Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning voting rights, drug policy, and corporate power.

America's last journalist, Greg Palast, reports that the state of Georgia can now block voter registrations for folks who don't also have cars registered in the state. They claim they're just trying to prevent people from driving in from out of state and voting in Georgia, but we all know what they're really trying to do: they're trying to prevent seniors, students, and folks of color from voting, since those groups often vote Democrat. They're calling the rule change a "guidance" so that they don't actually break the law, and they may yet lose in court -- but if they do, it'll be after they deliver a big assist to the two Republicans running in January's Senate runoff races, which could well determine which party controls our Senate. Oh, and when Republicans control it, only bad things happen. You might want to call at least three of the five members of Georgia's state election board; here's where to find their phone numbers. (Click on the "State Election Board members" sidebar to bring up the relevant phone numbers.)

Meanwhile, our House plans a vote on H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act; it's no good arguing that since Mob Boss Mitch would never hold a vote on it that it's no use telling our House Reps to pass it. In fact, it's not only "no good" arguing that, it's bad arguing that -- we're supposed to set the agenda, not him. And the MORE Act would do a lot of good -- it would legalize pot, which at this point would be about as harmful as legalizing booze which we tried once and almost certainly won't try again. The MORE Act would also help good Americans expunge pot convictions from their records and would fund the rebuilding of communities unfairly targeted by the "war on drugs." Our government has always intended the "war on drugs" to be a way of keeping folks of color (among others) down -- but don't take my word for it; take former White House counsel John Ehrlichman's word for it! And then let the ACLU help you tell your Congressfolk to help correct decades of mistakes by passing the MORE act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President-elect Biden to avoid stacking his Administration with corporate cronies, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Remember: when we hear that Mr. Biden should want a cabinet "with diverse viewpoints," that phrase means "without liberals." And when we hear that we should just let Mr. Biden have his center-right cabinet lest we lose both Houses in the 2022 midterms, we should remember that these exact precise center-right moves actually cause Democrats to lose big in midterm elections. And we should also remember that telling Mr. Biden to keep the corporatists out of his cabinet isn't actually something only liberals say -- a lot of folks who voted for our soon-to-be-ex-President feel exactly the same about corporate power, and would like our leaders to do something about it. If Democrats want to appeal to them, then fighting corporate power might be the best way to do it. Not that they ever take my advice.

Action: concerning hazard pay at Amazon, the Keystone XL pipeline, and war on Yemen.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Amazon hasn't been paying its workers hazard pay for months now. You may well be saying that warehouse work can't be that hazardous, but if you've ever actually done it, you know it's quite strenuous; now try doing it with eggheads constantly breathing down your neck to work harder and go faster. And, more to the point, try to imagine social distancing in a pandemic at possibly the busiest warehouse on Earth. Hazard pay is the least Amazon workers should be getting, especially since Amazon made over $6 billion in profits in the three months after cutting off hazard pay, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's net worth increased by $66 billion between April and September. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Mr. Bezos to reinstate hazard pay for his corporation's workers. It's not like he doesn't have the money, after all, and you may have noticed that COVID-19 cases have shot up lately.

Meanwhile, 350.org helps you tell President-elect Biden to stop Keystone XL cold dead on his first day in office. Yes, he'll have a lot to do his first day, but this isn't actually a heavy lift: TransCanada, the corporation with the notoriously bad pipe-safety record, began construction this year without even getting all its permits in order, so there's a fairly easy pretext for stopping construction right there. Of course, big oil drilling corporations are thinking they can elbow Mr. Biden into doing their bidding, but that's just the reason we need to speak out now: at least we can make him choose between doing the bidding of big campaign donors or executing the will of the American people as is his actual job. And no, "compromise" doesn't mean "letting the big oil corporations get their way." Keystone XL could contaminate the Ogallala Aquifer, provider of drinking water to millions of good Americans in our heartland, and there is no compromise where our clean water is concerned.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Congressfolk to reject our soon-to-be-ex-President's proposed $23 billion arms sale to the UAE so they can keep bombing the bejesus out of Yemen, then Win Without War still helps you do that. As with the multitudinous regulatory changes our soon-to-be-ex-President is trying to ram through before we drag him kicking and screaming from office, he's hoping to do one last favor for the warmongers in Saudi Arabia, which this surely is, even if the money's not going directly to them. (Saudi Arabia leads the coalition waging war on Yemen, with the UAE being the other major partner in that coalition.) Still, Sens. Menendez (D-NJ), Murphy (D-CT), and Paul (R-KY) have introduced "privileged" resolutions aiming to stop the sale -- meaning Super Great and Awesome Real American President Mitch McConnell can't stop a vote on them -- and if the odds favor us, we have the duty to make our will known.

Action: concerning police brutality, media consolidation, and Arctic drilling.

A new Administration comes to power in January, so Grassroots Law helps you tell the Biden-Harris team to do everything they can to stop racist police brutality. Grassroots Law has a good list of demands, and these include reopening police brutality cases left unsolved, ending the 1033 program that sends military weapons to police departments, repeal the Muslim ban and family separation policies, and getting more public defenders and civil rights attorneys involved in our Justice Department's work. A Biden-Harris Administration can accomplish most of this through executive order, without running to Great and Bounteous Real American President Mitch McConnell (or his trusty sidekick, Saint Joe Manchin of the Golden Age of Bipartisanship) for permission. And though Biden-Harris ran on most of this stuff, you know they really don't want to do it if they don't have to. But that's why we make them have to.

Meanwhile, FCC Chair Ajit Pai, who isn't very long for his job, plans to waive media ownership rules so that Fox can gobble up even more properties in the lucrative New York City media market, where Fox already owns two TV stations and the New York Post. And our FCC will only take public comments on this plan until next Friday, December 4, which is what they all do when they know the public will hate what they do. Media consolidation is one of the few issues in America where liberals and conservatives actually agree (i.e., in that they all hate it), so naturally the nominally "conservative" Mr. Pai would do the exact opposite! There's a lesson in there, somewhere. Until they learn it, Free Press helps you tell our FCC not to give out any more corporate welfare handouts to Fox. Fox will probably tell you it just can't compete with Newsmax, OANN, etc. without more handouts, but if it can't compete with those clowns, it deserves to die.

Finally, just about every big banking corporation in America has declared that it won't fund any drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) -- except for Bank of America. Sigh. Of course it's Bank of America! And it'll only take one well-funded (as far as we know!) bankster to ruin a stretch of public land the size of South Carolina. (No, really. Alaska is a really, really big place; people don't get how big it is.) And drilling for oil and gas in ANWR will not only ruin land home to the Gwich'in people and unique species of animals, it won't get us anywhere near as much oil as ANWR drilling proponents would like you to think. And once that oil's burned, and all that money gets spent, there really will be nothing left -- unless we fight to keep what's really important. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell Bank of America to abandon plans to fund Arctic drilling.

Action: concerning tax cheats, COVID vaccines, and Social Security.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell our President-elect and our Congressfolk to properly fund our IRS so we can, at long last, hold tax evaders accountable. Some folks will say you want to give more money to the IRS haw haw haw haw, but our government has underfunded our IRS over the last decade to the point that its officers admit they go after low-level tax cheats because they don't have the money to fight wealthy and corporate tax cheats, and while cheating on your taxes is never OK, going after big-money tax cheats means, well, more money, for the good services we expect, demand, and deserve from our government. Put more simply: big tax cheats take more money out of our mouths than the little ones do, and why should tax cheats be shielded from accountability simply because they can hire more lawyers to spin more convoluted tall tales?

Meanwhile, the HERO Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to make COVID-19 vaccines free to all Americans. Right-wingers will retort don't the companies that make the drugs deserve to make money? But one can answer that retort in at least four ways: a) these corporations often develop their drugs with taxpayer money, so we deserve more say over what happens afterward; b) only giving it to folks with money violates the rights of folks who don't have money; c) the more folks who get the vaccine, the more likely we'll defeat COVID-19, and d) people who die of COVID-19 because they can't afford a vaccine can't spend money on health care anymore. Plus, you know, e) don't put corporate profits ahead of people. (And since we don't just live in America but on Earth, Avaaz helps you tell all world governments to suspend patents on COVID-19 vaccines so everyone in the world can benefit from them.)

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell President-elect Biden to undo our soon-to-be-ex-President's attempts to destroy Social Security, namely by rolling back his changes to Social Security Disability and by demanding the resignations of all of our soon-to-be-ex-President's appointees to the Social Security Administration. Yeah, I know, he's going to have a lot on his plate, but that doesn't mean we should lay off him, and getting rid of these injuries to our Social Security is his job. Moreover, exactly zero right-wingers will thank him for making SSDI and SSI recipients to re-prove their eligibility for these programs every six freaking months. That ain't "fighting fraud," it's just harassment -- they're hoping people forget to prove their eligibility! You want to fight fraud? Hire more (and better) investigators -- but don't hurt deserving Americans.

Action: concerning corporate power, law enforcement, and Israel/Palestine policy.

Dig this: Tyson Foods managers at its Waterloo (IA) plant not only "explicitly directed supervisors to ignore symptoms of COVID-19, telling them to show up to work even if they were exhibiting symptoms of the virus," but actually started a pool to bet on how many of their workers would get sick. That's as good a reason as any to remind President-elect Joe Biden that the American voters did give him a mandate this month -- that mandate being "don't run the country like that guy did! -- and thus Public Citizen helps you tell President-elect Biden not to hire big corporate types for key jobs in his Administration, including Agriculture Secretary and OSHA administrator. After all, if they're capable of betting on how many of their workers will get sick, they shouldn't be in charge of anything, let alone "building back better" from a pandemic and a crippled economy.

Meanwhile, H.R. 7848/S. 4360, the Counselors Not Criminalization in Schools Act, would end federal funding for putting police officers in schools, and would replace those police officers with folks actually trained to deal with mental health issues, since we typically don't train police officers to do that. And we shouldn't! Should we train coal miners to write code? No, we shouldn't; mining coal and writing code use entirely different skills sets, and, in a like manner, enforcing our laws and dealing with folks with mental health issues use entirely different skill sets. Some folks used to respond "cops just need more training" when they contemplate these issues -- I used to say the same thing! -- but we'd do much better deploying folks already trained to do the job. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out students and police by passing the Counselors Not Criminalization in Schools Act.

Finally, our Secretary of State plans to formally designate the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (or BDS) movement as anti-Semitic -- which also means they'll create a blacklist of groups who support BDS. How many times must I tell these pimps! Opposing Israel's actions against the Palestinian people, and working to change them, does not make you anti-Semitic! It's like these people have no idea what anti-Semitism is like -- nothing from this Administration about assholes threatening American Jews or defacing Jewish graveyards, but they sure have plenty to say about good folks who disagree that keeping your boot on Palestinian throats is either a humane policy or an effective one! And how else do you change behavior of foreign countries, particularly when your own government will never make such an effort? Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell our State Department to abandon this foolish effort to injure free speech.

Action: concerning health care, debt, and corruption.

You've heard that Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine looks like it might be a winner? Well, Public Citizen reminds us of a few things -- chiefly, that it's not "Moderna's vaccine," since it received close to $2.5 billion in taxpayer money, i.e., our money. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our President-elect to make this COVID-19 vaccine, if proven safe and effective, available to all Americans, and also to ramp up manufacturing so that vaccine "rationing" doesn't occur. After all, it ain't like COVID is going to pass you by if you don't have access to the vaccine, is it? I know some people will call such a move "socialism," but those people call everything "socialism," so I'm not concerned about that. And if we taxpayers provided a significant amount of funding for a vaccine, don't we get a significant amount of say in what happens afterward? And yes, I know we could say that about most drugs developed in America, where big pharma socialized the cost but privatizes the profit.

Meanwhile, did you know that debt collectors can now come after you on Facebook or Twitter? That's thanks to one of this Administration's worst alphabet agencies, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB), which did decent work under Director Richard Cordray but not so much since a President who hates all regulations that might actually help people came to power. Hence our CFPB has loosened restrictions on how much debt collectors can harass you, plus our CFPB apparently doesn't care if these debt collectors harass good Americans who don't actually owe them anything! And, as I mentioned, now debt collectors can message you on your social media accounts. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell our CFPB to rescind regulations allowing debt collectors to hound you more often. Remember: our CFPB doesn't even care if you really owe anyone anything -- they're happy to let debt collectors waste your valuable time even if they're dead wrong. You'd think an actual conservative would be up in arms about that.

Finally, you may have heard that South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham -- who once upon a time was the very first Senator to condemn the abuses at Abu Ghraib, I kid you not -- has continued his long slide into corruption by actually suggesting to Georgia's Secretary of State that maybe he should throw out some mail-in ballots. Mr. Graham has apparently talked to other state officials about similar matters, though his recollections of such conversations are, as they say, evolving. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell Sen. Graham to resign immediately. No, I don't expect him to have such a Damascus moment any time soon, particularly after just winning re-election by 10 points against a guy who raised over $100 million to run against him, but duty is duty, and what should we demand of him after hearing that he's tried to influence the outcome of a Presidential election in his preferred direction after all the votes have all been counted? Should we sit back and take it? Of course we shouldn't.

Around the table: in which liberals did not "almost lose" the election for the 443rd time.

Looks like I spoke too soon: the two Republican Wayne County (MI) officials who certified the vote totals have now changed their minds and want to "rescind" their votes. I should never have underestimated the right wing thirst for drama! And yes, when officials see the same "problems" in suburban districts as in urban ones but only want to certify the results in the suburban ones, that's drama, and it's not good drama, either. And they can sign all the affidavits they want, but they can't "rescind" their votes. Voting is like that.

When I hear that Joe Biden would rather not investigate our soon-to-be-ex-President's many alleged criminal acts, I sympathize to a point -- I do not wish the Biden Administration to be all about our soon-to-be-ex-President; I'd rather it be all about the American people. Still, when you smear feces all over our house, we should hold you accountable for it, through the Administration that replaces you. And I sure hope Mr. Biden isn't thinking of interfering with the state of New York's investigations into our soon-to-be-ex-President.

