Senate Democrats have taken to skipping Committee meetings in an effort to stall President Trump's Cabinet nominees, which has led to some truly hysterical hand-wringing from the right -- Sen. Toomey (R-PA) called it "an unprecedented level of obstruction," which is to laugh! Surely you recall Senate Republicans refusing to confirm several of President Obama's nominees in 2013, which (unfortunately) led Democrats to get rid of the filibuster for Presidential nominees; Republicans seem anxious to point out that they didn't put up much of a fight on Mr. Obama's 2009 nominees, but his 2009 nominees were largely center-right nominees of whom even Pat Robertson seemed to approve, whereas Donald Trump's 2017 nominees are far right-wing extremists who do not speak for anyone but their biggest campaign donors. I was planning to urge you to use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Senators and tell them to oppose the nominations of Tom Price to Secretary of Health and Human Services and Mick Mulvaney to the Office of Budget Management -- Mr. Price for his obvious hostility to Medicare and Mr. Mulvaney for his stated desire to slash Social Security -- but hell, any of them is fair game right now.
Meanwhile, as you might expect, I've got action alerts concerning Mr. Trump's nefarious Executive Order which shut down refugee admissions for at least the next four months and banned legal immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations (though not the ones he's got business interests in or the ones who actually sent terrorists to kill us, amirite?). Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to denounce the Trump ban from the Senate floor, while the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Demand Progress, and MoveOn help you direct your will at all of Congress, and Sum of Us helps you contact Mr. Trump's CEO buddies, who (unlike some CEOs) have held their tongue about the Order. People who cheer on Mr. Trump's un-American ban should look into their own past and see if they were very well-received when they got here. Chances are they weren't! But did it kill this country to let such folks in? Of course it didn't. But the blind fear some folks have toward anyone who isn't like themselves is sure going to kill this country if we let it. And Donald Trump won't care, as long as he's making money. Let's try to make him irrelevant, as he most definitely deserves.
In other news, the FCC lately mandated that your internet service provider get your permission (which you can withhold!) before selling your data to third-parties -- and, of course, now that Mr. Trump is in office, his nominee for FCC Chair really, really wants to get rid of that mandate, because it's a good thing that helps people, rather than a bad thing that helps corporate CEOs make even more unearned money. Let me know if I'm not making my feeling absolutely clear, OK? Consumers Union helps you tell the FCC not to reverse the FCC's new privacy protections. Folks who would give you guff about this need to answer why on Earth we should expect privacy for our offline private information but not our online private information. The ease with which corporations can find and collect information is no excuse -- as your mama taught you, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. You wish our current ball-swinging man-child President's mama had learned this.
Finally, because like Ferdinand Foch I fight everywhere, Congress is mulling a backdoor attack on equal pay by rolling back pay reporting requirements that could reveal pay discrimination based on gender or ethnicity. What do our best and brightest corporate leaders have to hide? Some Congressfolk (no doubt egged on by these "best and brightest") act like any reporting requirement is onerous, like we're asking them to lift 16-ton weights with their pinkies or something. We only managed to get these reporting requirements last year, which means Congress might deep-six them before anyone has actually had to report any information! And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions (or EEOC) and the Labor Department (in theory, amirite?) need this information in order to investigate bad actors and enforce the many laws that would prevent corporations from discriminating against their employees. Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to gut equal pay reporting rules.
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