Twitter has lately declared it won't take money for political advertising, which is interesting, I suppose, but Free Press helps you tell Twitter that they might be better off banning white supremacists from their website. Thanks to our First Amendment, our government can't put you in jail merely for being a racist (though it can if you, you know, beat up black folks), but nothing in our First Amendment says "social media must allow Nazi wannabes to spew filth in public," just as our First Amendment doesn't force publishing houses to accept every single manuscript they receive, or force shopping centers to allow everyone who wants to set up shop there to do so. I would actually be perfectly OK with them using Twitter to get together in private, but Twitter doesn't really differentiate between "public" and "private" very well, and that's Twitter's fault, not theirs, mine, or our First Amendment's. Certainly Nazi wannabes don't need a damn megaphone going off in everyone's ears all the damn time. It's not as if only one person can have First Amendment rights at a time, after all.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Drug Administration (or FDA) to stop factory farms from using antibiotics on feed animals for any purpose other than illness, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. In recent years, our FDA has mandated more veterinary oversight over antibiotic use on factory farms, which is better, but the stakes really are life-or-death for the rest of us here -- when factory farms use antibiotics on nominally healthy feed animals in order to a) fatten them up and b) allow them to endure squalid conditions more easily, then the end result might well be superbugs that resist any antibiotics, and thus a world where the next cut on your finger could kill you. None of that is alarmism, and all of that is simple logic. And if you're that worried that big factory farm corporations will collapse and we won't be able to buy any meat, find a small farmer to fill that need. They still exist, and if you find them, you can help other people find them, too -- and you can help them find more customers.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to stop its efforts to rescind California's stronger car emissions standards, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. This ain't that damn deep: the only benefits anyone will get from rolling back California's standards are a) big auto CEOs won't have to spend more money making their cars run more efficiently and b) you might -- I said might! -- pay less for a car when you buy it. Now let's list the benefits we get from the California standards: more efficient cars, less gas burnt up, fewer emissions befouling our air, and lower gas bills. (Since California is a big market, automakers tend to avoid building separate cars for different states.) Does "paying a little less for a car" outweigh "paying less for gas the entire time you own that car"? I say it does not, and that's before we reconsider the other benefits listed above. And memo to right-wingers: what happened to "states' rights" as a conservative value? Or was that only ever about slavery?
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