Jesus Mary and Joseph when will this madness stop? Now Texas's state legislature is contemplating a slew of anti-gay bills, including one that would curb gays' right to adopt children, another taking aim at their right to get married, plus, of course, another "bathroom bill." And along with these bills (and many others, for as one activist ruefully notes, "Texas just does it bigger") comes the litany of excuses: we're protecting people's right to exercise their religious beliefs boo-hoo, we're trying to make bathrooms safe oh come on. No one has a right to use their "sincere religious beliefs" to abridge the rights of others, and if you're familiar with actual statistics on child molestation, you know that you'd be better off banning heterosexual male adults from public bathrooms than transgendered folks. Of course, we wouldn't do that, either, but hey, just saying. You may want to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom, if you're on a smartphone) to find and call Texas legislators and give them the spanking they deserve over this matter.
Meanwhile, we were just talking last week about the Sinclair Broadcast Group digging their tentacles even deeper into America's local TV stations, and now Free Press helps you tell the FCC to stop the proposed Sinclair-Tribune merger. The FCC, under its intrepid new chair, Ajit Pai, has lately loosened rules governing how many UHF TV stations a single corporation can own -- perhaps thinking that nobody watches UHF anymore, so who cares? -- except that, well, people do watch UHF TV stations, particularly good folks underserved by cable corporations, and if this deal goes through, Sinclair will be able to reach seven out of every 10 Americans. The problem isn't so much that Sinclair is an unregenerate right-wing network, or even that they might have colluded with the Trump campaign to get quid pro quo goodies later -- the problem is that they push cookie-cutter news content on local TV stations, thus enabling those stations to do less of the local news and analysis that is their very reason for existence. And, really, a monopoly is a monopoly, regardless of what "the rules allow." I mean, we're not blind here in America.
Finally, just as President Obama was beginning (and I do mean beginning!) to get our federal government out of the corporate-welfare-for-private-prisons business, along comes new President Trump to pull us right back in. And, you know, if you remember Mr. Trump saying, at the very first Republican debate, that he just puts out the money and the politicians do whatever he wants, you have every right to suspect that somebody, somewhere, paid for this obviously-foolish policy move, and maybe even broke the law doing so. Hence Rootstrikers helps you tell the Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to investigate possibly illegal contributions coming from the GEO Group. The GEO Group just got a $100 million-plus contract to operate a Texas detention center for immigrants, and just so happens to have pumped six figures into a Trump-aligned SuperPAC and six figures into the Trump inaugural ceremony beforehand. And GEO, like other private prison corporations, generally takes public money to run prisons badly. You have to wonder why we, as taxpayers, would put up with that.
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