Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning social media, school lunch shaming, and Bahamian refugees.

In the wake of reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hobnobbing with notorious right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro -- ostensibly in order to understand why right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's "bias" against them! -- Free Press helps you tell Mr. Zuckerberg to adopt vigorous rules defending its users from abusive hate speech. So far Mr. Zuckerberg has hidden behind the First Amendment in his effort to avoid adopting such standards, but the First Amendment doesn't protect us from Facebook; it protects us from our government, and Facebook, as a publishing platform, has no obligation to publish every single noxious utterance of every single asshole in order to adhere to a notion of "free speech" -- or, at the very least, no obligation to make these utterances public. And if he wants to know why right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's bias, he doesn't have to ask Ben Shapiro -- he can ask me. Right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's bias because whining is all you can do when you can't win arguments on the merits. You're welcome.

Meanwhile, you've heard horror stories of schools sending collection notices to families who can't afford school lunches, or putting wristbands on their children so everyone can identify them by their debt? Sounds like something you'd have seen in Nazi Germany, right? Well, H.R. 3366/S. 1907, the No Shame at School Act, would put a stop to school lunch shaming, would prevent school districts from handing over parents' private info to debt collectors, and would streamline the certification process for school kids so that simple misspellings (for example) won't lead to school lunch debt. You'd think civilized people would know better than to make a kid's life miserable just because his parents don't make a whole lot of money -- so I guess that means the people who would do such things aren't particularly civilized. Civilization isn't just something we have to maintain, after all; it's also something we have to earn. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop school lunch shaming by passing the No Shame at School Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to allow Hurricane Dorian refugees save haven in America, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Hurricane Dorian slammed into the Bahamas last month, leaving over 70,000 good Bahamians without homes, but our President, of course, cited the possibility of allowing "some very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very very bad drug dealers" into the country, as if America has never had a vetting process for refugees, ever. Gosh, nobody ever said you have to be stupid every single time you show mercy; why do you suppose some people would like to link the two in your mind? And why do you suppose our President would want you to think we have always just let people into America willy-nilly? It couldn't be because fear is the only weapon he has left, could it? It's not like he can point to a whole lot of good works as President (or as a human being, really) and persuade people to support him that way. But we're better than him, so let's do better than him.

Action: concerning all kinds of corruption.

I know, this Administration's a total crapshow right now, but before we give the proper amount of attention to their drama, please use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Our House already passed all these bills, and our Senate has no business ignoring our will on voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, respectively. It's a shame we ever have to remind our Congressfolk that the people actually have concerns other than the miserable dramas Our Glorious Elites force upon us day after day, but nobody said our duty as citizens was easy. And they need us more than we need them.

And now, to the drama: you can also use the aforementioned tools on this page to locate your House Reps' phone numbers, so you can tell them to impeach our President; if you're still not entirely sure why you should do that, David Swanson gives us approximately 25 reasons. And yes, our Administration's Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, did actually say that our President withheld foreign aid to the Ukraine so Ukrainian investigators would get dirt on Democrat servers; as for the fact that he tried to walk it back later, well, you can't unring a bell. But worse than that, he said you are stupid if you think there's a problem with that! I'm not sure how else to interpret "I have news for everybody: get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy." If you are proud of your "worldly" cynicism, you probably find this argument persuasive, but if you find a civilization's moral standards worth upholding, and you demand that our politicians be better people than they are, you won't. Cynicism is evil, and evil demands only one response -- a fight to the death.

Finally, in the wake of the news that the next G7 meeting would be held at a property owned by our President, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our President's habit of profiting from his office as part of their impeachment effort. Our President has since changed his mind about holding the next G7 summit there, but I'm old enough to remember when politicians would avoid such corruption merely because it looked bad, and violating our Constitution's emoluments clause actually is bad, and you don't need a polisci degree to see why: when our President decides to hold a world meeting at one of his own properties, he's showing us that he doesn't care so much about us as he does his own pocketbook. Again, it's a shame I have to spell any of this out -- and it's a bigger shame that our President has spelled it out himself by saying, out loud, that he's not supposed to "dislike" the Saudis because, after all, they spend a lot of money at his hotels. But corruption doesn't smell better just because folks laugh about it more than they used to.

Action: concerning government spying, marketing to children, and clean water.

You may recall that our FISA court revealed that our FBI routinely conducts unauthorized searches of NSA-collected data; we have already told our Congressfolk this week that the NSA shouldn't be collecting that data without a warrant, but we also need to tell Congress to close the "backdoor loophole" that allows our FBI to access the information, as Defending Rights and Dissent helps us do. You know, a lot of good folks labor under the impression that the "grave threats we face" (I just can't help quoting then-Senator Obama explaining why he'd done a 180 on government spying!) are somehow unique to our time, and I could be glib and just say "read a history book," but I'd rather just say that the values that sustain us -- you know, things like courage, doing unto others, speaking truth to power -- are not unique to our time, but have been part of our heritage for uncounted years, and when we abandon those values in the name of "security" or "fighting grave threats," then we die the thousand deaths of the coward. So let's stay on our Congressfolk to help us preserve these values.

Meanwhile, the Children's Online Privacy Act (or COPPA) helps parents protect their children's privacy by restricting the data corporations can harvest from children and limiting how they use it. But naturally the big corporations look at kids as money pots, whose data they can use to empty their parents' pockets faster, and so they're pressuring our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to loosen up COPPA -- and that pressure may be working, as evidenced by our FTC's decision to review the effectiveness of COPPA several years before the law requires it, and one commissioner's statement that the review would "tak(e) care of children and data both," when the law only requires them to help take care of children, data being, as you know, a thing that does not require care. Always they pretend that things are just as (or more) important as people! But they're not, and we don't have to take this lying down: we can let the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood help us tell our FTC to do their legally-mandated job to protect children's privacy from the corporations that would exploit them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its own proposed rollback of coal ash storage rules, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. "What would be worse than over 100 toxic coal ash storage sites lying in high-risk flood zones?" their latest email missive asks. "Answer: loosening the laws that protect our health and communities from contamination by those sites." Yeah, you knew where that was going, too, didn't you? Coal ash is the byproduct of coal plants -- one might do better calling it coal poop -- and contains carcinogens and other dangerous chemicals. And this coal poop can very easily leech into good Americans' drinking water, as the folks in Roane County, TN and Eden, NC can attest. But then again, clean drinking water is only the bedrock of good health care in America; it's not money or power, which are literally the only things this Administration cares about. Power corrupts, and money only makes you miserable in time, but clean water will always sustain us -- if we will but work to keep it.

Action: concerning shareholder power, adoptee citizenship, copyright trolling, and paid family leave.

Apparently because no regulation that serves the public interest can be allowed to survive under this abomination of an Administration, our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) is mulling whether to roll back rules that would inform shareholders of big business decisions involving pollution, campaign contributions, and offshore tax evasion. I guess their reasoning (such as it is) is that shareholders don't care about anything but money, which is certainly true of our President, but as I keep saying, our President is not America, and I bet you won't even find very many Republican-appointed judges who don't understand that shareholders make decisions on where to invest for a variety of reasons -- a thesis proven by the very existence of shareholder resolutions aiming to get corporations to pay their executives less, or address climate change. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our SEC to scuttle its own efforts to make corporations less accountable to their shareholders. Protecting shareholders from corporate abuse is, after all, our SEC's very reason for existence. That's not my opinion; that's the law.

Meanwhile, our Administration has been deporting immigrants who were adopted by American citizens but never got citizenship when they were adopted. What, you thought adoption automatically led to citizenship? So did I! Our Administration never tires of looking for these little loopholes in the law, do they? All so they can look "tough" when the truth is they are not tough, they are weak -- only weak people care so much about looking tough, and only strong people possess the quality of mercy, particularly when it concerns folks who have spent almost their entire life in America. Hence H.R. 2731/S. 1554, the Adoptee Citizenship Act, would expand citizenship to immigrants adopted by Americans under certain conditions (i.e., the immigrant got adopted before turning 18, and was present in America at the time of adoption). You'll noted that, at this writing, the House version of this bill actually has more Republican sponsors than Democratic ones, which makes it what? An actual bipartisan bill! 18 Million Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Adoptee Citizenship Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to reject H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act. The CASE Act would push "small claims" into an "alternative" court which of course isn't a real court of law, but a "Copyright Claims Board," not staffed with judges but still empowered to levy up to $30,000 in fines if you (for example) share something copyrighted in a meme on Facebook. And dig Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) claiming that the $30,000 cap limits the scope of this bill to "truly small claims"! You think $30,000 is "small"? I suspect not. I suppose we can't expect much better from the political party whose current standard-bearer once claimed to have gotten his start in real estate with a "very small loan" -- of a million bucks! So now is the time to stand up -- not just for the rule of law, which guarantees us our day in court, but also for the notion that $30,000 isn't a "small claim." It's like our leaders don't understand a thing about regular folks, which is why we teach them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Most working Americans can't take time off to take care of themselves or a sick loved one, or a newborn baby, without taking a risk they'll lose their jobs or fall into a debt hole, but the FAMILY Act would create a national paid family medical leave program, and if you make $50,000 annually, you would pay a mere $8.33 monthly to enjoy its benefits. We could debate whether that tax rate (two-tenths of one percent paid by worker, the same amount paid by employer) should be progressive -- that your rate should be higher the more money you make -- but that alone wouldn't be a good reason to withhold support, particularly in one of the few rich nations that doesn't have any paid family leave for workers, unless employers are generous enough to give them or unions are canny enough to negotiate them. So let's get it done.

Action: concerning detainment, banksters, and wildlife.

Our Administration loves looking "tough" on immigrants, but H.R. 2415/S. 1243, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, would force our government to adopt actual standards for detention that are as good or better than American Bar Association's proposed standards from 2014. The bill would also allow our government to break contracts with private prison corporations that repeatedly violate these standards; I'd prefer never to use private corporations for detainment, but this bill would still improve matters. And the bill would mandate inspections of detainee facilities and investigations of detainee deaths in custody. These are reasonable, even mild, changes -- we should still work to prevent corporations (and "businessmen" like our President cough cough) from importing immigrants solely to drive wages down, and if we should do that, we'll better be able to show mercy to those running from real harm, but this bill will improve lives. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to advance the cause of civilization by passing the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo must have thought they'd done enough PR work to make everyone forget that they opened accounts for customers without their permission, because now they're apparently "forgetting" to close accounts their customers have asked them to close for a few months, which results in negative accounts and significant fees. Nice work if you can get it! Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to investigate Wells Fargo for its alleged wrongdoing. You might be wary of doing so, knowing how thoroughly our current Administration has gutted the CFPB, with the explicit purpose of making it "friendlier" to banksters. Why, that's like a cop saying he wants to be "friendlier" to burglars! And this, from the "law and order" Presidency! But I digress, and anyway, if this wrongdoing is as easy to diagnose as it sounds, our CFPB might want an easy victory to "prove" it's still working on our behalf. That would be cynical of them, but the result would be the same if they weren't so cynical -- money saved for customers, and justice done.

Finally, you know that we designate certain areas of the country as wilderness areas so that we can protect wildlife -- but what about the wildlife that has to migrate in order to survive, but finds highways and buildings in their way? H.R. 2795/S. 1499, the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act, would provide for endangered and threatened species by protecting new and existing wildlife corridors, a matter that'll become far more important for those species as climate change drives them to move to new habitats. And in the wake of the U.N. report saying that a million plant and animal species are in danger of extinction right now, well, that matter's actually pretty important. Folks who worry that WE'LL NEVER BUILDZ ANYZ OFZ TEH THINGZ EVAHZ AGAINZ!!!!! would do well to ask whether what they really want is never to be bothered by anything other than self-interest. Really, man-in-the-mirror moments such as these can be very instructive. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect threatened species by passing the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act.

Action: concerning free speech, government spying, and corporate "personhood."

You've no doubt heard by now that hundreds of thousands of good Hong Kong citizens have taken to the streets in protest of their government's attempts to pass a bill that could result in innocent citizens being extradited to China -- boy, that sure smells like corruption, doesn't it? -- and you may also have heard that Hong Kong's government has used violence to try to put down the protests. But you may not have heard (though you probably won't be surprised to hear) that Hong Kong law enforcement has been using American "crowd control" weapons to do it. Hence H.R. 4270, the Placing Restrictions on Teargas Exports and Crowd Control Technology to Hong Kong Act (or PROTECT Hong Kong Act), would prohibit the sales of the sorts of things police use to stifle good people's free speech rights -- and everyone has free speech rights, whether their governments recognize that or not. So Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to support free speech and peaceful protest in Hong Kong by passing the PROTECT Hong Kong Act.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell your House Reps to let Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act expire for good. Section 215, as you know, is the section that permits our government to hoover up financial, medical, and phone records without a warrant or even evidence of wrongdoing; it's the nightmare scenario dystopian writers warned us about for decades, and the fact that we're talking about it doesn't mean "it's not that big a deal," but only means dystopia doesn't arrive all at once or announce itself once it's here. (And, you know, Muslims and folks of color would probably disagree that "it's not that big a deal" in the first place.) But with even our National Security Agency opining that they don't really need all that information to do their work, and with Congress mulling USA PATRIOT Act reauthorization as we speak, now's a pretty good time to make our will known to our Congressfolk. I mean, anytime is a good time to make our will known, but we'd be fools to pass up good opportunities.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment that would help us rein in the campaign finance spending that lets big corporations have more say in our democracy than people do, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The Constitutional amendment in question is H.J.Res. 48, better known as the "Democracy for All" amendment, and would state explicitly that "(t)he rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only," and that "(a)rtificial entities" like corporations would be "subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law." That ought to help bring corporate power to heel, since corporate power is a problem right-wingers seem loathe to admit even exists. They pretend that since our Founders weren't very much concerned with it, we shouldn't be, either, but we're Americans, which means (among other things!) that we're not slaves to sophistry.

