If you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center and send its detainees to nations that respect human rights, then Amnesty International still helps you do that. Guantánamo has been a stain on our national soul for some 19 years now -- yes, a baby born just after we started sending "dangerous" "terror" "suspects" there would now be old enough to vote! And like the worst stains on our soul, it's a stain built on lies -- lies that these clowns "return" to "terrorism," lies that we ever got any actionable intelligence from torturing them, lies, even, that they were ever "terrorists," for if you can't charge someone with something after a decade, how was he a "terrorist"? More likely he was just an excuse to "look tough." But the road to hell is paved with the skulls of politicians who tried to "look tough." So let's help Joe Biden not be one of those. At least this decade, amirite?
Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) that our internet should be a public utility and that they should reclaim it for us. In the old days, we called that "nationalizing," and during the era of actual Communists it had a bad name, but ain't nobody in contemporary America singing the praises of Comcast and Verizon, and besides, without UNIX and TCP-IP -- both Big Gummint creations! -- we wouldn't even have the internet we've got, so, by my lights, it's already ours. Making the internet a public utility would not only allow our FCC to bring back the net neutrality principles we all deserve as consumers, it'll help our FCC bring internet access to the 40 million Americans who still don't have broadband access (or any access!). 40 million underserved Americans in the COVID era, no less! But if we make our internet public again, then we should be able to serve all good Americans.
Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell President Biden to enact strong auto fuel emission standards. Our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) does that, after all, and the Clean Car Standards were one of Barack Obama's signature achievements as President -- until Donald Trump took a big dump all over them, of course! Really, though, air pollution and its resulting health issues are not popular, nor are gas-guzzling cars that cost more to fill up at the pump. These are fairly easy things for intelligent people to grasp, yet our enemies still talk of the "higher sticker price" of cars that pollute less, as if you wouldn't recoup that cost through lower gas prices, as if the only thing that matters is how much money you have or spend right now. Frankly, that was never very conservative of the Trump Administration. But thrift remains a value that sustains us, and cleaner cars will help us sustain our values -- and ourselves.
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