Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning voting rights and food safety.

You've heard that House Democrats plan, as their first act next year, to pass a "magnum opus" bill covering voting rights, campaign finance reform, and ethics reform? And you've also heard me say they'd be much better off trying to pass something more digestible first? That means now is a good time to call Democrat House leadership (here's phone info for Rep. Pelosi, Rep. Hoyer, and Rep. Clyburn) and tell them to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act first. The VRAA would ensure that our Justice Department could act on voting rights violations coming from any state or municipality -- not just the Southern ones, which seems to be the problem the Supreme Court had with the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. We may be done with poll taxes and literacy tests, but you see what's going on in Georgia and Florida -- and you also see states passing Voter ID laws, getting rid of early voting periods, moving voting machines out of low-income neighborhoods into wealthier ones, and using the Interstate Crosscheck database to deregister good Americans on mere "suspicion" of "voter fraud." So let's try to get House Democrats to do something we can all understand and support.

Meanwhile, a drug-resistant Salmonella outbreak has plagued raw turkey for over a year now, so far linked to over 160 illnesses (and one death) in 35 states -- and yet we still don't know which turkey brands are making consumers sick, so Consumer Reports helps you tell our USDA to tell consumers which brands of turkey are part of the outbreak. You might be saying, you really want our government to sound an alarm about turkey a week before Thanksgiving? But which is more important: turkey-producing corporations' business or people's health? I mean, if they didn't want the bad PR and lower sales associated with a year-long food poisoning outbreak, then maybe turkey producers should have fixed it before it came to that! It's sad that we even have to say that out loud. (Oh, and not to pile on, but I did say "drug-resistant" Salmonella; with all the antibiotics we pump into our feed animals, we're going to be hearing that a lot more in the coming years.)

Action: concerning banksters and facial recognition software.

H.R. 7006/S. 3542, the Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act, would (as its title suggests) break up the biggest banksters in America, by requiring that none of them would be able to control assets representing more than three percent of America's gross domestic product (or GDP); currently a mere six banks control assets that equal half of America's GDP, and that is (as a conservative might say) too much power concentrated in too few hands. All those big name banksters who've been running roughshod over our economy this last decade-plus? Yeah, this bill would smite them all. The bill would also prevent banks from using FDIC-insured deposits to indulge in the kind of hifalutin speculation that crashed our economy in 2008, thus re-erecting a Glass-Steagall-style wall between traditional banking and securities speculation. So CREDO helps you tell your Reps and Senators to pass the Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell our Transportation and Safety Administration (or TSA) to shut down its facial recognition program. The TSA has come out and said it wants domestic travelers to get "mugshots" so they can put this program into action! It's like you're a criminal even before you've committed a crime! And, as you know from other corporate antics, facial recognition software ain't good, particularly at identifying women and folks of color -- surely you've heard about that time Google's facial recognition software mistook a pair of black folks for apes. It gets better: TSA doesn't want to tell us what they'll do with their little "mugshots" -- might they share them with other law enforcement agencies without those agencies getting warrants? So, to sum: the technology isn't good enough, and it's also ripe for abuse. Why, that all sounds like it would do the opposite of keeping us safe!

Around the table: Democrats plan another mistake, plus somewhat better news.

Democrats plan a "magnum opus" of legislative provisions for their first bill, one that would address voting rights, campaign finance reform, and ethics. They've got the right idea, but as usual, they've got the wrong size: these all-encompassing pieces of legislation give Republicans too much space for prevarication (remember "death panels"?), and we can get more done with (and get more public support for) smaller bills. I think making H.R. 1 the Voting Rights Advancement Act would be the better idea, not least because we could put Republicans on the spot with it. After all, why do you oppose expanding voting rights? is a much more difficult question to answer than why do you oppose this big bill with all kinds of stuff in it? (Oh, and I'm also pretty sure they can't just overturn Citizens United with a bill.)

60 Minutes runs a lengthy report showing how European nations are actually doing more for their citizens' internet privacy than we are -- but doesn't mention that the FCC actually enacted privacy regulations in 2016, only to see Congress repeal them with a "resolution of disapproval" the next year. It's not like that was beside the point of the report! Anyway, Max Schrems's point about "forced consent" -- that it's wrong for a corporation to sell you a product and then say give us all your data, or you can't use the product -- should be attended by American jurists, maybe? It's not like there's no precedent in American law.

We could make too much of a U.S. District Court judge blocking further construction on the Keystone XL pipeline until our Administration does the proper reviews (and not just environmentally-related ones) as required by law, since our Administration could just show its work and OK I couldn't get through that sentence without spitting tea all over my keyboard. Also, too, if, per our Supreme Court, an Administration agency "cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past," well, that doesn't bode well for the FCC's net neutrality repeal, does it?

In other good news, our Administration announces that it will stop refueling Saudi planes bombing the bejeesus out of Yemen, though it will still aid the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen with weapons sales and logistical support. This is a good thing, though we'll need to pressure our Administration to do more, and I bet Mr. Khashoggi, now sitting comfortably in the beyond, finds his role in this matter rather amusing. Rep. Royce (R-CA) could use some education, however, lumping the Houthis in with al-Qaeda when the Houthis are some of the world's best fighters against al-Qaeda.

Finally, Axios/SurveyMonkey poll finds that 61% of Democrats think Republicans are "racist/bigoted/sexist," while some 31% of Republicans think the same of Democrats. For the record, I don't believe Republicans are bigots merely due to party affiliation -- in fact, I believe all of us are susceptible to bigotry (calling racism a "virus" that could be "activated" really was the smartest thing Nate Silver ever said), and better public policy, public policy that doesn't merely redistribute worker income upward to executives, would better ensure that fewer folks drink from the cup of bigotry.

Action: concerning trade, clean water, and healthy food.

The governments of the United States, Canada, and Mexico plan to sign the new USMCA trade agreement -- the one that would replace NAFTA -- on November 30; after that, the pact will go to Congress for ratification, so now's a good time to tell our Congressfolk to ensure that we get the strongest USMCA possible, as Public Citizen helps us do. The USMCA would eliminate the "investor-state dispute settlement" system with Canada in three years, and drastically curtail ISDS use with Mexico; these are tremendously good things, because we deserve to know that investors won't be able to nullify our laws and exact tribute from us simply because they can convince some tribunal that our clean air and clean water laws "cost them money." But that doesn't mean we shouldn't demand more, such as the elimination of corporate welfare for big pharma and better enforcement of labor and clean air/clean water standards. So let's get cracking.

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed expanding offshore drilling in almost all of our coastal waters -- except around Florida, of course, because they need Rick Scott in the Senate that badly. I would naturally have said hey, remember how well the Deepwater Horizon spill went?, but it turns out that the Taylor Energy oil spill of 2004 is about to overtake the Deepwater Horizon spill as the worst oil spill in American history. If you're wondering how a 14-year-old oil spill is still spewing hundreds of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day, well, Taylor didn't even tell anyone about the oil leaking for six years and still claims there's "no evidence" the spill is even happening. And this is the kind of thing our Administration apparently wants more of in our great nation! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to scuttle its plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your state Governor to follow the lead of Arkansas and ban dicamba usage on your state's farms. Arkansas banned dicamba usage during that state's main growing season after finding that dicamba doesn't stay put once it's sprayed on crops -- it drifts away for up to three full days, leaving a trail of destruction in its path, and if it drifts onto neighboring farms -- which, hello, happens all the time -- then it also damages other folks' crops, and therefore their livelihoods, and also therefore our food. Arkansas also found workers getting sick after working with dicamba, which couldn't possibly happen to consumers, could it? Naturally, Monsanto has a version of dicamba it uses with its proprietary soybean crop which it modified genetically to better withstand its dicamba. But our choice is simple here: we can either stand with farmers or stand with big corporations.

Action: concerning war, media, and immigration.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the war in Afghanistan. Their latest email missive informed me that some folks who were pre-teens when the war began in 2001 just got elected to Congress, which I found a bit sobering, but these new Congressfolk are considerably less emotionally-invested in this war than the folks who started it, and now (at last!) they get a bigger say in whether we keep that war going. Which we shouldn't, not least because we got Mr. bin Laden years ago. The forces of evil will try two tactics: 1) ZOMG TEH TERRURIZTZ WINZ!!!!!, and 2) let's privatize the Afghanistan War. Both arguments are moronic -- respectively, fearmongering is a way of announcing that you can't win the argument on the merits, and if we're going to fight wars, we should fight wars, rather than let mercenaries bleed the taxpayer. And taxpayers will be paying out the wazoo for bad results, if past privatization efforts are any indication.

Meanwhile, Media Matters's latest email missive opens with this blunt and completely accurate statement: "Fox News is a malevolent and destructive force." One almost (I said almost!) longs for the day when Fox's on-air "talent" went to some lengths to hide their racism, but now, with President Bigballs as their Personal Lord and Savior, they don't even have to do that anymore. And since we can't buy cable channels a la carte in America, we can't directly hit Fox News where it hurts (i.e., in their pocketbook). But we can tell Fox's corporate advertisers to stop sponsoring Fox News, which Media Matters helps you do. Do not tolerate any guff that boycott efforts like these "hurt free speech." Fox News punditoids have an inviolable right not to be imprisoned for their speech, but they have no "right" to six- and seven-figure TV jobs. Our First Amendment protects us from our government -- not from advertisers, not from activists, and certainly not from viewers.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) that their proposed expansion of the definition of "public charge" will unfairly punish immigrant families, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. As you may know, we've always kept immigrants out if we can establish that they'll become a "public charge," or someone completely reliant on the taxpayer, but HHS has proposed calling anyone who has ever availed themselves of Medicaid or food stamps a "public charge," which would make a lot of folks who work and contribute to society (not to mention pay taxes!) into "public charges." Our Administration is basically trying to deport as many immigrants as possible, which is a stupid way to make policy. And either "public charge" means something or it doesn't; our Administration obviously prefers meaninglessness and nihilism. But we don't have to put up with any of that.

On Election Day.

Today is Election Day, which means you ought to go out and vote, if you haven't done so already. If you have any trouble voting, of course, you should call 1.866.OUR.VOTE (or if, like me, you hate mnemonic devices for remembering phone numbers, 1.866.687.8683). (You can also text "Our Vote" to 97779, or visit 1.866.OUR.VOTE's website here.)

What would be a good reason to call 1.866.OUR.VOTE? Being told you can't vote if you have unpaid parking tickets or child support, getting challenged by official-looking people (or people with guns, even!) who don't have any actual authority to challenge voters, getting a flyer telling you Election Day is on Wednesday for people like you wink-wink. But what if you show up at the polls and the election worker says they can't find your registration? Well, you might be a victim of lousy recordkeeping, or you might be a victim of the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database, which, as you know, helps nefarious state governments deregister voters with the same name as voters in other states, though most names are, as you know, quite common (and Interstate Crosscheck doesn't check middle names or Social Security numbers!) That'd be a damn good reason to call 1.866.OUR.VOTE.

Note well that if you find yourself deregistered when you know you've done nothing wrong, your disgust will be palpable and righteous, and you may just want to throw up your hands and say to hell with these clowns and then go home. But before you do that, remember that this is exactly what they want you to do. It's the same reason they saturate the airwaves with negative ads the days before Election Day: because they want you to stay home out of disgust, so you won't vote against their cronies. Don't let them manipulate you, and don't let them win. Make the call to 1.866.OUR.VOTE, describe your problem to them, and let them help you take the next step.

Do I have predictions about how today will go? Yes, I have a few: I predict that you, dear reader, are not the kind of person who has been investing their entire identity in a Democrat "blue wave" today. And I also predict that, if Democrats lose Senate seats and only pick up a dozen House seats, you will remember that this is where we were two years ago, and that if the corporatists and the racists and the woman-haters win again, they'll be just as unpopular tomorrow as they were today -- they will have no mandate, and again they will have us to deal with. But here's the most important thing I predict: that you, dear reader, have already spent the last two years calling and writing your Reps and Senators every day -- and perhaps you've even been challenging them at the few townhalls they've held, and bird-dogging them at public events -- and thus you already know that your duty to our country doesn't end today, but begins today. Voting happens one day out of the year, and then Our Glorious Elites want you to sit on your hands the rest of the time. You can confound their expectations, and their nefarious goals, by expressing your will to your representatives every day after today. And this blog will continue to help you do that, as it has done since 2005.