I was never a big "Green New Deal" fan -- it was a non-binding resolution, and I always preferred bills like the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, which would actually do the things the Green New Deal resolution merely aspired to do -- but turns out 92 out of 93 House Green New Deal co-sponsors won re-election in 2020. That includes three out of four in competitive House districts, with the fourth currently leading his race by almost seven points with about 85% of the vote counted. Who thinks "let's create jobs building renewable energy infrastructure" is a loser? Only the long-time Democratic pols who are used to losing.

A Government Accountability Office (or GAO) report documents how big corporations like Walmart and Amazon pay their employees so little that they require public assistance like food stamps and Medicaid -- as in nearly six million Medicaid enrollees and nearly five million food stamp recipients who worked full time. And there's Sen. Bernie Sanders telling Walmart to "get off welfare," which Democratic politicians still can't see is winning messaging that resonates with broad sectors of the electorate.

Another day, another Republican (this time former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, he sure was a big help winning Ohio, wasn't he?) claiming that "the far-left...almost cost" Joe Biden the 2020 election. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is exactly right in her response, of course (i.e., that the "far left" won Georgia -- Georgia! -- for Mr. Biden), and moderates lose elections not only because they don't excite people, but also because they don't fight for popular things like (hate to beat a dead horse) renewable energy and Medicare-for-All.

Finally, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that we can't "meet Nazis halfway." Yes, her feelings are pretty much my feelings, and I feel compelled to remind folks that you couldn't "meet halfway" with Tha Bush Mobb, either, once they said everyone who disagreed with their palpably stupid case for war with Iraq was a traitor and a weakling. And let's not try too hard to "understand" Nazi wannabes, either, as our "liberal" media outlets are inexplicably still trying to do -- hate doesn't require a whole lot of navel-gazing, and if Nazi wannabes have legitimate grievances, they sure ain't the grievances they're airing.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad bureaucrats, and bad pro-pollution bills.

Happy Thursday, good Americans! Now's as good a time as any to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Doesn't matter that they don't want to do it, or would rather confirm more right-wing judges -- all that matters is that we want them to do it, and if we speak out enough, they'll be afraid not to do it. Don't laugh; I've seen it happen.

Meanwhile, Roots Action helps you demand that our government abolish the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. If abolition seems a little extreme to you, I wouldn't blame you -- I'd vastly prefer to reform government agencies before abolishing them myself. But I don't blame the folks who get beaten up by ICE officers for wanting it abolished, either. And, ah, one other thing to consider: our soon-to-be-ex-President used ICE officers this year essentially as a brownshirt force to beat up protestors at otherwise peaceful protests this year, and anytime a President decides to use law enforcement for his own purposes, rather than the ones mandated by our laws and our Constitution, well, that's a tool we've got to take out of the toolbox right quick. Recall, also, that our Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, under which ICE operates, ain't been around that long -- our government created it out of anti-immigrant hysteria during Tha Bush Mobb years, so it ain't like we just don't know how to live without it.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 619 would, and I can't believe anyone thinks this is a good idea, exclude from the Clean Stream Law's definition of pollution any "accidental discharge, spill or release that does not cause a violation of any of the numeric water quality criteria under 25 Pa. Code Chapter 93 (relating to water quality standards)." The kicker there, of course, is that Pennsylvania law doesn't define water quality standards for every conceivable pollutant, so SB 619 would essentially redefine pollution to exclude pollution. And SB 790 would do even more damage, by increasing pollution, lowering clean drinking water standards, and handing out big chunks of corporate welfare to big gas drillers. Always they hand out the welfare to those poor, poor big corporations, and never to the needy, so once again, we must remind our legislators that they work for us, not just their big donors. Hence the Center for Coalfield Justice helps you tell your PA state House reps and your PA state Senators to fight pollution by rejecting SB 619 and SB 790.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act and drilling on public lands.

Today's a good day to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Why is today a goodday? Because President-elect Biden said on Monday, at a press conference I would otherwise have ignored, that "Congress should come together and pass a COVID relief package like the HEROES Act that the House passed six months ago." Not even "a COVID relief package like the HEROES Act the House passed two months ago," but the much better one, passed back in May. That's a signal, folks! The May version of the HEROES Act spent more money, to be sure, but that's what you do when your economy's in trouble, you can print your own money, and your government won't fall anytime soon -- and not to beat a dead horse, but our government could also tax the rich a lot harder and not have as much debt. And we do need the May HEROES Act, not just because it'd fund testing and tracing, but because it'd help out states and localities that can't just print their own money (or even go into debt to dig out of trouble!).

Meanwhile, Food and Water Watch helps you tell President-elect Biden to ban all fossil fuel extraction on public lands, which would fulfill one of his campaign promises. Wait, you've heard that Joe Biden wouldn't ban fracking? Well, he wouldn't ban fracking on private land, but said he would on public lands, like our national parks and wilderness areas. You'd think we wouldn't be drilling there now, but we are, and not only are we doing that, we're failing to collect the royalties we deserve as taxpayers. I mean, it's not a "job-creation" strategy to make oil and gas drilling corporations pay a pittance to drill on public lands, it's a "take food out of good Americans' mouths" strategy, since those royalties would pay for services we all need. Best in any case to tax the rich a lot harder and keep fossil fuel drillers from polluting our public lands, which are ours, after all.

Finally, our soon-to-be-ex-President, seeing the writing on the wall, is rushing to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) to oil drilling. Now that's a hell of a legacy to take to the pearly gates! Yes, Lord, I did ensure that oil drillers polluted a pristine area so that oil executives could make even more money! No, that's really why he's doing it -- it's not for "jobs," and anyway why wouldn't our government create jobs by building out renewable energy infrastructure, so that the workers who helped build it and thus reduced pollution and helped avoid the more calamitous aspects of climate change can tell future generations I helped do that? Because our soon-to-be-ex-President doesn't care about the future and doesn't care about anything but bosses making more money, that's why. The rest of us can tell our Department of Interior to reject lease sales in the Arctic, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps you do.

Action: concerning government staffing, Presidential documents, and the war on Yemen.

Joe Biden will be President on January 20 -- but if Republicans still control our Senate by then, they'll do their damnedest to prevent Mr. Biden from even staffing a functioning government. Hence MoveOn helps you tell President-elect Biden to reject any hostage-taking attempts by The One True and Real and Great American President Mitch McConnell and build a Cabinet that fulfills the mandate the people gave them. (They got a mandate from the people? Yes, they did, and here it is: "don't run the country like that guy did.") How do they fulfill this mandate in the face of Republican obstruction? By making recess appointments and by filling Cabinet positions on an acting basis, a process our soon-to-be-ex-President has abused, surely, but one Mr. Biden can use lawfully. And, really, it's well past time for Democratic politicians to learn that when you can't work with someone, you work around them. And we will do our part, as we have always done, to make our government work for us.

Meanwhile, Open the Government helps you tell our National Archives and Records Administration (or NARA) to make sure our soon-to-be-ex-President preserves all their Presidential records. Shame we have to tell our government to follow the law and do their job, but duty is duty. And you can just imagine this clown car setting records on fire, can't you? Particularly the ones that could expose our soon-to-be-ex-President to legal action? Yes, you can. Bad things happen in this White House! Seriously, though, this may sound a lot like inside baseball, but it's really not -- by taking action, we're not only forcing our government to obey the law, a fine end in itself, but we're also making them preserve our heritage, a heritage of transparency, diligence, and openness, which all remain part of our heritage, even if this particular Administration betrayed it. They act like these records belong to them, but they don't -- they belong to us.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our Administration's plan to sell over $23 billion worth of weapons and weapons systems to the United Arab Emirates for use in their evil war on Yemen, then Win Without War still helps you do that. By law, Congress gets to review such proposed sales for 30 days after our President informs them of the proposal, so we've now got a little over three weeks to tell our Congressfolk to reject it. As an aside, anyone else find it interesting that our soon-to-be-ex-President has proposed making this particular sale to the UAE and not Saudi Arabia? Why, it's almost like he's figured out that selling weapons to Saudi Arabia is unpopular in America or something. But selling these arms to the UAE will result in just as much murder, just as much mayhem, and just as much misery as selling it to the Saudis -- and the UAE will still be acting in complete lockstep with Saudi Arabia's intentions. So let's make this particular stratagem fail with a quickness.

Action: concerning our election.

So, we're almost two weeks after Election Day, and our current and soon-to-be-ex-President is still trying to stop our federal courts to stop states from certifying their election results over horseshit voter fraud claims and horseshit claims of electioneering impropriety. Pardon my French, but I've no patience for his drama, nor that of his Republican enablers. Sen. McConnell told us the day after Election Day 2016 to "accept the results," but this time he sure was quick to assert our soon-to-be-ex-President's right to file all the frivolous lawsuits he wants after losing by five and a half million votes. And while we'd all love to think he can't just sue his way to victory here -- after all, he's sued plenty of small businesses he's stiffed into just throwing up their hands, but suing Wisconsin into flipping 20,000-plus votes, for example, is a rather bigger lift -- winning lawsuits and flipping votes may not be his goal: his goal, as many keen observers have said, may well be to stall the states from certifying their vote totals so that state legislators will have to take over and select the electors he wants. Everyone's on a deadline, after all, particularly the December 14 deadline when the Electoral College meets. And you know what'll help persuade those legislators to buck the obvious will of the American people? All these rallies where right-wingers demand that our President be re-elected because it's what they want, the rest of us be damned. With rage-filled right-wingers, of course, there'll likely be violence sooner or later, and violence tends to influence legislators far more than we should ever allow.

So here's where things stand now: as the link above reminds us, Republicans control the state legislatures of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, five states Mr. Biden won this election -- and a lot of these politicians were, like our President, telling a bunch of stories about people they know who heard things about dead people voting and the like. Things may be changing: a few days ago, state legislative leaders from four of these states (all save Georgia) said they wouldn't "intervene" in elector selection, although at least one (Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers) has left open the possibility that "some type of fraud -- which I haven't heard of" could change their minds. Suffice it to say that a "box from Alice" full of votes for our soon-to-be-ex-President won't turn up in Arizona -- but the right-wing fever dreams of machines switching millions of votes will continue, and as we approach the Electoral College deadline, the likelihood of Confederate flag-waving caravans of pickup trucks rolling through peaceful neighborhoods and demanding action-or-else will grow.

So our task today is to remind the leaders of these state legislatures of the promises they've made, promises we expect them to keep even when violence hits us. After all, they're getting a lot of phone calls from right-wing crybabies, so we've got to make sure we're heard, too. Here are their phone numbers:

Arizona House Speaker Russell "Rusty" Bowers: 602.926.3128.

Arizona Senate Majority Leader Rick Gray: 602.926.5413.

Georgia House Speaker David Ralston: 404.656.5020.

Georgia Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan: 404.463.2478.

Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield: 517.373.2629.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey: 517.373.5932.

Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler: 717.783.6424.

Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman: 717.787.1377.

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos: 608.266.9171.

Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald: 608.266.5660.

Your message can go something like this: "I call today to urge you to do your part to ensure that our Electoral College expresses the will of the people in this election, as your own state laws require. I am encouraged to hear less loose talk of so-called fraud and so-called impropriety during this election, but I am also aware that many right-wingers fantasize about doing violence, and may in fact do violence, in support of their preferred candidate, and when that time comes, I urge you to remember to do the job your laws command you to do, regardless of what pressure partisans may exert from the outside."

There is one other thing we must consider when talking to these folks: they all saw what we saw -- our soon-to-be-ex-President outperformed the polling, and did seem to drag a lot of House and Senate candidates upward to victory, against the pundits' expectations. At least in the short term, Republicans may come to different conclusions about that data -- some will say it "proves" that our current President "deserves" re-election regardless of the vote tally saying he doesn't, while others will say it proves that the "movement," such as it is, that our current President has galvanized will endure and requires "respect." I say that people who are wrong about everything and feel nothing but rage deserve no respect regardless of how much they whine in public, but a lot of folks will make different calculations than I will, and we have to prepare ourselves for that, not just today, but every day.

So good luck, and God bless.

UPDATE. Got some full phone mailboxes, so I'm going to add some email addresses here:

Georgia House Speaker David Ralston: david.ralston@house.ga.gov.

Georgia Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan: mike.dugan@senate.ga.gov.

Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield: LeeChatfield@house.mi.gov.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey: SenMShirkey@senate.michigan.gov.

Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald: Sen.Fitzgerald@legis.wisconsin.gov.

I was able to leave a voicemail with everyone else (very few legislative staffers are answering the phone these days due to COVID). Also, the 888 number for Speaker Vos apparently doesn't work outside of his district, so I removed it.

Action: concerning war, health care, and voting rights.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal all of the "war on terror"-era authorizations to use military force (or AUMFs). (Say terror-era too fast and you'll likely say "terror-error." Funny how that works.) Congress passed the 2001 AUMF right after 9.11 and the 2002 AUMF in the run-up to the Iraq war, and Presidents from both parties have used these AUMFs as excuses to wage war wherever they like, without the Congressional authorization mandated by our Constitution. Also, too, these AUMFs are not both over 18 years old, which means most of today's Congressfolk weren't in Congress when they became law, and gosh, might they have something interesting and important to say about that? We've spent a lot of blood and treasure in overseas wars the last two decades, and our little adventure in Iraq eventually gave us ISIS, which I'm sure was a completely unintended consequence. We should honor the folks we've lost by repealing the AUMFs that sent them to their deaths, and then maybe we'll learn to value the lives of those we love a bit better.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard that big pharma corporation Pfizer has announced that its COVID-19 vaccine (developed with BioNTech) is 90% effective with has minimal side effects, but you also know that means we're not all getting it tomorrow, because Pfizer must submit its data for peer review and to our FDA for approval. And this is something you don't want to get wrong! If Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine isn't nearly as effective as advertised or has side effects they've hidden from us, then we'd be derelict in our duty as a civilization to just hand it out because we're 10 months into a pandemic. A lot of folks don't get that because they're anxious, but a lot of other folks pretend not to get it for the Greater Glory of Our President. Hopefully they're seeing the futility of that strategy now! But Public Citizen helps you tell our FDA not to cut corners in approving any COVID-19 vaccine. Remember: in the old days, conservatives would have said don't make the solution worse than the problem.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end felony disenfranchisement, then the Hip Hop Caucus still helps you do that. In 11 states, you lose your right to vote even after you've completed your sentence, but if you don't believe in rehabilitation, then what claim do you have to being civilized? And in these states, you'd have to petition your governor to get your rights back; if we leave the restoration of rights up to the whim of a state Executive, then again, what claim do we have to being civilized? You shouldn't lose your right to vote even if you're still serving time, in my view, but it should really be a no-brainer to restore voting rights to folks who have paid their debt to society as mandated by a judge. And not for nothing, but the architects of felony disenfranchisement didn't intend to punish people like Paul Manafort -- they meant to punish the folks of color who might vote them out of office. And if it's all about keeping your job, then again, what claim do you have to being civilized?

