Once they return from their recess that I wish they'd stay on forever, Congress will have a mere five days to put together a budget -- or, more likely, a continuing resolution -- that will fund the government and raise the debt ceiling, and given that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the Presidency, I have no doubt they'll use the occasion to hold our government hostage to all sorts of right-wing budget priorities, including Mr. Trump's priority to cut $8 billion from the National Institutes of Health to build his precious border wall. And you cannot discount the possibility that Republicans will use the threat of a government shutdown and a default on our national debt to set other things aflame -- to slash Medicaid, to privatize Medicare and Social Security, to ram their health care "reform" bill down our throats, to defund FCC efforts to enforce net neutrality regulations, to slash EPA funding for clean air and clean water regulations, and any dozens of others you can name. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to fund our priorities, rather than use another manufactured hostage crisis to ram through theirs.
Meanwhile, as noted by more alert observers than I, it's a bit rich, so to speak, for President Trump to claim that he fired nearly five dozen missiles at a Syrian airbase because he wanted to save the lives of good Syrians, when he's so far issued two executive orders (both on hold, thanks to our court system) designed to prevent good Syrian refugees from coming to America! He'll say he needs to keep Syrian refugees out in order to keep terrorists out, but that's not how it works -- refugees, being people who, as the term implies, seek refuge from tyranny, are about the least likely people to try to foment terrorism on some other shore. The folks who commit terrorism are generally the reasonably well-off folks who watch other people get hurt, and who sympathize with them; really, every refugee we help is a blow not just against tyranny, but also against terrorism. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trumpian anti-refugee agenda. Because I won't let America become a nation of assholes just because our President is one.
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