Action: concerning civil rights, impeachment, and law and order.

First things first: use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Yeah, I know, there's an impeachment effort going on, and we'll get to that, but our House has already worked to pass good legislation supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, and your Senators should work to pass this legislation, too. And if our President vetoes all of it, as I'm sure he would, then let him be accountable for it. It comes with the job, after all. Too often we excuse the inaction, or the bad actions, of our leaders. Let's stop doing that.

Meanwhile, you can use the aforementioned tools on this page to find phone numbers for your House Reps, too, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President for his wrongdoing. Don't call your Senators, though. They're supposed to try the impeachment. It's annoying to hear some of our Senators currently running for President call for impeachment, because that's rather like a judge demanding an indictment. But other Senators get their role wrong, too: Sen. Alexander said last week that though what our President did was "inappropriate," an impeachment proceeding would "only divide the country further." At least Mr. Alexander wasn't Administration crony Roger Stone, who said that impeachment would bring about "a spasm of violence and insurrection in this country like you’ve never seen" and that "a politician who votes for it will be endangering their own life." I don't know about you, but when evil people try to scare me into doing the wrong thing, that only makes me twice as resolved to do the right thing. Which is to call my Rep and tell them to impeach this arrogant, ignorant, unprincipled, sorry excuse for a President.

In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to hold Administration officials who ignore their subpoenas in contempt. Like me, you probably thought the law-and-order issues were pretty cut-and-dried, but apparently not! Apparently if our 46% President believes he can't be touched while in office, or that the impeachment proceeding against him is somehow "illegitimate," he can direct his underlings to defy legal writs to show up in court and testify! Actually, he can't do that, or else anyone could simply refuse to comply with the law, but Democrats in the House seem to be answering his defiance with a shrug, and though you might argue that we could interpret this collective shrug as a shrug of confidence, well, come on, these are Democrats we're talking about -- they're either weak, or they're actively collaborating with evil while merely appearing weak. But that's why we're here: to provide the steel in their spine so they can do the right thing.

Action: concerning human rights in Iran and Yemen.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell the government of Iran to release human rights lawyer/activist Nasrin Sotoudeh, then Amnesty International still helps you do that. Iran threw Ms. Sotoudeh in prison back in 2011, ostensibly for "spreading propaganda" and "conspiring to harm state security" but more likely for representing opposition figures in court; Iran threw her in jail again in 2018, this time supposedly for "espionage," "dissemination of propaganda," and "stoking corruption and prostitution," but also for two other charges, "being a member of a human rights organization" and "disparaging the Supreme Leader of Iran," which you'll easily recognize as charges snowflake governments throw at people. The latter prison sentence is likely really over her activism against compulsory wearing of the hijab (or head covering) in public (hence "prostitution," I suppose). If Iran throws people in jail for that, they deserve all the bad PR they get from the rest of the world. So let's help them change their ways -- or give them what they deserve.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that our Congress is finishing up its annual defense spending bill, and annual appropriations bills are often our best opportunity to force our government to do right by us, so Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to include amendments defunding our involvement in the Saudi/UAE-led war on Yemen. We've gone extensively into why we shouldn't fund this war: because we're aiding and abetting in the committing of war crimes in Yemen, because the Houthi rebels targeted by the Saudi/UAE coalition are some of the best al-Qaeda fighters around, and because the Saudi/UAE rationale for war has always seemed like inside baseball at best and petty absurdity at worst. Why should we antagonize a President who has already vetoed some form of disengagement from the war on Yemen four times this year? Because duty is duty and will is will, and we have a much better chance of having our will done if we communicate it to our Congressfolk, even when it's not convenient for them to hear it. And of course, we should not worry about antagonizing the President. He should worry about antagonizing us.

Action: concerning banksters, whistleblowers, and abortion.

Another year, another attempt to "reform" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by privatizing them, which would effectively end their efforts to help low-income working families own homes. This idea didn't originate with our President, but he's sure glommed onto it, as he seems to glom on to all bad ideas eventually. Of course, privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would not "modernize" them, unless you have a very low opinion of modernity indeed, and it certainly wouldn't "stop another financial meltdown," because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't cause that meltdown to begin with. Bankster greed and hifalutin financial instruments caused the meltdown, and it'll cause another one -- particularly since hedge fund managers (whom our President supposedly hates, but you don't believe that, because it is to laugh) have grabbed themselves a big chunk of both corporations, and are now hoping to fully add them to their casino economy. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Meanwhile, with whistleblowers all in the news these days, S. 2529, the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act, would (as its title suggests) better protect those whistleblowers who expose corruption in the financial services sector of our economy. The bill would clarify that the protections of our laws extend to whistleblowers in commodities and securities (our Supreme Court apparently being unclear about that), would speed up the processing of whistleblower claims, and would beef up funding to the CFTC Consumer Protection Fund. If we'd had stronger whistleblower protections in 2008, the banksters might not have come so close to completely destroying our economy as they did. It's not beating a dead horse to keep reminding you of the 2008 bankster meltdown, since Congress too often seems to forget it happened. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good American citizens who expose fraud and corruption by passing the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act.

Finally, with an overturning (or, at least, a crippling) of Roe v. Wade within our Supreme Court's grasp, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act. States have been putting up hurdles to women getting abortions since the Republican wave of 2010, but this bill would prevent states from putting up these hurdles, which include forced ultrasounds, unnecessary tests, medically-inaccurate information, third-trimester abortion bans, forcing women to explain why they want the abortion and denying them if the state doesn't find their explanation "good enough," and absurd physical plant requirements for hospitals (this final item coming up before our Supreme Court shortly, in June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee). Like I said yesterday, rights are rights regardless of how legislatures "feel" about them, and no one makes a man write an essay on why he wants a vasectomy before letting him have one, do they?

Action: concerning cable fees, abortion, and public lands.

Tired of surprise cable TV fees that inflate your bill by over $35 a month? Well, H.R. 1220/S. 510, the TRUE Fees Act, would essentially outlaw those fees by forcing cable corporations to include all of them upfront in a base subscription price. The bill would also let you get out of your cable contract without penalty if your provider pushes some new fee on you. Big cable corporations of course oppose the TRUE Fees Act, and they might well be telling you that TEH BIG GUMMINT FORCEZ UZ TO IMPOSEZ TEH FEEZ!!!!!, but you should know that they've lied about that in court before, and you should also consider that such an objection really doesn't matter, since the TRUE Fees Act requires transparency. And if the big cable corporations call it a "rate-fixing" maneuver (which it's not!), they should be prepared for your reaction to be we can only hope! Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support cable customers by passing the TRUE Fees Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1692/S. 758, the EACH Woman Act, would repeal the Hyde Amendment that has (except in very limited circumstances) prevented our government from funding abortions over the last 40-plus years. The problem with the Hyde Amendment is that it essentially makes a matter of right (you have a right to have an abortion, after all, per our Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade) into a matter of means -- folks who have the right to have an abortion but can't afford abortions can't get them (if Medicare, Medicaid, or other government-subsidized health insurance won't help them). I guess for some folks that's a feature, not a bug, but a right is a right for everyone, not just for the people who can afford it, and none of us should use the powerless as a political pawn in order to gain a small advantage. Do I particularly want abortions to happen? Of course not! No one does! But a right is a right, regardless of what we "want," and we don't ask of rights that they never challenge us. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support abortion rights by passing the EACH Woman Act and thus repealing the Hyde Amendment.

Finally, H.R. 4273/S. 2467, the Transit to Trails Act, would fund more public transportation buildout to public parks, so that everyone can enjoy the public parks we all pay for with our taxes. After all, why should only people who can afford cars get to visit public parks? Why shouldn't everyone? Remember: anyone whose answer would include words like "riffraff" is an elitist, and elitism is un-American. At least, that's how I was brought up. And anyone would would answer with a statement like THEY GET TEH GOODIEZ WHY CAN'T I!!!! very likely isn't counting the goodies they already get with their tax dollars. Seriously, if you pay taxes, as prescribed by law, you should get to enjoy the things your taxes buy. And folks who ask WHEREZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!! should note the $10 million annual price tag, which ain't much in the context of an annual $4 trillion federal budget. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve our access to our public parks by passing the Transit to Trails Act.

Action: concerning anti-Semitism, corporate welfare, and endangered species.

You may have heard that a group of racists have begun compiling a "list" of Jewish critics on the Telegram chat platform. You may not have heard that this project was apparently too racist for both 4chan and Twitter! The compilers claim they don't intend any violence, but of course they haven't explained what other purpose the list could have -- it couldn't be a mere attempt to alert folks about who their critics are, because it only has Jews on it; gosh, you'd think fighting a World War over this crap would have given contemporary folks more instruction. But nobody said winning and securing victories over evil was easy, so Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell Telegram to take down the anti-Semitic list. Again, this is a public list, and Telegram's own terms of service indicate they're a lot tougher on public utterances than private ones, and again, our First Amendment does not protect terroristic threats (and what else could this public list of Jews be?).

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 1100 -- which supporters call the "Energize PA Legislative Package," but detractors call the "Ethane Cracker Welfare" bill -- would indeed give corporate welfare handouts to manufacturers of petrochemicals and fertilizers. They act like not paying taxes on your expenses isn't enough! Does HB 1100, in its purported effort to "energize" our power grid, include any tax breaks for solar, wind, or geothermal corporations? Of course not -- it's almost like the reactionary state legislature only cares about handing out welfare to corporations that pollute more. Not to pile on, but ethane crackers (which are "petrochemical," after all) generally turn fracked gas into single-use plastic, and nobody thinks we really need more of that clogging up our land and water. Hence both Penn Environment and Food and Water Watch help you tell your state Senators to fight pollution and corporate welfare by rejecting HB 1100.

Finally, in the wake of our Administration's regulatory changes designed to gut the Endangered Species Act, H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the Protect America's Wildlife and Fish in Need Conservation (or PAW and FIN) Act, may give us yet another clumsy legislative acronym, but it would essentially nullify these recent changes, and prevent any other Administration from using "economic factors" to decide how it's going to enforce the Endangered Species Act. You know, there really aren't that many people who complain about "burdensome" regulations; mostly CEOs complain about it, because it forces them to spend some of that money they'd earmarked for gilding the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. They don't put it like that, of course -- they say it's a "burden on small businesses," as if "small businesses" go around killing endangered species with drilling projects! The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect endangered species by passing the PAW and FIN Act.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, impeachment, and Social Security.

Happy Monday, good peoples! It's time, once again, to call your Senator and tell them to support voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And none of them get to play the well-the-bills-aren't-getting-voted-on card, because they could use the prestige of their offices -- that which remains, at least -- and publicly pressure Mr. McConnell into holding a vote on the bill. Of course, none of them really want to do that, since he's making himself look bad on their behalf, knowing that if he allows a vote on these bills and they all vote against them, they'll look bad. But again: their 13-dimensional chess games don't matter; only our will matters.

After that, you may want to get your House Reps on the phone and demand that they support an impeachment inquiry against our President. I haven't advocated for his impeachment up until now, partly because the President I really wanted impeached (that would be Bush the Lesser) did worse, partly because I didn't want the Russia investigation to distract us from our duties as citizens, and partly because, well, I wanted him to twist in the wind until his own vanity and ignorance buried him. But when a man admits to trying to leverage foreign aid into a foreign investigation of a political opponent, then Congress would be derelict in its duty if they did not impeach. The fact that he's tried to un-admit it in the following days means nothing. Really, though, impeachment is too good for him. Whatever happens to him, one thing must happen: I want our descendants to point to this man and say see this guy? Don't be him. If you're gonna be like him, you deserve to be alone until death.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 860/S. 629, the Social Security 2100 Act, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would accomplish much of what we've been trying to accomplish for years: it would put Social Security on sounder financial footing (not that you should believe any hysteria about the "cost" of "entitlements"!) by expanding the income that can be taxed into the system, and although I think it's actually rather odd to exempt income between $132,900 and $400,000, that's still a big improvement. The bill would also expand benefits to ensure our seniors have a more dignified retirement, and would index future cost-of-living increases to a measure of inflation that would actually reflect the bills seniors face -- and not the stupid "chained CPI," which would assume that if a price rises too high, folks will just switch to something else! Seniors have fixed costs (like medicine) they can't just "switch" their way out of! So let's pass the Social Security 2100 Act and treat our seniors better.