Action: concerning immigration, voting rights, and fracking.

Change.org helps you tell President-elect Biden to roll back our current Administration's immigrant child separation policy on day one of his Presidency. I've heard that he plans to do just that (and about a hundred other things that our laws let him write Executive Orders about) on day one, but you never know whether politicians will keep their promises, and you certainly never know what infernal 13-dimensional calculus Democrats will use to justify inaction. Best to tell them what to do in numbers they can't deny! Our current Administration's policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border -- in the name of "deterrence," which suggests a profound ignorance about what immigrants run from -- is a black mark on our nation's soul, which you can tell by right-wing excuses about President Obama's border policies like any of those justify the worse policies enacted thereafter. Certainly we do not need our politicians to do evil in our names, but they'll keep doing just that, unless we act.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell grocery corporation Publix to stop bankrolling vote-suppressing politicians in Florida. Publix runs over 1,250 supermarkets in the South, including over 800 in Florida, where it's also headquartered, and though it claims (because they all do these days!) that it "rejects racism and discrimination of any kind," it also sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to the same right-wing Florida politicians who defanged the 2018 ballot initiative that would have restored voting rights to felons there. These are the politicians who added the condition that ex-felons would have to pay all their fees and fines before getting their voting rights back, which is less "being a stickler for the rule of law" and more "let's find a way to subvert the people's expressed will." If this still seems a little obscure to you, consider how many big corporations dumped the American Legislative Exchange Council over Voter ID and Stand Your Ground. So we use the Big Stick of Bad PR to make Publix's campaign contributions toxic.

Finally, a pair of local fossil fuel corporations want to build a massive port in Gibbstown, NJ, right on the Delaware River, that'll help them export liquefied fracked gas, which they'll receive and process at the port and then send down the River or on highways or trains; anyone else see the multitudinous problems with that? Like sending volatile, polluting fossil fuels down a river or through populated areas on land? And that's not even mentioning the damage fracking does to our air and water before it's on a train or a boat or a truck! The Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) will meet next month to contemplate final approval of this project; the only thing stopping them from such approval so far is our activism against it, and indeed our Army Corps of Engineers and New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection have already issued permits for the project. But we can still beat it, hence Environmental Action helps you tell the DRBC to protect our air and water by rejecting the proposed fracked gas port in Gibbstown.

Action: concerning corruption, taxing the rich, and the Electoral College.

Because it's never too early to communicate your will, Daily Kos helps you tell President-elect Biden and your Senators not to confirm any corporate lobbyists to the incoming Biden/Harris Administration -- or any future Administrations. You only need think as far as fossil fuel lobbyist Andrew Wheeler's tenure as EPA Administrator to realize that putting corporate lobbyists in our government is fox/henhouse territory. And don't brook any silliness that corporate lobbyists "know their businesses the best." We have got to stop acting like business tycoons are the only "experts" worth listening to. Denying the value of the advice of scientists and scholars and lawyers and engineers and educators (among so many others!) has helped make our national discourse damn stupid. And anyway, tycoons don't know their businesses the best -- they just know how to extract money from them the best. And that's not a skill we can use.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. You've heard, no doubt, that our current President (i.e., the one who will be out of office on January 20) paid exactly zero dollars in federal taxes in two-thirds of the years between 2003-2017 and a mere $750 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017, and you've also heard, no doubt, that billionaires have made an absolute killing from this pandemic, and they already pay too little in taxes. Why, the fact that we have over 600 billionaires proves we don't make the rich pay enough in taxes! Back when we had the greatest middle class in history, and the tax rates were 91% on millionaire income and 55% on corporate profits, we had one billionaire; now we have billionaires who jack up the prices of life-saving drugs just because they can. They do us harm -- but the good we can do if we tax them properly would more than outdo it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College, then Change.org still helps you do that. Twice in the last 20 years (2000 and 2016) our Electoral College enabled the election of a patently unqualified candidate rather than stopped it, as our Founders supposed it would do, but the circumstances of the 2020 Presidential election also suggests we should get rid of it, even though the far less-unqualified candidate did eventually win the race. Mr. Biden was beating our current President by two points in the popular vote as of the morning of November 4, but if the counting had stopped then, he'd have lost Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and thus also the election. And Mr. Biden had more than 50% of the popular vote that morning! Imagine getting more than 50% in an election and somehow still losing. That's what our Electoral College permits, and how is that the "will of the people"?

Action: concerning good House bills, war on Yemen, and racism on social media.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now's as good a time as any to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Doesn't matter that an election just happened; duty is duty, and our Senate should at least vote on bills that promote voting rights, internet freedom, justice for immigrants, good health care policy, and job creation, among other good works.

Meanwhile, our current Administration lately told our Congressfolk that it would sell at least four dozen F-35 Lockheed Martin fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates (or UAE) -- which, as you know, is one of the leaders (Saudi Arabia is the other) in the coalition that's been fighting a decade-plus war against Yemen for no particularly good reason. Seriously, I'd say the "reasoning" for this war is total inside baseball, but that would be an insult to all the analytics-heads who populate baseball's front offices, and the bad reasons to fight the war -- that it's putting Yemen on the brink of famine, that it's actually fighting against the folks who've fought al-Qaeda best, that the weapons we sell over there too often wind up in al-Qaeda's hands -- should be more convincing. But there's hope: our Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees have the power to block the sale, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to actually advance the cause of peace by blocking the sale of F-35s to the UAE.

Finally, we asked Facebook to stop letting its algorithms promote fascism, racism, and violence last week, but we were just being nice: today we tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to hold Facebook accountable for its actions, as the National Whistleblower Center helps us do. As I said on Monday, this isn't even about Facebook publishing racist and violent content so much as Facebook promoting racist and violent content, in this case by allowing its own algorithms to collect racist and violent content into "pages" that otherwise wouldn't exist. Algorithms may be a useful tool, in a very general sense, but Facebook uses them so it can avoid having human beings moderate content; after all, you don't have to pay an algorithm, nor does an algorithm use family medical leave. If you grew up dreaming about how cool the future would be, like I did, you'd have to be pretty disappointed with the future as it's unfolded -- we don't have space exploration, a renewable energy grid, or a cure for cancer, but we do have computers repeating racism all over the place.

Action: Election Day.

Today is Election Day. A huge number of you may have voted already, but after today, this is it. So if you have any problems voting today -- including (but not limited to) finding your polling place, voter intimidation, accessibility issues, voting machine problems, and provisional ballot issues -- call 1.866.687.8683, a.k.a. 1.866.OUR.VOTE. (In Spanish, that phone number is 1.888.839.8682, or 1.888.VE-Y-VOTA. See other phone numbers at the 866.OUR.VOTE website.) You may also call the U.S. Department of Justice's Voting Rights Hotline at 1.800.253.3931; despite our President's best efforts, someone still works there who gives a damn. I worried about pickup trucks with Confederate flags rolling through neighborhoods on Election Day, but if our enemies are smart (and, despite appearances, they are) they'll also try to obstruct the vote-counting wherever it happens, so you may want to go to your state's Secretary of State website, find out where they're counting the votes in your area, and call 1.866.OUR.VOTE if you see anything untoward. Just know that you'll likely see many fewer Brooks Brothers suits and more swastikas. How far we've come, amirite?

Voting, as I've often said, is a citizen's minimum duty in America -- this is our government, no matter how little it resembles a good government, and we citizens must make it a good government, first on Election Day and then on every day thereafter. Our politicians would prefer that you vote for them on Election Day and then just shut your yap, but in the last four years, more and more of us have hounded our elected officials the way we should. So don't let anyone tell you that Senator So-and-so saved the Affordable Care Act, because guess what? We saved the Affordable Care Act, and we did it by getting in their grills until they couldn't ignore us anymore. I wish I could report that we stopped three awful Supreme Court nominees, but we made those votes closer than usual, and while Republicans narrowly passed their tax "reform" in 2017, they barely mentioned it in their 2018 campaigns because we made it toxic. And we helped stop a great many of our President's regulatory rollbacks in court, too -- if we didn't speak out about his pro-pollution agenda, courts would have had less reason to strike them down. I wish I could say America is a more perfect union than it was four years ago, but only we can make it one, and I know for a fact it's a more perfect union than it would have been if we'd all just resigned ourselves to what happened in 2016.

So let's get out there and vote today -- and then tomorrow, let's get back to giving our elected leaders, whomever they may be, the what-for they most definitely deserve.

Action: concerning social media, pollution, and racism.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell Facebook to stop letting its algorithms push racist/violent posts in our faces all the time, then Free Press still helps you do that. It's one thing to let racists spew their filth on Facebook, but it's another thing entirely to help their hateful sputum get a much larger audience than they would otherwise have gained on their own merits. But wait, isn't all this trampling on Facebook's freedom of speech? Short answer is "no," for at least three reasons. One, telling Facebook to do something isn't the same as making them do something. Two, if we regard Facebook as an "information service" (and I'm not saying we should, though the law does), and thus virtually absolve them of responsibility for monitoring the content folks post, we're telling them to stop amplifying certain speech, not censor that speech. Three, Facebook is a corporation, which is to say a thing, and regardless of what corrupt Supreme Court Justices say, things don't have rights; people have rights.

Meanwhile, have you heard of "nurdles"? Nurdles are plastic resin pellets that function basically as a building block for larger plastic products -- but nurdles get lost or unused, so every year some 9,000 truckloads of pellets get dumped into, guess where, our oceans. Does that sound like a good idea? Especially since these nurdles collect into massive trash pits in the ocean and wind up in the digestive systems of marine life? Well, at least one of our Senators (Democrat Tom Udall of New Mexico, who's retiring, unfortunately) has recognized the problem and sponsored S. 4681, the Plastic Pellet-Free Water Act, which would compel our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue regulations preventing these nurdles from polluting our waterways. Of course, if our President wins re-election, his EPA will either delay such rules or write bad ones, but if the bill passes, a judge can force them to do their job. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to protect us from pollution by passing the Plastic Pellet-Free Water Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8178/S. 4533, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. It's fairly obvious by now -- hell, it was fairly obvious before the pandemic -- that folks of color are less likely to have access to affordable health care, and more likely to have the pre-existing conditions (like diabetes and asthma) that make good health harder to achieve, and no it's not because THOSE PEEPULZ EATZ MOREZ OFZ TEH DINGDONGZ!!!!! It's because they get redlined into worse neighborhoods and are far more likely to have toxic waste dumps put near them! Anyway, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act would essentially mandate that our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) do more research on racism in public health, and would also establish a Law Enforcement Violence Prevention Program, since getting shot by police does tend to impact one's health.

Action: concerning water shutoffs, voting rights, and corruption.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) to impose a national moratorium on water shutoffs, then Food and Water Watch still helps you do that. Remember that a moratorium doesn't last forever, and doesn't in and of itself guarantee that no deadbeats will ever be punished again. And when the water company shuts off your water -- which, I feel compelled to point out, it's far more likely to do to individual customers than the big corporations that too often pile up much bigger delinquent bills! -- that means you can't bathe, wash your hands, or drink clean water. Clean water is, as I've often said, the cornerstone of good health care in America, and, ah, can anyone think of why that might be even more important right now? That's right, because we're still in the middle of a pandemic. So it turns out that the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do. It's funny how often that's the case in America. Well, it's not funny so much as it's painfully obvious to anyone with a healthy ego.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to restore full voting rights to all previously-incarcerated folks, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. Do judges sentence convicted criminals to lose their voting rights after they get out of jail? No -- state laws do that, partly so they can appear "tough on crime" (because what says "tough" like punishing people who've already paid for their crimes?), but mainly so they can keep poor folks and folks of color from voting. No, not because THEYZ COMMITZ TEH MOSTESTZ CRIMEZ!!!!, but because we harass and imprison a disproportionate number of them. Just imagine what Brock Turner's life would have been like if he were black: they'd have locked him up and thrown away the key after convicting him of rape, but because he was white, he got six months in jail, of which he served three, and the judge did all this hand-wringing about the poor boy's "future." Better we should concern ourselves with everyone's future.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to ban corporate lobbyists from serving in this Administration or any future ones. This President, after bragging that he'd "drain the swamp" of corruption in Washington, even after issuing an Executive Order purporting to ban lobbyists from our government, has appointed over 280 corporate lobbyists to his Administration, or four times as many as President Obama did in his first six years. Some folks still say that corporate lobbyists best understand the fields our government regulates, but a) that's total horsedoodle and b) that's like saying we should put law-breakers in charge of law enforcement because they really "get" law-breaking, or (and I know this is really far-fetched!) polluters in charge of clean air and clean water enforcement. We're supposed to have an adversarial relationship with the sectors we regulate! And we can't do that if we let corporate cronies infiltrate our government.

Action: concerning police brutality, pollution, and the Electoral College.

We learn from WUSA in Washington, D.C., that the D.C. police have been stockpiling tear gas and pepper spray since late spring, "in preparation for" post-election "civil disturbance." OK, the last phrase is a quotation, but the first phrase is just me being skeptical -- they don't "prepare for" disturbance, they cause disturbance! Who thinks protestors like getting the crap kicked out of them? Only haters think that -- the rest of us assume that protestors are human beings like everyone else, and would prefer to be heard without being shot or having their heads cracked. And not for nothing, but the Geneva Protocols ban tear gas, and we ratified those Protocols, so they're American law. I know Tha Bush Mobb said they weren't, because terrorism, but they were as wrong about that as they were about everything else. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to prohibit our law enforcement personnel from using tear gas. You know, lest we get in the way of our President deciding to hold up another Bible in front of another church.