So good luck today, and God bless.

Action: concerning government spying, antibiotic abuse, and cruelty to immigrants.

You may have heard that our military is trying to figure out if they can predict mass protests (i.e., against our President) from social media activity beforehand. Before we get into figuring out exactly which Philip K. Dick short story our government is trying to make into public policy this time, let's step back: why would our government want to know about protests beforehand? I can think of only one reason: because they don't want any good Americans to protest! And I'm sure they felt exactly the same way when Tea Partiers were making asses of themselves in our streets and on our public lands! Hence Free Press helps you tell Congress to pimp-slap any Administration effort to obstruct lawful protest in America using surveillance. Seriously, if they want to figure out when the protests are coming, all they have to do is note when they're about to do something that's going to hurt good Americans. Seems easier to just stop hurting Americans than to do all this hifalutin spying.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell Darden Restaurants to get the antibiotics out of the meat it sells at its restaurants. Darden, as you may know, owns Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, LongHorn Steakhouse, and the Capital Grille, among others; in total, Darden runs over 1,700 restaurants serving 400 million guests in North America annually, so it's got reach. And its shareholders have, in each of the last three years, put forward a resolution demanding that Darden meats stop relying on animals pumped full of antibiotics; the most recent iteration of that resolution got 40 percent. Add the Big Stick of Bad PR to shareholder pressure Darden's already getting and we may yet get Darden to rid its supply chain of antibiotic-drenched meat, and thus Darden could help us avert a world where antibiotic abuse in feed animals renders antibiotics useless for medical use, which would also be a world in which the next cut could kill us. So let's get to wielding that Big Stick.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration not to distend the definition of "public charge" so it can deport more immigrants later, then the National Women's Law Center and the Union of Concerned Scientists still help you do that. We've always tried to prevent immigrants from coming to America if it seems likely they'll become a "public charge," or someone who'll depend entirely on taxpayer assistance, but our Administration would dramatically expand the definition of "public charge" to include anyone who's ever used food stamps or Medicaid, when a lot of good Americans fall on hard times and need to rely on those services sooner or later. I guess it's asking too much for a President who was literally a millionaire before he was eight years old -- and not through his own hard work, but through his father's sketchy inheritance schemes -- to understand that hard-working people face hard times every once in a while. But we're happy to teach him otherwise.

Action: concerning Administration bullying and campaign finance.

Our Administration's plans to force transgender folks to undergo genetic testing to determine their "true" gender, which presumably will be, by our Administration's definition, the gender they're born with. How does this promote freedom, again? It doesn't -- it promotes the "freedom" of rage- and fear-addled religious bigots to make everyone conform to their vision of how Americans should be. And here you thought being an American was all about everyone's freedom! Luckily, our government contracts out so many of its functions that it'll just about have to depend on various genetic testing corporations, like 23andMe, Ancestry, and LabCorp, and Sum of Us helps you tell those corporations not to cooperate with our Administration's plan to gender-test transgender folks. Transgender folks face enough bulling already; they don't need any more from our Bully-in-Chief.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to ban politicians from using Leadership PACs as their personal slush funds, then Issue One still helps you do that. The FEC prevents candidates from using their own campaign funds on personal expenses -- an offense for which California Rep. Duncan Hunter got indicted in August -- but the FEC does not prevent candidates from using Leadership PACs for limo rides, expensive dinners, and trips to Disneyland, all things I wouldn't imagine even Chief Justice Roberts calling "free speech." Politicians who use Leadership PACs in this manner would likely argue that it's not a "necessity" for "survival" in the mean old political world, but sure ain't the attitude you need to have if you want to bring about a better world.

Action: concerning pollution, lead poisoning, and food safety.

Our President tried to ram through Keystone XL pipeline approval early in his term, but a U.S. District Court judge ruled in April that our State Department had to complete a lawful environmental review before issuing any permits. So now our Administration has apparently issued a draft of said environmental review that fails to fully evaluate the environmental impacts, not least of which is a proposed alternate route through Nebraska. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to do a lawful environmental review before committing to build the Keystone XL pipeline. And if doing a lawful review means they can't build the pipeline, well, that's just too bad! Our President doesn't care about climate and clean water; he only cares about swinging his balls in everyone's faces -- which, sadly, resonates strongly among those Americans who blame everyone but themselves for their problems. But they're not a majority, and they don't get all the say about everything.

Meanwhile, as schools are finding lead in their drinking water all the way up and down the state of California -- including half the schools in San Francisco, which really should be collecting enough money in property taxes to fund solutions to this problem -- Cal PIRG helps you tell your local school boards to protect our children from lead in drinking water. The state of California allowed lead in plumbing fixtures until the year 2010, which wasn't that long ago, even if it feels like it. That means a lot of schools there (and plenty of other states!) still have lead in their water pipes, and if you've got lead in your water pipes, you're probably going to have lead in your water sooner or later. And, as you know, any amount of lead in drinking water can cause brain damage in children. And children are literally our future! It wasn't just a Whitney Houston song! So let's tell our school boards to get on the stick with getting the lead out.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big food-producing corporations to get the glyphosate out of their food, then Only Organic still helps you do that. As you may know, the Environmental Working Group found the cancer-linked glyphosate (the main ingredient of Roundup, Monsanto's most famous herbicidal product) in two out of three of the oat-based foods it tested, and at a much higher level than scientists would call safe -- and a lot of our biggest food-producing corporations, like Quaker, Kellogg's, and General Foods, make these foods. And kids eat them in cereal and oatmeal and granola bars! The World Health Organization and the state of California have declared glyphosate a possible carcinogen, and the European Union has banned it from their crops entirely -- and yet our society just chugs along, our leaders in business and government saying their hands are tied. So let's give them some incentive to untie them.

Action: concerning clean water, moral pension investing, and worker rights.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5609, the WATER Act. What would the WATER Act do? The WATER Act would fund improvements in clean water infrastructure with a 3.5 percentage-point increase in the corporate income tax. You and I would probably jack up the corporate tax rate a lot more than 3.5 points, but at least no one could reasonably ask where we're going to get the money. Really, though, no one should be asking that anyway -- clean water is the bedrock upon which a civilized society stays healthy. And that money we'd "save" in (for example) not getting rid of lead pipes and not updating water well systems in rural areas? We'd lose all of that, and more, in rising health care costs when folks can't drink or wash in clean water. And here you thought planning for the future was a conservative value! Sadly, today's "conservatives" only seem to care about what makes some crony unearned cash.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania workers, take note: payday lending is (praise the Lord!) illegal in Pennsylvania, but Pennsylvania state pension funds still invest in payday lending operations in other states where it's still legal. Payday lenders, as you know, prey on poor working families in need of a quick influx of cash, trapping them in three-digit loans that all too frequently roll over automatically so that folks can't dig out fast enough. That sure doesn't sound like the kind of thing you'd like to make your retirement money off of, does it? Don't fall for fund managers telling you that they just can't make money for you unless they invest in payday lenders, because that's what? A hostage situation, folks -- don't make me invest in people who conduct their business morally, or your retirement gets it! So Penn PIRG helps you tell state pension boards to divest from payday lenders.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our National Labor Relations Board to stop trying to weaken the joint-employer standard, then the National Employment Law Project (among others) still helps you do that. Our NLRB strengthened the joint-employer standard in 2015, quite reasonably surmising that corporations were using franchise arrangements to avoid accountability when they hurt their workers. But it's even worse than that: too many large corporations hire workers through employment agencies, mistreat them, and then try to claim that they need to redress grievances through their employment agencies! Naturally, right-wingers call the strengthened joint-employer standard an "attack on small businesses," though it's obviously aimed at large corporations hiding behind small businesses. If you get as tired of that bald lie as I do, then you know what to do.

Action: concerning political prisoners and war in Yemen.

The government of Iran has imprisoned Atena Daemi for four years now. What did she do? The government says she's guilty of "assembly and collusion against national security," "propaganda against the state," "insulting the Supreme Leader and the sacred," and "concealing crime evidence." OK, so you recognize these as bullshit charges governments come up with when they know they could never rule without fear, so what did she really do? Put social protest songs on her cellphone, make jokes about the Ayatollah on Facebook, express her opposition to the death penalty, and fail to provide a social media password for another friend who's also now in jail. So in the Bizarro World that is Iran, that means six months of detainment followed by a 15-minute trial followed by seven years of prison! What time is it? Time for the Big Stick of Bad PR! Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to free Ms. Daemi.

Meanwhile, you've heard all about the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Turkey? The one the Saudis have told a lot of stories about? Well, now's a good time to recall that Saudi Arabia has been leading a war against Yemen which has put over 13 million good Yemeni on the brink of starvation and helped enable al-Qaeda, and that our government has given weapons and logistical support to this effort. Don't protest that we don't have enough allies in the Middle East, not unless you're ready to honestly account for how all our other allies (the Shah, Mubarak, Assad, Netanyahu, Hussein) have acted and where that's gotten us. We must stop treating the world's citizens as obstacles to stealing their resources -- and we must also stop treating dictatorial regimes as vehicles with which we can steal those resources more easily. Hence Stop the War helps you tell your Congressfolk to end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen.

Action: concerning nuclear weapons and immigration.

Our President has announced his intention to withdraw from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987. Why? Partly because our NSA chief, John "The Mustache of Evil" Bolton, hates all arms treaties, and also partly because our President hates any and all constraints on what he perceives to be his rightful absolute power as our 46% President. Hence his whining that Russia and China (the latter not even a party to the INF) get to "do weapons" while we don't, though you don't necessarily throw up your hands and build "usable" nuclear weapons just because someone violates a treaty. But luckily for us, our President can't build "usable" nukes without our Congress funding it, and our Congress wouldn't even fund Mr. Bush's bunker-buster nukes in the afterglow of his 2004 election victory, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk not to fund our President's latest wet dream of "usable" nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell Amazon to stop trying to sell its facial recognition software to our Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) agency. ICE's separate-all-the-families-at-the-border approach is notorious enough, but Amazon's Rekognition software, like some white folks, can't even reliably tell folks of color apart from each other; now imagine the two joining forces! Look, reducing illegal immigration to America is actually pretty easy: you make it impossible for big corporations to exploit immigrant labor, you amend the National Labor Relations Act to let farm workers unionize, and you adjust immigration quotas so that they acknowledge the reality that nations closer to us are going to send us more immigrants. But I guess Amazon would rather make money off of immigrant detention camps, and thus (like some Amazon employees have already done, and good for them!) we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Action: concerning cruelty and corruption.

As you likely know, our Administration has proposed narrowing the definition of gender under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act as, and I quote, "a person's status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth." Yes, that sure looks like a fairly obvious swipe at transgender folks, who are apparently TEH NEW GAYZ!!!!! for the religious right in America. The word "immutable" in that formulation almost suggests self-sabotage -- given that so many "biological traits," even those "identifiable by or before birth," are now mutable (indeed, this is what gets the religious right's shorts in such a bunch!), but there's no use taking a chance that Justice Gorsuch will see it that way or that Justice Roberts will remember to be compulsively literal in this instance, so People for the American Way helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services to reject its plan to erase transgender folks from federal policy.

Meanwhile, if you're feeling a bit stunned that the freaking President of Turkey is outclassing our President on the subject of the Jamal Khashoggi killing, recall that our President has deep and lucrative business ties to the nation that has now admitted that Mr. Khashoggi died in its Istanbul consulate, albeit after a "fistfight" which (as Sen. Rand Paul said earlier this week, who knew he had zingers?) somehow led to "dismemberment with a bone saw." Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our President to immediate divest himself of his business holdings; he would, of course, fight to the death before doing such a thing -- since making money is, for him, a feature not a bug of being President -- but the more our politicians are beholden to outside financial interests, the less they'll do their job, i.e., to serve the people. And do you think his business ties are helping keep us in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen? It's a question worth asking!

Action: concerning immigration and humane treatment of animals.

