD's algorithm would track how often applicants go out clubbing, like people are never supposed to have fun or something. So CREDO helps you tell our HUD to do public housing the right way and reject its own proposal to hand over functions to computers.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Senators to block the nomination of racist Steven Menashi to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. In "Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy," which he wrote for the University of Pennsylvania's international law journal back in 2010 (so no use saying "youthful indiscretion," amirite?), Mr. Menashi concludes that the more ethnically diverse a state is, the more ineffectual it is. He sounds like a man after our President's own heart! And Mr. Menashi's elite pedigree (he graduated Stanford and clerked for Justice Alito) doesn't excuse him; rather, it points out (as if we needed more of this!) how irredeemably corrupt and decadent Our Glorious Elites have become. If a white supremacist can smile, speak softly, and write complete sentences, they're not better than the barely coherent guy at the end of the bar, they're worse. Is it too much to ask to have fewer of them in positions of power?

Finally, CREDO also helps you tell ABC to drop former Administration spokeshack Sean Spicer from its upcoming season of "Dancing With the Stars." I have long believed that if you work for evil, then we, as civilized people, should shun and shame you. That's why I didn't think Condoleeza Rice was "oppressed" by the public pressure that prompted her to withdraw from her Rutgers commencement speech gig in 2014: frankly, someone who worked for Tha Bush Mobb should never have received such an invitation in the first place. I can already hear the right-wingers, not usually known for public displays of compassion, demanding to know WHEN WILLZ TEH SHAMINGZ STOPZ!!!!! "When people stop acting shamefully" would be the answer. And I can hear them saying WHYZ DO YOU HAVEZ TO BRINGZ TEH POLITICZ INTO ITZ!!!!! But, really, folks, Sean Spicer brings the politics with him wherever he goes, and when you work for evil, civilized people shouldn't rush to put you on family TV programming.