Meanwhile, our EPA continues to ignore the science regarding the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which causes brain damage in the children whose mothers get exposed to it while they're pregnant. But H.R. 7940/S. 4406, the Protect America's Children from Toxic Pesticides Act, seems tailor-made to grapple with an Administration that delays doing its job. The bill would prevent our EPA Administrator from making "interim determinations" on pesticides -- which allow harmful pesticides to stay on the market! -- and would also prevent said Administrator from simply running the clock out on review petitions by banning pesticides from market if the Administration doesn't complete said review within 90 days. And it would require our EPA to consider all relevant science, rather than just whatever "science" our EPA's industry flacks cough up. It's a shame we have to tell this Administration how to do its job, but duty is duty, so Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protect America's Children from Toxic Pesticides Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to enact the National Popular Vote Compact, which would allow states within the compact to assign their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, then Progress America still helps you do that. Currently states totaling 196 electoral votes have joined the compact, which leaves 74 more to make 270, which would ensure that the popular vote winner will also win the Electoral vote. One can't argue, at this stage, that the Electoral College has performed as our Founders supposed it would -- it hasn't prevented manifestly unfit candidates from becoming President, but has enabled manifestly unfit candidates to become President, in both 2000 and 2016. That's twice in 16 years; I'm not sure how many more experiments we need to run to confirm that hypothesis. Would the National Popular Vote Compact be better than a Constitutional amendment outlawing the Electoral College? No. But should we let the perfect murder the good? Certainly not.

Action: concerning violence against protestors, renewable energy, and public water.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: good Nigerian citizens raise their voices in protest of their government's violence against them, only to be met with more violence. While our President must be saying if only that could be me!, sane, moral, and decent people say there ain't nothing a protestor can do that warrants being shot to death on the street or disappeared into a labyrinthine court system. (And when your right-wing friends and neighbors whine BUT TEH LOOTERZ!!!!, you can remind them that a lot of these looters are agents provocateurs like the gas-masked Nazi wannabe who hammered away at the Minneapolis AutoZone.) Naturally the Nigerian government, having studied how bigger countries do it, calls their gang of thugs the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, because who supports robbery? Typical of tyrants, to pretend they're doing it for you when they're doing it to you. Thus CAPPA helps you tell international criminal courts to investigate the violence Nigeria commits against its people.

Meanwhile, the fifth anniversary of the biggest gas blowout in American history, at SoCalGas's Aliso Canyon storage facility in Los Angeles, just passed -- well, the fifth anniversary of its beginning, at least, since SoCal didn't finally plug the leak until almost four months later, meaning good Californians were breathing in all those toxins all that time. California suffers worse droughts and wildfires every year, while still producing two-thirds of our country's fruits and nuts and another third of our country's vegetables, so why does California push more gas production? "Cheap fuel," I guess, but it ain't cheap if you'll have no food, water, or earth in the foreseeable future. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell California to phase out of fossil fuels and shift toward renewables. And don't tolerate the retorts that "you see more solar panels in Cali than anywhere else" -- the big utility corporations, which make most of Cali's power, won't shift to renewable energy unless we make them.

Finally, notorious public water-mongering corporation Nestlé plans to sell all its North American bottled water operations, which means the Big Stick of Bad PR has worked! But it also means we need to make the Big Stick of Bad PR work against whichever corporation (or corporations!) buy up Nestlé's water operations -- which may include Coke and/or Pepsi -- so Sum of Us helps you tell Nestlé and/or whichever corporations buy up its water operations to give back the public water that really belongs to good folks in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, California, and Ontario. I've said it before and I'll say it again: bottled water is a scam, and in those rare places bottled water is cleaner than public water -- like, say, Flint -- then local governments need to improve their public water delivery systems, not sell them to private corporations that'll jack up the price of water so good folks can't afford it. Clean water is the cornerstone of health care on this planet -- but only if we can keep it.

Action: concerning good House bills, clean water, and anti-Semitism.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, our Senate just put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, which is demoralizing, but we have to be like Nick Foles and just bounce back up -- and when our Senators see us do that, they'll fear us the way they should.

Meanwhile, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) contemplates updating our Lead and Copper Rule (authorized by the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1991), which limits pipe corrosion as well as the amount of lead and copper at the tap -- and with this EPA, you know which way they want to "update" the rule! That's right, they want to update it so that it allows more lead in your drinking water, even though lead causes brain damage in everyone who ingests it, which (not to give our EPA any ideas!) is why we don't allow lead in gas emissions anymore. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to make the Lead and Copper Rule stronger, not weaker. Like, for example, let's get the lead out of the service lines that connect houses to water mains, since that's usually the biggest source of lead water contamination, and those lead service lines still serve over nine million homes and businesses. And some of those customers are child care centers, so, like, let's do that now. It would create jobs for people who refit the lines, after all. Even though right-wingers will call that "socialism" as they drive roads, call cops, and use libraries.

Finally, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell our government to stop calling organizations "anti-Semitic" merely because they advocate for Palestinian rights. Why? Well, partly because it's not true, and partly because the resulting PR hit from being called "anti-Semitic" can be very damaging (just ask Jeremy Corbyn!), but also because calling organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International "anti-Semitic" is a profound insult to all those who suffered and died -- and who continue to suffer and die -- from real anti-Semitism. And it is a bit rich to watch this Administration pretend to be concerned about anti-Semitism after openly cultivating supporters from the ranks of America's Nazi wannabes. We are, all of us, friends of Israel, and we are, all of us, fully aware that being a friend doesn't mean blindly supporting whatever our friends do, but calling them out when they do wrong, so that they (and we!) can be better friends. But too many folks call people who don't agree with them "anti-Semitic." We should stop listening to such people, since they act like they don't understand that civilization is actually pretty hard work.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, the HEROES Act, and worker safety.

Our Senate votes on Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to our Supreme Court today, so if you haven't called your Senators already, now's the time. Our "liberal" media says her ascension is a foregone conclusion -- particularly now that Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) says she'll vote for Ms. Barrett when her nomination actually comes up -- but reading sheep entrails before we act is not how we practice democracy. We practice democracy by communicate our will so loudly they can't deny us, after which the sheep entrail-reading crowd will follow us. Now, I've been saying that Judge Barrett seems like the kind of judge who thinks we'd actually be better off with computers doing all the judging, but of course that's only part of the story: when workers try to get their bosses to do right by them, and when women and folks of color try to get our government to stop pissing on them, I'm sure we'll find her ability to interpret our laws so that they favor the powerful completely unimpaired. And that's why we must tell our Senators to reject her, regardless of what we think "will happen." We have to make things happen.

While you have your Senators on the phone, go ahead and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, which would, as we know, provide much better pandemic relief than any of the ideas our Senate or our President have floated. When they say Nancy Pelosi doesn't "negotiate in good faith," do they mean she should have asked our Senate and our Administration for permission before passing a pandemic relief bill? Because the only people our House Reps should be "asking for permission" is their constituents, i.e., us. And if Mob Boss Mitch went to good Kentuckians and asked them what they wanted in a COVID-19 pandemic relief bill, they sure as hell didn't say "let's give corporations blanket immunity against lawsuits whenever they hurt good Americans," but Mob Boss Mitch sure fought like hell for that. And did Sen. Scott's constituents in South Carolina demand enhanced tax breaks for three-martini lunches? Because he put his name on that particular slab of absurdity. It's about time our Senators actually listened to us, but we have to make them listen first, and we can't do that if we keep our mouths shut.

Finally, you may know that our farm workers generally don't have basic workplace protections, including protection against working ten-hour days in hundred-degree heat. So along comes H.R. 3668, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, named for a farm worker who did die of heatstroke after working a ten-hour shift in hundred-degree heat. H.R. 3668 would mandate that our Department of Labor create a heat exposure workplace standard (under the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Act), and that standard wouldn't just protect farm workers, but any worker, whether they work indoors or out, who encounters excessive heat at their job. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect workers from heat exposure by passing the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act. If you're still inclined to reject this bill because you think it'll only protect "those people" work on farms, I would recommend reading about folks who aren't like you, because they you might learn that the person who looks different than you also comes from a land with engineers, healers, and poets.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, pollution, and unconstitutional war-making.

The Amy Coney Barrett nomination goes before the full Senate very soon, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject the Barrett nomination. We could belabor Republican hypocrisy in refusing to consider Merrick Garland's nomination in 2016 and then ramming through Ms. Barrett's nomination now, but the best argument against her is her own record. In her three years on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, she has not only demonstrated a pattern of ruling for corporations and against workers, but she has also demonstrated a pattern of refusing to even interpret laws, and that refusal too often manifests as a complete lack of compassion for those times our laws fail our people. Frankly, she acts like we should just put legal matters to justice machines and be done with it. Of course we also know that (in her life before federal court) she stated her opposition to Roe v. Wade publicly more than once and she belongs to a far-right religious group that teaches women to be subservient to their husbands. That might have suited our Court in 1830, but not now.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) has proposed hiking fines for air polluters in our Commonwealth, which they haven't done in 15 years, but naturally pro-pollution state lawmakers want to put a stop to that -- it's like they don't breathe the air themselves! -- so Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislator to reject House Concurrent Regulatory Review Resolution 3, which would cut DEP funding dramatically. Pennsylvania legislators have long had a starve-the-best mentality with regard to punishing polluters (silly legislators, not understanding that the polluters are the beast!), and the result is a DEP that can't do its job the way our laws require. And the hike in air polluter fines would allow our DEP to continue to crack down on polluters. Don't let our legislators fool you: they understand perfectly well that revenues pay for services; they'd just prefer not to perform these services, so that big polluting corporate executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. But surely they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Finally, the notorious 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force, the one they used to attack Iraq, is still on the books in America, but the negotiation of the annual defense appropriation bill presents another opportunity to repeal it, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore some semblance of the rule of law in America by repealing the 2002 AUMF. The war with Iraq has been over for many, many years -- George W. Bush told us so! -- but future Presidents, of both parties, invoked the 2002 AUMF for all kinds of unconstitutional adventures, from President Obama's adventure in Syria in 2015 to our current President's ordering of Gen. Soleimani's assassination earlier this year. Yeah, Mr. Obama didn't even go to Congress before bombing Syria, and our current President clearly forgot that Congress never declared war on Iran, which would be the only legal basis for killing Mr. Soleimani. And yes, Congress has spent the last 80 years essentially ceding its Constitutional war-making power to the President -- but why do we have to take that?

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, COVID-19 vaccines, and police brutality.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote on the Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court nomination today, so you can find contact information for those members right here, on Judiciary's website; just hover over the member's name, and you can navigate to their website, which will have their phone numbers. Be prepared to call more than one number for each Senator; Senatorial staffers haven't liked answering their phones for a few years now. There are many reasons to oppose the Barrett nomination, but today you'll want to address Ms. Barrett's almost pathological refusal to answer questions put to her by the committee. Not just the standard of-course-I-can't-rule-on-that-until-I-see-it sort of refusals, either -- she refused to commit to Supreme Court precedents as settled law, which even previous Republican nominees made a point of doing, and she wouldn't even say that a President who loses an election should transfer power peacefully, which you'd also think is pretty much a layup for a Supreme Court nominee. And if you think conservatism is about preserving traditions, you'd have to conclude that a nominee who won't even say that is no kind of conservative.

Meanwhile, our President has been in the habit of suggesting we're going to have a COVID-19 vaccine ready just in time for Election Day, as if literally no one could possibly see his own self-interest in that, but the corporation supposedly furthest along in developing one (Pfizer) has already said there's no chance of that happening, and of course you know that rushing a vaccine is a really stupid idea, not just because it might be full of poison, but also because if it doesn't work, people will less readily trust the one that does work. With that in mind, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our President from releasing a bad vaccine before the election just to improve his chances. If you stand ready to accuse me of having a political motivation, then please carefully re-read every single word I've written in this paragraph. Nothing would please me more than to have a good COVID-19 vaccine ready before Election Day, even if it gets this turd of a President re-elected. But passing off a bad one as a good one would be evil.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reform the notorious 1033 program which lets local police departments get masses of surplus military weapons, then the Project on Government Oversight still helps you do that. Why do police need bazookas? Not to make arrests, that's for sure! No, police "need" bazookas so they can put down peaceful protestors who oppose their executions of black folks without even charging them with a crime. And studies inform us that police kill more civilians they get massive amounts of military weapons, which would, I hope, make sense to you. I've said for a while now that we need to stop using police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization, that we need to stop making them respond to every conceivable request for assistance a citizen can make, and if we can do that, we certainly won't need to keep supplying them with rocket launchers and the like. If you're still of the mind that all of that is insufficiently "supportive" of our police, please just navigate away from this blog, because only God can give you the instruction you need, and I don't take God's tasks on my shoulders.

Action: concerning voting rights, pollution, and "independent contractors."

Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell your Congressfolk to outlaw felony disenfranchisement. Felony disenfranchisement is, sadly, a story almost as old as America, and governments have always sought to take the vote away from the very same people those governments target with law enforcement. No, really, it's that simple: our governments go out of their way to fill our prisons with as many folks of color as they can, and then they try to take the vote away from them when they get out. (In the early 19th century, felony disenfranchisement also targeted white folks our government didn't find white enough.) Now 48 out of 50 states don't let prisoners vote at all -- while letting governments stash prisoners in largely red areas precisely to enhance the power of those red area voters! -- and now over six million Americans can't vote even though they've paid their debt to society as determined by our legal system, the one that's already treating folks of color unfairly to begin with. And if states won't do right by their citizens, our federal government has to step in.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 619, which barely passed the state Senate a year ago, will suddenly get a House committee vote this week, and SB 619 is a noxious piece of crud that would virtually cripple our state's ability to keep pollution out of our rivers and streams. SB 619 would narrow our state clean water law's definition of "pollution" to exclude most kinds of pollution, plus it would let corporations determine if they should report their spills to our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP), which is like letting burglars off the hook if they decide to keep quiet about their burglaries, and would prevent our DEP from requiring that said corporations clean up their spill or prevent future, similar spills, which I guess means our legislators think it's all right that kids don't clean up their messes. Which don't harm good Pennsylvanians as much as water pollution does! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your state House Reps to protect our clean water by rejecting SB 619. Don't brook any foolishness about how SB 619 "creates jobs" -- if we're all dead from poisoned drinking water, ain't no jobs gonna help us.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Labor to reject its own proposal to let more employers reclassify workers as "independent contractors" so they can avoid their obligations under the law to treat those workers fairly, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Among these many, many obligations corporations wouldn't have to meet if this Administration gets its way? They wouldn't have to pay workers a minimum wage, they wouldn't have to pay workers overtime when they work more than 40 hours a week or 8 hours a day -- and they wouldn't have to collect Social Security and Medicare taxes for their workers! Yes, that's right, this proposal is yet another way our Administration attacks Social Security and Medicare, and if corporations are afraid of taking advantage of our President's notorious payroll tax "holiday," they'll be far less afraid of calling their workers "independent contractors," and our Administration will kill Social Security and Medicare that way. So let's stop that, shall we?