After getting in so much trouble with the American people for its "zero-tolerance" family separation policy, our Administration has proposed a fix to the problem -- by essentially terminating the Flores settlement that keeps our government from separating immigrant children from their parents in the first place! Then it'll be Super Happy Indefinite Detainment Fun Time Land in America again! But since our Administration's plan involves the Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) and the Department of Health and Human Services to issue new regulations, they must take comments from the public on the matter before moving forward -- which I'm sure angers them! -- so the ACLU helps you tell our Administration not to terminate the Flores agreement with new regulations. We have until November 6 to leave comments; as fate would have it, November 6 is also Election Day. Leave your comment now and you won't have to worry about doing both on the same day.

Meanwhile, Joann Burrows, of Yonkers, NY, has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Bronx Zoo to release an elephant named Happy to an elephant sanctuary. Why? Because the Zoo currently has Happy in a form of solitary confinement, after two newly-acquired elephants charged at her lifelong roommate (named Grumpy) and killed him in 2002, and her next roommate, named Sammy, passed in 2006. The Zoo decided at that point not to acquire any more elephants, which left Happy all alone, since they weren't going to have her live with the two elephants who killed Grumpy. But elephants need to be social, and Happy can't be, now -- the Zoo says she has "tactile and auditory contact" with the two elephants with whom she doesn't get along, but why would anyone think that's good enough? Better to find a place with other elephants for her. But they won't do it, of course, until we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Action: concerning sentencing, working families, and methane emissions.

Jacqueline Cooney has started a petition on Change.org with which you may tell our President to pardon her mother, Patricia Cooney, sentenced to 100 years in prison for a first-time drug offense almost 20 years ago. She's served 18 of those years and (thanks to sentence reductions, which, at least, testify to her status as a model prisoner) has 14 more years to go, but she's also 65 and very ill now, and might actually have a shot at getting her various illnesses (including lupus, hypertension, and hyperthyroidism) under control if she can get out of prison and actually get some good medical care. She sure seems to deserve mercy -- and though our President isn't exactly known for his mercy, he has been known to let people talk him into being merciful to folks caught up in long prison sentences now and then. OK, so we're not Kim Kardishian. But this is America, so why should that matter?

Meanwhile, Color of Change helps you tell NBA teams to stop booking Marriott hotels while Marriott workers strike. About 7,000 Marriott workers have been on strike since late last month, after their contracts expired over the summer, demanding such things as enough pay so they don't need a second job to make ends meet and enough say over Marriott's automation plans that they could at least blunt its impact. These are not unreasonable demands -- particularly the second one, where you would expect a corporation to automate its functions long before the technology actually supports that. But NBA players have been staying at Marriott hotels, though NBA players are, as you know, some of the most successful labor union members in the country. But the Big Stick of Bad PR can find everyone eventually, and my guess is that the NBA can find other hotels for their players to stay in, so that they can at least claim some solidarity with workers trying to make a better life.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its proposed plan to scuttle methane emissions rules, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. What argument will penetrate this thick-headed Administration? We've told them, many times, that methane packs a climate change punch far more potent than even coal emissions do. We've told them, many times, that letting oil and gas drilling corporations leak more methane into the air not only lets them waste usable energy but also lets them waste taxpayer money if they're drilling on public lands. I mean, our government should be about saving the taxpayers' money and saving energy, right? OK, I'll admit this is rather like banging your head against a wall. But don't bang your head against a wall -- just do your duty and communicate your will to your government. If they keep ignoring us, they won't be our government that much longer.

Action: concerning worker rights, education, and Chaco Canyon.

A few years ago, our National Labor Relations Board made it easier for workers to hold parent corporations accountable for wrongdoing -- which meant, among other things, that fast-food corporations couldn't pretend their franchises were completely independent actors. Of course, the Presidency has changed parties since then, meaning that a whole new NLRB is in town, meaning they're trying to repeal the joint-employer standard as we speak, because RULEZ ARE TEH BADZ!!!!!! Repealing the joint employer standard wouldn't just hit fast-food employees, of course -- it'd also hit temp workers, since a lot of corporations love using temp workers instead of hiring full-time workers like their forbearers did. But our NLRB still by law must take public comments on its proposal, hence Jobs With Justice helps you tell our NLRB to reject its own proposal to repeal the joint-employer standard. Of course, I don't think a corporation should ever own another corporation, particularly for the purpose of evading its responsibilities under the law. But that's another fight, for another day.

Meanwhile, you know that our schools face funding crises -- largely because of our failure to tax rich people hard enough and our willingness to continue indulging the charter school scam, but I digress -- and this makes schools more vulnerable to corporate money. Case in point: McDonald's sponsors McTeacher's Nights, during which our teachers serve junk food to students. I bet it's rather popular with the kids, as they say, but our children don't need any help from our schools choosing to eat 1200-calorie meals that'll contribute to obesity and all the health care problems that go with it. But wait, there's more! Putting teachers behind the food counter also denies work and pay to McDonald's own workers (who make rather less than teachers), and, as it happens, the schools don't get a whole lot of money out of these events. Hence Corporate Accountability helps you tell McDonald's to stop with the exploitation of schools and teachers already and end their McTeacher's Nights. The Big Stick of Bad PR can find all bad actors eventually, if we will but wield it.

Finally, our Administration still has a jones for drilling for gas and oil in the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico, despite the damage oil and gas drilling does to our clean water, despite the thousand-year-old Anasazi ruins and roadways and rock engravings revered by Pueblo and Navajo -- that latter item suggesting, again, that for this Administration, your heritage only matters if you're white. Our government has, over the years, leased most of the public land outside Chaco Culture National Historical Park for gas and oil drilling, but not the land inside the park -- even our current Interior Secretary seems a little cowed by all the public pressure against drilling inside the park. And there's no reason not to keep up that pressure, particularly since our Interior Secretary is eyeing the midterms just like all the rest of us are. (Note: we'll continue fighting the way we fight regardless of the results.) So Food and Water Action helps you tell our Interior Department to reject gas and oil drilling leases in the Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

Action: concerning vote suppression, immigration, education, and gas mileage.

You've no doubt heard by now that Georgia's Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, has refused to process over 50,000 voter registration applications because liberals -- or maybe because blacks, as the Associated Press has found that these registrations come disproportionately from black folks. A Kemp spokeshack says the Secretary is using "exact-match" criteria which would put a voter registration on hold for something as small as a hyphen dropped from a last name. Just like Interstate Crosscheck, which catches voter fraud through vigorous matching of folks with the same middle names and Social Security numbers! I kid, of course -- Interstate Crosscheck isn't so rigorous, but hey, whatever gets the job done. Who's running for Georgia Governor this year? Well, Stacey Abrams is one, and the other one, let's see here, wouldn't want to get his name wrong -- oh, yes, Brian Kemp! What a coincidence! Color of Change helps you tell Mr. Kemp to process the damn applications already. I mean, if he's really the best candidate, he should be able to win without tricks, right?

Meanwhile, our Administration, always looking for ways to diddle the rage glands of its votaries, would like to make it much, much harder for immigrants to gain citizenship if they've ever relied on public assistance. We have always tried to prevent folks from immigrating to America if it seems likely they'll become "public charges," or folks we'd have to completely support forever, but our Administration wants to make immigrants into a "public charge" if they've ever used Medicaid or food stamps, which a lot of good Americans have to use at some point or other. If someone said out loud that six months on food stamps makes you a hopeless "taker," we'd call that person a narrow, or even cruel. What would we then say of a government that held this position? We'd certainly say they don't give people enough of a chance to make something of themselves, when we as Americans assume that anyone can make something of themselves. The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell our Administration to reject yet another cruel immigration proposal.

In other news, people who think technology is the answer to every conceivable problem (and, ah, people who think technology is a good way of diverting taxpayer money away from public schools and into the coffers of private corporations) have been pushing online pre-K schools as a way of "helping" underprivileged kids, but I bet I don't even need to tell you why that's bunk: because if there's one thing kids need even less than junk food, it's screen time, and if there's one thing that today's "bright," "bold" "innovators" don't seem to get, it's that kids need real-life interaction with other kids and with adults in order to grow. Well, soda taxes funding universal pre-K doesn't seem so bad now, does it? (Full disclosure: soda taxes are still bad.) But seven states now run a "pilot" program involving online pre-K, and you can guess where that's going to end up even if it doesn't do these kids any damn good: "we're broke, so we have to keep doing it." Hence the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell your state education committees to fund real universal pre-K.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to stop trying to roll back our Clean Car Standards, then the Environmental Defense Fund still helps you do that. Stronger fuel efficiency standards means lower prices at the pump and less pollution in our air -- so what's the problem our Administration has with all of that? None of that makes oil CEOs richer, that's what, and if you've been attending our Administration's doings, you know that the only people they think deserve any say about anything in America are bosses. Forget you and your desire to pay less for gas and breathe clean air! Our EPA knows they don't have a leg to stand on, of course, or else they'd never have argued for lower fuel emissions standards by claiming that higher standards cause people to drive more and thus put them at a higher risk of car accidents. I mean, that's a cluster bomb of stupid right there. And we Americans deserve better than that from our public servants.

Action: concerning law and order, taxes, immigration, and media consolidation.

You've heard of banks being "too big to fail"? Our SEC has lately advanced the notion that certain CEOs are also "too big to fail," in refusing to remove Elon Musk from Tesla for securities fraud because, get this, Tesla wouldn't survive without Musk. Well, SEC Chair Jay Clayton actually said "holding individuals accountable is important," but that you also have to consider how "the skills and support of certain individuals may be important to the future success of a company." After all, it's not like Mr. Musk has underlings or anything. It's not like America is full of hungry people willing to work hard and reap the rewards of their work or anything. But our sick, immoral, and decadent society won't punish wrongdoing, and won't reward work -- and our "Best and Brightest" think it's someone else's job to train others to carry on the work of maintaining our civilization. If you value work and civilization more than that, then Demand Progress helps you tell the SEC to start doing its job and prosecute wrongdoers.

Meanwhile, you no doubt know by now about that New York Times report alleging that our President has broken the law repeatedly in order to avoid paying his taxes, and so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell our Congressfolk to investigate our President's alleged tax-related fraud. Recall that our President refused to release his tax returns while campaigning, even though every other major party candidate since Richard Nixon has done so; perhaps this (and not, for example, actual poverty) was what he was actually hiding? It'd be hard to know for sure without a Congressional investigation, but certainly such an investigation would be relevant, not just to our duty to ensure that everyone pay their fair share of taxes, but also to our duty to know whether our President has broken the law. Might we even find out that he's continued to break tax law as our President? Yes, we might. But only if we investigate.

In other news, our State Department has started denying passports to certain brown-skinned Americans who live along our border with Mexico -- and has even detained some of them! Apparently, our Administration thinks the existence of a handful of midwives who have admitted providing fraudulent citizenship documents for some of the babies they helped deliver means they can detain or deport anyone these midwives might have helped deliver, but the notion that someone committed a crime on someone's behalf does not mean they committed a crime on behalf of everyone they worked for, and absent evidence that would meet the probable cause standard, you would want to avoid denying passports and detaining and/or deporting people on such "suspicions." Or you would, at least, if you weren't constantly diddling the rage glands of your most devoted supporters. A group of good-government organizations helps you tell our State Department to stop its unwarranted harassment of certain American citizens.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FCC to reject the proposed Sprint/T-Mobile merger, then Free Press still helps you do that. Sprint and T-Mobile have been trying very hard to convince everyone that their merger would actually be pro-competition -- in that they'd be better able to compete with AT&T and Verizon if they were one corporation instead of two, I guess -- but we can all count, and three corporations dominating our cellphone market is worse than four. Sprint and T-Mobile have also been offering more options to low-income consumers than they're likely to do once they become one of the big three. I guess it's progress that they haven't been spending large amounts of money and time trying to convince everyone that their merger would "create jobs," but that doesn't change the reality that a merger would kill jobs -- nearly 29,000 of them, by the Communications Workers of America's estimate. If 29,000 jobs doesn't sound like a lot to you, remember that you won't feel better about that if your job is one of them.

Action: concerning law and order, nuclear waste storage, and "free" trade.

