The Ugandan Parliament has passed a bill that would punish folks with life in prison just for being gay. If this all sounds familiar, recall that last year's bill punished folks with the death penalty for being gay, and at one point in the current legislative process Parliament was apparently ready to levy a death sentence if HIV was involved -- such compromisers, these lawmakers! But let's not get too caught up in the difference between a pile of dung the flies have found and a pile of dung the flies haven't found yet, and let's also not forget that the bill also puts people in prison for not "reporting" their gay friends and neighbors. Because that's why freedom is so important -- so we can snitch on people we don't like! Lucky for us, President Yoweri Museveni said he'd veto the bill if Parliament passed it -- but he could get cold feet, you know, especially if he's waiting for another wave of international displeasure to help him out. Still, duty is duty, so CREDO helps you tell President Museveni to veto the gay-hate bill.
Meanwhile, you may know that the Washington Post's new owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns Amazon. But you may not know that Amazon has received a $600 million cloud-computing contract from the CIA. And of course, since the Washington Post, you know, does reporting on the CIA, you, as a reader, would have every reason to wonder whether the Post's reporting will, forthwith, be a bit more sympathetic to the CIA than the facts would warrant. No doubt the Washington Post would tell you that their reporting on NSA data snooping and warrantless wiretapping has been better than that of any other major news outlet, and though they'd be right about that, winning that prize is a little like being the best player on the 1974-75 Washington Capitals, and it's also not exactly relevant to the CIA. Has the Post's reporting on, say, killer drones and "signature" strikes stood out? Not particularly. So Roots Action helps you tell the Post to disclose its conflict of interest in its CIA reporting.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to renew the Production Tax Credit for wind energy, Friends of the Earth provides one more. And when they tell you the wind power tax credit does nothing for the wind power industry, you can tell him the cost of wind power has come down 90% over the last two decades, which period just about coincides with the Production Tax Credit's first appearance in the Energy Policy Act of 1992. You might also remark that wind power tax credits are certainly better than, say, oil tax credits, which only serve to inflate the profits of an already-stable industry. Others might argue that wind's production costs may soon reach parity with coal's, suggesting the subsidy's obsolescence at that point. I would not be uncivil to wonder if folks who'd make that argument have been spending the last decade or so making other anti-wind arguments just to see what sticks. But in any case, as long as big coal corporations have billions of dollars on hand to lobby Congressfolk to kill wind power subsidies -- and worse! -- I think we need to keep subsidizing wind power.
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