Action: concerning good House bills, internet privacy, and methane emissions.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, our Senate only wants to put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, and we'll get to that, but we still must remind them of their duty to do right by us.

Meanwhile, if you're wary of how much personal data big tech corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple collect from you, and you should be wary, then Consumer Reports helps you tell your legislators and regulators to do a much better job protecting our personal data. You'll recall that our FCC actually issued pretty good regulations that protected consumer privacy on the internet, but the last Congress couldn't crap all over that effort fast enough, moving quickly to repeal those regulations via the notorious "resolution of disapproval" process. The Consumer Reports petition asks that consumers get more control over their personal data, that corporations be more transparent about their use of that data, and that corporations don't get monopoly control over our internet. Our FCC may not be able to issue new regulations about the matter (yet another unfortunate aspect of the "resolution of disapproval" process), but nothing prevents our Congressfolk from passing bills about the matter. Well, nothing but their own cowardice or avarice, but what else is new?

Finally, our EPA just rolled back Obama-era regulations preventing big oil and gas drilling corporations from leaking methane into the air, and this rollback offends on so many levels -- it causes more pollution, it makes climate change worse, it wastes usable energy, and it deprives good Americans of royalties when it occurs on public lands. But, hey, some bossman somewhere gets to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so it's another round of "screw the people" for this Administration. And you know how right-wingers always say they'll just pass the costs of regulations on to the little guy? Well, the "little guy" winds up bearing the costs of methane emissions in all the ways described in the first sentence -- we lose royalties, we pay more for health care because of pollution, and we eventually don't get a livable planet to inhabit because methane emissions pack a much, much higher climate change punch than even coal emissions. That never makes it into the right's "cost-benefit analysis"; as I've said, they only care about the "cost" or "benefit" to executive paychecks. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to do whatever it takes to roll back yet another Administration rollback.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, voting rights, and pollution.

You've heard that Senate Republicans want to pass a half-trillion dollar "skinny" COVID-19 relief bill this week? Well, who cares what they want? They should be doing what we want! So let's call them and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Our House passed the HEROES Act five months ago, and that bill would (among other good works) fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, fund struggling states and localities, fund enhanced unemployment benefits, and issue another round of stimulus checks to good Americans. The Senate Republican bill, of course, would fund rather less-enhanced unemployment benefits and refill the so-called Paycheck Protection Program, which should call the Corporate Welfare Slush Fund given how little it's helped small businesses (its reason for being!) and how much it's helped certain entities pretend they employ people only to spend our money on things like yachts, strippers, and Gucci jewelry. Seriously, Senators, it's well past time to stop pretending to do right by working families and actually do right by working families.

Meanwhile, a private security corporation named Atlas Aegis is actually trying to get military veterans to "guard" Minnesota polling places, which I must presume means they want to "guard" voting booths from voters and their democracy cooties. Of course, even though the consent decree keeping the political parties from "monitoring" polling places expired before the 2018 elections, our state governments, working on their citizens' behalf, still get more say about what you can do at a polling place than any group of wannabe Proud Boys. Minnesota's Attorney General, to his credit, has already told Atlas Aegis to cut out this scheme, but wouldn't it be better if we all said something about it? After all, a politician's statement, no matter how agreeable, really means nothing without the people's backing. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your state government to enforce its laws and keep private security forces away from our polling places. After all, if folks wear official-looking (and military-looking) uniforms around our polling places, some voters will be confused -- and intimidated. And that's evil.

In other news, we're having a lot of trouble getting our Senate to pass, well, any good legislation, but in particular our Senate has not taken up H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act, which would limit our exposure to the toxic "forever chemical" PFAS, which is, like, everywhere. So it might be time to go pressure some private corporations to rely less on PFAS chemicals. Would that the Big Stick of Bad PR affected our elected officials the way it affects big corporations! Anyway, Penn PIRG helps you tell big fast food chain corporation McDonald's to stop using PFAS chemicals in their packaging. Because when folks throw away a million Big Mac containers a day, that's a lot of PFAS that can leech into our water, or get into our air if it's incinerated. Don't suffer the fools who complain that Big Macs will cost 80 bazillion dollars if we make them use better packaging, or that the already-suffering McDonald's workers will suffer more. Making your workers suffer, after all, is a choice. And where's that American can-do spirit that says McDonald's can find a way to use food packaging that doesn't pollute our air and water?

Finally, as many big banks divest from fossil fuel development projects, TD Bank still shovels billions of dollars into them, including the notoriously foul tar sands pipelines. But we were just talking about the Big Stick of Bad PR, right? So Sum of Us helps you tell TD Bank to stop investing in polluting fossil fuel projects. It's really well past time for the big banks to fund renewable energy projects, and don't suffer the fool who says that stuff doesn't make any money or that stuff isn't reliable, and not just because our taxpayer money subsidizes fossil fuel development. Think about it: if you were going to design an energy source from scratch, why would you design one that churns the ground and pumps filth into our air and water? You would design systems that cause the least amount of trouble, wouldn't you? And when you consider that renewable energy sources cause far less pollution and earth-churning than fossil fuels, wouldn't they seem more reliable? The only reason fossil fuels are "reliable" is we've chosen to do things that way. Why can't we choose better once we learn better?

Action: concerning water shutoffs, corruption, and the census.

As our President and our Senate Majority Leader fiddle on a new COVID-19 relief package, folks now face water shutoffs all over America -- you know, because they haven't been working, and it's hard enough to pay the bills when you are working? -- so Food and Water Action helps you tell our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) to issue a nationwide moratorium on water shutoffs. How does our CDC have the authority to issue this moratorium? Well, the short answer is "because the law allows it" -- specifically, the Public Health Service Act. The long answer is that our CDC can issue such a moratorium if public health demands it, and just so happens it does, since we can't actually expect people to wash their hands repeatedly for 20 seconds at a time if they don't have, you know, access to clean water. Furthermore, folks who don't have access to clean water are more likely to get COVID-19 than folks who do -- but as long as we have folks who don't have access to clean water, then the folks who do are also more likely to get it. And, yeah, we don't expect this Congress to do their job, so our CDC must do theirs.

Meanwhile, given the litany of news reports about our President's taxes lately -- ranging from the revelation that he paid $750 in taxes in 2017 and 2018 to $21 million in "highly unusual payments" which may have broken our few remaining campaign finance laws -- Americans for Tax Fairness helps you demand that our IRS and our FEC investigate our President's tax maneuverings. Our President may have borrowed multi-million dollar sums, funneled it through a shell corporation, and then not only donated it to his 2016 campaign, but wrote it off as a business expense! He calls such maneuverings "smart," but the rest of us call them corrupt. No one expects, at this late stage, any of his multitudinous votaries to renounce him -- that would involve admitting you're wrong, a task the best of us have trouble with. But our IRS and our FEC belong to us and work for us, and regardless of how many Presidential appointees they have, or how many career employees our President has driven away, they still have legally-mandated jobs to do.

Finally, now that our Supreme Court has said our Administration can end the 2020 census early and thus leave many good Americans uncounted, Public Citizen helps you tell our Administration to keep working at the census until everyone's counted. Because, as Public Citizen's latest email missive instructs us, "public outcry may be our best hope for compelling" our Administration to count everyone; yeah, I know, they've never demonstrated that they care very much about what we think, but duty is duty. Everyone knows the COVID-19 pandemic has made conducting our census harder than ever -- so much of our census depends on door-knocking, after all -- but we also know that our President wants to use that as an excuse not to count undocumented immigrants, even though they are people who live here and who thus must be counted so federal dollars can be budgeted appropriately. I mean, do people really think that starving areas with undocumented immigrants will induce them to leave? No, it'll make things harder for everyone, which I'm sure is our Administration's aim. Remember: they only need you for your pain.

Action: concerning the Electoral College, "stalkerware," and nuclear waste storage.

Feel like abolishing the Electoral College? I bet you do! And not just because two of the last five Presidential election winners actually lost the popular vote, but because, by the evidence, the Electoral College has plainly failed, twice in the last two decades, to do what our Founders intended -- to keep someone completely unfit for office out of office. You'll no doubt hear from folks who say they think the states should have more of a say in politics, but I say you got two Senators. Wyoming gets two Senators, and California gets two Senators, though California has 50 times the population, so why isn't that enough? And you've no doubt heard of all the machinations that could happen if someone doesn't feel like leaving office -- that they could, for example, get sympathetic legislatures to simply declare the results invalid and appoint their own electors, for example. I'll admit this is feeling a lot less like a contested election than it did six months ago, or even one month ago, but let's make this right anyway. Change.org helps you tell Congress to abolish the Electoral College.

Meanwhile, with so much schooling now taking place remotely, thanks to this pandemic and our government's incompetence in handling it, a lot of schools have hastily resorted to test-taking apps that, well, have a lot of problems, like flagging kids for cheating if they look around or talk to themselves, or if the app's facial recognition software misidentifies them. And these apps are surprisingly hungry for your private information -- they want access to all data on your computer and listen in on all your communications. No wonder they call it "stalkerware"! And, hate to pile on, but who gets the shaft from facial recognition software the most? Folks of color, that's who! Yeah, we all know it's tough enough to teach 30 kids in the same room with you, let alone 30 kids from all over town at the same time, but "first, do no harm" ain't just for the Hippocratic Oath, and you can't help but wonder which app developing corporations saw a way into hoovering up all kinds of personal data you wouldn't otherwise let them touch. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell schools and colleges to ban "stalkerware."

Finally, our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) wants to "temporarily" dump radioactive nuclear waste in West Texas, a plan so unpopular that even Texas's far-right Governor opposes it. Possibly he just wants it dumped in some blue state's backyard, but dumping ain't even half the problem -- transporting it from all over the country could expose virtually everyone who lives near ports and train tracks, trains and ships being susceptible to leaks, accidents, and sabotage. Not to pile on, but the area our NRC wants to use is a heavily-Latino neighborhood, and don't folks of color get the shaft enough already? Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our NRC to scuttle its proposal to allow "temporary" nuclear waste storage in West Texas. "Temporary" nuclear waste storage, by the way, is already illegal; chances are this scheme, if our NRC goes through with it, will be struck down in court, but you might not find much comfort in that if you've already had your water table poisoned by an accident in the meantime.

Action: concerning taxing the rich, public health research, and the right to repair.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the rich pay their fair share of taxes, by enacting a wealth tax and fully funding our IRS. You'll note several news hooks there: billionaires are making a killing (so to speak) during this pandemic while over 60 million Americans have filed for unemployment at some point over the last seven months, while the New York Times reported that our President paid literally $750 in taxes in 2017 and 2018. But there's one other news hook you might have missed: Congress has been defunding our IRS for the last decade, to the point where our IRS admits it goes after poorer tax cheat suspects because they don't have the money to fight rich ones in court. That's a despicable state of affairs, beloved only by those who hate all taxes and who have no apparent idea how many of the services they enjoy only exist because of taxes. Congress literally takes food out of our mouths by defunding the IRS, because if you can't stamp out tax avoidance by the rich, someone's still got to pay for roads and bridges and libraries and cops.

Meanwhile, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8178/S. 4533, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act. The bill would establish a "National Center for Anti-Racism and Health" within our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) and would also mandate that our CDC researches how structural racism (including police brutality) impacts public health. You may find all of that less useful than bills that would actually punish police brutality, curtail redlining, or deliver aid to minority neighborhoods ravaged by COVID-19, but conducting research on these matters is also important, not least because our government really hasn't done that research with this much vigor before. Folks say they always put the landfill next to the black neighborhood, but such arguments need to rise above anecdotes and get backing from scientific research. And we also haven't really confronted police brutality as a public health issue yet. If we did these things, we'd do good works, so this bill merits our support.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Apple to respect our right-to-repair with its products, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Apple has long been notorious for making their products almost impossible to upgrade and repair on your own, but Apple has also done its share of greenwashing, and has pledged to be completely carbon-neutral in 10 years. If it doesn't make its products easier to reuse, though, how can it do that? If our landfills are overflowing with "obsolete" hardware, how are we going to kick climate change's ass? The U.S. PIRG Education Fund has lately informed us that if we could all get another year out of our cellphones, the climate change impact would be like taking over 600,000 cars off the road! Granted, we have almost 275 million cars on the road right now, but now imagine what getting another year out of your desktops and laptops and iPads would be like. If we had more power to repair and upgrade our own stuff, we would do a lot of good. After all, people still like saving money. Some folks still even pride themselves on their thrift.

Action: concerning good House bills, working families, and spy drones.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Our Senators have all kinds of dumb ideas about what's important to good Americans, so we've got to be there to remind them of what's really important to us. And we keep reminding them until they get it. Even if it takes a very, very long time.

Meanwhile, our Department of Labor, apparently confused about its mission and legal mandate, plans to let corporations classify more of their workers as "independent contractors," and you know what that means: it means they won't have to pay minimum wage, obey child labor laws, or pay overtime when workers work more than 40 hours in a week. They always say they do it for "jobs," or for the cleaning worker in Detroit or the Grubhub driver in Pittsburgh or home health aide in Columbus, but that's a load of rubbish: they always do it for their rich cronies who whine about having to pay people in more than dung pellets. And, you know, the whole purpose of overtime is to stop corporations from trying to get by on too few workers (who are no doubt overworked!), so certainly we shouldn't give corporations yet another way out of their responsibility to their workers and to the American people. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Labor to scuttle its own proposal that would injure working families further.