You've been on a Greyhound bus, right? Well, Greyhound has lately gotten justly-bad PR by announcing that it'll continue to let Border Patrol agents board buses and harass non-white citizens without probable cause. Don't let right-wingers tell you TEH LIBRULZ WANTZ TEH IMMIGRANTZ TO RUN TEH FREEZ!!!!!, because if Border Patrol boards a Greyhound bus with a warrant, of course Greyhound should cooperate. Why do you suppose they'd come on board without a warrant? Because our government, from Tha Bush Mobb forward, has pretended that warrants are just an impediment to law enforcement doing its work. Hello! Getting a warrant is law enforcement doing its work! And using the spectre of TEH IMMIGRANTZ AND TEH CRIMEZ!!!! to justify breaking down protections that have helped sustain a civilized society for over two centuries is short-sighted at best and racist at worst. Hence the ACLU helps you tell Greyhound to (in the ACLU's colorful phrasing) "stop throwing passengers under the bus."

Meanwhile, our nuclear regulatory commission (or NRC) plans to start a federal nuclear waste dump in Andrews County, Texas. The NRC floated this plan once before, only to decide (after multitudinous negative public comments) not to pursue it, but in These Interesting Times, no idea is so awful that it can't pop up again and again like a zombie in desperate need of a head shot, so here we are again. If you're wondering how they're going to have a nuclear waste dump in one spot when we have nuclear power plants all over our country, well, they're going to transport nuclear waste by rail, which would be a splendid idea if trains never got into accidents. But wait, there's more! The Ogallala Aquifer, which provides drinking water to millions of heartland Americans, ain't far away from the proposed dump site, so add "anyone who wants to drink clean water" to the list of Americans who should oppose this plan, which Public Citizen helps you do.

Finally, the USMCA trade agreement, which would replace the hated NAFTA, does some good -- particularly in its (eventual) dismantling of the hated "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system between the U.S. and Canada and the drastic curtailing of the ISDS system with Mexico. ISDS, as you know, allows foreign investors to take us to court whenever they claim our laws have "cost them money," and allows them to nullify our laws and exact tribute from the taxpayer when an ISDS tribunal finds in their favor. That's the sort of thing that should be offensive to any law-abiding citizen, particularly now that we are acutely aware of how little work investors actually do anymore. But USMCA could be better -- it could push for better enforcement of its clean air/clean water/worker safety provisions, and could eliminate corporate welfare handouts to big pharma corporations. So Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to make a better trade deal with Canada and Mexico.

Action: concerning the right to protest, copyright law, and food safety.

So liberals get out in the streets to protest our government, and now our National Park Service wants to make it harder for good Americans to protest on public lands. Like our heritage as a people isn't based on protest! Like public lands don't, you know, belong to the public! The NPS would make protestors pay for the cost of barricades and "monitoring," would close off large areas around our White House to protests, and would give our government the right to shut down a protest for most piddling of reasons (rather than using the current "clear and present danger" standard). You know that famous photo of '60 civil rights protestors on the National Mall? Yeah, that won't happen under the new rules, and it's almost like that's the idea. You can pimp-slap the NPS by leaving a public comment opposing their new anti-free speech regulations, which Defending Rights and Dissent helps you do. But get to stepping, because deadline for comments is Monday.

Meanwhile, they call H.R. 1695 the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act; if you note the incongruous presence of the word "accountability" in the title, you already know something's up, and if you note the massive support this bill has from big entertainment corporations and big entertainment trade associations, you know something else is up, too. Currently our Library of Congress appoints a Register of Copyrights, but H.R. 1695 would make that position a Presidential appointee to be confirmed by the Senate. Meaning what? The position would become a political position, and, at present, would be filled by a President who thinks getting all kinds of unearned tax breaks for yourself is just "smart," but who also thinks that whatever big corporations think should be copyright infringement should maybe get your hands cut off. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Senators to reject H.R. 1695.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations to get the glyphosate out of our food, then Just Label It still helps you do that. As you may recall, an Environmental Working Group study found glyphosate in oat-based foods at considerably higher levels than what most scientists would call safe, and scientists have long linked glyphosate to cancer, childbirth issues, and cell function. It's bad enough that four European nations have suspended Monsanto's license to use the most popularly-known glyphosate, Roundup, on their farms -- but here in America, we douse our crops with glyphosate in the hope it'll kill all the nearby weeds, though those weeds have long been developing a resistance to glyphosate, which means we'll heap more of it on, which means they'll get more resistant and we'll get sicker, ad nauseam. This could be yet another one of those disasters "no one sees coming." So, as usual, it's up to those of us who do see it coming.

Action: concerning war-making and pollution.

Win Without War helps you tell our Congressfolk to end the war in Afghanistan now. I know, I know, it's only been 17 years! And tolerate no backtalk from your Congressfolk (and, remember, we heard this from both parties in 2007!) about how "ending the war" would put our troops in harm's way, as if there's just no way to get soldiers out of a war zone. Wow, that phrase "ending the war would put our troops in harm's way" really is a cluster bomb of stupid. Also tolerate no hifalutin rubbish about how privatizing the war --as Erik Prince would like to do, his corporation (The Artist Formerly Known as Blackwater) having done so much for the Iraq war effort! -- would sate the public's desire to get out of the Afghanistan War without, you know, actually ending the killing and destruction. Certainly don't tolerate anyone saying the private sector does everything better than the public sector, not when the malicious and the weak take turns controlling the public sector.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to scuttle its plan to weaken fuel efficiency standards, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. Again our Administration wants to get all law-and-order on black folks, but pretends that making cars pollute less and get better mileage is a hardship. They also act like cars costing less because they're less fuel efficient (you can click your heels together three times for that one if you like) is somehow better than gas costing less for the entire life of the car. And recall, also, that our Administration actually thinks that lower gas mileage will save lives because folks will drive less and thus die in fewer car crashes. I suppose not being able to breathe the air reduces the chance you'll die of cancer, too, but what sane person would say that with a straight face?

Action: concerning clean water, social media, and methane emissions.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell Gov. Wolf to do his damnedest to keep lead out of our drinking water. Finding lead in your drinking water isn't something that only happens to "those people" in Flint, Michigan -- Detroit's public schools just shut off their drinking water after they found lead in it, and our Government Accountability Office (or GAO) found over one-third of school districts that had tested for lead found elevated levels of lead in their water. And remember: there is no safe level of lead consumption -- any amount of lead can cause brain damage and can stunt a child's growth and/or brain development. This is one of those things we actually need to be zero-tolerance about, but too many of our leaders act like they can do nothing about it. But that sure in hell ain't the American can-do spirit in action. And it's well past time our leaders get right with the American can-do spirit.

Meanwhile, Facebook's Messenger Kids app isn't just an app that exposes our youngest children to all the problems older kids already have with social media, like depression and bad body image -- it's an app that apparently breaks the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act! Nobody could have predicted! Apparently Messenger Kids lets folks approve children's accounts without actually proving they're the parents and also lets Facebook disclose children's data to members of the "Facebook Family of Companies," both of which would contravene COPPA protections. Of course this is the sort of thing our President talks about as being "in the way of companies making money and trying to serve people," but when you hear such a thing in the context of protecting children's private information, I hope that kind of statement sounds like the lame excuse it absolutely is. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell Facebook to abandon its Messenger Kids app.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to continue to require strong methane leak rules, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Hey, weren't we just talking about those pesky regulations stunting our economy and forcing corporations to follow a lot of rules boo-hoo? Well, those "pesky" regulations forcing gas and oil drilling corporations to emit less methane not only protect us from pollution and climate change, they also keep usable energy from leaking into the atmosphere -- usable energy, I should add, that means royalties for the American people when it occurs on public lands. But our Administration just wants you to think it's thrown up its hands, what with the NHTSA's assessment that global temperatures would go up a staggering seven degrees by the end of the 21st century. But perhaps our Administration also needs to get right with the American can-do spirit.

Action: concerning trade and tax loopholes.

Public Citizen has released an analysis of the new trade deal with Canada and Mexico, but contrary to early news reports stating that the hated "investor-state dispute settlement" system remains intact (which I apologize for having relied upon), Public Citizen finds that the USMCA would terminate the ISDS system between the U.S. and Canada (though not until three years after the deal gets ratified) and narrow the scope of the ISDS system between the U.S. and Mexico. I won't lie to you, that's a big deal -- all ISDS systems do is nullify our laws and exact bailouts from taxpayers. But the deal also needs stronger labor and clean air/clean water enforcement mechanisms, and must scrap welfare handouts for big pharma corporations. So Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk how they can improve the USMCA trade deal. Don't let anyone tell you that you should just "let the negotiators work." The negotiators work for us, after all.

Meanwhile, our IRS is proposing changing a federal charitable deduction so that the rich won't be able to take so much advantage of it. Long story short: in some states, when folks donate to private school voucher programs, they're able to turn a profit on those deductions by claiming both state and federal tax credits, such that (for example) an Alabama resident could collect over $67,000 in deductions on $50,000 in donations. That kinda flies in the face of the whole definition of charity, doesn't it? The IRS's proposal could be stronger -- you and I don't get to simply deduct our charitable donations from our tax bill, but the IRS proposal would still allow someone to get 100% of their private school donations back. Our IRS is still taking public comments on their proposal, but only until Friday; you can click here to leave a comment.

Action: concerning prisoner rights in Pennsylvania and forced cotton field harvesting in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state Department of Corrections (or PADOC) has banned books coming into prisons -- meaning prisoners can only get ebooks, and then only through a private ebook vendor -- and has also forced all mail from family to prisoners to be scanned by a Florida corporation and then re-sent electronically. All this, because over 50 correctional officers became ill after exposure to synthetic cannabinoids coming in via books and mail. At least, that's the official story; some toxicology experts have questioned whether that could have happened, and, hey, we're not schmucks: whenever an "incident" precedes a crackdown on someone's rights -- and a private corporation opening up prisoner mail is absolutely violating their rights -- you have every right to wonder whether that was the plan, particularly with million-dollar contracts with private corporations involved. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your PA state legislators and your Governor to lift the restrictions that harm prisoner's rights.

Meanwhile, it's October, meaning it's forced harvest season in the cotton fields of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Yes, despite all the bad PR these nations have justly received, they still conscript good citizens into the cotton fields, no matter if you're already a doctor or a teacher or a civil servant -- or a child! Right-wingers, please attend: this is what an oppressive government acts like. We should point this sort of thing out whenever we can, lest some of our fellow-Americans continue to regard "being told Happy Holidays" or "worrying that I can't try to get a woman into bed without her saying I harassed her" as "oppression." We should also point this sort of thing out as the evil-alternate-universe version of "everyone coming together for the common good." We should come together for the common good willingly, and not for the "greater good" of cotton CEO bank accounts. So the Cotton Campaign helps you take a variety of actions against the forced cotton harvests, which include writing to the two governments in question.

Action: three alerts concerning *real* national security.

Our Administration plans to admit only 30,000 refugees into America this year; recall that refugees are running from terror and are thus far less likely than everyone else to commit terror and you'll see their plan as the grandstanding cruelty it is -- unless, of course, you're a rage addict. But our ministry is not for rage addicts, but for those who may be thinking "we need to do something," when the whole point of living in this world is not to do "something" but to do the right thing. I will say we would find it a whole lot easier to do the right thing in re refugees if we a) stopped treating the world's citizens as impediments to resources we could take for ourselves and b) stopped letting corporations import workers willy-nilly so they can pay workers less and keep more money for themselves. In the meantime, we still have to do the right thing, hence Amnesty International helps us tell our Congressfolk to welcome more refugees to America.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6534, the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, would ensure, within six months of its passage, that employees of our government, and not private contractors, perform essential diplomatic and consular security functions in those areas of the world we're fighting. The bill would then give our President a little over a year to get rid of private contractors in other war-making functions. If you recall how Tha Bush Mobb tried to win the Iraq war with too few soldiers, and then recall how much they paid Blackwater private contractors to perform security functions in Iraq, then you no doubt see how fiscally responsible it would be to ensure we don't privatize so much of our war-making. And if we can't fight or win wars without privatizing some part of them, well, that may just be an indication we shouldn't be fighting the war at all. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop privatizing our wars by passing H.R. 6534.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 6840, the Hold the LYNE Act, and thus stop our Administration's efforts to build so-called "low-yield" nuclear weapons. ("LYNE" stands for "low-yield nuclear explosive." I know, you also thought of this, too.) Anyway, we're already capable of destroying the world hundreds of times over with the nuclear weapons we already have, so you have to wonder why we'd consider building more. I'm sure LYNE advocates try to tell us that we need to have nukes that can cause less damage and give us more military flexibility. But setting aside the notion that we'd ever want to make nuclear war easier to fight: while there's a difference between a handgun and a semi-automatic rifle, there's really not very much difference between a low-yield nuke and what we're used to -- they both kill, they both make survivors very sick, and they both make worlds uninhabitable. It's enough to make you think LYNEs exist merely to make defense contractors rich.