Action: concerning drug policy, fossil fuels, and family planning funding.

H.R. 3884/S. 2227, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, would remove pot from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act -- which would make pot legal all across America -- and would also provide for reinvestment in communities most affected by pot arrests and would help folks serving pot-related sentences get them commuted or reduced. Frankly, the MORE Act's sentencing reforms and community reinvestment provisions aren't as direct (and therefore not as effective, I would think) as those of H.R. 1456/S. 597, the Marijuana Justice Act, but the Marijuana Justice Act's lead sponsor, Sen. Booker, is now a co-sponsor of the MORE Act. The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the MORE Act, but they allow you to edit the message, so nothing stops you, really, from using it to demand more effective drug policy reform legislation like the Marijuana Justice Act. Be sure to read both bills at Congress.gov beforehand, though; they're not long.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell General Electric to scuttle its plan to build coal plants across the planet. They must be figuring that since coal doesn't make any money in America anymore -- and that's not because of some imaginary "war on coal" but because of natural gas that's now much cheaper and renewable energy sources that are getting there -- they can make money building coal plants overseas. They might even be figuring that some of these countries would be lucky to have a coal plant! But that would be short-sighted and self-serving of them, since those countries would be even luckier to have renewable energy systems, which are just as easy for a corporation to build anymore. You have to wonder why GE doesn't do that! It couldn't be because, as Ralph Nader used to say, you can't own the sun and the wind, could it? I kid, of course -- the stew of short-sightedness and self-servingness I've already identified explains everything quite well. It's why I like people better than corporations.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to stop handing out Title X funds to notorious anti-birth control and anti-abortion centers, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. I expect this HHS effort to die in court one day -- the law authorizing our government to disperse Title X funding mandates that it fund comprehensive family planning services, not services that withhold information about abortion for supposed "conscience" reasons. Seriously, if that's your conscience, you're in the wrong business! I feel compelled to note that it's not necessarily conservative to oppose abortion -- Barry Goldwater used to say that the uterus was one more thing our government shouldn't meddle in. But a real conservative who opposes abortion wouldn't direct public funds to anti-abortion centers like this; a real conservative would amend our Constitution to outlaw abortion. You have to wonder why they don't.

Action: concerning hate speech, pollution, and paid family leave.

Facebook may have instituted a ban on explicit racist hate speech, but they seem to be having a little trouble enforcing it; that couldn't be because Facebook makes millions of dollars from ads promoting hate speech, could it? I suppose they'll tell us that they have a big platform and it's just very hard to find every instance of hate speech, but that only means their executives can break off some of their billions and hire more people to do the job. And remember what Dean Baker taught us: that Facebook is really a publishing platform, and thus should be subject to the same rules every other publishing house has to follow (though the law doesn't see it that way); they don't have a "right" to put up all manner of hate speech any more than ABC has to accept every single idea for a sitcom they get. Hence Free Press helps you tell Facebook to do a damn sight better at keeping racist pablum off its platform. (While we're at it, we might as well let CREDO helps us tell Twitter to do the same, since Twitter's brain trust, such as it is, doesn't even seem to find it a priority.)

Meanwhile, another day, another Obama-era anti-pollution regulation our current Administration wants to roll back because Obama! This time, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) wants to make it easier for coal corporations to spew out coal ash, because what's a little undrinkable water when there are already absurdly high executive salaries to plump up even further? Of course, our EPA will accept public comments on their proposal until October 15, so Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to reject its own proposal to roll back coal ash protections. Coal ash puts arsenic, lead, and other carcinogens in our groundwater, which makes folks sick; just ask the good citizens of Roane County, TN, where a coal ash pond ruptured in 2008, spewing forth over a billion gallons of coal ash slurry, or the good citizens of Eden, NC, where a pipe running underneath a Duke Energy coal ash pond ruptured and spewed nearly 40,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River. They're the folks our EPA is supposed to protect from pollution.

Finally, H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act, would, as you may know, establish a paid family leave program in America, to be funded by a 0.4% payroll tax to be divided equally between employer and employee, and no, that's not "4 percent" or "40 percent," in case our "liberal" media tells you that. People who make that "mistake" on cable news programs should be fired! Sorry, I've seen that too often to just let it go. This means that if you make $50,000 annually, you'd pay a total of $100 annually to support a program where everyone who works (including yourself!) can get family medical leave benefits. $100! That's $8.33 a month! That's a little over five junior bacon cheeseburgers at Wendy's! I don't like how we always sacrifice so that Our Glorious Elites don't have to, but this is hardly a crippling sacrifice, and (unless you're self-employed) you won't even be footing the whole bill out of your paycheck. Hence CREDO helps you tell our Congressfolk to support working families by passing the FAMILY Act.

Action: concerning war with Iran, billboards in space, and facial recognition technology.

As you no doubt know, our President's in a good bit of trouble right at the moment! And you know what that could mean? Why, it could mean war with Iran! Yeah, I know, he's made noises about not wanting war with Iran, and he did cut John Bolton loose not too long ago, but he's also done a lot of saber-rattling lately and plans to send more troops to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Now, a lot of his attempts to gin up a war have fallen flat so far, and you have to hope we all remember how Bill Clinton fired a couple of missiles in Mr. bin Laden's direction a couple days after admitting to his affair with Ms. Lewinsky -- not to mention all the times we got color-coded terror alerts from Tha Bush Mobb after some unrelated reversal or other! But, just in case our President is able to change the subject from his own rotten doings, Demand Progress helps you tell our Congressfolk to ensure our President can't go to war with Iran without Congressional approval. You know, like our Constitution says.

Meanwhile, some corporations want to put giant billboards in orbit! Yes, it's true! Like we don't have enough crap in the sky! Actually, the "billboards" will be groups of satellites that congregate to form the image of a corporate logo, but the difference is semantic, and the end result will be the same: you won't be able to look up at the sky without someone trying to sell you something. And, ah, you can imagine what'll happen if even more satellites occupy the night sky, right? Some of them will accidentally crash into each other. This may be what led the late, great Carl Sagan to call billboards in the sky an "abomination." Yes, not only is this a bad idea, it's an old idea, which also makes it a zombie idea. Well, we all know what to do with zombies, so Environmental Action helps you tell your House Reps to put the beatdown on the notion of giant floating billboards in the sky. People spend their time wishing for a better future and floating billboards is what they come up with?

Speaking of which, Fight for the Future helps you tell major live event corporations not to use facial recognition technology at their events. Why? Facial recognition technology invades the privacy you expect to have at a live event -- yes, you do expect some privacy, even at a "public event"; does everyone need to know where you are at all times? Facial recognition technology is also pretty terrible; no doubt you have heard that facial recognition technology, like your Tea Party uncle, can't tell black people apart very well. No government at any level regulates facial recognition technology very well -- for example, none of them regulate how long a corporation can hold onto the data it's scraped at a live show. And using this bad, unregulated, invasive technology can do folks real harm -- it can get them deported, detained, or otherwise harassed, again because our governments don't do their job and regulate how corporations can use the technology. And rather than hold our breath and wait for governments to do their job, let's just not use the crap, OK?

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, trade agreements, and surprise hotel fees

It's Monday, which means it's the day we call our Senators and tell them to support voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers. We give Mob Boss Mitch a lot of guff, and justifiably so, for refusing to even hold votes on any of this legislation because he thinks he's the boss of us and he knows better than us, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Democrats might have passed all these bills because they knew they wouldn't pass and it would make them look good without actually accomplishing anything. But their 13-dimensional chess games don't matter; only our will matters.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them not to vote on the USMCA trade agreement (a.k.a. "NAFTA 2.0") until our Administration fixes it. Specifically, you'll ask them to ensure our Administration gets rid of the corporate welfare for big pharma and improves the labor/environmental standards, and I think you should also make a point of saying that you want the changes to the investor/state dispute settlement (or ISDS) system either kept or made even better, because the USMCA isn't all bad just because the President who negotiated it is an irredeemable asshole. If they renegotiated the deal to get rid of the corporate welfare and the lax standards but also put back the ISDS system that enables foreign investors to nullify our laws and allows corporations to outsource our jobs, I'd say that's an even worse deal. So be sure you communicate your will precisely to your Congressfolk. They just love "mishearing" you, or telling you their pile of crap is exactly the meatloaf you asked for.

Finally, if you're fed up with surprise fees in your hotel bills -- fees that bleed almost $3 billion a year out of our bank accounts -- then Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4489, the Hotel Advertising Transparency Act of 2019. H.R. 4489 -- per one of its sponsors, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) -- "would require the prices regularly advertised by hotels and online travel agencies to include all mandatory fees that will be charged to a consumer, excluding taxes." Hence they won't be able to hide their "WiFi fees" and their "in-room safe fees" and their "resort fees" and even their "towel fees" (I know, right?) in their "low" prices. Gosh, how long before they start charging "bed fees" and "wall fees" and "floor fees" and "no secret camera behind your mirror fees"? Hotels have largely concocted these hidden fees in response to the pressure of winning in online comparison shopping, which only proves (as if we needed more proof!) that the future ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Action: concerning worker safety and discriminatory travel bans.

H.R. 3668, the Asuncion Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, would mandate that our Secretary of Labor, whomever that is, issue regulations that prevent workers from dying of heat exposure. Heat causes more deaths than any other weather-related phenomena, after all, and it'd be nice to have national standards that might protect workers from falling dead after 10 hours picking grapes in 105 degree heat, as Mr. Valdivia himself did in 2004. If you read the bill, you'll be pleased to see that it tells the Secretary of Labor to create a good heat exposure standard -- if the Secretary of Labor, whomever that is, decides, for example, to simply ignore the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's 2016 recommended standard for heat exposure, then they'll run afoul of Sec. 4(a)(1) of the bill, and federal courts will strike it down. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect workers by passing the Asuncion Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, and thus repeal our President's infamous Muslim ban, then CREDO still helps you do that. The House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees have begun hearings on this bill this week, so this might get to a full House bill in the coming months, and then get added to the list of bills we tell the Senate to pass even though "Mob Boss Mitch" won't let them come to a vote. Even if the bill dies in the Senate, we always do good when we communicate our will to our Congressfolk, and if they refuse to do our will, then we have them on the record as having failed us. The NO BAN Act wouldn't just roll back our President's Muslim ban -- which our Supreme Court blessed even though our President said, out loud, that he totally intended to single out Muslims -- but would greatly hamper his ability to issue future bans based on religion. And that is kind of the point of our Constitution, gang -- to prevent Presidents from having all the say about everything.

Action: concerning corruption and more corruption.

You may have heard that our House of Representatives has launched a formal impeachment inquiry against our President, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to get our President's tax returns as part of any impeachment effort. Don't brook any silliness from the right about "re-litigating the 2016 election" -- the same election in which 54% of the electorate voted against our President and he only won by getting pluralities in three swing states, but I digress -- because if he's really got nothing to be afraid of, he ought to cough up his tax returns. More likely he does have a lot to be afraid of -- not just of good Americans finding out exactly how compromised he is, which should be the focus of an impeachment investigation, but also of good Americans finding out he's actually dirt-poor in real terms, which would be icing on the cake. But generally, if the President fears it, we ought to do it.

In a related note, Win Without War still helps you tell Speaker Pelosi to ensure that the part of the House defense authorization bill that forbids our Department of Defense from spending taxpayer money at our President's properties makes it through conference. You can almost see her saying well, we don't need this now, because we've got an impeachment going on, can you? You can also see the impeachment effort falling flat, and then we'll be left with neither a justly-disgraced President nor the force of law preventing taxpayer money going right into said President's pockets. Really, it's the right thing to do, keeping taxpayer money from lining our President's pockets; you can imagine our Founders agreeing, right? You can also imagine our Founders spinning in their graves over the continued drama of this President abusing his power and enriching himself off these abuses. But you can't count on Congress to stop it -- unless we make our will unmistakably known to them.

Action: concerning airplane safety and pollution.

In the wake of the news that our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) never actually independently looked at the cause of two deadly Boeing crashes, but rather let Boeing tell them what they found out on their own, Penn PIRG helps you tell our FAA to stop outsourcing its regulatory duties to the private corporations it nominally oversees. It's a simple principle, really -- make corporations follow the law and do the right thing, rather than ask them if they're following the law and doing the right thing and just take their word for it -- but it has too often seemed a difficult task for the last six Presidential Administrations. Of course too many Americans (though not a majority) still regard regulations as a "burden" upon corporations. They don't regard laws against burglary as a "burden" on burglars, and they tend to change their tune when regulatory failure directly affects them, but we can't wait for their wisdom to catch up with ours.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our legislature is trying, yet again, to pass bills that would hamstring our state's ability to keep big oil and gas drilling corporations from polluting. HB 1106 would give our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) a mere 30 days to review gas and oil drilling permits, which wouldn't allow time for legally-mandated public comments, while HB 1107 would terminate all DEP employees currently involved in permit evaluations and would replace them with a five-member Commission appointed, of course, by the legislature. Again, it sure seems like politicians' anti-regulatory fervor only seems to affect good regulations. Might we call HB 1106/HB 1107 supporters objectively pro-pollution? Hey, civility is their shield and sword, not mine; mine is truth. The Center for Coalfield Justice helps you tell your PA state legislator to protect us from pollution by rejecting HB 1106 and HB 1107.

