Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning corruption and corporate welfare.

Our President has of course announced that he'll fire the Inspector General who first processed the whistleblower complaint that led to impeachment! On the basis that he's not a "fan" of our President! We're long past the point where we find such honesty refreshing, I hope. And we hear that our President plans to fire a bunch of other Inspectors General, presumably also on the basis that they're not "fans" of his. Of course we don't have Inspectors General to suck up to Our Personal Lord and Savior; we have them to root out corruption in our government -- which should be of keen interest to us, as governmental corruption can only occur with our tax money. Thankfully, the Inspector General Act gives Congress 30 days to stop the firing, so the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the firing of Inspector General Michael Atkinson. Don't brook any talk about Presidential "prerogatives," because that pales next to the people's prerogative to expose corruption and punish corrupt public servants.

You've heard, no doubt, that our government wants to pass yet another relief package relating to the pandemic, and with the previous package being full of big corporate payouts, what do you suppose will be different about this one? So naturally our President thinks that we should deal with the problems restaurant workers and owners are currently having making ends meet by bringing back more corporate welfare handouts! Specifically, he wants to jack up the corporate meals deduction back up to 100% (currently they can only deduct 50% of the cost of meals) and bringing back the corporate deduction for entertainment. If you're scratching your head wondering how that's supposed to help a cook pay her water bill, well, you're not alone. I don't know how much more proof folks need that our President only cares about other bosses -- I mean, you'd only come up with that idea by talking to a boss! Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to put people ahead of profiteers and reject yet more tax-cuts-for-the-rich in any future stimulus legislation.

Speaking of which, our President also seems obsessed with giving oil corporations some corporate welfare goodies in the next stimulus bill. First he said gas would be down to 99 cents a gallon in America and that would be like getting a "tax cut," then he praised Saudi Arabia for declaring it would ratchet back oil production, which would pretty much wipe out that "tax cut." Since then he's met with oil corporation executives because as I keep saying he only listens to other bosses. Big oil corporations, frankly, don't need any more handouts, even if people are driving less than they did a month or so ago, so Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any more handouts for big oil corporations in future stimulus legislation. Don't brook any silliness about how "oil corporations only make seven cents per gallon," because they sold over 140 billion gallons in 2015, and banging the SEVEN CENTZ!!! saucepan is like saying CEOs are underpaid because they only make four dollars every time they draw a breath.

Finally, you know who might actually need some financial assistance? Our Post Office, that's who! Our taxes haven't funded our Post Office since the early '80s (take that, would-be Post Office privatizers!), and our Post Office has said it might shut down by June, and not just because of this pandemic: Congress has forced our Post Office to prefund its workers' pensions for the next 40 years, a demand Congress has never made of any other entity and one that costs our Post Office $5 billion annually. Despite all the obstacles our government keeps throwing in its way, our Post Office, in my experience, continues to do a pretty terrific job -- and we'd miss them if they weren't around, that's for damn sure. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to give a hand up to our Post Office in any future stimulus legislation. Go ahead and remind your Congressfolk that we may be doing a lot more voting-by-mail this election, and that they surely don't want to be perceived as anti-voting! And no we're not all just going to switch to UPS or FedEx! They cost a lot more money!

Action: concerning good House bills, good coronavirus policy, and bad media coverage.

Because we don't give up, it's time once again to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). When our Congressfolk have other priorities -- like giving away as much taxpayer money they haven't even collected yet amirite? to corporate cronies as possible -- it's time to get them focused on the important things, like voting rights, internet freedom, public lands, and health care. So let's get to it.

Speaking of the important things, the pandemic took the lives of at least seven folks in federal custody last week, and if you think that's no big loss, please do the following things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that five of them were there on drug charges, and we should be curing drug addicts, not putting them in jail, 3) consider that at least two of these had high-risk health conditions almost sure to kill them if they got the virus, and 4) prisoners can't freaking practice any form of physical distancing and once one prisoner gets infected, pretty much all of them are at risk -- and that would include all kinds of people the state is detaining without having convicted of a crime. But now H.R. 6400/S. 3579, the Emergency Community Supervision Act, would reduce the kind of overcrowding that leads to mass graves by releasing certain prisoners into community supervision -- not violent prisoners, since right-wingers are no doubt already claiming the bill would do that. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to practice both mercy and pragmatic public policy by passing the Emergency Community Supervision Act.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell the big news corporations to stop covering our President's live coronavirus updates. It's a shame it's come to that, but it has, and when they say but it's news whenever the President says something, they're helping to ensure we live in a society where we all think our President is more important than we are. Well, he's not -- especially this one, amirite? Our news organs will also tell us that we're supposed to treat daily updates from our government about a pandemic with some importance. To which I respond: I wish our President would treat those daily updates about this pandemic with some importance! To him, it's just another opportunity to take all the credit for the good, blame everyone else for the bad, and otherwise act like a damn drama king. And the news already gives us too damn much drama! Our "liberal" media would also do well to learn that their job isn't covering the news passively so much as it's telling us the truth. If covering our President's clown car act gets in the way of the truth, then they need to stop covering it.

Action: concerning Medicare-for-All health insurance, voting by mail, and other excellent ideas.

At the risk of being accused of "using the pandemic as an opportunity to pass my wish list" -- an accusation I usually hear from people actually using the pandemic as an opportunity to pass their wish list! -- I think you should call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act. We all can see that the "free market" didn't make enough masks and didn't make enough ventilators -- and we all can see that the "free market" would never have made enough masks and ventilators to withstand a pandemic because there's no money in saving people from the coronavirus; the people who die, after all, are no longer a "burden on the system." That's not me talking; that's every health care CEO after his sixth beer talking. I would also tell your Congressfolk that Sen. Warren's plan to fund Medicare-for-All -- she would convert what corporations are already paying private insurers into a kind of fee that would fund Medicare-for-All -- is the best one. You know, for when they ask HOW WILLZ TEH LIBRULZ PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!!!

I'm going to put a lot of repeat action alerts at the end today, because this is going to be a busy week, but I want to highlight this one, in which Daily Kos helps you tell your state governments to allow voting-by-mail for the 2020 election. We've told Congress to do it, but getting Congress to do something good for their-bosses-the-people is like pulling teeth, so now we tell state governments to do it -- and they might be more responsive, even in red states, being as they're more likely to run into their constituents than federal-level politicians are. I say "even in red states" because Republicans are saying the same damn thing -- our President suggested to Fox and Friends last week that if too many Americans vote, Republicans won't win any elections, and the Georgia House Speaker echoed those "concerns" shortly afterward. You know what I say to that? It's bootstrap time! If you're afraid no one will vote for you, stop your whining and try persuading them!

Meanwhile, Avaaz helps you call for a global ceasefire as the pandemic rages. I know some idiot will say, again, "you're just using the pandemic to pass your own pet initiatives," but I would a) challenge them to produce the last time I called for a global ceasefire (spoiler alert: never) and b) I would remind them that wars just make pandemics worse -- wars create more destruction and more refugees, and wars take health care workers away from fighting the pandemic, either by killing them or putting them on the front lines where they're just fixing up troops well enough so they can go be cannon fodder again. And, seriously, can we name a war that's worth fighting right now? That war on Yemen, for example, might make Saudi Arabia's government feel safer, but really it does nothing but put good Yemenis on the brink of famine and kill the Houthis who are some of the best fighters of al-Qaeda on Earth. The Syrian civil war has been going on for almost a decade now, and to what end? Too often it seems like everyone's moved on from war except the politicians, so we should bring them to heel.

Finally, as I've said, I've got a lot of action alerts for this week (and it's only Monday!), so I'm going to summarize the ones I've talked about before. The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to contain coronavirus in our nation's concentration camps, since, you know, immigrants and refugees are people, too, even if our President says they're not. Also, the Union for Concerned Scientists helps you tell our President to start using the Defense Production Act to manufacture masks and ventilators already; he still hasn't done it, because GUMMINT BAD!!!!, but such ideology really should wither before the spectre of death. And Penn PIRG helps you tell your state Attorney General to investigate Amazon for price-gouging of medical supplies; they've said they're cracking down on it, but you know they also benefit financially from it, so you'd like to see some action. Last but not least, People for the American Way helps you tell our SEC to investigate any Senator who may have benefited financially from selling their own stock in advance of the pandemic. These ain't big asks, frankly -- and we'll keep asking until they do our will.

Action: concerning government spying, racism, and health care.

Our President seems averse to making bad "free" trade deals that nullify our laws, so why is he prepared to make a deal with the United Kingdom that would allow their law enforcement to search through American data without getting a warrant in an American court? It'd work the other way, too -- our police could search through data held in the United Kingdom without following British privacy laws, either. The Cloud Act allows foreign governments to negotiate agreements with our government to get access to data located in the United States, but we shouldn't just give that over willy-nilly -- they should have to respect our laws, just as we should have to respect theirs. That's not jingoism or xenophobia, that's just basic law and order; you can't reach out to other people if you don't stand your ground. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop any agreements with foreign governments that allow them to run roughshod over our laws.

Meanwhile, if you've been working from home a lot lately, you've probably used a lot of Zoom, the video conferencing software -- but you may not have heard that "Zoom bombers," or hackers, like to disrupt the calls of black folks and put racial slurs on their screens! I shudder to imagine what it would be like to have nothing better to do than that, but that's some folks' lives. Perhaps as a result of its sudden ubiquity in our lives, Zoom hasn't exactly done a sterling job keeping its lines secure, so the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell Zoom to ramp up its cybersecurity so that racists don't go "Zoom bombing" on its black users. I suspect Zoom might be receptive to the Big Stick of Bad PR here, because it might be the big dog of video conferencing now, but it's also not the only game in town, so they might not be the big dog for long. Hell, more than a few folks are going to take a second look at Skype or Hangouts -- or a first look at Webex, Whereby, or Starleaf.

Finally, a few states (like Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington) have recognized abortion as an essential health service which can't be closed during a pandemic, but, well, I could make a long list of states that have done the opposite and so could you I bet, so Daily Kos helps you tell your state governments to recognize abortion as an essential health service and stop restricting access thereto during this pandemic. Why? Because our Constitution protects women's rights to birth control, of course, and because abortion actually is an essential service, as you would know if you thought about the fact that a fetus keeps growing in your uterus the longer you don't have access to an abortion. Anything can happen during that time, including an unforeseen risk to the life or health of the mother. So you may have to tell your state governments to stop the grandstanding, though that doesn't make today that much different from any other day.

Action: concerning gas mileage standards and better coronavirus policy.

File this, also, under "evil done under cover of a pandemic": our EPA has announced that it will roll back clean car standards! The same standards that force car manufacturing corporations to give you more miles to the gallon, which saves you money at the pump! And for what? So our President can take yet another dump on one of the Obama Administration's few good works? You've heard it from their own mouths, how "cars will be cheaper" if they pollute more (ah, but higher gas prices will be with you for the entire life of your car) and how "it'll save lives because people will drive more if their gas is cheaper and thus have more accidents" (ah, but more pollution makes people sicker). Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your state Attorney General to fight the rollback, and the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to reverse this rollback. Hate to pile on, but the rollback will cost jobs, since regulations always create jobs for people trying to figure out how to adhere to them, and we'll have more trouble selling cars abroad where the standards are stricter. But as long as some CEO somewhere is redistributing income upward to himself, this Administration doesn't care.

Meanwhile, Iran and Venezuela aren't the only nations suffering under American sanctions during a pandemic -- so is Palestine. You've heard New York Gov. Cuomo talk about how many tens of thousands his state still needs to withstand this pandemic? Well, the Gaza Strip has a mere 56 ventilators, to go with its 40 ICU beds, for two million people, in a region the United Nations has declared would soon be uninhabitable thanks to over a decade of bombings and blockades. If you're inclined to say well that strip is just full of terrorists anyway so whatever, then ask yourself how two million terrorists could be so ground down! After all, it only took 18 terrorists to take down the World Trade Center and drive our government insane. Maybe, just maybe, most people in the Middle East are actually folks like us, and maybe, just maybe, most people don't deserve to be crushed in a pandemic. Hence Jewish Voice for Peace joins with M Power Change to help you tell your Congressfolk to act to end the Israeli blockade of Gaza so that its people might actually survive this pandemic.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our state and federal governments to suspend co-pays for prisoners who need medical attention. We went over this a few years ago: a prisoner who has to pay a $5 co-pay for a medical appointment may be getting a cheaper co-pay than you are, but given that a prisoner might be making 15 cents an hour (if they even have a job!), a $5 co-pay is actually an onerous charge that prevents prisoners from getting the care they need -- and thus putting other prisoners and prison workers at risk. There's also this little thing called a coronavirus pandemic going on, and a single prisoner deciding he can't pay a co-pay could feed the fire of this pandemic, especially in prisons, where "physical distancing" isn't actually possible. I mean, they're not going to set prisoners free (even though most of them haven't been convicted of a crime, but are awaiting trial) and they're going to shake them down for medical appointments, too? That's not how a civilized society conducts itself.

Action: concerning big pharma monopolies, coronavirus coverage, and pollution.

Gilead Sciences -- you've heard of them, they're the ones making a killing, so to speak, by charging over $70,000 for their Hep C drug -- has also tried to corner the market on a potential coronavirus treatment, by exploiting a loophole in the law that allows big pharma corporations to enjoy more monopoly rights on drugs that treat "rare" diseases. You're thinking coronavirus ain't rare, since it's all we're talking about, but the law defines "rare" as afflicting fewer than 200,000 people at the time the corporation applies for special treatment, and thus coronavirus is still "rare" at this writing, though maybe not in a few hours. Gilead faced some PR backlash for its naked attempt to monopolize that drug, and has thus decided not to exploit that loophole -- but they still haven't committed to making the drug affordable, which, given their history with their Hep C drug, they might not. Unless and until we bring the Big Stick of Bad PR! Public Citizen helps you tell Gilead Sciences to ensure that everyone can get its coronavirus drug, not just the well-off.

Meanwhile, it ain't just Fox News that's misinforming us during this pandemic crisis -- it's the usually more-estimable Associated Press! The AP's standard "What You Need to Know About the Virus Outbreak" passage it usually inserts into its articles might lull you into a false sense of security, what with "most people" getting "mild to moderate symptoms" "that clear up in two to three weeks," and saying "the vast majority of people recover" is, well, TBD, frankly. And, perhaps more to the point, will be of exactly zero comfort to you if you're one of the ones who die horribly. The Centers for Disease Control puts this matter somewhat differently: "Covid-19 can result in severe disease, including hospitalization, admission to an intensive care unit and death, especially among older adults. Everyone can take actions, such as social distancing, to help slow the spread of Covid-19 and protect older adults from severe illness." So for the AP, "what you need to know" somehow excluded "what you need to do"! FAIR helps you tell AP to get their act together in re informing good Americans about the pandemic.