Action: concerning "free" trade, tax policy, and our Supreme Court.

Our government has struck a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada, but guess what we already know from mainstream media coverage? That our government, in order to appease Canada yeah-sure, kept the "investor-state dispute settlement" system that outsources our jobs and nullifies our laws. I had long feared that our President, having run against "free" trade, would give us a trade deal that was just as bad as all the others -- and, sadly, I was right. No use objecting that we'll get more access to Canada's dairy markets or whatever when this deal also allows foreign corporations to nullify our clean air and clean water laws if it "costs them money" and then exact tribute from the American taxpayer to pay for that "loss." You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and demand that they oppose the USMCA trade deal.

While you're on the phone with your Senators, you might also tell them to oppose H.R. 6760, better known as "Tax Scam 2.0," which the House passed late last week while we were all watching the Kavanaugh hearing. Did they plan it that way? Does it matter? Evil people know that bad drama will give them cover for something, whatever that might be at whatever moment. H.R. 6760 makes permanent a number of otherwise "temporary" changes to the tax code, including the pass-through business tax cuts and the high-end income tax cuts that go almost entirely to rich folks; per the Tax Policy Center, that'll increase our federal deficits by $3.8 trillion over the 20 years from 2025-2045. And then some President who makes our current one look like the soul of decorum will tell you he just has to cut Medicare and Social Security to cover over this massive hole in our budget! Let's forestall this tragedy by rejecting this new round of tax-cuts-for-the-rich.

Finally, you might also want to tell your Senators, if you've still got them on the phone, to reject the nomination of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court. You may feel a little overwhelmed by all the drama surrounding his nomination, but you don't have to be -- taken together, his stated belief that Presidents should be shielded from criminal prosecution, his long history doing Republican dirty work, his multitudinous misstatements during his confirmation hearings, the quite credible sexual assault allegation against him, and his volcanic temper when confronted with that accusation all reveal a man who believes that if you are not part of America's elite class, you do not matter. And a man who thinks so little of us won't exactly rush to protect the rights we've won through struggle and hard work. So let's get someone maybe a bit less privileged up there.

Action: concerning cruel budgeting and our Supreme Court.

It may seem strange, but Republicans are talking an awful lot about cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and the protections of the Affordable Care Act -- Administration economic advisor Larry Kudlow told the Economic Club of New York that our Administration would be going after Medicare and Social Security after the midterms, and Republicans in Congress keep proposing budgets that would turn Medicare into a voucher program and cut trillions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid. You'd think with all the trouble Republicans had getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, they'd know better -- but then again, they're probably looking around the political landscape and seeing nothing but weakling Democrats who barely raise a peep in defense of popular and necessary programs. Thus it's up to us, as always, so Greyroots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court, then you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a smartphone) to call your Senators and give them what-for. The news is all about the sworn affidavit from a third woman accusing Mr. Kavanaugh of horrific sexual behavior toward girls while he was still a youth -- and, as other observers have pointed out, a sworn affidavit means perjury charges for the person who swears it if they're lying. But Justice Kavanaugh has already convinced us he'd do his damnedest to expand Presidential power, and I think we're all seeing how bad a proposition that would be right now. And these quite reasonable accusations over the last week also show us that Mr. Kavanaugh is too entitled to sit in judgement on anyone or anything.

Action: concerning corruption, corporate taxes, and the Muslim ban.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 3357, the Anti-Corruption and Public Accountability Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. S. 3357 would (among other things!) help keep lobbyists out of our government and keep our politicians out of lobbying after they leave office, prevent politicians from owning individual stocks while they're in office, and subject federal contractors to more public scrutiny. In addition, S. 3357 would reclassify federal administrative law judges as civil service jobs -- to reverse our President's efforts to pack those positions with his cronies -- and it would make the IRS release eight years of tax returns for all Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates (as well as two years' returns for Congressional candidates). All of that would help get rid of, as our President might say, a lingering stench in our government. So let's do it.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell big pharma corporations to stop stashing their profits in overseas tax shelters. We should, of course, continue to demand that our Congressfolk pass laws that make corporations pay their fair share of taxes -- so that good Americans and small businesses don't have to bear all the burden of paying for roads, bridges, firefighters, libraries, schools, and the like -- but we might as well go right to the corporations, too, particularly the ones who charge us an arm and a leg for drugs they tend to need a lot of taxpayer money to even make. The Big Stick of Bad PR makes a big crack and a big hurt -- even when corporations respond by saying we already pay all the taxes we're supposed to pay under the law! They hope you don't know that they spend millions of dollars every year getting our Congressfolk to write the laws that lower their taxes. The good news? I think that ship has sailed.

Finally, a group of good government organizations (including People for the American Way and Project South) helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal our Administration's notorious Muslim travel ban. No use arguing with me that TEH BAN IZ ALSO FOR TEH VENEZWAILYUNZ!!!!!, because we all know our Administration put them (and a few other nations) in there just so our Supreme Court would have an excuse to say "see, it's not a religious ban per se!" But if it looks like dung and smells like dung, you don't have to taste it just because some right-winger says "you can't prove it's not meatloaf." The Muslim ban is a stain on our national character, not just because it unfairly targets folks based on their religious beliefs, but because it is a policy that diddles the rage glands of America's most rage-addled folks. And, frankly, they shouldn't get all the say about everything in America.

Action: concerning taxes and conservation.

As you likely know, House Republicans are trying to ram through yet another tax-cut-for-the-rich; the bill number is H.R. 6760, and the title is the innocuous-sounding "Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act of 2018." The cojones on these clowns, pretending that families and small businesses have anything to do with it! The idea that "pass-through businesses" are "small businesses" -- and not, you know, the kind of corporations rich people set up to avoid taxation -- is a laugh. The idea that making the 2.6% drop in the top income tax rate permanent is a way of "protecting families" is also a laugh. But when Republican Congresses come after our Social Security and our Medicare and our Medicaid because TEH DEFICITZ!!!!! -- when their own tax plan blew open a trillion-dollar-plus hole in the deficit! -- ain't none of us going to be laughing. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called "Tax Scam 2.0."

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund before it expires on September 30, then the Wilderness Society still helps you do that. The Wilderness Society's email action tool also allows you to tell your Congressfolk to permanently reauthorize the LWCF, which sure would be better than leaving it vulnerable to the hostage crises our legislators like to create -- I mean, if Congress really desperately wants to repeal it (or improve it!), it could simply pass a bill to do that later. Ha ha, I said "simply" like it would be easy for them to do! The LWCF is actually pretty popular, after all -- most of us have visited one of the 40,000-plus scenic places it's created at no cost to the taxpayer. Yes, it's much "easier" for Congress simply to sit on its hands and let popular programs expire, which is a damn good reason to make them reauthorize such programs forever.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court and a vicious e. coli strain.

If you haven't done so, already, today would be a good day to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject the nomination of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court. I've said that the entirely plausible accusation of sexual assault, regardless of how long ago it was, is reason enough to sink his nomination -- I mean, we're only trying to fill one spot; think we can't find a qualified judge who doesn't have the sense of entitlement you'd have to have to try to rape someone? But we must remember that Mr. Kavanaugh poses a far greater threat to law and order: he has demonstrated, through his multitudinous writings, that he would expand Presidential power and Presidential prerogatives far beyond what our Founders intended or what a free society would tolerate. And that should upset you no matter what our President's name is.

Meanwhile, researchers at George Washington University have found a particular strain of E. coli (ST131-H22, to be precise) found in chickens seems to be migrating to humans and causing (among other infections) up to 40,000 urinary tract infections annually -- a mere one half of one percent of all UTIs Americans get in a year, but that won't comfort you if that number becomes 100 percent of you. And, of course, it could get much worse -- ST131-H22 has apparently developed some resistance to tetracycline, which it encounters frequently enough because factory farms tend to pump it into their chickens. Anyway, Penn PIRG helps you tell our USDA to start testing poultry for this strain of E. coli. The USDA can do this without additional authorization from Congress, and yes the big poultry producers will very likely stamp their feet and try to drag this out in court, but really, this is an appropriate time to say if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear.

Action: concerning Puerto Rico, self-driving cars, and endangered species.

Given the fact that Puerto Rico -- which ought to be a state, so Americans are less likely to think it's full of brown-skinned foreigners -- is still suffering from the ravages of Hurricane Maria over a year later, Amnesty International helps you tell local and federal authorities to investigate our government's response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The immediate news hook: a CBS News report (based on photos taken by a Puerto Rico police officer) that millions of bottles of water sat on a runway in Puerto Rico for more than a year. I guess our Administration will blame REGULASHUNZ!!!!! for that, though is that sort of excuse really worthy of a can-do country? Also, both the Union of Concerned Scientists and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to enact some real relief for the good citizens of Puerto Rico. And if that means building out a renewable power grid and/or ending the forced austerity policies so beloved by the banksters who hold Puerto Rican debt, well, those are sacrifices we should be willing to make.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to oppose S. 1885, the AV START Act, which would let corporations put self-driving cars on the road without ensuring their safety, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You heard about the two people self-driving cars have killed this year, but you may not have heard that road tests commonly find self-driving cars absolutely flummoxed by a little snow or a solitary seagull. One corporation wants to put sensors under cars so they'll "see" the road better. I have a few better ideas: properly fund public transportation, mandate that corporations with known safety problems start disclosing them, and shame people who only buy cars because they're flashy. We'll start getting safer driving after that! Why do we assume machines will do things better than people when machines can't check out my groceries better than a 16-year-old? Because bosses don't want to have to pay workers, that's why. Let's not enable that behavior.

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Administration not to pursue a bunch of regulatory changes that would seriously injure our ability to protect endangered species. Get to stepping, though, because the deadline for your comments is Monday. What does our Administration plan to do? Among other things, they plan to allow agencies to tabulate "economic costs" when deciding how to protect endangered and threatened species and also to ignore scientific data before giving out oil and gas drilling leases. They'd further mandate that every single threatened species in America get its own rule, even though one rule currently covers all of them; is that what right-wingers mean when they say REGULASHUNZ IZ TEH BURDENZ!!!!!? Apparently the right finds cumbersome regulations just fine when it makes the real work of civilization much harder. They'll answer to God for their nefarious works -- but let's maybe help them walk a more rewarding path by speaking out now.

Action: concerning ALEC, media consolidation, and public lands.

You may have heard that Verizon has lately left the American Legislative Exchange Council because of ALEC's newfound BBF, David Horowitz, a notorious right-wing Muslim-basher. Yeah, I wish more corporations had dumped ALEC over their support for Voter ID and opposition to municipal broadband, too, but I take an opening where I get it, so People for the American Way helps you tell other big corporations, like AT&T, Comcast, and UPS, to leave ALEC. I admit I was a bit surprised to learn that corporations were leaving ALEC over climate change, but I'd be a lot less surprised to find corporations leaving ALEC over David Horowitz. America's big corporations do seem to have wholeheartedly embraced liberal positions on social issues -- mainly, I suspect, to divert your attention from their reactionary positions on economic issues. But, like I said, I take an opening where I get it, and it's ALEC's economic work I hate the most.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, then Free Press still helps you do that. Sprint and T-Mobile keep telling us this merger will be good for them, like we're supposed to be emotionally invested in that -- I'm such a churl I want only the things that are good for all of us, and having three big phone corporations instead of four ain't good for us. If four turns to three, then three can more easily turn to two, and two to one, and one was the number of political parties in the Soviet Union, and you know how that turned out. I don't make this analogy lightly -- one corporation monopolizing all of America's phone services would mean (especially in this post-neutrality age) one corporation deciding what you can see and hear. What do conservatives teach us? That concentrated power anywhere is evil. It's why we passed the Sherman Antitrust Act almost 150 years ago.