Action: concerning copyrights and monopolies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from copyright trolls by rejecting H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act. Yeah, this bill would provide an "alternative" to fighting copyright issues out in court, and whenever someone proposes an "alternative" to the day in court that is your right, you should be suspicious. The CASE Act, as it happens, would create a "Copyright Claims Board" -- not even composed of judges, but of "claims officers" -- that could enforce penalties of up to $30,000 against you. $30,000! Nearly half of Americans don't have even $400 lying around! And what might you do to get a judgment against you? Share a meme or a video online! Seriously, that's all you might have to do! And it's something you probably do all the time! Of course, a copyright troll knows where all the loopholes in the law are, but why should they get more say than we do?

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FDIC to block the proposed BB&T/SunTrust merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. Haven't heard of BB&T or SunTrust? Southerners have -- and if we allow them to merge, then we'll all hear about the resulting behemoth they're planning to call Truist. Truist? I guess they think if people hear the name enough, they'll think it's a real word, and I can't entirely blame them for that, I suppose, since these are the days Our Glorious Elites repeat almost anything enough that large segments of the population will believe it. But I'm so old-fashioned I only want to keep corporations from getting so big that they run roughshod over our rights, and this would be the biggest merger allowed to go through since the 2008 bankster meltdown that almost destroyed our economy. Unless we stand in the way, of course -- and we should stand in the way. Why do we let money make all our decisions for us? And what kind of world will we leave for our children and our children's children?

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and war with Iran.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act, well, you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers. Regardless of what they say, it is absolutely your Senators' job to be supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections. Don't be thrown off by Mob Boss Mitch's recent embrace of $250 million in federal funding for secure elections, either. The SAFE act would provide more than that, plus it would mandate paper ballots, which would be a lot better than having our votes simply disappear into the ether. Though some Senators would want them to disappear.

Meanwhile, with ramped-up saber rattling over Iran in the news lately, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the recent must-pass defense bill explicitly forbids our President from waging war in Iran without Congressional approval. I know, our President fired long-time Iran war-monger John Bolton, and told Lindsey Graham to stop trying to push him into a war he doesn't want, but that's all drama -- our President (who still loves another Iran war-monger, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo) could merely be waiting until Iran does something, or possibly "does something." Don't tolerate the folks who whimper that "we don't want to tie the President's hands" by forcing him to go to Congress for a war declaration as our Constitution requires. How many times must I tell these pimps! Congress is supposed to tie the President's hands in exactly this manner, so that our President doesn't haul us off to war after war after war. This is one of the reasons we broke away from King George III, for Christ's sake!

Action: concerning war with Iran, racist housing policy, and school lunch shaming.

You've heard that our President doesn't want to go to war with Iran? Don't you believe it! No, him firing John Bolton doesn't mean we're in the clear, and him fighting Lindsey Graham over Iran policy doesn't mean we're in the clear, either. What would put us in the clear? Communicating our will to our Congressfolk that we don't want another stupid war in the Middle East, that's what! Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Khanna-Gaetz amendment, forbidding funding of any military operations in Iran without explicit Congressional approval, in must-pass defense authorization legislation. Seriously, if you're thinking that maybe this President is "different," or that only he can stop the "deep state," stop that. True, this President may be less adept at maneuvering the levers of power than his predecessors, but he only cares about his own ego, and the only people who can stop the "deep state" are us. So we need to keep working.

Meanwhile, our Administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed gutting civil rights protections mandated by the Fair Housing Act, so the National Women's Law Center helps you tell our HUD to stop its efforts to let more landlords discriminate against folks of color. I don't know what their rationale for this move is. I kinda hope it isn't we don't need these protections anymore, because, gosh, have they talked to a real estate agent? Real estate was, for many years, the last place you could get away with saying something openly racist like "this is a good neighborhood because it's mostly white." Actually, I do know what their rationale is -- our President and his father got sued real good back in the 1970s for refusing to put folks of color in their apartments. Is this his revenge? I kinda hope not, because a man who'd do that is a small man indeed, and I prefer to believe the best about people.

Finally, you may have heard that schools have been shaming kids whose parents can't pay school lunch fees, sometimes by making kids wear wristbands (gosh, so many people love strutting around these days, I wonder why?) or by putting their names on public lists. I've said we shouldn't be afraid to shame people, but we shouldn't shame kids who did nothing wrong -- we should shame adults who, for example, redistribute everyone's income upward to themselves! Anyway, H.R. 3366/S. 1907, the No Shame at School Act, would prohibit this kind of school lunch shaming, plus it would prevent school districts from handing over parents' private info to debt collectors -- because this, too, is apparently a thing now -- and it would streamline the certification process for school kids so that simple misspellings (for example) won't lead to school lunch debt. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out working families by passing the No Shame at School Act.

Action: concerning our Estate Tax, patent trolls, and compassion for hurricane victims.

S. 309, the For the 99.8% Act, would hike our Estate Tax on larger-income estates, i.e., those over $750,000, and create more progressive brackets for Estate Taxes, such that folks who leave billion-dollar estates would pay 77 percent on that part of the estate over a billion dollars, and estates over $10 million dollars would get taxed overall at rates much closer to 50% than they are now. (The high end of the Estate Tax rate is currently 40 percent.) Right-wingers have been having all the say about this matter for a long time now, what with their calling it the "death tax" even though (as the bill's title suggests!) much fewer than 1% of Americans will ever have to pay it! And if we don't tax large estates, then we won't be able to restrain the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to make Estate Taxes fairer and more vigorous by passing the For the 99.8 Percent Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3666/S. 2082, the so-called STRONGER Patents Act, would let patent trolls have their way in America by gutting the inter partes review process, which allows folks to challenge the validity of patents. And a lot of patents, quite frankly, need to be challenged, or else the Patent Office wouldn't have thrown out over 1,500 patents over the last seven years (more than one every other day!) via the IPR process. Patent trolls go around patenting every widely-used thing they can, like crowdfunding and messaging and picture menus, so they can sue craploads of people and win craploads of money, and of course Congress wants to make patents "stronger" so they can withstand scrutiny, rather than making them better so that real innovators can benefit from their work. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect real innovation in America by rejecting the STRONGER Patents Act.

Finally, Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas hard, depriving tens of thousands of good Bahamians of access to food, water, and shelter, but our President, peach of a man that he is, doesn't want to allow any victims of the hurricane to seek refuge in America, because some of them are bad people, or something. He really wants you to think this country has just never had a system to vet people who want to come here! Of course the Temporary Protected Status (or TPS) system has long existed to help out folks who flee their country because of natural disasters, hence H.R. 4272, the TPS for Victims of Hurricane Dorian Act, would allow Bahamians to live and work here for the next 18 months. 18 months! Some folks enjoy TPS status for decades, so bad off are their home countries. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to show some compassion by passing the TPS for Victims of Hurricane Dorian Act.

Action: concerning jobs for good people and book deals for bad people.

H.R. 3614, the Restricting Credit Checks for Employment Decisions Act, would prevent most employers from using credit checks as a part of their hiring decisions. What's wrong with that, you ask? Well, credit reports tend to have mistakes -- and you'd hate to pass someone over because of such a mistake, wouldn't you? -- and credit reports predict employee performance about as well as those 300-question "integrity tests" did back in the '80s. And another thing: we did have a major financial services meltdown a little over a decade ago, and that wrecked a lot of good folks' credit. You know what else wrecks people's credit and has little to do with job performance? Massive health care bills, that's what. The result? Folks who get slammed by life and can't get work wind up with bad credit -- and then can't get a job because of their bad credit! If that seems absurd to you, US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families who hit hard times by passing the Restricting Credit Checks for Employment Decisions Act.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell book publishing corporation Macmillan Publishers to terminate its book deal with former Administration spokeshack Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Isn't that mean, you ask? No meaner than she's been to everyone she's come into contact with, that's for sure! And isn't that "abridgment of her free speech rights"? No, it's not -- our First Amendment guarantees that our government can't throw you in jail for your speech; it does not guarantee a book contract for everyone in America. I'm not hopeful that Macmillan will see the light here -- their PR flacks cited her "grace under pressure" (it's not "grace" just because you don't yell!) and how she spent years "battling the media," rather than her years battling the popular will. But, as I've said, Ms. Sanders doesn't have a "right" to a book contract, and we have the right to protest Macmillan's decision. They also have the right to tell us to go scratch. But that's not going to be a good look someday. Think of how many Bush Mobbers have book contracts these days!

Action: concerning government spying and corporate spying.

The notorious USA PATRIOT Act, as you likely know, has been renewed through the end of this calendar year, and that gives us another opportunity to tell our Congressfolk to stop unconstitutional government spying, as Demand Progress helps you do. Congress changed Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to stop government collection of citizen metadata without a warrant -- though it requires big telecom corporations to collect this information, which our government can then get with a warrant. That ain't nothing, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) deserves credit for forcing the PATRIOT Act's expiration in 2015 (if only for a calendar day) so that its reauthorization would be an improvement. Still, expanded government spying not only violates our civil rights, but doesn't stop terrorist attacks -- though it does give our government even more tools to spy on protestors and folks of color. And you may have noticed that this Administration is openly hostile to protestors and folks of color! So let's make Congress do the right thing.

Meanwhile, speaking of runaway surveillance, you've seen ads for Amazon Ring, right? The video doorbell that allows you to see who's ringing your bell if you're out of the house, or something? Well, turns out over 400 police departments are "partnering" with Amazon to spy on people's homes using their Ring doorbells. They're not putting it like that, of course, and they're taking great pains to say that folks don't have to hand over their footage to police who request them, and it sure is a good thing that police never, ever abuse their power to coerce folks into handing over such info. Seriously, a private corporation with a massive surveillance network is bad enough, but a private corporation with that network collaborating with the police is considerably worse. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell your local officials to spurn such a partnership with Amazon. While you're at it, you ought to tell Alexa to get the hell out of your house. Being spied on ain't worth the 10 seconds you save because you don't have to physically find Barry White on your iPod.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and Administration corruption.

Happy Monday, good peoples! You know what comes next: the list of bills we're going to call our Senators and tell them to pass, namely H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And now that H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, has also passed the House, we can add it to this list, and all future lists, until Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell deigns to allow a vote on them. What's he so afraid of? That by allowing a vote he'll let his caucus go on record as opposing voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, secure elections, and public lands? Of course that is something to be afraid of, since all these things are actually quite popular with the American people and don't hurt anyone but already-too-rich CEOs. But if you want to be a Senator, you should have at least some cojones.

Meanwhile, with the news that our government has been putting up military personnel at one of our President's hotels in Scotland at taxpayer expense, and that Vice President Pence stayed at one of our President's hotels several hours away from his actual business in Ireland, Win Without War helps you tell House Speaker Pelosi to support an amendment to the defense authorization bill that would prevent our military from staying at our President's hotels. Time was that anyone in a position to divert taxpayer money to their own properties would at least make some effort at disguising what they're doing, but we live in a truly sick, immoral, and decadent time, when our President simultaneously thumbs his nose at the rule of law and declares that he alone can protect law and order! Some folks applaud his money-making, no doubt thinking of themselves (in Will Rogers's phrase) not as poor folks but as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." But most of us have been so poor for so long now that we don't wink at corruption anymore.

Action: concerning corporate tax avoidance, health care, and workplace harassment.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell Congress to investigate allegations of over $2.5 billion in tax dodging on the part of Walmart. Walmart apparently created a fake overseas entity in a foreign country that (conveniently) neither the foreign country nor ours would claim jurisdiction upon, but whatever the details, fact is Walmart doesn't pay enough in taxes, and that means less of the good services we all expect from our tax money. I know some folks, unscrupulous and not, will claim that we're taking "low prices" hostage by "going after Walmart." But saying don't make Walmart pay more in taxes, or we won't be able to afford paper towels is itself a hostage crisis, and quite unbecoming of the American can-do spirit. As for the folks who don't have anywhere to get their groceries other than Walmart, we can do other things to fix that -- like, say, aiding farmers' markets and breaking monopolies.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Rep to co-sponsor H.R. 1384, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. H.R. 1384 has 118 co-sponsors, but as you know, the House has 435 members, 235 of whom are Democrats, meaning that just over half of the more left-leaning party supports Medicare-for-All. And they should support it! The Medicare for All Act would insure all Americans, cut costs (mainly by cutting administrative overhead), and let you keep your doctor (by forcing doctors to accept Medicare for All health insurance, except those who only perform services the bill doesn't cover, like high-end plastic surgery). The big health insurance corporations say folks like their health insurers ("until they actually try to use it" is the part they leave out!) and generally fearmongering the population. But we're can-do Americans, and we don't have to put up with that.