Finally, Amazon clearly hasn't had enough of spying on you -- Alexa listens to your private conversations, and Ring enables bad police work, but now Amazon wants to foist upon us the Ring Always Home Cam, a drone that not only flies around your house but spies around your house. Think there might be some domestic abusers who'd use that on their partners? Or homeowners who'd use it on their AirBnB patrons? At this point we're far past if-you've-done-nothing-wrong-you-have-nothing-to-fear. And of course Amazon won't rule out letting the police capture all that drone video; you'd like to think they'd have to get a warrant first, but as you know our politicians haven't been real steadfast about our Fourth Amendment lately. Luckily Amazon has to get permission from our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to sell the drone, and they might find that difficult, since the drone doesn't satisfy FCC privacy protections as mandated by law. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell our FCC to reject Amazon's proposed sale of its flying spy drones.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, gerrymandering, public water, and public lands.

It's Monday, so it's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. I know, negotiations over a new COVID-19 stimulus bill are supposedly on again (though by the time you read this, they may be off again!), but there's no damn need to "negotiate" a good stimulus bill, because the HEROES Act is already a good stimulus bill, and our House passed it five months ago. Republicans didn't want it, of course, because it didn't include three martini lunch tax breaks and blanket immunity for corporations that injure people during the pandemic. Now some analysts have detected weakness in our President's recent vacillating, and if that's true, now's the time to strike, and tell our Senators to pass a bill that funds COVID-19 testing and tracing, funds enhanced unemployment benefits, funds our Post Office, and cuts another stimulus check for working families. (And if our President's merely playing us, guess what? Now is still the time to strike, because now is always the time to strike.)

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA helps you demand that your state Senators vote on SB 1242, the Legislative and Congressional Redistricting Act (or LACRA), which would make redistricting fairer in Pennsylvania. No, it wouldn't establish an independent commission to handle redistricting, but it would prevent redistricting plans from favoring particular candidates or parties and keep newly-redrawn districts from ignoring town and county boundaries, and it would do these things redistricting of both state legislative districts and U.S. House districts. You'll also want to contact Rep. Everett and House Speaker Cutler and demand they hold a vote on HB 2638, the House version of LACRA. The legislature will adjourn in less than two weeks, and it sure looks like they're trying to run out the clock. They may want to consider whether Democrats might reclaim both state Houses after Election Day. Stranger things have happened, after all. Hell, stranger things will have likely happened between the time I've written this sentence and the time you read it.

In other news, the notorious Nestlé is at it again, this time trying to keep paying a pittance to suck up public water from Ruby Mountain Springs in Chaffee County (CO), to the tune of 65 million gallons annually. But county officials will actually hold a public meeting about the matter in less than two weeks, and the good citizens of Chaffee County need to know we've got their back, hence Sum of Us helps you tell Chaffee County officials to keep public water for the public and reject Nestlé's application to keep sucking them dry. Colorado, like much of the West, suffers from increasing drought, which means they can't just keep giving water away to private corporations who then bottle it and resell it at an absurd profit. That ain't "job creation," that's getting played. The good news? Our efforts in other parts of the country to stem the tide of public water giveaways, while they haven't always worked, have called attention to the problem, and have taught people who've forgotten that public water is our water. So let's keep fighting.

Finally, our Administration has lately advanced a final rule proposal that would allow logging in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, so the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration, one more time, to reject logging in the Tongass. Getting logging corporations into an area that would cut down thousand year-old trees represents some kind of totem to this Administration -- if we can get loggers in here, they think, we can get them in anywhere -- but that kind of short-term thinking will obliterate this country and its good example to the world. We preserve thousand year-old trees because we experience awe at history and nature; this President apparently only experiences awe when he sees a plunging neckline. Also, but the Sierra Club's latest email missive says logging in the Tongass "turn(s) a climate solution into a climate problem," and they're absolutely right -- the more trees we have, the more carbon we capture. And that's just one thing trees do. And how long does money last, anyway?

Action: concerning endangered species and immigration.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reject its own proposal to make it harder to classify areas as "critical habitats," then Penn Environment still helps you do that. What would this proposal do? Why, undermine the Endangered Species Act, of course -- if there aren't a whole lot of "critical habitats" available, where will we help endangered species recover? I'd call that clever, if I didn't insist that cleverness be, you know, not evil. Reducing critical habitats also increases the amount of land subject to development, which has been this President's unfortunate mania from day one -- and not to stimulate the economy, nor to create jobs, but simply to deliver yet more unearned money into other bosses' wallets. We have long known that this President would eradicate history just to make himself and his cronies richer, so we must stand taller and stronger for a civilization that does not sacrifice itself to mammon. And if that makes us look more conservative than he, I'm not inclined to complain.

Meanwhile, you know our Supreme Court ruled in June that our Administration unlawfully ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program, which you would think would mean our Administration would be continuing the program, right? Of course not! They think rules and laws are for "losers," after all. Hence the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Administration to start doing its job and start processing DACA applications again. They're not just being big babies, they're also being cruel: folks who came here as children had literally no say in coming here, and they wouldn't recognize the countries to which we'd deport them back. And DACA doesn't even extend the protections of the law to all such immigrants, nor does it offer a path to citizenship. Which proves, maybe, that appeasing racists is a stupid idea. They sure better hope a real liberal never gets elected President.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big hotel chain corporations like Hilton, Choice, and Best Western to stop letting our Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) use their hotels as de facto concentration camps, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. Well, actually ICE subcontracts this nefarious duty to a contractor called MVM, but that's hair-splitting -- fact is, these big hotel corporations not only enable this Administration's abominable immigration policies (including family separation), but they make money off it, and you really should be making as little money from evil as possible in this world, lest you get a shock when you show up at the Pearly Gates. This Administration thinks very little about the long term, of course, but we don't ever have to be like them. We can choose to be civilized people, and we can use the Big Stick of Bad PR to help big corporations be civilized, too.

Action: concerning masks, whistleblowers, and government lies.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a national mask mandate. Because wearing a damn mask outside helps slow the spread of COVID-19! And no, right-wingers, it's not about your "freedom," unless by "freedom" you mean "freedom to infect others with a deadly disease." And certainly it's not like Nazis forcing Jews to wear the Star of David! (I mean, we're not all Jews, and if we were, making us wear masks to set us off from other people would be pointless. Right-wingers need to work on their damn similes.) We've coddled these don't-tread-on-me tantrum-throwers for too long, and I, for one, am willing to bring the force of law upon them. Everyone who's thought about the matter knows that masks do what the scientists say they do, and everyone who disagrees merely wishes it weren't true, and they'll latch on to whatever snake oil salesman doesn't sound completely off their rocker. Y'all will let me know if my true feelings aren't coming across here, right? I wouldn't want to be accused of holding back.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4816/S. 2529, the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act, would (as its title suggests) expand whistleblower protections, which currently only extend to those who blow the whistle on wrongdoing directly to our SEC or CFTC; the bill would extend those protections to those who assist in whistleblower investigations. I can't imagine what objections folks would have to that, unless they're of the DESTROYZ ALLZ REGULASHUNZ!!!! variety, or the FRIVULUZ LAWSUITZ!!!! variety. And, as you know, our government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in COVID-19 relief lately, which means hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money (i.e., our money) that could be stolen. Some right-wingers use that as an excuse to say all government programs are awful, but I say you need to have the courage to do right, and that includes punishing those who would subvert your efforts. So the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect taxpayers by passing the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act.

Finally, our Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) has lately proposed reclassifying complaint records as "temporary," which would give our National Archives and Records Administration (or NARA) the power to destroy any records of those complaints within four years of their filing! Our government destroying records of complaints against it -- why, who could find that suspicious? It's almost like they've got something to hide, like, you know, family separation, forced hysterectomies, wrongful deportation, or murder or sexual abuse at concentration camps! Seriously, if you want to be the greatest nation on Earth, you'd better be able to admit and overcome your mistakes, and you'd better be able to repent for your evil works; otherwise, you're not the greatest nation on Earth, but just another country doomed to get lost in the sands of time, and we'd all like to be remembered for the good we did on Earth, right? So Open the Government helps you tell our DHS to scuttle its proposal to censor complaints about its nefarious works.

Action: concerning good House bills, sanctions on Iran, and Chad Wolf.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Why do we keep doing this? Because we need to establish our will, as we communicate it to our Senators -- and thus also establish how badly they're doing at adhering to our will, which is their sole job, and a job they're doing much worse than our House is. And the more we do it, the closer we get to fulfilling the promise democracy.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and Secretary of State Pompeo to reject any more sanctions on Iran. We could go on at length about the damage more sanctions would do to good Iranians, who will certainly bear the brunt of sanctions more than their rulers, but all we need say is, well, calling this Administration's policy toward Iran piss-poor would be a grievous insult to piss. The Obama Administration helped craft a successful agreement that kept nuclear weapons out of Iran's hands, but this Administration withdrew from that agreement, apparently as part of a plan to create international chaos that could only be resolved by war with Iran, which is so 1980, you know. You could argue, I suppose, that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy only strengthened Iran in the region, thus tying our current President's hands, but just as two wrongs don't make a right, two stupids don't make a smart. So let's not remain hostage to bad foreign policy, because that would be un-American.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to the permanent Homeland Security Secretary position, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. They'd have plenty of reasons to reject the nomination, including Mr. Wolf's ardent support for family separation and illegal detainment of protestors, as well as his refusal to accept new DACA applications even though our Supreme Court told him to do it. But now that we're less than a month away from Election Day, our Senators would probably just prefer to wait this whole thing out and see how things go, given that voting for Mr. Wolf would be tough to defend to the voters who are about to decide your immediate future. It's funny that none of them have said confirming Mr. Wolf is essential given "the grave threats we face," since you know that's what they would have said in Tha Bush Mobb years. Still, we must remind them that cowardice is evil, and the time to do the right thing is always now.

Action: concerning nuclear waste and corporate investment in police departments.

Our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) wants to reclassify some kinds of radioactive nuclear waste so that big corporations can dump it in landfills! Which means it'll eventually wind up in our drinking water and in our crops -- and in our air, if landfills incinerate the stuff! If any of your friends tell you changing this rule will "create jobs," go ahead and ask them how. "By giving executives more money to create jobs" is not an acceptable answer, since we all know by now that when we give executives more money they hoard it, not spend it -- which means they certainly don't spend it on creating jobs! This regulatory effort will kill jobs, in fact -- the disposal operations to which nuclear power corporations currently send their waste do hire people to do jobs, after all. So, in sum: it'll kill jobs, and you won't be able to breathe the air or drink the water or eat the food, but some executive somewhere will be able to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home! Unless we all send public comments to our NRC opposing their rule change, which Food and Water Watch helps you do.

Meanwhile, on the heels of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron's charging one already-fired police officer with one charge in the killing of Breonna Taylor, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations UPS, Ford, and Humana to divest from the Louisville police department. The Louisville police department should be able to do its work on behalf of the good citizens of Louisville with tax money anyway, and the fact that police and jails already eat up almost half of Louisville's budget suggests that we ought to give them less of that work. Seriously, if we followed a treatment model for drug addicts rather than a punitive one, we'd be spending considerably less tax money, wouldn't need corporate money, and Breonna Taylor would be alive today. (The police who killed her were ostensibly conducting a drug investigation, after all.) And there ain't nothing corporations fear like the Big Stick of Bad PR. I wish they feared the law more than that, to be honest, but we're gonna use the tools available to us even as we work on getting better tools.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, social media, and birth control.

Once again we will call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Doesn't matter that they're not in session right now; doesn't matter that they all think they have more important things to do (like ram a right-wing Supreme Court Justice down our throats before we notice it); doesn't matter that Nancy Pelosi was just trying to pass a slimmed-down HEROES Act in order to "get something done." The HEROES Act is still the best COVID-19 relief bill either House of Congress has passed, and the race ain't even close. The CARES Act gave out over half a trillion dollars in corporate welfare, but the HEROES Act would actually fund COVID testing and tracing, enhanced unemployment benefits, relief for strapped states and municipalities, and relief for a strapped Postal Service (among other good works). Doesn't matter that Ms. Pelosi was negotiating with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, either -- they should only be negotiating with us. And the more we communicate our will, the more they'll finally get that. Really, they can't see the Mitch McConnell Way as anything but desperate. And where's he been in these negotiations, anyway?

Meanwhile, Facebook has been giving itself high-fives for "cracking down" on noxious Nazi-wannabe content at its platform, but, yeah, that's a crock, and you don't even have to know that Facebook got over 400 warnings about the Nazi wannabe groups organizing their "response" to Kenosha protests (that "response" included the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings) to know that. Whistleblowers have complained to our SEC that Facebook still helps Nazi wannabe groups by using algorithms to auto-generate pages that promote white supremacy; imagine if Random House "auto-generated" hundreds of different Turner Diaries rip-offs and you begin to see the problem. I make the publishing house analogy, again, because our laws should treat Facebook as a publishing house -- albeit one that can publish private utterances that must be exempt from social platform scrutiny -- and people still complain this is a "free speech" issue. But how can it be a free speech issue if some algorithm does the "speaking"? Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our government to hold Facebook accountable for lying about its "crackdowns."

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1692/S. 758, the EACH Woman Act, which would (finally!) allow federal funding of abortions. Our Supreme Court may soon be so constituted as to strike down Roe v. Wade at the first opportunity, and while no one ever wants to see a fetus aborted, the alternative -- a society that uses women as breeders -- is far worse. No, really, those are our two choices: a society that legalizes abortion, or a society where women can be controlled through pregnancy, this latter option a stated preference of many right-wingers; the former is the lesser evil, and we can mitigate that evil more easily than if (as with Prohibition) we make it illegal and more well-off folks still break the law with impunity. We mitigate the evil with safe and affordable birth control -- which, naturally, our right-wingers also vehemently oppose. But birth control is a civilized option, unless, I guess, you think the 40 million or so sperm from every ejaculation that don't ovulate also deserve more chances.

Action: concerning redistricting, clean water, and saner drug policy.