Finally, our Bureau of Land Management has proposed opening up almost all of New Mexico's Greater Carlsbad Cavern area to oil and gas drilling, and would even sell off some 50,000 acres for that purpose. Meaning it's no longer public land! Which you can only sell one time, I feel compelled to repeat with the italics hammer. Hence Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell our BLM to reject its plan to open up this area to oil and gas drilling. Read through Wild Earth Guardians's seven-point plan in the email you'd send and you'll be impressed with the breadth of its reasoning -- you would argue for prioritizing "securing public access to currently inaccessible lands" over corporate access and for strong safeguards against emissions and oil and gas leaks, among other things. So let's work on getting our policymakers to make some actual good policy, versus policy that enriches some crony or other.

Action: concerning banksters, free speech, and product safety.

With the 10-year anniversary of the 2008 financial services armageddon having lately passed, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to break up the big banks via a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, which would make banks smaller by preventing them from indulging in the hifalutin investments that crashed our economy and will crash it again. As the first sentence suggests, we've already seen what happens when we don't break up the big banks -- and we're continuing to see what happens when we let banksters determine what our economy is going to look like, and it includes a lot of income redistribution upward from people who work to people who don't. But limiting the size of any institution that threatens to run roughshod over our freedoms is not some "radical" proposal, but one with a long history and precedent in America. You might even say a fundamental opposition to concentrated power created America.

Meanwhile, our Education Department would like to adopt a definition of "anti-Semitism" that would equate criticism of Israel or support of Palestine with anti-Semitism! All so folks can win civil rights cases against folks who do either one in an academic setting! Hey, that could be any of us, if we work in a school! Of course, Israel is not Judaism even if their far-right-wing government acts like they are, and when even the progenitor of the legal theory equating anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel says it can't be used in academic settings due to free speech issues, you have to wonder what our Education Department is really afraid of. Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell our Education Department's Office of Civil Rights not to equate pro-Palestinian activism or criticism of Israel with "anti-Semitism." Yikes, this from the Administration whose President said some Nazi wannabes are "very fine people."

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to ban poisonous paint strippers. A lot of paint strippers contain N-Methylpyrrolidone (or NMP) and methylene chloride, which cause respiratory problems and could lead to death; our EPA did propose a rule banning these paint strippers during the second Obama term, but you know what happened after that: a President openly hostile to regulations that protect good Americans happened. Walmart, Lowe's, and Home Depot have all lately banned these toxic products, but that ain't the boon it seems to be, as our EPA might use that as an excuse to declare that "the market has taken care of the problem," even though these three big corporations could all reverse their decisions tomorrow. And, ah, don't be the fool who retorts WHAT YOU THINK PAINT STRIPPERS SHOULD ONLY HAVE NICE CHEMICALS HA HA HA SNORT. Nobody should worry about dying because they use a paint stripper.

Action: concerning taxes, unconstitutional war-making, and product safety.

As long expected, Congressional Republicans have introduced H.R. 6760, known as the "Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act of 2018," but perhaps better known as "Tax Scam 2.0," the bill that would make permanent certain tax cuts Republicans passed late last year, and though Republicans spend a lot of time telling you these are really for, well, "families and small businesses," that's utter rubbish -- sure, the cut in the 25 percent bracket to 22 percent will stay, but that's not a whole lot of real money, whereas the 2.6 percentage point cut in the former 39.6 percent bracket is real money, and so is the Estate tax cut (which working folks like us never pay), and so is the pass-through business tax cut which mostly rich folks get. We might as well get the jump on this, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your House Rep to reject the work-hating, deficit-busting, working families-hurting "Tax Scam 2.0."

Meanwhile, several Congressfolk from both parties are still pushing for a War Powers Resolution vote on our participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you demand that your Congressfolk vote on the war on Yemen, as our Constitution and the War Powers Act mandate they do. Earlier this week, our Administration "certified," in testimony to Congress, that Saudi Arabia and the UAE "are undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure." Like bombing school buses? Like leaving Yemen teetering on the brink of famine? Defense Secretary Mattis has also said that American influence on Saudi Arabia and the UAE has saved civilian lives, which sure sounds like a rhetorical hostage crisis to me. You know what would save more civilian lives? If our government didn't feel like it had to go along with whatever Saudi Arabia wants, that's what. It's hard to say you have leverage over someone if you never actually use it.

Finally, hot on the heels of the news that some Playskool crayons you find in dollar stores or at online sellers like Amazon or eBay might have asbestos in them, Penn PIRG (which conducted the study) helps you tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to recall these and other products that might injure our children off our shelves. (As an aside, I sure do find the misspelling of "playschool" less funny as I get older.) Penn PIRG's findings also included markers with benzene and three-ring binders with phthalates, and while a Johns Hopkins toxicologist said the amount of asbestos found in the Playskool crayons isn't dangerous to "most" people, you have to wonder if "most" people includes children, and one of the Penn PIRG study's authors points out that if you get trace amounts of asbestos from several products (and you might!), you're still at risk for getting sick. So, yes, it seems like recalling the crayons would help save lives.

Action: concerning data protection, corruption, and mergers.

Remember a year ago, when Equifax announced they'd been hacked, leaving the personal information of almost 150 Americans exposed? What do you suppose Congress has done about the matter since then? Go find an empty sheet of paper and hold it up, and you'll have your answer. Why, they even tried to cap class-action lawsuit awards to protect corporations like Equifax when they expose your data! But S. 2289, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would help protect good Americans from these little Equifax moments, by regulating credit corporations' cybersecurity, mandating annual inspections thereof, and instituting fines for non-compliance. I'd prefer jail time for these clowns instead of fines, but S. 2289 represents a better impulse after data breaches than "let's ensure no corporations get hurt!" Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans' data by supporting S. 2289.

Meanwhile, S. 3357, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, would engineer a wide swatch of reforms to our political system; some of these include keeping politicians from going into lobbying after they leave office, keeping lobbyists out of our government, getting more transparency out of Congress and federal contractors, and ensuring that regulations prioritize benefits to the people over benefits to corporations. S. 3357 would also make administrative law judges competitive civil service jobs, just like they used to be before our President reclassified them so he could pack immigration courts with his cronies. These and other reforms in S. 3357 will go some way toward ensuring that our elected officials don't spend all day ignoring the popular will and collecting perks from their big corporate donors. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support public integrity by passing S. 3357.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FCC to reject the proposed Sprint/T-Mobile merger, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Sprint and T-Mobile would like you to believe that they need to merge in order to better compete with AT&T and Verizon, but Jesus Mary and Joseph get bigger is not the solution to every problem. And that's not even to say these corporations haven't tried other things! But we know for certain that a bigger Sprint/T-Mobile corporation will not bequeath upon our civilization lower prices, more jobs, or better service. Why, gosh, I'm old enough to remember when economists said more competition resulted in lower prices, more jobs, and better service! I'm sure our corporate kingpins find all that "quaint," but they the only thing they're really good at is (everybody now) redistributing income upward from working people to themselves. And we deserve better than that.

Action: concerning methane emissions, drones, and endangered species.

Another day, another EPA regulatory proposal that would allow big gas drilling corporations to pollute more, specifically more methane. Our Administration has had an absolute hard-on for dumping methane emissions restrictions since the get-go, and Republicans surprisingly failed to pass a resolution of disapproval that would have nullified the EPA's methane emissions rules last year, so they're trying to undo them from inside the EPA now. But methane packs an even bigger climate change punch than coal emissions do, and letting gas drillers vent methane without making them clean it up also deprives America of a) usable fuel and b) royalties if gas drillers are drilling on public lands. Yes, whenever methane floats away on public lands, money that belongs to the American people floats away with it. So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to keep methane restrictions strong.

Meanwhile, our Congress is working on a Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) authorization bill, and aims to use that bill to give our government the ability to shoot down drones it considers a "threat." And they don't mean the drones that we use in our unconstitutional war-making activities, but the drones journalists use to get documentation of detention center abuses. One might reasonably respond that if our government didn't do bad things to immigrants and refugees in the first place, they wouldn't need to shoot down any drones recording those things! But that'll fall on deaf ears with this Administration, which is, like Tha Bush Mobb, ignorant and arrogant about it. And while a quarter of the electorate worships them for that, the rest of us can let the Electronic Frontier Foundation help us tell our Congressfolk to reject any FAA authorization bill that allows our government to shoot down drones whenever it pleases.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Fish and Wildlife Service (or FWS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (or NMFS) to reject their proposals to base endangered species decisions more on economics and less on science and common sense, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. Don't be one of those folks who constantly says how's anyone supposed to make money? every time we try to protect endangered species, because that's actually evidence of weakness -- weakness of mind, in the inability to conceive of how business and nature could coexist, and weakness of spirit, in the unwillingness to make things work for anyone other than bosses. I mean, this is America, dammit, the can-do country of world history, and if we elevate mammon to primacy in all our decisions, we will destroy that can-do spirit, and we will deserve oblivion. But those of us with that can-do spirit will continue to fight.

Action: concerning conservation, marijuana, and self-driving cars.

Congress still hasn't reauthorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, though it'll expire at the end of this month, and though it has worked to reclaim American lands for decades now. And why not? Because they abhor hard work? Because dedicating oil and gas drilling fees toward buying up and reclaiming lands like the Appalachian Trail is TEH EXTREMIZTZ ENVIRONMENTALISTZ!!!!!? Because it's about conserving the past so the future can enjoy it and today's politicians only care about the present? Because a program that doesn't actually cost taxpayers anything must be a program that runs well and therefore must be destroyed? Whatever the reason, the Wilderness Society helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund with a quickness. And if they start talking about the LWCF needing "reform," you can remind them that when they say "reform" they usually mean "deform." There's no reason they shouldn't know we're on to them.

Meanwhile, our Administration has convened a Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee, with the apparent purpose of bamboozling the public not to support better marijuana policy, as most of us do. You'd think they'd have better things to do with their time, but let's one-up this "policy coordination committee" and let Drug Policy Alliance help us tell our Congressfolk to pass pending legislation which would improve our federal policy toward marijuana. The bills you'd support are the Marijuana Justice Act (H.R.4815/S.1689), which would remove marijuana from Schedule I and help communities ravaged by the "war on drugs," and the STATES Act (H.R.6043/S.3032), which would let states that have legalized the drug operate without federal interference. Why, even our President endorsed the STATES Act earlier this year! Of course, that was then, and for our President, tomorrow is always another country.

Finally, Congress is still itching to pass legislation that would actually allow corporations to put self-driving cars on the road without first determining if they're safe. This is, as you know, a matter of some debate, since self-driving cars have killed people on two occasions this year, and you and I still can't get one! But S. 1885, the AV START Act, would not only let self-driving car-manufacturing corporations glide past federal safety standards, it would prevent states from banning self-driving cars. I remember asking why folks are so excited about self-driving cars, but of course I know the real reason: putting these monstrosities out on the road will make someone a lot of unearned money. Indeed, it often seems like that's the only reason corporations do anything in America. Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from unsafe products by rejecting S. 1885.

Action: three alerts about pollution.

Flint isn't the only city in Michigan still suffering with poisoned water: now Detroit has lead and copper in its water at its public schools. And Detroit only began testing its public schools' water for lead this past year! Who knows how long its water has been tainted, or how many good Detroit kids got their brains permanently warped by lead? Hence Color of Change helps you tell Michigan's government to get the lead out of public school plumbing. Knowing Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a notorious right-winger who thinks corporations know everything and government knows nothing, he'll probably force Detroit to contract with Nestlé to get clean water or something, but the only way to really fix the problem is to replace the lead pipes out of public schools and then install filters to keep lead out. Why, that's the kind of infrastructure our President is supposedly all about! And it's about time our governments actually supported it, on their bosses, the people's, behalf.

