Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA is conducting a "day of action" today, in which we would tell our state Reps and Senators to support fair redistricting in the state by passing HB 22 and HB 23, and Fair Districts PA's website will help you do that. I sure had a lot of trouble accessing Fair Districts PA's website as I was writing this post, and that sure does seem a bit suspicious, doesn't it? I mean, after the shenanigans the legislature has pulled over the last few years in their efforts to avoid passing legislation that would (as the saying goes) let the voters choose their legislators instead of letting legislators choose their voters, it's a question worth asking. Still, you can always use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your state legislators and call them and tell them to pass HB 22 and HB 23, so that we can prevent more absurd gerrymandering by the legislature. And remember: if they don't do it now, it'll be very, very tough to get them to do it before they redraw districts again next year.
Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell your U.S. Senators to fund contact tracing so we can stop the spread of COVID-19 now and in the future. "Contact tracing" is what it sounds like, a process by which we find out who's come into contact with folks who have COVID-19 and test them, and then find the folks who've come into contact with them and test them, and so on and so on. It's hard, unsexy work -- I think I've just described two reasons why this Administration doesn't want to do it! -- but we've been doing this with diseases for decades, and you may not know that we didn't eradicate smallpox for good until we did contact tracing (though certainly universal vaccines against smallpox helped). Really, we shouldn't have to tell our government to do this, since it's the right thing to do and it's what governments have been doing for over half a century, but, you know, duty is duty. Of course, if the Senate just passed the HEROES Act, which would already fund contact tracing, they could solve the problem in a jif; I won't complain if they figure that out, too.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to restore American funding to the World Health Organization (or WHO), then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Let's not get bogged down in arguments about foreign entanglements, because we're not talking about some alliance that commits us to doing evil, nor are we talking about some "free" trade deal that outsources our jobs and nullifies our laws -- the World Health Organization has done a good job helping the world's people deal with this pandemic, and our funding helps them do that good job. Of course, it's the "good job" part that most likely led our President to terminate WHO funding -- the WHO's competence was showing up his own arrogant ineptitude, and nobody does that to the Drama King without paying the price! But the President doesn't get all the say about this matter -- Congress can simply budget the money and tell him to spend it, and ain't a damn thing he can do about it, except whine and stamp his feet. Which he's good at.
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