As you've no doubt heard, our Administration ordered American hospitals to send their data directly to the Department of Health and Human Services instead of the Centers for Disease Control, where they'd been sending it. What's the difference? Why, the public can view the CDC's data, but not HHS's data! Which will of course be managed by a private corporation from Pennsylvania which of course received a noncompetitive contract for the data and whose CEO of course has donated to Republican politicians! It's a two-fer: they hide data from the public and funnel taxpayer money (i.e., your money) to a crony corporation! Hence MoveOn helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our Administration from playing a shell game with vital health data in the middle of a pandemic. Our CDC makes our President look bad because CDC scientists know what they're doing and our President doesn't. But we're Americans, dammit, and we don't have to take that. Particularly since it could be a matter of life and death.
Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make sure they extend expanded unemployment benefits past July 25. That's right, those benefits expire in less than a week, and for a minute there Congress seemed happy looking more at the 6 million jobs created the last two months and less at the almost-40 million jobs lost the previous three. But if you possess the ability to subtract a one-digit number from a two-digit number, then you know why good Americans still need those benefits. The HEROES Act would already extend them, and we'll tell our Senators to pass that bill tomorrow, but in the meantime, they should hear from us, loud and clear, that we want the unemployment benefits extended -- without the nonsense about how "lazy" unemployment benefits supposedly make people, and certainly without the poison pills Mob Boss Mitch loves attaching to must-pass legislation. Oh, and not for nothing, but this pandemic's getting worse.
In other news, Sign Here Now helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) for its response to COVID-19 in its concentration camps. We might reasonably expect such an investigation to conclude that it's no better than our Administration's disastrous COVID-19 response generally, but our Congressfolk should still investigate on our behalf. True, learning that ICE is wantonly spraying cleaning chemicals on immigrant and refugee detainees, for example, won't move any of our President's votaries -- who generally interpret any cruelty toward non-white folks as "toughness" and any perceived slight against white folks as "bullying" -- but learning about such things may move good Americans who already have a lot to think about in their lives. Personal to those who claim anyone who opposes cruelty to immigrants and refugees in concentration camps must ipso facto support "open borders": God doesn't like trolls.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. To review: the NO BAN Act would not only reverse our President's notorious and nefarious Muslim ban (i.e., his travel ban on six Muslim-majority nations, with North Korea and Venezuela thrown in solely so he could claim he didn't base his ban on religion), it would prevent future Presidents from enacting similar bans in the future. If you're still thinking that maybe keeping Muslims out of America is a way of reducing terrorism, please remember that a) we've got plenty of domestic terrorists who we can't just keep out of their own country and b) if we stopped interfering in Middle Eastern affairs, then we'd go much, much farther toward reducing the possibility that Muslims will fly another plane into another building. Also, appeals to fear are always wrong.
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