Finally, H.R. 2148/S. 1082, the BE HEARD in the Workplace Act, would expand protections against workplace harassment in a number of ways. The bill would, for the first time, expand the law's protections to interns, trainees, volunteers, independent contractors, and small business workers, and would also help workers redress the harm caused them by harassment by outlawing forced arbitration agreements and restricting the use of non-disclosure agreements. (You'll recall that Gretchen Carlson couldn't take Fox News's Roger Ailes to court for his sexual harassment of her because of a forced arbitration agreement in her employment contract.) And if you hear someone say this bill would prevent them from doing business, you're free to wonder how much of their business model depends on harassment. The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families by passing the BE HEARD Act.

Action: concerning war on Yemen, public water, and public lands.

So what else is up with the must-pass defense spending bill? The House version restricts our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen -- a war where we're somehow helping kill some of the best al-Qaeda fighters on Earth! -- and prevents our government from selling weapons to the Saudi/UAE coalition; the Senate version, naturally, doesn't have these provisions, but it's conference time, and why should we settle for weak conference bills when we could demand strong ones? Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep strong anti-war provisions in the defense spending bill. I don't care that our President might veto it -- wasn't he supposed to bring a different kind of foreign policy to the Oval Office, instead of doing whatever Israel and Saudi Arabia want him to do? Meanwhile, good Yemenis starve to death and watch their children get bombed at school.

Meanwhile, Nestlé is at it again, this time trying to get its permit renewed to draw over a million gallons of public water per day from Florida's Santa Fe River. How many times must I tell these pimps! People need all the water they can get! They sure as hell don't need some big corporation siphoning it off and selling it back to them! Naturally, the Suwannee River Water Management District (which covers the Santa Fe) has declared the Santa Fe to be "in recovery" as of 2014 -- meaning that it didn't meet the District's minimum requirements for river flows and water levels -- and back then, Nestlé was "only" siphoning off a quarter of what it's proposing now! I doubt the Santa Fe would "recover" from Nestlé suddenly drawing off four times the water it used to draw off. Hence CREDO helps you tell the Suwannee River Water Management District to reject Nestlé's petition to siphon off even more public water than it did before the Santa Fe declined.

Finally, our President has been trying to get our National Forest Service to re-evaluate whether the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which applies to national forests, also applies to the Tongass National Forest, and perhaps suspecting he'd lose that argument (as evidenced by the fact that the name "Tongass National Forest" does, in fact, contain the words "national" and "forest" in it), he's now told our Secretary of Agriculture to open up some 10 million acres of the Tongass to loggers! Brazil's Mr. Bolsonaro told farmers and loggers to burn whatever they wanted out of the Amazon, and then our President did what? He got jealous! Our President really does teach us all about the Seven Deadly Sins. And we can in turn teach him about, you know, the rule of law and the fact that words do actually mean things by telling our Department of Agriculture to reject any plans to allow logging in the Tongass National Forest, as CREDO helps us do.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, factory farm waste, PFAS chemicals, and food safety.

California actually passed strong campaign finance disclosure legislation in 2017, but that law didn't cover everything -- it still lets big donors push out mass text messages without revealing themselves, and it also hides the big donors behind massive petitioning efforts. But AB 201 and SB 47 would close these loopholes, so the California Clean Money Action Fund helps you tell California state legislators to do more to expose big campaign donors by passing these bills. AB 201 would force candidates to put their names on text messages and PACs to put committee names or URLs leading to disclosure info; SB 47 would require petition gatherers to disclose the top three donors of that petition before soliciting a signature. We're looking at a few hundred million text messages and over two dozen ballot initiatives (in 2018) that require more sunlight, so this isn't a "solution looking for a problem" -- you know, like Voter ID or Interstate Crosscheck.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3844, the Farmer Fairness Act, would at least address this issue as it related to factory farm waste. As it is now, big ag corporations have gamed the system so that the small farmers who own the animals on factory farms take all the blame for the waste on big factory farms, while the big ag corporations make off with all the profit! But the Farmer Fairness Act would "require all persons exercising substantial operational control over the concentrated animal feeding operation," which would include anyone who "exercises any control over the activities, operation, or management of a concentrated animal feeding operation." Hence both small farmer and big factory farm would be on the hook for polluting nearby rivers and streams with their animal waste. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big ag domination of small farmers by passing the Farmer Fairness Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would better address the clean-up of ubiquitous and poisonous PFAS chemicals, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. Specifically, you'd tell your Congressfolk to support provisions of the must-pass defense authorization bill that would better track PFAS contamination and better coordinate PFAS cleanup efforts; this is a big deal -- not just because scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, thyroid disease, and liver damage, not just because you can find PFAS chemicals in so many commonplace items ranging from nonstick saucepans to food packaging, but also because firefighting foam is a major source of PFAS chemicals, and our soldiers do put out a lot of fires. So, for once, let's pass some defense spending that helps all of us, and not just some defense contracting corporation's CEO.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our Administration's plans to reduce safety inspections at pork processing plants, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. What on Earth has possessed our last two Administrations to try to mess with meat inspections? Do they not know that food poisoning always gets into the news? It seems like the best of our politicians listen too much to big agricultural corporations like they know everything, when mostly what they know is how to redistribute income upward from consumers (and farmers!) to themselves. Some "expertise," that. Of course, the worst of our politicians only pretend to be that stupid, but actually mean to make their big ag cronies richer and damn the consequences for everyone else. Oh, well, I guess Americans are only the people who eat the food. Seriously, we deserve better, from both our food processing corporations and our politicians.

Action: concerning robocalls, working families, Arctic drilling, and racist policing.

Both houses of Congress have passed anti-robocall bills, and now they must conference out a bill to send to our President, and you know how House/Senate conferences can be a good place to pull all the teeth from good legislation, so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the strongest possible anti-robocall bill. The ideal bill would give good Americans free call-blocking tools and anti-spoofing technology, force all robocallers to get your permission before even calling you, and get tough with those who'd violate either of these tenets. Yes, there's a time to get tough and a time to go easy; usually the emptiest wagons of our law-and-order discourse get tough and easy at all the wrong times, but I can assure you that getting tough on robocallers would be getting it right. None of us want people we don't know calling us, particularly if they're just trying to separate us from our money.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3760/S. 2112, the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act, would fix a major injustice inflicted upon domestic workers: their near-total exclusion from the protection of federal labor laws. Domestic workers often can't get overtime pay, can't get workers' comp, and can't get justice when their employer harasses them; would you put up with that if it were you, or someone you loved? No use protesting that my boss treats me/my loved one fine, so I don't need the law, because laws are for everyone, and if something happened to you or your loved one, you might find our your boss is a fair-weather friend, and then you'll need the protection of the law. Would it be piling on to mention that most domestic workers are folks of color? No, it would not be piling on. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act.

In other news, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, may come up for a vote in the House this week -- at which point I guess we'll be adding it to our weekly list of good House bills that Mob Boss Mitch won't allow the Senate to vote on, but it's still very much worth it to call your House Rep and tell them to support the bill, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps you do. Drilling anywhere in the Arctic is a dicey proposition, as it's much harder to clean up a spill in frigid waters than it is in more temperate waters and oil corporations don't even want to do that, right, BP? But drilling in the Arctic also interferes with a) a thriving salmon industry and b) a Native American population that deserves our protection from corporate greed. Sadly, we also must consider that this President can't be trusted to develop a region with any other aim in mind than to enrich his cronies. So let's stand against him and his venality yet again.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FBI to stop targeting folks who protest fascism, cruel immigration policy, and racist policing, then Free Press still helps you do that. Right-wing politicians from our President on down have the gall to think these are the folks who threaten our nation, while all these white supremacist murderers swing their penises in our faces! Of course, these white supremacists generally support right-wing politicians from our President on down, but our FBI is supposed to be above all that, and if, historically, they haven't been, that's no reason to demand better of them, since, really, they work for us. And I'll brook no silliness about how they're our "first defense" against trouble and thus we should let them do what they want. Civilized people set boundaries, tell these "defenders" when they've gone too far, and take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. That's not too much to ask of us.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, and secure elections.

It's Monday, so it's time to call your Senators once again and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. You can find your Senators' phone numbers 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 you can find Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell's phone numbers here, though you'll have to scroll down a bit to find them. I mention Mob Boss Mitch, of course, because our House has passed all of these bills, but our Senate hasn't, because Mr. McConnell won't allow any votes on them. Didn't know that was how democracy worked, did you? Anyway, you don't have to tell your Senators why they should pass these bills, unless you really want to -- their staffers are there to take down your will, not argue with you about it. But I'm going to go ahead and describe the bills (and the paltry arguments against them) in some detail, since I haven't in a while, and I want you to get to the phone with the most confidence you can have. If you do, they'll sense that, and if enough of us call them, they'll bend to our will.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, includes a lot of terrific initiatives -- it would allow national automatic voter registration, require disclosure of large campaign contributions, create a public campaign financing system, make Election Day a national holiday, and mandate that states use nonpartisan commissions to draw up districts. All of these things have large support across the ideological spectrum, and their opposites (making it harder to vote or register to vote, letting state legislators carve out Rorschach-blot fiefdoms, letting corporations spend whatever they want to elect their lackeys) don't. What did Mob Boss Mitch have to say about the For the People Act? He called it "a Democrat power grab," which every right-winger in America would call whining if a liberal said something similar. And if a man equates more access to voting with Democrats getting more power, he might want to think about how maybe Republicans aren't convincing enough people to vote for them. That'd be pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps thinking, wouldn't it? So your Senators have no excuse to oppose the For the People Act. That's going to be a theme in the next several paragraphs.

H.R. 5, the Equality Act, would amend the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folk, who can still get fired, denied housing, and denied credit just because of who they are and whom they love. The objections to the Equality Act are truly ludicrous and, frankly, reminiscent of racist objections to fair housing laws in the 1960s -- haters say they'll be "forced" to hire gay or transgender folk when the truth is the law would force them not to discriminate against them merely because they're gay or transgender, and folks who can't tell the difference between these things may not be cut out for the hard work of civilization. But wait, there's more! Haters pretend employers will be prevented from firing gay or transgender folk for good reasons, which they won't, and that male athletes will get sex changes in droves to compete and dominate in women's sports leagues, which, like, can you see such athletes hanging out with their crew after doing something like that? I mean, duh. The haters are not only wrong, they're stupidly wrong. That's also going to be a theme in the next several paragraphs.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, is not a "boon to trial lawyers" as its opponents say, but merely a bill that would give women more tools to fight pay discrimination. The bill would outlaw clauses in employment contracts that prevent workers from talking about their pay, and would prevent retaliation against employees who do talk about their pay -- and these are important, since talking about your pay is usually how you find out you're being shafted. The bill would still allow employers to pay men and women differently based on bona fide factors like, you know, skill levels and qualifications, but would restrict employers' ability to manufacture a "bona fide factor" merely based on salary. You know, of course he's more qualified, I pay him more, QED? The bill would also stiffen penalties for discriminating against women workers. And somehow all those good things get translated into BUT TEH TRIALZ LAWYERZ!!!!! in the right-wing mind, as if the words "trial lawyers" are a magic spell that transforms all bad arguments into good ones. Ranting about "trial lawyers" is just playing team sports, but our real duty as citizens is to do good works.

H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour gradually over the next six years -- yeah, I made sure to put those last six words there, for all the haters who say IT'S TOO TEH FASTZ!!!!! -- and would increase that minimum wage every year thereafter in accordance with the rise in the median hourly wage, so that maybe we'll never have to hear again how some 70-year-old made $2/hour when they were starting out and what's wrong with kids today? When they made $2/hour, it had the buying power of $12-$15/hour, which is, as you see, higher than our current minimum wage. The bill would also hike the minimum wages for tipped workers and disabled workers gradually and close the gap between these and the regular minimum wage -- because you don't think big corporations will try to convert everyone into a tipped or disabled employee just to avoid paying them more? Dear reader, they will. So don't brook these complaints, or any scare numbers about "jobs lost" that either won't actually happen or would amount to a drop in the bucket of monthly job creation numbers, and certainly wouldn't compare with all the good folks a higher minimum wage would bring out of poverty.

H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, would reverse the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order which originally encoded the principle of net neutrality in law. Net neutrality, as you know, dictates that internet service-providing corporations should deliver all files to your computer at the same speed and with the same priority -- and this principle alone has made the internet the greatest information-sharing source of all time. But the corporatists at the FCC hated that, because it meant you had the power to determine where you wanted to go on the internet, and corporations had less power to herd you into junk news ghettoes like they do so easily on TV or in print. So don't brook, for example, Justice Kavanaugh's argument that corporations have a First Amendment "right" to restrict whatever internet traffic they like, as if we somehow don't have First Amendment rights to visit whatever website we want! Net neutrality used to be a principle that enjoyed bipartisan support among politicians -- and it still enjoys broad, bipartisan support among regular Americans like ourselves. So, again, our Senators have no excuse not to support this bill.

