First things first: the House's Homeland Security appropriations bill actually allows the President to put the Secret Service at any polling place he likes during federal elections. The Secret Service can accompany the President to the polls, but putting Secret Service folks randomly at polls sure sounds like our government trying to intimidate us, doesn't it? A spokesperson for the Senate's Homeland Security Chair, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, says that bit is not in the bill the Senate Homeland Security Committee passed this week, but that doesn't mean it won't be in the conference bill, and therefore, shortly thereafter, the law. This would be a very, very good time to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and call your Senators and demand that they reject this legislative rider.
While you've got them on the phone, you'll want to tell them to reject S. 2155, the so-called Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which has not yet received a full vote in the Senate, but which has about a dozen Democrat co-sponsors when it shouldn't have any sponsors, period. You may have heard that they're trying to change the bill a bit to make it more palatable. Your first objection to that statement might be how do you make a crap sandwich palatable? But, as David Dayen reports in The Intercept, the "fixes" the Senate has made won't actually fix a damn thing. And it gets worse: the House, which has passed even worse financial "reform" bills, aims to try to get their financial deregulation wish list jammed into the Senate bill via a "manager's amendment." All this, for a bill the CBO says will heighten the risk of another bankster meltdown. So the word of the day is "no."
Finally, the President has decided that he's going to ditch a ban on elephant trophies after all. I guess he figured we've all forgotten about that picture of his son holding a severed elephant tail! Uh, no: Environmental Action helps you tell our President to keep our ban on hunting elephants. Don't brook any nonsense from trolls that if you support the ban on hunting elephants, you must hate hunting. Really, what a flatugasm of immaturity -- I mean, if I said folks who support lifting the ban must really hate elephants, they'd all have a tantrum about it. Elephants' numbers have dropped dramatically over the last half-century, and hunting them down is a big reason why; don't hunters disapprove of hunting species into extinction? Or is that yet another tenet of conservatism that's just not conservative enough anymore for the rageheads who get into sword fights over the meaning of the word "conservative" these days?
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