As you know, our President signed an Executive Order late last week directing employers not to collect that half of the payroll tax workers owe -- the tax that funds Social Security and, to a lesser degree, Medicare -- through the end of the calendar year. They call it a "stimulus," but we know what it really is: a first step toward eradicating the payroll tax entirely and leaving Social Security and Medicare funding up to the whims of whichever party controls Congress and the White House. We don't know that merely because we suspect it -- we know it because our President has said so, out loud. And of course it's not a tax cut per se, since you'll still owe that money at the end of the year. He issued those Executive Orders late last week (and not earlier, when it would have received more attention from our media) for one reason: to look like he's "doing something." I get tired of leaders constantly looking like they're "doing something"; maybe they ought to just do something? Well, we'll do something, by demanding that Congress fight this Executive Order, as Demand Progress helps you do.
Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell our FBI to stop spying on black protestors. What do they expect to find, looting? We now know that a lot of these looters aren't "blacks burning down their own neighborhoods," but white agents provocateurs who get their jollies breaking stuff and blaming other people for it. How many work for our government, I wonder? It's a question worth asking! In the meantime, our FBI spies on black protestors for one reason only: because they think their free speech threatens their power. Well, maybe it is a threat, to their power to run roughshod over any Americans they like, but our FBI doesn't deserve that power any more than our hapless President does when he deploys his brownshirts to big cities. "Law and order" hotheads always complain more about black folks than about, say, corporations dumping filth into our air and water. They'll never see that the latter is a legitimate law-and-order concern, but we do.
Finally, Free Press helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on the Fox News Channel entirely. They might profess to find that notion counterintuitive, as Fox News has lately started outdrawing even the traditional over-the-air networks in ratings (not just the other cable news outlets) between 8 pm and 11 pm. But frankly that's overblown -- the over-the-air networks don't run very much of consequence during the summer, Fox News always gets ratings bumps during Presidential election seasons, the over-the-air nightly newscasts are doing a lot better than they have for some time, and Fox's flagship shows are only drawing about as much as a certain loofa-lover's show did back in the day. Besides, Fox News peddles hatred and stupidity; why would a corporation want to support that with its money? All Fox News does is condition its viewers to react to every tiny or imaginary slight with bottomless, inarticulate rage, and no corporation should enable that program with its advertising dollars.
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