Hot on the heels of a Washington Post "investigation" alleging that some 200 independent news organizations peddled "Russian propaganda," the U.S. House has passed an intelligence authorization bill that would create a committee ostensibly to "counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence over peoples and governments" -- but you know where such things wind up! They wind up going on witch hunts against media organs that won't kowtow to the Establishment, particularly when the committee has an overly broad mandate, and if you're thinking this'll go nowhere under a President Trump, who has often been accused of being too cozy with Russia, remember that "other duties as the President may designate" could include going after news organs that criticize him. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to oppose the "Russian propaganda" rider in the House's intelligence appropriations bill. And Democratic politicians who have their shorts in a bunch about Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 election should try putting up candidates who inspire people to vote for them, rather than attack independent media organs for not going along.
Meanwhile, the President-elect has made much noise about creating a Muslim "registry," but you may not know that Tha Bush Mobb had a program called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (or NSEERS), which targeted foreign Muslim men traveling to and from 25 countries (24 of which were Muslim-majority countries, of course), whereas Mr. Trump's ambitions in this regard are, ah, a bit broader -- he'd like to make every Muslim register, including those who are American citizens, thus contravening our First Amendment and, well, pretty much every basic notion of civilization. But our current President can do something about this (and indeed, already has, in emptying the NSEERS program of all of the countries Tha Bush Mobb had listed!), by simply scrapping the regulatory framework that established NSEERS (which, hate to pile on, never caught a single terrorist ever), and he won't even need to go to Real American President By God Mitch McConnell for permission to do it. Hence both CREDO and Moms Rising help you tell President Obama to dismantle the NSEERS registry before leaving office, thus making it harder for the Trump Administration to restart it. "Harder" is all we're getting out of this -- but we can make that count when Mr. Trump starts up his little registry.
Finally, Crate Free Illinois has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell The Maschhoffs, America's third-largest pork producer, to end practices that result in the abuse of hogs. Warning: you will not enjoy the video (total run time: four minutes, 38 seconds) of footage taken surreptitiously by the Animal Legal Defense Fund at a Maschhoffs production facility -- video that shows pigs suffering immensely in absolutely horrid living conditions, and also shows workers literally bashing "sickly" pigs' heads against the ground to kill them (which, as you might expect, doesn't always work the way it's supposed to, leaving those poor animals conscious of the damage done to them as they die). We also learn that pigs can starve "when the automatic electronic feeder malfunctions" -- in an economy where, you know, lots of people perfectly capable of feeding pigs still don't have enough work! We don't have to be vegetarians or vegans to understand that civilized people simply don't treat feed animals like this -- people who only care about profit treat animals like this. And I'll brook no guff about "keeping food prices low" -- these practices don't keep food prices low so much as they keep factory farm CEOs rich.
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