H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, would mandate voter-verified paper ballots for federal elections. This is a big deal, since (as we just saw in Mississippi) a lot of electronic voting machines don't let you vote for the person for whom you want to vote! Sometimes, when you've been doing something a certain way for hundreds of years, a machine actually can't do it better! Voter-verified paper ballots won't stop unscrupulous politicians from creating boxes of fake ballots, I suppose, but if you want to do that, you have to get a lot of other people to buy in, and only one of them needs to snitch to make your "victory" illegitimate. And you can steal votes a lot more easily with software, particularly when it's developed by some private corporation that'll fire any "snitch" who speaks out about its flaws. The bill would also fund state efforts to update their voting systems, which you know some states "forget" to do in their black and brown neighborhoods. As with H.R. 1, the For the People Act, you have to wonder why Mob Boss Mitch thinks it's just not worth it to make sure everyone can vote. What could he be afraid of?

Speaking of Mob Boss Mitch, he talks a lot these days about "bills we can pass," and acts like taking votes on bills that "can't pass" are a "waste of time." You know that's all rubbish -- even if these bills fail to pass the Senate, forcing your Senators to go on the record against voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, and secure elections is certainly worthwhile. But I want you to really think about Mob Boss Mitch's words, and measure the sheer contempt for the popular will they betray: nothing is worth doing unless a group of Senators pass a bill the President will sign. That's nowhere near the way it should work! How should it work? Absent a legitimate Constitutional concern -- and not just the bogus "concerns" of big donors passed off as "legitimate" concerns -- our Reps and Senators should pass the bills we tell them to pass, and the President should sign the bills we tell him to sign. We cannot rest until we have a system that works this way -- and when we get that system, we cannot rest in our duty to conserve that system for future generations, who will then have to work to keep it. But when we can do that, we'll have the "more perfect union" of which President Lincoln dreamed.

Action: concerning birth control and media monopolies.

Our Administration is trying its damnedest to redirect public Title X funding away from organizations like Planned Parenthood and toward organizations like Obria, which is notorious for giving incorrect information about abortion and for refusing to give birth control to its patients, even though birth control sure seems like the best way to reduce abortions. If you're tempted to think that this move merely reflects a shift in our government's priorities, remember that providing comprehensive family planning services is the whole purpose of Title X, and I don't think even now you'll find too many federal judges who'd be convinced that Congress explicitly authorized the provision of half-assed family planning. Shame that the law-and-order crowd doesn't see our Administration's poor funding of family planning as a law-and-order issue; maybe if more black people were involved in the law-breaking, they'd see it. Anyway, Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to stop illegally giving taxpayer money to fake family planning centers.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Justice Department to block the proposed CBS/Viacom merger. CBS and Viacom are saying they need to merge so they can compete with Netflix, Disney, and the like, but who cares what's good for CBS? I'm such a bastard I only care what's good for America, and you know what happens when big corporations merge: they cut jobs, raise prices, and redistribute more worker income upward to their executives -- which, admittedly, sounds exactly like the program of this entire Administration, whose Attorney General, William Barr, is another one who thinks "freedom" is all about letting corporations do whatever they want and damn the consequences for the rest of us. But the fewer corporations that own all of our media, the worse it is for us, not just in lost jobs and lost income, but in lost freedom to get the kind of critical information and alternate viewpoints with which civilized people make good decisions. When a big corporation owns a media outlet, after all, that media outlet not only avoids criticizing its owner, but any other big corporation that owner does business with. And that's just another kind of corruption we need to fight.

Action: concerning taxes and "free" trade.

David Koch passed away a few weeks ago, and if we want to make his life truly meaningful, we can, at the least, allow Americans for Tax Fairness to help us tell our Congressfolk to close the loopholes that result in the kind of absurd fortunes like the one Mr. Koch amassed largely tax-free. Some folks on the right indulge in a sort of hyper-individualism, in which they assert that we're only free when one person is as free as we can imagine, and if you see a kind of logic in that, you must also see that when one person achieves that much freedom, they trample over everyone else's freedom merely to make a meaningful life for themselves. When we restrained the freedom of the richest individuals, we created the greatest middle class in history -- and in recent decades we've destroyed that middle class by indulging in these individualist fantasies, where we celebrate those with billions of dollars they can never spend, fleets of classic cars they can never drive, or the umpteen huge vacation homes they can't live in at once. So let's promote some real freedom.

Meanwhile, the Amazon rainforest, a.k.a. "the lungs of the Earth," continues to burn, largely because of the lawless regime of Brazil's President, Jair Bolsonaro, who has encouraged loggers and farmers to burn trees in order to "spur development" -- and, not incidentally, infringe on the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Mr. Bolsonaro, as disgusting a human being as has ever held office, has gone on to accuse non-governmental organizations of setting the fire themselves, and has figured their motive as trying to make money off climate change, though sane people know that no environmental group will ever make as much money fighting climate change as a big corporation will make causing it. Anyway, while European nations offer financial aid with one hand, they're planning to conclude yet another of those notorious "free" trade "deals" with Mercosur, a sort of South American common market composed of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. If you're familiar with "free" trade, you know that'll just make everything worse, so Sum of Us helps you tell the European Union to scuttle the EU-Mercosur "free" trade "deal."

Action: concerning war in Yemen, methane pollution, and discrimination.

Both Houses of Congress have passed defense spending bills that include amendments that would get our soldiers out of the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen and stop our government from selling weapons that kill good Yemenis -- but, of course, now both Houses have to go to Congress, and some folks who should know better (Sen. Reed of Rhode Island, for one) are making noises about ensuring they pass a bill that our President will actually sign. How many times must I tell these pimps! You do the people's will, and you let the President take the heat for ignoring it! I tell you, they've got some serious Stockholm Syndrome sufferers in our Congress. Hence Avaaz provides some phone numbers: you can call Sen. Reed at 202.224.4642, Speaker Pelosi at 202.225.4965, and House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith at 202.225.8901, and tell them to keep anti-war amendments in the defense spending bill. It has to pass, after all, so our Congress holds all the cards here. They ought to start acting like it.

Meanwhile, our Administration has announced its final proposal for methane pollution limits -- and of course they're gutting them, because if a regulation actually protects good Americans from corporate pollution, it cannot stand! (Alternately, if President Obama issued a regulation, it cannot stand!) Allowing gas and oil drilling corporations to leak methane from their wells and pipelines willy-nilly not only packs a bigger climate-change punch than coal emissions do, they also deprive good Americans of royalties if the drilling operations are on public lands -- methane is, after all, a usable energy source. Hence Penn Environment, Environmental Action, and the Environmental Defense Fund all help you tell our EPA to reject its own proposal to increase methane pollution. Why bother telling our Administration to do things they don't want to do? Because they're taking public comments on it, meaning they have to come up with a very, very good reason to ignore the public will, or else the courts will smack them down -- as they've done to a great many of our Administration's regulatory "efforts" so far.

Finally, our Administration is also trying to let corporations get federal contracts and discriminate against people on the basis of their "religious" "conscience." Using religion as an excuse to discriminate is an old scam -- folks used the Bible to justify slavery, after all -- and using "religious" "conscience" to (for example) fire pregnant workers, avoid hiring gays, and force transgender employees into the wrong bathrooms isn't significantly different. Chances are it ultimately won't pass Supreme Court muster, since our Supreme Court ruled in the Hobby Lobby case that closely-held corporations (i.e., ones with a handful of owners), and not just any old corporation with a knuckle-dragging CEO, can exercise "religious" "conscience." But this Administration doesn't care about law and order; they only care about stoking rage in their votaries. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your Department of Labor to reject its own proposal to allow federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of "religious" "conscience."

Action: concerning fair housing, racism, and our duty as civilized people to shame those who have wronged us.

Our Department of Housing and Urban Development (or HUD) has proposed using algorithms to evaluate housing applicants. Ask yourself: why does an algorithm need to handle a task humans have been handling for years? The answer: because algorithms don't have families and don't need to use the bathroom. In other words, because they're not people. Call me old-fashioned, but if something's important enough to do, a person should do it. And if you think people are fallible, well, algorithms are worse -- facial recognition algorithms think all black people look alike, job-recruiting algorithms can't hire women, and social media algorithms can't root out violent racists. And HUD's algorithm would track how often applicants go out clubbing, like people are never supposed to have fun or something. So CREDO helps you tell our HUD to do public housing the right way and reject its own proposal to hand over functions to computers.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Senators to block the nomination of racist Steven Menashi to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. In "Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy," which he wrote for the University of Pennsylvania's international law journal back in 2010 (so no use saying "youthful indiscretion," amirite?), Mr. Menashi concludes that the more ethnically diverse a state is, the more ineffectual it is. He sounds like a man after our President's own heart! And Mr. Menashi's elite pedigree (he graduated Stanford and clerked for Justice Alito) doesn't excuse him; rather, it points out (as if we needed more of this!) how irredeemably corrupt and decadent Our Glorious Elites have become. If a white supremacist can smile, speak softly, and write complete sentences, they're not better than the barely coherent guy at the end of the bar, they're worse. Is it too much to ask to have fewer of them in positions of power?

Finally, CREDO also helps you tell ABC to drop former Administration spokeshack Sean Spicer from its upcoming season of "Dancing With the Stars." I have long believed that if you work for evil, then we, as civilized people, should shun and shame you. That's why I didn't think Condoleeza Rice was "oppressed" by the public pressure that prompted her to withdraw from her Rutgers commencement speech gig in 2014: frankly, someone who worked for Tha Bush Mobb should never have received such an invitation in the first place. I can already hear the right-wingers, not usually known for public displays of compassion, demanding to know WHEN WILLZ TEH SHAMINGZ STOPZ!!!!! "When people stop acting shamefully" would be the answer. And I can hear them saying WHYZ DO YOU HAVEZ TO BRINGZ TEH POLITICZ INTO ITZ!!!!! But, really, folks, Sean Spicer brings the politics with him wherever he goes, and when you work for evil, civilized people shouldn't rush to put you on family TV programming.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and public lands.

It's a new week, so it's time once again to call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Why would your Senators be afraid of bills that support voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections? I mean, these are all popular things. Of course their leader, "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell, won't allow the bills to come to a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." But when we flood our Senators' phone lines with calls demanding votes on these bills, Mitch McConnell's opinion won't mean a damn thing, and his power will disappear. After all, his power isn't rooted in good works, and (despite appearances!) that's the only sustainable power there is.

Meanwhile, with the Amazon rainforest literally on fire as we speak, CREDO helps you tell big private equity corporation BlackRock to stop investing in the Amazon's destruction. How is BlackRock investing in the Amazon's destruction? By putting its money into the logging, mining, and big ag corporations that are deforesting the Amazon -- and thus, not incidentally, injuring the Amazon's ability to sequester the carbon dioxide that causes climate change. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen -- you'd think more big corporations and big investors would respect that simple truth, but the only "truth" they respect is the money that'll do them no good at the Pearly Gates. Still, with the burning Amazon all over the TV news, maybe we can make BlackRock feel the Big Stick of Bad PR. (Hate to pile on -- OK, I really don't -- but BlackRock also invests in the destruction of the indigenous folks who live in and protect the Amazon. How about that -- folks who live in a place are actually invested in protecting it! It's like an actual conservative value or something.)

Finally, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would delete that section of the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that authorizes oil and gas drilling leases in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve (or ANWR). The New York Times recently reported that our Administration said we'd get about 40 times more money out of drilling in ANWR than we're actually going to get over the next decade, but that's not news to those of us who've been following the issue since Tha Bush Mobb tried to drill the hell out of these public lands, and seriously, what kind of public servant would be persuaded by the promise of a mere one-half of one percent of our annual federal budget, and over 10 years? The kind who only listens to big donors, that's who, and that's who passed that damn tax "reform" in the first place. But we can at least rectify the injury done to our public lands by telling our House Reps to pass H.R. 1146, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps us do.

Action: concerning campaign finance, Social Security, and immigration.

H.J.Res. 48, the "We the People" amendment, would at last allow we good Americans to pursue our dream of campaign finance reform. Section 1 would restrict Constitutional rights to "natural persons," i.e., you and I and everyone you know -- and not "artificial entities," like corporations. Section 2 would not only allow federal, state, and local governments to restrict campaign spending again like we used to in the days of McCain-Feingold, but would instruct judges not to interpret campaign spending as "free speech." Because how many times must I tell these pimps! Speech is speech, and money is property. Defenders of dark money rush forward to remind us that being heard takes money, but in doing so they show (among other things!) their apparent inability to grasp the word "restrict," which does not mean "stop entirely." Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support campaign finance reform by passing the "We the People" amendment.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to expand, not cut, Social Security benefits by passing H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act, then the Economic Policy Institute still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would expand benefits, index benefit hikes to an inflation index that actually reflects how seniors live, and fund its expansion by taxing pay above $400,000 into the system for the first time. And how will the opponents of the Social Security 2100 Act respond? By calling Social Security an "entitlement" -- how gracious of them, to give you the thing you've worked for and paid into all your life! -- and by saying we have to cut it to avoid exaggerated future budgeting shortfalls (remember when Social Security was supposed to "run out of money" in 2016?). But saying we have to cut a cherished program that benefits all of us sooner or later really isn't the can-do American spirit.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell furniture corporation Wayfair to stop making money off our government's notorious concentration camps for immigrants, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may recall that courageous Wayfair workers walked out in late June over their employer's habit of furnishing immigrant detention centers, including centers with children separated from their families. These workers also wrote an open letter to Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah demanding that Wayfair donate the proceeds from the furniture it's already sold to a non-profit legal service and end all future contracts that enable our Administration's nefarious immigrant detention policies. And what has Mr. Shah's response been? Approximately crickets. And it's been almost two months! That means we need to keep wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR until he feels it. And then any other big corporate CEO who might enable our Administration's policies will fear it.