Finally, our Administration's EPA has just announced its proposal to restrict the science that it can use to make decisions on how to protect our clean air and clean water. The EPA started this process back in 2018, but received some 600,000 comments (including yours, perhaps!) opposing their attempt to a) let it use corporate-backed science to make decisions and b) only use "publicly-available" studies to make decisions, when they know damn well that the reason most good scientific studies aren't "publicly-available" is that they contain good Americans' private health into and medical records. So, confronted with so many Americans telling them they were full of soup, what did they do? They decided to delay their proposal until they thought no one was listening -- you know, like, in the middle of a pandemic. But we are listening! Our Glorious Elites (including Mitch McConnell!) pretend you can only ever do or think or say one thing at a time, we know that's utter bunkum. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our EPA to use real science in deciding how to stop pollution.

Action: concerning good House bills, internet freedom, and voting rights.

It's once again time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). Why do I keep harping about these things in the middle of a pandemic? Because protecting voting rights and health care and public lands and internet freedom actually sustain us in pandemics and help us avoid future pandemics! So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell big telecom corporations to provide cheap or free unlimited internet service during this pandemic. You've no doubt been inside a lot during this pandemic, so you've likely been, ah, availing yourself of the various entertainment our internet easily provides, but that's not the only reason to press for super-affordable internet during a pandemic -- you're likely to get most of your information about how to fight the pandemic via our internet, and why would we make such a thing too expensive for some people? Unless we're cruel and heartless, that is. If you've been attending this argument, you'll no doubt wonder why we don't regulate our internet like a public utility! The answer, of course, is that we did -- until this President got elected, and decided that anything the previous President did that actually helped people should be shat upon, and so he put his cronies in at the FCC and they stopped regulating the internet as a utility. In the absence of sound public policy, the people must resort to shame.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state elected officials to ensure we can all vote by mail during this election season, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. While it's true that voting by mail is a good response to folks' fears that they'll get coronavirus from the voting booth, it's also true that voting by mail solves a number of other vote suppression hurdles people face -- there ain't long lines when you vote by mail, and there ain't no voting machines to "lose" your vote (or switch your vote to some other candidate!) when you vote by mail. Voting by mail doesn't necessarily address gerrymandering or caging, but that's why we're also telling our Senators to pass H.R. 1 (the For the People Act) and H.R. 4 (the Voting Rights Advancement Act). It may be giving them too much credit to say so, but this Administration may have hit on the ultimate vote suppression scheme -- the pandemic that'll scare people into staying home even when it's over! But voting by mail can help defeat such a scheme.

Action: concerning our pandemic, and the various evils our government does under its cover.

We're almost two months after our first coronavirus diagnosis and somehow we still don't have enough tests! And we need them; after all, we can't all just cough on a rich person or shake hands with our President! Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell tell Brent Giroir, our Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services and the man who runs coronavirus testing in America, to ensure everyone who needs a coronavirus test can get one. And, like, now -- I'm sick of hearing all the supposed can-do types who run our country shrug and say we can't do this. We can give away hundreds of billions in bailouts under cover of a pandemic, but we can't test our own citizens? Who wants to take that achievement to the pearly gates? They used to say a government that can do anything for you can do anything to you, but they helped create a government that can do anything to you but can't do anything for you. And we deserve better.

Meanwhile, speaking of dastardly things done under cover of a pandemic: you may have heard that our Department of Justice (sic) has asked Congress for the ability to detain Americans indefinitely -- you know, because courts will be closed, or open irregularity, and thus they "can't" grant us our constitutional rights of due process and habeus corpus. Awfully suspicious, eh? Another thing our all-powerful government just "can't" do, and if you don't think this government (or the next one) won't abuse that power, I know a dead Nigerian prince who left you a lot of money. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt by our Administration to grab the right to detain Americans indefinitely. If you're thinking well, this is just until the pandemic is over, I direct your attention to our NSA's warrantless surveillance of good Americans, which has gone on for almost 20 years after 9.11; when our government abuses its power, it doesn't want to stop.

Remaining on the topic of "dastardly things they do under cover of a pandemic": our EPA has declared that it won't enforce clean air or clean water regulations very vigorously during the pandemic, citing physical distancing. I'm old enough to remember when conservatives routinely said stop complaining about how hard it is to do the right thing and just do it! But today's right-wingers spend an awful lot of time whining about why they can't do the right thing. You think clean air and clean water enforcers couldn't be designated essential personnel? You have to wonder why this Administration hasn't done that! And please understand that when I say that, I mean "because this Administration hates regulations that actually help people, and only likes regulations that let someone push their allegedly religious bigotry on someone else." Too harsh? The truth always is. So the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to stop making excuses and protect good Americans from polluters.

Finally, Whole Foods's CEO, John Mackey, has actually said that if some of his workers need paid time off during this pandemic, then their co-workers should be gracious enough to "donate" their paid time off! Gosh, is that all it takes to be a CEO -- to refuse to help your own workers in their time of need? And they say getting rich is hard! Seriously, those of us who aren't rich might actually have a lot to be proud of. And Whole Foods, as you know, is owned by Amazon, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, is worth over $100 billion, that's "billion" with a "b," and he's echoed Mr. Mackey's suggestion that workers "donate" their paid time off, proving, again, that you don't get to be the boss by being generous or humane. I swear, if I've done one good work before I die, it'll be to make the word "boss" into a cuss word, a matter our President has helped a lot with, amirite? In the meantime, MoveOn helps you tell Messrs. Bezos and Mackey to ensure their workers have the paid time off they need.

Action: concerning war on Yemen, debt relief, and humane treatment of detainees.

Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell your House Reps to reintroduce a War Powers resolution to end our unconstitutional involvement in the war on Yemen. As you may recall, both House and Senate passed such a War Powers resolution in 2019, but not by a large enough margin to overcome a Presidential veto, and if you're wondering why we're bothering to try again, remember that a) right is right and duty is duty and b) just as the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen has pushed good Yemeni citizens to the brink of famine, the coronavirus pandemic threatens to wreak even more havoc, and the war has crippled Yemen's ability to respond to the pandemic. Our President will veto it again, and probably complain about having to tear himself away from Fox and Friends to do it, but I always say make him do it -- make him create more bad karma for himself and those who'd follow him off a cliff.

Meanwhile, Avaaz helps you tell G20 world leaders to offer debt relief to the nations of Asia, Africa, and South America. Why? Because the coronavirus pandemic will get there eventually, too, and developing nations sure could use a break. How will good folks packed into slums be able to afford good health care, or any health care, in these lands? If that voice in your head still says but everyone should pay their debts, please consider that the developed nations of the world kinda forced these loans on developing nations so that they could be more like them and less like themselves. All for free markets! And debt relief is not exactly unprecedented in the world, not just if you've heard of the word "jubilee," but if you've attended recent history -- even the IMF forgave $100 million in loans after ebola worked its will. So many of us are being so generous these days, and our leaders should be more like us.

Finally, with the first detainee in an ICE concentration camp recently testing positive for the coronavirus, Amnesty International helps you tell our government to ensure that all immigrants and asylum-seekers in custody get the medical care they need in order to survive this pandemic. Like our prisoners, these detainees also live in conditions that'll make the virus spread a lot faster than normal, plus they don't get very good care there, and they are human beings, after all. So please don't be the fool who says well what about our own people? Literally no one has advocated putting folks in concentration camps ahead of everyone else! We merely demand that America be the great nation we say it is by treating everyone as if they're important. That is the promise of America, after all. Either we mean that promise we make, or we're just another ignorant and arrogant nation about to fall into the ashheap of history.

Action: concerning health care, working families, and humane treatment of prisoners.

Thanks to our President's incompetence, our hospitals won't have enough ventilators to cope with the mass of coronavirus infections we face, which means we're going to be overusing the ventilators we do have, which means more of them will require repair -- and did you know that some ventilator manufacturing corporations don't make their repair manuals easy to use, or even access? Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell ventilator manufacturers to release service info that hospitals will need to fix their ventilators. Worried about hospital techs "fixing them wrong"? Then those techs deserve the best information! Worried about violating "trade secrets"? Not when millions of good Americans might die in the next few weeks! A lot of right-wingers, when they talk about the values to which we must hold even when inconvenient, think "protecting trade secrets" as one of them! And not, for example, telling the truth or not manipulating people. Then again, some right-wingers are really all about preserving profits no matter how inconvenient! But to paraphrase a famous philosopher: if money is all you want, then money is all you'll get.

Meanwhile, Philly sports fans might have heard that our local NBA team, the 76ers, was about to impose a 20 percent pay cut on its at-will employees (who aren't working, as you know, because the NBA ain't playing) until, well, local media covered the story, and then the hedge fund billionaire who owns the Sixers realized he'd stepped into a mountain of dung and reversed himself. (The NHL's New Jersey Devils had announced a similar pay cut scheme; guess which hedge fund billionaire owns the Devils as well as the Sixers?) In this spirit, Color of Change helps you tell NBA teams to pay all their laid-off workers for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic. Thousands of good Americans work in NBA arenas, and when the teams ain't playing, and their cities are in various stages of lockdown, where can they turn for a steady income? Sadly, in their immediate future, they might turn to payday lenders and get trapped in 300% death spirals of debt -- or, they might be forced to make either-or decisions about health care and bill-paying that really aren't either-or. So let's have as little of that in the richest country on the planet as possible.

Finally, we strive to practice good physical distancing (a.k.a., "the artist formerly known as 'social distancing,'") so that we don't get infected with coronavirus, or infect other good Americans with coronavirus, but what of folks who can't see their loved ones incarcerated in prison? They're left with video conferencing, and it's bad enough that video conferencing doesn't help keep folks who've served their time from going back to jail anywhere near as well as live, face-to-face visits with loved ones, but video conferencing tends to be a damn racket, saddling prisoners and their families with absurdly high bills, and why? Because they can. What are prisoners and their families going to do about it? Go find another service provider? Hence Color of Change helps you tell our elected officials to make prisoner/loved one communication free during the coronavirus pandemic and thereafter. Really, just because someone can make money doing something, doesn't mean anyone should make money doing something. Sorry, I forgot who was President for a moment.

Action: concerning voting rights, coronavirus policy, and price-gouging.

Daily Kos helps you tell your state officials they must make voting-by-mail available to all of your state's voters. I've been hesitant to mention voting-by-mail, not just because I fully intend to vote at my local voting booth this November come hell, high water, or pandemic, but because voting-by-mail isn't secret balloting and because the states that have been doing voting-by-mail well over the years have been doing it, well, for years. Still, I've tolerated non-secret balloting in other arenas (I voted absentee in 2004), and it's not like the voting-by-mail wisdom of states like Washington and Oregon just can't be reverse-engineered by folks in other states, and maybe a mandate will provoke your state into seeking and accumulating that wisdom. One thing's for sure: a lot of politicians would just prefer not to face the voters if they don't have to, and the pandemic gives them an excuse. But we don't tolerate excuses around here -- the politicians need to do their damn job and ensure everyone can vote.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos also helps you tell credit card corporations to waive monthly payments and interest while the pandemic is crippling the economy. One might well retort how do you expect them to make money especially when the economy is in the toilet? I expect them to make money by being generous now so that folks will still value their services later! Too many Americans won't think of the long term, and that's because our government and our media have conditioned us that way! But I'm old enough to remember when corporations did think of the long term -- largely because our government actually enacted and enforced regulations that gave them no choice! But if you just lost your low-paying job and can't make ends meet, the last thing you need is your credit card corporation haranguing you about your payments. No, people don't use credit cards for merely frivolous items, not anymore -- too many Americans use credit cards because they have to. Let's give them a hand up.

Finally, you've heard about price-gouging on things like saniwipes and hand sanitizer, and you may have told corporations like Amazon to stamp out that price-gouging on their sites, but, ah, price-gouging is also illegal, and those who jack up prices to absurd levels in a time of crisis deserve punishment for their evil works. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop price-gouging during this pandemic. Our FTC has been warning us that price-gouging could happen -- but that may be the extent of its interest in stopping price-gouging! They might well claim, as right-wingers typically do, that they "trust consumers" more than they trust mandates, but if that really worked, we wouldn't have any monopolies in America, would we? And when we have monopolies (or collusion between corporations), you can "trust consumers" all you want, but they won't have the tools to do something about price-gouging. This is why we have laws, and regulations, and it's why we have law enforcement! Maybe you heard that having law enforcement had something to do with black people, but really it has to do with all of us.

Action: concerning good House bills, insider trading, and sanctions against Iran.

It's time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). I know, I know, Congress is too busy working on a bailout, er, stimulus bill to pass all these good bills the House has already passed. Well, tough toodles! If they don't like us telling them what to do, they can always find another job.

Meanwhile, as you no doubt know, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) dumped over $1.5 million in stocks while getting daily briefs on the threat of a pandemic, well before the U.S. stock market tanked, and after telling the public things were going fine! Nice work if you can get it! And apparently he wasn't not the only one! Sens. Loeffler (R-GA), Inhofe (R-OK), and Feinstein (D-CA) also dumped a crapload of stock at around the same time. Now, none of these four Senators are stupid people, so maybe we can't actually convict them of insider trading in a court of law. Still, I'm old enough to remember when a Senator would rather resign than face the appearance of corruption, and maybe that's a time we need to bring back; we sure would have better Senators if we did. In the meantime, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban government officials from trading in individual stocks while they hold office.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to suspend sanctions against Iran for the next 120 days. Why? Because the pandemic is hitting Iran harder than us right now and economic sanctions tend to prevent things like ventilators from ever getting to Iran. And why else? Because we don't need to be imposing sanctions on Iran at all! Our President reimposed sanctions on Iran after unilaterally pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal which was working I say for the 40th time, all so he could pretend to be tough. There's really nothing deeper at work with this guy; he loves looking tough, though having been a millionaire literally since the age of 8 he's never worked a job in his life that could have actually made him tough. And now innocent Iranians have to die so he can look tough? Yes, Iranians are also suffering because they, too, have a government that likes looking tough when it's actually full of weaklings. But we have more control over our government, and little over theirs -- unless anyone has a time machine we can take back to 1953 to prevent the CIA-aided overthrow of Mr. Mossadegh.

Action: concerning the coronavirus pandemic.

So how do we start fighting the good fight this week? We start by calling our Reps and Senators (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 telling them that job one for them in these times is containing the damn coronavirus pandemic. Seriously, if they can't stop pandemics from killing us, then why are they even there? More specifically, we should demand that this Administration make tests widely available to all Americans now -- not six weeks from now because things like that are hard to do, but now because now is what we need. Then we demand that this Administration help our health care system withstand the onslaught of cases we expect it's going to get; if our government can't help build enough ventilators to help coronavirus victims breathe, then, again, why is it even there? Then we demand (and this is important) that our government assist people with their purported "stimulus" bill, not corporations -- as currently constructed, the McConnell "stimulus" plan is little more than a bailout bill. Sen. Sanders's proposal of paying $2,000 per household per month during the crisis would be a much better starting point for negotiations than the McConnell bailout bill -- people, as you know, will spend money to keep ur economy going, while corporations will just hoard whatever they get.