Meanwhile, our Administration got its rocks off by shrinking the size of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, and now our Bureau of Land Management is opening up what used to be part of Bears Ears to uranium mining corporations, hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep uranium mining away from the Bears Ears area. Uranium mining not only pollutes nearby water tables, but leaves a lot of radioactive sludge everywhere it goes, and for what? So uranium mining CEOs can make even more money? So we can prop up a nuclear power industry that's never made money no matter how much corporate welfare we've thrown at it? So we can build nuclear weapons when we already have enough of those to destroy the world hundreds of times over? So we can stick it to the Obama Administration for letting Native American nations have some control over the Monument? None of this sounds very respectful of the traditions that sustain us as a civilization.

Finally, get your surprised face ready, as our Administration plans to delay implementation of the EPA's 2015 coal ash rule -- the one that would prevent coal ash, the waste from burning coal, from seeping into groundwater and thus putting good Americans at a higher risk of getting cancer -- so Environmental Action helps you tell the EPA to implement the damn rule already and start protecting people from this kind of pollution. Our Administration will be ready to respond that WE'RE PROTECTINGZ TEH COAL MINURZ!!!!!, but of course they're not -- not unless they're giving coal miners magic suits that protect them against carcinogens! No, they care only about other bosses, and not their real bosses, i.e., us. Our Administration has had several of its previous attempts to delay regulations struck down in court, but lawsuits take time to wind through courts, and in the meantime, people get hurt. If we act, we can stop that.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, war in Yemen, and drugs in our meat supply.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senator to reject the nomination of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court, you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' contact information and call them. I still think the best reason to deny his nomination is his zeal for expanding Executive power, but you may also want to note his opposition to net neutrality because it supposedly violates the First Amendment rights of ISP corporations to your Senator. Judge Kavanaugh would ensure that corporations have more rights than you, just as he'd insure that your President has more rights than you. And he's not a "nice guy," or jes' folks getting to the Supreme Court by dint of hard work and elbow grease -- he's a right-wing judicial activist, looking to ensure that we "little people" have as little say over our democracy as possible.

Meanwhile, Spain has cancelled a $10 million-plus arms sale to Saudi Arabia -- though not, apparently, a $2 billion warships deal -- which means that yet another nation has outclassed us in withholding weapons from the Saudi/UAE war against Yemen, a war which has left Yemen near famine. Hence, Win Without War helps you tell your U.S. Senators to help block our own planned arms sale to Saudi Arabia. After all, how can we guarantee it won't be used on kids coming back from summer camp? I know many folks will drink from the cup of cynicism and say war is just an evil game and there's no use demanding that war be "nicer." But that statement doesn't answer the question of why we're involved in it -- particularly when the Houthi rebels the Saudi/UAE coalition is targeting are actually some of the best al-Qaeda fighters on Earth. It also doesn't answer the question of why we're making war without a Constitutionally-mandated declaration of war from Congress. So folks: don't drink from the cup of cynicism. Cynicism doesn't nourish or sustain you.

Finally, Consumer Reports has found that trace amounts of very, very bad drugs have been making their way into our meat supply -- drugs like ketamine (used at raves and during animal surgeries), phenylbutazone (no longer approved for human use because, among other things, it suppresses white blood cell production), and chloramphenicol (a powerful antibiotic with powerful side effects). If your immediate answer to this news is well, meat has pretty much everything in it, well, you won't be so sanguine about it if it's your kid dying of aplastic anemia from chloramphenicol in his meat. And kudos to you if you recognized our agricultural system's addiction to using antibiotics in feed animals. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep these drugs out of our meat supply. They might have to hold our USDA accountable in order to do that. Again, don't drink from the cup of cynicism and assume that this Congress or this USDA will do nothing. Bad people want you to tie your hands behind your back; good people help you do the right thing.

Action: concerning free speech and tax "reform."

H.R. 6054, the Unmasking Antifa Act, purports to be a bill preventing protestors from wearing disguises, but actually targets (as the bill's own title says!) the Antifa protestors who just so happen to oppose obnoxious racists who support our Administration. We could easily argue that bills targeting one set of protestors discriminate against those protestors -- just as we could have easily argued that bills "unmasking" Ku Klux Klan members do the same -- but you don't even need to go there to oppose this bill. If protestors want to disguise their identities, whether out of fear of being beaten up or out of simple cowardice, then the other good Americans watching them can decide for themselves how they feel about it; passing a bill attacking protestors who wear masks sure doesn't seem like trusting people, not government. Hence Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect free speech for everyone by rejecting H.R. 6054.

Meanwhile, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand answers from corporations over how they've spent their enormous tax cuts. You know, like how many of their employees got pay raises due to the tax "reform" bill (spoiler alert: very few), or how much money corporations are spending on stock buybacks versus wage hikes (spoiler alert: stock buyback money exceeds wage hike money by about a 37:1 ratio), or whether corporations gave their employees a pay raise anywhere near the $4,000 our President said would happen (spoiler alert: hahahahahaha). By asking them to account for this tax "reform," of course, you may well be inviting them to prevaricate about it, as Rep. Chauncey Gardiner Hultgren did last month, but at least make them make fools of themselves in public, that's what I say. I just wish they needed more prodding to do that.

Action: concerning labor, bailouts, and genocide.

H.R. 6080/S. 3064, the Workers' Freedom to Negotiate Act, would amend the National Labor Relations Act to strengthen worker protections. The bill would (among many other things!) strike down "right-to-work" laws at the state level, keep taxpayer dollars away from corporations that violate worker safety laws, narrow the definition of "independent contractor" so corporations can't just willy-nilly reclassify their employees as such, and prevent corporations from using class action waivers as a condition of employment. That last item is important, since more than half of all employers now subject their non-union employees to these class action waivers, thus depriving them of their right to a day in court when these employers screw them over. ("More than half" should clue folks in that "just go get another job" isn't a good objection.) So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Workers' Freedom to Negotiate Act.

Meanwhile, our Energy Department still thinks bailing out the coal and nuclear industries is a good idea, even though coal is dying out and nuclear has never made money. I can already hear the right-wingers squeal BUTZ WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH COAL MINURZ!!!!! How many times must I tell these pimps! This bailout ain't about coal miners; it's about CEOs, as it always is with this Administration. The Energy Department's plan to subsidize "reliable" industries has met with plenty of resistance already, so now they're claiming that we need to do it for national security reasons. Remember Dr. Johnson saying that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel? Well, squealing "national security" is the modern last refuge of politicians who can't win arguments on the merits. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to push back against our Administration's fossil fuel bailout plan.

Finally, Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to push the U.N. to bring the perpetrators of the massacre of Rohingya Muslims to justice. The Burmese military started ethnic-cleansing the Rohingya a little over a year ago, burning down villages and killing thousands, while spurring almost a million more Rohingya to flee to other countries, where they now live in (as you'd expect) wretched refugee camps. Hence we ask our Congressfolk to pressure our U.N. Ambassador, Nikki Haley, to bring the Burmese military to justice; she did call for a worldwide arms embargo of Burma last year, so she may be sympathetic. I do wonder how reasonable-sounding folks will argue that we should leave Burma's military alone. Because without their military, they'd collapse? That military is the very reason Burma can't succeed as a nation. And that military deserves no lenient treatment after committing genocide.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court and the war on Yemen.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has begun to hold hearings on our President's Supreme Court nominee, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject Mr. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. You need not go on a lengthy rant (that'll keep other good citizens off the phones, anyway): you need only mention that Judge Kavanaugh has demonstrated, through his writings and his decisions, that he would empower the Executive branch far beyond what the Founders wanted. Our Founders, sick of George III as they were, wanted a relatively weak President, not a President with so much power that he can make wars all by himself and shield himself from prosecution for his wrongdoings. A Justice Kavanaugh would make our President -- this President! -- that powerful.

Meanwhile, Congress wouldn't vote last month to curb our involvement in the Saudi coalition's war on Yemen -- this, even after an airstrike aiming at a summer camp bus purportedly harboring Houthi rebels killed 40 children and 11 adults. Naturally, that airstrike used an American-made weapon -- in case you thought we limited our culpability in this catastrophe to logistics! -- and the Saudi/UAE coalition later stated that that taking out the bus in a populated area was a mistake, meaning they would have preferred to kill all those summer school kids in a more open area. If we'd had all this out in Congress, as the Constitution demands, we'd have far less of this crap on our conscience -- and far fewer foreign entanglements that turn bad ideas into "matters of national security." So Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop giving weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE so they can kill defenseless Yemeni.

Action: concerning corruption and antibiotic abuse.

Sen. Warren (D-MA) introduced S. 3357, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, last Tuesday, which means she got overshadowed by other news that day, amirite? But S. 3357 would (among so, so many other good things!) ban politicians who serve at the federal level from ever lobbying after they leave office, prevent these same politicians from owning individual stocks while they're serving the public, and change rulemaking procedures so that big corporations can't have more say about federal regulations than the rest of the public. Oh, and it'd also force the IRS (and not the candidates, why didn't we think of that before?) to release eight years of tax returns for Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates and two years for candidates for Congress, but that's just icing on the cake. So Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 3357, and thus help restore ethics, integrity, and real law and order to our government.

Meanwhile, the FDA has proposed restricting antibiotic use in animals -- but would still let factory farm corporations use antibiotics on healthy feed animals, which is the main reason we're facing antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Don't let factory farm PR hacks tell you the "real" problem is with overprescribing antibiotics on humans, not in a world where four out of every five antibiotics go to animals-not-people, and too often factory farms use antibiotics merely to make their animals meatier or help them endure their squalid surroundings. If, one day, we live in a world where the next cut could kill us, we're sure not going to sit around the campfire and say well, we might all be dead now, but at least we preserved profits for factory farm CEOs! or at least chicken was cheap for a while! So Penn PIRG helps you tell our FDA to ban using antibiotics on feed animals for any reason other than illness.

UPDATE. I misidentified Sen. Warren's bill (first paragraph above) as S. 3397; it's actually S. 3357. Error corrected above.

Action: concerning government spying and carcinogens in food.

Google still gathers location data from users even after they disable location tracking on their phones. And worse, Google says they do it so they can better target advertisements to you! It's like they think buying stuff is the only thing anyone should ever be doing. Of course, we know it's more than ad targeting, because location tracking has become a sort of crutch for law enforcement over the last few years, and law enforcement doesn't need to get your permission to get that info, only Google's. No use saying if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear, either, because our government may decide that some benign doing of yours today (checking out some non-mainstream news website, for example) is a terroristic threat tomorrow. And, really, does any government or corporation deserve to know where we all are at all times? Demand Progress helps you tell Google to stop spying on its users.

Meanwhile, it's been a bad month for Monsanto and their notorious glyphosate herbicide RoundUp -- a jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million to a school groundskeeper who developed cancer after using RoundUp, the California Supreme Court wouldn't hear a challenge to glyphosate's inclusion on that state's famous list of carcinogens, and the Environmental Working Group reported finding dangerously high levels of glyphosate in two-thirds of the oat-based children's food products it tested. Gosh, they might be having a tougher time of it than our President, and they don't have a big chunk of the population that'll run through a wall for them like our President does. So Just Label It helps you tell big food-processing corporations General Mills, Kellogg's, and Quaker to make their food products free of glyphosate. Because, really, no one (and certainly not our children) should worry about getting cancer from oatmeal or granola bars.

Action: concerning prison strikes and student loan debt.

As you may know, prisoners all over America are going on strike -- with sit-ins, work stoppages, boycotts of commissaries, and even hunger strikes -- to call attention to the various indignities we visit upon them. No, we should not mistreat our prisoners, regardless of what they've done at least not if we're going to call ourselves civilized people. And if we're going to be the greatest nation on Earth, we should be confident enough in ourselves to treat prisoners humanely, and not least because it's the best way to rehabilitate them. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to listen to, and implement, the demands of the prison strikers. Your Congressfolk will find a lot of these -- paying prisoners in prevailing wages and not dung pellets, for example -- to be very difficult to accept, and some may have public tantrums about it, since, you know, it's OK because our President does that. But you're bigger than they are, so don't let that cow you.