Action: concerning trade, food stamps, and evil media.

Public Citizen helps you tell your House Reps not to vote on our President's USMCA trade agreement until he fixes its problems. Those problems include extended intellectual property protections for big pharmaceutical corporations -- which will keep drug prices higher, and drugs less accessible to the public, for longer -- and its relatively weak labor and clean air/clean water standards. If you're thinking big pharma deserves to make more money off what it makes, remember that most drugs don't get to market without a lot of government help, i.e., taxpayer help, i.e., your help. Remember, also, that no one should have monopoly power over life-saving drugs. The USMCA will drastically curtail the use of "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) systems which nullify our laws and outsource our jobs, and that's no small thing. But the other things aren't small things, either, and we deserve the best trade agreements we can get. So get on the horn to your House Reps and communicate your will.

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed taking away state options, under the federal food stamps program, to assist working families who have significant child care and shelter bills. Sounds wonky, I know, but the end result will be no more food stamps for three million good Americans who still need it, so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our USDA to reject its own proposal to take away food stamps from so many people. No, it's not absurd to tell them to reject their own proposal -- it was absurd for them to propose something that merely injures us. And when I say "us," I do mean us -- we all pay into the food stamps program with our taxes, and any one of us could need it at any time, and we're not "lazy" or "stupid" merely because we need to avail ourselves of it. Hate to pile on -- OK, I don't -- but depriving states of flexibility in administering federal programs sure doesn't sound very conservative.

Finally, Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson called white supremacy a "hoax" a few weeks back, and then promptly went on "vacation," but now he's back, albeit with fewer advertisers, so now's as good a time as any to remind you that Media Matters still helps you tell big corporate advertisers to "drop Fox." Big cable corporations won't let us buy cable channels a la carte, so the next best thing we can do is make Fox toxic to big corporate advertisers, since as long as Fox is making money, they'll never change. At least not for the better! Pressuring Fox advertisers is already working -- Mr. Carlson's program has been hemorrhaging advertisers for a while, and big fast food chain corporation Long John Silver's has lately pulled all its ads from Fox. Still, corporations like Expedia, Allstate, and Applebee's still seem to look at Fox News as just another avenue to hawk their wares. But big corporate CEOs ought to be ashamed of themselves for giving money to Fox News. It's a good thing the Big Stick of Bad PR still works.

Action: concerning public lands, racism, and equal pay.

Our Administration is desperate to open the Tongass National Forest to road-building, which seems innocuous on its face -- except that logging and mining corporations have long angled to get roads built in the Tongass so they can get their logging and mining operations in there! Hence H.R. 2491/S. 1311, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, which states that our government "shall not allow road construction, road reconstruction, or logging in an inventoried roadless area where those activities are prohibited by the Roadless Rule," as adopted in early 2001. That's right, yet again we have to tell this Administration that they have to follow legally-enacted regulations, which we might otherwise describe as "the law." But duty is duty, no matter where it takes us, so Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect public lands by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act. Obeying the law, protecting pristine areas from development -- why, that all sounds conservative, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard by now that our FBI considers black protestors a more important security threat than white racists, even though, ah, recent events would seem to counter that assessment. I mean, when mass murderers repeatedly say out loud how much they hate non-white people, wouldn't you have to pay attention? And even though police commit most of the violence that purportedly "accompanies" black protestors, our FBI has cooked up a "black identity extremist" category, which is even more absurd when you consider that for hundreds of years we systematically denied black folks any sort of identity other than chattel. Hence CREDO helps you tell our FBI to get its priorities straight, and go after white supremacists more than black protestors. If you really think black protestors have nothing really to protest anymore, well, a) you're wrong and b) that would have literally nothing to do with a reasonable assessment of whether black protestors or white supremacists are more dangerous. We fought a World War against the latter, after all.

Finally, H.R. 3804/S.2083, the Athletics Fair Pay Act, would mandate that our government pay U.S. Women's Team soccer players the same as U.S. Men's Team soccer players. Seems like a no-brainer to me, particularly since the U.S. Women's Team has won four out of the eight women's World Cup tournaments ever and the Men's Team has only been to one men's World Cup final and didn't even qualify for the tournament in 2018. And if your Tea Party uncle objects by saying oh, so now we're going to pay the WNBA the same as we pay the NBA?, well, you may be tempted to say why not?, particularly if you're not all that emotionally-invested in what your favorite athletes make (or if, like me, you're working toward that 91% tax bracket on millionaire income which would pretty much end the era of absurd pro athlete salaries). But comparing it to the NBA/WNBA is actually beside the point -- the NBA and the WNBA are private entities, but the U.S. Men's and Women's soccer team play for our country. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote equal pay by passing the Athletics Fair Pay Act.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and sane drug policy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass six good House-passed bills that "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell won't even allow them to vote on, well, you can still call them and demand both that they vote on it and that they pass it. We need to call them, because if we don't, these Senators can always say "well, I didn't hear about it from my constituents," and we should never let them use that excuse -- particularly during the month of August, when they're all in their home states meeting with constituents, at least nominally. You better believe their big donors are trying to get their attention this month! The six bills in question, as you may recall, are H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Anyone who opposes voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections doesn't deserve to be a Senator anyway.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1456/S. 597, the Marijuana Justice Act, would not only remove pot from federal scheduling (which would essentially legalize pot), but would withhold federal funding for prisons in states that haven't legalized it and have arrested a disproportionate number of folks of color for pot-related offenses. The bill would also expunge federal convictions for pot-related offenses and establish a Community Reinvestment Fund to help communities ravaged by the notorious "war on drugs." We spend too much time and money chasing after pot-smokers when they do about as much damage as drunkards do, and you no doubt recall how our effort at banning alcohol went. Of course, we also spend so much time and money chasing after pot-smokers because our government thought it was a great way to oppress civil rights protestors! Don't just take my word for it, though -- take the word of President Nixon's domestic policy guru/Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichmann! Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact saner drug policy by passing the Marijuana Justice Act.

Action: concerning lead poisoning and obnoxious racism.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 930 would protect Pennsylvania's children against lead in their schools' drinking water, by requiring testing, mandating testing result disclosure to parents, and keeping lead levels in school drinking water below five parts per billion. We're now five years after the Flint drinking water crisis, and residents across Pennsylvania are finding lead in their school drinking water, but we still don't have vigorous standards against lead, though any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, and they don't exactly grow out of that. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Reps to protect our children by cosponsoring and passing HB 930. What's the argument against testing our schools' water for lead, I wonder? That "we don't have the money"? If a civilization accepts that as a reason for failing to protect our children, then that civilization deserves to die -- particularly if it keeps handing out endless welfare to corporate cronies.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Twitter to do a much better job policing hate speech on its site, then Color of Change still helps you do that. And to those who squeal TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!!, recall that our First Amendment protects us from our government, not from commercial media -- just as your local newspaper is under no obligation to print your neighbor's rants about black folks merely because he wants to be heard, Twitter can ban any speech it likes, and its executives need only worry about whatever PR backlash might result. And if (as Dean Baker said not long ago) Facebook is a publisher and thus should be held to the same standards to which we hold other publishers, then so is Twitter. Twitter's CEO, unfortunately, seems to think obnoxious racism is difficult to define. Here's a clue: when they start putting up swastikas, it means they're obnoxious racists. I mean, you'd have to be, to take up the banner of a nation we defeated in war over 70 years ago.

Action: concerning financial predation and the death penalty.

Because our Administration hates all regulations that actually help good Americans, our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) wants to gut its whistleblower protection program. You can understand why governments hate whistleblowers -- because they expose the wrongdoing of politicians and political appointees! -- but the sheer hatred of the last two Administrations is still a bit surprising. Our SEC's proposed rules would automatically disqualify any whistleblowers who take their concerns directly to SEC Commissioners, would disqualify whistleblowers merely because they filled out paperwork wrong, and would put an arbitrary cap on whistleblower rewards; I'm no great defender of filling out paperwork incorrectly, for example, but the SEC's proposal would be like taking a sledgehammer to an ant. Why, it's almost like they're coming up with ways to protect their cronies from scrutiny! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our SEC to abandon its plans to make whistleblowing on financial firms a lot harder.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell Missouri's Governor to grant clemency to Russell "Rusty" Bucklew, because lethal injection would be, in his case, cruel and unusual. Mr. Bucklew suffers from a rare disease that grows tumors full of blood in his head and neck, and if he gets lethal injection, chances are those tumors would rupture and cause Mr. Bucklew to choke to death on his own blood. If you're reading that and saying so what? He's gonna die anyway, then you're doing civilization wrong -- we're supposed to be leaving as good example for future generations to follow, not wallowing in considerations of expediency until we become corrupt and cynical. And if you're familiar with the crime for which Mr. Bucklew got convicted, you might well be tempted to ask he sure didn't treat his victims with very much mercy, so why should we? Answer: the whole point of civilization is to lift ourselves above the murderer's level, not bring ourselves down to it. Maybe setting a good example will come back into vogue one day, but only if we lead.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then Color of Change still helps you do that. S. 2155 would make it a lot less attractive for big private equity corporations to do the thing they've done with impunity the last decade -- buy up large retail corporations, run them into the ground, and suck their wealth out in bonuses and fees on their way out the door. To think they have the gall to say we shouldn't "punish success," and that our richest Americans are merely the ones who have worked the hardest! How does running corporations into the ground and extracting their wealth benefit our civilization? Hell, how does it even qualify as "work"? And these predators have wiped a million jobs from our economy over the last decade; funny how folks who squeal about an increased minimum wage "killing jobs" have nothing to say about that. A lot of these folks are just nihilists, of course, but civilized people don't admire wanton destruction, let alone predators getting rich off it.

Action: concerning racism, immigration, and debt.

Wondering how hate groups get such a foothold on the internet? It ain't because they're right or because they're popular -- it's because they get money to spread their hate, and big charity corporations enable this horror by allowing some $11 million to flow through their "donor-advised funds" (or DAFs) between 2014 and 2017. Don't get the idea that "helping racists donate money to racist groups" is some kind of free speech issue, because a) money ain't speech and b) our First Amendment doesn't exist to promote hate speech, but merely to prevent folks from being thrown in jail merely because their speech is noxious to civilized people. And, ah, what law compels big corporations to fund hate speech merely because some donor wants to? If a donor wants to donate that badly, they can just write a check and send it where it needs to go; our First Amendment does not require that funding hate speech be easier than that. Hence Color of Change helps you tell big corporations to stop enabling the funding of hate groups.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell nine big hotel chain corporations to refuse ICE in their apparent quest to turn American hotels into immigrant detention centers. It's hard for me to see exactly how ICE could compel hoteliers to do this on their behalf, except through intimidation, and indeed four big hotel chain corporations (Marriott, Choice, Hilton, and Hyatt) have refused to cooperate with ICE. You don't even need to find ICE particularly odious to demand that hoteliers stop enabling them! You only need wonder why our government can't provide proper housing for detained immigrants on its own. And you might well conclude that maybe our government spends too much taxpayer money on private prison corporations -- which apparently can't do the job, or else ICE wouldn't be turning to Motel 6. Remember when we all used to imagine that evil was administratively apt? Yeah, this Administration sure is full of "evil geniuses." Nobody ever said Lex Luthor couldn't work within a budget.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) not to make it easier for collection corporations to harass us, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Yes, that's right, our CFPB, which exists to keep us away from financial predators, would allow debt collectors to call you seven times weekly per debt -- meaning per loan, per credit card, per health care bill, and heaven forbid have more than one of any of these -- and would also let debt collectors call your friends and family! I still know right-wingers who would say well, then, don't take on any debt you can't afford! They say this as if people plan to get slammed by unscrupulous health insurance corporations! But you may, if you like, point out them that debt collectors too often call folks about debts they've already paid or never had to begin with. Surely your right-wing acquaintances will find that objectionable. They are very proud people, after all.

Action: concerning Social Security, methane emissions, and working families.