A lot of folks on both the left and right think the coronavirus pandemic means the end of this Presidency. But I wouldn't lay money on that if I were you. It's true that, as many have said, our President can't just insult the coronavirus into submission on Twitter, but we should consider a few other things about this situation -- that our President thrives on chaos, that our "social distancing" response to the pandemic threatens to harden into an America divided physically as well as politically, and that our President's likely opponent this November is a man the punditry have dubbed "electable" apparently because he's been deeply complicit in virtually all the things Our Glorious Elites have done wrong over the last half-century. For Our Glorious Elites, as you know, every crisis is an opportunity -- not an opportunity to make a better world out of the shell of the old, of course, but merely an opportunity to further entrench themselves in power. They want you to think you can't count on anyone but them to get us through tough times. And if we're not careful, they might actually succeed in convincing us of that this time.

So, in the face of a pandemic like most of us have never experienced, and the almost certain economic Armageddon that'll result, what has our President done in the last week? Well, he's lied about all the stupid things he said and did to put us in this position, plus he's told Congress to "go big" on the "stimulus" bill about to emerge, and what do you know? His poll numbers have dramatically improved -- per a ABC News/Ipsos poll, well over half of Americans now think he's doing a good job managing the crisis, up some 10 points from the previous week. Also, our President has been pumping the old Nobody Could Have Predicted meme from Tha Bush Mobb years, and since the man lies so much that his lies (and the truth) become that much harder to track, we could go into an election not only with our economy in a recession, but a recession people don't blame him for causing. As a politician, how could you do better than that -- to have people pulling for you to get us all through the catastrophe you created? And to think George W. Bush and Scott Walker thought they had that act down!

Of course, in times like these, we would turn to each other for sustenance and strength. But what is the message we're hearing from everyone, even folks we trust? That we should be apart from each other in these times so we don't kill each other! I don't think Our Glorious Elites planned it this way -- too many folks would need to keep quiet about a conspiracy that big -- but it sure works this way. Now I don't mean to assert that you should ignore the six-feet rule or go shake 10,000 hands in a puerile act of defiance. But note well that over a dozen states have already postponed their Democratic Presidential primaries; why wouldn't our government try to postpone the national election, particularly if our President thinks he might lose? And it goes beyond voting -- folks won't be able to take to the streets in protest of some egregious action by our government, out of fear of dying, or fear of transgressing a local government edict. Even as we speak, our Justice Department is trying to back-door its way into getting indefinite detention powers using the fact that courts won't be open (or open as much). When we can't take to the streets, that's when we should fear our government the most.

But then, perhaps you are hoping we can all get through this thing and then just elect a Democrat President in November. I have repeatedly cautioned against hopes such as these, and not merely because they'd be beside the point in a properly-functioning democracy, but it looks like our President's opponent will be former Vice President Joe Biden, who has nothing to recommend him other than an occasionally coarse way of speaking that has fooled many folks into thinking he's a straight-talker. In properly assessing his role in screwing our world up, we don't have to go back as far as his sucking up to segregationists in the '70s or his tough-on-crime posturing all through the following decades -- we need only remember that as Vice President he signed on to giving our economy back to the banksters after the banksters nearly destroyed it, and that as President he's already spelled out his made-up reasons for not signing a Medicare-for-All bill if it should pass. Many folks would tell you our President won in 2016 because he blew his opponent's faults way out of proportion. But how can such a stratagem even succeed in the first place? Only when said opponent gives you no reason to vote for them other than the hope that they'll be less of an ogre. And that's going to be Joe Biden's pitch just as it was Hillary Clinton's pitch, and in a country where too many Americans can't make their bills every month, where surprise medical bills and ballooning college costs cripple our future for no damn good reason, where nearly half of us can't even cough up $400 in an emergency, why should that pitch work this time?

Right about now I feel compelled to say that I hope I'm wrong about most of what I've said in the previous four paragraphs, and that I don't say these things to demoralize you, but so you'll be ready for all the future battles we'll have to fight. And we need to be able to imagine a world where this President's still here a year from now -- but, more importantly, we need to be able to imagine a world where that doesn't matter. If we speak out today about how our government should handle this pandemic, in more or less the manner I prescribed in the first paragraph, we'll be that much closer to being able to imagine a world in which we matter more than Our Glorious Elites do. If we can imagine that world, we can make that world -- but if we let Our Glorious Elites divide us, and if we let ourselves caught up in the drama and the horserace, then we can't even imagine that world, let alone make a new one.

Good luck, and God bless.

Action: concerning paid sick leave, coronavirus policy, and worker rights.

Congress passed legislation responding to the novel coronavirus threat last night, and it included two weeks of paid sick leave for workers who have either contracted the coronavirus or been told by a doctor to stay home because of their symptoms, and we may well have our foot in the door to get paid sick leave legislation for all workers -- but not if we sit on our hands! Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid sick leave legislation for everyone. Everyone's not going to get the coronavirus, after all, but everyone is going to get sick from something sooner or later, or will need to take care of a sick family member sooner or later, and we all deserve to be able to take a day or two off to take care of ourselves and our families without having to worry about whether we'll lose our jobs or whether we'll be able to pay all the bills. Furthermore, Americans deserve better than having to worry about whether a sick worker will make them sick. See? Paid sick leave protects us all, and protecting us all is our government's job.

Meanwhile, Color of Change (among many other groups) helps you tell our local, state, and federal governments to release as many folks as possible from prisons and detention centers so that they don't all die in a coronavirus outbreak. Don't be the one who squeals YOU CAN'TZ LETZ TEH PRIZONURZ OUTZ INTO TEH STREETZ TEH MURDURZ!!!!!, because you know as well as I do that a) hard criminals comprise a small number of folks in jail, b) "as many folks as possible" would exclude them, and c) most folks being held in jails and detention centers -- without being convicted of a crime, I feel compelled to add -- are there for nuisance crimes. Also consider that prisons are probably the most densely-populated places on Earth; think maybe the virus can spread like lightning under those conditions? Consider, finally, that helping people to live, no matter what they've done, is humane policy. I've seen my fellow Americans have very little trouble being good to each other lately, and it's heartening, though not surprising. But it's well past time our politicians followed suit.

Finally, some time ago we discussed the plight of the Thai seafood workers, who face numerous abuses, ranging from torture, beatings, and executions to forced 20-hour work days and forced ingestion of methamphetamines in order to keep working; sadly, they still face these abuses, so the International Forum for Labor Rights helps you tell the Thai government to do something about the plight of seafood workers. Migrant workers testify that the laws generally favor employers and boat owners, which is not a tremendous surprise, but we should resist the urge to go numb at yet another report of that. And certainly the Thai government should resist the urge to pass a bunch of laws with bite that they don't enforce! This is often the way of things in the developing world -- legislatures will pass good laws, but governments either refuse to enforce them or let utterly corrupt people enforce them. Don't let such observations make you cynical, because your duty remains the same: to confront injustice and, ultimately, to defeat it.

Action: concerning coronavirus policy, solar power, and product safety.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to impose a national moratorium on evictions and foreclosures. You know how this is going to go: too many Americans are going to lose their jobs, either because the economy's about to go in the toilet or because they're sick and can't come to work and have neither paid sick days nor a union to fight for their jobs, and when they lose their jobs, they're not going to be able to make their monthly bills, and rent and mortgage are two of the biggest monthly bills you can pay. Even Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says we might have to prepare for a 20% unemployment rate! Of course, Steve Mnuchin is also the Foreclosure King, the man who kicked an elderly woman out of her house because she owed 27 cents on her mortgage, and I expect a lot of right-wingers will be like him: all those people thrown out of work will just get lazy if we let them stay in their homes! Yeah, all these "lazy" people needing respirators to help them breathe -- they should just get a job!

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: solar power is a lot less expensive than it used to be -- for many folks it's within the reach of a home equity loan now -- but why not help everyone enjoy the benefits of solar power? HB 531/SB 705 would set guidelines for the creation and operation of community solar organizations, which would enable a group of people to pool their resources together to get solar power if they can't afford it on their own, or if they rent rather than own a home, or if their house gets too much shade to have a proper solar set-up. Some right-wingers would call that "socialism," but not all right-wingers would! Some right-wingers would also say it's more self-reliant to use your own source of power, rather than relying on some distant utility. Too many folks don't understand that our government doesn't automatically cripple freedoms through laws and regulations, but can actually create and secure freedoms this way. If you're as subtle a thinker as that, then let the Sierra Club help you tell your PA state legislator to help spread solar power by passing HB 531/SB 705.

Finally, with a ProPublica investigation finding at least corporation designed its testing so that it's "side-impact-tested" car seat almost couldn't possibly fail it -- which sure doesn't tell you very much about whether your kids would die in a car crash if they were in that seat! -- US PIRG helps you tell our National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (or NHTSA) to enact the most vigorous car seat safety standards possible. Congress only told the NHTSA to accomplish this task 20 years ago, so maybe they should get cracking! And no, this isn't "socialism," either -- our government must step in where private corporations fail to protect us from their own greed and laziness; otherwise, why do we have one? To more effectively deliver corporate welfare to some politician's crony or other? Because that seems to be what today's politicians what our government to be. Luckily, we live in America, and they don't get all the say about everything: we do. But not if we don't use the power that belongs to us. Not if we don't speak out.

Action: concerning health care, encryption, banksters, and conservation funding.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to ensure that all Americans will be able to get a coronavirus vaccine if they need it. What does that mean, exactly? It means the coronavirus vaccine can't cost $700 a pop, for one -- in fact, it shouldn't cost the taxpayer any damn money at all, since it's, you know, a life-saving medicine. There's a reason I put "the taxpayer" in that sentence, of course, and that's because taxpayer money funds a lot of drug research and development in America, so certainly no big pharma corporation should have the "right" to charge an arm and a leg for something we all helped pay for. Sound "socialist" to you? Then don't take medicines, don't drive roads, don't call the cops, and don't take books out from the library, because if you do, then you are a socialist, and there are hypocrisies I won't abide. This is life and death, folks, and this everyone-for-themselves-make-all-the-money ideology we have ain't no hill to die on, figuratively or literally.

Meanwhile, Congress is contemplating S. 3398, the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (or EARN IT) Act, and if some overpaid and overfed Senator tells you that you have to "earn it," you should be skeptical. And so it goes with the EARN IT Act, which would, in the name of "preventing exploitation of children," destroy encryption in the United States by giving our Attorney General the power to shut down websites and applications if he doesn't like how big tech corporations are moderating the content that crosses their wires -- which, for this Attorney General, definitely means going after encryption. He said so! I think big tech corporations should act more like publishing houses than message board flame wars, but not by taking away a power we're all going to need more of in the future if Our Glorious Elites keep trying to destroy us. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to preserve our freedoms by rejecting the EARN IT Act.

In other news, our Administration wants to use the coronavirus pandemic to do a great deal of harm to the American people -- not just in their notorious "payroll tax holiday," a way of ending all payroll taxes (and thus Social Security and Medicare) if ever there was one, but also in letting big banksters evade the few requirements they have to prove they can actually survive a serious economic downtown. So Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to shut down any Administration attempt to ease regulations on banksters. It's not like banksters got more popular over the last 12 years, amirite? And it's certainly not like they've ever shown any penitence over what they did in 2008, or have taken steps to make sure it doesn't happen again -- all they've done is put more numbers on the roulette wheel. But, you know, this President thinks rules and regulations are only for little people like us, not big people like him. That's why we have to tell our Congressfolk what to do.

Finally, Congress did permanently reauthorize the existence of the Land and Water Conservation Fund last year, which was actually kind of unexpected -- but they still have to authorize its funding, for even though the Fund nominally gets its money from gas and oil drilling royalties on public lands, not only do certain Administrations think reducing royalties owed to the public is "sound policy," but Congressfolk do like to raid the Fund for other purposes. Also, this Administration's proposed budget would have cut funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund by a staggering 97%. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund so that it can actually, you know, conserve public lands and water sources. We wouldn't have the Grand Canyon, the Delaware Water Gap, or the Appalachian Trail without the Fund, and we should be proud of these things -- and we should be ashamed to steal from the Fund to compensate for our shortsightedness elsewhere.

Action: concerning good House bills and good coronavirus policy.

It's, well, close enough to Monday that it's time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). No, we do not excuse the Senate from doing the right thing because of the pandemic! They use anything as an excuse to ignore the people's will! And they'll continue to do so until we make it impossible for them to do so -- and that means a lot more phone calls.

Meanwhile, you know how they tell us we should wash our hands more frequently now to stop the spread of the coronavirus? It's good advice -- and it's advice people literally can't follow if their water's turned off. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to mandate that localities can't shut off folks' water service during the coronavirus pandemic. If you're tempted to think of this as a way of coddling people who should have paid their water bills, please do the following things: a) slap yourself; b) contemplate whether death is a suitable punishment for failure to pay your water bill; c) contemplate more fully the absurdity that some folks buy penthouse apartments just to leave them empty for tax purposes while most folks don't make enough money to pay all their bills all the time; and d) contemplate more fully that when some folks can't wash their hands, all of us still face the threat of getting the coronavirus. See? It's not about helping freeloaders; it's about helping all of us. If you still don't see that, repeat steps a) through d) until you do.

Finally, in the wake of the news that New York Governor Andrew "the Lesser" Cuomo (D) would pay prisoners less than a dollar a day to manufacture hand sanitizer, Color of Change helps you tell Gov. Cuomo to try more humane policies in dealing with prisoners at risk of coronavirus. It's not like they can even use hand sanitizer in prisons, since the state's own laws would regard it as "contraband"! (Hand sanitizers contain over 60% alcohol, as you may know.) Hence you would call for Gov. Cuomo to end forced labor in prisons and institute a living wage for prisoners, stop blocking cash bail reform and thus stop artificially boosting prison populations, and grant clemency to the most immunocompromised prisoners (who will not necessarily then come to your door and cough on you, if you're of the paranoid stripe). I know a lot of folks would oppose such moves because they're mean to criminals as a way of feeling less insecure about themselves, but if we can't be humane to those who have injured our civilization and thus been put in prison, then we can't be humane, period. And I would like to think better of us than that.

Action: concerning price-gouging, pollution, and internet freedom.

