You may have heard that a North Dakota state's attorney has announced plans to charge Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman with participating in a riot for her work covering the Dakota Access pipeline controversy. You and I can see that filing criminals charges against journalists because you don't like their coverage is profoundly dangerous and offensive, but good luck getting very many of today's "liberal" media journalists to agree, given that they spend most of their time sucking up to powerful people cultivating their sources. And Ms. Goodman is hardly alone: currently North Dakota police and the National Guard have literally set up checkpoints, where they stop you, demand ID, and ask you where you're going. Like they're the boss of you, when it's really the other way around! Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell North Dakota's Governor to stop with all the military occupation tactics in his state, lest it start to look like he thinks his real constituents are oil corporations and not, you know, the good citizens of North Dakota.
Meanwhile, the EPA is preparing to finalize smog standards, and, as you might imagine, big corporate coal and oil polluters want to make those rules as weak as possible -- once they're done demonizing the agency as a bunch of "unelected bureaucrats" and their work as "job terrorism," of course. But we don't have to take it! Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to mandate the most vigorous smog-fighting rules possible. Used to be you only got smog in cities (which helped give cities a bad name back in the day) and even then only during the summer, but now smog afflicts us year-round, and has even spread to rural areas (which threaten to give the country a bad name). Thing is, the EPA is actually approaching this whole matter in an authentically (and appropriately) conservative manner, by mandating technologies that states and power plants have already developed and proven successful. Of course, the word "conservative," like so many other words, hardly means what it used to -- so many folks now think it just means loving money and hating gays and women, and who can blame them, when they see how nominal "conservatives" act on TV?
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