It's only been two days and I have a boatload of repeal-the-sequester action alerts. Both the Coalition on Human Needs and the National Women's Law Center help you tell Congress to repeal the whole thing, not just the part that impacts them as they try to get out of town on a weekend. Of course we all understand problems a lot better when they impact us personally, but it shouldn't take that much empathy to get rid of the spending cuts that take food directly out of seniors' mouths, or slash unemployment assistance to folks who need it, which also takes food out of their mouths. Oh, but we're not just about stopping the bleeding, we're also about starting the healing: Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI) has introduced S. 278, the Job Preservation and Sequester Replacement Act, which would replace the sequester's cuts with new revenues generated from ending certain corporate tax breaks and instituting the Buffett Rule. S. 278 is already up on thomas.loc.gov; you may want to call your Reps and Senators about it. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, Europe has banned a class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids (that's right, related to nicotine), because of their tendency to kill off honeybees. But we haven't, and indeed the EPA is mulling approving Dow Chemical's sulfoxaflor for wider insecticide use (the EPA approved it for use on cotton last year, on an "emergency" basis, no less). And the EPA says sulfoxaflor is "very highly-toxic" to bees, but also says its effects on bees are "relatively short-lived." Relative to how long they'll be dead, maybe? Organic Consumers helps you tell the EPA to reject sulfoxaflor for any use. It's get-off-the-pot-time for the EPA, and all this jockeying over whether sulfoxaflor is precisely a neonicotinoid or just something else that kills off a lot of bees sounds like what the big corporations want us to do while they make money hand over fist from desperate farmers. This ain't no joke -- we have fewer than half the bees we had in 1960, and if they all die, they'll very likely take almonds, apples, peaches, cherries, blueberries, avocados, and watermelon with them, and you won't find apples at the market anytime you want, either.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to support H.R. 1755/S. 815, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (or ENDA), People for the American Way offers one more. Corporations can fire folks just for being gay in 29 states (and transgender in 34), and I know a lot of honest conservatives would prefer that we just hire the best people for the job and not worry about who they sleep with at night. Of course, who can hear America's honest conservatives over the gaggle of ragehead punditoids who create all the drama and get all the attention? But the tide seems to be turning against anti-gay bigotry; a majority of U.S. Senators now support gay marriage, the first active male athlete from one of the four major sports just came out of the closet, and even S. 815's five co-sponsors include two Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Mark Kirk of Illinois. H.R. 1755's 161 co-sponsors include (only) two Republicans (Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania and Richard Hanna of New York), but the House ain't the boss of us. Now, right wingers: no lies about gays being allowed to break all the rules (see Sec. 8 of S. 815) or the bill creating gay affirmative action (Sec. 4) or forcing churches to hire all-gay choirs (Sec. 6), OK?