If you've poked around on Amazon lately, you may have found $50 bottles of hand sanitizer and $200 bottles of disinfecting wipes; I wonder why? Amazon has since removed many of these products, but you have to wonder why they didn't seem to see it coming, particularly since, you know, price-gouging in times of crisis is as old as the hills. Or maybe you don't have to wonder why they didn't seem to see it coming -- they make more money off price-gouging than they do off regularly-priced goods, and the only thing that stops the corporation responsible for about half of all online sales from embracing price-gouging with both arms is the Big Stick of Bad PR. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell Amazon to put safeguards in place before the price gouging starts. And, not for nothing, but price-gouging magically found some of Amazon's own products, too. If only we had antitrust laws to prevent this sort of thing! Of course, we do; our government just doesn't enforce them, because TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!!!

Meanwhile, factory farms continue to spew their filth into our waterways, creating low-oxygen "dead zones" where nothing can live or grow, and if you find yourself thinking well, that's so we can keep chicken prices down, I would remind you that focusing exclusively on the next pack of cutlets you buy at Shop Rite is short-term thinking, and antithetical to a civilized existence. And if you find yourself thinking well, it's only fish that are dying, remind yourself that civilizations have been eating fish for as long as we can remember and pollution doesn't just go away because we'd prefer not to see it. Factory farms are also guilty of cramming feed animals into ever-smaller pens and pumping them full of antibiotics so they can produce more meat, but if factory farms help cause the destruction of civilization, we probably won't argue too much about whether it was antibiotic abuse or pollution that destroyed us. So let's just avoid future dystopias entirely by letting Penn Environment help us tell our Congressfolk to stop the expansion of factory farms in America.

Finally, federal courts have so far upheld our FCC's nefarious net neutrality repeal, but have struck down our FCC's attempts to prevent states from enacting their own net neutrality legislation, so Daily Kos helps you tell your state legislators to ensure real internet freedom for their constituents by enacting the most vigorous net neutrality legislation possible. Net neutrality, as you know, is the principle that says that you, and not some big corporation, should be able to determine where you want to go on the internet -- that an internet service-providing corporation can't, for example, deliver content from its "partner" corporations before the content you want to see, or block content merely because those content-makers haven't paid the proper tribute, or censor perfectly lawful content. You may well ask: how come Twitter should be able to block abusive speech but Comcast shouldn't? Simple: Twitter is a publishing house, while Comcast is a utility, regardless of what our FCC thinks.

Action: concerning the coronavirus and its effects.

Yesterday I suggested that our Administration's policy responses to the coronavirus would all just make their rich cronies richer, but I have to say I didn't know how bad they truly were -- seriously, letting big airline corporations defer their taxes, when they can already defer their taxes so much that most of them pay no taxes every year? And remember that a "payroll tax holiday" means no money paid into Social Security and Medicare; even Barack Obama signed off on a payroll tax cut, and only on the employee side. Less money for Social Security and Medicare means what else? A manufactured funding "crisis," that's what, one that means they "have" to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits down the road! Don't think this Administration is stupid, no matter how stupid our President acts; they know what they're doing, and they know they're doing evil. So now would be a good time to call your Reps and Senators and tell them you reject all of this Administration's attempts to use the coronavirus to pass bad policy. And don't be afraid to describe those policies as "evil," either.

And while you're got them on the phone, you can suggest better policies that would help us weather bad times a whole lot better than all of our President's attempts to redistribute income upward to his fellow executives. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy identifies five such policies: increase investment in public health spending, including Medicaid and the Centers for Disease Control budget; expand unemployment insurance and offer paid sick leave; reverse the 2017 tax "reform"; actually collect the few corporate taxes we're still supposed to collect; and start taxing the rich considerably harder than we're doing now, by imposing a wealth tax and reforming capital gains taxes so that rich folks don't consistently pay less in taxes from selling property than working families do by, you know, merely existing. As ITEP says at the above link, "(c)rises are inevitable but we have power over our response." Politicians like to pretend we're their hostages, but we're free people, with powers vested in us by our laws and our traditions. So let's use that power; it is our solemn duty as citizens, after all.

Finally, regarding paid sick leave in particular, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation guaranteeing paid sick leave for American workers immediately. I'm sure right-wingers will accuse us of "using a crisis to pass our pet legislative priorities," but paid sick leave would actually help contain the coronavirus threat, by giving workers the option to take some paid time off if they get sick, so they don't go to work and get other people sick. Not everyone has that option, as you know, since taking a day off without pay results in unpaid bills and lost jobs, in a country where almost half of us don't have the financial resources to face a $400 emergency. Surely paid sick leave would help contain the spread of the coronavirus better than more deferred taxes for airline corporations! And starving Social Security and Medicare through a "payroll tax holiday" (which Social Security Works helps you oppose, if you're in a hurry) won't actually help working families very much, though it will result in yet another unearned pile of money for their bosses. But we're not a nation of bosses -- we're a nation of workers, and a nation of citizens, and the politicians should hear us, and obey us.

Action: concerning bankster welfare, slave labor, and school lunch nutrition standards.

You've heard that the "economic stimulus" ideas our Administration is contemplating as a response to the coronavirus are mostly give-rich-people-more-money-they-haven't-earned? Well, banksters think that the coronavirus justifies letting them out of passing "stress tests" that would demonstrate their ability to weather another financial Armageddon. We can go ahead and call that corporate welfare. I guess your kids can use the coronavirus as an excuse to get their cookies before they eat their dinner, too! And burglars can use the coronavirus as an excuse to get off scot-free when they break into your house! More to the point, of course, is that banksters would use the coronavirus as an excuse to shirk their duty not to smear dung all over our economy again. And you know our Administration thinks duty isn't for big people, but only for little people like us. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Reserve not to use the coronavirus crisis as an excuse to enable banksters. These people really act like diaper-loaded brats, but at least babies are more charming once you change them.

Meanwhile, turns out Apple ain't just providing China with technological help oppressing the Uyghur Muslim population there -- it's also using Uyghurs as slave labor in its supply chain! It's a double-whammy! I'm old enough to remember when the corporatists would scold you for protesting slave labor in supply chains by saying you like your cheap consumer goods? And now we have a corporation using slave labor in its supply chain to make consumer goods that aren't even cheap. You have to wonder if Our Glorious Elites planned to take our outrage hostage to cheap stuff, then replace the cheap stuff with expensive stuff. It is the logic of the drug dealer, after all. But we won't fix it by meditating on our own alleged hypocrisy, or by building our own cellphones, which requires expertise most folks don't have and can't acquire on the fly -- we'll fix it by continuing to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR, and continuing to demand that corporations do right by their employees. So MPower Change helps you tell Apple to stop using slave labor from oppressed Chinese folk in its supply chain.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our USDA to scuttle its own efforts to roll back school lunch nutrition standards, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. If I seem strident about this matter, it's mainly because I've seen so, so many stupid arguments about getting our children to eat less junk food, and more fruits and vegetables, in school. People say some variation of GUBMINTZ DON'TZ TELLZ TEH KIDZ WHAT TO DOZ!!!!, when, actually, we have legally charged our government with this very task for our children while they're in school. And you'd think more people would want more support from our government when they try to get their kids to eat a banana instead of a bag of chips! I also hear that "some kids throw their apples away," as if the behavior of "some kids" means we should do nothing for any kids, or that "some districts are having trouble meeting the standards," when most districts aren't having that trouble and, again, do we stop doing good works because of a few stragglers? And when our USDA decides that french fries can count as fruit, they've all but said they're losing the argument.

Action: concerning paid sick leave, Social Security benefits, and unsafe baby products.

It's a bit rich hearing big corporations like Amazon and Uber telling their workers to stay home if they feel sick, since most of these big corporations don't offer paid sick leave to their employees. So if they don't come to work because they're sick, they don't get paid, and they might get fired! If you still think you shouldn't get paid when you're sick, ask yourself how many of the illnesses you've had were 100% your fault. I swear, some people act like no one else has ever deserved a break. And if you still think getting fired for being sick is "just the free market at work," I would feel compelled to ask if you have ever been in danger of losing your job for being sick. In a world where we now bow out of social gatherings because we fear the coronavirus, we should make sure folks who interact with a lot of customers can take some time off to get well so they don't make those customers sick. And these workers shouldn't face joblessness or destitution because of it! Hence Sum of Us helps you tell big corporations to start granting paid sick leave to their workers.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 860, the Social Security 2100 Act, so that we can increase benefits and ensure Social Security remains on a secure fiscal footing, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would calculate cost-of-living increases in a realistic manner, rather than used the "Chained CPI" that doesn't take into account all the fixed costs seniors have. I mean, if the price of a drug goes up, seniors aren't just going to switch to a cheaper drug, are they? But Chained CPI would assume they would! The Social Security 2100 Act would also tax income over $400,000 into the system -- feel free to tell your Congressfolk that income between $132,700 and $400,000 should also be taxed into the system! -- and would raise the threshold at which Social Security benefits can be taxed. So the Social Security 2100 Act would pay out more money, and would also let you keep more of your hard-earned money. And make no mistake, you earned Social Security.

Finally, with our government a little slow (who'da thunk it?) in getting dangerous and potentially lethal inclined baby sleepers off the market, Consumer Reports helps you tell Facebook and Craigslist to ban the sale of these items on their platforms. Facebook's marketplace is booming, and Craigslist is still a big player in online classifieds no matter how 2000s they seem. And they really have no excuse, since Walmart, Amazon, and eBay have already committed to ridding inclined baby sleepers from their platforms. Please don't be the fool who says but don't folks who have inclined baby sleepers have a right to recoup some of their costs? After all, they didn't know they were buying a product that would be banned! I would answer that question with another question: does any baby deserve to die by accident in a product we all know isn't safe just so someone can get a few bucks back? You could only answer "yes" to the first question if you could also answer "yes" to the second; I suspect more folks would answer "yes" to both than they would have years ago, simply because being uncivilized doesn't seem to be the stigma it used to be. But they're still wrong.

Action: concerning good House bills, war with Iran, and internet privacy.

Happy Monday, good citizens! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). Our House of Representatives has assembled a good record of passing legislation that protects voting rights, health care, worker wages, consumer protection, and real internet freedom, and our Senate has done bupkus about all of that. And they won't do anything until they hear from us, in numbers, again and again and again.

Meanwhile, last month our Senate passed S.J.Res. 68, which would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional approval, and now the House must pass the bill, so we can send it to our President. He'll veto it, but let's make him veto some legislation, particularly legislation that would make him adhere to our Constitution. I said that the House might pass this bill with a quickness, but clearly I forgot that our Congressfolk hate taking up foreign policy-related legislation that might "hamstring" the President in foreign policy, but how many times must I tell these pimps!. Delegating war-making powers to Congress, not our President, is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug! Our Constitution only gives the President the authority to figure out how to win wars Congress has already declared, not the authority to go off all half-cocked. Hence Peace Action West helps you tell your House Reps to restrain our rogue President from unilaterally starting a war with Iran by passing S.J.Res. 68.

Finally, Clearview AI aims to scrape your photos off your Facebook page so it can create the world's biggest facial recognition database -- which should trouble you, since facial recognition a) generally oppresses activists more than it catches actual criminals and b) can't hardly tell black folks apart and it's almost like that's the idea. Besides, they're your photos! You put them on the internet, but that doesn't mean you give permission for big corporations to make your life hell! Besides, Facebook does have privacy settings, the existence of which signal your own intent as to how you want folks to use your photos, and also signal Facebook's duty in protecting them from folks you don't want to see them. Commonsensical, right? You'll be gratified to learn that Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn have all threatened legal action against Clearview for scraping photos from their sites -- but not Facebook, apparently. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop Clearview AI from harvesting your private photos for their nefarious ends.

Action: concerning health care, pregnant workers, and discrimination.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support Medicare-for-All health insurance. The news hook, of course, is the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, and you may have heard about the fellow in Miami who got slammed with a surprise $3,000-plus medical bill after getting tested to ensure he didn't have it. Since Medicare-for-All would cover everyone, and since even right-wing think tanks say it'll cost substantially less than our current health insurance system, I feel pretty confident in saying that surprise medical bills would be a thing of the past under Medicare-for-All. We live in a nation where we can watch pretty much any TV show we like pretty much any time we like but almost half of us still can't afford even a $400 emergency; I put that first part in there to give today's more libertarian-minded observers some pause. I'm sure in the '40s they were arguing that no social justice movements were necessary because every house has a refrigerator now! But that doesn't help folks who are six feet under because they couldn't pay for health care.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. Some folks no doubt wonder why discriminating against pregnant workers isn't already illegal, but actually, it is already illegal -- and when you make something illegal, you then have to deal with all the ways big corporations try to get around the law in order to punish workers for getting pregnant. It's sad, but it's true -- as Noam Chomsky said long ago, the corporation is fundamentally anti-family, because caring for families not only doesn't help a corporation make money, it makes the worker "less reliable" as a cog in the corporate machine, since, you know, family members get sick and need to be cared for. So when you're up against corporations, you don't just need laws telling them they can't discriminate; you need laws telling them they can't discriminate in all the ways they've gotten away with since they were told they can't discriminate. But this is our duty.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Our President issued his Muslim travel ban over three years ago, has lately added six more countries to his ban, and has even mooted using the coronavirus to extend that ban to even more countries -- though even our Supreme Court, which blessed his Muslim ban without evaluating his own statements that he aimed to discriminate against Muslims, might not bless that last extension. See? Give an Executive an inch and he takes a mile! I guess his votaries would squeal NO TERRURIZTZ ATTACKZ SINCEZ TEH GREATESTZ PRESNITZ EVAHZ TOOKZ OFFICEZ!!!!!, but then these are the same folks who blindly supported the Republican President who did allow a major terrorist attack on American soil. And anyway, denying people entry into this country because they're Muslims is profoundly un-American. I try not to use that word "un-American," but some folks leave me no choice.

Action: concerning government spying, nutrition standards, and forced arbitration.

Ban Facial Recognition helps you tell universities across America to (naturally) ban the use of facial recognition technology on campus. Proponents of facial recognition like to tell you that it'll reduce crime, but there are a number of problems with that, and the fact that crime rates are falling faster than we're reducing our own fear of crime is only one of them. Another problem is that facial recognition, like your Tea Party uncle, can't hardly tell black folks apart. Another problem is that you did not consent to be spied upon when someone uses facial recognition technology on you; make consent easy and transparent and you can make that particular problem go away, but of course you can see why law-and-order types don't think very much about consent. Another big part? You know law enforcement will use facial recognition on folks who agitate for peace, for racial equality, for voting rights, for health care, for all manner of good policies -- in other words, liberals! Yes, liberals! And, really, who's more liberal than a college student? Besides me, I mean.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard that our Administration wants to roll back the school lunch nutrition standards which are literally the only positive achievement of the Obama USDA. But you may not have heard that our Administration's proposed rule would, get this, count french fries as a fruit and pasta as a vegetable. Because what keeps you more regular than french fries? In other words, our Administration wants to count junk food as a fruit. Think maybe one of the many acting department heads in our Administration decided to curry favor with our President by telling him he's really been eating fruit all this time? Seriously, politicians who think we should count junk food as fruit are objectively pro-childhood obesity. And don't believe the hype that kids don't want to eat healthy -- if we subsidized fruit the way we subsidize high fructose corn syrup, kids would never want anything other than apples. The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our USDA to scuttle its own plans to destroy school lunch nutrition standards.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Amtrak to stop forcing arbitration on its customers, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You already know that forced arbitration clauses keep you from exercising your right to redress grievances in court, and force you into an arbitration hearing that you're not likely to win (meaning whatever you've heard about "average awards being bigger than in class action suits" is rubbish, since the average award to arbitration losers is, well, zero). But you know what stinks even worse about Amtrak forcing you to go to arbitration to punish them for their wrongdoing? Your taxes pay for most of Amtrak's operations! Which means that, in a very real sense, you are Amtrak's boss! And if anything belongs in our courts, it's cases brought against our government by its owners, the American people. Word on the street is that Rep. Lamb (D-PA) and Sen. Blumenthal (D-CT) will introduce a bill on this matter very soon, but you can still let your Congressfolk know how you feel now.

