H.R. 3471/S. 1696, the Women's Health Protection Act, would prevent state and local governments from passing laws that unfairly target abortion centers. We need this bill because of the rash of anti-abortion legislation in states these past few years, legislation that has pretended to be about the "health of women" but which actually subjects abortion clinics to far more stringent regulations than other health care centers, in order to make abortion unavailable to as many women as possible. Last I looked, abortion is a legal medical procedure, and anti-abortion activists would do better to try to make abortion illegal, rather than weigh down abortions with unnecessary tests, restrict doctors from prescribing particular drugs, or mandate the size of janitorial closets in abortion clinics, all of which represent, to me, the coward's way out. Not that I believe anti-abortion activists are cowards -- but I certainly believe politicians are cowards. Planned Parenthood helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Women's Health Protection Act.
Meanwhile, we've kept the Delaware River Basin Commission from allowing fracking in the Delaware Valley so far -- but the Commission plans to mull the matter again within the next few months. What has changed, exactly, since the last time the Commission decided not to open the Delaware River Basin to fracking? Has fracking become safe? Has it stopped lighting tap water on fire, stopped making water brown and gelatinous, stopped shooting dangerous chemicals into the air? Have corporations begun to get serious about stowing the waste so that it doesn't leech into the water table? The only thing that's changed, as far as I can tell, is that Barack Obama got elected for a second term as U.S. President, and we've been learning lately that he's a pretty pro-fracking individual, no matter what noises he makes about keeping our water safe. As of this time, we can have clean water, or we can have gas drillers getting rich off hydraulic fracturing of shale; we can't have both. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission to ban fracking, not enable it.
Finally, Roots Action still helps you tell Congress to reform the NSA data-vacuuming program that has violated the civil rights of so many good Americans. Specifically, you'd ask Congress to pass the USA FREEDOM Act, which would stop the willy-nilly collection of Americans' private data unless it related to a specific counterterrorism investigation -- and you'd also ask Congress to oppose a competing bill, the so-called FISA Improvements Act, which would for the first time give express Congressional consent to the NSA's spying, and would explicitly allow the NSA to collect such data without anything even remotely resembling probable cause, an act even the nefarious FISA Amendments Act of 2008 did not dare to contemplate. The FISA Improvements Act, sadly, has already moved out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Select Intelligence Committee, despite having only one sponsor, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein. Meanwhile the USA FREEDOM Act, with 19 Senate sponsors including three Republicans, can't get out of Judiciary. We might have something to say about that.
Comments