Remember when then-Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain insisted that Guantánamo Bay had to close in order for us to begin to repair our standing in the world? Well, perhaps because the Obama Administration has actually transferred 27 detainees out over the last three months, Sen. McCain has changed his mind -- which nobody could have predicted, just as nobody could have predicted that he would renounce virtually everything else he'd become famous (and loved) for in the run up to 2008 -- and has co-sponsored S. 165, which would cut off funding for nearly any effort our government undertakes to transfer the remaining 122 men we're detaining in Guantánamo Bay, which includes 54 already cleared for transfer, some of these cleared several years ago. And the Senate will apparently begin deliberation on this bill today, so how about some action? Amnesty International helps you tell the Senate Armed Services Committee to reject Mr. McCain's effort, and continue the unfortunately very long process of closing Guantánamo Bay.
Meanwhile, the FCC will issue new net neutrality regulations by the end of this month -- and by the sound of it, they'll be pretty strong net neutrality regulations -- but the big telecom corporations still don't like it, like they're not rich enough or something, hence their push for the much weaker Thune/Upton net neutrality bill in Congress, which is shot full of loopholes and which strips the FCC of its power to regulate the issue. Hence the ACLU helps you tell Congress to reject the Thune/Upton bill, while CREDO helps you tell the big telecoms to back off their push for the Thune/Upton bill. The big telecoms have been saying that net neutrality will slow investment. But net neutrality isn't something new -- it's been the norm in internet relations all this time -- so one must ask, slow it from what? And if it were true, it wouldn't be a law of physics -- big corporations would be slowing investment on their own, because they didn't get their way. We don't tolerate that sort of behavior from bratty children, so why do we tolerate it from our supposed best-and-brightest corporate chieftains?
Finally, CREDO also helps you tell the FDA to crack down on food warehouses that don't meet its health standards. This isn't a matter of asking the FDA to start investigating dirty food warehouses, but to follow through on citations it's already issued -- some 90 of them, with one Senator comparing the FDA's citations (which found such food-friendly items as dead rats and rat poop) with the book that jump-started the FDA back in the day, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. And the FDA currently inspects "high-risk" food warehouses only once every three years, even though almost one in six of us will get food poisoning this year, and 3,000 Americans will very likely die from it. I suppose the FDA (which has been nearly as bad under President Obama, if not as bad, as Tha Bush Mobb's FDA) will retort that it doesn't have the money to conduct more frequent investigations. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't tell them to do a better job -- if we tell them enough, our deficit-mad government-hating politicians will have to notice sooner or later, lest they lose their jobs.
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