Action: concerning community reinvestment, harmful pesticides, and "conversion therapy."

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act. With the news that our current Administration would like to declare banks compliant with the CRA even when they lend less to low- and middle-income borrowers -- which sure does seem like our law-and-order President just ignoring the law, doesn't it? -- you would, at the above link, call for our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) and our Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (or OCC) to ensure that banks give out loans to small businesses and family farms more than big sports stadiums, and to ensure that banks that create "affordable housing" units actually put low- and middle-income folks in those housing units. Such rules would seem self-evident, but apparently they're not self-evident to a President who thinks rules are only for little people and big people should break all the rules they want. Luckily we have built a civilization to constrain such people, and we must constrain them wherever we can.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban pyrethroid use in pesticides until they can be proven safe. For a long time, we thought they were safe, at least for us; scientists have long known that most vertebrates (cats being a conspicuous exception) produce enough enzymes to break down pyrethroids, but that pyrethroids hurt most invertebrates. Trouble is we use so damn much of the stuff now, for so many purposes -- spraying crops, household pest control, repelling mosquitoes, treating lice outbreaks -- that we're finding that it does make us sick, or, at least, folks who get a lot of exposure to it get sicker than the rest of us. And though our bodies absorb pyrethroids very easily, that's less significant if we're absorbing a lot of them, to the point where studies have linked pyrethroids to chronic diseases including diabetes and Parkinson's. So, yeah, it's time for our best-and-brightest to come up with new ways of controlling pests. Hey, civilization requires maintenance.

Finally, the state of Florida has not yet banned "conversion therapy" for gay folks, even though the American Psychological Association (or APA) declared it a harmful, bogus practice over a decade ago. "Conversion therapy" often involves inducing vomiting while showing homoerotic imagery and forced re-enactment of past sexual abuses and "exercises" involving nudity and intimate touching. Oh, and electric shocks! You won't be surprised to learn that the APA also found that it caused guilt, depression, self-hatred, and increased suicidal ideation, and you certainly won't be surprised to learn that it doesn't turn gay folks hetero! America gets a bad rap, I think, for being bigoted toward folks who are different from the mainstream, but most Americans would just as well leave each other alone, except that Our Glorious Elites need to create drama to distract from their thievery. If you want to strike a blow against that drama, then let Change.org help you tell Florida state legislators to ban "conversion therapy" forever.

Action: concerning statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C., energy investment, and child care.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to grant statehood to Puerto Rico, and Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to grant statehood to Washington, D.C.. Not because they'll then elect Democrats to Congress! You know how I feel about a lot of the Democrats who serve in Congress, and besides, Republicans might well one day convince enough Puerto Rico and D.C. residents to elect them to represent them. Hey, stranger things have happened -- Hawaii sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate for three terms at the beginning of its tenure as an American state! No, Puerto Rico and D.C. should be states because their citizens have no representation in the Senate and only token representation in the House even though Puerto Rico has over 3.5 million residents and D.C. has over 700,000 residents, that latter figure being about the size of the average House district. Congress also typically strong-arms both Puerto Rico and D.C. -- Puerto Rico far more egregiously in recent years! -- and no Americans have to tolerate that.

Meanwhile, Mitsubishi wants to build a coal plant in the middle of the Ha Tinh province of Vietnam, a community still recovering from the pollution of its coastline by the Formosa Ha Tin Steel plant, which virtually wiped out the local fishing industry. If George W. Bush still ran the world, we'd be hearing about what a wonderful opportunity this disaster would be for another corporation to swoop in, poison a little more of the local air and water, and enrich some executives! But even if Orange George Bush runs the world now, we shouldn't tolerate that state of affairs, hence Sum of Us helps you tell Mitsubishi to abandon its plans to put another coal plant in Ha Tinh province. Mitsubishi might be vulnerable to the Big Stick of Bad PR, not just because several of its financial partners have pulled out of the project, but because the good folks of Ha Tin have fought back other proposed projects, too. Gosh, if they'd just embrace solar and wind, maybe they'd be more amenable to big corporations coming into their backyard. Anyway, let's help them out, and let Mitsubishi know we're watching.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1364/S. 568, the Child Care for Working Families Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Child care costs are one of those costs -- like college, health care, and car loans -- where corporations can pretty much charge whatever they like because, hey, we can't just "choose" not to have these things, not anymore! It'd be nice to live in a world where only one parent in each family has to work, but we don't live in that world anymore, and child care corporations take advantage of that fact by charging out the wazoo. If your Tea Party uncle wonders whether we're going to make government pay for everything in the future, just remind him that a) "government paying for everything" is actually we the people paying for everything and b) we should not measure the effectiveness of a "free market" by how much unnecessary pain it causes working families. You may also remind him that child care almost certainly wasn't an issue for him, either as a child or as a parent, largely because of aggressive government taxation. Hey, truth doesn't have to tickle.

Action: concerning good bills and bad leadership.

Happy Monday, good citizens! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). These are excellent bills that would secure our voting rights, protect our public lands, protect us from predatory health insurance corporations, and restore real internet freedom -- among many other good works! But of course our Senate runs on Mitch McConnell time, which is "never." So tell them they need to run on Do the Right Thing time, which is now.

Meanwhile, the notorious Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act -- which authorizes various federal agencies to spy on citizens without offering us the due process of law our Constitution requires -- expires on March 15, and you know what your Congressfolk are like: they're scaredy-cats who would rather let good Americans lose our rights than take a stand that'd be unpopular with the bullies among Our Glorious Elites. This, even though our own NSA shut down its metadata surveillance program last year! And word on the street is that Congressional leaders might use a coronavirus spending bill as the vehicle to ram through an extension or reauthorization of Section 215, which would be an act of unconscionable cowardice. And rather than wait for Rand Paul to stand up for our freedoms -- although, to be fair, he's gotten some of our freedoms back with his machinations in the past -- we should stand up for them. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to reauthorize Section 215 without reforms that would protect our rights, especially if they try to use the coronavirus as cover. Seriously, no one who would do such a thing should ever be allowed near an elective office ever again. Both Democrats and Republicans should attend that statement.

Finally, The Other 98 helps you tell our Administration to remove Vice President Pence from his position overseeing the American response to the coronavirus. All ye need know about Mr. Pence's ability to manage a crisis is that while Governor of Indiana, he let an HIV mini-epidemic spread in rural Scott County rather than let that county run a needle exchange program, arguing for two years that needle exchange programs encourage drug addiction, which, like, no it does not. And now he goes on Pravda TV and tells everyone what a great job he did for Scott County, since he did ultimately relent and allow needle exchange programs in Scott county two years later, which sure will comfort the families of those who died in the meantime. So we have an executive who knows nothing, thinks he knows everything, and then lies about his record of knowing nothing and thinking he knows everything -- gosh, it's like we learned nothing from George W. Bush. And not for nothing, but maybe, just maybe, if our President really wants to get the coronavirus under control, he should stop whining about how everyone's out to get him. People hate leaders who whine about the jobs they signed up for. They also hate leaders who make everything about themselves all the time, like our lives are their big drama.

Action: concerning human rights and health care.

Avaaz helps you tell the U.N. Human Rights Council, world governments, and corporations doing business in China to fight that nation's continued oppression of over a million Uyghurs. The U.N. Human Rights Council will meet in Geneva for the next month, so now's an especially good time to get their attention! As you know, China has detained over a million of its ethnic Muslims, and detainment in China also includes torture, rape, and family separation. Of course, earlier this week we were taking Apple to task for failing to provide secure messaging apps on their Apple Store in China, and, well, China's ongoing oppression of the Uyghurs is just one of the things Chinese activists get "disappeared" for talking about with each other. And oppression, in these times, requires a lot of corporate help, particularly in the area of surveillance and DNA databases. But we can wield the Big Stick of Bad PR and get corporations, governments, and the U.N. to respond. Indeed, we already have.

Meanwhile, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell six fairly famous American corporations to stop enabling Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory. If you just read that sentence and immediately thought that telling those corporations to pull out would mean the death of Israel, then consider this: just as "being a friend" and "enabling whatever your friend wants to do no matter how harmful it would be" are two entirely different things, supporting Israel's right to exist and thrive and enabling it to wipe out Palestine are two entirely different things. I suspect most Americans understand that, though Our Glorious Elites pretend not to. But if we get Airbnb, Expedia, Trip Advisor, General Mills, Motorola (which provides a lot of the technological backbone for checkpoints and surveillance in the occupied territories), and Booking Holdings to stop doing business in occupied Palestine, we'll get some change.

Finally, both Moms Rising and Public Citizen help you tell our government not to give out exclusive licensing rights for a coronavirus vaccine to big pharma corporations. Sadly, our Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar, has already announced that he can't even guarantee a coronavirus vaccine would be affordable -- dig the can-do American spirit he evokes there! -- since "we need the private sector to invest" and (sigh) "price controls won't get us there." Both of those statements are absolute horsedoodle -- insisting that price controls can't control prices is, of course, a special kind of stupidity long fashionable on the right, but the fact is that we the taxpayers will do most of the investing in any coronavirus vaccine, as we have done since 2002. So, no, we don't actually need private investment -- in fact, we could redirect a very small portion of federal budgetary misspending (cough vanity border wall cough!) to get it done.

Action: concerning bad budgeting, human rights, and gerrymandering.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our Administration's skewed budget priorities, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Don't believe folks who say our President's budget doesn't cut Medicaid, food stamps, and Social Security disability programs, because his budget does these things, and the fact that neither House of our Congress wants to hold hearings on his budget doesn't matter -- the time to communicate our will to our representatives is always now, and don't think Congress wouldn't pull a bait-and-switch and pass this nefarious budget if we weren't watching, because of course they would. And regarding SSI, don't believe right-wingers when they sling around anecdotes about someone they heard or thought played up their back pain into SSI like that justifies $75 billion in cuts over 10 years. To amend Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and "let me just tell you three stories."

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Apple to stop enabling China's awful human rights abuses, then Sum of Us still helps you do that. You'll want to get cracking on that one, since their annual shareholder meeting is happening as we speak, and you want to make sure they can see us wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR. Apple has garnered plenty of good PR by standing up for encryption in the United States, but they're helping China spy on activists' phone calls and text messages by refusing to sell (encryption) apps on the App store in China. No doubt they'll argue that China will just "disappear" anyone who downloads such apps, but China can't put everyone in a concentration camp at once, though they'll try. Just as South African anti-apartheid activists instructed us that divestment couldn't make their lives any worse, I bet Chinese human rights activists would prefer having the ability to shield their communications from their government.

And finally, Pennsylvania residents, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to pass the anti-gerrymandering bills HB 22 and 23, then Fair Districts PA still helps you do that. HB 22 would amend the Pennsylvania state constitution to permit the creation of an eleven-person redistricting commission to handle the drawing of legislative boundaries; this would take the from the the state legislature, which has proven it can't handle it, such Rorschach-blot districts (excluding sides of streets and single houses, even!) do they draw. HB 23 would attend the nuts and bolts of the creation of the commission, the selection of its members (four voters from each of the two major parties, plus three more unaffiliated voters), and the criteria by which it can redraw legislative districts. If we can pass these bills, we'll be closer to a world in which voters actually pick their representatives, instead of representatives picking their voters.

Action: concerning human rights, land mines, and stupid airline fees.

Yasaman Aryani and her mother Monireh Arabshahi protested Iranian forced veiling laws for women back in 2019, by riding a train without a head covering, so naturally an Iranian judge sentenced them to 16 years in prison for "inciting and facilitating corruption and prostitution." 16 years for not wearing a head covering! I mean, gosh, it's not like they stole the pensions of thousands of workers or something. You naturally recognize "inciting and facilitating corruption and prostitution" as the kind of snowflake charge that snowflake governments concoct when they're trying to keep people down. And though Iran has lately reduced Ms. Aryani's sentence to a little over 9 1/2 years, that's still a little over 9 1/2 years too long to spend in jail because you didn't wear a head covering on a train. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to free Ms. Aryani and her mother immediately. Because even repressive governments still respond to the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Meanwhile, our Administration has decided to end American prohibitions against military use of land mines. I guess they'll say other nations get to use land mines, so we should, too, which was pretty much our Administration's argument for bowing out of the INF last year. But over 160 nations have joined the Mine Ban Treaty since 1997, and the fact that the United States is pointedly not one of them means we largely leave it up to the Executive branch to voluntarily stop using land mines in war-making. After three-plus years, we are hopefully seeing the value of not leaving so much up to the Executive branch, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation banning the use of land mines. And another thing: land mines don't just go away if no one sets them off, but remain a threat for decades, and so they maim and kill people long after all the wars are over. It sure seems to me that civilized people wouldn't allow that to happen.

Finally, Consumer Reports instructs us that the three largest American airline corporations -- American, Delta, and United -- actually charge fees to families if they want to sit together on flights, and are otherwise happy to sit children as young as 1 or 2 next to complete strangers! And here you thought getting government out of our way was going to help make a more family-friendly America! Of course, you don't need to be a Noam Chomsky acolyte to see that a corporate-controlled America must be less family-friendly, because families get in the way of corporate profits (or, more precisely, executive pay), so Consumer Reports helps you tell the three biggest airline corporations to stop separating families on flights. You may wonder why we don't simply tell Congress to pass a law. We may do that in the future! But first, we'll try wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR, which really ought to work on corporate CEOs here, since it concerns family separation.

Action: concerning good House bills, good housing policy, and bad Justice Department behavior.