You know how we've been talking about expanding Social Security, so that we can get ahead of talk from Our Glorious Elites about cutting "entitlements"? Well, H.R. 860/S. 229, the Social Security 2100 Act, would do just that, by actually increasing benefit amounts, increasing the amount of Social Security benefits retirees can enjoy tax-free, and creating a Consumer Price Index that accurately reflects seniors' economic trials. You know, rather than using "Chained CPI," which assumes that if something becomes too expensive, folks just switch to something cheaper. Can you imagine seniors "just switching" to cheaper drugs? No, you can't. Social Security has helped hundreds of millions of Americans live a more dignified retirement, free of poverty and want, and this is despite 40 years of politicians and their corporate paymasters trying to wreck the program and advancing every problem they've created as a reason to cut the program. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our retirements by passing the Social Security 2100 Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2711, the Methane Waste Prevention Act, would require gas drilling corporations to capture 99 percent of the methane gas that escapes from their operations within five years. H.R. 2711 would also require gas drillers to flare (or burn) that minuscule amount of methane gas they fail to trap, and would require our government to set standards for gas drilling equipment so that it doesn't leak methane gas. Methane leakage is, as you know, a byproduct of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), and it tends to trap far more carbon emissions in our atmosphere than even coal does. And methane is also, you know, usable fuel which does us not one bit of good if it's floating around in our atmosphere. Don't abide any whining about how all this is so hard and will cost gas drilling corporations money; their money isn't more important than our air and our climate. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our clean air and help slow the advance of climate change by passing the Methane Waste Prevention Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our President's nomination of Eugene Scalia to be our next Secretary of Labor, then CREDO still helps you do that. We don't oppose him because he's the late Justice Scalia's son, but because, well, of his entire career helping big corporations run roughshod over working people; the Wall Street Journal called Mr. Scalia one of the banksters' "go-to guys for challenging financial regulations," which doens't exactly speak to his love of working people, as does his work helping WalMart overturn a Maryland law which would have mandated that WalMart contribute something-anything to their workers' health insurance. Mr. Scalia also seems to have a unique animus against ergonomic safety regulations, which you'd only find sympathetic if you haven't noticed that technology has created more desk jockeys than hard hats over the years. He even lamented that such regulations would force businesses to "hire more workers," to which the only reasonable response would be: we can only hope!

Action: concerning good House bills and a bad Senate bill.

It's Monday, so it's time once again to call our Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. The House passed all these bills, but the Senate won't even vote on them, because Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) won't even hold a vote on any of them. He even calls himself the "Grim Reaper" now! Who but an insane person would be proud of the fact that they refuse to pass legislation promoting voting rights, civil rights, equal pay for women, a higher minimum wage, freedom from corporate interference on the internet, and safe and secure elections? Seriously, let that be your meditation object as you call your Senators. You'd think a few of them would want to go on the record supporting the things I've listed above, but too many of them think of politics as nothing more than team sports -- a profound offense to those of us who call America our team.

In the wake of a mass murder apparently perpetrated by someone who really, really hated immigrants, Republicans have responded swiftly -- with legislation that would further injure immigrants! Yay priorities! S. 1494, the so-called Secure and Protect Act, would (among other nefarious works) impose an unnecessarily high screening standard on potential aslyees, essentially prevent Central American refugees from even getting asylum in the U.S., and deny immigrants due process by subjecting them to abnormally fast "rocket docket" hearings. Naturally, Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called a Committee vote on the bill without even letting Democratic members speak on it, which is what you do when you're really confident in your bill. And aslyees and refugees are actually the least likely people to commit terrorism, because, you know, they're fleeing terrorism in their home countries. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to resist this persistent posturing about immigration by rejecting the so-called Secure and Protect Act.

Action: concerning good science, bad science, and bad media.

You've heard, no doubt, about our Administration's multitudinous attempts to hide and purge scientific information that good Americans deserve to know. Hence S. 2220, the Open and Responsive Government Act, would amend the Freedom of Information Act so that folks couldn't hide "confidential" information from the public unless it would actually cause them substantial harm. S.2220 would also specify more precisely that you can't withhold a big slab of information from the public merely because a portion of it might meet the "substantial harm" standard. These are good ideas, of course, but why are they urgent now? Because our Administration's EPA has packed its scientific advisory boards with (you guessed it) industry figures who could claim all kinds of "substantial harm" if FOIA requests would require answers from them. Of course, I'd rather not have this revolving door between corporations and our government in the first place, but in the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Open and Responsive Government Act.

Meanwhile, Sky Gray, of Asheville, NC, has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell online retail corporation Amazon to stop selling "conversion therapy" books. "Conversion therapy" -- which aims to "convert" gay folks (including children!) into straight folks by, among other odious methods, making them re-enact their sexual abuse -- is now illegal in 14 states. Are you feeling a little anxious about whether you're "suppressing free speech" by telling Amazon to do this? Rest assured that you're not -- Amazon can always say "no," after all, if they think they can withstand the bad PR that'll result. But our First Amendment only guarantees writers of "conversion therapy" books the right not to be imprisoned by our government for their speech -- it does not guarantee an audience for your speech, and it does not guarantee you the right to make money off your speech. In a sane and moral society, such books would be available at the gay-hating version of Paladin or Loompanics -- but not necessarily on America's biggest bookseller.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell corporations to stop advertising on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle on the Fox News (sic) Channel, then Color of Change helps you do that. Why? Well, because of everything they've ever said and done, really, and why do such terrible people get so many TV shows? It's like our media only care about drama! But both talking heads have also spread around plenty of racist pablum over the last few years, and with so many white supremacists going around shooting people these days, well, it's not a good look. And I wish we lived in an America where simply "changing the channel" was enough, but it's not enough, because even if we're not watching it, we're still paying for it, and corporations are still advertising on it. In the absence of a good a la carte cable packaging law, we can at least wield the Big Stick of Bad PR on their advertisers.

Action: concerning social media and Arctic drilling.

CREDO helps you tell big tech corporations Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to ban white nationalist and other hate groups from their platforms. And again, it's not a matter of "free speech no matter how noxious": our First Amendment guarantees that folks can't be put in prison for the mere fact of their noxious speech, but it does not guarantee a platform for your noxious speech, let alone a living. And let's also bury the suggestion that we merely oppose speech "we don't like" -- nobody should like it when far-right assholes cheer another racist for carrying out a mass murder! Big tech corporations (Facebook especially) act like it's so hard to keep assholes from ruining their platforms, but it really isn't -- they could stop valuing executive salaries like they're the only thing worth preserving in civilization and break off some of that money to hire more people to monitor speech on their platforms. For such powerful people, our big tech CEOs sure do act helpless an awful lot. And we shouldn't tolerate such weakness.

Meanwhile, our Department of Interior plans to push ahead with oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) this year, but Environmental Action helps you tell our Secretary of the Interior not to allow drilling in the Refuge. We call it a "refuge," after all, because we'd like some part of the old world to keep going, uninterrupted by the churning of the new one. Of course, the folks in charge of our government now, though they call themselves "conservative," don't value the past except insofar as they can convert it into money for some crony or other. And that's all we'll get by drilling in ANWR, scientists having found that we're not going to extract very much oil from the area. There is something truly noxious about converting wild places into nothing more lasting than money, which always gets spent and always cries out for replacement. Of course, such noxiousness is our President's calling card. Might we at least convert his bad example into a warning for future generations?

Action: concerning banksters, pollution, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may well be saying to yourself, self, I'd very much like to stop Wall Street looting, too, but would this bill really do that? The answer is yes, S. 2155 would basically take all the joy banksters feel when they suck all the assets out of a corporation -- it would impose a 100 percent tax on all the fees private equity firms impose on a corporation for two years after they buy it, it would make those firms actually take on more of the debt they've assumed rather than simply transfer it back to the corporation they've bought, it would give workers more of a chance to recover what they've lost after their employer goes bankrupt, and it would make private equity firms' doings more transparent. These firms don't just kill big chain stores like Sears and Payless -- they kill local newspapers all over America, too (the Denver Post being the most famous example). And S. 2155 will help us stop them.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 707, 708, and 709 would give the state Attorney General "concurrent jurisdiction" over certain clean air and clean water laws in the state, and thus give our AG the power to initiate investigations into these matters. Given that our Attorney General is supposed to, you know, enforce the law on behalf of the people of the Commonwealth, you would think our AG would be able to do that on his own, but no -- current law mandates that our AG must first get a referral from the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) or a local district attorney. I have to admit I'm at a loss to explain why the state of Pennsylvania does it that way -- it sounds a lot like a decades-old turf battle won in favor of someone who may not even be alive now, frankly. But we don't need to put up with inter-bureaucratic turf battles, because our Attorney General answers to us. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to help our state government protect us from pollution by passing SB 707, 708, and 709.

Finally, in the wake of yet another data breach exposing the private data of over 100 million good Americans, Fight for Privacy helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass strong legislation that protects the privacy of good Americans' online information. There's no use saying if you still want privacy, don't put your information online, because putting your information online is basically necessary now, unless you pay for everything with cash and never take out a loan. I will say I continue to be disappointed with our Congressfolk's apparent inability to process the fact that we should be able to opt in to corporate attempts to sell our data to third parties. It wouldn't "break the internet" (as Sen. Toomey infamously put it in 2011), and it wouldn't even be very hard to do -- and it would protect a lot more people from a big bank that somehow decides to put all of its sensitive information on a freaking Amazon cloud server. When will folks realize that "cloud computing" doesn't actually make our lives better? It only makes it easier for big corporations to make big money.

Action: concerning Social Security, renewable energy, and Presidential bad behavior.

2020 is coming, which means more fearmongering from the Koch brothers and their like-minded ilk about "runaway" "entitlements," and which likely also means that our President will go back on his promise not to touch Social Security because of TEH DEFICITZ!!!! he made worse with his tax cuts for the rich (probably not until after re-election, though). And it also means that the "liberal" media outlets that supposedly hate our President will be considerably more blunt then he about the "need" to cut "entitlements." So let's head them off, by telling our Congressfolk that we must expand Social Security, not cut it, as Social Security Works helps you do. The haters keep trying to sound "reasonable" and "serious" about cutting Social Security, and they keep failing -- but only because we stand up to them. We worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and when we retire, we deserve to enjoy it. So don't let the haters and their scare numbers take it from us.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend funding for clean energy programs. Would it be crass to mention to them that they take big campaign donations from the fossil fuel corporations they still subsidize even though they don't really need it? No, it would not be crass. Would it be crass to mention that we just had the hottest June in recorded history and massive heat waves devastating the country in July, and that using more renewable energy and less fossil fuel energy would help us suffer less of that? Would it be crass to mention the increased health care costs from dirty air and dirty water caused by pollution from fossil fuels (and, ah, not from renewables)? The answers are, in order, "no" and "no." And though renewable energy has grown tremendously across America over the years, it still only provides about 10% of our electricity, and it still needs support from our government -- which really means support from us, the taxpayers. We should get the livable future we pay for, right?

Elyse Marin has begun a petition on Color of Change which helps you tell the Anschutz Entertainment Group (or AEG) to stop hosting our President's rallies. That's right, it's time for the Big Stick of Bad PR again -- if you're a corporate sponsor giving stadium space to our President so he can have his little Nuremberg rallies where his votaries all squeal "lock her up" and "send her back" and other noxious crap, then you deserve to be pointed out and shamed until you change your behavior. I know there are still folks who are so proud of their cynicism that they'll say well how do you say no to the President, huh? Gosh, 54% of the electorate said no to him on Election Day 2016 (though, as you know, he's not a man who takes "no" very easily!), and anyway, saying no to our President is part of our birthright as Americans, a lesson I bet meant a lot more to the cynics when Barack Obama was President. Is it too much to ask that no big arena in America enable our President's obnoxious behavior?

Action: concerning good bills, soldier pensions, and mass shootings.

That stack of good House-passed bills keeps piling up on Mitch McConnell's desk, and he doesn't care what you think about that, but that's OK, because we don't care what he thinks! Go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act. Mob Boss Mitch ain't the boss of your Senators, after all -- you are. People say I'm naive for thinking we can get Republican Senators to pass bills supporting voting rights, civil rights, internet freedom, better paychecks, and secure elections. But what would they hate even more than passing these bills? Being humiliated and jobless, that's what, and if enough of us speak up, they'll either bow to our will or be humiliated and jobless. Having the better arguments ain't enough -- we also have to deploy them, in force.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court gave our President the green light to appropriate some Defense Department funds for his vanity border wall, and then the Pentagon announced late last week that it would divert almost $225 million in military pension funds toward the wall. Taking from our troops' retirement to keep drama going -- how utterly despicable! I wonder how our President's votaries will explain it away. Perhaps they'll say it's only $224 million, which I'm sure will comfort our retired soldiers as they make ends meet. Or they'll say they're taking a lot more from real defense spending, so shutup or he's cutting money for weapons we don't even use, and that's a good thing -- but neither of these arguments can magically convert taking pension money into a good thing. Our President's phone number is 1.215.456.2011. He doesn't care what you and I think, but he's also sensitive to bad PR, so doing our duty might actually yield a result here.

Finally, on the heels of yet another mass shooting perpetrated by yet another white supremacist asshole, too many of our politicians are offering "thoughts and prayers" again, apparently having completely forgotten the backlash they got over their "thoughts and prayers" last year. Hence Greyroots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to get to work and pass some common-sense gun control legislation for once. Since I oppose very much control of handguns and hunting rifles, I'm going to use Greyroots' contact tool to specify the common-sense legislation I want -- legislation that would amend the National Firearms Act to make it just as hard for folks to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons. And all that bill did was get tommy guns off our streets. Our main job as civilized people is to fix problems without resorting to violence; if we don't commit to that, we'll never have enough weapons for the resulting apocalypse anyway.