Congress is, believe it or not, mulling tax reform -- and Sens. Baucus (D-MT) and Hatch (R-UT) have reportedly proposed a "blank slate" approach to their colleagues, meaning they want them to imagine that our federal tax code has no loopholes or tax credits and then justify the loopholes or credits they want to keep. You'd like a tax code without all the tax credits corporations take as an "incentive" to create jobs they have no intention of creating, right? But a "blank slate" approach would also get rid of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC). Instead of thinking of these credits as Free Money for Those People (an epithet I rarely hear from right-wingers when talking about corporate tax credits), we ought to think about the EITC and CTC as tax credits that actually stimulate the economy -- they go to folks at the low end of the economic spectrum, who have to spend most of what they've got, so if you give them more of it, they'll spend it. So Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to keep taxes low for working families.

Meanwhile, the Food and Water Watch also helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to ban fracking on public lands, if you haven't done that yet. (If you have, don't do it again; more than one comment per citizen muddies the data.) The proposed BLM rules, as you may know, let gas drilling corporations keep the chemicals they're using secret so you don't know what poisons go into your drinking water -- or "allow" "disclosure" to an industry-funded website. But hello! Public land is our land, and the air and water you find on public land is our air and water, too, and we deserve clean air and water. Now, Congress will soon take an entire month off, and praise the Lord for such a boon! But the Executive branch runs year-round, which may be better or worse depending on what aspect of public policy we're discussing, so the Bureau of Land Management will take comments until August 23rd. And don't be flustered by morons calling you a tree-hugging liberal; banning a dangerous practice on our lands until we can make it less dangerous is, actually, a profoundly conservative thing to do.