Happy Monday, good folks! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, and H.J.Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Don't worry about giving your Senators' staffers too much to write down, because if they truly aimed to do the people's will, they'd have debated and passed these bills already. After all, it's been over a year since all Senate clocks got set to "Mitch McConnell Time" -- i.e., "never" -- and we're on Do the Right Thing Time, which is now, and our Senators should set their clocks like we do.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has introduced H.R. 5072, called A Just Society: A Place to Prosper Act. The Place to Prosper Act would institute several necessary housing reforms: it would establish a national rent control program prohibiting landlords from jacking up rent higher than inflation (unless inflation is under three percent, in which case they could increase rent by three percent); it would amend the Fair Housing Act by preventing discrimination on the basis of income; it would fund removal of lead paint from public housing; and it would keep landlords who routinely abuse tenants out of the running for various forms of public funding (including public mortgages and public housing insurance). If you cringe at the words "rent control," just ask yourself: should landlords be allowed to squeeze tenants with virtual impunity? Particularly in areas of the country (cough California New York City cough) where housing prices are absurdly high to begin with? The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Americans from predatory landlords by passing the Place to Prosper Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Justice Department's Inspector General to investigate the apparently pro-Presidential machinations of Attorney General Barr, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. I mean, we ought to use Inspectors General while we still can -- our President has already tried to get rid of all the Inspectors General in our government, and if he gets re-elected, he'll no doubt feel emboldened to try again. And our Inspectors General have long done good, independent work on our behalf, and the DOJ's IG would have quite a hornet's nest to probe where Mr. Barr is concerned -- he intervened to demand a lower sentence for Presidential crony Roger Stone, which action prompted four DOJ prosecutors to resign; he tried blocking an investigation into a money laundering case apparently at the behest of our President; and he used outside lawyers to review various DOJ actions our President opposed, including the indictment of then-NSA chief Michael Flynn and the non-indictment of former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe. Ain't none of this a good look for the President who constantly yells about "law and order," and we deserve real law and order in America.

Action: concerning Social Security, pollution, and immigration.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to "scrap the cap" on income that can be taxed into Social Security. The occasion? Folks making a mere $1 million annually have already hit that income cap (about $137,700) as of yesterday, and won't be paying any more money into Social Security this year. Of course, H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act, would tax income above $400,000 as well as income below $137,700, and I wonder why that bill has to have a "donut hole" of funding. Of course I have advocated for the bill's passage, and will again, but we now have an opportunity to communicate our will that all income get taxed into the Social Security system, and thus fund benefit increases now and trust fund shortfalls in the future. We worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and we deserve to enjoy it when we retire, so don't let weakling politicians fearmonger you about it, or tell you that it's just not "possible" to demand better stewardship of it. By demanding what we want, and fighting for it, we always widen the palette of the possible.

You know how our Administration always says regulations hurt businesses with all their rules and stuff? Well, now, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) wants to scuttle rules that require corporations to demonstrate that they're financially able to clean up after their own accidents -- their oil spills, their gas leaks, their coal ash pit leaks, you know. I don't have to explain, I trust, the necessity of making sure big corporations clean up their own messes -- hey, nobody but me cleans up my messes! -- and I'm sure you can also see that this proposal amounts to corporate welfare for the coal industry in particular, an industry about to die at the hands of cheap natural gas and cheaper renewable energy sources. And of course you can also see who's going to pay to clean up their messes if they don't -- we are. You want to be an enabler of bad corporate behavior when they befoul our air and water? If not, let Public Citizen help you tell our EPA to reject its own plan to weaken accountability for polluting corporations.

Finally, our President plans to divert another $3.8 billion of defense spending toward the building of his vanity border wall -- you know the one? The one that a reciprocating saw can cut through, the one a halfway decent climber can scale, the one that an inopportune flood could cause to fall if you don't keep gates open, the one a stiff wind can knock over? I hope we still have historians who will note these ironies -- if, indeed, ironies are what they are! Is it ironic, really, that a drama king who prances and preens about immigration can't actually build a wall that can stand on its own? Do we expect better from drama kings? Do we call it ironic merely because we think so well of our country? We should keep thinking well of our country, of course, and keeping it a country of which we think well means fighting the evils our President perpetrates, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to defund our President's vanity border wall. Seriously, "national emergency" my ass.

Action: concerning our nation's budget, law and order, and dangerous baby products.

You've no doubt heard by now that our President has put out a budget that would, guess what, cut Medicaid, cut Medicare, cut Social Security, cut food stamps, cut housing assistance, cut job training funding -- but jack up funding for defense, since spending more than the next eight highest-spending countries in the world combined somehow just isn't enough. Even Republicans in Congress act like the President's budget is a dead letter -- retiring Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, announced last week he won't even hold a hearing on the budget, but that doesn't mean we can't weigh in anyway! And we must weigh in -- our President has decided to weigh in, after all, on "his priorities," so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject our President's budget and fight for our priorities. Mr. Enzi is correct to note that "Congress holds the purse strings, according to the Constitution," but our laws require that our President submit an annual budget proposal; it's a real, legal thing that happens, so we, the American people, must attend to it.

Meanwhile, you've also no doubt heard by now the tantrum our Administration threw over its Justice Department prosecutors recommending seven to nine years in prison for Administration crony Roger Stone, the subsequent hullabaloo resulting in the resignation of four prosecutors in the Stone case (I feel their pain, but I wish they hadn't quit, since now our President will replace them with four new cronies) and over 2,000 former Justice Department officials demanding the resignation of Attorney General Barr for his interference in the matter. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our House Judiciary Committee and the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate our Justice Department for possible wrongdoing. Yeah, I know, look how well the impeachment investigation worked out. But this won't go before a Senate full of Administration lapdogs: this will go before a hostile House committee and an Inspector General mandated by law to be independent. Maybe our President will fire all the Inspectors General -- he's already tried! -- but let's at least make him humiliate himself before the people.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban inclined baby sleepers, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Do it quickly, though, since our CPSC's comment period ends in eight days. Researchers have linked, at this time, the inclined sleepers to 73 baby deaths and over a thousand baby accidents and injuries to the inclined sleepers, and remember, 73 is the number of babies we know about. Manufacturers touted the sleepers as a way to rock babies to sleep faster and keep them asleep longer, but the sleepers allow babies to roll onto their stomachs while rocking, and then they suffocate because they can't get back on their back. Babies also suffocate when their heads fall forward (their heads tend to be disproportionately heavy) in the sleeper, or when their faces roll into the product's sides and they rebreathe carbon dioxide-filled air. We all know parents are exhausted (indeed, it's almost like our economy wants it that way) but we also need to get rid of products that kill their babies.

Action: concerning campaign finance, animal safety, and paid family leave.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow our government to regulate campaign finances again, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. H.J.Res. 48, the "Democracy for All" amendment, would end the fiction of corporate "personhood," explicitly stating that "(t)he rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only. Artificial entities, such as corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities, established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law." The amendment also authorizes state, federal, and local governments to regulate campaign finance, so that "all citizens, regardless of their economic status, have access to the political process, and that no person gains, as a result of that person’s money, substantially more access or ability to influence in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure." So there we are.

Meanwhile, you've heard our President's bloviating about "piles of dead birds" at the foot of windmills? Then you will be interested to hear that our Administration has basically decided not to prosecute violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, by allowing oil, electric, and fishing corporations to simply claim they didn't "intend" to kill any of the birds they routinely kill! Law and order! Remember how Antonin Scalia would get heated about attempts to discern the "intent" of a law? I'd like to think he'd be just as hoppin' about this Administration's attempts to simply assign a benign intent to violations of the law. And anyway, if an oil corporation doesn't cover its waste pit though its executives know birds will drown in it, then what do they intend? They intend to harm, and they intend to break the law -- no finger-shaking about how they "only intend to save money," lest that become the "religious conscience" of the new decade. If we wanna be all law and order, we actually have to be all law and order. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its plan to let bird-killers off the hook.

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 Moms Rising still helps you do that. Brook no silliness from anyone about HOW WILL WE PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!!, because the cost to the worker making $50,000 annually for this program would be $8.33/month -- about the price of four Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers at Wendy's, or about a buck and a half less than the price of Boz Scaggs's Silk Degrees album on iTunes. Seriously, it's not a lot of money for a lot of peace of mind. And everyone won't be using family leave at once! Because that's not how insurance works! Insurance is when people pool together their resources to help any one of them, or any few of them, through a tough time. We've forgotten this because our culture drills this everyone-for-themselves ethos into us, to the point where fools call things like the Affordable Care Act "socialism" and never face the scorn and ridicule they deserve. But we need to get back to what works in America, and what works in America is Americans helping each other out.

Action: concerning good House bills and bad government policy.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. This week we add H.J.Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment, and (sorry this got by me!) H.R. 397, the Rehabilitation for Multiemployer Pensions Act (a.k.a. the Butch Lewis Act), which would help save at-risk pension funds and thus the workers who depend on them. I know the Senate's on Mitch McConnell Time (i.e., "never"), but we're on Do the Right Thing Time, which is always now, so let's get to it.

Meanwhile, we managed to (mostly) beat back a Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing proposal to use "risk assessment tools" when sentencing criminals, and if you thought about it (or saw Minority Report!), you'd see that you can't just use the past to predict the future like that, and you'd also see that taking data like "past encounters with law enforcement" into account when sentencing would hurt folks of color and poor folks the most, since our justice system seems to accuse and imprison a disproportionate number of these. Now our Commission wants to use a risk assessment tool just for domestic violence cases, which, again, sounds good, particularly when you consider how difficult it seems to be to get domestic abusers convicted, but you can easily imagine a Commission saying well, it worked so well there (whether it does or not!), so now let's expand it to all the other areas! And they're trying to slip this proposal by us a bit, which never recommends a proposal. Hence the ACLU helps you tell the Commission to scrap their latest "risk assessment tool" proposal. Because if our laws don't protect all of us, we're all in danger.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration not to enact regulatory changes that would essentially gut the National Environmental Protection Act, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. The NEPA mandates that our government tell the public about proposed drilling, mining, and logging projects on public lands, and also requires our government to conduct analyses of the impact of these projects on clean air, clean water, and climate. The NEPA also requires our government to take public comments on these matters. Now guess which three things our Administration wants to "streamline" as far out of existence as possible? Always when they say they're "streamlining" they're really streamlining us out of our own democracy, and not so that they can "create jobs" or "relieve" corporations of "unnecessary burdens," but so they can make their cronies richer. They don't care about you, and they don't care about me -- they only care about other bosses, and their "right" to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. But we care about each other, and we care about our country, so we can fight them and, ultimately, beat them.

Action: concerning government spying, financial predators, and unsafe baby products.

H.R. 5675/S. 3242, the Safeguarding Americans’ Private Records Act (or SAPRA), would roll back many of the worst offenses of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act. It would, for example, end NSA hoovering of your private data, prohibit warrantless collection of your browsing and search histories and your geo-location data, and would sunset the National Security Letters program which the FBI has used to get information without a court order. Note very well words like "warrantless" and "court order" in the previous sentence; passing SAPRA would not "hamstring our ability to fight terror," but would merely make law enforcement follow our laws and our Constitution in fighting terror. Hate to pile on, but if we stopped treating people entirely like commodities, we'd have a lot less terrorism. Sure, we'll always have some nutjobs, but let's not create more of them with tax cuts for the rich and corporate tax cuts and mass incarceration, shall we? The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our privacy rights by passing SAPRA.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5050/S. 2833, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act (or VFCA), would extend the protections our soldiers and veterans enjoy from predatory lenders to all Americans. The bill would cap annual interest rates at 36%, so payday lenders couldn't trap good Americans in a death spiral of debt with loans that wind up having 400% interest rates. Banksters will no doubt complain that we just won't allow them to make money anymore, but nobody puts a gun to your head and makes you become a payday lender! I suspect folks become payday lenders because they see it's easy money. Besides which, lenders can still make money if the don't gouge their customers; we know this because veterans already enjoy the protections of the bill, and some states have passed similar protections, and is our economy in the toilet? No, it is not -- in fact, banksters continue to do quite well a dozen years after crashing our economy. Hence US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect all Americans from predatory lenders by passing the VFCA.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban the inclined baby sleepers that have led to over six dozen baby deaths, then Consumer Reports still helps you do that. The CPSC will take public comments on the matter until the end of February, though I have some difficulty imagining what pro-inclined sleeper comments you could write. I guess it would be priceless to learn that some stooge of the inclined baby sleeper lobby commented that banning inclined baby sleepers would be "the nanny state at work"! I suppose they'll say a ban is too extreme, that our CPSC should give them time to work out the kinks, as it were, but I would have a couple of things to say about that. One, the corporations making the sleepers knew for years that their sleepers were killers but did nothing about it. Two, if it were your baby, you wouldn't want it to happen to anyone else's baby. Three, there are other ways to put a baby to sleep -- ways that will not result in the baby's death, no less!

Action: concerning surprise medical bills, data privacy, and paid family leave.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing surprise medical bills. Plenty of folks get them, and they don't get them because "they don't take care of themselves" or because "they don't read the fine print" or because they've screwed up in some other way; they get them because our privatized health insurance system loves exploiting holes in provider networks to deprive you of money. Do folks "deserve" to get billed in the thousands of dollars because their surgeon was in-network but his anesthesiologist wasn't? Or because their hospitals subcontract to out-of-network air ambulance providers? Or because they get life-or-death service (please attend closely the words "life-or-death") at an out-of-network hospital? No, they do not. That is not the "free" market at work, nor is it the work of "makers" as opposed to "takers" and "looters" -- I'm fairly confident, in fact, that were Zombie Ayn Rand to visit us today, she would tell us that the corporations that issue these surprise medical bills are the "looters." If not the "takers"!

Meanwhile, you won't be surprised to learn that our government doesn't regulate location tracking very well, to the point where Google still tracks the location of people who've turned off all the location tracking functions on their phones and computers, so Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to protect our digital private data a whole lot better than they've been doing. Remember: Congressfolk have done little about this issue not because it's a "hard issue to understand." "Protect my privacy" ain't that damn deep -- it only becomes "deep" when Congressfolk take campaign money from corporations that want to sell your private data, and it only becomes "deep" when law enforcement wants to get location data without going through the trouble of getting a warrant for the information. Certainly don't believe that corporations know this issue better than politicians, because that's a little like saying we should let the fox, not the farmer, run the henhouse.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass meaningful paid family leave legislation, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. By "meaningful legislation" we most certainly do not mean "legislation that would steal from your future Social Security benefits to pay for family medical leave now," like right-wingers would have us do. No, meaningful paid family leave legislation would more closely resemble H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act. The FAMILY Act would create a national paid family leave program, and when your Tea Party uncle asks HOW WILLZ YOU PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ HA HA HA SNORT STUPIDZ LIBRULZ!!!!!, you can respond that the FAMILY Act would pay for itself with an 0.4% payroll tax -- that's four-tenths of one percent, not "four percent" or "40 percent," "liberal" media! -- and the employer would pay half, meaning someone making $50,000 annually would pay $8.33 monthly. That's not even five cups of coffee at Wawa monthly, and for peace of mind? What an easy choice.

