Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to reject the President's nominations of CIA chief Mike Pompeo to become Secretary of State and current CIA deputy chief Gina Haspel to take over Mr. Pompeo's current job. One doesn't want to get into the habit of starting sentences with "well at least Rex Tillerson didn't," but Mr. Tillerson's general lack of enthusiasm for scuttling the Iran nuclear deal and bombing the crap out of North Korea are two positive attributes Mr. Pompeo doesn't share. Plus, Mr. Pompeo thinks you might be a criminal if you use encryption! Ms. Haspel's apparent rise to the top is no less offensive, as she oversaw a notorious CIA torture farm during Tha Bush Mobb years. As Dexter Filkins at The New Yorker reminded us early last year, if not for Mr. Obama's let's-look-forward attitude to prosecuting CIA torturers, "people like Haspel, quite plausibly, could have gone to prison." Can we at least keep her from becoming CIA Director?
Meanwhile, some Pennsylvania Republican state reps want to pass HB 28, a bill that would let any municipal employee contact our federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) department, at any time, while forcing municipalities to jail folks whenever ICE asks (with none of those pesky judges to get in the way!) or risk losing state funding. I guess if you can't win the argument, you start taking hostages -- give ICE whatever it wants, or the money gets it! You don't let just any state employee contact ICE because state employees all have superiors who should be handling such contacts, and you don't let ICE force towns to jail folks because you want feds to get warrants before getting cooperation from localities. You'd think nominally conservative politicians would be sensitive to all of that. So the ACLU helps you tell your PA state rep to preserve local rights and reject HB 28.
Finally, Congress is mulling a pair of bills -- H.R. 848, the so-called Farm Regulatory Certainty Act, and S. 2421, the so-called Fair Agricultural Reporting Method Act -- that would (as you no doubt gathered from the words "regulatory certainty") hamstring our ability to counteract factory farm pollution. H.R. 848 would prevent us from suing factory farms under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act when factory farms pollute our water, and S. 2421 would let factory farms keep more of their toxic gas emissions secret from nearby communities. If Democrats had any guts, they'd be hammering Republicans with ads calling them objectively pro-pollution and objectively pro-dirty water and objectively pro-dirty air, but you know the chances of that happening. Which means, as usual, it's up to us. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from factory farm pollution by rejecting H.R. 848 and S. 2421.
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