First, some good news for Pennsylvania residents: SB 1242, the Legislative and Congressional Redistricting Act (or LACRA), passed out of the Senate State Government Committee last week, and while Pennsylvania's state legislators have managed to get rid of the independent citizens' commission that characterized the previous redistricting bills we've championed here, LACRA still accomplishes a lot of what those bills would have done: Sec. 504, for example, would prevent redistricting plans from favoring particular incumbents, candidates, or political parties, while Sec. 703 (a) would make it substantially harder for any redrawn districts to divide towns and counties up in the Rorschach blot-districts that blighted our state for so long. Sadly, the House version of LACRA, HB 2638, hasn't even received a committee vote yet. Hence Fair Districts PA helps you tell Senate Majority Leader Corman to schedule a full Senate vote on LACRA, tell House State Government Committee Chair Everett to hold a committee vote on HB 2638, and tell House Speaker Cutler to hold a full House vote on HB 2638. Each of those links contains the officials' phone numbers, so feel free to call them, too.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund lead pipe replacement. Getting rid of the lead service pipes that still plague over nine million American homes would do a lot of good things -- like getting the lead out of our drinking water so that children don't suffer brain damage, or like creating jobs for the workers who would change out those lead pipes, or like making it easier to accomplish all the other necessary infrastructure improvements we'll need to make over the next few years. I know, I know, doing it with tax money is "communism" or something, except, of course, that it's not -- it's good Americans chipping in for a better future for all of us. The pipes will pay for themselves in time, not just from reduced health care costs associated with lead in our drinking water, but also in the healthier, more accomplished human beings we'll have doing great things in America once they're no longer saddled with brain damage through no fault of their own. And not for nothing, but folks in low-income areas deserve clean water just as much as the rest of us. If we didn't believe that, how could we look ourselves in the mirror?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. Our House was all set to vote on this bill -- which would essentially legalize pot and fund help for communities ravaged by war-on-drugs policing -- and then decided not to vote on it. Why? Because they were afraid that Republicans would go all nyah-nyah on them for passing that instead of, say, a COVID-19 relief bill. Republicans will go all nyah-nyah on you for anything, of course -- because what else can you do when you can't win arguments on the merits? -- and the House did pass a COVID-19 relief bill over four months ago, so there comes a time when you have to, you know, adult up. And if House Democrats won't do it, we will have to do it for them, by reminding them that the time to do the right thing is always now and the MORE Act is actually rather popular. So, yeah, let's do that.

Action: concerning corruption, pollution, and privatization.

By now you've likely heard that Congress gave our Department of Defense $1 billion to make personal protective equipment (or PPE) to help battle COVID-19 -- and Defense instead spent most of it plugging perceived holes in its budget wholly unrelated to COVID-19. They've apparently spent (among other expenditures) $22 million on propellers from Rolls-Royce and over $13 million making drones, a press release trumpeting the saving of "14 jobs." That's almost a million dollars a job! Could it be that our Administration is trying to prove that government can't do anything right? I kid, of course -- they're absolutely trying to "prove" that, while simultaneously asserting that only this President can "fix" it! But corruption is still corruption, hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our Pentagon's use or misuse of these funds. And remember: every dollar misspent means fewer masks and gowns for hospital workers working directly with COVID-19 patients.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to roll back protections against toxic wastewater from coal plants, even though they pump out all kinds of toxins -- including mercury, lead, and arsenic, all linked to cancer, heart disease, diabetes and developmental problems in kids. Clean Air Act regulations restricted emissions from coal smokestacks, so coal corporations started putting the pollution into wastewater and dumped it into our rivers and streams! Then the Obama Administration issued regulations addressing coal wastewater, but now this Administration wants to roll them back. They're probably ready to tell us that this whole story just proves that ALL TEH REGULASHUNZ AREZ TEH USELESSEZ!!!!! -- that "corporations will just find another way to pollute," or something. But what kind of message does that send to our children? "Don't do the right thing, ever, because wrongdoers will find a way to confound you?" U.S. PIRG helps you tell our EPA to reject its own plan to roll back toxic wastewater emissions from coal plants.

Finally, corporations are trying to privatize Pennsylvania's public water systems, but HB 2746 and HB 2597 would require that any proposed sale of our public water to private corporations go before the voters first. And what would private corporations have to fear? If they really can run it better than our government, they shouldn't have any trouble proving it to the voters! Of course they can't, since we all know water privatization means higher prices, worse service, and lost jobs, and that's only in the short run -- in the long run, water privatization means that the people who drink the water lose all control over its maintenance. Our government, after all, is accountable to us, and that remains true even after they fail us; private corporations are only accountable to their shareholders, and executives try their damnedest to avoid even that responsibility. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your PA state legislators to ensure that we get to vote on whether we sell our water systems.

I'll be taking care of a health issue over the next few days, so posting may be light. Before that happens, I feel compelled to mention that I've received numerous action alerts exhorting us to prevent Republicans from voting on a new Supreme Court justice before Inauguration Day 2021, but I haven't passed any of them along, because I wanted the Senate to vote on Merrick Garland in 2016 and I am not a powermad hypocrite like Mitch McConnell. I know some folks will say I speak from a position of privilege, that I am not one of the folks who stand to lose the most from replacing the last Justice Ginsberg with a reactionary (i.e., folks of color and gay and transgender folks), and thus I have the "luxury" of following the rules. But I say that following the rules isn't actually a luxury even if so many Americans (most of them rich!) act like it is, and I also say that if we say one thing in 2016 because it suits us and then say the opposite in 2020 because it suits us then we become the folks we most hate. And I also say that putting a sympathetic Supreme Court Justice on the court is not the only way to fight for justice; yes, a 6-3 right-wing majority on the Court will suck, but we have dealt with worse as a nation and succeeded. In any case, if I find our President's eventual nominee wanting, I will advocate for our Senators to reject her, and if we do that, and we make our Senators afraid for their jobs, they will comply. It's the only thing that really works in such instances; everything else is a shortcut.

Action: concerning good House bills, consumer protection, and product safety.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Don't believe the hype that our Senators have a lot on their plates right now! If they'd have passed these bills earlier, they'd have less to do now. Besides, you don't get to make excuses when you don't do your job, so why should they?

Meanwhile, you probably have some experience with price-gouging during this pandemic, so along comes H.R. 6450/S. 3853, the Price Gouging Prevention Act, which would (as its title suggests) prevent sellers from using an emergency to jack up prices more than 10 percent over the average price over the previous 120 days. If you're concerned about the rights of the accused, note well that Sec. 3 (b) (2) gives sellers the opportunity to rebut any presumptions of price gouging by providing "clear and convincing evidence that the increase in price of the consumer good involved is directly attributable to additional costs paid by the seller in procuring, acquiring, or providing the consumer during the emergency period." Seems fair, though "free" market votaries won't think so. And I'm old enough to remember when they would, though whether they were just fronting then or have simply devolved into morons now is a question historians will have to answer. The bill would also empower our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enforce its provisions and would not preempt stronger state laws against price gouging. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from financial predators by passing the Price Gouging Prevention Act.

Finally, Johnson & Johnson has announced that it'll stop selling talcum-based baby powder in most of North America, supposedly because demand has declined, but one must wonder if the many thousand complaints consumers made about asbestos in their talcum powder (apparently it's hard to find talcum in nature without tripping over asbestos) had more to do with it. And, sadly, despite their declaration, talcum-based baby powder remains on your local shelves, because J&J didn't issue a recall, which would kinda be the next step. If you're worried about J&J being able to sell down its stock of baby powder already on the shelves, consider more carefully whether we should expose our babies to cancer and mesothelioma, two common health problems scientists associate with asbestos. Really, the right answer is never "take care of corporations first," and the right answer is always "take care of people first." Gosh, when I was a youth, I thought moral questions would be thornier than this. They're not, so U.S. PIRG helps you tell J&J to put people first by recalling its remaining stocks of talcum-based baby powder.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, cruelty to immigrants, and Social Security.

You've heard that Democrats and Republicans are "negotiating" another COVID-19 stimulus bill? And you've heard Republicans say Democrats are "blocking" their efforts in some way or other? Don't believe the hype! Our House passed H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, over four months ago already, and that bill's a good enough COVID-19 stimulus bill -- it would fund states and localities, it would fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, it would repeal hedge fund manager tax cuts, it would extend enhanced unemployment benefits, and it would issue another round of stimulus checks, among other things. So why haven't our Senators passed it? Oh, you know, because it doesn't give big corporations blanket immunity from COVID-19-related lawsuits, it doesn't expand three-martini lunch tax breaks, and it doesn't give Congress the power to gut Social Security without debate. I wish it were more complicated than that, but it's not, such is the intellectual vapidity of our opposition these days. So call your Senators and tell them to pass the HEROES Act. After all, why do they negotiate with each other like they're more important than we are?

Meanwhile, you've also no doubt heard by now that at least one OB/GYN at an ICE concentration camp in Georgia did so many hysterectomies there that one whistleblower called him "the uterus collector," but outrage doesn't mean much if it doesn't translate into results, hence Daily Kos helps you tell your House Reps to demand an investigation into alleged mass hysterectomies of immigrant detainees. Surely you won't have to convey the moral reasons for such an investigation -- though if you want to tell your Reps that great nations always treat immigrants with the dignity and compassion they deserve, go ahead! What could it hurt? -- but even the political calculations should not dissuade your House Reps from investigating this matter. Most people oppose cruelty, after all, and the pro-cruelty crowd (not that they'd ever describe themselves as such!) don't win elections without a lot of help from outside factors. Besides, all that hysteria about TEH CARAVANZ!!!! didn't exactly help Republicans keep their House majority in 2018, did it?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a "resolution of disapproval" that would block our President's Executive Order delaying the collection of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. Make no mistake, this payroll tax "holiday" is no holiday for working families, and not just because so many of their employers aren't taking advantage of the "holiday," nor because working families will owe all that money when the "holiday" expires -- this "holiday" is absolutely a way to cut Social Security's funding to the bone, and our President has said this out loud. Yeah, he's also said he'd like to fund Social Security a different way, but what way will that be? It won't be by taxing his rich cronies, that's for sure! Don't believe any hype from Presidential votaries that blocking the payroll tax "holiday" would be "like a tax hike." It's literally not a tax hike to keep collecting the taxes everyone already knows they have to pay.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, concentration camps, and saner drug policy.

You remember those accountability features Congress built into the CARES Act? Yeah, there weren't enough of them, I know, but our Administration seems determined even to ignore the ones that exist, as our Office of Management and Budget (or OMB) has apparently told federal agencies disbursing COVID-19-related relief funds to simply ignore reporting requirements -- including the one that would tell us whether this use of taxpayer funding actually saves any jobs! I keep saying the same thing because they keep doing the same thing -- this Administration doesn't hate "bureaucracy"; they only hate that part of the bureaucracy that actually help good Americans, hence their utter disgust for anti-pollution regulations, and their utter disgust for laws that would hold them accountable to their bosses, the American people. Who are the ones who fund their little corporate welfare slush fund, I feel compelled to note with the italics hammer. Hence the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our OMB to rescind its guidance that hides how well our government uses our money during this pandemic.

Meanwhile, giant investment corporation BlackRock has (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) talked a good game about being "socially responsible" in their investments, which would be gratifying, especially coming from a corporation that manages close to $6 trillion in assets (as of 2018) -- except that they still invest directly in Palantir, the notorious data management corporation that helps our Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) run its even more notorious concentration camps. So investing in family separation, terroristic raids, putting kids in cages -- it all sure makes the phrase "socially responsible" sound hollow! The more charitable among you might tell me it takes time to root out all the evil in your portfolio once you've resolved to do it, but that's why we point it out to these big corporations, right? Hence the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell BlackRock to pull its investments out of the concentration camp business by divesting from Palantir. I mean, evil can find plenty of money on its own, I would think.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment & Expungement (or MORE) Act, then Drug Policy Alliance still helps you do that. The MORE Act would not only legalize marijuana (by removing it from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act), but would invest in the communities of color at which our government has targeted its half-century-long "war on drugs." No, "targeted" does not overstate the case -- but you don't have to believe me about that; you can believe former Nixon Administration counsel John Ehrlichman, who said, out loud, that the "war on drugs" had rather little to do with illicit drugs taking away good Americans' freedoms and rather more to do with targeting civil rights and anti-war protestors. And yes, drugs do take away your freedoms, if you abuse them, and no, not every street drug should be legal, but putting pot on the level of something truly destructive like heroin smacks of the mistakes of the Prohibition Era. And surely we don't want to go down that road.

Action: concerning paycheck fairness and the right to repair.

H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, may get a full House vote this week, and it would, at long last, force employers to make the same accommodations for their pregnant workers that they already make for their disabled ones. And if you're quick to yell THE PREGNANCIEZ IZ NOT TEH DISABILITIEZ!!!!!, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) imagine yourself walking around with 30 extra pounds and a constant urge to pee, and 3) consider that employers wouldn't have to make these accommodations forever because the pregnancy will end. The bill would also prevent employers from retaliating against workers for requesting reasonable accommodations, denying employment to pregnant workers merely because they know they'll have to make those accommodations, or force employees to accept unnecessary accommodations when they can make reasonable ones. The key word, as you may have noticed, is "reasonable," so keep that in mind when right-wingers start with their imaginary horror stories about what'll happen if we treat pregnant workers with fairness and dignity. Moms Rising helps you tell your House Reps to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell your state legislators to pass "right-to repair" legislation. Why? Because we generated nearly 60 million tons of e-waste (or waste from computers and computerized gadgets) just last year, which would represent the weight of over 160 Empire State Buildings. And why do we generate so much waste? Because we're drawn to the new and the now, sure, but also because big corporations like Apple and Microsoft make it prohibitively difficult for you to repair your own products, and not just by refusing to give third-party repair shops access to parts and manuals -- I'm old enough to remember installing a faster processor and more RAM in my Apple laptop from the '90s; just a few years later I didn't even find screws on the outside of my iBook. And if we could do that easily again, we could make our computers and phones last longer! Not to pile on, but all this e-waste also means we have a crap-ton more toxic chemicals like mercury polluting our air, land, and water, and it seems to me we shouldn't tolerate that, either.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad methane regulations, and bad corporate acquisitions.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Do I "keep saying the same thing"? Yes, I do, if what I keep saying is the right thing. Let our Senators listen to anyone but their big donors for once, and then I'll count the colors in my garden. Until then, it's hammertime.