Action: concerning disaster aid, pregnant workers, and "religious" "conscience."

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Housing and Urban Development (or HUD) to disburse Congressionally-appropriated hurricane funds to Puerto Rico. Yes, once again, we have to tell our President to obey the law -- if Congress says spend money on X, the President has to do it, no matter how thin-skinned he is when Puerto Rican government officials criticize him. Seriously, must drama guide every decision a President makes? And I know, he's gotten away with his refusal to disburse money to the Ukraine until it investigated one of his political opponents, but right is right and duty is duty. And you can't discount the possibility that our President wants Puerto Rico to continue to suffer so that banksters can come in and steal all of the island's money, again. In fact, we really should assume that's the endgame! But that doesn't mean we put up with it -- after all, it could happen to any of us, particularly if we don't deliver our electoral votes to this President in 2020.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. No this bill will not be a "boon to trial lawyers" or "impose undue burdens on small businesses" -- and anyway, right-wingers who would complain that way love trial lawyers when they're working for them, and love using small businesses as a human shield against any effort to make big corporations do the right thing. And, seriously, forcing big corporations to make reasonable accommodations to their pregnant workers isn't a "burden." Forcing big corporations not to discount a pregnant worker's job application merely because they're pregnant isn't a "burden." And forcing big corporations not to retaliate against workers for getting pregnant isn't a "burden." For right-wingers, burdens only ever seem to exist on big corporations that already pay a lower rate in taxes than people do and already get more welfare handouts than we'll ever see. But they don't get all the say around here.

Finally, if you're sick and tired of our Administration going out of their way to allow big corporations to discriminate against gay and transgender folks out of "religious" "conscience," then Daily Kos helps you tell Congress to pass legislation that would nullify all of this Administration's human rights rollbacks. Our Administration may think our Supreme Court now allows anyone who claims to have a "religious" "conscience" to discriminate against anyone they want, but, actually, it doesn't -- the notorious Hobby Lobby ruling actually only allows closely-held corporations (i.e., corporations with only a few shareholders, who might be family members) to exercise such "conscience." Granted, our Court may just be waiting for the case that would allow them to expand that exemption so that everyone gets to pretend they're discriminating because Supply Side Jesus said to. Still, let's not let our Administration pretend it's open season on everyone's rights.

Action: concerning campaign finance, FGM, and clean water.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Rep to pass a Constitutional amendment allowing our government to regulate campaign finance again, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Our Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United v. FEC ruling in 2010 has opened the floodgates of corporate campaign spending, even though good Americans get more and more disgusted with all the money blown on campaigns, too often for politicians who shouldn't be elected dog-catcher. Proponents of campaign finance spending tell us that it takes money to get heard, etc., but that statement does not justify allowing people or corporations to spend virtually any amount of money to "get heard." In fact, we can reasonably suppose that when a few people or corporations drop hundreds of millions on a campaign, they actually prevent other good Americans from being heard. So let's bring back campaign finance reform in America.

Meanwhile, Washington is one of 15 American states that somehow do not ban female genital mutilation (or FGM), so a Change.org petition helps you tell Washington state legislators to ban FGM. Some religious sects claim our First Amendment protects FGM, though reasonable people would conclude differently -- if your rights end when they trample on other people's rights, then reasonably your "right" to mutilate a young girls' genitals would end with her right, you know, to not be fucking traumatized for life. Congress banned FGM at the federal level over 20 years ago, but a Michigan federal District Court judge overturned the ban, saying that FGM is a "local criminal activity" and that "Federalism concerns deprive Congress of the power to enact this statute." That should warn you against imbibing too much Federalism! And our Justice Department won't appeal the ruling, so whom does that leave? That leaves us! You know, like always.

Finally, our EPA has proposed a new Lead and Copper Rule, but won't mandate the replacement of lead-lined service line pipes, which does kind of defeat the purpose of a new Lead and Copper Rule, doesn't it? Unless our EPA's "purpose" is actually to pretend to protect our clean water while utterly failing to do so! Hence Environment America helps you tell our EPA to make sure we get all the lead pipes out of our water infrastructure within a decade. Our EPA is only taking comments until tomorrow, though, so get cracking. At least six million homes in America still get water from lead-lined service lines, meaning at least six million homes remain at risk for lead contamination and all the neurological problems it brings, especially for children. Cities like Madison, WI and Lansing, MI have replaced all of their lead service lines, so it's not like replacing their lines would be a "burden." You know what would be a burden? The increased health care costs from lead poisoning, which we all must bear.

Action: concerning good House bills, government spying, and conservation.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. This week we add H.R. 2474, the PRO Act, which would protect workers' right to organize and which the House passed late last week. Just because the Senate runs on Mitch McConnell time -- which we know from experience is never -- doesn't mean we can't demand (among other things!) better voting rights protections, better health care protections, higher wages for workers, and real internet freedom. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban corporate welfare from localities for Amazon Ring. Law enforcement would like to link up all the Ring doorbells in your neighborhood to form their very own surveillance network; they say it'll just help them watch The Bad Guys, but you know it'll help them watch you, too, and Ring is also, guess what, fairly hackable technology! And if your neighborhood decides to buy up a bunch of Ring doorbells, who pays for that? That's right, you do, with your taxes. Like Amazon needs another damn handout from the taxpayer! They already pay virtually nothing in taxes on all their billions in profits, so funneling our taxpayer money to them so police can spy on us just adds insult to injury. Also, as I've said, the police won't be the only ones spying on you -- Amazon will be spying on you (just ask Alexa, amirite?), and anyone who can hack into a Ring doorbell will be spying on you, too. And again, you'll be paying for all of that! The "free market" my ass.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to protect roadless areas from the pro-pollution urges of this Administration, then the Alaska Wilderness League still helps you do that. Specifically, you'd ask your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2491/S. 1311, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, which would mandate 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." That's right, we have to pass a law to tell this Administration to follow the law, a task that's going to be even harder now, amirite? Our Administration wants to open up the Tongass National Forest in Alaska to loggers, and they can only do that by weakening the Roadless Rule preventing development. Naturally, the Tongass is home to thousand-year-old trees, and cutting them down for logging corporation profits would, I hope, strike you as not terribly conservative. There's a reason "conservative" and "conservation" have the same root, after all.

Action: concerning public water, discrimination, and facial recognition.

At last, Michigan's government may be ready to rein in Nestlé's mad drive to siphon off public water at pennies a gallon in order to sell bottled water at dollars a pint, as three bills -- HB 5290, HB 5291, and HB 5292 -- would, respectively, bring the state's water under the public trust, ban the sale of bottled water outside of the Great Lakes area, and expand two state agencies' ability to protect public water. I guess right-wingers will squeal about bans and burdensome regulations, but let's read over the first phrase of the first sentence again: is there really nothing wrong with taking the state's public water at pennies a gallon and then selling it as bottled water at dollars a pint? Right-wingers would call that "capitalism," as if any conceivable money-making scheme is moral simply because it makes someone some money. But I would call it "stealing," and assert that ensuring everyone can have access to clean water is actually moral. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Michigan state legislators to protect their state's public water.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to expand "religious" exemptions under Title IX far beyond what common sense would require. Currently Title IX -- which states that "(n)o person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance" -- carves out limited exceptions for religious schools, but our Administration would of course allow anyone to claim any sort of exception based merely on their own "religious" "conscience." And when I tell them the kind of world my "religious" "conscience" would entitle me to have -- I've spoken about that matter at some length -- I bet they'd rush to tell me "well, that's different," or "your conscience is worse than my conscience!" At which point reasonable people would agree that Title IX should stay the way it is. So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell our Department of Education to scuttle its own pro-discrimination proposal to essentially gut Title IX.

Finally, you know facial recognition is evil technology, not just because it's one more tool that unscrupulous governmental and corporate actors use to snoop on good Americans, but also because it's bad at its stated purpose, all too frequently mixing black people up even more than your Tea Party uncle does. But tech corporations keep trying to find new markets for their lousy wares, and now they're eyeing schools. Can you say "school-to-prison pipeline," boys and girls? You would think that the debacle at the Iowa Democratic Presidential Caucus this past week would give bad "technological solutions" a permanent black eye, but then politicians of both parties love bad technology, and the big campaign donation money that inevitably comes with it. On the other hand, those of us who love freedom can tell our Congressfolk to prohibit schools from using facial recognition technology, as Demand Progress helps us do. Hey, we're never going to get them to do the right thing if we don't tell them to do the right thing.

Action: concerning redistricting, labor, and immigration.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: a pair of bills -- HB 22/SB 1022 and HB 23/1023 -- would create a five-member redistricting commission to draw Congressional and state legislative districts every 10 years. Why? Because the state legislature has historically drawn these districts to their advantage, not the people's! And when they abuse their power, we must take the power back from them. Putting redistricting power in the hands of a five-member committee (two Democrats, two Republicans, and a fifth member agreed upon by the other four) would improve matters greatly; the PA Supreme Court didn't throw out the 2010 Congressional map until 2018, so we can't just count on them to fix whatever abomination the legislature spews forth in 2020. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your PA state legislator's phone number, and then call them and tell them to pass these bills. (If they say they're a co-sponsor -- which many are, since they can tell which way the wind blows -- thank them.)

Meanwhile, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, would strengthen your right to have a union in America. And if the word "union" triggers you, for some reason, ask yourself if corporations should just reclassify workers as "independent contractors" whenever they like so they don't have to pay benefits. You don't like that? Well, the PRO Act would stop them from doing that. And do you like it when your employer reclassifies you as a "supervisor" even though you don't get to tell people what to do or make the big decisions? Well, the PRO Act would stop them from doing that, too. So, again, use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your House Reps' numbers so you can call them to tell them to pass the PRO Act. You know, we spend too much time in America lionizing the boss at the expense of the worker, when frankly it's the worker, not the boss, who really makes this economy go, and we need to start protecting the worker again. Passing the PRO Act would be a start.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then Win Without War still helps you do that. You no doubt know that our President issued his original Muslim Ban three years ago, and this past week he marked that anniversary by adding six more nations to the ban -- one of those nations being Myanmar, whose military actively oppresses its Rohingya Muslim population, burning down their villages, bombing their houses, and raping their children. If you're thinking well, those are exactly the people I don't want coming here and doing the same to us!, then you have failed to learn one of the biggest lessons of the "war on terror," which is that folks running from terror don't commit terror; the middle-class folks who watch the terror perpetrated upon their poorer brethren commit the terror. The NO BAN Act would roll back all of this President's Muslin bans and prevent future Presidents from issuing similar bans on the basis of religion; we need to deprive terror of oxygen, and the NO BAN Act will help us do that.

Action: concerning impeachment, Medicaid, and pollution.

The Senate votes today on the two impeachment charges against our President, so now's the time to call your Senators and tell them to convict and remove him from office. (You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers; you may want to check out their websites, too, in case you can't reach their Washington numbers. I've programmed all of my Senators' phone numbers into my phone.) Republicans have been admitting for months that our President did wrong, but they're also saying it doesn't rise to the level of an impeachable offense. While I don't presume that this is the most impeachable offense he's committed, nor do I presume this is the worst thing he's done in office, just picture how Republicans would have reacted if President Obama had refused to release Ukraine aid money Congress had already mandated he spend unless the Ukranian government concocted some sort of investigation into Mitt Romney. They'd have howled like banshees! Their commitment to the rule of law may be entirely situational, but that doesn't mean ours has to be, nor does it mean we must remain silent.

Meanwhile, you may know that our President has decided to let states accept federal Medicaid funding in block grants, and you may also know that this has been a long-desired goal of the far right in America. Why? Because the far right hates Medicaid, of course -- it helps poor working folk get health insurance and therefore health care, so the right hates it as it hates all government programs that actually help people. And turning Medicaid funding into block grants would give states "flexibility" in how they spend it -- meaning they might not even spend it on health care! This block grants scheme would also limit funding to states, meaning that if folks need more health care than the block grant would fund, those folks would be SOL. Luckily, this block grant program is an option for states, not a mandate -- though it sure won't be an option for poor working folk! We expect a lot of states would leap to accept this "option," but we, the residents of those states, have a say about that. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell states to stop our government's attempt to destroy Medicaid by refusing the "option" to accept Medicaid funding as a block grant.

Finally, as part of its mad drive to destroy all regulations that actually help good Americans, our Administration has proposed to "streamline and clarify" the process by which our government enforces the National Environmental Policy Act, and you can guess what that means -- it means "streamlining and clarifying" science and public input out of the process, by reducing public commenting on decision-making processes that might cost some corporate executive some money, and by preventing government agencies from taking climate change into their decisions. Every time this Administration changes a regulation they make it worse, and the only thing that's stopped them from doing far more damage so far? Us, that's what. No, really, us -- when the courts strike down an Administration regulatory proposal, they often cite the numerous public comments this Administration routinely ignores in pushing that proposal, and believe it or not, clean air and clean water actually remain fairly popular with the American people. Hence both WildEarth Guardians and the Union of Concerned Scientists help you tell this Administration to scuttle yet another plan to ruin clean air and clean water regulation.

UPDATE. Senate acquits our President by 48-52 on the abuse of power charge (Sen. Romney of Utah being the only Republican to vote with all 47 Democrats) and 47-53 on the obstruction of Congress charge. Sen. Collins voted to acquit, saying our President had "learned a lesson" from the experience; I shudder to think the "lesson" he's learned is that he can do even more of whatever he likes. But we'll keep instructing him otherwise, as is our duty as citizens.

Action: concerning endless war-making, predatory lenders, and climate change.

As the Afghanistan War enters its 19th (!) year, it's well past time for Congress to investigate the sheer folly of this effort, hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Afghanistan Papers, which describe how our government has been lying and BSing its way through this war for almost two decades. The Washington Post, as you may recall, obtained the "Afghanistan Papers" through a Freedom of Information Act (or FOIA) request, and published them in early December; the papers expose government officials declaring the war unwinnable in virtually every conceivable sense but plugging on with the disaster anyway, apparently adhering to the belief that the only thing worse than doing wrong is admitting you're wrong. You may wonder why we're bothering to get Congress in on this. Why, because it's their job -- as it has been all these years! -- and we must always tell them to do their job. And saying we-can't-win-but-let's-lie-about-it-rather-than-change-it is one thing in a memo you don't intend to ever see the light of day, but it's another thing entirely under oath, before the people's representatives. At least, it should be -- and we should make it be.

Meanwhile, banks used to evade state interest rate caps by "partnering" with out-of-state banks that don't face interest rate caps, but our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) cracked down on them during Tha Bush Mobb years, of all times. But guess what? Times are changing back! With an Administration determined to destroy every regulation that might help good Americans suffer a little less, at least two banks -- FinWise (of Utah) and Republic Bank (of Kentucky) -- have restarted the notorious "rent-a-bank" scheme that lets them offer loans with interest as high as 160% to good Americans facing emergencies, thus assuring that they'll be trapped in a pit of debt for years to come. Nice work if you can get it! But, as I've said, this is already illegal, so the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our FDIC to crack down on banks gaming the system to trap vulnerable folks in usurious loans. No use telling me "this isn't the job of government," not unless you want me to call you objectively pro-financial predator. We should be using terms like these a lot more; maybe they'll help bring shame back to our civilization.

