With the situation in Syria deteriorating "in spite of" President Obama's unilateral air strikes, Just Foreign Policy helps you tell our government to give more help to Syrian refugees and negotiate with all parties, including Russia and Iran, to end the bloodshed. Right-wingers who think negotiation is for weaklings might want to check themselves to make sure they're not projecting, and when they point to the Iran negotiations as an example of how negotiating with your enemies is always wrong because you can't "trust" them, they should note the stringent inspection regime that agreement produced, and thus should not expect that just because Iran would be involved with these negotiations that we would simply "trust" Iran about anything in particular. They should also know that bombing everyone into the stone age is not a mark of strength, but a mark of weakness. Accomplishing peace, real peace where everyone's a stakeholder and everyone's accountable, is strength. Is it too much to ask that reasonable adults get more of the say about things in America than rage-filled right-wingers?
Meanwhile, Common Cause helps you tell the IRS to vigorously regulate the so-called "social welfare" non-profits that have been spending millions of dollars on political campaigning. 501(c)4 groups can keep their donors secret because they have, historically, been civic organizations doing things like publishing community newspapers and organizing community sports leagues, but groups like Crossroads GPS, the nefarious creation of Karl Rove, are somehow 501(c)(4) "social welfare" non-profits despite pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into political campaigns. Do they seriously want to argue that trying to elect knuckle-dragging Republicans who will clamp down on any government program that actually helps people promotes "social welfare"? I'd be glad to have that argument. The IRS's actual proposal suggests they're not the model of courage right now, their investigations into right-wing groups some years back being totally overblown by both the right and the "liberal" media, but the right thing to do is still the right thing to do, whether right-wingers whine about it or not.
Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your state legislators to fight back against big fossil fuel corporations' attempts to cripple the solar power industry. So far, the "sun tax" initiatives pushed by groups like the Koch brothers -- you know, the ones that try to cripple home solar power creators' ability to sell their power to utility corporations, under the absurd reasoning that folks who spent tens of thousands of dollars to create their own power are "free riders" -- have occurred at the state level, and in the aftermath of the 2016 elections, however they turn out, that could well change, but we should fight for solar power at the state level before the battle goes nationwide. And that means going directly to the same state legislators far too prone to regurgitate whatever ALEC tells them to. We really do live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society when so-called "conservatives" try to stop people from making their own power, and try to destroy an industry adding jobs at twenty times the national average. But this is a democracy, so we can fix that.
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