Meanwhile, our Administration has formally weakened methane emission regulations, by repealing requirements that oil and gas corporations install the technology that would detect and repair methane leaks. Ugh, one more time: methane packs a much bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions, leaked methane is a waste of usable energy, and leaked methane also deprives the taxpayer of royalties if said leaking occurs on public lands. But what's all that pollution and waste and lost revenue next to gas drilling corporation executives being able to gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes? Seriously, that's all our Administration's new rule does: hand out welfare to corporations and rich people. Like everything else they do! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to block this Administration's new methane emissions rule. Congress would have to accomplish this by passing a "resolution of disapproval," and you may be tempted to wait until a new President and a new Senate come into office, but I wouldn't count on that, and anyway, our duty is always to do the right thing right now.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to block the proposed sale of DNA-collecting corporation Ancestry to big private equity corporation Blackstone, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Hopefully I've identified the problem with the proposed sale by identifying what each of these corporations does -- it's bad enough that big corporations get their grubby hands so deep in your investments, so you certainly would not want their grubby hands in your private information, and your DNA is as private as it gets. And I do not accept the notion that "you give your DNA to someone to help figure out where you came from and you take your chances." Why must it be like that? Because the internet's a big place? Because the "free" market is sacred? I'm so old-fashioned I only think doing what's right is sacred, and letting big corporations buy your DNA info is wrong. And I've never believed the internet is "too big to civilize," no matter how much Our Glorious Elites want you to believe it. And I always choose civilization over chaos.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, Arctic drilling, and corporate welfare.

Happy Monday, good Americans! Now would be a good time to call your Senators (whose phone numbers you can find using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act. At this writing, 122 days have passed since our House passed the HEROES Act, even though the HEROES Act would do everything a decent COVID-19 relief bill should do, like fund testing and tracing, extend enhanced unemployment benefits, and issue another round of stimulus checks. But, alas, Republicans hold our Senate, and the only thing Mob Boss Mitch McConnell knows how to do is stamp his foot and say no. The Delivering for America Act, which would roll back the changes our Postmaster General made to wreck our Post Office, has been awaiting a Senate vote for a somewhat shorter length of time, but this is no less shameful, considering the 2020 election could be at stake. So keep calling your Senators, because shame is all that'll get them to act. No, it works; I've seen it work before.

Meanwhile, opening ANWR to oil drilling was one of the "accomplishments" of the 2017 tax "reform," and our President has lately announced plans to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). But bad politicians have been trying to open up ANWR to oil drilling corporations for decades, and at this writing five of America's six largest banks have said they won't fund any drilling efforts there. Whether that's because drilling on public lands is rather unpopular or because the big banks know there won't be enough oil in ANWR to justify the effort, I couldn't say. I can say, however, that the notorious Bank of America is the big bank that has not said they won't fund drilling efforts in ANWR, hence the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Bank of America to reject the funding of Arctic oil drilling projects. Not just for the caribou or for the Gwich'in people, but also for the waste of effort -- it's just not worth destroying ANWR just so a few oil corporation executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Believe me, that's all that's going to come from ANWR drilling. Well, that and pollution and disruption of ancestral homelands.

Finally, H.R. 7781, the End Polluter Welfare Act, would increase royalties for drilling on public lands, prevent our government from offering "royalty relief" to big drilling corporations, repeal liability limits when oil and gas drillers pollute our lands, end new federally-funded fossil fuel research, stop internationally-sourced funding from going to fossil fuel projects in America, and get rid of a bunch of "tax incentives" toward fossil fuel development -- among many, many other things. Seriously, giving fossil fuel corporations welfare handouts would be a little like giving the New York Yankees extra money every year so that they can "stay competitive." Fossil fuel subsidies currently outstrip renewable subsidies by about 2 to 1; this, when renewable energy actually needs taxpayer help precisely because the fossil fuel corporations are so big they can stamp out alternatives. And if you've attended the fact that our West Coast is presently on fire, you know we need those alternatives post-haste. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane energy policy by passing the End Polluter Welfare Act.

Action: concerning credit reporting and gun violence.

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban negative credit reports during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because over 40 million good Americans lost their jobs and still need to put food on the table! Ideally, credit reports measure how well you manage money, but who's managing money well during this pandemic? Only the rich, and it's a lot easier to balance the checkbook when money's coming in by the boatload. As it happens, this pandemic seems to be prompting a lot of mistakes on credit reports -- compare the number of credit report mistake complaints filed over the last five months with the number of similar complaints filed during the same five months of 2019 and you find they've almost doubled. Stupid or evil, who cares? The end result is the same: good Americans can't get loans and can't get jobs, through no damn fault of their own -- or, more precisely, because of the incompetence and venality of our President. Don't blame good Americans for his bad works, that's what I say. Even if the "free" market demands it.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund community anti-gun violence programs. To the tune of $150 million, which ain't that much in the context of a $4 trillion-plus federal budget. And note well that "community anti-gun violence programs" is not the same thing as "banning handguns." If you know someone who can't tell the difference, well, you may want to leave their instruction to God. We can only be so reasonable, after all! By "community anti-gun violence programs," we mean direct intervention and outreach on streets and in hospitals, and these ideas have worked in the past, when they've been well-funded, of course. And again: $150 million on one hand, $4 trillion on the other; if you can save lives and rescue souls with a mere four one-thousandths of one percent of our federal budget, you do it. And, you know, funding intervention and outreach is also a job creation scheme -- unless you're one of those benighted souls who thinks working for our government somehow doesn't count as a job.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act and social media.

Word on the street is that Sen. McConnell (E-KY) plans to start voting on his "skinny" COVID-19 relief bill -- so now's a pretty good time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. There's no need to humor Republicans who want to look like they're "doing something" about tens of millions unemployed and a thousand-plus deaths every single day from COVID-19 -- they can just pass the HEROES Act, which our House passed almost four months ago and which would extend enhanced unemployment benefits, expand COVID-19 testing and tracing, help out states and localities suffering from a shrinking tax base, fund our Post Office so it can better handle all the votes-by-mail it's going to have to deliver, and issue another round of checks bigger than the ones we got from the CARES Act. Really, there's no need to reinvent the wheel here; our House already passed the HEROES Act, and all our Senators have to do is pass it. Then our President has to sign it! But let's take this one step at a time.

You remember the Burmese military's genocide of its Rohingya Muslim population? All that village-burning, murder, and rape, plus 800,000 refugees fleeing to Bangladesh? Facebook played a big role in helping folks spread lies about and threats at the Rohingya while all that was going on -- and now won't hand over information that the Republic of Gambia has filed suit in our federal courts to get. Facebook must think they're too big for the Republic of Gambia! Or, perhaps, Facebook thinks its own apologies about enabling the genocide are enough, apologies I'm sure the families of the dead find very persuasive. Actually, Facebook claims the requests are too broad -- why, they're making requests for info all the way back to 2012! When, ah, the Burmese military also killed a lot of Rohingya. These killers said what they wanted to do out loud on Facebook, so the Republic of Gambia might be able to nail them in court -- but only if we speak out! So Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop enabling the ongoing coverup of genocide in Burma.

Action: concerning good House bills, big telecom shenanigans, and water conservation.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. These bills would make America a more perfect union -- by raising working family wages, protecting voting rights, and restoring internet freedom, among other good works -- which must be why Sen. McConnell (E-KY) refuses to allow a vote on any of them! But he ain't the boss of us! And our Senators need to know that -- but they'll only know it if we speak out.

Meanwhile, Charter Communications, the second-largest cable corporation in America, has lately petitioned our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) for permission to institute data caps! In the middle of a pandemic, while millions of kids are learning from home, no less! And Charter pledged not to institute data caps if our FCC green-lit its merger with Time Warner Cable, which should remind us how much a corporation's "word" is worth. In a typically whiny retort, Charter spokeshacks say that since other corporations get to do it, they should get to do it, too, but nobody should get to do it, because it doesn't serve any real purpose except to make money. I'm old enough to remember when our government forced corporations to serve customers, but now our government pretends that's never an option, as they let big telecom corporations jack up prices for ever-worsening service. But we don't have to take that! Free Press helps you tell our FCC to reject Charter's request to institute data caps. After all, this is the year it could cost your kids at school -- and it may not be the last year that happens, either.

In other news, our Administration has proposed loosening showerhead water efficiency standards, by redefining "showerhead" so that individual parts of the showerhead can count as a complete showerhead! And thus the entire showerhead can waste more water while still nominally complying with the standards! Our President complained a little over a month ago that showerheads don't put out enough water to help him make his hair "perfect," and while we shouldn't give one rat's hind-quarter about whatever our President's hair issues are, we should also note that we're staring at a future with a lot more drought in it, and appliances which actually help us conserve water will also help us deal with that drought. There's that word "conserve" again, the root word of that other word, "conservative," which a lot of reactionary rageheads pretend to be these days without understanding that it's really not all about yelling and screaming and getting attention and pissing off liberals. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of Energy to reject its proposed plan to loosen showerhead regulations.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, DACA, bad public servants, and taxing the rich.

Congress comes back to work today, so take a minute to boo them, and then get on the phone with your Senators and tell them to pass both H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act. You've heard that "Democrats blocked the Republican pandemic stimulus bill"? Well, that sure ain't the whole story, since our House passed the HEROES Act, a pretty good pandemic stimulus bill, over three months ago. It funds testing and tracing, extends enhanced unemployment benefits, and issues another round of stimulus checks, among other good works -- but it doesn't make three-martini lunches fully tax-deductible, which is apparently a sticking point with Republicans. I wish I were kidding about that! Our House has also passed the Delivering for America Act, which would reverse all the stupid changes our new Postmaster General has made to our Post Office so it'll run a lot worse than it currently does. If Senate Republicans won't do the work we've called them to do, well, we've got to keep calling them -- for as long as it takes. Tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers are, as always, in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page).

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court struck down our President's clumsily unlawful attempt to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program -- hate to pile on, but our Court called our President's actions "arbitrary and capricious," and it must have pained the notoriously literal John Roberts to say that -- but our U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (or USCIS) still won't accept new DACA applicants, in open defiance of our Court's ruling. How likely is it that our Administration just can't find any folks who came here as children who just don't meet DACA's criteria? Our USCIS also plans to renew existing DACA statuses for only one year instead of two, just to make DREAMers' lives harder. They already wouldn't recognize the countries to which they'd be deported, and had literally no choice in coming here, so I guess our Administration says what's a little more cruelty? Hence the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Administration to stop defying the rule of law and accept DACA applicants again. Shame we have to tell this Administration to follow the law, but such is our lot in life.

On a related topic, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to be that department's permanent Secretary. As "permanent" as such things are with this Administration, amirite? Our President loves circumventing the rule of law by appointing "acting" department heads -- and according to our Government Accountability Office (or GAO), he doesn't even do it lawfully, bypassing less "loyal" civil servants to elevate the ones he wants. And this is quite telling, since Republicans have held the Senate during this entire Administration, and have eagerly rubber-stamped his judicial nominees, for example. But Mr. Wolf has thoroughly demonstrated his unworthiness for the job over the last nine-plus months, perhaps most notably by sending unmarked and armed officers to protests and abducting protestors off the street. Perhaps one day he'll find out what everyone else finds out -- that slavish loyalty to our President rarely goes unpunished. But why wait? His spiritual arc is no more important than anyone else's, and certainly no more important than the people's will, which we ought to express posthaste.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8020/S. 4490, the Make Billionaires Pay Act, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. We all know by now that the biggest "winners" of this pandemic have been billionaires, whose wealth has grown by at least $732 billion over the last six months, and while you may be tempted to say right-place-right-time about Jeff Bezos (since ordering stuff online has become even more of a lifeline for good Americans than it was before), fact is billionaires don't need that damn much money. No, they don't "create jobs" with that money -- they hoard that money! Just like you or I would do! That's why we have laws to compel them to part with some of that money, and the Make Billionaires Pay Act would hardly make any of them destitute -- it'd put a 60% tax of billionaire wealth earned since March, which would leave 40%, and as we know, 40% of a crapload is still a crapload. The bill would redirect the money toward good Americans' out-of-pocket health care expenses -- which we know have shot up, because tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs (and thus any health insurance they might have had). So let's get to it.

Action: concerning whistleblowers, immigration, and our Post Office.

Our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) planned to vote on regulatory changes that would cripple vital whistleblower protections -- but cancelled the vote shortly before it would have taken place, which is what they usually do when they don't have enough pro-evil public comments. The SEC's proposed changes would have arbitrarily capped whistleblower rewards, hampered whistleblower reporting, and prevented our SEC from acting in certain legitimate circumstances; what would comments in favor of these changes look like? Please, SEC, shield banksters from the investors they try to screw over? But the important thing is there have never been enough comments favoring the changes, or else our SEC would have pushed through these changes last year, when they cancelled a vote on them after getting over 100,000 public comments opposing them. So let's keep up the pressure! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our SEC to reject its own proposed changes to its whistleblower program.

Meanwhile, defense contracting corporation MVM has made several hundred million dollars from our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) to detain over 100 migrants, with many children reportedly among their number. Apparently the best way to disappear these folks is to put them in a privately-held hotel, since detaining them in one of our notorious concentration camps would create, at least, a paper trail. And MVM says its workers can handle abuse reports, but their contract says they don't actually have to do anything about them! What would you say, if your money paid for all of this? Oh, wait, it did -- we don't fund defense contracts with bake sales, after all. And don't be put off by the notion that it's only a hundred migrants, because they'll do it to a thousand or a million if we don't stop them now. Hence we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against the weakest link in this particular chain, as Sum of Us helps you tell Best Western to end its participation in this ongoing disgrace.

Finally, upon learning that our U.S. Postal Services Board of Governors Chair Robert M. Duncan also just so happens to direct a $130 million Super PAC aligned with Sen. Mitch McConnell (E-KY), Progress American helps you demand that Mr. Duncan resign his post on the USPS Board of Governors. The rot didn't start with Mr. DeJoy, it turns out! Is it against the law for Mr. Duncan to do both jobs? I'll bet it's not; folks like Mitch McConnell don't break the law so much as change the law so that it turns law-breaking into law-following! And your right-wing neighbor is no doubt already saying and you're surprised? But the fact that something's no surprise doesn't automatically make it tolerable! Time was nobody would serve in our government and run a campaign arm at the same time simply because it made people look corrupt! But our leaders care less and less about that every day -- and, sadly, so do many Americans, only because all the corruption has made them dizzy. Still, duty is duty.