Finally, if you've been attending the wildfires in Australia, you know climate change ain't no "Chinese hoax," as our President put it long ago, and you know we have a lot of work to do to counter its effects -- mainly, move from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Legislation supporting renewable energy is one way to do that, but it's not the only way -- another way is to get private corporations to divest from fossil fuels. We've told banks to divest from fossil fuels, and they've started to get the message, but we also have to get state pension funds out of fossil fuels, so Daily Kos helps you tell your state governors and legislators to get state pension funds to divest from fossil fuel corporations. Our opponents will tell us that we would be "hurting pensioners" if we did that, but you recognize that as a rhetorical hostage crisis by now, and besides, pension funds are kind of in the driver's seat here -- corporations want their business, after all! Maybe state pension funds should act like they're in charge, then?

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, unconstitutional war-making, and freedom of the press.

It's Monday morning, and you know what that means: it's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. You may be tiring of telling your Senators to pass these bills, but the more they hear from us, the more embarrassed they'll be -- and the more they'll swing our way, as is their damn job. They need to hear from us that we want bills that protect voting rights, working families, public lands, disadvantaged minorities, and internet freedom. And they need to suffer the consequences of standing against these things -- you know, like losing their jobs.

Meanwhile, our President has declared that the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF), which authorized war with Iraq, also authorizes war with Iran! And that's reason enough to let Demand Progress help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 AUMF -- because all this open-ended authority for the Executive branch to wage war isn't a good thing, and certainly isn't how our Founders envisioned our government running. They envisioned Congress declaring war, after all, and the fact that Congress has largely abdicated that duty since the end of World War II doesn't change that fact, and certainly doesn't change what's right or what works. I wish I could say that our current President's claim was the most absurd claim I've heard from a recent President over his authority to bomb wherever he likes, but sadly, it's not -- President Obama's claim that various AUMFs gave him authority to strike in Libya and Syria were, frankly, more strained, and if our current President's votaries weren't so good at letting their pride erase their memory, they'd see that their Personal Lord and Savior is wrong, too. I'm not going to lay money on that happening any time soon, but I'd be happy to be wrong about that.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell the Brazilian government to drop cybercrime charges against journalist Glenn Greenwald. Mr. Greenwald's website, The Intercept, published articles last year exposing the infamous Brazilian "corruption" probe -- one which happened to put a lot of liberal politicians in jail, and just so happened to put the current President's opponent in jail while the campaign was going on! -- as an utter sham, and for that, the Brazilian government has arrested him. I like to believe folks are deeper than they seem, so I wish there were more to it than that, but there's not -- journalists who actually practice journalism, and expose the folly and venality of Our Glorious Elites, are more likely to wind up in jail than banksters who foreclose on grandmothers overdue by 27 cents on their mortgage. Of course, Brazil has laws, too, so they can't just put a journalist in jail for publishing leaked or hacked info; they have to insinuate that Mr. Greenwald somehow aided the hackers. But I'll believe the journalist who exposed government misdeeds over the government embarrassed by those misdeeds any day. It's not like we have a lot of journalists left, after all.

Action: concerning impeachment, pollution, and the Equal Rights Amendment.

So they've had the trial, and they've complained about hearing "nothing new" even though they've done their damnedest to keep out evidence and witnesses, and what have we learned? That the Senate should convict our President of the charges for which he's been impeached and remove him from office. Don't take my word for it, though: take the word of conservative former New Jersey Superior Court Judge and Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano, who argues that Congress needs not wait for an actual crime to remove our President from office, but needs only wait for "behavior that is so destructive of the constitutional order that it is the moral equivalent of statutory crimes" -- plus he has committed actual crimes. Need I mention that as a conservative and as a Fox News contributor, Mr. Napolitano has at least two very good reasons to say exactly the opposite of what he's saying? Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to get your Senators' phone numbers so you can tell them to convict and remove.

Meanwhile, our EPA has proposed a chemical safety rule that would, color me surprised, more than triple the cancer risk for good Americans living near chemical manufacturing plants. Naturally our EPA would be ignoring its own findings in heightening our cancer risk, particularly in the case of ethylene oxide (or ETO), where EPA has apparently gone on a fishing expedition in order to go fishing for a state that has dramatically underestimated said cancer risk -- in this case, Texas. Hate to pile on, but big chemical corporations too often situate their plants near communities of color -- whose people have enough to worry about without having to worry about whether their air is even more likely to kill them -- and so folks of color will bear the brunt of our EPA's foolishness, as usual. Remember: our President doesn't do these things for we-the-people; he does them for other bosses, because other bosses are the only people who really matter to him. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our EPA to scuttle its own plan to expose good Americans to even more cancer-causing chemicals.

Finally, with Virginia's state legislature becoming the 38th to pass the Equal Rights Amendent, the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 79, which would eliminate the 1982 expiration date Congress imposed on the Equal Rights Amendment. Constitutional amendments don't usually have expiration dates, as you know -- the 27th Amendment to the Constitution saw literally over 200 years elapse between its proposal and its ratification -- but the ERA did, presumably so that some Congressfolk could say they voted for equal rights while they also injured the fight for equal rights. I suggested last week that our younger-fresher-right-wingers on the Supreme Court might stand in the way of the ERA becoming the law of the land on such a basis of "legislative intent," but now I think they would have an even weaker case than I had originally supposed -- after all, laws get amended all the time, and if you're a legislator, you vote on the bill in front of you, not the bill as it might or might not be expressed in law down the line. We could have equal rights in America, as we all deserve, so let's get to it.

Action: concerning pollution, TV sensationalism, and Presidential tax returns.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its own attempt to loosen coal ash regulations, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. You'll want to get moving, though, because the deadline for public comments is tomorrow, January 31. Our EPA wants to allow coal corporations to put off closing unlined coal ash ponds, even though the state of Illinois alone has 90 leaking coal ash ponds, and even though coal ash a) contains lead, arsenic, and carcinogens and b) will leak into local water tables. (Since, you know, they're unlined.) Again our Administration pretends that a corporation's "right" to save a little bit of money (or, more precisely, a corporation's "right" to deliver a little more money to executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home) is more important than our actual right not to drink poisoned water. They care only about bosses redistributing more income upward to themselves, but money doesn't last forever. Clean water does -- if we take care of it.

Meanwhile, after TMZ leaked the news of Kobe Bryant's death in a helicopter crash before his wife, Vanessa, and their three surviving children could find out about his death from local authorities, a Change.org petition helps you tell Fox to cancel TMZ. I think everyone would agree that, no matter how famous they are, folks should get tragic news from their local authorities before they get it from the TV, let alone TMZ, which has been a notorious purveyor of uncivilized sensationalism for almost 15 years now. To be perfectly frank, I'd favor oblivion for them even if they had managed to display a moment's sensitivity on what I would imagine would be the worst day of Vanessa Bryant's life. And please don't entertain the notion that they're "better" at journalism because they got the "scoop" first -- do "scoops" about celebrities serve a purpose in our civilization other than titillation and arousal? If they don't, then they're not journalism, period, end of.

Finally, H.R. 273, the Presidential Tax Transparency Act of 2019, would require all major party Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates, as well as the President and Vice President themselves, to disclose 10 years of tax returns. This has been a big deal, as our current President was the first major party candidate not to disclose his tax returns since Richard Nixon, and several investigations into his conduct have tried to get his tax returns in order to see exactly how compromised he is; he says the issue is closed since he won, but of course that's not how democracy works: the issue is closed when we say it's closed, not him. So Americans for Tax Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to hold Presidential candidates accountable by passing the Presidential Tax Transparency Act. (Don't confuse H.R. 273 with H.R. 162, also titled the Presidential Tax Transparency Act, which would require only the President and Vice President to disclose their tax returns.)

Action: concerning xenophobia, pollution, and high drug prices.

The third anniversary of our President's notorious Muslim Ban passed this week, and our President -- never one to admit that he's ever done anything wrong! -- has said he'll expand the ban, so this is as good a time as any to let the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your House Reps to pass two bills that would restrain our President's xenophobia with regard to immigrants and refugees. The bills in question are H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, and H.R. 2146/S. 1088, the GRACE Act; the former bill would roll back the Muslim ban and make it harder to enact future religion-based bans, while the latter would increase the minimum number of refugees we can admit every year. I would caution against pointing to the lack of 9.11-style attacks since our President enacted his Muslim ban, since we had many, many years without such an attack while having much, much less restrictive immigration policies. I would also remind you that our President's election saw a spike in hate crimes against Jews and Muslims and that we do still seem to suffer an awful lot of mass shootings. I mean, white people also commit terrorism.

Meanwhile, it ain't just the Great Barrier Reef that's under siege from pollution -- America's only living coral barrier reef, the Florida Reef, also struggles with pollution despite its continuing designation as a marine sanctuary. And now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA) is mulling whether to offer new protections for the Florida Reef, so Environmental Action helps you tell our NOAA to implement the strongest protections possible for the Florida Reef. The threats to the Reef have, after all, changed over the years -- the Reef didn't face rising sea levels, farm runoff, and plastic pollution 40 years ago the way it does now -- and thus our regulations need to meet those changes. Interesting that our NOAA is actually considering strengthening environmental protections, considering that this Administration has consistently demonstrated a hatred of such protections. Probably our President wants something to argue about with TEH LIBRULZ!!!! whenever we complain about his record, and probably he wants to win Florida again. But I would take these risks to save the Florida Reef.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell the Connecticut state legislature to cap the cost of insulin copayments. Why Connecticut? Presumably because the petition's author lives there, but also because several states have already moved to cap the cost of insulin, and though our House of Representatives has moved to do the same at the federal level, our Senate will do its damnedest to do nothing about it, this even though one out of every four diabetics wind up rationing their insulin due to its exorbitant cost, and a diabetic who rations their insulin is likely to wind up dead. I'd prefer to contextualize the rising cost of insulin a bit differently, though -- the cost went up 100% (that is, it doubled) between 2012 and 2016, and what was inflation, generally, during that time? 4.5%. And how much did health care costs go up generally during that time? 15%. 100%, you'll notice, is considerably larger than both of these numbers, and no producer of insulin has ever justified such a cost hike. So gosh, maybe governments can hold those costs down without ludicrous insinuations of "socialism"?

Action: concerning farmworker safety, conservation funding, and rampant racism.

In their insane drive to gut all regulations that actually help people, our Administration now wants to change the Agricultural Worker Protection Standard so that farmworkers get exposed to more toxic pesticides! Because worker health is a "burden" to some bossman, somewhere. Our Administration would no doubt argue that you only need to protect farmworkers on the literal farm in which they work, but, ah, they have heard of pesticides drifting onto other lands, have they not? Of course they have; they're just pretending it doesn't happen, even though deep-red Arkansas has limited the use of Monsanto's dicamba herbicide after it drifted onto other farms, damaged crops, and injured farmworkers. Someone should tell this Administration that it's not "common sense" if it's wrong. Oh, wait: we can do that! The Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs to actually protect farmworkers by rejecting its own proposed rollbacks of the Agricultural Worker Protection Standard.

Pennsylvania's Environmental Stewardship Fund, also known as the "Growing Greener" fund, has done the same thing the Land and Water Conservation Fund has done at the national level -- it's helped preserve and rebuild some of the state's greenest areas over the last two decades, like the trails of the Wissahickon Creek and the Phipps Conservatory, not to mention close to 80,000 of family farmlands. The fund also helps clean up abandoned mines and upgrade sewer systems, and these are all good things. Preserving land is a good thing! Keeping our water clean is a good thing! But Growing Greener seems to face a funding shortfall every year -- as government programs that do good things always seem to do! -- so Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to ramp up funding for the Growing Greener fund in 2020. Seriously, taxpayer money should not be a bottomless trough upon which corporate cronies gorge themselves -- it should deliver the services taxpayers expect and deserve. And Growing Greener is one of those services.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell Twitter's head of Legal Policy Team, Vijaya Gadde, to ban white nationalists from that platform. No cries of WHAT ABOUT TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!!!, please, because getting banned from Twitter is not the same as being put in jail by your government; our First Amendment protects us from the latter, not the former. And profoundly awful people get to spew their white supremacist rubbish and the only reaction from Twitter is well gosh how do you ever balance free speech rights and racism? And what is racism anyway? Is white nationalism really racist per se? As I've suggested, the First Amendment already tells us how to achieve that "balance." And Dean Baker has told us how to achieve that balance more than once, too -- by treating platforms like Facebook and Twitter as publishing houses, which our laws already can hold liable for the speech they decide to publicize. See? We really are a resourceful people, we Americans -- and our tradition of freedom is one of our greatest resources.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Social Security, and public water.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. Bills that protect voting rights, health care, clean water, worker wages, and public lands (among other good things!) shouldn't have so much trouble passing in the Senate. And the more we demand they pass those bills, the more likely it'll be that they pass. Hey, it's not like Our Glorious Elites or their media enablers want them to pass! So it's up to us.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to cut Social Security disability insurance, and will take comments on their proposal until January 31, so both Social Security Works and Moms Rising help you tell our Administration to scuttle their proposal. President Reagan tried cutting SSDI benefits for hundreds of thousands of people in the '80s, and helped cause over 20,000 deaths; he ultimately reversed course after public pressure, but that sure didn't help those 20,000-plus dead folk, did it? Our current President no doubt will yell and scream about making sure the people who actually deserve it get what they need, but everyone thinks of "those people" as "undeserving," and when we do that we're generally unaware that other people look at us exactly the same way! And our President's votaries seem to have more serious trouble realizing that these Social Security disability cuts could very easily affect them. And, really, folks who try to convince me SSDI is rife with fraud and abuse love to cite individual stories, but, as Neal Gabler has said, three incidents of chicken pox don't constitute an epidemic.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Suwannee River Water Management District to keep notorious water-bottling corporation Nestlé from pumping out over a million gallons a day from the Ginnie Springs along the Santa Fe River, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. We could go on about the cypress trees and underwater caves and species of turtles at Ginnie Springs, but let's keep it simple: why are we letting private corporations take public water for pennies a gallon so they can sell it for dollars a pint? That's rock-stupid, and it's not the "genius" of the "free market," either, since it requires governmental capitulation in order to work. Clean water is one of the great achievements of the last 150 years, and it does not belong to some corporation like Nestlé; it is our achievement, as a civilization. And it is kind of amusing that the corporate drive to undermine this achievement needs public water to work. Ultimately, though, it also needs public acquiescence to work, and we don't have to give them that.