Meanwhile, our Department of Education has proposed rules that would actually hinder good Americans' ability to get loans forgiven after predatory colleges rip them off. Because for-profit colleges are more important than Americans, apparently! I'm old enough to remember when my parents would laugh whenever an ad came on TV for a for-profit college, for back then, for-profit colleges were virtually synonymous with thieves. What has changed in the intervening years? They've bought themselves a gaggle of politicians, that's what! You may well be saying to yourself, self, why bother leaving public comments with a Department of Education that's just going to ignore them? I don't blame you for asking! Here's the answer: because they may break laws in ignoring the popular will, and we can get them in court if they do. Hence Consumers Union helps you tell our Department of Education not to make it so much harder for students to get relief from predators.

Action: concerning monopolies and conservation.

Freedom from Big Tech helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission to start breaking up big tech monopolies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Why? Because they have too much power! You remember Orkut, Tribe, MySpace, and Friendster? Now they're either gone or mere husks of their former selves, because Facebook dominates all. You remember search engines like Momma and Ask Jeeves? Well, Google stomps all over them, too. And Amazon didn't just muscle B. Dalton, Encore, and Waldenbooks out of strip malls all over America, they sentenced uncountable small businesses to oblivion. How many times must I tell these pimps! Small businesses are more accountable to the communities they serve than any big corporation, and they innovate more, too -- which is why big corporations constantly buy small businesses out. But the bigger they get, the more they impose their will upon us, and we have every right to demand that our government -- which works on our behalf, ideally! -- put a stop to that.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission to reject the proposed Sprint/T-Mobile merger. You know the reasons to reject it: mergers kill jobs, raise prices, give consumers fewer choices, and concentrate power in fewer hands; the fact that neither one of these corporations planning to merge is AT&T or Verizon doesn't change any of that. We have, incidentally, another reason to reject the merger: that it might cut off access to smaller carriers that use the bigger carriers' lines, since the resulting bigger corporation can more easily push around smaller carriers. For example, Consumer Cellular -- you've seen their ads; they give inexpensive phone plans to folks over 50, and they even offer flip phones! -- uses T-Mobile's lines; you think the behemoth resulting from a Sprint/T-Mobile merger will give Consumer a better deal? Maybe that sounds like a first-world problem -- until you can't afford phone service.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which has given us such historic outdoors landmarks as the Delaware Water Gap and the Appalachian Trail. LWCF funding expires in just a few weeks, and Congress probably hopes you don't realize the LWCF is there -- and certainly we can't count on our President suddenly reminding us it's there, since the LWCF is about preserving the past for future generations and I just named two things our President doesn't give one rat's hind quarter about. But the LWCF dedicates certain offshore gas and drilling fees toward the task of buying up and preserving historic lands, and when it last expired in 2015, Congress only extended it for three years, despite initially authorizing it for 25 and then renewing it for another 25. Yes, that's another data point suggesting Congress really has gotten a lot worse over time. But we made them reauthorize it before, and we can do it again -- if we act.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering why posting has been relatively light lately, I'm working on the second Penny Rants volume, which will cover the years 2013-2016. I'll put that out in mid-October, and then I'll get to work on the third Penny Rants volume, which will cover 2017 and 2018; that'll be out in mid-January. I'll do some live shows to celebrate those two releases; I'll share more details about those as I get them. But, you know, save the dates, such as they are -- and thank you for reading, and for being good citizens.)

Action: concerning "free" trade, consent, and campaign finance disclosure.

As NAFTA renegotiation drags on, Sign for Good still helps you tell your Congressfolk that any NAFTA renegotiation (which they'll have to approve, after all!) must put people before corporations and protect our clean air and clean water. "Free" trade defenders claim the problems we diagnose with these trade deals are "theoretical." But our recent experience proves they're wrong! In 2015, the World Trade Organization ruled that our country-of-origin labeling laws violated at least two "free" trade deals -- and then Congress rushed to repeal those laws rather than face punitive tariffs. Why should we let "free" trade deals nullify our laws like that? And why should we tolerate the existence of "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanisms that let corporate investors nullify laws that would protect our clean air and clean water -- and then exact tribute for the "hardship" of having to follow them? Given the low character of our corporate elites, none of this is "theoretical."

Meanwhile, this Change.org petition helps you tell the Virginia state House to impeach state 12th Judicial Circuit Court Judge T.J. Hauler for allowing an 18-year-old man to serve no jail time despite being convicted for raping a 14-year-old girl. I have just described everything you need to know about that case -- the age of consent in Virginia is 18, and any kind of "carnal knowledge" with youths between the age of 13 and 15 is a felony in Virginia, which means this was rape the moment he knew how old she was. No, there is literally no imagining that "she secretly wanted it" or "she asked him to tie that belt around her neck" or even that she said yes at any point -- we have age of consent laws precisely so we can protect younger people against the older people who'd abuse them. Still, Judge Hauler gave the offender zero years in jail, and wouldn't you know it, Judge Hauler has a history of going light on sex offenders. But maybe not for much longer!

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6239/S. 3150, the DISCLOSE Act, then a consortium of good-government groups including Common Cause and Issue One still helps you do that. The DISCLOSE Act would, as its title suggests, force more campaign finance disclosure for political ads that target a candidate for office -- for example, it would force disclosure of campaign ads that target a candidate's character without explicitly also endorsing another candidate, and it would force corporations to run an "I approve this message" disclaimer the way candidates for office have to do. In this, the "Age of McConnell" -- that is to say, the age of virtually unrestricted campaign contributions leading to virtually boundless corruption -- most folks want to know who exactly is spending buku bucks trying to manipulate them. And even our Supreme Court, notorious for conflating money and speech, says that's not too much to ask.

Action: concerning free speech, killer weed-killers, and corporate welfare.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Cambodia to release housing rights activist Tep Vanny from prison. Ms. Vanny is currently serving a 30-month sentence (of which she's already served two years) for "intentional violence with aggravating circumstances," which sounds better than what they ring activists up on in Saudi Arabia, I suppose, but that's nothing to brag about. The Cambodian government convicted her solely on written statements of purported witnesses, which, like, any government can do; you might more reasonably suspect that they're really convicting her of agitating against her government's ongoing evictions of over 20,000 good Cambodians from her community under its notorious Economic Land Concession scheme, which is, apparently, how the government gives land away to foreign corporations for "development." Untrammeled corporate power: it really is a menace everywhere on Earth. Luckily the world has folks like Ms. Vanny to fight it.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the news that a terminally-ill man who used Monsanto's signature weed-killer Roundup in his job as a school groundskeeper won a $289 million judgment against Monsanto after getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Penn PIRG helps you tell the EPA to ban Roundup. I'll bet the tort "reform" crowd is just aching to call this a frivolous lawsuit because of the massive award, but they'd have to explain how a 42-year-old man got terminal cancer after using Roundup at his job for just two years, and they'd also have to explain Monsanto knowing (per internal documents) that Roundup causes cancer for decades while insisting in public (and still insisting, no less!) that it doesn't. They'd be better off realizing that not putting more potentially carcinogenic chemicals in our food and water is actually a conservative impulse. You know, instead of insisting that whatever's good for big corporations is "conservative."

Finally, S. 1885, the AV START Act, would actually let corporations sell self-driving cars without ensuring they conform to federal safety standards, and worse, would pre-empt states from passing their own laws regarding self-driving cars. Conservatism! It's all about advancing solutions that make problems worse! It's also about keeping states from doing anything about driverless cars that run people over! Seriously, aside from the prospect of collecting corporate welfare, why is anyone excited about driverless cars? Are they really a better transportation option than buses or trains? Are we really going to have fewer accidents when we get rid of people? And how offensive is it that we have to fight like dogs to get public investment in actual revolutionary technologies like solar and wind, but self-driving cars somehow wind up on the fast track? Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumers by rejecting S. 1885.

Action: concerning public water, airline fees, and animal experimentation.

First things first. Asahi-Schweppes (you may know Schweppes' tonic water and bitter lemon sodas from your grandparents' liquor cabinet) is pumping a few hundred thousand liters of groundwater from the town of Stanley in Australia, and then selling it as, well, "better" than what comes out of your taps, I guess. Thing is, Stanley has nut and fruit orchards which provide the town's 370 residents with a livelihood, and those orchards need groundwater to keep going. (Oh, and people already pay taxes so they can drink clean water, too.) The good folks of Stanley seem to have exhausted all their legal options; now it's up to us to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against Asahi for picking on a town of not even 400 people thinking they won't be able to stand up for themselves. So Sum of Us helps you tell Asahi to stop taking Stanley's water from them. Over 95,000 good folks have signed this petition, at this writing; I bet those 370 Stanley residents don't feel so alone now.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the FAIR Fees amendment to the FAA reauthorization bill. You just love being hit with unexpected airline fees for changing flights or checking bags, right? Of course you don't; nobody does, but if the FAIR Fees amendment passes, our Department of Transportation (or DOT) would have the authority to tamp down high airline fees. I guess right-wingers will squeal BIG GUMMINT!!!! at the thought of our DOT actually making sure these fees have something to do with the "services" airlines supposedly provide in exchange, but I'd just respond you like big airlines better? The three biggest airlines collected over $16 billion in fees in 2016 alone -- and none of us are getting across the country in five hours by train or automobile, so what do we call that? A hostage situation, that's what. And whenever predatory corporations take us hostage, we have to get our government to stop them.

Finally, the White Coat Waste Project has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell our government to retire and release lab animals at the end of federally-funded animal experiments. You don't have to oppose animal experimentation to see that letting them go to good homes is a much, much better idea than simply killing them off, which is what otherwise happens to those animals at the end of experiments. If you fear that the animals would never adapt to a life outside of being imprisoned in a cage, then I would urge you to have a little more faith in a living thing's resilience. And if you'd rather just kill them off so we can spend less taxpayer money, then I would urge you to a) slap yourself and b) contemplate more fully the idea that civilization should take some effort on our part to maintain, and maybe it should even cost more money than barbarism. You may also want to contemplate the fact that rich folks sure could be paying more in taxes.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, pollution, and whistleblowing.

Late last week, the Saudi-led coalition bombed a school bus in Yemen, killing upwards of 29 children. And our own Defense Department can't say whether the coalition used U.S.-supplied munitions to do the deed, or if we refueled the planes that dropped the bombs, because CENTCOM doesn't track these planes. I have to say that seems awfully convenient. And for decades Congress has let Presidents do pretty much what they like overseas, and even now is mulling a bill that would abdicate even more of their Constitutional responsibility to declare war. And if you thought this President would "be different" and "put America first" and "be laser-focused on fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS," recall that the Houthi rebels Saudi Arabia keeps fighting are some of the finest fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth. Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end American support for this undeclared and unconstitutional war that has put over two-thirds of Yemen's people in need of immediate humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, you know all about the nefarious "cost-benefit analysis" that right-wingers constantly use to say regulations are "too costly" for businesses? Well, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) is now proposing to make their cost-benefit analyses even worse, by forcing the EPA to consider the "harm" its regulations might do to corporate profits before considering the health benefits of its regulations. Scott Pruitt may be gone, but this particular proposal, somehow entitled "Increasing Consistency and Transparency in Considering Costs and Benefits in Rulemaking Process," surely comes from his gnarled hand. One can only hope that this particular Administration initiative, like so many of their pro-pollution initiatives, will die an ignominious death before a federal judge, but in the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell the EPA to reject its plan to put polluters before people, and mammon before life.

Finally, the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our government to do a considerably better job protecting whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing at the Veterans Administration. We can't reasonably blame this state of affairs on our most recent President, but on his predecessor, Barack Obama, who seemed to have a visceral hatred of whistleblowers across our government, including VA whistleblowers. But hatred of whistleblowers is a bit hard to understand on the face of it when you consider that a whistleblower's complaint will either be proven in a court of law or it won't; you may be tempted, as I am, to consider that our government must hate whistleblowers because our government can't win the argument on the merits. But we the people have an absolute, inviolate right to stop our government from screwing us over, and whistleblowers are often our only way of knowing our government's doing that. So, as civilized people, we protect whistleblowers with laws.