The House passed a COVID relief bill on Saturday morning; now it's time to tell your Senators to do the same. Tell them they must include the $15/hour minimum wage in the bill, even if it means overruling the Senate Parliamentarian. I don't particularly want to do that, but let's be realistic: Republicans will do it next chance they get, and blame Democrats for it. And we should still work on Sens. Manchin (D?-WV) and Sinema (D?-AZ) about their particular unwillingness to pass the $15/hour minimum wage; their phone numbers are 202.224.3954 and 202.224.4521, respectively. Most Americans want this minimum wage hike, and more than half of Republicans want it, and ain't no way all the Republicans who don't want it all live in Arizona and West Virginia. Sens. Manchin and Sinema should stop adhering to the conventional wisdom on "how to represent a conservative state." You represent a conservative state the same way you represent the will of any other state: by doing the will of its people. And again, ain't no one in America going into the voting booth in 2022 saying thank God Democrats preserved the sanctity of Senate procedure at great cost to all of us!)
While you've got your Senators on the phone, you'll want to tell them to confirm President Biden's three new nominees to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors. President Biden nominated them not too long after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told a House Committee to "get used to me," so maybe now we won't have to get "used" to the big-time Republican donor who tried to foul up voting-by-mail and whose solution to all the problems Congress has created for our Post Office over the years is to cut back on delivering mail by air, which will make every day like the most recent holiday season, when packages took as long as a month and a half to get where they were supposed to go. Seriously, saying you can't serve the public because you don't have the money is un-American -- we can stop forcing our Post Office to pre-pay pension and health benefits at a scale we demand of literally no other government agency or corporation, or we can let our Post Office offer banking services again (which Daily Kos helps you do), and people like Louis DeJoy won't have their excuses anymore.
Meanwhile, President Biden has ordered our Justice Department to stop using private prisons, but hasn't ordered our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) to do so, and our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) operates under the auspices of DHS, hence Amnesty International helps you tell DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to release all detained immigrants and stop ICE from using private prisons to detain folks. Private prisons obey the profit motive, after all, and if abusing prisoners makes them more profits, they'll do it! Doesn't matter, necessarily, that private prisons also have to obey government regulations concerning the safety and health of detainees -- private prisons can ignore those regulations and dare our government to stop them, and if someone dies in neglect, well, a government fining a private prison won't bring that person back to life. That person is someone's mother, father, sister, brother, son or daughter, too -- not a faceless warrior in a "caravan." Generally, these folks run from oppression, and we're Americans, so we need to live up to our heritage, not cut it down out of wrath and sloth.
Finally, you've no doubt heard that President Biden proved he's just like all the other Presidents by ordering air strikes against Syria, presumably against Iran-supported militias -- so Win Without War reminds us that, hey, we can avoid firing missiles by rejoining the Iran nuclear deal, which they help you tell Mr. Biden to do! President Biden was Vice President when the Obama Administration negotiated that deal, after all, and it worked -- until President Trump, determined to piss on anything with the Obama name on it, withdrew America from the pact for no good reason. (And then put John Bolton in charge of our NSA, which, in retrospect, may not have been the best way to cure Mr. Trump's jones for war with Iran, since it clearly didn't get us there.) Seriously, war with Iran won't be as easy as war with Iraq was -- Iran has a lot more people to control! -- and war with Iraq, as it turned out, wasn't that easy and gave us ISIS, almost like that was the whole idea. We can avoid such miserable foreign policy choices by going with the diplomacy that's proven to keep Iran from developing nukes, and that's the Iran nuclear deal.
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